Ash looked worried. “What are you going to do?”
“Try to put it together.” Until she said the words, Hazel hadn’t realized the idea was anywhere in her head. But as soon as they were out she knew it was the right thing to do. “We’ve got a lot of the pieces already. What Jerome said to you. What you heard and saw later that night. What Saturday said about Trucker and Barclay. If Argyle wanted Jerome dead, he could have sent Trucker to get Barclay riled up and got Donald Murchison to do the rest. Murchison knew how to kill the CCTV so there’d be no record of it. All we’re short of is a motive. If we had that, IPCC would know it wasn’t just bad luck.”
A terrible thought struck Ash. “You’re not going to ask him? Go to Mickey Argyle and ask him?”
Hazel had to think for a moment but then dismissed the idea. “No, of course not.” It would have been a mistake. Not because she was afraid of him, although she was, but because he wouldn’t tell her anything—and he
would
then know she was on his trail. That would be both dangerous and counterproductive. She could prove nothing if he locked her in a room with one of his thugs. “Our tutors always used to say, ‘Try not to ask questions until you’ve at least some idea what the answers should be.’”
“Who else could you ask? Someone at Meadowvale?” The look she gave him was answer enough. “What about the local paper?”
“That reporter—Jackson.” Her voice sharpened with sudden possibility. “He seemed to know a fair bit about Argyle, didn’t he? And he knows that he’s involved—he saw his heavies snatch you off the street. Okay. I’ll call the
News.
”
“Wait.” For the first time in their acquaintance Ash reached out and touched her—laid his hand on top of hers as she pulled out her phone. The strength in his long, bony fingers surprised her. “Think about this.”
“
Think
about it?” she echoed, startled. “I’ve thought about nothing else for nearly a week! I haven’t slept for thinking about it. If I think any more about it, I’ll go mad. It’s time to
do
something.”
“Thinking about it might cost you sleep, but it won’t make you mad.” He spoke as one who’d done the experiment. “Doing something may very well get you hurt. It could get you killed. If there
was
a conspiracy to murder Jerome Cardy, and if you draw attention to yourself, those responsible may decide it would be safer to silence you than to let you rattle on.”
“‘Draw attention to myself’? Gabriel, that boat’s sailed! They’re sticking pins in little Hazel dolls all over Meadowvale! Everybody knows what I’ve done, everybody has an opinion. Pandora’s box is wide open, it’s too late to start stuffing things back in. And do you know, I’m not sure I would if I could? Covering up awkward facts is not what I joined the police to do. Let them out—let them all out where the air can get at them! Do you know what was left at the bottom of Pandora’s box when all the evils of the world had escaped?”
“Hope,” murmured Gabriel Ash.
“Exactly.”
“You think, if you can prove you’re right, you can wipe the slate clean.”
“I don’t know. But I know this. When you’re in too far to turn back, through is the only way out.”
* * *
Nye Jackson drove back to Norbold, his lips shaping silently Othello’s closing speech. The boy hadn’t been raving, and neither had Gabriel Ash. Jerome Cardy had made the same mistake as Othello, and he’d found a way of telling his cell mate without the policeman at the door noticing. He’d been a smart boy—at least in most respects. He’d also taken a gamble—that Ash would remember what he said and pass it on to someone who might make sense of it. Most people who knew Ash wouldn’t have thought it a gamble worth taking. But Jerome hadn’t had many options, so he worked with what he had.
Jackson parked in his accustomed spot behind the boot factory, on a bit of waste ground handy for the newspaper’s back door. As he locked the car the words were dancing in his head.
Then must you speak of one …
He hadn’t remembered the lines exactly. He’d used his phone to look them up on the Internet. And there it was: the reason Jerome had to die. What he’d done that was so terrible another man wanted to kill him for it.…
Of one that loved not wisely, but too well.
Jerome Cardy, talented actor, promising law student, and black, had fallen in love with Mickey Argyle’s younger daughter.
Jackson had been a reporter for too long to think that all he had to do was write the story and justice would be served. The toughest libel laws in the world made it possible for a dishonest man to sue an honest newspaper for reporting the truth and walk away with millions. But Jackson knew what had happened now, and he knew what to do about it. First talk to his editor. Then talk to Dave Gorman and Johnny Fountain. And while they were investigating there was nothing to stop him putting some of what he’d learned on record. He could write about Jerome Cardy without risk of prejudice. Remind people of his outstanding school career, and that memorable production of
The Tempest
where he shared the acting honors with the girl who played Ariel.
