Deadly Virtues by Jo Bannister Read Free Book Online Page A

“So she put the pair of them in number four, where we could keep an eye on him for a couple of hours. He was asleep every time I checked on him.”
    “Hm.” Another of those little departures from procedure that aren’t supposed to happen but happen all the time and usually do more good than harm but just occasionally introduce the spark to the box of fireworks. “So he wasn’t locked in?”
    Murchison shook his head.
    “Did you lock the door after you put Cardy in there?”
    “No. Ash wasn’t under arrest—I didn’t want to lock him in. And Cardy wasn’t the type to make trouble.”
    Fountain was nodding slowly. “And after Mary Watson was released, five probably wasn’t locked, either.”
    The sergeant had no idea where he was going with this. All he could do was answer honestly. “No, sir.”
    Fountain leaned forward very slightly in his chair. “Donald, maybe nobody moved Jerome Cardy. Maybe he moved himself. What if he got tired bunking with a snoring idiot and his flea-ridden dog? He saw that the cell opposite was empty, both doors were unlocked, so he just ambled across the corridor and made himself comfortable. He wouldn’t have thought he was doing anything very wrong, let alone dangerous. Then when Barclay was brought in, you and everyone else thought number five was empty.
    “I’ve been there when we’ve been wrestling Barking Mad Barclay into a cell,” he recalled warmly. “There isn’t a lot of spare time for checking under the blankets. If he went through the door without somebody’s ear in his teeth, you’d just slam the door and shoot the bolt before he had time to turn on you. Do you suppose that’s what happened?”
    If you fall off a ship in the middle of an ocean, you’re pretty sure you’re going to drown. It’s not exactly that the fear passes, but an element of resignation creeps in. If there’s no hope, if there’s only one way it can end, there’s no point fighting. Despair drives out panic.
    But if someone throws you a life preserver, everything changes. You might still drown, but you might survive. And the hopeless calm of waiting for the inevitable gives way in an instant to terror. That you might not reach the life preserver, that the rope will break. That was what was in Sergeant Murchison’s eyes now: the recognition that there was a way he might come out of this. And the hope, and the fear, that recognition engendered. “I … I suppose … it hadn’t occurred to me. But maybe that’s what happened.”
    Fountain was nodding again. “Well, we can’t ask Cardy, poor chap. We could ask Ash, though I doubt he could tell us much—and I doubt we could put much faith in anything he did tell us. We can ask the guys if any of them moved Cardy. But if no one owns up, that’s probably why. No one did move him. He moved himself.”
    The sergeant was thinking fast. “If that’s what happened, there should be footage on the CCTV.”
    “You haven’t looked yet?”
    Murchison shook his head. “I didn’t want … I wanted to give one of the guys time to say it was his idea to move Cardy before I checked the tape.”
    Fountain could understand that. “Let’s have a look at it now. It might let everyone off the hook.”
    But it didn’t. The two men gazed impassively at the screen as the image of the row of cells pixilated and broke up at some point between Jerome Cardy’s being brought in and Robert Barclay’s rather more dramatic arrival.
    Chief Superintendent Fountain said with commendable restraint, “It’s doing that again, is it?”
    Sergeant Murchison felt as if the Coast Guard cutter had thrown him an anchor. “The technician said he’d sorted it out.”
    “All right,” said Fountain wearily, “so there’s no CCTV. So we have a theory but no supporting evidence. I think we have to be frank with the IPCC—tell them we think we know what happened but we can’t prove it. If they think something else may have happened, it’s up to them to