by Jo Bannister
In an odd way, this was reassuring. Criminals, even violent criminals, she could deal with. She could figure out their motives, predict their actions, hope to out-think them. Well, perhaps not just now, but when this headache subsided a bit more. Dealing with criminals was part of her job, and she was good at her job. She clung onto that thought as if it were the only floating debris after a shipwreck.
Against people, even people who’d do this to her, she had a chance. Half an hour ago – maybe: she had no way of accurately tracking the passage of time – she’d thought she might be dead, and she didn’t fancy her chances against the Grim Reaper at all. As recently as five minutes ago, when she’d first tried to move, she had thought that the injury which had caused her headache might also have paralysed her. Compared with that, a bit of rope round her hands and feet was a problem on a much more human scale. She made a determined effort to calm her thinking, plan her next move – well, metaphorical move. Someone had gone to considerable efforts to bring her here and make sure she stayed. He – or she: Hazel believed in equal opportunities – would be back. She needed to know what she would do, what she would say, then.
It would help to understand how she’d got here. She was pretty sure she’d been unconscious for a while, possibly quite a while, so what was the last thing she remembered? What was she doing, where was she doing it and with whom, immediately before the world went away?
She screwed her eyes up tight – out of habit, there were no sights to distract her – and forced her mind to retrace its steps. She was in the country somewhere. She remembered driving through countryside: trees, and dappled shadows under them. It had been a nice day for a drive. No, a nice evening. Where was she going? And did she get there?
Big house, she thought ponderously. Bigger than Railway Street; bigger even than Highfield Road. And … lorries?
That was the key that opened the floodgate. It all came back then. She’d driven out to Spell, to the Harbingers’ farmhouse; but it wasn’t them she’d been speaking to, it was their housekeeper. Who’d been helpful up to a point, but Hazel had left knowing little that she hadn’t known before.
But she had left. She remembered that. She was going to talk to … to the gardener … to John Fisher, who was the son of the Harbingers’ murdered chauffeur, but he’d gone somewhere, for something. Vermiculite. What the hell was vermiculite?
So she’d got back in her car and … And that was where the memory ran out. Which didn’t mean that it was then that someone took a blunt instrument to the back of her head. It could have happened then, but it could have happened later. Brains are complex and mysterious organs, and it was possible that her recollection ended where her problems began, but it might simply mean that concussion had interfered with her ability to retrieve stored memories.
If she didn’t know what did happen, could she theorise about what might have happened? She might, or might not, have left the farmhouse. If she didn’t, then it was probably one of the Harbingers who was responsible for her current situation. By all accounts Jerome was too frail to be hauling sturdy young women about, even if he’d managed to take one by surprise; but he was a man who employed other men, who was used to giving orders and being obeyed.
What about his daughter? She could have wielded the blunt instrument, but again, was likely to have needed help to move Hazel from where she fell to where she was now. So what about the gardener? He could have returned with his mysterious vermiculite in time to stop her leaving. He would have had no difficulty throwing her into the back of his vehicle, and perhaps not much compunction about it. They were as thick as thieves, the Harbingers and the Fishers. If they guessed she’d worked out what they’d done, seventeen years ago and since, they might have seen her visit – alone, apparently unsanctioned by Norbold CID – as an irresistible opportunity to bring her meddling to an abrupt and conclusive end.
So why had they tied her up instead of – she swallowed – killing her? They couldn’t let her go after this, so why take the risk that she might escape or be discovered? Because … because … because she had information they needed. They thought she could lead them to Elizabeth Lim. They wanted to know what she knew: everything she knew. They had hurt her to bring her here, they would hurt her again to get the information they wanted, and then they would kill her.
Would they believe her if she said that everything she knew, DI Gorman knew as well? Probably not. It happened to be the truth, but it was exactly what she would say even if it wasn’t.
