Kindred Spirits

by Jo Bannister

  In winter it was a series of frost pockets linked by sheet ice. Edward Cho wasn’t the first motorist to end his journey in the reservoir, fifteen metres below the road, and he wouldn’t be the last.

  Some reservoirs are miracles of the water engineer’s art, beautiful as well as useful, indistinguishable from natural lakes and drawing trippers from miles around. The Clover Hill dam wasn’t in that category, mainly because of its underlying geology. Warwickshire is a county of rolling hills, green pastures and picturesque spinneys; Clover Hill was unusual in the steep ravine that fell away from its western flank, providing the perfect opportunity to dam a watercourse. If the art of dairy farming is to extract the maximum amount of milk with the minimum of moo, the skill of reservoir building is to hold back the maximum amount of water with the shortest possible dam. Water engineers have wet dreams about ravines.

  So even on a sunny day there were no campsites on its steep banks, no painters poring over their easels, no windsurfers exploring its chilly depths between occasional brief excursions on their boards. But it did have a certain bleak charm, and a small car park had been constructed close to the spillway. Sometimes, in nice weather, people brought kites to fly over the dark and enigmatic water, but by the time the police convoy arrived dusk had all but given way to darkness and the car park was empty.

  Ash was not a police driver and his Volvo was not a police car: he was overtaken on the first hundred-metre straight. As he pulled into the car park he saw headlights and torches, and Gorman hurrying up the bank towards him. Behind him, the last of the day extinguished by the towering hills, the surface of the water was oily black. Ash lowered his window. ‘She’s not here?’

  DI Gorman bit his lip. ‘Gabriel – there are tyre-marks on the grass.’

  For a moment he didn’t understand. ‘Going where? There’s nothing down there but …’ And there he stopped.

  Gorman gave a fractional nod. ‘Yes. Going into the water.’

  If they’d got here an hour earlier, DI Gorman would have called for police divers. That was what Ash expected him to do, and he waited impatiently to hear that they were on their way. Gorman took him aside.

  ‘It’s too dangerous in the dark, Gabriel. If her car’s down there, and if she’s still in it, we know she’s not coming out alive. I can’t risk men’s lives for what can only be a recovery operation.’

  Ash stared at him. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. It made perfect sense, it was the only possible decision, except that this was Hazel they were talking about. Except that his friend could be trapped in her car under fifteen metres of cold black water, and Gorman wanted to leave her there until it was safe to send someone down to take a proper look. Ash wanted to shout and scream at him, to swear that it wasn’t so, it couldn’t be, but if it was they had to do something now, right now. But deep inside him an emotional black hole was opening up, hollowing him out, feeding on his gut and then his heart and then his voice. When he opened his mouth, for a moment no sound came. Then he managed, ‘What are we going to do?’

  Gorman was gutted too. But he had more experience at putting his emotions on hold while he did what was necessary. He said gently, kindly, ‘You’re going to go home, and go to bed and try to get some sleep. I’m going to stay here, and at first light tomorrow, which should be about four o’clock in the morning, I’ll have divers ready to go into the water. I’ll call you as soon as I know anything.’

  It was midnight before Ash and Patience returned to Highfield Road. But Frankie, hearing the door, came downstairs, got the salient facts in a few brief sentences, and took over.

  She didn’t think Ash would go to bed, but she made him lie down on the kitchen sofa and put a warm quilt around him for the shock. Then she made hot chocolate and buttered toast, and told him to eat, and went upstairs for another quilt, meaning to spend the night in the chair beside him. If she could do nothing to help but wait with him, that was what she would do. But returning a minute later she found that fear and exhaustion had caught up with him and he was asleep, the white dog pressed into the small of his back. She sat down quietly, finished the toast, and drowsed intermittently as the night wore on.

  At ten past four the phone rang. It was DI Gorman. ‘The divers are in the dam now. There’s a car down there. But it’s deep – it’s going to take time to recover it.’

  ‘Hazel’s car?’ Ash needed him to be clear.

  ‘It’s too soon to say, Gabriel. It could have been there for years. They can’t even tell me what colour it is. Best guess is, it’s a small dark hatchback.’

