by Jo Bannister
It had been built as a family house, but it wasn’t one anymore. As soon as she stepped inside she knew he lived here alone, unless you counted the dog. Not because he’d lapsed into a kind of squalor that no woman would have tolerated—the place was both clean and tidy. But there was an essential grayness in every room, a lack of warmth or color—not so much the decor as the very air itself. It was a sad house, a house that had known better times.
There was a kettle on the Aga. “I don’t think I’ve got any biscuits.” He gave her a thin smile. “Only dog biscuits.”
He’d taken Patience’s lead off as they came in, and she’d led the way into the kitchen. This seemed to be the main living- space, furnished with an ancient brown leather sofa and a chair, a bookcase full to bursting, a television set that had been state-of-the-art a decade earlier, and a dog bed. In spite of which, Patience appropriated the sofa. Ash didn’t even try to move her. He waved Hazel to the chair, and when the tea was made, he sat down beside his dog, stroking her ticked white fur absently.
Hazel was trying to fit what she knew about the man with where and how he lived. “Have you lived here long?”
“Three years.” He didn’t elaborate.
“On your own?”
“Yes.”
She didn’t pursue a line of questioning that was in danger of becoming impertinent. Partly because she thought she knew the answers. His wife had left him and he’d fallen apart. There had been no shortage of money at one point, but the good job that had enabled him to buy this property had been a casualty of the split and now he went on living in a house that was too big for him and that he couldn’t afford because he was clinging to the shreds of a happier past. One day soon the bank would give him the choice between selling up and foreclosure; until that happened, unable to make the move on his own, his occupation of it would contract into fewer and fewer rooms. Hazel thought that if she came back here in six months, she’d find he was sleeping in the kitchen as well.
No wonder the house seemed mournful. She wondered if they’d had children. If, for Ash, the rooms still echoed with the shrieks and laughter of excited children who now made only an occasional phone call and sent Love you, Daddy cards for Christmas and his birthday. If there was a shoe box somewhere with every one of them carefully preserved.
It wasn’t just morbid curiosity on Hazel’s part. It was significant that Gabriel Ash hadn’t always been as he was now. He hadn’t been born a sandwich short of a picnic. Once, not very long ago, he’d been an intelligent man with a good job. Maybe he’d always carried the seeds of breakdown within him, as many people do who are driven to achieve. But he’d held his life together with conspicuous success until not very long ago. His mental difficulties didn’t go back far, so perhaps they didn’t go down very deep.
So maybe she shouldn’t dismiss quite so lightly what he was telling her. She sipped her tea and said, “Tell me again what Jerome Cardy said.”
Ash’s eyes flew wide. They were the color of bitter chocolate, and, with the thick black hair and olive-tinted skin, gave him a slightly Mediterranean air. They had an expression in Norbold for someone with roots elsewhere: “A granny missing from the graveyard.” Hazel thought Gabriel Ash had at least one granny buried a long way from Norbold.
“Othello!” he exclaimed, startled by the way the memory had returned. As if it had bitten him.
“Come again?” Hazel Best’s mother had thought it was a terribly common expression, but she’d never quite cured her daughter of using it.
“The Shakespeare reference—what he called his dog. He called it Othello.”
“Did he?” she said levelly. “Okay.”
Ash seemed to think it mattered. “Why did he want me to know that? That’s not casual conversation. He was being taken to another cell, but he hung back long enough to tell me that he once had a dog called Othello. Why?”
If he was remembering correctly, it was odd. “Did he say anything else about it?”
“He said it was a sniffer dog.”
Hazel frowned. “That’s not a breed. You can’t go out and buy one. Could he have had a security-trained dog?”
