by Jo Bannister
The other thing Barking Mad isn’t is a diagnosis. In fact, though he’d been arrested numerous times, committed twice, and examined by every psychiatrist within a fifty-mile radius, no one had ever come up with a convincing diagnosis. He wasn’t a psychopath or a sociopath; he understood absolutely the difference between right and wrong, and the effect his behavior had on others. He didn’t hear voices telling him what to do. He did what he wanted to do.
As far as could be established, he hadn’t been either abused or overindulged as a child, nor was his father also his grandfather and his uncle. If life had been harsh to him, it was only acting in self-defense. Unless there was something amiss deep within his brain, where it would only be discovered by cutting it into thin slivers and putting it under a microscope—and don’t think that didn’t seem an excellent idea to those who knew him best—he was just a very angry man who responded with uninhibited aggression to anything that irked him.
As luck would have it, he was also a very large and powerful man, known at Meadowvale as a “three-hander.” You didn’t even try to arrest him until there were at least three of you to do it.
Hazel Best was new to Norbold. She didn’t know this.
After seeing Gabriel Ash and his dog settled in the Meadowvale cells, she and Constable Budgen had gone back on patrol. They’d overseen chucking-out time at the local hostelries, hushing the noisier revelers and steering others away from the car parks and toward the taxi rank. By one in the morning the town was quiet, but there remained hours of their shift still to serve. Wayne Budgen suggested checking the all-night café for criminal masterminds. When none was immediately apparent, they took a corner table and—as cover—ordered a pot of coffee and some sticky buns.
They were still waiting for the criminal masterminds to show up when the call came in. Another disturbance at the park, this time involving vandalism at the war memorial. As they hurried out to the car, Hazel mumbled around the last of her bun, “It’ll be those same yobbos again, bet you anything. The ones who kicked nine bells out of … um…”
“Rambles,” Budgen reminded her. “Let’s hope so.”
Hazel looked at him in surprise. “You can think of someone you’d be less happy to meet on a dark night in an empty park than half a dozen young thugs who six hours ago were trying to beat a man to death?”
“Oh yeah,” said Wayne fervently. “Barking Mad Barclay.”
In primitive societies, you never speak of fairies for fear they might appear. Primitive societies know a thing or two.
Norbold’s war memorial was a simple, dignified affair—a four-step plinth topped by a stone obelisk engraved with the names of the fallen, in two world wars and all the campaigns since. There were a lot of them.
Barking Mad Barclay was head-butting the obelisk.
If that had been all, they might have taken the view that twelve tons of granite could stand up to anything the human head could throw it, and waited until either boredom or brain damage intervened. Unfortunately, before he started on the obelisk, he’d overturned three of the four stone urns located around the plinth and rolled them into the Garden of Remembrance, scattering the faded remnants of wreaths. This is the kind of thing that upsets people, and it left them with no option but to make an arrest. Or at least try to.
“Gonna need backup,” predicted Wayne Budgen.
Hazel elevated an eyebrow. “Really?” They were both young, fit, robust, and well trained, and the suspect—which hardly seems an appropriate term when actually you’ve seen him head-butting a war memorial—had blood pouring down his face and a glazed expression in his eyes. “We can take him. Can’t we?”
“That’s…” But before he’d got more than one word into the explanation, something unexpected happened to Constable Budgen. He blushed. She was a woman—all right, a couple of years older than he was, and maybe a shade more substantial and capable-looking than the girls he usually went for, but still an attractive young woman with green eyes and a lot of wavy fair hair that she tied back for work but which tended not to stay tied back—and she was looking to him, expecting him, to help her subdue Barking Mad Barclay. And Wayne Budgen was too embarrassed to tell her he was afraid. Of course they should have waited for backup. Budgen knew that; every police officer in Norbold should have known that. It was just Budgen’s luck to be patrolling with the one exception when it became an issue.
He’d been thumped before. What was going through his mind now was that it would be better to be thumped again than let Hazel Best raise that eyebrow any higher at him. He amended what he’d been about to say. “If he flattens me, call for backup.”
