by Jo Bannister
‘And yet?’ Hazel prompted gently.
Mrs Fisher sighed. ‘And yet, I cannot put my hand on my heart and tell you I never suspected. There were things. Things he said, sometimes just looks, that were slightly out of place. Things that suggested he was – I don’t know – thinking about something other than what we were talking about. When I heard what happened to Mr Cho, then when I heard about Mrs Cho, I can’t say I didn’t wonder.
‘Unless I was imagining it.’ She raised a supplicant face to her visitor, as if looking for reassurance that that was the explanation, that she’d simply let her imagination run away with her. Hazel could offer no such reassurance, so after a moment she continued. ‘Of course, physically he was still strong then. Even as he grew older, he employed a lot of people. A lot of men have worked for him for a lot of years. They’re not all … well, let’s say they’re not all choirboys. If he’d wanted that kind of help …’ She shrugged unhappily.
‘What about his daughter?’ asked Hazel. ‘Do you think she suspected too? Perhaps she was even involved. She may have felt the same compulsion he did.’
Mrs Fisher looked away. ‘As time went on, Miss Jocelyn took over all her father’s responsibilities. I’m not sure how much they actually discussed it – I think, very often, she just spotted something that was being neglected and worked it into her schedule. But within five or six years, she was running the company.’
‘That’s not really what I’m asking.’
‘I know what you’re asking!’ The sharpness of her tone came from the pain these questions were causing her. ‘And I’ve told you, I don’t know anything. I’m just saying, when Jocelyn took over the business, she may have taken on everything that was important to her father. They were always very close. They’re two very similar people. The same things matter to them, and they deal with problems the same way.’
‘Did you ever hear them discussing the Chos? Or anything that, with hindsight, could have been a discussion about the Chos?’
‘Could have been – yes. I don’t listen in to their conversations, but neither do they wait until I’ve left the room before they talk to one another. There have been times when I’ve wondered what they were talking about. I’ve always assumed it was something to do with the business. I could have been wrong. John said once …’ And there she stopped.
‘Your son John? What did he say?’
Her brows drew together as she debated with herself. Finally she said, ‘I told you, he doesn’t just work in the garden. When they need a chauffeur, he puts on his father’s old uniform.’ She managed a thin smile. ‘Metaphorically speaking – John’s a much bigger man. And they don’t need driving as much as they used to when Mrs Harbinger was alive. Mr Harbinger hardly goes out, and Miss Jocelyn usually prefers to drive herself. But …’
‘But it happens sometimes,’ suggested Hazel. ‘And once when he was driving them, he overheard … what?’
But Mrs Fisher was close to shutting down the conversation. She’d already said much more about her family than a loyal housekeeper normally would. Hazel thought it wasn’t concern for past crimes that motivated her so much as the hope that she might protect the Harbingers from the consequences of any future actions. She didn’t think Mrs Fisher cared very much, even now, about the persecution of the Cho family, except as it might impact on her employers.
‘I don’t know,’ said the housekeeper yet again; now her whole manner was closing down. ‘I wasn’t there. I may have misunderstood what John said; and he may have misunderstood what he heard. You can ask him yourself, if you want to. He’s working in the garage this morning. Shall I call him and tell him you’re coming?’
‘Unless you want to come round with me, so we can all talk it through together?’
‘No thank you,’ said Mrs Fisher coldly.
TWENTY-THREE
You should call her.
‘Call who?’
Even for a man doing his accounts, this was disingenuous. Even a man doing accounts much more demanding than Ash’s would have known exactly who his dog was referring to.
Patience rolled her toffee-coloured eyes and sighed. You should call her.
‘There’s no point. She wants me to do something I’ve no intention of doing. If I call her, we’ll only argue again.’
Better to argue than to pretend that hurting one another doesn’t matter.
