by Jo Bannister
She hauled herself into the shower, tolerated its assault for a few minutes, then dragged herself out again. Lacking the energy to lather, she wasn’t confident she’d come out much cleaner than she’d gone in, but it was at least a gesture. She found her way into a fresh shirt and jeans and stumbled downstairs.
She was astonished to find the little table in the kitchen set for breakfast, the electric kettle steaming, the toaster toasting, and Saturday—wearing one of his new, unslept-in T-shirts—as attentive as a creepy waiter in a low-budget horror film, ready to fry her egg to order.
She peered myopically at his bright scrubbed face, his amazingly tidy hair, and the cogs of comprehension ground inch by inch toward a conclusion. “You going somewhere?”
“I’ve got a job interview.”
They were words Hazel had never expected to hear from him. More important, they were words Saturday had never expected to speak. They chimed like a carillon of bells, thrilled like the first notes of a fanfare. They fluttered like flags for the launch of a new life.
It wasn’t, in all conscience, the kind of job interview that most people would get excited about. The petrol station where he had acquired the Armitage laptop had put a postcard in the window for someone to stack shelves in the shop and keep the jet-wash machine charged with shampoo. It was a job for someone leaving school with no qualifications, unless you counted an instinct for locating the cheapest bottle of cider in any part of town.
But then, that was pretty much who Saturday was. He hadn’t much to offer, only a certain wiry strength and—it seemed—the desire to do the job.
He hadn’t even—and this immediately struck Hazel as an obstacle—the one qualification his prospective employers would insist on, a track record for honesty. Over her egg she inquired, with as much tact as she could muster, how he intended to deal with the inevitable interest in his probity.
“That’s easy.” He beamed. “I’ll tell them about the laptop.”
Hazel froze mid-chew. “The laptop that was stolen from their washroom?”
Saturday nodded enthusiastically. “I’ll tell them I was going to keep it but I didn’t.”
“Well—good luck with that,” said Hazel, doubtful but entirely sincere.
After he’d gone off, first raiding her side of the linen closet for—dear God!—a clean handkerchief, she slumped back into the armchair, alone with the white dog, and fell to thinking about families. About Saturday’s family, and whether they’d be pleased or appalled to see his keenness to interview for a dead-end job he probably wouldn’t even get. About Charles Armitage, who was willing to go to prison rather than let his fourteen-year-old son pay the price of his Internet obsession. About Gabriel Ash’s family, who thought he’d died to save them and were in for—putting it mildly—a shock.
About Stephen Graves’s family, on whom he turned his back without hesitation when that became the price of his freedom. Who were sitting in their nice house outside Grantham, waiting for the phone to ring, knowing by now that it probably wouldn’t and that even if it did, the call would be taken by one of the quiet, watchful, entirely serious police officers who had moved in with them. The plump middle-aged wife who couldn’t match for glamour the resident of the Cambridge flat, and the children who’d always thought their dad—with his gray suits and his business trips and his conversation full of government regulations and double-entry bookkeeping—was a bit boring, and now would give anything for him to be boring once again.
“He’d already left them,” she said aloud.
Patience lifted one ear, inviting her to elaborate.
“Stephen Graves’s family,” Hazel explained. “I don’t think he’d really been with them for some time. He was still putting food on their table, but the future he saw for himself was with someone who mattered more to him. The woman at the flat wasn’t a casual friend who let him use the place for his secret computer. She’s his mistress.”
The white lurcher yawned, showing teeth that went right back to her ears. Hazel almost heard the words You could be right. She blinked.
“That’s where he’s gone. That’s why he came back to England instead of staying in Somalia—to be with her. Miss Carole Anderson—or at least the woman who uses that name. After Gabriel showed up again, he warned her to leave the flat. So she went somewhere safe till he could join her. When Dave Gorman let him go, he didn’t go home, because everything he wanted was somewhere else.”
