Deadly Virtues

by Jo Bannister

  He wasn’t sure what to do. He could wait for the evening papers, but none of them published in Norbold and might relegate the story to a couple of paragraphs on an inside page. He could wait for the next edition of the News, but it only published twice a week, and the Monday issue was mostly full of sport reports.

  Or he could do nothing. This was in many ways his default option. These days, not many things struck Ash as important enough to disturb the routine he wore like a suit of armor but still trivial enough that he might be able to do anything useful about them. The death of Jerome Cardy certainly qualified on the first count and failed on the second. If there was no point exposing himself to scrutiny, interrogation, and derision, he would rather not do it. He had never courted attention. These days he’d do almost anything to avoid it.

  But a man had died. At least, Ash thought he had. Something terrible had happened—he knew that from the silence that had descended on the police station, which even the hurried footsteps, the clipped commands, and, soon afterward, the nearby wail of an ambulance siren somehow did nothing to dispel. A somber-faced officer had asked him to leave, and there seemed to be some urgency, because he was collecting Ash’s scant belongings while Ash was still fumbling to tie his shoes.

  And even if he was right and the young man he’d briefly shared his cell with was dead, the tragedy would hardly have disturbed the isolation he’d crafted around himself, except for one thing. Jerome Cardy had known he was going to die. Had asked for Ash’s help, not even to protect him but simply to remember. To bear witness.

  Memory was one of the things that gave Ash problems these days. Remembering when he needed to, and forgetting when he should.

  He looked at the dog. “What do you think? We should leave well enough alone?”

  She didn’t need to reply. The severity of her expression—nobody can look down their nose at you like a lurcher—was answer enough.

  “Oh, all right.” Ash sighed. “I suppose…” Inspiration struck. “I know. Let’s find … thingy.…” The search for the young policewoman who’d helped him the previous night wasn’t going to be made easier by the fact that he’d forgotten her name.

  CHAPTER 6

  ALONE AMONG Norbold’s police, Hazel Best had no idea what had happened after she’d been sent home. Groggier than she’d been willing to admit, she’d gone straight to bed and slept through until ten on Thursday morning, when she woke with a headache and a black eye.

  She regarded her battered reflection in the bathroom mirror. “Memo to self,” she told it wryly. “Many potentially violent situations can be defused by taking a casual and friendly approach. But not all of them.”

  She made coffee, found there was no bread for toast, had the coffee anyway, then headed for the shops.

  As she emerged, a bag in each hand, she saw them: as distinctive a pairing as Laurel and Hardy, Gabriel Ash and his white dog wandering across the road, apparently oblivious to the traffic maneuvering around them. Fortunately Patience was on a lead. It ensured that Ash reached the curb safely.

  Hazel dropped her shopping onto the backseat of her car, then moved to intercept them. She pinned a reassuring smile in place in case he didn’t recognize her without her uniform. “Hello. How are you this morning?”

  He stared as if she’d grown an extra head overnight. She remembered the black eye. “Don’t worry about that. A little misunderstanding.” She was searching his face for some sign that he knew who she was. “Constable Best—Hazel. We were talking yesterday evening, after you were attacked in the park. I went back later, but there was no sign of the little thugs who did it. How about you? Any ill effects?”

  He was still staring at her, his face pale against the shock of dark hair. “You don’t know, do you?”

  “Know what, Mr. Ash?”

  “Someone died in the police station last night. Killed—murdered. I was there. I was talking to him half an hour before.”

  Hazel felt the blood drain from her face and her eyes, or at least one of them, saucer. She reminded herself that this was Gabriel Ash, Rambles with Dogs—in less politically correct times he’d have been described as the village idiot. She didn’t think he was lying. But just because he believed it, that didn’t make it true. She started groping for her phone. “I’d better call in. See if they need me…”

  If they’d needed her, they’d have called her. But if they were dealing with that ultimate disaster, a death in custody, they might have forgotten she even existed. She wasn’t part of the Meadowvale furniture yet. Whether she was needed or not, she ought to offer her help, if only to man the phones and free up people who would be of more use.

