Deadly Virtues (8 page)

If he did, no possible good could be served, but his own career would suddenly be in jeopardy. People would start wondering if he was still up to the job. Retirement would be proposed as a way of avoiding repercussions. If that wasn’t what he wanted—and Sergeant Murchison had not struck Hazel as a man counting the weeks to his pension—perhaps even an honorable man could be forgiven for failing to volunteer the information that made sense of everything that had happened.

If, she reminded herself forcibly, what Gabriel Ash thought he remembered bore any relationship to the truth. This was a man who’d lost everything, including a large portion of his wits. He avoided saying the word
fleas
in front of his dog, for God’s sake! He’d been sleeping off a concussion when he was wakened by assorted comings and goings and finally by all hell breaking loose. In such circumstances anyone might have got some of the details wrong. In such circumstances it would be amazing if Gabriel Ash had got any of the details right.

“Mr. Ash, do you remember when we went into the police station after you were hurt?” Ash nodded. “Do you remember meeting the sergeant who was in charge?”

“Yes.”

“We spoke to him, didn’t we? Then he showed us where you and Patience could get a bit of rest.”

“He put us in a cell.” Which was another way of saying the same thing.

“Do you think that’s what you’re thinking of? That the concussion made you confuse the two memories? That you
did
see the police officer at the door, but it was earlier, when he was showing you to the cell. That he wasn’t actually there later, when Jerome went for a look around.”

For several seconds he made no attempt to answer. She couldn’t be sure if he was offended or thinking about it. Then he said, “What about the things Jerome said to me?”

Hazel shrugged sympathetically. “You took quite a beating. Bad dreams were probably the mildest aftereffect to be expected.”

Still that ambivalent, almost unwinking gaze from his deep, dark eyes. “You think I dreamed it. Everything the boy said. Everything that happened.”

“Not everything,” she protested. “He was certainly in with you for a time, and maybe you were talking. And later he left the cell, and later still all hell broke loose next door. You didn’t imagine any of that. But the mind has a way of trying to make sense of unconnected bits of information. I’m just wondering if that’s what’s happened. That after you knew something awful had happened to Jerome Cardy, your brain—which was also having a bad day—drew together things it had heard and seen in different contexts, including dreams, and made them into a plausible narrative. I don’t think you’re making any of this up. I think your brain, also from the best of motives, may have been playing tricks on you.”

“And Othello, the sniffer dog?”

Hazel gave a sympathetic smile. “Does it seem likely? Because most things that don’t, didn’t happen. Or didn’t happen the way we remember. It’s not just you. Every time we talk to a witness we have to consider what other factors might have affected what they think they saw. Most people try to tell the truth. But it’s very easy to get it wrong.”

He had nothing to say to that and she had nothing to add. She stood up, putting down her cup. “Try not to worry about it. The people who’ll investigate what happened are very experienced. They’ll get to the bottom of it. Thanks for the tea. I’ll see you again.”

Ash stood up, too, and showed her to the door. “I don’t think I thanked you. For last night. For looking after me.”

“All part of the service,” she said brightly—too brightly. It must have been obvious to him that she’d satisfied herself as to what had happened and exactly what his testimony was worth. She hoped he wouldn’t think she was being rude. But probably, she reckoned, by the time she was back in her car he’d have forgotten what it was they were discussing.

But she was wrong about that.

After Constable Best had gone, Ash went back to the leather sofa in the kitchen and sat down beside his dog again, his right arm slipping automatically and naturally across her back. She gazed at him with expectant amber eyes.

“She didn’t believe me. She thinks I imagined it.”

The dog said nothing.

“
I
don’t think I imagined it,” Ash said stubbornly. He poured more tea, sipped it reflectively. “I
think
that boy asked me for help.
Would
I have dreamed something like that? In so much detail?” He simply didn’t know. “But if it wasn’t a dream, then I owe him … something. To do as he asked—to find someone who might believe me. Someone who might understand what he was trying to say.”

