Deadly Virtues (31 page)

“It wasn’t Sergeant Murchison I saw outside the cell door, it was you. You took off your dinner jacket and your tie, and you looked like every other officer on duty that night. I saw a white shirt, dark trousers, shiny shoes, and I heard you say a few words. The chances of my recognizing you were minuscule.”

This time Fountain said nothing. And that wasn’t right. Perhaps he didn’t feel the need to explain himself to Ash, but he owed Hazel better than to leave her wondering if the man she’d admired all this time, the man she’d worried about letting down, had feet of clay all the way up to the armpits. Was corrupt to his soul, and responsible for the brutal death of a twenty-year-old boy. If he’d had anything to say to her, he’d have said it then.

She found herself speaking aloud the thoughts that were chasing one another’s tails in her head. “Even alone, you could have done everything that Donald Murchison and a couple of mates could have done. You could have let yourself in the back way without anyone knowing you were on the premises. The CCTV would have picked you up, except that the geek”—she couldn’t remember his name—“had told everyone not to fiddle with it or it would die. You fiddled, it died, and there was no record that you were ever there that night. Until Sergeant Murchison called to say there’d been a DIC and you hurried back to deal with it.”

“He wanted you out of Meadowvale,” Ash told her tiredly, “not because you were barking up the wrong tree but because you were too close to the truth. You knew
someone
at Meadowvale had a hand in Jerome’s murder. If Sergeant Murchison had managed to clear himself, you’d have wondered who else it could be. You were still thinking about it after everyone else thought they knew what had happened. That made you dangerous.”

Finally, terribly late if he’d been innocent of what he was accused of, Johnny Fountain turned—his whole big body pivoting—and met Hazel’s stare. He spoke very deliberately. “You know this is nonsense, don’t you? You
must
know better than to listen to a man who hasn’t been on nodding terms with reality for the last four years.”

But Hazel was still thinking, and the more she thought the more the facts slotted into place. “How did Argyle know we were at the cottage?”

Fountain shrugged. “You must have left a trail.”

She shook her head, no doubt in her mind. “No. The only people I spoke to before Argyle’s crew turned up were Rossi and you. You think IPCC had my call traced? The only one with a reason to do that was Argyle’s glove puppet, and I never spoke to Donald Murchison. Anyway, he doesn’t have the authority. It was you. I asked you for help, and you told Mickey Argyle where to find us.”

Still something didn’t fit. “Is DI Gorman involved as well? Because even if you didn’t talk to him, I know I did. After the gorillas arrived at the cottage and before they ran me down, I told him we were in trouble.”

Fountain said nothing, left her to flounder.

Ash was looking at the chief superintendent. “You lied to Gorman as well. He called you after Hazel called him. You put him off—said you were closer and you’d get some local help to deal with it. That’s why he never turned up at the cottage, and why he hasn’t found this place. He doesn’t know he should be looking.”

CHAPTER 30

“Y
OU FOUND ME OUT
cold in the lane,” recalled Hazel. Her eyes were wide with shock, but now her brain was in gear. “You said you’d called DI Gorman, but it was him who called you. And you told him everything was under control. You didn’t want him showing up at the cottage, any more than you want him showing up here. You’re not here to save Ash, or Alice. You’re here to make sure that no one who knows about your deal with Mickey Argyle is ever going to talk about it.”

Another pregnant pause, then Johnny Fountain said, “That’s right.” He was looking at the penknife still gripped in his hand. “With this.”

When he saw that none of them realized it was a joke, he let out a gruff, despairing little laugh. “Oh, God help us all! I’m a policeman, for pity’s sake! I don’t go around killing people.”

Hazel found her voice first. “But people die because of the kind of policeman you are. Jerome Cardy died because the crime returns mattered more to you than the fate of an innocent individual. Nye Jackson died because he found out about Jerome and Alice Argyle.”

She was still aching for him to deny it. Perhaps even now they’d got it wrong. Perhaps when he’d finished teasing, he’d put Hazel, and the world, straight. She could bear for him to think her stupid if she could avoid knowing he was corrupt. This was a man she’d respected long before she met him, a copper’s copper. And not a paper tiger, more style than substance, who wanted the accolades without the hard slog necessary to achieve them.

