Deadly Virtues

by Jo Bannister

  Sergeant Murchison returned. “DI Gorman’s going to be tied up in court for another hour, maybe more. Do you want to go on home? He’ll call you when he gets in.”

  Outside the police station Jackson headed for his office and Ash turned the other way to walk home. But Hazel plucked his sleeve and said, “Come with me. I’ll give you a lift.”

  “There’s no need,” he said, surprised. “I’m all right, you know.”

  “I know.” She nodded. “I don’t think you should go home alone.”

  “Why not?”

  “They could be waiting for you.”

  He’d spent so long as the invisible man, shut up in his big house behind drawn curtains or wandering the blind streets with his dog, that being the focus of attention came as a shock. He genuinely hadn’t thought of that. He looked askance at Hazel. “Are you armed?”

  She laughed out loud, though it wasn’t that funny. “No!”

  “There were three of them. They were quite big.”

  Hazel thought that the correct response to that was, “I am a trained police officer. Armed with nothing but quick wits and a smattering of jujitsu I am more than a match for three large men armed with anything less than machine guns.” What she actually said was, “I have Meadowvale on speed dial.”

  There was no one waiting for them. “They mustn’t know about this place,” said Ash.

  “Or else they’ve already been here.”

  Ash looked at his dog. “Apparently not.”

  Hazel frowned. “What do you mean?”

  He glanced up quickly, guiltily. “Patience would be upset if someone had been prowling around.”

  The constable seemed to accept that. “I still think you’d be wiser staying somewhere else for a few days.”

  Ash gave a tiny, helpless smile. “You know a B and B that takes dogs?”

  Hazel shrugged. “Put her in a kennel.”

  It was as if she’d proposed something indecent. Both of them, man and dog, regarded her with silent, unblinking disfavor.

  Hazel found herself breathing heavily at them. Which was odd, because she’d always rather prided herself on her patience. Something about Gabriel Ash got under her skin. Something about Ash and his dog made her want to bang their heads together. “You haven’t forgotten that this is your safety we’re talking about?”

  “Why would anyone want to hurt me?” He wasn’t arguing with her; he just wondered if she knew the answer.

  Hazel sighed and lowered herself onto his leather chair, which bore the unmistakable circular impression of a sleeping dog and was still warm. “You made the classic mistake—you were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “In the cell with Jerome Cardy?”

  “It has to be. Somebody’s worried about what he said to you.”

  “What he said made no sense.”

  Hazel shrugged. “You must be remembering wrong. Just a little bit—just enough to obscure what he was trying to say. Mickey Argyle has a pretty good idea what it was. Now he wants to know if you’ve worked it out.”

  “Worked out what?”

  “I don’t know,” said Hazel, exasperated. “Something to do with drugs? That’s Argyle’s line of work. Jerome fled the scene of a minor accident he hadn’t even caused—why? Was he carrying drugs for Argyle? Is that why he thought he was in deep shit—because he’d got himself picked up by the police while driving around with a suitcase full of cocaine?”

  Ash stared at her in surprise and mounting admiration. It made more sense than anything he’d thought of. “Maybe that’s why he mentioned the sniffer dog. To flag up the drugs connection.” He frowned. “Where does Othello fit in?”

  Hazel thought some more, then shook her head. “Beats me. Othello. Strangled his wife because he thought she was having an affair.”

  “Jerome was black, like Othello. But his father said he didn’t have a girlfriend.”

  Hazel gave him an old-fashioned look. “He was a twenty-year-old student. There must have been someone. Even if he didn’t tell his dad. Maybe it was a boyfriend rather than a girlfriend.”

  Ash’s train of thought had turned up a branch line. “They could have killed me with that car. Then anything Jerome told me would have been lost. If this Mickey Argyle’s such a bad lot, that would have been the sensible thing to do.”

  Hazel had never heard anyone described as a “bad lot” before. “He could still do it. Perhaps he wants to talk to you first in case it isn’t necessary.”

