Deadly Virtues (23 page)

She realized where he was going before he’d finished the sentence, and rolled her eyes to the ceiling in a
God give me strength!
kind of way. “No, you’re right. A motel might not take the dog. So we’ll look for a farm cottage, maybe, or a caravan park. We’ll find something. Look at it this way. The harder we have to hunt, the harder it’ll be for Argyle to find us. We’ll leave no trail for him to follow. I’ll let IPCC know what we’re doing, but nobody else—and after I’ve talked to them I’ll dump the phone and buy a new one. We have to be very, very careful. We have to think of everything. If we do that, we’ll be safe.”

“For how long?”

“As long as it takes.”

He persevered. “As long as
what
takes? Hazel—how do you think this is going to end?”

She hadn’t actually got that far. “I suppose, one of two ways. If we’re not careful enough, it ends with both of us dead, Barking Mad Barclay in Broadmoor, and the file on Jerome’s murder closed. If Argyle can’t get to us, it ends when someone gets to him.”

“Who? Fountain? IPCC?” The problem with that was that Mickey Argyle wasn’t IPCC’s problem, and Johnny Fountain had been trying to get him for ten years, without success.

“He killed Jerome Cardy! He killed Nye Jackson. They’ll pull out all the stops—they’ll have to.” Hazel was trying very hard to believe it.

“Only if they see the connection. There’s no more evidence that Argyle is responsible for Jackson’s death than there was tying him to Jerome’s. I
know
they didn’t believe what I told them. If they dismiss what you told them as well, there isn’t much of a case left. We could be in that farm cottage a long time.”

“We’ll convince them,” said Hazel doggedly. “We have to. No offense, but I’m not spending the rest of my life in a rented cottage in Leicestershire with you and Patience.”

Ash nodded as if he understood. “Fair enough. Only, why Leicestershire?” He was already pulling a battered suitcase out from under the stairs.

“There’s a lot of nothing in Leicestershire. Easy to get lost.”

CHAPTER 22

“W
ELL—THIS
is nice.”

It wasn’t. It was a dump. It smelled of rodents and damp bedding, and they were to find that the nose had it in both cases.

But the cottage offered something that none of the others they’d passed could: total anonymity. If they’d tried to rent a property from an estate agent, they’d have been asked to prove who they were and a record of that would have existed on a computer. What exists on one computer can be accessed by another, if the operator is clever enough, and a man who could hire both killers and policemen could certainly hire a computer geek.

This run-down little hovel, hardly better than animal housing, had been home more likely than not to some elderly farmer’s unmarried sisters until the last of them died, leaving the overflowing gutters to meet the rising damp halfway up the stairs and the farmer’s eldest son with a barely habitable property to let out until probate could be finalized. He’d made the T
O
L
ET
sign with some paint he had left over from doing his cow shed, and seemed astonished beyond measure when someone came to his door to express an interest. He didn’t ask them to prove who they were. It was enough that they offered him cash.

“I’ll get a fire started.”

Hazel was still looking around in horror and incredulity at where she was proposing to spend the next weeks or months, or possibly the last days, of her life. Mrs. Poliakov’s, or even the station house, seemed like gracious living by comparison. There were three bedrooms upstairs, each with a single bed that hadn’t been changed since its last occupant left feetfirst. Dust bunnies played in the corners of the rooms when she opened the doors. “Sorry … what?”

“It’ll seem better once we’ve got a fire going.”

“No, it won’t!” she cried, despairing. “It’s a dump!”

“I’ve stayed in worse. I’ll see to the fire. Why don’t you drive into town and get some sleeping bags, food, and a kettle. There are pans in the kitchen.”

“Call me fussy,” said Hazel grimly, “but I think I might buy some new pans, too.”

“While you’re away Patience can make a start on the livestock.”

Hazel shuddered and left.

Oh I can, can I? said the white dog, looking down her nose at Ash.

“Of course you can. It’s in your blood. Generations of your ancestors were bred for ratting.”

Your
ancestors used to hunt woolly mammoth, Patience observed pointedly. It doesn’t make you Mr. Self-Sufficiency.
You
don’t like seeing a fish with the head on.

