Desperate Measures: A Mystery (19 page)

“What?” Her voice was a challenge. “That I’d take it to heart? Is that what you think? That we’re just two ships passing in the night, whose actions have no effect on each other? Gabriel, you’re my friend. I care what happens to you. I’ll go on caring what happens to you. When this is all over and you’re back with your wife and children, I don’t expect I’ll see much of you anymore. But I’m still going to care about you. I’d always be upset if I thought you’d been unhappy enough to do … what I thought you’d done.”

Ash let out a slow, broken sigh and sat down beside his dog. “I don’t deserve that kind of friendship.”

“Yes, you do,” insisted Hazel. “You are a good man. You are a good, kind, and clever man, and I don’t want you ever to forget it. You deserve for good things to happen to you.”

“In four years you were the best thing that happened to me,” said Ash. “I’m never going to forget that.”

It was, she thought, like seeing your teenager off to university: you knew it was the right thing for all concerned, but still everyone on the station platform wanted to bawl. She made an effort to change the mood. “So what was it that made you suspicious of Stephen Graves?”

If he hadn’t already been sitting down, Ash would have staggered. He gaped at her until the burning of his eyes reminded him to blink. “I will
never,
” he swore, “get the measure of what goes on in your head.”

“About the same as goes on in yours, except perhaps a little slower.” All the same, she was pleased. “So tell me: what first made you think he was more than just a victim in all this?”

He couldn’t say, even to Hazel, “My dog remembered the taste of his trousers.” He improvised. “A few things. The fact that piracy in Somalia had been dropping off considerably, except in this one sector. Arms shipments originating in Britain. Why? If they could bully Graves into cooperating, they could do the same to someone in France or Germany. But they didn’t. They were interested only in shipments either from Bertrams or some other British company Graves was familiar with. That’s a lot of eggs to keep in one basket, when at any time Graves could have decided he’d had enough and gone to the police.

“And the attack on us, which we blamed on Saul Sperrin until we found out there was no such person, came just a few days after I’d been to see him. I must have seemed like more of a threat to the operation than I realized.”

“You think it was Graves who ran us off the road?”

Ash nodded. “A hired hit man would have done a better job and we wouldn’t be here talking about it. It was amateurish. He ran us into a ditch and came to finish the job with a shotgun, but he got off only one shot before Patience took a chunk out of his backside and he ran. No one with a reputation to protect would have been put off that easily.”

“So why not hire a hit man?”

“Because these things take time to arrange, and he thought he was running out of time. He thought he could salvage the situation if he moved quickly enough. I think, when I left his office, he followed us to your father’s house. But it was a few days before he could get us in circumstances where he felt able to deal with us. Well, me really—you were just collateral damage.”

“Gabriel”—she sighed—“you do say the sweetest things.”

He gave a wry chuckle. “Yes. Sorry.”

“And then”—if he wasn’t going to bring it up, Hazel had to—“there was the massive coincidence of him and your wife.”

Ash’s eyes flared, but he said nothing. Hazel winced inwardly; she could have put that better. She hastened to explain. “What were the odds that the man you were questioning was the same man Cathy’s abductors had chosen to put in contact with her? If we hadn’t been so stunned, we’d have wondered the moment her face came up on his screen. The pirates took several shipments off Graves. If they’d wanted his assistance, why not keep one of the aircrew flying his cargo—someone he’d sent into danger? That was the way to pull
his
strings. Why assume he’d sacrifice his integrity for a woman he’d never met, someone he owed nothing to? He had to be part of the conspiracy. Gabriel, he wasn’t just doing the pirates’ bidding. He’s one of them.”

“You think…” It was odd that his voice should falter and fail like that. These were exactly the thoughts he’d been wrestling with, hammering out, for days. They were exactly the conclusions he’d reached. But somehow, hearing them on someone else’s lips invested them with a reality they had not had until now. He swallowed and tried again. “You think Stephen Graves kidnapped my wife and sons?”

“I don’t know.” It was the honest truth; Hazel owed him that. “It may not have been his decision. But I’m guessing he was, or became, a party to it.”

