Desperate Measures: A Mystery

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CHAPTER 1

L
AURA FRY DROVE THROUGH THE WET NIGHT
as if lives depended on it. Possibly they did.

It was a long time now since emergency calls had been part of her daily routine. She saw her clients in a comfortable office overlooking Norbold’s Jubilee Park, during office hours, over coffee and the occasional shortbread. They were all people with problems in their lives, and though as a therapist she did her best to help them, and believed she was broadly successful, it was only realistic to acknowledge that sometimes people on the edge totter over.

This wasn’t the first time she’d had a client do the mental equivalent of bungee jumping on knicker elastic. It wouldn’t be the first time if the outcome was a nasty mess on the pavement. Usually, though, it was someone else’s job to clean up. A psychiatric emergency response team if the client was still essentially intact, an ambulance if he was badly broken, a meat wagon if all the urgency had already gone from the situation. Laura would expect to hear what had happened sooner rather than later, but it was unusual these days for her to be involved while a crisis was still in progress.

This was different for two reasons. Gabriel Ash was certainly a client, had been for two years, and remained in need of her professional services, but he was not in fact mentally ill. His problems didn’t originate within himself; they’d been inflicted on him. And, perhaps because of that, she’d come to think of him as a friend as well as a client. So when he needed her, she came. If that meant coming out in the early hours of a Sunday morning, no sign yet of the midsummer sun, virtually no vehicles on the roads, only herself and the traffic lights and the streetlamps reflecting off the rain-washed tarmac, so be it.

She drove straight to the big stone house in Highfield Road, abandoned her car in the drive, and hurried to the front door. It opened before she reached it, and a young woman wearing a checked shirt and a worried expression ushered her inside.

“It’s good of you to come.”

“Where is he?”

“In the kitchen. I’ve got the range going. He’s icy cold.”

“That’s the shock.”

The big man was hunched bearlike in a fireside chair. Someone, probably the girl, had put a blanket around his shoulders, but it wasn’t enough. Gabriel Ash was shaking like a man in an epileptic fit.

The dog was there, too, pressed against her owner’s legs, as if the only comfort she could think to offer him was the warmth of her slender body.

“Gabriel,” said the girl. “Laura’s here.”

He looked up, dark eyes sunk deeper than normal, all the color gone from his face. He nodded spasmodically. “Thank you.” His teeth chattered on the words.

“Good grief, Gabriel—you look like you’ve seen a ghost!”

It had taken Laura Fry six months to get Ash to start talking to her. He’d never been the sort of client to gush out his woes at the sight of a psychiatrist’s couch. (In fact, she’d dispensed with her couch when she found clients getting too comfortable, helping themselves to the shortbread and settling in for the afternoon.) She didn’t expect he’d be able to tell her anything useful now. She turned to the girl. “What happened?”

*   *   *

Where to begin? Five years ago, when he was a government security analyst, a man with a wife and sons and a scheme for combatting Somali piracy? Four years ago, when the pirates struck back by kidnapping his family? Six months ago, when he was a shattered wreck of a man, living like a recluse in the house where he was born, barely venturing out except when the white dog he’d taken in required it?

Or nine hours ago, when he talked to his wife by video call on a computer in Cambridge?

Hazel Best took a deep breath and tried to put it into some kind of context. She knew, and was grateful, that Laura Fry was familiar with the background—that she didn’t have to start by explaining everything that had happened to Gabriel Ash, only what had just happened.

“He was following up old leads. People he’d talked to before Cathy and the boys disappeared. One of them pinged on his radar, so we followed him. To Cambridge. Gabriel was right: the man was involved—
is
involved. He wasn’t just in touch with the pirates, he was working for them. Sending them information on arms shipments. That’s his business—arms exports.”

Laura looked at her in astonishment. “You did call the police? Please tell me you called the police.”

“I
am
the police,” Hazel reminded her wryly. “Except when I’m on leave, like now. And no, we didn’t. For the same reason Stephen Graves didn’t. The pirates have a hostage. They’ll kill her if we don’t do exactly what they want.”

Laura was shaking her head. Casual acquaintances thought her a severe woman, with her narrow face and upswept hair and statement spectacles. None of that was for effect, but it wasn’t all there was to her. She was a strong-minded woman. She was also, even beyond the demands of her profession, a caring one.

