by Jo Bannister
‘But he did kill Mr Cho?’ Hazel thought she could get the answers now. She wished to God she had something to record them on.
Mrs Fisher seemed to have lost all inhibition about sharing her secrets; seemed almost to want to tell someone. In a way, Hazel understood that. If she and Ash walked away from this, the woman holding them at gunpoint wasn’t going to; and vice versa. So it hardly mattered what she said to them. She could afford to be honest.
‘He meant to. He phoned him – a public phone, no records – and asked him to come to the house, said they had unfinished business. I’ll give him this: Cho was a brave man to say he would. I think he was expecting an apology, some kind of reconciliation.’
‘Instead of which …?’
‘Mr Harbinger was waiting for him on the road, with a double-barrelled shotgun. This double-barrelled shotgun,’ she noted with satisfaction. ‘I have no doubt he’d have used it. But Cho was too quick for him: he saw the gun, guessed what it meant and drove off like Jehu. Mr Harbinger went after him. Cho knew the quickest way home – the quickest way to anywhere he could get help – was up the Clover Hill road. What he didn’t know was how icy it gets in winter.
‘He nearly made it. But he lost control close to the brow of the hill, and his car rolled over on the bank and into the reservoir. Mr Harbinger came home.’
Hazel was puzzling over the legal implications. Murder? Manslaughter? Possibly attempted murder. ‘But he didn’t kill Mrs Cho? Are you sure? We know he threatened her.’
Contempt twisted Mrs Fisher’s lip. ‘Pretty sure. I know he threatened her – he threatened all of them, the whole family. And he meant it at the time. But once Cho was dead, it became obvious he wasn’t going to do it. Because she was a woman. Because it wasn’t her who’d lied to us. Because … oh, who cares why? He wasn’t going to do it.’
Hazel said softly, ‘So who did?’
Mrs Fisher barked a humourless laugh. ‘If you want a job doing properly, do it yourself. It really wasn’t very difficult. She’d have slammed the door in Mr Harbinger’s face, but I was another woman, wasn’t I? And we’d both just lost our husbands. We ended up drinking tea in her kitchen. I slipped sleeping pills into hers, and when she was groggy enough I steered her into the bathroom and … well, you know what I did. She hardly struggled. It took almost no force to keep her head under the water, so no bruises.’
‘Why?’ demanded Ash in a horrified whisper. ‘What happened was nothing to do with her or her children.’
‘Why? Because she was his wife.’ The bitterness in her voice was almost inhuman. ‘Because they were his children. Because Edward Cho’s family was still walking the earth when mine lay in ruins.
‘Because he lied. He promised the police wouldn’t be involved, and that was a lie, and my husband died because of it. The only possible response was to wipe everything bearing his name off the face of the earth. When the last of them is gone, then I can sleep. I haven’t, you know. Not properly. Not for seventeen years.’
Which explained a fair bit, Hazel thought. Grief had turned to resentment, and resentment to a cold fury that had consumed the woman’s life. And not just hers: she had passed the contagion to her son. Brought him up to it, nurtured him on it, fed him the bitter grapes of her wrath. He had had no life, no adult life, that wasn’t overwhelmingly tainted by it. She had destroyed them both with her hunger for retribution.
‘You found Lester Pickering. He robbed the Harbingers, he beat you when you tried to stop him, and he was responsible for the deaths of your husband and Jennifer Harbinger,’ said Hazel. ‘How did you find him?’
‘That wasn’t easy,’ admitted Margaret Fisher. ‘Which is why it took so long. But if you keep asking questions, and keep going back to remind people that you still want the information, and you’re still willing to pay for it, sooner or later something bubbles to the surface. He was using Mrs Harbinger’s picture to bankroll more crimes. He had no idea we knew about it. You should have seen his face when he realised who we were!’
‘You were there?’
She grinned fiercely. ‘You think I was going to miss that? John’s stronger than me, he did the needful, but damn right I was there. I told Miss Jocelyn I needed time off to deal with some personal business. You can’t argue with that. I watched that bloody man die, crawling round the lino at my feet, and I was glad to see it.’ Her chin came up determinedly. ‘So don’t think I’ll baulk at using a gun. I was born in the country: I’ve shot vermin all my life.’
