Desperate Measures: A Mystery

by Jo Bannister

  He made himself coffee and toast, more to pass the time than because he was hungry. He was looking forward to seeing Patience again, but what he really needed was to talk to Hazel. Tell her where he’d been, what he’d been doing. Not because he was desperate for human contact. This week he’d spoken to more people, old friends and new faces, than in the whole of the previous four years. He was exhausted by the casual chatter. But Hazel Best filled a special role for him. She was his sounding board, as he was hers. They could talk together about things too crazy to discuss with anyone else.

  Ash wanted to talk to Hazel about Stephen Graves. His conversations with Welbeck had, potentially, cast new light on the man’s activities; Ash thought Hazel might help him organize the half-formed thoughts that had sleeted past while he was doing battle with the files. He hoped he wouldn’t find her asleep. But after a week without contact, she was hardly still waiting up for him. Of course he could wake her. But if he ventured upstairs, he risked waking her young lodger as well, and while he was happy to entrust his family’s safety to Hazel’s care, he didn’t feel the same way about Saturday.

  The witching hour approached. As he got up to wash his face, he heard the unmistakable sound—clear as a chime in the silent house, the silent street—of a key in the lock downstairs.

  His whole body froze. By now he knew Laura Fry’s routine too well to suppose she’d returned to catch up on some late-night paperwork. But no one else had a key.

  Ash was not such an innocent as to assume that doors could be opened only with the key that came with the lock. There’s the clever way, which is to have the right tools and the right skills to pick it, and the direct approach, which is to corner the locksmith who fitted it and ask for a duplicate. That was how Welbeck had got him a key to Hazel’s new house.

  But the seminal point, the only point that mattered right now, was that if it wasn’t Laura, it was someone who had no legitimate business here. If Ash was discovered, alive and well and living in an attic in Norbold, the best chance of bringing to justice the men behind a conspiracy that had cost so many lives was going over Niagara in a barrel.

  His options were limited. If someone had come here looking for him, it was because he was known to be here. He could try killing the torch, hiding under the bed, and holding his breath, but he doubted the intruder would go away without searching the attic. If he tried to leave, they would meet on the stairs.

  Attack is often said to be the best means of defense, and when discussing the matter like sensible human beings or running like stink aren’t going to work, very often it is. The shock of the cornered rat suddenly flying at its tormentor’s throat may be enough to put even a hardened aggressor momentarily on the back foot, and if you’re desperate enough, a moment may be all you need. Ash was a big man, and no longer as cadaverous as he’d been six months ago, and it was possible that if he jumped on someone who wasn’t expecting it, in the dark, he might conceivably win.

  But then what? Even if he could subdue the man with one hand, he couldn’t use the other to dial 999. The Norbold police thought he was dead. He might eventually persuade them otherwise, he might still have his captive when they arrived, but his secret would be out and Welbeck’s operation as thoroughly blown as if the intruder had completed his task. Ash could call Welbeck, but Whitehall was a long way away and the basic mathematics of the situation remained. Whatever he did—whether he fought or not, whether he won or lost, even if he died in the attempt—whoever had sent this spy was going to know that Ash had faked his suicide and the jaws of a trap were poised to snap shut. They would know sooner if the man downstairs was allowed to do what he’d come here for, but just as surely as if the local police stormed in here with tear gas and Tasers. There was nothing Ash could do to keep the secret.

  There was one thing. The thought of it hit Ash like a steel toe cap in the belly. He’d considered fighting. He’d considered dying. Now he considered killing.

  Gabriel Ash had worked in national security for seven years, not including the four he’d been on sick leave. He had never been licensed to kill. He’d never been licensed to shout loudly or carry a pointed stick. He was a desk jockey—always had been, always would have been until he took his pension and the CBE that went with it. By nature he was meticulous, analytical, occasionally intuitive, but never aggressive or confrontational. He was the kind of man who apologized to people who bumped into him in shop doorways.

