The Retribution

He’d looked over his shoulder, panicked that one of the bullies had crept up behind him. Then startled, he’d realised she was looking at him. ‘Aye, thee, tha big daft lad.’

He shook his head, his upper lip rising in fear, showing his teeth like a nervous terrier. ‘Nothing,’ he said.

‘You’re a liar,’ she said, ladling an extra-large portion of macaroni cheese on to his plate. ‘Come round the back here.’ She gestured with her head to the side passage that led to the serving kitchen.

Truly terrified by now, Tony made sure nobody was looking and slid sideways into the passage. Clutching his tray to his chest like a horizontal shield he stood in the kitchen entrance. The woman came towards him, then led him round the corner to the back kitchen where the real work happened. Four women were washing huge pots in deep sinks amid clouds of steam. A fifth was leaning against the back-door jamb, smoking. ‘Sit thysel’ down and eat,’ the woman said, pointing to a high stool by a counter.

‘Another bloody rescue pup, Joan?’ the smoking woman said.

Tony’s hunger overcame his anxiety and he shovelled his food into his mouth. The woman, Joan, watched him with satisfaction, her arms folded across her chest. ‘You’re always last in the queue,’ she said, her voice kindly. ‘They pick on you, don’t they?’

He’d felt tears well up in his eyes and nearly choked on the slippery macaroni. He looked down at his plate and said nothing.

‘I keep dogs,’ she said. ‘I could do with a hand walking them after school. Would that be something you might fancy?’

He didn’t fancy the dogs. He just wanted to be with somebody who spoke to him the way Joan did. He nodded, still not looking up.

‘That’s settled, then. I’ll see you at the back gate when the bell goes. Do you need to let them know at home?’

Tony shook his head. ‘My nan won’t mind,’ he said. ‘And my mum never gets back before seven.’

And that had been the start of it. Joan never asked him about his home life. She listened once he understood he could trust her, but she never probed, never judged. She had five dogs, each with a distinct personality, and while he never came to care for the dogs the way Joan did, he learned how to fake it. Not in a disrespectful way, but because he didn’t want to let Joan down. She didn’t try to be a mother to him or to bribe him into investing her with more significance in his life. She was a kind, childless woman who had been drawn by his pain in the same way that she’d been drawn to her dogs down at the animal rescue. ‘I always know the ones with the good temperaments,’ she would boast to him and to the other dog walkers she’d stop and chat to.

And she encouraged him. Joan wasn’t a clever woman herself, but she recognised intelligence when she saw it. She told him the way to escape whatever ailed him was to educate himself so that he had choices. She hugged him when he passed his exams and told him he could do it when he grew discouraged. He was sixteen when she told him he had to stop coming round.

They’d been sitting in her kitchen at the formica-topped table, drinking tea. ‘I can’t have you coming round any more,’ she said. ‘I’ve got cancer, Tony lad. Apparently I’m bloody riddled with it. They say I’ve only a matter of weeks to live. I’m taking the dogs to the vet tomorrow to have them put down. They’re all too old to adapt to some other bugger, and I doubt your nan would give them houseroom.’ She’d patted his hand. ‘I want you to remember me as I am. As I have been. So we’ll say our goodbyes now.’

He’d been horrified. He’d protested at her decision, declaring his willingness to be by her side till the end. But she’d been adamant. ‘It’s all arranged, lad. I’m putting everything in order then I’m taking myself off to the hospice. I hear they couldn’t be nicer in there.’

Then they’d both cried. It had been hard, but he’d respected her wishes. Five weeks later, one of the dinner ladies had called him over and told him Joan had died. ‘Very peaceful, it were,’ she said. ‘But she’s left a bloody big hole round here.’

He’d nodded, not trusting himself to speak. But he’d already discovered that Joan had taught him how to negotiate that bloody big hole for himself. He wasn’t the same boy she’d befriended.

It was years later, when he was doing postgraduate work on personality disorders and psychopathic behaviour, that he understood the power of what Joan had done for him. It wasn’t overstating the case to say that Joan had saved him from what lay in prospect when she had snatched him out of the dinner line. She’d been the first person to show him love. A brusque, unsentimental love, it was true. But it had been love and even though he’d had no experience of it, he’d recognised it.

