China Roses

by Jo Bannister

  ‘Half a million? No, probably not – this is Norbold. Still, a significant amount. I presume you could mortgage it?’

  Ash thought for a moment, breathing long and slow. ‘No,’ he said then, ‘I couldn’t.’

  She seemed surprised. ‘Why not? You have a pension, haven’t you? It wouldn’t break you.’

  ‘I’m not buying you off with my mother’s house,’ he said quietly. ‘Because we both know that, whatever it’s worth, it would never be enough. In another year, or two years, or five years, we’d be having this conversation again. If you need money to get safely out of the country, that I can find. I’ll go to the bank tomorrow. For anything more, you’ve come to the wrong shop.’

  Her smile spread. So he’d been right: it wasn’t about the money. At least, not only about money. ‘You mean, you’d rather hang on to your sons’ inheritance than your sons?’

  He managed a thin smile of his own. ‘This isn’t about either the house or the boys. Is it? Are you going to tell me what it is about? Or do you want to play games for a bit longer first?’

  Cathy sighed. ‘I wish I could say you’ve got boring as you’ve got older, Gabriel. But you haven’t really: you always were horribly prosaic. All right, if you want the truth, I find myself wrong-footed in a business matter. I thought I could slip into the country, tidy up the mess and slip out again without anyone being any the wiser. But things have gone very slightly pear-shaped, and I need somewhere to stay for a few days. I thought it would be a good chance to see the boys, catch up on all your news. You know – family stuff.’

  Ash was staring at her as if she’d pulled a rabbit out of a top hat and proceeded to eat it. ‘You can’t stay here!’

  ‘I could go to a hotel,’ she said, almost as if she hadn’t heard him, ‘but I’d rather not have to produce my ID. It’s fake, of course; and though it’s pretty good, you can never be quite sure it’s not on a watch list somewhere. That’s why I didn’t fly in through Coventry: I’m safer coming in, shall we say, under the radar. I’ll take your room.’ She smiled at him. ‘But I don’t mind sharing.’

  Gilbert helped him lug the old studio couch down from the box-room to his study, and move his desk under the window to make room for it. With commendable, even remarkable, restraint for his age, the boy asked no questions and offered no observations until they were finished. Then he said in a low voice, ‘Is Mum staying then?’

  There was no point denying the obvious. ‘For tonight,’ said Ash firmly.

  ‘She isn’t coming back to live with us?’

  Ash lowered himself into the office chair, looking his son in the eye. ‘Gilbert, she can’t. You know that. It isn’t safe for her here.’

  ‘Are the police still looking for her?’

  ‘They’ll always be looking for her. They don’t stop. You know what she did – what she was a part of.’

  ‘I know.’ He said nothing more for a couple of minutes. But Ash knew there was more to come. ‘We could hide her.’

  Ash nodded. ‘For a day or two. But sooner or later they’d find her. Someone would notice. Or one of us would say something – let something slip.’

  ‘Guy,’ said Gilbert disdainfully.

  Ash managed a thin chuckle. ‘Well, maybe. He’s the family chatterbox, isn’t he? You and I ration our words as if we’d paid cash money for them.’

  Another pause for thought. ‘When she leaves here, where will she go?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Ash said honestly. ‘I don’t know where she’s come from, and I don’t know where she’ll go.’

  ‘Dad …’ A note of supplication had crept into the boy’s voice. ‘She won’t make us go with her, will she?’

  Gabriel Ash regarded his first-born and resisted the urge to grab him and hold him tight. ‘Over my dead body,’ he said.

  Gilbert was an intelligent and – for a ten-year-old – literate boy, and he knew what a figure of speech was. And he saw the resolution in his father’s eyes, and knew that wasn’t one.

  Hazel had her phone in her pocket all Monday morning and knew she hadn’t missed any calls. She took an early lunch and headed round the corner to Rambles With Books. Clearly something was going on with the Ash household, and she thought she would get to the bottom of it sooner face-to-face than by phoning him.

  But the bell jangling on its circular spring as she opened the door brought not Ash but a middle-aged woman in a tweed jacket, who smiled at Hazel’s evident confusion. ‘Mr Ash couldn’t come in today. He asked me to mind the shop.’

