Kindred Spirits

by Jo Bannister

The chaplain squinted at her, looking more like a pirate than ever. ‘Why don’t you ask the questions, and we’ll see if I have any problems with the answers?’

  Hazel was happy with that. ‘I told you on the phone I needed some information about your time at Saints Philip & James.’

  Wade nodded. ‘Good old Pip & Jim. It’s ten years since I left there.’

  ‘How long were you there?’

  ‘Also about ten years. It was my first parish.’

  ‘I thought you must have been pretty young. Oh, sorry,’ she said again, blushing, ‘that’s rude. Only I was expecting someone on a Zimmer frame.’

  He smiled, soft-eyed with reminiscence. ‘I was young. About your age. So’ – he spread his hands as if in benediction – ‘what is it you want to know?’

  ‘There was a Chinese family in your congregation. Father, mother, son, daughter. You conducted a funeral for the father, seventeen years ago. Edward Cho.’

  ‘Yes.’ Wade remembered clearly. ‘In fact they were an Anglo-Chinese family – Mary was English. Edward was born here too, although his parents came from Hong Kong.’

  ‘How much did you know about the circumstances of his death?’

  Wade shrugged. ‘What I was told; what the papers said. There was no evidence that it wasn’t an accident, but there was that lingering suspicion. You know about the Harbinger affair – about Jerome Harbinger threatening him?’ Hazel nodded. ‘The family didn’t believe it was an accident. But then, it can be hard to accept something as random as dumb chance. People look for a reason.’

  ‘Do you remember who was at the funeral?’

  ‘Mary, of course, and their children, James and Felicity.’ It was the first time Hazel had heard Elizabeth Lim’s real name. ‘There were people from Edward’s firm there, and what you might call the old retainers – members of the congregation who turn out for just about anything in the church. The verger, the organist, the parish secretary.’

  ‘Any close friends of the Chos?’

  Wade’s face twisted with the effort to remember. ‘I’m sure there were. They were regular church-goers – not just hatches, matches and despatches, not even just Christmas and Easter. Mary was in the Mothers’ Union, Edward used to help with the grounds maintenance. Everyone liked them. If there was any racial prejudice against them, I wasn’t aware of it. But they were a quiet family. Polite but self-contained. I don’t remember anyone being particularly close to them – seeing them outside of church, for meals or holidays or …’

  The sentence died away. He looked at Hazel with a new sharpness in his eye. ‘So maybe there was some prejudice, and I just missed it. Maybe they were aware of it.’

  Hazel was disappointed. She’d hoped there might have been someone Lim would have risked keeping in touch with. A godparent, a neighbour or a school-friend she was unwilling to part from even though she knew the risks. But anyone that close would have been there to support her at the funeral.

  If Wade couldn’t help her, she’d be reduced to trying house-to-house enquiries in the street where the Chos had lived, and a visit to Felicity’s school. But it was all seventeen years ago: young people move, old people die; elderly people forget.

  And maybe there was nothing to find. They were a self-contained family with no close friends. They were polite, and people were polite back, but no one wanted to know them better. Maybe it had been easier for Edward Cho’s children to turn their backs on the home of their youth than Hazel had imagined.

  ‘You haven’t asked about Mary’s funeral,’ Wade said suddenly.

  ‘I wasn’t sure if you conducted that or not.’

  The chaplain pursed his lips. ‘On the whole, I prefer “officiated”. “Conducted” sounds like waving a stick to keep the pall-bearers in step.’

  Hazel smiled dutifully. ‘So she was buried from the church?’

  ‘Ah.’ Again that sharp look. ‘You mean, although she committed suicide.’

  ‘That’s what the police thought. What the coroner believed.’

  ‘There was no evidence of foul play. But absence of evidence is not—’

  ‘—Evidence of absence,’ Hazel finished. ‘You must know my first sergeant. No, I’m not sure I believe it, either.’

  ‘It’s one hell of a coincidence that Edward drove off an icy road and Mary drowned herself before the earth had settled on Jennifer Harbinger’s grave.’

