Desperate Measures: A Mystery (7 page)

“Your friend Mr. Ash.”

Slightly stung by the implication that she might have only the one, Hazel nodded nevertheless. “Yes. Mr. Ash.”

“The crazy man.”

“He’s not…” But there was no point. Hazel sighed. “It’s not Gabriel Ash I want to keep in my flat for a few days, it’s Patience. She’s very quiet, she’s very clean, and if she causes you any problems, I’ll think of something else to do with her. But I’d consider it a favor if you’d let me keep her here.”

Mrs. Poliakov bent in the middle to take a closer look. She was a middle-aged Polish woman who’d lived in England for so long that it had required a real effort of will to keep her accent. “What sort of a dog is it?”

It was the first chink in her armor. And Hazel wasn’t the only one to notice it: Patience waved her scimitar tail, just once, decorously.

“She’s a lurcher. Saturday says she’s a gentleman’s lurcher—a pointer cross.”

“Saturday?”

That was going to take too much explaining. And while Hazel thought her landlady just might soften to Patience in the end, she knew she’d chase the street kid down her steps with a broom. “Just someone I know. His granddad was a dog expert, apparently.”

“A gentleman’s lurcher, hmm.” There was a bit of Mrs. P. that was unreconstructed snob. It wasn’t a small bit. The magic word swung the balance. “One bark in the night, she goes,” she said sternly. “One unmentionable on the carpet, she goes. She chew my furniture, you both go.”

“It’s a deal,” said Hazel, relieved; and Patience waved her tail again, just the once.

*   *   *

Balfour Street, where Hazel shared the three-story Victorian villa with Mrs. P. and two other tenants, was on the far side of Norbold from Highfield Road, with its leafy gardens and nearby park. But the canal ran along the back, and since the Rivers Agency had restored the waterway and the council had tidied up the towpath it was a pleasant strip of open space, a rural finger tracing its route through the postindustrial town.

It was popular with narrow boat enthusiasts, with ramblers, and with dog walkers. Hazel lost no time introducing Patience to its charms.

Half a mile up the towpath, with the houses thinning as the eastern edge of town approached, Hazel was less surprised than she might have been to see the thin, always slightly shifty figure in its misleading rugby shirt strolling nonchalantly toward her, toes visible through a hole in one trainer.

“I didn’t know you knew about this place,” said Hazel by way of a greeting.

“’S public property,” said Saturday defensively, shoving his hands deep into the pockets of his jeans.

“I didn’t mean that,” said Hazel, starting to apologize before she realized she had nothing to apologize for. “I thought the park was your preferred hangout.”

The boy shrugged. “The park’s good. The canal’s good.”

Hazel couldn’t think what he found it good for. Even after the Rivers Agency’s efforts, a hook dropped into the water was more likely to catch a shopping trolley than a fish; and anyone planning to mug the walkers had better be stronger and faster than the brisk, no-nonsense senior citizens who frequented the towpath, or he’d find himself tipped into the canal.

On the other hand, he knew where she lived. “Were you looking for me?”

“No,” Saturday said quickly. He looked around him rather than meet her eye. “Jeez, a guy can’t even get a bit of fresh air without being accused of something.”

“Okay,” she said mildly; but she knew she was right, and when he fell into step beside her, she knew it was only a matter of time before he told her what was on his mind.

Where a bridge took the Coventry road over the canal, someone had parked a chip van. The legend on the side read
WINKWORTH’S MOBILE CATERING
, but it was still a chip van. With lunchtime imminent, Hazel bought sausage and chips for two, then remembered there were three of them and asked for extra sausages. But she was damned if she was buying the dog a mug of tea as well.

Winkworth was doing a roaring trade in the sunshine, and all the nearby benches were taken. They wandered a little farther up the towpath and, on the far side of the bridge, sat down on the edge, dangling their legs over the water and defending their chips from a particularly determined swan.

Finally Saturday said, “You handed the laptop in, then.” Hazel nodded. “Anybody claim it?”

“The DI worked out who it belonged to and sent it to him.”

There was a longer than expected pause. Had Saturday been hoping to get it back? It wasn’t as if he had anywhere to charge it. “So he got into it?”

