Desperate Measures: A Mystery (17 page)

“Only of course, as soon as Bobby—that’s my son—heard what I’d done, he freaked out. I mean
really
freaked out. Not ‘I’m going to have to get everyone’s e-mail addresses again, but at least I’ll get a new laptop’ freaking—complete and total panic. He was literally screaming at me. It took his mother an hour to calm him down enough to find out why.”

Finally Charles Armitage met his visitor’s gaze. “Miss Best, I don’t want you to think we condone what he’d been doing. We were both of us deeply shocked and upset. We still are. Those aren’t just pictures, they’re pictures of young girls being exploited and humiliated. If I’d found out about it in any other circumstances, I’d—well, I’m not sure what I’d have done, but I’d have dealt with it like a responsible parent. We are responsible parents. We care about raising our children properly.

“But this wasn’t something we could deal with in the privacy of our own home. The laptop had been stolen, and there weren’t just those pictures on it, there was enough material to connect it to our family. It had my presentation on it, for heaven’s sake! You found me through it. Someone could have used it to blackmail me. The best I could hope for, the very best, was that whoever stole it would keep it.

“So no, I didn’t phone the police. I gave Bobby the bollocking of his life”—he blushed when he realized he’d said that to a strange young woman—“and I don’t think any of us got any sleep that night. The next morning I made myself go in to work, as if nothing had happened. Every time a phone rang I wondered if it was somebody telling my employers what he’d found on my computer.

“Do you know, it almost came as a relief when Detective Inspector Gorman called? I knew what I was going to do. I was going to lie to him—say I’d downloaded the pictures. Bobby’s fourteen years old. I honestly don’t believe he meant any harm. I don’t think he’s a danger to anyone. I was willing to take the blame if it would save him from dragging a conviction for a sex offense through the rest of his life. Do you believe me?”

Hazel was shaking her head in despair. “Actually, I do believe you. It’s just the sort of stupid thing that otherwise sensible people do when their children are involved. But it would have been easy enough to establish who downloaded the material. And as a juvenile, your son wouldn’t have been in anything like the same trouble that you as a grown man would have been. Do you think we don’t know what young boys are like? That we can’t differentiate between a prurient teenager and a genuine pervert? Give us some credit!”

“Perhaps it was foolish,” admitted Armitage. Telling the truth had obviously taken a weight off his shoulders. “But it’s easy to see what needs doing when your emotions aren’t involved. All I could think was that this was my son and somehow I had to protect him. I’d lay down my life for him. My reputation didn’t seem too big a thing to give up.

“But Mr. Gorman didn’t want to arrest me. He just wanted to return the laptop. No one had scrutinized it more deeply than was necessary to find out who owned it. I thought—I dared to think—we were off the hook.”

“Why on earth did you send a private investigator to my flat?” Hazel was still indignant about that.

“Another bad decision,” he said, squirming inside his clothes. “I just … I so badly wanted the business to be over! I didn’t want someone coming around with a hand out after I thought we were safe. I asked Ms. Harris to find out if you were the kind of person who’d do that. If you’d made copies of Bobby’s files with a view to doing exactly that.”

“I am a police officer!” insisted Hazel, wide-eyed with outrage. “How dare you think that?”

“Yes,” murmured Armitage. “I’m sorry.”

She shook her head in a kind of wonderment. It was that simple? A teenage boy behaving as teenage boys have behaved since the year dot, only with the power of the Internet at his disposal, and a horror-stricken father doing what fathers do? But then … “And you really didn’t send anyone to my house?”

“No,” he said. “I really didn’t.” And Hazel believed him.

She put that aside for the moment. “All right. There are two things you can do. You can keep your head down, and wait to see if Mr. Gorman comes calling or not. I think he will, sooner or later, but you might get lucky. Or you can go and see him, and tell him everything you’ve just told me. If it was me, I’d want to get it out of the way, rather than jumping out of my skin every time the phone rings, but it’s your call. I won’t be doing anything more about it. If Mr. Gorman asks me a direct question, I’ll have to answer it honestly, but otherwise you can forget about me. I’m satisfied that things happened as you say they did. I imagine you’ll be taking steps to ensure that nothing similar happens again?”