“It doesn’t have to matter,” she said slowly and precisely. Her sharp jaw came up, daring them to argue. “It’s a horrible thing to say, but in hostage situations it comes down to damage limitation. What’s the best thing for the greatest number of people? You pay a ransom, and more people get kidnapped. You refuse, and one person dies, but that’s probably the end of it. You cannot make it a worthwhile strategy for terrorists to kidnap people. It’s one of those lines you have to hold, whatever the short-term cost.”

“It’s Cathy Ash.”

When you drop a bomb, it radiates force and matter, and light, but most of all it radiates sound. Imagine dropping a bomb that radiated silence. That was what Hazel Best had done: she’d dropped a bomb that blasted silence into all the corners of the shabby, shadowy room. Under the table and chairs, behind the dresser, into the awkward gap beside the range where Ash had squeezed a dog basket although Patience had expressed a preference for the sofa the first time she entered the house. More than that: this silence seemed to bundle within it the impossibility of sound. For longer than a man can hold his breath, it seemed impossible that any of those present would find a way of breaking it. Of returning sound to the world.

Of all of them, perhaps Laura had been in this position most often before. Startled wordless by a development unpredictable even as the expression of a damaged mind. She recovered quicker than most people would have done; and she knew that what was important now was not that she said the right thing but that she didn’t say the wrong thing.

She said carefully, by way both of clarifying and of inviting clarification, “Gabriel thought he was talking to his wife?”

Ash looked up at her. “It
was
Cathy.”

“You saw her? You recognized her?”

He nodded fitfully.

Laura bit her lip. “Gabriel—is it possible that you saw what you wanted to see? If this woman was being held by the people who took your wife, it wouldn’t need a great leap of imagination to think it was her. I’ve seen these video transmissions—they’re not great quality, even if they’re coming from somewhere much closer than Africa. And it’s been four years. If she’s alive, if she is with these people, Cathy won’t look like she looked four years ago.…”

Hazel said quietly, “She recognized Gabriel, too.”

This was not par for the course, even in leading-edge psychotherapy. It was the equivalent of a patient who thought he was a duck actually laying an egg. It was a game changer. Laura Fry didn’t often feel out of her depth, but she did now. “You
have
to go to the police.” Even to herself she sounded breathless.

“No.” Ash’s tone was not the one she was familiar with. His tribulations, the breakdown they had provoked, had left him desperately uncertain of the world and his place within it, and all the time she had known him that was how he spoke: softly, troubled, afraid of drawing attention to himself. This abrupt determination was something new. At least new to her. A flash of intuition suggested that this was how he had been, always, before the sky fell.

“This isn’t something you can cope with alone.”

“Maybe not. But I’ll decide what we do about it, and when. No one else is better equipped to. And no one has a better right.”

Laura felt her jaw hanging and shut it. He looked like hell. He was still visibly shaking. But something inside his mind was standing up on its hind legs for the first time in four years, and she had the distinct feeling that if she tried to stand in front of it, to catch or corral it, it would run her down.

She turned to the girl. This was the first time she’d met Hazel Best, but she knew a fair bit about her. The fall from grace of Norbold’s senior police officer had been documented by the local newspaper; certain aspects of it were not public knowledge, but were the preserve of an informed inner circle to which Laura Fry belonged; and some of the details were known only to those who were there when Superintendent Johnny Fountain met his death. Hazel Best was one of them. Gabriel Ash was another. And Ash told Laura things he would otherwise confide only in his dog.

So she knew that Hazel was, at twenty-six, a little older than the average police probationer—not, indeed, a girl at all, despite the initial impression created by her fresh complexion, unimproved by cosmetics, her wide green eyes, worried now into a frown, and the mass of fair curls partially tamed by an elastic band at the nape of her neck. In jeans and a red-checked shirt, she looked as if she might work on a farm.

The first hint that the whole might be greater than the sum of the parts came when the clear green eyes sought out Laura’s own. There was a depth there that, primed as she was by her uncommon knowledge, still managed to surprise the therapist. A depth of intelligence that was nonetheless open and honest and strong. These are not characteristics that inevitably go together. But that brief clash of gazes told Laura Fry that Ash hadn’t imagined anything that he’d told her about Hazel Best. This was a young woman purposeful enough to shoot a gangster dead when the alternative was something worse.

Laura cleared her throat. “You were there? You saw her, too?”

“I saw her.” Hazel nodded. “I didn’t recognize her. I’d only ever seen photographs.”