Desperate Measures: A Mystery (10 page)

Then they realized that the phone didn’t belong to any of them, but to the man on the screen, the ring reaching them through the plate-glass window. The chastened manager had turned the sound up, almost as a public service for those who didn’t have the equipment to follow these unfolding events. A detached part of Hazel’s brain that was still capable of rational analysis supposed it was the same at all the electrical shops where the little crowds had gathered. Many more people—ordinary people, not natural ghouls—would be following the drama on computers, laptops, and smartphones in homes and offices up and down the country, and farther afield.

The phone was on the desk beside Ash’s computer; in answering it, he brought it into the Webcam’s field of view. The sound of his voice had more trouble penetrating the plate glass than the ring of the phone had, but in fact the sound was almost superfluous. Anyone could have read his lips for the few words he spoke, and those who couldn’t could have read his eyes.

He said, “Yes?” And then, with a different inflection, “Yes.” A much longer pause while he listened.

Then: “You’re sure?” And finally: “Very well.” And he rang off.

All her life Hazel Best had been an optimist. She had always believed the glass to be half full. She had always believed—really believed—all the things that little girls used to embroider on samplers:
Where there’s a will there’s a way. Every cloud has a silver lining. The darkest hour is just before the dawn. God never shuts a door but that He opens a window.

She believed, at a bone-deep level and despite the evidence all around her, that most people were fundamentally decent, and most disasters could be averted when people of goodwill worked together. And somewhere inside her she still believed that the tragedy unfolding before her eyes wasn’t going to happen. That Dave Gorman would knock the door down in the nick of time. That word would reach Ash that his family was already beyond harm. That, in the last resort, Gabriel Ash wouldn’t do what he’d promised.

So, in spite of everything that had brought them to this point, Hazel was not prepared for it—not really, not inside herself—when Ash put the phone down and picked up something else that was just out of view of the camera, and it was a handgun.

For a couple of seconds he looked at it as if unsure how it had got there, or what it was for. Then he vented a sigh, and a tiny, fragile smile flickered across his face. Then he put the muzzle in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

The explosion sprayed the back of his head across the wall behind him. His body lurched sideways out of the chair, and the computer’s camera—unwinking, unmoved—continued to record the blood on the wall, the left shoulder and wide-flung arm of the body crumpled against the skirting board, until some innate sense of decency made somebody somewhere pull the plug.

CHAPTER 12

H
AZEL BEST CONTINUED TO STARE
at the blank screen long after most of those around her had drifted away. A couple of them, like the girl beside her, were in tears, but Hazel wasn’t crying. A couple of them were trying desperately to find something smart to say to defuse the palpable sense of shock. Of course they failed miserably, crassly, but Hazel couldn’t find it in her to resent them. Everyone deals with tragedy in their own way. There are no guidelines. You do what you can bear to, what you can live with. If a sick joke made what they’d just witnessed more bearable for some of them, Hazel wasn’t going to tell them they were wrong.

And of course they didn’t know—how could they?—that alone among the people watching Gabriel Ash kill himself, the quiet fair-haired girl looking over their shoulders knew the man personally. Cared about him, counted herself his friend. She could have told them. They might not have believed her. At moments like this, there are people who get a peculiar satisfaction from involving themselves in the story—claiming to have been on the wrecked train, to have seen the assassin, to have walked by the car bomb moments before it exploded. To have known the man who blew his brains out live on the Internet. What stopped her, though, wasn’t that, but the obscure but persuasive sense that they didn’t need to know. Telling them wouldn’t make her feel better, and it might make them feel worse. She went on staring at the blank screen, her eyes stretched with shock, stripped of the will to do anything else, as the little crowd dissipated around her.

By the time she was fully aware again, she was standing on the pavement alone, and the manager was standing in his shop window waving angrily at her to go away. She dragged in the first proper breath she’d drawn for fifteen minutes, turned, and stumbled back to her car.