Hazel dipped her sausage in ketchup. “There wasn’t much of a password. There were plans on it, for a development here in town. It belonged to someone from the architect’s office.”

“And the coppers gave it back to him.”

“’Fraid so,” said Hazel, briskly unsympathetic. She could have gone on to tell him about her break-in, but there seemed no point. And Saturday would never be a reliable confidant. If she’d wanted any more doing about it, she’d have done it herself; and if she didn’t want anything doing, she certainly didn’t want anyone gossiping about it.

There was a long pause. So long that she began to think the conversation was over and the youth was simply hanging around in the hope of getting an ice cream to follow his sausage and chips. But no. Saturday wasn’t here because he was interested in narrow boats. He’d come looking for her, and he hadn’t yet got around to saying why.

Finally, with the air of someone being forced to play both sides of a chessboard because his opponent was too dim to do her share, he said, “What about the pictures?”

Hazel hadn’t guessed he was interested in architecture, either. She shrugged. “I told you. They’re redeveloping Dirty Nellie’s. Offices, shops, flats. Why?” She grinned. “Thinking of putting your name down for one?”

As soon as it was out, Hazel wished it unsaid. It had only been a bit of banter. If she’d said it to Ash, or Ash had said it to her, it would have been obvious as such. But both of them had homes, and Saturday did not, and that meant it wasn’t a joking matter. You have to be a very close friend before you ask a man with no legs when he’s trying out for Manchester United.

Saturday gave her a long sideways look. But before she could marshal an apology he said, with a kind of heavy patience, as if he was going to make her understand if it killed him, “Not those pictures. The other pictures. The pictures he shouldn’t have had. The ones he had hidden behind the second password.”

CHAPTER 9

D
ISTRACTEDLY, HAZEL WENT TO GIVE THE REST
of her chips to the swan. It was only the dog’s reproachful look that stopped her. So she gave them to Patience, but really she didn’t care who ate them as long as she could concentrate on Saturday’s bombshell.

She turned to face him, and waited until his shifting gaze settled somewhere near hers. “There was a second password?”

“Sure,” he said negligently. As if none of this really mattered. As if he hadn’t been walking up and down this towpath, possibly for hours, in order to have this conversation with her.

“How do you know?”

“I hacked it.”

This was the first she’d heard about the boy as computer wizard. But then, he was from the generation that had grown up with computers. Before he was a street kid, he was just a kid, going to school and doing IT classes and learning even more from his mates behind the bicycle sheds.

“How?”

He looked at her askance. “A guy who uses PASSWORD as his password, he’s not suddenly going to use a quadratic equation to lock his vault.”

Hazel thought about it. Children’s names, pets’ names, birthdays—most people used one or another of them, but Saturday wouldn’t have known that sort of information about Charles Armitage. So … “DROWSSAP?” she asked faintly.

Saturday grinned. “Tragic, innit?”

All this was a little beside the point, except as evidence that the rest of it, the important stuff, was not a figment of the boy’s imagination. “All right. So you got into his vault, and it was full of pictures. We’re not talking family snaps here, are we?”

“Jesus, I hope not!”

And they weren’t talking about Mr. Armitage’s mistress, either. Saturday might have spent an inordinate amount of time studying pictures like that, but he wouldn’t have involved Hazel if that was all he’d found. He’d found something that even someone with a street kid’s flexible morality felt he had to do something about.

“Children? Saturday—were they pictures of children?”

He wasn’t grinning now. He nodded and looked away.

“Children being abused?” Again the nod. “Sexually?”

“Yes!” he shot back, angry and embarrassed. “All right? Little kids, some of them. And girls pretending to be all grown-up, except they’re clutching a teddy bear in their free hand. It isn’t right, Hazel. Not when they’re that little. I don’t want to be a prude, but … that’s not right.”

“No, it isn’t.” It never occurred to Hazel to doubt the truth of what he was telling her. She knew he was perfectly capable of lying, cheating, and stealing, but she didn’t think he was lying about this. It was too serious—a thing even Saturday regarded as beyond the pale. “How many pictures did you see?”

He shrugged. “A fraction of what was there.”

