Other Countries

by Jo Bannister

  ‘No,’ murmured the solicitor cautiously.

  ‘So of course I went looking for evidence. And funnily enough, even though we thought we were investigating Desmond’s attack on Mr Ford, the material gathered by the scenes of crime officer, together with the clothes both of them were wearing, turned out to be exactly the evidential materials we would have bagged if Desmond had made his allegation right away. Wasn’t that lucky?’

  Something in his tone warned Ms Purbright that it may have been lucky for someone but possibly not her client. She made no response.

  Gorman waited just long enough to make her uncomfortable, then carried on. ‘You’ll never guess what forensics found when they turned their microscopes on what that kid probably describes as his pyjamas. Blood from the injuries to Oliver Ford’s head, certainly. But also Oliver Ford’s bodily fluids in places where Oliver Ford’s bodily fluids had no business being.

  ‘So, Ms Purbright,’ he concluded happily, ‘we’re singing from the same hymn-sheet here. I’m ready to discuss these matters with your client just as soon as his doctors give us the OK. I’ll be most interested to hear how he’s going to explain that.’

  Again, Ms Purbright said nothing. But what she was thinking was, You and me both.

  It wasn’t the kind of success you celebrate. All the same, Ash thought that once the dust had settled he’d take his friends out for a meal, see if they couldn’t re-establish normal, casual, uncharged relations over the sticky toffee pudding. Or maybe get Frankie to make up a picnic and take the boys as well. There was a shop opposite the park where he could buy a kite. A bit of running round and shouting would do Saturday the world of good.

  But it never happened. Three days after he’d secured Saturday’s freedom, Ash was putting his sons to bed – to the nightly complaint from Gilbert that he was two years older and shouldn’t have to go to bed at the same time as Guy – when the calm he’d just about established was fractured by hammering at the front door.

  He left Frankie to answer it, continued reading Treasure Island. The boys seemed to consider it a satisfactory bedtime story, although Ash found himself shivering at the tap-tap-tapping approach of Blind Pew.

  But Hazel’s voice – more particularly the distress in Hazel’s voice – came up the stairs to him, and he brought the chapter to an abrupt finish and went down.

  ‘He’s gone! Gabriel, he’s gone.’ Her hair – shaggy as the sharp cut grew out and skewbald as it reverted from red to her natural blonde – was awry and she was crying.

  ‘Who’s gone? Saturday? Gone where?’

  ‘I don’t know!’ she wailed. ‘He’s taken his things, and that ghastly rucksack, and picked up his wages from the garage and gone.’

  Ash tried to reassure her. ‘He can’t be far away. He’s hardly been out of Norbold in his life. I’ll drive, you look. It won’t take us half an hour to find him.’

  ‘Do you think I haven’t been looking? He’s gone. The people at the garage saw him hitch a lift on a truck heading for the motorway. They thought it was bound for London.’

  Ash was puzzled. ‘Why would Saturday go to London? He doesn’t know anyone there.’

  It infuriated Hazel how dim an intelligent man could be. ‘That’s the whole point! He wants to go where nobody knows him. He wants to disappear. He can’t face being here, being with us, after what happened.’

  Ash stared at her. ‘He told you this?’

  ‘Of course he didn’t tell me! If he’d told me he was going, I’d have stopped him. He left me a note. I found it when I got in this evening.’ She brought it from the pocket of her jeans and held it out to him. Her hand was shaking.

  The note said rather less than Hazel had read into it. Like its author, it was wary, oblique, guarded. If a note can be uncommunicative, it was uncommunicative, giving the minimum amount of information that he’d thought would prevent its recipient from worrying or – since it was addressed to Hazel – calling out the Marines.

  ‘Going away for a bit,’ he’d written, in the carefully drawn letters of someone who’d hardly picked up a pen since puberty. ‘Get my head straight. Do not worry about me I will be fine. Will get in touch when I know where I am going to be. Tell Mr Gorman sorry. Tell Gabriel sorry. You two. Thanks for everything, Saturday.’

  ‘“You two”?’ Perplexed, Ash read it aloud.

  ‘He means, “You too”.’ Hazel sketched the double O in the air with a finger. ‘Gabriel – he’s taken his second-best pyjamas. He hasn’t a bed to go to, but he’s stuffed his pyjamas into that battered old rucksack. We have to find him!’

  There were two possible responses. One was to point out that, if the boy had gone to London because he didn’t want to be found, their chances of finding him were vanishingly small. The other was to drive around until the impossibility of the task became inescapably clear to her.

  Gabriel Ash had no talent for lying. And lying to Hazel about this could only prolong the misery. ‘I don’t think we can,’ he said honestly.

  ‘We have to! Gabriel, you know people – people in London, security people. They can help.’

