Desperate Measures: A Mystery

by Jo Bannister

  “The best. So I’m reliably informed.”

  Hazel was nodding slowly. Sometimes you spend all day digging a trap, only to see the suspect tap-dance around the edge. But sometimes he jumps in with both feet. “Everyone needs a computer expert in the family these days. Who’s yours?”

  “My s—”

  If Charles Armitage had finished the word, Hazel might have been left wondering if she’d jumped to the wrong conclusion. Again. But he didn’t. He froze one letter in. The tentative smile fell off his face and his thick, soft body, which had been cautiously relaxing, jerked rigid. He knew he’d made a mistake. He knew she knew he’d made a mistake. It was too late to rectify it; all he could do now was wait to see how costly it would prove.

  “I suppose we could keep this up for a while longer,” said Hazel kindly. “Keep pretending the laptop was yours, that everything on it was yours, and that if you have a son at all, he isn’t remotely interested in the Internet. But we’re neither of us getting any younger, Mr. Armitage, and sooner or later we’ll have to deal with the reality of what happened. Tell me about your son. Tell me about how you borrowed his laptop, and only found out what he kept on it after it was stolen from the petrol station.”

  CHAPTER 18

  IF HE’D THOUGHT A LIE WOULD SERVE, he’d have lied. He’d done much worse trying to deal with the consequences of his carelessness. He’d hired a private detective. He’d tried to intimidate a police officer, for pity’s sake!—him, Charles Armitage, who obeyed speed limits when there was no one about and halted at stop signs when there was nothing coming. He was one of nature’s compliants. Show him a line in the sand and he’d die of thirst before crossing it.

  None of which had prevented him from becoming a successful professional. If there was ever a trade in which slavish adherence to the rules was a virtue, it was structural engineering. (Creativity doesn’t keep bridges from falling. Mathematics does.) Nor had it hindered him in his quest to be a husband and father. He’d found a girl who didn’t like taking risks, either, and they’d built a happy life around obedience to the laws of God, man, and the parish council. They never put their bins out on the wrong day, and always sorted the recyclables first.

  But there is literally no limit to what a man will do to protect his children. Even—perhaps especially—a man like Charles Armitage. Lie? He’d have stripped to his underwear and claimed to be Superman if it would have done any good.

  But he’d seen enough of this clear-eyed young policewoman to know that more lies wouldn’t make her go away. He’d thought he’d got rid of her, but she’d come back. He still wasn’t entirely sure why, but he knew now that she wasn’t going to be fobbed off and she wasn’t going to be frightened off. He’d have tried buying her off if he hadn’t known with absolute certainty that it would make things ten times worse.

  One possibility remained. It didn’t offer much hope of rescue from the dreadful coils of deceit he’d managed to wind around himself, but in extremis any hope is better than none. It had always been his first choice, now it was his last resort. The truth.

  “He’s fourteen,” he told Hazel quietly. They were leaning against a field gate. If anyone saw them, he’d say he was giving her directions. “I suppose it’s the curious age. When I was fourteen, I was curious about girls, too, but there was no such thing as the Internet, so you had to pluck up the courage to meet them face-to-face. It was all horribly embarrassing, you just knew what was going through their minds while you were trying to strike up a conversation, but it had this in its favor: you never got the chance to see them as a commodity. Something to be used. You had to approach them, which was difficult, and they had only to turn up their noses at you to send you on your way a gibbering wreck. You had to show them some respect.”

  He sighed. “Teenagers today, they go on about all the friends they have, but what they mean is that someone found their photograph less than totally repulsive and hit a button on a computer. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s easy and undiscriminating, and in no way prepares them for proper relationships. They don’t actually know how to make friends. They just sit in front of their screens, each in his own private space, and they barely understand the difference between what’s real and what isn’t. Because they’re viewing the images in the same way, they don’t really understand the difference between the fictional world of films and games and the real world, in which real people are being hurt. They know it, but they don’t feel it.”

