Desperate Measures: A Mystery

by Jo Bannister

  The prospect of getting a right royal roasting should not have deterred her from taking whatever measures were necessary to protect Saturday and herself. But it’s human nature to avoid a bollocking where we can, and Hazel at least wanted to be sure it was the best option before confessing to DI Gorman. She called the locksmith, deciding to defer any other action until it was clear that new locks wouldn’t resolve the situation.

  CHAPTER 17

  THREE DAYS AFTER THE NEW LOCKS WERE FITTED, someone had been in the house again.

  At first it was nothing much more than intuition telling Hazel that it was so. There was nothing to see: no broken glass, no jimmied woodwork. So far as she could determine, nothing had been taken; at first she wasn’t even aware that anything had been moved. Was there an unfamiliar smell in here, then? But no; only the increasingly homely signatures of dog, which is rather engagingly the smell of broken biscuits, and—somewhat less beguiling—teenager’s trainers.

  She tried to tell herself she was imagining it. That the previous visitation had left her jumping at shadows. But somehow she knew better. “Absence of evidence,” she murmured to herself, quoting from a distant lecture, “is not evidence of absence.”

  And finally she spotted something that supported what the short hairs on the back of her neck had been trying to tell her: something that shouldn’t even have been in the sitting room, let alone displayed on the bookshelf as if it were a treasure. The ball Patience had brought home from the Clent Hills. The punctured, flattened blue ball with the cartoon footballer on it.

  She called Saturday down from his room. (She’d bought him a junk-shop television. Now he could hardly be dragged away from it.) “I’m going to ask you something really stupid,” Hazel said. “I know what the answer is. I just need to hear you say it, so there’s no room for doubt. Did you put that up there?” She pointed.

  The boy frowned, unsure what she was pointing at. “The candlestick? The photo of your mum and dad? One of the books? Whatever, the answer’s no.…” Then he saw it. “What’s the dog’s ball doing there?”

  “Thank you,” said Hazel quietly. “So you didn’t.” Saturday shook his head. “And I didn’t. And Patience can’t reach that high. Our friend has been back.”

  “You mean…” Finally there was a hint of alarm in his voice.

  “Yes.”

  “After you changed the locks.”

  “Yes.”

  “You think it was…”

  “Oh yes.”

  Saturday thought about it. “You think he drove thirty miles and broke in so carefully that there’s nothing to show for it, in order to put his kids’ ball on your bookshelf? Why?”

  “It’s a message. He wants me to know that he can get at me anytime he wants. If I make trouble for him, he’ll be back, and next time he won’t settle for rearranging the ornaments.”

  Saturday was impressed. “All that from a dog’s ball?”

  “Before it was Patience’s ball, it was his kids’ ball. He knows I know that. He knew I’d know what bringing it in here meant.”

  Saturday sucked on his front teeth. “What are we going to do?”

  A little bit of Hazel was grateful for that. Just because she’d tried to solve some of his problems didn’t mean he had to return the favor, so it was nice that he wanted to. But the greater part of her was determined to keep him out of harm’s way. She wanted to keep those thirty miles between Saul Desmond, known as Saturday, and Charles Armitage, with his interest in hurting children, for as long as she could.

  “We are doing nothing,” she said firmly. “I am going to have this out with Mr. Armitage, right now. I am damned if I’m having him threaten me in my own house.”

  “You’ll be in a lot more trouble if he starts threatening you in his house.”

  “This is true,” acknowledged Hazel. “Which is why you’re going to sit by the phone. I’ll call you when I get there. I’ll call you again when I leave. If you haven’t heard from me after half an hour, call DI Gorman”—she scribbled the number of his mobile—“and tell him what’s going on. Tell him I may need help.”

  * * *

  Somehow, the Clent Hills seemed closer this time. Too close. Hazel wasn’t sure she should be rattling the cage of an unpredictable man who knew where she lived and could be there in under an hour. But the alternative was to let him think she was intimidated by his mind games. And maybe she was, but she was damned if she was letting him know that.

  She wondered if he’d be expecting her. He must have known that one possible response to his invasion of her home was that she’d come back and make merry hell in his. But then, he hadn’t left a message lipsticked to her mirror, something she would see as soon as she got home. It might have taken her a couple of days to notice the ball on her shelf and work out what it meant. So he wouldn’t be waiting for her. But neither would he be surprised when she turned up.

  In fact, he was on his way home from work. Hazel had her suspicions from half a mile back about the broad-breasted charcoal gray car she found herself following through the country lanes. It was just the kind of car she would expect a man like Charles Armitage to drive: just a little bit bigger, bolder, and more ostentatious than was strictly necessary.

  And he realized it was her before he had the uncomfortable experience of turning into his own drive and seeing her turn in after him. Of course, if he knew her new address, he would certainly know what car she drove. In any event, realizing he was being followed, he pulled over beside the broad grass verge where Patience and Saturday had played with the ball, and climbed out.

  “Miss Best,” he rumbled by way of a greeting. “I’m surprised to see you again.”

  “Yeah, right,” retorted Hazel. She got out of her car, too, discreetly checking the phone in her pocket.

