Deadly Virtues (16 page)

Hazel, white-faced, wondered if another apology might help. She wasn’t sure it was called for, but if it would defuse the situation, she was willing to try. But a peremptory hand waved her to silence.

“They may accept that. They’re going to give me some very funny looks, I dare say I’ll be the butt of a few good jokes at the Division Christmas party, but with luck—with a lot of luck—it may go no further. If you believe in the power of prayer, that’s worth praying for.

“I have to tell you, regaining your colleagues’ trust will be harder. It may not be possible. If this gets out, they’re going to feel you didn’t just stab Sergeant Murchison in the back, you stabbed them, too. I don’t know what you can do to persuade them that you won’t do it again, the next time you want to make an impression on the top brass.”

There are worse things for a police officer to do than bursting into tears, but not many. A bit like knocking over an elderly nun on a zebra crossing when you’re taking your driving test, it’s pretty much the end of the line. Another of those unwritten rules that you can’t afford to break. You hold on. You wait till you’re alone. Family, and very close friends, are the only ones who ever see you cry.

Hazel knew that if she cried in front of Chief Superintendent Fountain, he’d probably stop glaring at her in furious disbelief and put his arm around her instead, but that would be worse. The end of all her hopes. If none of her colleagues trusted her, and her chief superintendent thought she was pathetic, she could kiss good-bye to her police career. She’d worked hard to get here. People had expected her to go far. Now, it seemed, she had a great future behind her; and maybe she’d been wrong, and maybe she’d been naïve, but she’d acted from honorable motives and she still thought her concerns hadn’t been given the consideration they deserved. But she was damned if she was going to cry.

“Sir, I really don’t think you’re being fair. I’ve given this a lot of thought. I believed—I still believe—that it could be coincidence, but the chances of it being something else were too high to ignore. I was on my way to see you when I was redirected to IPCC, and once there I answered their questions as honestly as I could. I thought, and I still think, that was my duty.

“I understand that this is the last thing you expected to have to deal with. I’m sorry it was me who came up with this instead of a more senior officer who’d worked for you for years and whose judgment you’d learned to trust. But that’s not what happened. Maybe I’m wrong. I
hope
I’m wrong. But I think someone with a lot more experience on the job than me needs to look at it properly before you write it off as a rookie mistake.”

He said nothing, just kept looking at her. But from the way his eyes widened slightly, she thought she’d managed to surprise him. Again. She wasn’t sorry. She was already in such deep water that splashing probably couldn’t do her any more harm.

Unless it attracted sharks.

Finally Johnny Fountain sucked in a deep breath, let it out in a sigh, and shook his head bemusedly. “All right.” He almost sounded defeated. “If you want me to look into it, I’ll look into it. I’ll have to speak to Sergeant Murchison, and the other officers who were on duty that night. I’ll even—God help me!—have to talk to Rambles. But you understand, any chance we might have had of playing this down goes out the window the moment I get involved. That’s what you want, is it? You’re sure?”

Hazel drew herself up to her full height and squared her shoulders: what had been described to her in training as “filling the uniform.” She’d liked that, and remembered it, and she did it now not to impress and reassure a member of the public but so that Fountain would never know how devastated his assessment had left her, how uncertain she now was of what had seemed so obvious. But it was too late to back down. She’d rather be proved wrong, with all that would follow, than be thought weak and mean-spirited. Her career would be over either way, and she’d rather be shot down in flames than slowly choked. Like Desdemona.

“Yes, sir,” she said, and wondered at the firmness in her own voice. “I think it’s necessary.”

“All right.” He sat back, broad shoulders slumping. “On your own head be it.”

CHAPTER 15

I
T STARTED
almost immediately.

No one spoke an unkind word to her. No one spoke to her at all, unless it was strictly necessary, when they said what they had to in as few words as possible and then moved away. Their faces remained expressionless. None of them could have been accused of intimidating her by word, deed, or manner. But oh, the power of silence.

