Desperate Measures: A Mystery Read Online Free PDF Page A

to sit in the sun and do bugger all. Enjoy it while you can.”
    Hazel felt herself relaxing in his company. “I’ll try.” She put the laptop on his desk. “I brought you this.”
    He raised a bushy eyebrow. “Whose is it?”
    “I don’t know. I think it must be lost property. Somebody left it sitting on my car.”
    “Where?”
    “Highfield Road. I came out and found it this morning.” She didn’t explain what she was doing at Gabriel Ash’s house, and Gorman didn’t ask.
    “You didn’t see who left it?”
    Hazel shook her head. “No.” It was a lie, but only a white one.
    “Did you try to access it?”
    “No,” she said again. “We can now, if you want to. It’s probably the best way of finding out who owns it.”
    “Okay.” Gorman nodded. “Though isn’t it a bit technical, getting past other people’s passwords?”
    Hazel had taught IT during her first career. “I’ll let you into a secret about passwords,” she said, opening the device and pressing keys. “Something like seventy percent of computer owners use the password PASSWORD.” She entered the magic letters and the laptop let her in.
    Automatically she called up the most recent document. But it wasn’t a letter, as she’d hoped—something that would have the correspondent’s name and address on it. For a moment she wasn’t sure what it was. She tried tilting her head to one side in case that might make a difference.
    “It’s a map,” said Dave Gorman helpfully.
    But it wasn’t, not exactly. “More like a blueprint,” said Hazel. “The sort of thing an architect draws up to show how a building will sit on its site.” Brow furrowed, she slowly resumed the vertical. “It looks familiar. Why does it look familiar?”
    Gorman was shaking his head, bemused, when he recognized it and changed the side-to-side motion into an up-and-down one. “Dirty Nellie’s.”
    Hazel turned to look up at him peering over her shoulder. “Pardon?” Her mother had thought it a vulgar expression, but she’d never quite cured her daughter of using it.
    “The pub on the corner of Market Street. Former pub, I should say, it hasn’t had a tenant for ten years. The sign says ‘The Red Lion,’ but everyone in Norbold calls it Dirty Nellie’s. After a former landlady who ran it as a brothel.”
    “And they couldn’t find a tenant for a pub known throughout Norbold as Dirty Nellie’s? Amazing,” said Hazel mildly.
    “In the end the council bought the place to redevelop the site, just as the recession hit,” said Gorman, remembering. “Nothing’s been done about it because there’s no money. Except”—he nodded at the screen—“it looks as if someone’s finally taking an interest in it.”
    “Housing, by the look of it,” said Hazel. “And shops.” She scowled. “All very desirable, I’m sure, but it doesn’t help us get this thing back to its owner.”
    “Yes, it does. The council will know who the developers are, and they’ll know which of their employees has mislaid his laptop. A couple of phone calls, and you can expect a nice bunch of flowers from a relieved architect.”
    Hazel grinned. “That’ll be the day.” Flowers were optional, but she’d badly needed a success today, and this simple restoration of lost property would do. Already she was feeling better than she had an hour ago.
    “Lunch?” suggested DI Gorman, reaching for his jacket.
    Hazel looked critically at her watch. “It isn’t lunchtime.”
    Gorman sniffed. “I am the senior CID officer and currently the second most senior officer in this police station. Lunchtime begins when I say it begins.”
    *   *   *
    When the house in Highfield Road was built, good families kept their own carriage and horses and needed somewhere to park them. Around the back, accessed from a narrow lane referred to locally as a ginnel, was the stable block. For most of the last century, of course, it had been garages, and there was a car there now. It wasn’t