by Jo Bannister
“Useful?”
“I don’t know,” she said honestly. “He wasn’t giving anything away. Of course, they don’t. I told him how things looked from this end and told him to sort it out.” She gave a self-satisfied little chuckle at the recollection.
“Had they connected what happened to Jackson with the Cardy case?”
“I don’t think so. Rossi asked for evidence and I said we hadn’t got any. I told him Mickey Argyle was behind it, he asked how I knew, and I told him it was the only thing that made sense. I don’t know if he believed me. I don’t know if he’ll do anything about it.”
“He’ll do something,” said Ash. “At least enough to cover himself if we turn up dead.”
“Terrific,” growled Hazel. She changed the subject. “How are you getting on with Othello?”
“I don’t think English literature is my forte,” confessed Ash. “Somebody keeps being referred to as ancient, when he’s clearly nothing of the kind. Somebody borrows a handkerchief, and because of that someone else strangles his wife. I thought I was irrational till I met these people.”
Hazel laughed. “If everyone behaved sensibly, there would be no art. No one would go to the theater to watch Othello take his wife aside and say, ‘Iago says you’ve got the hots for Cassio,’ and her tell him, ‘Iago’s cross because you didn’t promote him.’ Othello sacks Iago, Cassio marries Bianca, Othello and Desdemona live happily ever after. End of play, curtain, back to the bar, where they haven’t even washed up the first lot of glasses.”
“Not a lot of scope for the kind of speeches people will be quoting four hundred years later,” agreed Ash ruefully.
“‘Then must you speak of one who was no mug,’” essayed Hazel. “No, it isn’t as catchy as the original.”
Something odd was happening in Ash’s face. His lips were still smiling, but his eyes were clouding over and a frown was gathering between them. He got up without a word and went into the next room, and came back with the book, leafing through it not at all casually.
“What is it?” asked Hazel. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m not sure,” he said without looking up. “That’s Othello, isn’t it—after he’s killed Desdemona and Iago’s treachery has been revealed. And he says—I want the exact words—he says…”
It was the only quotation from the play that Hazel knew by heart. Probably, that most people know. “Then must you speak of one that loved not wisely, but too well.”
Now Ash looked up, looked directly at her. “Is that it?”
“Pretty much.”
“No. I mean, is that it? Is that what Jerome Cardy wanted me to know? That the mistake he made, that was going to cost him his life, was to fall in love?”
Hazel was forgetting to breathe. “Who with?”
“Does Argyle have daughters? It had to be someone close to home—he didn’t go to this much trouble because he disapproved of Jerome’s love life in a general sort of way.”
“Let’s find out.”
* * *
Some things are a matter of public record. For more than ten years Mickey Argyle had kept officialdom from knowing, or at least proving, that he was a criminal, the overlord of numerous other criminals, and the main conduit for drugs in the Norbold area, but when his census form turned up, he filled it in like every other householder. Except for the fact that he gave his occupation as club proprietor, he told the truth. That his household consisted of himself, his wife, Phyllis, his son, McAuley … and his younger daughter, Alice.
It took Hazel longer to get an Internet connection than to flesh out the information on Facebook. Alice Argyle was a year younger than Jerome Cardy. She was into athletics, modern art, and the theater. She was studying English literature at Durham University. She had an unfeasibly large following of friends, and a habit of reporting even the most trivial aspects of her life. And one of the pictures on her Facebook page was of her triumph as Ariel, playing opposite a handsome black youth in a turban.
“Durham?” asked Ash. “She’s at Durham University?”
“Yes. Why?”
“So was Jerome.”
“Different courses.”
“Yes. Same campus.”
Hazel returned to the Facebook entry. It hadn’t been updated for nearly a week. For a girl who thought people wanted to know what shoes she was going to wear to a party, this struck Hazel as significant.
“Who would know if Jerome and Alice were an item?” Hazel was talking to herself, but Ash thought that was something only he did, so he answered.
“His parents?”