‘Where’s the picture now?’
‘In the butler’s pantry,’ Mrs Fisher answered promptly. ‘I get it out and look at it sometimes. I can’t return it to the Harbingers without explaining how I came by it, but at least it’s back in the house.’ She looked pensive for a moment. ‘They say it’s worth millions. I can’t see it myself. It’s just some girl with a cage-bird. It’s called Anime Gemelle. That’s Italian for Kindred Spirits, you know. I’ve never understood why a famous artist like that would paint a girl and a bird.’
‘She’s one of the Medici,’ Hazel said softly, ‘married into a rival family to seal a truce. Caravaggio was making the point that she had as much choice in the matter, as much freedom to fly away, as the bird.’
‘Yes?’ The older woman sniffed dismissively. ‘I suppose we’re all hostages to circumstance, one way or another. And he did paint the fabrics very nicely. I still can’t see millions in the thing.’
‘It’s been hanging in the butler’s pantry, and nobody noticed?’ Hazel could hardly credit it. First Lester Pickering’s office wall, now that of the Harbingers’ housekeeper. For an internationally important painting, it didn’t seem to be very recognisable.
‘Who goes into the butler’s pantry except the housekeeper?’ asked Mrs Fisher haughtily. ‘And to be fair, I don’t keep it on the wall. It’s packed away where no one will find it. But I get it out from time to time, to remind myself that my husband may have died for nothing but those responsible paid for what they did. The picture doesn’t matter. The payment does.’
Ash was aware that time was passing. He didn’t need John Fisher to start feeling better. After the hammering he’d taken, he probably couldn’t have contributed much to the balance of power, but even squirming around the floor trying to get Ash’s foot off his neck he’d be an unnecessary complication.
‘You know this is over now, don’t you?’ he said. ‘You’re neither of you walking away from this. John’s going in an ambulance, and you’re going in the police car that will be here at any moment.’
‘I don’t hear any police car,’ said the housekeeper coldly. ‘So far as I can see, it’s just us four. And I’m the one with the gun. Now, get away from my son!’
Wearily, Ash shook his head. ‘Mrs Fisher, you need to believe me. I will do this. To protect my friend, to prevent my sons from being left fatherless, I will crush his throat and he will die of suffocation. I don’t think there’s anything you can do, even with a double-barrelled shotgun, as quickly as I can shift my weight onto my right foot.’
‘I can shoot you dead,’ she said thickly.
‘Only with the second barrel,’ said Hazel. She sucked in a deep breath and moved sideways, masking Ash’s body with her own. ‘With the first one you’ll have to shoot me. By the time you can shoot again, John will be beyond help.’
‘At least if we’re dead, we won’t have to listen,’ said Ash grimly. ‘You will. You’ll hear him fighting for the breath that won’t come. You may try CPR, but it won’t make any difference. He’ll no longer have an airway. In the end there’ll be nothing you can do except sit here and wait for him to die. It’ll be the longest three minutes of your life. Nothing you have experienced so far, nothing you have done, will prepare you for it.’
Margaret Fisher looked at Hazel and wondered if it was worth calling the bluff. Then she looked at Ash and knew it wasn’t a bluff. She held onto the gun a little longer, while the sands of time ran out of her future. Then she broke it – safet
y is instinctive among people who shoot – and passed it to Hazel.
‘Damn you,’ she said, quietly and with absolute sincerity. ‘Damn you both to hell. Move away from my son, you monster.’
‘She called me a monster,’ Ash said unhappily. ‘After everything she’d done and caused to be done, she thought I was the monster.’
‘You were threatening to kill an unconscious man,’ DI Gorman reminded him. ‘Her son. Whose blood was, right then, all over you.’
‘She’d have shot us both if I hadn’t.’
‘I know that. That’s why we’re talking about it over a pub lunch instead of in Interview Room One with the tape running.’
