Deadly Virtues

by Jo Bannister

  What senior reporter Nye Jackson couldn’t get was someone to talk to him about what had happened. Chief Superintendent Fountain declined on the grounds that the matter was now in the hands of the Independent Police Complaints Commission, while the IPCC cited the danger of prejudicing the inquiry. He tried hanging around the back way in to Meadowvale, in the hope that someone on the way home after the night shift would give him a throwaway because he was standing between them and their bed, but it didn’t happen. The matter was too serious, and much too close to home.

  Contrary to the impression given by popular television, most newspapers enjoy a good working relationship with their local police, because it works better for both parties than being constantly at loggerheads. Whatever Mrs. Fountain thought about him, Nye Jackson was a regular and well-tolerated visitor to Meadowvale Police Station, and could usually count on getting what he needed, officially or otherwise.

  By the same token, the Norbold News was the main point of contact between the local police and the population it served, and Fountain knew how to use a cooperative newspaper to serve his own ends. It was a symbiotic relationship in which each party benefited, and also recognized the benefits conferred on the other.

  But not this week. This week men and women Jackson had known for years—people he’d been drinking with, whose children’s achievements he’d chronicled and whose parents’ centenaries he’d recorded—pretended not to know him and hurried past to their parked cars, leaving him standing in a soft April mizzle with his collar turned up and his ginger hair plastered to his head. He felt like a beggar. Can you spare a fact, gov? Nothing big, just a little loose-change fact from your back pocket? I’ve got a hungry newspaper to support.…

  Which left the boy’s family. Jackson hated interviewing the newly bereaved, but it was part of the job, and you just had to get on with it. What surprised him, when he was younger and easier to surprise, was that usually they were glad to see him. They wanted to tell their story. They didn’t want a death that had devastated their family to pass unnoticed in the wider world. They wanted to answer his questions and they felt better, just a little, when they had.

  Not that their feelings, or indeed his own, were that important. There’s an unspoken deal that a journalist makes with the readership of his newspaper. They’ll buy—in both senses of the word—what he’s selling them, but it has to be worth what they’re paying. If it’s the sort of newspaper that promises the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth—there are still one or two around—then that’s what the customers expect. If it’s tits and bums, that’s what they expect. And if it’s “Aliens Ate My Mother-in-Law (says Luscious Linda, aged 19),” then Linda had better be both luscious and not a day over twenty, and shrinking her to two columns at the bottom of page four because some boffin somewhere has found the answer to world hunger will never be forgiven.

  The Norbold News didn’t do tits and bums. It only did Luscious Linda if she’d actually achieved something—runner-up in Miss West Midlands, perhaps, or a wobble-on part in The East End of Coronation Farm. It reckoned on doing the truth, as much of the truth as it could prize out of the lying bastards who ran the Town Hall, and nothing but the truth unless it was really entertaining. The denizens of Norbold and environs knew pretty much what to expect when they put their money on the counter, and would not have been happy if they’d got only those stories that the subjects wanted told, that the reporters wanted to cover, and that the editor knew he could print without getting his tires slashed.

  So when he gave up on calling in some of the favors he was owed at Meadowvale, Jackson went back to his car, wiped the rain off his face with his handkerchief, and headed for Windermere Close, where the Cardys lived.

  He was turning the car—journalists, like bank robbers, know the value of a smooth getaway—when a man emerged from the house he was heading for. His first thought was that it was Geoff Cardy on his way out, and he wondered whether to hurry and buttonhole him, and risk his being annoyed or too short of time to give a meaningful interview, or let him go and come back later. But it wasn’t Cardy. As he turned, Jackson saw that the curly black hair masked not only a white face but one that he recognized. He gave a muted whistle. “Now, what are you doing here?”

  It was a puzzle anyone might have set themselves. But reporters don’t pose rhetorical questions; they collar someone who ought to know the answer and stand there until they get it.

