Desperate Measures: A Mystery

by Jo Bannister

  “I don’t want to be a nuisance,” Cathy said carefully.

  “Don’t even think that way. It’s our job—the job of the police—to make things easier for you, not the other way around. If there’s anything worrying you…” That was stupid; kicking herself, she tried rephrasing it. “If there are particular things that are troubling you, that you need help or advice dealing with, Dave Gorman will want to know. If he can’t help you himself, he’ll find someone who can.”

  “Everyone’s being very kind,” murmured Cathy. Then, after a longish pause: “There is one thing.”

  “Tell me.”

  “When will we be able to have a funeral? It’s nearly a month, and I don’t know what the delay is. It’s not like we don’t know how Gabriel died. But until we can lay him to rest, it’s as if we’re not really dealing with what happened. Not really acknowledging what he did for us. I suppose he’s in a chill cabinet somewhere. But it’s not dignified, and he’s been there long enough. We owe him a decent burial now.”

  This the most Hazel had heard her speak. Cathy, too, seemed surprised by her passion: behind the fading tan, her color rose. “I’m sorry. I’m not doing this very well. I’ve spent four years too afraid to ask for anything I wasn’t given. But I don’t think Detective Inspector Gorman is going to beat me up for asking when I can bury my husband, is he?”

  Hazel managed a little smile, though it was a close-run thing, because her heart was twisting inside her. She ached to do the one thing she absolutely must not do. “No, he isn’t. He’ll understand absolutely. I don’t know what the delay is, either,” she lied, “but he can make some phone calls and find out. I imagine it’s just that there are so many different agencies involved—police, Home Office, Foreign Office, the Ethiopian embassy.… But it has to be sorted out. You need to be able to move on with your life.”

  “I’m not sure I want to move on with it,” said Cathy softly.

  “No. But you need to.”

  Hazel led the way to DI Gorman’s office, but she didn’t go in. She took each boy by a hand—the older one plainly resented it—and said, “I think we’ll wander over to the park while you’re busy. Ice creams all around?” The resentment mellowed a little. To Cathy she said, “Perhaps the inspector would get someone to bring you over when you’re finished.”

  Dave Gorman nodded. Cathy, though, looked ready to object.

  “I’ll look after them,” Hazel promised, and Gorman ushered Ash’s wife into his office.

  Hazel parked beside the wrought-iron gates. The ice-cream van was already on-site, though it was barely midmorning. The boys demanded all the trimmings; Hazel threw caution to the wind and did the same. With sprinkles and flakes and chocolate sauce, it wasn’t so much an ice cream she came away with as a heart attack in a wafer cone.

  They were already on the same side of the park as Laura Fry’s office. Hazel picked the house out from the long terrace of identical three-story buildings, looking for a face or movement at the top-floor window. She saw nothing. She knew better than to wonder if that meant he’d forgotten.

  Feigning tiredness, she dropped onto a convenient bench. One facing the road, not into the park. Little Guy sat down obediently beside her, half hidden by his ice cream. The older boy, Gilbert, made a point of sitting down on the grass instead, half turned away from her. Hazel had no issues with that. It wasn’t her view of him that mattered.

  Hazel looked for a neutral topic of conversation. “So how does it feel to be back home?”

  “This isn’t our home,” Gilbert replied sternly. “We’re Londoners.”

  Of course they were. They had both been born in Covent Garden; you couldn’t be more of a Londoner than that. “That’s right—I’d forgotten. But your dad was born in the house where you’re living now. He played in this park when he was a little boy.”

  “We aren’t living here,” Gilbert said distinctly over his shoulder. “We’re staying here.”

  “Well, I’m glad you are,” said Hazel gamely. “I’ve been wanting to meet you for a long time.”

  “We’ve been to Africa,” piped up Guy, his face already a bandit’s mask of chocolate sauce.

  Anyone with children of her own would have automatically attacked him with a handkerchief. Hazel, with no offspring and no siblings, had only her training to guide her, and Sergeant Mole had been strong on child protection and interviewing child witnesses but had had nothing to say on the subject of chocolate sauce.

