From the edge of the park, the two-tone of a fast-approaching police car. The old lady with the Westie had had a mobile phone in her handbag. Ignoring the signs, the driver came the direct route across the grass and his companion got out, edging cautiously toward the injured man while keeping her eyes constantly on the dog. But Patience, as if she understood, sat down and let her come.
* * *
Her name was Hazel Best, and she hadn’t been in Norbold long. In fact, she hadn’t been a police officer for very long. She was still on probation and this was her first posting.
The men and women she’d trained with had commiserated, thinking she’d drawn the short straw. Norbold wasn’t the sort of place where careers were made. For that you needed one of the big cities, where crime stalked the streets and some of the people it stalked were rich and famous. You needed the opportunity to disarm an ax maniac or foil a bank robbery from time to time. You needed the possibility of saving a celebrity’s toddler from kidnapping, or to be the thinnest of thin blue lines between a terrorist wearing the ultimate in hi-viz vests and his intended targets. Of course, you also needed to survive these experiences, but if you did, you could expect promotion, fast-tracking, maybe even a medal.
And all these things were more likely to happen on the streets of London, or Glasgow, or Birmingham or Manchester, than in a small West Midlands town where the biggest employer was a manufacturer of flowered tea sets and the average age of the population was fifty-three. Indeed, Norbold was famous—infamous, among Hazel Best’s fellow probationers—for its low crime rate. The general feeling was that, in order to build up some kind of an arrest record there, she’d have to stop people for being old and disorganized, and wielding a walker without due care and attention.
Hazel let them enjoy their joke. In fact, she was curious to learn how you policed a town so as to keep the level of almost all crimes consistently below the national average. And she’d been told the answer the first day she reported for duty. The answer was Johnny Fountain.
But Norbold’s charismatic chief superintendent and his signature brand of zero-tolerance policing had not been enough to save the man at her feet from the kind of beating that leaves people deaf, blind, or brain-damaged. While he was unconscious and masked in his own blood, there was no knowing how serious his injuries were. Hazel shouted, “Ambulance!” to her colleague in the car, then—still keeping one eye on the dog—reached down to touch the man’s shoulder. “It’s all right,” she said, using the calm of her voice to cut through the terror that had been his last conscious thought. “You’re safe now. We’ll look after you.”
Constable Wayne Budgen, having made the call, came over to help. He winced. “They fairly laid into him this time.”
Hazel looked up in surprise. “You mean this has happened before?”
“Not like this. But yes, he’s been roughed up a time or two. Local kids, mostly.”
“Why? Who is he?”
“I don’t know his name. Everyone calls him ‘Rambles.’” The frank incredulity in her stare made him flush. “‘Rambles With Dogs.’ You know—like
Dances with Wolves
? I think he’s a bit…” He made a spiral movement with one finger about his ear. “He wanders around the place talking to that dog.”
“You’re telling me that he’s suffering from a mental disability, and therefore the local youth make a hobby of kicking him up and down the park.”
Hazel’s voice was level, but Wayne Budgen knew perfectly well when he was being told off. And he wasn’t sure how to deal with it. Theoretically, he was senior to Hazel Best—he’d been on the job longer; that’s why he’d been given the task of showing her around. But she was a couple of years older than he was—twenty-five, twenty-six. She’d done something else before joining the police. He wasn’t sure what, but from the way she was looking at him, it might have been teaching.
He spread a defensive hand. “What can we do? We can’t lock him up.”
“No. Perhaps we should try locking
them
up.”
“It’s different ones each time. Look, I’m not saying it’s right. I’m saying it happens. Vulnerable people get bullied. We stop it when we see it.” He saw the skepticism in her gaze. “If you don’t believe me, look at the crime returns. Common assault—eight percent below the national average. Eight percent. That’s a lot of people—people like him—that get home safe in Norbold who’d be in Accidents & Emergency in most other towns.”
Hazel sighed. “Yes. Yes, I know, Wayne. I’m not blaming you. Like you say, some things are always going to happen. It’s just, if you’re one of the people it always happens to, it won’t seem that important that people somewhere else have it even worse.”