Ash put down his pen and turned to look at her. They were in the kitchen at Highfield Road. Ash had started bringing his books home to do at the kitchen table while the boys did their homework. It had seemed a nice, companionable thing to do. But first Gilbert and then Guy got bored with keeping him company after their own work was finished, so now they raced upstairs as soon as Frankie brought them home, did their homework at the playroom table, and spent the summer evenings either in the garden or in front of the trashiest television programmes they could find.
‘She doesn’t understand that I have other obligations now. Other responsibilities.’
She understands. But she misses you. She wonders why she fought so hard to give you a life in which she would no longer have a place.
Ash stared at his dog. She lifted one ear – the speckled one – and scratched delicately under it with a back paw. There was no doubt about it: she was a dog. It had occurred to him to wonder if she was actually an alien from the planet Zog, who by some kind of cosmic joke just happened to look like a dog. It would explain her use of telepathy. Of course, that would also be explained if his trolley had finally jumped the rails and was merrily hurtling downhill on the path of least resistance.
He blinked and cleared his throat. ‘I don’t actually need any help to feel guilty. Not about Hazel – not about any of it. It’s the one thing I can do really well all by myself.’
Patience said primly, Feeling guilty is a self-indulgence until you’ve done everything in your power to make amends.
Ash snorted. ‘Did you find that in a fortune cookie?’
You know where I found it, she said gnomically.
And he did. She could read him like a book. Now, as so often, Patience spoke the inconvenient truths that he tried to bury in the deep damp cellar of his consciousness, behind the Victorian furniture stored for long-deceased aunts and the boxes of orphan crockery that would come in useful sometime although they never had yet.
He muttered, ‘What kind of amends?’
Call her, Patience said again. Better still, let’s go round and see her. Apologies should always be made face-to-face if possible.
‘I don’t think Hazel’s in the mood to apologise.’
Not her, you muppet – you.
‘Me?’ Ash was genuinely surprised. ‘I haven’t done anything to apologise for!’
All the more reason, Patience said firmly.
He dismissed that with a sniff and returned to his accounts. But he wasn’t running Amazon, and there’s a natural limit to how long anyone can spend writing up the sale of – it had been a good day – twenty-two second-hand books. When that limit had been reached, and he could tell from the quizzical tilt of her eyebrows that Patience knew it as well as he, Ash gave in.
‘All right. All right. We’ll go and see her. I’ll apologise. Maybe, on the walk over, I’ll figure out what I’m apologising for.’
There’s a good boy, said Patience approvingly.
Railway Street, where Hazel lived, was a world away from Highfield Road, but only a twenty-minute walk. Since acquiring a dog, Ash had done a lot of walking, and they still did a couple of miles together most days. It was when he did a lot of his thinking. The roads around Norbold were too busy for day-dreaming behind the wheel, so if he wanted peace to think he would take Patience’s lead down from the hall rack, wait while she fetched Spiky Ball, and set off for a ramble round the park or up the canal towpath.
Patience made a point of not interrupting him, but trotted quietly at his side, Spiky Ball held precisely in her narrow jaws; and people who would once have crossed roads to avoid A
sh now smiled at them as they passed. When he noticed he smiled back; but mostly he thought, hunting the elusive notions through the labyrinthine pathways of his mind.
Hazel’s car was missing from its usual spot under her front window. There was nothing odd about that: the likeliest explanation was that she’d gone to Meadowvale, to pester Dave Gorman some more. Ash phoned to ask if he should wait for her, but the call went straight to voice mail.
That wasn’t unusual either. There are many junctures in the career of a police officer when the jingle of an untimely phone-call could be embarrassing, others when it could be dangerous. But Hazel was supposed to be on holiday. Perhaps she’d got in the habit of turning it off. Now he thought about it, he hadn’t phoned her for so long he couldn’t be sure. They talked – when they talked – when she called him, or when she came round to Highfield Road or the shop.
He looked down at Patience, and Patience looked back, smugly. See?
She had a point. It doesn’t take long to make a phone-call. There were plenty of quiet moments in his schedule when he could have asked Hazel about her day and told her about his. ‘We’ll wait,’ he decided. ‘Maybe she won’t be long.’
‘Cooee!’