  Hazel didn’t disagree with him. She didn’t yet see how relevant this was, but he seemed to be trying to explain and she was willing to give him time.

  “I don’t know where he found those images.” All the color had gone out of both his face and his voice; he seemed ten years older. “He says he stumbled across them at different times, and wouldn’t know where to find them again. But that’s a bit disingenuous. You might find something like that, but you wouldn’t download it. Well—I wouldn’t. And you wouldn’t. I don’t know about other fourteen-year-old boys. I kind of hope they would. The alternative is to think that my son is peculiarly perverted in his interests and instincts.”

  Armitage took a deep breath. “I knew nothing about any of this until the morning I was going to Norbold for a presentation to the council on the development at the Archway.”

  “Dirty Nellie’s.” Hazel nodded.

  The engineer blinked. “Sorry?”

  “Dirty Nellie’s. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, Mr. Armitage, but however impressive a design you come up with for it, and however trendy a name you give it, in Norbold it’ll always be known as Dirty Nellie’s.”

  “Really?” He took his glasses off and polished them. “How unfortunate. So I’m part of the team giving this presentation, and I’m on my way out to the car when I trip over the next door’s cat and drop my laptop. I switch it on to check it’s all right, and it isn’t. I can’t seem to access any of the files I want.

  “Which isn’t the end of the world. I’ve got it all backed up on a memory stick—all I need is a laptop. My son was already at school, so I couldn’t ask him, but I didn’t think he’d mind if I borrowed his. Not really, not when it mattered so much. I picked it up and got on my way.

  “I didn’t really need petrol. But I thought it would look unprofessional to go into the meeting and have to start fiddling with the memory stick, so I stopped at the service station, filled up, and spent a couple of minutes transferring my data onto my son’s laptop. I didn’t hit any problems. Of course, I knew his password—we’d set it up together. I didn’t know he had another level of security. I thought I’d managed to rescue the situation.”

  “Then somebody stole the laptop.”

  “Yes,” said Armitage. The memory made him wince.

  “You took it into the washroom with you?”

  He looked surprised. “I wasn’t going to leave it in the car, was I? That wouldn’t be very safe.”

  Hazel forbore to comment. “What happened?”

  He avoided her gaze. “I put it down while I washed my hands. And some … toe-rag”—it seemed to be the worst insult he knew—“snatched it up and legged it for the car park. By the time I reached the door, there was no sign of him.”

  Hazel sucked reflectively on the inside of her cheek. “Can you describe this toe-rag?”

  Armitage shrugged. “Maybe my son’s age. Maybe a bit older, though there wasn’t much of him. Quick on his feet. Wearing a rugby shirt, I think, though I didn’t recognize the club.”

  I bet I do, thought Hazel. The Saturday Irregulars. I’ll give him I found it in a washroom! She said, “Why didn’t you report the theft to the police?”

  “I should have done. But I was already late for my presentation, and I still had the memory stick in my pocket, and I thought I could do all that later. I thought, What’s the worst that can happen? I’ll buy Bobby a new laptop. I’ll have to anyway—we’ll never get it back. I thought I’d get my meeting out of the way, go home, confess to my son, and the
n call the theft in to the Norbold police.

  “Only of course, as soon as Bobby—that’s my son—heard what I’d done, he freaked out. I mean really freaked out. Not ‘I’m going to have to get everyone’s e-mail addresses again, but at least I’ll get a new laptop’ freaking—complete and total panic. He was literally screaming at me. It took his mother an hour to calm him down enough to find out why.”

  Finally Charles Armitage met his visitor’s gaze. “Miss Best, I don’t want you to think we condone what he’d been doing. We were both of us deeply shocked and upset. We still are. Those aren’t just pictures, they’re pictures of young girls being exploited and humiliated. If I’d found out about it in any other circumstances, I’d—well, I’m not sure what I’d have done, but I’d have dealt with it like a responsible parent. We are responsible parents. We care about raising our children properly.

