Desperate Measures: A Mystery (31 page)

She nodded guardedly.

“I don’t believe you,” said Ash.

Another long, painful pause. Cathy propped one hip on the corner of the table and crossed her arms. When Ash looked at her, he saw two people: the woman he loved and had married and held sacred in his heart all through the broken years, hiding in the shadows behind the older, stronger woman who felt like a stranger. Of course she was older; they were both older. He wanted to love her again. He wanted to believe her. But not quite enough to lie to himself. To tell himself that the story he was hearing made sense.

Cathy said quietly, “I’ve told you what happened, Gabriel. I can’t make you believe it.”

They regarded each other across the tiny expanse of the houseboat’s saloon. Four years of tragedy compressed into a space two meters by three. No wonder the air felt electric, as if a storm was imminent.

Finally Ash said, “No. There’s something you’re not telling me. You know I’ll find out. You know this is what I do. You might as well tell me now.”

She shook her head. Her eyes held him, unwavering. “You’re wrong. It wasn’t complicated, it was simple. I believed that our lives were in constant danger. I did what I had to do to keep us alive. I’m sorry if you think I should have handled it better. But I was catapulted into a situation I had no way of dealing with, and Graves created that situation but you bear some responsibility, too.” There was a note of accusation like acid in her voice. “Your work is why Stephen Graves tore our lives apart. Your precious work. None of it would have happened if you’d known when to back off; if you hadn’t been so goddamned
dedicated
!”

“You blame me.” His voice was like a scratchy chalk. “Do you think I don’t blame myself? That I haven’t
been
blaming myself every minute of the last four years? Do you think I haven’t regretted the things I did, the things I didn’t do? I’m sorry to the bottom of my soul for what happened. I’m sorry I was a better security analyst than I was a husband. Whatever you did in consequence, the one who let us down was me. I know it, and I will always regret it.

“But what you’re telling me doesn’t add up. However afraid you were, you didn’t live in a nice apartment in Cambridge for four years without getting a chance to raise the alarm. So maybe you weren’t looking for one. Maybe you didn’t want a way out. Cathy, be honest with me. Were you in love with Stephen Graves? Is that what kept you there? It was an apartment building, not a prison—you could have knocked on any door and had help in minutes. But something stopped you. Was that it? You didn’t take the first opportunity to get away from Graves because you didn’t want to?”

Ash’s dark eyes searched hers till Cathy broke away with a dismissive shrug. “I’ve told you all there is to know. It’s easy to look at someone else’s dilemma and think you’d have handled it better. Maybe you would have, Gabriel. I’m not saying I have much to be proud of. Except that I survived, and so did our sons. Maybe, if I’d been braver, we wouldn’t have done.”

He shook his head slowly. “You were always brave. From the moment I met you. You took London by the throat while I was still wiping my feet on the doormat. No one ever succeeded in making you do anything you didn’t want to.”

“They had guns!”

“But I don’t think they were pointing them at you for four years. So there was something else. A reason to live as the cooperative Ms. Anderson, and not run for help when the chance arose, and to tell the story Graves needed you to even after you were released.

“Oh dear God!” Understanding hit him like a train, breaking him in a million pieces. His lips went to parchment, dry and pale, his limbs to water. His fists clenched, white-knuckled, on the handrails on either side of the companionway. “Oh Cathy. Please … please tell me it wasn’t money. Tell me it wasn’t as simple as
that.
Graves offered to cut you in on the deal, and you bit his hand off?”

CHAPTER 34

T
HIS WHOLE CONVERSATION HAD BEEN PUNCTUATED
by awkward silences. Where one or the other of them had stopped breathing for a moment, waiting to see which way the fish was going to jump, and if it was going to pull the angler into the river. Some had gone on almost too long to bear. Long enough that the gritted teeth started to pain the jaw, that the skin crawled with electricity, that the unblinking eye itched like a burn.

None of them, Ash now discovered, had been in any way meaningful beside this one. This was like the world holding its breath. Every muscle in his body clenched tight as he waited for her response. At first he waited for her to gasp and for tears to spring to her eyes, but the moment for that passed. Then he waited for her to slap his face, all the power of her hurt and anger behind the blow, but the moment for that passed, too. Finally he was waiting for her to speak—to marshal words adequate to the occasion, in the low, precise voice of bridled fury, and furnish an explanation that would fill him with remorse and regret and infinite relief.

