Desperate Measures: A Mystery

by Jo Bannister

  She climbed out stiffly, easing her cramped limbs while Patience disappeared discreetly around the back of the car. When she returned, Hazel settled her on the backseat. “I’ll get you something to eat, okay?” The dog blinked, almost as if she were nodding.

  The Little Farmer was true to its advertising: it was still open, though the chef was asleep over the counter and the bell tinkling over his door didn’t wake him. Hazel cleared her throat robustly and he looked up in momentary alarm. Then he remembered where he was and yawned. “What can I get you?”

  “Sausage, bacon, and egg,” said Hazel. “Twice—once in a bowl for my dog. Another bowl of water, and a pot of tea.”

  The chef didn’t even look surprised. The food arrived promptly. Patience disposed of hers, and Hazel went back inside to spend a little longer over her own meal. She ate at the counter, keeping the lonely chef company. Over her second cup of tea she produced the photographs. “Any idea where that is?”

  He’d nothing better to do, wouldn’t have for another hour or more. He studied the pictures. “Looks vaguely familiar.” He groped under the counter, came up with a handful of guidebooks. “Hang on, hang on.… No, that’s not the one.… Windermere, Coniston Water … Ullswater. There we are.” He turned the book so she could see. “Isn’t that it, up on the hill? Sedgemere House.”

  He was right. It was. The angle was different, the photograph taken from farther along the lake, but the house was recognizably the same, even to the jetty below it. And at the time that the photograph was taken—Hazel checked the copyright date, which was only two years earlier—the little houseboat was still moored there. Her heart quickened. Maybe it was still there today. Maybe the goose she’d been chasing wasn’t so wild after all.

  She bought the guidebook from him. It seemed the least she could do. At the back she found maps to all the tourist attractions. Sedgemere House was marked as open for prearranged tours only, but that didn’t matter. All she needed was its location, on the hillside above the long finger of Ullswater, the roads that would take her there, and the lane—a mere scratch on the map—that would take her down to the jetty.

  Now Hazel had a dilemma. She wanted to call DI Gorman, tell him she’d found the house in the picture, and ask him to send the cavalry. But if she did that, he’d know she’d gone against … not his orders—he probably wasn’t in a position to give her orders—but his express wishes. He had her mobile number; she thought he’d call when he got an answer to his fax, and the circumspect thing might be to wait for that call. But Ash could be in trouble now, needing her now, and even Dave Gorman wasn’t likely to be in his office before seven in the morning. So either she wasted two hours doing nothing but keeping on his good side or she made her way to Ullswater and found the road to Sedgemere House and the lane—track, rather—down to the jetty, and then …

  Well, one of only two things, actually. She could proceed with caution down to the lakeside, see if the houseboat was still there, and if it was, who, if anyone, was on it. But that would put her in danger and anger DI Gorman. The alternative was to wait, handy but out of sight, for Gorman’s call. That would be the sensible thing to do, and Hazel had always prided herself on her common sense.

  The rising sun found her driving west into the northern Lakes, wilder and less fashionable than their southern cousins. Since leaving the motorway, she found the roads oddly quiet for the Lake District in summer. But of course it was barely six o’clock. All the tourists were still in their beds and the first of the day’s Cumberland sausages had yet to hit the frying pan. She followed the map, looking first for the road that would take her down the southern shore of Ullswater, then for the laneway to Sedgemere House. Somewhere along that lane, the jetty should come into view. She guessed wrong at the first attempt and ended up in someone’s farmyard, with his dairy herd coming the other way, but her second guess was better. The lake, which had been playing hide-and-seek with her for the last mile, reappeared in front of her. A moment later, she glimpsed the side of the house through a screen of conifers, then the end of the jetty, finally the little houseboat snugged in close to the shore.

  Somehow it managed to come as a surprise. As if she’d never really expected to find it; as if there was some doubt in her mind that it even existed. But there it was, a small, squarish white boat with touches of blue about it, tied fore and aft to the old black timbers of the jetty. There was no one in sight, either at the boat or anywhere around, but there was a car parked halfway down the track. A big gray car in the style of an earlier decade.

