by Jo Bannister
It took another minute, but when they found it there was no longer any doubt that they were in the right place. The grassed-over top of the structure was barely any higher than the rest of the field, but on its northern side, pointing away from the summer sun, was a low wooden door sunk another metre into the earth. Not long ago, enough debris had been cleared away for the door to open. And then someone had fastened it with a padlock.
Most people, faced with a padlock to which they do not have the key, call a locksmith. A few people raid their mother’s dressing table for hairpins. But Ash had worked in security, and he knew that there are very few padlocks that will withstand the determined application of a hammer. Ash didn’t have a hammer, but he found a fist-sized stone in the roots of the hedge that would serve as well.
This one gave at the second blow, the hasp crumpling, the broken padlock pinging off the mossy stonework into the undergrowth. Undeterred by, or possibly unaware of, his skinned knuckles, Ash dragged the heavy door open and ducked under the low stone lintel.
TWENTY-EIGHT
‘Fire! Fire! Help, fire!’
‘What? Where? Oof …’
‘Gabriel?’
‘Hi, Hazel. That is you, then.’ His voice sounded to be coming from a lot further away than the gritty stone floor of the little ice-house. Still squinting against the light, she made him out sprawled on his back, panting softly, winded by the violent collision of her head with his belly.
‘Sorry. I wasn’t expecting you.’
‘No. I guessed that.’ He sucked in a lungful of air. ‘Are you all right?’
Skin heals, she told herself severely, fighting back tears. ‘I’m fine. You?’
‘Give me a minute,’ he said breathily, ‘and I’ll be fine too.’ There was a pause for consideration. ‘Why did you shout Fire?’
‘It’s a well-known fact,’ said Hazel, ‘that people who think you’re being attacked will run a mile, but everyone wants to see a fire.’
While Ash recovered his composure, Hazel had time to reflect that, if it had been John Fisher come to kill her, her counter-measures would scarcely have delayed him a minute. She was still bound hand and foot, he would have been where Ash was, between her and the door, and there was no sign of the Seventh Cavalry arriving in the person of DI Gorman.
‘It was John Fisher, wasn’t it?’ she said. ‘The gardener.’
Ash sat up and looked at her. ‘Don’t you know?’
‘I didn’t see who hit me. Or if I did, I don’t remember. I must have been out cold when he brought me here. Where is here, by the way?’
Ash told her. ‘It’s on Harbinger land, about five hundred metres from the house, but unless you knew it was here you’d never find it. I was standing on top of it and thought it was just a hump in the grass.’
‘Then, how did you find me?’
‘Patience’ – he swallowed the word said just in time – ‘indicated that you’d been in Fisher’s pick-up. Then she tracked its scent over the fields.’
Hazel was suitably impressed. ‘Clever dog. Where’s Fisher now?’
‘I left him back at the house …’ That, he was suddenly aware, didn’t mean Fisher was still back at the house. ‘We need to get you away from here.’
‘Unless you want to carry me, you’ll have to untie me first.’
Ash had nothing resembling a knife about his person. He picked the knots apart with his nails and his teeth, and by the time Hazel was free his fingertips were cracked and bleeding.
She shook the last coils off her wrists, rubbing some life back into them. ‘Is Dave Gorman here?’
‘He’ll be here in half an hour. Right now he’s dragging the Clover Hill dam because he thinks you drove into the reservoir.’
‘The one where Edward Cho died?’ Hazel stared at him. ‘Why on earth would he think that?’
‘Let’s put it this way. You were going to need a new car before too long anyway, weren’t you?’
Her eyes rounded as understanding dawned. ‘The bastard dumped my car in the reservoir?’
‘I suppose it was quite clever, really,’ Ash said wryly. ‘They found the car first thing this morning, in fifty feet of water. The windscreen was smashed. If they never found a body, they’d assume they just hadn’t been able to find the body. But if he needed to dispose of you later, he could slip you into the dam after they’d all gone home and wait for someone to find you months or years from now.’
‘Gabriel.’ She took a moment to admire the restraint in her own voice.
‘Hm?’
