Deadly Virtues

by Jo Bannister

  Fountain bent over deliberately and finished cutting Ash free. He didn’t think Argyle would shoot him for it, and he was right. Nor did he think Ash would leap to his feet, arm himself with some leftover horseshoes, and change fundamentally the balance of the standoff, and he was right about that, too. Gabriel Ash couldn’t have got to his feet to save his own life or anyone else’s. All the same, he was glad to be free. There’s no pride in being lashed to a lump of iron while people hit you.

  Argyle watched with impatience and disbelief. He couldn’t see the dilemma. From where he was standing, the way ahead was clear. “Okay. I know this hasn’t been easy for you. It hasn’t been easy for me—it was my daughter fell for that black buck. None of it would have been necessary if it wasn’t for her. But let’s be sensible now. All we need to do is tidy up and no one will be any the wiser. I’ll deal with the loose ends”—he waved the gun casually at Ash—“and pack Alice off to some associates overseas until she’s prepared to be reasonable, and that’s it: problem solved.

  “All you have to do is walk away. Go to the funerals, say how sorry you are, say you’ve got your best people on it. We both know they’ll get no further than they have before. I don’t mind being suspected of all sorts as long as there’s no proof. Okay? Two bullets is all it’s going to take.” He looked at Ash disapprovingly. “I doubt this one even needs a bullet. Bursting a paper bag should see him off.”

  “And Constable Best?”

  Mickey grinned. “Best you don’t ask.”

  Half of Chief Superintendent Fountain was appalled and half was actually tempted. Appalled, because however much he understood the theory of people like Argyle, in practice the complete disregard for human life still had the power to stagger him. Tempted, because when Argyle could lay it out in a couple of sentences, he had to acknowledge that it was possible. Simple, even. He didn’t have to put his life on the line. Life could go on pretty much the same, except for Gabriel Ash and Hazel Best.

  “No,” said Johnny Fountain.

  Argyle’s narrow brows lowered. “I could always make it three bullets.”

  “You want to shoot me, Mickey? You really want to shoot me? Not a probationer Whoopsie who’s already out of the picture, but a senior police officer? You know what happens to people who kill cops. They never get away with it. They might think they have, for a while. But every cop in the world has a vested interest in catching them, and the odds are just too great. One day in Vienna or Venezuela you run a red light and it’s game over. That’s why, as a general rule of thumb, your people leave my people alone. You know this, Mickey. I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know.”

  Silence confirmed this.

  “Take what I’m offering and go,” said Fountain. “There’s no other game in town.”

  Finally Argyle seemed to be thinking about it. About getting out with what he could carry before even that door closed. It would mean leaving behind a lifestyle he’d spent ten years perfecting. But if he could take the profits with him, he could start again somewhere. Somewhere nicer than Norbold. Somewhere ripe for the picking.

  It wasn’t what he wanted. If he’d been ready to retire, he could have done it at any time, and—crucially—at a time of his choosing. But you can’t always have everything you want, even if your name is Mickey Argyle. Sometimes you have to settle for second prize. If he stayed, he’d be risking it all. And there was no need. He’d already achieved everything he wanted, made as much money as he could spend, put the fear of God into as many people as any one man could hope to. He could go now and enjoy the fruits of his labors with, so to speak, a clear conscience.

  Nobody told Mickey Argyle what to do. In one game-changing second his mouth twisted into an ugly shape and the gun came up. “Go to hell, Mr. Fountain.”

  Gunfire in an enclosed space fills the room, echoing off every hard surface. One shot can sound like a volley, two like a battlefield. Johnny Fountain’s eyes opened wide in surprise. It had been a risky strategy; he’d known that. Still he never expected it to end this way.

  On the floor, still leaning against the anvil, Ash flinched and squeezed his eyes tight. He didn’t think he was the target this time, but he lacked the particular kind of courage to stare down the muzzle of a gun in order to see where it was pointing.

  Mixed in with the gunfire was another bang as the door of the smithy hit the wall, and suddenly there were more people in the workshop than there had been and—what with the echoes still bouncing around and the smell of cordite—for a moment he couldn’t work out who any of them were.

