Desperate Measures: A Mystery by Jo Bannister Read Free Book Online

working for him, broke into her flat, looking for memory sticks.
    Hazel went quickly to her own computer, opened the drawer where she kept her peripherals. It looked undisturbed, but then, so had the flat. Had someone copied them? It would have been the work of moments if he’d come prepared. But he wouldn’t have found what he was looking for, only photos of family and friends and copies of work-related documents she might conceivably need again.
    The next question was, would that have reassured him, or the very opposite? Would he have waded through the pictures of her father digging his garden, Pete Byrfield driving his cows, and Patience posing smugly against a variety of backdrops—she had no images of Ash, who hated being photographed—and read her essays on the future of community policing in twenty-first-century Britain, then celebrated with a stiff drink the fact that nobody so boring could represent any kind of a threat? Or would he have been concerned that finding nothing didn’t mean there was nothing to find; rather, that she’d been clever enough to hide it where he wouldn’t look?
    “Mr. Armitage, Mr. Armitage”—she sighed, gazing at his photograph on her laptop screen—“what is it you’re not telling me? You mislaid your laptop, you got it back within a few days, and still you were worried enough to turn burglar. Why? Besides all those plans and drawings and things, what the hell else did you have on that computer?”

 
    CHAPTER 7
    “T HEY WANT TO TALK TO YOU.” There was an audible shake in Stephen Graves’s voice.
    “When?”
    “Now. Tonight.” In fact, it was already Wednesday morning, if only just.
    “Where?”
    “The Cambridge flat.”
    “You’ll meet me there?”
    “Yes.” Even to himself, Graves’s voice must have sounded hesitant, because he repeated the word with added certainty. “Yes.”
    “I’ll leave now. But it’ll take me a couple of hours to get there.”
    “There’s time. Just.”
    Ash looked at his watch. For a long time after leaving his job, he hadn’t bothered wearing one. Time hadn’t had much meaning for him. Only days ago he’d felt the need to reintegrate himself into the temporal continuum that ruled most people’s days and used to govern his. He’d gone to the chest of drawers in his bedroom, straight to the watch his wife had given him. He hadn’t looked at it for years, but he knew exactly where it was. Now it was on his wrist.
    “All right,” he said.
    The dog watched expectantly as he dressed. He avoided meeting her gaze. “I can’t take you. I don’t know how long I’ll be. I don’t know if I’ll be coming straight back.”
    Patience said nothing, just held him in her steady golden gaze.
    “I’ll leave the back door open.” There was little in his house that was worth stealing. “If I’m not going to be back by morning, I’ll ask Hazel to come around and feed you.…”
    That pulled him up short, like dropping a mental anchor. He couldn’t call Hazel. He’d told her he didn’t want her help. If he called now, to ask her to look after Patience, she’d think him a hypocrite for using her when it suited him, excluding her when it didn’t. She’d say that he presumed on a friendship that he only ever acknowledged on his own terms.
    And then she’d come around and look after Patience.
    Knowing that didn’t make him feel much better as he let himself out of the house, pausing only to check that he had his phone.
    *   *   *
    He didn’t even have the courage to speak to her. Eight o’clock that morning found Hazel sitting on her bed, fuming, with the text on her knee. After all they’d been through together. After everything she’d forgiven him for—and everything, to be fair, he’d forgiven her. And now he couldn’t pick up the phone and say, “Look, when I said I didn’t need any more help, I may have been a bit premature.”
    Instead he sent her a text. “Can you feed Patience? Possibly next few days. Will