Armitage nodded energetically. “He’ll be using the new laptop in the living room from now on,” he promised fervently. “And I’ll be learning a bit more about the damn things, too.”

*   *   *

Hazel called Saturday to say that all was well, then took her time driving home. At one point she deviated from the main road to take the scenic route, winding through the apple orchards that a few weeks earlier had been a froth of blossom. When she got home, she’d have to deal with Saturday, but before that she wanted some space to think.

On the whole her mission had been successful. She hadn’t got anybody bang to rights (even Sergeant Mole hadn’t actually used the term), but she was satisfied that the situation had been resolved. That Charles Armitage was not a predatory sex offender waiting to leap on her or anyone else, and that the author of the collection that had so shocked Saturday—no mean feat in itself—was an immature teenager with a man’s urges and a boy’s lack of self-control. She trusted Armitage when he said there would be no repetition. She suspected he’d be inspecting Bobby’s computer every night until he turned thirty.

She hoped Armitage would find the courage to tell Dave Gorman what had happened. If he did, she thought the matter would go no further; if he didn’t, she suspected that at some point it would come back to bite him. Either way, she felt no need to remain involved. She had achieved everything she’d needed to.

Which left the matter of the intruder at her house. Could she have imagined that? No. She’d seen the footprints; she’d seen the ball. Someone had gone to her new home and found a way in past her new locks. If not Armitage, then who? And why? She wandered around the orchards of ripening fruit, thinking until her brain ached, while the long evening turned into dusk.

Saturday had gone to bed by the time she got home. He was becoming a proper little suburbanite: a mug of cocoa and asleep by eleven, for all the world as if he had something to do the next morning. That could be her next project: finding him a job. But not tonight. Nor did she want to discuss the theft of Charles Armitage’s laptop tonight, although there was absolutely no chance that she would let it pass. Tonight she had something else on her mind.

Patience looked up from the sofa when she came in. She waved her tail and Hazel stroked her ears. She made herself toast and coffee and took them back to the sitting room. “Do you want to go out?” she asked, but the dog declined, only turned around once and went back to sleep. Hazel ate her supper, then turned the light out, leaving the house in darkness.

She didn’t sleep. She may have dozed; it was hard to be sure. Without turning the light back on, she could not have guessed to within an hour at what time of the night she became aware that she was no longer alone.

There had been no noise to alert her. But even before Patience stirred and sat up, a pale shape in the darkness, Hazel knew he’d come back. Their visitor, who’d stood in the flower bed, staring in at the kitchen window; who’d let himself into the house and moved things just enough to show he’d been there. Now, in the middle of the night, when decent people were asleep in their beds, here he was again.

She’d left the kitchen door ajar. On her left cheek she felt the whisper of air as he passed through it and behind her chair. Of course, the room was as dark for him as it was for her. He didn’t know she was there, waiting in the high-backed wing chair, until she reached out and turned the reading lamp on.

“Hello, Gabriel,” she said softly.

CHAPTER 19

H
E MADE NO REPLY.
He made no move. He was directly behind her chair, so Hazel couldn’t see him without standing up and turning around. She felt no need to do either. She knew now who’d been coming into her house late at night when she and Saturday were dreaming—she about sorrow and loss, he almost certainly about television. She knew it before Patience got down from the sofa, stretched her long white body, and padded across the room, tail waving.

In the hearts of tumultuous events there are places, and moments, where nothing is happening. The eye of the storm. That was where Hazel was now. When what she felt caught up with what she knew, emotions from weak-kneed relief to volcanic fury would rip through her, and anyone in the fallout zone had better find something to stand behind. But it was too soon for that. Right now she was calm and in control, and enjoying the feeling of moral superiority that came from outwitting him.

Finally he managed: “How long have you known?”

“Only today,” admitted Hazel. “The pieces finally fell into place a few hours ago.”

“What … why…?” He considered, tried again. “How?”

Now Hazel stood up and faced him. The last time she’d seen Gabriel Ash, she’d seen—or thought she’d seen—him shoot himself in the head. It seemed that death rather suited him. If anything, he looked tidier than usual—the thick black hair combed back, the collar of his shirt better ironed than when he’d done it himself. Hazel felt the smugness in her own smile and couldn’t resist saying it anyway. “It was the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”

Gabriel Ash had read a lot of psychology and criminology; he’d read an unending stream of reports and reviews and articles sent to him in his capacity as a security analyst. Perhaps he hadn’t read Sherlock Holmes. “What did the dog do in the night?”