“I don’t think he had. I didn’t think so at the time. He didn’t talk like someone who had dogs. If you know what breed it is, you say so—if you don’t, you say it’s a mongrel or a crossbreed, or a Heinz fifty-seven. Or a lurcher.” He looked down at his own dog with a smile. “That boy didn’t know what kind of dog Othello was. I asked if it was a spaniel and he said it was, but he didn’t sound as if he’d ever thought about it. I don’t think it was a real dog. I think it was a piece of information he wanted me to have.”
“You mean like a secret message?” It was as improbable as the house.
Ash nodded. “I think so. He wanted to give me some information without the policeman realizing what he was doing.”
“What policeman?”
“The one who came for him.”
“But…” There was no point. She tried another tack. “Why?”
“I don’t know.”
Hazel thought, worrying the idea like a terrier, but nothing came to mind. “Othello. Othello the sniffer dog.”
“Sniffer dogs look for drugs.”
“Or explosives. Or dead bodies. Or various other things, actually. You can train them to associate just about any smell with a reward.”
“Othello strangled his wife.”
“Jerome Cardy wasn’t married.”
“But he was black.”
“You think that’s relevant?” It wasn’t a criticism—she genuinely wondered.
“I have no idea,” confessed Ash. “But it wasn’t an off-the-cuff remark. It meant something to him, and he thought it might mean something to me.” He rolled his eyes to the ceiling in a gesture of despair. “God help him.”
“All right,” said Hazel. “So what do we know about Othello?”
Gabriel Ash had had a good education once. But it was getting to be a long time since he’d studied English literature. “He was a Moor. Wasn’t he the governor of Cyprus? He killed his wife after his sidekick convinced him she was having an affair. She wasn’t. She loved Othello, and he loved her. But he killed her just the same.” His eyes had gone distant again and there was a hint of bitterness in his voice.
“It was jealousy that killed Desdemona,” Hazel recalled. “Is that what Jerome was trying to tell you? That someone was jealous of him?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“And why tie it up in ribbons? If he thought someone was going to hurt him, why not tell you who, and why?”
“Because we weren’t alone. He wanted me to know. He didn’t want the policeman to understand.”
The mysterious policeman again. “Ash, are you sure about that? That someone took Jerome to the other cell? That he didn’t just wander off by himself?”
He looked momentarily offended. But he did her the courtesy of running through it in his mind once more. He reached the same conclusion. “Someone came to the door. He told the boy he’d freed up a cell for him. He seemed to think Patience might bite him, or”—he glanced apologetically at the dog—“worse.” He mouthed the word fleas at Hazel, as if it would cause offense if overheard.
Every time she was tempted to put some credence to what he thought he remembered, he did this. Behaved like a lunatic. She asked the question because asking questions put her in control, made her comfortable. “Would you know him again? This policeman.”
Ash shrugged. “I didn’t see his face. He was in uniform, but I didn’t get his number, if that’s what you mean. I heard his voice. An older man rather than a younger one.”
Against her better instincts, Hazel found herself toying with the information. Sergeant Murchison was not a young man. If there had been any shifting of prisoners to be done, as custody officer that night he was the one likeliest to have done it. But Sergeant Murchison said Jerome Cardy had shifted himself.
People get forgetful as they get older. If a cell had b
ecome vacant, he would have transferred Cardy to it; and if he had forgotten—if something had distracted him before he got it logged—when Barclay was brought in amid a flurry of fists and oaths, it would have been the easiest thing in the world for him to fling open the cell door and have the wild man shoved inside. Perhaps he never remembered that Cardy was in there, and a young black law student was the last person that Barclay, the rabid racist, should have been in with. Or perhaps he remembered just too late, at which point it was only a question of whether he owned up to his error or not.
If he did, no possible good could be served, but his own career would suddenly be in jeopardy. People would start wondering if he was still up to the job. Retirement would be proposed as a way of avoiding repercussions. If that wasn’t what he wanted—and Sergeant Murchison had not struck Hazel as a man counting the weeks to his pension—perhaps even an honorable man could be forgiven for failing to volunteer the information that made sense of everything that had happened.
