by Jo Bannister
He pushed his hands deep into his pockets and raised his shoulders ruefully. She must think this is Amateur Night, he thought despairingly to himself. Aloud he said, ‘I’m sorry, Miss Harbinger. I didn’t know your father was disabled. I didn’t know your mother was killed by a police firearm.’
‘It was an accident, of course,’ conceded Jocelyn. ‘He’d been shot himself – his gun went off as he fell. He wasn’t to blame. Whoever sent him was to blame.’
Gorman sidestepped that. ‘What I do know is that Mr Harbinger threatened the entire Cho family, and that Edward Cho was dead within a fortnight and his wife a few weeks later. And a week ago there was an attempt to abduct their daughter. I suppose what I’m asking is if your father’s still strong enough and still angry enough to be responsible for that.’
Jocelyn went on regarding him steadily, her expression unchanging. She said nothing for so long that Gorman thought she was refusing to answer. Then she drew a deep breath and said, ‘My father did threaten the Chos. Mr Cho came to our house three days after my mother’s funeral, to express his regrets. I hope he wasn’t expecting absolution, because he was never going to get it. Not from my father, and not from me.
‘When someone you love dies, Inspector – even in normal circumstances, even when it wasn’t violent and unnecessary – the full impact of it doesn’t hit you right away. Shock cushions you at first. Then, as the shock starts to recede, there are things to do – people to notify, arrangements to make, decisions to be made. So many things. They add up to a kind of tide that sweeps you along, so you’re doing what needs doing but it doesn’t feel like you doing it. You’re not really feeling anything much at all.
‘Once all the things that need doing have been done, and there’s time to stop and think, that’s when you start feeling it. When you really start to understand what’s happened, what you’ve lost. When all the people who came round with food and sympathy have left and you’re alone, and the house is quiet and grey and so empty you don’t think you can bear it.
‘And that, Inspector,’ she went on, still holding his eye with the icy emeralds that were hers, ‘is when Mr Cho arrived at the front door. I’m sure he didn’t mean to make things worse. I’m sure he thought he was just leaving a decent interval, and then doing what he believed he ought to do. I don’t think he was a monster. I think he was a decent man who wasn’t up to a difficult job, and he made a mistake. Talked to someone he shouldn’t have done about something he should have kept quiet about. Maybe that’s why he came here, to explain what went wrong. I don’t know. My father wouldn’t hear him out.’
She turned away then and resumed walking slowly, Gorman at her side. ‘That’s when he threatened Mr Cho and his family. It’s perfectly true: that’s what he did. There was nothing ambiguous about it. Mr Cho said he knew what we were going through. My father said he didn’t, not yet, but he was going to.
‘You see, all those early days when there was so much to arrange, he’d managed to hold himself together. Rigidly. He was like a man made of ice: cold and clear and brittle, and I was terrified – terrified – that the next thing that touched him would break him in a million pieces.
‘And then Mr Cho tried to apologise. He’d promised to keep my mother safe, and she was dead, and Edward Cho stood in our hallway and tried to apologise!’ She vented an unsteady sigh. ‘And my father lost control. All the pain, all the rage, all the bitterness, rose up like one of those great geysers and shot out, boiling and steaming, and Mr Cho was the one standing too close.
‘So yes, he did threaten Cho’s family. He said anything and everything he could think of to hurt and frighten the man. It wasn’t nice. It wasn’t edifying. But, Inspector, apart from the minute or two it took to spew out, it wasn’t meant. My father was a businessman, he ran a trucking company – there was never any prospect that he’d take out a contract on someone. Even someone he was so angry with. He was never going to have anyone killed! Only, for a few minutes, while the grief was bubbling over, it gave him some comfort to say that he was. To strike fear into the heart of the man responsible for my mother’s death.’
Dave Gorman knew perfectly well that most threats are not to be taken seriously, that they perform the same function as a pressure-valve. ‘And yet,’ he said quietly, ‘Edward Cho is dead. His wife is dead. And now their daughter has been the subject of an attack.’
