* * *
Gabriel Ash saw it from the backseat of the car, and something inside him snapped. It wasn’t a very robust something to start with. He hadn’t seen what happened to his wife and sons, he didn’t even
know
what had happened to them, but this was close enough to drive a dagger into the same coil of his innards that had been hacked apart when he lost them.
He cried out in horror and grief; and neither was inappropriate, because though Hazel Best wasn’t an old friend, he’d known her just long enough and well enough to feel a personal pain that went beyond the shock any decent man would have felt at witnessing a murder. In a way he could not have explained, the horror and the grief, and the rage, were compounded because he’d been here once before and the pathways of his brain were primed.
The men on either side of him took a wrist each and twisted them up behind him. But the elastic snapping in his head had catapulted him to a place where pain and fear and even the threat of death had very little meaning. He fought them with all his strength, a heart full of pain and a howling in his throat, and he succeeded in shaking off one of them and using the fist thus freed to cannon the other’s skull into the reinforced glass of the window. Then he launched himself forward, fists pounding on the head and shoulders of the Rat, who let out a yelp of shock and then cowered over the wheel with scant regard for the way bits of landscape that were racing at him at forty miles an hour.
If it hadn’t been for Fletcher, possibly all of them would have died, bent around a tree or somersaulting into a field. But Fletcher recovered quickly, and he had a gun. For half a second—and half a second was all he had—he considered shooting Ash there and then, and explaining to his boss how he’d had no choice. But in fact there was another option, and he took it. He palmed the gun and swung it as best he could in the confines of the rocking car.
Fireworks burst behind Ash’s eyes. He left off what he was doing with an odd little pant, and blinked, and his free hand moved uncertainly toward his head. It was halfway there when the blackness took him.
* * *
Not long afterward, the blackness that had taken Hazel began to thin. Not all at once. First she was aware of sounds—the sound of a car, then a man’s voice. Then she felt strong hands and thought of her father. But he didn’t know where she was, let alone that she needed him, so probably it was Mickey Argyle’s men come back to finish the job their big black car had started. There was nothing she could do to stop them. She waited, not resigned exactly, just too tired to help herself.
“Open your eyes.” Though it certainly wasn’t her father’s, it was a voice that she recognized, even if for the moment she couldn’t place it. “Hazel, open your eyes and look at me. I know you’re in there.”
She was also too tired to argue. She did as she was told.
Seeing the figure bent over her did nothing to dispel her confusion. She was still imagining things. If it couldn’t be Alfred Best, it couldn’t be Johnny Fountain, either. “Wha’…?”
“That’s better,” growled Fountain, straightening up. He’d eased her into a more comfortable position under the tree, his folded jacket under her head. “You’re concussed—you’ve had a crack on the head. And you’re going to be pretty sore all over, but I don’t think there’s anything broken. Do you think there is?”
“What?”
He sighed and tried again. “Are you in pain? Can you move your arms and legs? How are your ribs?”
When she tried, she found he was right—she was sore all over. But there was no sharp, unignorable pain that said something wasn’t going to be better after a hot bath and a good night’s sleep. “I’m okay,” she mumbled.
It wasn’t true, and Fountain knew it wasn’t true. He could see a glazed sickness in her eyes. “Don’t try to move. I’ll call an ambulance. They’ll get you checked out at A&E. I’m sorry, I can’t wait with you. I need to find Ash.”
“Ash!” She’d all but forgotten. “Mickey Argyle has him.”
“You saw him?” The lowering of his heavy brow concentrated his gaze on her like a searchlight. “Argyle was here?”
Hazel went to shake her head, then thought better of it. “His heavies. At least, I guess so. No one else had any reason.…” But the effort of putting the words together into sentences was helping to clear her head. She looked at Fountain oddly. “Nobody knew we were here. Even
you
didn’t know we were here. Only Detective Inspector Gorman, and that was after they found us.”
“I know. He called me. You got lucky—I wasn’t fifteen minutes away. Heading home from a working lunch in Leicester. I thought I could get here before the local CID.”
Against his advice, Hazel was struggling to sit up. Fountain let her, watching to see if she’d topple over again. She didn’t. “You’re going after them? Argyle’s men, and Ash?”
