Desperate Measures: A Mystery (2 page)

“So—can you be sure it was his wife?”

“She recognized him,” Hazel said again. “She said his name.”

“It couldn’t have been…?” But Laura didn’t bother to finish the sentence. There was no credible alternative. She made a helpless little gesture with her hands, a sort of low-level shrug. “I didn’t think she was still alive.
Nobody
thought so, except maybe Gabriel, and I think even he only believed because he couldn’t bear not to. What did she say to him? What did he say to her? How did he”—she groped for a word, could do no better than this—“handle it?”

Before Hazel could answer, Ash growled at her: “He probably handled it very badly. He was a bit gobsmacked, to be honest. But he’s sitting right here, and he hasn’t gone deaf, and he can probably talk to you himself if you keep the questions simple.”

Laura felt her eyes popping, made the effort to blink. “Jesus, Gabriel,” she exclaimed, “you need a therapist like I need a personal astrologer. I’m sorry. You look like shit. But obviously you’re thinking fairly clearly.”

Gabriel Ash vented an unsteady sigh. “No, I’m sorry. And I don’t know how clearly I’m thinking. But I know what I saw and heard. I know what it means. Cathy is alive. Somewhere, my wife is alive. In Somalia, being held hostage by men whose only use for her is as a human shield, but alive.”

Laura didn’t know how to ask tactfully. But worse than saying it wrong would be not saying it at all. “What about the boys?”

He shook his shaggy mane of dark hair. “I don’t know.”

“You didn’t ask her?”

His deep eyes burned like coals. “Of course I asked her. They didn’t let her answer. They moved the camera off her. They—I don’t know—I think they hurt her. I could hear her crying.” He could still hear her—the lonely, desperate wail that had less to do with fists or even guns being shaken in her face, and more because for a few brief seconds a veil had parted in the nightmare that had engulfed Cathy Ash and a face she must almost have forgotten had flickered there, and then it had gone. “When the picture came back, she was reading from a card. Nothing about the boys. Only that I had to do what they said or they’d kill her. If I went to the police, they’d kill her. If I went to the Foreign Office, they’d kill her. If I tried to find them, they’d kill her.”

“Did you believe them?”

Ash wasn’t a man to whom hatred came easily. But there was no mistaking the hatred in the whiplash glance he threw at Laura Fry. “Yes. I believed them.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. Wait for them to tell me what they want.”

“They’ll contact you again?”

“I imagine so.”

CHAPTER 2

T
HE DOG, PATIENCE, STOOD UP, ALERT,
all long legs and pointing nose. She was looking down the hall. The doorbell rang.

Surprised, Hazel looked at her watch. Even on a weekday the milkmen would still have been in their beds. She moved toward the front of the house. “Whoever it is, I’ll get rid of them.”

This soon after the solstice, a paleness was already creeping into the sky. But the streetlamps were still lit, and light from the hall spilled out as she opened the door. If there had been anyone standing on the step, she’d have seen him. There wasn’t.

If she’d taken another ten seconds to reach the door, she’d never have known who’d rung the bell. Thinking better of it, he’d retreated as far as the gate and was disappearing behind the hedge, a grubbier than usual teenage boy in a rugby shirt for a team that wouldn’t have let him into its clubhouse.

“Saturday?”

Hazel got the distinct impression that he wished he hadn’t come. But now he’d been spotted, he had fractionally too much pride to make a run for it. He ground to a reluctant halt, waiting outside the gate.

Hazel hurried down the path. “It
is
you. How are you? We haven’t seen you since … well, for weeks.” She glanced uncertainly back at the house. “Listen, I’d ask you in, but we’re involved in a bit of a crisis.”

The boy looked at her, all eyes, like a famine victim. His thin lip twisted in an ironic grin. “Another one?” On a good day he looked about twelve, on a bad one about forty. This was not a good day. In fact he was sixteen. He looked thin and cold in the early-morning chill, and more than that he looked …

She beat the thought back. If she admitted to herself that yes, that skimpy sixteen-year-old boy who lived in squats and had as near nothing as can be measured but still once risked it all for Gabriel Ash looked afraid, regardless of what was going on in the house behind her she could not for shame have turned him away—would have had to make the time to find out what he needed. As long as she could remember he’d been a street kid, a survivor; she could leave him on the back burner while the difficult events of today were dealt with. There would be a moment for Saturday later.

