Desperate Measures: A Mystery (20 page)

“If it’s right.”

“Whether it’s right or not. If it is, we’ll find the evidence once we look for it. But you need the theory first, and you got it, and I didn’t.”

The man was clearly discomfited. But there was no way Hazel could tell him she’d had help. She believed Ash’s secret would be safe with DI Gorman, who might not be one of CID’s greatest thinkers but was honest and reliable and to whose hands she would entrust any confidence that was hers. But this wasn’t, and she wasn’t free to share it. Nor would it have served any useful purpose. All she would achieve by telling him Ash was alive was to confuse him further.

She shrugged. “You’ve had other things to worry about. I’ve been thinking about nothing else, all day and most of the night, for three weeks.”

“Yes. Well, that isn’t great, either,” said Gorman. “For you, I mean. Leave it to me now, Hazel. I’ll haul Graves back in and we’ll find out how dirty he is. But you need to step back. Chill out. Go sit in the park or something.”

That reminded her. She gave him her most winning smile. “There’s something you can do for me, Dave. Call Cathy Ash and…”

*   *   *

Cathy had spent Monday morning at the shops. Of course she had, thought Hazel. For four years the only clothes she’d owned had been those she’d been kidnapped in and whatever her abductors had provided her with. Of course the first thing she’d want to do, after emerging from the exhaustion that followed the thrill of release, was hit the shops with a well-charged credit card.

She’d paid a visit to a hairdresser’s as well. They’d worked wonders with the ragged, sun-bleached crop she’d kept trimmed with a blunt pair of scissors and a scrap of mirror. All in all, she was barely recognizable as the woman Hazel had met off the plane from Addis Ababa.

Except perhaps in her eyes, which retained the look of a captive: self-contained, cautious, acutely aware, and giving nothing away; reflecting still the traits that had kept her alive through an experience that would have destroyed many people. What she’d been through couldn’t be cast off with her much-mended clothes; her soul wouldn’t be repaired by expert reshaping followed by a shampoo and a sachet of brightener. Only time, and plenty of it, would make inroads against the hurts and memories stacked behind her eyes.

But she greeted Hazel rather more warmly than the last time they’d met, so perhaps she was coming to terms with what had happened, no longer saw in every new face a fresh enemy.

“Come in,” she said, holding the front door wide, “let me make you a coffee. But I can’t be long. Mr. Gorman asked me to call at the police station again.”

“Yes, I know,” said Hazel, “he sent me to pick you up. I’ll look after the boys so you and the DI can talk in peace. We could go for a coffee afterward, if you like.”

“Oh—yes,” said Cathy, a shade uncertainly. But then, she’d rather lost the knack of social occasions as well. “Yes, that would be nice.”

As she drove them to Meadowvale, Ash’s sons arguing on the backseat over a plastic toy, Hazel said quietly, “There must be lots of things you want to know. Ask Dave Gorman. What he knows, he’ll tell you; what he doesn’t, he’ll try to find out. He’s a good guy. You can trust him.”

“I don’t want to be a nuisance,” Cathy said carefully.

“Don’t even think that way. It’s our job—the job of the police—to make things easier for you, not the other way around. If there’s anything worrying you…” That was stupid; kicking herself, she tried rephrasing it. “If there are particular things that are troubling you, that you need help or advice dealing with, Dave Gorman will want to know. If he can’t help you himself, he’ll find someone who can.”

“Everyone’s being very kind,” murmured Cathy. Then, after a longish pause: “There is one thing.”

“Tell me.”

“When will we be able to have a funeral? It’s nearly a month, and I don’t know what the delay is. It’s not like we don’t know how Gabriel died. But until we can lay him to rest, it’s as if we’re not really dealing with what happened. Not really acknowledging what he did for us. I suppose he’s in a chill cabinet somewhere. But it’s not dignified, and he’s been there long enough. We owe him a decent burial now.”

This the most Hazel had heard her speak. Cathy, too, seemed surprised by her passion: behind the fading tan, her color rose. “I’m sorry. I’m not doing this very well. I’ve spent four years too afraid to ask for anything I wasn’t given. But I don’t think Detective Inspector Gorman is going to beat me up for asking when I can bury my husband, is he?”

