Desperate Measures: A Mystery (16 page)

Hazel had no sympathy for him. “An even better idea would have been
not
to fill up your computer with the kind of images that no self-respecting man would want to see once, let alone repeatedly. Would want to forget if he came across them by accident.”

Armitage hesitated, thinking urgently. Without knowing it, he was twisting his fingers together as if wringing out a wet cloth. “Miss Best,” he said finally, “I don’t know what you thought you saw on that computer—”

“
Thought
I saw!” echoed Hazel indignantly, and in fact misleadingly.

“—but none of it was my doing,” he continued with quiet obstinacy. “I am not particularly familiar with technology. I know how to use it for my work, I do the same things with it so often I could do them in my sleep, but there are whole areas that I know nothing about. That—what you’re talking about—is one of them. I have never come across such images, even by accident. I have never downloaded them onto a computer. I have never wanted to.

“I’m a structural engineer. I’m interested in building things. Good, useful things that do a job for people, and make their days better and easier. I’m also a husband and father; I love my family and want to keep them safe. I haven’t done what you think I’ve done. I’m no threat to you, and in fact you’re no threat to me. You can’t prove your accusation, partly because the laptop is no longer available but also because it isn’t true. Please don’t ruin my life trying to prove that it is.”

Hazel knew she couldn’t trust a word he said. But some treacherous corner of her heart wished she could—wanted it all to be a misunderstanding. But she believed absolutely that Saturday had seen what he said he’d seen.

“So you explain it,” she said roughly. “Those images were on your laptop—we’re not even going to discuss that. If you didn’t put them there, who did?”

Armitage blinked. As if a chink had opened in the darkness and, just for a moment, daylight had streamed in. “Somebody playing a joke? Yes. I take it to building sites with me. I put it down while I go off to look at some I-beams. Maybe one of the laborers thought it was funny, to download some pictures that would blow the socks off that stuffy Mr. Armitage with his preoccupation with concrete mixes.…”

Hazel gave him a deeply skeptical look. “How would he have got past your password?”

“The same way you did—by knowing it’s the one used by people with no imagination!”

She couldn’t argue with that. “But if someone wanted you to find the pictures, why protect them with
another
password?”

“Because…” But he couldn’t think of a reason, and the sentence petered out.

Hazel scowled at him. But it was a kind of double-edged scowl, facing both ways. She was missing something here. She’d known exactly who Charles Armitage was after Saturday told her what he’d seen on the man’s computer. His attempts to frighten her had only confirmed it. She’d known exactly what she was dealing with when she first came here to confront him sixteen days ago.

Only somehow, this time she’d seen another side of him. The imagined laborer had a point: the man
was
stuffy. Middle-aged, middle-class, middle-income, middle-of-the-road. The kind of man who completed questionnaires with fives and sixes. Mr. Average. Hazel was inclined to believe him when he said he was a loving husband and father. Somehow, what she knew was now arguing with what she saw.

He said he hadn’t sent anyone to break into her house. Well, he would, wouldn’t he? Except, if his purpose was to show how far his reach extended, he wouldn’t want her to actually believe that. And again, she more than halfway did.

So what did she know for sure? That the dog’s ball was on her bookshelf. That before it was Patience’s ball, it belonged to the Armitage children. Hopefully, they’d thrown it away after it got punctured, although possibly she’d sneaked in and stolen it off the front lawn, but either way, Hazel was meant to know where it had come from. Otherwise the message would have been meaningless and so would the threat. That ball was significant only if it was brought into her house and left where she would see it at the behest of Charles Armitage.

But Armitage denied it. And how could he not know that she’d moved—or if he knew, why pretend not to, when the effectiveness of his threats depended on Hazel’s knowing who was threatening her?

Somewhere in the drive train of her mind, cogs were beginning to move and mesh. (With a degree in information technology under her belt, Hazel would have loved to compare her brain to a computer, connections lighting up the synapses faster than a Riverdancer’s feet. But usually it felt much more twentieth century than that. Sometimes it felt like it was being powered by a turnspit dog.)

