by Jo Bannister
“They were sure, Gabriel. They’re sure enough about the procedure that the prospect of someone going to prison on the strength of it doesn’t give them sleepless nights. Almost all the time your sons were missing, they were in England.
“And it makes no sense that they would be in England while Cathy was in Somalia. So either the pirates managed to deceive her for four years—and smuggle her out there in time to be met by Graves and the British consul, still without her realizing—or she was lying.”
From behind the torch Ash’s voice rasped like fingernails on a comb. “If people were pointing guns at you, you’d say anything they wanted, too.”
“I probably would,” Hazel agreed. “Until I was where they couldn’t hurt me anymore, at which point I’d want to put the record straight. Because nobody, not even my husband, would have a better motive for seeing the bastards found. Any information that I had, that I thought I had or that I even thought I might have, I’d want to put in the hands of someone who could use it.
“Cathy’s had that chance several times over. She’s been here in Norbold for a month. Her sons are safe. She’s talked to your boss, the guys from CTC, and Dave Gorman. If she’d said something under duress that might be misleading them, she’s had every opportunity to put it right. She hasn’t taken it.”
“Then she didn’t know.” Ash’s voice was so thick it was almost incomprehensible.
“That’s one explanation,” said Hazel levelly.
He didn’t want to ask. He didn’t want to say it, and he didn’t want to hear her answer. But in the end he had to. “What other explanation is there?”
She pitied the man with all her heart. She’d have given anything to save him this. But some quirk of intuition had set her on a train of thought that no one else had thought to travel, with the result that she’d seen things that more experienced investigators hadn’t. If there had been any doubt in her mind, she’d have been talking to those investigators now, not to Ash. But there wasn’t. She didn’t like the answer she’d come up with. She didn’t expect him to like it, either; probably his first instinct would be to shoot the messenger. It didn’t have to matter. Unless she’d gone horribly astray, this was something they had to deal with.
“That she was part of the conspiracy.”
CHAPTER 28
SOMETIMES HAZEL ACTED ON IMPULSE, seizing the surge of the tide and trusting that intuition and goodwill would see her through. At other times, though, she planned her moves meticulously, working through all the possible combinations—of what might happen, how people might react, what she should do and say next—in the hope of being able to respond effectively whatever turn events should take.
Before coming here she’d considered all the ways this moment might play out. The arguments Ash might marshal to confound her. The clever, tortuous ways he might find to avoid the unbearable fact that the wife whose loss he had mourned to the brink of madness had betrayed him. That she’d been living comfortably in a smart Cambridge apartment paid for by her lover while Ash crucified himself.
Hazel had thought he would hear her out until he realized what it was she was actually suggesting. But then all her calculations failed, like the math of physicists trying to map the Big Bang. The closer she got to the moment of truth, the more her predictions broke down, the wilder the extremes to which small variations on the theme might fling her. He might listen in silence, allowing the professional part of his brain to work the problem and come, however reluctantly, to the same conclusion. He might shout and throw things. There was every chance, Hazel thought, that his fragile recovery might implode, leaving him weeping uncontrollably while she hunted desperately for Laura Fry’s home number.
There was also the possibility that he might hit her.
There was nothing delicate about Hazel Best. Much of her childhood had been spent in the country, helping to move bullocks and falling off ponies. She had embarked on her career as a police officer knowing that intermittent acts of violence came with the badge. You didn’t go looking for fights, but sometimes they were unavoidable. You watched your back, and those of your colleagues, and they watched out for you, but still sometimes a situation got out of hand.
Hazel had been struck before and expected to be struck again—by drunks, by thugs, and by otherwise decent people in the throes of hysterics. She had been hit with fists, with weapons—she’d done a short posting in a district of Liverpool famous for its sales of baseball bats despite its having no baseball team—and once with an artificial leg. It was inevitable, and if you couldn’t deal with it you couldn’t do the job. But she also knew that if Gabriel Ash struck her now, their friendship would be over.
Not because she wouldn’t forgive him. She understood how much he’d been through, and how much more she’d just dumped on top of him. If he couldn’t handle it without momentarily losing control, she could understand that, too. Ash was the one who would never forgive. Hitting her would put him on the wrong side of a Rubicon there would be no returning over, regardless of whether her theory was ultimately proved right or wrong. The last four years hadn’t left him with much in the way of pride. But whatever the provocation, raising his hand to a young woman who was trying to help him would leave him with none.
If the room had been bigger she’d have stepped out of reach. But her back was already against the door, and she was damned if she was going to open it and retreat to the landing as if she was afraid of him. She’d seen things that he hadn’t because her emotions were not involved in the same way. She’d told him because he needed to know. Whatever he did next, this dim attic, in the quiet of the night, with only the two of them present, was the best place to deal with it.
He didn’t hit her. It was impossible to tell, from what she could see of his expression, whether he had mastered the urge or never felt it. But his eyes burned like coals in the backwash of the torch, and the August night seemed to grow hotter with the fever in his skin.
