Dangerous Pursuits

By Jo Bannister

When Gabriel Ash comes across a terrified young woman fleeing a brutal attacker, he and Hazel Best are drawn into a complex and baffling investigation.



Rachel Somers, running . . . Something appalling happened in the wood. When Gabriel Ash and his dog come to her aid, she thinks she's safe. But this is Norbold, where things aren't always as they seem.



Detective Chief Inspector Gorman thinks this is his worst nightmare: a predatory paedophile who's prepared to kill rather than be taken. Constable Hazel Best thinks she's helping both the Somers family and her friend Ash, but her tendency to follow her heart rather than her orders is about to get her into trouble again. And the people of Norbold have noticed that descriptions of the attacker, sketchy as they are, fit Ash better than they fit anyone else.



With panic stalking the town, DCI Gorman needs to make an arrest before more young girls are attacked, before someone else dies, before the vigilantes who burned Ash's shop decide to burn him too. But the parameters keep shifting, and almost none of the facts he's relying on will turn out to be true. The solution to the mystery is more shocking, and more tragic, than even these three could have imagined.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Severn House
• Release date: Jul 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781448304394

Jo Bannister

Jo Bannister lives in Northern Ireland, where she worked as a journalist and editor on local newspapers. Since giving up the day job, her books have been shortlisted for a number of awards. Most of her spare time is spent with her horse and dog, or clambering over archaeological sites. She is currently working on a new series of psychological crime/thrillers.

Book preview

ONE

Rachel Somers, running. Not for pleasure; not for prizes. With the blood pounding in her ears and fear pumping through her veins. With her shirt torn and one shoe lost; with her face and her hands scratched by the undergrowth she’s forced her way through and the brambles she cannot allow to slow her. Running as if the hounds of hell are snapping at her heels; as if she doesn’t mean to stop, as if she doesn’t know how to stop, as if only the bursting of her young heart will stop her. Her eyes wide with terror, and disbelief, and something akin to indignation, because this sort of thing does not happen to girls like Rachel. Except that it has.

On the edge of the cornfield, green-gold under the blaze of the August sun, the man straightened up stiffly and shook his head. ‘I think he’s lost.’

Don’t say that. Keep looking.

‘I am looking. I’ve been looking for the last fifteen minutes. I can’t find him. And actually, it’s not my job to find him – it’s yours. He’s your baby, it was you who put him down and forgot where – plus, you’re the one with the nose. I don’t know why you bring him if you’re going to drop him in the long grass and run off the moment something catches your eye.’

A reproachful look from the toffee-coloured eyes. It was a hare. A hare …

‘That hare was just minding its own business. It didn’t need chasing. I’m fairly sure it didn’t want chasing.’

Sullenly: Chasing is in my blood.

The man shrugged, not entirely sympathetically. ‘Well, I don’t know what else we can do, short of borrowing a scythe and cutting Mr Burton’s barley for him. Come on, let’s go home.’

I can’t leave without him!

‘Yes, you can. You’ve got a spare, identical in every way except slightly less chewed. Patience, I don’t think you’ve any choice. Spiky Ball is lost. It’s time to bring on the substitute.’

The unusual thing about this conversation, had there been anyone to overhear it, was not that the subject of it was a jelly-pink ball with some of its squidgy protuberances chewed back to stumps. Old and treasured toys get lost on walks every day of the week, and tearful small children have to be hauled away before nightfall, only slightly mollified by the promise of a replacement. It wasn’t that this particular toy had acquired enough personality to be identified not only by name but by gender.

No, what was remarkable about this conversation was that one of the parties to it was not a small child but a dog: a slim white lurcher, with one tan ear and one speckled one, and a long scimitar tail currently flying at half-mast in distress.

Gabriel Ash knew dogs couldn’t talk. It was one of the things he’d known from earliest childhood. The sky is blue, things fall down not up when you drop them, and animals can’t talk. Though he was not a gambling man, he would have staked quite a lot of money on the fact, until he acquired Patience.

So far as he was able to figure it, there were two possibilities. One was that the mental breakdown he’d suffered, six years ago now, had not resolved as completely as he’d believed, leaving him with a tendency to confabulate – in this case, to attribute to a perfectly normal dog the ability to voice thoughts and ideas that originated inside his own head. The other was that Patience could in fact talk, even if Ash was the only one who heard her. Of the two, he found the first slightly less alarming. Madness was something he’d had practice at dealing with.

He sighed. He was not an unkind man. ‘Five more minutes. We’ll keep looking for five more minutes. After that it’ll be too dark to see him even if we step on him, and we’re going home. Yes?’