  “But this wasn’t something we could deal with in the privacy of our own home. The laptop had been stolen, and there weren’t just those pictures on it, there was enough material to connect it to our family. It had my presentation on it, for heaven’s sake! You found me through it. Someone could have used it to blackmail me. The best I could hope for, the very best, was that whoever stole it would keep it.

  “So no, I didn’t phone the police. I gave Bobby the bollocking of his life”—he blushed when he realized he’d said that to a strange young woman—“and I don’t think any of us got any sleep that night. The next morning I made myself go in to work, as if nothing had happened. Every time a phone rang I wondered if it was somebody telling my employers what he’d found on my computer.

  “Do you know, it almost came as a relief when Detective Inspector Gorman called? I knew what I was going to do. I was going to lie to him—say I’d downloaded the pictures. Bobby’s fourteen years old. I honestly don’t believe he meant any harm. I don’t think he’s a danger to anyone. I was willing to take the blame if it would save him from dragging a conviction for a sex offense through the rest of his life. Do you believe me?”

  Hazel was shaking her head in despair. “Actually, I do believe you. It’s just the sort of stupid thing that otherwise sensible people do when their children are involved. But it would have been easy enough to establish who downloaded the material. And as a juvenile, your son wouldn’t have been in anything like the same trouble that you as a grown man would have been. Do you think we don’t know what young boys are like? That we can’t differentiate between a prurient teenager and a genuine pervert? Give us some credit!”

  “Perhaps it was foolish,” admitted Armitage. Telling the truth had obviously taken a weight off his shoulders. “But it’s easy to see what needs doing when your emotions aren’t involved. All I could think was that this was my son and somehow I had to protect him. I’d lay down my life for him. My reputation didn’t seem too big a thing to give up.

  “But Mr. Gorman didn’t want to arrest me. He just wanted to return the laptop. No one had scrutinized it more deeply than was necessary to find out who owned it. I thought—I dared to think—we were off the hook.”

  “Why on earth did you send a private investigator to my flat?” Hazel was still indignant about that.

  “Another bad decision,” he said, squirming inside his clothes. “I just … I so badly wanted the business to be over! I didn’t want someone coming around with a hand out after I thought we were safe. I asked Ms. Harris to find out if you were the kind of person who’d do that. If you’d made copies of Bobby’s files with a view to doing exactly that.”

  “I am a police officer!” insisted Hazel, wide-eyed with outrage. “How dare you think that?”

  “Yes,” murmured Armitage. “I’m sorry.”

  She shook her head in a kind of wonderment. It was that simple? A teenage boy behaving as teenage boys have behaved since the year dot, only with the power of the Internet at his disposal, and a horror-stricken father doing what fathers do? But then … “And you really didn’t send anyone to my house?”

  “No,” he said. “I really didn’t.” And Hazel believed him.

  She put that aside for the moment. “All right. There are two things you can do. You can keep your head down, and wait to see if Mr. Gorman comes calling or not. I think he will, sooner or later, but you might get lucky. Or you can go and see him, and tell him everything you’ve just told me. If it was me, I’d want to get it out of the way, rather than jumping out of my skin every time the phone rings, but it’s your call. I won’t be doing anything more about it. If Mr. Gorman asks me a direct question, I’ll have to answer it honestly, but otherwise you can forget about me. I’m satisfied that things happened as you say they did. I imagine you’ll be taking steps to ensure that nothing similar happens again?”

  Armitage nodded energetically. “He’ll be using the new laptop in the living room from now on,” he promised fervently. “And I’ll be learning a bit more about the damn things, too.”

  * * *

  Hazel called Saturday to say that all was well, then took her time driving home. At one point she deviated from the main road to take the scenic route, winding through the apple orchards that a few weeks earlier had been a froth of blossom. When she got home, she’d have to deal with Saturday, but before that she wanted some space to think.