But Hazel hadn’t joined the police in order to watch other people do the difficult bits. “He probably would flatten you,” she admitted, adding with hasty tact, “if he could. He might not flatten me.” She pinned her most amiable smile in place, climbed the stone steps, and tapped Barking Mad Barclay on the shoulder. “Excuse me. Hello?”
It had the desired effect, in that he stopped what he was doing and peered around at her. He had a Zapata mustache that was the height of fashion around 1975, currently clotted with blood, and tiny, bleary eyes looking in slightly different directions. “What the footling hell do you want?” He did not say footling. And he spoke with a Glasgow accent that he affected only when he’d been drinking. Budgen knew for a fact that he’d been born in Kidderminster.
Hazel proffered a tissue. “Do you know you’ve cut your forehead?”
He looked at the tissue. He looked at Hazel. He looked at the floodlit obelisk, which had a bloodstain the size of a football on it. “No! Really?”
“We ought to get that looked at for you. You don’t want it to scar.”
Budgen was watching with amazement, admiration, and deep disquiet. She was talking to Barking Mad Barclay as if he was normal—as if he’d tripped on the steps of the war memorial and hurt himself on the obelisk. The constable had no idea what would happen next. Probably what usually happened when a police officer approached Barclay armed with anything less than rocket-propelled grenades. But he thought there was just a chance that it might work. That Barclay would accept the offer of her hankie and go with her to see the police surgeon. If that happened, Hazel Best would be the toast of Meadowvale Police Station. Even Wayne Budgen might get a little reflected glory.
Alas, the remarkable doesn’t happen nearly as often as the blindingly obvious. Barclay slurred, “Go footle yersel’,” and swatted Hazel as if swatting a fly. She landed in the middle of the Garden of Remembrance with a ringing in her ears and no clear idea of which way was up.
After which they did it Constable Budgen’s way and got backup. Hazel took no further part in the arrest. Back at Meadowvale, Sergeant Murchison made her a cup of tea—well, fetched her one from the machine in the corridor—had the police surgeon look at her, took a photograph of her bruises for the report, then sent her home.
CHAPTER 5
BARKING MAD Barclay was known in Meadowvale as a three-hander. Except when he was worked up, like now, when you tried to round up the front row of the Division rugby team in order to tackle him.
Except like right now, when there was someone in there with him, taking the brunt of all that anger, when the first officer on the scene hit the alarm in passing, threw open the cell door, and threw himself at the big man without waiting for anything. It happened to be Sergeant Murchison. It could have been any of them. He knew he’d get hurt. He knew he could get injured quite badly. It didn’t have to matter. If he waited, even a few seconds, he was going to have a dead man in his cells. Already, in the time it had taken him to run here from his desk in the outer office, the shrill yells of terror and the bubbling ones of pain had been cut off, leaving only the deep animal grunts of effort.
Donald Murchison had seen a lot in twenty years of police work. He thought he was ready for what he was going to see when he went through the cell door. But he wasn’t. The place was an abattoir.
He was lucky that, by and lar
ge, the police station was staffed by people just like him. They grumbled and whinged, they gossiped, they backbit, they clock-watched and counted off the days to their pension; but when the shit hit the fan, without pausing to think of the cost, they supported one another with everything they had. Murchison had barely got a hand on the berserker in his cell before four colleagues were piling through the door behind him, grabbing anything that moved and hanging on to it for grim death. One of them grabbed Murchison, and apologized breathlessly before shifting his grasp.
With five of them hanging on to him like bulldogs locked onto a raging bull, at last even Barclay’s manic strength began to wane. The thick limbs, each now dragging a policeman, slowed and submitted to restraint. After another moment the big man allowed himself to be dragged down, tumbling with a kind of monstrous grace into the wreckage of his victim.
Finally there was time to take stock. No one was shouting anymore. The only sound in the cell was of aching lungs being replenished. Then Wayne Budgen whispered a thunderstruck, “Bloody hell!”