Hazel turned from her laptop and looked at him as his mother might have done. “So, you were never actually a teenage boy? You went straight from infancy to middle age? Of course he didn’t tell his parents. If he told anyone, it was friends—male friends. Or maybe just one friend—the one he was closest to. Someone at university, probably.”
Chastened, Ash nodded. “Maybe his parents would know who.”
“Yes, maybe. Give them a call.”
“I don’t know their number.”
A couple more keystrokes and Hazel had it.
“What should I tell them?”
“Anything you like. The truth. Or a lie. Just tell them you want to talk to his best friend and do they have a number for him.”
He did as she said, using the new mobile. Hazel noted how he was all fingers and thumbs with it. Phones had got a lot smaller in the time he’d been out of touch with the world.
Ash was relieved when Mrs. Cardy answered the phone. He knew her husband doubted his motives, would have wanted to know why before parting with the information. Jerome’s mother seemed to accept that he was trying to help.
“Actually, Mr. Ash, his best friend was a boy he was at school with. A moment while I find his number.”
Moments later she was back. She reeled off a string of digits. “Tom Woods. They knew each other since junior school. Tell him you’ve been talking to me, if you like.”
Hazel made the call. Without a flicker of guilt she introduced herself as a constable at Meadowvale Police Station. And that was the first they knew that they were following a trail blazed twelve hours earlier by Nye Jackson of the Norbold News.
“I didn’t want to talk to the press,” said Woods, “but he seemed to know most of it already. Jerome and Alice were serious about each other. They knew how many obstacles would be put in their way. Her family of course, but also members of his family thinking his own kind weren’t good enough for him anymore. It didn’t have to matter.
“That’s not true,” he said then, editing as he went along. “It did matter to them—this wasn’t a joke, something they’d come up with to outrage people’s sensibilities. But being together mattered more. When Jerome proposed and Alice said yes, they were never more serious about anything in their lives.”
“They were going to get married?” Hazel heard her voice soar, coughed it back to a professional level. “When did they decide this?”
“About five weeks ago,” said Tom Woods. His voice didn’t break; that didn’t mean his heart hadn’t. “I was going to be best man.”
CHAPTER 23
“SO THEY’VE BEEN friends for years, all through high school and now at the same university,” said Hazel. They were eating breakfast in the cottage, balancing on rickety kitchen chairs while Patience watched from the sofa. “They have the same interests—literature, theater, sport. They have everything in common except for two things: the color of their skins, and the fact that his family is respectable. Getting married isn’t something they’ve rushed into. But with graduation looming they decide it’s now or never and they can’t face the idea of never.
“What’s the first thing you do when you get engaged? You tell the parents. But that was going to be the biggest hurdle they faced, so they put it off. For maybe a month they held back, knowing they were going to light a cigar in a gun powder factory. Then they did it. They thought they’d get the Argyles out of the
way first. Maybe Alice told them on her own, or maybe they did it together—who knows? Whatever they thought would be safest.” She looked up at Ash. “But it wasn’t. Safe. Mickey Argyle said—and I’m paraphrasing here, but I’ll bet you anything this is pretty much exactly what he said—‘Before I see you marry my daughter, I’ll kill you, you…’ Supply the racist invective of your choice.”
Ash was nodding slowly. Finally it was making sense. “He won’t be the first father to feel that way about his daughter’s intended. He won’t even be the first to go crazy. Usually, though, given a bit of time people calm down. Or even if they don’t, they lack the means to carry out their threats. There’s nothing stopping Argyle. He’s ruthless enough to do it, he has the kind of help to get it done, and he can afford to pay for it. If he told Jerome he was going to kill him, Jerome would know it wasn’t empty rhetoric. And Alice would know exactly how much danger he was in.”
Hazel took up the story again. “They decided he should get out of Norbold right away. He probably wanted to tell the police that he was being threatened, but Alice knew her father had people inside Meadowvale. She told Jerome, ‘Don’t stop for anything. This time the police are not on your side.’”