Fountain sighed. “I’m sorry about young Cardy.” He looked at the girl in his arms, and didn’t try to stop her when she—carefully, watching his face—moved away. “Truly. I’d no idea things would go that far. I thought he’d get away with a broken nose, maybe a cracked rib. Mickey told me about him and Alice, said he wanted to mark his card. That’s all. That’s all I agreed to, and I only agreed to that because I thought I could keep matters from escalating. All right, I was wrong, but give me credit for good intentions.

“Jackson came as a complete surprise. I didn’t know his death
wasn’t
an accident. I suppose you’re sure?” No one dignified that with an answer, so he shrugged. “I’m sorry about him, too, although the man was becoming a nuisance. I suppose it’s what you risk if you want to be an investigative journalist.”

The sheer impertinence of that struck Hazel to the heart. “He was just doing his job! No, he was doing
your
job. He was trying to find out why a twenty-year-old boy…”

And there her voice petered out, foundered on the thing he’d just said. She felt the last of the color drain from her cheeks. He’d dashed all her hopes in a few words. She’d been right, and Ash had been right, and Fountain wasn’t even going to deny it. Argyle had had a mole at Meadowvale since before Hazel came to Norbold, and it was the chief superintendent.

Ash reached a decision. It was time he got off the floor. He labored as far as his knees, clinging to the anvil; Fountain helped him the rest of the way. He stood swaying, his head low, his face a butcher’s mask. “You realize, of course, you’re going down for this.”

There was something supercilious in Fountain’s gaze. “You reckon?”

Hazel’s voice was breathy, as if he’d knocked the wind out of her all over again. “You think there’s some
doubt
? You think you can do what you’ve done, and people find out about it, and you can still get away with it?”

The broad shoulders shrugged. “Maybe.”

“
How?
”

“If I can persuade you that what I did was right.”

In moments of stress Hazel Best occasionally lapsed to the kind of coarseness her late mother had disapproved of. She’d called it “common.” “Oh yeah, like that’s going to happen!”

“I am not a bad man,” said Chief Superintendent Fountain forcibly. “I am not a bad policeman. I did some things that weren’t in the manual. I did them because they were the lesser of the evils I was facing.”

Suddenly he seemed to run out of patience. “You’re such a
child,
Hazel! Such an innocent. How do you
think
I keep a town like Norbold safe? I do deals all the time—with Division, with the council, with the support services, with the taxpayers. I can wrap them up in cotton wool, so no harm will ever befall them, at a price no one could ever pay; or I can give them what they can reasonably afford and accept that sometimes it won’t be enough.

“So yes, I take shortcuts. Turning a blind eye to Mickey Argyle was one of them. I kept my end of town clean, and he looked after his. He kept the lowlifes under control, made sure they didn’t bother the nice people of middle England who pay their rates and don’t want to know what goes on at gutter level. Look at the figures. It worked. It saved lives every year. It saved lives, and pain, and fear, and money.”

He almost managed to make it sound reasonable. As if he’d held this debate with himself so often that he’d honed his argument until it sounded almost reasonable.

“You’ve no idea what Norbold was like ten years ago. Crime was out of control. People got hurt, or worse, for being on the wrong street at the wrong time. Even in broad daylight. Women saved their shopping till their husbands came home, so they’d have someone riding shotgun. Old people traveled in convoy to collect their pensions. Nobody was safe.”

“Nobody was safe because of people like Mickey Argyle!” exclaimed Hazel.

“Perfectly true,” agreed Fountain. “There were half a dozen major players at that time, probably twenty significant street gangs, and more one-man bands than you could shake a truncheon at. It would have taken the Met two years to clean it up. Nothing less would even have made an impact.

“When they told me to take a crack at it, I had three options. I could quail before the enormity of the task and take to drink, which is what my predecessor did. I could do my best with what I’d got, which meant throwing patrols at the center of town and never mind what went on in the rest of the manor. Or I could get myself some allies. I chose Mickey not because he was the best of a bad lot but because he was the biggest, meanest dog in town. When he barked, the other dogs cowered.”

