by Jo Bannister
‘If it wasn’t ACC-Crime, it was someone working to the same agenda,’ Hazel surmised. ‘Someone who’s decided that seventeen years is long enough for a murderer to go free. Someone who thinks the Cho case can be cleared up now but doesn’t want to do it himself. Possibly because he could have done it before if he hadn’t been protecting people that he calls Sir.’
Gorman sniffed sourly. ‘Someone who thinks it could still be a poisoned chalice, and he’d rather someone else took the first sip.’
That was entirely possible. Hazel chuckled ruefully. ‘I suspect there’s a big red stamp on our personnel files – yours and mine – saying EXPENDABLE. Well, maybe that’s what we’re best at: taking flak. And – and this is important – keeping going. We’ll crack this, Dave. The information is out there. And now there are higher-ups willing us to succeed, even if they’re not ready to announce the fact. We just have to put it together.’
‘That’s all?’ said Gorman weakly. ‘Oh good.’
They pushed ideas between them for another hour, without making much progress. Then Gorman was called out to deal with an attempted robbery at knife-point – the teenage perpetrator, his identity disguised by one leg of a pair of tights because his mum didn’t wear stockings, was locked in a storeroom: he’d panicked and rushed through the wrong door when the seventy-year-old shop assistant set about him with a mop – and Hazel took the scenic route home, via Rambles With Books.
The boys were there too. Frankie had dropped them off after school while she visited her dentist. Ash had set them to rearranging the display on the long central table.
‘Find me one on art theft,’ Hazel said in passing, and Gilbert – sounding exactly like his father – said, ‘I’m sure we’ll have one here somewhere.’
Ash noticed the new purpose in her manner and raised an eyebrow. ‘Developments?’
‘Maybe. Not sure.’ She told him about her conversation with Everton Woods.
‘So what are you thinking?’ asked Ash. ‘That this man Pickering fenced the Harbingers’ Caravaggio?’
‘Possibly. He seems to have been in that line of work.’
‘Is there any reason to suppose that’s why he was killed?’
Hazel shrugged. ‘He seems to have been killed by someone who also wanted what was hanging on his office wall. We’ve no way of knowing what that was, except it was too big to be the Caravaggio.’
‘His office wall? Not in the shop?’
‘No, it doesn’t seem to have been part of his stock. So far the Met haven’t found anyone who remembers seeing it.’
‘So, whatever it was, it was for his own private satisfaction. Or …’ The rest of the sentence failed to materialise, and when Hazel looked sharply at him his face had gone still and his eyes had turned distant and unfocused.
Recognising the expression, she didn’t want to interrupt his thought processes. But when a couple of minutes had passed and he was still peering intently at some internal landscape, her patience ran out and she prompted him. ‘Or what?’
‘Hm?’ He came back to her then, and there was a new clarity in his eye that suggested he’d brought something with him. ‘Art theft is a specialised field. Stealing a painting isn’t like stealing a diamond necklace or a stack of gold sovereigns. It has no intrinsic value – you can’t cut it down or break it up or melt it and recast it as something else. A painting is only worth something when it can be identified. When it can be attributed to a good artist. Otherwise it’s just a bit of old canvas and flaking paint.’
‘All right,’ said Hazel. ‘So?’
‘So what do you do with a stolen painting? There’s an international art theft register: the moment something is reported stolen, no reputable museum, gallery, private or institutional buyer will look at it. And if you render it unrecognisable, you destroy its value anyway.’
Hazel tried to follow his train of thought. ‘So you … hang it in your private office for seventeen years?’ She hoped, she really hoped, Jennifer Harbinger hadn’t died to provide Lester Pickering with wallpaper.
‘In a way, yes,’ said Ash. ‘Paintings like that – like the Harbinger Caravaggio – do have a value when they’re used in a particular way. They’re used in crime circles – serious crime circles – as a kind of hostage to fortune.
