Desperate Measures: A Mystery (13 page)

But the alternative was also pretty appalling. To leave her car and walk up this drive, alone, and knock on the door and confront Charles Armitage about the contents of his laptop’s photo file. Knowing that she could prove nothing. Knowing that he was a well-to-do, well-connected professional man who undoubtedly retained expensive lawyers. If he denied everything, what would she do then? She couldn’t produce Saturday—his credibility as a witness was too meager to justify the risk to him—and she’d never seen the pictures herself; and if DI Gorman had, it would have been him walking up the Armitages’ front drive, and Armitage would know that. Hazel hadn’t a single shot in her locker.

Sometimes, they say, nothing is a real cool hand. But usually it’s not.

She found herself wondering what Gabriel Ash would have done.

Maybe he wouldn’t have got himself in this position in the first place. It was, she had to admit, pretty stupid, and Ash was never a stupid man.

But nor had he been afraid of looking stupid if he thought he was doing the right thing. He’d confronted some grim situations himself—and to Ash, who’d found even casual conversation a trial, the prospect of a hostile reception must have been anathema—when he’d needed answers he could see no other way of getting. Gabriel Ash had always had the courage of his convictions. He was dead, and his wife and sons were alive, because of it.

Hazel felt a slow flush traveling up into her cheeks, and the die was cast. She wouldn’t disappoint just Saturday if she turned around now. She would be letting Ash down, too, because he would have expected better of her. A serious crime had been committed by the man who lived in that church, and maybe there was nothing she could do to bring Charles Armitage to justice, but she could at least let him know that she knew. Mark his card. Make him aware that, whatever his social circle believed, however much they admired his talent and envied his success, there was a police officer (probably) in Norbold who knew exactly what he was. Maybe it would have an effect. Maybe the humiliation of having his secret discovered would be enough to make him concentrate such spare time and energies as he had on golf.

Hazel took a deep breath, marched up the gravel drive, and rapped on the lancet-shaped front door before she had time to change her mind.

Everyone knows what a pedophile looks like, don’t they? Pale, damp, limp-wristed, washed-out eyes that avoid your gaze, a tendency to dress much as he had when his mother was buying his clothes. Except for the jolly uncle ones, of course, who are red-faced and round and never stop laughing, and have pudgy hands and wear socks with their sandals. And then there’s the other kind, who …

And therein lies the problem. As a trained police officer, Hazel knew exactly what a pedophile looks like. He looks like everyone else. Certainly there are those who match the stereotypes, but there are more who don’t. Who look like husbands and fathers, like teachers and clergymen and shopkeepers, like people you know and trust. You can’t tell by looking at them. Hazel knew what he was, and still Charles Armitage didn’t look like a pedophile when he opened the door with a yellow duster and a spray can of furniture polish in his spare hand. When his rosy middle-aged face with its laughter lines on the cusp of turning into wrinkles split in an amiable, slightly rueful smile and he said, “Yes? Can I help you?”

A uniform is a magical thing. It can turn a bunch of individuals into a cohesive group. It can make them fight for one another when, without it, they wouldn’t fight for themselves. It can make them stand when all their instincts are screaming at them to turn and run. One made of soft blue cloth can stiffen a spine better than whalebone.

Hazel had been told this. Now she knew it was true. She’d had the protection of a uniform, and then she had lost it, and she knew what it was worth.

On the other hand, it isn’t the uniform that does the job: it’s the person inside. Hazel Best was still who she’d always been, and arguably more so. She stiffened her own spine, and looked him in the eye, and did what she’d got good at doing recently: lying without saying an untruthful word.

“I’m Hazel Best, from Meadowvale Police Station in Norbold. Your laptop was handed to me as lost property.”

She paused there, watching to see the effect of this opening statement on Charles Armitage. It was reasonably gratifying. The smile died on his face and much of the color drained out of it. He took half a step backward and his eyes contracted around a little knot of worry at their cores. He knew what she was talking about all right, and she hadn’t said anything yet.