  “What do you mean?” His gaze was honest, uncomplicated by any sense of irony.

  Hazel chewed her lip delicately. “How am I going to put this? There’s a general perception around Norbold that you’re as dotty as Dundee cake. Don’t look at me like that—I’m not saying it’s what I think.

  “But if I’m wrong and everyone else is right, Mickey doesn’t need to shut you up. It wouldn’t matter what Jerome said to you, it wouldn’t even matter if you’d understood it, because no one would listen to anything you had to say. Argyle would only attract attention by killing you. I think that’s why he wanted to talk to you—to find out if you’re worth worrying about.” She risked meeting his eyes. “Maybe that’s why they threw you out of the car. They decided you weren’t.”

  It was hard to take that as a compliment. But Ash’s frown was more puzzled than offended. “Why?”

  “You wanted to go with them. You thought something good was happening.”

  A faint flush crept up Ash’s sallow cheek. “I suppose that does seem pretty crazy.”

  “What was going through your mind?” asked Hazel. “Who did you think they were? What did you think they wanted?”

  For a couple of minutes, which is a long time to sit in silence with someone you hardly know, he made no attempt to answer. But she knew he was going to, so she waited.

  Finally he said, “Jackson—the reporter—knows who I am. You don’t, do you?”

  Hazel shook her head. “Sorry. I’ve only just come to Norbold.”

  “Most people who’ve lived here all their lives don’t know me from Adam, either. It didn’t happen here—we were living in London, had been for years. I only came back here afterward.”

  “After what?”

  He’d been trying to make them a pot of tea. The attempt fell apart in slow motion as he grew increasingly distracted, getting out cups that didn’t go with the saucers, putting them back, getting out mugs, forgetting—and being quite unable to remember, even though he stood there racking his brains—where he kept the teaspoons, his shaking hands struggling with the jar until he dropped it and scattered tea bags across the countertop.

  Hazel got up quietly, turned off the kettle, and drew him to the leather sofa, where the white dog was waiting, watching him with concern. “Sit down. Talk to me.”

  If she’d known she was asking him to strip his soul, she might not have pressed him. Or perhaps she would have. She was no psychologist, but there are human instincts that we all share, and human instinct was telling her that Gabriel Ash needed someone to talk to. She wasn’t sure what he was going to tell her. She wasn’t sure that it mattered. She thought he needed to talk about what was consuming him before his brain melted.

  And it wasn’t that any of it was a secret. As Nye Jackson had pointed out, it had once been national news. But news is ephemeral, and four years later only those directly involved remembered. Ash had got in the way of internalizing his grief not because the events were secret but because he was that kind of man. He had never worn his emotions openly. It said a lot about him that he would rather be thought mentally ill than recognized as the victim of a tragedy.

  But perhaps things were changing. Partly it was that working with Laura Fry had made it possible for him to think of opening up to others. Partly it was because Hazel was a police officer, and Ash had been brought up with that unthinking respect for the law that is a defining characteristic of the middle class. And perhaps the shock of finding himself involved in something else—som
eone else’s tragedy—actually made it easier. He took a deep, steadying breath. His arm slid around the dog’s shoulders as a child clutches a comfort blanket. And he began to talk.

  CHAPTER 12

  “I WAS A GOVERNMENT security adviser,” said Ash. “Don’t read too much into that. I wasn’t sitting at the prime minister’s right hand or anything like that. It was a big department, a whole bunch of us with different backgrounds, different strengths. I was in counterterrorism.”

  He flicked her a self-deprecating little grin. “Before you ask, no, I wasn’t licensed to kill. I wasn’t licensed to do anything except read reports and watch video and interpret what I was seeing. I worked in an office in Whitehall. There are field agents, but I wasn’t one. I trained as an insurance investigator. It turned out the skills you use, the techniques you acquire, are pretty much the same.