  Rats aren’t aggressive by nature, either. Their first choice is always to run away. They attack only when they’re backed into a corner and have nowhere left to go. That was where Ash was now. He’d backed away until he could retreat no farther; and if he was discovered now, it wasn’t just his life at stake. His family were back in England, but were they safe? Philip Welbeck, who hadn’t spent his entire career at a computer console, couldn’t guarantee it. There weren’t many things that would induce Ash to consider launching a murderous attack on someone. No principles, no causes, no amount of money or status or honor. But the safety of his wife and children?

  After everything they’d been through? He’d have taken a flamethrower to anyone who threatened them again.

  And that was how it had to be. No warning, no quarter, no chance for the intruder to put his hands up and come quietly. Gabriel Ash was no street fighter: the element of surprise was the only weapon he could field. If he gave it away in the interests of good sportsmanship, he would lose. He would lose, he would quite possibly die, and if he didn’t, there was a chance that his wife and sons would. The notion of himself as an ambush killer filled him with horror, but he was a rat with its back to a wall. He had to do this, if he could, and try to forget what it was he was doing and remember instead why he was doing it.

  The element of surprise would not be enough; he needed to arm himself. He didn’t know any karate or the pressure points that would make a man’s brain shut down, and he’d been in his twenties before he realized ikebana was not a martial art. The decision was easier than it might have been because his choices were so limited: the torch (tiny and inoffensive), the laptop (his homework: Welbeck had loaded his files onto it so he could put his time in purdah to some use), and two liters of bottled water. If bottles were still made of glass, as they had been in his youth, it would have been the ideal impromptu weapon—a blackjack with deniability. But a plastic bottle would either bounce or split, inflicting not so much lethal injury as bloody annoyance. It would have to be the laptop. At least it was tolerably heavy, its corners hard; swung with enough conviction, it should floor his opponent, giving him time to—

  What? Heel-grind his larynx, suffocating him? Break his neck by sheer brute force? What, then?

  Ash couldn’t afford to think that way. All he could do—all he had time to do—was one thing after another, deal with each problem as it presented. The first was to incapacitate his visitor with a scything blow from a ballistic laptop to the side of the head. Only if that worked would he have to figure out what to do next.

  The moment of truth was approaching. He could hear steps on the uncarpeted top flight of stairs. At the last possible moment Ash leaned forward and turned the key, whisper-quiet, in the lock. He needed the door to open when the intruder tried it so that he would walk in, feeling for the light switch, and Ash would have room to swing his weapon.

  The footsteps stopped, only the thickness of the door away. Ash held his breath. A glimmer of moonlight from the window showed the tarnished brass handle starting to move. Ash held the laptop in both hands, higher than his head, ready to swing with all the power and determination he could muster as soon as the deeper blackness of a figure appeared in the doorway.

  The door opened. Against the dark landing, the shape of a human figure appeared in the frame.

  “Forgive me,” whispered Gabriel Ash.

  The light came on, throwing the dusty room and the two figures into sharp relief.

  “Good grief, Gabriel,” said Hazel Best, staring, “put that down before you hurt
someone!”

  CHAPTER 27

  ASH PUT THE LAPTOP DOWN ON THE BED. A moment later he thumped down beside it, anticlimax releasing a tremor behind his knees that threatened to drop him to the floor. He’d been ready to kill someone. He’d psyched himself up until he was ready to kill someone—anyone, someone he didn’t know but who posed a threat to him and his family. If he’d done a slightly better job of it, if he hadn’t delayed just that few seconds longer, he could have killed Hazel.

  He was panting for breath, as if he’d been running. “I was going to come and see you.”

  “Yes? I wanted to see you, too.”

  “How did you get in? Lockpick, skeleton keys?”

  Hazel looked at him as if he’d been sniffing the bleach again. “I asked Laura for the key.”

  “Ah,” said Ash, feeling foolish. In the world of national security, sometimes it was easy to overlook the simple charms of the blindingly obvious.

