Desperate Measures: A Mystery (29 page)

That was the point at which Hazel thought she could do some good. If Graves was there, he would be arrested; if Cathy was there, she, too, would be arrested; and that would leave Ash—if he’d found them—stunned, bereft, unable to begin the process of getting himself and his sons home. Hazel wanted to be at his side, to help him do what needed doing and then to bring him home.

For the same reason, she collected Patience before hitting the motorway. She knew Ash well enough to suspect that, if she found him in a state of fugue, he might take more comfort in his dog’s presence than in hers. Plus it meant that, at least technically, Hazel hadn’t lied to DI Gorman.

It was a good road but still a long way. At least most of the traffic was heading south by now, a ribbon of headlights streaming toward her through the night, a trail of taillights in her mirror. It was gone midnight before road signs directing her to the North had given way to more specific destinations like Kendal, Windermere, and Keswick. And she still didn’t know where she was going.

Help came, a little before dawn, in the shape of a fat man with a straw in his mouth, carrying a pitchfork, with the words emblazoned across his ample belly:
THE LITTLE FARMER—ALL DAY BREAKFASTS, ALL NIGHT SNACKS.
Hazel swung off the motorway where the pitchfork pointed and pulled up in front of the diner. There were three big trucks in the parking lot but no customers at the tables inside.

She climbed out stiffly, easing her cramped limbs while Patience disappeared discreetly around the back of the car. When she returned, Hazel settled her on the backseat. “I’ll get you something to eat, okay?” The dog blinked, almost as if she were nodding.

The Little Farmer was true to its advertising: it was still open, though the chef was asleep over the counter and the bell tinkling over his door didn’t wake him. Hazel cleared her throat robustly and he looked up in momentary alarm. Then he remembered where he was and yawned. “What can I get you?”

“Sausage, bacon, and egg,” said Hazel. “Twice—once in a bowl for my dog. Another bowl of water, and a pot of tea.”

The chef didn’t even look surprised. The food arrived promptly. Patience disposed of hers, and Hazel went back inside to spend a little longer over her own meal. She ate at the counter, keeping the lonely chef company. Over her second cup of tea she produced the photographs. “Any idea where that is?”

He’d nothing better to do, wouldn’t have for another hour or more. He studied the pictures. “Looks vaguely familiar.” He groped under the counter, came up with a handful of guidebooks. “Hang on, hang on.… No, that’s not the one.… Windermere, Coniston Water … Ullswater. There we are.” He turned the book so she could see. “Isn’t that it, up on the hill? Sedgemere House.”

He was right. It was. The angle was different, the photograph taken from farther along the lake, but the house was recognizably the same, even to the jetty below it. And at the time that the photograph was taken—Hazel checked the copyright date, which was only two years earlier—the little houseboat was still moored there. Her heart quickened. Maybe it was still there today. Maybe the goose she’d been chasing wasn’t so wild after all.

She bought the guidebook from him. It seemed the least she could do. At the back she found maps to all the tourist attractions. Sedgemere House was marked as open for prearranged tours only, but that didn’t matter. All she needed was its location, on the hillside above the long finger of Ullswater, the roads that would take her there, and the lane—a mere scratch on the map—that would take her down to the jetty.

Now Hazel had a dilemma. She wanted to call DI Gorman, tell him she’d found the house in the picture, and ask him to send the cavalry. But if she did that, he’d know she’d gone against … not his orders—he probably wasn’t in a position to give her orders—but his express wishes. He had her mobile number; she thought he’d call when he got an answer to his fax, and the circumspect thing might be to wait for that call. But Ash could be in trouble now, needing her now, and even Dave Gorman wasn’t likely to be in his office before seven in the morning. So either she wasted two hours doing nothing but keeping on his good side or she made her way to Ullswater and found the road to Sedgemere House and the lane—track, rather—down to the jetty, and then …

Well, one of only two things, actually. She could proceed with caution down to the lakeside, see if the houseboat was still there, and if it was, who, if anyone, was on it. But that would put her in danger and anger DI Gorman. The alternative was to wait, handy but out of sight, for Gorman’s call. That would be the sensible thing to do, and Hazel had always prided herself on her common sense.