  “He’s here,” whispered Hazel.

  Patience thought so, too. The dog tugged excitedly at her seat belt, whining under her breath.

  Despite her sense of urgency, Hazel forced herself to be cautious. She quietly backed away, until the jetty disappeared once more from sight. Then she got out and walked forward in order to study the scene without being noticed.

  There was just the one car, Ash’s mother’s Volvo, and nowhere another could have been concealed. Either Ash had found the boat deserted or whoever had got here first had already left. Hazel let out her pent-up breath in real relief. She knew she couldn’t deal with Stephen Graves, but she’d have died of anxiety waiting for those who could.

  But surely Ash’s car meant he was the only one there now. It was probably safe to approach. Even so, Hazel saw no reason not to cover her back. She called DI Gorman’s mobile number.

  The man might not have gone off duty before midnight. This might be his wake-up call. It couldn’t be helped. She had to tell him that she’d found Ash and where they were. Once he’d finished shouting, he’d send someone from the local constabulary to meet them.

  Gorman answered eventually. He didn’t sound as if she’d disturbed his sleep. He sounded as if she’d disturbed him while he was brushing his teeth.

  He listened more than he talked; even so, he couldn’t contain the occasional exclamation—of surprise, of dismay, of downright disbelief. He took down the directions she gave him. Finally he said darkly, “We’ll talk about this later. For now, stay put and wait for backup.”

  “I’m going down to the boat,” she said. “There’s no danger. Gabriel’s on his own.”

  “Wait for the area car! You don’t know what you’ll find down there.” But she was already gone.

  It wasn’t there now, but there had been another car. Beside the jetty was an area of flattened grass with tire treads and the distinctive marks of a woman’s shoes pressed into the damp earth. Even in summer, the ground never dries out for long in the Lake District.

  Hazel had walked down the grassy slope, at a tangent to the stony track that curved around to the jetty. Arriving at the water’s edge, she sidestepped the parking area to preserve the evidence, but then she hesitated. Gorman was right: she didn’t know what she’d find on the boat. She was assuming that Ash was here alone. But that, she now realized, could be a bad mistake. If Graves had finally managed to kill him, he might have taken the body away for disposal where some canoeist wasn’t going to snag it with his paddle, and have every intention of returning when he had. Perhaps she should wait.…

  The decision was taken out of her hands. She’d left Patience in her car, tethered by the seat belt, with the window open for ventilation. But somehow the dog had freed herself, and now she trotted past Hazel with her nose high, scenting the air. Hazel called her name sotto voce, but the lurcher ignored her, continued out onto the jetty. When she reached the boat, she let out a single high-pitched bark.

  And since that put paid to the option of covert surveillance, Hazel followed. With the element of surprise gone, it was important to take control of the situation before anyone had time to react.

  Of course, it shouldn’t have been a solitary probationary constable on sick leave attempting to take control. Hazel knew that well enough. But she was the one here. Help was on its way, but it hadn’t come yet, the dog had given away her presence, and there was still the chance that Ash was in the kind of trou
ble that couldn’t wait. On balance, therefore, Hazel thought it better to board the boat immediately and establish who was there and what they were doing, and hope that when the area car from the nearest police station turned into the lane, it would have its siren wailing for all to hear.

  She fixed Patience with a steely eye. “You and I are going to have words when this is over.”

  The dog didn’t move. Her hackles were up, and a low growl was purring in her throat. Hazel reached for a stanchion and swung herself onto the deck.

  By now she could smell it, too: the sickly sweet scent of blood. The smell of something very wrong. Her heart sank. She’d half expected the thing to end in anticlimax—Ash here alone, any others who had been here long gone, leaving her to make complicated explanations to the local lads currently speeding through the country lanes with their blues-and-twos going. But it wasn’t going to be like that. A lot of blood has to have been spilled before you can smell it, enough that whoever lost it needs help. At least it removed the last argument for doing nothing. She reached for the companionway and stepped inside.

