Desperate Measures: A Mystery by Jo Bannister

successful, promise me faithfully that you won’t blame yourself. None of this is your fault.”
    And perhaps it wasn’t. But she was a compassionate young woman, and if she couldn’t save Ash, if this happened despite her best efforts, she would feel all her life that she’d let him down.
    “And the other thing we might want to consider,” murmured Gorman, “is that maybe Ash is right and we’re wrong.”
    Hazel didn’t understand. She frowned at him, perplexed, so that he had to grit his teeth and say aloud what he’d hoped she might recognize intuitively.
    “I mean, maybe a man has the right to make a sacrifice—even this sacrifice—for the sake of his family.”
    Hazel stared at him in astonishment. “Kill himself? In front of the world’s online community? To protect a bunch of murderous pirates? Are you insane? ”
    But he wasn’t ready to back down. “Give it some thought. Would you stop him from diving into a river to save them if their car went off a bridge?”
    “It’s different,” she insisted. “To risk your life is one thing. To throw it away is another.”
    “He’s prepared to sacrifice himself for his wife and children. Lots of people would see that as a pretty noble thing.”
    “It is noble,” Hazel conceded. “Being willing to do it is noble. It wouldn’t be very noble of us to let him.”
    “Would he forgive us if we stopped him?”
    “Probably not. Who cares?”
    “Would he forgive you ?”
    That made her pause. But it didn’t make her change her mind. “I don’t imagine he would. Too bad. This is too important to go along with what somebody else thinks is right, even if it’s Gabriel. I think he’s too distraught to be making life-and-death decisions, and if I can stop him making this one, I will. If we can stop him, we must.”
    It was hard to tell what Gorman thought. Perhaps he wasn’t allowing himself the luxury of an opinion. To a great extent, his duty was clear whatever he thought. Suicide isn’t a crime in Britain, but assisting one is. If he could save Ash from his own best intentions, he was bound to try.
    Hazel’s brow was creasing again with thought. Suddenly it cleared. She knew, as surely as if she’d overheard the conversation, to whom he would have turned in preference to Hazel herself. And Stephen Graves would have agreed because, his own involvement’s being so problematic already, the last thing he wanted was Ash angry enough to go to the police.
    “Find Stephen Graves,” she said breathlessly. “If Gabriel needs someone to fly out and negotiate Cathy’s freedom for him, at least he won’t have to explain it all to Graves. At least Graves won’t try to stop him.”
    *   *   *
    That night, when she was alone, she watched the thing again. Patience, curled up on her sofa, seemed not to recognize the image on the screen and paid it no heed. Hazel envied the dog her blissful ignorance.
    Hazel was an optimist at heart. She always looked for silver linings, always believed that there would be one even if it took a bit of finding. Driving home—Dave Gorman had offered to have someone take her, but she didn’t want company and most of all she didn’t want the company of police officers—she’d almost managed to persuade herself it was a trick. Norbold in general and Meadowvale in particular knew Gabriel Ash as an idiot. They called him “Rambles With Dogs.” Hazel knew a very different Ash, a man with a highly intelligent and analytical mind damaged by the events that had overtaken him. She had to trust that he was still capable of putting together a package that would give him what he wanted—the return of his wife and sons—without giving the kidnappers what they wanted. She had herself more than half convinced that when she watched the video again, that was what she would see: a clever man outsmarting his tormentors.
    And it wasn’t. Try as she might, hard as she looked, Hazel could see only what everyone else had seen: an exhausted