Desperate Measures: A Mystery (8 page)

“You didn’t see these images?” Gorman asked Hazel.

“No.”

“And he didn’t tell you about them when he gave you the laptop?”

“No,” Hazel said again. “Mr. Gorman, I know this boy. I know he isn’t lying. He’s got nothing to gain by lying. He could have sold the laptop and neither you nor I would ever have known. Fifty quid, eighty quid in his pocket. That’s a lot to someone like Saturday. He’d need a good reason not to do that. Well, this is it. What he saw on that computer. He may not be your idea of a model citizen, but this struck him as important enough to do the right thing.”

“Why didn’t you tell us what was on it?” This time the detective was looking straight at the boy.

Saturday mumbled something in reply.

“What?”

The boy looked up with a sudden hawklike fierceness. “Because,” he enunciated sharply, “it never occurred to me for one frigging minute that you wouldn’t frigging look!”

Gorman had Saturday repeat in grueling detail exactly what he’d seen. He prepared a witness statement, which Saturday, under a kind of weary protest, signed. They had a certain amount of difficulty with the witness’s address, until Hazel volunteered her own, fervently hoping that Mrs. Poliakov would never get to hear of it.

“You going to arrest him now?” asked Saturday, adding with a fine disdain, “The dirty bugger.”

“I’m certainly going to bring him in for questioning. And seize his laptop.” DI Gorman glanced at Hazel. “The problem is, of course, that he’s had time to cover his tracks.”

“It’s pretty hard to erase things from a hard drive so completely that an expert can’t find them,” Hazel pointed out.

“This isn’t some middle-aged creep running a second life from his back bedroom,” said Gorman shortly. “He’s a professional man.” He might have said more, but there were things he would say to Hazel that he wouldn’t say in front of the teenager.

“I know who he is,” retorted Saturday. “Charles Armitage. Every file on the desktop had his name on it, for God’s sake. I also know what he is.”

Gorman scowled. “All right. Well, Mr. Armitage is also a well-connected professional man. If he needs technical help, he can buy it. If he needs the kind of technical help that’ll keep its mouth shut afterward, he can buy that. And if he needs a steamroller to flatten his old laptop and give him an excuse to buy a new one, well, he works on building sites every day, doesn’t he?”

“We’d still have Saturday’s statement.” Doubt was seeping into Hazel’s voice.

“Yes,” said Dave Gorman. He said nothing more. He didn’t have to. If it came to a straight choice between believing responsible, professional, middle-class Charles Armitage and believing a street kid who needed to borrow an address to put on his witness statement, a jury that found Saturday’s evidence credible would probably believe in unicorns and the tooth fairy as well.

The DI got up. He opened his door and waved to a passing constable. “Show Mr. Desmond the way out, will you?” But as Hazel went to follow, he shut the door again, almost in her face. She turned, startled, and his expression took her completely off guard. Intense, concerned, a hint of dread pinching the small muscles beside the eyes. “You don’t know, do you?”

Hazel stared at him in astonishment. “Know what?”

“It’s been all over the Internet all morning.” Gorman pursed his lips. “But I suppose you’ve been busy.…”

“
What’s
been all over the Internet?”

“Your friend Ash,” said Dave Gorman, and Hazel’s stomach dropped into her boots.

She dragged up a heard-it-all-before voice to hide behind. “What’s he done now?”

CHAPTER 10

F
IFTEEN MINUTES LATER DAVE GORMAN
leaned forward and turned the screen off. The absolute silence that washed back into the small, untidy room was almost tangible.

He waited for her to say something. But Hazel had lost the power of speech. She’d almost lost the power of thought. She just sat there in stunned silence, staring at the blank screen with gritty, dry eyes, as if she, too, was waiting.

For what? For Gorman to give a sudden chuckle and say, “Don’t look so serious, it’s just a joke”? For the door to bang suddenly open and all the people who thought they owed her a slap to pour through it blowing whoopee whistles? For the DI to advance a kindly hand as far as her trembling wrist and say, “Don’t worry, we won’t let it come to that,” and mean it?