“But he did stop,” said Ash. “When Mrs. Wiltshire ran into him.”
“He was a decent, law-abiding citizen. He wanted to make sure she was all right. When he saw she wasn’t injured, he made a run for it before the police arrived.”
“But now there was good reason for them to give chase. Leaving the scene of an accident without observing the proprieties. This was what Argyle’s man inside Meadowvale—”
“Sergeant Murchison,” Hazel reminded him. Her voice was low, as if even now she didn’t like admitting it out loud.
“—Sergeant Murchison was waiting for. What Argyle had told him to find, or to make—an excuse to get Jerome Cardy into the cells. When the patrol called in that they’d arrested Jerome, he thought the boy was doing his job for him. He put him in a cell and called Argyle to see what he wanted to do next.”
“What Argyle wanted,” Hazel continued grimly, “required privacy. It couldn’t be done in a cell he was sharing with someone else. So Murchison cleared a cell—sent home the only woman prisoner that night—then he nobbled the CCTV and took Jerome across the hall. He wasn’t wandering around looking for somewhere quiet to sleep. The custody sergeant took him to another cell and locked him in there.”
“And he tried to leave me a coded message,” murmured Ash, “because he didn’t dare speak plainly in front of a man he knew was in Argyle’s pocket.”
Hazel nodded slowly. “Meanwhile, Argyle—or more likely one of his crew—was talking to Saturday’s friend Trucker, who found Barclay, plied him with drink, and told him about the names on the war memorial. Anyone could have guessed how that would end—with Jerome alone in a cell and Barclay flung in with him, already foaming at the mouth. He never had a chance.”
“And he knew it.” Ash’s face was gray. “As soon as he was arrested he knew what was going to happen to him. He desperately needed help.” He swallowed. “What he got was me.”
Hazel regarded him with compassion. “Gabriel, he was lucky to get you. You listened. You cared. And you tried to find out what had happened. You think any of the usual drunk-and-disorderlies we have for bed and breakfast would have done that? The people whose job it was to protect him didn’t do it either, and how much of that was down to carelessness and how much to corruption, I don’t know. You couldn’t save him. But if we do this right, we can get justice for him. It has to be worth something.”
After a moment he nodded. “Yes, of course it is. I’m sorry, I’m not much good at this anymore. I used to be a dab hand at solving puzzles. That was when I was able to think of it as a puzzle, an intellectual exercise. When it became personal, the objectivity went out the window and I’ve never been able to get it back.”
“You’re not doing badly.”
He smiled. When he smiled, it was as if all the grief, all the trauma, coalesced into a dark mask, and behind the mask, and looking through the mask, was the man he used to be. Around the edges of the mask he seemed almost to glow. “You’re not doing so badly yourself.”
“For a rookie,” she qualified ruefully. Then she chuckled. “A rookie cop and a washed-up analyst. And a dog. Not exactly the Sweeney Todd, are we?”
Ash looked puzzled. “The demon barber?”
“The Flying Squad,” Hazel explained patiently.
The dog whined. It seemed to remind him of something, because Ash blinked, and Hazel saw the little perplexed frown gather between his eyebrows again and his lips purse on the beginnings of a question.
“What?” she asked. “Gabriel, what is it?”
“So—where’s Alice?”
“At Durham.” She thought he’d forgotten.
“You reckon? You think after her father murdered her fiancé she had a little cry, and a consolation shopping trip, and tootled off back to read Chaucer at Durham? A girl strong enough to know that she wanted Jerome Cardy despite all the trouble she knew they’d face? And to want to do it properly—not to run off and marry in a registry office before her father could catch up with them, but to face him first and tell him that she knew he wouldn’t be happy but this time he wasn’t going to get his own way. You think a girl like that wouldn’t be talking to policemen before Jerome’s body had cooled?”
“Whatever else he is, he’s her father,” Hazel pointed out.