Across the park they heard the sound of the ambulance. It seemed to mean something to the man on the ground, too, because finally he started to uncurl and make vague gestures toward getting up. Hazel knelt beside him.
“How are you feeling? I’m Hazel, by the way. Maybe you shouldn’t move around too much until the paramedics have had a look at you.”
“I’m all right,” he mumbled. She wasn’t sure how much of his lack of clarity was due to his broken lip, how much to concussion, how much to his mental condition. He looked around for his dog, and then, having located her, looked at Hazel. “Really. I don’t need the paramedics.”
“Well, they’re here now,” said Hazel reasonably, “so they might as well check you over. You’ve got some nasty cuts there. They’ll probably take you to the Royal to get a few stitches put in.”
“No.” Ash shook his head with infinite caution. “I’m not going to the hospital. They can slap on some of those butterfly plasters, they’ll do just as well.”
Which rather surprised Hazel Best. He didn’t talk like a man with psychiatric problems. He talked the way she talked—the way normal people talk.
Guided by the old mantra that no head injury is so trivial it can safely be ignored nor so serious it should be despaired of, the paramedics wanted to take him in for X-rays. Ash refused. “I’m not going to the hospital,” he said again. “I don’t want to be rude. I’m grateful for your help, but you can’t make me.”
Constable Budgen frowned. “What’s the problem? You one of these religious nuts … people?”
Gabriel Ash gave a little snort that seemed closer to laughter than anything else. “No, just an ordinary nut.”
“You’re worried about your dog, aren’t you?” Hazel realized. “Because you can’t take it into the hospital. I’ll look after it for you, if you like.”
He smiled. A bloody, beaten thing it was, too, but the warmth was genuine. “Thank you. But I don’t need to go to the hospital. If you want to help, help me up.”
It was a bit of a dilemma. People are entitled to refuse offers of assistance, however well intentioned and indeed well advised. On the other hand, if there was some doubt about his mental capacity …
“How do you feel about police stations?” asked Hazel. “Ours is just around the corner. The police surgeon can have a look at you, we’ll have a cup of coffee—I don’t know about you, but I need one, and Wayne here’s desperate for a fag break—and you and your dog can have a quiet sit-down for an hour. If you still seem all right then, I’ll take you home. Deal?”
He thought about it. “Deal.”
She helped him up. She gave him the dog’s lead. “I don’t know your name.”
“Gabriel Ash. And this is Patience.”
CHAPTER 3
C
HIEF SUPERINTENDENT
John Fountain regarded the reflection in the mirror with fond solemnity. Not his own face, which had been a thing of no great beauty when he was young and now showed the effects of too many late nights and pie and chip suppers, but that of his wife behind him, the tip of her tongue protruding between her lips as she concentrated on the bow tie he himself had given up on. Her name was Denise, and he supposed that by conventional standards she wasn’t a thing of any great beauty, either; but she was to him. She was the only woman he’d ever loved, and he loved her more now than when they were twenty.
Which is why he went on sitting at the dressing-table mirror while she fiddled with the stupid strip of fabric instead of groping around in his chest of drawers for the ready-made one. Denis—he called her Denis: it had been their joke for so long it didn’t even seem like a joke anymore—insisted that an occasion like tonight demanded the real thing. Fountain doubted that anyone in the Town Hall would care or even notice whether his bow tie was elasticized or not; and if the speeches went on long enough for someone to pay that much attention to his attire, he knew they’d know he wasn’t the one who had tied it. Johnny Fountain wasn’t the kind of man who spent time prettifying himself. He was the kind of man who rugby-tackled football hooligans and arm-wrestled them into the backs of Land Rovers while younger, more cautious officers were leafing through the police manual.
In a way, that was what tonight was about. Norbold’s great and good were gathering under the Town Hall candelabra to pay tribute to the vision, determination, and application of one man, and that man was Johnny Fountain.
He caught his wife’s eye in the mirror. His voice was a low Yorkshire rumble. “You’re not going to embarrass me tonight, are you?”
She pretended not to know what he meant. “Embarrass you?”
