Desperate Measures: A Mystery (30 page)

Ash knelt in the grass, with the afternoon sun beating down on his back and tears winking like crystal on his cheeks, and had no idea what to do next. They believed he was dead. Two months ago he’d believed
they
were dead. If he called to them, they wouldn’t know him. They hadn’t seen him for four years. They couldn’t have picked him out of a police lineup if two of the other men had been black and one had been a dwarf. If he approached them, they’d yell for their mother. If he tried to grab them and drag them to his car, they’d scream blue murder and fear him forever.

And he still wouldn’t have achieved what he’d come here for. Failure should have been a price worth paying for the safe return of his sons, but he wanted more. Needed more. Needed to hold them and take them home with him, but also to talk to Cathy and find out what had happened. Hazel’s theory didn’t explain everything. Ash was desperate to hear his wife say something that would make sense of what she’d done. That would justify letting him think he’d brought about the destruction of his family. Even hearing that she was in love with Stephen Graves would be something. No one is entirely responsible for the things they do for love. If she could tell him that she’d been overwhelmed by the strength of her feelings, that she’d wanted Graves to the exclusion of honor, decency, or any regard for the man with whom she’d spent the previous eight years, he could begin to forgive her. He would have killed for her; perhaps that was how she felt about Graves.

But she’d loved him once, Ash was sure of it. He needed to hear her say it; and then say that how she’d felt for him once, now she felt for someone else. Then he would take his sons and go home; and tomorrow he would tell the police everything he knew that might help bring Stephen Graves to justice. If Cathy, too, found herself gathered in by the long arm of the law, he would feel a twinge of regret, but his primary concern was to ensure the boys were safe and happy. It had taken him four years, but his job was done. A criminal enterprise that had hijacked millions of pounds’ worth of armaments and cost dozens of lives was broken. It was a major achievement. One day, perhaps, it would feel like it.

Down at the jetty, Gilbert grew bored with waiting to be noticed, still perfectly safe, meters from the water. He stood up and, with a last accusing glance at the boat, hands in pockets, walked up the grassy bank, scuffing his shoes.

Guy looked up as he passed. “Do you want to play zombies?”

“No.”

“Okay.” Untroubled, Guy went on playing with his bird’s skull, while Gilbert went on being displeased.

When he was perhaps fifty meters from the shore, he turned back and called out rebelliously but not quite loud enough to be heard from the boat, “Is this far enough from the water?” He took off his life jacket and threw it down on the grass.

Which is when he saw Ash.

One of the defining achievements of Western society in recent decades has been to make its children afraid of half the human race. The vast majority of children who come to harm do so at the hands of those they live with; but the notion of the strange man stalking the streets in search of children to carry off is one that every cherished girl and boy will be familiar with. In large parts of the civilized world it stops them from playing outside with friends until they’re almost old enough to marry and drive a car.

So the first emotion that Gabriel Ash saw flicker across his elder son’s face after four years—he’d been too far away at the park—was fear. He felt his heart breaking within him. He wanted to leap to his feet, reach for the boy, and clasp him tight against his chest—and he knew that if he tried, Gilbert would scream in terror and run from him. So he stayed where he was, kneeling in the grass, and a kind of desperate smile diverted the tears into the corners of his mouth.

When he didn’t move, the alarm in Gilbert’s eyes turned by degrees to puzzlement. The fine, dark brows gathered. He looked at Ash, then uncertainly back at the boat, and then at Ash again. He said, “I’ve seen you before.”

Ash nodded. “I used to know your mother. Years ago, when you were little.”

“Did you know my father, too?”

“Yes, I did.”

“He died,” said the boy, watching for the effect of this revelation. “While we were on holiday.”

“I heard that,” said Ash. He couldn’t think what else to say.

“We had to come back. We’d only just got there.”

“That must have been … difficult.”

“He was clever,” Gilbert said, waiting as if he expected to be contradicted. “My dad was.”

“Yes?”

“Clever, but not smart,” explained Gilbert. “That’s what my mum says.”

Ash bit his lip. “That sounds about right.”

“She’s down at the boat. My mum. Shall I call her?”