Hazel managed a little smile, though it was a close-run thing, because her heart was twisting inside her. She ached to do the one thing she absolutely must not do. “No, he isn’t. He’ll understand absolutely. I don’t know what the delay is, either,” she lied, “but he can make some phone calls and find out. I imagine it’s just that there are so many different agencies involved—police, Home Office, Foreign Office, the Ethiopian embassy.… But it has to be sorted out. You need to be able to move on with your life.”

“I’m not sure I want to move on with it,” said Cathy softly.

“No. But you need to.”

Hazel led the way to DI Gorman’s office, but she didn’t go in. She took each boy by a hand—the older one plainly resented it—and said, “I think we’ll wander over to the park while you’re busy. Ice creams all around?” The resentment mellowed a little. To Cathy she said, “Perhaps the inspector would get someone to bring you over when you’re finished.”

Dave Gorman nodded. Cathy, though, looked ready to object.

“I’ll look after them,” Hazel promised, and Gorman ushered Ash’s wife into his office.

Hazel parked beside the wrought-iron gates. The ice-cream van was already on-site, though it was barely midmorning. The boys demanded all the trimmings; Hazel threw caution to the wind and did the same. With sprinkles and flakes and chocolate sauce, it wasn’t so much an ice cream she came away with as a heart attack in a wafer cone.

They were already on the same side of the park as Laura Fry’s office. Hazel picked the house out from the long terrace of identical three-story buildings, looking for a face or movement at the top-floor window. She saw nothing. She knew better than to wonder if that meant he’d forgotten.

Feigning tiredness, she dropped onto a convenient bench. One facing the road, not into the park. Little Guy sat down obediently beside her, half hidden by his ice cream. The older boy, Gilbert, made a point of sitting down on the grass instead, half turned away from her. Hazel had no issues with that. It wasn’t her view of him that mattered.

Hazel looked for a neutral topic of conversation. “So how does it feel to be back home?”

“This isn’t our home,” Gilbert replied sternly. “We’re Londoners.”

Of course they were. They had both been born in Covent Garden; you couldn’t be more of a Londoner than that. “That’s right—I’d forgotten. But your dad was born in the house where you’re living now. He played in this park when he was a little boy.”

“We aren’t
living
here,” Gilbert said distinctly over his shoulder. “We’re
staying
here.”

“Well, I’m glad you are,” said Hazel gamely. “I’ve been wanting to meet you for a long time.”

“We’ve been to Africa,” piped up Guy, his face already a bandit’s mask of chocolate sauce.

Anyone with children of her own would have automatically attacked him with a handkerchief. Hazel, with no offspring and no siblings, had only her training to guide her, and Sergeant Mole had been strong on child protection and interviewing child witnesses but had had nothing to say on the subject of chocolate sauce.

“I know you have.” Hazel nodded encouragingly. “Did you see any lions?”

“Don’t be silly,” said Gilbert dismissively.

“I saw a lion once,” volunteered Guy.

“No, you didn’t,” said his brother.

“Yes I did,” insisted the younger boy. “It was in a cage.”

“Don’t listen to him,” snorted Gilbert, “he’s stupid.”

“
You’re
stupid!”

“Neither of you is stupid,” said Hazel pacifyingly. “A lion in a cage is still a lion.”

“It wasn’t
just
in a cage,” grumbled Gilbert in an undertone, “it was on the TV.”

Hazel glanced at her watch and wondered if DI Gorman would keep Cathy occupied for the full half hour he’d promised. She passed some time taking the photographs she had promised Ash.

In fact it was forty minutes before the area car dropped Cathy Ash at the park gates. Hazel rose immediately and waved her hand. “We’re over here.”

Cathy whipped out a tissue as Guy, spotting her, jumped down from the bench and trundled toward her with stump-legged determination. “Down the throat,” she reminded him mildly. “The ice cream’s meant to go down the throat, not all over the face.” His little round face emerged, grinning and unchastened, from the mop-up.

“What have you been talking about?” asked Cathy.

“Lions,” Hazel replied, “and whether seeing one on TV counts. Football, and whether you’re allowed to support Manchester United when you’ve never been to Manchester. Oh yes, and whether Superman could take Godzilla in a fair fight.”

Cathy laughed. “That’s my boys. That one in particular”—she indicated Gilbert with mock indignation—“will argue that black’s white rather than agree with anything anybody else says!”

“In that case,” countered Guy smugly, “I’m going to argue that white is black.”