Still the dog said nothing.

“He was only twenty years old. He must have parents in the town. And it’s not a common name. Someone who wanted to find them probably could.”

Patience raised a back foot and delicately scratched her ear.

“Maybe I should talk to Laura first.” It had taken the therapist a year to get him to use her first name. “She’ll think it’s a bad idea. Maybe it
is
a bad idea. She’ll say it’s more about my feelings of guilt than anything the boy said. That I’m making a mystery of it because you can hope to solve a mystery, where you can’t hope to put right a tragedy.”

He looked sidelong at his dog as if waiting for a response, but there was none.

“I know what you’re thinking. That this is displacement activity. That I
want
there to be something going on that no one else knows about. Because I used to be good at this. When there was space in my head to think. That I’m never going to pick up where I left off, but I could do if I had to. And maybe then there wouldn’t be enough space left in my head for … Or at least, not every minute of every damned day.”

He sighed. “And you’re probably right. What happened at Meadowvale Police Station is most probably what appears to have happened—a monstrous, horrible thing, but not a mystery. Robert Barclay killed Jerome Cardy because he is a bad man; Jerome died because he was unlucky.”

He stood up and walked to the window. The view was more pleasant than remarkable; but then, he didn’t look out much. “But just suppose for a moment that you’re wrong. Suppose Jerome meant exactly what he said when he told me he was going to die in that police station, and something quite different when he talked about Othello. If he was trying to alert someone to what was happening to him. No one at the police station is going to ask these questions. Either they don’t know there’s a puzzle to solve or it’s in their best interests to leave well enough alone.”

Gabriel Ash thought a little longer; then he made up his mind. “I’ll go tomorrow. To express my condolences to his parents, and ask if any of this makes sense to them.”

What he didn’t say, aloud or even in the privacy of his own head, was, “Maybe if I can get to the bottom of this mystery, the other one—the old one, the big one—might seem slightly less unbearable.”

Be careful, said Patience.

CHAPTER 8

Y
OU NEED TO
make yourself presentable.

Ash ignored the voice in his head, which is something he didn’t often do, at least when they were alone. So the dog said it again. You need to make yourself presentable before we go and see them.

“Who?” His furtive glance showed that he knew exactly who.

The Cardy family. I know you’re going to see them. I saw you looking up their address in the phone book.

Phone books are something the average dog knows very little about, unless it’s how quickly you can shred one if you’re left alone in the house. So Ash was probably right when he rationalized these conversations he had with Patience as being something that took place inside his head. Undoubtedly Laura Fry would have agreed, if he’d told her that he didn’t just talk to the dog but also heard her reply.

She said that talking to animals was a way of holding a debate with other viewpoints within your own mind. He wasn’t sure how she would react if he was honest with her—if he admitted that he seemed to hear the dog respond exactly as he heard other people speak, except that she didn’t move her lips. He didn’t hear other animals talk, just Patience. Laura had said he wasn’t mad. He wondered if she’d want to review that diagnosis if he reported, word for word, the conversation he was now having. And all the others that he’d had in the last three months, since discovering that the stray dog he’d adopted to give him something to think about beyond his own misery spoke better English than most teenagers.

His first thought was that the therapist was wrong and he was indeed mad. He was terrified, precisely because it didn’t come out of left field. Things had happened in his life that would have driven anyone mad. But he’d thought the crisis had passed. He’d come as close to a mental breakdown as you can without slipping irrevocably over the edge, but somehow he’d clawed his way back. Or, to be fair, been dragged back by talented and dedicated people who’d convinced him he could learn to live in the world again, even though everything about it had changed.