  “Mostly, getting a feel for when you’re being lied to. Spotting tiny inconsistencies in what you’re being told. And then working out whether they mean the subject is genuinely doing his best, he’s got something wrong precisely because he hasn’t rehearsed what to say, or if it’s a sign that things didn’t happen how he says they happened. It’s pretty much the same job whether you’re investigating a claim for flood damage or a plot to blow up an airport. Except that the stakes are higher.”

  It had been a good job. Interesting, challenging, and important. He’d liked feeling he was making a difference. That people were alive who might have died without his input. He was good at it, had the right kind of mind—meticulous, analytical, but also creative and intuitive. It’s not a combination you encounter every day.

  “Cathy loved living in London,” Ash recalled. “My wife. Like me, she came from a small town nobody’d ever heard of, and she loved the whole cosmopolitan thing. The bars, the restaurants, the theaters, the concerts. The choice. The fact that, whatever you felt like doing, whenever you felt like doing it, you could probably find it within a couple of miles of where you were.”

  He glanced shyly at Hazel. “Cathy was a lot better at the whole social thing than I was. I enjoyed taking her places I’d never wanted to go, because she got so much pleasure out of it. People loved being with her. All our friends were her friends—at least friends that she’d made. I knew a few people from work. By the time we’d been there three months, people waved at her if we walked down Portobello Road. She was good at people. I’m good at reading people. She was good at being with them. People liked her even before they knew her.”

  It hadn’t escaped Hazel’s notice that he was talking about his wife in the past tense. Divorce, of course, throws up all sorts of grammatical problems, but so does death. Youth isn’t much protection, as events had recently underlined. Even short of murder, young people die of illness, accidents, suicide. If Ash had lost his wife to one of these, it might explain both his mental collapse and the obvious fact that he still loved her.

  “Everyone said she’d have to slow down when the children came, but she didn’t. If anything, pregnancy put an extra bloom in her face, an extra spring in her step. It was no trouble to her, either time. As if having children was something she’d been born to do. The midwife said she delivered them like shelling peas.”

  Remembering put a glow in his sallow cheeks and the words dried up. Hazel thought he’d forgotten she was there. When a couple of minutes had passed and he was still soft-eyed and silent, she prompted him gently. “What did you have? Boys, girls, or one of each?”

  He blinked and came back to the gloomy, loveless room. “Boys. Gilbert and Guy. Two years between them. They’d be eight and six now.”

  That hit Hazel like a fist in the belly. Her womb turned over. That wasn’t a question of syntax; it could mean only one thing. Gabriel Ash hadn’t just lost his wife; he’d lost his sons as well. She felt her heart thudding wildly, a constriction in her throat like a physical lesion, and had no idea what to say next. Changing the subject would be like dropping litter on their graves. But there seemed a real danger that if she pressed him to continue, he would fall apart in front of her, so tenuous was the thread that tethered him to what was left of the world.

  She needed help here, she realized. She’d done it again, charged in blithely where wiser souls would have exercised caution, and once again someone else was paying the price of her indiscretion.

  But guilt was a self-indulgence, and right now she was fully occupied keeping an unhappy man from self-destructing in his own kitchen. She made herself speak calmly. “Gabriel, is there someone I can call for you? Someone you’d rather talk to? I’m not sure how much help I’m being.…”

  The deep, dark eyes were hollow with grief, and with entreaty. “Please. I need … it isn’t easy, talking about this. And I’m sure you’ve got better things to do than listen, but I need … to explain. What happened. Why…” Now his gaze dropped and his pale cheeks flushed as if with shame. “Why I live like this. Why I am like this.”

  Hazel was a public servant and Ash a member of the public: if he needed a sympathetic ear, she would provide it. But it wasn’t just a professional obligation. Compassion demanded no less of her. “I’ll stay as long as you want me to. I’ll listen to anything you want to tell me.”

