Deadly Virtues (7 page)

Her first thought was to take him to the park, to talk in the leafy quiet and paradoxical privacy of an open space with members of the public constantly passing. Then it occurred to her that he might not feel the same way about parks, at least this one, as she did. Instead she turned down toward the canal, found a tiny lay-by with a picnic bench and a view over the still brown water to spring green willows growing along the far bank.

“Okay,” she said, turning the engine off. “It’s not good news.”

She told him what had happened. She told him that everyone had done their damnedest to save Jerome Cardy’s life but that it had been in vain. He’d suffered too much damage.

Ash heard her out in silence. She could almost see his mind churning behind the deep-set dark brown eyes, but he didn’t interrupt her, neither to confirm what she’d been told nor to contradict. Even after she’d finished he went on thinking about what she’d said for several minutes.

She waited patiently, using the time to study him. Hard to put an age on him, she thought. Late thirties? Tidied up—the thick black curls trimmed neatly, the battered jeans and sweater replaced by something smarter—he might have looked younger. Or he might be older than she thought: that look of earnest concentration gave him a slightly childlike air that made it hard to get a handle on him. Also he looked underfed. He had the bone structure to carry a certain amount of bulk, but nothing hung off his frame except the rough clothes. If he didn’t look quite like a tramp, at least he looked like someone understudying the role.

Finally he said, “This isn’t right.” He sounded worried and slightly offended—like, Hazel thought, someone from a culture where they don’t have jokes watching someone do stand-up. As if all the words were familiar but the meaning eluded him. Perhaps, she realized with a flash of insight, that was exactly what having psychological problems was like: turning up at a party where everyone but you knew all the latest slang.

“This isn’t right,” Ash said again, insistently. “What happened wasn’t an accident. He
knew
it was going to happen—the boy, Jerome. He knew he was going to die—long before he was put in the other cell, before this other man was even brought in. How could that be?”

“It couldn’t,” agreed Hazel gently. “Ash, you were hurt. You were concussed and asleep, then all this happened. You must have some of the details wrong.”

“No.” He seemed absolutely sure at first, and then, as he thought about it, less so. “I don’t think so. He knew something bad was going to happen to him. He wanted me to remember.”

“What exactly did he say?”

But she was right—a lot of the details were lost in the fog. Ash ran a distracted hand through his thick hair. “I … I’m not sure. He said it wasn’t about the car crash. That was just an excuse. He said I had to tell someone when I got out and he didn’t.” His eyes found Hazel’s. “That’s what I’m doing. I’m telling you.”

She smiled reassuringly. “Yes, you are. And we’re going to make sense of it. Did he say anything else?”

Ash screwed his face up in the effort to remember. “Something about Shakespeare.”

She wasn’t expecting that. “
What
about Shakespeare?”

“Something about a dog. He had a dog. He called the dog after…” He lost the thread, shook his head helplessly.

“He called his dog after a character from Shakespeare?” suggested Hazel. “Macbeth? Caesar?” She gave a tiny grin. “Bottom?”

But Ash wasn’t ready to see the funny side of any of this. “I don’t know. And I don’t know why he told me.”

“Because you had your dog with you. He was just making conversation.”

But that wasn’t how Ash remembered it. “He woke me up. To tell me this stuff. To tell me to remember. And to mention the fact that he used to have a dog called Bottom?”

It didn’t seem very likely. But then, none of it did. And the most probable explanation was that an unquantifiable amount of it was a by-product of the man’s troubled mind. Some of it happened, some of it didn’t; some of it he was remembering just wrongly enough to put a completely different slant on it.

There was no more Hazel could do but take him to wherever he called home, put the kettle on—if he owned a kettle—bid him good day, and draw a line under the whole regrettable incident. There was nothing to be gained by trying to reconcile what Gabriel Ash thought he remembered with what she’d been told by Sergeant Murchison.

It wasn’t just that Ash would make a terrible witness. There are, as every police officer knows, plenty of people who see something happen, remember what they’ve seen, report it accurately, and still make terrible witnesses in court because they fall apart under the most rudimentary cross-examination. You nurse people like that, help them as much as you can, hope a jury will recognize the difference between a nervous witness and an unreliable one; and if the worse comes to the worst, remind yourself that their evidence enabled the investigating officer to understand what had happened even if he couldn’t always prove it.