  Armitage frowned. “I thought I made it clear that I had nothing more to say to you.”

  “If you didn’t want me coming back here, maybe you shouldn’t have left an invitation at my house.”

  The frown deepened. “What?”

  “The ball on my bookshelf? With the comedy footballer on it?”

  He was looking at her as if she were mad and quite possibly dangerous. Which was fine with Hazel. She wanted him to be afraid of her. It might be the best protection either she or Saturday had against his malice.

  She breathed heavily at him. “Mr. Armitage, I’m finding these games of yours increasingly tiresome. I thought we had some kind of an understanding. I thought you understood that I know what you’ve been up to, but in view of the difficulty of proving it now that you’ve disposed of the laptop, I was willing to give you a chance to mend your ways. I thought you understood that you’re on our radar now, and there will be people watching you for a very long time. I’m only one of them. If you think that scaring me off is going to solve your problem, you don’t understand at all how the police work. We’re like the proverbial swan. Sometimes there seems to be nothing much happening. But if you look below the surface, the feet are going like the clappers to get us where we need to be.”

  Charles Armitage kept looking at her—as if, Hazel thought, she had the remains of her dinner on her chin. Of course, he wanted to make her think she might be mistaken. Know she was right but be afraid that she was wrong. Because in the face of outright denial, there was no more she could do this time than there had been before.

  Policing isn’t always about what you can do. Sometimes it’s about what you can make people believe you can do. And sometimes that’s a good thing and sometimes it’s not, but today it was the only weapon left to her.

  So she drew herself up to her full height and curled her lip at him. “Let’s cut the crap here. We both know you’ve lied repeatedly since you lost your laptop, so there’s no earthly reason I’d believe anything you say now. I’m not here for an explanation. I know why you broke into my house.”

  She raised a peremptory hand to forestall the protest he was obviously preparing. “Yes, I know—it wasn’t you
. But if you hire someone, the way you hired Martha Harris and now presumably you’ve hired someone else, you are responsible for their actions in every way that counts, legally and otherwise.

  “So I’ll say it again: I know why you broke into my house. And when I talk to Detective Inspector Gorman, he’ll know why you broke into my house. He already knows about the dirty pictures on your computer. When he hears you’ve been stalking me, he’ll suspect you’re more than just a consumer of child pornography, that you are in fact a purveyor. Someone responsible for ordering attacks on children, for making images of them, and for disseminating them via the Internet. Someone, in short, he’ll want to get behind bars urgently enough to drop whatever else he’s doing.

  “Which probably wasn’t your intention, was it? Well, welcome to the world of unintended consequences.” She was a little taken aback at the venom she heard in her own voice.

  “I didn’t break into your house,” said Charles Armitage. Behind the imperious calm she heard desperation. “I didn’t send anyone to break into your house.” Somewhere he found the gall to look down his nose at her. “And isn’t that a rather pretentious way of describing two rooms with a Polish widow?”

  Surprised, Hazel hesitated. Could he possibly not know she’d moved? “I’m not going to the expense of changing the locks again when you’ve obviously got some way of shimming them.” She was well aware of the difficulties, even for an expert, of creating security that another expert couldn’t breach. Ordinary household locks are meant to deter opportunistic housebreakers, not high-end professionals. Lock yourself out of your own house and you’ll see how quickly your local locksmith can gain access—unless you’re paying him by the hour. “What I’m going to do instead is warn you that the next time I see so much as a shadow on my window I’ll be talking to Dave Gorman and so, in very short order, will you. If that isn’t what you want, stay away from me.”

  “I didn’t break into your house,” said Armitage again. He paused, debating with himself whether to say more, decided he had little to lose. “And I find myself wondering why, if you’re so convinced I did, you haven’t spoken to Detective Inspector Gorman already.”

  It was, of course, the raised flagstone on which her shaky authority tripped and went sprawling. He must have realized that. But Hazel had hoped to have finished marking his card and be driving away before he could react.

  The best she could do was bluster. “Detective Inspector Gorman doesn’t need my help to deal with you. He’ll search your house from rafters to cellar. He’ll seize anything capable of storing digital images and question every member of your family. And he won’t stop until he has the lot. All the grubby little pictures in your collection. How long you’ve been collecting them, where you got them. If you took any of them yourself, who helped you, and who your victims were. After he’s finished, your reputation will be in tiny little pieces you could keep in an envelope.”

  Too late she heard what she was doing: warning him how a thorough investigation would proceed. Dave Gorman would have the battered, bloodied remnants of her warrant card for this.

  But Charles Armitage seemed to have heard something that alarmed him. He took a step back and his face closed down, a shield to guard whatever it was he was most anxious to protect. For a third time, carefully now, he said, “I didn’t break into your house. I haven’t done any of the things you think I have. That’s not quite true,” he amended. “I did ask Ms. Harris to find out who you were, and that was foolish. I was … a little freaked by what had happened.” He managed a wan smile. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  Hazel had no sympathy for him. “An even better idea would have been not to fill up your computer with the kind of images that no self-respecting man would want to see once, let alone repeatedly. Would want to forget if he came across them by accident.”