He was thinking along these lines, and resisting the urge to skip, as he crossed the rough tarmac of the back alley.
He almost got there. Another three strides and he’d have been safe in the
News
building, at least for now. Of course, the car that hit him didn’t come out of nowhere—they never do. But he didn’t see it coming, certainly not in time to avoid it, not even in time to recognize it. It swept him up like a sudden tornado, threw him into the air, and flung him down on the back steps of the
Norbold News.
CHAPTER 21
A
SH SAW HAZEL’S
face change as she talked on—or rather, listened to—her phone. Age crept up on her. So he knew it wasn’t good news.
When she’d finished, she quietly put the phone away and turned to meet his troubled gaze. “Nye Jackson’s dead.”
At first, for more than a few seconds, Ash thought he’d misheard. “Sorry—he’s … what?”
“He’s dead, Gabriel.” Her voice was flat, the calm of the professional at delivering bad news, but her eyes were shocked and appalled and filling with tears. “He was run down by a car in Tanner’s Alley about an hour ago. He was dead before they got him to A&E.”
There were probably forty thousand cars in and around Norbold. Most of them would not be large and black. In spite of which, Ash felt he’d seen it happen. “Not an accident.” It wasn’t even really a question.
Hazel shrugged helplessly. “No one saw. There’s a security camera over the back door at the
News
offices, but it missed what happened. Just caught a corner of the roof as it sped off. A big estate, they thought. Black. No registration.”
No, thought Ash. Entry-level blagging for men who worked for Mickey Argyle would include the field of view of every CCTV in town. Finally he said, “It was Mickey Argyle. You know that, don’t you?”
Hazel nodded. Her head felt like someone else’s. “I imagine so. Why?”
“Because he interfered when Argyle sent for me.” Guilt thickened Ash’s voice.
It may also have clouded his judgment. Hazel wasn’t convinced. “His people didn’t hurt you—why should they hurt Nye? You might, if you were that sort of man, kill the eyewitness to a murder. You don’t kill someone who saw you drop litter.”
He saw her point. It wasn’t a proportionate response. Whatever it was that Jackson prevented, all he actually saw was a man being helped into a car and then helped out of it. Nothing Argyle could do to Nye Jackson was as smart as nothing at all. Any attack on him would have elevated a minor incident into a major one; killing him told the world that the reporter was on to something big. Norbold’s last surviving godfather had no reason to draw attention to himself like that. “Then why?”
Hazel was trying to think. “Where did he go when he left us?”
“Back to his office to talk to his editor.”
“That was on Friday. What’s he been doing since?”
But Ash had no idea. “I haven’t seen him.”
“I bet Mickey Argyle has,” Hazel said curtly. “I bet Mickey Argyle had him watched from the moment he took that pretend photograph outside the Cardys’ house. But that’s not why he killed him. He killed him because of something Jackson discovered in the last twenty-four hours.”
Ash could go very still when his attention was engaged. “Like what?”
“Like what’s had us all puzzled—the link between Argyle and Jerome Cardy. We know there has to be one. I think Nye Jackson found it.”
“And Argyle killed him because of it.” Ash reached a decision. He put his book down and tried to steer Hazel toward the front door. “You have to leave. Now. Leave here; leave Norbold. Go and stay with your father. It’s not safe for you here.”
Hazel blinked. “Me? What have I done?” Then she saw it from Argyle’s viewpoint. “Apart, of course, from telling IPCC that his tame policeman facilitated the murder of a twenty-year-old boy who’d somehow displeased him. Yes, I see what you mean.”
“There’s no one to protect you now,” warned Ash. “The people at Meadowvale have shut you out. Argyle would have hesitated at taking on the local police, but now he’s wondering if he needs to think of you as police anymore. You’re alone and you’re vulnerable. Getting rid of you would serve both Argyle’s needs and Sergeant Murchison’s.”
