Desperate Measures: A Mystery (11 page)

“Thank you,” he said. “I will. And…”

Hazel had half turned away. She turned back, one eyebrow raised.

“I’m sorry about Ash.”

“Yes,” she said after a moment. “We all are.”

*   *   *

The easiest thing was to concentrate on Ash’s sons. There was no ambivalence in how Hazel felt about them. She could see Ash in both boys, but particularly in Gilbert, who was dark, quiet, and solemn, and who watched the world carefully from a pair of deep, dark eyes exactly like his father’s. He said very little. Hazel felt he was reserving judgment: possibly on her, possibly on England.

The circumstances in which he and his brother had been kept would emerge in due course. Even a sensitive debriefing would have to wait until they were capable of dealing with it. Hazel knew they’d been separated from their mother for much of the time, but neither showed the scars of either cruelty or neglect. Perhaps some local family had been given the task of caring for them, and over the years the barriers between the boys and their fosterers had blurred. Perhaps they felt that being made to return to a land neither of them could remember very clearly, and to a mother who was almost a stranger, was another abduction, more painful to them than events half a lifetime ago.

They wouldn’t go on feeling like that, Hazel told herself. By the time they were old enough to understand what their father had done for them, to comprehend the enormous wellhead of love his sacrifice had sprung from, they would be old enough and settled enough to be grateful.

She made no attempt at conversation as she drove, left Cathy to set the pace. And clearly Cathy was worn-out—exhausted by the long journey, by the emotional upheaval that had preceded it, most of all by four years of living on a knife edge. For four years this woman had been the captive of utterly ruthless, wholly unpredictable men. They had snatched her from her safe, comfortable life in London with a husband who loved her and sons she adored; somehow they’d smuggled her out of the country and across a couple of continents; they’d taken her sons away and made her plead for their lives with a total stranger on a computer screen. Now she had her children back and was bringing them home to a place she didn’t know, to pick up a life she must hardly remember, without the husband who had bought her freedom with his death. Hazel couldn’t begin to imagine how Cathy Ash must be feeling. But she understood why the woman didn’t want to make small talk all the way to Norbold.

On the backseat, first one, then the other of the little boys fell asleep.

It was five o’clock before she turned into Highfield Road and stopped outside the big stone house near the end. “We’re here.”

Cathy looked at it out of the car window, made no attempt to get out.

“Have you been here before?” asked Hazel gently.

“A couple of times.” Cathy’s voice was colorless. “To visit his mother. When did he move back?”

“A couple of years ago, I think. It was before I knew him. You knew…” But of course Cathy didn’t know how Ash had passed the time they’d been apart. How could she? Perhaps a hint from Graves, but he didn’t know much more himself. Hazel made herself look Ash’s wife in the eye. “Gabriel had a mental breakdown after you were abducted. He blamed himself. He was hospitalized for a time. He only came back here after his doctors thought he was fit to cope on his own.”

And that, she added in the privacy of her own head, was a fairly doubtful judgment. But perhaps if he hadn’t come back here, Ash would never have gained the strength to rebuild his life. In which case he’d still be alive, and you’d still be in a whitewashed room in Mogadishu.

There was a pause while Cathy considered. Then she said, “I didn’t know that.” Another pensive gap. Then: “Do you think that’s why he … did what he did? Because the balance of his mind was disturbed?”

“No!” said Hazel quickly—so quickly, so vehemently, that Cathy’s pale eyes rounded for a moment. “You mustn’t think that. He knew exactly what he was doing. He finally found a way to help you. He was glad to take it.”

Cathy managed a thin, pale smile. “You were a good friend to him, I think.”

“I valued his friendship, yes.”

Cathy Ash sighed, finally opened her door. On the backseat the boys stirred. “I suppose we’d better go in. See what we’ve got and what we need.”

“I’ll come back tomorrow, if you like, and help you shop,” offered Hazel.

“Thank you. But really I need a car. Did Gabriel have one?”

“I don’t know where it is now,” Hazel had to admit. “The police may have it. I’ll arrange a rental car for you. And I’ll bring his dog around.”

Cathy blinked at her. Hazel might have been proposing something faintly unsavory. “Gabriel had a dog?”