That wasn’t Hazel. Hazel had never cried ‘Cooee!’ in her life. Ash looked round for the source of the hail and spotted the next-door neighbour waving at him from an upstairs window.
‘Hello, Mrs Burden.’
‘It’s Mr Ash, isn’t it?’ Ash had to acknowledge that it was. ‘If you’re looking for Hazel, she went out.’
He nodded. ‘Do you know when she’ll be back?’
‘Couldn’t say,’ said Mrs Burden. ‘I just saw her driving off.’
‘When was that?’
‘About tea-time. Half-past five or so.’
That was when she’d come to the shop. He glanced at his watch: nearly five hours ago. He’d thought, when she left him, she was coming home. ‘She hasn’t been back since?’
‘I don’t think so, dear. I generally hear the front door.’
It was gone ten o’clock, and the long summer twilight was well advanced. Hazel had left the bookshop soon after six; and she had left angry with him. Where had she gone instead of coming home? She might have met friends, or gone to a local pub, but the worry beads chafing softly in the pocket of Ash’s mind suggested another possibility. She’d thought of a way forward, seen a way to hasten matters towards a conclusion. If so, there were two places she might have gone.
DI Gorman’s number was one of a small, select circle on Ash’s phone: with hardly a moment’s hesitation he called it.
Gorman answered immediately. ‘Gabriel? Is everything all right?’
‘I expect so. Is Hazel with you?’
‘No.’ He sounded surprised.
‘Has she been with you?’
‘No. Have you tried her home?’
‘I’m there now,’ Ash said tersely. ‘Her car’s gone, and her phone’s switched off. Dave, I saw her earlier. She was angry with me – she wanted me to do something about the Harbingers. I refused, and she stormed out. I think that’s where she’s gone.’
DI Gorman was done playing games with these people. He turned into the Harbingers’ drive at speed, spitting the carefully raked gravel onto the carefully manicured lawn, with two squad cars behind him. This was as near going in mob-handed as Meadowvale could manage with three constables on holiday and Sergeant Murchison off with his trouble.
Nor had he sought permission. He had informed Superintendent Maybourne what he intended to do and why; and while he was still marshalling his arguments for when she said no, she nodded and reached for her jacket. ‘I’ll follow you down.’
Hurrying home for his car, Ash found himself trailing the police convoy by a mile or more. Gorman had a search organised by the time he reached the Harbingers’ farmhouse. The doors to all the outbuildings were standing open and uniformed and CID officers were working methodically through a range of garages, potting sheds, boiler houses, empty stables and disused pigeon lofts.
Hazel’s car was not in front of the house, not in the yard that ran down the side and round the back, and now, with the doors ajar, it was plainly in none of the garages either.
Jocelyn Harbinger stalked down the kitchen steps and looked for a moment as if she was going to take a swing at the detective inspector. Instead she said, in the clipped tones of someone who is only just not shouting, ‘I take it you have a search warrant?’
Gorman eyed her implacably. ‘Do I need one?’
‘Yes!’
‘Then yes.’ He shook it out and slapped it into her hand. ‘Where’s your handbag?’
She stared at him. ‘Inside. Why?’
‘You’re going to need it. And your father’s going to need any medications he ought to take in the next six hours.’
‘Six hours?’ Jocelyn’s voice ran up in anger and alarm. ‘I don’t understand. What … where …?’
‘You’re both going to accompany me to Meadowvale Police Station, where I will be conducting formal interviews into the attempted kidnapping of Elizabeth Lim and the actual disappearance of Constable Hazel Best. If you’d like your solicitor present, now’s the time to call him.’
Jocelyn was shocked by the change in his manner. She’d had him down as a fairly affable, reasonably competent small-town copper, promoted to or possibly just beyond the limits of his ability, working on not enough evidence and generally a shade out of his depth. She wasn’t sure what had turned him into this hard-eyed, sharp-tongued, infinitely determined officer – new information he hadn’t had before, mislaying one of his officers? – but the transformation left her breathless and off balance. ‘Are you arresting us?’
