by Jo Bannister
Then: “You’re sure?” And finally: “Very well.” And he rang off.
All her life Hazel Best had been an optimist. She had always believed the glass to be half full. She had always believed—really believed—all the things that little girls used to embroider on samplers: Where there’s a will there’s a way. Every cloud has a silver lining. The darkest hour is just before the dawn. God never shuts a door but that He opens a window.
She believed, at a bone-deep level and despite the evidence all around her, that most people were fundamentally decent, and most disasters could be averted when people of goodwill worked together. And somewhere inside her she still believed that the tragedy unfolding before her eyes wasn’t going to happen. That Dave Gorman would knock the door down in the nick of time. That word would reach Ash that his family was already beyond harm. That, in the last resort, Gabriel Ash wouldn’t do what he’d promised.
So, in spite of everything that had brought them to this point, Hazel was not prepared for it—not really, not inside herself—when Ash put the phone down and picked up something else that was just out of view of the camera, and it was a handgun.
For a couple of seconds he looked at it as if unsure how it had got there, or what it was for. Then he vented a sigh, and a tiny, fragile smile flickered across his face. Then he put the muzzle in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
The explosion sprayed the back of his head across the wall behind him. His body lurched sideways out of the chair, and the computer’s camera—unwinking, unmoved—continued to record the blood on the wall, the left shoulder and wide-flung arm of the body crumpled against the skirting board, until some innate sense of decency made somebody somewhere pull the plug.
CHAPTER 12
HAZEL BEST CONTINUED TO STARE at the blank screen long after most of those around her had drifted away. A couple of them, like the girl beside her, were in tears, but Hazel wasn’t crying. A couple of them were trying desperately to find something smart to say to defuse the palpable sense of shock. Of course they failed miserably, crassly, but Hazel couldn’t find it in her to resent them. Everyone deals with tragedy in their own way. There are no guidelines. You do what you can bear to, what you can live with. If a sick joke made what they’d just witnessed more bearable for some of them, Hazel wasn’t going to tell them they were wrong.
And of course they didn’t know—how could they?—that alone among the people watching Gabriel Ash kill himself, the quiet fair-haired girl looking over their shoulders knew the man personally. Cared about him, counted herself his friend. She could have told them. They might not have believed her. At moments like this, there are people who get a peculiar satisfaction from involving themselves in the story—claiming to have been on the wrecked train, to have seen the assassin, to have walked by the car bomb moments before it exploded. To have known the man who blew his brains out live on the Internet. What stopped her, though, wasn’t that, but the obscure but persuasive sense that they didn’t need to know. Telling them wouldn’t make her feel better, and it might make them feel worse. She went on staring at the blank screen, her eyes stretched with shock, stripped of the will to do anything else, as the little crowd dissipated around her.
By the time she was fully aware again, she was standing on the pavement alone, and the manager was standing in his shop window waving angrily at her to go away. She dragged in the first proper breath she’d drawn for fifteen minutes, turned, and stumbled back to her car.
She was too late. She hadn’t reached him in time, and Gabriel Ash was dead because of it. Sorrow filled her chest and rose up her throat, threatening to choke her. She hadn’t known him that long. They’d never been more than friends. But somehow his passing carved a great hole in her world, one she didn’t know how she’d set about filling. She’d have other friends, closer friends. But Ash had been … unique. Irreplaceable. No one would ever fill the gap he’d left, nor would the wound heal that he’d left by dying that way, hopeless and alone.
Hazel’s only consolation was that, if there was any justice in the world, his death had accomplished more than simply shocking a bunch of people walking past electrical stores. If his sacrifice had bought the freedom of his wife and sons, he had paid a terrible price but one he at least had considered worth paying. Hazel wouldn’t devalue his final desperate gift to his family by saying it wasn’t. It was a decision only Ash had the right to make.