  There was nothing else to be said. Both men knew what Hazel Best drove.

  ‘When will you know if … if …?’ He meant, If she’s still in there.

  Gorman knew what he meant. ‘Soon. I’ll call you back.’

  ‘Don’t bother,’ said Ash, throwing off the quilt, ‘I’m on my way.’

  By the time he reached the Clover Hill, the divers had attached a rope and airbags to the sunken car, and borrowed a JCB to lift it onto the bank. Ash hurried down the grassy slope to where Gorman was watching the rope arrow into the depths. Something was becoming visible: not the car but the yellow airbags raising it. The seconds ticked slowly by. The shape of the vehicle began as a suggestion and hardened to a certainty. Finally there was no more room for doubt. It was a small navy-blue hatchback, still showing the scars of its last off-road venture. Hazel had nearly drowned in a roadside ditch that night.

  Ash had to know but it took all his courage to look. He let out a gusty sigh. ‘There’s no one inside.’

  ‘No,’ agreed Gorman. ‘But Gabriel, don’t get your hopes up. The windscreen’s broken. She could have gone out that way.’

  Ash didn’t understand. He looked urgently round the hillsides, half now in sunshine and half in shade. ‘You mean, she could be trying to walk home? We need to look for her – organise a search. We need—’

  ‘Or,’ Gorman interrupted him, ‘she never made it to the surface.’

  Ash gave a little moan like an injured animal. All the strength drained out of him, like the black water draining out of the drowned car. So this was how it ended. He’d never thought he would lose her. He’d always thought that, when he needed her, she’d be there.

  When she’d needed him, he wasn’t.

  Only an effort of will kept him on his feet. ‘When will you know?’

  ‘When we find her. We’ve got four men in the water now, there are more on the way.’

  ‘And if they don’t find her?’

  ‘Then we won’t know until we find her somewhere else.’

  It wasn’t what he needed to hear. He needed to hear that no news was good news; that while they didn’t know she was dead, there was a chance she was alive. He wanted Gorman to promise that there had been time for her to get out before the car sank, and that with luck she was steaming gently in front of the Aga in the nearest farm kitchen right now. He wanted someone to tell him that she hadn’t died the way Edward Cho died, scared and alone with the cold waters of the Clover Hill dam closing over her head.

  DI Gorman couldn’t do that. But he reached out a clumsy hand and clasped Ash’s shoulder. ‘If this wasn’t an accident …’

  ‘Of course it wasn’t an accident!’ Ash’s voice broke with grief.

  ‘… We’ll find out. This one isn’t going to the back of the filing cabinet.’

  After a moment Ash nodded, mutely, and Gorman went back to work.

  Someone was tugging at Ash’s sleeve. He looked down and met the golden gaze of his dog looking up.

  She wasn’t in the car.

  Ash blinked several times in quick succession. But he hadn’t imagined it. Trying not to move his lips he whispered, ‘How do you know?’

  Patience gave him a deeply cynical stare. Is this nose ever wrong?

  ‘The car’s been in fifty feet of water!’

  I’m telling you, she was never here. I know what Hazel smells like. She wasn’t the last person in that car
.

  Hope burgeoned in Ash’s breast like a sob. ‘But that means …’

  … She’s somewhere else, agreed Patience. All these policemen are looking for her in the wrong place. You have to tell them.

  And that was going to be a problem. ‘Excuse me, officers, my dog says …’ Ash had never been sufficiently insane to tell the local constabulary that his lurcher spoke to him. When they saw him talking to her they called him Rambles With Dogs. He hated to think what they’d call him if he said she talked back.

  He sidled up to Gorman. ‘Dave – I don’t think she’s dead.’

  The DI turned sharply on his heel and fixed Ash with a penetrating gaze. ‘Is that hope talking, or have you some reason for thinking it?’

  Ash gave his awkward, bear-like shrug. ‘I don’t know. Maybe I’m kidding myself, but I think I’d know if she’d died here.’

  Gorman looked deeply unconvinced. But he said, ‘Well – that’s good, isn’t it?’

  ‘It would be great,’ agreed Ash, ‘if I could think of some way that her car ended up in fifty feet of water but she wasn’t in trouble.’

