by Jo Bannister
Hazel’s voice was breathy, as if he’d knocked the wind out of her all over again. “You think there’s some doubt? You think you can do what you’ve done, and people find out about it, and you can still get away with it?”
The broad shoulders shrugged. “Maybe.”
“How?”
“If I can persuade you that what I did was right.”
In moments of stress Hazel Best occasionally lapsed to the kind of coarseness her late mother had disapproved of. She’d called it “common.” “Oh yeah, like that’s going to happen!”
“I am not a bad man,” said Chief Superintendent Fountain forcibly. “I am not a bad policeman. I did some things that weren’t in the manual. I did them because they were the lesser of the evils I was facing.”
Suddenly he seemed to run out of patience. “You’re such a child, Hazel! Such an innocent. How do you think I keep a town like Norbold safe? I do deals all the time—with Division, with the council, with the support services, with the taxpayers. I can wrap them up in cotton wool, so no harm will ever befall them, at a price no one could ever pay; or I can give them what they can reasonably afford and accept that sometimes it won’t be enough.
“So yes, I take shortcuts. Turning a blind eye to Mickey Argyle was one of them. I kept my end of town clean, and he looked after his. He kept the lowlifes under control, made sure they didn’t bother the nice people of middle England who pay their rates and don’t want to know what goes on at gutter level. Look at the figures. It worked. It saved lives every year. It saved lives, and pain, and fear, and money.”
He almost managed to make it sound reasonable. As if he’d held this debate with himself so often that he’d honed his argument until it sounded almost reasonable.
“You’ve no idea what Norbold was like ten years ago. Crime was out of control. People got hurt, or worse, for being on the wrong street at the wrong time. Even in broad daylight. Women saved their shopping till their husbands came home, so they’d have someone riding shotgun. Old people traveled in convoy to collect their pensions. Nobody was safe.”
“Nobody was safe because of people like Mickey Argyle!” exclaimed Hazel.
“Perfectly true,” agreed Fountain. “There were half a dozen major players at that time, probably twenty significant street gangs, and more one-man bands than you could shake a truncheon at. It would have taken the Met two years to clean it up. Nothing less would even have made an impact.
“When they told me to take a crack at it, I had three options. I could quail before the enormity of the task and take to drink, which is what my predecessor did. I could do my best with what I’d got, which meant throwing patrols at the center of town and never mind what went on in the rest of the manor. Or I could get myself some allies. I chose Mickey not because he was the best of a bad lot but because he was the biggest, meanest dog in town. When he barked, the other dogs cowered.”
If he was honest with himself—and Fountain had never lost the ability to be honest with himself, in the middle of the night with Denis snoring companionably beside him—it wasn’t just an act of desperation. There had been a kind of glory to it, too—a headiness, as of too much wine and brave talk. There’s a saying in India: “He who rides a tiger can never dismount.” But then you have to ask why people would want to ride a tiger in the first place. And the answer is: for the glory. For the sheer intoxicating splendor of doing something most people couldn’t do and wouldn’t dare try. Even if the beast wasn’t really tamed, even if you rode it only on its own terms, for a certain kind of man the admiration that earned was worth the price that deep inside himself he knew he would someday have to pay.
Except that Johnny Fountain still wasn’t entirely convinced that payday had arrived. The biggest obstacle to finding a way through this lay dead on the floor. Nothing would have bought Argyle’s silence if Fountain had broken their truce. The others were more of an unknown quantity. More honest, of course, appalled by what he’d done, but possibly also more open to reason. If he could find the key to each of them, he might yet secure their cooperation.
Paradoxically, Constable Best, whose snooping had brought him to this pass, might be the easiest to convince. “Hazel, try to see it from where I was sitting. Norbold was like a Wild West town after the sheriff’s been lynched. Nothing I did, nothing I had the manpower or the budget to do, made any difference. We arrested gang leaders, and the next rank down took their place. There was no end to them. Kids of eight and nine were carrying lethal weapons.”