But Ash wasn’t like that. His mind was fundamentally disordered. Even if he had heard something significant, how could anyone hope to sieve it out from the noodle soup simmering away in his brain? The sensible thing to do—the only thing to do—was to dismiss him as a witness in the same way that she’d dismissed the dog. They might both have seen or heard something useful, but there was no way of accessing the knowledge.

“Let’s get you home,” she suggested. “If I find out anything more, I’ll let you know.”

CHAPTER 7

T
HE HOUSE CAME
as a surprise. At first Hazel thought he’d brought her to the wrong place—that he’d forgotten where he lived. Then she thought the house must have been divided and maybe he had a bed-sit in the basement. But no. Gabriel Ash—Rambles With Dogs—lived in a double-fronted stone-built Victorian house at the pricey end of Highfield Road. Even after the bottom fell out of the housing market, it must have been worth a small fortune.

“You’ll come in?”

She’d had no intentions of doing so, but nothing nobler than curiosity made Hazel follow him up the front steps and into the hall.

It had been built as a family house, but it wasn’t one anymore. As soon as she stepped inside she knew he lived here alone, unless you counted the dog. Not because he’d lapsed into a kind of squalor that no woman would have tolerated—the place was both clean and tidy. But there was an essential grayness in every room, a lack of warmth or color—not so much the decor as the very air itself. It was a sad house, a house that had known better times.

There was a kettle on the Aga. “I don’t think I’ve got any biscuits.” He gave her a thin smile. “Only dog biscuits.”

He’d taken Patience’s lead off as they came in, and she’d led the way into the kitchen. This seemed to be the main living- space, furnished with an ancient brown leather sofa and a chair, a bookcase full to bursting, a television set that had been state-of-the-art a decade earlier, and a dog bed. In spite of which, Patience appropriated the sofa. Ash didn’t even try to move her. He waved Hazel to the chair, and when the tea was made, he sat down beside his dog, stroking her ticked white fur absently.

Hazel was trying to fit what she knew about the man with where and how he lived. “Have you lived here long?”

“Three years.” He didn’t elaborate.

“On your own?”

“Yes.”

She didn’t pursue a line of questioning that was in danger of becoming impertinent. Partly because she thought she knew the answers. His wife had left him and he’d fallen apart. There had been no shortage of money at one point, but the good job that had enabled him to buy this property had been a casualty of the split and now he went on living in a house that was too big for him and that he couldn’t afford because he was clinging to the shreds of a happier past. One day soon the bank would give him the choice between selling up and foreclosure; until that happened, unable to make the move on his own, his occupation of it would contract into fewer and fewer rooms. Hazel thought that if she came back here in six months, she’d find he was sleeping in the kitchen as well.

No wonder the house seemed mournful. She wondered if they’d had children. If, for Ash, the rooms still echoed with the shrieks and laughter of excited children who now made only an occasional phone call and sent
Love you, Daddy
cards for Christmas and his birthday. If there was a shoe box somewhere with every one of them carefully preserved.

It wasn’t just morbid curiosity on Hazel’s part. It was significant that Gabriel Ash hadn’t always been as he was now. He hadn’t been born a sandwich short of a picnic. Once, not very long ago, he’d been an intelligent man with a good job. Maybe he’d always carried the seeds of breakdown within him, as many people do who are driven to achieve. But he’d held his life together with conspicuous success until not very long ago. His mental difficulties didn’t go back far, so perhaps they didn’t go down very deep.

So maybe she shouldn’t dismiss quite so lightly what he was telling her. She sipped her tea and said, “Tell me again what Jerome Cardy said.”

Ash’s eyes flew wide. They were the color of bitter chocolate, and, with the thick black hair and olive-tinted skin, gave him a slightly Mediterranean air. They had an expression in Norbold for someone with roots elsewhere: “A granny missing from the graveyard.” Hazel thought Gabriel Ash had at least one granny buried a long way from Norbold.

“Othello!” he exclaimed, startled by the way the memory had returned. As if it had bitten him.

“Come again?” Hazel Best’s mother had thought it was a terribly common expression, but she’d never quite cured her daughter of using it.