Hazel paused in her soliloquy. The theory was perfectly feasible; nothing she knew contradicted it. And she was pleased to find she could do this on her own, not just in partnership with Gabriel Ash. But right or wrong, it didn’t take her anywhere. There was no trail of bread crumbs to follow.
If she was right, Graves had gone to ground here in England rather than trust his luck to the airports, with their observant staff and their WATCH OUT FOR THIS MAN flyers. But that wouldn’t make him easier to find. He could be anywhere, living with any one of thousands of women the police had no reason to know about. The only thing they knew about this one was that her name wasn’t Carole Anderson. When she left Cambridge she presumably took a flat somewhere else, making a new life that Graves would slip into. They would make new friends, who would have no reason to question whatever account they gave of themselves. He’d got false papers for her; he could get some for himself. To all intents and purposes, they would disappear.
The mistake people make when they’re trying to vanish is to go back when they should be going forward. To return somewhere familiar rather than start from scratch in a place that means nothing to them. If Stephen Graves was the man he increasingly appeared to be—not the pawn of criminals but their partner—he probably wouldn’t make that mistake. But what about his girlfriend? Perhaps she had no experience of this sort of thing. Perhaps the only reprehensible thing she’d ever done was love a bad man. If so, she might have fallen into the trap of escaping her present life by returning to a former one.
All her personal belongings had gone from the Cambridge flat, Ash had said. But it takes more than a couple of suitcases to pack away a woman’s life, and if she’d rolled up with a removal van, the porter would have noticed. So she’d taken everything with her name on it, and the clothes she’d need, and anything that was both portable and valuable, like jewelry, which she could turn into cash if she had to. But she must have left many things behind. Perhaps among them she’d left a clue. A clue to where she’d come from and where she might return.
If Stephen Graves’s love nest had been in Norbold, so that DI Gorman would have overseen the search, Hazel would have asked him what had turned up. Would have offered to help him conduct a second search on the basis that, in a woman’s flat, another woman might spot something that a man might miss. But Cambridge CID owed her nothing, and nothing was what she confidently expected to get out of them.
Which left what Sergeant Mole at the training college had liked to describe as “the old-fashioned way.”
Hazel was on her way to the front door when a disembodied sense of disappointment made her hesitate and look back. “Fancy a drive?”
Patience bounded onto the backseat as soon as the car door was open, and waited for Hazel to fasten her seat belt. Ash said she didn’t like wearing it, but Hazel didn’t care if she liked it or not, and it seemed the dog recognized that pouting worked better on men than on other women.
* * *
It was a big apartment block: the job of porter was shared by a pair of brothers, as was the ground-floor flat sandwiched between the boiler room and the laundry. Both incumbents had been interviewed by the police. Neither had remembered anything terribly helpful about the woman who had lived under their roof.
If Hazel had been a man, they’d have declined to go through it all again. But she wasn’t. She was an attractive young woman with a lot of curly fair hair wrestled into a rough bunch behind her neck, and she had bright green eyes flecked with copper and an open, engaging smile; and the older brother ushered her to
the best chair while the younger put the kettle on.
They talked for a while, Patience curled up quietly on the rug. Neither of the brothers liked dogs, but it was too hot to leave her in the car, and they tolerated her because Hazel Best had a talent for making people enjoy talking to her. Then they went upstairs to the Anderson apartment.
The scenes of crime officer had finally finished, taking his tools and his tape with him, leaving behind the furniture and the powdery residue of his fingerprinting.
Hazel had been here before, the day she and Ash followed Graves to the flat where he talked to the pirates. It hadn’t struck her at the time—there had been other things to think about—but she realized now that Graves’s girlfriend, ostensibly abroad on business, had already moved out. Though furnished, the place hadn’t felt lived in. Since then that impression had been compounded by the work of serious professionals stripping it down for whatever secrets it might be hiding, so that now the apartment was like a hotel room, equipped with all the necessities for the next person to come through the door and nothing to make them feel they were entering someone else’s space.