Finally he said, in a voice that was more breath than sound, “Perhaps you should leave now.”
Hazel shook a stubborn head. Some of the corn-colored hair, escaping from the bunch she gathered it in, danced around her face. “No, Gabriel. Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me you know Cathy better than I do and there has to be another explanation. Or tell me you don’t care who did what, you don’t want to know who did what, all that matters is that your family is safe. But don’t tell me to go away and stop bothering you. You don’t owe me much, my friend, but you owe me better than that.”
Some things command respect. The hunted animal, too tired to run any farther, that turns at bay in order to go down fighting. The mother defending her young with a ferocity she could not muster to defend herself. And Hazel Best, who didn’t need to be here, who could have turned over her findings to her friends in CID, secure in the knowledge that, whatever they discovered about Cathy Ash’s involvement, her husband would never have to know where the suspicion had originated.
Though Ash was appalled by what she was proposing, a fragment of his mind that had managed to remain objective was able to admire that. The way she would always do what she thought was right rather than what she knew was easy. In the short time he’d known her, it had got her into endless trouble. She’d been proved right more often than not, but even that wasn’t the point. The point was, it took guts to do the unpopular thing, and he’d never known anyone with more.
But what she was saying was untenable. He literally could not entertain the idea that, in a war against criminals who put a cash value on people’s lives, his wife had taken their side, not his. It couldn’t be true. He knew it in his heart, in his bones. Whatever she’d done had been forced on her.
What had she done?
He swallowed. “You’re wrong. You have to be wrong.”
Hazel kept her voice steady. “I may be wrong about some of it. But there are things that I’m sure of, facts I can prove, and other things that I can’t explain any other way.”
That stirred
him to a little last-ditch passion. Anger was a curd on his tongue. “You’re infallible now? There’s always another explanation. Have you put any of this to Cathy?” Hazel shook her head. “Of course not. If you had—if you’d talked to her instead of pestering me with your fantasies—you’d know how utterly, stupidly wrong you are. Cathy is an innocent victim. She was kidnapped and held prisoner for four years. For four years she thought every day could be her last.”
Hazel didn’t flinch from his machine-gun fury. “I don’t think she did. I think she helped Graves to keep you out of commission. I don’t know why she did it, but I think that’s what she did.” There were, Hazel knew, only three possible reasons—fear, love, and money—but she didn’t need to tell Ash that right now. Not when she’d already dismissed the first.
“But it’s absurd!” He was saved from a complete loss of control, and things he might have said that would have brought this conversation crashing to a halt, by the genuine belief that she had misread the situation. “How would Cathy even know Graves, much less know he was involved? I didn’t. None of us did.”
“But he did,” said Hazel. She could feel herself shaking inside now, wondered if Ash could hear it in her voice. “You’d interviewed him a couple of times by then. He knew you were closer to the truth than you did. He made inquiries about you, and they took him to Cathy.”
“And he kidnapped her,” insisted Ash.
“It’s possible he did.” Hazel nodded. “In the first instance. But then he made her an offer she didn’t feel she could refuse: Join us, or you and your boys will be in Somalia by the end of the week.”
“She’d have said yes,” conceded Ash, his voice low. “Anybody would.”
“Yes.” She said nothing more, waited.
“And then,” Ash said slowly, “as soon as she was free to, she’d have called me, and I’d have got her and the boys to safety before going after Graves with a chain saw.”
Which was where the defense of duress fell down, and both of them knew it. If the woman really had been living pleasantly in Cambridge, what could have stopped her from contacting Ash or Ash’s office or the police for four years?
“She’d have done anything to protect the boys.” Even in his own ears it sounded like an excuse. But it was true. Presented with a straight choice between their well-being and his, Ash knew Cathy would have chosen her sons. It’s what mothers do. She would fight like a tigress to protect them all, but if she couldn’t, the children would come first.
“Yes,” Hazel said again.
His head came up pugnaciously. In the half-light she couldn’t see his face, only the burning of his eyes. “You’re determined to think the worst of her!”
“Gabriel, I’m not!” But she bridled her tongue. In his pain he was striking out at the nearest target; it was a miracle that he wasn’t doing it physically. “Truly. I’m sorry. I’m sorry it’s me saying this stuff. I’ll be sorry if I’m wrong, and even more sorry if I’m right. But believing what I do, I had to tell you. You think this is a figment of my imagination? If you can look at the facts honestly and come to another conclusion, no one will be more relieved than me.”
Ash sucked in one deep breath after another, like someone preparing for a dive. “All right, tell me. All these facts you’ve discovered.” He managed to make it sound like the kind of f word usually represented by a row of stars. “Tell me what gives you the right to say these things about my wife.”
Hazel was deeply impressed that he was managing to remain logical. It didn’t have to matter that he was talking as if he hated her. This was more important than the feelings of either of them. People had died. At least, people had disappeared, and it was too much to hope that the crews of several aircraft were all living under assumed names in Cambridge.
