by Jo Bannister
What kept him from leaving the battlefield to nurse his wounds in privacy was the possibility that he might be right. That was all it was—a possibility. A cogent argument could have persuaded him he was wrong. But thinking about the matter this way finally enabled him to explain things that had seemed inexplicable, and until someone came up with another viable theory, he wasn’t going to let this one go by default. Not because he was prideful or stubborn, although on occasions he could be both, but because if he was right, it was vitally important to find how far the rot at Meadowvale had spread and cut it out before it cost the life of another decent young man.
“Please,” he begged her, “hear me out. I know one man couldn’t have done all that. But maybe two men could. Three could do it without much difficulty. I’m not suggesting that everyone at Meadowvale is corrupt. I’m suggesting that a small group may be. You know the place, Hazel, you know the people. Is that so utterly beyond the bounds of possibility? Might there not be two or three people, out of all those who work there, who’ve got themselves involved in something they shouldn’t have?”
“Something they shouldn’t have?” Incredulity sent Hazel’s eyebrows soaring. “Like murdering witnesses, you mean? Yes, I can see how that would happen. Anyone can make a mistake—fill in the wrong form, enter the wrong charge, throw a twenty-year-old boy to a homicidal maniac. There but for the grace of God, as they say…”
She was willfully misunderstanding him and Ash knew it. He just couldn’t seem to find the words to stop her, to make her think about it, not as a fellow police officer but as an intelligent and concerned individual. To grapple with the idea in her head, not her heart. To remain open to possibilities however distasteful they might be.
He shook his head helplessly. “That’s not … Hazel, you know that’s not what I’m saying. I’ve known a lot of police officers. A lot of them I’d trust with my life—have trusted with my life, and things that meant more to me. But I also know, and so do you if you’re honest, there are a percentage who are not trustworthy. Who went into the job for the wrong reasons, or got frustrated or disillusioned somewhere along the way and started wondering what would make them feel better.
“And once you take that turning, there’s no coming back. You take the first bad decision out of greed, and the second to protect yourself from the consequences of the first. Men who never wanted anything more than an extra week in Marbella with the wife each year end up trashing serious inquiries because they’re in too deep to say no to whoever’s pulling their strings.”
In the honest heart of her—and her heart was nothing if not honest—Hazel could not have argued with a word that he’d said. But she was no longer capable of an entirely rational response. She was angry, and hurt, and beleaguered by what felt like a personal attack; and somehow the fact that she had already entertained doubts about one of her colleagues made it worse, not better, by adding guilt to the mix. On top of that, it rankled that these accusations came from someone she’d gone out of her way to be kind to. Someone she’d tried to help and protect, and listen to, when everyone else was dismissive. She felt Ash owed her better than a sneak attack.
“There’s no one pulling my strings,” she shot back, hammering the words out like bullets. “I make my own mistakes. Like this one. People warned me about you. Told me not to get involved. Told me you weren’t reliable. I thought they’d got it wrong. Hadn’t looked deeply enough, hadn’t given you a chance. I thought if I treated you like a normal, intelligent, responsible individual, you’d behave like one.
“And that was naïve. You can’t, can you? It’s asking too much. If you could behave normally, you would, and that dog” —she flicked a bitter glance at Patience—“would be just a dog, not a kind of alter ego. You live in a dream world, Gabriel. Nothing you say or think has any basis in reality. Which means the stupidest thing of all is that I would even care what you think of me!”
And with that parting shot she spun on her heel sharply enough to bring tears to a drill sergeant’s eyes, and stalked out of Gabriel Ash’s house—and, she believed, out of his life—and back to her car.
Ash stood staring in amazement and distress as the door quivered on its hinges.
Goodness, said Patience mildly. Little Miss Grumpy.
CHAPTER 17
NYE JACKSON HAD always known he wanted to be a reporter. He knew when the other boys in his class still thought they were going to be astronauts and firemen. He was the only eight-year-old boy his English teacher had ever known who not only owned a dictionary but wrote his name inside it so it wouldn’t get lost.
