Desperate Measures: A Mystery

by Jo Bannister

  “Absolutely nothing,” Hazel said in quiet triumph.

  * * *

  “You first.”

  Ash demurred, glanced anxiously at his dog. “But…”

  “You first,” insisted Hazel. “Gabriel, I saw you blow your brains out! You said you were going to do it. I saw you do it and I thought you’d done it. What happened—did you miss?”

  “You saw that?” He had the grace to sound appalled. “It never occurred to me that you’d be watching.…”

  “It wasn’t my idea.” Her voice was hard. “But it was always meant for public consumption. You must have known that somebody who cared for you would see it.”

  Ash glanced at the lurcher. He didn’t put the thought into words, but Hazel heard it just the same. He didn’t think anybody cared about him except for Patience. Hazel felt a sudden, fierce impulse to slap him. The eye wall of the storm was spinning closer.

  She gritted her teeth. “It was pretty convincing. How did you do it?”

  Ash gave a self-deprecating little shrug. “Special effects. Popguns and blood packs. We ran through it six or seven times before we had all the angles right—before the camera was seeing everything it was supposed to and nothing more. Then we went live and did it for real.”

  “We—who?”

  “Sorry.” He wasn’t trying to be secretive; there was just a lot of ground to cover and he was still reeling with the shock of discovery. “My department. My old boss set it up. Philip Welbeck—I’ve told you about him, haven’t I?”

  “He was the one who had you sectioned.”

  The least trace of a smile flickered across Ash’s lips. “He was. To be fair, he was trying to stop me from getting Cathy killed.”

  But it made no sense. “Dave Gorman was on the scene within minutes. He told me he was too late. Are you telling me he was lying, too?”

  Ash shook his head. “He was deceived, like everyone else. These people are professionals, Hazel—they dressed the set so no one would have suspected. They”—he swallowed, embarrassed—“got hold of a body. I don’t mean they killed someone,” he added hastily, as if the idea wasn’t entirely preposterous. “I mean they brought a dead body from a morgue somewhere so they could be seen removing it afterward. Did Gorman tell you the Home Office arrived immediately after he did and took over?”

  She nodded.

  “We needed him to believe it as well. Everyone had to believe, except the smallest-possible inner circle. We couldn’t take the risk of anyone having doubts and talking about them. Philip brought two sets of clothes, the same clothes, for me and the corpse. The moment the uplink was killed, his team yanked me out of that room and put the substitute in.”

  “Did he look like you? This corpse.”

  Ash passed a hand across his eyes. He whispered, “Not after they fired a gun inside his mouth.”

  So Gorman had seen what he was required to see, and was immediately hustled out of the back room of the Copper Kettle by the Home Office team. Soon after that he’d told Hazel what he honestly believed to be true. Because he believed it, she did, too.

  Behind her eyes, the bridled rage was glowing incandescent.

  Ash seemed unaware of it. He looked at Hazel hesitantly, as if about to ask something difficult. “Have you seen Cathy?”

  Hazel clenched her fists until the nails dug into her palms, and the molten anger bubbled on the very lip of the crater. “Yes. I met them at the airport.”

  “How did she look?”

  “She looked all right. A bit thin, and tired from the journey, but that’s the least you’d expect. She’ll have a lot of readjusting to do. But I think she’ll be okay.”

  “They didn’t hurt her?”

  Hazel regarded him with exasperation. The angriest part of her wanted to tell him the truth: “Of course they hurt her! They hurt her, and went on hurting her, for four years. They made her do things she desperately didn’t want to do. They kept her sons away from her. Of course they hurt her.” Instead, she said distinctly, “Whatever physical injuries she had seem to have healed. The emotional ones will probably take longer.”

  “And the boys?”

  “The boys are fine. I don’t think anyone harmed them. It was how you always thought: they were held as a guarantee that you’d leave the pirates alone. When they thought you were no longer a threat, they sent them home. I met them off the plane and took them to Highfield Road.” But he must know that. If he’d troubled to track Hazel to her new house, of course he’d been to his own.