I suppose, the dog agreed reluctantly.

But they didn’t give it five more minutes. While Ash was bent over, peering dutifully among the stalks as best he could without trampling the crop, Patience suddenly stiffened into the point she’d inherited from the better-bred side of her family.

Gabriel …

He looked where she was looking, saw the hawthorns shaking fifty metres up the path, saw a figure detach itself from the deep shadows gathering under the hedge. ‘Please – oh, please help me!’

Ash thought at first it was a child. But it was a young woman, so breathless with exhaustion she could barely get the words out. ‘Of course,’ he said quickly, hurrying towards her. ‘What’s happened? What can I do?’

Ash had sons, not daughters, so it was not much more than an educated guess that she was sixteen or seventeen years old. But he didn’t need to be an expert to see the stigmata of violence: the flimsy shirt torn at the breast, the cotton skirt at the hem; bloody tracks across her skin from the brambles; one bare foot where she’d lost a red and white trainer. And more than that, the porcelain pallor and vast, stretched eyes, the gasping breath racking her thin chest, the tremors shaking the hands she reached towards him, and the brain-lock that stopped her getting out any kind of coherent explanation. ‘Someone … He tried to … In there.’ She darted a terrified glance over her shoulder, as if the culprit might erupt through the hedge at any moment.

Ash, glancing too, moved protectively towards her. As he did so she sank to her torn knees in the grass of the cornfield’s headland. Ash knelt beside her. ‘You’re safe now.’ But it was important to be sure what she was trying to say. ‘Did someone attack you?’

‘Yes! He …’ She waved a wild arm back at the hedge. ‘I got away.’

‘Just now?’

His questions were upsetting her. ‘Yes! Please – I want to go home …’

‘I’ll take you home,’ Ash promised. ‘Where do you live?’

Again the unsteady gesture towards the tangle of trees beyond the hedge. ‘On the other side of the spinney.’

Highfield Spinney was half a mile across and dusk was falling. ‘I’ll come with you. Or we’ll take my car. That’s my house’ – he pointed – ‘over there.’

She was torn. She didn’t know this large, shambling man; didn’t know if or how far she could trust him. But she did know what lay behind her. ‘I don’t want to go back in there.’

‘Of course not,’ agreed Ash. ‘We’ll go to my house. My children’s nanny will be there. We’ll call your parents so they know you’re safe, then I’ll drive you home. All right?’ She took his arm gratefully. ‘And we’ll let the police know what’s happened. My name’s Gabriel Ash,’ he added as an afterthought, ‘and this is Patience.’

The girl clung to his arm, too shocked to respond in the usual way until he prompted her. ‘And you are …?’

‘Rachel Somers,’ she said then. Her teeth were chattering. A fresh horror crossed her face. ‘I’ve lost my phone!’

Ash would have thought this was the least of her problems, but then he wasn’t a teenage girl. He used his to make the few calls that wouldn’t wait until he reached home or his shop. He didn’t understand how much of a teenage girl’s life was bound up in that small parcel of electronics. ‘We’ll use mine.’

The first flicker of an emotion that wasn’t fear canted her thin dark brows. Regrettably enough, it was irritation. ‘You know my mother’s number?’

‘Er … no.’

‘Me neither. It’s in my phone.’

So he took her to Highfield Road, and while Frankie Kelly, her charges dispatched to bed, was finding a jacket to cover Rachel’s torn clothes, Ash was calling the local police. He would have called 999, except that he had Detective Chief Inspector Gorman’s number on speed-dial.

Gorman cut right to the chase. ‘Are we talking rape here, Gabriel?’

‘I don’t think so. She hasn’t given me chapter and verse, and I didn’t like to quiz her, but I think she got away before anything much happened. But she’s very shocked, and she’s torn her clothes and scratched herself pretty badly.’

‘And this just happened.’

‘She appeared in the field behind my house ten minutes ago. I don’t know how long before that she was attacked.’

‘I’ll have the area car do a circuit of the spinney. They might spot his car, or him if he’s on foot. It’s too dark now, but tomorrow we’ll search the wood. What was she doing there, anyway?’

Ash hadn’t thought to ask. ‘Can I take her home? Or do you want to see her first?’

‘Take her home,’ said Gorman. ‘I’ll meet you there.’

The Somerses’ house was up a long lane off the county road, with Highfield Spinney starting where the back garden ended. A light showed at the rear of the house, but no one came when Ash rang the bell. Rachel took his hand. ‘Come round the side. I left the back door unlocked.’