But somewhere along the line the dream had bumped into real life and come off worst. He’d never been a front-line war correspondent. He’d never worked for Reuters. He wasn’t a hard-bitten investigative journalist on one of the national tabloids. He was senior reporter (out of three) on a small-town biweekly newspaper that filled its centerfold with wedding photographs and its back pages with under-fifteens soccer and racing pigeon results.
Even that wasn’t the worst of it. He wasn’t much past forty; he could still have made his name as a crime reporter, if only he hadn’t ended up working in the town with the lowest crime rate in the Midlands. The sort of town where a reign of terror amounted to two little boys letting off bangers. Where he’d once written the headline BEAST OF NORBOLD: FEAR EMPTIES STREETS over a story about Queenie Porter’s potbellied pig, Nigel, who’d taken to breaking out of her backyard on a Friday night and going looking for sex and/or curry-house leftovers.
Jackson was a disappointed man. Somehow he’d expected his life to be better than this—more exciting, more important. He wasn’t sure where he’d gone wrong. Lying wakeful in his lonely bed in his rented flat above a grocer’s shop, listening to Nigel rooting around in the bins below, more than once he’d tried to identify the point at which he’d had the chance to live the dream and not taken it. He’d gone for jobs with the big news-gathering organizations, but there’d always been somebody better qualified, more experienced, perhaps more photogenic after the same job. For a long time he thought the broadcast media had something against a Welsh accent. When Huw Edwards did so well for himself, Jackson had to accept that it wasn’t his accent putting off the news moguls; it was him. The Norbold News was going to be the high-water mark of his career.
What happened yesterday had made him think again. Made him wonder if there wasn’t a little bit of life left in the dream. If the right story might not even now propel him to the fame he still secretly craved. Not a Pulitzer Prize, of course, but perhaps a British Press Award?
The right story. Well, maybe. At least some of the elements were there. The holy fool with his tragic background. The murdered boy. The O.K. Corral standoff between the last godfather and the lawman who’d made all the others history. If he could tell it right—if, first of all, he could work it out—this could be it. The breakthrough story. The one that the nationals, and the radio and TV, all picked up and ran with. And kept coming back to Nye Jackson for updates and analysis. He just had to get his byline repeated enough times and people at the sharp end would start thinking of him as one of them. This could be how—if he handled it right.
Gabriel Ash was the key. Jackson didn’t know how—he didn’t think Ash knew how—but journalistic instinct insisted that it was so. Of course, like any other storyteller, a journalist wants a tidy outcome, all the loose ends neatly tied. It makes the story more satisfying both to write and to read. It’s easy for novelists. In this as in so many ways, life is messier than art.
If only he’d got the photograph. However fuzzy and pixilated, however stubbornly the story refused to come together, a real-time picture of a murder witness being bundled into a big dark car and a caption explaining how, and by whom, he was rescued would have made front pages across the country.
Except possibly, and Jackson still had to get his head around this, in Norbold. When he left Meadowvale to return to his office, to his surprise his editor had not so much cong
ratulated him, or even suggested that it might have made still better news if the kidnapping had been allowed to continue, as warned him off.
Discreetly, of course. Journalists are an obstinate and contrary bunch; almost the only way of making them throw everything they’ve got into their work is to tell them there are stories they can’t write. If Desmond Burnham had told his senior reporter to hold back on the Jerome Cardy murder, that he didn’t want to publish any more than a bare statement of facts until someone was charged and convicted, the editor would have known that a rival paper would have the unexpurgated version before the end of the week, with everything but a Look you in the intro to identify the author.
So he hadn’t done that. He’d talked about the relationship between the Norbold News and the town’s police, and how it benefitted both parties. He reminded Jackson how fragile a relationship was when it relied entirely on trust, and how vital it was to do nothing to jeopardize that trust. Finally he let Jackson know—Jackson wasn’t sure now that he’d actually said the words—that Chief Superintendent Fountain would deem it a personal favor if the News could refrain from speculating about the Cardy murder until the IPCC had worked out whether there was more to it than met the eye, and if there was, found out what and charged somebody.
