Desperate Measures: A Mystery (12 page)

Hazel needed telling none of this. She knew she had no right to resent Cathy. She bit her lip. “Has anyone suggested that she talk to Laura Fry?”

“As a matter of fact,” said Gorman, “I did. Laura’s happy to see her. Cathy’s going to need a little persuading, but I’ll try again when she’s had a chance to catch her breath.”

“What about the boys? How are they adjusting to being back in England?”

“I’m not sure,” admitted Gorman. “Cathy’s—naturally—very protective of them. I’ve tried to speak to them, but she won’t let them out of her sight. As a matter of fact”—he had the grace to sound faintly embarrassed—“I had hoped you might succeed where I’ve failed. That she might let you take them for an ice cream and a chat.”

“I wouldn’t hold your breath,” muttered Hazel.

“It’s probably too soon,” agreed Gorman. “But will you? If I can get her to agree?”

Hazel couldn’t think of a reason to say no, so she said yes.

*   *   *

She knew that if she walked Patience beside the canal, Saturday would appear. And he did, barely ten minutes after they’d left Balfour Street. Hazel didn’t particularly want to talk to him, because she knew what he’d want to talk about and she hadn’t an answer to satisfy him. But she was damned if she was going to avoid him, as if she’d done something to be ashamed of. So she kept walking, and Saturday caught up and fell into step beside her.

He had a black eye.

There was nothing terribly unusual about this. Saturday and his associates traded casual blows the way normal people exchange handshakes. Sometimes when she saw him, he had a black eye; sometimes he had a skinned knuckle. She imagined he gave as good as he got, or at least had the sense to run if he was seriously outclassed. “What happened to you?”

The boy shrugged, unconcerned. “Nothing much. A misunderstanding.”

“His? Or yours?”

Saturday grinned. At sixteen he was caught on the cusp of change, no longer a child, not yet a man. There was something knowing, ironic, in his grin that would not have been there six months ago. “His. I explained where he went wrong.”

Hazel regarded him critically. He was small for his age, undernourished, not so much wiry as downright thin. She could only assume the other party had been skimpier still. “When are you going to do something with your life?” she demanded waspishly.

He looked surprised. “Like what? Brain surgery? Ballet dancing?”

“Like getting a job,” snapped Hazel. “Like pushing a wheelbarrow around a building site and making the tea until someone thinks you’re worth teaching some skills. Like buying a chammy and a bucket and cleaning people’s windows until you’ve saved up enough for a mower so you can cut their lawns. Like anything that adds net worth to the human race instead of being a drain on it.”

This wasn’t a boy who was easily hurt. Or rather, he was so used to being hurt, in the normal course of every day, that it took something special to register with him. That, coming from Hazel, whom he had learned to trust, got through his defenses in a way she had not anticipated. He reared back as if she’d struck him; color flooded momentarily into his pinched cheeks.

Guilt flooded Hazel’s. Her eyes dipped quickly—and met the golden gaze of the lurcher, watching with interest to see what she would do now. Hazel glared at her—she didn’t need a dog to tell her when she was behaving badly!—then glanced apologetically at Saturday. “I’m sorry. I’ve no business taking it out on you.”

He was still startled from the way she’d turned on him. Another moment, though, and he’d have fired off a fitting retort, something to leave her feeling mean and small-minded. And then he saw her expression and realized there was very little he could do to make her feel any worse.

Saturday didn’t flatter himself that being unkind to him had reduced her almost to tears. He said quietly, “What’s happened?”

Hazel stared at him in growing disbelief. “You don’t know?” But of course he didn’t know. He didn’t own a computer or a television or a power-socket to plug them into. His only chance of learning what had happened to Ash was if somebody tossed him some unfinished chips wrapped in the front page of the
Norbold News
, because even if half the town was talking about it, nobody would think of telling a street kid. Nobody would think he might be interested. “Gabriel is dead.”

Incredibly, the boy laughed. “Dead? Of course he isn’t dead! Who told you that?”

“Nobody told me. I saw it.”