  “Where have you been?”

  Ash gave her the abridged edition. He had nothing to report that was either helpful enough or interesting enough to be worth elaborating on.

  “It was a good idea,” Hazel conceded. “You might have spotted something that, first time around, you had no reason to notice.”

  “That’s what Philip said. But I didn’t.” Ash forcibly unclenched his fingers from around the laptop. “How was your week?”

  “I’ve been busy, too.” For half a minute she said nothing more. She closed the door and leaned against it, hands clasped in the hollow of her back, one knee bent and the foot flat against the dusty wood. This is something you really can’t do in high heels, but Hazel lived in jeans and trainers these days and this was her yogic thinking position.

  Eventually she continued. “I’ve some things to tell you, Gabriel. Things you’ll struggle to understand, and then struggle harder to believe. But you need to hear them, and you have the right to hear them before anyone else. All right?”

  They’d switched the attic light off again. Probably no one would have noticed, but there was no point advertising the fact that the top of the building was still occupied after its owner had gone home. The little torch, which gave a good light where it was pointed and a faint glow everywhere else, was ideal for Hazel’s purposes. This was going to be hard enough without Ash’s eyes raking her like claws.

  “All right.”

  Perhaps because the light was so low, she adopted instinctively the rhythmical tone of someone telling a bedtime story. It wasn’t very appropriate, but nothing else would have been, either.

  “I want to talk about hair. Ordinary human hair. It grows at a rate of about six inches a year, and each hair has a natural life span—typically two to four years, although in some individuals it’s longer—after which it falls out. Unless you’re unwell or a man of a certain age, the loss is barely noticeable—a few strands in the brush every morning—because the hair is constantly replaced.”

  In the half-light Ash’s lips formed the shape of the word hair and his heavy brows were puzzled. But Hazel didn’t allow herself to be distracted.

  “People say you are what you eat, and it’s certainly true in the case of hair, which reflects our diet, and particularly the water we drink. Water picks up minerals from the local geology, and the growing hair fixes them in the same proportions. So you can chart someone’s travels over a period of a few years by comparing the minerals in their hair to those in various geographical locations. It’s called stable isotope analysis.

  “The ratios, specifically of strontium and oxygen, are like a fingerprint—you get enough points of comparison and you can say that this person was drinking water in Lancashire, for instance, and not on the Isle of Wight. Even where the same minerals are present, the proportions of one to another vary significantly. It’s a comparatively new technique, but they’ve reached a level of accuracy where the analysis is accepted as forensic evidence. In the case of suspected terrorists, for instance. They can swear blind that they’ve been on holiday in Margate, but if their hair shows they were in Pakistan, a jury may think they were actually at a jihadist training camp.” She looked at Ash, sitting bewildered on his borrowed bed. “Are you with me so far?”

  “I understand the principle,” he said. “I’m not sure how it helps. Are we still talking about Stephen Graves? Because the nature of his work at Bertrams must involve a lot of travel. He’s probably drunk the water in places where it isn’t supposed to be drunk.”

  Hazel chewed unhappily on the inside of her cheek. But she had only two alternatives: to get it said or to let him find out some other way. She took a deep breath. “I’m not talking about Graves. Gabriel, I had samples of your sons’ hair analyzed. They haven’t been in Somalia; or rather, they have, but it was only a flying visit. For most of the time they were missing, they were living in southeast England. The best geological match is Cambridgeshire.”

  There, it was said. She waited for Ash to react. To absorb the implications of what he was hearing and gasp. But he said nothing. She’d expected an argument; she’d been ready for him to accuse her of something—stupidity, misunderstanding what she’d been told, even lying. But not this terrible silence. “Gabriel?”

  “You think…” Even when he found a voice, it wasn’t capable of doing his bidding; it cracked and ran out, and he had to start again. “You’re saying they were here all along? In England? Not Somalia? When they were taken away from Cathy, they weren’t kept in another part of the camp—they were sent back to England? Why?”