They were. Forty-eight hours had passed, so the bruises acquired by both Ash and Hazel were now at their Technicolor best. Apart from that, both were recovering from the ordeal. It would take time to put it behind them entirely – Hazel’s leave had been extended on medical grounds, Ash had put a sign in the bookshop window advising that it would be closed for a week – but the roller-coaster cycle of insomnia alternating with nightmares, of emotions unnaturally dulled or heightened to a pitch of absurd sensitivity, of uncalled-for snappishness or sudden tears, would eventually yield to normality. All they could do in the meantime was ride the peaks and troughs, and remind one another that it was only to be expected, that this too would pass.
An odd musical tone sounded in Ash’s pocket. ‘I want to take this,’ he said, extracting his phone, ‘it’s the vet.’ He went through the black oak door into the pub’s back garden.
‘How is his dog?’ asked Gorman.
‘She’ll be fine,’ said Hazel. ‘The van did hit her, but Fisher was wrong when he said he’d killed her. She has a broken foreleg and three broken ribs. The vet operated yesterday. Gabriel’s hoping to get her home soon.’
‘Good. I don’t know what he’d do without that dog.’
‘First off, he’d have to get a new nickname,’ she said impishly. It hadn’t originally been meant kindly, but time and usage had left Ash quite sanguine about Meadowvale calling him Rambles With Dogs.
Gorman ignored that. ‘I gather Miss Lim moved back into her flat this morning.’
Hazel nodded. ‘I said she was welcome to stay longer, if she wanted to get her breath back, but she said there was no need. As soon as she knew she was safe, she wanted to start getting back to normal. I think she’ll be back at work on Monday.’
‘Tough lady,’ said Gorman appreciatively. ‘And she’s not the only one. That was smart work, giving Fisher directions to the safe house. When you knew she wasn’t there, because you’d taken her down to your house the previous morning.’
Hazel accepted the compliment complacently. She’d impressed herself with that, too. ‘I hoped it would have the ring of truth, without putting Elizabeth in danger if in the end I couldn’t stop him. I certainly wasn’t going to tell him she was at my place. It’s not long since I finished decorating – I didn’t want to have to do it again.’
The DI grinned. It was easy to be flippant about danger after it’s been resolved. He knew what it had taken to face up to John Fisher and find a way of protecting both Lim and Ash. ‘What about her brother?’
‘She can’t contact him directly. But she has spoken to Martin Wade, so next time James calls, he’ll pass on the news and Elizabeth’s phone-number. Hopefully, they can get together again soon. They have seventeen years to catch up on.’ She pushed away the last of the Black Forest gateau, still not sure why Gorman hadn’t wanted any. ‘So the only loose end is the men in the grey van.’
‘We’ll get them, sooner rather than later,’ said the DI confidently. ‘We know who they are – John Fisher didn’t show much interest in protecting them once he realised it was over. They worked for Harbinger Transport in Leeds. Fisher identified them as potential muscle a while back when he drove Jocelyn up there to open a new depot.’
He gestured for the bill. ‘I spent an hour with Jocelyn Harbinger last night, bringing her up to date. She knew her housekeeper and her gardener had been arrested, of course. She didn’t know, until I told her, that her father was unlikely to face charges.’
‘He was responsible for Edward Cho’s death.’
The DI shrugged. ‘He probably was. But would you want to bring the prosecution? He’s not fit to stand trial. OK, Edward Cho’s car probably wouldn’t have left the road if no one had been chasing him – but we’d have to prove criminal culpability, and the Harbingers can afford the best defence lawyers. Jerome has nothing to be proud of. But maybe he’s already paid for what he did with his own physical and mental decline.’
They sat in a reflective silence for a minute. Then Hazel said, with a kind of careful innocence, ‘I’m glad Jocelyn wasn’t involved.’
Gorman nodded. ‘Me too.’
‘Yes. That’s why I’m glad.’
He frowned at her. ‘What?’
‘It’s none of my business. I just got the impression that you and she were’ – Hazel shrugged negligently – ‘getting on quite well.’
‘She was a suspect,’ he said, outraged.
‘And now she isn’t. Dave, you’re a single man – if you like the woman, tell her so.’
‘I have a girlfriend,’ mumbled Gorman.
‘No, Dave,’ said Hazel patiently, ‘you had a girlfriend. You took her out, regular as clockwork, once a week, for dinner at the rugby club. More than half the time she went home alone because you got called back into work. But the last time she went home with a prop forward who works in an accountant’s office and never gets paged. And,’ she added pointedly, ‘all this happened four months ago. It’s time to dip your toe back in the water.’