He paused, remembering. Hazel watched him intently, and for the life of her she could not see a wicked man. “When I first thought of cutting a deal with Mickey, it was like a joke. But the idea wouldn’t go away. Because I knew it could work. I could give the silent majority of Norbold what they’d been begging for—the right to feel safe in their own town. And it wasn’t going to cost them anything, and all it was going to cost me was some self-respect. I’d tried to get Mickey and failed. Really, the only difference was that now I stopped trying.
“And credit where credit’s due,” said Fountain generously, “he kept his end of the bargain. He cleaned up the gangs by giving them a simple choice: line up behind him or quit. Once he’d tamed them, the only crime in town—if you leave out the odd drunken housebreaker and a bit of domestic violence—was his crime, and he kept it off my streets. Users and pushers still ended up dead sometimes. I’m not saying that’s a good thing, but it’s the life they chose—nobody forced them. Decent law-abiding people were off-limits. That’s what I achieved: that the vast majority of Norbold’s citizens could get on with their lives in peace and security.”
The man still, somehow, commanded respect. His argument did not. “Jerome Cardy was a decent law-abiding person! Nye Jackson was a decent law-abiding person. And actually,” snapped Hazel, “I am and so is Ash. Your friend Mickey was going to kill us both.”
“I know it got out of hand,” admitted Fountain. “Mickey took his eyes off the prize when it got personal. He said he wanted to drum young Cardy out of town and I agreed to help. Reluctantly. I thought it was better than having them deal with him in a dark alley some night.”
Alice couldn’t contain a peal of hysterical laughter. Fountain frowned his disapproval, as if she were a child cheeking her betters. “You don’t have to believe me. But that’s what I thought. That if it was going to happen, it was better happening at Meadowvale.
“Mickey set it up. Not the accident, which was nothing more than that. But when he heard that Jerome had been arrested, he made arrangements to have Barclay arrested, too. All he wanted from me was to make sure they ended up in the same cell. It didn’t seem that big an ask. I saw to it after the speeches had finished. When I heard later that the boy was dead, I was as horrified as anyone.” His scowl dared Hazel to call him a liar.
“So what should I have done? Owned up? Would that have made Norbold a better place? Mickey wouldn’t have come quietly. He and his crew would have shot huge holes in the thin blue line. I’ll tell you something else.” Under its mane of white hair the craggy face leaned forward urgently. “We play this wrong now and there’ll still be mayhem. With Mickey gone, there’s a power vacuum that every dog he kept at heel will want to fill.
“What do you suppose will happen if I go, too? The only hope of keeping the lid on Norbold right now is me. You talk to IPCC and I guarantee you that tonight all hell will break loose. People will die—lots of people. And some of them will be little thugs taking on bigger thugs, but some of them will be ordinary citizens and some of them will be police officers. Hazel—do you really want that on your conscience?”
“You talk…” Her voice cracked and she had to try again. “You talk as if there’s an alternative. As if we can go back to Meadowvale and carry on like nothing happened!”
“No,” Fountain agreed candidly, “of course that’s not an option. I’ll resign. I’ll take responsibility for what happened to Jerome—it’s my station, it was always my responsibility—and
I’ll leave. But before that I’ll make sure nobody takes over where Mickey left off. That can be my legacy. To put things right before I go. To leave a town at peace instead of under anarchy. Wouldn’t that be better? Honestly?” It was a tribute to the sheer power of his personality that she found herself wondering if it wouldn’t.
It was necessary to say something before he took her silence for consent. “What about Alice? What can you offer her to begin to make up for the harm you’ve done?”
Fountain pivoted slowly, his glance sweeping over the forge like the beam of a lighthouse. “I can’t bring her fiancé back. But I can make all this”—he indicated the dirty workshop and the dead man on the floor—“go away. Give me the gun. Nobody need ever know that Alice shot her father. I shot Mickey Argyle. He tried to kill me, I got him first. No one will even question it. And Alice doesn’t have to go through the rest of her life with the gutter press haunting her every move.”
