Deadly Virtues

by Jo Bannister

  But Ash had no idea. “I haven’t seen him.”

  “I bet Mickey Argyle has,” Hazel said curtly. “I bet Mickey Argyle had him watched from the moment he took that pretend photograph outside the Cardys’ house. But that’s not why he killed him. He killed him because of something Jackson discovered in the last twenty-four hours.”

  Ash could go very still when his attention was engaged. “Like what?”

  “Like what’s had us all puzzled—the link between Argyle and Jerome Cardy. We know there has to be one. I think Nye Jackson found it.”

  “And Argyle killed him because of it.” Ash reached a decision. He put his book down and tried to steer Hazel toward the front door. “You have to leave. Now. Leave here; leave Norbold. Go and stay with your father. It’s not safe for you here.”

  Hazel blinked. “Me? What have I done?” Then she saw it from Argyle’s viewpoint. “Apart, of course, from telling IPCC that his tame policeman facilitated the murder of a twenty-year-old boy who’d somehow displeased him. Yes, I see what you mean.”

  “There’s no one to protect you now,” warned Ash. “The people at Meadowvale have shut you out. Argyle would have hesitated at taking on the local police, but now he’s wondering if he needs to think of you as police anymore. You’re alone and you’re vulnerable. Getting rid of you would serve both Argyle’s needs and Sergeant Murchison’s.”

  “This isn’t Chicago! Things like that don’t happen here.” But even as she said it Hazel knew that she was wrong. The evidence was there. Jerome Cardy was murdered in a police cell at the behest of Norbold’s last gangster; and a man’d who made it his business to find out why was lying in the morgue at Norbold Royal Infirmary. Of course she was a target. She’d dared to suspect the unthinkable. If Argyle’s handy little setup was under threat—if he was in danger of losing his insiders at Meadowvale, and the freedom and power they bought him—it was her doing.

  If she were to disappear now, the possibility that she’d been neutralized by Argyle might not be the first thing IPCC thought of. They knew how difficult things at Meadowvale had become for her. They knew Fountain had put her on suspension. They’d wonder if she’d run away with her tail between her legs because the whole thing had suddenly got heavier than she ever expected. If she’d let her imagination run away with her, and was only now realizing how slight her evidence was and how unlikely she was to be vindicated.

  Ash saw in her eyes when the understanding fell into place. He nodded. “If you disappear, they’ll all think you had second thoughts and couldn’t face admitting it. They’ll finish the investigation, they’ll have to, but it won’t be much more than a paper exercise if they think the whistle blower has cut and run. They’ll rap some knuckles, tell Mr. Fountain to tighten up his procedures, and in all probability that’ll be that.”

  “That’s what’ll happen if I bugger off to my dad’s place, too!”

  “Maybe. But you can come back from…” He raised an expectant eyebrow.

  “Byrfield,” Hazel told him “It’s near Peterborough.”

  “From Byrfield. You can’t come back from the foundations of Mickey Argyle’s kitchen extension.”

  For someone who, for four years, had rationed his words like a smoker finishing his last packet before quitting, Gabriel Ash had an unexpected facility with them. The picture they painted hung before Hazel’s unblinking eyes. This wasn’t an exercise she was involved in, a challenge to her deductive powers, or even a moral dilemma, but something that could get her killed. Something that had already claimed two innocent victims would have no difficulty claiming another. She was twenty-six. This had the potential to stop her from reaching twenty-seven. Unless she got out, and got far, far away right now.

  Her voice stumbled. “I can’t go to my father. Anyone could find me there.”

  “All right. Go somewhere you’ve never been before. Go pony trekking in Snowdonia. Take a Mediterranean cruise. Anything. Go, go now, and don’t leave a trail. You can phone me to see if there are any developments. I won’t phone you. I don’t want your number.”

  Their eyes met and neither was prepared to look away. She knew exactly what Ash was saying. That he didn’t want to be able to betray her if Argyle hurt him.

