Desperate Measures: A Mystery (25 page)

But she didn’t think tact was called for now. Gabriel Ash was her friend, and if she thought about his misfortunes the tears could still spring to her eyes, but actually that wasn’t what he needed from her right now. Right now he needed to understand. He needed to know what she knew, everything that she knew, and grope his way toward an understanding of what it meant; and no amount of hearts and flowers would help him do that.

“That’s one possibility,” she said carefully. “I thought about it but, like you, I couldn’t imagine why. If the reason for separating them was to make Cathy more compliant, the boys needed to be close enough to be produced if the pirates wanted to reward her or needed to threaten her. And why risk sending them back to England, where even people who didn’t know them would want to help them?”

There wasn’t light enough to read his expression, but Hazel saw Ash’s head move as he looked up at her. “My God.” The bottom had fallen out of his voice. “You think … you think they were
all
in England, all along? For four years? That they were held somewhere near Cambridge, and Graves only
told
Cathy they were in Somalia? Is that even possible? Could he have maintained the deception that long?”

His thoughts were racing like a river in spate, tumbling over one another in their urgency, bouncing off the sides in a welter of foam. It was theoretically possible. If she’d been kept in a closed room, with minimal access to the outside, it might have been possible to exclude any clues that what she’d been told wasn’t right. Guards who could pass for Somalis. A basic block-built structure with no view to anything green. Four years’ captivity would have involved three English winters—to keep the illusion going, the electricity bill would have been horrendous.…

“What about the computer?” he asked breathlessly. “Why didn’t we realize the transmission was coming not from four thousand miles away, but from just around the corner?”

Hazel sighed. “Because we saw what we’d been told we were going to see: a frightened woman in a pirate camp in Somalia. Actually, we saw almost nothing—a bare room. But there was nothing to tell us it
couldn’t
be Somalia, and at that point we didn’t know Graves was an unreliable witness. We thought that, however questionable his actions, he was telling the truth. Plus, you can route computer communications through different hubs to make it hard even for experts to trace their origins. Just from looking at the screen for a few minutes, nobody would have known.”

“They were here all along? In England? A couple of hours away?”

“I think so, yes.”

“She was never more than a few minutes from help, and she didn’t know?” Ash’s voice cracked again on the tragedy of it.

Hazel steeled herself. It was now or never. “Unless she
did
know.”

The silence stretched till it groaned. Hazel could feel it like static on her skin.
Say something,
she begged in the haven of her own skull.
Say something, say something, say something …

Ash didn’t ask her to say it again, because he’d heard the first time. He didn’t ask her to explain, because her meaning was clear. He said nothing, because, until he knew what was going to come out when he opened his mouth, it wasn’t safe to. Instead he reached for the torch and, still without a word, turned it on Hazel’s face.

She went to raise a hand in front of her eyes. But she stopped herself, let him see her blinking in the beam. The gentle glow that had made this conversation easier for her had deprived him of information he needed. How her interpretation of these events was reflected in her expression. If she believed it. If she knew how much she was hurting him.

For a long moment Hazel let him take in whatever it was he needed to see. Then she said quietly, “I’m not making this up. When you’re ready for the science bit, you can study the report.” She took the sheets out of her pocket, unfolded them, and put them beside him on the bed. “You can talk to the laboratory that did the analysis. I have. I asked how sure they were. They said there’s always a margin for error in any analytical process. I asked how big, they said not very big at all. I asked if they could mean Somalia when they said Cambridgeshire, and when they stopped laughing they said no, an error that big wouldn’t be in the margin, it would be all over the page.

“They were sure, Gabriel. They’re sure enough about the procedure that the prospect of someone going to prison on the strength of it doesn’t give them sleepless nights. Almost all the time your sons were missing, they were in England.

“And it makes no sense that they would be in England while Cathy was in Somalia. So either the pirates managed to deceive her for four years—
and
smuggle her out there in time to be met by Graves and the British consul, still without her realizing—or she was lying.”

