by Jo Bannister
Hazel Best didn’t just surprise her colleagues sometimes: sometimes she surprised herself. Everyone in the house had more experience and more seniority than she had, and none of them had said anything very terrible. She just got so tired of it. Of people who should know better treating Ash like a joke rather than a victim. If he’d been knocked down in the street by an inattentive driver, every one of them would have rushed to help. Instead he’d been run down by an emotional express train, and left broken and bleeding by the track, and rather than gathering around with splints and oxygen and hot, sweet tea, they made fun of him. They called him Rambles With Dogs. She was angry with them and ashamed of them; and maybe she’d spoken out of turn, but what she’d said had needed saying.
She sat in Ash’s mother’s best armchair, getting her breath back. At least she’d found a way of getting the front room to herself. The search would continue along the hall and up the stairs, but it wouldn’t come in here until there was no alternative. Even then Presley’s team would draw straws for who was going to disturb her.
Hazel looked around curiously. In all the times she’d been in this house, she’d never explored this room. The reason was the same reason so many people don’t use the biggest room in their house: because their mothers said you had to have one room where things stayed looking nice, and the only way to achieve that was by excluding people. So the best china, which was never used, and the best chairs, which were never sat on, and the best rugs, which people had to walk around, were all concentrated in the front room and seen only after family funerals or by the person doing the spring cleaning.
The other thing that people kept in the front room was the family album. These days most people keep photographs on their phone or their computer, but Mrs. Ash would certainly have had a family album, and Hazel thought Ash would have continued sending contributions for it while she was alive.
If there was somewhere that Ash had guessed Cathy would go, it was probably somewhere they had been together, in happier days. And maybe they’d immortalized it in photographs.
Hazel found a stack of albums in the bottom of the sideboard. Some of them were clearly ancient, showing women in long skirts and men in buttoned-up jackets; the prints were stuck in with little adhesive corners, and someone had written names, places, and dates below many of them. “Mother and Mrs. Kitchen, Blackpool, 1932” was one such legend. Another read, “Father atop the General, Marmbury Stumps, 1949”—which might have been a bit ripe for most people’s family album, except that the General was a horse.
Toward the end of the century, as photography became easier, less care had been taken in cataloguing the prints. Important ones were still labeled—“Henry and Elizabeth, married Norbold Parish Church, May 2, 1971”; “Gabriel’s christening, Norbold Parish Church, February 15, 1975”; “Gabriel’s graduation, Oxford, 1997”—but most were just tacked loosely in place, nameless faces in unknown places on occasions long forgotten.
What was she expecting, Hazel asked herself sourly, a photograph labeled “Gabriel and Cathy at their favorite hideaway,” with a sign in the background to identify the location? Nothing she knew of detective work suggested it was ever that easy. Quite often it proved impossible: you never found the X that marked the spot. Promising lines of inquiry petered out because a victim with other things on his mind failed to leave a trail of crumbs leading to his murderer’s front door—or if he did, a conscientious street cleaner swept it away. The success of a criminal investigation is less dependent, usually, on inspiration and more on a scrupulous chain of evidence connecting the who with the what.
So it was going to take time, effort, and a degree of concentration she’d struggle to maintain here, with Presley’s team tip-toeing around her from time to time. She found a cardboard box in the kitchen and packed the albums into it.
“Where do you think you’re going with those?” demanded DS Presley.
It was a reasonable question, and Hazel tried to answer it reasonably. “I’m going to work on them at my house. There’s too much going on here for me to think.”
“You can’t do that! That’s evidence.”
“Of what?” asked Hazel. And that, too, was a good question, as well as being irritatingly grammatical.
“Er…”
Hazel took pity on him. “Ask Mr. Gorman. He wants me to work on this stuff—he thinks I might spot something nobody else would. Look”—she showed him—“it’s a box of old photographs. It can’t be evidence of any crime you’re interested in.”
The sergeant was unconvinced. But he called DI Gorman; then he stood back from the doorway to let her pass. “Still seems pretty irregular to me,” he grumbled.