  Finally Hazel understood that the damaged man in front of her knew more about these things than she did. That he’d operated at a level that made the apprehension of disorderly drunks and the confiscation of the occasional machete seem trivial. His experience, his expertise, made her look like a school monitor. But for the atrocity visited upon him, Constable Best would never have heard Gabriel Ash’s name until it appeared on an Honors List for undefined services to the nation.

  He had a clearer idea what to expect than she had. It didn’t matter if he talked to his dog: if he talked to her, she had to listen. And not just to what he said but to what he didn’t want to say. Hazel let out a slow, careful breath. “If it’s not safe for me to stay here, it’s not safe for you.”

  Ash tried to make light of it. “I’ll be fine. Nobody cares what I think because nobody believes what I say.”

  “Argyle’s already tried to grab you once. He knows who you are. He knows you were there when Jerome was murdered.”

  “I don’t think he’ll try to kidnap me again.”

  “I don’t think he’ll try to kidnap you again, either,” retorted Hazel sharply. “Things have moved on from there. He’s not taking any more chances. That’s why Nye Jackson’s dead. If Argyle deals with both of us, he has nothing left to fear.”

  Ash tried for a confident grin. He looked like a schoolboy telling fibs to his teacher. “Patience will look after me.”

  Hazel looked at the dog. Then she looked back at Ash. “Bulletproof, is she?”

  Ash swallowed. “Probably not. What do you suggest?”

  “That we both leave. All right”—she anticipated his objection—“that all three of us leave. Now—as soon as you can pack a bag. We’ll find a motel and book in under a false name, and we’ll stay there until it’s safe to come home.”

  “Er…” Hazel thought for a moment that it was the idea of booking into a motel under an assumed name with a young woman that was making him hesitate. Because he still thought of himself as a married man. But it wasn’t that. “I don’t think a motel…”

  She realized where he was going before he’d finished the sentence, and rolled her eyes to the ceiling in a God give me strength! kind of way. “No, you’re right. A motel might not take the dog. So we’ll look for a farm cottage, maybe, or a caravan park. We’ll find something. Look at it this way. The harder we have to hunt, the harder it’ll be for Argyle to find us. We’ll leave no trail for him to follow. I’ll let IPCC know what we’re doing, but nobody else—and after I’ve talked to them I’ll dump the phone and buy a new one. We have to be very, very careful. We have to think of everything. If we do that, we’ll be safe.”

  “For how long?”

  “As long as it takes.”

  He persevered. “As long as what takes? Hazel—how do you think this is going to end?”

  She hadn’t actually got that far. “I suppose, one of two ways. If we’re not careful enough, it ends with both of us dead, Barking Mad Barclay in Broadmoor, and the file on Jerome’s murder closed. If Argyle can’t get to us, it ends when someone gets to him.”

  “Who? Fountain? IPCC?” The problem with that was that Mickey Argyle wasn’t IPCC’s problem, and Johnny Fountain had been trying to get him for ten years, without success.

  “He killed Jerome Cardy! He killed Nye Jackson. They’ll pull out all the stops—they’ll have to.” Hazel was trying very hard to believe it.

  “Only if they see the connection. There’s no more evidence that Argyle is responsible for Jackson’s death than there was tying him to Jerome’s. I know they didn’t believe what I told them. If they dismiss what you told them as well, there isn’t much of a case left. We could be in that farm cottage a long time.”

  “We’ll convince the
m,” said Hazel doggedly. “We have to. No offense, but I’m not spending the rest of my life in a rented cottage in Leicestershire with you and Patience.”

  Ash nodded as if he understood. “Fair enough. Only, why Leicestershire?” He was already pulling a battered suitcase out from under the stairs.

  “There’s a lot of nothing in Leicestershire. Easy to get lost.”

  CHAPTER 22

  “WELL—THIS is nice.”

  It wasn’t. It was a dump. It smelled of rodents and damp bedding, and they were to find that the nose had it in both cases.

  But the cottage offered something that none of the others they’d passed could: total anonymity. If they’d tried to rent a property from an estate agent, they’d have been asked to prove who they were and a record of that would have existed on a computer. What exists on one computer can be accessed by another, if the operator is clever enough, and a man who could hire both killers and policemen could certainly hire a computer geek.

