Other Countries

by Jo Bannister

  ‘Start at the beginning,’ Ash said softly. ‘What day was it?’

  ‘The day after …’ And there Saturday stopped. That was something he hadn’t wanted to share, least of all with Ash.

  Ash considered for a moment and then filled in the blanks. ‘The day after the boys gave you the slip. That’s it, isn’t it? My boys ran away; you called Hazel, and Hazel left Ford on his own at the museum. He blamed you for spoiling his big day. So – what? He came round here to bawl you out and ended up thumping you?’

  ‘Pretty much.’ Moved by some impulse of honesty Saturday added, ‘He didn’t really thump me.’

  ‘Were you hurt?’

  ‘He’s not exactly Arnold Schwarzenegger! No, I wasn’t hurt. I got a back-hander across the mouth. It wasn’t the first time, I don’t expect it’ll be the last.’

  ‘Did you hit him back?’

  ‘’Course not. He may not be Arnold Schwarzenegger,’ said Saturday, amusement in his sideways glance, ‘but he’s still bigger than me. I high-tailed it out the back door.’

  Ash reviewed the conversation thus far. ‘You haven’t told me why he hit you.’

  ‘Yes I have.’

  ‘Not yet,’ said Ash judiciously. ‘But you’re going to.’

  The boy sniffed. ‘I may have called him … something.’

  Ash’s knowledge of teenage terms of abuse was limited; he genuinely wanted to know. ‘What?’

  ‘A gigolo.’ He pronounced it Giggle-O.

  Ash laughed out loud. There was something unexpectedly old-fashioned about this Nobody’s Child; it was one of the things that made people warm to him. Well – some people. ‘He must have loved that!’

  ‘He’s a professional charmer. And he’s old enough to be Hazel’s father.’ Saturday sounded quite indignant. ‘It’s pathetic.’

  ‘He is not old enough to be her father. He’s younger than me.’

  ‘Yeah, but you’re not … you don’t …’ Embarrassment overtook him and the sentence died.

  Ash sighed. ‘Saturday, who Hazel chooses to have relationships with – even if they’re nearly as ancient as me – is none of your business. You are her lodger, and her friend. You are not her father, her husband or her priest. Any more than I am. It’s not for us to tell her who she should spend her time with.’

  ‘You’re happy to see her with a guy who lashes out when he’s angry?’

  And that was exactly the right question. When Rachid Iqbal said Hazel wasn’t safe with Oliver Ford, Ash had been worried enough to go to the police. Now Saturday was telling him the same thing. Oliver Ford may well have wanted to hit the cheeky brat his new girlfriend had unaccountably taken in. Almost everyone who knew him had wanted to hit Saturday at one time or another, including Ash. But most people stopped short of actually doing it. Ford hadn’t. And he hadn’t stopped short of whatever he’d done to earn Iqbal’s enmity either. Without knowing what that was, it was hard to know how it fitted in, but there was at least the suggestion of a pattern emerging.

  ‘No, I’m not,’ he told Saturday. ‘If I knew where she was I’d go and talk to her. She’d tell me to mind my own damn business, but after she’d sent me away with a flea in my ear she’d think about it. She’s a police officer – she knows that domestic violence isn’t only about labourers drinking their wages on a Friday night and taking out their frustrations on their wives. She knows almost anyone can be a perpetrator, and almost anyone can be a victim. Even if she didn’t believe it, at least at some level she’d be ready for him.

  ‘But I don’t know where she is. No one seems to know where she and Ford are now. The last address the film crew had for them was in Morocco, but they moved on from there. I know almost nothing about film-making, but the one thing everyone knows is that it’s expensive. If Ford has left his team in the lurch, that undermines his professional reputation. I can’t believe he’d do it on a whim. Which raises the possibility …’ He didn’t even want to put it into words.

  Saturday needed him to. His pale, pinched young face – still pale because he worked at night and slept much of the day, still pinched because it would take time to undo the damage of two years living on the streets – was anxious. He needed Ash to make the fear go away. That’s what grown-ups did. They took care of things. Ash, though he might have baggage of his own, was not only a grown-up but an intelligent, influential grown-up, and he could make things happen that someone like Saturday could only dream of. His eyes begged Ash to make things right. ‘What possibility?’