No one said, “Yes, that would be best,” but no one told him what he could do with his suggestion, either. The silence had to mean they were considering it. Against their better instincts perhaps, but considering it nonetheless. For Alice. For Alice who’d lost everything, who wasn’t to blame for any of this but who was going to pay for it, one way or another.
Fountain wasn’t thinking about Alice. Fountain was trying to see his way out of this mess with his reputation, and if possible his pension, intact. It was true what he’d told Hazel—he’d gone into it with good intentions. He’d climbed onto the tiger’s back thinking it would take out the other tigers for him and then he could vanquish it. He still didn’t feel that being unable to complete the task made him a bad man.
All Fountain could think about was Denis. How she would face up to his disgrace. Bravely, of course, but God, he’d have given anything to save her that. He’d have given his life. Widow’s weeds at a police funeral would at least have left her some dignity, and she’d never have known that he let her down. If it all came out, Denis was going to be so disappointed. He thought she’d stand by him—in fact he knew she would—and he thought she’d speak her mind only once, only to him, and after that she’d be the dutiful, supportive wife for as long as necessary. But Fountain had no illusions about what it would do to her.
Unless these three people could be persuaded that there were better ways for this to end than with him in the dock and photos of Alice Argyle all over the tabloids. He thought Constable Best was at least considering his proposition. Alice, he thought, would do what the others told her to. Which left Gabriel Ash. Rambles With Dogs.
Johnny Fountain smiled at the battered man. “You’re thinking I’ve nothing to offer you. Nothing to set against the satisfaction of showing a town that humiliated you that you were cleverer than its senior police officer and its top gangster put together.
“But you’re wrong. You see, Mr. Ash, I know things. I may know more about what happened to your family than anyone else. Some of it because I got a brief from Division when you came back here, and some because Mickey Argyle knew another side to the story. I doubt if anyone else in the country knows as much as I do, and that’s only because I made a pact with the devil. How’s that for poetic justice?
“What do you want most in the world, Mr. Ash? To know what happened to your wife? To know where your sons are? What I can do for you is tell you things nobody else can—”
In the confined space, and the breathless hush into which Fountain was dropping his serpent words, the last gunshot sounded like cannon fire.
CHAPTER 31
ONLY WHEN JOHNNY Fountain fell over, no surprise on his face this time, just a dreadful blankness, did Hazel see Argyle behind him, propped up on one elbow, still aiming his gun with infinite care as if, in the clouding mists of his mind, he couldn’t be sure if he’d hit him the first time.
Ash let out a wail of terrible anguish, the howl of a tortured dog. Fountain was dead before he hit the floor, but Ash wouldn’t believe it. Couldn’t bring himself to believe it. For most of four years he’d had no hope. Then someone had dangled the promise of information in front of him, and before he’d even had a chance to respond, the promise had balloon-burst in front of him. If Fountain was dead, what he knew had died with him.
Ash fell on him and thumped frantically at his chest, numb to the pain of his broken fingers. “Breathe,” he cried, half furious, half weeping. “Breathe, damn you!”
Hazel reacted with a combination of instinct and training that precluded the need for thought. Before the sound had finished echoing around the forge, she’d caught Alice by the elbow and swung her outside the door. Then she turned back.
In training college they’d taught her the art of triage. It didn’t matter that Ash was breaking apart in front of her. It didn’t matter that Johnny Fountain was dead or dying on the floor. It mattered that Argyle was still somehow conscious and still pointing his gun, and where Fountain had been a moment earlier, now there was Ash.
Hazel had half a second’s notice of what was going to happen next. She didn’t hesitate. She brought up the hand holding Fletcher’s gun from due south to due west and fired.
Police trainees tend to divide into two camps: those who dread having to make the life-and-death decision and those who can’t wait. On the whole, the former make better police officers. Hazel had been one of the former. What astonished her now was how easy it was, how uncomplicated by morality or compassion or simple human reticence, to make that decision when the moment came. To shoot a bad man in order to protect a good one. There was no thought in her mind of disabling Argyle. He needed stopping, right now, and she aimed the gun that fortune had provided her with at the center of his forehead and blew his brains out.
