by Jo Bannister
“Alice. Your daughter.” He said the words as clearly as his broken mouth would allow and gave them time to sink in. “You’re willing to hurt your own child in order to get what you want from me.”
“That’s right.” Argyle leaned forward, the bubble of viciousness he moved in encompassing the man on the floor. “You want to be the tough guy? Let’s see how tough you are with a teenage girl screaming for your help.”
Gabriel Ash said quietly, “So this is how it begins.”
Argyle didn’t understand. “How what begins?”
“How a man sets about killing his own child. To start with, it’s a act. You don’t have to hurt her; you just have to convince me you’re prepared to hurt her. But what if it isn’t enough? Then maybe you do hurt her, just a little bit. A slap or two. Just enough to startle that first scream out of her.
“But what if I still don’t talk?” Ash asked the blurred shape bending over him. “You’re committed now, aren’t you? If slapping her about a bit doesn’t make me want to protect her, maybe cutting her will. Not badly, nothing that won’t heal—just enough to up the ante. Add a bit of blood to the screams. That should do the job, surely?
“But what if it doesn’t, Mr. Argyle? What if it doesn’t? Will you admit defeat? Or will you keep ratcheting up the punishment until the screams stop and there’s no more left of Alice than there was of Jerome Cardy after you’d finished with him?”
The door behind them opened again as Fletcher returned, his arms around Alice Argyle in a manner as ambiguous as the situation, half protection, half restraint.
Lashed to the anvil, Ash could not turn to look at her, and anyway his vision was all but gone. Which was a pity. If he’d been able to see her, he’d have known that what he’d been through had been worth it.
She was tall and fine. She had a cap of short fair hair that had been cut well and then left to do pretty much its own thing. She had long, straight limbs, strong, like a distance runner’s. She had haughty green eyes that refused absolutely to acknowledge the fear knotting her innards.
The funny thing was, anyone seeing Mickey and Alice together would have known they were father and daughter, and also that everything that mattered she’d taken from her mother’s side of the family. He’d given her life, and that firmness of jaw, and the strength of purpose to take what she wanted from life, and nothing else. There was a luminosity to her that owed nothing to Argyle. In better days it had been a joy in living that radiated from her so much, it brightened the days of people who didn’t even know her, who just saw her in the street. It was why she’d loved Jerome Cardy, and why he’d loved her.
It was why she’d lost him. And it was why she, too, was now facing death. The haughty green eyes that refused to acknowledge the fear were too intelligent not to acknowledge the danger.
She was also dirty, as if she’d been locked in a dusty room for several days, and her hands were tied with cord in front of her. She saw Ash hanging from the anvil and her heart skipped beats. She rounded on her father in disgust. “Now what have you done, you frigging madman?”
Argyle was struggling to clear his head of the images Ash had planted there. “Do you recognize him?”
“His own mother wouldn’t recognize him!”
“It’s Sir Lancelot.”
Alice stared at him as if genuinely doubting his sanity. But a real madman would have had some kind of an excuse. Argyle’s only excuse was that there were things that he wanted and hadn’t got yet. Alice refused him the compliment of an answer.
Argyle went on regardless, his voice spiteful. “Your knight in shining armor. He’s been worried about you. He was afraid something bad might have happened to you.”
He still had the power to take her breath away. She kept her silence because the only possible alternative was to howl like a dog.
Argyle turned to Ash, nudged him again with the side of his foot. “See? She’s fine. Don’t worry about her. Just tell me what I need to know.”
If Ash had been as groggy as he looked, it might have worked. Unable to hold on to the line of his reasoning, he might have thought this was what he’d been hanging on for. That he’d absorbed the punishment for Alice, but now that he knew she was unhurt, he didn’t need to absorb any more. But in fact most of his injuries were superficial. Fletcher knew his job well enough to avoid inflicting the kind of head trauma that would make nonsense of anything a man said.
Ash considered for a moment. Then he whispered, “Alice?”
