By the time he’d spoken to each of them, DCI Gorman had a fair idea what had happened, except for one thing. He didn’t know who had shot Benny Price.
Hazel had assumed it was an armed response officer brought in along with the helicopter. Given her track record, most of Meadowvale had assumed it was Hazel.
The mystery was solved – or perhaps it was compounded – when John Carson arrived at Meadowvale Police Station with Leo Harte’s solicitor.
‘My client is here to furnish you with a full and frank explanation of how he came to shoot someone in that part of the Wittering Woods known as Lubbuck’s Gully earlier this morning.’
Dave Gorman was generally rather good at not being surprised; and quite good at not appearing surprised even when he was. But no amount of practice could stop his hedgerow eyebrows from shooting up into his low-slung hairline. ‘You mean, he’s here to confess to a crime?’
‘Well, possibly,’ said the solicitor carefully, ‘or at least a misdemeanour. If you still deem it in the public interest to prosecute when you’ve heard all the facts.’
‘A misdemeanour …?’ John Carson putting a bullet through Benny Price’s brain might have been the least-worst outcome of the events in the wood that morning, but Gorman’s soul baulked at lumping it in with dropping litter.
‘When you’ve heard all the facts.’
Two hours later, DCI Gorman released John Carson on his own recognisance, with the warning that he should hold himself available for further interview and charges might follow. Then he left DS Presley holding the fort in CID and drove up to Highfield Road.
Having used every cushion in Ash’s house, Frankie Kelly had then raided the neighbours in order to pad both sofas in the big sitting room. When she showed Gorman in, Ash was nursing his bruises on one, Hazel buried under quilts on the other.
Patience was curled in the chair closest to the roaring fire. Gorman stood over her expectantly.
Yes? Can I help you? she asked politely.
‘Just get off and let the man sit down,’ said Ash. With every sign of reluctance, the dog did as she was bid.
‘You’re not going to guess who I’ve been talking to,’ said Gorman.
‘Not the hospital?’ asked the hump in the quilts that was Hazel, anxiously.
‘No,’ he said quickly. ‘Though I called them before I came out. Saturday’s fine. He’s asleep, and they’ll hold onto him until tomorrow, but they say he’s come through it remarkably well. They say …’ He hesitated, and cleared his throat. ‘They say you got to him just in time. And you did exactly the right thing. That you saved his life.’
‘Or to put it another way,’ she mumbled, ‘I nearly got him killed.’
‘Oh Hazel,’ sighed Gorman, ‘don’t go off on a guilt trip over this. None of what happened was your fault. Benny Price was a mentally deranged man who got fixated on you only because you were doing your job well. Everything that happened was down to him, not you.’ He switched his gaze to the other sofa. ‘Tell her, Gabriel.’
‘I’ve been telling her,’ Ash said patiently, ‘since eleven o’clock this morning. It’s now’ – he glanced at the grandmother clock in the corner – ‘a quarter to four. I have every hope that by about eight o’clock this evening she will begin to believe me.’
The mound of quilts grunted. ‘Then who have you been talking to?’
‘John Carson.’
That brought the top of her head into view, down to the level of her nose. ‘Leo Harte’s social secretary?’
‘The very same. And the man who shot Benny Price.’
Both of them stared at him in a most gratifying way. ‘You are kidding,’ gasped Hazel, with a vulgarity that would have dismayed her mother.
‘Leo Harte’s social secretary?’ said Ash, perplexed.
Hazel ventured a bit further out of her warm cave. ‘It’s his job description. Because Chief henchman and occasional knee-breaker doesn’t look good in the annual accounts.’
‘You know who Harte is?’ asked Gorman. Ash nodded. ‘Well, Carson’s his fixer. And a bloody fine shot with a rifle, it turns out.’
Frankie brought fresh tea. He settled in with a cup – Ash’s mother’s tea set was nearly as awkward in his big hands as Superintendent Maybourne’s – and told the story he’d been told. ‘You are not to understand from this that I believe what I was told, only that this is Carson’s account and I’m pretty sure he’s going to stick to it. And I may not be able to break it, even if I try.’
