Desperate Measures: A Mystery

by Jo Bannister

  “You know this. You know that if we arrange to meet, you’re always slightly surprised when I turn up. If you want to feel safe, if you want some certainty in your life, you probably don’t want to live the way I live. I’m not saying this so you’ll feel sorry for me,” he explained earnestly, “just so you understand. We don’t feel the same way about danger as you do. Because it’s always there, in our lives, pretty much everywhere we look. And because we have less to lose.”

  And then, having twisted the heart within her, he broke it entirely by adding, “But it’s kind of nice that you care.”

  Another mile down the road Hazel asked, “Whatever happened to you, Saturday? You’re a nice kid. Somebody loved you enough to make a good job of bringing you up. She should be proud of you. But here you are, sixteen years old—”

  “Seventeen last week,” he interjected, as if that was the bit that mattered. He was sitting not beside her but on the backseat, one arm round the lurcher.

  “Seventeen years old, you’re living in empty buildings, you own nothing that you can’t carry on your back, and your idea of a day’s work is leaning on a lamppost, sticking your hand out as people go past. You’re capable of so much more than that. You’re worth so much more. Whatever happened to make you think you weren’t?”

  “She died,” Saturday said simply. “My mum. She died when I was thirteen. Breast cancer. She hung on long enough for my bar mitzvah”—in the rearview mirror a tiny smile crossed his face—“and then she died. My dad remarried. We didn’t get on. I went to live with my grandparents. Then my gran got sick. My granddad didn’t need to worry about me as well, so I moved out. I told him I had somewhere to go. I write to him sometimes, tell him I’m doing fine. Maybe he believes me. Or maybe he wonders why I never send an address he can write back to.”

  Hazel had let the car coast to a halt. Not because she had anything to say that required her full attention. She had nothing to say at all. And she knew he’d be utterly astonished if she leaned through the gap in the seats and hugged him. All the same, she felt the tears she’d all but managed to stifle in the last few days beating their fists against the inside of her throat. There had been a couple of times in her life when she thought she’d been really unlucky. But that left all the rest of her life, and moments like this she knew herself blessed. Perhaps she always knew, but it took moments like this to remind her.

  She put the car back into gear and rejoined the traffic. She thought in silence for six or seven miles. She suspected that what she wanted to do was crazy. She still thought that it was right.

  Finally she said, watching for his reaction in the mirror, “If I can find a little house to rent, will you come and live with me? As my lodger,” she added hurriedly, in case he should think anything different. “This may be your lucky day, but it’s not that lucky. All I’m offering is room and board. I won’t try to reform you. If you want a chance in life, you’ll have to make your own. But I’d like to know you have somewhere dry to sleep at night. What do you think?”

  “I’ve no money,” he pointed out, unnecessarily.

  “I’ve got enough. Hell’s bells,” she snorted, “anyone who could afford to keep a budgie could feed you. All I ask is that you don’t trash the place, you help me look after Patience, and you don’t bring trouble to my door. I’m still a police officer. Any laws you’re in the habit of breaking, you stop now.”

  “Doesn’t Ash’s wife—”

  “Widow,” Hazel said, correcting him.

  “—want Patience?”

  Hazel shook her head. “She doesn’t like dogs.”

  She might have taken offense that he had to think about it. But then, he, too, was giving things up. His freedom to come and go unnoticed. His right to break any laws he could get away with. Any change carried the seeds of risk. He might have thought it better to stick to the life he knew.

  But he didn’t. “Okay,” he said. As if she’d offered him ketchup on his burger. As if it was a thing of no great matter, to either of them, whether he said yes or no.

  For a moment Hazel was taken aback. Then she understood that, to someone accustomed to disappointments, the best defense was not to put too much value on anything. “Okay, then,” she said, and drove them home to Norbold.

  The next morning she was waiting when the estate agents’ opened.