None of those things was going to happen, and somewhere in her tiny icy heart Hazel knew it. Those few brain cells that were still operating knew it. It wasn’t a joke, and it wasn’t a mistake, and it wasn’t Meadowvale getting its own back, and Dave Gorman wasn’t going to say that he was in a position to prevent it. The most he could say, the very most, was that he’d try to prevent it; and though she waited, achingly, he didn’t even say that.

What he said eventually, when one of them had to say something and it was becoming clear that Hazel wasn’t going to, was, “It may be some kind of a delaying tactic. He may not intend to go through with it.”

Hazel blinked. Then she cleared her throat. Her voice still didn’t sound much like her: thin and frail yet utterly convinced. “He intends to go through with it.”

Gorman leaned closer, studying her face. “How can you know that? Have you spoken to him?”

“About … this?” She shook her head, the girlish fair hair tossing. “About his wife and sons, yes. He was always ready to do anything that would bring them home. He told me once he’d have gladly killed himself if that would bring them home. The only thing stopping him was that he wouldn’t know if it had worked. If the Somalis would realize he was out of their way.

“Well, he knows now.” She swallowed, looked up at Gorman. “I’m understanding this right, am I? They’ve contacted him. They’ve said Cathy and the boys can come home if he … if he…” She couldn’t say the words.

“Yes,” said the DI, and his naturally rather coarse voice was gentle. “That’s what they say. Why would he believe them?”

“Because they have nothing to gain by holding his family if Gabriel is”—this time she got it out—“dead. They were hostages to his good behavior, the means of keeping him off the pirates’ backs. If he’s no longer a threat to them, they don’t need to hold on to the people he loves.”

“They could still kill them,” warned Gorman. “It would be easier than sending them home.”

Hazel nodded. “Gabriel will know that. He’ll make sure he’s getting what he wants before he gives them what they want.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. But he’ll find a way. Don’t underestimate him. People around here think he’s a fool. He’s not. He never was.”

Gorman was nodding slowly. “I know that. But it’s a big ask, to outwit people as ruthless as that when they’re holding something so important that you’re prepared to die for it.”

The immediate shock was passing. In its wake Hazel felt a terrible sense of urgency. “We have to find him. He will do it, when he’s sure Cathy and the boys are safe. He’ll do exactly what he’s agreed to—kill himself, live on the Internet. We have to find him and stop him. Where did that package come from?”

“The IT guys are working on that right now,” Gorman assured her. “Only…”

This was Hazel’s field. “Only, it may not be possible to establish exactly where he was talking from; and even if it is, he may not still be there when we get there.”

“In a nutshell,” agreed Gorman. “Hazel, you know him better than anyone. Where would he go? If he needed not to be disturbed while he worked on this? He must have known we’d hear about it as soon as it went viral, and he’ll know we’re trying to find him. Where would he go if he didn’t want to be found?”

“I don’t know!” When she first knew him, Gabriel Ash’s world had shrunk to a half-mile radius centered on his house and extending no farther than the park, the nearest shops, and his therapist’s office. She knew he’d had a life before that, and friends, and probably places he went. But the life had collapsed in on itself when his family disappeared; the friends had been defeated, their attempts to help or console rejected, and had drifted away; and in the months she’d known him, the only times he’d left Norbold he’d been with her. “Is someone watching his house?”

“Of course.”

“What about the house in London? Covent Garden, I think. Does he still own that?”

Gorman made a note. “I’ll find out. Even if he doesn’t, I’ll have the Met check it, just in case. Good. Anywhere else?”

“The flat in Cambridge?”

“What flat in Cambridge?”

So she told him. She kept the explanation brief and to the point; even so, there was time for his expression to grow from compassionate to thunderous. Laura Fry had been right: she should have told him before.

“You’re telling me the CEO of one of the arms companies that lost shipments was helping the hijackers? And you’ve known this for four days,
and you didn’t see fit to share it with me
?”

“I’m sorry.” She meant that. “He said they’d kill her. Ash’s wife. Graves said if we went to the police, the pirates would kill her.”

Gorman went on glaring at her, but there was nothing he could usefully say. He knew that the only responsible reaction to a hostage situation is to ensure that the kidnappers gain nothing by it. He knew Hazel knew that. He also knew that, when it’s personal, all the responsible, moral, above all
right
arguments in the world aren’t worth a row of beans. Confronted by a sobbing, terrified image of the wife he’d thought was dead, Gabriel Ash had been incapable of entrusting her fate to the police; and what Ash couldn’t do, Hazel Best wouldn’t do. Gorman was entitled to be angry; but he knew that if the same situation arose again, the outcome would be exactly the same.