  Miss Hornblower was one of Ash’s most faithful customers; it didn’t surprise Hazel that he would ask her to help out, nor that she would agree. She was perplexed by the timing. ‘When?’

  The woman gave her a faintly aggrieved look down her aristocratic nose. ‘He phoned me this morning, in fact. Does that matter?’

  It did, or at least it might, but Hazel wasn’t about to explain. ‘He had your number?’

  ‘He looked me up in the phone-book. With a name like mine, I’m not hard to find.’

  Hazel wasn’t hard to find, either, particularly when her number was usually top of Ash’s calls list. If he could call Miss Hornblower, he could have called Hazel as he’d promised.

  She gave a slightly forced smile. ‘I’m sorry. I’m just a bit puzzled – I’ve been trying to talk to him since yesterday. I think he must be avoiding me.’

  Miss Hornblower had already forgiven Hazel her sharpness. But she still looked concerned. ‘He didn’t sound entirely himself,’ she admitted.

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Not very much, only that some sort of family crisis had blown up. I didn’t like to quiz him but I said, Nothing serious, I hope, and he said, No, just something he had to deal with. But he did sound anxious. And … distracted.’

  Ash often seemed distracted. But Miss Hornblower had known him almost as long as Hazel had, she knew that. If she thought he’d seemed troubled, she was probably right.

  Hazel thanked her, and left her to the packed lunch she could see laid out on the little kitchen table. In the shop alone, Ash often forgot to eat in the middle of the day. Miss Hornblower had brought smoked salmon, cream cheese and cucumber sandwiches, with the crusts cut off.

  A glance at her watch told Hazel there was time enough. She turned up towards the park and, beyond it, to Highfield Road.

  She never knew, afterwards, what inspired her to park at the corner instead of where she always did, in front of Ash’s house. Perhaps a little bird told her. A bird of ill omen. Feeling foolish even as she did it, she left her car at the corner of Highfield Road and walked the last hundred metres. Or rather, she walked ninety of the last hundred metres.

  The big stone house that had been Ash’s mother’s was built at a time when good workmanship came cheap. The main rooms on both storeys had bay windows. Bay windows illuminate a room wonderfully, and make it possible for those inside to see up and down the street as well as across it. And also for those in the street to see anyone in the embrasure of the window. Hazel stopped dead when she saw two forms cross the window of the master bedroom upstairs. The light was wrong to see much more than the outlines, shapes without detail, but she was as sure as she needed to be of two things. One of the figures was Ash. The other was a woman.

  Rooted to the spot, Hazel could not have found words to describe what went through her head then. Astonishment – perhaps more astonishment than she was entitled to. And certainly more outrage than she was entitled to. Ash owed her no fidelity. They were friends – good, close friends – and there had been moments when the possibility of something else had seemed to tread on the heels of that friendship. That it had never been formalised, even by the most tentative of proposals, was due at least as much to her ambivalence as to Ash’s.

  She’d been too afraid of losing what they had to risk moving the goalposts. She had known – well, believed – that if she’d taken the initiative she could have coaxed a commitment out of him, even if it was contingent
on the eventual dissolution of his marriage. The fact that she’d been no more willing than he to make that first move left her on shaky ground as far as a sense of betrayal was concerned.

  Yet a sense of betrayal was what she felt. Betrayal, and hurt. Her body rigid, her visible expression carefully neutral, from inside herself she watched with open-mouthed indignation as the two figures moved behind the bedroom window. So the cunning dog had got himself a bit on the side! No wonder he was avoiding her. What offended her most of all wasn’t even the fact that, when he’d been ready to move on, it wasn’t Hazel he’d been ready to move on with. It was the secrecy, the tacit lies – the hole-in-corner evasions that cheapened both their friendship and this new involvement.