  That took Hazel by surprise. She was a police officer – a nasty suspicious mind came with the truncheon and the sensible shoes. She hadn’t expected a man of the cloth to share the same jaundiced view of his fellow men.

  Wade read her mind and flicked a tiny smile. ‘I don’t know if Edward’s death was an accident. I don’t know if Mary intended to die in her bath, if she fell asleep or if someone killed her. I hoped the police would establish the truth, but the investigation seemed to peter out. I thought at the time there was a certain lack of effort, but perhaps there was nothing to find.’

  He seemed then to change the subject. ‘Do you know how many suicides I’ve buried, Constable … Hazel?’ She shook her head. ‘Absolutely none. I don’t believe in suicide as a concept. I think that people who end their own lives have been driven to it – by circumstances, by illness, by mental frailty. If even the law doesn’t pillory people for things they do under duress, why should the Church? Why would a loving God?’

  But Hazel had seen too many things to believe in a God who saw the fall of every sparrow. ‘If one or both of the Chos were murdered, it’s possible their children are now in danger.’ She summed up in a few sentences the incident at Norbold Quays and the subsequent disappearance of the high school principal. ‘We want to be sure that they’re safe. But we don’t know where to find either of them. Do you remember where they went to school? It’s a long shot, but they may have stayed in touch with old school-friends.’

  Wade hardly had to think. ‘Borough High, a few hundred yards from the church. Penelope Reid, our organist, was the music teacher there until she retired. She was always proud of how well Felicity had done for herself.’

  ‘Would it be worth me talking to her?’

  ‘I wish you could.’ Wade gave a gentle smile. ‘I buried her last spring.’

  Hazel looked up sharply. ‘Anything odd about that?’

  He stared at her. ‘Good grief, no. The woman was eighty, she broke her hip falling off a chair while she was cleaning her windows, and succumbed to pneumonia.’

  So anything the organist had known had died with her; and probably there had been nothing. The Cho children had done the sensible thing, the thing that people in their position are always advised to do and always find so hard: they had severed all contact with their previous lives.

  Except …

  ‘She knew Felicity was a teacher, then.’

  ‘It gave her real pleasure. It’s human nature, isn’t it? – we like to see people we care about following in our footsteps. Penelope steered Felicity towards teaching because she thought she’d be successful. But principal in her early thirties – that was more than even Penny had expected.’

  ‘How did she know?’

  Wade raised a grizzled eyebrow. ‘Hm?’

  ‘Mr Wade, Felicity Cho disappears from the record at the age of sixteen. Elizabeth Lim goes to university, becomes a teacher, becomes principal at Norbold Quays. How did your organist know it was the same girl?’

  Wade’s mouth opened and shut a couple of times but no answer was forthcoming. He knew he’d dug himself into a hole.

  Hazel said softly, ‘You’ve been in touch with Elizabeth Lim, haven’t you? You knew at least something of her new life – the one that was created to keep her safe, the one she wasn’t supposed to share with anyone from before. You knew, and you told Penelope Reid – or maybe the other way round. But you knew.’

  FIFTEEN

  The chaplain spent what seemed a long time considering his options. But actually there were only two: to persist in what was plainly a lie, or to tell the truth.
‘You’re right. I have heard from her. Not regularly – three or four times a year. And about as often from James. They leave messages with me for one another. They didn’t want to risk having each other’s phone numbers or addresses, so they leave messages with me. Sometimes it’s months before a message is collected, sometimes just days. When one of them calls, I ask how they’re doing – if they’re safe, if they’re happy. Felicity told me something about her career, and I told Penny. I trusted her to keep it to herself, and she did.’

  ‘Did James tell you where he’s living now?’

  ‘London. He’s working as an accountant in some big London company.’

  ‘What name does he go by?’

  ‘I don’t know. I haven’t asked, and he hasn’t told me.’

  ‘Can you contact him?’

  ‘I can’t contact either of them. I wait until they contact me.’