In spite of Joan’s intervention, though, he’d never quite mastered the art of making easy connections with others. He’d learned to pretend – ‘passing for human’, he called it. He didn’t have a raft of mates like most of the men he’d worked with. He didn’t have a backlist of girlfriends and lovers like them. So the few people he cared about were all the more valuable to him. And the thought of losing Carol Jordan gave him a physical pain in his chest. Was this what the precursor to a heart attack felt like?

There was more than one way to lose her. There was the obvious – the fact that she’d made it clear that she didn’t care if she never saw him again. But there was always hope that he could change her mind. Other ways were more final. In the state she was in, she would place little value on her life. He could imagine her deciding to go it alone against Vance, and he feared that would only have one outcome.

Then it dawned on him that he might not be the only person capable of saving Carol from herself. He reached for his phone and called Alvin Ambrose. ‘I’m a bit busy just now,’ the sergeant said when he answered.

‘I’ll keep it brief, then,’ Tony said. ‘Carol Jordan’s on her way to confront Jacko Vance.’

50

Paula looked at her watch, feeling glum. She was inches away from giving up on Vice and going home. Right now, she should have been sitting in her kitchen, drinking red wine and watching Dr Elinor Blessing applying her surgical skills to carving a leg of lamb. She hoped there would be some left over after their dinner guests had eaten their fill. She yawned and laid her head on her folded arms on the desk. She’d give them five more minutes, then to hell with it.

She woke with a start because someone was standing next to her. Blinded by the pool of light from her desk lamp, Paula could only see the outline of a figure against the dimly lit squad room. She jerked upright and pushed back in her chair, scrambling to her feet. A low laugh came from what she could now see was a woman. Middle-aged, middle-height and middle-weight. Dark hair in a neat bob. Face a bit like a garden gnome, complete with button nose and rosebud mouth. ‘Sorry to disturb your nap,’ she said. ‘I’m Sergeant Dean. From Vice.’

Paula nodded, pushing her hair back from her face. ‘Hi. Sorry. I’m DC McIntyre. I just put my head down for five minutes … ’

‘I know who you are, pet.’ The accent was from the North East, the cadences blunted from years spent elsewhere. ‘No need to apologise. I know what it’s like when you’re in the thick of it. Some weeks, you wonder if your bed was only a dream.’

‘Thanks for coming in. I didn’t expect you to give up your Saturday night.’

‘I thought it was easier to come in. And besides, my husband and my two lads are off to Sunderland for the late kick-off game, they’ll not be back till gone eleven by the time they’ve had their post-match curry. So all you’re keeping me from is crap telly. What Bryant had to say sounded a lot more interesting. Care to fill in the blanks?’ DS Dean settled herself comfortably in Chris Devine’s desk chair and propped her boot heels on the bin. Paula tried not to mind.

Slightly wary of the Vice cop’s obvious interest, Paula explained Tony’s theory as best she could then smiled apologetically. ‘The thing with Dr Hill is that his ideas can sound … ’

‘Stark staring mad?’

Paula chuckled. ‘Pretty much. But I’ve worked with him for long enough now to know that it’s kind of spooky how often he gets things right on the money.’

‘I’ve heard he’s good,’ Dean said. ‘They say that’s part of the reason Carol Jordan has such a great success rate.’

Paula bristled. ‘Don’t underestimate the chief. She’s a helluva detective.’

‘I’m sure she is. But we can all use a bit of help now and again. And that’s the reason I’m here. Whenever other detectives are interested in my turf, it’s time to take a personal interest. None of us wants our carefully cultivated contacts rubbed up the wrong way.’

Now that Dean had laid out her stall, Paula felt more comfortable in her presence. ‘Naturally,’ she said. ‘So, can you help me?’

Dean dug into the pocket of her jeans and took out a memory stick. ‘I’ll share what I can. Bryant said you were interested in new lasses?’

‘That’s right. I hear there are more new faces because of the recession.’

‘That’s true, but a lot of them are inside workers, not on the street. How new are you interested in?’

