Desperate Measures: A Mystery

by Jo Bannister

  Gilbert Ash was at an age when his default position for anything asked of him was refusal. If Cathy had asked him to finish the last of the chocolate ice cream from the freezer, he’d have said no before realizing in horror what it was he was saying no to. For some reason, though, when the tall, stooping man he vaguely remembered asked him to look after his younger brother, he understood that it was important and he nodded. “All right.”

  “Thank you.” Ash walked down the grassy bank and out onto the jetty. After a moment’s hesitation he stepped over the fenders onto the deck of the houseboat.

  CHAPTER 33

  CATHY WASN’T EXPECTING HIM. Of course she wasn’t: she thought he was dead. She thought she’d seen him die. She wasn’t expecting anyone else, either, so she assumed the footsteps on the deck overhead meant the boys had finished playing and were hungry again. She raised her voice to carry up the companionway. “Supper’s in the oven. It’ll be ready in half an hour.”

  There was no reply, but she heard the narrow double doors at the top of the steps fold back, and turned with the smile already on her face. “I told you, half an—”

  That was when she saw him, sitting on the top step, his long legs bent, his arms folded on his knees, watching her.

  The words turned to cinders in her mouth, the blood in her veins to ice. She couldn’t remember the sequence of muscular movements that would close her mouth. Her legs went weak under her, so that she had to clutch the edge of the table. All the color drained from her face.

  For long moments she seriously entertained the possibility that he was an illusion. Possibly a ghost; possibly a phantasm dreamed up by a guilty portion of her brain to punish her. Cathy Ash was a rational woman, but it still seemed marginally less improbable than the actual physical presence of her late husband on her uncle Ernie’s boat.

  Her bloodless lips moved. Breath came out, but still nothing recognizable as words.

  “Hello, Cathy,” Ash said quietly.

  Finally she managed to say, “You’re not dead.”

  Ash barked an ironic little laugh. “Try to sound a bit more thrilled.”

  “You shot yourself! So that the boys and I could come home. It was live on the Internet. I saw it!”

  He shook his head. “Special effects. You remember Philip Welbeck? He always did have a taste for the dramatic.”

  She couldn’t tear her eyes off his face. “You’re all right.”

  Ash considered. “I wouldn’t go that far. I don’t think my therapist would go that far. Let’s say I’m better than I was. Sometimes I sleep.”

  The initial shock was beginning to fade. Cathy felt her brain lurch with the effort to catch up. And, having caught up, to map her way out. She needed to know what he was going to do. And for that, she needed to know what he knew. Maybe little enough. It meant nothing that he’d found her here, only that he guessed this was where she would come. “You’ve seen the boys?”

  “Yes.”

  “They’re alive because of you. They’re here because of you. We all are.”

  Ash breathed steadily for a moment. “Cathy—I know you haven’t been in Somalia. Or at least, only for long enough to be brought back.”

  The quick clutch and declutch of gears as Cathy adjusted her strategy. “I’m not entirely sure where we’ve been.”

  “No? I am. It was a nice apartment. No wonder you didn’t want to stay in my house.”

  She could lie. She didn’t think she could lie well enough to convince him. Or she could tell him the truth. What would he do if she told him the truth? She wasn’t afraid that he’d hurt her. Would a half-truth serve?

  “He threatened me. Stephen Graves. He was the brains behind the whole piracy business. You didn’t know that, did you, when you asked for his help? He used us as human shields. He threatened me, and he threatened the boys. I knew what you must be going through. I couldn’t find a way out.”

  “Threatened you.” Impossible to tell if he believed her or not.

  “You thought he was one of the pirates’ victims? No. That may be how he came in contact with them, but after that he was part of the organization. I think, to all intents and purposes, he ran it from his factory in Grantham. He fed them information about arms shipments they could hijack and what security measures had been taken. After you went to see him—the first time, five years ago—he knew you were smarter than the other people who’d questioned him. He realized you’d work it out, that he needed a hold over you. He picked us up off the street between home and the corner shop.”