Jackson had stared at his editor with shock giving way quickly to outrage. “He wants to muzzle us?”
“Of course he doesn’t want to muzzle us,” retorted Burnham sharply. “And if he did, do you suppose I’d let him? He’s trying to keep the bung in the powder keg. This isn’t just a murder. It’s the murder of a black youth by a white racist while they were both in a police cell. Are you old enough to remember Brixton and Broadwater Farm? There’s nothing nastier than race riots, nothing harder to put back in the box.
“Right now there’s one thing standing between Norbold and the sort of scenes that’ll flash around the world before bedtime: that by the merest stroke of luck, Jerome Cardy was not a street kid from the Flying Horse but a law student and the son of a respectable, hardworking family. Not the obvious poster boy for a gang uprising. But the longer this goes on, the more likely it is that people will start to focus on the color of his skin. That’s where it goes ballistic.”
He gave a world-weary sigh. “That’s what Fountain is desperate to avoid, and if he thinks we can help, I’m not going to tell him we’re not prepared to. You’ll get to write your story, when you can write the whole story and not leave gaps to be exploited by people who’d like nothing more than a good black-and-blue barney culminating in running battles through the center of town. This newspaper is not on the side of people who want to manufacture race riots.”
And the words, even to Jackson’s recalcitrant ears, made sense. Journalism is not now and never was a matter of dumping raw facts in front of the public. It is always necessary for someone to choose which facts to report and which to discard. It’s what the word editing means. The most that can be hoped for is that the person doing the choosing is governed by good and honorable motives.
And yet …
Jackson had known his editor for six years. Des Burnham had been appointed over him, which caused a certain amount of irritation. He hadn’t wanted the job, but he’d have liked the opportunity to turn it down. It wasn’t even that Burnham was a world-class editor. He was overcautious, worried too much about what the owners wanted, what the advertisers wanted, and, yes, what the police might want. But he was straight. He had no hidden agenda. He did the job to the best of his ability.
This was different. Sitting on a story like this, for whatever reason, couldn’t be the right decision. It had to be told. Carefully, yes, depriving anyone with an interest in rabble-rousing of ammunition, but told and told fully. A boy had died. A man had probably escaped the same fate by the narrowest of margins. Mickey Argyle was probably in it up to his neck. And Des Burnham, and Johnny Fountain, wanted to play it down?
“Bugger that for a game of soldiers,” muttered Jackson, heading for his car.
The Norbold News was founded in 1898 and had published once or, later, twice every week since, including through the General Strike, two world wars, and the Winter of Discontent. That’s a lot of back copies to file in a small and generally chaotic office. Like many newspapers, the News kept its archive on microfiche in the local library. That was where Nye Jackson went that Saturday afternoon.
He wasn’t interested in copies going back a hundred years. He was interested in copies going back perhaps five years. Five years ago Jerome Cardy was fifteen—Jackson couldn’t imagine he’d done anything much before that to annoy Mickey Argyle.
It was, he was ready to admit, quite a leap of faith, from the Cardy boy’s being beaten to death by a local head-case to ultimate responsibility lying with Norbold’s last surviving godfather. But reporter’s instinct was putting it to him something like this: If something really bad happens in a town from which nearly all the really bad people have been removed, it makes sense to run a suspicious eye over those remaining. That was what he was doing: running a suspicious eye over Mickey Argyle and any connection he might have had with Jerome Cardy. He was doing it in the Norbold General Library because it was safer than chatting to the bouncer outside Argyle’s snooker rooms.
Five years’ worth of a biweekly newspaper is still over five hundred copies; at an average of twenty-eight per issue, that was fourteen thousand pages to scan. Jackson didn’t propose to read every word on each of them. But, not knowing exactly what it was he was looking for, he knew he’d have to skim pretty well every item to be sure he wasn’t missing anything. Then there were the photographs. There might be a hundred of them to an issue. Any one of them might hold a clue. He’d have to look at every one to be sure it didn’t.