‘When you went into the spinney?’

‘There’s a wicket gate,’ she said. ‘I was looking for my cat. He wasn’t in the garden, so I took his feed bowl into the wood. To coax him in, you know? I was only a couple of metres from the gate – I never meant to go any further. But then … then …’

Ash nodded his understanding. ‘It’s all right, you don’t need to tell me. The police would probably prefer you to speak to them first, anyway.’

‘Police?’

‘DCI Gorman’s a friend of mine. I called him before we left, he’ll be here shortly. Is your mother at home?’

‘Her car isn’t here,’ said Rachel. She shivered inside Frankie’s jacket. It was a warm evening, but now the adrenalin was subsiding she was feeling chilled. ‘She said she’d be working late.’

‘Your father?’

‘Not in the picture.’

Under a bulkhead light, a small black and white cat was waiting on the back steps, rigid with disapproval. Rachel scooped it up, held it against her. ‘So here you are,’ she mumbled into its fur. It put its ears back and hissed at Ash, on principle.

He opened the door and ushered Rachel inside. ‘Hello?’ But there was no reply. ‘Do you want to phone your mother or shall I?’

‘I will. I’ve got her number in my diary.’

Ash went upstairs with her, turning lights on as he went. It occurred to him that, with the back door open and a potential rapist just beyond the garden gate, the house would have to be searched before it could be considered secure.

But before he could start there was the sound of cars in front of the house, and a moment later the sound of voices. One he recognised as Dave Gorman’s. The other was a woman’s.

The door flew open as Ash went to open it. The woman wrenched her key from the lock and shouldered past him, terse with alarm. ‘Who the hell are you? Where is my daughter?’

‘I’m here, Mum.’ There was no more room in the hall: Rachel waited on the stairs. ‘I’m all right.’

Her mother threw her handbag into a corner, her keys onto the hall table, and strode towards her, staring into her face, taking in the scabs and scratches. ‘Are you? What happened? What on earth are you wearing? You didn’t hurt your hands? Where’s Gethin? Rachel – tell me what happened!’

The cat was called Mephistopheles, and he made up for his lack of stature with the sex drive of a Spanish jackass. Female cats as far away as Wittering blushed and giggled when his name came up in conversation. Being shut in at night was not part of his plan for fathering every kitten within a five-mile radius, but the human who called herself his mistress knew his weakness. His other weakness. When it came right down to it, Mephistopheles could not ignore a meal he could see and smell in order to pursue other forms of gratification which might prove elusive.

With dusk approaching, the light above the back door dispelled the deep shadow under the hydrangeas. The cat wasn’t there. Rachel had no presentiment of danger, no reservations about going into the wood, at this time of day or any other. She’d spent the last four years in this house, had treated Highfield Spinney as her playground. Experience told her that her cat was probably within spitting distance as she shook the bowl encouragingly, and that given a moment to consider his options he would appear, purring and weaving round her ankles like a very small Morris dancer.

Tonight was different. Tonight, experience was no guide.

The first she knew was a hand grasping her arm. More startled than alarmed, she let out a yell and dropped the cat’s bowl, and tried to turn to see who it was. But his other arm snaked around her neck, keeping her back to him. His breath was heavy in her ear but he didn’t speak. He forced her against a tree-trunk and, releasing his grip on her arm, began to tug at her clothes.

Shocked as she was, Rachel recognised the moment as possibly the only chance she would get, and she took it. She drove both elbows back into his belly and scraped the side of her trainer down the front of his shin. The shoe came off, but – winded, hurt, and wrong-footed by her counter-attack – his grip weakened and Rachel flung herself free.

He was between her and the house so she ran the other way, deep into the wood. She doubted he knew it better than she did. She chose the rougher, narrower tracks, ignoring the low branches that whipped her face, and though at first she could hear the heavy-footed blundering behind her, soon enough he lost her among the shadows.

She had never heard his voice. She had never seen his face. She had never seen more than a vague shape crowding over her shoulder. The bulk of him pressing her against the tree had felt massive and muscular, but her own vulnerability may have distorted her judgement. She didn’t think she’d know him again if DCI Gorman produced a suspect.

‘And you’re sure you’re not hurt?’ demanded Pru Somers. ‘I can see the scratches. What about your hands? If he hurt you, you have to tell us.’

‘I’m fine, Mum,’ Rachel sighed wearily. ‘Thanks to Mr Ash.’ She cast him a tremulous smile.

