And it wasn’t that any of it was a secret. As Nye Jackson had pointed out, it had once been national news. But news is ephemeral, and four years later only those directly involved remembered. Ash had got in the way of internalizing his grief not because the events were secret but because he was that kind of man. He had never worn his emotions openly. It said a lot about him that he would rather be thought mentally ill than recognized as the victim of a tragedy.
But perhaps things were changing. Partly it was that working with Laura Fry had made it possible for him to think of opening up to others. Partly it was because Hazel was a police officer, and Ash had been brought up with that unthinking respect for the law that is a defining characteristic of the middle class. And perhaps the shock of finding himself involved in something else—someone else’s tragedy—actually made it easier. He took a deep, steadying breath. His arm slid around the dog’s shoulders as a child clutches a comfort blanket. And he began to talk.
CHAPTER 12
“I
WAS A GOVERNMENT
security adviser,” said Ash. “Don’t read too much into that. I wasn’t sitting at the prime minister’s right hand or anything like that. It was a big department, a whole bunch of us with different backgrounds, different strengths. I was in counterterrorism.”
He flicked her a self-deprecating little grin. “Before you ask, no, I wasn’t licensed to kill. I wasn’t licensed to do anything except read reports and watch video and interpret what I was seeing. I worked in an office in Whitehall. There are field agents, but I wasn’t one. I trained as an insurance investigator. It turned out the skills you use, the techniques you acquire, are pretty much the same.
“Mostly, getting a feel for when you’re being lied to. Spotting tiny inconsistencies in what you’re being told. And then working out whether they mean the subject is genuinely doing his best, he’s got something wrong precisely because he hasn’t rehearsed what to say, or if it’s a sign that things didn’t happen how he says they happened. It’s pretty much the same job whether you’re investigating a claim for flood damage or a plot to blow up an airport. Except that the stakes are higher.”
It had been a good job. Interesting, challenging, and important. He’d liked feeling he was making a difference. That people were alive who might have died without his input. He was good at it, had the right kind of mind—meticulous, analytical, but also creative and intuitive. It’s not a combination you encounter every day.
“Cathy loved living in London,” Ash recalled. “My wife. Like me, she came from a small town nobody’d ever heard of, and she loved the whole cosmopolitan thing. The bars, the restaurants, the theaters, the concerts. The choice. The fact that, whatever you felt like doing, whenever you felt like doing it, you could probably find it within a couple of miles of where you were.”
He glanced shyly at Hazel. “Cathy was a lot better at the whole social thing than I was. I enjoyed taking her places I’d never wanted to go, because she got so much pleasure out of it. People loved being with her. All our friends were her friends—at least friends that she’d made. I knew a few people from work. By the time we’d been there three months, people waved at her if we walked down Portobello Road. She was
good
at people. I’m good at reading people. She was good at being with them. People liked her even before they knew her.”
It hadn’t escaped Hazel’s notice that he was talking about his wife in the past tense. Divorce, of course, throws up all sorts of grammatical problems, but so does death. Youth isn’t much protection, as events had recently underlined. Even short of murder, young people die of illness, accidents, suicide. If Ash had lost his wife to one of these, it might explain both his mental collapse and the obvious fact that he still loved her.
“Everyone said she’d have to slow down when the children came, but she didn’t. If anything, pregnancy put an extra bloom in her face, an extra spring in her step. It was no trouble to her, either time. As if having children was something she’d been born to do. The midwife said she delivered them like shelling peas.”
Remembering put a glow in his sallow cheeks and the words dried up. Hazel thought he’d forgotten she was there. When a couple of minutes had passed and he was still soft-eyed and silent, she prompted him gently. “What did you have? Boys, girls, or one of each?”
He blinked and came back to the gloomy, loveless room. “Boys. Gilbert and Guy. Two years between them. They’d be eight and six now.”
That hit Hazel like a fist in the belly. Her womb turned over. That wasn’t a question of syntax; it could mean only one thing. Gabriel Ash hadn’t just lost his wife; he’d lost his sons as well. She felt her heart thudding wildly, a constriction in her throat like a physical lesion, and had no idea what to say next. Changing the subject would be like dropping litter on their graves. But there seemed a real danger that if she pressed him to continue, he would fall apart in front of her, so tenuous was the thread that tethered him to what was left of the world.