“The Shakespeare reference—what he called his dog. He called it Othello.”

“Did he?” she said levelly. “Okay.”

Ash seemed to think it mattered. “Why did he want me to know that? That’s not casual conversation. He was being taken to another cell, but he hung back long enough to tell me that he once had a dog called Othello. Why?”

If he was remembering correctly, it
was
odd. “Did he say anything else about it?”

“He said it was a sniffer dog.”

Hazel frowned. “That’s not a breed. You can’t go out and buy one. Could he have had a security-trained dog?”

“I don’t think he had. I didn’t think so at the time. He didn’t talk like someone who had dogs. If you know what breed it is, you say so—if you don’t, you say it’s a mongrel or a crossbreed, or a Heinz fifty-seven. Or a lurcher.” He looked down at his own dog with a smile. “That boy didn’t know what kind of dog Othello was. I asked if it was a spaniel and he said it was, but he didn’t sound as if he’d ever thought about it. I don’t think it was a real dog. I think it was a piece of information he wanted me to have.”

“You mean like a secret message?” It was as improbable as the house.

Ash nodded. “I think so. He wanted to give me some information without the policeman realizing what he was doing.”

“What policeman?”

“The one who came for him.”

“But…” There was no point. She tried another tack. “Why?”

“I don’t know.”

Hazel thought, worrying the idea like a terrier, but nothing came to mind. “Othello. Othello the sniffer dog.”

“Sniffer dogs look for drugs.”

“Or explosives. Or dead bodies. Or various other things, actually. You can train them to associate just about any smell with a reward.”

“Othello strangled his wife.”

“Jerome Cardy wasn’t married.”

“But he was black.”

“You think that’s relevant?” It wasn’t a criticism—she genuinely wondered.

“I have no idea,” confessed Ash. “But it wasn’t an off-the-cuff remark. It meant something to him, and he thought it might mean something to me.” He rolled his eyes to the ceiling in a gesture of despair. “God help him.”

“All right,” said Hazel. “So what do we know about Othello?”

Gabriel Ash had had a good education once. But it was getting to be a long time since he’d studied English literature. “He was a Moor. Wasn’t he the governor of Cyprus? He killed his wife after his sidekick convinced him she was having an affair. She wasn’t. She loved Othello, and he loved her. But he killed her just the same.” His eyes had gone distant again and there was a hint of bitterness in his voice.

“It was jealousy that killed Desdemona,” Hazel recalled. “Is that what Jerome was trying to tell you? That someone was jealous of him?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

“And why tie it up in ribbons? If he thought someone was going to hurt him, why not tell you who, and why?”

“Because we weren’t alone. He wanted
me
to know. He didn’t want the policeman to understand.”

The mysterious policeman again. “Ash, are you sure about that? That someone took Jerome to the other cell? That he didn’t just wander off by himself?”

He looked momentarily offended. But he did her the courtesy of running through it in his mind once more. He reached the same conclusion. “Someone came to the door. He told the boy he’d freed up a cell for him. He seemed to think Patience might bite him, or”—he glanced apologetically at the dog—“worse.” He mouthed the word
fleas
at Hazel, as if it would cause offense if overheard.

Every time she was tempted to put some credence to what he thought he remembered, he did this. Behaved like a lunatic. She asked the question because asking questions put her in control, made her comfortable. “Would you know him again? This policeman.”

Ash shrugged. “I didn’t see his face. He was in uniform, but I didn’t get his number, if that’s what you mean. I heard his voice. An older man rather than a younger one.”

Against her better instincts, Hazel found herself toying with the information. Sergeant Murchison was not a young man. If there had been any shifting of prisoners to be done, as custody officer that night he was the one likeliest to have done it. But Sergeant Murchison said Jerome Cardy had shifted himself.

People get forgetful as they get older. If a cell had become vacant, he would have transferred Cardy to it; and if he had forgotten—if something had distracted him before he got it logged—when Barclay was brought in amid a flurry of fists and oaths, it would have been the easiest thing in the world for him to fling open the cell door and have the wild man shoved inside. Perhaps he never remembered that Cardy was in there, and a young black law student was the last person that Barclay, the rabid racist, should have been in with. Or perhaps he remembered just too late, at which point it was only a question of whether he owned up to his error or not.