by Jo Bannister
“Exactly.” She turned to Ash. “Gabriel?”
Except for physically, Ash wasn’t even in the car. He was back in the forge, with Johnny Fountain offering to tell him about his sons. Recalled by the sound of his name, his body jerked. “What?”
“A kind lie or a harsh truth? Where do you stand on this?”
Ash blinked the better of his eyes. “If we lie, where does the lie stop?”
“Right there,” said Hazel with certainty. “If you’re wondering if I’m prepared to perjure myself to protect Johnny Fountain’s memory, the answer’s no. I don’t care who knows. IPCC can worry about it, Division can worry about it. If they want to sit on it, they can. If they want it out in the open, they can issue a press release. I don’t care. I’m asking if you’ll help me protect Alice. One lie, to protect a nineteen-year-old girl who’s done nothing wrong.”
“You’re a police officer. I don’t think you’re supposed to tell even one lie.”
“No,” she agreed, “I’m not. But I’m going to, unless you tell me you can’t.”
He thought for a moment. “I didn’t see who shot Mickey Argyle.”
Hazel gave a tight smile. “Good man.”
“No, really—I didn’t see. A lot of what happened I didn’t actually see.”
“Okay,” said Hazel. “Stick to that, and don’t speculate, and we’ll be fine. And if either of you finds yourself in difficulties, remember the magic words.”
“M-magic words?” stammered Alice.
“I don’t know. Stops an interview in its tracks every time. Don’t speculate, don’t answer questions you haven’t been asked, don’t try to be clever, and any time you find yourself on shaky ground the answer is I don’t know. It leaves the investigator nowhere to go. He may think you’re lying through your teeth, but in order to unpick your story you have to give him a story to unpick. I don’t know gives him nothing.”
Alice said hesitantly, “You don’t have to do this. If you’re going to get into trouble…”
“I’m not going to get into trouble,” said Hazel firmly. “I’ll tell Mr. Gorman that the old sparring partners ended up shooting each other and he’ll believe me. Why wouldn’t he? If I was going to lie about anything, it would be about the shot I fired, and I’ll be quite candid about that. I had no choice, so I did it.”
“I wouldn’t want you sacrificing your career for me,” insisted Alice, shy and stubborn at the same time. “I’ve nothing to hide. Not my relationship with Jerome, not how it ended, and not the fact that I shot the man responsible. I don’t know if it was self-defense. I think he was a danger to me, but that’s not why I killed him. I killed him for Jerome.”
“You didn’t kill him,” Hazel reminded her. “I did.”
“I did my level best,” said Alice.
* * *
Hazel heard the police cars coming and walked to the gate to meet them. But before they arrived, something else caught her eye. A very weary, very footsore, very dirty white dog was limping up the lane toward her, its tongue hanging around its knees.
“Oh dear God,” murmured Hazel, and hurrying forward she bent and gathered the dog up in her arms; staggering a little under the weight because although it was leggy, it was also muscular. “Gabriel! It’s Patience.…”
Alice, of course, had no idea where the dog had come from. But she saw how Ash reacted, and she got out of the car and went to the front seat so Hazel could put the animal in beside him. Patience put her head on his knee, and Ash stroked her grimy fur with anxious, damaged hands and bowed his head over her. His tears invested her with fresh new spots.
“She’s all right,” Hazel stammered, trying to reassure him. “I mean, she’s worn-out, of course she is, and her feet’ll take time to heal, but she’ll be all right. Gabriel, she’ll be fine.”
“She followed me,” whispered Ash. “When they took me from the cottage. She followed me here.”
“She must have run for twenty miles,” said Hazel, scarcely able to credit it.
The first of the cars arrived and she tore herself away. After a moment Alice went, too. Ash was left cradling his exhausted dog, both of them bleeding gently on the expensive upholstery of a dead man’s car. “Are you?” he whispered. “All right?”
No, said the dog, I’m knackered. My feet are killing me and I’d sit up and beg for a cold drink. How about you?