Ash took refuge from the burgeoning fury in the place where he always felt at home, the realm of pure reason. “Graves must have known that if I took up the case again, he’d be the first person I’d want to talk to. He had contingency plans ready to go as soon as I showed my face. He must have been on our trail before we got out of the goddamned car park!” He wasn’t a man who swore routinely. But there are times when the Queen’s English just doesn’t cut the mustard.

Hazel ran the action across the editing screen of her mind’s eye. “He followed us to Byrfield—he couldn’t have known that was where we were going. But once we were there, he knew from the baggage that we were going to stay a few days. So he had time to pick up a shotgun, come back, and wait for a chance to ambush us where there’d be no witnesses. In the middle of the night, on a rural road miles from anywhere. It could have been days before anyone found us.”

“But he failed. Thanks to Patience.”

For the first time in a while, Hazel smiled. “Thanks to Patience, we got away with a fender bender and a few bits of lead shot in places you wouldn’t show your maiden aunt. But he couldn’t leave it at that. He had to deal with you, once and for all. Even better, he’d get you to deal with yourself. Kill yourself. It was pretty smart. He didn’t need to take any more risks, he could do it all over the Internet—put you in contact with the pirates, let you see Cathy, tell you the price of her freedom. All it required was that you were a man who cared more for his wife and children than for his own life.

“It should have worked. His only mistake was to underestimate you. You a
re
that man, but you’re pretty smart, too. Well—on a good day. And you still have some useful contacts. You were able to make it look as if you were dead, without actually dying. Hell, Gabriel”—she still couldn’t keep the occasional surge of bitterness out of her voice—“of course they were convinced.
I
was.”

He couldn’t keep apologizing. “You wanted to know when I first suspected that Graves was more than just another victim. I suspected when I sent him to meet Cathy. I thought, even if I was right—especially if I was right—he was the best man for the job. But I wasn’t sure until now.”

Hazel knew a compliment when she heard one. She felt her cheeks warm and her skin glow. She felt a sudden impulse to lean forward and kiss him.

And that came as a shock. They didn’t have that kind of relationship. She’d started off feeling sorry for this strange, diffident, damaged man. Over a period of months that had mutated into a genuine friendship, deep and abiding, strong enough to survive all the other times she’d been angry with him.

But she had other friends, including other men friends. Pete Byrfield was one; another was the spiky archaeologist David Sperrin; until she’d turned their cozy little world upside down, she’d have counted a number of colleagues at Meadowvale Police Station. But she hadn’t felt the same way about any of them as she’d come to feel about Ash.

But she wasn’t falling in love with a married man: she could never have looked herself in the eye again. And feelings, she reminded herself sternly, are an unreliable informant. They wax and wane; sometimes they feel like they’ll endure forever, only to peter out by the end of the week. No one is responsible for their feelings, but they are responsible for what they do about them, and Hazel Best was far too sensible to trade her self-respect for a feeling she hadn’t had last time she checked and wouldn’t have again at some point in the near future. It was a phantasm, born of shared dangers and shared triumphs. What she had with Gabriel Ash was precious, but it wasn’t what he had with his wife and what Hazel would one day have with the father of her children.

She cleared her throat as nonchalantly as she could manage. “Okay. So Stephen Graves wasn’t just the hapless tool of ruthless men somewhere in Africa: he’s a co-conspirator. Except…”

Ash waited, then said, “What?”

“If he’s criminally involved, and you gave him a good reason to go to a part of Africa where he has friends and resources, why did he come back? He should have vanished with the rest of the pirates into the wilds of Somalia, not come back to a grilling from Counter Terrorism and the distinct possibility of charges.”

Ash frowned, scanning his internal hard drive for answers. But they wouldn’t come. Perhaps he was too emotionally involved. Or perhaps they were wrong about Graves. But he didn’t think so.

Hazel was saying, “I need to tell DI Gorman he should be talking to Mr. Graves.”

“He may have worked it out for himself,” said Ash. “On the other hand, he may not have all the information we have.”

Hazel was puzzled. “I told him everything that happened.”

Maybe, thought Ash, but I didn’t. He said aloud, “It’s not like being there. Something gets lost in the translation.”

“Then I’d better talk to him tonight. And you’d better call your boss.”