  Who was she? Not that it mattered: whoever she was, she had as much reason as Hazel to be upset by Ash’s lack of candour. If he’d had the guts to ask Hazel round to Highfield Road and introduce them, she’d have wished them well – regretfully, but in full acknowledgement of his right to a life richer than anything she had come out and offered him. But to turn her away from his door without a word of explanation – to say he’d call her, and then fail to – it was the kind of retreat employed by teenage boys, not grown men! Not a strategic withdrawal but a shifty, shuffling rout. If he finally gave her the glad tidings in a text, nothing on God’s earth would prevent her from storming into his shop and feeding him his own entrails.

  But for now, she turned quietly on her heel and returned to her car; and didn’t slam the door, and didn’t drive off in a flurry of grit and exhaust fumes; and didn’t have a name for the pain in her heart.

  Ash and his wife were arguing. They were doing it in the front bedroom because, rather than risk a careless remark proving infinitely costly, Ash had kept the boys at home today and they were playing in the back garden.

  ‘I’m sorry, Cathy, I’m not going to change my mind about this,’ he said – and a part of him was amazed to hear him say it. ‘I don’t want you here. It isn’t safe, for any of us. You, because you’ll go to prison if you’re found here; me, because I’ll be charged with aiding and abetting; and the boys because you’ve already done your best to break them in pieces, they don’t need you kicking those pieces down the wind! I won’t stand by and watch you do it.’

  ‘You’re over-reacting,’ she complained drily, ‘as usual. I just want somewhere to stay for a few days: is that really asking so much? You said I could always count on you.’

  ‘That was before you took my sons away and let me think you were all dead! Before you decided I was worth more to you in a straitjacket than as a husband and father. And incidentally, before you shot me!’

  ‘Well …’ She couldn’t deny it. She also couldn’t hide the impish little smile. ‘All families have their little ups and downs. Look,’ she tried again, her tone reasonable, ‘I stayed here last night and the sky didn’t fall in. It won’t fall in if I stay here another few days. I won’t go out, I won’t answer the door – no one’s going to know that I’m here. Even your little friend.’

  ‘I lied to her,’ Ash said thickly. ‘That’s the second time I’ve lied to her. The first time was for your benefit as well. There isn’t going to be a third.’

  Cathy sighed. ‘Why does everything have to be such a drama with you, Gabriel? Everyone lies sometimes. It’s what keeps the world turning. Tell her the boys have come out in spots and you don’t want to risk her catching them. That’ll keep her at bay for a week. Just, stop looking so god-forsaken guilty! If you go about looking like that, it won’t take a detective to figure out that you’re hiding something.’

  ‘What have you got yourself involved in this time?’ asked Ash in a low voice. ‘What can possibly be worth taking such risks?’

  She gave a careless shrug. ‘There are always risks. Success in life is about risk management.’

  He stared at her in disbelief. ‘You think you’ve made a success of your life?’

  She looked away from him, deliberately. He followed her gaze down to her hands, palm-down in front of her. She had always liked jewellery. Almost every finger carried a stone of some kind. Ash was no expert, but none of it looked like costume jewellery. Only the plain gold band he’d given her, twelve years ago now, was missing.

  He looked back at her, appalled. ‘That’s how you measure it? By the number of diamonds you own? Cathy – what you did cost you your sons!’

  ‘No, Gabriel,’ she said tartly, ‘what you did cost me my sons. For now. Don’t worry, I shan’t forget about them. I know where they are. I shall always know where they are. A time will come when what I can offer them will look a lot more interesting than a draughty old house and a second-hand bookshop.’

  ‘When they’re old enough to choose, I won’t stand in their way. I won’t have to. They have values. They’re eight and ten years old, and already they know that working for what you want costs less, in the long run, than stealing it from someone else. I’m proud of them. Perhaps you’d find them something of a disappointment. I do hope so.’

  That seemed to touch a nerve. It was as if she could deal with the possibility that he hated her – she’d given him reason enough, after all; and she believed that any hatred he was capable of would only ever be a veneer, that underneath it he was still and would always be helplessly in love with her. What she couldn’t deal with, could neither accept nor ignore, was being despised. It didn’t fit with the image she had of herself. She had come to think of herself as a romantic figure, something between a pirate and a tightrope-walker. It struck at her self-esteem that he saw her as a glorified shoplifter.