The rising sun found her driving west into the northern Lakes, wilder and less fashionable than their southern cousins. Since leaving the motorway, she found the roads oddly quiet for the Lake District in summer. But of course it was barely six o’clock. All the tourists were still in their beds and the first of the day’s Cumberland sausages had yet to hit the frying pan. She followed the map, looking first for the road that would take her down the southern shore of Ullswater, then for the laneway to Sedgemere House. Somewhere along that lane, the jetty should come into view. She guessed wrong at the first attempt and ended up in someone’s farmyard, with his dairy herd coming the other way, but her second guess was better. The lake, which had been playing hide-and-seek with her for the last mile, reappeared in front of her. A moment later, she glimpsed the side of the house through a screen of conifers, then the end of the jetty, finally the little houseboat snugged in close to the shore.

Somehow it managed to come as a surprise. As if she’d never really expected to find it; as if there was some doubt in her mind that it even existed. But there it was, a small, squarish white boat with touches of blue about it, tied fore and aft to the old black timbers of the jetty. There was no one in sight, either at the boat or anywhere around, but there was a car parked halfway down the track. A big gray car in the style of an earlier decade.

“He’s here,” whispered Hazel.

Patience thought so, too. The dog tugged excitedly at her seat belt, whining under her breath.

Despite her sense of urgency, Hazel forced herself to be cautious. She quietly backed away, until the jetty disappeared once more from sight. Then she got out and walked forward in order to study the scene without being noticed.

There was just the one car, Ash’s mother’s Volvo, and nowhere another could have been concealed. Either Ash had found the boat deserted or whoever had got here first had already left. Hazel let out her pent-up breath in real relief. She knew she couldn’t deal with Stephen Graves, but she’d have died of anxiety waiting for those who could.

But surely Ash’s car meant he was the only one there now. It was probably safe to approach. Even so, Hazel saw no reason not to cover her back. She called DI Gorman’s mobile number.

The man might not have gone off duty before midnight. This might be his wake-up call. It couldn’t be helped. She had to tell him that she’d found Ash and where they were. Once he’d finished shouting, he’d send someone from the local constabulary to meet them.

Gorman answered eventually. He didn’t sound as if she’d disturbed his sleep. He sounded as if she’d disturbed him while he was brushing his teeth.

He listened more than he talked; even so, he couldn’t contain the occasional exclamation—of surprise, of dismay, of downright disbelief. He took down the directions she gave him. Finally he said darkly, “We’ll talk about this later. For now, stay put and wait for backup.”

“I’m going down to the boat,” she said. “There’s no danger. Gabriel’s on his own.”

“Wait for the area car! You don’t know what you’ll find down there.” But she was already gone.

It wasn’t there now, but there had been another car. Beside the jetty was an area of flattened grass with tire treads and the distinctive marks of a woman’s shoes pressed into the damp earth. Even in summer, the ground never dries out for long in the Lake District.

Hazel had walked down the grassy slope, at a tangent to the stony track that curved around to the jetty. Arriving at the water’s edge, she sidestepped the parking area to preserve the evidence, but then she hesitated. Gorman was right: she didn’t know what she’d find on the boat. She was assuming that Ash was here alone. But that, she now realized, could be a bad mistake. If Graves had finally managed to kill him, he might have taken the body away for disposal where some canoeist wasn’t going to snag it with his paddle, and have every intention of returning when he had. Perhaps she should wait.…

The decision was taken out of her hands. She’d left Patience in her car, tethered by the seat belt, with the window open for ventilation. But somehow the dog had freed herself, and now she trotted past Hazel with her nose high, scenting the air. Hazel called her name sotto voce, but the lurcher ignored her, continued out onto the jetty. When she reached the boat, she let out a single high-pitched bark.

And since that put paid to the option of covert surveillance, Hazel followed. With the element of surprise gone, it was important to take control of the situation before anyone had time to react.