“Please,” said Ash. “Try. For Hazel’s sake. You might enjoy it.”

Oh, all right. She got up with dignity and began sniffing along the skirting boards. And though she was in many ways a remarkable animal—probably—she was also a lurcher, and her pulse quickened at the ripe, musky smell that gathered in her nose, and the imminent prospect of a chase that would end in a sharp, damp squeak.

*   *   *

Hazel also wanted to buy a new phone. She drove through the first village she came to and on to the market town ten miles beyond. In between was almost nothing. A few farmhouses across the fields with no obvious way of reaching them; a tractor at work on the horizon; a woman on a horse, who turned and stared as if an unfamiliar car was a remarkable event in these parts. Hazel hoped she’d be able to find her way back to the cottage. If she didn’t, she thought Ash—miles from anywhere and without transport—would quietly starve to death.

Once she had the new phone she used the old one to call Meadowvale. It took a minute to connect her to IPCC investigator Daniel Rossi; if it had taken a minute and a half, she’d have rung off. She didn’t want to make it easy for anyone to trace her call, even him. Perhaps she was taking caution to ridiculous lengths, but she didn’t want her famous last words to be, “I never thought of that!” When this was all over, they could laugh about the things they’d done that there had been no need to do. But only if they were still alive.

She couldn’t tell from Rossi’s tone whether he believed what she was saying or not. She told him everything: everything she knew, everything she believed, everything she and Ash had worked out. “Nye Jackson was working on it, too. I think he’d got more than we had. I think that’s why he’s dead.”

“Mickey Argyle.” Rossi’s voice was flat, expressionless.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because Jackson found out why Argyle had Jerome Cardy killed.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” Hazel was forced to admit. Then a little of the old spirit stirred within her. “But if a small-town reporter could nail it in a couple of days, a squad of professional detectives ought to be able to work it out as well, sooner or later.”

The silence lasted long enough for her to wonder again if he was trying to triangulate her location. Actually he was trying to classify her. He was familiar with police officers making mistakes, even stupid ones; he was familiar with idle officers trying to protect their pensions and dishonest ones trying to cover their backs; he was familiar with those who joined the police to Make a Difference (the capitals were integral), to Make the World a Better Place, to offer care and support to the unloved and the unlovable, who saw it as their duty to guide old ladies across roads whether they wanted to go or not. Hazel Best didn’t seem to fit any of these templates exactly, and it bothered him. He considered the possibility that she was simply a more straightforward person than he was accustomed to dealing with: good-hearted rather than a do-gooder, someone who was both pragmatic
and
principled. His head sunk low into his shoulders. That was all he needed. He was much more at home with people who lied to him.

Finally he said, “Assuming there’s something to all of this, Constable Best, what exactly is it that you expect me to do?”

Her response jolted him with its immediacy, its simplicity, and its magnitude. If she wasn’t a silly girl getting a kick from playing detectives, then she was laying a huge burden on his shoulders. A burden he’d carried before, to be sure, but one he’d half-hoped to shed when he took on a job that was half pencil pusher, half Gruppenführer.

She said, “I expect you to keep me alive, sir. Me, and my friend Gabriel Ash. I want us to walk away from this. And I don’t think we will unless you can find out why Jerome Cardy died and put Mickey Argyle behind bars.”

Daniel Rossi had been on the point of packing up for the evening. After Hazel rang off, he went on staring at the phone in his hand for a full minute. Then he spread the file once more across his borrowed desk.

Hazel finished her shopping, dropped her old phone regretfully into a Dumpster, and drove back to the cottage. She had no idea if what she’d said to Rossi would do any good, but saying it had made her feel better. She’d put responsibility for their safety into better-paid hands than her own. There was no point worrying about whether she would come out of this with her job when she was by no means sure she’d come out of it with her life. The fact that she’d done the best she could was some consolation. As she drove she found herself humming the Monty Python classic “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.”

She’d wondered if she should arrange a password with Ash, decided there was no point. If Argyle found them, a cottage door wasn’t going to keep him out, whether or not he knew the password. All the same, she was taken aback to find the front door not only unlocked but standing open. The white dog emerged from the tangled shrubbery, looking faintly embarrassed at having been surprised at her toilette.

