by Jo Bannister
Her V-shaped smile was solemn. “Of course you can. Anytime. I mean that, Gabriel—anytime. But if there’s nothing more I can do here, maybe I’ll grab another hour’s sleep before breakfast.” One uptilted eyebrow made it a question.
Ash nodded. “Next time I go ape I’ll try to do it during office hours.”
Hazel saw her out. Laura paused in the doorway. “You were right to call me. Call me again if you think you should.”
“You think he’s wrong, don’t you?” said Hazel. “About handling this himself.”
After a moment Laura nodded. “I’m concerned that, in trying to do what’s best for Cathy, he’s going to pull himself to pieces. I hope it ends well—that he finds a way of bringing her home. But there are a lot more ways this can go badly, and if it does, he’s going to blame himself. If he can’t save her, I don’t know what he’ll do.”
A chill settled on Hazel’s spine. “Suicide? Gabriel?”
“It’s a possibility. We need to be alert to it. Or he may go the other way.”
“Other way?”
“Try to destroy the rest of the world.”
This was Gabriel Ash they were discussing, the gentlest man Hazel had ever known. It was impossible for her to imagine him going Rambo. But she knew Laura wasn’t trying to frighten her for fun. “I’ll keep in touch.”
“Do.”
CHAPTER 3
WHEN HAZEL WENT BACK TO THE KITCHEN, Ash was in the process of emptying the dresser cupboards. He didn’t keep pots in there; he kept papers—vast quantities of papers, in box files and lever-arch files and concertina files and loose in stacks. It looked as if a tornado had hit the Public Records Office.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m going to need some help with this,” he said tersely. “Not the police. There are people … I have contacts … I know people. People who can help. There must be someone…” The urgent activity ground to a painful halt, leaving him stranded in the middle of his kitchen floor, his arms full of paperwork, his face twisted with a tortuous combination of hope and despair as the realization dawned on him that the people he had known, the contacts he had had, those who could have helped him, inhabited a past to which he no longer had access. In the depths of his eyes he looked lost, as if he genuinely didn’t know where he was.
Hazel took the papers from him and put them with the others on the kitchen table. Then she took his arm and steered him toward the stairs. “All that is probably true, and when you’ve slept, you’ll be capable of making decisions about it. Until then, anything you do is likely to make things worse rather than better. Go to bed, Gabriel. I’ll wake you in three hours, and we’ll talk about what we do next.”
Ash allowed himself to be packed off to bed like a child and offered no argument. Perhaps he could see the sense in what she said. More likely, he was currently incapable of making any decisions, even to remonstrate.
Hazel gave him ten minutes, then went to check on him. She found what she expected. He was sitting on the edge of his bed, still fully dressed. He’d managed to get one shoe off; now he was holding it in his hands and staring at it as if unsure where it might have come from.
With a sigh, she took the shoe from him and knelt down to take off the other one. Then she pushed him back on his pillows and tucked the quilt around him. “There. That’s good enough.” She pulled the curtains to keep out the growing day.
“She’s alive.” His voice was a wondrous whisper. “Hazel, Cathy’s alive.”
“Yes,” said Hazel softly. “And that’s all we need to know for now. Go to sleep.”
She didn’t expect him to. But half an hour later she looked in again, and he was dead to the world.
* * *
Patience wanted to go out. Hazel let her into the back garden, then sank into the old leather sofa with a cup of hot, sweet tea. She didn’t like hot, sweet tea, but she’d heard somewhere it was good for shock. Though probably not when it was allowed to sit untouched in its mug until it went cold. While Ash slept upstairs, Hazel slumped into an exhausted doze on the kitchen sofa.
She awoke with a guilty start, and for a moment couldn’t think what she had to feel guilty about. Then she remembered the dog. Even on a summer’s morning, it was too early in the day for the chill to have left the air, and her thin coat and spare frame gave the lurcher little protection from the weather. Hazel levered herself up and opened the back door.
The step was unoccupied. Hazel went outside. “Patience?” She dared not raise her voice for fear of disturbing Ash. “Patience! Time for your breakfast.”