Jocelyn Harbinger tossed her head dismissively. ‘Edward Cho died in a car accident on a notoriously icy road on a winter’s evening. His wife committed suicide. As for their daughter, I know nothing about her. I do know that my father is no longer capable of pursuing a vendetta even if he wanted to.’
The problem was, Gorman thought she was right. Jerome Harbinger was a shadow of the man he must once have been. The wheelchair wouldn’t keep him from taking a murderous revenge: a man with financial resources can buy whatever help he requires, even that kind of help. But men with a purpose, even a twisted purpose, don’t look as Harbinger looked now. They remain focused, braced by the hunger and the single-minded determination to feed it. It was Gorman’s instinct that, if Jerome Harbinger had been behind the attack on Elizabeth Lim, he wouldn’t have looked so very diminished now. That a cause this important to him would have kept him from crumbling into peevish, fractious old age.
He couldn’t afford to trust his instinct; and he couldn’t afford to ignore it. Harbinger was a chess-player – a good chess-player. It was conceivable that his broken titan act was exactly that: a performance, designed to throw investigators off the scent. Or that while the manifestations of age and deteriorating faculty were indeed genuine, the hatred still burned brightly enough within him to keep his vicious dream alive. No one was suggesting he was one of the men in the van. To finish what he’d started seventeen years earlier, all he had to do was use a telephone and make a bank transfer. Someone determined enough could do it from an iron lung, let alone a wheelchair.
‘The night that he died,’ he said, ‘had Edward Cho been to this house?’
‘Certainly not,’ said Jocelyn shortly. ‘Don’t you think he knew by then that he wasn’t welcome here?’
‘He might have come anyway, if your father had asked him to.’
‘Why would we have wanted to see Cho again? The man was nothing but bad memories to us.’ She considered for a moment. ‘Why are you asking?’
‘Because that road up the Clover Hill isn’t one he would have had much occasion to use. It would take him home to Coventry, but not from anywhere that we know he had a reason to be. His office was in Birmingham. He visited clients in various places, but the only house we know he visited in this area is this one.’
‘And look how well that turned out,’ said Jocelyn Harbinger sourly.
Either there was nothing more she could contribute, or nothing more she would. ‘I will need to speak to your father again,’ Gorman said.
Jocelyn Harbinger’s jaw came up. Her green eyes sparkled, as if the ice was reflecting firelight. ‘As you wish. But not now. I shall require his solicitor and his doctor to be present. You can make an appointment, if you like.’ A kind of terse humour crept into her voice, making it a challenge. ‘Or you could arrest him, and I’ll bring them down to your police station. Norbold, did you say? Well, that’ll give the Norbold News something a bit punchier for its front page than the usual dog and pony show. Geriatric cripple accused of murder: DI helps defendant up police station steps.’
Gorman chewed his lip reflectively. He wasn’t afraid of anything she could do to him. He wasn’t afraid of looking like an idiot: it wouldn’t be the first time, it wouldn’t be the last. He wasn’t even afraid of being wrong. But he didn’t want to find himself doing something inappropriate just because she’d told him he couldn’t.
‘I can come back tomorrow,’ he said calmly. ‘Or if that doesn’t suit, I can come back the next day.’
‘Fine,’ she said.
Gorman became aware of a presence at his back. The gardener had found a rea
son to push a barrow-load of clippings up behind them, although there wasn’t a compost heap in sight. ‘Everything all right, Joss?’
‘Hm?’ She looked past Gorman’s elbow in surprise, as if momentarily she’d forgotten she employed a gardener. ‘Oh … yes. Yes, of course, John. Are we in your way? I think we’re about finished, aren’t we, Inspector?’
Gorman smiled politely. ‘Until tomorrow.’
FOURTEEN
Hazel did as she’d been told: she went to help Ash in his shop. Perhaps because it was Saturday morning, this was one of those rare occasions when there were customers – customers plural; two women who arrived together and a young man who came in on his own – so she put the kettle on then drifted over to the long table to see what he’d laid out by way of temptation today.