  “I know you have.” Hazel nodded encouragingly. “Did you see any lions?”

  “Don’t be silly,” said Gilbert dismissively.

  “I saw a lion once,” volunteered Guy.

  “No, you didn’t,” said his brother.

  “Yes I did,” insisted the younger boy. “It was in a cage.”

  “Don’t listen to him,” snorted Gilbert, “he’s stupid.”

  “You’re stupid!”

  “Neither of you is stupid,” said Hazel pacifyingly. “A lion in a cage is still a lion.”

  “It wasn’t just in a cage,” grumbled Gilbert in an undertone, “it was on the TV.”

  Hazel glanced at her watch and wondered if DI Gorman would keep Cathy occupied for the full half hour he’d promised. She passed some time taking the photographs she had promised Ash.

  In fact it was forty minutes before the area car dropped Cathy Ash at the park gates. Hazel rose immediately and waved her hand. “We’re over here.”

  Cathy whipped out a tissue as Guy, spotting her, jumped down from the bench and trundled toward her with stump-legged determination. “Down the throat,” she reminded him mildly. “The ice cream’s meant to go down the throat, not all over the face.” His little round face emerged, grinning and unchastened, from the mop-up.

  “What have you been talking about?” asked Cathy.

  “Lions,” Hazel replied, “and whether seeing one on TV counts. Football, and whether you’re allowed to support Manchester United when you’ve never been to Manchester. Oh yes, and whether Superman could take Godzilla in a fair fight.”

  Cathy laughed. “That’s my boys. That one in particular”—she indicated Gilbert with mock indignation—“will argue that black’s white rather than agree with anything anybody else says!”

  “In that case,” countered Guy smugly, “I’m going to argue that white is black.”

  “Sit down,” said Hazel, indicating the bench she’d risen from, “get your breath back. Had Mr. Gorman anything new to say?”

  The women sat together. Cathy looked puzzled. “I’m not sure why he wanted to see me. He asked about Stephen Graves—how well did I know him, how much did I know about him, how and when did we meet.” Her voice hardened. “I’d have thought he’d be more interested in the men who abducted me and held me at gunpoint for four years.”

  “That’s probably someone else’s job,” Hazel suggested. “What did you tell him?”

  Cathy looked at her oddly. “Everything. Everything I could remember. Several months ago the pirates stuck a laptop in front of me and told me to talk to him. We’ve probably talked five or six times in total. I don’t know him. I didn’t know his full name until he came to meet me at the Ethiopian border four weeks ago.”

  “How many of them?” Hazel heard herself interrogating the woman and stopped abruptly. “I’m sorry. I don’t suppose you want to talk about this any more than you have to.”

  Cathy shrugged. “It doesn’t bother me. Not now. I’m not sure how many of them there were. I probably saw half a dozen at different times. But I was locked up in a room with no windows. I’ve no way of knowing how many there were who never got the job of bringing me food or taking me to the latrine.”

  Hazel bit her lip. She knew she was prying where she had no right, where the memories were still too fresh and too painful. And then, she had only to be patient. When Ash was free to return to his family, he’d hear everything that had happened in all the detail his wife could furnish, and Hazel would get a digest then. If Ash ha
d time for their friendship now that his family had returned home.

  CHAPTER 22

  WHEN DI GORMAN SENT FOR STEPHEN GRAVES AGAIN, the man had disappeared. He’d left his Grantham office to go home on Monday afternoon but he never got there, and his wife was bewildered and increasingly anxious. She’d been about to call the police when they arrived at her door.

  “I take it somebody checked the flat in Cambridge,” Ash said to Hazel that night.

  Of course they had. The porter had used his passkey, but no one had been in the flat since the scenes of crime officer wound up and left. Not Stephen Graves, and not the flat’s mystery tenant, Miss Carole Anderson.

  “Has anyone ever actually met Miss Anderson?” Hazel asked, querulous with disappointment. “Or was she Stephen Graves in a dress and sun hat, setting up a bolt-hole under an assumed name?”