Only then, when her expression failed to soften into a grin, did he realize it wasn’t a joke. Something terrible happened to his face. Slowly the flesh—and there wasn’t much of it to start with—melted from his cheeks, so that he aged twenty, thirty years in front of her. His eyes hollowed, sucked in by grief. His skin sallowed to the gray of old concrete, the flimsy dryness of archived paper. In the space of a few seconds he changed before Hazel’s eyes from a skinny youth to an old man to something almost more like a mummy. A lifetime compressed by time-lapse photography.

She’d had no idea Ash meant so much to him. All she could think was that Saturday had so few friends, so few people in his life who even cared whether he lived or died, that losing one was devastating. “I’m sorry,” she stammered. “I should have told you before. There were things to do, and I didn’t think … I’m sorry.”

The tears on Saturday’s cheeks were like drops of rain among the freckles. “When?”

“Four days ago.”

“How? What … How?”

So she told him, holding nothing back. The truth would hurt him, but he deserved to hear it from her, not as a bit of casual gossip tossed over a campfire in a condemned building.

By now they had lowered themselves onto the grassy edge of the towpath, legs dangling over the water. Hazel was plaiting stems of couch grass as she talked, her fingers deliberate and careful about the meaningless task. Moved by the same need for distraction, Saturday was stroking the dog, holding her in the crook of his arm. Patience turned her long face and licked his nose once, golden eyes all concern.

“What are we going to do?” the boy moaned when Hazel had finished her account.

“Do?” she echoed bitterly. “There’s nothing
to
do. We get on with our lives. We’ve lost a friend. The world won’t stop turning because of it.”

She thought she’d managed to shock him. That Saturday thought she, too, should be crying for Ash. But four days had passed, and she’d done all the crying she could do for now. She straightened her bent back, threw the little plaited wreath onto the brown water of the canal, and stood up.

“Actually,” she said crisply, “there is something we can do. Something I can do, and you can help me with. Something DI Gorman should be doing, except he’s too busy and we’re not. We can get that damned laptop back.”

CHAPTER 15

A
LMOST AS SOON AS THE WORDS WERE OUT,
Hazel knew she was making a promise—or issuing a threat—that she had no way of keeping. They might know what Charles Armitage had been up to, but the only evidence was a bundle of electronics he’d had ample time to dispose of. In all probability the laptop no longer existed.

Hazel was aware that a hard drive is harder to wipe than most people outside the computer industry appreciate. But even a top nerd needed at least the remains of the laptop, and if Armitage—knowing what was on it, knowing the police had had it in their possession—hadn’t dropped it in a lake a week ago, weighted with stones like someone who’d come second in a gang war, he needed his head examined. That was the real reason Dave Gorman wasn’t beating his door down right now. Not that he was busy, although undoubtedly he was, but because there was no point. His time was too valuable to waste chasing wild geese.

But right now Hazel needed to be doing
something.
Anything would be better than sitting in her quiet room, looking at Ash’s dog, wondering when it was going to strike Patience that he wasn’t coming back. It was oddly upsetting that she couldn’t explain what had become of him to someone—all right, to an animal—who’d loved Ash as much as anyone in the world. It was another small misery adding to Hazel’s burden.

She needed a job to do, something worthwhile, to occupy her mind and tire her body, and give her some prospect of a success. Because right now she felt a failure. Gabriel Ash had been her friend, she’d taken satisfaction in what she’d been able to do for this clever, wounded, vulnerable man, but the bottom line was that she hadn’t been able to keep him alive. He hadn’t trusted her enough to tell her about his appalling dilemma and give her the chance to help him. Someone else might have seen that as his failure. Hazel saw it as hers.

She desperately needed a success to set against it. Not to erase it from her memory—nothing would do that—but to set against it in the great scale of deeds. She needed to be able to think, Perhaps I couldn’t save Ash, but there are some miserable, abused young girls who are going to get back a bit of their childhood because of me, and a man who exploited and encouraged and enjoyed their degradation got his comeuppance because I know what to do and will do it.

And maybe Saturday needed that as well. Some small triumph of hope over despair. That, too, had been in her mind when Hazel made her rash pronouncement. But all she could see now, a scant half hour later, was that she was also going to let Saturday down. There was no possible way she could do what she’d said she was going to do.