Murchison’s hands looked as if he’d dipped them in blood. And he didn’t think any of it was his. He dragged in a long breath and tried to think.
“Okay. Ambulance. Dr. Wellington was here earlier—see if he’s still on the premises. Send Rambles home and put this … animal … in there. Find the straitjacket. I’m going to want SOCO, Forensics, and the Home Office pathologist. And somebody had better call Mr. Fountain.”
* * *
Johnny Fountain was still wearing his dinner jacket when he arrived to take command of the situation. The first thing he did was to pull off the hated bow tie. The second was to call Sergeant Murchison to his office. “What happened, Donald?”
If there’d been anyone else present, Donald Murchison would have stayed on his feet. But these two had respected each other for ten years, and he sank into the chair on the other side of Fountain’s desk as if only willpower had kept him upright this long. He vented a sigh of utter despair. “I don’t know what to tell you. A misunderstanding? Somebody misheard? I thought I’d got Cardy in four and Barclay in five. Cardy was certainly in four earlier—I looked in on them.”
“Them?”
“Rambles … sorry, Gabriel Ash. You know who I mean—goes everywhere with a white dog on a lead? He’d got himself duffed up earlier, and Hazel Best put him in there so someone would notice if his brain started leaking out of his ear. I had Mary Watson in five—DIC and driving while disqualified. We got her processed and sent her home, which left five free. When Barclay came in, that’s where I allocated him. Only sometime in the previous quarter of an hour someone must have noticed five was free and moved Cardy in there, and never got around to telling me.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t even asked.” He swallowed. “A boy just died in my cells—I’m not going to keep the class back until someone puts their hand up. We’ll find out who did what and why, but we don’t have to do it while the blood’s still wet on the floor. For now, sir, all that matters is that we know who’s responsible. I am. I was the custody officer. It was my job to allocate cells in such a way that a mild-mannered black law student wasn’t put in with a violent racist. Jerome Cardy is dead because I slipped up. And I’m more sorry than I can say.”
For a long time Chief Superintendent Fountain said nothing. But it wasn’t the silence of censure: Fountain understood as well as anyone how little mistakes can mount up until all at once in the middle of the night there’s a full-fledged disaster. He’d served in pretty well every position in the police service—he was never a dog handler—on his way to where he was now. He knew that sometimes even the best intentions, coupled with years of experience, aren’t enough to avert a tragedy.
Murchison sucked in a deep breath. “You’ll be calling the IPCC.” He knew that when the Independent Police Complaints Commission took over, his career would be effectively over.
“I suppose so,” Fountain said slowly.
Murchison blinked. There really wasn’t a choice and Fountain had to know that. “Sir?”
“The bloke with the dog. Ash?” Murchison nodded. “Why was he in the cells again?”
“Hazel Best thought he was concussed. She wanted to take him to the hospital, but he wouldn’t go because they wouldn’t let his dog in. He’s a bit…” A tap of the forefinger to his temple. “So she put the pair of them in number four, where we could keep an eye on him for a couple of hours. He was asleep every time I checked on him.”
“Hm.” Another of those little departures from procedure that aren’t supposed to happen but happen all the time and usually do more good than harm but just occasionally introduce the spark to the box of fireworks. “So he wasn’t locked in?”
Murchison shook his head.
“Did you lock the door after you put Cardy in there?”
“No. Ash wasn’t under arrest—I didn’t want to lock him in. And Cardy wasn’t the type to make trouble.”
Fountain was nodding slowly. “And after Mary Watson was released, five probably wasn’t locked, either.”
The sergeant had no idea where he was going with this. All he could do was answer honestly. “No, sir.”
Fountain leaned forward very slightly in his chair. “Donald, maybe nobody moved Jerome Cardy. Maybe he moved himself. What if he got tired bunking with a snoring idiot and his flea-ridden dog? He saw that the cell opposite was empty, both doors were unlocked, so he just ambled across the corridor and made himself comfortable. He wouldn’t have thought he was doing anything very wrong, let alone dangerous. Then when Barclay was brought in, you and everyone else thought number five was empty.
