Read Online Deadly Virtues by Jo Bannister - Free Book Online

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