‘A month before the killings began?’

‘I like to keep my ear to the ground,’ Dean said, digging into the pocket of her jeans and coming out with a smartphone. ‘I also don’t like putting anything on the computer that doesn’t have to be there. Especially when it comes to vulnerable young women.’ She fiddled with the phone then gave a grunt of satisfaction.

‘There’s no hard and fast way of dealing with the crap out on the streets,’ Dean said, thumbing through a list. ‘It’s all a bit ad hoc, you might say. When new faces show up, we try and get alongside them. Sometimes a little bit of leaning is all it takes, you know? Especially with the more or less respectable ones. A mention of how a criminal record will fuck up everything from their childcare to their credit rating and you can see the wheels going round. But that’s a tiny minority. Once they’ve got as far as walking down that street, there’s mostly no going back. So what I’m looking for there is to develop sources. And just to keep an eye out, you know?’

‘Nobody wants bodies turning up.’

‘Aye, well, I like to think we mostly manage to step in before it gets that far. My bonny lads tell me I’m living in cloud cuckoo land. But at least I try to get their names and a bit of background so we know what to put on the toe-tag, if it comes to it.’

‘So what are we looking at here?’

‘Forty-four square miles of BMP force area. Nine hundred thousand population, give or take. At any given time, there’s somewhere around a hundred and fifty women working as prostitutes. When you think that about fifty per cent of men admit to having paid for sex, them lasses are working bloody hard for a living.’

‘Not much of a living, either,’ Paula said.

‘Enough to keep them in drugs so they don’t care what they’re doing to earn the money for the next fix.’ Dean shook her head. ‘I bloody hope I’ve brought my lads up with a better attitude to women, that’s all I can say.’ She took her feet off the bin and sat up straight. ‘The time frame you’re looking at, I’ve got three names for you.’

‘I’m just glad it’s not more than that.’

‘We’re getting into summer time. The nights are lighter and the punters are more wary of being recognised when they’re kerb crawling.’

‘I never thought of prostitution as being seasonal.’

‘Just the street stuff, pet. Indoors goes like a fair all year round. If you were interested in indoor, this list would be more like a dozen. So here we go. Tiffany Sedgwick, Lateesha Marlow and Kerry Fletcher.’

Paula couldn’t believe her luck. ‘Did you say Kerry Fletcher?’ she said, excitement quickening in her.

‘Does that ring a bell?’

‘Kerry Fletcher’s female?’

Dean looked at her as if she’d lost the plot. ‘Of course she’s female. You didn’t ask me about rent boys. Why? Does the name mean something?’

‘It came up earlier in a different part of the inquiry. Given the context, we thought it was a bloke. Kerry, it could be a bloke’s name.’ She frowned. ‘That makes no sense.’

Dean smiled. ‘You can check it out for yourself. You’ll find her most nights down the bottom end of Campion Way. Near the roundabout.’

‘Do you know anything about her?’ Paula scribbled the name in her notebook, opening up her email program and starting to type a note to Stacey.

‘I know what she told me about herself. How much truth there is, who knows? They all make stuff up. Good stuff and bad stuff. Whatever they need to feel all right about themselves.’

‘So what did Kerry tell you?’ Paula liked a bit of job-related chit-chat as much as anyone, but right now the only thing she was interested in was Kerry Fletcher.

‘Well, she’s a local lass. I suspect that bit’s true, because she’s got a broad Bradfield accent. She was born in Toxteth Road, round the back of the high flats in Skenby.’

Paula nodded. She knew Toxteth Road. What the local cops said was that even the dogs went round mob-handed down there. It was also in the area Stacey had identified from the number plates. ‘Desolation Row,’ she said.

‘Bang on. Then when she was five or six, they moved to a sixteenth-floor flat. And that was that for her mother. She never left the flat from the day they moved in. Kerry’s not sure if it was claustrophobia or agoraphobia or fear of Eric – that’s the dad. But whatever it was, she became a prisoner in her own home.’ The sergeant paused for dramatic effect. It was clear that she relished her stories.