Alice Argyle stayed where she was. An appalled tremor shook her voice. “Who are you?”
“Gabriel Ash. That doesn’t matter. Listen to me. I’ve got something to tell you. Something important.”
“What?”
“Listen…”
At a nod from Argyle, Fletcher took her closer. Alice bent to catch the words trickling from the broken lips. “I’m listening.”
Ash sucked in enough breath to say everything he had to, because he knew he wouldn’t get a second chance. “If you want to live, get away from here right now. It doesn’t matter what you have to do or who you have to hurt—just do it and go and don’t look back.”
It was instructive how everyone in the forge reacted. The Rat looked at Fletcher. Fletcher shot a fast look at Argyle. Argyle moved almost like a ballet dancer to finally deliver the kick he’d been toying with for half an hour, not to Ash’s cracked ribs or broken hands to punish him, but to his jaw to shut him up.
Alice recognized good advice when she got it and acted on it immediately, with courage and determination. She made no attempt to free her hands but drove one elbow as hard as she could into Fletcher’s belly, picked up the length of rebar they’d been using on Ash, and bent it round the Rat’s head. Then she used the leftover momentum to hurl it at her father and was on her way out of the door before any of them had time to grab her.
And there she stopped dead. Which would have been a bad mistake except that she’d run up against the sudden unexpected presence of Chief Superintendent Johnny Fountain, and it was like running into a small outhouse that someone had parked in the way.
CHAPTER 28
THE MEN BEHIND her were all picking themselves up, except for Ash, who stayed where he was, bleeding, so it took them a few moments to recognize that the situation had changed not once but twice. A stillness grew in the forge as one after another they noticed the new arrival and weighed what his presence here meant.
At last Mickey said guardedly, “Mr. Fountain.”
“Mr. Argyle.”
“What are you doing here?”
Fountain looked past him to the man on the floor. “What are you doing here?”
Argyle straightened up. “Nothing to concern you.”
Fountain sighed. “Mickey, everything you do concerns me. It has done for the last ten years. Now I’m going to make you an offer that you really shouldn’t refuse, because it’s the best chance you have of still being a free man tomorrow morning. Get in your car, go home, pack. Use your contacts, your money, and your initiative to get out of the country some way that no one will see you going. If you’re really lucky, we may never find you.”
Argyle’s thin lip curled. “I’m not going anywhere, Mr. Fountain. Why should I? Nothing has changed.”
“Nothing’s changed?” Suddenly Fountain was roaring like a cannon. “Everything has changed. You had a twenty-year-old boy beaten to death in my cells! How dare you, you arrogant little bastard!”
“He was fucking my daughter!” snarled the gangster. “What was I supposed to do—hold his coat? I warned him off. I told him what would happen if he didn’t get back to whatever monkey jungle he came from. He thought he could give me the finger! Nobody gives me the finger, Mr. Fountain—nobody.”
Alice had been following the exchange like someone at an increasingly tense tennis match, head turning first one way, then the other. None of it was exactly news to her—she knew what had happened and why—but this was the first time Argyle had admitted in front of her what he�
��d done. Finally she could contain herself no longer.
“He loved me, you mindless thug!” she yelled, her voice soaring—with pain, with distress, most of all with fury. “And I loved him. You’ve ruined my life. What are you going to do now—kill me as well? Everyone here knows you’re capable of it. Only he”—she indicated Ash—“will even be shocked. So if you’re going to do it, Daddy”—she filled the word with infinite vitriol—“do it here and do it now. If you ask him nicely, I bet Mr. Fountain will hold your coat.”
If she’d spent hours studying to insult the chief superintendent, she could hardly have done any better. A dull flush the color of brickwork spread up Fountain’s craggy cheeks. Men of his rank don’t often hear exactly what other people think of them.
Until that moment, he’d thought Constable Best’s fears for Alice were exaggerated. But the girl knew the situation she was in. She knew her father needed her dead. If Argyle hadn’t realized it yet, he would soon. The scenario dreamed up by his newest constable and her strange new friend was no longer hypothetical.