She was too late. She hadn’t reached him in time, and Gabriel Ash was dead because of it. Sorrow filled her chest and rose up her throat, threatening to choke her. She hadn’t known him that long. They’d never been more than friends. But somehow his passing carved a great hole in her world, one she didn’t know how she’d set about filling. She’d have other friends, closer friends. But Ash had been … unique. Irreplaceable. No one would ever fill the gap he’d left, nor would the wound heal that he’d left by dying that way, hopeless and alone.

Hazel’s only consolation was that, if there was any justice in the world, his death had accomplished more than simply shocking a bunch of people walking past electrical stores. If his sacrifice had bought the freedom of his wife and sons, he had paid a terrible price but one he at least had considered worth paying. Hazel wouldn’t devalue his final desperate gift to his family by saying it wasn’t. It was a decision only Ash had the right to make.

Still dry-eyed, she turned in her seat and looked at Ash’s dog. What was Patience going to think when her master didn’t come back? Would she think she’d been abandoned again? And would it be better or worse if she knew Ash was dead? Not that it mattered. Hazel had no way of explaining the situation to even a smart dog.

A more immediate problem was how she was going to explain to her landlady. Because whatever she’d promised Mrs. Poliakov, Hazel’s first act after witnessing Ash’s lonely death wasn’t going to be to take his dog to a shelter.

An immeasurable amount of time passed. Eventually she was ready to get back on the road.

She might simply have turned and gone back the way she’d come. There was no longer anything to be gained in Leamington. But she couldn’t bring herself to. It felt like a betrayal. She felt something almost like duty calling her on, to the address she’d been given, to the empty building on its unfashionable side street, which had once housed the Copper Kettle Café.

Until the moment she turned into that narrow street, she wasn’t sure that this was where he had been. But half a dozen police vehicles filled the road, many with their lights still blinking blue and white although the need for urgency was now past. There were uniforms on duty at the door, admitting a few people with the right credentials, turning more away.

Which told her everything she needed to know. Still she found herself getting out of the car—carefully leaving the windows slightly open for Patience—and walking up the street to where the cordon was being controlled by a detective constable from Meadowvale. She steeled herself and hoped her voice would come. “Is DI Gorman inside?”

DC Rodgers did a classic double take. He’d hadn’t seen her for weeks, was startled—though later he realized he shouldn’t have been—to see her here. “Hazel? Er—yes. I’ll call him.”

“Don’t bother. I’ll find him.”

Rodgers looked concerned. “I don’t think you should go inside. It’s pretty … messy … in there.”

Hazel sighed. “Of course it is. But it won’t be anything I haven’t seen before.”

“It’s different when it’s someone you know,” warned Rodgers.

“I know it is. But, Jack, it really won’t be something I haven’t seen. I saw him do it.”

“Oh, shit.”

A moment later the front door opened and Dave Gorman emerged. He’d been watching for her. “I’m sorry. We were too late.” He looked terribly tired.

“I know.” She managed a brittle smile, to ease a little the guilt they all felt when they did their job but didn’t do it quite fast enough. “I saw.”

Gorman fisted both hands deep in his trouser pockets, dropped his square chin onto his chest. “I’m so sorry. That we couldn’t stop him. That we didn’t get here in time.”

“I know. Thank you.”

He looked past her. “Is this your car? You shouldn’t be driving. I’ll find someone…”

She held on to her car keys, politely but firmly. “I’m fine. I’ll head home now. Unless…?” She left the question mostly unasked.

Gorman heard it just the same. He shook his head. “You can’t go up there. You wouldn’t want to, Hazel. And you wouldn’t want to hinder the investigation. The guys from the Home Office are here already. I suppose, because of who Ash was. They’ve pretty well taken over.”

“Investigation?” For the first time since it had happened, her iron control wavered, the word booming like an overpressured dam. “Dave, we know what happened! We know what he did and why he did it. The whole world knows, or at least as much of it as has access to the Internet. Tell me one thing. Are they safe? Are they really safe?”

The DI nodded somberly. “Yes. The British consul is at the checkpoint now. He’s confirmed that Cathy Ash, her two sons, and Stephen Graves are all safe. They’ll be on a plane home as soon as it can be arranged. Ash achieved what he wanted to, Hazel. If he thought the price was worth paying, then it was.”

But Hazel still didn’t think so.