  ‘So where do you want me to go?’ she demanded nastily. ‘The sort of motel where they don’t ask for ID and you pay by the hour? How do you suppose I’m going to get there without being seen?’

  ‘The same way you got here without being seen,’ growled Ash.

  ‘Friends brought me. The friends who’re going to be in as much trouble as I am if I’m picked up. So I don’t think setting your mind at rest is going to be top of their priorities, do you?’

  Ash breathed heavily at her for a minute. The alternative was to start shouting loudly enough that the boys would hear, even from the back garden. That people would hear him as far away as Whitley Vale.

  ‘All right,’ he said eventually. ‘Three days. You don’t go out, and no one comes here. Then you leave, and you never come back. Do you agree?’

  Since it was exactly what she wanted, Cathy had no difficulty agreeing. ‘I knew you’d see sense in the end,’ she said smugly.

  ‘Three days. If you’re still here on Friday, I’ll call the police myself.’

  THIRTEEN

  Through all her adult life, Hazel Best had dealt with reverses at work by seeking consolation with her friends, and vice versa. If her relationship with Ash had foundered on the rocks of time and expectation, there were successes to be had elsewhere. Including one very close to home.

  As she left for work on Monday morning, she’d thought Sperrin was looking stronger. She hadn’t allowed for the fact that, expecting to see her, he had his game face firmly in place. Coming in unexpectedly at quarter to one, she found him asleep in the living-room armchair, all his defences down, and he looked broken and old. All that had kept him going this far was sheer bloody-minded determination, and now he was paying the price for it.

  Seeing him like that, not so much resting as exhausted, his broken arm wedged in the only position that gave him some respite and his face the colour of old concrete, Hazel went through to the kitchen, meaning to make herself a sandwich and leave without disturbing him. But either she made more noise than she intended or some part of his battered brain remained on anchor-watch, because she heard a cough and then his gruff voice saying her name, and she stuck her head back through the door.

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you.’

  ‘I wasn’t asleep.’

  Ash did this too, so did Dave Gorman: you caught them taking forty winks, and they denied something that woul
d have been obvious to a short-sighted man wearing long-sighted glasses. As if there was something reprehensible about sleeping; as if they’d been caught doing something they wouldn’t have wanted their mothers to know about.

  ‘Yeah, right,’ she said, smiling. ‘Do you want a sandwich?’

  He shook his head, dark hair tangled from … not … sleeping. ‘I’ll have coffee if you’re making it.’

  It turned out he’d have a sandwich too, if one was available and not nailed down. Hazel let him have it, returned to the kitchen to make another. They munched companionably.

  ‘Do you usually come home for lunch?’ asked Sperrin.

  ‘Not usually, no.’

  ‘So?’ As if he had a right to some kind of explanation. As if this was his house, and she was the uninvited guest.

  Hazel eyed him speculatively. Well, if he wanted to talk … ‘Why are you here, David?’

  His gaze turned mulish. ‘You know why.’

  ‘You’re expecting to find some answers here. Not at Myrton: here. But why? This is just where the goods train stopped long enough for you to fall off.’

  ‘It’s also the nearest town of any size to the reservoir where they dumped the girl’s body. Is that a coincidence? Maybe it is. Maybe they set off to follow the train, and that’s as far as they got before they lost it. I don’t know. I just … feel … this is where I need to be. That leaving would be too much like giving up.’

  ‘On the mystery?’

  ‘On the girl.’

  Hazel pursed her lips. ‘Suppose you’re right, and these people have some connection to Norbold. That means this isn’t the safest place for you now. You witnessed a murder: there could be people here who need to silence you. And they’ll know you if they see you, and you won’t know them.’

  ‘Maybe I will know them. Maybe seeing them will unlock everything.’

  ‘That’s possible,’ agreed Hazel. ‘In which case you’re going to feel really pleased with yourself, for as long as it takes one of them to pull a gun. They shot Rose in the back, they’re not going to get sentimental about shooting you. Go back to Byrfield. Pete wants you home, and I’d be happier too. I don’t like leaving you here alone.’