She needed help here, she realized. She’d done it again, charged in blithely where wiser souls would have exercised caution, and once again someone else was paying the price of her indiscretion.
But guilt was a self-indulgence, and right now she was fully occupied keeping an unhappy man from self-destructing in his own kitchen. She made herself speak calmly. “Gabriel, is there someone I can call for you? Someone you’d rather talk to? I’m not sure how much help I’m being.…”
The deep, dark eyes were hollow with grief, and with entreaty. “Please. I need … it isn’t easy, talking about this. And I’m sure you’ve got better things to do than listen, but I need … to explain. What happened. Why…” Now his gaze dropped and his pale cheeks flushed as if with shame. “Why I live like this. Why I am like this.”
Hazel was a public servant and Ash a member of the public: if he needed a sympathetic ear, she would provide it. But it wasn’t just a professional obligation. Compassion demanded no less of her. “I’ll stay as long as you want me to. I’ll listen to anything you want to tell me.”
He flicked her a grateful smile. Then he took a deep breath and started again. “I don’t know how much you know about the arms industry.” He paused, with a lift of one eyebrow, and Hazel shook her head. “There are two central points. One is that it’s a field where the UK punches well above its weight. We’re world-class when it comes to arms manufacture and export.
“The other is that the whole area is massively regulated. We don’t want to sell state-of-the-art weaponry to people who’ll fire it back at us. There’s a long list of criteria that the government considers before it will grant an export licence, everything from our national interest and those of our allies to the human rights record of the end user and its ability to control its own borders so our munitions aren’t diverted to terrorists.”
Hazel said nothing. But she was thinking how articulate he suddenly became when he was talking about his own area of expertise. No rambling now.
Ash checked that she was with him so far, then continued. “It all takes time and effort, and expense, but everyone accepts that it’s necessary. The manufacturers know that the hoops we make them jump through are necessary to stop their goods from being used for terrorism, torture, oppression, or warmongering.”
“What went wrong?” Hazel asked softly.
“Pirates.”
Whatever she’d been expecting, it wasn’t that. She blinked. “What—skull and crossbones, pieces of eight, one-legged men with parrots on their shoulders?”
Ash knuckled his eyes. “I dare say some of them have parrots. I dare say some of them have wooden legs. What all of them have these days is RPGs and assault rifles, fast patrol boats, helicopters and half-tracks. And intelligence. Access to the information superhighway. Forget Johnny Depp. These are private armies. There are still large areas of the world where there is no law to speak of except that imposed by private armies. And it doesn’t matter how careful we are about vetting end users if consignments of our arms are intercepted before they ever reach the customer.”
“That was your job? Stopping pirates from taking our arms exports?” Just in time Hazel stopped herself from adding: “From a desk?”
Ash shook his head. “My department reported to the government on the status of end users. So when antiaircraft batteries approved for export to a conscientious African democracy were used to take out the ruling family of an Arab principality, we got a rocket, too, from Downing Street.”
The first time it happened Ash was instructed to investigate where the blame for the disaster lay, with particular emphasis on how little of it could be laid at the feet of the British government. The report was accepted, passed on to the Arab principality, and forgotten about.
Until four months later, when it happened again. Again, all the criteria had been met by the manufacturer, all the appropriate licences had been obtained, the shipment was attended by all proper security—and this time it actually reached its destination airport before being hijacked on the tarmac and flown elsewhere.
“Was anyone hurt?” asked Hazel.
“Yes. None of the aircrew were seen again. We assume that when they’d flown their cargo to wherever the hijackers wanted it, they were killed and the plane destroyed.”
“What was the cargo?”
“Mixed munitions. Assault rifles, shaped charges, and white phosphorus grenades.”
Hazel’s eyes flew wide. “There
are
people with a legitimate use for that kind of thing?”
“Yes. We have them in our arsenal, and other responsible states have them in theirs.”