  When Dave Gorman frowned, his hairline came down to meet his eyebrows. ‘You’re serious about this?’

  ‘Yes. I’m worried that we’re all standing round here when we should be out looking for her.’

  ‘Gabriel – the likeliest explanation—’

  ‘I know,’ Ash cut in quickly. ‘I know that, usually, things are exactly how they look. But you know that sometimes they aren’t. I know what I feel. I can’t explain it, I can’t prove that she’s alive. But just suppose I’m right. Can’t we cover the possibility? We should go back to the Harbingers’. That’s the last place where we know she was.’

  All Gorman’s experience told him Gabriel Ash was clutching at straws. That he was hunting desperately for some alternative explanation because he couldn’t deal with the evidence in front of him. But experience isn’t everything: there’s such a thing as instinct too, and Gorman’s instincts were telling him that, until they found the body of Hazel Best, they should not treat her death as a fact.

  He reached a decision. ‘Give me another half-hour. If they haven’t found her by then, I’ll leave Superintendent Maybourne to oversee things here and I’ll take my people back to Spell. I don’t think she’s there, Gabriel. We’d have found her if she was. But I can talk to the Harbingers again, and SOCO can look for trace evidence.’ He meant bloodstains.

  Ash nodded his gratitude. ‘What would you like me to do?’

  ‘Honestly? I’d like you to go home. You can’t be part of the investigation, and that means you’re just in the way. Leave it to us now. You don’t want to be here if we find a body. And if we find her alive, you’ll be the first one I call.’

  That made sense. ‘All right. We’ll leave you to it. But you will call …?’

  ‘Of course I will. Whether there’s anything to report or not.’ He watched Ash shamble back to his car – his late mother’s car, that predated electric windows and parking assist and computerised diagnostics, and was thus likely to remain roadworthy until someone actually drove a steamroller over it.

  Only as the buff-coloured Volvo headed back down Clover Hill did Gorman get an echo of what Ash had said. Puzzlement made his forehead vanish again. ‘We?’

  TWENTY-FIVE

  It was cold where Hazel was, and dark, and damp. The words bounced queasily around inside her aching skull. They were accurate, so far as they went, but as her mind started to clear a little she recognised that they didn’t explain very much.

  It was summer: there should have been nowhere this cold anywhere in England. It was like the cold at the bottom of a deep well where the sun never reaches. The stones she lay on – stones? Yes, apparently, setts or blocks of stone tightly butted with fine gritty lines between them – radiated cold, transfixed her with penetrating fingers of it. She couldn’t remember what she was wearing, but it wasn’t enough.

  The dark wasn’t the dark of a dark night, when you might have trouble distinguishing a friend from a stranger close enough to touch. There were no shapes of deeper darkness silhouetted against the almost black of an overcast night. There was no light of any kind. The darkness was absolute. She blinked, consciously, to make sure her eyes were in fact open; and establishing that they were, confronted the possibility that whatever had happened had blinded her. The throbbing pain at the back of her skull was the only evidence she had, and it wasn’t reassuring.

  The stones she lay on weren’t just cold, they were damp. Dank. So was the air she breathed. It smelled of deep earth and neglect, like an abandoned mine. Were there any abandoned mines in Warwickshire? She didn’t know.

  She considered, briefly, the possibility that she was dead. She hoped not – it would be disappointing to learn that you took your headaches with you – and on the whole decided it was unlikely. She tried to approach the puzzle logically. But she hadn’t got much further than cold, dark and damp when a wave of nausea rolled over her, putting a stop to any more productive thinking for now. She lay with her cheek flat against the cold, damp stone, and cold salt tears rolled slowly down her nose.

  We’re not really going home, are we? asked Patience as soon as a bend in the Clover Hill road hid the little car park from sight.

  ‘Of course we’re not,’ said Ash. His voice was steely.

  Good. Where are we going instead?

  ‘Harbingers’. We know Hazel was there – we need to find out if she ever actually left. Let’s see if that nose of yours is as good as you claim.’

  One of my forebears was a bloodhound, said the slim white lurcher loftily.