  “I don’t know about the dress and the sun hat,” said Ash, pausing just long enough to picture it and smile. “There was certainly a woman living there until recently. But the paper trail doesn’t lead to anyone real. The ID documents she provided were forged.”

  “When did she leave the flat?”

  “About a month ago. At least, that’s when the porter saw her last. She didn’t say she was leaving, so he assumed she was on holiday or a business trip or something. But all her personal belongings were gone. Except the computer that Graves used to talk to the Somalis, and there was nothing on that to identify her, either.”

  “Graves said she’d been abroad for months. That he was keeping an eye on the place for her.”

  “He lied,” Ash said simply.

  “I don’t suppose it was Mrs. Graves?” Her tone was more of hope than expectation. If Graves’s wife had been involved in the conspiracy, she might lead them to him. But Hazel wasn’t surprised when Ash shook his head.

  “The porter looked at a photograph—he said they could hardly be more different. Mrs. Graves is older, shorter, and plumper.”

  “Clever makeup and a cushion up her jumper?”

  Ash grinned. “I’d like to think our highly trained professional police investigators would have noticed the cushion.”

  “Who is she, then?”

  Ash shrugged. “An associate? A girlfriend? Without even her real name to go on, she’ll probably be harder to find than Graves.”

  “And he’s on his way back to Somalia by now. He’ll be safer there than anywhere else on earth. I still don’t know why he risked coming back to England when he could have just given Cathy her tickets and left her at the airport.” She drew a deep breath. “Gabriel—how long are you going to wait before you decide that he’s gone where you can’t follow and let Cathy know you’re still alive?”

  Ash flicked her a haunted look. He was back on the sofa, the white dog’s long body draped across his knees. “I don’t know.”

  “Somebody needs to make a decision on that, and sooner rather than later. If you went around there tonight and told her—don’t worry, I’m not suggesting you should—she’d be stunned, and then she’d be thrilled, and then she’d be angry with you for deceiving her.” Hazel knew this for a fact. “But if it drags on for another month, she may be so angry she’ll never forgive you. Don’t wait until she’s come to terms with your death and is making plans for the rest of her life.”

  He swallowed. “I can’t make that decision. I owe everyone too much. My family are safe in England instead of hostages in Somalia. I couldn’t have done that on my own. I can’t just grab my trophy and run, and leave everyone else to cope with the fallout.”

  “Talk to Philip Welbeck,” advised Hazel. “Get him to put a sell-by date on the operation. I don’t…” She bit her lip. “I don’t want you, or Cathy, to have gone through so much only to lose what you did it for. To come so close to happily ever after but end up alone again.”

  Ash understood what she was saying. He knew she was right. He just didn’t know what to do about it. “I’ll talk to Philip,” he promised. “Hazel…”

  She raised an inquiring eyebrow.

  “I haven’t thanked you. For this morning. Well, for everything you’ve done, but especially for this morning.”

  Hazel smiled. “You were there, then. I couldn’t see you. But I didn’t think you’d have forgotten.”

  “No.”

  He seemed to be struggling with something. Hazel frowned. “Gabriel? What is it?”

  It was guilt. “I didn’t recognize them,” he admitted. “If you hadn’t been there, if I hadn’t been expecting to see them, I wouldn’t have known them. My sons. But they could have been anybody’s. Any two boys playing in the park. I thought I’d know them a mile away, but I didn’t.”

  “Hell, Gabriel,” said Hazel impatiently, “it’s been four years! Of course they’ve changed. Gilbert’s twice the age he was the last time you saw him. Guy’s gone from being a toddler to a six-year-old. A schoolboy. At least he will be when you have time to arrange it.”

  Ash hadn’t thought of that. “We’ll have to get them some help. I don’t imagine they’ve had any education. They’ll need to learn to read. Even Gilbert was only just starting—he’ll hardly remember anything he learned four years ago.”

  “There’ll be time,” Hazel reassured him. “All the time in the world now. Let them catch their breath first. The important thing is for you all to get used to one another again. If they didn’t look familiar to you, how do you suppose you’ll look to them? Guy may not remember that he ever had a father.”