‘If?’ echoed Hazel.
Gorman ignored her. ‘Before John Carson worked for Leo Harte he was a soldier, and before he was a soldier he was a bit of a wild lad. Think Trucker Watts but with brains. One of his little earners was poaching – a brace of pheasant here, a roebuck there – not industrial scale, just enough to supply a short-sighted butcher or two. It wasn’t even the money so much as the fun of dodging gamekeepers he enjoyed.’
‘This must have been years ago,’ said Hazel.
‘It was. Now, of course, he’s a respectable grown-up who does a responsible grown-up job and pays his income tax and votes in council elections and supports worthy charities, and any kind of criminality is far behind him.’ Gorman caught her look and interjected defensively, ‘I didn’t say I believed this crap. I’m telling you what he told me.
‘Except,’ he resumed, ‘every now and then he can’t resist the urge to go out into some quiet bit of woodland and knock down a pheasant or two. He doesn’t do it often, he doesn’t take many, and he sticks to neglected corners of wood where the birds don’t really belong to anybody or at least won’t be missed. That’s what he was doing this morning. Poaching.’
‘With a rifle?’ said Ash doubtfully.
‘That’s what I said. He said he’d been a crack shot in the Army, and this was a way of keeping his hand in. Shotguns, apparently, are for cissies. Look,’ he said sharply, anticipating Hazel’s interruption, ‘I told you – this is the statement he gave under caution. I don’t believe it either. It’s just a low-cost way of explaining what he was doing there.’
‘He was there because Leo Harte sent him,’ said Hazel.
‘Of course he was.’
‘Because …’ Revelation dawned in Hazel’s eyes. ‘Leo Harte didn’t want Benny Price arrested. Benny killed the woman he cared about, and he didn’t want justice, he wanted revenge.’
‘Exactly. He offered to help you find Gillian Mitchell’s killer because he thought you – well, me too but you especially – had a better chance than he had. And he kept watch on you. Where you went, who you spoke to. That maroon hatchback – I bet you kept seeing it around?’ She nodded wordlessly. ‘That’s Carson’s. Harte reckoned that if he kept an eye on you, sooner or later you’d lead him to Gillian’s killer.’
‘At which point he always intended to take over,’ guessed Ash.
‘Harte had no interest in seeing the man who killed Gillian in court. He wanted him dead. When Carson saw Price pull a hammer out of his backpack, he knew (a) that he had his man, and (b) that he had a scenario he could walk away from. Price had killed before and was about to kill again. Any court in the land would say that what John Carson did then was justifiable homicide.’
‘He used me,’ said Hazel, anger sparkling with the firelight in her eyes. ‘Leo Harte. I thought I was using him, but he was using me.’
‘Yes, he was,’ agreed Gorman. ‘And if he hadn’t, you and Saturday would both be dead now.’
‘What will you do about Carson?’ asked Ash.
But Gorman hadn’t decided. ‘I could try to get him for poaching. If we can figure out who that scrap of wildwood between the forestry and the farmland belongs to, and if they’re prepared to stand up and say that Leo Harte’s fixer had no permission to be shooting there. I might get his gun licence revoked. Or I might just send him a cigar.’
After he’d gone, Patience slipped back onto the fireside chair and Hazel emerged from under the quilts and went to raid the kitchen for biscuits. She was no longer chilled, either from exposure or shock, but her body craved something sweet.
Ash said, ‘Why don’t you stay here tonight? The guest room’s made up.’
She was tempted, but only for a moment. ‘Tonight I’m going to sleep in my own bed, in the absolute confidence that no one will break in, no one will leave little parcels on my doorstep, and there’ll be no stiffened envelopes pushed through my letterbox. A luxury I haven’t enjoyed for three weeks.’
‘And it was all Benny Price,’ mused Ash. ‘The man from the council. One of the little people that nobody notices.’
‘I feel pretty stupid about that,’ Hazel admitted. ‘I knew he worked for the council. I saw him standing beside the hole in my road and assumed that was his job. If I’d thought to ask, and been told he was actually the park warden and none of the guys digging the hole knew why he was always hanging round, we’d have got him days ago. We’d never have let Saturday go off with him.’