  One of them was Alice Argyle, holding a handgun as though she’d been taught how, a dirty unkempt nineteen-year-old girl pointing a gun as if she meant it. Another was Hazel Best.

  For three attenuated seconds nothing changed. Mickey Argyle kept his gun on Johnny Fountain; Alice Argyle kept hers on her father. Chief Superintendent Fountain stayed on his feet; Gabriel Ash stayed on the floor. Hazel looked from one to another of them, wondering who needed her help most, or most urgently, or was past benefitting from it, and whether—simply by moving—she’d break the spell and someone would die in front of her.

  After three seconds Mickey Argyle let out an oddly gentle sigh, lowered his weapon, then slowly folded to the floor at Fountain’s feet. There were two neat holes in his chest.

  Alice Argyle kept pointing her gun at him, as if at the least provocation she would empty it into his dead body. “He killed Jerome.” She spoke through clenched teeth.

  “Yes,” agreed Hazel. “Give me the gun. Alice—give me the gun.”

  Finally Fountain’s brain accepted the evidence of his senses and understood that he hadn’t been shot. He made a conscious effort to relax all the muscles holding him rigid. “All right. Is anyone hurt?” Then he looked at Argyle, at Ash, at Alice. He looked again at Hazel. “Okay, silly question. Was anyone else hit?”

  By now Hazel had Fletcher’s gun. He’d given it up because, bottom line, Alice was her father’s daughter and Fletcher was trained to jump when an Argyle said “Jump.” He hadn’t known what she intended to do with it. He hadn’t asked himself. The Rat had run at that point, but Fletcher was waiting out by the cars, ready to do what he was told by the first Argyle to emerge from the forge.

  Hazel’s left arm was around Alice, trying to still the shaking of her slender young body. She said tersely to Fountain, “We need an ambulance, and we need DI Gorman here right now. Get him on the phone, find out how long he’ll be.” It didn’t strike either of them as odd, that she was issuing instructions to a man who outranked her by a whole career.

  Gabriel Ash, beaten bloody, weak as a kitten and dizzy as a lush, mumbled through broken lips, “Detective Inspector Gorman isn’t coming.”

  Fountain looked at him. Hazel passed him a tissue, though what good she expected him to do with it wasn’t clear. “We called him from the cottage.” She was keeping her voice very calm, very level, for fear of what would happen if she didn’t. “He’ll be here any moment.”

  “No,” said Ash, “he won’t.”

  Hazel thought he hadn’t understood. She explained as simply as she could. “We talked to him before we left the cottage. Mr. Fountain knew about this place. He guessed Argyle would have you brought here. DI Gorman was going to get crewed up and meet us. Really,” she added with a touch of asperity, “he should be here by now.”

  “Who called him?” asked Ash.

  “Mr. Fountain.” She looked at the big man standing very still in the middle of the concrete floor. When she said it again, there was a slightly different inflection in her voice. “Chief Superintendent Fountain did.”

  Ash used the tissue to clear himself a little vision. He tried not to notice how much of his blood came away on it, concentrated on Fountain. “Do you want to tell her or shall I?”

  Fountain said nothing. There was a slightly puzzled half smile on his big craggy face. Hazel looked at the pair of them over Alice’s shoulder. “Tell me what?” Her voice
didn’t sound like her own. “Tell me what, sir?”

  Fountain shook his head. He blew out a gusty breath of relief. “I’m not sure. I think he’s a bit … disorientated. It’s no wonder.” He reached out. “I’ll look after Alice. You see what you can do for Ram—Mr. Ash. And I’ll call Dave Gorman. Maybe he’s having trouble finding us. Or maybe he never got the message.”

  “Message?” echoed Hazel. She frowned. “I thought…”

  Fountain took Alice from her and walked the girl to the open door, where she didn’t have to look at what she’d done. “It’s all right, you know,” he was saying reassuringly. “What you did. You’re not in any trouble. He was going to kill me. You saved my life.”

  Hazel crouched beside Ash, still looking uncertainly at her chief superintendent. “I thought…”

  “You thought he’d spoken to DI Gorman?” Ash looked terrible, and his damaged mouth slurred the words, but his mind was working better than hers. “He told you that?” She nodded. “He didn’t call anyone. He wanted to sort it out himself. He needed to sort it out himself.”