“Had better days,” mumbled Ash.
I can see.
CHAPTER 32
THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON, when she visited him in hospital, Hazel thought Ash looked both better and worse. Worse, because those bits of him that weren’t bandaged were swollen beyond recognition and his bruises were at their Technicolor height; better, because he looked cleaner and more cared for than he usually did. He lay propped on hospital pillows, his curly dark hair freshly washed, his splinted hands on the sheet folded over his chest, and for a moment she wasn’t sure if he was asleep or if his eyes had finally swollen shut.
Then he gave a slow smile. “Hi, Hazel.”
She returned the smile, hooked up a chair. “Hi yourself. How’re you doing?”
“Oh, you know. Okay.”
“You look terrible.”
“You should see the other guy.”
“I did,” said Hazel, baldly enough to stop further conversation for a few moments. Then she shook off the memory. “Patience sends her love.”
For a second he looked surprised. “You heard…?” Then he realized it was a figure of speech. “Oh. Yes. Is she all right?”
“She’s fine,” said Hazel. “I took her to the vet last night, just to make sure. Then she slept for twelve hours straight and woke up ready to bring down a moose. Her feet are a bit scabby, but I’m putting cream on them and she’s on the mend.”
“It’s good of you to take care of her,” Ash said quietly.
There had been four options, but it didn’t take long for Hazel to dismiss three of them. The dog wasn’t ill enough to stay at the vet’s, and it would have been poor reward for her loyalty to book her into a kennel. Hazel’s landlady could probably have been talked into taking a temporary boarder, but what the dog really needed were the familiar comforts of her own home. Hazel had packed a bag and moved in with her.
No, that wasn’t right. She was starting to think like Ash. She’d packed a bag and moved into Ash’s house. The dog was a dog, not a tenant.
Hazel shrugged. “No problem. I’ll stay with her till you’re back on your feet.” She sniffed. “It’s not like I’ve much else to do.”
He frowned. At least, that extra twisting of his misshapen face was probably a frown. “You’re not going back to work?”
“Not for now. I’ve talked to IPCC, and I’ll be seeing them again, but nobody’s willing to give me the okay to return to duty. I shot someone. Even if he deserved it, they’re worried I might have some kind of a psychological reaction and they don’t want me ripping my clothes off and singing ‘Nellie Dean’ in front of the courthouse.” She vented a weary sigh. “I’m not sorry. I’d only put a dampener on the gossip in the canteen if I went back now.”
“But you will do? When the dust has settled?”
“Yes, of course,” she said, sounding more confident than in fact she felt. “I might look for a transfer at some point, but I should go back to Meadowvale first, just to show I’m not afraid to. That I’m not the bad guy here. That their old mate Johnny Fountain was.”
“You should go back,” Ash agreed softly, “but not yet. Give yourself time to heal.”
“That’s good, coming from you.”
He tried to shrug without hurting himself. “Don’t underestimate the effect all this will have had on you. You’ve been through the wringer, too. You ended up having to kill someone. If nothing else had happened—if you hadn’t been hurt, and threatened, and cut adrift by your colleagues—you’d have needed time to come to terms with that. Don’t rush the process. Take all the time you need before you start easing yourself back into the groo
ve.”
Hazel nodded slowly, touched by his concern. “What about you? What are you going to do with the rest of your life?”
For a moment she thought Ash was going to lie to her. His gaze slid off around the room. But then it came back and he met her eyes with the bruised, narrowed slits of his own. “I know what you think, and you’re probably right. That Fountain was blowing smoke in my face. That he didn’t know anything about my family that isn’t a matter of record.
“But Hazel—what if it was true? He was on friendly terms with a target criminal: What if Mickey’d heard something that never made it into the official record? What if they talked about me, after it turned out I was in the cells that night? What if Argyle told Fountain what he’d heard?”
Hazel knew how much he wanted it to be true. But she didn’t think it was, and anyway she didn’t think it would make much difference. “Suppose for a moment that you’re right. I don’t think you are, but suppose. Whatever they knew died with them. Don’t let it torment you when there’s no way you can ever know what it was, or even if there was something.”