He’d find her. Sooner or later Gorman would find her, however carefully the Harbingers disposed of her; or, if he didn’t, Ash would. Neither of them would give up until they did. But it was going to be too late to do her any good. They probably didn’t even realise that she was missing yet.
Which meant that, if she was going to come through this, she was going to have to rescue herself. The thought should, she was sure, have sent a warm tingle down her spine and a wine-like draught of courage to her heart. Where there’s life there’s hope. She was fit and strong – well, normally she was – and not stupid, and reasonably cool under fire; and she was a trained police officer with skills at her command that could tip the balance in her favour.
But she was also a realist. She was concussed, disorientated, chilled, tied up, and a fit strong woman when whoever had brought her here was almost certainly a fit strong man. All the sex-equality legislation in the world wouldn’t alter the fact that her assailant was more powerful than she was. He might also be armed. If he thought for a moment that he was losing control of the situation, he would kill her on the basis that nothing she knew, nothing she could be persuaded to tell him, was worth the risk that she might get away.
She was so dead.
If she couldn’t overpower him, could she out-think him? It would be helpful to know who she was dealing with. Not who was paying the piper, but who was playing the pipe. She kept coming back to John Fisher. She couldn’t remember if she’d ever actually met him – although she had an image of him in her mind, big and broad-shouldered, so maybe she had. Maybe he got back with his horticultural necessity before she left the Harbingers’. Maybe they met on the driveway, and she stopped to speak to him, and …
Maybe it was before that. Could he have been one of the men at the school? On the whole she thought not. That was the sort of job you brought people in for. You didn’t do it yourself, and you didn’t give it to someone who worked at your house. Norbold was too close to home: there was too great a risk of recognition. Harbinger Transport employed a lot of men all over the country – if there was dirty work to do, there’d be someone willing to do it and able to disappear afterwards.
The chill of the damp floor was working its way into her bones. Hazel humped and wriggled herself onto her other side. It wouldn’t make any difference in the long run, but her morale took a tiny boost from being able to do something, even something so minimal, to improve her situation.
Of the various people who might have decked her, the likeliest candidate was John Fisher. She’d been looking for him. His mother had said he’d be back shortly. They’d both worked for the Harbingers for years. Was that reason enough to commit murder for someone?
Hovering on the edge of her memory was something else someone had said. It might have been her. She’d said … she’d said … she’d said to Mrs Fisher, ‘Mrs Harbinger wasn’t the only innocent victim that night.’ She’d acknowledged the housekeeper’s loss, and the hurtful way her husband had been almost airbrushed out of the story.
But Mrs Fisher wasn’t the only one to suffer that loss, that hurt. The same applied to her son. Her fit, strong son who worked for the Harbingers and had as much reason to resent Edward Cho as his employers had.
He hadn’t threatened the Cho family. That didn’t mean he didn’t share the purpose of the man who had.
Jocelyn Harbinger had been twenty when her mother died, the chauffeur’s son a couple of years younger. Suppose … suppose … Jerome Harbinger meant every
word when he said he would wipe the Chos off the face of the earth. Suppose he killed Edward and Mary himself, alone and unaided. But as he grew older and frailer, who more natural to turn to for help than his employee, the strapping son of the other murder victim?
It made a kind of sense. The crimes perpetrated on the Cho family had required strength of purpose, strength of body, and money. Strength of purpose, to keep a vendetta alive for seventeen years. Physical strength, to do what had been done to Hazel, what had been done to Lester Pickering. And money, because if someone kills people for you, the last thing you want is for him to feel undervalued. Jerome Harbinger and John Fisher made a credible partnership in all the deeds that had been done.
Better than Harbinger and his daughter? Yes, because a gardener, a man who used his muscles every day, would always be stronger than a woman. Better than Harbinger and someone else she hadn’t yet thought of? Also yes, because John Fisher had a motive that no one else could match.
