“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
“T
HIS 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.
Fountain bent over deliberately and finished cutting Ash free. He didn’t think Argyle would shoot him for it, and he was right. Nor did he think Ash would leap to his feet, arm himself with some leftover horseshoes, and change fundamentally the balance of the standoff, and he was right about that, too. Gabriel Ash couldn’t have got to his feet to save his own life or anyone else’s. All the same, he was glad to be free. There’s no pride in being lashed to a lump of iron while people hit you.
Argyle watched with impatience and disbelief. He couldn’t see the dilemma. From where he was standing, the way ahead was clear. “Okay. I know this hasn’t been easy for you. It hasn’t been easy for me—it was my daughter fell for that black buck. None of it would have been necessary if it wasn’t for her. But let’s be sensible now. All we need to do is tidy up and no one will be any the wiser. I’ll deal with the loose ends”—he waved the gun casually at Ash—“and pack Alice off to some associates overseas until she’s prepared to be reasonable, and that’s it: problem solved.
“All you have to do is walk away. Go to the funerals, say how sorry you are, say you’ve got your best people on it. We both know they’ll get no further than they have before. I don’t mind being suspected of all sorts as long as there’s no proof. Okay? Two bullets is all it’s going to take.” He looked at Ash disapprovingly. “I doubt this one even needs a bullet. Bursting a paper bag should see him off.”
“And Constable Best?”
Mickey grinned. “Best you don’t ask.”
Half of Chief Superintendent Fountain was appalled and half was actually tempted. Appalled, because however much he understood the theory of people like Argyle, in practice the complete disregard for human life still had the power to stagger him. Tempted, because when Argyle could lay it out in a couple of sentences, he had to acknowledge that it was possible. Simple, even. He didn’t have to put his life on the line. Life could go on pretty much the same, except for Gabriel Ash and Hazel Best.
“No,” said Johnny Fountain.
Argyle’s narrow brows lowered. “I could always make it three bullets.”
“You want to shoot me, Mickey? You really want to shoot me? Not a probationer Whoopsie who’s already out of the picture, but a senior police officer? You know what happens to people who kill cops. They never get away with it. They might think they have, for a while. But every cop in the world has a vested interest in catching them, and the odds are just too great. One day in Vienna or Venezuela you run a red light and it’s game over. That’s why, as a general rule of thumb, your people leave my people alone. You
know
this, Mickey. I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know.”
Silence confirmed this.
“Take what I’m offering and go,” said Fountain. “There’s no other game in town.”
Finally Argyle seemed to be thinking about it. About getting out with what he could carry before even that door closed. It would mean leaving behind a lifestyle he’d spent ten years perfecting. But if he could take the profits with him, he could start again somewhere. Somewhere nicer than Norbold. Somewhere ripe for the picking.
It wasn’t what he wanted. If he’d been ready to retire, he could have done it at any time, and—crucially—at a time of his choosing. But you can’t always have everything you want, even if your name is Mickey Argyle. Sometimes you have to settle for second prize. If he stayed, he’d be risking it all. And there was no need. He’d already achieved everything he wanted, made as much money as he could spend, put the fear of God into as many people as any one man could hope to. He could go now and enjoy the fruits of his labors with, so to speak, a clear conscience.
Nobody told Mickey Argyle what to do. In one game-changing second his mouth twisted into an ugly shape and the gun came up. “Go to hell, Mr. Fountain.”
Gunfire in an enclosed space fills the room, echoing off every hard surface. One shot can sound like a volley, two like a battlefield. Johnny Fountain’s eyes opened wide in surprise. It had been a risky strategy; he’d known that. Still he never expected it to end this way.
On the floor, still leaning against the anvil, Ash flinched and squeezed his eyes tight. He didn’t think he was the target this time, but he lacked the particular kind of courage to stare down the muzzle of a gun in order to see where it was pointing.
Mixed in with the gunfire was another bang as the door of the smithy hit the wall, and suddenly there were more people in the workshop than there had been and—what with the echoes still bouncing around and the smell of cordite—for a moment he couldn’t work out who any of them were.
One of them was Alice Argyle, holding a handgun as though she’d been taught how, a dirty unkempt nineteen-year-old girl pointing a gun as if she meant it. Another was Hazel Best.
For three attenuated seconds nothing changed. Mickey Argyle kept his gun on Johnny Fountain; Alice Argyle kept hers on her father. Chief Superintendent Fountain stayed on his feet; Gabriel Ash stayed on the floor. Hazel looked from one to another of them, wondering who needed her help most, or most urgently, or was past benefitting from it, and whether—simply by moving—she’d break the spell and someone would die in front of her.
After three seconds Mickey Argyle let out an oddly gentle sigh, lowered his weapon, then slowly folded to the floor at Fountain’s feet. There were two neat holes in his chest.
Alice Argyle kept pointing her gun at him, as if at the least provocation she would empty it into his dead body. “He killed Jerome.” She spoke through clenched teeth.
“Yes,” agreed Hazel. “Give me the gun. Alice—give me the gun.”
Finally Fountain’s brain accepted the evidence of his senses and understood that he hadn’t been shot. He made a conscious effort to relax all the muscles holding him rigid. “All right. Is anyone hurt?” Then he looked at Argyle, at Ash, at Alice. He looked again at Hazel. “Okay, silly question. Was anyone else hit?”