  Ash was too wrapped up in his own anxieties to soften the blow. He was thinking aloud. In truth, he was using Saturday as a sounding board in the way he used Hazel when she was here. ‘That he’s already done something that means he can’t come home.’

  EIGHTEEN

  Frankie agreed without hesitation to move into the house in Highfield Road and assume responsibility for Ash’s sons. She arrived for work on the Friday morning with a suitcase.

  ‘I think we’d better make this permanent, don’t you?’ said Ash through the open bedroom door as he threw a few necessities into a bag.

  ‘That would be entirely acceptable, Mr Ash,’ said Frankie, simultaneously unpacking in the guest room across the landing.

  The boys had raised tearful objections to Ash leaving, at twenty-four hours’ notice and unable to say when he’d be back. Predictably, Gilbert came up with the most hurtful thing he could say in the circumstances. ‘If you didn’t want to be with us, why didn’t you leave us with Mum?’

  Ash had immediately gone down on his knees and gathered the angry child to his breast. ‘Of course I want to be with you. You mean everything to me. Everything,’ he repeated fiercely. ‘But Hazel is my friend, and I think she’s in danger, and if I didn’t try to help her I wouldn’t be a good enough man to be your father. Please try to understand, Gilbert. It’s not that I want to do this – I have to do it. Frankie will look after you until I get back. It might only be a couple of days, but I’m not going to promise that because I don’t know.’

  Before flying to Marrakech he spent half a day in Whitehall, talking to people he knew and people they knew, putting together a support package he could call on when – if – he found Hazel, or Ford, and needed the kind of help that British consuls don’t routinely offer.

  Although he had spent five years as a government security analyst, he had never been the guy who gets on the plane. He’d worked at a desk, sometimes in a library, occasionally in a nice coffee-house where he could talk to people who wouldn’t be seen dead entering the Home Office, even by a back door. He had never been licensed to kill; he’d never been licensed to shout at people, or poke them with a stick. He was essentially an academic.

  Except this time. This time there was no alternative but to blow the cobwebs off his passport and do the job himself.

  Heathrow is one of the busiest airports in the world. It handles seventy-five million passengers and almost half a million aircraft movements every year. Aircraft queue up on the ground to take off, and in the air to land.

  It was years since Ash had flown anywhere. He didn’t allow enough time to check in before his flight closed. Afterwards it was hard to believe this wasn’t a higher power at work, but while he was trying desperately to pay off his taxi with one hand, shoulder his bag with the other and figure out the shortest route to the check-in desk, it just seemed another example of the world getting too damn fast for a man who’d spent four years in purdah. Every time he checked his watch another three minutes had unaccountably disappeared. Before he could shut the door on the taxi he’d just climbed out of, someone else was climbing in. Behind them, another party was ready to hail the next one. And behind them …

  ‘Gabriel? Whatever are you doing here?’

  For a moment – only a moment – he really thought he’d imagined it. That his troubled mind, so preoccupied with her safety, so anxious to hear her voice, had conjured it out of the babbling mayhem of the taxi rank. Some other woman hailing a friend – s
ome other Gabriel? – maybe he’d misheard …

  Almost nothing else in the English language sounds like Gabriel. And when he looked around – eagerly, anxiously, unable to bear the disappointment he was sure must follow – there she was: Hazel Best, golden-tanned, spiky fair hair sun-bleached, in a cotton shirt nowhere near warm enough for Britain in October, and high-heeled sandals. Hazel Best, safe and well. Not murdered; not, so far as he could see, molested; just sun-kissed and happy, and back a few days late from a holiday she’d clearly enjoyed. If she ever guessed the things that had been going through his mind, and what he’d planned to do about them …

  She pushed through the taxi queue to reach his side. Several heads away, standing guard over the luggage, Ford nodded a greeting but didn’t move.

  ‘I said, what are you doing here?’ There was something indefinably different about her. She looked … more sophisticated, somehow. Older. More prosperous. She pulled a pashmina out of the straw bucket she’d used as carry-on and threw it round her shoulders, and Ash knew immediately that it was cashmere.