Ash didn’t accept that. He couldn’t—it mattered too much. “There are things we can assume,” he said stubbornly. “Why would Mickey know anything about piracy? If Fountain knew something, and if he got it from Mickey, Mickey got it from somewhere much closer to home than where these munitions were hijacked. The attacks happened in Africa, but I don’t imagine that’s where Mickey got his information. So maybe these people don’t just work out of Somalia. They work here, too.”
“Norbold?” exclaimed Hazel, astonished.
“Well, England anyway,” amended Ash. There was a light like coals burning in the slits of his eyes. “Somewhere Mickey Argyle might have bumped into them. And that means, somewhere they can be found. Some place where they can’t just disappear into the desert.”
Hazel thought for a minute. “Listen to me, Gabriel. We’ll talk about this again. When you’re better, and I’m feeling a bit more normal. I know I’m not going to talk you out of it, so if you want to try and follow it up, I’ll help you. I’m going to have time on my hands for a while—we can go over what you know and what Argyle could possibly have found out.”
Her voice hardened. “But promise me you won’t get your hopes up. You’re not going to find your wife and your sons. You may conceivably find out what happened to them, even who was responsible, but you’re not going to find them. They’re gone. Do you understand that?” She knew she was being cruel. She also knew that she owed him the truth.
He gave a long, sad sigh. “Yes.”
“All right, then. We’ll get you home, get our breath back, and then you can tell me what you want to do. Who we could talk to, what we could ask. Yes?”
“Yes,” Ash said again. He managed a tiny, grateful smile.
“One thing you can do right now,” said Hazel, changing the subject, “is tell me where you keep your can opener. You’ve got a cupboard full of dog food and no way of getting into it. I ended up making us stew for dinner.”
Ash refrained from saying that the reason the cupboards were full of dog food was that he very often shared his own meals with Patience. It hadn’t struck him as particularly odd. “Try the top drawer of the hall bureau. I was using the bottle opener bit.”
Hazel made a mental note. “You do know that most dog food comes in ring-pull cans, don’t you?” she asked tartly.
“Patience prefers the other sort.”
“Why am I not surprised?” Hazel couldn’t however stop herself from smiling. She got up to leave, then on an impulse leaned forward quickly and kissed his forehead. “Get better. She’s missing you. Well—we both are.”
He was so surprised at the kiss that she was at the door before he called after her. “Anything else you can’t find, ask Patience. She knows where everything’s kept.”
Hazel paused and looked over her shoulder at him. “As a matter of fact,” she said stiffly, “I did ask Patience. She was no help. She must have forgotten about the bottle opener.”
“Either that,” murmured Ash to her departing back, “or she fancied your stew.”
Also by Jo Bannister
Death in High Places
Liars All
Closer Still
Flawed
Requiem for a Dealer
Breaking Faith
The Depths of Solitude
Reflections
True Witness
Echoes of Lies
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JO BANNISTER began her career as a journalist after leaving school at sixteen to work on a weekly newspaper. She was shortlisted for several prestigious awards and worked as an editor for some years before leaving to pursue her writing full time. She lives in Northern Ireland, and spends most of her spare time with her horse and dog, or clambering over archaeological sites. Her last thriller, Death in High Places, was nominated for the RT Reviewers’ Choice Best Book Award.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
DEADLY VIRTUES. Copyright © 2013 by Jo Bannister. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.minotaurbooks.com
Cover design by David Baldeosingh Rotstein
Cover photograph by Joan Vicent Canto Roig/Getty Images
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Bannister, Jo.
Deadly Virtues / Jo Bannister.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-250-02344-5 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-02345-2 (e-book)
1. Police—England—Fiction. 2. Mystery fiction. I. Title.
PR6052.A497D37 2013
823'.914—dc23
2012042105
e-ISBN 9781250023452
First Edition: March 2013