By now Hazel had Fletcher’s gun. He’d given it up because, bottom line, Alice was her father’s daughter and Fletcher was trained to jump when an Argyle said “Jump.” He hadn’t known what she intended to do with it. He hadn’t asked himself. The Rat had run at that point, but Fletcher was waiting out by the cars, ready to do what he was told by the first Argyle to emerge from the forge.
Hazel’s left arm was around Alice, trying to still the shaking of her slender young body. She said tersely to Fountain, “We need an ambulance, and we need DI Gorman here right now. Get him on the phone, find out how long he’ll be.” It didn’t strike either of them as odd, that she was issuing instructions to a man who outranked her by a whole career.
Gabriel Ash, beaten bloody, weak as a kitten and dizzy as a lush, mumbled through broken lips, “Detective Inspector Gorman isn’t coming.”
Fountain looked at him. Hazel passed him a tissue, though what good she expected him to do with it wasn’t clear. “We called him from the cottage.” She was keeping her voice very calm, very level, for fear of what would happen if she didn’t. “He’ll be here any moment.”
“No,” said Ash, “he won’t.”
Hazel thought he hadn’t understood. She explained as simply as she could. “We talked to him before we left the cottage. Mr. Fountain knew about this place. He guessed Argyle would have you brought here. DI Gorman was going to get crewed up and meet us. Really,” she added with a touch of asperity, “he should be here by now.”
“Who called him?” asked Ash.
“Mr. Fountain.” She looked at the big man standing very still in the middle of the concrete floor. When she said it again, there was a slightly different inflection in her voice. “Chief Superintendent Fountain did.”
Ash used the tissue to clear himself a little vision. He tried not to notice how much of his blood came away on it, concentrated on Fountain. “Do you want to tell her or shall I?”
Fountain said nothing. There was a slightly puzzled half smile on his big craggy face. Hazel looked at the pair of them over Alice’s shoulder. “Tell me what?” Her voice didn’t sound like her own. “Tell me what, sir?”
Fountain shook his head. He blew out a gusty breath of relief. “I’m not sure. I think he’s a bit … disorientated. It’s no wonder.” He reached out. “I’ll look after Alice. You see what you can do for Ram—Mr. Ash. And I’ll call Dave Gorman. Maybe he’s having trouble finding us. Or maybe he never got the message.”
“Message?” echoed Hazel. She frowned. “I thought…”
Fountain took Alice from her and walked the girl to the open door, where she didn’t have to look at what she’d done. “It’s all right, you know,” he was saying reassuringly. “What you did. You’re not in any trouble. He was going to kill me. You saved my life.”
Hazel crouched beside Ash, still looking uncertainly at her chief superintendent. “I thought…”
“You thought he’d spoken to DI Gorman?” Ash looked terrible, and his damaged mouth slurred the words, but his mind was working better than hers. “He told you that?” She nodded. “He didn’t call anyone. He wanted to sort it out himself. He
needed
to sort it out himself.”
“Why?”
There was a longish pause. He seemed to be wondering if she had to know. But of course she did—it all had to come out now, and Hazel Best had more right to know than anyone. “Because Sergeant Murchison wasn’t the one in Argyle’s pocket.
He
was.”
Hazel didn’t tell him he was crazy, because she knew he wasn’t, and didn’t suggest that he was concussed, because he probably was, but she didn’t think it was that, either. “Explain.”
“They had a deal. Him and Argyle, going back years. Fountain would leave Argyle alone if Argyle would help him tidy up the rest of Norbold. Stop his own people moonlighting, I suppose, keep an iron hand on his end of town, pass on any information that came his way as long as it didn’t impact on his own business.
“That’s how Mr. Fountain made such an impact in a high-crime area. He turned it into a low-crime area within a couple of years, and he kept it that way until today. Except for the drugs. Didn’t it strike anyone as odd that he could get on top of everything from mugging to murder but the drugs scene just seemed to go from strength to strength?”
“I … you can’t … nobody’s a hundred percent successful,” managed Hazel.
“That’s true. But it’s a lot easier if your prime suspect is helping you on the sly.”
Hazel straightened up slowly. She was looking at Fountain. “Is this true?”
The chief superintendent gave a disparaging sniff. “Hazel, you know who he is. You know
what
he is. For pity’s sake, recognize a fairy story when you hear one.”
Her gaze turned back to Ash. “Gabriel, you do know what you’re saying? That it wasn’t Donald Murchison who helped Argyle to murder Jerome Cardy, it was Mr. Fountain.”
“Yes,” said Ash simply.
Fountain gave a snort that was half a chuckle. “Hazel, you
know
where I was that night! In the Town Hall, getting the Freedom of Norbold from the mayor with four hundred of the great and good looking on.” As alibis go, it was a pretty good one.
“Were you in uniform?”
Fountain smiled. “Dinner jacket and black tie.”
That wasn’t a lie; it would be too easy to check. Ash stepped mentally around it. “It’s two minutes’ walk from the Town Hall to Meadowvale. If Constable Best asks your wife, will she be able to say you never left her sight all evening? Didn’t go to the gents, didn’t nip out for a cigar? Ten minutes was all it would take. Once Argyle got word that Jerome was in custody, he sent you a message to say Barclay would be on his way in shortly. All you had to do was make sure they were put in the same cell.