Unsmiling, holding his eyes with her own, she continued slowly, picking her words with care. “It seems there may have been some … irregularity … in the way the hand-in was logged. You’ll understand, there are procedures that need to be followed when we take responsibility for somebody’s valuable property. There’s some question as to whether we recorded all the necessary particulars.”

It was a classic police tactic, hiding the weakness of her position behind a wall of official-sounding words that might mean anything or nothing at all. And it was entirely alien to the way Hazel had done her job, which was with the same openness and honesty with which she lived her life. But all the weapons in an armory have a use, and she went on holding his gaze remorselessly, daring him to look away. And he wanted to, but couldn’t.

“So would you mind providing me with some information about the item now? For the record? Is it your personal property or does it belong to your company?”

“Er—it’s mine,” said Armitage. He was sure he’d covered this ground when the laptop was returned to him, but if covering it again was the price of getting rid of her, he was more than willing.

“But you were using it for business.”

“Yes.”

“When you lost it.”

“Yes.”

“At a petrol station.”

“Yes. Officer…”

Hazel tilted her head imperiously, so that her nose came up like an admonitory finger. “One moment, sir. Let’s get what we need first. Does anyone else use the computer?”

She saw his lips tighten. Oh yes, he knew what she was here for. “No, Officer.”

“And do you use it for anything other than business?”

He took a deep breath. “Occasionally. I really can’t see how relevant…”

“So all the files stored on it would be yours. And they would mostly be connected to your work as a structural engineer, but there might be some personal data on there, too. Would that be a fair assessment?”

Charles Armitage nodded once. “Yes.” He managed to look both ill and obstinate.

“May I see the computer, sir?” asked Hazel, adding, from not much more than personal malice, “Again.”

That, too, had the desired effect. Her meaning jolted through his expression. “You accessed it?”

“Of course we did, Mr. Armitage. How else could we find the owner?”

“But the password…”

“Yes,” she reflected. “PASSWORD. Not the most secure I’ve ever come across. In fact, I read somewhere that it’s the commonest password used in the English-speaking world. You might want to change it to something a bit more original.” And then, having stretched the silence until it was ready to break like an elastic band, she added pointedly, “And DROWSSAP isn’t much better.”

If she’d expected him to fall apart in front of her at the dreadful realization of how much she knew, to fall gibbering at her feet, blaming it all on his upbringing and the public school system and the fact that his wife didn’t understand him, Hazel had mistaken her man. He seemed to shrink in front of her; but things that get smaller without losing mass actually get denser, harder. Charles Armitage’s eyes hardened to little steel balls and his lips compressed so much that they almost disappeared.

“Thank you for the advice, Officer,” he said, expressionless. “I’ll bear it in mind.”

Hazel nodded slowly. “So … may I?”

“May you what?”

“See the laptop that was returned to you.”

Of course, he’d had a week to work out what to do if this, or anything like it, came knocking at his door. He was on firmer ground here, and it showed. “I’m afraid not.”

“Really?” said Hazel. She could hardly pretend to be surprised. “Surely you haven’t lost it again?”

“In fact, I gave it away,” said Armitage, lying easily because actually it didn’t matter whether she believed him or not. “While it was missing, I treated myself to a new one. When it turned up again, I took all my data off it and passed it on to a charity. They send them to schoolchildren in Africa, I believe.”

Hazel hadn’t seen that one coming. “What was the name of the charity?”

Armitage pondered. “I don’t think I can remember. I saw a flyer, it seemed like a nice idea, I dialed the number, and someone picked it up.”

“Do you still have the flyer?”

It was a final sally from a position about to be overrun, and Armitage knew it. There was a tight smile in his voice. “I’m afraid not. I didn’t expect to be asked about it.”

There was nothing more Hazel could do. There wouldn’t have been much more if she’d been here in an official capacity. She could make an accusation she now had no way of proving, or she could retreat with a small measure of dignity intact.

But she couldn’t resist a parting shot. She knew what he’d been up to. Armitage knew she knew. If all she could do was give him a sleepless night, and maybe get him to stop surfing the Internet for a bit, it had to be better than nothing. “Not to worry,” she said, the words casual but the message in her eyes entirely serious. “There can’t be many people doing that in this area. I’m sure I can find them. Someone must remember collecting your laptop. From here, was it, or your office?”