“I’ve been there when we’ve been wrestling Barking Mad Barclay into a cell,” he recalled warmly. “There isn’t a lot of spare time for checking under the blankets. If he went through the door without somebody’s ear in his teeth, you’d just slam the door and shoot the bolt before he had time to turn on you. Do you suppose that’s what happened?”
If you fall off a ship in the middle of an ocean, you’re pretty sure you’re going to drown. It’s not exactly that the fear passes, but an element of resignation creeps in. If there’s no hope, if there’s only one way it can end, there’s no point fighting. Despair drives out panic.
But if someone throws you a life preserver, everything changes. You might still drown, but you might survive. And the hopeless calm of waiting for the inevitable gives way in an instant to terror. That you might not reach the life preserver, that the rope will break. That was what was in Sergeant Murchison’s eyes now: the recognition that there was a way he might come out of this. And the hope, and the fear, that recognition engendered. “I … I suppose … it hadn’t occurred to me. But maybe that’s what happened.”
Fountain was nodding again. “Well, we can’t ask Cardy, poor chap. We could ask Ash, though I doubt he could tell us much—and I doubt we could put much faith in anything he did tell us. We can ask the guys if any of them moved Cardy. But if no one owns up, that’s probably why. No one did move him. He moved himself.”
The sergeant was thinking fast. “If that’s what happened, there should be footage on the CCTV.”
“You haven’t looked yet?”
Murchison shook his head. “I didn’t want … I wanted to give one of the guys time to say it was his idea to move Cardy before I checked the tape.”
Fountain could understand that. “Let’s have a look at it now. It might let everyone off the hook.”
But it didn’t. The two men gazed impassively at the screen as the image of the row of cells pixilated and broke up at some point between Jerome Cardy’s being brought in and Robert Barclay’s rather more dramatic arrival.
Chief Superintendent Fountain said with commendable restraint, “It’s doing that again, is it?”
Sergeant Murchison felt as if the Coast Guard cutter had thrown him an anchor. “The technician said he’d sorted it out.”
“All right,” said Fountain wearily, �
�so there’s no CCTV. So we have a theory but no supporting evidence. I think we have to be frank with the IPCC—tell them we think we know what happened but we can’t prove it. If they think something else may have happened, it’s up to them to establish what.”
Murchison swallowed. “They’re going to think we’re covering for one another.”
Fountain shrugged expansively. “They won’t like it, I know that much. I wouldn’t like it if it was my investigation. It’s always more satisfying to know what actually happened than to be left by default with what probably happened. But they’re realists. They know there isn’t always forensics, you can’t always find an impeccable witness. Sometimes, the likeliest explanation is the best you’re going to do. And unless someone comes forward to say different, the likeliest explanation is that Jerome Cardy was the author of his own misfortune. That the only one to blame for his death is Robert Barclay.” The chief superintendent looked his custody sergeant in the eye. “Do you suppose anyone will want to say something different?”
Murchison stood up. Thoughts were racing through his head like getaway cars. “I doubt it, sir. If no one’s looking for another explanation, it doesn’t seem too likely that anyone will offer one.”
Fountain gave a little grunt. It might have been agreement, sympathy, or just dismissal. “I think you should go home now, Donald. Try to get some sleep. Things’ll seem brighter in the morning.”
“Yes. And—thank you, sir.”
Fountain gave him a puzzled look. “What for?”
* * *
Most people would have turned on the television, looking for a local news bulletin. Gabriel Ash no longer owned a television. Or they might have asked around at work, or called a friend. Ash hadn’t worked for four years—was not so much unemployed as unemployable—and didn’t have any friends. There was a newsagent opposite the park. He and Patience went out as soon as it opened and bought the local paper.
There was nothing in it. At least, there were lots of things in it, but nothing that interested Ash. Events at Meadowvale Police Station had occurred after the Norbold News went to press.