Sergeant Mole, who had talked at training college about the absence of evidence, had had other aphorisms as well. It isn’t always necessary, he used to say, to see the chicken. If there are eggs in the kitchen, and chicken pellets in the shed, and chicken shit on your shoes, it is reasonable to infer the presence of a chicken, whether you can see one or not. And Hazel Best had seen signs of the chicken.

She took a long slow breath and let it out in a rueful sigh. She managed a smile. “Mr. Armitage, I don’t think I’m achieving much here now, am I? It’s just possible I owe you an apology. I thought I knew what was going on, but maybe I was wrong. Maybe I should go home, and we’ll try not to bother each other again. What do you think?”

Charles Armitage thought it was an excellent idea. He tried, for the look of the thing, not to seem too eager, but still he jumped at it. “You
were
wrong about me. I promise you.”

“Yes? Well, good. Just—you know—be careful. With the new computer.”

“I will,” said Armitage fervently. “Believe me.”

She did. “What did you go for? A handy tablet, or something with some real wellie behind it?”

Armitage gave a wry smile. “I told you, I’m no expert. But for that price, I
hope
it’s wearing wellies!”

“Lots of memory? Lots of speed?”

“Oh yes.”

“Top-end graphics?”

“The best. So I’m reliably informed.”

Hazel was nodding slowly. Sometimes you spend all day digging a trap, only to see the suspect tap-dance around the edge. But sometimes he jumps in with both feet. “Everyone needs a computer expert in the family these days. Who’s yours?”

“My s—”

If Charles Armitage had finished the word, Hazel might have been left wondering if she’d jumped to the wrong conclusion. Again. But he didn’t. He froze one letter in. The tentative smile fell off his face and his thick, soft body, which had been cautiously relaxing, jerked rigid. He knew he’d made a mistake. He knew
she
knew he’d made a mistake. It was too late to rectify it; all he could do now was wait to see how costly it would prove.

“I suppose we could keep this up for a while longer,” said Hazel kindly. “Keep pretending the laptop was yours, that everything on it was yours, and that if you have a son at all, he isn’t remotely interested in the Internet. But we’re neither of us getting any younger, Mr. Armitage, and sooner or later we’ll have to deal with the reality of what happened. Tell me about your son. Tell me about how you borrowed his laptop, and only found out what he kept on it after it was stolen from the petrol station.”

CHAPTER 18

I
F HE’D THOUGHT A LIE WOULD SERVE,
he’d have lied. He’d done much worse trying to deal with the consequences of his carelessness. He’d hired a private detective. He’d tried to intimidate a police officer, for pity’s sake!—him, Charles Armitage, who obeyed speed limits when there was no one about and halted at stop signs when there was nothing coming. He was one of nature’s compliants. Show him a line in the sand and he’d die of thirst before crossing it.

None of which had prevented him from becoming a successful professional. If there was ever a trade in which slavish adherence to the rules was a virtue, it was structural engineering. (Creativity doesn’t keep bridges from falling. Mathematics does.) Nor had it hindered him in his quest to be a husband and father. He’d found a girl who didn’t like taking risks, either, and they’d built a happy life around obedience to the laws of God, man, and the parish council. They never put their bins out on the wrong day, and always sorted the recyclables first.

But there is literally no limit to what a man will do to protect his children. Even—perhaps especially—a man like Charles Armitage. Lie? He’d have stripped to his underwear and claimed to be Superman if it would have done any good.

But he’d seen enough of this clear-eyed young policewoman to know that more lies wouldn’t make her go away. He’d thought he’d got rid of her, but she’d come back. He still wasn’t entirely sure why, but he knew now that she wasn’t going to be fobbed off and she wasn’t going to be frightened off. He’d have tried buying her off if he hadn’t known with absolute certainty that it would make things ten times worse.

One possibility remained. It didn’t offer much hope of rescue from the dreadful coils of deceit he’d managed to wind around himself, but in extremis any hope is better than none. It had always been his first choice, now it was his last resort. The truth.