‘Dickens,’ said the young man who’d quietly drifted over to join her. ‘And some poetry.’
‘Never saw the point of Dickens,’ sniffed Hazel. ‘Jeffrey Archer with warmer vests.’
The young man looked taken aback. ‘Er … well. It’s a point of view, I suppose. How do you feel about the First World War poets?’
She shrugged. ‘How many rhymes are there for “mud”?’
Gabriel Ash was in many ways a terrible businessman. He didn’t know anything about running a shop, he didn’t need the income and he didn’t like having too many customers. But he had a keen instinct for when Hazel was burning on a short fuse. He left the women perusing a collection of the Brontës, put a friendly arm around Hazel’s shoulders and steered her firmly towards the kitchen at the back.
Patience, who was lying under the long table with Spiky Ball between her paws, watched them go with placid, toffee-coloured eyes.
When Hazel was perched on the counter with a steaming mug in her hands, Ash asked, ‘What’s happened?’
She told him everything. Ash heard her out in silence, giving nothing away. Hazel finished sourly, ‘And Dave Gorman won’t let me help, even though he’d know nothing about any of it if it wasn’t for me!’
‘But now he does, it’s his job to investigate. It says so on his door: Criminal Investigation Department. You’re paid to maintain law and order.’
‘Not today. I’m on holiday.’
If Ash felt his heart sink, he managed to keep it off his face. ‘Good. What are you going to do?’
‘I was going to help Dave Gorman. He said I should come and help you.’
Gee, thanks, thought Ash. Aloud he said, ‘Then stop upsetting my customers. I don’t get so many I can afford to have them frightened off.’
‘Then what am I supposed to do?’
She sounded like a child on the second week of the summer holidays, and Ash almost answered in the same vein: ‘Have you cleaned your room? The dog needs brushing. When did you last write to your pen-friend?’ It was curious, and just a little sad, how the return of his children had altered the relationship between him and Hazel. Sometimes he almost forgot she was a woman and a friend, and thought of her a little like a third son. Older and more responsible than Gilbert and Guy, but still not entirely mature. A moody teenager, now generous, now in rebellion.
But it wasn’t Hazel who had changed, it was him. When they’d first met she had made time to help him, although her days were already full and he had nothing but time. Now he was busy with his children and his shop, and Hazel would have been less than human if she hadn’t noticed that their friendship was having to take a back seat. Ash regretted that, but didn’t know an answer to it that didn’t involve inserting another three hours into every day.
He couldn’t say any of this to her. He focused on the question she’d asked. ‘How much background does Dave have to the Harbinger case?’
‘All of it,’ said Hazel, puzzled. ‘In the files.’
‘Perhaps he doesn’t want to call up the files. If he’s been told to leave the matter alone, and then he puts in a request for the Harbinger file …’
Hazel caught the direction of his thinking like a hound winding a fox. Her head came up and her eyes widened. ‘Yes. If ACC-Crime wants the lid kept on this, he’ll have put a note on the file so he’ll be informed if anyone asks for it. Rather than risk that, Dave’s probably working in the dark.’
‘You can’t pull that file either. But you could get together as much information as was made public at the time. Harbinger was a rich man and his wife died in a shoot-out: the newspapers must have been full of it. And IT is your thing, isn’t it? You could probably put together a file every bit as good as the one Dave would ask for if he dared.’
Hazel brightened at the thought of useful activity. ‘Of course I can. Like you say, the Harbingers were important people – reporters on all the nationals must have spent hours dredging up facts about the art theft, the police raid and the aftermath. There’ll have been inquests on Edward and Mary Cho, too. Whatever’s in the public domain, I’ll find it.’
‘Excellent,’ said Ash, satisfied. Nothing could have pleased him more than the thought of her sitting safe at a computer screen for the next few days.