  “Picked you up. Kidnapped you?”

  “Yes! What did you think, we met at a tea dance? I went out for milk, bread, and broccoli, and found myself in the back of a van with duct tape over my mouth!”

  “Where did he take you?”

  “I don’t know. The van drove for a couple of hours, then stopped. We were in a builder’s yard, something like that. They kept the boys in the van, took me into a kind of warehouse. That was when I met Graves.”

  “What did he say?”

  “That you were putting a profitable enterprise at risk. That I was going to help him get a bridle on you.”

  “How?”

  Cathy swallowed. She looked older than he remembered, and thinner, and there was a hardness that Ash didn’t recall, but she was still a beautiful woman. “He gave me a choice. He intended to keep the boys. They were his guarantee that you’d leave him alone. I could stay with them or go back to you. I’m sorry, Gabriel. I chose them.”

  If she expected sympathy, she was disappointed. Instead he said, “But he didn’t take you to Somalia.”

  “No. To the flat. We were watched all the time. I wasn’t allowed to talk to anyone. I kept thinking all I had to do was be patient, that my chance would come. That the men guarding us would get bored and careless, and we’d be out of there. But the right moment never came. They never got careless enough.”

  “Never? Not in four years?”

  She met his gaze without flinching. “Never. We were safe, we were even comfortable; life of a kind went on. I thought of you all the time. I knew what you’d be going through. There was nothing I could do without putting the boys in danger.”

  “And the video call?”

  “Graves turned up at the flat one day. He said to pack everything up, we were leaving. He took us back to the builder’s yard. He said you’d surfaced again, that he needed to put you back in your cage. If I refused to help, I’d never see the boys again.”

  “So you said yes.”

  Cathy hesitated. “I didn’t say no. I waited to see what he had in mind. Several days passed. Finally Graves said you’d found the Cambridge flat, and he’d fixed up a video link so I could talk to you. But I had to pretend I was in Somalia.”

  “Did you know what he was proposing to do? The deal he was going to offer me?”

  For the first time Cathy’s voice wavered. “No. I thought knowing we were alive would be enough to keep you in line. I only knew … when…” The sentence petered out.

  “Did you watch?”

  Her eyes dipped. “He made me. He said it was important, to both of us. That he needed to know it was done, and I needed to know why you’d done it. For us. The boys and me.”

  “Then you flew out to Somalia, ready to come back to a hero’s welcome.”

  Cathy nodded. “Graves had false papers for us.”

  “And then you were back in England, and the boys were with you, and Graves was talking to CTC. Why didn’t you tell Detective Inspector Gorman everything that had happened?”

  “I meant to. When I’d got my breath back.” She looked up at him, her eyes begging for his understanding. “I just couldn’t face any more questions. It’s why I came here. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing, I just needed to get away. I’d spent four years doing exactly what I was told, not daring to do anything else. I wanted to be somewhere I could do what I wanted for a while. No watchdogs, no police, not even your well-meaning little friend. Just me and the bo
ys.”

  “So Graves was never here.”

  She looked surprised. “He doesn’t know about this place. How could he?”

  “Only one way,” admitted Ash.

  The silence opened like a pit between them. Ash did nothing to fill it. Finally Cathy whispered, “Is that what you’ve been thinking? That we were lovers? That I chose him over you, and that’s why I took the boys and let you think we were dead? Gabriel—is that what you think of me?”

  It would have been seductively easy for him to deny it. To say of course not, she’d misunderstood, he was sorry, he loved her, he’d always loved her … But what if the Cathy he’d always loved was a myth? He needed to be sure more than he needed to be comforted.

  “I don’t know what to think,” he said simply. “For four years I thought you were all dead. Now it turns out you were living in Cambridge. Stephen Graves threatened you, and you were so afraid that in four years you couldn’t find one opportunity to grab the boys and go to the police. That is what you’re telling me?”

  She nodded guardedly.

  “I don’t believe you,” said Ash.