Ash was puzzled. This was the second time Mrs Somers had enquired after her daughter’s hands. In the same circumstances, Ash imagined most parents would have other concerns.

Gorman had noticed too. Being a policeman, he didn’t settle for being puzzled: he asked. ‘Her hands?’

‘My daughter is a pianist,’ said Mrs Somers, looking at him as if he should have known. ‘Any damage to a pianist’s hands is unthinkable.’

They had moved into the sitting room, where there was enough seating for Mrs Somers and her daughter, the two men, and Detective Constable Emma Friend who was taking notes. They were ranged round a low coffee table, currently occupied by a drift of magazines, a plate of biscuits and a mug with an inch of cold coffee in it.

Now Pru Somers rose abruptly from the sofa and went to the front window, peering out. ‘And where’s Gethin? He should be here.’

‘Who’s Gethin?’ asked Gorman.

‘My partner,’ said Pru. ‘Gethin Phillips. He should be here.’

‘What time does he usually get home?’

‘It can be any time. He’s an architect – a partner, he makes his own hours. But he said this morning he’d be finished by mid-afternoon. He suggested we go out somewhere, but I knew I wouldn’t be home till late.’ She turned to Rachel. ‘Was he here when you got in?’

Rachel shook her head, the straight dark hair still tangled from the wood. She’d changed her clothes, and DC Friend had bagged what she’d been wearing for evidential purposes. ‘I haven’t seen him.’

‘And what time did you get home?’ asked the DCI.

‘About seven. I do a masterclass in Norbold on Monday evenings. I caught the six forty-five bus.’

‘The only car on the drive when we arrived was Gabriel’s,’ said Gorman.

Pru Somers barked a terse little laugh. She was a small, intense woman, expensively dressed, wearing a cap of short dark hair and vivid lipstick. ‘That means nothing. Did you check the garage?’ she asked her daughter. Then, by way of explanation: ‘Gethin’s car is his baby, he puts it in the garage every night.’

Rachel shook her head. ‘I didn’t know he was meant to be here so I didn’t go looking for him. I suppose he could have been in the study, or upstairs.’

Gorman nodded at his DC, who put down her notebook and slipped out by the back door. Two minutes later she was back. ‘There’s a red sportscar in the garage.’

‘That’s Gethin’s,’ nodded Pru. ‘If the Morgan’s here, he should be here.’

‘Could he have’ – Gorman was a city boy at heart – ‘walked down for a paper?’

‘The nearest shop is three miles away,’ said Pru coldly.

To Rachel, Ash said quietly, ‘Did you scream?’

‘What?’

He had everyone’s attention. ‘You were attacked not far from your garden gate. If you screamed – which would be the natural thing to do – Mr Phillips may have heard you. He might be in the spinney right now, looking for you.’

Rachel bit her lip and nodded. ‘Yes. I screamed.’

Gorman stood up. ‘Then we’d better find him. Probably better, for both of them, if he isn’t the one to catch up with this joker. Emma, grab a couple of torches from the car and we’ll go and look for him. With any luck he’ll hear us calling. If not, we’ll need some more bodies – we can’t put off searching the woods till morning if there’s a chance that someone’s been hurt.’

Ash would have liked to go home now. He’d had enough excitement for one evening. But he couldn’t in decency leave two people to search half a mile of woodland in the dark. ‘I’ll get my torch too.’

‘Is Patience with you?’

Ash shook his head. ‘I left her at home.’

‘Typical,’ growled Gorman. ‘All the places you take that bloody dog, and the one time she might actually come in useful, she’s had an early night!’

Pru stayed with Rachel, and locked the back door. Ash, Gorman and Friend split up at the wicket gate: Ash could see the flicker of torches through the trees, and hear Friend’s high, clear voice travelling further than Gorman’s gruff rumble. He called too. ‘Mr Phillips? Are you there?’ But he heard no reply.

After ten minutes they were to regroup at the wicket gate. Ash was already on his way back, swinging out to cover a different track, when he heard Friend calling again. Not, this time, the missing man’s name. ‘Sir? Over here.’

Gorman and Ash converged on her voice. Gorman reached her first. ‘Oh, bugger.’

He knelt down among the ferns and the leaf-litter, and shone his torch close, and felt inside the man’s collar for a pulse. He couldn’t find one, and when he saw the injuries to his head he wasn’t surprised. He straightened up stiffly.

Ash said, ‘Is he dead?’

‘I’m not a doctor,’ grunted Gorman. ‘But yes, he’s dead.’

‘Who is he?’

Gorman glared. ‘Who do you think?’

