Free Deadly Virtues by Jo Bannister

overheard.
    Every time she was tempted to put some credence to what he thought he remembered, he did this. Behaved like a lunatic. She asked the question because asking questions put her in control, made her comfortable. “Would you know him again? This policeman.”
    Ash shrugged. “I didn’t see his face. He was in uniform, but I didn’t get his number, if that’s what you mean. I heard his voice. An older man rather than a younger one.”
    Against her better instincts, Hazel found herself toying with the information. Sergeant Murchison was not a young man. If there had been any shifting of prisoners to be done, as custody officer that night he was the one likeliest to have done it. But Sergeant Murchison said Jerome Cardy had shifted himself.
    People get forgetful as they get older. If a cell had become vacant, he would have transferred Cardy to it; and if he had forgotten—if something had distracted him before he got it logged—when Barclay was brought in amid a flurry of fists and oaths, it would have been the easiest thing in the world for him to fling open the cell door and have the wild man shoved inside. Perhaps he never remembered that Cardy was in there, and a young black law student was the last person that Barclay, the rabid racist, should have been in with. Or perhaps he remembered just too late, at which point it was only a question of whether he owned up to his error or not.
    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