Desperate Measures: A Mystery

by Jo Bannister

  He had no way of knowing if the boy would do as he was asked. But Ash knew for sure that if he himself tried to leave the boat now, there would be bloodshed. Any of them, boys included, could be hurt or killed. Gilbert backed away from the hatch. Ash moved slowly until his body blocked both the exit and the view.

  Graves broke the silence. “He’s right, you know. They’ll be better off with him.”

  Cathy stared at him as if he’d said something obscene. “I am their mother! Of course they’re coming with me.”

  “If they come with us, we’ll be caught. I’ll go to prison, so will you. He’ll get custody anyway. If he takes them now, we’re free and clear.”

  But she was past listening to reason. She spun on him with violence in her eyes. “You coward! You’re a big man, aren’t you, when you’re directing mayhem from behind a desk. When you can make a phone call and people thousands of miles away will do your dirty work for you. You’ve already killed a lot of people, Stephen. You may not have pulled the trigger, but you planned it and you ordered it and you profited from it, and that makes you a killer in every way that matters.

  “Now I need you to do one thing for me. Just one, but I need you to do it, and I need you to do it now. I need you to kill my husband. After that we’ll do anything you want. We can split up, and I’ll get the boys somewhere safe and we’ll meet up later when everyone’s tired of looking for us. Or we can split the proceeds now and never see each other again. It’s your call. But you’ll do this one thing for me. I’ve done everything you needed, and now I need something in return. I need you to kill Gabriel Ash.”

  There was, Ash thought, a look of godforsaken understanding on Graves’s face. As if he, too, had finally realized just who it was he’d yoked himself to. He’d admired her ruthlessness, but until now he’d never quite made that last leap of intuition—that when her own interests required it, she’d be equally ruthless with him. He’d thought they could play a sort of Bonnie and Clyde version of Happy Families on the proceeds of five years’ worth of international crime. He’d thought it would be exciting. He knew now there was no future for them. That he’d thrown away everything he had for money and nothing else.

  He started to raise the gun. Then he held it out sideways. His voice was expressionless. “You want him dead, you do it. I’ve nothing against the man. Except that he’s cleverer than I am, and that’s no reason to kill someone.” He managed a gray smile in Ash’s direction. “It’s funny. I thought it was. I thought we’d be safe if you were dead. But it’s too late for that. Killing you won’t make any difference now.”

  “It’ll make a difference to me!” snarled Cathy.

  “Then do it.” Graves shrugged. “Me, I’m out of here. I’ll take the car, if you don’t mind. If you shoot him, you can take his. If you don’t, I imagine transport will be provided for you.” He headed for the steps. Ash moved aside to let him pass.

  Perhaps it wasn’t the wittiest joke ever made. But for a man in Graves’s position, with the cinders of his world settling softly around him, it was brave to attempt a joke of any kind. It should have earned him something—a moment’s appreciation, a faint grin, something.

  In fact, it got him killed.

  As Cathy’s fingers closed around the gun he’d given her, the scale of the disaster overwhelmed her. She’d thought she was free and rich, and the jewel in a besotted man’s crown. The future she’d envisaged included palmy shores and expensive hotels, and possibly a small yacht, and the kind of security from consequence that only a great deal of money can buy, but always—always—with her sons beside her. She hadn’t distinguished herself as a wife. She hadn’t made a conspicuous success of being a mistress. But nothing would shake her conviction that she was a good mother.

  To challenge that view of herself was to court her bottomless fury. Think she-eagle with chicks; think lioness with cubs. The eyes filled with blood and the claws came out, and it is entirely possible that she didn’t even know what she was doing until it was done. But Cathy Ash was a fiercely protective, angry woman who felt her children were being threatened, and the two men she blamed were right in front of her, and one of them had put a loaded gun in her hand. There was never a chance that she wasn’t going to use it.

  A gunshot at close quarters is a louder thing than anyone raised on television drama ever expects. Two reports filled the cabin of the little houseboat and went rolling away across the water like staccato thunder.