“Did she actually live here?” asked Hazel. “I understand she was abroad a lot.”
“No, she lived here all right,” said the older of the two brothers. “It didn’t always look like this. I was up here a few times—problems with the central heating—and it looked like anybody’s flat then. Magazines on the coffee table, coats in the hall cupboard, kids’ toys, everything.”
“How long was she here?”
“Three and a half years.” He’d had to look it up for the police.
“I don’t suppose she told you where she was going?” Hazel knew what the answer had to be.
“Didn’t even tell us that she was going. First we knew was when the police turned up, and all her stuff was gone.”
Hazel nodded. “So when was the last time you saw her?”
“A month ago, or maybe a little more. The boyfriend came by sometimes, said he was keeping an eye on the place for her. We just thought she was on holiday again. She did like her foreign holidays. Always topping up her tan somewhere.”
Hazel heard an echo of something that had been said before. “Kids’ toys? Miss Anderson had children?”
The older brother leered at her. “Now, miss, don’t be so old-fashioned. Lots of single ladies have kids. None of our business, as long as they don’t disturb the other residents.”
“And did they?”
“Quiet as mice,” said the younger brother. “Almost too quiet. You expect little boys to make a bit of noise, it’s only natural. All those guns, and not so much as a pop out of them.”
Hazel’s eyebrows rocketed. “All what guns?”
The younger of the brothers grinned. “Don’t be silly, miss—toy guns, not real ones. They had a real collection. It’s funny, that. People don’t like their kids playing with guns so much these days.”
“No, they don’t,” agreed Hazel. “But the man who used to come here was in the arms business. It probably seemed quite natural to him.”
The older brother looked sidelong at her. “Were they his children?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” That was one possibility: that, unsuspected by his wife, Graves had been living a second life for years. That he’d had children with his mistress, and kept them all in comfort in Cambridge and took them abroad for holidays in the sun. She wondered how she could check if the business trips he’d made on behalf of Bertrams corresponded to Miss Anderson’s holidays.
But it wasn’t the only possibility. “I hope so,” she heard herself say.
Something occurred to her. She rooted through her bag, finally found her phone. Trepidation delayed her only a moment longer; then she held it out. “Have a look at this.…”
CHAPTER 24
HAZEL KNEW IN THE MOMENT of waking that the day ahead was going to be a long and difficult one. It was going to be difficult if she couldn’t get the answers she needed to the questions plaguing her, and even more difficult if she did.
She began by phoning her father’s employer.
Peregrine, Lord Byrfield—known almost universally as Pete—was delighted to hear from her. Until they’d renewed their acquaintance a few weeks earlier, it had been years since they’d done much more than wave to each other across a field, and Byrfield had somehow never updated his memory of the handyman’s daughter from when he knew her as an outdoorsy twelve-year-old exercising his sisters’ outgrown ponies.
Hazel wasn’t twelve anymore—Byrfield had also forgotten that when she was, he was only sixteen himself—and though she still seemed entirely at home amid the woods and meadows of his estate, he had to admit that she’d changed. The corn-colored hair had turned a shade of rosy gold; the frank, open gaze had acquired depth and understanding without losing its impish good humor; and the tomboy’s freckled face had changed in the myriad tiny ways that happen when girls become women, and at the same time had hardly changed at all. Quite apart from her support at an unsettling time in his life, Byrfield had enjoyed her company and looked forward to her next visit.
She was quick to disappoint him. “It’s not actually you I’m looking for,” she admitted honestly. “Is David still at Byrfield?”
Pete’s half brother—they’d agreed on that as a viable description, though the reality was in fact more complicated—was an archaeologist. “Sorry, no,” said Byrfield. “He’s on his way to Carnac.”
“Karnak in Egypt?”
“Carnac in France. Something to do with standing stones.”