Child protection is a specialist field, online child protection even more so, but Hazel had covered the basics in training and—with her IT background—seen more of it than most probationers. More than enough, though if she returned to policing she would undoubtedly see more. She understood now why the boy had been so determined to pass a valuable piece of equipment on to the police. It had been a good and brave thing he’d done, when much the easiest thing would have been to drop the thing in the canal.

Because it was a police matter. The children could be half a world away, possibly beyond any help Hazel could hope to send them, but the men fueling the trade—and they were mainly, though not exclusively, men—were everywhere. They were in England; they were in Norbold. They were in nice houses like the ones in Highfield Road and in modest flats like hers. They had jobs and friends and workmates, and most of them had families, and hardly any of those people knew about their little hobby, or would have believed if they were told. They were someone to have a drink with, to play darts with, to have around for a meal. They were the men who didn’t mind dating a girl with kids. Sometimes they were the husband and father who was happy to keep coaching the junior swimmers, though his own kids had now left home.

They were that nice professional gent in the architect’s office who’d pick your kids up from school if you were running late.

“Saturday, we have to take this to Meadowvale. To DI Gorman.”

The boy’s eyes flared, afraid. “No way!”

“We have to. It’s too serious to ignore.”

“I didn’t ignore it. I gave the laptop to you.”

“I thought it was just lost property! I didn’t know it was evidence of a crime!”

They were shouting at each other, enough to draw curious glances. Hazel lowered her voice. “It never occurred to me that you wanted me to pick it apart. When we saw the drawings and realized where it had come from, we thought it was just a matter of getting it back to him. I’m sorry, Saturday, but we need to see DI Gorman right away.”

“You tell him.” There was a nasal whine in the boy’s voice.

“I will,” promised Hazel. “I’ll explain everything. But he’ll need to talk to you. You saw these things and I didn’t. He won’t be angry with you. Why would he be?” She got to her feet, pulled Saturday to his.

And it was through her hand on his arm that she felt his spare muscles bunch, ready to flee. She said softly, “If you run, I will come after you. We have to deal with this, and we have to do it now.”

After a moment, Saturday nodded. They walked back to Balfour Street and collected Hazel’s car.

*   *   *

Detective Inspector Gorman had them shown up right away. It was almost, Hazel thought, as if he was expecting her. But the boy trailing reluctantly behind her like a pram dinghy behind a frigate took him by surprise.

He had his mouth open to say one thing, then thought better of it and shut it. He waved them to chairs on the opposite side of his desk. “Er…”

Hazel waited another moment, politely, before embarking on the explanation she’d prepared. “This is my friend Saul Desmond. You may know him as Saturday. He’s the one who left that laptop for me to bring in.” She was pleased with that. It was perfectly accurate, without contradicting anything she’d told the DI previously. “And the reason he wanted us to have it instead of selling it to some guy in a pub”—Saturday kept his eyes averted—“is that he’s got better instincts for criminality than the two of us put together. He accessed it the same way we did. But instead of seeing who the owner was and shutting it down, he found a second set of files behind a second password. Those were the ones he wanted you to see.”

Dave Gorman blinked. He’d thought, when he heard Hazel was at the front desk, that he knew how the next few minutes were going to go. But it wasn’t like this. “Why?”

Hazel turned to Saturday; Saturday remained fixated on a tear in the left knee of his jeans. Hazel sighed. “Because they’re full of images of child pornography. Scores of them.”

Police officers dedicated to the pursuit of criminals and the prevention of crime cannot decently admit to smacking their lips at any lawbreaking. Among themselves, though, a certain relish may be detected at the prospect of a good jewel heist to solve or a clever art robbery. There are those who positively look forward to working on a good old-fashioned bank job or a brilliant con.

But nobody wants to investigate child abuse. They do it because decent police officers, like all decent people, want it dealt with as efficiently as possible, and the perpetrators put where they can do no more harm. No one wants to work on cases like that, but when they do, no one has to ask them to stay late. Detectives who can normally stretch a lunch hour until three can be seen eating sandwiches at their desks. They abandon all hope of a private life until they’re sure they’ve done everything they can.