  Ash nodded, avoiding her gaze.

  “Have you seen them?”

  “They won’t let me,” he muttered miserably.

  One of Hazel’s eyebrows climbed. “Who won’t?”

  “Philip. The Home Office, SO15—the guys calling the shots. They don’t want me ruining their operation by taking my sons for an ice cream.”

  Hazel could see their point. “Whose idea was it? Yours?” He nodded, shy as a child. She was unsurprised. “You thought the only way Cathy and the boys were coming home was if the pirates were convinced you were dead. So you approached your old boss, and he arranged it. Yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you didn’t see any need to tell me.”

  Ash knew she was angry. He spread an apologetic hand. “We couldn’t tell anyone. It mattered too much. The first thing the pirates would do before accepting the evidence of their eyes was check how the people around me reacted. If you’d carried on as if nothing had happened, they’d have wondered if anything had.”

  Hazel hadn’t expected that. “You think they sent someone from Somalia to spy on me—to make sure I was grieving appropriately?”

  “Maybe they had to send someone, maybe they didn’t,” mumbled Ash. “But yes, I imagine someone was watching you, at least for a few days. If you’d known it was faked, you could have done something that didn’t ring true. Just a suspicion would have been enough for them to hold on to my family. Then they’d have pulled up the tent pegs and disappeared into the undergrowth, where we’d never find them. We needed them to believe they were safe. It was our only chance of finding them and stopping them. That was the primary objective for the government guys. All I cared about was saving my family. But they were spending big money, public money, and they needed to be able to justify it. They needed to end the piracy once and for all.”

  “And have they?” asked Hazel coolly. “Found the pirates? Stopped them?”

  Ash bit his lip. “Philip’s working on it. It’s a big undertaking. But this is an opportunity we never had before. The exchange at the border meant that we knew, for the first time ever, exactly where they were going to show up. They were under surveillance when they went back into Somalia, and they still are. When we’re sure we’ve mapped the whole organization, it’ll be expunged.” He seemed to relish the sound of the word.

  “Well, whoopee for our side.”

  He didn’t understand her rancor. “This is important,” he insisted. “Not just to me. Over the last five years, nearly thirty aircrew have disappeared, presumed murdered. Tons of munitions have gone missing, only to reappear in the hands of criminals and terrorists. It had to stop. I’m sorry if I upset you.…”

  “If?” she echoed, her voice momentarily soaring.

  “I couldn’t think how else to handle it. I had to convince these men that Cathy and the boys were now surplus to requirements. The best way to make them believe was to make everyone believe. To make them think they’d seen it happen. If I could have stopped you from seeing it, I would have.”

  “You could have,” cried Hazel. “You could have told me! You could have trusted me! I could have put on any act you needed me to, but you should have told me. You shouldn’t have let me think I’d seen you die!”

  “I’m sorry,” he said again.

  Hazel fought to bring her breathing under control. “So when are you going to tell Cathy that she’s not a widow after all?”

  Ash made an awkward shrug. “When Philip says
I can. He’s done so much for me, I can’t risk jumping the gun. I’ll see Cathy when it’s safe.” He looked at Hazel uncertainly from under heavy eyebrows. “My turn?”

  Hazel was a long way from forgiving him. “What do you want to know?”

  He encompassed the little sitting room with a jerky sweep of his arm. “You were waiting for me. How did you know?”

  “Patience told me.”

  His head came up and his jaw dropped. Astonishment saucered his eyes. “You can hear her?”

  Hazel closed her eyes for a moment, waited till the renewed urge to hit him passed. “Gabriel, don’t be such a doofus! I mean, if anyone else—anyone else—had broken into the house, she’d have raised the roof. Even if she’d been here on her own, she’d have been anxious, unsettled when I got back. But I knew someone had been in here. How did you do that, by the way?”

  “Philip got me a key. There’s no end to the strings he can pull.”

  “Well, he can stop pulling mine!” snapped Hazel. “When I made myself think about it, it was the only thing that made sense. That you were still alive. That you wanted to see that Patience was all right. And while I was asleep upstairs, you were quietly playing ball with her down here. Only you made a mistake. When you finished, you put the ball somewhere I never would have put it.”