If he was honest with himself—and Fountain had never lost the ability to be honest with himself, in the middle of the night with Denis snoring companionably beside him—it wasn’t just an act of desperation. There had been a kind of glory to it, too—a headiness, as of too much wine and brave talk. There’s a saying in India: “He who rides a tiger can never dismount.” But then you have to ask why people would want to ride a tiger in the first place. And the answer is: for the glory. For the sheer intoxicating splendor of doing something most people couldn’t do and wouldn’t dare try. Even if the beast wasn’t really tamed, even if you rode it only on its own terms, for a certain kind of man the admiration that earned was worth the price that deep inside himself he knew he would someday have to pay.

Except that Johnny Fountain still wasn’t entirely convinced that payday had arrived. The biggest obstacle to finding a way through this lay dead on the floor. Nothing would have bought Argyle’s silence if Fountain had broken their truce. The others were more of an unknown quantity. More honest, of course, appalled by what he’d done, but possibly also more open to reason. If he could find the key to each of them, he might yet secure their cooperation.

Paradoxically, Constable Best, whose snooping had brought him to this pass, might be the easiest to convince. “Hazel, try to see it from where I was sitting. Norbold was like a Wild West town after the sheriff’s been lynched. Nothing I did, nothing I had the manpower or the budget to do, made any difference. We arrested gang leaders, and the next rank down took their place. There was no end to them. Kids of eight and nine were carrying lethal weapons.”

He paused, remembering. Hazel watched him intently, and for the life of her she could not see a wicked man. “When I first thought of cutting a deal with Mickey, it was like a joke. But the idea wouldn’t go away. Because I knew it could work. I could give the silent majority of Norbold what they’d been begging for—the right to feel safe in their own town. And it wasn’t going to cost them anything, and all it was going to cost me was some self-respect. I’d tried to get Mickey and failed. Really, the only difference was that now I stopped trying.

“And credit where credit’s due,” said Fountain generously, “he kept his end of the bargain. He cleaned up the gangs by giving them a simple choice: line up behind him or quit. Once he’d tamed them, the only crime in town—if you leave out the odd drunken housebreaker and a bit of domestic violence—was
his
crime, and he kept it off my streets. Users and pushers still ended up dead sometimes. I’m not saying that’s a good thing, but it’s the life they chose—nobody forced them. Decent law-abiding people were off-limits. That’s what I achieved: that the vast majority of Norbold’s citizens could get on with their lives in peace and security.”

The man still, somehow, commanded respect. His argument did not. “Jerome Cardy was a decent law-abiding person! Nye Jackson was a decent law-abiding person. And actually,” snapped Hazel, “I am and so is Ash. Your friend Mickey was going to kill us both.”

“I know it got out of hand,” admitted Fountain. “Mickey took his eyes off the prize when it got personal. He said he wanted to drum young Cardy out of town and I agreed to help. Reluctantly. I thought it was better than having them deal with him in a dark alley some night.”

Alice couldn’t contain a peal of hysterical laughter. Fountain frowned his disapproval, as if she were a child cheeking her betters. “You don’t have to believe me. But that’s what I thought. That if it was going to happen, it was better happening at Meadowvale.

“Mickey set it up. Not the accident, which was nothing more than that. But when he heard that Jerome had been arrested, he made arrangements to have Barclay arrested, too. All he wanted from me was to make sure they ended up in the same cell. It didn’t seem that big an ask. I saw to it after the speeches had finished. When I heard later that the boy was dead, I was as horrified as anyone.” His scowl dared Hazel to call him a liar.

“So what should I have done? Owned up? Would that have made Norbold a better place? Mickey wouldn’t have come quietly. He and his crew would have shot huge holes in the thin blue line. I’ll tell you something else.” Under its mane of white hair the craggy face leaned forward urgently. “We play this wrong now and there’ll still be mayhem. With Mickey gone, there’s a power vacuum that every dog he kept at heel will want to fill.

“What do you suppose will happen if I go, too? The
only
hope of keeping the lid on Norbold right now is me. You talk to IPCC and I guarantee you that tonight all hell will break loose. People will die—lots of people. And some of them will be little thugs taking on bigger thugs, but some of them will be ordinary citizens and some of them will be police officers. Hazel—do you really want that on your conscience?”