Desperate Measures: A Mystery by Jo Bannister Page A

man driven to despair, offering up his own life for the safety of his family. His deep eyes were drained, no hope left, and over the broad bones his face was drawn gaunt, dark shadows gathered in the hollows of his cheeks.
    Despair. Not desperation, which at least allows the possibility that a situation may still be salvaged and hunts frantically for the hidden way. Despair is not frantic but chill, the slow cooling that follows the death of all hope. Despair knows there is no happy ending. Nothing left to chase, nothing to strive for. That was how Gabriel Ash looked now, staring out of the screen at her like a stranger. Like a dead man captured forever in the moments before his death. The vacant-eyed Tommy photographed in the muddy trench in Flanders, repairing his kit while even now another soldier of the Great War is loading the shell that will kill him.
    Sobs juddered in her throat. She twisted her hands in the hem of her shirt, wringing it beyond rescue. Grief tore her insides. He was her friend, and she was about to lose him, and he was alone. If he’d been where she could reach out to him, nothing would have stopped her. Certainly not the fact that he was somebody else’s husband. She wasn’t in love with Gabriel Ash. That had never been an issue. But, however much he exasperated her, she had come to love him, in a way. To care for him, to worry about him, to hope things would work out for him.
    But they weren’t going to, and he knew it and now she knew it, too. And she wanted to be with him. To stop him, if she could; to plead with him that the sacrifice was too great, whatever the prize; to insist that there was another way, had to be, and beg him to look for it; to cut the plug off his computer and the jack off the phone line so the essential element of proof that the pirates were looking for couldn’t be provided, at least until he got to a hardware shop. And if all that failed—and Hazel knew in her heart that it would fail, that the most she could do now was delay him—to be with him at the end. His witness, his comfort, his friend.
    But she wasn’t with him; he’d made sure of that. He hadn’t wanted to listen to her arguments or her pleas, and he hadn’t wanted her to witness what he was going to do. That was why he had left Norbold and not told her where he was going.
    She sat up most of the night, miserable, lonely, and afraid, waiting for news that never came. Around dawn, exhausted, still in her chair—and yesterday’s clothes—she fell into a troubled sleep. The phone woke her; she started violently enough to bruise her insides. It was DI Gorman.
    “Stephen Graves has left the country. He was on a flight from Heathrow to Addis Ababa yesterday afternoon. Just him. Neither his wife nor his secretary knew he was going.”
    “He’s gone to bring her home,” Hazel said faintly. “After…” She swallowed. “After Gabriel is dead.”
    “That’s what it looks like,” agreed Gorman, his tone somber. “The pirates take Graves to Cathy, he calls Ash to say she’s fit and well and ready to leave, and Ash carries out his side of the bargain.”
    “At which point the pirates slit Cathy’s throat and Graves’s as well,” said Hazel. Her voice was thick as wormwood in her throat.
    “It’s possible. Though actually, it wouldn’t gain them anything. With Ash dead, they might as well let them go. If only in the interests of future negotiations.”
    She hadn’t thought of that. She hadn’t thought that the business of piracy would go on after her own involvement had ended. That other hostages would be taken, if they weren’t already being held in reserve, and their desperate relatives made to dance to the pirates’ tune. There seemed to be no way of stopping it, not even with innocent blood.
    “This isn’t why I called,” said Gorman. “Has Ash ever mentioned a café called the Copper Kettle to you?”
    The sheer unexpectedness of it made Hazel bark an incredulous laugh. “You think