  He flicked her a grateful smile. Then he took a deep breath and started again. “I don’t know how much you know about the arms industry.” He paused, with a lift of one eyebrow, and Hazel shook her head. “There are two central points. One is that it’s a field where the UK punches well above its weight. We’re world-class when it comes to arms manufacture and export.

  “The other is that the whole area is massively regulated. We don’t want to sell state-of-the-art weaponry to people who’ll fire it back at us. There’s a long list of criteria that the government considers before it will grant an export licence, everything from our national interest and those of our allies to the human rights record of the end user and its ability to control its own borders so our munitions aren’t diverted to terrorists.”

  Hazel said nothing. But she was thinking how articulate he suddenly became when he was talking about his own area of expertise. No rambling now.

  Ash checked that she was with him so far, then continued. “It all takes time and effort, and expense, but everyone accepts that it’s necessary. The manufacturers know that the hoops we make them jump through are necessary to stop their goods from being used for terrorism, torture, oppression, or warmongering.”

  “What went wrong?” Hazel asked softly.

  “Pirates.”

  Whatever she’d been expecting, it wasn’t that. She blinked. “What—skull and crossbones, pieces of eight, one-legged men with parrots on their shoulders?”

  Ash knuckled his eyes. “I dare say some of them have parrots. I dare say some of them have wooden legs. What all of them have these days is RPGs and assault rifles, fast patrol boats, helicopters and half-tracks. And intelligence. Access to the information superhighway. Forget Johnny Depp. These are private armies. There are still large areas of the world where there is no law to speak of except that imposed by private armies. And it doesn’t matter how careful we are about vetting end users if consignments of our arms are intercepted before they ever reach the customer.”

  “That was your job? Stopping pirates from taking our arms exports?” Just in time Hazel stopped herself from adding: “From a desk?”

  Ash shook his head. “My department reported to the government on the status of end users. So when antiaircraft batteries approved for export to a conscientious African democracy were used to take out the ruling family of an Arab principality, we got a rocket, too, from Downing Street.”

  The first time it happened Ash was instructed to investigate where the blame for the disaster lay, with particular emphasis on how little of it could be laid at the feet of the British government. The report was accepted, passed on to the Arab principality, and forgotten about.

  Until four months later, when it happened again. Again, all the criteria had been met by the man
ufacturer, all the appropriate licences had been obtained, the shipment was attended by all proper security—and this time it actually reached its destination airport before being hijacked on the tarmac and flown elsewhere.

  “Was anyone hurt?” asked Hazel.

  “Yes. None of the aircrew were seen again. We assume that when they’d flown their cargo to wherever the hijackers wanted it, they were killed and the plane destroyed.”

  “What was the cargo?”

  “Mixed munitions. Assault rifles, shaped charges, and white phosphorus grenades.”

  Hazel’s eyes flew wide. “There are people with a legitimate use for that kind of thing?”

  “Yes. We have them in our arsenal, and other responsible states have them in theirs.”

  Hazel shook her head despairingly. “And now one of the irresponsible ones had them as well.”

  “The third time,” said Ash, “it was ammonium picrate armor-piercing shells.”

  “For blowing up tanks? You could start a war with those!”

  “Which is why we try so hard to keep munitions out of the hands of people who’ll use them. Or at least, use them aggressively and without extreme provocation.”

  “And you were getting the blame for this.”

  “Not really. There was nothing wrong with our recommendations. The government couldn’t blame the manufacturer, either, or the purchaser. Both of them lost out when the goods went walkabout. No, the reason we stayed involved was that report I’d been asked to write. I ended up with an overview of the situation that no one else had, so every time there were developments the Foreign Office came to me for an assessment of what it might mean.”

  It wasn’t that Hazel was uninterested. It was a field she knew nothing about, but usually that made things more interesting, not less so. Right now, though, it wasn’t what she wanted to hear about. “So what happened?”