Perhaps it helped that he hadn’t had much choice in the matter. Ash hadn’t so much separated himself from his former life as had it taken from him. But isolation can become a habit, too, and after he left London he’d withdrawn into himself much as a crab does, for protection. He’d turned his back on everyone he once knew, all the support he might have had, excepting only Laura Fry, who was imposed on him almost as a condition of remaining at large. He’d returned to live alone in this empty house, the house where he’d grown up, wrapped himself in his most comfortable old clothes, existed for months at a time only on those foods that could be delivered. He knew people—neighbors, tradesmen, the local police—thought he was strange, but until he got the dog he’d agreed with Laura, that underneath all that, the essential core of him had survived more or less intact.

The first time the dog spoke to him, he thought it had finally happened: that his ravaged personality had splintered and his brain was now leaking out of his left ear. He thought he should probably get himself committed. Again. That would be the end of everything—especially those last dregs of hope that made him pay the phone bill religiously even though he never made calls.

When he’d calmed down a bit, and Patience was quietly washing her paws and there was no gray goo on his shoulder, he tried to make sense of it. And this was what he came up with: that the words that seemed to come from the dog were actually emanating from part of his own mind. It was talking to him like a friend, helping him to see things clearly, and he only credited its input to the dog because that seemed marginally less peculiar than debating with a semidetached bit of your own brain.

A few times he’d been close to putting this theory to Laura Fry. She might concur immediately. She might say it was a common phenomenon, a recognized part of a traumatized individual’s coping strategy, that it didn’t mean he was mad at all. Or, of course, she might regard him in a silence that became less reassuring the longer it lasted, put her letter opener where he couldn’t reach it, and pick up the phone. That was what kept him from confiding in her. He’d rather think he might be finally, permanently, irrevocably mad than have it confirmed.

So now he dealt with the phenomenon—that was a fairly safe word—by accepting it. If it was a less traumatized portion of his own brain inviting him to hold an internal debate about things—things that had happened, things he might do next—then it made sense to join in. If it was a psychosis, it was best not to draw attention to it. And if it really was that he’d come home from the pound with a talking dog, he’d be wise to take her advice seriously. The aliens had landed, obviously they were smarter than people, but since they walked on four legs and flashed fangs when they smiled, they’d been misunderstood and taken not to any of the world’s leaders but to Battersea Dogs’ Home.

He did as he was told and went to look in the wardrobe.

*   *   *

In spite of how they’d parted, Hazel Best harbored a faint unease about discounting what Gabriel Ash had told her. It made no sense, and it came from a man who was clearly unreliable, and yet …

Almost more than anything else, she was puzzled by her own reluctance to let it go. She could shed no light on the death of Jerome Cardy, and she was pretty sure Ash couldn’t, either. She hadn’t been there; he’d been there in body but probably not in mind; and that should have been the end of it. Hazel was annoyed with herself that she kept thinking about it, taking the pieces apart and trying to get them to fit together better.

At least she’d had the sense not to discuss the matter with people at work. Just imagining the response made her wince. If she told anyone there that the man known throughout Meadowvale as Rambles With Dogs had given her tea and no biscuits and a version of events that varied slightly but significantly from Sergeant Murchison’s, and that if Ash was remembering right then the custody sergeant responsible for Jerome Cardy’s safety had made an elementary mistake that resulted in his death, they’d laugh in her face. If they were feeling generous. They’d tell her all the other things they’d been vouchsafed by village idiots, perhaps even by this village idiot, and how difficult it was to climb the promotion ladder if you couldn’t tell the difference between the probable, the possible, and the downright ludicrous.

She might have risked it. She might have told herself that if Ash had got any part of his story right, the least a police officer owed to a murdered boy was to try to get at the truth. If there was nothing to find, if Ash’s fears were entirely baseless, she could dismiss him and them with a clear conscience. At which point, giving her colleagues a laugh would seem a small-enough price to pay.

What stopped her was the danger that being the office joke for a week mightn’t be the end of it. Donald Murchison had been a pillar of the police community—and they
were
a community, even a family, in the way they bickered and grumbled and picked fault with one another, right up to the point that something threatened any one of them, at which point they instantly closed ranks—longer than Hazel had been alive. He’d been at Meadowvale longer than anyone else. He was both liked and respected.