She returned his grin wryly. “Yes, another one. Can I tell you later? It’s all hands to the pumps in there.”

The boy nodded. “Anytime. Catch you.” He let go of the gate and it rattled a moment before the latch fell.

Deep inside herself Hazel knew she was behaving badly. Saturday deserved better. He hadn’t come with the first light of a summer’s day because a gap in his social diary had prompted him to look up old friends. He’d needed something. Ash wasn’t the only one with problems. She knew this boy, and owed him more than to tidy him out of the way until she could spare the time to help him.

Guiltily, she called after him. “Saturday—do you need anything? Money? Anything?”

Already she had only a back view of him shaking his head. “I’m fine.”

Hazel knew it wasn’t true. She knew she should have gone after him and found out what was going wrong in his life. What more was going wrong. But she told herself that his problems were probably the ones he’d always had and could wait, while Ash’s demanded that decisions be reached pretty well immediately. She bit her lip, but she went back inside.

“Who was it?”

“Saturday.”

Laura Fry looked confused.

So, for a moment, did Ash. So much had happened since then. So much had happened even in the last twenty-four hours. “Oh—yes. Was he all right?”

“He looked all right.” Hazel knew as she said it that it was disingenuous.

“What did he want?”

“He didn’t say.”

Ash nodded distractedly. “I’ll…” The sentence went unfinished because, even one word in, he knew he wasn’t going to be doing anything about Saturday anytime soon. Instead he looked at Laura. “Thank you for coming. Hazel thought I was going into meltdown. Perhaps I was. I feel steadier now.”

“I can give you a bit of sedative, if you think it would help.”

He shook his head. “No. Thank you. I need to think. Can I call you later, if I need to talk?”

Her V-shaped smile was solemn. “Of course you can. Anytime. I mean that, Gabriel—anytime. But if there’s nothing more I can do here, maybe I’ll grab another hour’s sleep before breakfast.” One uptilted eyebrow made it a question.

Ash nodded. “Next time I go ape I’ll try to do it during office hours.”

Hazel saw her out. Laura paused in the doorway. “You were right to call me. Call me again if you think you should.”

“You think he’s wrong, don’t you?” said Hazel. “About handling this himself.”

After a moment Laura nodded. “I’m concerned that, in trying to do what’s best for Cathy, he’s going to pull himself to pieces. I hope it ends well—that he finds a way of bringing her home. But there are a lot more ways this can go badly, and if it does, he’s going to blame himself. If he can’t save her, I don’t know what he’ll do.”

A chill settled on Hazel’s spine. “Suicide? Gabriel?”

“It’s a possibility. We need to be alert to it. Or he may go the other way.”

“Other way?”

“Try to destroy the rest of the world.”

This was Gabriel Ash they were discussing, the gentlest man Hazel had ever known. It was impossible for her to imagine him going Rambo. But she knew Laura wasn’t trying to frighten her for fun. “I’ll keep in touch.”

“Do.”

CHAPTER 3

W
HEN HAZEL WENT BACK TO THE KITCHEN,
Ash was in the process of emptying the dresser cupboards. He didn’t keep pots in there; he kept papers—vast quantities of papers, in box files and lever-arch files and concertina files and loose in stacks. It looked as if a tornado had hit the Public Records Office.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m going to need some help with this,” he said tersely. “Not the police. There are people … I have contacts … I know people. People who can help. There must be
someone
…” The urgent activity ground to a painful halt, leaving him stranded in the middle of his kitchen floor, his arms full of paperwork, his face twisted with a tortuous combination of hope and despair as the realization dawned on him that the people he had known, the contacts he had had, those who could have helped him, inhabited a past to which he no longer had access. In the depths of his eyes he looked lost, as if he genuinely didn’t know where he was.

Hazel took the papers from him and put them with the others on the kitchen table. Then she took his arm and steered him toward the stairs. “All that is probably true, and when you’ve slept, you’ll be capable of making decisions about it. Until then, anything you do is likely to make things worse rather than better. Go to bed, Gabriel. I’ll wake you in three hours, and we’ll talk about what we do next.”