  * * *

  Mrs. Poliakov was sorry to see her go. Hazel thought she was even sorry to see Patience go. But then, she hadn’t mentioned Saturday. She was pretty sure her landlady would have felt less sentimental about her departure if she’d said she was bringing a homeless youth to live with her.

  At some point she was going to have to tell her father, too. Unflappable in many ways, he was still a conventional man. He might confine his comments to a raised eyebrow, but Hazel knew it would not so much disappear into his hairline, which had receded, as go clean over the top and fall down the back of his pullover.

  But apart from the fact that no money would change hands—or if it did (Hazel was a realist) it would go the opposite way from usual—she was only doing what Mrs. Poliakov had done for the last thirty years: letting out a room in her house to someone who needed somewhere to stay. Saturday wasn’t even a grown man, he was just a boy; and maybe people would talk, but Hazel had had worse things said about her. She wanted to help him, she could help him, and she was going to help him—whether he wanted helping or not.

  The house was in a smoke-stained terrace close to the town center, five minutes from the park in one direction and the canal in the other. Studying the particulars, Hazel realized with a shock that she was putting the dog’s requirements ahead of those of the humans involved. There was also a back garden. The daughter of a gardener, Hazel was suddenly struck by the fact that she’d missed having a bit of green space that was her own. It was overgrown—the house had been empty for a month; the estate agent was so keen to let it that he gave her a knockdown rent—but it’s wonderful what you can achieve with a strimmer on the brush-cutter setting.

  Some bits of furniture had been left behind by a previous tenant, including a Victorian bed in the main bedroom that was so big it must have been built up there, but there was still a list of basics she needed to buy. She made Saturday go with her, not so much for his design input as to help carry things.

  She found him a cheap bed in a charity shop. Saturday was appalled at how much even a cheap bed cost. “You can’t afford all this,” he hissed at her, a little like Jiminy Cricket and a little like her mother.

  “Yes, I can,” she said.

  “You’re not working, either.”

  “I’m on invalidity. You get injured in the course of duty, they look after you.” The fact that her injuries were mostly psychological, and at least in her own judgment had healed some time ago, had not inclined the assessors to deal more strictly with her. Hazel suspected they were paying her to stay off work because she was less trouble that way.

  They carried what they could—the furniture would follow in a van—home to the little house in Railway Street. Patience had already appropriated the most comfortable chair, but she left it long enough to greet them at the door. She was carrying a ball.

  Hazel vaguely recognized that it had been around for a while, but she hadn’t had time to notice. “Where did that come from?” The lurcher had never really done toys.

  “She found it,” said Saturday, stacking paint cans. “Last week, while you were talking to the perv.”

  Hazel regarded him levelly. “You let her steal his children’s ball?”

  “She didn’t steal anything,” said Saturday dismissively. “They threw it away. It’s got a hole in it the size of your finger. Only a dog would want it.”

  Even the lurcher didn’t want it very much. In the back garden, after they’d spent most of Monday moving in, Hazel tried throwing it for her. Patience studiously ignored the thing; Hazel had to fetch it herself. It was blue, with a cartoon footballer embossed on it, and had no bounce left.
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br />   Knocking the house into shape took less time than she’d expected. With Saturday’s help, which was neither very expert nor very dependable but was marginally better than nothing, she did most of what needed doing that first week. By the weekend the worst of the paintwork had been refreshed—however cheap the rent, she couldn’t sleep in a Barbie pink bedroom—the kitchen and bathroom had been scrubbed clean, and new curtains, rugs, and throws had given the whole place a fresh look. Hazel was inordinately proud of it. This was the first time she’d had a house of her own. She’d lived with her parents, she’d lived in university accommodation, in flat shares with friends, in police station houses, and she’d lived with Mrs. Poliakov. She’d moved into the house in Highfield Road while Ash was in hospital. But she’d never been a householder before. Never been the one who’d have to fill in the census form. Suddenly, at the age of twenty-six, she felt quite grown-up.