Fountain sighed. “Well, saying ‘Hear! Hear!’ loudly every time someone says something nice about me would qualify. So would asking the mayor, the assistant chief constable, and Her Grace the Duchess to pose with me for a photograph.”
From the disappointment he glimpsed in her reflection, he thought he’d already hit pay dirt, and the list was hardly exhaustive. Nor had he any confidence in his ability, or the time frame available, to expand it to include every way she might find to make the evening memorable for all the wrong reasons.
“But I’m proud of you, dear,” Denis said fondly.
“Well, that’s nice to know. But can we settle for the occasional smug smile rather than blasts on a feathered whoopee whistle?”
Behind him her smile was distinctly smug. “I’ll do my best.”
“No one can do more,” Fountain acknowledged graciously.
* * *
She did try. To some extent she succeeded. But her husband, and everyone else who knew her, was aware of how sorely the evening in the Town Hall tested her resolve. Denis Fountain was a woman who had always embraced life, who had no talent for—and saw no point in—playing it cool. She was bursting with pride and didn’t care who knew it. Wanted people to know it. And everyone who stood up to add to the litany of praise heaped upon the head of Norbold’s senior police office only stoked the fires, until his wife was glowing like a small sun with a new hairdo. If only there’d been room in her tiny evening bag for a feathered whoopee whistle!
And the best thing about it, the very best, was that every word was true. All these people weren’t here simply because it was Fountain’s turn: they’d done the mayor last month and the Paralympic archer who’d come in second at the European championships the month before, and now it was time to do the chief superintendent. The speeches were such music to Denis’s ears because they were an honest acknowledgment of a plain and simple truth: that, like pushing water uphill, and in the first instance with precious little help and no expectation of success, her husband had turned Norbold from a crime black spot into one of the safest places to live in the whole country. Crime was low because people who wanted to make a career of it found better prospects elsewhere. The clear-up rate as a proportion of reported crime was impressively high. As a consequence, the fear of crime in and around Norbold, from the middle-class suburb of Sedgewick to the council estates of Hollybush and the Flying Horse, ran at the sort of levels usually associated with pastoral communities in Dorset. People no longer expected to be the victims of crime, and they knew who they had to thank for that. It had taken him ten years, but ten years wasn’t too long for people to remember what Norbold was like before Johnny Fountain.
And because this was essentially a testimonial, people were kind enough not to mention his one failure, the one facet of local crime he had yet to make inroads against. In part this was because the people who attend gala testimonials for important local figures are themselves important local figures and tend not to live or work in the kind of areas where drug dealing and drug taking have a major impact on people’s daily lives. So they see it as somebody else’s problem.
Fountain had slashed the rates of burglary, mugging, damage to and thefts from cars, dangerous driving, and attacks against the person that were not drug-related—all the crimes that respectable, responsible people could imagine themselves and their families falling victim to. For the most part they saw drugs as something other people’s families got involved in; unless of course they knew better, when their focus shifted to hoping the police
wouldn’t
find out. In short, if Chief Superintendent Fountain had to have a blot on his copybook, drugs was the best page to have it. The great and good of Norbold avoided referring to it because they knew how, to a man conspicuously successful in every other aspect of his work, it must rankle.
No one had ever counted Nye Jackson of the
Norbold News
among the great and good, and this was to his credit. There’s something seriously wrong with a reporter who isn’t getting under people’s skin. After the meal and the speeches, as the diners circulated, he made sure a little eddy washed him up against the guest of honor.
Johnny Fountain was a big man. Nye Jackson wasn’t. He was a wiry red-haired Welshman with a chip on his shoulder because he was still working on a provincial weekly at the age of forty-three: too old to be working his way up to
Panorama,
too young to be coasting toward retirement. He’d been in Norbold for eight years. People serve less time for murder.
He fought to keep his drink safe from passersby who hadn’t noticed him and inquired of the chief superintendent’s shoulder, “Any progress with that van business, Mr. Fountain?”
Fountain looked around before looking down for him, smiling like a genial adult pestered by a child. “Hello, Scoop. You clean up nicely. I hope you got all the flattering things people were saying about me?” The North of England accent was matched by a craggy face and lion’s mane of white hair. He was in his mid-fifties now.