“Er…” The thing about lying is, you need to think fast and remember well. The thing about structural engineering is, you take all the time necessary to do all your thinking long before someone picks up a trowel, and you write everything down. Charles Armitage was not a natural liar. “Here,” he managed to say eventually.

It was the right answer—if he’d said the office, a colleague would have witnessed the transaction—but the time it took him to produce it, and the uncertainty in his voice, left her a small but definite triumph to leave on. “Good enough, Mr. Armitage,” she said, turning from his door. “I’ll let you know if there’s anything else I need to ask you.” A faint spring in her step, she returned to her car.

It was empty.

CHAPTER 16

I
T DIDN’T TAKE HER TEN SECONDS TO LOCATE THEM,
Saturday and Patience both, on a wide verge fifty meters away, playing a version of fetch in which the dog dropped a ball into the long grass and the boy beat around looking for it. But for those ten seconds she thought it had happened again. That she’d lost someone else for whose safety she’d assumed responsibility. That someone had seen Saturday waiting outside Armitage’s house, guessed who he was, and taken him where he couldn’t be a threat anymore.

When she spotted them, relief surged in her throat like vomit; but faster and sourer still came a furious rage. She’d told him to stay in the car. He’d agreed to stay in the car. And she couldn’t pump the horn, let alone shout his name, without drawing attention to him. She got into the car, turned it around, and drove to where they were playing. “Get in,” she said quietly.

They both looked at her innocently. “Finished, then?” said Saturday.

“Just … get in.” Hazel was hanging on to her temper by the thinnest of threads.

They were half a mile down the road before she trusted herself to speak again. “I told you to stay out of sight.”

Saturday seemed genuinely surprised. “I
was
out of sight. Unless there was someone sitting on the roof, hanging on to the belfry, and I’m pretty sure I’d have noticed if there was.”

Hazel breathed heavily at him. “How can I get it into your thick skull that you could be in danger?”

The boy delayed answering so long that she thought he wasn’t going to, that he’d accepted the reprimand to deny her the satisfaction of shouting at him. She concentrated on her driving.

But Saturday wasn’t stumped for an answer. He was just trying to formulate it in a way that she might understand. “Hazel,” he said quietly after a minute or so, “I’m always in danger. Not just me, we all are—all the people I live around. Every night from October to May there’s the danger of a hard frost that means some of us won’t wake up. Every time we strike lucky and find someone’s unwanted lunch on a park bench, there’s the danger it’s been there longer than we thought and there’s enough bugs in it to bring a buffalo to its knees. Every time we ask someone for his change, there’s the chance he’s had a really bad day and this is the last straw and he’s going to turn nasty. A girl I knew was in hospital for three months after a pinstriped city type hit her with his umbrella and knocked her into the traffic.

“You know this. You know that if we arrange to meet, you’re always slightly surprised when I turn up. If you want to feel safe, if you want some certainty in your life, you probably don’t want to live the way I live. I’m not saying this so you’ll feel sorry for me,” he explained earnestly, “just so you understand. We don’t feel the same way about danger as you do. Because it’s always there, in our lives, pretty much everywhere we look. And because we have less to lose.”

And then, having twisted the heart within her, he broke it entirely by adding, “But it’s kind of nice that you care.”

Another mile down the road Hazel asked, “Whatever happened to you, Saturday? You’re a nice kid. Somebody loved you enough to make a good job of bringing you up. She should be proud of you. But here you are, sixteen years old—”

“Seventeen last week,” he interjected, as if that was the bit that mattered. He was sitting not beside her but on the backseat, one arm round the lurcher.

“Seventeen years old, you’re living in empty buildings, you own nothing that you can’t carry on your back, and your idea of a day’s work is leaning on a lamppost, sticking your hand out as people go past. You’re capable of so much more than that. You’re worth so much more. Whatever happened to make you think you weren’t?”