  He blinked. “The shelf? I thought…”

  “Gabriel, who keeps their dog’s ball on a bookshelf? Really,” she added impatiently, “I think you’re getting odder all the time!”

  He said nothing. He felt there was nothing useful he could say.

  “So now what? I’m supposed to go on pretending that you’re dead?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “For how long?”

  Another of those awkward broken-winged shrugs. “I don’t know. Until the matter’s resolved.”

  “But what does that mean, Gabriel? Until a battalion of paratroopers drops into the pirates’ camp? Until piracy stops being the chief export of Somalia? When?”

  “Actually…”

  Hazel knew that remote, internalized expression. It meant he was engaged in a debate inside his own head. “Actually what?”

  Ash blinked, as if surprised to see she was still there. “Actually, to a large extent it already has. It isn’t nearly as prevalent as it was a few years ago.”

  “Yes? Well—good. I still don’t know what you expect me to do.”

  The hopeful look, together with the black hair that was getting long enough to curl around his ears, gave him the demeanor of a spaniel who thinks his owner might be good for one more throw of the stick. “Nothing. I need you to do nothing. Forget you saw me. Not forever—just till we’ve done everything we can to stop these people and make sure they never do it again. I can’t say how long it’ll take. Weeks rather than months—if we haven’t succeeded by then, I don’t think we will. Please, Hazel. Can you play dumb for another couple of weeks? In the interests of justice?”

  Hazel regarded him levelly. But behind the mask of professional calm, like the makeup on a white-faced clown, her emotions were in turmoil. She was so glad to see him, so relieved to know he was all right, that she wanted to beat him senseless. “I expect so. But then, I expect I could have done it for the last three weeks, if you’d told me what you intended.”

  He only shook his head regretfully. “I couldn’t.”

  “Fine,” said Hazel, ending the conversation with her tone. “Then I think I’ll go to bed and leave you with your dog. Let yourself out when you’re finished. Oh yes—you always do, don’t you?”

  Ash bowed beneath her disdain as if it were blows.

  With her hand on the hall door, Hazel paused, looking back at him over her shoulder. After a moment she said, “She knew. Patience. She knew you were coming back. Not just the last few days when you’ve been hanging around—since it happened. She knew you’d be back for her. It was almost the hardest thing, that I couldn’t find a way of telling her you were dead. She didn’t even seem to miss you. She moved in with me quite cheerfully because that’s what she does: she fits in. You were away, so she came to stay with me for a bit, but she obviously expected you to come back and pick her up any day. And she went on expecting that, even as the days added up. You have no idea how awful it was, seeing her waiting for you when I knew—when I thought—she was never going to see you again.”

  Ash had no answer for her. Hazel went to bed.

  When they were alone Ash sank, enervated, into the depths of the sofa, and Patience climbed up beside him. His arm went automatically around her shoulders. “I’m not surprised she’s angry with me,” he observed ruefully. “I keep hurting her. I don’t mean to, but I keep doing it just the same.”

  Patience laid her head on his knee to get her long ears stroked.

  “And another thing,” said Ash, looking at her sharply, “what was all that with the ball? You said that was where it was kept!”

  The lurcher raised one eyebrow at him. Her eyes were the color of caramel flecked with honey.

  There was a man she suspected of doing bad things, explained the dog. She needed reminding that he had a son. What was I going to do, write her a memo?

  CHAPTER 20

  HAZEL DIDN’T HEAR HIM LEAVE, but not because she was asleep. She didn’t sleep. For the rest of the night she switched between lying rigid between her sheets, her mind racing, staring blindly at the dark ceiling, and tossing as miserably, as pointlessly, as a stranded flounder. Her body ached for rest; her mind ached for respite; but too much had happened.