Still no response, and Hazel knew with an awful certainty that she wouldn’t find Ash’s dog even when she combed the whole of the overgrown garden. So it proved. It was an old house with a stone wall around it that should have secured anything but a sex-starved rhinoceros, but the dog had clearly found a way out.
Back in the kitchen, Hazel debated her options. To do nothing was probably the sensible thing. Patience had found her way over long distances before now and would undoubtedly return when she was ready. In the meantime she could keep herself out of trouble. Hazel knew this because for six months the dog had kept Ash out of trouble, which was much more of a challenge.
Or Hazel could go looking for her. Probably Patience had headed toward the park, which was where she usually took Ash for his morning walk. But Hazel didn’t want to leave the house. If she woke Ash to tell him why, he would worry; and if she didn’t and he woke to find himself alone … then she would worry about how he’d react.
She settled for a compromise. From the front gate she had a good view down the length of Highfield Road, halfway to the park. She walked into the middle of the street, hoping to catch a glimpse of the slender white shape with its distinctive scimitar tail.
In fact what she saw was the whole dog, trotting breezily up the pavement toward her. Nor was she alone. Hazel recognized the rugby shirt before she could see the boy’s face. She went to meet them.
“Saturday! Thank God you caught her.”
Saturday looked puzzled. “She didn’t need much catching.” And indeed, the dog was walking amiably beside him without so much as a bit of string through her collar.
“She must have known I wanted to talk to you.” Hazel grinned so he wouldn’t think she really thought that. “I owe you an apology. Come up to the house, let’s have some breakfast.”
She noticed, and didn’t let him see she’d noticed, that the boy took the chair nearest to the range. Hazel opened a can from the cupboard. Chicken soup isn’t most people’s idea of breakfast fare. But then, most people don’t go to bed hungry, and she was pretty sure Saturday had.
By the time the soup was hot, and the butter was melting into the toast, and cold tea had given way to hot coffee, a bit of color was showing in Saturday’s pinched cheeks. He looked nonchalantly around the kitchen. “Ash not here, then?”
Hazel shook her head. “I sent him to bed.”
“He’s all right, is he?” He wanted her to think it was just a casual inquiry. But his nonchalant manner failed to disguise his genuine concern.
Hazel didn’t know what to tell him. Wasn’t sure how much of a secret it was. Realized then that it hardly mattered what she said to Saturday, because he had no one he could tell. In the end, too tired to lie, she told him a simplistic version of the truth. “He received some news about his family last night. His wife is still alive. She’s being held hostage in Somalia. Africa,” she added, in case he didn’t know.
“Jesus.”
“Quite.”
One of the few things she knew about Saturday was that his family, when he had one, were Jewish. It was where the nickname came from—“Excused Saturdays.” But he’d been alone so long that his language, including his profanities, was the language of the street. The community of the half homeless—those who didn’t sleep in shop doorways but in empty houses, derelict factories, and disused garages, and didn’t appear in most statistics because on the whole they did
n’t annoy anyone—were his family now.
Hazel was about the closest he had to a friend outside that community. Now that she was safely back so Hazel didn’t have to tell Ash his dog was missing, she was glad Patience had gone over the wall. “I’m sorry about before. There was something you wanted, wasn’t there? Tell me.”
He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter.”
She breathed heavily at him. “Saturday, it’s quarter past six in the morning! Anything you do at quarter past six in the morning, unless it involves toothpaste or toast, must matter, because you wouldn’t be doing it otherwise, or at least not then. So tell me. It’s not like I’m in a hurry to be somewhere else.”
“I’ve got this laptop,” mumbled the boy.
Hazel stared at him. “A laptop? You haven’t got an address. You haven’t got a power supply. And I don’t mean to be rude, but you also haven’t got any money. What are you doing with a laptop?”
“It’s not mine,” he growled. Nothing she had said was untrue. That didn’t mean he felt good hearing it. “I found it.”
“Ah…” As a police officer, Hazel had some experience of people finding laptops. Mostly they found them on the backseats of locked cars.