Hazel was determined to see it through. It wasn’t as if these people were her friends. Not really, not yet. They were colleagues, and they could go on working together whether or not they liked one another. She had done nothing wrong. She kept reminding herself of that. Others would decide if her suspicions were warranted, but even if they weren’t, she’d had no choice but take them to someone with more experience, more seniority than she. Maybe those who’d known Sergeant Murchison since he was directing traffic onto the Ark would be proved right. That still wouldn’t make what Hazel did wrong.

So if her colleagues at Meadowvale Police Station wanted to keep her at arm’s length until the truth could be established, fine. Unnecessary, Hazel thought, and unkind, and maybe even cowardly, but fine. Sooner or later, whatever transpired, they would have to deal with her, and she’d still be here. She wasn’t about to plead stress and go on gardening leave.

But for the first time since joining the police she couldn’t wait for the end of her shift. When she went into the women’s locker room to change that Saturday morning, everyone who was already there left. One left in her bra, pulling her shirt on as she stalked down the corridor.

Okay, thought Hazel Best, and just for badness she paused at the drinks machine in the foyer, bought a strong coffee, and took her time drinking it. Only then did she leave the building.

At first she drove around aimlessly, torn between thinking and trying not to think. Then she noticed the looks she was getting from people on the street, whom she’d passed three times, and realized they thought she was curb crawling. She left the car by the park gates and walked as far as the war memorial.

The urns had been restored to their proper positions, the uprooted shrubs replanted, the granite steps swept clean. Robert Barclay’s blood on the obelisk had been washed away.

Why?
she found herself wondering.
Why
had he wanted to head-butt it? Barking Mad or not, he must have known he’d hurt himself much more than the monument. Whatever was there about a granite war memorial to make him so angry? Hazel bent closer to read the inscriptions. But they were just names. The names of young men, and a few young women, who’d lived in Norbold and died on foreign fields in conflicts from World War I to present-day Iraq and Afghanistan.

There were even a couple of Bests. No relation. As far as she knew she had no family in Norbold, but that didn’t stop the discovery from giving her a little jolt. In a way it didn’t matter if they were close kin or not. They were all one. They’d come from roots like hers, and grown up in this place, expecting to be teachers and plumbers and, yes, policemen, and they hadn’t had the chance. Some of them had died bravely, and some of them had died with their arms over their heads, crying for their mothers, but all of them had been trying to do a good thing and it had cost them their lives. Their loss had been felt in hearts and homes in every street in the town.

And Robert Barclay had found their monument so offensive that he tried to rip it down with his bare hands and indeed his bare head.
Why?

Or maybe it didn’t matter why. Maybe she was looking for some sort of logic where none existed. It wasn’t what Barclay did here that was important; it was what he did in cell five at Meadowvale.

Unless Gabriel Ash was right when he suggested—it had been little more than an off-the-cuff idea, and they hadn’t pursued it because they’d started talking about something else—that someone else had used Barclay to do his dirty work. Used him as a weapon, Ash had said—primed him and pointed him and stood well back to wait for the explosion. Mickey Argyle, perhaps, whose interest in Ash suggested he was in some way involved in Jerome Cardy’s life, if not his death. A man like that, a serious player on the organized-crime scene—one of the last serious players in Norbold, thanks to Johnny Fountain—might have the nous to manipulate smaller thugs like Barclay if he also had the need. Hazel couldn’t imagine why he would go to so much trouble to launch a stealth attack on a law student, but it wasn’t necessary for her to know in order to find out if there was any mileage in the idea. To go back through Barclay’s night, and possibly the previous day, to see if she could discover what made him do what he did that got him arrested.

The war memorial. He could have attacked any of the bus shelters on the way here, any of the shop fronts, or the art installation in front of the Town Hall, which had made Hazel reach for her truncheon more than once. He hadn’t. He’d come into the park in order to attack the war memorial. She leaned forward, scanning the names. Not far up the long list from where she’d found the Bests, she found a Barclay. Lance Corporal E. M. Barclay of Second Battalion, the Parachute Regiment, died 1979 in Northern Ireland. Barking Mad’s dad? She could check the custody records, but the man she’d tried to arrest looked to be around forty, making it perfectly feasible. Perhaps as a small child this big, violent man had stood on a railway station and waved good-bye to a soldier father he was never going to see again.

Was that enough? To make him put a brick through the window of the recruiting office maybe, but to attack the monument? Hazel couldn’t see it.