“In a minute.” He’d driven two hundred miles to see her, to ask her what had happened; now it turned out he didn’t want to talk to her at all, didn’t need to know. All he wanted was his sons, and they were right here, and if only he’d brought Hazel with him, she could have stayed with them while he told their mother he was assuming custody. He could just have taken them, of course, and left her to wonder in increasing panic what had become of them, but he wouldn’t have done that. He remembered too well how it felt.

Slowly, careful not to scare the boy, he climbed to his feet. “Will you do something for me, Gilbert? Will you keep an eye on Guy while I have a word with your mother?”

Gilbert Ash was at an age when his default position for anything asked of him was refusal. If Cathy had asked him to finish the last of the chocolate ice cream from the freezer, he’d have said no before realizing in horror what it was he was saying no to. For some reason, though, when the tall, stooping man he vaguely remembered asked him to look after his younger brother, he understood that it was important and he nodded. “All right.”

“Thank you.” Ash walked down the grassy bank and out onto the jetty. After a moment’s hesitation he stepped over the fenders onto the deck of the houseboat.

CHAPTER 33

C
ATHY WASN’T EXPECTING HIM.
Of course she wasn’t: she thought he was dead. She thought she’d seen him die. She wasn’t expecting anyone else, either, so she assumed the footsteps on the deck overhead meant the boys had finished playing and were hungry again. She raised her voice to carry up the companionway. “Supper’s in the oven. It’ll be ready in half an hour.”

There was no reply, but she heard the narrow double doors at the top of the steps fold back, and turned with the smile already on her face. “I told you, half an—”

That was when she saw him, sitting on the top step, his long legs bent, his arms folded on his knees, watching her.

The words turned to cinders in her mouth, the blood in her veins to ice. She couldn’t remember the sequence of muscular movements that would close her mouth. Her legs went weak under her, so that she had to clutch the edge of the table. All the color drained from her face.

For long moments she seriously entertained the possibility that he was an illusion. Possibly a ghost; possibly a phantasm dreamed up by a guilty portion of her brain to punish her. Cathy Ash was a rational woman, but it still seemed marginally less improbable than the actual physical presence of her late husband on her uncle Ernie’s boat.

Her bloodless lips moved. Breath came out, but still nothing recognizable as words.

“Hello, Cathy,” Ash said quietly.

Finally she managed to say, “You’re not dead.”

Ash barked an ironic little laugh. “Try to sound a bit more thrilled.”

“You shot yourself! So that the boys and I could come home. It was live on the Internet. I saw it!”

He shook his head. “Special effects. You remember Philip Welbeck? He always did have a taste for the dramatic.”

She couldn’t tear her eyes off his face. “You’re all right.”

Ash considered. “I wouldn’t go that far. I don’t think my therapist would go that far. Let’s say I’m better than I was. Sometimes I sleep.”

The initial shock was beginning to fade. Cathy felt her brain lurch with the effort to catch up. And, having caught up, to map her way out. She needed to know what he was going to do. And for that, she needed to know what he knew. Maybe little enough. It meant nothing that he’d found her here, only that he guessed this was where she would come. “You’ve seen the boys?”

“Yes.”

“They’re alive because of you. They’re here because of you. We all are.”

Ash breathed steadily for a moment. “Cathy—I know you haven’t been in Somalia. Or at least, only for long enough to be brought back.”

The quick clutch and declutch of gears as Cathy adjusted her strategy. “I’m not entirely sure where we’ve been.”

“No? I am. It was a nice apartment. No wonder you didn’t want to stay in my house.”

She could lie. She didn’t think she could lie well enough to convince him. Or she could tell him the truth. What would he do if she told him the truth? She wasn’t afraid that he’d hurt her. Would a half-truth serve?

“He threatened me. Stephen Graves. He was the brains behind the whole piracy business. You didn’t know that, did you, when you asked for his help? He used us as human shields. He threatened me, and he threatened the boys. I knew what you must be going through. I couldn’t find a way out.”

“Threatened you.” Impossible to tell if he believed her or not.