Fountain’s voice dropped low again. “What about it, Mickey? Are you going to take your chances—grab what you can and run?”
Argyle shook his head. He said, with a finality that was like the sound of a vault door shutting, “I’m not going anywhere.”
The policeman nodded, unsurprised. He wasn’t sure how this was going to end now. But he knew how it wasn’t going to end, not if he could stop it. He half turned toward Alice. “There’s a constable in my car outside. Go and get in, and lock the door.”
As Fletcher extended an uncertain hand to bar her way, Fountain’s voice hardened. “And you two get the same choice I gave your boss. Stay, or go. Choose now, because you won’t get another chance.”
Again, the Rat looked at Fletcher and Fletcher looked at Argyle. For what felt like a long time, no one said anything. Then Argyle growled, “You don’t really need me to tell you, do you?” But it spoke volumes that he felt he had to say it.
The big man gave a little sigh that sounded almost like despair. But Argyle was right: for a hired thug it was no choice at all. “We’re with you, boss.”
“So I should bloody well think. Go outside. Stop Mr. Fountain’s muscle from interfering. Or leaving.”
Fletcher nodded, and he and the Rat went out.
They expected to find Alice Argyle being comforted by an enormous rugby-playing hulk who might need subduing. When they saw it was just another girl, not very much older, they relaxed.
This may have been a mistake.
“They’re sorting things out,” Fletcher told his corporal confidently, indicating the forge with a jerk of the head. “We’re to wait out here.”
That suited Hazel fine. She’d no intentions of going anywhere, not without Ash, or at least without knowing what had become of him. The girl complicated matters, because professional instinct said she should get the civilian out of harm’s way at the first opportunity. But Hazel Best knew herself well enough to know that the big man standing by the car door was an excuse for not leaving; he wasn’t really the reason.
* * *
Fountain always carried a penknife. It was about all that a man in a suit could have without being accused of carrying a concealed weapon. He went to cut Ash free.
Argyle stood in his way. “You know he isn’t leaving here, don’t you, John?”
“Mickey—you don’t make the rules anymore. You don’t get to say how this ends.”
“It doesn’t have to end,” snarled Argyle impatiently. “Not for either of us.” He looked at Ash. “And what’s he? Does he even have a name? No one will miss him, no one will come looking for him. It’s like putting down a mad dog—really, you’re doing it a favor.”
“And Constable Best?”
Misunderstanding, Argyle shrugged. “A road accident. These country lanes are a lot more dangerous than they look. When she’s found, the local plods will interview the local farmers, learn nothing, and give up. Hit-and-run. Stranger to the area, vanished back to where he came from.”
“She isn’t dead.”
That did alter things. If Argyle had known she was sitting in the car outside, he might have thought it didn’t alter them very much. But Fountain didn’t tell him that.
“How much does she know?”
“She’s a smart girl. I think what she hasn’t worked out already, she will work out.”
Argyle’s narrow eyebrows soared. “Well, that decides it. There’s no point wasting any more time on this idiot. I’ll put a bullet in his brain now, and the boys can dump him in a reservoir somewhere. Then we’ll round up the girl. With both of them out of the picture, we’re safe enough.”
Fountain shook his head. “You’re wrong, Mickey. It does have to end, and this is where. Ten years late, maybe, but better late than never.”
Argyle was regarding him quizzically. “John—what exactly is it that you think you’re going to do? That you think I’m going to let you do?”
“My job,” said Johnny Fountain simply. “Michael Argyle, I’m arresting you on suspicion of—well, actually, because I know you’re guilty of—just about every crime in the book. You do not have to say anything. But it may harm your defense—assuming you can find a brief imaginative enough to come up with one—”
He got no further with his hand-knit caution. Argyle took a step backward, reached behind him, and drew a gun.
Fountain looked at his penknife and felt underdressed.
* * *
“Here,” said Fletcher, looking at Hazel in some alarm, “you’re dead!”