  ‘Excellent,’ said Hazel tartly. ‘That is entirely sound practice, recommended in all the best manuals. Unfortunately, while we’re waiting for them to call you, the people who traced Felicity to Norbold Quays are still looking for her. It won’t take them another seventeen years to find her again.’

  ‘I understand your concern,’ said Wade calmly. ‘But they’ve got pretty good at this, Felicity and James both. They’ve stayed safe all this time by adopting new identities and not letting anyone know who or where they are. What can you offer that’s better than that?’

  Which was a very good question. Hazel could see why the Chos felt that running and hiding was their best chance of escaping Jerome Harbinger’s everlasting fury; but she was a police officer, and though she knew it was an imperfect system, she believed that keeping people safe was the job of the police. She understood why the Chos felt disinclined to trust their lives to a force which had served them so poorly in the past, but she still thought it was their best chance of a future.

  ‘I don’t want them to be running scared for the rest of their lives,’ she said simply. ‘I want this resolved. That’s something they can’t do for themselves. It’s something you can’t help them with. It’s going to need resources only the police can provide.

  ‘You’re going to tell me,’ she went on, forestalling Wade’s interruption, ‘that we haven’t distinguished ourselves up till now in protecting the best interests of either family, the Harbingers or the Chos. And I have to admit you have a point. There could be a number of reasons for that – incompetence, malice or just bad luck. But we are the duly appointed authority, and if we’re not doing our job well enough, the answer is to make us do it better, not to look for some way of getting it done without us. The hand-crafted version may look as good at first glance, but sooner or later it will unravel and there’ll be no one to pick up the stitches. That’s where we are now.’

  Wade was watching her levelly. ‘Incompetence, malice or bad luck. Where are you putting your money?’

  Hazel actually shivered. ‘Honestly? I don’t know. Could be any of them; could be a bit of all three. I hope – I hope – no one took a deliberate decision to turn a blind eye to murder. That no one considered the deaths of Edward and Mary Cho a price worth paying to cover up police culpability in the death of Mrs Harbinger. That’s the worst-case scenario. Incompetence? Well, that’s sometimes just a word for good intentions having bad outcomes. And sheer bad luck can play a bigger role than any of us likes to admit.

  ‘But even this long after, things can be put right. Bad decisions can be revisited. Corrupt officers, if that’s what we’re dealing with, can be made accountable. The police service is nobody’s private army: if the chief constable himself is implicated, he won’t be able to prevent a proper investigation once we start throwing all the doors and windows wide and shaking out the carpets.’

  Hazel took a much-needed breath. ‘I can see how lies and secrecy kept James and Felicity safe for a time. But now, secrecy is on the side of their enemy. The shadows that sheltered them for so long are now protecting the man threatening them. We need to bring the whole sorry business out into the light of day, and state publicly what’s been going on and who’s to blame. That’s where their long-term safety lies. I think it’s the only way they’ll ever be safe again.’

  ‘You want them to trust you.’

  ‘That’s exactly what I want. I want them to trust me. Maybe they can’t trust something as big and faceless as a police force, but they can trust me. And I trust DI Gorman. We will figure this out. We will give them a better option than cutting themselves adrift from their lives every few years. In the meantime’ – she pushed a card across the table to the sometime vicar of Pip & Jim’s – ‘if you hear from either of them, please – please – ask them to contact me. We can protect them if they’ll let us. If they won’t, someone else may find them before we can.’

  Wade nodded, and took the card and left. Hazel thought he would do as she asked, if he got the chance. But there were so many imponderables. Whether either of the Chos would call him in the near future. Whether they would be willing to entrust their safety to a provincial detective inspector and an even lowlier uniformed constable. Whether she could keep her promises.

  We can protect them … Was that even true? Could Hazel count on the professional skills and goodwill of her superiors? Edward Cho had thought he could, and his mistake had cost lives and might yet cost more. Why had the police stormed the handover, the climax of delicate negotiations, with such devastating effects? A misunderstanding? A cold-blooded lie? Had someone in a comfortable office at Division decided it was more important to prevent thieves from prospering than it was to protect the innocent parties involved?