‘It works like this. Suppose I need money to set up a bank robbery. It’s an expensive business – like any other enterprise, you need to speculate to accumulate. There’s information to buy, people to buy off, equipment to get hold of. I know I can repay these sums from the proceeds of the crime, but I can’t go into the Credit Union and ask for a loan, can I? I need someone to bankroll me. And he wants some guarantee that he’ll get his money back, with interest. He doesn’t want to take my word for it – he’s not sure I’m entirely honest.’
‘Whatever would give him that idea?’ murmured Hazel.
‘Plus, even if I’m not out to cheat him, things can go wrong. Like a bank lending money, he doesn’t want to share in the risks of the enterprise, only the profits. Fortunately, I know Lester Pickering, and Lester has a painting which is probably worth more than the bank has in its vaults. Lester will lend this painting to the man with the money, to hold as ransom until the loan is repaid. When the job is successful, the money man gets his money back, together with his cut; Lester gets his painting back, together with his cut; and I keep what’s left.’
He became conscious of her open-mouthed stare. ‘What?’
‘Gabriel – how do you know this stuff?’
‘You know what I used to do for a living.’
‘You were a spy.’
‘I was not a spy,’ he retorted sharply. ‘I was a security analyst. And before that I was an insurance investigator.’
‘You worked on this sort of stuff?’
‘Sometimes. And I worked with people who did it all the time. Who knew the workings of the criminal underworld better than the criminals themselves.’
Hazel gave herself a little shake. Occasionally, he still amazed her. After months of playing with absolute conviction his role as the archetypal middle-class householder, small businessman and parent, the stage curtain had twitched aside for a moment and given her a glimpse of this other life he’d had before she knew him. She knew he was a clever man. She knew his professional skills had been in demand. Somehow, evidence of why still managed to surprise her.
‘All right,’ she said after a moment. ‘Suppose that is what Pickering was doing. And suppose the Harbingers’ Caravaggio is what he was doing it with. Who would want him dead?’
‘Not the people who used him to guarantee their loans. Now he’s gone, they’ll have to find someone else to underwrite their projects.’
‘What if one of them went wrong? If someone took the money and didn’t do the bank robbery?’
‘Then the money man would keep the Caravaggio until the bank robber could put together another job. That’s what it’s for. But neither party would blame Pickering. He’s the one who would have restructured the loan for them. He’d have to, or he’d never get his painting back.’
Hazel shook her head. ‘If it was the Caravaggio, everything would fall into place. Then it would be the Harbingers who killed him. They found out he was involved in the theft of their art collection, and they finally caught up with Pickering just as they caught up with Elizabeth Lim. Unfortunately, it isn’t. It isn’t the right size.’
‘Bigger? Smaller?’
‘Pickering’s picture was bigger. And while you might conceivably cut a painting down – if it got damaged, for instance – you couldn’t make it bigger.’
‘How much bigger?’
She consulted her notes. ‘Twelve centimetres in one direction, and … OK, twelve centimetres all round.’
Ash was looking at her as if she’d just said something very foolish, and for the life of her Hazel couldn’t think what.
He said, ‘It’s a frame.’
TWENTY-ONE
Hazel still didn’t understand
. ‘Nobody’s trying to frame anybody, Gabriel. But if the picture’s too big—’
Ash shook his head gently, trying not to smile. ‘The extra twelve centimetres – that’s the picture frame. The insurers’ report would give the size of the canvas. The white patch on Lester Pickering’s office wall would be the size of the framed picture. Twelve centimetres all round would be a nice baroque frame, just the thing for an Old Master.’
Hazel put her hand to her mouth and closed her eyes for a moment. It was so obvious, now he’d pointed it out. ‘It never occurred to me. I compared the measurements, and they weren’t the same. I have to tell Dave.’
But Gorman wasn’t answering his phone. He was too busy preventing the elderly shopkeeper from beating up the teenager who’d tried to rob her.