Ash allowed himself to be packed off to bed like a child and offered no argument. Perhaps he could see the sense in what she said. More likely, he was currently incapable of making any decisions, even to remonstrate.

Hazel gave him ten minutes, then went to check on him. She found what she expected. He was sitting on the edge of his bed, still fully dressed. He’d managed to get one shoe off; now he was holding it in his hands and staring at it as if unsure where it might have come from.

With a sigh, she took the shoe from him and knelt down to take off the other one. Then she pushed him back on his pillows and tucked the quilt around him. “There. That’s good enough.” She pulled the curtains to keep out the growing day.

“She’s alive.” His voice was a wondrous whisper. “Hazel, Cathy’s alive.”

“Yes,” said Hazel softly. “And that’s all we need to know for now. Go to sleep.”

She didn’t expect him to. But half an hour later she looked in again, and he was dead to the world.

*   *   *

Patience wanted to go out. Hazel let her into the back garden, then sank into the old leather sofa with a cup of hot, sweet tea. She didn’t like hot, sweet tea, but she’d heard somewhere it was good for shock. Though probably not when it was allowed to sit untouched in its mug until it went cold. While Ash slept upstairs, Hazel slumped into an exhausted doze on the kitchen sofa.

She awoke with a guilty start, and for a moment couldn’t think what she had to feel guilty about. Then she remembered the dog. Even on a summer’s morning, it was too early in the day for the chill to have left the air, and her thin coat and spare frame gave the lurcher little protection from the weather. Hazel levered herself up and opened the back door.

The step was unoccupied. Hazel went outside. “Patience?” She dared not raise her voice for fear of disturbing Ash. “Patience! Time for your breakfast.”

Still no response, and Hazel knew with an awful certainty that she wouldn’t find Ash’s dog even when she combed the whole of the overgrown garden. So it proved. It was an old house with a stone wall around it that should have secured anything but a sex-starved rhinoceros, but the dog had clearly found a way out.

Back in the kitchen, Hazel debated her options. To do nothing was probably the sensible thing. Patience had found her way over long distances before now and would undoubtedly return when she was ready. In the meantime she could keep herself out of trouble. Hazel knew this because for six months the dog had kept Ash out of trouble, which was much more of a challenge.

Or Hazel could go looking for her. Probably Patience had headed toward the park, which was where she usually took Ash for his morning walk. But Hazel didn’t want to leave the house. If she woke Ash to tell him why, he would worry; and if she didn’t and he woke to find himself alone … then
she
would worry about how he’d react.

She settled for a compromise. From the front gate she had a good view down the length of Highfield Road, halfway to the park. She walked into the middle of the street, hoping to catch a glimpse of the slender white shape with its distinctive scimitar tail.

In fact what she saw was the whole dog, trotting breezily up the pavement toward her. Nor was she alone. Hazel recognized the rugby shirt before she could see the boy’s face. She went to meet them.

“Saturday! Thank God you caught her.”

Saturday looked puzzled. “She didn’t need much catching.” And indeed, the dog was walking amiably beside him without so much as a bit of string through her collar.

“She must have known I wanted to talk to you.” Hazel grinned so he wouldn’t think she really thought that. “I owe you an apology. Come up to the house, let’s have some breakfast.”

She noticed, and didn’t let him see she’d noticed, that the boy took the chair nearest to the range. Hazel opened a can from the cupboard. Chicken soup isn’t most people’s idea of breakfast fare. But then, most people don’t go to bed hungry, and she was pretty sure Saturday had.

By the time the soup was hot, and the butter was melting into the toast, and cold tea had given way to hot coffee, a bit of color was showing in Saturday’s pinched cheeks. He looked nonchalantly around the kitchen. “Ash not here, then?”

Hazel shook her head. “I sent him to bed.”

“He’s all right, is he?” He wanted her to think it was just a casual inquiry. But his nonchalant manner failed to disguise his genuine concern.

Hazel didn’t know what to tell him. Wasn’t sure how much of a secret it was. Realized then that it hardly mattered what she said to Saturday, because he had no one he could tell. In the end, too tired to lie, she told him a simplistic version of the truth. “He received some news about his family last night. His wife is still alive. She’s being held hostage in Somalia. Africa,” she added, in case he didn’t know.