* * *
“Hazel, he knew! What happened to them. He knew what happened to them!”
Now that it was over, Hazel’s hands were trembling. She tried to keep her voice steady. “Gabriel, calm down. I don’t think he knew anything. Only how to play with your emotions. He needed you to think there was something he could offer you, that’s all.”
“He said he knew where the boys are! Not where they died, not where they’re buried—where they are!” There was something deeply pathetic about his eagerness to believe. “Doesn’t that mean they’re alive?”
Hazel put the gun down carefully on the anvil and put her arms around him, though whether for his comfort or her own, she could not have said. “All he knew was what came down to him from Division—that you were living in Norbold again, and why, and that you might need an eye kept on you. I’m sorry, Gabriel. I don’t think he knew anything that you don’t know. He was trying to use you.”
“But…” He so wanted to argue with her. To convince her that Chief Superintendent Fountain had put together snippets of information garnered on both sides of the fence and come to an understanding that no one else had. But before he was a grieving husband and father and a broken man he was a security analyst, trained to know when he was hearing the truth, and what she said made sense. At the end, Johnny Fountain had used every weapon at his disposal to save his professional life. And sometimes you don’t even need a weapon to make someone do what you want—you just have to make them think you have one. He thought Hazel was probably right. The tears flowed from his swollen eyes down his bloody cheeks.
With DI Gorman and an ambulance finally on the way, Hazel took her companions outside, away from the abattoir inside the forge, and settled them in Fountain’s car.
Ash looked doubtfully at the cream leather upholstery. “I don’t want to bleed on it.”
“Who’s going to care?” asked Hazel brutally. “Listen to me, both of you. We have maybe ten minutes to decide what we’re going to say. And the only way it can be other than the unvarnished truth is if we all agree.”
Ash looked as if he hadn’t quite taken in anything that had happened since Johnny Fountain turned his world upside down again, and he wasn’t doing any better with this. “Other than the truth? Why…”
Hazel breathed heavily at him. “You know why. Fountain knew why. Because if we tell how it happened, I’m going to walk away undamaged and you’re going to walk away undamaged, and Alice is going to have to convince the authorities that the father who murdered her fiancé was prepared to murder her, too, so it was self-defense when she shot him. Even after that her story—her tragedy—is going to be tabloid fodder for months. She’s nineteen years old, Ash! She’s been through enough already. What I’m asking is, can we save her from going through any more?”
Finally his thought processes seemed to engage. “How? How would it work?”
Hazel nodded, relieved to have got through to him. “We change a few salient details. Mr. Fountain offered to say that he shot Argyle—well, we take him up on that. I think the old bastard owes us a favor. So everything happened exactly the way it did until Argyle pulled his gun. Then Fountain snatched Fletcher’s gun from Alice and shot him. Then he gave it to me to preserve as evidence. I’ll put his prints on it, then some more of mine over the top.”
It wouldn’t just mean manhandling the corpse; it would mean lying. “But you killed Argyle?” Ash was making sure.
“I did kill Argyle. We’re editing Alice out, that’s all. If we’re agreed that we should, and that we can all stick to the amended version.”
Alice said numbly, “I meant to kill him. When I shot him, I intended to kill him.”
“I know,” said Hazel softly. “And I don’t blame you, and I don’t think anyone else would, either. The fact remains, you didn’t kill him—I did. I was doing my job, and I’ll answer for it to anyone who asks. There’s nothing to be gained by saying it was you, not Fountain, who fired the first shots.”
“I don’t want anyone else paying for what I did.”
“It won’t cost me a thing. And it won’t cost Mr. Fountain anything, either, and it wouldn’t even if he was alive.”
“Then…” The girl wrestled her head around it. “All right. Mr. Fountain shot him. I took the gun off Andy Fletcher, and Mr. Fountain grabbed it when my father produced his.” Hazel could hear the burden lightening in her voice; but also the uncertainty that remained. The hope that could still be taken away.