  And if that person still occupied a comfortable office at Division, he had a vested interest in how these events played out. He might prefer to keep the file at the back of the Cold Case cabinet rather than see it cleared up, at least – he was seventeen years older now – until his pension came through. He might be able and willing to obstruct any inquiries that would expose that old decision to new scrutiny.

  Hazel sipped her tea while a notion formed. Then she took out her phone. When it came to technology, she was an early adopter. She used her mobile as a pocket computer, would have felt hamstrung without Internet access.

  It took her half a minute to find the information she was looking for. ‘Oh you bastard,’ she swore softly.

  Two middle-aged ladies at the next table glanced sternly her way. Swearing is still disapproved of by middle-aged, middle-class ladies in tea-rooms. But Hazel was too intent on the miniature screen, and the mental arithmetic that made the disparate facts add up to one unwelcome whole, even to notice. So she went on, sotto voce, oblivious of her audience.

  ‘You utter bastard. What’s the reason this time – a CBE? You only need to stay out of trouble long enough and the country will express its gratitude in the usual way? But not if the Harbinger case makes it back onto the front pages. Not if the media blame you for what happened to Jennifer Harbinger. As long as no one starts digging up the old controversy, you can complete your service and take your pension and wait for the envelope with the royal monogram on it. And if that means turning your back while one man you’ve wronged takes his vengeance on the family of another, well, he’s rich and they’re outsiders, and with luck no one else will ever know.

  ‘You think your reputation is worth people’s lives? How dare you? How dare you? You took the same oath I did, you bloody, bloody man!’ And with that she shoved herself back from the table and stalked out of the café, trailing startled looks in her wake.

  ‘ACC-Crime.’

  DI Gorman had the attentive look of a spaniel that’s heard someone load the shotgun and is waiting for the bang. He went on waiting. He was, he thought, reasonably good at putting two and two together. Even so, he needed more than three letters and a word to sink his teeth into.

  Hazel tried to bridle her impatience. Talking to Dave Gorman wasn’t like talking to Ash. He didn’t pick the thoughts straight out of her head while she was still
hunting for the words. Of course he didn’t: no one else did either. It was her job to explain what it was that her quick trawl of the Internet had confirmed.

  ‘He’s been a dragging anchor on this inquiry since it started. He wouldn’t believe that Elizabeth Lim was the target until she disappeared; and when she did, he was determined to consider the matter closed. He ordered us to waste no more time on the case. I think he also put pressure on Gabriel to keep him from helping us.’

  Gorman was nodding slowly. ‘OK, maybe he did all those things. So?’

  ‘He was so worried about what a proper investigation would turn up that he dropped every obstacle he could think of in your way.’

  That too seemed a tenable interpretation of the facts. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because if Elizabeth Lim leaves Norbold voluntarily and is never heard of again, and if some London accountant whose name we don’t know is fished out of the Regent’s Canal after an unfortunate accident with his concrete water-skis, those are two incidents no one has any reason to connect – with each other, with Norbold, or with an art theft seventeen years ago. But if someone joins the dots, that file isn’t going back in the cabinet.’

  ‘Why would ACC-Crime care?’

  Hazel gave a brittle smile. ‘I don’t suppose you know off-hand where he was working seventeen years ago. But I wonder if you could guess?’

  She saw the thought splash down in his eyes and sink through his brain. She saw understanding gain a hold, and after understanding an indignation to match her own. ‘It was his decision to send in the snatch-squad?’

  ‘I can’t prove that,’ Hazel admitted. ‘But he was working at Division, and he was one of the handful of officers who might have made that decision. It could have been one of the others; it could have been a joint effort. But he’s the one who has been actively trying to draw a veil over what happened that night.’

  ‘So … he found out about the exchange, and his decision to crash the party resulted in the deaths of three innocent people.’ Gorman’s voice was a low growl as he mentally ticked the boxes. ‘He’d expected plaudits and promotion for what he confidently expected would be seen as a major coup. Instead it turned into a disaster and somebody’s head was going to roll. He thought his career was over.