Hazel woke Dave Gorman, and got growled at for her pain. But she thought he understood the importance of what she was saying. Philip Welbeck answered Ash’s call as calmly as if he’d been expecting it. As if he’d been toying with the same idea himself. It was three in the morning before they finished. Hazel regarded Ash pensively, unsure how to put this without causing offense. “Gabriel—where are you sleeping these nights?”

Ash smiled. “Not under the viaduct, if that’s what you’re wondering. Laura Fry has a room above her office. She’s made me up a bed in there.”

Hazel felt herself bristle all over again. “And how long has Laura been in on the secret?”

“A couple of days longer than you have, that’s all. Philip Welbeck spirited me out of sight up a back corridor at Whitehall. But when Cathy and the boys came home…”

Hazel finished the sentence for him. “You wanted to be nearer to them. Have you been to see them?”

“No!” He said it so sharply, it had to be the truth.

“Even from a distance?”

Still the answer was no. “Too big a risk,” he said regretfully. “To the investigation. And, just possibly, to them. I don’t want someone taking potshots at them because I’ve been spotted lurking in the bushes behind Highfield Road.”

It was a wise precaution. But Ash’s sense of longing was palpable.

“Laura’s office overlooks the park,” said Hazel.

“Yes, it does.” He didn’t know where she was going this time.

“I’ll find an excuse to take them there. I’ll let Laura know when. It’s not much, but I’ll try to get you a glimpse of them. And I’ll take some photographs.”

Ash’s dark eyes brightened so abruptly, it had to be tears. “Thank you.”

CHAPTER 21

“Y
OU DID
WHAT?
”

A lot of things had changed in the last few months. One of them was Hazel Best. She would never have spoken like that to a senior officer when she first came to Meadowvale. Her parents had instilled good manners in her, and she’d reached her mid-twenties still believing that they cost nothing and improved everyone’s day. She continued to believe that, but she’d reached a point in her life where, if the world kept throwing bricks at her, she wasn’t going to keep replying with flowers. A soft word might turn away anger, but a baseball bat was more reliable.

Dave Gorman looked a little taken aback. “I sent him home,” he said again. “I talked to him yesterday. He denied having any greater involvement than we already know about. I sent him home and told him to stay handy. What else was I going to do? Right now I wouldn’t know what to charge him with even if I was sure we were going to charge him.”

Hazel breathed heavily, and reminded herself that DI Gorman hadn’t been there when she’d discussed Graves’s role with Ash. What now seemed so obvious to her was news to him. “Stephen Graves was not an innocent dupe in the kidnapping of Cathy Ash and her sons. He was involved. Maybe before the fact, maybe after it, but all the way up to his eyebrows. Get him back and charge him with conspiracy.”

“Hazel—er—Constable—um—Miss Best…” He didn’t even know what to call her. She
was
a probationary constable at Meadowvale, but not right now. Right now she was on sick leave. Right now she was here in her capacity as a concerned member of the public … wasn’t she? As the late Gabriel Ash’s friend, certainly. As someone who’d become involved in his family’s tragedy. And, just possibly, as someone who’d worked out who’d done what while Gorman himself was still floundering. That wasn’t his fault. Scotland Yard or Counter Terrorism Command or someone better qualified should be dealing with this. Dave Gorman was a small-town detective. He was a good small-town detective, but what he knew about Somali pirates you could put in your eye without rubbing. A month ago he’d thought such things happened in a world entirely disconnected from his world of burglars, drug dealers, teenagers armed with bread knives robbing corner shops, and the occasional, almost accidental murder, where one party was drunk enough to take a swing with a fire iron and the other was drunk enough to watch it come.

But it hadn’t been Hazel Best’s world, either. If she’d got up to speed in the time available, he should have done, too. He made a concerted effort to catch up. “Tell me again.”

She told him again. Honesty compelled her to add, “I can’t prove any of this. Not yet. But it’s the only thing that makes sense.”

Gorman was seeing her in a whole new light. “And you figured this out all by yourself?” He heard how patronizing that sounded, and had the grace to blush. “Sorry, that didn’t come out quite how I meant. I mean, that’s pretty impressive thinking, Hazel.”