“Sit down,” said Hazel, indicating the bench she’d risen from, “get your breath back. Had Mr. Gorman anything new to say?”

The women sat together. Cathy looked puzzled. “I’m not sure why he wanted to see me. He asked about Stephen Graves—how well did I know him, how much did I know about him, how and when did we meet.” Her voice hardened. “I’d have thought he’d be more interested in the men who abducted me and held me at gunpoint for four years.”

“That’s probably someone else’s job,” Hazel suggested. “What did you tell him?”

Cathy looked at her oddly. “Everything. Everything I could remember. Several months ago the pirates stuck a laptop in front of me and told me to talk to him. We’ve probably talked five or six times in total. I don’t know him. I didn’t know his full name until he came to meet me at the Ethiopian border four weeks ago.”

“How many of them?” Hazel heard herself interrogating the woman and stopped abruptly. “I’m sorry. I don’t suppose you want to talk about this any more than you have to.”

Cathy shrugged. “It doesn’t bother me. Not now. I’m not sure how many of them there were. I probably saw half a dozen at different times. But I was locked up in a room with no windows. I’ve no way of knowing how many there were who never got the job of bringing me food or taking me to the latrine.”

Hazel bit her lip. She knew she was prying where she had no right, where the memories were still too fresh and too painful. And then, she had only to be patient. When Ash was free to return to his family, he’d hear everything that had happened in all the detail his wife could furnish, and Hazel would get a digest then. If Ash had time for their friendship now that his family had returned home.

CHAPTER 22

W
HEN DI GORMAN SENT FOR STEPHEN GRAVES AGAIN,
the man had disappeared. He’d left his Grantham office to go home on Monday afternoon but he never got there, and his wife was bewildered and increasingly anxious. She’d been about to call the police when they arrived at her door.

“I take it somebody checked the flat in Cambridge,” Ash said to Hazel that night.

Of course they had. The porter had used his passkey, but no one had been in the flat since the scenes of crime officer wound up and left. Not Stephen Graves, and not the flat’s mystery tenant, Miss Carole Anderson.

“Has anyone ever actually met Miss Anderson?” Hazel asked, querulous with disappointment. “Or was she Stephen Graves in a dress and sun hat, setting up a bolt-hole under an assumed name?”

“I don’t know about the dress and the sun hat,” said Ash, pausing just long enough to picture it and smile. “There was certainly a woman living there until recently. But the paper trail doesn’t lead to anyone real. The ID documents she provided were forged.”

“When did she leave the flat?”

“About a month ago. At least, that’s when the porter saw her last. She didn’t say she was leaving, so he assumed she was on holiday or a business trip or something. But all her personal belongings were gone. Except the computer that Graves used to talk to the Somalis, and there was nothing on that to identify her, either.”

“Graves said she’d been abroad for months. That he was keeping an eye on the place for her.”

“He lied,” Ash said simply.

“I don’t suppose it was Mrs. Graves?” Her tone was more of hope than expectation. If Graves’s wife had been involved in the conspiracy, she might lead them to him. But Hazel wasn’t surprised when Ash shook his head.

“The porter looked at a photograph—he said they could hardly be more different. Mrs. Graves is older, shorter, and plumper.”

“Clever makeup and a cushion up her jumper?”

Ash grinned. “I’d like to think our highly trained professional police investigators would have noticed the cushion.”

“Who is she, then?”

Ash shrugged. “An associate? A girlfriend? Without even her real name to go on, she’ll probably be harder to find than Graves.”

“And he’s on his way back to Somalia by now. He’ll be safer there than anywhere else on earth. I still don’t know why he risked coming back to England when he could have just given Cathy her tickets and left her at the airport.” She drew a deep breath. “Gabriel—how long are you going to wait before you decide that he’s gone where you can’t follow and let Cathy know you’re still alive?”

Ash flicked her a haunted look. He was back on the sofa, the white dog’s long body draped across his knees. “I don’t know.”

“Somebody needs to make a decision on that, and sooner rather than later. If you went around there tonight and told her—don’t worry, I’m not suggesting you should—she’d be stunned, and then she’d be thrilled, and then she’d be angry with you for deceiving her.” Hazel knew this for a fact. “But if it drags on for another month, she may be so angry she’ll never forgive you. Don’t wait until she’s come to terms with your death and is making plans for the rest of her life.”