  Stephen Graves fell the way a tree falls: slowly at first, gathering momentum as he went. He was on the top step when the bullet with his name on it hit him in the back. It wasn’t big enough to throw him forward. He stopped, and looked back vaguely, and one hand reached up behind him as if trying to scratch an itch. But the bullet had torn open two of the chambers of his heart. The blood that should have been pumping to his brain was pooling inside his chest, and it took him longer to fall—bouncing off the handrails, and off Ash, who tried to catch him—than to die. By the time his body slumped to its awkward rest at the foot of the companionway, his eyes were already still and blank.

  Ash stared at him, openmouthed, his own eyes stretched with shock. He stared at Cathy, gun still in her hand. It occurred to him that he didn’t know if she’d meant to kill Graves, if she’d been shooting at her inconvenient husband, or if the fact that she’d fired twice was significant.

  That was when the inside of the houseboat started moving around. Not so much up and down, which might be expected in something afloat, as in and out. Beyond the galley, the cabin doors were washing in and out like driftwood on a tide. So was the woman in front of him.

  Ash recognized that this was not a normal state of affairs. Even so, it took him an absurdly long time to find an explanation. There was blood on his shirt. He blinked at it, owlishly, wondering where it had come from. Of course, Graves in his death dive had tumbled over him. But that didn’t explain the visual disturbances he was experiencing. Tentatively, testing a theory, he pressed one hand against his ribs. The blood kept coming, seeping between his fingers.

  “You shot me,” he said stupidly.

  “Yes.”

  Cathy was still pointing the gun at him—at arm’s length, as if she meant it, so that from Ash’s perspective the black mouth of the little handgun looked as big as a cannon. He held his breath. She’d said she wanted him dead, and he believed her. Perhaps both shots had been intended for him. Perhaps, if her aim had been truer, they wouldn’t be having this conversation.

  But there were more rounds in the gun. If she’d meant to kill him rather than Graves, it was the work of a moment to rectify the situation. He ought to try to stop her. Run, or rush her before she had the chance to fire again. But the weakness from the hole under his hand was spreading outward through his body: quite literally, he could not have fought her to save his life. He stayed where he was, waiting for her to put him down like an injured horse, one bullet between the ears.

  She sighed. All the fury seemed to leach out of her along with the breath. She lowered the gun until it was pointing at the floor. “Oh Gabriel, how did we come to this?”

  “I think”—he was having to enunciate carefully now to get the words out at all—“they call it ‘irretrievable breakdown of marriage.’”

  Cathy laughed out loud. There was a hysterical trill to it. Perhaps afraid that the gun would go off again, accidentally, as reaction caught up with her, she placed it—well out of his reach—on the table. “It’s hard to argue with that. Are you badly hurt?”

  He was too tired for anything but honesty. “I don’t know.”

  “Let me see.”

  Ash didn’t want to move his hand, was afraid that both the blood and the pain would quicken if he did. But Cathy prized his fingers away, tore open his shirt, and considered the wound beneath. Just below his ribs, dark blood was pumping freely from two holes a handspan apart.

  “It’s gone straight through,” she said judiciously. “How’s your basic anatomy—is there anythi
ng vital around there?”

  He didn’t know, either. And he didn’t know what she’d do if he said there wasn’t.

  Cathy looked at him. She looked at the gun. She blew her cheeks out in exasperation. “I know what I said. I didn’t want you coming after us. I still don’t. But maybe it doesn’t matter now. With Stephen dead, you won’t be the only one looking for me. And, in a funny sort of way, though you’ve driven me crazy most of the time I’ve known you, I’m not sure I want to kill you after all. I think the world might be a poorer place without you in it somewhere.

  “Tell you what: let’s leave it in the lap of the gods. If you can get help before you bleed out, maybe you’ll live. If you can’t, you’ll die, but I’ll know that I gave you a fighting chance.” Having reached a decision she was comfortable with, Cathy spent a minute throwing belongings into a couple of bags, stepping over the dead man’s legs as she did so.