When the door opened – there had to be a door, even if she couldn’t see it – it wouldn’t be Jerome Harbinger coming for her, and it wouldn’t be his daughter. It would be John Fisher. He’d want to know how much the police knew, and where Elizabeth Lim was hiding. Some of the things she knew, she could only have learned from talking to Lim. That might not prove that Hazel knew where she was now, but Fisher would believe that she didn’t only when he was sure she’d have told him if she did.
Then he would kill her, and if she hadn’t managed to hold her tongue, he’d kill Lim too. That was what mattered most, to him and to Harbinger. Getting away with it mattered too, but annihilating the Cho family mattered more.
An odd little sound rasped in her throat. For a moment Hazel tried to believe it was a grim little chuckle. She could have taken some satisfaction from facing her own imminent death with a smidgeon of bravado. But it wasn’t a chuckle: it was a sob, and she wasn’t good enough at deceiving herself to pretend otherwise. Cold, alone and desperately afraid, she cried brokenly in the dark – for all the people she would never see again, for all the things she would never do, for the opportunities she had let pass and those that could never come again – until exhaustion stilled her.
TWENTY-SIX
Gabriel Ash was wary of giving Patience commands. This was not because she was disobedient, although she had a way of treating even the clearest requests as mere suggestions. He wasn’t worried about offending her: after all, no one heard what she had to say except him. He worried what bystanders might think if she declined to co-operate and they heard him engaging in a strenuous, one-sided argument with his dog.
Today, though, there was no prospect of a disagreement. They both knew what they were here for. Ash opened the doors and, one by one, Patience explored the outbuildings.
All of them smelled of many things and quite a lot of people, including some people she was familiar with. None of them smelled of Hazel.
She wasn’t here.
Ash didn’t know if that was good news or bad news, but he knew Patience would be right. He turned to Jocelyn. ‘Do you know where she parked her car?’
Jocelyn Harbinger shrugged, raised her voice. ‘Mrs Fisher, did you notice where Miss Best parked her car?’
The housekeeper came out onto the kitchen steps. ‘At the front, I think.’
‘We’ll try there.’ Ash led the way round the corner of the house. ‘See if you can pick up her scent,’ he said softly to the dog. ‘Figure out which way she went.’
Jocelyn was looking oddly at him. ‘Aren’t you supposed to give one-word commands to dogs?’
‘I was thinking aloud,’ said Ash.
In front of the house, where the gravel was disturbed by the comings and goings of many cars, Patience lowered her long nose to the stones and began casting from side to side. Almost immediately she stopped, with a somewhat casual version of a point.
Here.
‘All right. And where did she go when she got out?’
More sniffing, then: The front door.
‘Did she leave the same way?’
I don’t think so.
The white lurcher cast a widening circle that took her back towards the side of the house.
She came out by the kitchen door. And … here! Here!
‘What?’
Something was parked right here, on the corner. She got into it. She didn’t get out.
Still Ash didn’t know if he was hearing good news or bad. If Hazel had got into something other than her own car, and hadn’t got out, almost anything might have happened to her – except driving her car off the Clover Hill road and into the dam. The turmoil of emotions raced across his face like cloud shadows on a meadow. ‘Who parked here?’ he asked.
Jocelyn could not or would not help. ‘Anyone? Everyone? There have been cars coming and going for what feels like days now.’
Ash could barely contain his impatience. ‘There was a vehicle parked right here, and Hazel Best went away in it. Who was driving it?’ But neither Miss Harbinger nor her housekeeper had an answer for him.
He turned in desperation to the dog, no longer caring who else heard or what they thought. ‘Can you find that vehicle?’
I can try, said Patience uncertainly.
‘Try.’
Vehicles, like people, each have their own distinctive smell. The trouble with roads, and even driveways, is the number of vehicles that pass over them. The cocktail of oil smells and grease smells and rubber smells that make up one particular vehicle’s olfactory footprint is so easily overlaid and diluted by all the others.