He was staring at her, half impressed, half appalled. ‘How do you know all that?’
‘Dave!’ she laughed. ‘We both work in the same police station. There are no secrets in a police station. You want a private life, get another job.’
Gorman took a fierce bite out of a weak shandy and changed the subject. ‘Gabriel’s phone. He never struck me as the type to use the Bond theme as a ring-tone.’
Hazel chuckled. ‘He didn’t. I downloaded it one day when he wasn’t looking, and he hasn’t figured out yet how to get rid of it.’
Outside, Ash had finished talking to his vet. The news was all good. Patience’s leg had been pinned and her ribs strapped, and she was hobbling round looking sorry for herself but would probably recover better at home now. He could pick her up this afternoon.
He was heading back inside when the stupid ring-tone went again. He thought it was the vet with more instructions, but it wasn’t. It was Philip Welbeck.
‘Ah, Gabriel. Everything sorted out now?’
Suddenly Ash needed to sit down. He lowered himself onto one of the picnic benches. ‘Philip? How did you know?’
‘Oh, one keeps a little eye open. I always like to know what you’re up to. You and your little friend.’
Ash waited for him to say something more. Welbeck waited for Ash to respond. The silence was the silence of a second boot getting ready to drop.
Finally Ash said, ‘What really brought you up to Norbold last week? Did someone ask you to warn me off?’
Welbeck managed to sound shocked and amused at the same time. Ash knew it meant nothing: the man was a born performer. ‘Of course not. I just wanted to know how you were.’
‘Only Hazel and I aren’t particularly popular at police headquarters.’
‘Really?’ Now he sounded surprised, and that was every bit as disingenuous. ‘Well, nobody told me.’
‘You’re saying it was a coincidence? That no one in the chief constable’s office asked you to lean on us?’
‘My dear boy,’ said Welbeck expansively, ‘I’m not a hired gun! I don’t go round the country leaning on people just because they’ve annoyed some provincial chief constable. How would I ever get my day’s work done?’
Ash was inclined to believe him. Not because he thought Welbeck wouldn’t lie to him – he knew
his old boss could and would lie like a trooper any time he thought he had anything to gain by it – but because they’d known one another long enough that he believed he could tell when Welbeck was experimenting with the truth. He mumbled, ‘It felt like too much of a coincidence. About the time Hazel stumbled onto the Harbinger case, you turned up on my doorstep.’
Welbeck laughed out loud, a merry tinkling sound like a delighted pixy. ‘Dear boy! The only conspiracies I take part in are those I initiate.’
‘I thought you’d been asked to give me something else to worry about. To stop us wondering if we were dealing with police incompetence or actual corruption.’
‘Do I?’ asked Welbeck slyly. ‘Worry you?’
‘Always,’ said Ash with feeling.
‘Oh good.’
There was another of those significant pauses, when Welbeck would have ended the call if he’d had nothing else to say but in fact failed to do so. Eventually Ash said, ‘Then this too is just a social call?’ Though he knew that it wasn’t.
‘Actually,’ said Welbeck, ‘it’s that situation we talked about. Where you might be able to help me out in return for a favour or two that I’ve done for you in the not-too-distant past.’
That was the second boot. Ash gave it one more try. ‘This isn’t my line of work any more, Philip. I’m stale and I’m out of touch. I’m not sure how much use I could be to you.’
‘Let me worry about that, dear boy. I’m not trying to turn you into a field man, you know. That was never where your strengths lay – you were always a desk jockey. It’s just, you were always a better one than anyone else. And right now I could use someone with your particular talents.
‘Not for very long,’ he added quickly. ‘Don’t think I want to drag you away from your second-hand bookshop and the charms of downtown Norbold for weeks at a time. Three or four days might be enough. But I’d like you here on Monday, if you could manage it.’
Ash’s heart followed the legendary boot and clumped on the floor. He didn’t want to do it. He knew Welbeck knew he didn’t want to do it. And he knew Welbeck was going to make him. He was too tired to argue any more.