Still dry-eyed, she turned in her seat and looked at Ash’s dog. What was Patience going to think when her master didn’t come back? Would she think she’d been abandoned again? And would it be better or worse if she knew Ash was dead? Not that it mattered. Hazel had no way of explaining the situation to even a smart dog.
A more immediate problem was how she was going to explain to her landlady. Because whatever she’d promised Mrs. Poliakov, Hazel’s first act after witnessing Ash’s lonely death wasn’t going to be to take his dog to a shelter.
An immeasurable amount of time passed. Eventually she was ready to get back on the road.
She might simply have turned and gone back the way she’d come. There was no longer anything to be gained in Leamington. But she couldn’t bring herself to. It felt like a betrayal. She felt something almost like duty calling her on, to the address she’d been given, to the empty building on its unfashionable side street, which had once housed the Copper Kettle Café.
Until the moment she turned into that narrow street, she wasn’t sure that this was where he had been. But half a dozen police vehicles filled the road, many with their lights still blinking blue and white although the need for urgency was now past. There were uniforms on duty at the door, admitting a few people with the right credentials, turning more away.
Which told her everything she needed to know. Still she found herself getting out of the car—carefully leaving the windows slightly open for Patience—and walking up the street to where the cordon was being controlled by a detective constable from Meadowvale. She steeled herself and hoped her voice would come. “Is DI Gorman inside?”
DC Rodgers did a classic double take. He’d hadn’t seen her for weeks, was startled—though later he realized he shouldn’t have been—to see her here. “Hazel? Er—yes. I’ll call him.”
“Don’t bother. I’ll find him.”
Rodgers looked concerned. “I don’t think you should go inside. It’s pretty … messy … in there.”
Hazel sighed. “Of course it is. But it won’t be anything I haven’t seen before.”
“It’s different when it’s someone you know,” warned Rodgers.
“I know it is. But, Jack, it really won’t be something I haven’t seen. I saw him do it.”
“Oh, shit.”
A moment later the front door opened and Dave Gorman emerged. He’d been watching for her. “I’m sorry. We were too late.” He looked terribly tired.
“I know.” She managed a brittle smile, to ease a little the guilt they all felt when they did their job but didn’t do it quite fast enough. “I saw.”
Gorman fisted both hands deep in his trouser pockets, dropped his square chin onto his chest. “I’m so sorry. That we couldn’t stop him. That we didn’t get here in time.”
“I know. Thank you.”
He looked past her. “Is this your car? You shouldn’t be driving. I’ll find someone…”
She held on to her car keys, politely but firmly. “I’m fine. I’ll head home now. Unless…?” She left the question mostly unasked.
Gorman heard it just the same. He shook his head. “You can’t go up there. You wouldn’t want to, Hazel. And you wouldn’t want to hinder the investigation. The guys from the Home Office are here already. I suppose, because of who Ash was. They’ve pretty well taken over.”
“Investigation?” For the first time since it had happened, her iron control wavered, the word booming like an overpressured dam. “Dave, we know what happened! We know what he did and why he did it. The whole world knows, or at least as much of it as has access to
the Internet. Tell me one thing. Are they safe? Are they really safe?”
The DI nodded somberly. “Yes. The British consul is at the checkpoint now. He’s confirmed that Cathy Ash, her two sons, and Stephen Graves are all safe. They’ll be on a plane home as soon as it can be arranged. Ash achieved what he wanted to, Hazel. If he thought the price was worth paying, then it was.”
But Hazel still didn’t think so.
She got back in her car and headed south. A few miles from Norbold, though, the weather turned unexpectedly dreary—mist shrouded the A road so much that she had to slow down, followed soon afterward by a downpour that stole the last of her vision and forced her into a lay-by.
Only when the windscreen wipers whined a dusty protest and failed to improve matters did Hazel realize that the downpour was highly localized. That the dam had broken, and it was tears blinding her, not rain.