‘Can we not waste time discussing how my body could be disposed of when the man who wanted to kill me may be close enough to hear? Call Dave, tell him where we are. Tell him it was Fisher. We can prove it later.’
Ash had got quite good about carrying his phone. He pulled it from his pocket and looked at it doubtfully. ‘Will the signal carry through solid stone and half a metre of earth?’
‘Of course it will,’ said Hazel briskly; but she was wrong.
‘We’ll take it outside.’ Ash was on his feet now but still bent double under the low stone roof.
He never made it. As he ducked even lower under the lintel, something coming in the opposite direction with the weight, speed and unerring accuracy of a mule’s kick slammed into his temple and he dropped without so much as a sigh.
Hazel saw nothing of the cause, only the effect. Even so, it came as no surprise when first a double-barrelled shotgun and then the face of its owner appeared in the doorway. The gun was pointing her way, and the face was wearing an expression of profound irritation.
‘You know, this is starting to get messy,’ said John Fisher.
He made no attempt to enter the stone igloo. Hazel hoped he might, and that Ash’s form collapsed in the doorway would impede him to the extent that she might snatch the gun. But Fisher saw the same danger. He sat down on the grassy bank where the door cut into the landscape, invisible from anywhere anyone might have been looking.
There was something wrong. Well – something else wrong. ‘Where’s Patience?’
Fisher frowned. ‘Who’s Patience?’
‘Gabriel’s dog.’
‘The lurcher? I shot it.’
Hazel thought for a moment, then shook her head. ‘No, you didn’t. We’d have heard.’
‘No, I didn’t,’ agreed Fisher with a grin. ‘I ran over it with the truck.’
It’s odd how human emotions work. In that moment, it was more upsetting to her that Ash had lost his dog than that the man responsible was about to kill both Ash and her. Hazel gave herself a mental shake. She couldn’t afford to think like that. She was in the same position she’d been before Ash arrived. Fisher intended to kill her, but she didn’t have to make it easy. Conceivably, she could make it impossible. There was at least enough hope to keep her focused. For one thing, her hands and feet were free now.
She was still facing a double-barrelled shotgun. But a gun is a little like a nuclear bomb: it can only be used in all-out warfare. In anything short of that – border disputes, say, or the assassination of minor royalty – it’s more of a hindrance than a help. You can’t use an atom bomb to win territory that you couldn’t use for generations because of the fall-out, but having it stops you thinking in terms of weapons you could use. Hazel didn’t kid herself that having a gun put Fisher at a disadvantage, but right now any edge was worth exploiting. For what was the worst that could happen? He was prepared to murder them both. He couldn’t murder them twice, however much she annoyed him.
She said – and it astonished her how calm she managed to sound – ‘You can’t use that in here.’
Fisher raised a sardonic eyebrow. ‘Wanna bet?’
Hazel kept her gaze steady. ‘These are stone walls. Curved stone walls. The shot will go everywhere. You’ll do as much damage to yourself as you will to us.’
She saw the hesitation flicker across John Fisher’s face. He wasn’t sure if she was right, but he wasn’t confident enough to i
gnore the warning. ‘Teach you that in plod school, did they?’
‘They did better than that,’ said Hazel, ‘they showed us. Put a dummy where you are now, and used a string to pull the trigger. From behind a blast wall.’ She waited.
He didn’t want to ask. He couldn’t not do. ‘And?’
‘Let’s put it this way. That dummy was going to need a fast ambulance, blood transfusions and reconstructive surgery. It wasn’t going to limp down the lane and get its mother to stick a plaster on its knee.’
Fisher couldn’t help himself. His eyes left her and travelled over the walls of the ice-house. ‘I don’t believe you.’
Hazel shrugged. ‘Suit yourself. DI Gorman will be suitably grateful. It’s always a bonus when the criminal leaves himself at the crime scene.’
There are people who don’t care about being caught in the commission of their crime. Who don’t care about dying in the commission of their crime. Who are so hell-bent on achieving what they’ve set out to that even the ultimate price seems worth paying. But John Fisher wasn’t one of them. He wanted to walk away from this. He expected to be able to close the door on the ice-house, and drop a few old logs or something in front of it, and never see it opened again. He hadn’t signed up for the nuclear option entailing mutual assured destruction.