‘And that made her the perfect bargaining chip for Eric Fletcher,’ Dean continued. ‘He began sexually abusing Kerry when she was about eight. If she didn’t do exactly as she was told, Eric took it out on her mother. He’d batter her, or push her out on the balcony and leave her there till she was a gibbering wreck. And little Kerry loved her mum.’

Paula sighed. She’d heard variations on this tale so many times, but every time had the force of the first time. She couldn’t help imagining what it must have been like to feel so powerless. To endure a poverty of experience that meant this was a child’s only exemplar of love. When that was all you knew, how could you believe anything else was achievable? The relationships you saw on TV shows must have felt as fantastical as Hogwarts. ‘Of course she did,’ she said. ‘Why wouldn’t she? Until she learned to despise her.’

Dean looked slightly pissed off. This was her story, after all. ‘And so it went on. Even after she left school and started working at the petrol station on Skenby Road. She had no life of her own. Eric saw to that.’ She gave Paula a shrewd look. ‘It’s what your Tony Hill would say. People become complicit in their own victimhood.’

‘You know a lot about Kerry Fletcher.’

Dean gave her a wary glance. ‘I make it my business to know as much as I can about all of them. A cup of coffee and a motherly attitude goes a very long way on the shit side of the street, Paula.’

‘So what happened?’

‘The mother died. About four months ago, as far as I can make out. It took a few weeks for it to dawn on Kerry that she was free at last.’

‘So she went on the streets? What happened to the job at the garage?’

‘When the scales fell from Kerry’s eyes, they made a right clatter on the pavement. She didn’t just want to be free, she wanted to rub Eric Fletcher’s nose in it. He wasn’t getting her for free any more, and she was making other men pay for what had been his.’

Paula whistled. ‘And how did Eric take that?’

‘Not well,’ Dean said drily. ‘He kept turning up where she was working and begging her to come home. Kerry refused point-blank. She said it was safer on the streets than in his house. We warned him off a couple of times, he was making a scene in the street and it was shaping up to turn nasty. Since then, he’s kept a low profile, as far as I’m aware.’

‘She said it was safer on the streets than in his house,’ Paula repeated. ‘That sounds like the perfect fit for what Tony was talking about. And he must have used her email address. Of course he did.’ Energised now, she was tapping on the computer keys, composing an urgent message to Stacey to look for an Eric Fletcher in the Skenby flats, probably the sixteenth floor.

As she sent it, she noticed a message had arrived from Dr Grisha Shatalov. ‘Bear with me a second,’ she said, momentarily abstracted. Paula, it read, We’ve got a torn piece of fingernail embedded in the exposed flesh of the latest body. It doesn’t match the victim’s fingers. It’s almost certainly that of the killer and we should be able to get DNA – enough certainly for identification via STR and Mitochondrial DNA. Hope that cheers up your Saturday night. Give my condolences to Carol if you see her before I do. Dr Grisha.

Sometimes a case reached a point that was like turning a key in a complicated lock. One tumbler would fall, then another, then it felt like an inevitable matching of pins and key, and the door would swing open. Here, now, late on a Saturday evening, Paula knew it was only a matter of time before MIT would be able to point to their last case with pride in the result. Carol could walk out with her head high, knowing she’d created something, whereas Blake could only destroy.

It would be a moment to relish.

Ambrose’s voice had risen to a bellow. ‘She’s what? Who the fuck told Jordan where Vance is hiding?’

‘Stacey, of course,’ Tony said, sounding far more patient and reasonable than he felt.

‘What the fuck was she thinking? That’s operational information.’

‘And Carol Jordan is her boss, not you. She turned her expertise to this problem for Carol, not for you. You shouldn’t be surprised that she is loyal to the person who gave her the chance to shine.’

‘You need to stop Jordan,’ Ambrose said, his voice hard and rough. ‘I don’t want her blundering into this. He’s too dangerous to confront single-handed. You need to stop her before something terrible happens.’

‘That’s exactly why I’m hammering up the motorway right now,’ Tony said, keeping his tone level to try and take the heat out of the situation. ‘When are you leaving?’

‘Within the next five minutes. When did she take off?’

