‘How do I set a trap for him?’
Hazel had left the computer screen for the recommended ten-minute break, having sat staring at it for rather longer than the recommended fifty minutes, and taken coffee through to Dave Gorman’s office. It said everything about his new role that, just for a moment, she wasn’t sure he was there, hunched behind the Alpine paperwork.
‘That’s easy,’ said Gorman immediately, reaching for the waxed cup through a kind of mountain pass between crime reports on the one hand and annual reviews on the other. ‘You don’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘You know why not. It’s entrapment. It would get the case thrown out of court, you thrown out of the police and me thrown to the wolves.’
‘So I just have to wait until he tries to jump my bones again?’
‘Of course you don’t,’ said Gorman. ‘Or to put it slightly differently, yes. Or here’s a thought: you could go back to Cambridgeshire and finish your holiday.’
‘We talked about that,’ Hazel said shortly. ‘It wouldn’t solve anything, just spin it out. Besides …’
‘Besides what?’
‘Oh – nothing. I’m sorry, chief, but I’m not going anywhere. I can come in here and work, or I can stay at home and listen for footsteps on the stairs. There isn’t a third option.’
‘Fine. Because sitting by an open window with a Colt 45 hidden under your negligee certainly isn’t one.’
Hazel considered. But it was no use, she was the wrong generation. ‘What’s a negligee?’
‘Beats me,’ admitted Gorman. ‘I think you sleep in them, but I never had one.’
When she got home, without a word Saturday handed her the post. Among the bills and fliers was a stiff brown envelope.
Hazel glanced at him. ‘Did you open it?’
‘Of course I didn’t open it,’ he retorted sharply. ‘I don’t go round opening other people’s post! What do you take me for?’
‘Sorry,’ she countered, ‘just for a minute I thought you were my friend Saturday who hacks into people’s bank accounts for a living.’
It wasn’t perfectly accurate, but it was too close for him to argue. ‘Point taken,’ he murmured. ‘Do you want me to open it?’
Hazel shook her head. ‘No, I’ll open it. See what little treat he’s got in store for me this time. Wait a minute while I get some gloves.’
Again she opened it at the bottom, although the flap of the first envelope had failed to yield any traces of DNA so probably this one wouldn’t either. It was, as they both expected, a photograph. Hazel pulled it out carefully.
Saturday heard the sharp intake of breath and looked at her in concern. Her face had frozen, lips parted in shock, eyes wide. ‘Hazel?’ But as he twisted to see the reason, she snapped back into action and crumpled the photograph violently, tossing it towards the fire.
‘No!’ He dived after it, retrieving it – or most of it – at the cost of singed fingertips. ‘What are you doing? That’s evidence.’
She sucked in a deep breath. ‘Yes. Have you seen what it’s evidence of?’
It wasn’t top quality. It was taken with a cheap phone, after dark, in a street with not enough municipal lighting. Only the wet pavements bouncing the flash around made any sense of the image it recorded.
‘Jesus!’ whistled Saturday.
It was Ash. It had been taken well on into the attack, after he’d stopped trying to defend himself. If he wasn’t already unconscious he was the next thing to it; which was why his assailant could spare a hand to take happy snaps. With his other hand he was holding Ash’s head off the road by a fistful of his hair, rat-tailed, the rain mingling with blood from his split scalp. There was another gaping gash across his cheekbone. By the time Hazel saw it in the hospital, it had been reduced to a thin scabby line by a row of neat stitches which gave almost no indication of what the A&E staff had had to deal with. His eyes were unresponsive, almost closed, thin white crescents under the bruised lids. His mouth was torn, and mired from the dirt running in the gutter.
‘You’re right,’ Hazel said unsteadily, ‘I shouldn’t burn it. But I’m sure as hell not putting it in his bloody album! I’ll e-mail a copy to Dave Gorman, see what he makes of it.’
Her hands were shaking. Saturday quietly took over, taking the crumpled photograph, smoothing it out, scanning it onto her laptop. At the second time of trying, Hazel pulled up the DCI’s address, and Saturday wrote a brief explanation and attached the image to it.
‘I need a drink.’ Hazel was in no danger of becoming an alcoholic – she didn’t like the taste enough – but she kept a bottle of whisky for emergencies, and this was one.
‘I’ll stick with coffee,’ said Saturday, unusually diplomatic. ‘In case we have to go down to the police station.’ So Hazel put the bottle back and made coffee for two.
Saturday put the laptop aside as she came back from the kitchen. ‘How are you getting on with your homework?’ He meant Gillian Mitchell’s files, a hefty block of data currently occupying much of Hazel’s hard drive. They needed something to talk about other than the sight of their friend beaten to bloody rags in the street.
‘It’s slow,’ she said, pulling herself together. ‘And most of it’s pretty boring. There must be people who want to read articles about cod stocks around Iceland and the role of aid organisations in Yemen, but I’m not one of them. And I have to. Since I don’t know what it is I’m looking for I can’t afford to skip.’
‘You think the reason for what happened to Gillian Mitchell is a story she wrote, or one she was working on?’
Hazel shrugged. ‘Her work is what brought her into contact with Leo Harte. If she met someone even more disreputable, who didn’t take a shine to her, that’s probably how.’
‘I don’t think she was murdered by an Icelandic cod-fisherman.’