  What greeted her made her jaw drop and her eyes widen in shock. She stayed frozen on the steep wooden steps, her vision adjusting to the dimness of the cabin, knowing she made an easy target for anyone in the mood for more violence but momentarily quite unable to move.

  When the tightness in her chest reminded her to breathe, she sucked in a great lungful of air that loosened the stricture in her throat. Even so, her voice didn’t sound remotely like her own. “God in heaven, Gabriel,” she gasped, “what have you done?”

  CHAPTER 32

  IT WAS AFTERNOON BEFORE ASH LEFT THE MOTORWAY. The traffic had been horrendous; it wasn’t much lighter now, and the road was less capable of dealing with it. But speed wasn’t an issue. No one was waiting for him at the houseboat. Perhaps no one was there at all.

  He hadn’t thought to bring a map, was relying on memory alone to find the place. He’d done the journey four or five times, most recently some six years ago, and each time Cathy had been beside him, guiding him. She’d been coming here since childhood, had learned to swim in the cold waters of the lake, knew every sheep trod within a five-mile radius.

  Bringing him here for the first time had been like giving him a present wrapped in rainbows. She had loved him then. When had she stopped? When he took her to London? But she loved London, too, quickly surrounded herself with a network of interesting and attentive friends. She loved the fact that if the days weren’t long enough to see what the capital had to offer, it all went on into the night as well. That couldn’t be what he’d done wrong. He hadn’t forced her to relocate to London, and by the time they’d been there a month, it fitted Cathy like a second skin. London wasn’t the reason she’d come to hate him.

  Ash made a couple of false turns and had to retrace his route. Every time he turned off a major road onto a minor one, the traffic thinned abruptly, so that he had the last length of laneway to himself. The lake, which had sat at his shoulder for several miles, had slipped from sight before he made the final turn; now he breasted a little rise in the lane and the sapphire length of it was spread out to the right and left of him, brilliant in the sunshine. He remembered that heart-stopping moment from every time he’d been here. The beauty of it never faded.

  When the jetty came into sight, he stopped the car and parked in a gateway. It seemed wiser to go the rest of the way on foot. That may have been a mistake. Nothing that anyone on the houseboat could do in the few moments between hearing a car and its arrival was as important as having the means of a speedy departure close at hand.

  But he chose to walk down the last few hundred meters of track, and the decision earned him a prize he would not otherwise have had: the sight of his sons playing unawares beside the lake. Ash caught his breath. Then he sank slowly onto his knees to watch them unobserved.

  With the water so close, Cathy had made them wear life jackets. Gilbert was old enough to resent being treated like a baby; sullenness radiated from him like heat from a smoldering fire. He sat on the landward end of the jetty, bare legs dangling over the grass, casting indignant glances toward the boat to see if his mother was feeling silly yet.

  Two years younger, and with a sunnier disposition, Guy didn’t care if the life jackets were necessary. The sun was shining, the water was sparkling, they were living on a boat, and he’d found a bird’s skull polished white by the weather. What radiated from him was the sheer joy of being six years old and without a care in the world.

  Ash knelt in the grass, with the afternoon sun beating down on his back and tears winking like crystal on his cheeks, and had no idea what to do next. They believed he was dead. Two months ago he’d believed they were dead. If he called to them, they wouldn’t know him. They hadn’t seen him for four years. They couldn’t have picked him out of a police lineup if two of the other men had been black and one had been a dwarf. If he approached them, they’d yell for their mother. If he tried to grab them and drag them to his car, they’d scream blue murder and fear him forever.