The same situation was never going to arise again.

He reached for the telephone.

Hazel didn’t know the address of the Cambridge flat. She described, to three different people, how to find it. None of them shouted at her, but the strain of not doing so came right down the phone line at her. Like hands clamped around her throat, it left her white-faced and trembling because she knew now that she’d been wrong, and what being wrong on this scale was going to cost.

By the time Gorman had finished making phone calls, some of his anger had subsided. She was a young, inexperienced police probationer who was on extended sick leave because previous traumas had left her emotionally fragile. He was surprised that she hadn’t behaved like a hardened officer of ten years’ standing? That she’d behaved like a human being and a friend instead?

“Cambridge will have someone at the flat in five minutes. Do you think they’ll find him?”

Hazel chewed her lip. She desperately wanted to be able to say yes, but she couldn’t. “I don’t think he’ll be anywhere I know about. He may have gone there once more, to tell the pirates how to contact him directly, but after that, all he needed was access to the Internet. He can get that anywhere—why would he risk going somewhere I could find him? He knows I’ll stop him if I can. He’ll be in a motel somewhere, or a lockup that he’s hired for cash down, or … hell, if he was a bit more up-to-date he could do it all through a smartphone. I don’t know how we’re ever going to find him in time.”

Gorman said slowly, “Maybe he isn’t the one we should be looking for.”

Hazel almost managed indignation. “Of
course
we should be looking for him! However hard it’s going to be, we can’t just abandon him. These people are
killing
him—murdering him. The fact that they’re using his own hand to do it doesn’t alter that!”

“That’s not what I mean,” said the DI quickly. “What I mean is, Ash is going to need help. To make sure his family is safe before he does anything … irreversible. Someone to meet them and let him know they’re okay. That person may be easier to find. Who would he ask? To do something that difficult, that dangerous, that emotionally demanding. Who would he turn to?”

There was no stopping the tears now. It was the final straw, the ultimate betrayal of their friendship. Hazel felt as if the last thing Gabriel Ash had done before organizing his public suicide was slap her face. “Me,” she sobbed. “I didn’t know there was anyone else.”

Gorman brought her coffee in a horrible little waxed-paper cup. She used the time it took to drink it to pack her emotions back in the box and hammer the lid down.

Finally, when her composure was more or less restored, the DI said, “Hazel, you know we’ll do everything we can. But if we aren’t successful, promise me faithfully that you won’t blame yourself. None of this is your fault.”

And perhaps it wasn’t. But she was a compassionate young woman, and if she couldn’t save Ash, if this happened despite her best efforts, she would feel all her life that she’d let him down.

“And the other thing we might want to consider,” murmured Gorman, “is that maybe Ash is right and we’re wrong.”

Hazel didn’t understand. She frowned at him, perplexed, so that he had to grit his teeth and say aloud what he’d hoped she might recognize intuitively.

“I mean, maybe a man has the right to make a sacrifice—even this sacrifice—for the sake of his family.”

Hazel stared at him in astonishment. “Kill himself? In front of the world’s online community? To protect a bunch of murderous pirates?
Are you insane?
”

But he wasn’t ready to back down. “Give it some thought. Would you stop him from diving into a river to save them if their car went off a bridge?”

“It’s different,” she insisted. “To risk your life is one thing. To throw it away is another.”

“He’s prepared to sacrifice himself for his wife and children. Lots of people would see that as a pretty noble thing.”

“It
is
noble,” Hazel conceded. “Being willing to do it is noble. It wouldn’t be very noble of us to let him.”

“Would he forgive us if we stopped him?”

“Probably not. Who cares?”

“Would he forgive
you
?”

That made her pause. But it didn’t make her change her mind. “I don’t imagine he would. Too bad. This is too important to go along with what somebody else thinks is right, even if it’s Gabriel.
I
think he’s too distraught to be making life-and-death decisions, and if I can stop him making this one, I will. If we can stop him, we must.”