‘Neither do I. But she took her job seriously. Her work was supported by a lot of research – names, places, dates. It’s possible that one of these references puts somebody somewhere he shouldn’t have been, and it was going to cost him money or reputation or both if a newspaper showed that he was.’
‘If someone killed her to stop a story appearing, it had to be one she was still writing. There’d be no point killing her after it was in print and the damage was done.’
Hazel widened her eyes at him. ‘So you think I should start with the most recent files and work backwards? Oh wait – that’s what I thought, too.’
Saturday grinned. ‘If you don’t want my help, you just have to say so.’
‘Of course I want your help. Who knows, the very next thing you suggest, I mightn’t have figured out for myself two days ago.’
‘OK. Well, my next suggestion is that you can probably exclude Brother Jam from your inquiries.’
Hazel frowned. ‘Who?’
‘The mad monk. He may have been the terror of the cloisters seven hundred years ago, but I don’t think he’s responsible for Trucker, for Gillian Mitchell or’ – his gaze slid sideways to the crumpled photograph on the coffee table – ‘that.’
Hazel laughed out loud. ‘James! Brother James. When did you last get your eyes tested?’
‘I have twenty/twenty vision,’ said Saturday with dignity, picking up the computer again, ‘and it definitely says Jam here.’
‘Then it’s a typo,’ chuckled Hazel. ‘Whoever heard of someone in holy orders being named after a fruit preserve?’
When the coffee had steadied her hands, she went to return the photograph to its cardboard sleeve. Her grunt of surprise made Saturday look up. ‘What?’
‘There’s something else in here.’
‘More of the same?’ His voice was harsh.
Hazel shook her head. ‘It’s scenery of some kind.’ Her voice lifted in unreasoning hope. ‘Hell’s bells, Saturday, I think he’s sent us his holiday snaps by accident!’
Breakthroughs in criminal detection come as a result of happy accidents more often than detectives like to admit. But that would have represented a new nadir of stupidity in a field largely – though not exclusively – populated by stupid people, and when Hazel carefully took it out and examined it, there was nothing to identify the photographer. No one grinning in a Kiss Me Quick hat, no car with the number-plate showing, not even a signpost to indicate where it was taken.
It showed a heavily wooded little glen and a waterfall pouring white foam over a stone ledge into a mossy pool. It wasn’t the kind of beauty spot tourists travel halfway round the world to see. It was the kind to visit with your kids and a picnic if the sun happens to be shining and there’s nothing worth watching on the television.
‘Is that somewhere local, do you suppose?’ But she was asking the wrong person. Saturday’s interest in the natural world had never gone much beyond how cold it was likely to get at night and whether there would be more rain than an ancient parka could cope with. ‘And wherever it is, why does he want me to have it?’
‘It’s an invitation,’ said Saturday.
‘What?’
‘You’re meant to read it alongside the other one. He came to your house. He found Gabriel leaving, late at night. He … marked his disapproval, and took a photograph to show you. The second picture is to say that he won’t be coming back here – that it’s your turn to come to him. That’s where you’ll find him – in that wood, by that waterfall.’
Hazel considered. It was a bold interpretation of not many facts, but the more she thought about it, the more she felt he could be right. She couldn’t think what else it could mean. ‘He might want me to come to him, but he can’t seriously think I’m going to.’
Saturday shrugged thin shoulders. ‘Who knows what he thinks? This is a deeply disturbed person. You start understanding his thought processes, it’s time to question your own sanity.’
Hazel was peering deeper and deeper into the photograph, as if by concentrating she might pass through into that other reality, look around her and see more than the photograph showed. ‘Do you suppose he lives there? In a cabin in the woods?’
‘Me Tarzan, you Hazel? Of course he doesn’t live there. It’s a rendezvous. Somewhere quiet where he thinks the two of you won’t be disturbed. But he’s pretty sure you can find it if you put your mind to it.’
‘Why would I want to?’
‘Because of the other photograph,’ said Saturday.
And actually, he was right. If Hazel had recognised the spot, she would have gone there. To put an end to this before anyone else got hurt. She would have organised back-up, of course, and then she would have gone. Except …
‘If he doesn’t live there, how will he know that I’ve solved his puzzle and I’m on my way?’
Saturday thought the explanation was obvious. Reluctantly, he put it into words. ‘He’s watching you. He’s going to be watching you. He’ll know if you go there, and he’ll know if you go alone. Unless you’re alone, he won’t show.’
Hazel shivered. ‘Well, it’s all a bit immaterial since I don’t know where it is he wants to meet me. And I wouldn’t go alone if I did.’
‘I could come.’
The offer was meant kindly and Hazel was grateful for it. But she wouldn’t have dreamed of taking him up on it. ‘If this comes to anything, it’s outdoor specialists we’ll need – woodsmen, trackers, maybe dog handlers. People who can search rough country without getting lost or falling down ravines. You’re a good friend, Saturday, but you’re not really pioneer material.
‘Plus, when we find this man we’ll need enough people to arrest him safely. I couldn’t do that on my own, and you and I couldn’t do it together. That might be what he wants, but he’s not going to get it. I’ll talk to Dave Gorman tomorrow, see if we can figure out where this waterfall is. But I’m going nowhere near it unless I’ve got five burly coppers squeezed into a Black Maria right behind me.’