Hazel turned back to Ash, an expectant glow in her face. ‘If that was the Caravaggio, surely we’re right back to the Harbingers as prime suspects. They killed Pickering because he was involved in the robbery that led to Jennifer Harbinger’s death. Maybe he was actually there – maybe he was the one who got away, with the thing tucked under his arm. He certainly had it long enough to produce a mark on his office wall.
‘When they tracked him down, the Harbingers beat his head in and took the painting because it was theirs to take; and they didn’t take anything else because, whatever else they are, they’re not thieves. They don’t have to steal antiques when they can simply buy them.’
‘Jerome Harbinger is a frail elderly man,’ Ash reminded her. ‘Jocelyn Harbinger is a woman. But beating a man’s skull in with a walking-stick requires physical strength.’
‘Or maybe just a lot of pent-up anger,’ said Hazel. ‘It’s amazing what people can do with enough motivation. Anyway, the Harbingers could hire someone to do their dirty work. It wasn’t them at the school either. That doesn’t mean they weren’t responsible.’
Clearly that was true. Perhaps the two men in the grey van paid Lester Pickering a visit. Which meant – Ash paled visibly – a cold-blooded killer had laid hands on his sons. If Hazel hadn’t weighed in when she did … Involuntarily, he glanced out into the shop, to check they were still there, still safe.
‘You’re pretty confident it’s them, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘One of them, or both of them.’
‘Means, motive, opportunity,’ Hazel enumerated. ‘They had all three. We don’t know of anyone else who had. That’s not the same as proof. But what are the odds that there’s someone else out there with a vendetta against both the Chos and a known fence of stolen art?’
Put that way … ‘Not high,’ Ash admitted. ‘So Jerome Harbinger meant every word he said. And when he got too frail to finish the job himself, he got someone to help. Possibly his daughter, as well as two men with a grey van. And Elizabeth Lim is still in danger, and will be until that vicious old man and those he’s either bought or suborned are behind bars.’
‘Exactly.’ Hazel seemed to remember telling him this days ago.
Ash must have sensed what she was thinking. ‘I’m sorry I haven’t been more helpful. I was wrong to tell you not to get involved. This needs clearing up, now, so Miss Lim can go home. She’s been a victim long enough.’
She’d heard that note in his voice before. That little hint of steel, that was how he spoke instead of shouting. Her heart quickened. It was as if he’d been away and now he was back. This was what she’d missed: this sense of being part of a team. She almost had it with Dave Gorman, but not quite. The ranks got in the way. When push came to shove, if Gorman said, ‘Jump’, either she jumped or she started looking for another job. What she had with Ash was a meeting of free minds, kindred spirits with a shared purpose, two people trying to do the right thing not because they were paid to or because they had to but because it was the right thing. Since his boys had come home, Ash had been too busy, too preoccupied, to be her wingman. She knew she’d missed him: she hadn’t realised just how much.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Oh yes. What do you suggest?’
‘I’ll go and see Superintendent Maybourne. She needs to put more people on the case. Even with your help, even now Dave can use the rest of CID, there aren’t enough bodies for an investigation on this scale. She may need to bring in detectives from neighbouring forces.’
And that was as if he’d used a very fine needle to prick a tiny hole in her balloon: not big enough to burst it, just enough to let all her hopes leak quietly away, leaving her heart an empty bladder.
‘That’s it?’
He looked surprised. ‘It should help, don’t you think? I know manpower is always stretched, but this is a murder investigation. And the longer it takes to wrap it up, the more likelihood there’ll be another murder. It isn’t just a major inquiry, it’s an urgent one. If no one else has spelled that out for Superintendent Maybourne, I will. Any member of the public has the right to express concern about policing matters, and it may make it easier to drum up extra help if she can tell Division she’s getting complaints about the lack of progress.’
Hazel was looking at him not so much with disappointment as suppressed indignation.
‘What?’ asked Ash uncertainly.
‘I have to tell you, Gabriel,’ she said tersely, ‘you were more fun when you were mad. Now you’re sane again, you’re just like everybody else. Conventional. Predictable. Safe.’ She made it sound like an insult.