“He’s fourteen,” he told Hazel quietly. They were leaning against a field gate. If anyone saw them, he’d say he was giving her directions. “I suppose it’s the curious age. When I was fourteen, I was curious about girls, too, but there was no such thing as the Internet, so you had to pluck up the courage to meet them face-to-face. It was all horribly embarrassing, you just
knew
what was going through their minds while you were trying to strike up a conversation, but it had this in its favor: you never got the chance to see them as a commodity. Something to be used.
You
had to approach
them,
which was difficult, and they had only to turn up their noses at you to send you on your way a gibbering wreck. You
had
to show them some respect.”

He sighed. “Teenagers today, they go on about all the friends they have, but what they mean is that someone found their photograph less than totally repulsive and hit a button on a computer. It doesn’t
mean
anything. It’s easy and undiscriminating, and in no way prepares them for proper relationships. They don’t actually know how to make friends. They just sit in front of their screens, each in his own private space, and they barely understand the difference between what’s real and what isn’t. Because they’re viewing the images in the same way, they don’t really understand the difference between the fictional world of films and games and the real world, in which real people are being hurt. They know it, but they don’t
feel
it.”

Hazel didn’t disagree with him. She didn’t yet see how relevant this was, but he seemed to be trying to explain and she was willing to give him time.

“I don’t know where he found those images.” All the color had gone out of both his face and his voice; he seemed ten years older. “He says he stumbled across them at different times, and wouldn’t know where to find them again. But that’s a bit disingenuous. You might find something like that, but you wouldn’t download it. Well—I wouldn’t. And you wouldn’t. I don’t know about other fourteen-year-old boys. I kind of hope they would. The alternative is to think that my son is peculiarly perverted in his interests and instincts.”

Armitage took a deep breath. “I knew nothing about any of this until the morning I was going to Norbold for a presentation to the council on the development at the Archway.”

“Dirty Nellie’s.” Hazel nodded.

The engineer blinked. “Sorry?”

“Dirty Nellie’s. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, Mr. Armitage, but however impressive a design you come up with for it, and however trendy a name you give it, in Norbold it’ll always be known as Dirty Nellie’s.”

“Really?” He took his glasses off and polished them. “How unfortunate. So I’m part of the team giving this presentation, and I’m on my way out to the car when I trip over the next door’s cat and drop my laptop. I switch it on to check it’s all right, and it isn’t. I can’t seem to access any of the files I want.

“Which isn’t the end of the world. I’ve got it all backed up on a memory stick—all I need is a laptop. My son was already at school, so I couldn’t ask him, but I didn’t think he’d mind if I borrowed his. Not really, not when it mattered so much. I picked it up and got on my way.

“I didn’t really need petrol. But I thought it would look unprofessional to go into the meeting and have to start fiddling with the memory stick, so I stopped at the service station, filled up, and spent a couple of minutes transferring my data onto my son’s laptop. I didn’t hit any problems. Of course, I knew his password—we’d set it up together. I didn’t know he had another level of security. I thought I’d managed to rescue the situation.”

“Then somebody stole the laptop.”

“Yes,” said Armitage. The memory made him wince.

“You took it into the washroom with you?”

He looked surprised. “I wasn’t going to leave it in the car, was I? That wouldn’t be very safe.”

Hazel forbore to comment. “What happened?”

He avoided her gaze. “I put it down while I washed my hands. And some …
toe-rag
”—it seemed to be the worst insult he knew—“snatched it up and legged it for the car park. By the time I reached the door, there was no sign of him.”

Hazel sucked reflectively on the inside of her cheek. “Can you describe this toe-rag?”

Armitage shrugged. “Maybe my son’s age. Maybe a bit older, though there wasn’t much of him. Quick on his feet. Wearing a rugby shirt, I think, though I didn’t recognize the club.”

I bet I do, thought Hazel. The Saturday Irregulars. I’ll give him
I found it in a washroom
! She said, “Why didn’t you report the theft to the police?”

“I should have done. But I was already late for my presentation, and I still had the memory stick in my pocket, and I thought I could do all that later. I thought, What’s the worst that can happen? I’ll buy Bobby a new laptop. I’ll have to anyway—we’ll never get it back. I thought I’d get my meeting out of the way, go home, confess to my son, and then call the theft in to the Norbold police.