  Armitage hesitated, thinking urgently. Without knowing it, he was twisting his fingers together as if wringing out a wet cloth. “Miss Best,” he said finally, “I don’t know what you thought you saw on that computer—”

  “Thought I saw!” echoed Hazel indignantly, and in fact misleadingly.

  “—but none of it was my doing,” he continued with quiet obstinacy. “I am not particularly familiar with technology. I know how to use it for my work, I do the same things with it so often I could do them in my sleep, but there are whole areas that I know nothing about. That—what you’re talking about—is one of them. I have never come across such images, even by accident. I have never downloaded them onto a computer. I have never wanted to.

  “I’m a structural engineer. I’m interested in building things. Good, useful things that do a job for people, and make their days better and easier. I’m also a husband and father; I love my family and want to keep them safe. I haven’t done what you think I’ve done. I’m no threat to you, and in fact you’re no threat to me. You can’t prove your accusation, partly because the laptop is no longer available but also because it isn’t true. Please don’t ruin my life trying to prove that it is.”

  Hazel knew she couldn’t trust a word he said. But some treacherous corner of her heart wished she could—wanted it all to be a misunderstanding. But she believed absolutely that Saturday had seen what he said he’d seen.

  “So you explain it,” she said roughly. “Those images were on your laptop—we’re not even going to discuss that. If you didn’t put them there, who did?”

  Armitage blinked. As if a chink had opened in the darkness and, just for a moment, daylight had streamed in. “Somebody playing a joke? Yes. I take it to building sites with me. I put it down while I go off to look at some I-beams. Maybe one of the laborers thought it was funny, to download some pictures that would blow the socks off that stuffy Mr. Armitage with his preoccupation with concrete mixes.…”

  Hazel gave him a deeply skeptical look. “How would he have got past your password?”

  “The same way you did—by knowing it’s the one used by people with no imagination!”

  She couldn’t argue with that. “But if someone wanted you to find the pictures, why protect them with another password?”

  “Because…” But he couldn’t think of a reason, and the sentence petered out.

  Hazel scowled at him. But it was a kind of double-edged scowl, facing both ways. She was missing something here. She’d known exactly who Charles Armitage was after Saturday told her what he’d seen on the man’s computer. His attempts to frighten her had only confirmed it. She’d known exactly what she was dealing with when she first came here to confront him sixteen days ago.

  Only somehow, this time she’d seen another side of him. The imagined laborer had a point: the man was stuffy. Middle-aged, middle-class, middle-income, middle-of-the-road. The kind of man who completed questionnaires with fives and sixes. Mr. Average. Hazel was inclined to believe him when he said he was a loving husband and father. Somehow, what she knew was now arguing with what she saw.

  He said he hadn’t sent anyone to break into her house. Well, he would, wouldn’t he? Except, if his purpose was to show how far his reach extended, he wouldn’t want her to actually believe that. And again, she more than halfway did.

  So what did she know for sure? That the dog’s ball was on her bookshelf. That before it was Patience’s ball, it belonged to the Armitage children. Hopefully, they’d thrown it away after it got punctured, although possibly she’d sneaked in and stolen it off the front lawn, but either way, Hazel was meant to know where it had come from. Otherwise the message would have been meaningless and so would the threat. That ball was significant only if it was brought into her house and left where she would see it at the behest of Charles Armitage.

  But Armitage denied it. And how could he not know that she’d moved—or if he knew, why pretend not to, when the effectiveness of his threats depended on Hazel’s knowing who was threatening her?

  Somewhere in the drive train of her mind, cogs were beginning to move and mesh. (With a degree in information technolog
y under her belt, Hazel would have loved to compare her brain to a computer, connections lighting up the synapses faster than a Riverdancer’s feet. But usually it felt much more twentieth century than that. Sometimes it felt like it was being powered by a turnspit dog.)

  Sergeant Mole, who had talked at training college about the absence of evidence, had had other aphorisms as well. It isn’t always necessary, he used to say, to see the chicken. If there are eggs in the kitchen, and chicken pellets in the shed, and chicken shit on your shoes, it is reasonable to infer the presence of a chicken, whether you can see one or not. And Hazel Best had seen signs of the chicken.

  She took a long slow breath and let it out in a rueful sigh. She managed a smile. “Mr. Armitage, I don’t think I’m achieving much here now, am I? It’s just possible I owe you an apology. I thought I knew what was going on, but maybe I was wrong. Maybe I should go home, and we’ll try not to bother each other again. What do you think?”

  Charles Armitage thought it was an excellent idea. He tried, for the look of the thing, not to seem too eager, but still he jumped at it. “You were wrong about me. I promise you.”

  “Yes? Well, good. Just—you know—be careful. With the new computer.”

  “I will,” said Armitage fervently. “Believe me.”

  She did. “What did you go for? A handy tablet, or something with some real wellie behind it?”

  Armitage gave a wry smile. “I told you, I’m no expert. But for that price, I hope it’s wearing wellies!”

  “Lots of memory? Lots of speed?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Top-end graphics?”