  “Is that what you’ll tell the boys?” mumbled Ash. “That you gave me a fighting chance?”

  “I won’t tell them anything. They think their father died three weeks ago. Why would I tell them anything different?”

  “Because Gilbert knows!”

  “He knows you said you were his father. He also knows there are strange men out there who tell lies to little boys. I’ll tell him you were lying.”

  “I’m never going to see them again, am I?” Ash heard his own voice break.

  “No,” said Cathy. “But you’ll know they’re safe. I’m sorry, Gabriel. I’m sorry that I’ve hurt you. But it’s time to forget about us.”

  “Forget…” It came out as a sob.

  “I’m sorry,” she said again, and then she was gone.

  In his mind Ash followed her. In his mind he moved quickly enough to block her exit up the companionway, kept her there and reasoned with her, calmly yet forcefully, marshaling arguments about the welfare of the boys and her own best interests. In his mind he knew he could win her over, and she would leave alone. But when he tried to do it for real, his body let him down. The pint of his blood that had pumped doggedly from the holes in his side seemed more vital to his ability to function than the other seven still coursing through his veins. When he tried to stand, his knees wavered and dropped him, gasping with pain, back on the steps.

  Driven by despair, he tried again; this time he managed to stay on his feet. But he couldn’t climb the steep steps, not with one hand clamped against his ribs. He needed to grip the rail on either side. Immediately he felt the queasy sensation of his warm blood cooling on the outside of his skin. But there were only half a dozen steps; he could stay on his feet for half a dozen steps. There was still all to play for if he could reach her now.…

  And then it was too late. He heard the car start up, the revs climbing as it scaled the hill. At the brow the engine noise diminished quickly and silence washed back. Ash was still only on the second step. He felt the life drain out of him as the sound of Cathy’s car went away, and the evening sunshine, reflected into the little boat by the surface of Ullswater, faded as if someone were drawing one curtain after another. As the last curtain closed he was already falling, the way Stephen Graves had fallen, the floor and the crumpled body coming up to meet him. But he didn’t remember hitting them.

  CHAPTER 36

  THE BLEEDING STOPPED EVENTUALLY. But not before every piece of fabric Ash could reach had been saturated in his attempt to stanch the wound.

  Certainly he was still bleeding when he woke up on the floor of the boat, cold to the bone, partly with shock but also because night had come and Ullswater is a northern lake, chilly by default even in summer. Shuddering with distaste, he disentangled himself from the dead man’s twisted limbs and sat up against the galley units, breathing the wholly disconcerting smell of his own blood and waiting for the boat to stop spinning.

  His wits were slow returning, but two things he knew as soon as he’d figured out which way was up. One was that his sons were gone. The other was that he could still die if he couldn’t find some way of summoning help.

  He had a phone. It was in his car, at the top of the hill. If he could have reached it, he probably wouldn’t have needed help.

  The short night passed. Dawn filtered into the boat. He was still alive, still sitting on the floor, surrounded by bloody cloths, with only a corpse for company. Then there were footsteps on the deck and, bizarrely enough, Hazel Best and Patience were there. He lifted an arm as heavy as a sack of grain, and put it around the dog’s shoulders while Hazel strapped him up. As she worked, he talked, in a dull, distant, soulless voice, telling her what had happened as if it had happened to someone else.

  When she was finished, she went on deck to call an ambulance. Hazel’s phone was, of course, in her pocket, where it could do her some good in an emergency. Patience went with her.

  They were longer than Ash expected. But then, his sense of time was shot to hell. He waited, not so much patient as apathetic, until Hazel came back alone. The dog had plainly found something more interesting to do than sit with a man just this side of comatose.

  Hazel took a duvet from one of the cabins to cover the dead man on the floor. She checked Ash’s dressing again. It was almost clean. She sat back on her heels. Ash couldn’t think why she was smiling. So he wasn’t going to bleed to death. To a man who’d lost what he’d lost, it didn’t seem much reason for cheer.