Hazel shook her head despairingly. “And now one of the irresponsible ones had them as well.”
“The third time,” said Ash, “it was ammonium picrate armor-piercing shells.”
“For blowing up tanks? You could start a
war
with those!”
“Which is why we try so hard to keep munitions out of the hands of people who’ll use them. Or at least, use them aggressively and without extreme provocation.”
“And you were getting the blame for this.”
“Not really. There was nothing wrong with our recommendations. The government couldn’t blame the manufacturer, either, or the purchaser. Both of them lost out when the goods went walkabout. No, the reason we stayed involved was that report I’d been asked to write. I ended up with an overview of the situation that no one else had, so every time there were developments the Foreign Office came to me for an assessment of what it might mean.”
It wasn’t that Hazel was uninterested. It was a field she knew nothing about, but usually that made things more interesting, not less so. Right now, though, it wasn’t what she wanted to hear about. “So what happened?”
“I talked to the manufacturers. I talked to the military attachés of the end-user countries. The issue wasn’t how the pirates got hold of the shipments but how they got hold of the information about where the shipments would be. That had to be happening within a fairly narrow band of informed personnel. I talked—”
“No. Gabriel.” She caught his eye and held it. “What
happened
?”
In the urgent desire to protect innocent lives he’d made the oldest mistake in the book: he let it get personal. In his determination to move the inquiry forward he raised his head above the parapet. All the time he was gathering information about them, that well-armed, well-informed, entirely ruthless private army was gathering information about Ash. And they made a positive ID before he did.
“I never thought”—his voice cracked—“not for a moment, that I was putting myself in danger. I wasn’t on the front line: I worked in an office, for God’s sake—I drove a computer! And you see, there was no warning. At least nothing I recognized as a warning—nothing I associated with the case. There was an e-mail.…” The words petered out.
“An e-mail?” Hazel prompted gently. This seemed to be her role for the moment, to inject a little impetus when Ash ground to a halt. “What did it say?”
“
Stop
,” he said, and the memory turned his deep eyes bottomless. “
Stop now
.”
“Just that?”
“Just that.”
“I wouldn’t have known what it meant, either.”
He gave a broken sigh. “But maybe you should have done. If you’d thought about nothing else for nine months, and you knew you were getting close, and you knew the men you were getting close to had already killed people, then maybe you
should
have recognized it as a warning. As the only warning you were going to get. And not dismissed it”—guilt colored his pale cheeks—“as an office joke.”
That was understandable, too. The coming of the IT age, which had delivered such wonders of mass communication, had also put a powerful toy in the hands of many people who, intelligent and highly educated as they were, routinely behaved like ten-year-olds. The joke e-mail was the twenty-first-century heir to the photocopied posterior as the height of office wit.
Hazel Best could see how it happened as clearly as if she’d been there. He’d got the e-mail. He’d opened it and read it. He’d read it again, trying to see the joke. But this was Gabriel Ash, and he probably didn’t have much of a sense of humor even before he lost his family. He’d be used to not getting the joke. He probably glanced around the office in case anyone was visibly giggling, then, failing to identify the author, deleted it without another thought. And only thought of it again after it was too late.
She whispered, a third time, “What happened?”
Ash shrugged, the awkward movement of a bird with a broken wing. “I don’t know. I got home one evening and no one was there. There were no messages. There was no sign of a forced entry or a struggle. The car was in the drive. Cathy had taken her handbag but nothing else, for herself or the boys. None of their toys was missing. It was as if she’d popped out for milk and never come back.
“At first I thought that was what had happened.” Hazel could tell from the odd flatness of his voice that he wasn’t just reporting these events; he was reliving them. The need to bridle the surging panic still held his emotions in an iron fist. “She’d run out of something, walked to the shops, maybe got talking to someone. After an hour I was getting a bit uneasy, so I walked down to meet her. But they hadn’t seen her in any of the shops. So maybe she’d met someone and they’d gone for coffee and lost track of time. After another hour I started phoning her friends, but still no one had seen her. At ten o’clock that night I called the police.