  Another long, painful pause. Cathy propped one hip on the corner of the table and crossed her arms. When Ash looked at her, he saw two people: the woman he loved and had married and held sacred in his heart all through the broken years, hiding in the shadows behind the older, stronger woman who felt like a stranger. Of course she was older; they were both older. He wanted to love her again. He wanted to believe her. But not quite enough to lie to himself. To tell himself that the story he was hearing made sense.

  Cathy said quietly, “I’ve told you what happened, Gabriel. I can’t make you believe it.”

  They regarded each other across the tiny expanse of the houseboat’s saloon. Four years of tragedy compressed into a space two meters by three. No wonder the air felt electric, as if a storm was imminent.

  Finally Ash said, “No. There’s something you’re not telling me. You know I’ll find out. You know this is what I do. You might as well tell me now.”

  She shook her head. Her eyes held him, unwavering. “You’re wrong. It wasn’t complicated, it was simple. I believed that our lives were in constant danger. I did what I had to do to keep us alive. I’m sorry if you think I should have handled it better. But I was catapulted into a situation I had no way of dealing with, and Graves created that situation but you bear some responsibility, too.” There was a note of accusation like acid in her voice. “Your work is why Stephen Graves tore our lives apart. Your precious work. None of it would have happened if you’d known when to back off; if you hadn’t been so goddamned dedicated!”

  “You blame me.” His voice was like a scratchy chalk. “Do you think I don’t blame myself? That I haven’t been blaming myself every minute of the last four years? Do you think I haven’t regretted the things I did, the things I didn’t do? I’m sorry to the bottom of my soul for what happened. I’m sorry I was a better security analyst than I was a husband. Whatever you did in consequence, the one who let us down was me. I know it, and I will always regret it.

  “But what you’re telling me doesn’t add up. However afraid you were, you didn’t live in a nice apartment in Cambridge for four years without getting a chance to raise the alarm. So maybe you weren’t looking for one. Maybe you didn’t want a way out. Cathy, be honest with me. Were you in love with Stephen Graves? Is that what kept you there? It was an apartment building, not a prison—you could have knocked on any door and had help in minutes. But something stopped you. Was that it? You didn’t take the first opportunity to get away from Graves because you didn’t want to?”

  Ash’s dark eyes searched hers till Cathy broke away with a dismissive shrug. “I’ve told you all there is to know. It’s easy to look at someone else’s dilemma and think you’d have handled it better. Maybe you would have, Gabriel. I’m not saying I have much to be proud of. Except that I survived, and so did our sons. Maybe, if I’d been braver, we wouldn’t have done.”

  He shook his head slowly. “You were always brave. From the moment I met you. You took London by the throat while I was still wiping my feet on the doormat. No one ever succeeded in making you do anything you didn’t want to.”

  “They had guns!”

  “But I don’t think they were pointing them at you for four years. So there was something else. A reason to live as the cooperative Ms. Anderson, and not run for help when the chance arose, and to tell the story Graves needed you to even after you were released.

  “Oh dear God!” Understanding hit him like a train, breaking him in a million pieces. His lips went to parchment, dry and pale, his limbs to water. His fists clenched, white-knuckled, on the handrails on either side of the companionway. “Oh Cathy. Please … please tell me it wasn’t money. Tell me it wasn’t as simple as that. Graves offered to cut you in on the deal, and you bit his hand off?”

  CHAPTER 34

  THIS WHOLE CONVERSATION HAD BEEN PUNCTUATED by awkward silences. Where one or the other of them had stopped breathing for a moment, waiting to see which way the fish was going to jump, and if it was going to pull the angler into the river. Some had gone on almost too long to bear. Long enough that the gritted teeth started to pain the jaw, that the skin crawled with electricity, that the unblinking eye itched like a burn.

  None of them, Ash now discovered, had been in any way meaningful beside this one. This was like the world holding its breath. Every muscle in his body clenched tight as he waited for her response. At first he waited for her to gasp and for tears to spring to her eyes, but the moment for that passed. Then he waited for her to slap his face, all the power of her hurt and anger behind the blow, but the moment for that passed, too. Finally he was waiting for her to speak—to marshal words adequate to the occasion, in the low, precise voice of bridled fury, and furnish an explanation that would fill him with remorse and regret and infinite relief.