‘OK,’ he said slowly. With his left hand he reached into a deep pocket. ‘Good job I’ve got this, then.’ It was a knife, a broad strong blade that could take cuttings from a plant or gut a rabbit or cut the throat of a human being. He switched it into his right hand, used his left to pass the gun carefully out of sight behind the stone doorframe.
It might as well have been in the next county, because Hazel would have to pass Fisher to reach it. Nevertheless, she felt a quiver of hope in her breast. Now she was facing a pocket-knife instead of a double-barrelled shotgun, and she’d been taught how to disarm a man wielding a knife.
Of course, she’d also been taught that there are no guarantees. That sometimes the man with the knife declines to give it up, and even a very small knife is a potentially lethal weapon. What she needed to do next, she supposed, was persuade him to put the knife away too, and threaten her with a balloon on a stick …
She said quietly, ‘Nobody thought of you, did they? They all assumed you were too young to have had anything to do with Edward Cho’s death. That was a mistake. You were young – but you’d just lost your father. You were probably as angry as Jerome Harbinger was.’
Fisher sneered at her. ‘I didn’t kill Edward Cho.’
‘No? You mean, that was Harbinger?’
‘Actually, no,’ he said. ‘He never laid a hand on him.’
‘It really was an accident?’ Hazel didn’t believe it. She knew what these people were capable of: it was straining credulity to think Jerome Harbinger had been prepared to annihilate Cho’s entire family, but a stroke of luck started the process for him.
‘That’s what I was told. I wasn’t there.’
‘And Mary Cho, a month later?’
‘Ah. That wasn’t an accident.’ He volunteered nothing more. But in a way it hardly mattered which of them – Fisher, Harbinger or Harbinger’s daughter – had brought about Mrs Cho’s death. If all the elements of a conspiracy were there, they were all responsible.
Hazel had to keep him talking. The longer he talked, the more chance that Ash would return to the land of the living. ‘And you spent the next seventeen years trying to track down the Chos’ children. When you found out that one of them was teaching a twenty-minute drive away in Norbold, you saw your chance. But you needed to talk to her before you killed her. You wanted her to tell you where her brother was.’
John Fisher dipped his head with a slow smile. ‘You’re good at this. You should be a detective.’
Hazel replied with a brittle smile of her own. ‘Which is also why you didn’t kill me when you had the chance. Why you brought me here. Well, you could have saved yourself the effort. I don’t know where her brother is. I don’t even know who her brother is.’
‘No,’ said Fisher softly. ‘But you know where Felicity Cho is, don’t you?’
Hazel froze at the core. It was all she could do to keep the fear out of her eyes and voice. ‘No. What makes you think that?’
John Fisher had a kind of lazy smile that said, I know you know. I know you know I know. And we both know how this is going to end. Hazel could imagine that smile was the last thing ever seen by generations of slugs and greenfly. ‘You’ve been talking to her. You know things you could only have learnt from her. Where is she?’
‘You’re wrong,’ insisted Hazel. ‘I’ve been talking to people about her. I wanted to find her before you did, so I asked a lot of questions. But I never did find her. No one has seen her since you tried to grab her outside the school. At least, I’m assuming that was you. It all happened so fast, I only got a glimpse of the faces.’
‘Actually,’ he said irritably, ‘it was the hired help. If it had been me, we’d have got the right woman and not some damned nanny. I mean’ – irritation barred his voice – ‘you’d think it was simple enough, wouldn’t you? I gave them photographs. I told them where she’d be, and when she’d be there. You wouldn’t think they could get it wrong, would you?’
All Hazel could think to say was, ‘You can’t get the staff these days.’
Fisher looked at her as if he didn’t quite understand. As if they didn’t have irony where he came from. He shrugged it off. ‘So where is she?’
‘I told you, I don’t know.’
‘You know,’ he said with heavy certainty. ‘And you’re going to tell me. And frankly, I don’t care how much I have to hurt you.’ The blade flickered just enough between his fingers to catch the light.