CHAPTER 13
TWO DAYS LATER, on a hot Saturday afternoon, an RAF flight landed them in Coventry. Hazel was there to meet it. DI Gorman had conveyed the request from the Home Office, but she was glad to, felt she owed it to Ash to greet his family. He’d have been there himself if he could. She was a poor substitute, but no one else would have been a better one.
The first she saw of Cathy and her sons was three dots on the tarmac. Actually there were four dots—Stephen Graves was there, too—and it took them a few minutes to cross the open space, heat haze rising like a mirage from the surface, to where Hazel was waiting.
It wasn’t a bad way to approach what was always going to be a difficult meeting. As the figures grew larger, the two women were able to adjust mentally to each other’s presence. Hazel found herself vacillating between relief that Cathy Ash had found her way home after four years in captivity, so that her husband’s sacrifice had not been for nothing, and a resentment so deep that she could hardly contain it, even knowing how unreasonable it was.
What Cathy thought of being met by this young woman who had been her husband’s friend, there was no way of knowing. Her face was closed, all her emotions tightly contained. For four years her life had depended on her ability to keep her thoughts to herself. To absorb developments and react, if she reacted at all, only after considering the consequences. Of course her ability to express her feelings had been compromised.
Intimidated by the wide-open spaces, perhaps, Ash’s sons stuck close by their mother’s side. The taller would be Gilbert, now eight years old; Guy was six. Gilbert was the most like his father, but both of them had inherited their mother’s slender frame. Hazel had expected they would all be deeply tanned, but they weren’t, only touched with a little gold, as if they’d been on holiday. The reason was obvious: they’d spent most of their time in Africa inside locked rooms. The boys glanced at her suspiciously, Guy clutching Cathy’s hand, as Hazel went forward to greet them.
Graves performed the introductions. “Mrs. Cathy Ash, this is Constable Best.” The faint emphasis on her title puzzled Hazel until she remembered that the last time they met she’d let him think he was dealing with someone very much more senior. “And this is Gilbert, and Guy.”
Hazel smiled at them. “I’m here to take you home.”
“Home?” Cathy sounded uncertain, as if she’d all but forgotten what one of those was.
“To Norbold.”
But Cathy and her sons had never lived in Norbold. Their home had been in London. Hazel felt a twinge of embarrassment for forgetting that. “For now,” she added quickly. “Until you get things sorted out. Gabriel kept your flat in Covent Garden, but he let it out. It may be a little while before you can get it back. In the meantime, we’ll get you settled in his mother’s house.”
Cathy nodded. She was around Hazel’s height but slimmer, would have been even without four years of living on kidnappers’ rations. Her hair was cut short, the color somewhere between fair and brown, her eyes the washed-out blue of old denim. She wore no makeup. She was wearing a cream shirt and linen skirt, and though they had obviously been bought for the journey, they were hardly any different from what she’d been wearing when Hazel saw her last, on the computer screen in Cambridge. She looked around warily, eyes skating over Hazel, over the police officers, over the airport buildings, unable to settle for more than a moment at a time. She was free, and she was back in England, but Hazel thought it would be a long time before she lost that hunted look.
Turning to Graves, Hazel said evenly, “What about you? Are you coming back with us?”
Graves flicked her a somber little smile. “No. There are people waiting for me, too.” He nodded resignedly at the police contingent. “I’m in a certain amount of trouble. Just how much remains to be seen.”
“You did what you felt you had to do,” said Hazel.
“I got people killed.”
“And saved Mrs. Ash and her sons. Mr. Graves, I have no idea how this will all work out. But I do know that actions taken under duress can’t be compared with those undertaken willingly. Get yourself a good lawyer. Make sure everyone understands why you did what you did.”
“Thank you,” he said. “I will. And…”
Hazel had half turned away. She turned back, one eyebrow raised.
“I’m sorry about Ash.”
“Yes,” she said after a moment. “We all are.”
* * *
The easiest thing was to concentrate on Ash’s sons. There was no ambivalence in how Hazel felt about them. She could see Ash in both boys, but particularly in Gilbert, who was dark, quiet, and solemn, and who watched the world carefully from a pair of deep, dark eyes exactly like his father’s. He said very little. Hazel felt he was reserving judgment: possibly on her, possibly on England.