From behind the torch Ash’s voice rasped like fingernails on a comb. “If people were pointing guns at you, you’d say anything they wanted, too.”

“I probably would,” Hazel agreed. “Until I was where they couldn’t hurt me anymore, at which point I’d want to put the record straight. Because nobody, not even my husband, would have a better motive for seeing the bastards found. Any information that I had, that I thought I had or that I even thought I might have, I’d want to put in the hands of someone who could use it.

“Cathy’s had that chance several times over. She’s been here in Norbold for a month. Her sons are safe. She’s talked to your boss, the guys from CTC, and Dave Gorman. If she’d said something under duress that might be misleading them, she’s had every opportunity to put it right. She hasn’t taken it.”

“Then she didn’t know.” Ash’s voice was so thick it was almost incomprehensible.

“That’s one explanation,” said Hazel levelly.

He didn’t want to ask. He didn’t want to say it, and he didn’t want to hear her answer. But in the end he had to. “What other explanation is there?”

She pitied the man with all her heart. She’d have given anything to save him this. But some quirk of intuition had set her on a train of thought that no one else had thought to travel, with the result that she’d seen things that more experienced investigators hadn’t. If there had been any doubt in her mind, she’d have been talking to those investigators now, not to Ash. But there wasn’t. She didn’t like the answer she’d come up with. She didn’t expect him to like it, either; probably his first instinct would be to shoot the messenger. It didn’t have to matter. Unless she’d gone horribly astray, this was something they had to deal with.

“That she was part of the conspiracy.”

CHAPTER 28

S
OMETIMES HAZEL ACTED ON IMPULSE,
seizing the surge of the tide and trusting that intuition and goodwill would see her through. At other times, though, she planned her moves meticulously, working through all the possible combinations—of what might happen, how people might react, what she should do and say next—in the hope of being able to respond effectively whatever turn events should take.

Before coming here she’d considered all the ways this moment might play out. The arguments Ash might marshal to confound her. The clever, tortuous ways he might find to avoid the unbearable fact that the wife whose loss he had mourned to the brink of madness had betrayed him. That she’d been living comfortably in a smart Cambridge apartment paid for by her lover while Ash crucified himself.

Hazel had thought he would hear her out until he realized what it was she was actually suggesting. But then all her calculations failed, like the math of physicists trying to map the Big Bang. The closer she got to the moment of truth, the more her predictions broke down, the wilder the extremes to which small variations on the theme might fling her. He might listen in silence, allowing the professional part of his brain to work the problem and come, however reluctantly, to the same conclusion. He might shout and throw things. There was every chance, Hazel thought, that his fragile recovery might implode, leaving him weeping uncontrollably while she hunted desperately for Laura Fry’s home number.

There was also the possibility that he might hit her.

There was nothing delicate about Hazel Best. Much of her childhood had been spent in the country, helping to move bullocks and falling off ponies. She had embarked on her career as a police officer knowing that intermittent acts of violence came with the badge. You didn’t go looking for fights, but sometimes they were unavoidable. You watched your back, and those of your colleagues, and they watched out for you, but still sometimes a situation got out of hand.

Hazel had been struck before and expected to be struck again—by drunks, by thugs, and by otherwise decent people in the throes of hysterics. She had been hit with fists, with weapons—she’d done a short posting in a district of Liverpool famous for its sales of baseball bats despite its having no baseball team—and once with an artificial leg. It was inevitable, and if you couldn’t deal with it you couldn’t do the job. But she also knew that if Gabriel Ash struck her now, their friendship would be over.

Not because she wouldn’t forgive him. She understood how much he’d been through, and how much more she’d just dumped on top of him. If he couldn’t handle it without momentarily losing control, she could understand that, too. Ash was the one who would never forgive. Hitting her would put him on the wrong side of a Rubicon there would be no returning over, regardless of whether her theory was ultimately proved right or wrong. The last four years hadn’t left him with much in the way of pride. But whatever the provocation, raising his hand to a young woman who was trying to help him would leave him with none.