‘Lester Pickering,’ Hazel said quickly, snatching the name out of the air. Anything, anything, to distract him. To buy time. ‘You killed him?’
‘The fence? Yes.’ Remembering, Fisher smiled again. ‘With his own walking stick.’
‘Why him?’
‘The robbery was his idea. He put the firm together, and it was him at the house. It was him who beat my mother. And it was Pickering who handled the exchange. It wasn’t him who shot my father – that was Harry Clark; he died at the scene. Pickering was already heading for the exit with the Caravaggio under his arm. It’s been on his wall on and off for the last seventeen years. He couldn’t sell it, it was too well known. He used it as collateral to bank-roll other jobs, but it always came back to that nail in the wall above his desk.’
He shook his head in a kind of wonder. ‘Where anyone could have seen it, and no one ever did. Or no one who both knew what it was and was going to talk to the police. You have to assume the man didn’t get many visitors. Which is why, I suppose, it took so long for anyone to find him.’ The smile turned impish. ‘Of course, the note I put in his window saying he was off on holiday may have helped.’
‘Where is the painting now?’
Fisher grinned. He was a good-looking man, even an attractive one, except for the circumstances. ‘Look, I’ve seen those films too. Where the villain confesses everything to someone he’s going to kill, only she doesn’t die and she puts him away for twenty years. I’m not telling you anything.’
‘You think I’m going to overpower you?’
‘Actually, no,’ he said. ‘I think you really are going to die. But why take the risk?’
‘Because if you’re going to kill me, you owe me some kind of an explanation. I mean – why? I can see why you’d be angry with Edward Cho. But what did his family ever do to you?’
‘You wouldn’t understand,’ he said gruffly.
‘I want to understand.’
‘Because … because some acts of treachery are too massive to be paid for with one life alone. The stupid man killed himself, anyway. Where’s the justice in that? Where was the closure? He destroyed two families, the Harbingers and mine. He could only ever pay for that with his own. They had to be … eradicated. Expunged
. So there was never any chance of my mother turning into the bread aisle at Sainsbury’s and finding herself face to face with Edward Cho’s wife, or his daughter, or his son. That man ruined her life. My father would be alive today if he’d kept his word.’
‘Mr Cho did keep his word,’ said Hazel. ‘I’ll tell you what happened, if you like. But maybe you don’t want me to. Because it would make a nonsense of how you’ve spent all your adult life. It would mean you killed Mary Cho for nothing, and the vendetta against their children that’s driven your existence for a decade and a half would have been a mistake. Stripped of that, you have nothing. You are nothing. Even if I proved to you that Edward Cho kept faith with Jerome Harbinger, you’d still murder his daughter if you could. You wouldn’t know what else to do.’
If he hadn’t had the knife in his hand, Hazel believed he’d have struck her. That’s what she was hoping for. It would mean him leaning forward, off-balance, stretching over the recumbent Ash, and probably moving the weapon into the hand he was least confident about using it in …
Perhaps he saw the danger as clearly as she did. In any event, he lifted the corner of his lip in an angry sneer and left the knife where it was. ‘You think I care what you think? You think it matters a tinker’s damn to me? Only one thing matters to me, and that’s finishing this. Finding that bitch and her brother, and scrubbing them out of history.
‘And you’re going to help me. And it doesn’t matter if it takes all day, but it won’t. Scream as much as you like – nobody’ll hear you. Someone standing ten feet away wouldn’t hear you.’
TWENTY-NINE
Hazel believed him. Walls that could keep the summer sun from melting ice could stop sound travelling far enough to save her. Fear put a tremor in her voice; she hoped she was the only one who heard it. ‘However much you hurt me, I can’t tell you what I don’t know.’
Fisher glanced down then. The anger in his face mutated to a kind of savage cunning. ‘Well, maybe. Maybe you wouldn’t tell me where she is. Maybe some kind of stupid professional pride would stop you. There are people who can do that – swallow their own pain, face their own death, rather than compromise their principles. Not many, I don’t think, but some. Maybe you’re one of them.’