  And he still wouldn’t have achieved what he’d come here for. Failure should have been a price worth paying for the safe return of his sons, but he wanted more. Needed more. Needed to hold them and take them home with him, but also to talk to Cathy and find out what had happened. Hazel’s theory didn’t explain everything. Ash was desperate to hear his wife say something that would make sense of what she’d done. That would justify letting him think he’d brought about the destruction of his family. Even hearing that she was in love with Stephen Graves would be something. No one is entirely responsible for the things they do for love. If she could tell him that she’d been overwhelmed by the strength of her feelings, that she’d wanted Graves to the exclusion of honor, decency, or any regard for the man with whom she’d spent the previous eight years, he could begin to forgive her. He would have killed for her; perhaps that was how she felt about Graves.

  But she’d loved him once, Ash was sure of it. He needed to hear her say it; and then say that how she’d felt for him once, now she felt for someone else. Then he would take his sons and go home; and tomorrow he would tell the police everything he knew that might help bring Stephen Graves to justice. If Cathy, too, found herself gathered in by the long arm of the law, he would feel a twinge of regret, but his primary concern was to ensure the boys were safe and happy. It had taken him four years, but his job was done. A criminal enterprise that had hijacked millions of pounds’ worth of armaments and cost dozens of lives was broken. It was a major achievement. One day, perhaps, it would feel like it.

  Down at the jetty, Gilbert grew bored with waiting to be noticed, still perfectly safe, meters from the water. He stood up and, with a last accusing glance at the boat, hands in pockets, walked up the grassy bank, scuffing his shoes.

  Guy looked up as he passed. “Do you want to play zombies?”

  “No.”

  “Okay.” Untroubled, Guy went on playing with his bird’s skull, while Gilbert went on being displeased.

  When he was perhaps fifty meters from the shore, he turned back and called out rebelliously but not quite loud enough to be heard from the boat, “Is this far enough from the water?” He took off his life jacket and threw it down on the grass.

  Which is when he saw Ash.

  One of the defining achievements of Western society in recent decades has been to make its children afraid of half the human race. The vast majority of children who come to harm do so at the hands of those they live with; but the notion of the strange man stalking the streets in search of children to carry off is one that every cherished girl and boy will be familiar with. In large parts of the civilized world it stops them from playing outside with friends until they’re almost old enough to marry and drive a car.

  So the first emotion that Gabriel Ash saw flicker across his elder son’s face after four years—he’d been too far away at the park—was fear. He felt his heart breaking within him. He wanted to leap to his
feet, reach for the boy, and clasp him tight against his chest—and he knew that if he tried, Gilbert would scream in terror and run from him. So he stayed where he was, kneeling in the grass, and a kind of desperate smile diverted the tears into the corners of his mouth.

  When he didn’t move, the alarm in Gilbert’s eyes turned by degrees to puzzlement. The fine, dark brows gathered. He looked at Ash, then uncertainly back at the boat, and then at Ash again. He said, “I’ve seen you before.”

  Ash nodded. “I used to know your mother. Years ago, when you were little.”

  “Did you know my father, too?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “He died,” said the boy, watching for the effect of this revelation. “While we were on holiday.”

  “I heard that,” said Ash. He couldn’t think what else to say.

  “We had to come back. We’d only just got there.”

  “That must have been … difficult.”

  “He was clever,” Gilbert said, waiting as if he expected to be contradicted. “My dad was.”

  “Yes?”

  “Clever, but not smart,” explained Gilbert. “That’s what my mum says.”

  Ash bit his lip. “That sounds about right.”

  “She’s down at the boat. My mum. Shall I call her?”

  “In a minute.” He’d driven two hundred miles to see her, to ask her what had happened; now it turned out he didn’t want to talk to her at all, didn’t need to know. All he wanted was his sons, and they were right here, and if only he’d brought Hazel with him, she could have stayed with them while he told their mother he was assuming custody. He could just have taken them, of course, and left her to wonder in increasing panic what had become of them, but he wouldn’t have done that. He remembered too well how it felt.

  Slowly, careful not to scare the boy, he climbed to his feet. “Will you do something for me, Gilbert? Will you keep an eye on Guy while I have a word with your mother?”