  Assuming there was any kind of truth in any of this.

  She put the phone back in her bag. “Mr. Ash, do you know who it was who died? Do you know who killed him?”

  “He was just a boy. Nineteen, twenty.” Ash’s deep-set eyes had gone distant. “I never saw the man who killed him. But I heard him. He was so … angry. Mad with rage. The boy was yelling for help and I was yelling, and Patience was barking, and the police were there in just a couple of minutes, but it was already too late. By the time they got the cell open and the crazy man off him, the boy was dead.

  “I think,” he added carefully. “That’s what’s someone said. But they sent me home, so I never heard for sure. I came out for a paper, hoping they’d have it, but they haven’t. And I need to know, you see.” There was a catch in his voice and his eyes were deeply troubled. “If he’s getting better in hospital, then it was probably just a coincidence. But if he’s dead…”

  His voice petered out, drained by emotion. Hazel thought he’d finished. But a moment later it came back stronger and he finished the sentence. “If he’s dead, there are things I know about it that I have to tell someone.” He was looking at her as if he thought that she might do.

  Hazel swallowed. If she wasn’t careful, she was going to be the laughingstock of Meadowvale—the probationer who believed Rambles With Dogs when he told her he’d witnessed a murder.

  But what could she do? Even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day. Maybe there was something in what he was trying to say. She couldn’t dismiss it as a figment of a deranged imagination without at least checking with Sergeant Murchison. “Tell you what, Mr. Ash,” she said. “Let’s go to the police station right now. You and Patience get in the car, and we’ll go and find out exactly what’s happened to who. Yes?”

  After a moment he nodded. “Yes. Thank you.” And then, as a kind of postscript: “Ash.”

  Hazel smiled. “Yes, I know, Mr. Ash.”

  He shook his head. “Not ‘mister.’ Just Ash. Most people call me just Ash.”

  Not at Meadowvale they don’t, thought Hazel as she let him into the car. “Is that what I should call you?”

  “Most people do,” he repeated. “Except my therapist and, of course, Patience.”

  Hazel Best froze, an ice sculpture of a woman halfway into a car. Everything he’d said to her in the last five minutes, all the fears that had raced through her mind, came back to mock her. Rambles With Dogs. They didn’t call him that just to be unkind.

  She got herself unlocked and finished climbing into the driver’s seat, though no longer with the same sense of urgency. “What does Patience call you?”

  “Gabriel. Or sometimes,” he confided with a tiny, rueful grin, “you hapless idiot.”

  * * *

  He hadn’t imagined everything. Jerome Cardy was dead. Dr. Wellington, the police surgeon, who saw him first, was pretty sure, but that didn’t stop the paramedics who arrived soon afterward from throwing him into the back of the ambulance and taking off with lights flashing and sirens wailing, because sometimes you can be sure and still wrong. But none of the high-tech equipment in A&E was able to detect any signs of continuing existence.

  The doctor who signed the death certificate checked with Sergeant Murchison before completing it. “A man did this? You’re sure? An unarmed man? The last time
I saw anything like it, it was a farmer who’d lost an argument with his bull.”

  All the time the sergeant was talking, quietly, in the corridor, where they could have a little privacy, Hazel Best was turning a papery shade of pale. “And this was the guy who knocked me into the flower bed?”

  Sergeant Murchison—who shouldn’t still have been at Meadowvale but was and showed no signs of leaving—nodded grimly. “Robert Barclay. The man you tried to arrest armed with nothing more than a winning smile while Wayne Budgen watched from behind the squad car. He could have killed you, Hazel. And that is not a figure of speech.”

  She swallowed. “I know. Wayne said we should wait. Just for the record, though,” she added in a spirit of fair play, “I asked him to stay back. Wayne. He wasn’t hiding, he was trying to avoid making things worse.”

  “Yes?” grunted the sergeant. “That worked a treat.”