She was close to tears. She sniffed, and grinned ruefully, and then sobbed.
Ash rose from his sofa like an old arthritic horse, and put one creaky arm about her shoulders. ‘It’s just reaction,’ he reassured her. ‘All the time you’re dealing with an emergency, your mind prioritises. It filters out the stuff it can do nothing about in order to focus on the things it can. Afterwards, it all comes back and hits you. Have a good cry. You’ll feel better for it.’
He was right about that, too. But when she was done, the horror remained. ‘We almost lost him, Gabriel. Saturday. We were that close to losing him.’
‘Saturday will be all right,’ promised Ash. ‘He’s been through a lot in his time. He’s always come out intact, and he will again. He’s resilient.’
‘You didn’t see him,’ she mumbled. ‘You didn’t feel the absolute chill of his skin. I thought he was dead. I thought no one could survive that.’
‘But he did,’ Ash insisted softly. ‘And tomorrow he’ll come home, and apart from a disinclination to take country walks or indeed cold showers for a while, he’ll be fine.’ That made Hazel laugh, a choking half-ashamed little chuckle that nevertheless brought a smile to Ash’s face. ‘So will you. It’s history now. You did well, and now it’s over.’
Except in the back of his mind was the one thing still unresolved. ‘Er – what are you going to do about Christmas? Are you going back to Byrfield, to spend it with your father and Pete?’
It was almost as if, with everything that had happened since, she’d forgotten that Pete Byrfield wanted to make an honest countess of her. ‘No,’ she decided. ‘No, I want to spend it here. With you and the boys, and Frankie, and Saturday.’ She drew a deep, unsteady breath. ‘But then I will have to go back. Pete and I need to talk. Properly. Talk through what we want, figure out what we’re going to do.’
‘There’s no rush,’ suggested Ash.
‘No. And nothing to be gained by putting it off, either.’
Soon after that she collected her clothes – Frankie had been warming them round the kitchen range, she’d spent the afternoon in Ash’s pyjamas with the arms and legs rolled up – and headed home. Saturday’s yellow sports car had been left outside her door. There was no sign of the maroon hatchback.
But as she went to open her front door, she caught a movement under the weak street lamp as someone padded across the street. ‘Er – miss?’
It was Trucker’s sharp-faced little friend, in the same old grey hoodie with the hood up, his gloveless hands shoved deep in the pockets of his threadbare jeans. ‘Hello, Neville.’
‘It’s just,’ he began awkwardly, ‘there’s talk going round. I thought, Get it straight from the horse’s mouth. Only people are saying you found who done for Trucker.’
After a moment she nodded. Trucker hadn’t had many friends. The Rat was possibly the only one who cared enough about his death to ask the police for information. ‘That’s right. Do you remember the man Trucker threatened on the train? It was him.’
The Rat’s eyes widened. ‘That fat little bloke? He got the better of Trucker?’
‘He wasn’t just a fat little bloke. He was a strong, fat little psychopath who used a hammer as an offensive weapon. There’ll be an inquiry to establish the facts, but there won’t be a prosecution because he’s dead now as well.’
Now the Rat’s mouth dropped open as well. ‘Did you kill him, miss?’
‘No, I didn’t,’ she said shortly. ‘Occasionally, things happen around here that are not my fault. He was going to kill me, except that a man with a gun saw him and stopped him. And that, until the full facts are released, is all I can tell you. I’m sorry you lost your friend, Neville. I hope it’s some comfort to know that the man who killed him won’t be hurting anyone else.’
The Rat thought about that. Then he nodded, satisfied. But on the point of turning away, he hesitated and looked up at her again. ‘Er – miss?’
‘Yes, Neville?’
He did the shy smile that had touched her before. The one probably no one had seen since his mother. ‘You always call me that. Everybody else just calls me Rat, but you always call me Neville. My mum thought it was a bit classy. A cut above the Waynes and Tyrones and Leroys you mostly get round here.’
Hazel smiled noncommittally.
‘Er – miss?’
‘Yes, Neville?’
‘Would you mind not doing?’