If, she reminded herself forcibly, what Gabriel Ash thought he remembered bore any relationship to the truth. This was a man who’d lost everything, including a large portion of his wits. He avoided saying the word fleas in front of his dog, for God’s sake! He’d been sleeping off a concussion when he was wakened by assorted comings and goings and finally by all hell breaking loose. In such circumstances anyone might have got some of the details wrong. In such circumstances it would be amazing if Gabriel Ash had got any of the details right.
“Mr. Ash, do you remember when we went into the police station after you were hurt?” Ash nodded. “Do you remember meeting the sergeant who was in charge?”
“Yes.”
“We spoke to him, didn’t we? Then he showed us where you and Patience could get a bit of rest.”
“He put us in a cell.” Which was another way of saying the same thing.
“Do you think that’s what you’re thinking of? That the concussion made you confuse the two memories? That you did see the police officer at the door, but it was earlier, when he was showing you to the cell. That he wasn’t actually there later, when Jerome went for a look around.”
For several seconds he made no attempt to answer. She couldn’t be sure if he was offended or thinking about it. Then he said, “What about the things Jerome said to me?”
Hazel shrugged sympathetically. “You took quite a beating. Bad dreams were probably the mildest aftereffect to be expected.”
Still that ambivalent, almost unwinking gaze from his deep, dark eyes. “You think I dreamed it. Everything the boy said. Everything that happened.”
“Not everything,” she protested. “He was certainly in with you for a time, and maybe you were talking. And later he left the cell, and later still all hell broke loose next door. You didn’t imagine any of that. But the mind has a way of trying to make sense of unconnected bits of information. I’m just wondering if that’s what’s happened. That after you knew something awful had happened to Jerome Cardy, your brain—which was also having a bad day—drew together things it had heard and seen in different contexts, including dreams, and made them into a plausible narrative. I don’t think you’re making any of this up. I think your brain, also from the best of motives, may have been playing tricks on you.”
“And Othello, the sniffer dog?”
Hazel gave a sympathetic smile. “Does it seem likely? Because most things that don’t, didn’t happen. Or didn’t happen the way we remember. It’s not just you. Every time we talk to a witness we have to consider what other factors might have affected what they think they saw. Most people try to tell the truth. But it’s very easy to get it wrong.”
He had nothing to say to that and she had nothing to add. She stood up, putting down her cup. “Try not to worry about it. The people who’ll investigate what happened are very experienced. They’ll get to the bottom of it. Thanks for the tea. I’ll see you again.”
Ash stood up, too, and showed her to the door. “I don’t think I thanked you. For last night. For looking after me.”
“All part of the service,” she said brightly—too brightly. It must have been obvious to him that she’d satisfied herself as to what had happened and exactly what his testimony was worth. She hoped he wouldn’t think she was being rude. But probably, she reckoned, by the time she was back in her car he’d have forgotten what it was they were discussing.
But she was wrong about that.
After Constable Best had gone, Ash went back to the leather sofa in the kitchen and sat down beside his dog again, his right arm slipping automatically and naturally across her back. She gazed at him with expectant amber eyes.
“She didn’t believe me. She thinks I imagined it.”
The dog said nothing.
“I don’t think I imagined it,” Ash said stubbornly. He poured more tea, sipped it reflectively. “I think that boy asked me for help. Would I have dreamed something like that? In so much detail?” He simply didn’t know. “But if it wasn’t a dream, then I owe him … something. To do as he asked—to find someone who might believe me. Someone who might understand what he was trying to say.”
Still the dog said nothing.
“He was only twenty years old. He must have parents in the town. And it’s not a common name. Someone who wanted to find them probably could.”
Patience raised a back foot and delicately scratched her ear.
“Maybe I should talk to Laura first.” It had taken the therapist a year to get him to use her first name. “She’ll think it’s a bad idea. Maybe it is a bad idea. She’ll say it’s more about my feelings of guilt than anything the boy said. That I’m making a mystery of it because you can hope to solve a mystery, where you can’t hope to put right a tragedy.”