Saturday read her thoughts through the back of her neck as she poured the coffee. Not much made him blush these days. Somehow that did. Knowing what she thought of him. Knowing she had every reason to think it.
“Where did you find it?”
“At the service station at Whorley Cross. In the washroom.”
He also didn’t have a car. “What were you doing at a service station?”
The flush in his cheek was not subsiding. “Having a wash, all right?” And looking to see if anyone had left anything valuable lying around. Both of them knew it.
“All right,” said Hazel. “Did you give it to the people in the shop?”
“That bunch of thieves?” Saturday glowered. “They’d sell it for beer money, and blame me if someone came looking for it.”
“And I’m guessing you didn’t take it in to Meadowvale, either.” No one in Saturday’s position ever entered a police station willingly.
“I thought you could take it in.”
“Why?”
“Because no one’ll accuse you of stealing it!”
“If you handed it in, no one would accuse you of stealing it.” But there was no point; she was never going to convince him. She sighed. “Okay, I’ll take it in.”
“Don’t mention me. Tell them you found it.”
“I’m not telling them I found it in the men’s washroom of the Whorley Cross service station!”
“I don’t care what you tell them! Just don’t mention me.”
She shook her head at him, exasperated—like his mother, like his teacher. She imagined both of them had tried to keep Saturday on the straight and narrow. Hazel had no illusions about the likelihood of succeeding where they had failed. But there was something about the boy, a certain grubby charm, an underlying decency, that made her want to try. “All right, I’ll think of something. Where is it?”
He carried his life in an ex-army rucksack, slung from one thin shoulder because he thought that was cooler than carrying it on his back. It was lying at his feet now. He reached into it, past the personal treasures he kept wrapped up in his other pair of socks, and produced the laptop.
It wasn’t big. But it was a good make with a good spec: someone had paid serious money for it. Someone else would have paid fairly good money for it, no questions asked. Hazel directed a quizzical eyebrow at him. “You didn’t think of selling it?”
The boy shook his head, turned his attention to the food. “It’s not mine,” he said virtuously, leaving Hazel fighting the urge to laugh.
“Okay, leave it with me. I’ll drop it at Meadowvale later today.”
“Don’t mention me.”
“And I won’t mention you.” She smiled. “Now—bacon and eggs?” It was her turn to blush. “Oh—sorry…”
Saturday returned her smile with one of his own, a sweeter, clearer-conscienced thing than he had any right to. “Don’t tell Granddad, but I don’t keep kosher anymore. You’d have to be awful fucking selective about which bins you raided.”
CHAPTER 4
HAZEL WENT UPSTAIRS QUIETLY. She met Patience coming through the open bedroom door and, a moment later, Ash himself. The sleep had done him good. He still had no more color than a ghost, but at least now he looked like a ghost that had worked out what had happened to him and what he had to do next.
“Has Saturday gone?”
Hazel nodded. “I gave him something to eat. Actually, I pretty well emptied your fridge. Sorry.”
“What did he want?”
“He nicked somebody’s laptop. Now he’s thought better of it and wants me to hand it in as lost property.”
The fact that Ash was in the boy’s debt didn’t blind him to his essential nature. “Thought better of it?”
Hazel gave a grim chuckle. “That puzzled me, too. He wouldn’t say any more, just left the thing with me and told me not to mention his name.”
“We don’t know his name.”
Hazel looked surprised. “Of course we do. It’s Saul—Saul Desmond.”
“You asked him?”
She stared at him. “You didn’t?”
And that was the difference between them. Hazel was a people person, Ash was not. She was genuinely interested in who they were and where they came from. Ash wasn’t, and never had been. He was interested in big pictures, not fine brushstrokes.
“Never mind Saturday and his thieving little ways,” said Hazel. “What are we going to do about your wife?”
They were words that must have been said a million times, and probably never in circumstances like these. But they were both too troubled to note the irony.
Ash led the way downstairs. Or rather, Patience did and Ash followed. In the hall he turned to face his friend. “Hazel, I appreciate that more than you can know. What are we going to do. But the reality is, we are not doing anything. I’ll tackle this on my own from now on.”