  Partly, she recognized, her enthusiasm stemmed from the fact that she’d finally found a way to move forward. Ash’s death ten days ago had cast a pall over her soul—on top of which had come the Armitage fiasco. The little house in Railway Street seemed to represent a turning point. From now on things were going to get better. Better for Saturday, and also better for her.

  After a little thought, she presented Saturday with his own front door key, together with the warning that she’d be running the bolt across before she went to bed and she got really grumpy if her sleep was disturbed.

  He looked at it as if he didn’t know what it was.

  “You put it in the lock and turn it,” she said helpfully, “then the door will open.”

  A little glitter of annoyance sparked in his eye. “I know what it does,” he growled.

  “Yes? Well, that one’s a Yale key.” She reached out and turned it in his hand. “It goes in that way up.”

  “Thank you,” said Saturday.

  Hazel smiled. “You’re welcome. I know it’s all a bit new.…”

  “I didn’t mean the key. At least, I didn’t just mean the key. I meant”—his gaze circled the kitchen—“this. Thank you.”

  She nodded, returned to the cupboard she was stocking. “But I meant it,” she added over her shoulder. “Very grumpy.”

  In spite of which, she was fully prepared for a testing of boundaries the first Friday night they were there. She was determined to keep her word and lock him out if he tried to roll home after midnight, drunk or high, or in the company of people her father and Mrs. Poliakov would have considered undesirable. She didn’t expect to change him into a model citizen, overnight or probably at all; but neither did she intend to be a martyr to his lifestyle, and the sooner he realized it, the better.

  In fact, he didn’t go out at all, except to walk the dog. They sat together on the inherited sofa and watched television, which was more enjoyable than it should have been, simply because it was their television and their sofa and their home now. When Hazel was ready for bed, she found Saturday had succumbed some time earlier and was fast asleep, snoring softly, his head cushioned against the back of the chesterfield. She didn’t wake him, just spread a throw over him against the early-morning chill and went to her bed smiling. She no longer had any reservations about taking the boy in. It had felt like the right thing to do because it was.

  He brought her breakfast in bed, which was a nice thought, even though you could have varnished oceangoing yachts with the tea.

  She just wished he’d be a bit more careful about locking the back door when he went out. Admittedly, she was a police officer and therefore probably neurotic about security; and Saturday wasn’t used to having the kind of personal space you could lock, which didn’t matter, because he also didn’t own anything worth stealing. Hazel told herself he’d get the hang of locking up eventually, and in the meantime they could probably count on Patience to deter any prowlers. But it irritated her that the boy’s immediate reaction to being reminded was to deny all responsibility. Again, in his old life, denying responsibility for anything and everything was a sound default position. But it wasn’t unreasonable to expect him to start growing up a bit, now he was seventeen.

  Then something happened that made her wonder if she’d been blaming him unfairly.

  She was in the back garden with Patience. The dog brought her the purloined ball. Hazel threw it down the garden, because that’s what you’re supposed to do; and instead of doing what she was supposed to do, which was fetch it, Patience gave a kind of lurcher shrug and wandered away.

  Walking down the lawn after it, Hazel gave the dog a serious talking-to. “This is the very last time,” she informed her sternly. “I’m not going to keep throwing it if you won’t bring it back.”

  She retrieved the flattened thing out of the shrubbery. Patience was watching with interest to see what she’d do next.

  “I mean it,” said Hazel. “If you don’t want to chase it, stop giving it to me.”

  Patience waved her long scimitar-shaped tail. She came and sat in front of Hazel, regarding the ball steadily.

  “Last time,” Hazel warned her again. “Last time ever, unless you bring it back.” And she threw it toward the house.

  Patience gave a gentle sigh and lay down in the grass.

  Hazel stalked the length of the lawn and bent to lift the thing from the flower bed under the kitchen window. “That’s it. That’s absolutely it. I’m putting it away now, and you’re not getting it back. You don’t want to retrieve, fine. But don’t ask me to throw what you don’t want to fetch!”