  This run-down little hovel, hardly better than animal housing, had been home more likely than not to some elderly farmer’s unmarried sisters until the last of them died, leaving the overflowing gutters to meet the rising damp halfway up the stairs and the farmer’s eldest son with a barely habitable property to let out until probate could be finalized. He’d made the TO LET sign with some paint he had left over from doing his cow shed, and seemed astonished beyond measure when someone came to his door to express an interest. He didn’t ask them to prove who they were. It was enough that they offered him cash.

  “I’ll get a fire started.”

  Hazel was still looking around in horror and incredulity at where she was proposing to spend the next weeks or months, or possibly the last days, of her life. Mrs. Poliakov’s, or even the station house, seemed like gracious living by comparison. There were three bedrooms upstairs, each with a single bed that hadn’t been changed since its last occupant left feetfirst. Dust bunnies played in the corners of the rooms when she opened the doors. “Sorry … what?”

  “It’ll seem better once we’ve got a fire going.”

  “No, it won’t!” she cried, despairing. “It’s a dump!”

  “I’ve stayed in worse. I’ll see to the fire. Why don’t you drive into town and get some sleeping bags, food, and a kettle. There are pans in the kitchen.”

  “Call me fussy,” said Hazel grimly, “but I think I might buy some new pans, too.”

  “While you’re away Patience can make a start on the livestock.”

  Hazel shuddered and left.

  Oh I can, can I? said the white dog, looking down her nose at Ash.

  “Of course you can. It’s in your blood. Generations of your ancestors were bred for ratting.”

  Your ancestors used to hunt woolly mammoth, Patience observed pointedly. It doesn’t make you Mr. Self-Sufficiency. You don’t like seeing a fish with the head on.

  “Please,” said Ash. “Try. For Hazel’s sake. You might enjoy it.”

  Oh, all right. She got up with dignity and began sniffing along the skirting boards. And though she was in many ways a remarkable animal—probably—she was also a lurcher, and her pulse quickened at the ripe, musky smell that gathered in her nose, and the imminent prospect of a chase that would end in a sharp, damp squeak.

  * * *

  Hazel also wanted to buy a new phone. She drove through the first village she came to and on to the market town ten miles beyond. In between was almost nothing. A few farmhouses across the fields with no obvious way of reaching them; a tractor at work on the horizon; a woman on a horse, who turned and stared as if an unfamiliar car was a remarkable event in these parts. Hazel hoped she’d be able to find her way back to the cottage. If she didn’t, she thought Ash—miles from anywhere and without transport—would quietly starve to death.

  Once she had the new phone she used the old one to call Meadowvale. It took a minute to connect her to IPCC investigator Daniel Rossi; if it had taken a minute and a half, she’d have rung off. She didn’t want to make it easy for anyone to trace her call, even him. Perhaps she was taking caution to ridiculous lengths, but she didn’t want her famous last words to be, “I never thought of that!” When this was all over, they could laugh about the things they’d done that there had been no need to do. But only if they were still alive.

  She couldn’t tell from Rossi’s tone whether he believed what she was saying or not. She told him everything: everything she knew, everything she believed, everything she and Ash had worked out. “Nye Jackson was working on it, too. I think he’d got more than we had. I think that’s why he’s dead.”

  “Mickey Argyle.” Rossi’s voice was flat, expressionless.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Jackson found out why Argyle had Jerome Cardy killed.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” Hazel was forced to admit. Then a little of the old spirit stirred within her. “But if a small-town reporter could nail it in a couple of days, a squad of professional detectives ought to be able to work it out as well, sooner or later.”