  There were many things Gabriel Ash was good at. Some he was better at than almost anyone else. Lying wasn’t one of them. ‘Er …’

  She put it another way, as if talking to a small child. ‘Where are you going? Which terminal? Which airline? Show me your ticket …’

  Ash threw up his hands in surrender. ‘I’m not going anywhere. Look, I’ve got a taxi … Oh. It’s gone.’

  Hazel regarded him fondly, head on one side. ‘You came to meet us? How did you know when we were getting in?’

  ‘I got lucky,’ mumbled Ash; and though he knew it was a rubbish explanation, he hoped she’d be tired after the flight and let it go for now.

  ‘Did you drive down? Where’s your car?’

  ‘I left it in Whitehall.’

  By now Oliver Ford had flashed his profile and secured another taxi. Their bags were disappearing into the capacious boot. ‘We’ll drop you off there,’ he offered, coolly. He’d been as surprised to see Ash as Hazel had been, but not as pleased.

  Ash blinked. ‘Won’t you let me drive you home?’

  ‘We’re not going back to Norbold, not yet. Oliver has some people to see in town.’ That was part of what had changed: she had never described London in that way before, as if it was her natural milieu. ‘Town’ had meant Norbold; even ‘going into the city’ had only meant Birmingham. ‘We’ll stay over a couple of nights. I’ll call you when I get back.’

  ‘I tried to call you,’ said Ash. He heard the whine of complaint in his own voice. ‘Your phone was switched off.’

  ‘Bloody roaming charges,’ she explained airily, ‘they cost a fortune. What were you calling me about?’

  ‘Oh – nothing. Just …’ Inspiration struck. ‘I’ve taken on a nanny for the boys. I wanted you to tell me it was a good idea.’

  ‘Excellent,’ said Hazel enthusiastically. ‘Gabriel, we’ll have a catch-up when I get home. You can tell me about your nanny, and I’ll tell you about our trip. Is Saturday all right? He hasn’t burned the house down?’

  Ash glanced at Ford just quickly enough to see Ford think about glancing at him and change his mind. ‘Saturday’s fine. The house is fine. But he’s been worried about you. You might at least have sent a postcard.’

  ‘I did send postcards,’ Hazel protested. ‘They’ll probably turn up next week. Where I posted them, they probably come part of the way by camel.’

  It’s a tedious drive from Heathrow into central London. Ford pretended – Ash was sure it was a pretence – to fall asleep. Hazel too dozed, her head against Ash’s shoulder. Not for worlds would he have moved it.

  He didn’t want to get out of the taxi at Whitehall. But there seemed to be no alternative. ‘You’ll call me as soon as you’re home? You promise?’

  Hazel stared at him, her fair brows gathering. ‘Are you all right, Gabriel? You seem … distracted.’

  He forced a smile. ‘I’m fine. Why wouldn’t I be? But call me.’

  She waved as they drove away.

  Before collecting his car, Ash returned to the anonymous office behind Whitehall to update Philip Welbeck. To thank him for the assistance he’d offered, and explain why he wouldn’t need it. Something rather disturbing happened. No one shouted at him. Neither Welbeck nor any of the others who’d been roped in to help called him an idiot, or laughed at him, or told him he was getting too old for chasing young blondes halfway round the world.

  Men and women who, recently, had been treating him almost as they had before his breakdown were being careful around him again. Not saying anything unkind. Not saying anything that might upset him. Just quietly sliding the paper-knives off their desks and putting them away in drawers.

  Ash wanted to tell them that it wasn’t necessary. That he’d made a mistake but he wasn’t irrational, they didn’t have to worry about him losing his marbles again. But instinct warned him that would only make things worse – that protesting his sanity would only draw attention to the question marks surrounding it. Ash felt something inside him curl up and die. He apologised again, and left, and did not expect to set foot in the building again; and he supposed that no one there would share his regrets. In that at least he was mistaken.