‘I think,’ Ash said carefully, ‘he could be either Gethin Phillips or the man who attacked Rachel. I think, if Phillips caught up with him and they fought, that could be either of them.’

After a moment Gorman nodded. ‘True.’ He played the torch the length of the still body. ‘It’s Phillips.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Most rapists don’t go trawling for victims in their slippers.’

TWO

The sun was up before DCI Gorman had finished at the spinney. His mind and body ached for his bed, if only for a couple of hours, but on a hunch he took the scenic route home via Highfield Road. As he’d guessed, there was a light on in Ash’s study at the front of the big stone house that had been his mother’s. Gorman tapped on the window, quietly enough not to disturb the rest of the household, and Ash beckoned him to the front door.

He made coffee and toast. A glance at Gorman’s haggard face, and he put extra coffee in the coffee and extra butter on the toast. ‘You should be in bed.’

‘So should you,’ countered Gorman. ‘At least I’m paid to stay up nights, worrying.’

‘I’m more of a gifted amateur,’ conceded Ash.

Gorman chuckled. They weren’t old friends – three years earlier, all Gorman knew about Gabriel Ash was that he wandered round Norbold holding mumbled conversations with his lurcher: the people at Meadowvale Police Station called him Rambles With Dogs. But they had become good friends. They were much of an age, they shared the same values, and even in their most marked differences – Gorman was very much a physical presence, Ash more of an intellectual one – they dove-tailed rather than clashing. Even before he learned that Rambles was once a government security analyst, DCI Gorman – but he was a detective inspector then – had discovered that attending to Ash’s instincts paid dividends.

‘All right, Sherlock,’ he said, ‘so what do we think happened out there?’

Ash squinted at him. Gorman’s square, crumpled, frankly ugly face could be deeply uncommunicative when the need arose, but there was a certain dogged intelligence in his gaze. He’d spent the last nine hours considering the options, and wanted to know if Ash had come to the same conclusion.

Pensively, Ash blew steam off his coffee. ‘The girl wasn’t able to add anything helpful?’

‘No. Shock, of course. I’ll talk to her again today, see if she’s remembered anything else. I’ll need a statement from you too. But essentially, what she said is all we have to go on.’

‘Scenes of crime officer …?’

‘… Will have another look round now it’s daylight. And we’ll get an autopsy report, but it won’t tell us much that we don’t already know. That Gethin Phillips went into the spinney in his slippers and someone beat his head in.’

‘Any strange vehicles parked on the edge of the wood?’

‘No. The patrols didn’t spot anyone on foot, either. But absence of evidence …’

‘… Is not evidence of absence,’ Ash finished with a smile. ‘You and Hazel must have had the same training sergeant.’ He thought for a minute longer. ‘Rachel went into the spinney looking for her cat. Someone grabbed her and she screamed. Phillips heard her from the house and hurried outside, without changing into his shoes, to see what had happened.

‘Rachel hadn’t realised he was at home so she didn’t know help was coming. When she broke free she was more concerned with getting away from her attacker than with reaching the house. She fled, and he ran after her. Then the sound of pursuit died away. She assumed she’d put enough distance between them that he’d given up.’

‘But?’ prompted Gorman.

‘Perhaps what happened is that Phillips caught up with him. They fought, the attacker got the upper hand, put Phillips out of commission, then he disappeared into the trees. He may have got clean away while we were all bent over Phillips’ body and before the reinforcements turned up.’

Gorman was nodding slowly. ‘That’s about how I figured it. We’ve got dogs in the spinney, but he won’t still be there. He must assume that we’ve found the body by now.’

Surreptitiously, Ash added more milk to his mug. The brew was as strong as creosote, and Ash hadn’t had his taste-buds destroyed by twenty years’ worth of police station coffee machines the way Gorman had. When he worked in the anonymous office behind Whitehall, they’d inclined towards Earl Grey tea.

‘Will the dogs be able to track him?’ he asked.

Gorman shrugged. ‘They should be able to follow his line out to the road, and we’ll find traces of a vehicle having been parked there. It’s too dry for tyre-tracks, but we can hope for flattened grass, broken twigs; if there is a God, the bastard might have dropped a cigarette butt, a cash-machine receipt or something else we can use. It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen.’

Ash knew how seldom; how long policemen had to wait between gifts like that. He said, ‘How is Mrs Somers

Reviews for Dangerous Pursuits

[deaconbernie · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Tedious. The characters are boring. The solution became obvious half through the book but it took the investigators way too long to even consider it.