  “Why?”

  There was a longish pause. He seemed to be wondering if she had to know. But of course she did—it all had to come out now, and Hazel Best had more right to know than anyone. “Because Sergeant Murchison wasn’t the one in Argyle’s pocket. He was.”

  Hazel didn’t tell him he was crazy, because she knew he wasn’t, and didn’t suggest that he was concussed, because he probably was, but she didn’t think it was that, either. “Explain.”

  “They had a deal. Him and Argyle, going back years. Fountain would leave Argyle alone if Argyle would help him tidy up the rest of Norbold. Stop his own people moonlighting, I suppose, keep an iron hand on his end of town, pass on any information that came his way as long as it didn’t impact on his own business.

  “That’s how Mr. Fountain made such an impact in a high-crime area. He turned it into a low-crime area within a couple of years, and he kept it that way until today. Except for the drugs. Didn’t it strike anyone as odd that he could get on top of everything from mugging to murder but the drugs scene just seemed to go from strength to strength?”

  “I … you can’t … nobody’s a hundred percent successful,” managed Hazel.

  “That’s true. But it’s a lot easier if your prime suspect is helping you on the sly.”

  Hazel straightened up slowly. She was looking at Fountain. “Is this true?”

  The chief superintendent gave a disparaging sniff. “Hazel, you know who he is. You know what he is. For pity’s sake, recognize a fairy story when you hear one.”

  Her gaze turned back to Ash. “Gabriel, you do know what you’re saying? That it wasn’t Donald Murchison who helped Argyle to murder Jerome Cardy, it was Mr. Fountain.”

  “Yes,” said Ash simply.

  Fountain gave a snort that was half a chuckle. “Hazel, you know where I was that night! In the Town Hall, getting the Freedom of Norbold from the mayor with four hundred of the great and good looking on.” As alibis go, it was a pretty good one.

  “Were you in uniform?”

  Fountain smiled. “Dinner jacket and black tie.”

  That wasn’t a lie; it would be too easy to check. Ash stepped mentally around it. “It’s two minutes’ walk from the Town Hall to Meadowvale. If Constable Best asks your wife, will she be able to say you never left her sight all evening? Didn’t go to the gents, didn’t nip out for a cigar? Ten minutes was all it would take. Once Argyle got word that Jerome was in custody, he sent you a message to say Barclay would be on his way in shortly. All you had to do was make sure they were put in the same cell.

  “It wasn’t Sergeant Murchison I saw outside the cell door, it was you. You took off your dinner jacket and your tie, and you looked like every other officer on duty that night. I saw a white shirt, dark trousers, shiny shoes, and I heard you say a few words. The chances of my recognizing you were minuscule.”

  This time Fountain said nothing. And that wasn’t right. Perhaps he didn’t feel the need to explain himself to Ash, but he owed Hazel better than to leave her wondering if the man she’d admired all this time, the man she’d worried about letting down, had feet of clay all the way up to the armpits. Was corrupt to his soul, and responsible for the brutal death of a twenty-year-old boy. If he’d had anything to say to her, he’d have said it then.

  She found herself speaking aloud the thoughts that were chasing one another’s tails in her head. “Even alone, you could have done everything that Donald Murchison and a couple of mates could have done. You could have let yourself in the back way without anyone knowing you were on the premises. The CCTV would have picked you up, except that the geek”—she couldn’t remember his name—“had told everyone not to fiddle with it or it would die. You fiddled, it died, and there was no record that you were ever there that night. Until Sergeant Murchison called to say there’d been a DIC and you hurried back to deal with it.”

  “He wanted you out of Meadowvale,” Ash told her tiredly, “not because you were barking up the wrong tree but because you were too close to the truth. You knew someone at Meadowvale had a hand in Jerome’s murder. If Sergeant Murchison had managed to clear himself, you’d have wondered who else it could be. You were still thinking about it after everyone else thought they knew what had happened. That made you dangerous.”