“And people make allowances for family,” agreed Ash. “She must have known what he did for a living. She kept quiet about it because he’s her father. You could understand that. This is something else. He killed the boy she loved. You think she’d keep quiet about that? This girl? Alice Argyle, who must have been scared to death of her father but faced him anyway? Because I don’t.”
“Then … what do you think?” Fear is contagious; she was catching it from him.
“I think,” Ash said slowly, “that even if Argyle loves her as much as normal people love their children, he knows he can’t trust her with this. That she’ll betray him if she’s ever free to do so. He’ll never be safe while Alice is alive, and I think that somewhere in the bitter, twisted heart of him he knows it.”
Hazel stared at him in horrid disbelief. “You’re not suggesting he’d kill her? His own daughter?”
Ash took a deep breath. “Yes, I am. Not yet. He probably thinks he can talk her round—convince her that what he did was for the best, that he was only thinking of her, that one day she’ll understand that and when she does, he’ll let her go. I think he’s taken her somewhere she can’t get help or talk to anyone, and he thinks he’s only got to keep her there until she starts seeing things his way. But she won’t. And a time will come when Argyle will see that. See that he’s all out of options.”
Hazel stared at him dumbstruck for half a minute. Then she felt herself getting angry. “His daughter?” she repeated. “You think he’d kill his own child rather than go to prison?”
“Men kill their own children all the time,” Ash said bleakly. “Not just men like Mickey Argyle—ordinary men, not psychopaths. They kill them because they don’t love them, or they love them too much, or they get drunk, or angry, and lose control just long enough for one irreversible act. They shake the baby, they push the child, they hit the teenager. The inhibitor that’s meant to cut in and prevent you from harming your own offspring fails momentarily and they do what every parent has thought about doing: they hit out. And men are strong, and children are weak. The wonder is not that it happens, but that it doesn’t happen more often.”
Hazel shook her head. “But we’re not talking about a man losing his temper with a stroppy teenager, are we? We’re talking about a man weighing the pros and cons and deciding that his liberty is worth killing his daughter for. I don’t believe it. Not of Mickey Argyle; not of anyone.”
Ash had seen more of the world than she had. It was a long time since he’d seen
anything through rose-tinted glasses. “Look what he’s done already. He didn’t kill Jerome in a fit of fury. He planned it, meticulously, because he didn’t just want to stop his daughter from marrying a black man. He wanted to make sure there was no trail back to him. Even the people he used didn’t know what they were doing, or why, or who for. That wasn’t a crime of passion. It was an act of cold, calculated vengeance.”
“Jerome wasn’t his child!” exclaimed Hazel, exasperated. “There’s all the difference in the world between what a man like Argyle would do to anybody else’s son or daughter and how he’d treat his own. I’d have thought—”
She almost managed to leave the thought in her head, the words unspoken. She did succeed in cutting it off at the knees, the bit that got past her completely innocuous. It could have been anything that she’d started to say and then thought better of.
But it wasn’t just anyone she’d started to say it to. Gabriel Ash had made his living by reading signs that were hardly there and extrapolating from fragments of evidence to the facts they were evidence of. He heard what people hadn’t said, what they had carefully avoided saying. Almost, he heard their thoughts. He heard Hazel’s thought, and it went straight through his armor and exploded in his gut.
“You thought I’d have understood that?” His voice was low, his dark eyes burning. “What, as a father myself? As the father of dead children—is that what you meant?”
Regret for her clumsiness rose in a dull flush up Hazel’s cheek. “Gabriel, I didn’t mean—”
“Of course you meant it. You thought that the way I feel about my sons is the way Mickey Argyle feels about his daughter.”
“I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“Oh, that boat has sailed!”
They stared at each other for another moment, then Ash looked away. He gave a sigh of infinite weariness. “I’m sorry. I … overreact. I know you didn’t mean anything by it. You may even be right. Being a career criminal doesn’t prevent you from loving your children the same way law-abiding fathers do. Maybe I’m wrong, and Mickey Argyle would lay down not just his liberty but his life for any of his children, and do it willingly.