  Nye Jackson had his car door open when the black 4x4 with the tinted windows passed him, close enough that he had to jerk back inside. He scowled, and had a few choice comments ready to hurl after it, when he noticed what it was doing. It was turning at the end of the street and coming back. Like a journalist; like a bank robber. But it wasn’t him it was stalking. Jackson went very still, watching.

  Gabriel Ash reached the pavement and turned down Windermere Close, back toward town. His shoulders were hunched and his expression remote. Impossible to judge what might be going on behind the sunken, distant eyes. He didn’t notice Jackson waiting in his car. He didn’t notice the big black 4x4 cruising up quietly behind him.

  The first Ash knew, two men were getting out beside him—neither of them the driver: the car was still moving slowly forward—taking an arm each and very calmly, very professionally heaving him onto the backseat before he could raise a word of protest.

  His first thought was that it was the police. He needed to make another statement about the last hours of Jerome Cardy—or rather, to repeat the first because someone had judged it not worth space in a filing cabinet and dropped it in the bin instead. But a quick survey of the men either side of him dashed that notion. These were not police officers. They were big enough, he already knew they were strong enough, and they were plainly accustomed to manhandling people who didn’t want to go with them. But they wouldn’t look at him. They stared straight ahead, and when he turned to look at the one on his left, the one on his right jabbed him sharply in the ribs with his elbow. Ash was still bruised from the encounter in the park, and maybe a man who cared more about the impression he created wouldn’t have gasped and doubled up like that. But it was meant to hurt, and a policeman would at least have warned him first.

  His second thought, which arrived a split second after the elbow, was that the same thing that had brought him to Windermere Close had brought the black car and its occupants, that they were somehow tied into events that had already cost a young man his life.

  But there was no time to dwell on that, because Ash’s third thought, which drove everything else out of his head, was that this was what had happened before. This was how people disappeared in broad daylight, and were never seen again, and nobody saw or heard anything. Only now, finally, he was going to find out what happened. Where the disappeared disappear to.

  Nye Jackson wasn’t sure what he was looking at, except that it was nothing good. It was odd enough coming here to speak to the Cardys, only to see Gabriel Ash leaving the house as he approached it. Watching him lifted bodily off the street by what he had no difficulty in recognizing as Mickey Argyle’s rent-a-thugs kicked it into a whole extra dimension. Which was what, unless his reporter’s instincts were starting to slip, they proposed to do to Gabriel Ash. Jackson had no idea why, but perhaps it didn’t matter why. What mattered—perhaps the only thing that mattered—was what Jackson was going to do about it.

  He could have stayed in his car, kept his head down, and called 999 after the big black car had passed. That’s what most responsible, law-abiding citizens would have done. It’s what law-abiding citizens were advised to do. And Jackson was one of those, even though it sometimes suited him to forget. But he was also a reporter, and that gave him a proprietary interest in events that normal people consider somebody else’s problem.

  He’d never been a front-line war correspondent, never donned a flak jacket—or a burka—and been waiting at the presidential palace when the NATO troops arrived. But certain obligations go with the job wherever you d
o it, and one is lifting your head above the parapet to see what’s happening on the other side. Jackson knew well enough that in these precise circumstances it was dangerous lunacy to draw attention to himself. But his reporter’s pride wouldn’t let him duck down behind his dashboard until the danger had passed, like an ordinary civilian.

  He threw the car door open, oblivious now of his paintwork, bounded into the street as the 4x4 wiggled to avoid him, and had his phone out before both feet had hit the tarmac. “Smile for the paper!” he yelled as the car surged past, and nothing in his demeanor gave away his deep suspicion that he’d let the battery get too low for taking photographs.

  When the brake lights came on, the import of what he was doing hit him like a train and the expression of reckless exhilaration fell off his face, leaving his mouth open and his eyes wide with alarm. But only for a second, and there was no one to see. Then the back door of the black car opened and Gabriel Ash rolled off the seat and into the gutter.

