Free Deadly Virtues by Jo Bannister Page B

to what was happening to him. No one at the police station is going to ask these questions. Either they don’t know there’s a puzzle to solve or it’s in their best interests to leave well enough alone.”
    Gabriel Ash thought a little longer; then he made up his mind. “I’ll go tomorrow. To express my condolences to his parents, and ask if any of this makes sense to them.”
    What he didn’t say, aloud or even in the privacy of his own head, was, “Maybe if I can get to the bottom of this mystery, the other one—the old one, the big one—might seem slightly less unbearable.”
    Be careful, said Patience.

 
    CHAPTER 8
    Y OU NEED TO make yourself presentable.
    Ash ignored the voice in his head, which is something he didn’t often do, at least when they were alone. So the dog said it again. You need to make yourself presentable before we go and see them.
    “Who?” His furtive glance showed that he knew exactly who.
    The Cardy family. I know you’re going to see them. I saw you looking up their address in the phone book.
    Phone books are something the average dog knows very little about, unless it’s how quickly you can shred one if you’re left alone in the house. So Ash was probably right when he rationalized these conversations he had with Patience as being something that took place inside his head. Undoubtedly Laura Fry would have agreed, if he’d told her that he didn’t just talk to the dog but also heard her reply.
    She said that talking to animals was a way of holding a debate with other viewpoints within your own mind. He wasn’t sure how she would react if he was honest with her—if he admitted that he seemed to hear the dog respond exactly as he heard other people speak, except that she didn’t move her lips. He didn’t hear other animals talk, just Patience. Laura had said he wasn’t mad. He wondered if she’d want to review that diagnosis if he reported, word for word, the conversation he was now having. And all the others that he’d had in the last three months, since discovering that the stray dog he’d adopted to give him something to think about beyond his own misery spoke better English than most teenagers.
    His first thought was that the therapist was wrong and he was indeed mad. He was terrified, precisely because it didn’t come out of left field. Things had happened in his life that would have driven anyone mad. But he’d thought the crisis had passed. He’d come as close to a mental breakdown as you can without slipping irrevocably over the edge, but somehow he’d clawed his way back. Or, to be fair, been dragged back by talented and dedicated people who’d convinced him he could learn to live in the world again, even though everything about it had changed.
    Perhaps it helped that he hadn’t had much choice in the matter. Ash hadn’t so much separated himself from his former life as had it taken from him. But isolation can become a habit, too, and after he left London he’d withdrawn into himself much as a crab does, for protection. He’d turned his back on everyone he once knew, all the support he might have had, excepting only Laura Fry, who was imposed on him almost as a condition of remaining at large. He’d returned to live alone in this empty house, the house where he’d grown up, wrapped himself in his most comfortable old clothes, existed for months at a time only on those foods that could be delivered. He knew people—neighbors, tradesmen, the local police—thought he was strange, but until he got the dog he’d agreed with Laura, that underneath all that, the essential core of him had survived more or less intact.
    The first time the dog spoke to him, he thought it had finally happened: that his ravaged personality had splintered and his brain was now leaking out of his left ear. He thought he should probably get himself committed. Again. That would be the end of everything—especially those last dregs of hope that made him pay the phone bill religiously