Sometimes fate lends a hand. While Patience was still trying to sniff her way through the nasal maze that was the Harbingers’ yard, and Ash was standing well back to give her room to work, a brown pick-up came down the drive. It made a jink around the dog and pulled up at the corner of the house, a couple of metres from where Ash was standing.
Patience wasn’t sniffing now. She was erect, her head up, staring at the truck. She said, Found it.
John Fisher was a few years younger than Ash, and a few kilos heavier, but they were much of a height and build. The similarity would have been even more marked if Ash had earned his living working out of doors, building up muscle and a healthy farmer’s tan, and would remember to stand up straight instead of stooping slightly. It was a habit he’d picked up during what he thought of as his doolally days. Being mentally ill attracted enough nervous glances; being mentally ill and six foot two made people cross roads or wait for another bus.
Jocelyn Harbinger said, ‘Making an early start, John? I’m glad you’re here. We’ve got a bit of a crisis on. Someone’s gone missing – a policewoman from Norbold. Will you help us look for her?’
‘Here?’ He sounded almost more offended than surprised.
Jocelyn gave a helpless shrug. ‘I don’t quite understand it myself. Apparently her car was found in the Clover Hill dam. But Mr Ash’ – she glanced at him but her gaze didn’t dwell, possibly because of what he might read in it – ‘thinks she may not have been in it. She was here yesterday, he thinks she may have come back.’
‘Why?’
It could have been either of two questions: why would Hazel return to the Harbingers’ house, or why would anyone think that? Ash chose to answer the first. Knowing what he knew – what Patience had told him – made it hard to be civil to the man; but he had to do it and somehow he did. The alternative was to admit to the source of his information, which would be the last thing he did before men in white coats dragged him away. He said quietly, ‘Perhaps she had unfinished business here.’
‘If I’d just driven my car into the Clover Hill dam,’ said John Fisher, ‘business would have to wait while I found some dry clothes and told people I was safe.’
Ash nodded. ‘If that’s what happened.’
Fisher looked at Jocelyn. ‘I thought you said her car was found.’
‘Police divers are searching the dam now,’ said Ash. ‘They still haven’t found a body.’ Only the b
elief that Patience knew they wouldn’t kept his voice from cracking.
‘And that means she came back here?’ said Jocelyn doubtfully.
‘It may mean she never left.’
‘So how did her car get up to Clover Hill, five miles away?’ That was Fisher.
‘Clearly, someone drove it. It’s a small hatchback, not a B-52 bomber – it doesn’t take a special skill-set to operate it.’
Finally Jocelyn understood what he was saying. ‘You mean – someone may have wanted it to look as if she’d drowned, when actually … You think she’s been kidnapped?’
‘I think that’s possible, yes,’ said Ash. ‘That someone wanted us to waste time dragging the dam instead of looking for her.’
‘Why would anyone kidnap a policewoman?’ asked Fisher cynically.
‘Why would anyone try to kidnap a teacher?’
Fisher looked at him. Then he looked at Jocelyn. Then he looked back at Ash and shook his head. ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘He’s talking about Felicity Cho,’ said Jocelyn Harbinger quietly. ‘Someone tried to abduct her outside the school where she worked a couple of weeks ago.’
‘Cho? As in …?’
‘Yes.’
‘That isn’t a name I expected to hear again!’
‘Perhaps that’s why she changed it,’ Ash said softly.
Fisher’s gaze darkened from puzzlement towards anger. He hadn’t actually been accused of anything, but it felt as if he had. ‘Tell me again: who are you?’
‘My name’s Gabriel Ash. I run a bookshop.’ Ash waited until he saw confusion in the other man’s expression. ‘I’m a friend of Hazel Best’s – the missing woman.’
Perhaps the name rang a bell. Fisher looked at Ash as if he knew now who he was. And knowing took a weight off his mind. ‘Oh yes.’ He smiled. ‘I’ve heard of you.’