  For a moment, struck dumb by amazement and pride, Nye Jackson thought he’d probably managed to prevent a murder. He didn’t know what to think when Ash, road dirt staining his best clothes, hauled himself to his feet and tried to run after the accelerating vehicle, yelling, “Don’t Go! Don’t Go! Come back!” as if his heart was breaking.

  CHAPTER 11

  BY THE TIME Jackson reached him, Ash had ground to a hopeless halt, bent over, hands on his knees, great sobs racking the gaunt frame somewhere inside his good suit. Jackson thought it was shock, but it wasn’t; it was grief. His dark eyes were vast with it, the tears washing tracks through the grit on his face.

  When Jackson reached out an uncertain hand, Ash turned on him like a tormented dog. “Why? Why would you do that? Four years I’ve waited. Four years I haven’t known if they were alive or dead. Finally they come for me, too, and … you…” He ran out of words, overwhelmed by emotion. His body shook and sagged, and he leaned against a lamppost and very slowly slid down it until he was sitting on the pavement again.

  There weren’t many people in Norbold who’d have been able to make any sense of what Gabriel Ash was saying, why he was distraught instead of relieved, and hurling bitter accusations at the man whose quick thinking had saved him. Nye Jackson was one of those few, and even he didn’t know much. He knew Ash had been a government adviser in one of the less well-publicized departments, that four years ago he’d lost his family, and that that wasn’t a euphemism.

  He bent down, forcing Ash to look at him. “Listen to me,” he said, the Welsh accent harsh in his voice. “This is nothing to do with what happened before. Those men didn’t have any news for you. They work for Mickey Argyle. I don’t know what they wanted with you, but take my word, it was nothing good. Nobody wants Mickey Argyle taking an interest in them. If you’d gone with them, they’d have hurt you. Or killed you. Do you understand? They would not have taken you to your family. They don’t know anything about your family. If you’d gone with them, they’d have killed you.”

  Finally a little intelligence seemed to creep back into Ash’s eyes. He swallowed, looked down the road in the wake of the vanished car. “Who’s Mickey Argyle?”

  Jackson let loose his breath in a gusty, impatient sigh. “Jesus, don’t you know anything?” Then, remembering who he was talking to, his tone softened. “No, I don’t suppose you do know much about Norbold’s criminal underworld. You haven’t been getting out much since you came back, have you?”

  Ash looked puzzled. “Do you know me?”

  Jackson straightened up, offered his hand. “I know who you are.” He introduced himself. “I work for the local paper.”

  “Then you know…” Jackson nodded. “It was in the paper?”

  “Mr. Ash,” said Jackson patiently, “it was in every paper in the country, for about ten days. Since then … well, there really hasn’t been anything to add, has there?”

  “No.” Gabriel Ash took the proffered hand and stumbled to his feet. He looked again in the direction that the car had sped away. “Then … what did they want?”

  Jackson shook his ginger head. “I can’t begin to imagine. But then, I can’t imagine what you were doing at the Cardys’ house, either.”

  Ash told him. He saw no reason not to.

  Jackson felt himself staring, and blinked. “You were the—” And there he stopped, mentally editing. In its next edition his paper would use the expression “learning disabled itinerant,” which was ugly to the nth degree but more politic than “thicko tramp,” which is what Jackson wrote when he got the story first thing on Thursday morning, just too late for a stop-press. “The other guy in the cells that night. The police press office didn’t give us a name. They just said Cardy was originally in with someone else before he wandered off.”

  He looked across the road at the house he’d come to visit. “Well, I suppose that had better wait. We’ll get you down to the cop shop, tell them what happened.”

  As they were walking up to the front door at Meadowvale, Hazel Best was walking down. She stopped at the sight of Ash’s muddy clothes. “Whatever’s happened to you now?”

  “I’m not quite sure,” Ash said honestly. “I think someone tried to kidnap me.”

  “What?”

  “Who’s Mickey Argyle?”

  Hazel had heard the name, though it wasn’t engraved on her heart as it might have been if she’d been stationed here for longer. “He’s involved in the drugs trade in Norbold, I think. Why, what have you done to annoy him?”