  She saw the shock cross his face and hastened to soften the blow. “You’ll deal with it. You’ll spend time together and you’ll deal with all the problems you meet. But it won’t happen overnight. You’re setting yourself up for grief if you think it will.”

  “You were with them. You talked to them.” She could hear the envy in his voice. “How did they seem?”

  He was asking the wrong person. Hazel was no connoisseur of children. “They seemed fine.”

  “But they can’t be, can they?” said Ash fretfully. “Almost all the life they’ve known has been as captives among murderers. They were kept away from Cathy for a lot of the time. God knows who was looking after them. God knows what they’ve seen, what’s happened to them. I don’t know if they’ll ever fully recover, but they certainly can’t be fine this soon after!”

  “All right!” Hazel spread her hands to ward off his anger. “Poor choice of words. But I don’t know what to tell you. I didn’t know them before, and I don’t know any children their age to compare them to, but to me they seemed pretty normal. Maybe Gilbert seemed a bit … unsettled. Anxious, and looking for someone to take it out on.

  “I think that’s pretty normal, too, in the circumstances. Not just the way they’ve been living, but the way they came home. Cathy must have given them some reason why you weren’t at the airport to meet them. If she told them what she believes to be the truth, they think you’re dead; and if she told them some fairy story she thought would make things easier, they must be afraid you don’t want to see them. Either way, that’s a tough thing to deal with before you’re ten.

  “But listen, they’re out of danger now, and you have all the time it’s going to take to put things right. You and Cathy will need to get to know each other again, and you’ll have to start afresh with the boys—tell them who you are, learn who they are. You’re going to need patience.”

  At the sound of her name, Ash’s dog looked up and smiled. He stroked her head and she settled down again.

  “And Cathy. How did Cathy seem?” It was as if he was snatching love letters from the flames. Every fragment he could get his hands on was a treasure.

  “I thought she was coping pretty well. I don’t think you need to worry, Gabriel. I think they’ve all come through remarkably well. You’ll have a better idea when you’re able to talk to Cathy in person, but in the meantime, don’t torture yourself. The worst is over, for them and for you. Of course you won’t just slot back into how things were four years ago. But you�
��ve got what you wanted. Soon you’ll have everything you wanted.”

  “Not quite everything.” Hazel was surprised at the steel vibrating in his voice. “I wanted to rip their kidnappers’ hearts out. I wanted to see them burn.”

  “That’s someone else’s job,” she reminded him. “And just because they haven’t been found yet, that doesn’t mean they won’t be. They aren’t faceless anymore. Even in Africa, Graves may find it harder to evade justice than he imagines.”

  “What about his office? There could be some evidence there.…”

  “A specialist team has gone into Bertram Castings and locked it down,” said Hazel. “They’re picking the computers apart for every scrap of information that might be helpful. They know what they’re doing, Gabriel. You can’t help—truly you can’t.”

  “I’m going mad, doing nothing! Venturing out only in the middle of the night, talking only to you and Laura, knowing my family are less than a mile from here and I can’t—I absolutely can’t—go and see them. It’s driving me crazy.”

  Hazel understood his frustration, but she was running out of sympathy. This was the bed he’d made; he had no right to complain to her that it was uncomfortable. The events he’d set in motion had to play out to the finale, and both of them had to stay in their seats until someone played the national anthem and set them free.

  “So no change there,” she muttered irritably; and was rewarded by the startled look of a man who, bending to sniff a flower, has got a noseful of hornet.

  CHAPTER 23

  LACK OF SLEEP WAS BEGINNING TO TAKE ITS TOLL, making Hazel not just irritable but stupid as well. It was all right for Ash, she reflected sourly as she dragged herself into Tuesday a little before eight; he could sleep all day in his secret attic while Laura Fry dispensed equal measures of sympathy, wisdom, and waspishness to her clients downstairs. But Hazel had to carry on as if nothing was disturbing her routine except occasional moments of grief.