  Finally, irritably, he said, “What?”

  She stood up. “Some people to see you.”

  He hadn’t heard the ambulance. Perhaps that wasn’t surprising. Even in an emergency the big vehicle could only have crept down the steep, stony lane. The boat rocked very slightly as someone stepped aboard.

  Patience sprang nimbly from the top of the companionway to the bottom. Slower, hesitantly, the two boys climbed down the steep steps.

  Hazel thought she would treasure the look on Ash’s face for as long as she lived. For several seconds it seemed that he literally could not believe what he was seeing. His pale lips rounded in the wh shape that almost all questions begin with, but no sound came. Perhaps he couldn’t decide which to ask first. So he just stared at them, mouth open, eyes wide in astonishment, and joy rose through him in an intemperate tide.

  When the ambulance arrived, he suffered himself to be taken away, still understanding almost nothing of the miracle that had come to him. Hazel, driving behind with the two boys and the dog, spent the journey coaxing a coherent story out of Gilbert.

  * * *

  When Cathy hurried from the boat, throwing bags into the back of her car, she was spurred to fresh anger by the discovery that her sons were not waiting for her. “Will you stop messing about?” she shouted, turning on her heel to gather the hillside in her gaze. “I haven’t time for your nonsense. We have to leave here now.”

  But they were nowhere in sight. Hiding? There was nowhere to hide. Unless … Seeing the vehicle parked higher up the slope, her eyes narrowed and she started her own car and drove up the lane to where Ash had left the Volvo.

  It was a good guess. Gilbert was in the driver’s seat, Guy in the back. They watched her intently through the closed windows. She snatched at the door handle. It was locked.

  “Open this at once!” she snapped. “This minute!”

  Gilbert shook his head.

  It was so unexpected that for a moment she didn’t know what to do next. They were little boys, not angels, and they didn’t do everything she said and sometimes they did things she said not to, but she wasn’t accustomed to open defiance.

  She caught her breath, bridled her temper. Frightening them would only add to the delay. “Come on, Gilbert, there isn’t time for this. We need to leave. Everything’s in the car. Bring Guy and let’s be on our way.”

  Her elder son shook his head again. He’d locked the doors, and nothing in his expression suggested he was going to unlock them anytime soon. Cathy was mystified and alarmed. She didn’t think Ash was mortally wounded. When the shock passed, he would come after the
m. He was much bigger and, in the normal way of things, much stronger than she was: if it came to a tug-of-war, he would win. She needed to be away from here while his knees were still trying to bend both ways.

  “Honey, please,” she wheedled, “what is this? You can’t want to stay here. With him? You don’t know him!”

  Gilbert’s voice, small to begin with, was further muffled by the glass. But the words were unmistakable. “He’s my father.”

  She’d need more time to persuade him otherwise than she could spare right now. “And I’m your mother! I love you. I need you to come with me.”

  But Gilbert shook his head again. He said nothing more, but his expression spoke volumes. His obstinacy would have bent girders.

  In desperation, Cathy hammered on the glass with her fists. The boys shrank from her, but the car remained locked. She was crying with grief and frustration, but tears don’t open every door. She couldn’t think what else to do. A professional car thief might have been able to break in with minimal time and effort, but he would have the right tools and, more than that, the know-how. Cathy didn’t even have half a brick. She looked around urgently, but nothing suitable presented itself. She still had the gun, but she wasn’t about to fire it into the car where her children were sitting.

  She supposed there would be a wheel brace somewhere in the boot of her hired car, but her luggage was piled on top of it and she felt time breathing hot on the back of her neck. At any moment Ash might emerge from the cabin, and the God-honest truth was that she was afraid to face him. Four years ago he would have died rather than hurt her. But now? She didn’t know what he might do, knowing himself betrayed, seeing his sons on the point of vanishing once more.

  She returned to her car and drove away.

  * * *

  “She drove away?” whispered Hazel, appalled, jerking her attention back to the road as she felt her own car veer over the center line.