But the moment for that passed, too. After that, he didn’t know what he was waiting for. Cathy wasn’t avoiding his gaze anymore; she was returning it, level, calculating. Waiting for him to blink first. Waiting for him to rush out an apology she could take her time about accepting. And it took all the strength Ash owned to keep from withdrawing the accusation, even though she hadn’t bothered to deny it.

Finally, incredibly, she chuckled. “Oh Gabriel,” she said, and the amusement in her voice was quite unfeigned, “when did you become such an insufferable prig?

“No, really,” she persisted, seeing his stricken expression and tempering her assault not at all. “You weren’t always this boring. Or maybe you were and I was too young to notice. I was only twenty-five when we married. It didn’t seem that young at the time. Looking back, it seems much more than twelve years ago.

“And you were clever. I knew that the first time we met. I think I was a little seduced by it. I thought it would be a fine thing to marry a clever man. But then, I thought you’d do rather more with it than jockey a desk and add up columns of figures all day. I know it was important, but it’s not exactly
sexy,
is it? Not the sort of thing a girl can boast to her friends about. ‘And guess what he did
this
week? He figured out that the Lithuanians were
giving
more for the gas than the Estonians were
charging
for it! What do you think about that, then?’”

Now she was waiting for him to answer. And she had to wait almost as long before he managed to say, “We were happy. I know we were happy.”

“Gabriel, we
were
happy,” Cathy agreed, as if handing him a consolation prize. “For a time. Until I started to realize just how much I was missing, being married to a man who was born middle-aged.

“It was London that did it,” she reflected. “That was the big mistake. If we’d stayed in the Midlands—if, God help us, we’d settled in Norbold—maybe I’d have been satisfied with you for the rest of my days.”

“You loved London!” Ash protested.

“I
did
love London. That’s what I mean. Suddenly I saw how much more there was to life. Suddenly I was meeting people who weren’t just clever but interesting as well. It doesn’t take much to be an intellectual giant somewhere like Norbold. In London, you need to have a bit more to offer.

“And now”—she smiled indulgently—“you’re looking like a puppy dog whose squeaky toy has been taken away. I’m not blaming you. It wasn’t you who changed, it was me. We grew apart, only you never noticed. I felt trapped and desperate, and you never noticed.”

“The boys…”

“The boys gave me something to do. But it was only a matter of time before I realized the package wasn’t indivisible. I wouldn’t lose my children if I pulled the plug on my marriage.”

Was
he clever? Struggling to get his mind around these revelations, Ash seriously doubted it. “You mean you were never kidnapped? You just left me?”

She shook her head, her pale eyes merry. “How astonished you sound! Do you honestly think you were such a treasure that no woman in her right mind would have turned her back on you? Gabriel, I was ready to leave you long before Stephen Graves came along. All I was waiting for was a catalyst of some kind. If a distant aunt had died and left me an inheritance, that would have done. If someone had offered me a job I wanted to do, that would have done. Well, Stephen offered me a way out—a nice flat, a new identity, enough money to fund a stimulating lifestyle. I’d like to say I agonized over it, but I didn’t really. I had everything to gain and nothing to lose.”

“What…?” The word came out so thin Ash barely heard it himself. He cleared his throat and tried again. “What happened?”

Cathy gave a negligent shrug. “I told you what happened. We were kidnapped off the street. We were kept under armed guard at that builder’s yard for a fortnight. And then…”

“He made you an offer you couldn’t refuse?” The words tore Ash’s throat on the way out.

“Well, actually, no,” admitted Cathy. “I made him one. It worked for both of us: he got what he needed, and I got what I needed. He looked”—she laughed at the memory—“pretty much how you’re looking now when I suggested it. But I was sick of that bloody yard, the boys were climbing the walls. I had to find some kind of a solution. I told him I’d do everything he needed me to do if he made it worth my while.