The chief superintendent nodded.
“I’m coming, too.”
“Don’t be ridiculous! You’re waiting here for the ambulance. You’re in no fit state.…”
“I’m coming,” she said again firmly—so firmly it ended the discussion. “I’ll stay in the car. I’ll work the radio. But I am coming.”
CHAPTER 26
F
OUNTAIN HELPED
her into his car, and by the time she’d remembered how a seat belt works they were on their way. She’d no idea how far ahead the 4x4 was, nor where it was heading. Back to Norbold? To a rendezvous elsewhere? Her hands dropped helplessly in her lap. “I don’t know where they’d take him.”
“I have an idea,” grunted Fountain. “Mickey has a workshop outside Liddam, this side of Norbold. I think it was a blacksmith’s shop. He took it in settlement of a debt years ago. Most people don’t know it’s his.”
“You think that’s where they’re going?”
“Nobody lives there and there are no passersby. If I wanted to talk to someone who didn’t want to talk to me, that would be my choice.”
Hazel tried not to focus on the implication that a meeting between Mickey Argyle and Gabriel Ash could get noisy. And messy. “Maybe Alice is there, too.”
Fountain shot her a sideways look. “You still think she’s in danger?”
Hazel made her protesting body swivel sideways on the car seat. She knew she must look like death warmed up. “He killed Jerome. He killed Nye Jackson. He thinks he killed me, and he means to kill Ash. Why would he draw the line at Alice?”
Fountain made no reply.
As her wits found their way back, like swallows settling on a telegraph line, Hazel remembered Patience. “The dog, sir! Ash’s dog. What happened to her?”
He shrugged. “I didn’t see it. It wasn’t there when I arrived. Did they take it with them?”
“I don’t think so. She was with me, until … unless they came back for her, and why would they do that? It’s not like she can be a witness against them.”
“It must have run off.”
Hazel shook her head slowly, the picture unfolding behind her eyes. “No. She’s following them. She’s following the car.”
“Then she’s got a long journey ahead of her,” grunted Fountain. “We’ll probably catch up with her on the road.” But they didn’t.
* * *
Ash, too, woke to a sensation of hands. One hand, anyway, slapping his face—not gently, but with an insistency that rocked his battered brain. A voice was calling him, though not by his name. “Hey, dummy! Wake up. I want to talk to you.”
Brain damage, which is what concussion is, surprises even the professionals with its puckishness, the way it may affect one faculty profoundly and leave another untouched. Ash couldn’t see for the constellation of stars exploding in the dark room, and couldn’t move for vertigo even though he was lying down. But he could hear, and he could think, too. He knew what had happened. He knew what was happening now, and he knew what was going to happen. He knew his ability to influence what was going to happen was limited by the proximity of a number of men, all of whom were stronger, fitter, and tougher than him.
“Mr. Argyle,” he slurred, mostly into gritty concrete. He concentrated all his efforts on getting his face off the floor. “About time, too. Now, where’s your daughter? You’d better not have hurt her.”
It was a long time since anyone had surprised Mickey Argyle. No, that wasn’t true. His daughter Alice had surprised him—shocked him to his foundations—only a couple of weeks ago, but before that he couldn’t remember the last time.
Men like Argyle can’t afford to be surprised. They need to know what’s going on around them all the time. They need to know how the people they’re dealing with will react in any situation. If they get it wrong, they can pay with their lives, literally or at least in a penal sense. Mickey Argyle didn’t like anyone saying or doing something unexpected. He spent serious money surrounding himself with the kind of help that could keep the unexpected at bay.
Sprawled on the floor of his blacksmith’s shop, grime on his tramp’s clothes and blood on his hands and face, was the Norbold village idiot, beaten helpless, his long, thin limbs as capable of doing his bidding as bits of well-chewed string. His eyes were sunk deep in a gaunt face masked by dirt, blood, and bruises; he was struggled to keep them open. And yet he knew things that nobody should have known. That his
wife
didn’t know. Things that existed only in Mickey’s head. For all that she’d done, he hadn’t laid a finger on Alice. He’d only thought—briefly, guiltily, dismissing the idea almost if not quite entirely—that he might have to.
