Desperate Measures: A Mystery (34 page)
Read Desperate Measures: A Mystery Online
Authors: Jo Bannister
Tags: #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Mystery, #Police Procedurals, #Women Sleuths
“Open this
at once
!” she snapped. “
This minute!
”
Gilbert shook his head.
It was so unexpected that for a moment she didn’t know what to do next. They were little boys, not angels, and they didn’t do everything she said and sometimes they did things she said not to, but she wasn’t accustomed to open defiance.
She caught her breath, bridled her temper. Frightening them would only add to the delay. “Come on, Gilbert, there isn’t time for this. We need to leave. Everything’s in the car. Bring Guy and let’s be on our way.”
Her elder son shook his head again. He’d locked the doors, and nothing in his expression suggested he was going to unlock them anytime soon. Cathy was mystified and alarmed. She didn’t think Ash was mortally wounded. When the shock passed, he would come after them. He was much bigger and, in the normal way of things, much stronger than she was: if it came to a tug-of-war, he would win. She needed to be away from here while his knees were still trying to bend both ways.
“Honey, please,” she wheedled, “what is this? You can’t want to stay here. With him? You don’t know him!”
Gilbert’s voice, small to begin with, was further muffled by the glass. But the words were unmistakable. “He’s my father.”
She’d need more time to persuade him otherwise than she could spare right now. “And I’m your mother! I love you. I need you to come with me.”
But Gilbert shook his head again. He said nothing more, but his expression spoke volumes. His obstinacy would have bent girders.
In desperation, Cathy hammered on the glass with her fists. The boys shrank from her, but the car remained locked. She was crying with grief and frustration, but tears don’t open every door. She couldn’t think what else to do. A professional car thief might have been able to break in with minimal time and effort, but he would have the right tools and, more than that, the know-how. Cathy didn’t even have half a brick. She looked around urgently, but nothing suitable presented itself. She still had the gun, but she wasn’t about to fire it into the car where her children were sitting.
She supposed there would be a wheel brace somewhere in the boot of her hired car, but her luggage was piled on top of it and she felt time breathing hot on the back of her neck. At any moment Ash might emerge from the cabin, and the God-honest truth was that she was afraid to face him. Four years ago he would have died rather than hurt her. But now? She didn’t know what he might do, knowing himself betrayed, seeing his sons on the point of vanishing once more.
She returned to her car and drove away.
* * *
“She drove away?” whispered Hazel, appalled, jerking her attention back to the road as she felt her own car veer over the center line.
Beside her, Gilbert nodded. His eyes were cast down to his knees and he didn’t look at her, consumed by the shame of being abandoned by his own mother. Of knowing there were things that were more important to her than her children.
“So you stayed in your dad’s car? All night?”
Again the solemn, wordless nod.
“Why? Ah…” Ash had asked him to take his brother up to the car and wait for him. That’s what he had done. Admittedly, he’d ignored the other instruction, which was not to play with the controls, but if he hadn’t locked the doors, Cathy would have taken her sons away. He’d made his decision; then he’d waited for his father to come, as he’d said he would.
And if Ash had bled to death in the little boat? If Hazel had not come, nor had anyone else, would they have stayed in the car until they, too, died? Hazel shook her head in wonder, by no means confident that they would not have.
There was still something she didn’t understand. “Gilbert,” she said gently, “why did you decide to stay with your father? When your mother wanted you to go with her. I mean, it was a brave decision, when you’ve been with her all these years and you hardly remember him.”
Still Gilbert refused to look at her. He mumbled, “She made us lie. About where we’d been.”
“That must have been difficult,” Hazel said softly.
“It wasn’t her, it was him,” the boy said in a fierce rush, answering the inbuilt urge to defend his mother. “Uncle Stephen.”
“Uncle…”
“We had to call him Uncle Stephen. He isn’t really our uncle.”
“No.”
“And now he’s dead,” Gilbert added with a certain relish.
Hazel winced. So they’d guessed what she’d hidden under the duvet.
“Is my father going to die?”
At least she had a proper answer to that. “No. He’s going to be all right. In twenty minutes he’ll be in A&E, getting stitches in his side, then they’ll stick an antibiotic in his bottom”—predictably, that made the little boy smile—“and send him home with us. Everything’s going to be fine.”
“Did my father shoot Uncle Stephen?”
There were only two possible answers, and she wasn’t going to lie. “No, Gilbert, he didn’t.”
“Ah.” It was somehow a very adult sound. “Then Mummy did.”
Maybe, without actually lying, Hazel could soften the truth. “I think she thought she was protecting you.”