Not for the first time in these last months, Hazel wished her friend Saturday was here. She no longer thought of him with the sharp pain of grief and guilt that had been enough to make her catch her breath; but the missing him hadn’t gone away. She still sometimes heard the narrow stairs of her little house in Railway Street creak, and took it for his footsteps. She still occasionally found herself making late-night cocoa for two.
By any objective measure, he had been a terrible lodger. On what he earned, his contribution to the household had been minimal – leaving school at fourteen to live off his wits on the streets of Norbold hadn’t qualified him for anything better than the late-night shift at a service station – and the trouble he’d brought to her door should have outweighed any pleasure she’d found in helping him. Additionally, he left a tide-mark round the bath and could never be induced to put used pots into the dishwasher; and on top of that, he put her to the expense of a new hall carpet by braining someone with a cricket bat on the stairs. Yet she missed him. Never a day passed but that she thought about him, and wondered where he was and what he was doing, and even if he was still alive.
Today she had a particular reason for missing him. Hazel knew computers inside out. She’d taught IT before going into the police. She could do with them just about everything that could legally be done. But somehow Saturday, despite living for years in squats with no broadband and often no electricity, had acquired computer skills that left her gasping. He could do all the things that couldn’t be done legally.
But though liquor is quicker, candy is still dandy. Time and again in training, she’d been reminded that getting the answer right was more important than getting the answer fast. That used to mean struggling through piles of paperwork, and asking for documents that were being held elsewhere, and being sent the wrong ones, and sending them back and waiting for the right ones, and hoping to God that no one had spilled coffee on a vital page. Electronic data retrieval did away with all that. It was still grunt work, but it was now possible to achieve in hours what used to take days or even weeks. Hazel tried to remember how lucky she was as her eyes started to burn and go red, and then to cross at all the print dancing across her screen.
But she was getting a lot of material, and she was fairly sure that the solid core of it was going to be valuable. There were newspaper reports on the robbery and, three months later, the death of Mrs Harbinger. There were reports of the death, two weeks after that, of Edward Cho. She found no suggestion of foul play – he was driving home up a notoriously treacherous hill on a frosty winter’s evening – but she did discover where the funeral was held, and that led her to the Parish Church of Saints Philip & James in the leafy suburbs of Coventry.
Further surfing established that the current vicar was too recent an arrival to have conducted the service, but that the incumbent seventeen years ago was Reverend Martin Wade, now serving time as a prison chaplain in Birmingham. She found a
contact number for him and tried it, without success. She left a message, and fifteen minutes later he got back to her.
It might have occurred to her at that point that, while trawling the Internet could hardly be described as interfering in a CID investigation, interviewing a potential witness certainly could. In fact, she entirely failed to notice the line she was blithely stepping over. She was just gathering information; the Chos’ family priest might be able to add to that fund; if he was happy to talk to her, she saw no reason not to talk to him.
She offered to meet him at the prison. He suggested the more congenial surroundings of a tea-room near the Bull Ring, and he was waiting when she arrived, a younger man than she was expecting with a beard and an almost piratical expression to go with it.
He spotted her before she spotted him, and only partly because the other customers were women doing their weekend shopping, encumbered with carrier bags and small children. ‘I saw your picture in the paper.’
‘Oh God,’ she groaned; and then, apologetically, ‘Oh … sorry.’
Martin Wade grinned. ‘Better to take the Lord’s name in vain than forget it altogether.’
‘That must have been on one of the tablets that got broken.’
He liked that. He laughed, showing strong, perfect teeth. ‘What can I do for you, Constable Best?’
Given his willingness to co-operate, she felt obliged to be honest. ‘Call me Hazel. I’m not sure the “constable” bit is appropriate, just at the moment.’
‘They’ve sacked you again?’ Clearly, Hazel wasn’t the only one who could do a bit of research on the Internet.
‘They never sacked me before!’ she retorted indignantly. Several of the shopping ladies looked up from their toasted tea-cakes. ‘They suspended me from duty, but they never sacked me. They still haven’t. It’s just, this isn’t entirely official. I don’t have the authority to demand answers from you if you want to stand on your rights.’