  Ash suspected that the stock of favours he could still call in was all but exhausted. But he’d have tried, for her sake and for Saturday’s, if he’d thought there was any point. ‘This truck he got a lift with. Are we sure it was heading for London?’

  ‘Not exactly.’ Someone in the garage had thought that was what the driver said when Saturday asked where he was bound. Someone else thought he said Dublin. ‘But if he wants to lose himself, that’s where he’ll go. We can catch them on the motorway.’

  ‘Hazel – he’s probably there by now. He left the note while you were out specifically so he could get a head start. This truck: were the people at the garage able to describe it?’

  ‘White, with some kind of machinery on the back.’

  ‘A white truck hauling machinery to London, or possibly Dublin, that left hours ago – and you think we can find it? I’m sorry, I know it’s not what you want to hear, but we’re already too late. He wanted to disappear and that’s what he’s done.’

  ‘I can’t let him go like this!’ she cried from the breaking of her heart. ‘This is my fault! It’s my fault he was hurt. But for me he’d never have met the bastard who hurt him. And now, because my face would be a daily reminder of that, he’s turned his back on the only home he’s known for three years and the only people in the world who give a damn about him. Gabriel, help me! Help me to find him. You found your wife, for God’s sake, when everyone thought she was dead. You can help me find Saturday.’

  He understood where it came from, but still the reference to Cathy turned a knife under Ash’s ribs. He bit back the retort that was already in his mouth, reminded himself that Hazel was floundering in a toxic emulsion of grief and guilt, and sinking more than she was swimming.

  So instead he said gently, ‘I didn’t find Cathy – Cathy found me. It only looked as if I’d been clever. You know that, Hazel. You know I have very little to be proud about as far as Cathy’s concerned, and it was nothing more than luck, and the bloody-mindedness of my eldest son, that meant I got the boys back.

  ‘Of course I’ll help you. Tell me what you want me to do. But I don’t think we’ll succeed. Saturday spent three years staying under everyone’s radar. If he’s chosen to melt back into the shadows now, no one is better equipped.’

  ‘You’re saying we’ll never see him again,’ Hazel whispered brokenly. She laid her cheek against Ash’s broad chest, and he put his arms around her for the comfort of them both.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying, this is what he wants right now. And maybe it’s the right thing for him. He wants to be alone for a while, to come to terms with what happened without his friends smothering him with sympathy. He wants to be anonymous. And there’s nowhere like London for being anonymous in.

  ‘But it won’t be forever. He’s growing up. This was a pretty significant event in his life, but i
t’s not the first significant event he’s had to deal with. He managed before, and he’ll manage now. They have shelves to stack in London, too. He’ll get a job, he’ll rent a room, and he’ll be OK for as long as he feels he has to stay. And when he feels he doesn’t have to stay away any longer, he’ll come back.’

  Hazel sniffed moistly. ‘If he can keep out of trouble.’

  ‘He kept out of trouble for three years,’ Ash pointed out. ‘The only trouble he ever got into was when he was with us.’

  It was true, though hardly calculated to make her feel better. ‘What about the case? Saturday’s the chief witness: if he doesn’t give evidence, will Dave Gorman have to let Oliver go? If that happens,’ she advised darkly, ‘I may well buy a gun and go after him myself.’

  Ash shook his head. ‘There’s plenty of evidence without Saturday’s testimony. The best of it is the forensics. The only possible defence Ford can muster is to say that the sex was consensual – and that makes so little sense in the context of their relationship that his defence team will be reluctant to field it. For one thing, a consensual relationship with a teenage boy would do nearly as much damage to Ford’s reputation as being accused of rape.

  ‘For another, there’s Rachid Iqbal. He came to England looking for revenge, and you stopped him. If he’s offered the chance of another kind of payback, by telling a court how Ford used him exactly as he used Saturday, in almost identical circumstances, he’ll take it. You don’t need to worry about Oliver Ford, Hazel. You aren’t going to bump into him in Sainsbury’s any time soon.’

  ‘And you really think Saturday will come back?’ She sounded like a child pleading for reassurance, her voice small and muffled by his increasingly damp shirt front.

  Ash smiled sombrely into the top of Hazel’s head, where a line like a Cold War frontier divided the red ends of her hair from the blonde roots. ‘I’m sure of it. When he’s had a chance to heal. When the appeal of anonymity has started to wear thin. Or when he needs something, he’ll be back.’

  He thought about that then and realised he wasn’t being fair. Saturday had never taken much from them. A second-hand bed in Hazel’s house; a few square meals; some clothes to sleep in that weren’t the ones he spent the rest of the time in. What he’d given in return was more significant. For starters, he’d saved Ash’s life.

  ‘Or maybe,’ he added, ‘when we need him.’

  THE END