  On the whole her mission had been successful. She hadn’t got anybody bang to rights (even Sergeant Mole hadn’t actually used the term), but she was satisfied that the situation had been resolved. That Charles Armitage was not a predatory sex offender waiting to leap on her or anyone else, and that the author of the collection that had so shocked Saturday—no mean feat in itself—was an immature teenager with a man’s urges and a boy’s lack of self-control. She trusted Armitage when he said there would be no repetition. She suspected he’d be inspecting Bobby’s computer every night until he turned thirty.

  She hoped Armitage would find the courage to tell Dave Gorman what had happened. If he did, she thought the matter would go no further; if he didn’t, she suspected that at some point it would come back to bite him. Either way, she felt no need to remain involved. She had achieved everything she’d needed to.

  Which left the matter of the intruder at her house. Could she have imagined that? No. She’d seen the footprints; she’d seen the ball. Someone had gone to her new home and found a way in past her new locks. If not Armitage, then who? And why? She wandered around the orchards of ripening fruit, thinking until her brain ached, while the long evening turned into dusk.

  Saturday had gone to bed by the time she got home. He was becoming a proper little suburbanite: a mug of cocoa and asleep by eleven, for all the world as if he had something to do the next morning. That could be her next project: finding him a job. But not tonight. Nor did she want to discuss the theft of Charles Armitage’s laptop tonight, although there was absolutely no chance that she would let it pass. Tonight she had something else on her mind.

  Patience looked up from the sofa when she came in. She waved her tail and Hazel stroked her ears. She made herself toast and coffee and took them back to the sitting room. “Do you want to go out?” she asked, but the dog declined, only turned around once and went back to sleep. Hazel ate her supper, then turned the light out, leaving the house in darkness.

  She didn’t sleep. She may have dozed; it was hard to be sure. Without turning the light back on, she could not have guessed to within an hour at what time of the night she became aware that she was no longer alone.

  There had been no noise to alert her. But even before Patience stirred and sat up, a pale shape in the darkness, Hazel knew he’d come back. Their visitor, who’d stood in the flower bed, staring in at the kitchen window; who’d let himself into the house and moved things just enough to show he’d been there. Now, in the middle of the night, when decent people were asleep in their beds, here he was again.

  She’d left the kitchen door ajar. On her left cheek she felt the whisper of air as he passed through it and behind her chair. Of course, the room was as dark for
him as it was for her. He didn’t know she was there, waiting in the high-backed wing chair, until she reached out and turned the reading lamp on.

  “Hello, Gabriel,” she said softly.

  CHAPTER 19

  HE MADE NO REPLY. He made no move. He was directly behind her chair, so Hazel couldn’t see him without standing up and turning around. She felt no need to do either. She knew now who’d been coming into her house late at night when she and Saturday were dreaming—she about sorrow and loss, he almost certainly about television. She knew it before Patience got down from the sofa, stretched her long white body, and padded across the room, tail waving.

  In the hearts of tumultuous events there are places, and moments, where nothing is happening. The eye of the storm. That was where Hazel was now. When what she felt caught up with what she knew, emotions from weak-kneed relief to volcanic fury would rip through her, and anyone in the fallout zone had better find something to stand behind. But it was too soon for that. Right now she was calm and in control, and enjoying the feeling of moral superiority that came from outwitting him.

  Finally he managed: “How long have you known?”

  “Only today,” admitted Hazel. “The pieces finally fell into place a few hours ago.”

  “What … why…?” He considered, tried again. “How?”

  Now Hazel stood up and faced him. The last time she’d seen Gabriel Ash, she’d seen—or thought she’d seen—him shoot himself in the head. It seemed that death rather suited him. If anything, he looked tidier than usual—the thick black hair combed back, the collar of his shirt better ironed than when he’d done it himself. Hazel felt the smugness in her own smile and couldn’t resist saying it anyway. “It was the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”

  Gabriel Ash had read a lot of psychology and criminology; he’d read an unending stream of reports and reviews and articles sent to him in his capacity as a security analyst. Perhaps he hadn’t read Sherlock Holmes. “What did the dog do in the night?”