  He’d had a bad night, and things weren’t going to get better for a while, and the last thing Hazel wanted to do was add to his woes. There remained the question of Gabriel Ash. “You remember the guy I brought in earlier? Who got beaten up in the park?”

  “Rambles? What about him?”

  “He’s outside in my car. He says he was there when it happened.”

  “He was. Till I needed his cell for Barclay.”

  “He says the boy knew something was going to happen to him.”

  “I imagine he did. He’d been arrested for leaving the scene of an accident and trying to give us the slip.”

  “I mean something terrible.”

  Murchison frowned. “That’s silly. Hazel, something like last night happens once in a career. If you’re unlucky. There was no reason for Jerome Cardy to think anything bad was going to happen to him. Except…” He considered a moment. “He was a law student, wasn’t he? Well, that’s it, then. If he’d ended up with a record, his career would have been over before it started.”

  “I suppose,” she said, a little doubtful but still mainly relieved. “Ash must have got it wrong. He was pretty shaken up.”

  “Yes,” agreed Sergeant Murchison kindly. “I dare say being as dotty as a dalmatian doesn’t help, either.”

  She asked if there was anything useful she could do, but he couldn’t think of anything. “Mr. Fountain’s called Division. They’re organizing a Fatal Incident Inquiry. They’ll want to ask how you came to bring Barclay in, and his demeanor at the time.”

  “Yes, of course,” said Hazel, a shade absently.

  When she said no more and her brow creased in a troubled frown, Murchison prompted her. “What?”

  “Sarge—was this my fault? If I’d done as Wayne said and waited for backup, and we’d brought him in without getting him all riled up first, would Jerome Cardy still be alive?”

  He stared at her in astonishment. “No. Hazel, no. You did nothing wrong. Hen, this is what we do. We pick up the pieces. Which means, something was smashed before we got involved. We try to keep the broken glass off the streets, but we can’t glue it back together again. I’ve known Robert Barclay since he was a nipper. All that time I’ve known, and everyone here has known, that sooner or later he’d kill someone. It was that inevitable. Don’t fret yourself. This would have happened regardless of anything you did or didn’t do. It would probably have happened regardless of anything I did or didn’t do.”

  So he was feeling guilty, too. Perhaps they all were—everyone at Meadowvale. Perhaps it was right, or at least healthy, that they should.

  Hazel made an effort to pull herself together. She gave him a grateful smile. “Okay. Well, I’ll leave you in peace. I’ll be in this evening. If you need me before then, you have my number.”

  When he saw her returning, Gabriel Ash went to get out of the car. But she waved him back. “Let’s go somewhere quiet and I’ll tell you what I know.”

  Her first thought was to take him to the park, to talk in the leafy quiet and paradoxical privacy of an open space with members of the public constantly passing. Then it occurred to her that he might not feel the same way about parks, at least this one, as she did. Instead she turned down toward the canal, found a tiny lay-by with a picnic bench and a view over the still brown water to spring green willows growing along the far bank.

  “Okay,” she said, turning the engine off. “It’s not good news.”

  She told him what had happened. She told him that everyone had done their damnedest to save Jerome Cardy’s life but that it had been in vain. He’d suffered too much damage.

  Ash heard her out in silence. She could almost see his mind churning behind the deep-set dark brown eyes, but he didn’t interrupt her, neither to confirm what she’d been told nor to contradict. Even after she’d finished he went on thinking about what she’d said for several minutes.

  She waited patiently, using the time to study him. Hard to put an age on him, she thought. Late thirties? Tidied up—the thick black curls trimmed neatly, the battered jeans and sweater replaced by something smarter—he might have looked younger. Or he might be older than she thought: that look of earnest concentration gave him a slightly childlike air that made it hard to get a handle on him. Also he looked underfed. He had the bone structure to carry a certain amount of bulk, but nothing hung off his frame except the rough clothes. If he didn’t look quite like a tramp, at least he looked like someone understudying the role.