  Finally, terribly late if he’d been innocent of what he was accused of, Johnny Fountain turned—his whole big body pivoting—and met Hazel’s stare. He spoke very deliberately. “You know this is nonsense, don’t you? You must know better than to listen to a man who hasn’t been on nodding terms with reality for the last four years.”

  But Hazel was still thinking, and the more she thought the more the facts slotted into place. “How did Argyle know we were at the cottage?”

  Fountain shrugged. “You must have left a trail.”

  She shook her head, no doubt in her mind. “No. The only people I spoke to before Argyle’s crew turned up were Rossi and you. You think IPCC had my call traced? The only one with a reason to do that was Argyle’s glove puppet, and I never spoke to Donald Murchison. Anyway, he doesn’t have the authority. It was you. I asked you for help, and you told Mickey Argyle where to find us.”

  Still something didn’t fit. “Is DI Gorman involved as well? Because even if you didn’t talk to him, I know I did. After the gorillas arrived at the cottage and before they ran me down, I told him we were in trouble.”

  Fountain said nothing, left her to flounder.

  Ash was looking at the chief superintendent. “You lied to Gorman as well. He called you after Hazel called him. You put him off—said you were closer and you’d get some local help to deal with it. That’s why he never turned up at the cottage, and why he hasn’t found this place. He doesn’t know he should be looking.”

  CHAPTER 30

  “YOU FOUND ME OUT cold in the lane,” recalled Hazel. Her eyes were wide with shock, but now her brain was in gear. “You said you’d called DI Gorman, but it was him who called you. And you told him everything was under control. You didn’t want him showing up at the cottage, any more than you want him showing up here. You’re not here to save Ash, or Alice. You’re here to make sure that no one who knows about your deal with Mickey Argyle is ever going to talk about it.”

  Another pregnant pause, then Johnny Fountain said, “That’s right.” He was looking at the penknife still gripped in his hand. “With this.”

  When he saw that none of them realized it was a joke, he let out a gruff, despairing little laugh. “Oh, God help us all! I’m a policeman, for pity’s sake! I don’t go around killing people.”

  Hazel found her voice first. “But people die because of the kind of policeman you are. Jerome Cardy died because the crime returns mattered more to you than the fate of an innocent individual. Nye Jackson died because he found out about Jerome and Alice Argyle.”

  She was still aching for him to deny it. Perhaps even now they’d got it wr
ong. Perhaps when he’d finished teasing, he’d put Hazel, and the world, straight. She could bear for him to think her stupid if she could avoid knowing he was corrupt. This was a man she’d respected long before she met him, a copper’s copper. And not a paper tiger, more style than substance, who wanted the accolades without the hard slog necessary to achieve them.

  Fountain sighed. “I’m sorry about young Cardy.” He looked at the girl in his arms, and didn’t try to stop her when she—carefully, watching his face—moved away. “Truly. I’d no idea things would go that far. I thought he’d get away with a broken nose, maybe a cracked rib. Mickey told me about him and Alice, said he wanted to mark his card. That’s all. That’s all I agreed to, and I only agreed to that because I thought I could keep matters from escalating. All right, I was wrong, but give me credit for good intentions.

  “Jackson came as a complete surprise. I didn’t know his death wasn’t an accident. I suppose you’re sure?” No one dignified that with an answer, so he shrugged. “I’m sorry about him, too, although the man was becoming a nuisance. I suppose it’s what you risk if you want to be an investigative journalist.”

  The sheer impertinence of that struck Hazel to the heart. “He was just doing his job! No, he was doing your job. He was trying to find out why a twenty-year-old boy…”

  And there her voice petered out, foundered on the thing he’d just said. She felt the last of the color drain from her cheeks. He’d dashed all her hopes in a few words. She’d been right, and Ash had been right, and Fountain wasn’t even going to deny it. Argyle had had a mole at Meadowvale since before Hazel came to Norbold, and it was the chief superintendent.

  Ash reached a decision. It was time he got off the floor. He labored as far as his knees, clinging to the anvil; Fountain helped him the rest of the way. He stood swaying, his head low, his face a butcher’s mask. “You realize, of course, you’re going down for this.”

  There was something supercilious in Fountain’s gaze. “You reckon?”