“That’s right,” Hazel said evenly. “I’ve come back to haunt you.”
She’d moved into the driver’s seat after Fountain got out of the car. The key was in the ignition, so she had a weapon of a kind, albeit one she couldn’t pull as quickly as Fletcher could pull his gun. He wore it under his jacket, a hard, unmistakable lump that would have made a tailor cry. Only the possibility that they might need to leave in a hurry kept her behind the wheel. Because Alice Argyle, stubborn as always, had refused to get in beside her and was standing by the wing, her hands still tied, staring at the big man with undisguised contempt.
“Why do you do everything he tells you?” she asked.
To Fletcher the answer was obvious. “He pays my wages.”
“Then why do you work for him?”
He thought for a moment it was a trick question, but it wasn’t, just another easy one to answer. He said it again, with slightly increased emphasis. “Because he pays my wages.”
“Did you kill him?”
That was harder. She’d need to be more specific. “Him who?”
Her voice dripped acid. “Jerome. Jerome Cardy. The man I was going to marry.”
Fletcher shook his head. “Barking Mad Barclay. I thought you knew that.”
“I know who got Jerome’s blood on his shirt! I want to know who’s got blood on his hands. Apart from my father, of course. Was it you? Was it you who fixed things so Jerome would be put in a cell with a homicidal racist?”
“No,” said Fletcher, and from the way his eyes flared it may have been the truth. “I just do the heavy lifting. The boss doesn’t trust me with the clever stuff.”
“He never did anyone any harm.” Alice’s gaze raked his cheek like claws. “Jerome. All he wanted to do was help people. The only thing he did wrong was love me.”
“I know.” There was the least hesitation in his voice. “It was … rough. But come on, girl, you know how the boss feels. He was never going to take that on the chin!”
If simple hatred killed people, he’d have been lying on the ground now. Smoking. “I remember you from when I was a child,” Alice said. “You used to carry me on your shoulders. You said it was because I could see farther from your shoulders than from my father’s, but that wasn’t the reason. He never wanted to carry me. He didn’t want to wrinkle his suit.
“You carried me on your shoulders. I think you taught me to
ride a bike?” Fletcher dipped his gaze in a nod. “Then you stood by and let him kill the man I loved, and now you’re going to stand by and watch him kill me.”
“I…” She’d touched him somewhere unexpected, left him floundering. “I … no. That’s not—”
“Of course that’s what he intends to do! He has no choice. It’s him or me now.” She glanced back at the forge door. “That man in there, the one you’ve been kicking nine bells out of, he knows it. So does she”—a nod at Hazel. “I’ve known for days. I’ve known since he brought me here. He was never going to be able to let me go. Now you know, too. So I’m going to give you a choice. My father or me. Choose me, and we take him down. Choose him, and he’s still going down, but you’ll have a hell of a lot more to answer for when he does.”
The big man made no reply. Hazel, her heart thudding in her ears, thought he couldn’t, was literally unable to, reach a decision.
Alice thrust her hands at him. “Untie me.”
“Alice, pet…”
“Untie me!” she shouted. “Right now!”
After another, infinitely long pause he did.
Now she held her right hand out. “Gun.”
“No way!”
She didn’t take the hand back. Unyielding, she said it again. “Gun.”
“No.”
CHAPTER 29
“THIS DOESN’T HAVE to end with one of us dead, John,” said Mickey Argyle.
“No, it doesn’t,” agreed Fountain.
“I’m not going to prison.”
“You could still make a dash for the Harwich ferry.”
“And leave everything I’ve worked for? When hell freezes over!”
Johnny Fountain sniffed reflectively. “The night this all started I was getting the Freedom of the Borough.”
He had a penknife against Argyle’s automatic pistol. That wasn’t a great situation to be in, although there was an upside. An armed man facing an unarmed man thinks he’s invulnerable. He thinks he has time. He thinks no one would be stupid enough to take him on. That was how Argyle was feeling now. That he’d already won. That the chunk of steel in his hand was heavy enough to outweigh everything else.