He was genuinely taken aback. He didn’t know what he’d done to upset her. ‘But Hazel … what more can I do? Borrow a Stetson, stick a tin star on my lapel and meet Jerome Harbinger at high noon on ground level enough that his wheelchair won’t run away? I am not and never have been a police officer. You are, but – I’m sorry to be blunt – you don’t have the seniority to do what needs doing. Dave Gorman is the senior detective in this town. Tom Severick is the senior detective of this force. What can we possibly do that they can’t?’
‘Care?’ suggested Hazel acidly.
Ash frowned. ‘That’s unfair. Dave is doing his best to resolve this. If he can get the help he needs from headquarters now, he’ll get on top of it.’
The criticism in his tone stung. ‘I know that. I know how far Dave was prepared to stick his neck out for Elizabeth Lim. He went up against ACC-Crime knowing Severick had the means and believing he had the motive to cut the legs from under him. And I was ready to go with him. He didn’t want me to, but if things had gone the way we fully expected, I’d have been right there beside him.
‘Because that’s what the job requires. We keep the peace, we protect the innocent, we hold the guilty to account – and we do these things not just when it’s convenient and makes our superiors smile benevolently, but also when it’s going to raise hackles and lower eyebrows all the way up the corridors of power.’
She thought for a moment. ‘They say the job of a free press is to tell truth to power. I’ve always admired that. Someone has to, and it takes courage to stand up to people with more bullets in their gun than you’ve got. However this ends up, Dave Gorman comes out of it with honour, because he tried to do the right thing even when it looked like costing him everything.
‘But what about you, Gabriel? A lot of people have stuck their necks out for you in the last couple of years. Don’t you feel it’s your turn now? To help someone else who’s afraid and in danger, and has run out of people to turn to? Or did you stop being interested in justice once you’d got yours?’
The unexpected fierceness of her attack stunned Ash into silence. He hadn’t seen this coming, hadn’t realised it had been building for days. That her frustration at the lack of progress had created a head of steam that, sooner or later, was always going to blow the kettle off the stove.
His soul recoiled as if scalded. His first instinct, when he could find a voice at all, was to protest. To say that she was being unreasonable; that she was venting her anger on him only because he was handy; that she was expecting more of him than any man with a small business and two children to look after could hope to deliver.
&
nbsp; What stopped him was the realisation that her assessment might, at least in part, be justified. Working together these last fifteen months, their achievements had been broadly satisfactory but their motivations had not been the same. Ash thought he was, on the whole, a good man, but he lacked Hazel’s perfect altruism. She was right: what good he had done, he had done from essentially selfish motives. To protect himself, his family and his friends. To fend off the recurring questions about his mental equilibrium.
He had not done what she had done: taken up the cause of complete strangers simply because no one else would. And one of those complete strangers had been him, and he wouldn’t be here – right here, in his shop, with his two sons on the other side of a flimsy partition wall – if she too had kept her compassion close to home.
He knew it, and felt a sudden surge of shame. Unfortunately, it had the effect that shame so often has on people: it made him defensive. ‘I’m not Superman,’ he gritted. ‘I have never felt the urge to wear my underpants on the outside. I have only so much to go round: so much time, so much passion, so much strength. And yes, I look after my own first. I’m sorry if that seems selfish to you. Perhaps when you have children, you’ll understand.’
Hazel barked an incredulous laugh at him. ‘Oh dear God, you’re playing the fertility card! The last refuge of the man losing on points. Gabriel – everything has babies. Goldfish have babies. Earthworms have babies. Mice do almost nothing their entire lives but have babies. Having the physical equipment and the psychological urge to pass on your DNA does not turn you into a higher life-form! It just messes with your hormones so you think it has.
‘Having children is not a get-out-of-jail card for when difficult decisions have to be taken. If anything, your family gives you a vested interest in having a civilised world to raise them in. You can’t opt out of your duties as an intelligent, compassionate human being because it’s time to help with the homework!’