As she backed away, nodding a tiny salute, someone was watching her. A dog walker, she supposed, waiting on the edge of the spinney while his charge investigated the fascinating aroma of something dead in the leaf mold. But there was no dog. As she moved, his shoulders moved to follow her.

Hazel turned toward him.

She thought he was going to hurry off—something about the way his body gathered itself in balance over his feet. But he resisted the urge and let her approach.

He was about sixteen, thin and pinched in the face, none too clean even for a teenager and wearing clothes too light for the April weather and trainers with holes over the toes. She thought he was sleeping rough, or the next best thing.

“Were you looking for me?” she asked, keeping her tone friendly.

He answered with a question, and a note of challenge. “Are you a cop?”

That surprised her. She was out of uniform, and hadn’t lived around here long enough for everyone to know who she was and what she did. “That’s right.” She nodded. “Do you need some help?”

He disdained to answer that. “You were here three nights ago. After the nut with the dog got beat.”

Hazel ignored his choice of words. “What do you know about that?”

The boy shrugged inside his thin clothes. “Nothing.”

“You knew it was me dealing with it. You must have seen me.”

“Nothing to do with me.” Another moment and he really was going to run.

“He was all right, you know,” said Hazel. “A bit bruised, nothing more. Which is a minor miracle, when you think about it.”

“Yeah,” muttered the boy.

“Yes.” Hazel pretended not to notice the shiftiness of his demeanor. She thought she knew what this was about. “He said somebody helped him. That he’d have been hurt much worse if somebody hadn’t taken the risk of helping him.”

“Yeah?”

“By letting the dog go.”

Saturday shot her a sideways glance from under overlong hair, half wary, half pleased. “They were going to kill him.”

“Yes,” agreed Hazel, “I think they were.”

“It was the dog run them off. Cracking good dog, that.”

“She couldn’t have done it if you’d held on to her.”

“He never done them any harm. Why’d they want to kill him?”

Hazel shook her head. “I don’t know. They’re not my friends.”

“They’re not mine, neither! They’re…” He didn’t finish the sentence. It was as if he was accustomed to being cut short. As if never being listened to had freed him from the mental discipline of having to think things through to a conclusion.

But Hazel was listening to him now, politely, her head tipped a little to one side like a curious bird’s. “What, then?”

Like forcing a rusty hinge, like hand-cranking an unused engine, the boy made the feelings in his head shape molds for the underused words to flow into. At first they flowed like treacle. “Just, people I know. People like me. Wasters. No jobs, no money. Time to kill. You end up doing stupid things just to fill the day. Beating up on harmless idiots. Hanging out with people who beat up on harmless idiots.”

“Why don’t you do something else?”

His eyebrows rocketed. “Like what? Airline pilot? Bit of brain surgery? There’s no jobs going for people much better qualified than me.”

“That’s not actually true,” she chided him gently. “I know these are difficult times. But however tough the conditions, there are always some people who do better than others starting from the same place. The trick is to try to be one of them.”

Saturday stared at her as if he really, genuinely thought she might have come from another planet. And, at least metaphorically, she had. A world where effort was by and large rewarded, and where people were motivated by the general expectation that it would be. Trucker’s crew would have laughed the very idea to bitter scorn. Saturday suddenly felt jealous. He had no middle-class aspirations. He didn’t even have any working-class aspirations. He knew, at a bone-deep level—the way he knew that if you aren’t with the pack, you’re the quarry—that he had no future beyond this daily drift toward the void.

He was never going to starve. They made sure you didn’t starve, made a point of saving you from that. They never explained what it was they were saving you
for.
So far as Saturday could see, it was a kind of cosmic joke—to give you nothing to do, nothing to hope for, and make sure you’d all the time in the world to do it in. These days he didn’t look very far ahead, not if he could help it, but when it sneaked up on him in the middle of a cold, unsleeping night, he knew with a cruel certainty that there was nothing ahead of him that was any better than what he had right now. Or any different. He was sixteen. Excepting violence, he might expect to live into his sixties. That meant there was three times as much living still to be done as he’d done already, and it was all going to be just like this. Just as pointless as this.