“This isn’t Chicago! Things like that don’t happen here.” But even as she said it Hazel knew that she was wrong. The evidence was there. Jerome Cardy was murdered in a police cell at the behest of Norbold’s last gangster; and a man’d who made it his business to find out why was lying in the morgue at Norbold Royal Infirmary. Of course she was a target. She’d dared to suspect the unthinkable. If Argyle’s handy little setup was under threat—if he was in danger of losing his insiders at Meadowvale, and the freedom and power they bought him—it was her doing.
If she were to disappear now, the possibility that she’d been neutralized by Argyle might not be the first thing IPCC thought of. They knew how difficult things at Meadowvale had become for her. They knew Fountain had put her on suspension. They’d wonder if she’d run away with her tail between her legs because the whole thing had suddenly got heavier than she ever expected. If she’d let her imagination run away with her, and was only now realizing how slight her evidence was and how unlikely she was to be vindicated.
Ash saw in her eyes when the understanding fell into place. He nodded. “If you disappear, they’ll all think you had second thoughts and couldn’t face admitting it. They’ll finish the investigation, they’ll have to, but it won’t be much more than a paper exercise if they think the whistle blower has cut and run. They’ll rap some knuckles, tell Mr. Fountain to tighten up his procedures, and in all probability that’ll be that.”
“That’s what’ll happen if I bugger off to my dad’s place, too!”
“Maybe. But you can come back from…” He raised an expectant eyebrow.
“Byrfield,” Hazel told him “It’s near Peterborough.”
“From Byrfield. You can’t come back from the foundations of Mickey Argyle’s kitchen extension.”
For someone who, for four years, had rationed his words like a smoker finishing his last packet before quitting, Gabriel Ash had an unexpected facility with them. The picture they painted hung before Hazel’s unblinking eyes. This wasn’t an exercise she was involved in, a challenge to her deductive powers, or even a moral dilemma, but something that could get her killed. Something that had already claimed two innocent victims would have no difficulty claiming another. She was twenty-six. This had the potential to stop her from reaching twenty-seven. Unless she got out, and got far, far away right now.
Her voice stumbled. “I can’t go to my father. Anyone could find me there.”
“All right. Go somewhere you’ve never been before. Go pony trekking in Snowdonia. Take a Mediterranean cruise. Anything. Go, go now, and don’t leave a trail. You can phone me to see if there are any developments. I won’t phone you. I don’t want your number.”
Their eyes met and neither was prepared to look away. She knew exactly what Ash was saying. That he didn’t want to be able to betray her if Argyle hurt him.
Finally Hazel understood that the damaged man in front of her knew more about these things than she did. That he’d operated at a level that made the apprehension of disorderly drunks and the confiscation of the occasional machete seem trivial. His experience, his expertise, made her look like a school monitor. But for the atrocity visited upon him, Constable Best would never have heard Gabriel Ash’s name until it appeared on an Honors List for undefined services to the nation.
He had a clearer idea what to expect than she had. It didn’t matter if he talked to his dog: if he talked to
her,
she had to listen. And not just to what he said but to what he didn’t want to say. Hazel let out a slow, careful breath. “If it’s not safe for me to stay here, it’s not safe for you.”
Ash tried to make light of it. “I’ll be fine. Nobody cares what I think because nobody believes what I say.”
“Argyle’s already tried to grab you once. He knows who you are. He knows you were there when Jerome was murdered.”
“I don’t think he’ll try to kidnap me again.”
“
I
don’t think he’ll try to kidnap you again, either,” retorted Hazel sharply. “Things have moved on from there. He’s not taking any more chances. That’s why Nye Jackson’s dead. If Argyle deals with both of us, he has nothing left to fear.”
Ash tried for a confident grin. He looked like a schoolboy telling fibs to his teacher. “Patience will look after me.”
Hazel looked at the dog. Then she looked back at Ash. “Bulletproof, is she?”
Ash swallowed. “Probably not. What do you suggest?”
“That we both leave. All right”—she anticipated his objection—“that all three of us leave. Now—as soon as you can pack a bag. We’ll find a motel and book in under a false name, and we’ll stay there until it’s safe to come home.”
“Er…” Hazel thought for a moment that it was the idea of booking into a motel under an assumed name with a young woman that was making him hesitate. Because he still thought of himself as a married man. But it wasn’t that. “I don’t think a motel…”