Hazel couldn’t see why the door couldn’t be both shut and locked, and Patience could wait to be let in like normal dogs. She went inside alone, loaded with carrier bags and sleeping bags, ready to tell Ash as much. What greeted her dried the words in her mouth.

You can’t make a silk purse of a sow’s ear. But if you try this hard, what you get is arguably more valuable. Ash had spent every moment of her absence sweeping, scrubbing, dusting, ejecting the irredeemable, and tidying what was left into some semblance of a habitation. He turned at the sound of her tread, his gaunt face flushed with effort, shy and hopeful, as if unsure what her reaction might be. “Er—better?”

Hazel put her shopping down where it wouldn’t spoil the effect. “Much, much better.” There was a lump in her throat. She steered Ash by the shoulders to the newly excavated sofa. “Sit down. I’ll put the kettle on.”

She’d closed the front door as she came in. So she was surprised, as she carried the mugs through to the sitting room, to meet the white lurcher trotting down the hall toward her. Ash appeared not to have moved.

“Did you let her in?”

He shook his head. “She opens doors. She can close them, too, but you have to insist.”

Hazel put the mugs down and went to close the door, again. She found herself studying the lever handle. Yes, it was possible for a tall dog to rear up, put a paw on it, and let its weight do the rest. It was possible that a dog could be trained to close the same door by rearing up on the other side. Perhaps the world was full of smart dogs who’d worked out that they need not stay in the rooms where they were left if they didn’t want to. And having opened a door, of course they’d prefer it to stay open. A closed door was always going to restrict a dog’s movement around the house, particularly if it was carrying something. The newspaper, perhaps, or its knitting … Hazel recognized just in time that her train of thought had been diverted down the siding named Surreal and she went back to Ash and the coffee.

He was looking at her politely, as if he was waiting for a reply. Seeing the blankness of her expression, he repeated the last thing he’d said. “Did you get through to IPCC?”

“Oh—yes. I talked to the guy who interviewed me.”

“Useful?”

“I don’t know,” she said honestly. “He wasn’t giving anything away. Of course, they don’t. I told him how things looked from this end and told him to sort it out.” She gave a self-satisfied little chuckle at the recollection.

“Had they connected what happened to Jackson with the Cardy case?”

“I don’t think so. Rossi asked for evidence and I said we hadn’t got any. I told him Mickey Argyle was behind it, he asked how I knew, and I told him it was the only thing that made sense. I don’t know if he believed me. I don’t know if he’ll do anything about it.”

“He’ll do something,” said Ash. “At least enough to cover himself if we turn up dead.”

“Terrific,” growled Hazel. She changed the subject. “How are you getting on with
Othello
?”

“I don’t think English literature is my forte,” confessed Ash. “Somebody keeps being referred to as ancient, when he’s clearly nothing of the kind. Somebody borrows a handkerchief, and because of that someone else strangles his wife. I thought
I
was irrational till I met these people.”

Hazel laughed. “If everyone behaved sensibly, there would
be
no art. No one would go to the theater to watch Othello take his wife aside and say, ‘Iago says you’ve got the hots for Cassio,’ and her tell him, ‘Iago’s cross because you didn’t promote him.’ Othello sacks Iago, Cassio marries Bianca, Othello and Desdemona live happily ever after. End of play, curtain, back to the bar, where they haven’t even washed up the first lot of glasses.”

“Not a lot of scope for the kind of speeches people will be quoting four hundred years later,” agreed Ash ruefully.

“‘Then must you speak of one who was no mug,’” essayed Hazel. “No, it isn’t as catchy as the original.”

Something odd was happening in Ash’s face. His lips were still smiling, but his eyes were clouding over and a frown was gathering between them. He got up without a word and went into the next room, and came back with the book, leafing through it not at all casually.

“What is it?” asked Hazel. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m not sure,” he said without looking up. “That’s Othello, isn’t it—after he’s killed Desdemona and Iago’s treachery has been revealed. And he says—I want the exact words—he says…”