  Ash shrugged, bemused.

  “Mickey Argyle is the drugs trade in Norbold,” explained Jackson. “He was before Johnny Fountain rode into town, and he will be after he rides out. He’s the one stain on your chief’s escutcheon.”

  “And he tried to kidnap Ash?” Any more doubt in her voice would have called him a liar.

  “Well, they weren’t driving his car with the personalized number plates, but I’m pretty sure they were Argyle’s gorillas. One of them I’ve seen before—his name’s Fletcher—and the others came in the same boxed set.”

  “What did they want?” She was asking Ash.

  “They didn’t say.”

  Hazel clung on to her patience. “Gabriel, tell me what happened.”

  Jackson gestured at the door. “We’re just going inside to report it. Come with us if you want. It’s going to be a matter of public knowledge soon enough.”

  “Not that soon,” said Hazel, turning and following them back up the walkway. “The best way to keep a secret—”

  “Is to tell it to the police press office.” Jackson nodded. “Not this time. I’m an eyewitness. And a reporter.”

  Hazel shut up.

  If Sergeant Murchison wondered what it meant that these three people arrived at his desk together, nothing in his expression betrayed him. “Kidnapping,” he echoed, straight-faced.

  “Well, attempted kidnapping,” said Ash, to whom accuracy was important. “Then they changed their minds and threw me out on the street.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they saw me take a picture of them doing it,” said Jackson with some relish. “If anything had happened to him after that, you’d have had a witness and photographic evidence in a murder hunt. They had to let him go. Doesn’t mean they won’t pick him up again another time.”

  “Let’s have a look at this picture, then.”

  “Flat battery,” admitted Jackson regretfully. “Damn shame, that. It would have gone down a blinder on my front page.”

  Ash was still rocking from the last thing he’d said. “Another time?”

  Jackson was surprised at his naïveté. “You thought that was the end of it? Mickey Argyle wanted to talk to you enough to send his gorillas rather than a deckle-edged invitation, but he was put to rout by a middle-aged reporter with a camera phone? It’s a nice thought, but I wouldn’t stake my life on it.”

  Sergeant Murchison’s ears pricked up. “It was Mickey Argyle? Did you see him?”

  Jackson’s
gaze was caustic. “Don’t be silly. If he was that stupid, you’d have nailed him long ago. I think it was his crew. I think Andy Fletcher was one of them. I can’t be positive, let alone prove it, but you’d have to ask yourself who else in Norbold was going to pull a stunt like that. Mickey Argyle is about the only godfather we’ve got left.” He said it as if he rather regretted the passing of the old days.

  “What does Mickey want with Mr. Ash?”

  “That’s kind of the point,” said Jackson, who’d somehow taken over the interview. “Ash isn’t a client, and he isn’t a rival. You’d have thought he was pretty much below Argyle’s radar. So the next thing you have to ask yourself is, was it anything to do with what happened in the cells here the other night?”

  Murchison stared. “How could it be?”

  Jackson gave a cheerful grin. “Beats me. But Ash here, who’s hardly been farther than his corner shop for years, was picked up after leaving the Cardys’ house. So either they went there looking for him or they followed him. There was nothing random about it.”

  Now Murchison was staring at Ash. “What were you doing at the Cardy house?”

  Ash gave an awkward shrug. “I wanted to express my condolences.”

  “Did anyone know you were going?”

  Just barely he managed not to say, “My dog.” He shook his head.

  “Followed, then,” said Jackson with unseemly satisfaction.

  Murchison put his pen down. “This is CID stuff. I’m going to have to get hold of DI Gorman. I’ll put you in one of the interview rooms while I track him down. Hazel, can you organize some coffee?”

  It was like police station coffee everywhere: virtually indistinguishable from the tea, the hot chocolate, and the oxtail soup. The best that can be said was that drinking it gave them something to do while they waited. Hazel showed Ash to the washrooms and he attempted to clean himself up. Jackson ignored the SWITCH OFF MOBILE PHONES sign and called his editor.