“Absolutely nothing,” Hazel said in quiet triumph.

*   *   *

“You first.”

Ash demurred, glanced anxiously at his dog. “But…”

“You first,” insisted Hazel. “Gabriel, I saw you blow your brains out! You said you were going to do it. I saw you do it and I thought you’d done it. What happened—did you miss?”

“You saw that?” He had the grace to sound appalled. “It never occurred to me that you’d be watching.…”

“It wasn’t my idea.” Her voice was hard. “But it was always meant for public consumption. You must have known that
somebody
who cared for you would see it.”

Ash glanced at the lurcher. He didn’t put the thought into words, but Hazel heard it just the same. He didn’t think anybody cared about him except for Patience. Hazel felt a sudden, fierce impulse to slap him. The eye wall of the storm was spinning closer.

She gritted her teeth. “It was pretty convincing. How did you do it?”

Ash gave a self-deprecating little shrug. “Special effects. Popguns and blood packs. We ran through it six or seven times before we had all the angles right—before the camera was seeing everything it was supposed to and nothing more. Then we went live and did it for real.”

“We—who?”

“Sorry.” He wasn’t trying to be secretive; there was just a lot of ground to cover and he was still reeling with the shock of discovery. “My department. My old boss set it up. Philip Welbeck—I’ve told you about him, haven’t I?”

“He was the one who had you sectioned.”

The least trace of a smile flickered across Ash’s lips. “He was. To be fair, he was trying to stop me from getting Cathy killed.”

But it made no sense. “Dave Gorman was on the scene within minutes. He told me he was too late. Are you telling me he was lying, too?”

Ash shook his head. “He was deceived, like everyone else. These people are professionals, Hazel—they dressed the set so no one would have suspected. They”—he swallowed, embarrassed—“got hold of a body. I don’t mean they killed someone,” he added hastily, as if the idea wasn’t entirely preposterous. “I mean they brought a dead body from a morgue somewhere so they could be seen removing it afterward. Did Gorman tell you the Home Office arrived immediately after he did and took over?”

She nodded.

“We needed him to believe it as well. Everyone had to believe, except the smallest-possible inner circle. We couldn’t take the risk of anyone having doubts and talking about them. Philip brought two sets of clothes, the same clothes, for me and the corpse. The moment the uplink was killed, his team yanked me out of that room and put the substitute in.”

“Did he look like you? This corpse.”

Ash passed a hand across his eyes. He whispered, “Not after they fired a gun inside his mouth.”

So Gorman had seen what he was required to see, and was immediately hustled out of the back room of the Copper Kettle by the Home Office team. Soon after that he’d told Hazel what he honestly believed to be true. Because he believed it, she did, too.

Behind her eyes, the bridled rage was glowing incandescent.

Ash seemed unaware of it. He looked at Hazel hesitantly, as if about to ask something difficult. “Have you seen Cathy?”

Hazel clenched her fists until the nails dug into her palms, and the molten anger bubbled on the very lip of the crater. “Yes. I met them at the airport.”

“How did she look?”

“She looked all right. A bit thin, and tired from the journey, but that’s the least you’d expect. She’ll have a lot of readjusting to do. But I think she’ll be okay.”

“They didn’t hurt her?”

Hazel regarded him with exasperation. The angriest part of her wanted to tell him the truth: “Of course they hurt her! They hurt her, and went on hurting her, for four years. They made her do things she desperately didn’t want to do. They kept her sons away from her. Of course they hurt her.” Instead, she said distinctly, “Whatever physical injuries she had seem to have healed. The emotional ones will probably take longer.”

“And the boys?”

“The boys are fine. I don’t think anyone harmed them. It was how you always thought: they were held as a guarantee that you’d leave the pirates alone. When they thought you were no longer a threat, they sent them home. I met them off the plane and took them to Highfield Road.” But he must know that. If he’d troubled to track Hazel to her new house, of course he’d been to his own.