She kept her manner cool, forensic. “The hair samples show that the boys were in England, probably close to Cambridge, most of the time they were supposed to be in Somalia. Graves told us he was keeping an eye on the Cambridge flat for a woman who was working abroad. But the porters told me she was there for three and a half years, until sometime in June.”
“So?”
“It was mid-June when you interviewed Graves on our way down to visit my father. At the time you thought he was just one of the manufacturers who’d lost arms shipments. But if he is in cahoots with the pirates, you turning up again must have alarmed the hell out of him. He’d thought you were an ex-problem. But you were back in business and you’d got as far as his door. He had to do two things as a matter of urgency. One was to shut you up for good, hence the ambush on our way back from the horse fair. The other was to warn his co-conspirators.”
“Cathy is not a co-conspirator!”
There was nothing to be gained by arguing. Hazel pressed on. “At which point, Miss Anderson suddenly left her flat in Cambridge, without telling the porters where she was going or how long she’d be away. But she never meant to return. All their personal belongings were removed—hers and the children’s. All she left behind were the furniture and that computer, set up to handle video calls.”
That hit Ash like a fist. “Children?” he said faintly.
Hazel nodded. Again she waited.
Eventually he whispered, “Boys? Girls?”
“Two boys. Gabriel, they were your sons. It’s straining credulity to think anything else. When she learned you were back on the job, she packed up and left. I presume she went to Africa then. To be safe if you couldn’t be stopped, to be brought back if you could.” She didn’t spell it out—“if they succeeded in accomplishing your death”—but Ash knew what she meant.
“Graves set up the video call,” Hazel went on. “All they needed was a bare room somewhere and enough know-how to reroute the transmissions. We thought we were following Graves to Cambridge, but actually he was leading us. He wanted to show you that your family were still alive but also still in danger. And we fell for it like a couple of amateurs,” she added bitterly. “I thought it was as real as you did.”
“Then…” A ghost of a voice in the half darkness. “Their offer. My family’s lives for mine. If you’re right … Cathy wanted me dead as much as Graves did.”
Hazel winced. It had been necessary to convince him. It seemed she’d succeeded. She wished she could feel happier about it. “She may have thought she was in too deep to object to anything he proposed.” It wasn’t much of an argument, but it was all she could manage to smooth a little balm on Ash’s excoriated soul.
He shook his head, almost in wonder. “There was only one way she could come home—if I wasn’t there waiting for her. If she’d come back to me, sooner or later one of the boys would have said something that blew her story apart. She could drill them in what they could and couldn’t say, and protect them from interrogation, but she couldn’t keep them from talking to their father. Sooner or later, one of those little boys was going to say something that proved his mother a liar.”
Hazel had nothing to say that would make this any easier for him, and saw no need to pile more evidence on what he had already accepted. Maybe tomorrow she’d tell him that she’d shown the Cambridge porters the photographs she’d taken of Ash’s sons, and they’d recognized them immediately.
He gave it one last try. “Could he have … compelled her? Threatened her? Threatened the boys?”
“It’s possible.”
But Ash had never seen any point in fooling himself. “If she’d needed help dealing with him, it was all around her. As close as the nearest police station. She lived in Cambridge for three and a half years? If she’d felt threatened by Graves, she’d have done something about it.”
“You realize,” Hazel said after a decent pause, “I have to go to the police with this.”
He hesitated, but not for long. “Yes.”
“And it’ll be out of our hands what happens next.”
Still buffeted by the inner turmoil, Ash was slow to realize that what had sounded like a statement was in fact a question. “I suppos
e so.…”
Hazel sighed. If they’d been discussing anyone’s situation other than his own, he’d have realized at once that, while there could be no question about what she had to do with her information, there might be some flexibility as to when she had to do it. But he was too shocked, too deeply hurt. He needed her to guide him through the maze of what was possible.
She said patiently, “If you wanted to, you could talk to her first. I can hold off for a few hours, if you want to see her before she’s arrested.”
He tried to think about it rationally. “I said I’d stay away from her. I promised.”
But the situation had changed since that promise was made, and Hazel knew things that Philip Welbeck didn’t. “I’m not saying it’s a good idea. Just that, if you want to, this will be the last chance.”
Even then Ash didn’t realize what it was she wasn’t saying. That if, in spite of everything, he’d sooner see his wife disappear than face prison, this would be his last opportunity to help her. Once Hazel had talked to DI Gorman, no one would care what either she or Ash wanted. Cathy would be arrested, tried, and convicted for her part in a murderous conspiracy. She would be an old woman before she was free.
But there was a limit to what Hazel was prepared to do, even for her friend, and telling him how to subvert the course of justice was beyond it.
“I suppose,” Ash said slowly, “I could give her the chance to explain.”
That’s one explanation that’d be worth hearing, thought Hazel.
He made his mind up. “I’ll go around there now, while the boys are asleep. They don’t need to hear the things I’m going to need to say.”