Hazel nodded. “Patience. They thought the world of each other. Because neither of them had anyone else, I suppose.”

“I’m sorry,” said Cathy stiffly, “I really don’t want a dog in the house.”

It was one of those moments when the world shifts very slightly to the left, and you just know that somewhere a tsunami is getting ready to wipe out some villages. Hazel tried to convince herself that Ash’s wife hadn’t understood. “Patience lives here. I mean, she’s at my house at the moment, but she was Gabriel’s dog. She’s no trouble—she’s clean and good-natured, and she doesn’t chew things.… I’m sure the boys would like to have their father’s dog.”

“Oh no,” Cathy said firmly. “I’m not having a dog.”

Hazel felt as if she’d been floored by a pillowcase full of wet herrings. “But … what do you want me to do with her?”

Cathy shrugged. “It’s at your house? Keep it, if you like. If not, I’m sure there’s a shelter somewhere that will find it a nice home.” She walked up the steps to her new front door, and the boys piled out of Hazel’s car like weary puppies and followed her.

CHAPTER 14

M
RS. POLIAKOV LOOKED AT HER
as if she suspected Hazel, not the dog, of having designs on her furniture. So much so that Hazel, who had never in her life felt the urge to chew a cabriole leg, began to redden and talk faster, as if she had something to hide among the words.

By contrast, Patience sat demurely in the hall, unflustered by the increasingly warm debate on her future. Posing elegantly, her long tail curled around her long legs and her long nose directing the focus of her golden-amber gaze, she might have been one of those stone hounds that guards the gates of stately homes, except for the faint, not unpleasant aroma of prophylactic flea repellent. Hazel had spent a small fortune at the vet’s only that morning. The dog’s fine, thin coat offered a poor haven to hitchhikers, but Hazel didn’t want to risk even one appearing. She felt sure that Mrs. Poliakov could zero in on a single flea on twelve square meters of carpet like a laser-guided missile, with similarly explosive results.

“A few days, I said,” insisted the landlady, her tone that curious combination of outrage and aggression that women of her profession have developed as a defense against Being Put Upon. “Didn’t I say that? A few days. We agreed.”

“We did agree,” Hazel admitted. “I expected Gabriel would be back for her after just a few days. I didn’t expect…”

Mrs. Poliakov was not an avid reader of the popular press. Uniquely in Hazel’s experience, she watched television for the adverts for cleaning products, then turned off when the programs resumed. She took a Polish-language magazine, but activities in middle England were low down on its list of priorities. She didn’t know what had happened. “Expect what?” she demanded. “That your friend would vanish, leaving you holding his baby?” She thought about that. “Puppy?”

Hazel swallowed. “He’s dead, Mrs. P. He shot himself. To save his wife and children. They were the only things in the world that mattered more to him than this dog. I can’t—I won’t—give her to a shelter. If you won’t let me keep her here, I’ll have to find somewhere else to live.”

Mrs. Poliakov was still taking it in. Translating the English words, with which she was quite familiar, into her native tongue inside her head because even after thirty years things didn’t seem entirely real until she’d absorbed them in Polish. “Your friend Gabriel?” she said eventually. “Mr. Ash?”

“Yes.”

“He’s not coming back? Never?”

“No,” said Hazel. It still broke her heart to say it out loud. “And his wife doesn’t want a dog.”

Mrs. Poliakov started to say, “
I
don’t want…” and then thought better of it. She thought of the hurt in Hazel Best’s eyes, red-rimmed and smudged beneath with dark stains like bruises. She thought of how happy she’d been when she first came here, a bright, cheerful girl eager to embrace the challenges of her new job; and how that, too, had been snatched away. Her unlikely friendship with the strange man with the dog had been almost the only satisfaction she’d got out of the last few months. And now he was gone, too, leaving her with only grief and a white dog.

She leaned forward, peering with concern into Hazel’s drawn face. “You think this through? I mean properly? You never want a dog before. You want this dog?
Why
you want this dog?”

The tears started again, more than she could blink away, more than she could blame on a touch of hay fever. But then, Hazel wasn’t at work; she didn’t have a professional facade to maintain. She’d lived under Mrs. Poliakov’s roof for over a year. She counted her a friend. You can be honest with friends. You
should
be honest with friends. Her voice broke. “Because she’s all of him that I have left.”