  And she was so angry. More than anything. More than surprised or delighted or relieved, she was unreasoningly angry with Gabriel Ash for not being dead after all. She knew it wasn’t an appropriate response. But she didn’t know what was, and until she worked it out, there was a vacuum there that rage was still pouring into like a storm surge into a low-lying village. Until she found a way to marshal her feelings about these events, sleep was a hope too far. It came as a positive relief when the sun hauled itself above the roofline opposite and twitched at her curtains, and she could consign the night to the wastebin of lost opportunities and start the next day.

  It still wasn’t much after six, and Patience cast her a jaundiced look from the sofa, clearly thinking it far too early for civilized people to be up and about. But Hazel wasn’t prepared to apologize to a dog she obscurely felt had misled her.

  “He’d been coming here for days, hadn’t he?” she said accusingly. “And you said nothing!”

  Only when the lurcher went on saying nothing did Hazel realize what she’d said. She gave a snort that hadn’t too much laughter in it but still earned points for effort, and went to fill the kettle.

  She must have disturbed Saturday, because he appeared a few minutes later, his hair even more like a haystack than usual, rubbing his eyes. “Kettle on?”

  Hazel considered him irritably. She was aware that it was now some years since he’d had different clothes for sleeping and being awake in, but all the same, she didn’t need to launch each bright new day with the sight of him in underwear that should have been washed days ago. To be fair, she couldn’t picture him in striped pajamas. But he could pick up new T-shirts and shorts for a few pounds down at the market—she’d give him the money; it would be worth every penny—and like it or not, he was going to learn how the washing machine worked.

  The boy had no idea what she was thinking. He tried a hopeful grin. “Any eggs?”

  After the night she’d had, Hazel didn’t give a toss for his feelings. “You lied to me.”

  At least he didn’t deny it. “What about?”

  “The laptop. You said you found it.”

  His eyes flickered warily. “I did.”

  “No, you didn’t. The man put it down for a minute while he washed his hands. While he was still soapy, you were sprinting across the forecourt with the thing under your arm!”

  Saturday considered his options. “He told you that?”

  “That’s what he tol
d me.”

  “You know you can’t believe a word he says. A man like that? A man with that kind of stuff on his computer?”

  Hazel breathed heavily at him. But perhaps she owed him something of an explanation. “It was his son’s computer. He’d borrowed it without knowing what was on it.”

  “You believe that? You don’t believe me, but you believe that?”

  “Yes, I do,” said Hazel firmly. “The boy’s fourteen years old. About the only age at which a normal human being can be forgiven for being curious about … that kind of stuff. Well, I’m pretty sure he won’t have free Internet access again until he’s old enough to know when to switch the computer off. Which just leaves you and your thieving.”

  Saturday braced himself. “Do you want me to leave?”

  “No, I don’t want you to leave,” snapped Hazel. “I want you to stop stealing things!”

  “I have.”

  Hazel rolled her eyes. “Yeah, right!”

  But Saturday was quietly insistent. “I have. I told you I would when I moved in here, and I have. I can’t change stuff that happened before.”

  It was certainly true that no one can change the past. “Really? You’ve gone cold turkey?”

  He was a little scared of her in this mood, but he managed a chuckle at that. “Really.”

  “Well … good,” said Hazel severely. “Now, for pity’s sake go and get yourself cleaned up. After breakfast we’re going shopping.”

  He stared at her. “Again?”

  “Again.”

  * * *

  While Saturday tried out his new sleep attire, Hazel sat up late with a book, waiting for the sound of a key in her lock. But Ash didn’t come, and at two in the morning she gave up and went to bed.

  He came the next night. Hazel had finished her book and moved on to a stack of magazines. Even so, she was struggling to keep her eyes open. Then Patience gave a soft whine and sat up, tail twitching, and Ash came in from the kitchen. He didn’t look particularly surprised to see Hazel waiting for him. He didn’t look particularly happy, either.

  He was a tall man with a big frame, a frame designed to carry a lot more weight than it had in the time Hazel had known him. And like many big men who don’t wish to appear intimidating, he’d developed a way of stooping slightly, like a bear caught with its head in a trash can. He was doing it now. “Are you still angry with me?”