“We’re on the same side here, Sergeant,” she reminded him. “We’re all just trying to find out where these people have disappeared to and stop them from doing any more harm to one another. I don’t know if I can do anything useful with these”—she hefted the albums—“but I have to try.”
That made sense. Mollified, Presley nodded. “Try.”
* * *
Saturday offered to help for a couple of hours before work. (Before work! It pleased Hazel’s heart, how quickly he’d slipped into the thought processes of the gainfully employed.) But though the offer was kindly meant, this was something she needed to do alone. If it was her memory the pictures needed to jog, it was her eyes that needed to see them.
The youth nodded, shrugging off the rejection as he’d shrugged off so many in the past, and pivoted on the bottom step, heading back to his room. On impulse Hazel left the photo albums she was laying out on the coffee table and crossed the room quickly enough to catch his wrist. He turned back to her, startled, eyes saucering—and she astonished both of them by leaning up and kissing him.
She felt the need to explain. “That was a sisterly kiss, not to be confused with anything more promising. But I want you to know how proud I am of you. Of how you’ve got your life together. You told me you’d turn over a new leaf, and you have. You’ve stayed out of trouble, you’ve got yourself a job, you’re turning into a model citizen. When I offered you a room, I had no idea if you’d be able to make a go of it, or if you’d slip back to your street friends and your street ways. I knew you were worth taking a chance on. I didn’t know if you’d be able to do anything with that chance.
“Saturday, it pleases me more than I can say that you’ve made me feel pretty silly for worrying. I don’t need to worry about you—you’re going to be fine. You’re a smart, decent young man, and you make your old landlady very proud!”
Saturday went on staring at her for a minute. Then he blinked, nodded, and continued on up the stairs. Hazel smiled to herself. She’d seen what it was he was blinking away.
She headed back to the coffee table and began leafing through the albums, randomly, seeing nothing that meant anything to her. Then she took the photographs out and spread them on the sitting room carpet. Not all of them, just those from the last forty years—even a favorite haunt from Ash’s childhood might have drawn him back decades later with his wife. There were still dozens and dozens of them. Hazel had no idea how she’d get them back in the right albums when she’d finished.
She spread them out and let her eyes slide over them. She arranged them into a rough chronology, with the little shock-haired boy to the left and the grown man with his wife and sons to the right. There was, of course, nothing from the last four years. There was hardly a moment of those four years Ash would have wanted recorded for posterity; and after his mother died there was no one to send them to.
Hazel then discarded those that had nothing to say beyond Here we are, still alive and breathing. She needed information, not smiles and a cross section of knitwear. She was looking behind the people in the photographs to the backgrounds, watching for recurring themes.
There were three photographs, taken over twenty years, against the backdrop of Blackpool Tower. But then, most English families would have taken occasional holidays in Blackpool; and when she found the group posing du
tifully on the steps of a large terrace house, with “Back at Mrs. Sidgewick’s again!” penciled on the reverse, Hazel put them aside. No one in his right mind would have taken Cathy Ash to a Blackpool B and B.
What else? Views of the Lake District. Every family in Britain had also holidayed in the Lake District. Lake Windermere, the bridge at Ambleside, Castlerigg Stone Circle, Ullswater, Derwentwater. Wonderful vistas of purple mountains with wonderful names—Haystacks and Catbells and Striding Edge—and azure lakes, and no hint of all the rain that kept the lakes brimful.
A surprise then: Gabriel Ash showing a degree of sporting prowess. He’d never said anything about archery. But here he was, about twelve years of age, with a bow almost as tall as he was and a silver trophy. There was so much she didn’t know about him. He’d done forty years’ living before they’d even met. The place he’d thought of, where Cathy might go, could be hidden anywhere in any one of those years.