“You thought he was one of the pirates’ victims? No. That may be how he came in contact with them, but after that he was part of the organization. I think, to all intents and purposes, he ran it from his factory in Grantham. He fed them information about arms shipments they could hijack and what security measures had been taken. After you went to see him—the first time, five years ago—he knew you were smarter than the other people who’d questioned him. He realized you’d work it out, that he needed a hold over you. He picked us up off the street between home and the corner shop.”

“Picked you up. Kidnapped you?”

“
Yes!
What did you think, we met at a tea dance? I went out for milk, bread, and broccoli, and found myself in the back of a van with duct tape over my mouth!”

“Where did he take you?”

“I don’t know. The van drove for a couple of hours, then stopped. We were in a builder’s yard, something like that. They kept the boys in the van, took me into a kind of warehouse. That was when I met Graves.”

“What did he say?”

“That you were putting a profitable enterprise at risk. That I was going to help him get a bridle on you.”

“How?”

Cathy swallowed. She looked older than he remembered, and thinner, and there was a hardness that Ash didn’t recall, but she was still a beautiful woman. “He gave me a choice. He intended to keep the boys. They were his guarantee that you’d leave him alone. I could stay with them or go back to you. I’m sorry, Gabriel. I chose them.”

If she expected sympathy, she was disappointed. Instead he said, “But he didn’t take you to Somalia.”

“No. To the flat. We were watched all the time. I wasn’t allowed to talk to anyone. I kept thinking all I had to do was be patient, that my chance would come. That the men guarding us would get bored and careless, and we’d be out of there. But the right moment never came. They never got careless enough.”

“Never? Not in four years?”

She met his gaze without flinching. “Never. We were safe, we were even comfortable; life of a kind went on. I thought of you all the time. I knew what you’d be going through. There was nothing I could do without putting the boys in danger.”

“And the video call?”

“Graves turned up at the flat one day. He said to pack everything up, we were leaving. He took us back to the builder’s yard. He said you’d surfaced again, that he needed to put you back in your cage. If I refused to help, I’d never see the boys again.”

“So you said yes.”

Cathy hesitated. “I didn’t say no. I waited to see what he had in mind. Several days passed. Finally Graves said you’d found the Cambridge flat, and he’d fixed up a video link so I could talk to you. But I had to pretend I was in Somalia.”

“Did you know what he was proposing to do? The deal he was going to offer me?”

For the first time Cathy’s voice wavered. “No. I thought knowing we were alive would be enough to keep you in line. I only knew … when…” The sentence petered out.

“Did you watch?”

Her eyes dipped. “He made me. He said it was important, to both of us. That he needed to know it was done, and I needed to know why you’d done it. For us. The boys and me.”

“Then you flew out to Somalia, ready to come back to a hero’s welcome.”

Cathy nodded. “Graves had false papers for us.”

“And then you were back in England, and the boys were with you, and Graves was talking to CTC. Why didn’t you tell Detective Inspector Gorman everything that had happened?”

“I meant to. When I’d got my breath back.” She looked up at him, her eyes begging for his understanding. “I just couldn’t face any more questions. It’s why I came here. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing, I just needed to get away. I’d spent four years doing exactly what I was told, not daring to do anything else. I wanted to be somewhere I could do what I wanted for a while. No watchdogs, no police, not even your well-meaning little friend. Just me and the boys.”

“So Graves was never here.”

She looked surprised. “He doesn’t know about this place. How could he?”

“Only one way,” admitted Ash.

The silence opened like a pit between them. Ash did nothing to fill it. Finally Cathy whispered, “Is that what you’ve been thinking? That we were
lovers
? That I chose him over you, and that’s why I took the boys and let you think we were dead? Gabriel—
is that what you think of me?
”

It would have been seductively easy for him to deny it. To say of course not, she’d misunderstood, he was sorry, he loved her, he’d always loved her … But what if the Cathy he’d always loved was a myth? He needed to be sure more than he needed to be comforted.

“I don’t know what to think,” he said simply. “For four years I thought you were all dead. Now it turns out you were living in Cambridge. Stephen Graves threatened you, and you were so afraid that in four years you couldn’t find one opportunity to grab the boys and go to the police. That is what you’re telling me?”