  Finally he said, “This isn’t right.” He sounded worried and slightly offended—like, Hazel thought, someone from a culture where they don’t have jokes watching someone do stand-up. As if all the words were familiar but the meaning eluded him. Perhaps, she realized with a flash of insight, that was exactly what having psychological problems was like: turning up at a party where everyone but you knew all the latest slang.

  “This isn’t right,” Ash said again, insistently. “What happened wasn’t an accident. He knew it was going to happen—the boy, Jerome. He knew he was going to die—long before he was put in the other cell, before this other man was even brought in. How could that be?”

  “It couldn’t,” agreed Hazel gently. “Ash, you were hurt. You were concussed and asleep, then all this happened. You must have some of the details wrong.”

  “No.” He seemed absolutely sure at first, and then, as he thought about it, less so. “I don’t think so. He knew something bad was going to happen to him. He wanted me to remember.”

  “What exactly did he say?”

  But she was right—a lot of the details were lost in the fog. Ash ran a distracted hand through his thick hair. “I … I’m not sure. He said it wasn’t about the car crash. That was just an excuse. He said I had to tell someone when I got out and he didn’t.” His eyes found Hazel’s. “That’s what I’m doing. I’m telling you.”

  She smiled reassuringly. “Yes, you are. And we’re going to make sense of it. Did he say anything else?”

  Ash screwed his face up in the effort to remember. “Something about Shakespeare.”

  She wasn’t expecting that. “What about Shakespeare?”

  “Something about a dog. He had a dog. He called the dog after…” He lost the thread, shook his head helplessly.

  “He called his dog after a character from Shakespeare?” suggested Hazel. “Macbeth? Caesar?” She gave a tiny grin. “Bottom?”

  But Ash wasn’t ready to see the funny side of any of this. “I don’t know. And I don’t know why he told me.”

  “Because you had your dog with you. He was just making conversation.”

  But that wasn’t how Ash remembered it. “He woke me up. To tell me this stuff. To tell me to remember. And to mention the fact that he used to have a dog called Bottom?”

  It didn’t seem very likely. But then, none of it did. And the most probable explanation was that an unquantifiable amount of it was a by-product of the man’s troubled mind. Some of it happened, some of it didn’t; some of it he was remembering just wrongly enough to put a completely different slant on it.

  There was no more Hazel
could do but take him to wherever he called home, put the kettle on—if he owned a kettle—bid him good day, and draw a line under the whole regrettable incident. There was nothing to be gained by trying to reconcile what Gabriel Ash thought he remembered with what she’d been told by Sergeant Murchison.

  It wasn’t just that Ash would make a terrible witness. There are, as every police officer knows, plenty of people who see something happen, remember what they’ve seen, report it accurately, and still make terrible witnesses in court because they fall apart under the most rudimentary cross-examination. You nurse people like that, help them as much as you can, hope a jury will recognize the difference between a nervous witness and an unreliable one; and if the worse comes to the worst, remind yourself that their evidence enabled the investigating officer to understand what had happened even if he couldn’t always prove it.

  But Ash wasn’t like that. His mind was fundamentally disordered. Even if he had heard something significant, how could anyone hope to sieve it out from the noodle soup simmering away in his brain? The sensible thing to do—the only thing to do—was to dismiss him as a witness in the same way that she’d dismissed the dog. They might both have seen or heard something useful, but there was no way of accessing the knowledge.

  “Let’s get you home,” she suggested. “If I find out anything more, I’ll let you know.”

  CHAPTER 7

  THE HOUSE CAME as a surprise. At first Hazel thought he’d brought her to the wrong place—that he’d forgotten where he lived. Then she thought the house must have been divided and maybe he had a bed-sit in the basement. But no. Gabriel Ash—Rambles With Dogs—lived in a double-fronted stone-built Victorian house at the pricey end of Highfield Road. Even after the bottom fell out of the housing market, it must have been worth a small fortune.

  “You’ll come in?”

  She’d had no intentions of doing so, but nothing nobler than curiosity made Hazel follow him up the front steps and into the hall.