The circumstances in which he and his brother had been kept would emerge in due course. Even a sensitive debriefing would have to wait until they were capable of dealing with it. Hazel knew they’d been separated from their mother for much of the time, but neither showed the scars of either cruelty or neglect. Perhaps some local family had been given the task of caring for them, and over the years the barriers between the boys and their fosterers had blurred. Perhaps they felt that being made to return to a land neither of them could remember very clearly, and to a mother who was almost a stranger, was another abduction, more painful to them than events half a lifetime ago.
They wouldn’t go on feeling like that, Hazel told herself. By the time they were old enough to understand what their father had done for them, to comprehend the enormous wellhead of love his sacrifice had sprung from, they would be old enough and settled enough to be grateful.
She made no attempt at conversation as she drove, left Cathy to set the pace. And clearly Cathy was worn-out—exhausted by the long journey, by the emotional upheaval that had preceded it, most of all by four years of living on a knife edge. For four years this woman had been the captive of utterly ruthless, wholly unpredictable men. They had snatched her from her safe, comfortable life in London with a husband who loved her and sons she adored; somehow they’d smuggled her out of the country and across a couple of continents; they’d taken her sons away and made her plead for their lives with a total stranger on a computer screen. Now she had her children back and was bringing them home to a place she didn’t know, to pick up a life she must hardly remember, without the husband who had bought her freedom with his death. Hazel couldn’t begin to imagine how Cathy Ash must be feeling. But she understood why the woman didn’t want to make small talk all the way to Norbold.
On the backseat, first one, then the other of the little boys fell asleep.
It was five o’clock before she turned into Highfield Road and stopped outside the big stone house near the end. “We’re here.”
Cathy looked at it out of the car window, made no attempt to get out.
“Have you been here before?” asked Hazel gently.
“A couple of times.” Cathy’s voice was colorless. “To visit his mother. When did he move back?”
“A couple of years ago, I thin
k. It was before I knew him. You knew…” But of course Cathy didn’t know how Ash had passed the time they’d been apart. How could she? Perhaps a hint from Graves, but he didn’t know much more himself. Hazel made herself look Ash’s wife in the eye. “Gabriel had a mental breakdown after you were abducted. He blamed himself. He was hospitalized for a time. He only came back here after his doctors thought he was fit to cope on his own.”
And that, she added in the privacy of her own head, was a fairly doubtful judgment. But perhaps if he hadn’t come back here, Ash would never have gained the strength to rebuild his life. In which case he’d still be alive, and you’d still be in a whitewashed room in Mogadishu.
There was a pause while Cathy considered. Then she said, “I didn’t know that.” Another pensive gap. Then: “Do you think that’s why he … did what he did? Because the balance of his mind was disturbed?”
“No!” said Hazel quickly—so quickly, so vehemently, that Cathy’s pale eyes rounded for a moment. “You mustn’t think that. He knew exactly what he was doing. He finally found a way to help you. He was glad to take it.”
Cathy managed a thin, pale smile. “You were a good friend to him, I think.”
“I valued his friendship, yes.”
Cathy Ash sighed, finally opened her door. On the backseat the boys stirred. “I suppose we’d better go in. See what we’ve got and what we need.”
“I’ll come back tomorrow, if you like, and help you shop,” offered Hazel.
“Thank you. But really I need a car. Did Gabriel have one?”
“I don’t know where it is now,” Hazel had to admit. “The police may have it. I’ll arrange a rental car for you. And I’ll bring his dog around.”
Cathy blinked at her. Hazel might have been proposing something faintly unsavory. “Gabriel had a dog?”
Hazel nodded. “Patience. They thought the world of each other. Because neither of them had anyone else, I suppose.”
“I’m sorry,” said Cathy stiffly, “I really don’t want a dog in the house.”