He looked sidelong at his dog as if waiting for a response, but there was none.
“I know what you’re thinking. That this is displacement activity. That I want there to be something going on that no one else knows about. Because I used to be good at this. When there was space in my head to think. That I’m never going to pick up where I left off, but I could do if I had to. And maybe then there wouldn’t be enough space left in my head for … Or at least, not every minute of every damned day.”
He sighed. “And you’re probably right. What happened at Meadowvale Police Station is most probably what appears to have happened—a monstrous, horrible thing, but not a mystery. Robert Barclay killed Jerome Cardy because he is a bad man; Jerome died because he was unlucky.”
He stood up and walked to the window. The view was more pleasant than remarkable; but then, he didn’t look out much. “But just suppose for a moment that you’re wrong. Suppose Jerome meant exactly what he said when he told me he was going to die in that police station, and something quite different when he talked about Othello. If he was trying to alert someone to what was happening to him. No one at the police station is going to ask these questions. Either they don’t know there’s a puzzle to solve or it’s in their best interests to leave well enough alone.”
Gabriel Ash thought a little longer; then he made up his mind. “I’ll go tomorrow. To express my condolences to his parents, and ask if any of this makes sense to them.”
What he didn’t say, aloud or even in the privacy of his own head, was, “Maybe if I can get to the bottom of this mystery, the other one—the old one, the big one—might seem slightly less unbearable.”
Be careful, said Patience.
CHAPTER 8
YOU NEED TO make yourself presentable.
Ash ignored the voice in his head, which is something he didn’t often do, at least when they were alone. So the dog said it again. You need to make yourself presentable before we go and see them.
“Who?” His furtive glance showed that he knew exactly who.
The Cardy family. I know you’re going to see them. I saw you looking up their address in the phone book.
Phone books are something the average dog knows very little about, unless it’s how quickly you can
shred one if you’re left alone in the house. So Ash was probably right when he rationalized these conversations he had with Patience as being something that took place inside his head. Undoubtedly Laura Fry would have agreed, if he’d told her that he didn’t just talk to the dog but also heard her reply.
She said that talking to animals was a way of holding a debate with other viewpoints within your own mind. He wasn’t sure how she would react if he was honest with her—if he admitted that he seemed to hear the dog respond exactly as he heard other people speak, except that she didn’t move her lips. He didn’t hear other animals talk, just Patience. Laura had said he wasn’t mad. He wondered if she’d want to review that diagnosis if he reported, word for word, the conversation he was now having. And all the others that he’d had in the last three months, since discovering that the stray dog he’d adopted to give him something to think about beyond his own misery spoke better English than most teenagers.
His first thought was that the therapist was wrong and he was indeed mad. He was terrified, precisely because it didn’t come out of left field. Things had happened in his life that would have driven anyone mad. But he’d thought the crisis had passed. He’d come as close to a mental breakdown as you can without slipping irrevocably over the edge, but somehow he’d clawed his way back. Or, to be fair, been dragged back by talented and dedicated people who’d convinced him he could learn to live in the world again, even though everything about it had changed.
Perhaps it helped that he hadn’t had much choice in the matter. Ash hadn’t so much separated himself from his former life as had it taken from him. But isolation can become a habit, too, and after he left London he’d withdrawn into himself much as a crab does, for protection. He’d turned his back on everyone he once knew, all the support he might have had, excepting only Laura Fry, who was imposed on him almost as a condition of remaining at large. He’d returned to live alone in this empty house, the house where he’d grown up, wrapped himself in his most comfortable old clothes, existed for months at a time only on those foods that could be delivered. He knew people—neighbors, tradesmen, the local police—thought he was strange, but until he got the dog he’d agreed with Laura, that underneath all that, the essential core of him had survived more or less intact.