How could the village idiot know that?
If he couldn’t, he didn’t. Argyle got a grip on himself, clamped down hard on the stunned expression that had crept over his face, and replaced it with the usual one of rigid, ruthless control. “What are you talking about?”
“Alice,” said Ash carefully. He’d levered himself pretty well upright against the timber block that held the anvil in the middle of the floor, and if it had cost him blood, at least it had restored to him a little dignity. “Your daughter Alice. Who knows what you did. Who nobody has seen for days. Where is she? What have you done with her?”
“You’ve been spying on me? On my family?” Argyle heard himself losing his cool again, which wasn’t good. Not that he cared what Ash thought. He cared what his crew thought. They did what he told them because he paid them to, but also because they were scared shitless of him. They’d have admitted as much. It was part of the deal: they probably wouldn’t have worked for someone they
weren’t
scared of. So it mattered if it appeared that Argyle was not on top of things. That there was someone
he
was scared of.
Of Gabriel Ash? Rambles With Dogs? How could a man like Argyle be scared of something like that? He only had to say the word and Ash was history.
But Ash’s ghost could still come back to haunt him. He needed to know what Ash knew, how he knew it, and who he’d shared the information with. Not the reporter, who’d been dealt with, or the girl, who’d lost to a tree in a head-butting contest, but who else? Who else had he talked to that Argyle knew nothing about? Who
does
a village idiot talk to when he’s not talking to his dog?
He hadn’t thought it mattered. He hadn’t thought Ash was capable of rational thought, or that anyone who was would have paid him much heed. But somehow he’d managed to convince both the Whoopsie and the hack. The fact that they’d both been neutralized didn’t blind Argyle to the danger that Ash had also spoken to, and been believed by, someone else. Someone he knew nothing about.
The only one who could tell him was Ash. He leaned slowly over the man on the floor. “Tell me everything you know, and everything you think you know, and I’ll let you go.”
Ash rocked his head back and regarded the man laconically. Physically he felt exhausted, drained, and sick. Oddly, his mind felt light. He smiled. “No, you won’t.”
Argyle blinked. He was an older man than Ash by maybe ten years, of a similar build but more muscular, with thinning black hair slicked back in a manner that was more fashionable once than now. He had brown eyes without a hint of warmth in them. He frowned, puzzled by the smile. “What do you mean?
I
don’t want you, and the kids are too old for pets. But you’ve been telling porkies about me and I need to set the record straight. Talk to whoever you’ve been talking to and explain how you get things wrong sometimes.”
It wasn’t a bad pitch. If Ash had done all his thinking inside his own head, he might have wondered if he’d made a fundamental mistake. But he hadn’t. He’d hammered it out with Nye Jackson and Hazel Best, two professional people with their feet firmly on the ground; and now—he didn’t think there was much doubt about this—both of them were dead. By and large, people don’t get murdered to keep them from telling fairy stories.
He nodded a rueful agreement. “I
do
get things wrong sometimes.”
Argyle, too, nodded, and smiled. The smile was as warm as the eyes. “It’s easy done. And you haven’t been well. It’s easy to start imagining things. Let’s talk about it, sort out what’s real and what isn’t.”
“Then what?”
“Then we’ll take you home, and I’ll put things right with anyone you’ve accidentally misled.”
“Put things right.”
“Yes.”
“You mean run them down with your car.”
Argyle feigned shock. “Of course not. Why would I do that?”
“Hell, I don’t know,” said Ash disingenuously. “The same reason you’ve done it before? To stay out of prison?”
“I thought we talked about this.” Argyle was speaking through clenched teeth now. “About how you get things wrong sometimes. I’m not going to prison. I haven’t done anything to go to prison
for
.”
Ash’s smile broadened. He rested his forehead on the back of his wrist and propped his elbow on his bent knee. “Of course not, Mr. Argyle. It was all a misunderstanding. You’re an upright citizen, an honest businessman, and a loving father, and these people”—his gaze flicked toward the men from the car—“are your valet, your accountant, and your personal astrologer. I may be mad, but I’m not a fool. I know what you did. And I know what you’ll end up doing.”
“I’m not going to kill you!”