  Hazel could do tact. It had always been one of her professional strengths, the reason she’d been called on to deal with difficult situations that were beyond her level of training and, arguably, her competence. She had a feel for how to break bad news in a way that was not shockingly abrupt but didn’t prolong the agony, either. It was a product of her genuine interest in people and sympathy for their misfortunes.

  But she didn’t think tact was called for now. Gabriel Ash was her friend, and if she thought about his misfortunes the tears could still spring to her eyes, but actually that wasn’t what he needed from her right now. Right now he needed to understand. He needed to know what she knew, everything that she knew, and grope his way toward an understanding of what it meant; and no amount of hearts and flowers would help him do that.

  “That’s one possibility,” she said carefully. “I thought about it but, like you, I couldn’t imagine why. If the reason for separating them was to make Cathy more compliant, the boys needed to be close enough to be produced if the pirates wanted to reward her or needed to threaten her. And why risk sending them back to England, where even people who didn’t know them would want to help them?”

  There wasn’t light enough to read his expression, but Hazel saw Ash’s head move as he looked up at her. “My God.” The bottom had fallen out of his voice. “You think … you think they were all in England, all along? For four years? That they were held somewhere near Cambridge, and Graves only told Cathy they were in Somalia? Is that even possible? Could he have maintained the deception that long?”

  His thoughts were racing like a river in spate, tumbling over one another in their urgency, bouncing off the sides in a welter of foam. It was theoretically possible. If she’d been kept in a closed room, with minimal access to the outside, it might have been possible to exclude any clues that what she’d been told wasn’t right. Guards who could pass for Somalis. A basic block-built structure with no view to anything green. Four years’ captivity would have involved three English winters—to keep the illusion going, the electricity bill would have been horrendous.…

  “What about the computer?” he asked breathlessly. “Why didn’t we realize the transmission was coming not from four thousand miles away, but from just around the corner?”

  Hazel sighed. “Because we saw what we’d been told we were going to see: a frightened woman in a pirate camp in Somalia. Actually, we saw almost nothing—a bare room. But there was nothing to tell us it couldn’t b
e Somalia, and at that point we didn’t know Graves was an unreliable witness. We thought that, however questionable his actions, he was telling the truth. Plus, you can route computer communications through different hubs to make it hard even for experts to trace their origins. Just from looking at the screen for a few minutes, nobody would have known.”

  “They were here all along? In England? A couple of hours away?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “She was never more than a few minutes from help, and she didn’t know?” Ash’s voice cracked again on the tragedy of it.

  Hazel steeled herself. It was now or never. “Unless she did know.”

  The silence stretched till it groaned. Hazel could feel it like static on her skin. Say something, she begged in the haven of her own skull. Say something, say something, say something …

  Ash didn’t ask her to say it again, because he’d heard the first time. He didn’t ask her to explain, because her meaning was clear. He said nothing, because, until he knew what was going to come out when he opened his mouth, it wasn’t safe to. Instead he reached for the torch and, still without a word, turned it on Hazel’s face.

  She went to raise a hand in front of her eyes. But she stopped herself, let him see her blinking in the beam. The gentle glow that had made this conversation easier for her had deprived him of information he needed. How her interpretation of these events was reflected in her expression. If she believed it. If she knew how much she was hurting him.

  For a long moment Hazel let him take in whatever it was he needed to see. Then she said quietly, “I’m not making this up. When you’re ready for the science bit, you can study the report.” She took the sheets out of her pocket, unfolded them, and put them beside him on the bed. “You can talk to the laboratory that did the analysis. I have. I asked how sure they were. They said there’s always a margin for error in any analytical process. I asked how big, they said not very big at all. I asked if they could mean Somalia when they said Cambridgeshire, and when they stopped laughing they said no, an error that big wouldn’t be in the margin, it would be all over the page.