Hazel had a pen ready. “Can I have his number?”
Byrfield read it out to her. “If it’s urgent, you might catch him in London before he leaves.”
“I don’t need to see him. I only want to pick his brains.”
Pete Byrfield felt a quiver of satisfaction that he would not have acknowledged—not to her, not to anyone.
David Sperrin’s phone rang for so long that Hazel was ready to give up. Then he answered with a characteristically graceless “Now what?”
She didn’t know what questions to ask him, only the answers she wanted him to give. She vaguely remembered something he’d said—she couldn’t help it, but when he held forth on archaeological method, part of her brain shut down in self-defense—about science’s being able not only to date ancient human remains but to reveal details of people’s lives that seemed impossible to know thousands of years later.
“Uh-huh.” She seemed to hear him nod. “Stable isotope analysis.”
Hazel waited for him to explain. Sperrin waited to be prompted. Hazel breathed heavily at her phone. “Which is what?”
He gave her the abridged version. When she still didn’t understand, he gave her what he thought of as the version for idiots and small children. Taking notes, she had him spell some of the words. “Enamel hypoplasias,” he said a second time. “H-Y-P-O-P-L-A-S-I-A-S.”
“-A-S-I-A-S,” repeated Hazel, scribbling furiously.
And: “Mass spectrometry,” said David Sperrin. “S-P-E-C-T-R-O-M-E-T-R-Y.”
“-M-E-T-R-Y,” echoed Hazel.
And: “The ratio of strontium-87 to S-86.”
And: “In the case of deciduous teeth, you can even say at what age nursing ceased.”
When she’d worked out what he was saying, Hazel held the phone away from her, glaring at it as if he were there in person. “And what possible excuse,” she demanded incredulously, “could I offer for asking someone to pull one of her children’s teeth out?”
Now she heard Sperrin shrug. Interpersonal relationships had never been his strong point. “How about hair?”
“How about hair?”
The explanations were getting shorter. Hazel could almost see him checking his watch. “Look, Hazel, it’s great that you’re finally taking an interest in archaeology, but could we talk about this some other time?”
“No,” she said firmly. “Tell me about hair.”
When she used that tone
of voice, usually she got what she wanted. This time she got David Sperrin to tell her about hair. About stable isotopic ratios of strontium and oxygen. About how water percolating through rocks picked up their mineral signature. About hair fixing the relative proportions of minerals present in the drinking water.
“Okay?” said Sperrin. “Hazel, I really have to go now. If you need any more”—she thought he was going to tell her to call again—“Google it. Bye.” And the phone went dead, leaving her to wonder what kind of urgency could attend the study of ancient artifacts.
* * *
Hazel didn’t like lying. She’d been brought up to tell the truth and shame the devil; and in her professional life, too, while there might occasionally be some merit in the little white lie that salved feelings and persuaded the lethally offended to believe they might have misheard, on the whole she had found honesty to be the best policy. Lying required too much imagination and too good a memory.
This wouldn’t be a little white lie. She had a horrible suspicion growing at the back of her mind, and she was looking for the evidence that would either prove it or dismiss it entirely. If she could have seen a way to obtain it legitimately, that’s what she’d have done. But she had no authority to demand what she wanted, and though she could have asked DI Gorman to make the request, she’d have had to tell him why. And she really didn’t want to do that. If she was wrong, she didn’t want anyone to know that the notion had even crossed her mind.
And if she was right, she wanted to talk to Ash before she spoke to anyone else.
Cathy opened the front door on to a hall filled with suitcases. For a moment Hazel didn’t know what to say. “Going somewhere nice?”
“To visit my mother,” said Cathy, folding T-shirts. “She hasn’t seen the boys for four years, and she’s not well enough to travel herself. So we’re going up to Chester for a week or two.”
“Cheshire’s lovely at this time of year,” Hazel mumbled weakly. “Er … before you go…”
“Hmm?”