‘Stacey spoke to her directly after she spoke to you. And then she spoke to me. And I left about fifteen minutes ago.’

‘Fuck. This is a nightmare.’

‘There’s one thing you could do,’ Tony said, moving over into the fast lane.

‘What?’

‘You could call Franklin and ask him to intercept her.’

Ambrose snorted. ‘That’s your idea of a solution? We’ll end up with a Mexican stand-off between Jordan and Franklin while Vance hightails it out the back door, over the hills and far away.’

‘Please yourself,’ Tony snapped. ‘I’m just trying to save her life, that’s all.’ He ended the call and coaxed another five miles an hour out of his protesting engine. ‘Oh, Carol,’ he groaned. ‘Please don’t do anything brave. Or noble. Just sit tight. Please.’

Sam Evans had never lost his appetite for getting out on the street and talking to people. He didn’t have Paula’s skills in the interview room, but he was good at drawing people into conversation then sussing out when to charm and when to lean. He could slip straight back into his working-class accent, and that helped when you were dealing with people at the bottom of the heap. Sam opened his mouth and they imagined someone who wasn’t condescending or judging.

When Paula had passed on the background she’d got from the sergeant in Vice, the obvious next step had been to find Kerry Fletcher and bring her in, out of harm’s way. Paula needed to stay in the office, pulling together any information that might give them a lead on where to find Eric Fletcher. Meanwhile, Sam would do his best to find Fletcher’s daughter.

Temple Fields on a Saturday night was thronged with people. Drag queens, beautiful boys, striking baby dykes with their tattoos and piercings, and Lady Gaga wannabes were the eye candy, but there were plenty of more conventional-looking people out for a good time in the gay bars and restaurants that lined the streets. The area had shifted from hardcore red-light zone to gay village back in the nineties, but the new century had made it more eclectic, with the hippest of the straight young people happy to hang out in what they perceived as the cool clubs and bars. Now, it was a heaving mix, an anything-goes part of town. And there was still a thriving kerbside sex trade, if you knew where to look.

Sam weaved his way through the crowds, alert for female and male prostitutes. Sometimes they saw him coming, smelled ‘cop’ on him and melted away into the anonymous crowds before he could speak to them. But he’d managed to talk to half a dozen of the women. A couple of them had completely blanked him, refusing to engage in conversation at all. Sam suspected they knew their pimps were watching.

Two of the others denied any knowledge of Kerry Fletcher. A fifth said she knew Kerry though she hadn’t seen her for a day or two, but that was probably because Kerry usually worked Campion Way, not the main drag. So Sam had moved down towards the boulevard that separated Temple Fields from the rest of the city centre. There he’d found a more informative source.

The woman was leaning against the wall in the mouth of an alley, smoking and sipping on a coffee. ‘Christ, can’t I have ten fucking minutes to myself?’ she said as Sam approached. ‘I don’t give freebies to the Bill.’

‘I’m looking for Kerry Fletcher,’ Sam said.

‘You’re not the only one,’ the woman said sourly. ‘I’ve not seen her tonight, but her old man was round looking for her last night.’

‘I thought he’d been warned off?’

‘Maybe so. He’s turned the volume down, that’s for sure. But he still hangs around, watching her every move. She turned on him last night, though. Told him to fuck right off.’

‘How did he take that?’

‘He didn’t have much choice, she went off with a punter.’

‘So what was he saying to her to wind her up?’

‘I wasn’t paying a lot of attention. I was trying to earn a fucking living. He was going on at her about how it’s not safe on the streets. That somebody’s killing whores like us and she should come home. She said she’d rather take her chances out on the street than with him. And he said he’d do anything she wanted if she’d just give up selling herself on the streets. And she said, “I just want you to stop this. Now fuck off.” Then she walked away and got in this bloke’s car.’

‘Have you seen them go at it like that before?’

The woman shrugged. ‘He’s been trying to freak her out about there being a serial killer out there.’ She curled her lip in disdain. ‘Like we don’t know there are bastards out there who get off on hurting us. You don’t do this job if you’re worried about health and fucking safety. We all know it, all the time. We just try not to fucking think about it.’