But she wasn’t going to tell him. She thought this was one of those few occasions when chasing the unattainable was better than letting it go, because just going through the motions would give both of them something to focus on. Hazel would have to pretend they were doing some good; but she was willing to do that, for Saturday’s sake. The boy had been kicked in the face too often already.

The developers working on the Dirty Nellie’s site were a Birmingham firm. Charles Armitage lived in the Clent Hills, less than an hour’s drive from Norbold. Hazel had two decisions to make before she did anything. Whether to approach Armitage at his home or his office, and whether or not to warn him she was coming. There were arguments for and against in both cases.

She didn’t expect a closet pedophile to be honest with her wherever they met, but was he more likely to be flustered into betraying himself by the presence of family or colleagues? It would be easier to throw her out of his private home than a public office, but then he’d have to explain to his wife. Also, it was more likely that the man pursued his grubby little hobby in his study than in his place of work, which meant that any evidence was more likely to be found at his home. If he left her alone long enough to look for it. If he let her through the front door in the first place.

The second decision also made itself. If she called him first, however quickly she drove he would have time to hide or destroy that evidence. If she turned up on his doorstep, she ran the risk that he wouldn’t be there—but if he was, she could snatch the initiative because she knew now what she was looking for.

She could go this evening. She thought Monday night was probably as good a time as any to catch Armitage at home. If he’d been away for the long weekend that professional people take as their right, he would be back by tonight. Hazel still marveled at the way the moneyed classes got on a plane because there was nothing worth watching on the television.

Saturday wanted to go with her. Hazel thought it was a bad idea. One reason was the same as Ash’s for not taking Patience on important and delicate visits. If knocking at someone’s door with your dog on a lead damaged your credibility, being accompanied by someone like Saturday would probably kill it off entirely.

But she wasn’t a cruel person, so she gave him the other reason. “I don’t want him to see you. He knows enough about who found his laptop”—you see: that was kind—“to recognize you if he sees you. You don’t want him recognizing you.”

The youth was full of a fine disdain. “Some ponce who wets himself over pictures of little girls? You think I can’t take him?”

“Some ponce with money and connections,” Hazel reminded him. “Maybe you could take him.” Kindness again: privately she couldn’t think of
anyone
he could take. “But he wouldn’t come himself. What about the three heavies he’d send looking for you?”

“Hmm—three,” murmured Saturday, as if he’d have expected to cope with one or two. “Maybe you’re right.”

Afterward, Hazel realized the ease with which she’d won the argument should have made her suspicious. As it was, she was approaching Warwick when a rustle of movement in a corner of the rearview mirror made her purse her lips thoughtfully and look for a lay-by. Safely out of the traffic, she turned around and lifted her coat off the backseat. It was her warm winter coat, which had lain there undisturbed for months.

Saturday sat up and gave her a sickly grin. So did Patience.

*   *   *

Plan B was where Saturday stayed in the car and kept out of sight. “Can you do that?” demanded Hazel.

“Course I can,” growled the boy.

“You didn’t do it very well just now.”

“Well enough to fool you,” muttered Saturday.

“Fooling me isn’t the point,” retorted Hazel tartly. “I’m not going to beat your head in if you get it wrong.”

Charles Armitage lived in one of the many little rural churches converted into homes in the last thirty years, since congregations started to shrink and house hunters’ aspirations to grow. This one was set amid the rolling greenery of the Clent Hills.

Hazel parked on the main road, staring at the quaint stone building in absolute horror. Somehow, until right now, she hadn’t believed—not really
believed
—that this moment would come. She’d known it was a wild-goose chase from the start, thought she was just driving around the countryside to give herself something to do and Saturday something to feel positive about. Somehow she’d forgotten that if she kept following the sat-nav instructions, she’d end up at Charles Armitage’s front door. Now she was here, she hadn’t the faintest notion what to do next. Drive away again? She could imagine what Saturday would say. Patience would look down her nose at her as well. Patience could say more with the angle of her long nose than you could put in a short essay.