  Ash wasn’t entirely convinced. ‘Well – maybe. In any event, any dog’s sense of smell is vastly more powerful than a person’s. The time has come to establish whether you’re as smart as you say you are, or just a dog like any other dog and everything else is my imagination working overtime. Have a prowl round those outbuildings, see if Hazel was there. See if’ – he didn’t want to say it out loud, but it was what he was thinking – ‘she came to any harm there.’

  There was a pause then. Ash drove. Patience sat on the front seat beside him, wearing the seatbelt Hazel had insisted she needed. After a little while she said, We will find her, you know. She’ll be all right.

  ‘From your mouth to God’s ear,’ swore Ash.

  To dog’s ear, Patience amended complacently.

  Jocelyn Harbinger was still in bed, though she hadn’t done much sleeping that night, when she heard the hiss of tyres on gravel. Her heart turned over. She had known DI Gorman would either return or send for her, and she’d prepared herself for the interrogation that would follow. She didn’t know what evidence he was working on, had persuaded herself there couldn’t be anything worthy of the name. But if he was back here at – she glanced at the clock, already clear in the brightening day – quarter past five in the morning, he must have something substantial. It looked as if she was in for the fight of her life.

  Well, that was all right too. She had been sitting on her hands to stop her doing what she had always done in difficult times: grabbing control of the situation and bending it to her advantage. This was different because today she wasn’t the de facto head of Harbinger Transport but a suspect in a murder inquiry, and trying to force the pace would only make the investigating officer wonder why. But she wasn’t sorry if matters were finally coming to a head. All her life she had fought for what she wanted. Fighting came more naturally to her than waiting. She rolled out of bed, dashed water in her face and quickly dressed.

  When she heard voices in the hall she went downstairs. But it wasn’t Gorman. It was the big, slightly unkempt, shambling man in the old beige Volvo, accompanied by his slender white dog. ‘Mr Ash. Did you catch up with Miss Best?’

  He wasn’t sure how much he should tell her. But if she was involved in Hazel’s disappearance – for now, that was the label he was sticking with – she already knew, and if not she might be able to
help. ‘We found her car. Where they found Edward Cho’s, at the bottom of the Clover Hill dam. There was no one in it.’

  The colour drained from Jocelyn’s face, the timbre from her voice. ‘Have you found her?’ Ash shook his head. ‘So she might still have … gone into the reservoir?’

  ‘She might,’ agreed Ash. ‘We don’t know.’

  ‘Oh, dear God.’ There was an oak blanket-box at the foot of the stairs. Suddenly weak, she lowered herself onto it. ‘Are they – I don’t know – looking for her?’

  ‘Of course. There are divers in the water now. If she was in the car when it went into the dam, there’s little chance of finding her alive. So I’m pinning my hopes on the possibility that she wasn’t.’

  ‘That she got out before it sank, swam ashore and wandered off into the hills?’ It didn’t sound very likely, but if he wanted to cling to a chance in a hundred, Jocelyn wasn’t going to argue.

  ‘Or else she wasn’t in the car at all, in which case someone’s gone to a lot of trouble to make it look as if she was.’

  ‘Who?’ She bridled. ‘Me? Now I’m being accused of kidnapping police officers? Tell me, are there any outstanding crimes on the books at Meadowvale Police Station that I’m not in the frame for?’

  ‘Right now, Miss Harbinger,’ Ash said wearily, ‘all that interests me is finding Hazel. If she is in the dam I’m already too late: if she’s anywhere else, there may still be time. Have you any objection to me searching your outbuildings?’

  ‘The police have already looked there!’

  ‘I have a dog.’

  Jocelyn regarded Patience. Patience regarded Jocelyn.

  ‘That dog?’

  ‘She’s in plain clothes.’

  Jocelyn Harbinger rolled her eyes despairingly. ‘Go anywhere you want to. Look – sniff – anywhere you want. You won’t find her. You won’t find anything.’

  As the nausea subsided, Hazel supposed she ought to make an effort to move. Nothing much happened, but the attempt was itself instructive. Trying hurt her wrists and her ankles. Even in her current state, it was no great leap of intuition to conclude that someone had tied her up.