If he’d slapped her face, she could hardly have been more hurt. Surprise and resentment turned her voice into a plaint. “You don’t want my help?”
Ash swallowed, feeling like a worm. But it was important to hold firm. “Of course I want your help. But I won’t keep risking your life to have it. These are dangerous people. We know that—we’ve already been shot at, Cathy’s been held captive for four years, and God knows what’s happened to my sons. Well, I have nothing to lose. But you have, and I’m not going to see someone else I care about harmed because I made a bad decision. Go home now, Hazel. Stay away from me. When it’s safe, I’ll let you know how it all worked out.”
She couldn’t believe what he was saying. Far from waning, her sense of injustice and her anger grew—like sunflowers, like fireworks. She felt her fists knot and a quiver of pure rage travel up her spine. “Gabriel Ash, how dare you speak to me like that? After everything I’ve done for you! All the crap I’ve taken, for you! Because we were friends, and friends don’t walk out on one another when the going gets sticky. How dare you tell me to go home now?”
“I don’t want you to get hurt.”
“I’ve been hurt!” she yelled. She knew she was going red in the face and didn’t care, or not enough to stop. “I’ve been knocked out, half drowned, and had my backside peppered with buckshot! I’ve been stood down from a job I love, and I don’t know when or if I’ll be allowed back. My colleagues think I’m a loose cannon, my friends think I’m crazy. And why? Because you needed my help. You still need my help. Don’t you dare tell me I’m surplus to requirements!”
His big hands reached out for her. He had never held her before, or only to keep her face out of a ditch. He held her now, broad fingers grasping her upper arms. There was nothing remotely sensual about it, but she felt concern radiating from him. And a calmness she would never have believed, even as recently as a few hours a
go. Hazel knew then that Ash had already decided what his next move would be, and that it would not involve her, and that nothing she could do or say would change his mind. She felt slighted and disappointed and relieved, and could not for the life of her have said which she felt most.
“I know what I owe you,” Ash said quietly. “Everything that I am today that I wasn’t three months ago. Specifically, someone who now has the strength to do what’s necessary without having his hand held. I am more grateful to you, Hazel Best, than I will ever be able to say: for your friendship, for your patience, for sticking by me when wiser counsels would have told you I was past redemption and you needed to consider your own position.
“Well, I still need your friendship, and I need your patience more now than before, but it’s time you listened to those wiser counsels and started looking after your own best interests. If you won’t, I’ll do it for you. What I need to do next I don’t need help with, and I don’t want to be worried that in trying to save Cathy I’m putting you in danger. I mean it. Go home. I’ll keep in touch. When there’s something to report, I’ll call you.”
Hazel looked into his face, into the shadows of his deep-set eyes, and saw that he meant almost every word of it. He would accept no more help from her. From this point, he would travel on alone. His tone was gentle, but the words were ruthlessly honest. The only lie he had told was when he promised to call her. She knew she wouldn’t hear from him again.
“Gabriel…” She couldn’t keep her voice from cracking.
“It’s all right.” He smiled solemnly, and put her away from him. “Go home now.”
“I can’t.”
“Yes, you can. You have to. If you come back, I won’t be here.”
* * *
What do you do when the sky falls? When everything changes? When the doctor says, “It isn’t good news.” When the lover says, “There’s someone else.” After your heart has clenched tight like a fist around broken glass, and the roller-coaster sensation in your head has passed, and the sun is still rising and setting to its appointed rhythm and the tide is still caressing a million nameless shores, and gradually it dawns on you that life will go on. That even your life will go on. Well, you pick yourself up, and you dust yourself down, and you check for missing limbs and the sort of bloodstains that might upset other people, and then you look for some point where you can reinsert yourself into your recent history. Where you can hope to pick up where you left off; and it won’t be the same, it’ll never be the same, but your screams will be silent ones and people who know you a little will think how brave you’re being. How sensible. And never guess that you feel like you’re bleeding all over.