If the room had been bigger she’d have stepped out of reach. But her back was already against the door, and she was damned if she was going to open it and retreat to the landing as if she was afraid of him. She’d seen things that he hadn’t because her emotions were not involved in the same way. She’d told him because he needed to know. Whatever he did next, this dim attic, in the quiet of the night, with only the two of them present, was the best place to deal with it.

He didn’t hit her. It was impossible to tell, from what she could see of his expression, whether he had mastered the urge or never felt it. But his eyes burned like coals in the backwash of the torch, and the August night seemed to grow hotter with the fever in his skin.

Finally he said, in a voice that was more breath than sound, “Perhaps you should leave now.”

Hazel shook a stubborn head. Some of the corn-colored hair, escaping from the bunch she gathered it in, danced around her face. “No, Gabriel. Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me you know Cathy better than I do and there has to be another explanation. Or tell me you don’t care who did what, you don’t want to know who did what, all that matters is that your family is safe. But don’t tell me to go away and stop bothering you. You don’t owe me much, my friend, but you owe me better than that.”

Some things command respect. The hunted animal, too tired to run any farther, that turns at bay in order to go down fighting. The mother defending her young with a ferocity she could not muster to defend herself. And Hazel Best, who didn’t need to be here, who could have turned over her findings to her friends in CID, secure in the knowledge that, whatever they discovered about Cathy Ash’s involvement, her husband would never have to know where the suspicion had originated.

Though Ash was appalled by what she was proposing, a fragment of his mind that had managed to remain objective was able to admire that. The way she would always do what she thought was right rather than what she knew was easy. In the short time he’d known her, it had got her into endless trouble. She’d been proved right more often than not, but even that wasn’t the point. The point was, it took guts to do the unpopular thing, and he’d never known anyone with more.

But what she was saying was untenable. He literally could not entertain the idea that, in a war against criminals who put a cash value on people’s lives, his wife had taken their side, not his. It couldn’t be true. He knew it in his heart, in his bones. Whatever she’d done had been forced on her.

What had she done?

He swallowed. “You’re wrong. You have to be wrong.”

Hazel kept her voice steady. “I may be wrong about some of it. But there are things that I’m sure of, facts I can prove, and other things that I can’t explain any other way.”

That stirred him to a little last-ditch passion. Anger was a curd on his tongue. “You’re infallible now? There’s always another explanation. Have you put any of this to Cathy?” Hazel shook her head. “Of course not. If you had—if you’d talked to her instead of pestering me with your fantasies—you’d know how utterly, stupidly wrong you are. Cathy is an innocent victim. She was kidnapped and held prisoner for four years. For four years she thought every day could be her last.”

Hazel didn’t flinch from his machine-gun fury. “I don’t think she did. I think she helped Graves to keep you out of commission. I don’t know why she did it, but I think that’s what she did.” There were, Hazel knew, only three possible reasons—fear, love, and money—but she didn’t need to tell Ash that right now. Not when she’d already dismissed the first.

“But it’s absurd!” He was saved from a complete loss of control, and things he might have said that would have brought this conversation crashing to a halt, by the genuine belief that she had misread the situation. “How would Cathy even know Graves, much less know he was involved? I didn’t. None of us did.”

“But
he
did,” said Hazel. She could feel herself shaking inside now, wondered if Ash could hear it in her voice. “You’d interviewed him a couple of times by then. He knew you were closer to the truth than you did. He made inquiries about you, and they took him to Cathy.”

“And he kidnapped her,” insisted Ash.

“It’s possible he did.” Hazel nodded. “In the first instance. But then he made her an offer she didn’t feel she could refuse: Join us, or you and your boys will be in Somalia by the end of the week.”

“She’d have said yes,” conceded Ash, his voice low. “Anybody would.”