  But the moment for that passed, too. After that, he didn’t know what he was waiting for. Cathy wasn’t avoiding his gaze anymore; she was returning it, level, calculating. Waiting for him to blink first. Waiting for him to rush out an apology she could take her time about accepting. And it took all the strength Ash owned to keep from withdrawing the accusation, even though she hadn’t bothered to deny it.

  Finally, incredibly, she chuckled. “Oh Gabriel,” she said, and the amusement in her voice was quite unfeigned, “when did you become such an insufferable prig?

  “No, really,” she persisted, seeing his stricken expression and tempering her assault not at all. “You weren’t always this boring. Or maybe you were and I was too young to notice. I was only twenty-five when we married. It didn’t seem that young at the time. Looking back, it seems much more than twelve years ago.

  “And you were clever. I knew that the first time we met. I think I was a little seduced by it. I thought it would be a fine thing to marry a clever man. But then, I thought you’d do rather more with it than jockey a desk and add up columns of figures all day. I know it was important, but it’s not exactly sexy, is it? Not the sort of thing a girl can boast to her friends about. ‘And guess what he did this week? He figured out that the Lithuanians were giving more for the gas than the Estonians were charging for it! What do you think about that, then?’”

  Now she was waiting for him to answer. And she had to wait almost as long before he managed to say, “We were happy. I know we were happy.”

  “Gabriel, we were happy,” Cathy agreed, as if handing him a consolation prize. “For a time. Until I started to realize just how much I was missing, being married to a man who was born middle-aged.

  “It was London that did it,” she reflected. “That was the big mistake. If we’d stayed in the Midlands—if, God help us, we’d settled in Norbold—maybe I’d have been satisfied with you for the rest of my days.”

  “You loved London!” Ash protested.

  “I did love London. That’s what I mean. Suddenly I saw how much more there was to life. Sudden
ly I was meeting people who weren’t just clever but interesting as well. It doesn’t take much to be an intellectual giant somewhere like Norbold. In London, you need to have a bit more to offer.

  “And now”—she smiled indulgently—“you’re looking like a puppy dog whose squeaky toy has been taken away. I’m not blaming you. It wasn’t you who changed, it was me. We grew apart, only you never noticed. I felt trapped and desperate, and you never noticed.”

  “The boys…”

  “The boys gave me something to do. But it was only a matter of time before I realized the package wasn’t indivisible. I wouldn’t lose my children if I pulled the plug on my marriage.”

  Was he clever? Struggling to get his mind around these revelations, Ash seriously doubted it. “You mean you were never kidnapped? You just left me?”

  She shook her head, her pale eyes merry. “How astonished you sound! Do you honestly think you were such a treasure that no woman in her right mind would have turned her back on you? Gabriel, I was ready to leave you long before Stephen Graves came along. All I was waiting for was a catalyst of some kind. If a distant aunt had died and left me an inheritance, that would have done. If someone had offered me a job I wanted to do, that would have done. Well, Stephen offered me a way out—a nice flat, a new identity, enough money to fund a stimulating lifestyle. I’d like to say I agonized over it, but I didn’t really. I had everything to gain and nothing to lose.”

  “What…?” The word came out so thin Ash barely heard it himself. He cleared his throat and tried again. “What happened?”

  Cathy gave a negligent shrug. “I told you what happened. We were kidnapped off the street. We were kept under armed guard at that builder’s yard for a fortnight. And then…”

  “He made you an offer you couldn’t refuse?” The words tore Ash’s throat on the way out.

  “Well, actually, no,” admitted Cathy. “I made him one. It worked for both of us: he got what he needed, and I got what I needed. He looked”—she laughed at the memory—“pretty much how you’re looking now when I suggested it. But I was sick of that bloody yard, the boys were climbing the walls. I had to find some kind of a solution. I told him I’d do everything he needed me to do if he made it worth my while.