  The silence lasted long enough for her to wonder again if he was trying to triangulate her location. Actually he was trying to classify her. He was familiar with police officers making mistakes, even stupid ones; he was familiar with idle officers trying to protect their pensions and dishonest ones trying to cover their backs; he was familiar with those who joined the police to Make a Difference (the capitals were integral), to Make the World a Better Place, to offer care and support to the unloved and the unlovable, who saw it as their duty to guide old ladies across roads whether they wanted to go or not. Hazel Best didn’t seem to fit any of these templates exactly, and it bothered him. He considered the possibility that she was simply a more straightforward person than he was accustomed to dealing with: good-hearted rather than a do-gooder, someone who was both pragmatic and principled. His head sunk low into his shoulders. That was all he needed. He was much more at home with people who lied to him.

  Finally he said, “Assuming there’s something to all of this, Constable Best, what exactly is it that you expect me to do?”

  Her response jolted him with its immediacy, its simplicity, and its magnitude. If she wasn’t a silly girl getting a kick from playing detectives, then she was laying a huge burden on his shoulders. A burden he’d carried before, to be sure, but one he’d half-hoped to shed when he took on a job that was half pencil pusher, half Gruppenführer.

  She said, “I expect you to keep me alive, sir. Me, and my friend Gabriel Ash. I want us to walk away from this. And I don’t think we will unless you can find out why Jerome Cardy died and put Mickey Argyle behind bars.”

  Daniel Rossi had been on the point of packing up for the evening. After Hazel rang off, he went on staring at the phone in his hand for a full minute. Then he spread the file once more across his borrowed desk.

  Hazel finished her shopping, dropped her old phone regretfully into a Dumpster, and drove back to the cottage. She had no idea if what she’d said to Rossi would do any good, but saying it had made her feel better. She’d put responsibility for their safety into better-paid hands than her own. There was no point worrying about whether she would come out of this with her job when she was by no means sure she’d come out of it with her life. The fact that she’d done the best she could was some consolation. As she drove she found herself humming the Monty Python classic “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.”

  She’d wondered if she should arrange a password with Ash, decided there was no point. If Argyle found them, a cottage door wasn’t going to keep him out, whether or not he knew the password. All the same, she was taken aback to find the front door not only unlocked but standing open. The white dog emerged from the tangled shrubbery, looking faintly embarrassed at having been surprised at her toilette.

  Hazel couldn’t see why the door couldn’t be both shut and locked, and Patience could wait to be let in like normal dogs. She went inside alone, loa
ded with carrier bags and sleeping bags, ready to tell Ash as much. What greeted her dried the words in her mouth.

  You can’t make a silk purse of a sow’s ear. But if you try this hard, what you get is arguably more valuable. Ash had spent every moment of her absence sweeping, scrubbing, dusting, ejecting the irredeemable, and tidying what was left into some semblance of a habitation. He turned at the sound of her tread, his gaunt face flushed with effort, shy and hopeful, as if unsure what her reaction might be. “Er—better?”

  Hazel put her shopping down where it wouldn’t spoil the effect. “Much, much better.” There was a lump in her throat. She steered Ash by the shoulders to the newly excavated sofa. “Sit down. I’ll put the kettle on.”

  She’d closed the front door as she came in. So she was surprised, as she carried the mugs through to the sitting room, to meet the white lurcher trotting down the hall toward her. Ash appeared not to have moved.

  “Did you let her in?”

  He shook his head. “She opens doors. She can close them, too, but you have to insist.”

  Hazel put the mugs down and went to close the door, again. She found herself studying the lever handle. Yes, it was possible for a tall dog to rear up, put a paw on it, and let its weight do the rest. It was possible that a dog could be trained to close the same door by rearing up on the other side. Perhaps the world was full of smart dogs who’d worked out that they need not stay in the rooms where they were left if they didn’t want to. And having opened a door, of course they’d prefer it to stay open. A closed door was always going to restrict a dog’s movement around the house, particularly if it was carrying something. The newspaper, perhaps, or its knitting … Hazel recognized just in time that her train of thought had been diverted down the siding named Surreal and she went back to Ash and the coffee.

  He was looking at her politely, as if he was waiting for a reply. Seeing the blankness of her expression, he repeated the last thing he’d said. “Did you get through to IPCC?”

  “Oh—yes. I talked to the guy who interviewed me.”