Although Argyle had run the drug trade in this town for longer than Jackson had lived here, the reporter was not so naïve as to expect to find a reference to that. When someone was picked up peddling his drugs, it wasn’t Argyle’s name that went on the charge sheet. When someone was dumped at Norbold Royal Infirmary A&E with his head broken by a snooker cue, Argyle may have been the prime suspect, but without evidence no one risked saying it aloud, let alone putting it in print. Mickey Argyle made the Norbold News when his club sponsored an under-fourteens snooker tournament, when he gave away his elder daughter in marriage to a Brazilian polo player, and when he bought himself a 1950s Rolls-Royce in a millionaires’ charity auction. Those were the only references Jackson was able to find in five hours of hunting.
Funnily enough, in view of their respective significance to the town, there was more on Jerome Cardy. Jerome, age fifteen, winning the debating competition at Norbold Quays High School. Jerome, age sixteen, receiving the English Literature Award from his mother. Jerome, age seventeen, running a marathon for charity. Those were just the highlights. It had been a short career but an illustrious one. The boy full of promise grinning out of the photographs would have grown into the man he was born to be if he’d only had time. You’d like to think that anyone’s death will be mourned by someone. But even the notoriously unsentimental Jackson recognized Jerome Cardy’s death as a loss to all Norbold.
In the end he nearly missed it. It was just another photograph, pretty much like all the others he’d spent the last several hours looking at. This time it was Jerome Cardy presenting the mayoress with a bouquet of flowers after the school production of The Tempest. He’d played Prospero; she, if the photograph was anything to go by, had been bored.
It wasn’t either of their faces that drew Nye Jackson’s gaze. For half a minute he wasn’t sure what it was. His brain was telling him there was something in that three-year-old group photograph that was significant, but for half a minute he couldn’t see what it was.
Then he did. He’d seen one of the other faces in the picture before—not long before, while he was scrolling through this bloody microfiche. It took him another ten minutes to find it again, and to confirm that his eyes weren’t playing tricks on him. The strange sparkly ma
keup might have confused him, but when Jackson made copies of both pictures and held them side by side, he no longer had any doubt.
It might mean nothing, or it might mean everything. Jackson needed to find out what it meant.
CHAPTER 18
HAZEL HAD EXHAUSTED all the other possibilities. She’d sought counsel inside her own head and done what she believed was right. She’d looked to her colleagues for support and met only silent recrimination. She’d even tried to find some sort of common ground with Gabriel Ash, only to have her offer of friendship thrown (so it felt) in her face. What do you do when the world turns against you? You go home.
It was a long drive—three hours, even using the motorways as far as she could, even on a Saturday afternoon. She didn’t begrudge the time. It gave her the space to work out what she wanted to say—how to broach the subject without sounding pathetic. It mattered to her that her father didn’t think she was pathetic. Not because he’d task her with it, but precisely because he wouldn’t. He was—now, at fifty-nine, and had always been—a strong man who didn’t need to trade on others’ weaknesses to prove it. But she’d spent all her life admiring him and trying to live up to his example. It was going to be bad enough admitting to him that she’d failed. Letting him see how miserable she was would break her.
It was easy to find his cottage, even for strangers. You followed the signs for the big house, and Alfred Best lived in the gate lodge. He’d turned joiner when he left the army at forty, took a job maintaining the woodwork at Byrfield House. Peregrine, Lord Byrfield was often to be seen holding his ladder steady and peering anxiously up at his beetle-challenged rafters.
Hazel had grown up in the gatehouse. It had been an idyllic childhood, all the freedom of the Byrfield estate without the appalling prospect of inheriting it. When she’d left home, she’d thought it would always be here, always the same. But within twelve months her mother had died. Alfred had shouldered the loss as he shouldered every tribulation he met: manfully, with dignity, keeping his tears for when no one was around. Hazel had never seen him cry, but she knew it would be stupid, insulting even, to think that he didn’t. That his grief had been any less than hers.