Gabriel the archer, Gabriel the student, Gabriel the graduate. Gabriel the bridegroom. Gabriel the father of sons. Family snaps, nothing more. Important to him, important no doubt to his mother, but no help now. Hazel wanted scenery, landscapes, something behind the familial cheeriness that might be identifiable; buildings or hills or a river that would appear on a map if she could figure out where to look. Like that one—where was it?—on the boat with the big house in the background. The boat might be long gone, but the house would still be there. Maybe that was somewhere Cathy might think of hiding and Ash might think of looking.
It wasn’t a eureka moment: Hazel didn’t suppose she’d cracked the case with that twitch of intuition. But if they’d had somewhere special, they would have taken photographs there. Cathy would have photographed Ash, and Ash would have photographed Cathy; then they’d have flagged down a passing rambler to photograph them both. They’d have sent a copy to Ash’s mother and she’d have put it in her album. So it should now be on Hazel’s sitting room carpet.
But if it was, she wasn’t seeing it. She wasn’t even seeing the one with the boat anymore. There were, however, lots of lakes, or possibly the same lake from different angles; and surely—yes, this one—another shot with the big house in the background. From farther away this time, with the tree-clad slope climbing steeply behind it. She turned it over, but there was nothing written on the back. But it had to be the Lake District, didn’t it? Unless it was Scotland. Lots of lakes—lochs—and hills there, and a fair number of trees. Was there anything Scottish about the house—pepper-pot turrets, crow-stepped gables, men in kilts playing bagpipes on the front lawn? The house was too distant in this shot to be sure. Where was the other one?
She frowned. What had she done with it? Puzzled, she bent and leafed through the prints. She knew—from the ages of the subjects—approximately when it was taken and therefore where it should have been. Still she couldn’t find it.
The temptation is always to believe that the missing item must be there, that we’re just not seeing it. But Hazel had been taught observation as a professional skill, and to trust the evidence of her eyes. She didn’t start searching through the whole collection again. Instead she sat back on her heels and thought. Then she got up and went to her bedroom.
She found it in her handbag. Because it hadn’t come from the Ash family albums. It was the one Cathy had given her along with the locks of the boys’ hair.
It showed what she remembered it showing: Ash looking happier than Hazel had ever seen him, his arm about his wife and the wind in his thick hair, on the deck of a small houseboat moored to a jetty. A stony lane ran up the hillside and, high above the lake, the house occupied the top right-hand corner of the shot. It still didn’t look particularly Scottish.
Hazel called Laura Fry at home. “Did Gabriel ever mention a boat to you? I have a photo of him and Cathy on what looks like a houseboat.”
As a therapist, Laura had been accustomed to peculiar questions coming without much warning even before she knew Ash and Hazel. She didn’t ask why Hazel wanted to know; she concentrated on trying to answer. “He talked about a few holidays they had together. Tunisia was one; Thailand was another.”
Hazel was shaking her head. “This looks very like England. Maybe the Lake District.”
That rang a bell. “Oh—yes, they did that a few times. The boat belonged to a relative of Cathy’s. They’d go up for the weekend sometimes.”
Hazel felt her senses quicken. “Do you know where it was?”
“I don’t think he ever told me. Is it important?”
“Probably not. Just an idea I had.” Hazel was trying to hide her disappointment. There was a chance that Cathy had thought of that boat as a secret refuge, and that Ash had thought of it, too. But she hadn’t enough information to find them.
She couldn’t bring herself to move on. She was on the right track: she knew it in her bones. She went back to the photographs, separated out those that might have been taken in the Lake District, scrutinizing each in turn until her eyes itched. Then she went back to the picture Cathy had given her. The boat might be gone, but the house would still be there and so would the jetty. Someone familiar with the area would recognize them. If she showed that photograph to a Lake District postman, for instance …
She could head up there now, tonight, and do exactly that. She might find the house. She might even find the boat. Then what? If Ash hadn’t found Cathy there, she could bring him home. But if Cathy had gone to the boat, Graves might be there, too.
Hazel was going to need help. She couldn’t ask Dave Gorman to go with her on what might so easily prove a wild-goose chase. She could ask for backup from the local constabulary, but the request would have to come from Gorman.