Gorman leaned closer and his eyes were fierce. ‘Do I need to?’
‘Er …’ Perhaps it was a bluff. But she didn’t dare call it. ‘No …’
‘Good. Get your father. If you need help with him, bring your housekeeper.’
The search party split up, half its number following Jocelyn into the house while the rest finished inspecting the outbuildings before moving off into the grounds.
A thorough search of even a modestly sized property is a more time-consuming affair than members of the public ever realise. It can take a couple of days to be quite sure that any and all evidence of wrong-doing has been collected. An evidential search of a building as old, large and randomly extended as the Tudor farmhouse could easily take a week, and leave the place looking like a bombsite. But they weren’t, at this point, looking for fingerprints and bloodstains. There was no attempt to lift carpets and rugs, no shifting of furniture, no application to suspicious stains of Luminol and ultra-violet light. They were just looking for a missing person, and after forty minutes DI Gorman was as confident as he could be that, if Hazel had come here, she had also left.
Only at that point did he ask Jocelyn Harbinger if Hazel had paid her a visit.
‘Who?’
Gorman breathed heavily at her. ‘Constable Hazel Best. Tall girl, fair hair – full of questions. We know she came here.’ This was stretching the truth a little, but he felt justified.
‘Well, I haven’t seen her.’
‘Ask your father.’
Jerome Harbinger was in the back seat of the second police car, looking both lost and angry. Jocelyn glanced at him, and back at Gorman. ‘Inspector …’
‘Ask him.’
But before she could, the housekeeper who had been putting a somewhat superfluous blanket around her employer’s knees straightened up and said primly, ‘Excuse me, Miss Harbinger, but I saw the young lady the policeman’s talking about. Earlier this evening. About a quarter to seven?’
She looked to him for confirmation, and Gorman nodded. ‘That might fit.’
‘She seemed to think I could tell her – tell the police – things that the family either couldn’t or wouldn’t. She was, of course’ – she looked directly at Jocelyn – ‘mistaken. We talked for a little while. She asked if she cou
ld also talk to my son, and we went out into the gardens to find him. But he’d gone over to a neighbour for some vermiculite. She said she might pop back tomorrow, and she left. A little after seven, I suppose.’
‘Did she say where she was going next?’ Gorman was keeping an open mind about Mrs Fisher’s account. He didn’t have to decide whether or not to believe her just yet. All he had to do at this point was keep asking questions.
Mrs Fisher frowned as she sifted her memory. ‘Yes. Well, no, but she asked the best route to Coventry from here.’
‘Coventry?’ He turned to Ash, who was standing at his elbow. ‘You know any reason she’d want to go to Coventry?’
‘I don’t think so.’ A suspicion tugged at the corner of Ash’s mouth. He looked past Gorman to the housekeeper. ‘Which is the best way from here?’
‘This time of year? The hill road – through Beominster, up Clover Hill and past the reservoir. I wouldn’t send anyone that way in winter, but it’s a good enough road in good weather.’
Mention of the reservoir flared Gorman’s eyes wide. ‘That’s where …’
‘Yes,’ said Ash flatly. ‘She wanted to see where Edward Cho died.’ He was halfway to his car before the sentence was out.
Gorman went to follow. But Jocelyn Harbinger stopped him with a hand on his sleeve. ‘So … what? Are we coming with you? I should tell our solicitor to meet us at the reservoir?’ She’d had a couple of minutes to recover something of her old self-possession.
Gorman thought for a moment, then shook his head. ‘No. The interview will have to wait. I’ll send a car when I’m ready to see you.’
TWENTY-FOUR
It wasn’t the shortest way to Coventry, and it wasn’t the fastest road. But the shortest road was via one small village after another, none of them with bypasses, most of them occupied mainly by old ladies on sticks and young children on tricycles, all confident of their right-of-way over vehicular traffic. And the fastest road, the motorway, was eight miles in the wrong direction. In summer, the Clover Hill road was the obvious choice.