  Somewhere in the course of this one-sided argument, however, her attention shifted from the beat-up ball with its deflated cartoon footballer, and she finished the sentence on autopilot. She was looking at the flower bed, newly turned where she’d grubbed up four months’ worth of weeds and planted some geraniums. The geraniums were fine, but between them—carefully between them, as if their owner hadn’t wanted to leave any damage as evidence of his visit—there were footprints.

  Sometime in the two days since she’d planted the bed, someone had stood looking in at the kitchen window.

  Hazel was a pragmatist. She looked for simple explanations first. Had she left the marks herself when she was working there? Well, no. She’d heeled the plants in, but she hadn’t stood among them with her face to the back window. She’d had no reason to do so. If she’d wanted to know what was going on in the kitchen, she’d have gone inside.

  Saturday, then. Had he been out here with Patience and heard Hazel in the kitchen and looked in to see if there was any chance of a brew-up? He might well have done, thought Hazel, but he wouldn’t have left footprints that big if he had. He was a seventeen-year-old boy the size of a fourteen-year-old girl, and those were the footprints of a man.

  A shiver ran down her spine. She hadn’t been in the habit of wandering around naked even before she shared her home with Saturday, but the idea of some stranger hiding in the dark and watching her was deeply unsettling. Her mind turning over the possibilities, Hazel headed back inside. “And you,” she told Patience severely, “are about as good a guard dog as you are a retriever.”

  Two scenarios occurred to her. She didn’t like the first, but the second was more worrying.

  Hazel and her young lodger had moved into this house six days earlier. It was not impossible that one of the neighbors, curious about them, had taken the direct approach to nosiness and shinned over the back gate. The garden was sufficiently well enclosed to keep the dog in, but a determined Peeping Tom might have come equipped with a stepladder. Or just reached over and groped for the bolt. Hazel made a mental note to put a padlock on it before today was out.

  The more worrying possibility was that the man watching from the garden knew exactly who she was, and also who Saturday was. That, far from being intimidated by her visit, Charles Armitage had decided to return it. If so, he now knew things that she wouldn’t have wanted him to.

  She was more concerned for Saturday than for herself. Even on sick leave, a police officer isn�
�t someone to take on lightly. If Armitage threatened her with violence, he’d quickly find colleagues from Norbold and farther afield lining up to deal with him. Not because they liked her, because most of them didn’t, but because a police service that tolerates attacks on its members has lost its authority. Respect isn’t just an aspiration: it’s body armor.

  The street kid, with no family, no status, almost no friends, would be a much easier target. If Armitage guessed that Saturday had seen what was hidden on his laptop, the situation could be salvaged easily enough. Street kids disappear all the time, and no one ever knows—or usually cares—if they’ve died or moved on or what. If the man or someone in his employ had stood in the back garden of the little house in Railway Street last night and seen the skinny youth in Hazel’s kitchen, Saturday was now in danger.

  A cold hand fingered her heart. What if Saturday was telling the truth and he hadn’t left the back door open? What if the owner of the footprints had got a key or made one or found a way of doing without one, and had been inside the house? If he’d done it once, there was nothing to stop him from doing it again. That no one was hurt the first time was no guarantee that no one would be hurt in the future.

  Hazel knew there were two things she ought to do. The first was easy: she could have the locks changed immediately, Sunday afternoon or no Sunday afternoon. The second, which seemed equally obvious at first glance, in fact presented considerable problems. She couldn’t tell Detective Inspector Gorman that she’d had a visit from Charles Armitage without also telling him that Armitage had had one from her. And Gorman would hit the roof.

  He’d be entitled to. She had interfered with an investigation that was his prerogative, even if other demands on his time had prevented him from proceeding as quickly as Hazel Best would have liked. He may even have been delaying his opening gambit deliberately, to give Armitage time to relax and grow incautious. When he learned that, far from being lulled into a sense of false security, Armitage had been warned that the police were still interested in him—pretty much what they knew and even how little of it they could prove—Dave Gorman would want her guts for garters.