Mrs. Poliakov had the right to keep her home a dog-free zone. But she knew that if she exercised that right, it would be a long time before she slept soundly again.

Instead she said, “All right. We give it a try. Any trouble”—she raised an admonitory finger—“she have to go. But she’s a good dog, I can see that. We give it a try.”

*   *   *

With Patience’s immediate future secure, Hazel knew it was time for her to get on with her own life. She thought about visiting her father. But the only place she could get used to Gabriel Ash’s not being around anymore was here, where he ought to be.

She needed something to do, something useful to occupy herself. She thought of the situation Saturday had dumped in her lap. First thing on Monday morning, she called Dave Gorman.

“What’s happening about Armitage and his computer?”

“Er—what?” It was clearly not what DI Gorman had thought she was calling about.

Hazel breathed heavily down the phone at him. “Charles Armitage? The guy with the unpleasant little hobby and a casual approach to computer security? What are you doing about him?”

Gorman was recovering from the surprise enough for indignation to surface in his gravelly voice. “Today? Not very much. In case you hadn’t noticed, I’ve been pretty busy with something else.” But that was unkind, and anyway it wasn’t a good answer. He took a deep breath. “Sorry. I haven’t forgotten, Hazel. I will deal with this. Leave it with me a few more days.”

For now anger, even misplaced anger, was easier to deal with than grief. “There are children involved, Dave.” She couldn’t remember when she’d started to use his first name; but if she was no longer a probationer at Meadowvale Police Station, she was damned if she was going back to calling him Mr. Gorman. “I don’t know how current the images on that computer were, but some of that abuse may be going on right now. Today. The information that will help us put a stop to it may be on that laptop. Are you sure you’ve got more important things to do than getting it back?”

There was a pause while DI Gorman reevaluated. This was something Hazel had grown used to, as people who had her marked down as a nice, polite, responsible, well-brought-up young woman suddenly realized there was another side to her. It was the human equivalent of a sat-nav system spinning its gyros and stammering out “Recalculating … recalculating…”

Finally he said, “You’re right. I’ll get on it as soon as I can. Don’t think I’ve forgotten about Armitage just because I haven’t the manpower to deal with him this very minute.”

She knew all about prioritizing. Any other week she’d have sympathized. But the anger was serving her too well to let it go. “And another thing. Every time I ask about Gabriel Ash’s funeral, I’m told you’re not ready to release the body. You never listened to him when he was alive—what do you think he’s going to tell you now?”

That was easier to answer, although Gorman knew the answer wouldn’t satisfy her. “Not my call, Hazel. The Home Office has him, they’re calling all the shots.” Invisible at the other end of the line, he winced at the unfortunate turn of phrase. “I’ll keep you informed. As soon as I know something, you’ll know it.” There was another pause as he debated whether to ask his next question. But he wanted to know. “Have you seen much of Cathy Ash since she got back?”

“No.” Hazel added nothing to that, though Gorman waited.

Eventually he tried again. “You should probably keep in touch with her. You’re the best friend Ash had in Norbold—any questions she has, you’re probably best placed to answer them.”

“I don’t think she has any questions,” said Hazel shortly. “Or if she has, there are people she’d rather be dealing with. I don’t think she wants me anywhere near her.”

“Why?”

That could have been either of two inquiries. “Why doesn’t she want to see me? I think she’s got the idea there was something going on between me and Gabriel. There wasn’t, but I think Cathy thinks there was. And why do I think that? Because she pretty well slammed the door in my face when I took her home.”

Gorman gave a sad little sigh. “We need to make allowances, Hazel. The woman’s had a hell of a time. For four years, if she slept at all, she woke up not knowing if she was going to survive the coming day. For a lot of that time she didn’t know where her children were—didn’t know for sure that they were even alive. Lord knows how she felt about Ash by the end—whether she hung on to the belief that someday he’d come and save her, or if she blamed him for everything. Either way, how he died must have put her emotions through the mincer. She’ll need a lot of help to come to terms with it all. Until she has, we should try not to judge her.”