Of course, it shouldn’t have been a solitary probationary constable on sick leave attempting to take control. Hazel knew that well enough. But she was the one here. Help was on its way, but it hadn’t come yet, the dog had given away her presence, and there was still the chance that Ash was in the kind of trouble that couldn’t wait. On balance, therefore, Hazel thought it better to board the boat immediately and establish who was there and what they were doing, and hope that when the area car from the nearest police station turned into the lane, it would have its siren wailing for all to hear.

She fixed Patience with a steely eye. “You and I are going to have words when this is over.”

The dog didn’t move. Her hackles were up, and a low growl was purring in her throat. Hazel reached for a stanchion and swung herself onto the deck.

By now she could smell it, too: the sickly sweet scent of blood. The smell of something very wrong. Her heart sank. She’d half expected the thing to end in anticlimax—Ash here alone, any others who had been here long gone, leaving her to make complicated explanations to the local lads currently speeding through the country lanes with their blues-and-twos going. But it wasn’t going to be like that. A lot of blood has to have been spilled before you can smell it, enough that whoever lost it needs help. At least it removed the last argument for doing nothing. She reached for the companionway and stepped inside.

What greeted her made her jaw drop and her eyes widen in shock. She stayed frozen on the steep wooden steps, her vision adjusting to the dimness of the cabin, knowing she made an easy target for anyone in the mood for more violence but momentarily quite unable to move.

When the tightness in her chest reminded her to breathe, she sucked in a great lungful of air that loosened the stricture in her throat. Even so, her voice didn’t sound remotely like her own. “God in heaven, Gabriel,” she gasped, “what have you
done
?”

CHAPTER 32

I
T WAS AFTERNOON BEFORE ASH LEFT THE MOTORWAY.
The traffic had been horrendous; it wasn’t much lighter now, and the road was less capable of dealing with it. But speed wasn’t an issue. No one was waiting for him at the houseboat. Perhaps no one was there at all.

He hadn’t thought to bring a map, was relying on memory alone to find the place. He’d done the journey four or five times, most recently some six years ago, and each time Cathy had been beside him, guiding him. She’d been coming here since childhood, had learned to swim in the cold waters of the lake, knew every sheep trod within a five-mile radius.

Bringing him here for the first time had been like giving him a present wrapped in rainbows. She had loved him then. When had she stopped? When he took her to London? But she loved London, too, quickly surrounded herself with a network of interesting and attentive friends. She loved the fact that if the days weren’t long enough to see what the capital had to offer, it all went on into the night as well. That couldn’t be what he’d done wrong. He hadn’t forced her to relocate to London, and by the time they’d been there a month, it fitted Cathy like a second skin. London wasn’t the reason she’d come to hate him.

Ash made a couple of false turns and had to retrace his route. Every time he turned off a major road onto a minor one, the traffic thinned abruptly, so that he had the last length of laneway to himself. The lake, which had sat at his shoulder for several miles, had slipped from sight before he made the final turn; now he breasted a little rise in the lane and the sapphire length of it was spread out to the right and left of him, brilliant in the sunshine. He remembered that heart-stopping moment from every time he’d been here. The beauty of it never faded.

When the jetty came into sight, he stopped the car and parked in a gateway. It seemed wiser to go the rest of the way on foot. That may have been a mistake. Nothing that anyone on the houseboat could do in the few moments between hearing a car and its arrival was as important as having the means of a speedy departure close at hand.

But he chose to walk down the last few hundred meters of track, and the decision earned him a prize he would not otherwise have had: the sight of his sons playing unawares beside the lake. Ash caught his breath. Then he sank slowly onto his knees to watch them unobserved.

With the water so close, Cathy had made them wear life jackets. Gilbert was old enough to resent being treated like a baby; sullenness radiated from him like heat from a smoldering fire. He sat on the landward end of the jetty, bare legs dangling over the grass, casting indignant glances toward the boat to see if his mother was feeling silly yet.

Two years younger, and with a sunnier disposition, Guy didn’t care if the life jackets were necessary. The sun was shining, the water was sparkling, they were living on a boat, and he’d found a bird’s skull polished white by the weather. What radiated from him was the sheer joy of being six years old and without a care in the world.