  He drove the long road home. Only when he turned into his drive in Highfield Road and caught a glimpse of the boys at the window of their playroom, and felt the surge of love and relief that still had the power to overwhelm him, was he able to put events into some kind of perspective. Perhaps there were things he had lost: the respect that came from doing an important job well, the regard of people he himself respected. But nothing could take away from the value of what he had gained. From the knowledge that everyone he cared about was safe.

  NINETEEN

  Oliver Ford made his peace with Emerald and a new schedule was agreed for completing the shoot. The earliest everyone could be brought together again was five weeks hence, by which time the winter would be looming and the settled weather so vital for filming could not be counted on. Not that it ever could in England, even in summer, but the latter part of the year was always the least predictable.

  Ford proposed waiting until spring, so he could spend the winter indoors, on his book, but Emerald was having none of it. She knew from bitter experience that TV personalities were even less reliable than the weather: if Ford began work on another project, there was no knowing when or even if she’d get him to come back.

  She would dearly have loved to replace him, with someone less well-known but more dependable, but that would have meant reshooting everything she already had in the can, and trying to persuade broadcasters that viewing figures would hold up without Ford’s name supporting them. On the whole she thought it better to finish the project at the earliest opportunity, and make a note in her diary never to employ Oliver Ford again. Or if she really had no choice, to take him to the vet first.

  With no certainty as to when shooting would resume, Ford decided to take a house in the area. The glorified camper-van he had occupied back in September was barely adequate, he insisted, for a single man in warm weather. Hazel refrained from pointing out that whole families had been born and raised in houses no bigger, her own included. If he wanted to rent a house, no doubt he could afford to.

  She did not immediately realise that she was a part of his plans. She had imagined that when they returned to Norbold he would find himself a smart service flat and she would return to Railway Street and the faint but pervasive smell of Saturday’s trainers. On their last night in London, Ford watched her carefully sorting her clothes from his and packing them in separate bags. For weeks now their clothes had shared a proximity as intimate as that of their owners.

  He frowned. ‘Aren’t you coming with me?’

  ‘Coming where?’ asked Hazel. ‘You haven’t even looked at flats yet, let alone taken one. Why don’t you stay with me until you find something?’

  He could hardly have been more horrified if she’d proposed erecting
a tent for him in her back garden. ‘Your house? Hazel, I don’t want to be rude, but …’

  People never said that, she had noticed, unless they were about to be very rude indeed. So it proved.

  ‘… But if I had a flunky, and the flunky had a wastrel brother, and the wastrel brother had a drug dealer, the drug dealer would live in your house. In fact, I suspect he already does.’

  Hazel froze, even more astonished than she was offended. Only when her eyes burned did she remember to blink; only the dry, centrally heated air on her tonsils reminded her to shut her mouth. She swallowed. ‘How dare you …?’

  At which Ford flashed the big, handsome, TV personality grin. ‘Come on, Hazel, I’m only teasing. It’s a perfectly nice little house. But that’s the point – it’s a little house. And we wouldn’t even have it to ourselves, unless you gave that feckless boy his marching orders, and you’re not going to do that, are you? It makes much more sense to rent somewhere we can be alone. And not in Norbold – somewhere nice and quiet. There’s some really pretty country around Norbold,’ he added seriously. ‘Who’d have guessed?’

  ‘Er – everyone who lives in Norbold,’ said Hazel tersely. She was still mentally reeling from the force of his insult. ‘Oliver – I can’t rent a house with you. It’s all I can do to find the rent for the one I’ve got. I’m sorry it isn’t smart enough for you, and I’m sorry you don’t like my friends, but I’m not about to change either of them any time soon. If you need somewhere better suited to your image, take a look at the property ads in Country Life. Let me know if you find something. I promise I won’t visit without fumigating myself first.’

  Only then did Ford seem to realise how much he’d upset her. The big, handsome grin disappeared, to be replaced by something slightly apologetic but also critical. ‘Don’t be like that, Hazel. It was just a joke. Don’t they have jokes where you come from?’

  ‘We do have jokes,’ said Hazel, zipping the last case and straightening up. ‘You can tell that they’re jokes because they make people laugh. We also have snobs. They’re pretty laughable too.’