So the DI was her next call. By now, she was pretty sure, his heart must sink at the sound of her voice.
CHAPTER 31
DI GORMAN LOOKED AT THE PICTURES. He listened to what Hazel had to say. Finally he said, doubtfully, “So these photos were taken anything up to ten years ago. Is there any reason to suppose the boat’s still there?”
“Well, no,” admitted Hazel. “But the house will be.”
“But the Ashes have no connection with the house.”
“No. But the boat may still be there. Even if it isn’t, whoever owns the house may know where it went. If Gabriel could find it, I’m sure we can.”
“But you’re not sure Ash has gone there. That any of them have gone there.”
Hazel had to concede that she wasn’t. “I know it’s a long shot. But even long shots pay off sometimes. You told me to think of somewhere they might have gone. Well, this is it.”
He had said that. And she could be right. But it wasn’t grounds to mobilize a task force. “Tell you what, Hazel. It’s too late to do much tonight. First thing tomorrow I’ll fax a copy of your picture to Cumbria, see if any of the local lads recognize this house. If they do, they can go and see if the boat’s still there, and if anybody’s on it. Good enough?”
Hazel stared at him as if he were mad. “Of course it isn’t good enough! You want to send a couple of local plods to bring in a man who’s wanted for hijacking airplanes? Stephen Graves will eat them alive!”
“He’s a businessman.…”
“He’s in the arms business! He came after Gabriel and me with a shotgun!” Hazel took a moment to curb her temper. “All right. But Gabriel’s been missing for twelve hours, maybe longer: he could be in a lot of trouble by now. Send the fax tonight, ask Cumbria to get on it at first light. And warn them what they might be walking into.” She turned to go, taking the photographs with her, leaving Gorman the photocopies.
“Hazel?”
She stopped, turned back. “What?”
“Don’t even think of going up there alone. If there’s anything to find, we’ll find it.”
She nodded, managed a smile. “I know.”
“And?”
“And I won’t even think of going up there alone.”
Gorman grinned. He’d lost a tooth playing rugby, w
ore the gap as a badge of honor. “Good girl.”
But then he didn’t hear her murmur as she headed down the stairs, “You’re never alone with a lurcher.”
* * *
Before she embarked on the long drive north, Hazel was clear in her own mind about what she didn’t hope to achieve. She thought she could find the jetty where the houseboat had been moored; though that didn’t mean that Ash or his wife or his wife’s lover was there now or ever had been. But she wasn’t going to arrest anyone. She had no intentions of putting herself in danger. Even when she was troubled, she wasn’t stupid. If she could find the boat, the local constabulary could detail firearms officers to deal with Graves.
That was the point at which Hazel thought she could do some good. If Graves was there, he would be arrested; if Cathy was there, she, too, would be arrested; and that would leave Ash—if he’d found them—stunned, bereft, unable to begin the process of getting himself and his sons home. Hazel wanted to be at his side, to help him do what needed doing and then to bring him home.
For the same reason, she collected Patience before hitting the motorway. She knew Ash well enough to suspect that, if she found him in a state of fugue, he might take more comfort in his dog’s presence than in hers. Plus it meant that, at least technically, Hazel hadn’t lied to DI Gorman.
It was a good road but still a long way. At least most of the traffic was heading south by now, a ribbon of headlights streaming toward her through the night, a trail of taillights in her mirror. It was gone midnight before road signs directing her to the North had given way to more specific destinations like Kendal, Windermere, and Keswick. And she still didn’t know where she was going.
Help came, a little before dawn, in the shape of a fat man with a straw in his mouth, carrying a pitchfork, with the words emblazoned across his ample belly: THE LITTLE FARMER—ALL DAY BREAKFASTS, ALL NIGHT SNACKS. Hazel swung off the motorway where the pitchfork pointed and pulled up in front of the diner. There were three big trucks in the parking lot but no customers at the tables inside.