“
I
think she was protecting herself.”
And that was why, faced with a decision no child should have had to make, Gilbert Ash had backed the father he hardly knew over the mother he knew only too well.
Hazel had been over-optimistic. The hospital wanted to keep Ash long enough to be sure that he wouldn’t start bleeding again as soon as they said he was fine.
While he was being admitted, Hazel took the boys for something to eat. All they’d had since the previous afternoon was some biscuits they’d found in Ash’s car. Hazel didn’t say so, but she was fairly sure they were the ones he bought for Patience.
The boys tucked into everything put in front of them, then filled their pockets at the chocolate machine.
While they were occupied, Hazel did something she was aware she should have done sooner: tell Saturday.
It wasn’t yet midmorning. The phone rang for two minutes before the teenager dragged himself out of bed and down into the hall to answer it. “Yeah—what?”
“Saturday, it’s me.” Silence. “Hazel,” she added, pointedly. “I’m in the Lake District. I should be back sometime tomorrow.”
“Yeah? Good.” He still sounded half-asleep.
She took a deep breath. “Gabriel’s here.”
“Yeah? Well … there’s no show without Punch.”
“
What?
”
“I mean, you can’t have much of a funeral without the dearly departed. But hell, you might have asked if I wanted to go.”
He’d misunderstood. Of course he’d misunderstood: for perfectly good reasons, the fact that Ash had survived his apparent suicide had been kept from even his friends. “Saturday—Gabriel isn’t dead. He’s not exactly on peak form, either, but he’s a long way from dead. It was all an elaborate hoax, to persuade the men who were holding his sons to send them home.”
A long, long silence. Hazel could almost hear the gears of Saturday’s brain spinning. Finally he demanded, “Are you for real?”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I’m absolutely for real. He’s alive, he’s a bit shop-soiled, but he’ll be fine in a day or two. I’m hoping to bring him home tomorrow.”
“… Alive?”
“Yes.”
“Gabriel. Alive.”
“Yes.”
Another long silence. Then: “I thought so.”
Hazel laughed out loud. “Yeah, right!”
“I did,” protested Saturday. “I didn’t know how, but I didn’t believe—didn’t really believe—he was dead.”
“I didn’t want to believe it, either,” said Hazel. “But I knew, or at least I thought I knew, what I’d seen.”
“Nah.” She heard him shaking his head at the phone. “She’d have known if he was dead.”
Hazel frowned. “Who?”
“Patience,” he said, as if she was being dim. “Patience would have known. Dogs are smart that way.”
“Yes, they are,” she agreed. “Anyway, I thought I’d better warn you, so you don’t have a heart attack the first time you see him.”
“Did he get his kids back?”
“Yes.” Hazel felt herself smiling. “Yes, Saturday, he did.”
“That’s all right, then.” And with no more ceremony than that, he put the phone down; and Hazel knew as surely as if she could see him that he was heading back to bed.
By the time she took Ash’s sons up to the ward, Ash was tucked up in bed, still pale but glowing with happiness. Unless it was the local anesthetic getting into his bloodstream. At the sight of his visitors, he slid over to one side of the bed and patted the other, and the boys, increasingly confident, went to sit beside him.
Hazel took the chair and, smiling inwardly, watched them starting to learn about one another. This wasn’t her moment; all she could be was a bystander. But she was happy for Ash, satisfied at how things had turned out; and if she was aware that the situation was still unresolved, that getting what he’d longed for was no guarantee that he’d be able to hold on to it, and that there would be sensible, experienced, dedicated people in Norbold’s social services department who would raise both eyebrows at the notion of leaving two small boys with a man universally known as Rambles With Dogs, now wasn’t the time to mention that, either.
After fifteen minutes she excused herself. “I’ll go check on Patience. I’ll be back for you in half an hour, boys—your dad ought to get some rest soon.” To Ash she said, “I’ll find somewhere to stay tonight. With luck we can all go home tomorrow.”
His deep, dark eyes were liquid with gratitude. “I owe you so much. One day I’ll make a start on repaying you.”
Hazel grinned. “There’s no hurry. First of all, get better.”
The grin slowly faded, though, as she headed down the stairs alone. What she was thinking was, I think you’re going to need a lot more help, my friend, before you’re in a position to do anyone else any favors.
Jo Bannister
began her career as a journalist after leaving school at sixteen to work on a weekly newspaper. She was short-listed for several prestigious awards and worked as an editor for some years before leaving to pursue her writing full-time. She lives in Northern Ireland and spends most of her spare time with her horse and dog or clambering over archaeological sites. You can sign up for email updates
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Jo Bannister
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