She got back in her car and headed south. A few miles from Norbold, though, the weather turned unexpectedly dreary—mist shrouded the A road so much that she had to slow down, followed soon afterward by a downpour that stole the last of her vision and forced her into a lay-by.

Only when the windscreen wipers whined a dusty protest and failed to improve matters did Hazel realize that the downpour was highly localized. That the dam had broken, and it was tears blinding her, not rain.

CHAPTER 13

T
WO DAYS LATER,
on a hot Saturday afternoon, an RAF flight landed them in Coventry. Hazel was there to meet it. DI Gorman had conveyed the request from the Home Office, but she was glad to, felt she owed it to Ash to greet his family. He’d have been there himself if he could. She was a poor substitute, but no one else would have been a better one.

The first she saw of Cathy and her sons was three dots on the tarmac. Actually there were four dots—Stephen Graves was there, too—and it took them a few minutes to cross the open space, heat haze rising like a mirage from the surface, to where Hazel was waiting.

It wasn’t a bad way to approach what was always going to be a difficult meeting. As the figures grew larger, the two women were able to adjust mentally to each other’s presence. Hazel found herself vacillating between relief that Cathy Ash had found her way home after four years in captivity, so that her husband’s sacrifice had not been for nothing, and a resentment so deep that she could hardly contain it, even knowing how unreasonable it was.

What Cathy thought of being met by this young woman who had been her husband’s friend, there was no way of knowing. Her face was closed, all her emotions tightly contained. For four years her life had depended on her ability to keep her thoughts to herself. To absorb developments and react, if she reacted at all, only after considering the consequences. Of course her ability to express her feelings had been compromised.

Intimidated by the wide-open spaces, perhaps, Ash’s sons stuck close by their mother’s side. The taller would be Gilbert, now eight years old; Guy was six. Gilbert was the most like his father, but both of them had inherited their mother’s slender frame. Hazel had expected they would all be deeply tanned, but they weren’t, only touched with a little gold, as if they’d been on holiday. The reason was obvious: they’d spent most of their time in Africa inside locked rooms. The boys glanced at her suspiciously, Guy clutching Cathy’s hand, as Hazel went forward to greet them.

Graves performed the introductions. “Mrs. Cathy Ash, this is Constable Best.” The faint emphasis on her title puzzled Hazel until she remembered that the last time they met she’d let him think he was dealing with someone very much more senior. “And this is Gilbert, and Guy.”

Hazel smiled at them. “I’m here to take you home.”

“Home?” Cathy sounded uncertain, as if she’d all but forgotten what one of those was.

“To Norbold.”

But Cathy and her sons had never lived in Norbold. Their home had been in London. Hazel felt a twinge of embarrassment for forgetting that. “For now,” she added quickly. “Until you get things sorted out. Gabriel kept your flat in Covent Garden, but he let it out. It may be a little while before you can get it back. In the meantime, we’ll get you settled in his mother’s house.”

Cathy nodded. She was around Hazel’s height but slimmer, would have been even without four years of living on kidnappers’ rations. Her hair was cut short, the color somewhere between fair and brown, her eyes the washed-out blue of old denim. She wore no makeup. She was wearing a cream shirt and linen skirt, and though they had obviously been bought for the journey, they were hardly any different from what she’d been wearing when Hazel saw her last, on the computer screen in Cambridge. She looked around warily, eyes skating over Hazel, over the police officers, over the airport buildings, unable to settle for more than a moment at a time. She was free, and she was back in England, but Hazel thought it would be a long time before she lost that hunted look.

Turning to Graves, Hazel said evenly, “What about you? Are you coming back with us?”

Graves flicked her a somber little smile. “No. There are people waiting for me, too.” He nodded resignedly at the police contingent. “I’m in a certain amount of trouble. Just how much remains to be seen.”

“You did what you felt you had to do,” said Hazel.

“I got people killed.”

“And saved Mrs. Ash and her sons. Mr. Graves, I have no idea how this will all work out. But I do know that actions taken under duress can’t be compared with those undertaken willingly. Get yourself a good lawyer. Make sure everyone understands why you did what you did.”