“His first thought was that I was lying. That I was working the chain loose before making a bid for freedom. Of course he thought that—he’d have been stupid not to. He started thinking maybe I could be trusted when I explained that being kidnapped was not the worst thing that could have happened to me just then.”

Ash’s mouth was almost too dry to get the question out. “You persuaded Graves to cut you in on the deal?”

“Persuaded.” She thought about the word. “Yes. Yes, in the end he was persuaded. He recognized that if he turfed me and the boys onto the street with enough money for a taxi, we still weren’t going back to you. A whole realm of other possibilities opened up.”

“Are you telling me you
were
lovers?” He didn’t want to hear her say it. But he knew he needed to.

Her voice ran up in a light rill of laughter, all cool unkindness. She seemed to have abandoned any hope of winning his sympathy, decided her best course lay in unmanning him. “Men are such
romantics
! Stephen’s the same. He will keep talking about love! I’d rather think of it as a happy convenience. But then, I married for love, and look what a letdown that was.”

The corners of her mouth turned up in an impish smile. “I don’t suppose this is what you wanted to hear. But you demanded the truth, and this is it. I left you because you were boring me rigid. Fate presented an alternative and I took it. I’m not low-maintenance, Gabriel, I never was, and I wasn’t prepared to spend the rest of my life learning to be. Stephen represented financial independence. I was never going to turn my nose up at that.”

“So what next?” asked Ash weakly. “You play house together? You know he’s on the run?”

That seemed to surprise her. “Really? I thought they’d bought his version of events. Someone figured it out? Ah…”

There hadn’t been much comfort for Ash in this conversation. Cathy’s expression, when she realized that her husband had in the end outflanked her lover, was about all there was going to be. “Hazel had her suspicions before I did,” he said. “Of course, she wasn’t hindered by supposing she knew the people involved. When she made me think the facts through dispassionately, it became obvious that Graves was working with the pirates. And that, probably, you were, too.”

“Well—
thinking
always was your forte.” She managed to make it sound like a vice. “It doesn’t matter. All we have to do is stay off the radar until interest in us dies down. Anyway, I couldn’t have stayed in Norbold, with your little friend and that no-neck policeman trying to question the boys every time I turned my back. I thought we’d be safe here. I thought the only one who’d remember this boat was already dead. But at least you haven’t told anyone else.”

He tried to keep his tone neutral. “No?”

She regarded him with a fine disdain. “If you’d told the police, they wouldn’t have let you come here. You had to choose. You could send in an armed response unit and see me in court. Or you could keep your suspicions to yourself until you’d talked to me. You’re on your own here, Gabriel. There is no Seventh Cavalry waiting in the gulch.”

She knew him so well. Ash cleared his throat. “Cathy, you said it yourself—you’re not low maintenance. Do you really think you can have the kind of life you want—the kind of life that was worth throwing me to the wolves for—with the police looking for you? You can’t go back to Somalia, even if you wanted to. You’d be arrested there. The pirates were being rounded up even as you were flying home. The local authorities weren’t really up to the job, but Philip Welbeck is a resourceful man. You’d be amazed what strings he can pull. Stephen Graves has no friends left in the Horn of Africa.”

“Stephen’s a resourceful man, too,” retorted Cathy. “He’ll take us somewhere no one will follow. I made it clear to him. If he wanted us to stay together he’d need to offer me something better than I could achieve on my own. He said he’d do whatever it took to keep me happy. Wasn’t that sweet?”

“You believed him?”

“Oh yes,” Cathy replied immediately. “I told you, he loves me. He thinks we’re going to be together for always.”

“But you don’t?”

“Always is an awfully long time.”

It wasn’t that any of this was coming at Ash out of a blue sky. At intervals, though, the enormity of what she was confessing broke through the defenses his mind had fashioned, and rage and grief erupted through the breach. “People died! Cathy—the men flying those shipments died! Twenty-nine pilots and engineers who disappeared along with their planes and cargoes died to keep you in comfort in Cambridge!”

“Yes, they did,” she agreed. “But I didn’t kill them.”

“And me.” His voice was thick with bitterness. “I thought I’d got you killed. You and our sons. It tore me apart. You must have known that. You must have known what you were doing to me.”