‘What did he do then, her dad?’

She tossed her cigarette end on the pavement and ground it out. ‘He did what he was told. He fucked off. Now I’d like you to do the same.’ She waved her fingers at Sam in a shooing motion. ‘Go on, you’re ruining my trade.’

Sam backed away and watched the woman totter to the kerbside on insanely high heels. What he’d learned didn’t take them much further forward. But it was corroboration. And when you were building a case, sometimes that was the best you could hope for.

51

There was something blissful about the way the blue light carved a line through the traffic. Cars and vans scuttled sideways like crabs when they spotted her. Carol especially loved the ones who were pulverising the speed limit till they saw her in their rear-view. Suddenly they’d brake and slew into the middle lane with an air of, ‘Who, me, guv?’ When she passed them seconds later, they’d always be staring resolutely straight ahead, their vain pretence glaringly obvious.

Sometimes people genuinely didn’t see her. They were lost in music or Radio 4 or some football phone-in on Talk Sport. She’d get right up behind them then give them a blare on the horn. She could actually see one or two of them jump. Then they’d jerk the wheel and she’d be past them, so close she imagined them swearing.

It was exhilarating, this feeling of finally taking action. It felt like forever since she’d stood in the barn looking down at Michael and Lucy’s bodies, a viscous sea of time that dragged at her feet and stopped her making any progress. She wanted to move forward, to bury the horror. But she couldn’t even start while Jacko Vance walked free. At liberty, he was an affront to her sense of justice.

It wasn’t death that Carol wanted to mete out. She knew a lot of people in her shoes would be satisfied with nothing less. But she didn’t believe in capital punishment, or even private vengeance that ended up with bodies on the floor. She and Vance were oddly at one on this point. She wanted him to live with the consequences of what he had done. Every day, she wanted him to know he was never going to look at an unfettered sky again.

And she wanted him to know who had put him back behind bars. Every day, she wanted him to hate her more.

Vance couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in Halifax. It must have been back when he was making his hit series, Vance’s Visits. He knew he must have been there before, because he clearly recalled the spectacular road curving down from the motorway round one side of the bowl of hills that cradled the town itself. Tonight it was a basin of lights, sparkling and twinkling below. It must have been hellish in Halifax after the Industrial Revolution. All those wool mills, spewing out smuts of smoke and clots of coal dust, filling the air with noxious fumes and filth, and nowhere for it to escape to, held tight in the embrace of the hills. He could understand the working man’s attraction to getting out to the dales and the moors to breathe clean air, to feel like a human being and not just a part in the vast machine.

He swept down from the high motorway into the valley below, keeping an eye out for a possible temporary base. He needed somewhere with wi-fi, so that he could check that his target was where he hoped she would be. It was too late for coffee shops, always supposing Halifax had anything so cool. And he didn’t want an Internet café, where people could peer over your shoulder and wonder why you were looking at CCTV pictures of a woman in her living room when she was clearly well past the age of sexual fantasy.

As he rounded a bend, he saw the golden arches of a McDonald’s. He remembered Terry telling him that, when all else failed, you could always count on McDonald’s. ‘Coffee, grub, or the Internet, you can get it there.’ Vance shuddered at the thought. Even when he’d pretended to have the common touch, he’d drawn the line at McDonald’s. But maybe for once he could make an exception. There must be a quiet corner where he could drink coffee and get online.

At the last minute he swung into the entrance and parked the car. He grabbed his laptop bag and went inside. The restaurant was surprisingly busy, mostly with teenagers who were fractionally too young to persuade even the most short-sighted bartenders that they were old enough for alcohol. Their desperate need to feel cool had driven them out from houses where Match of the Day was the natural late-night Saturday fare into the unforgiving glare of McDonald’s lighting. They slouched around the place with their milkshakes and colas, the boys with baseball caps at any angle except the conventional, the girls with an astonishing amount of flesh on display. Vance, who considered himself a connoisseur of teenage girls, felt faintly queasy at the sight. He had no interest in girls who had no sense of dignity. What was there to break down when the girls had already given everything away?

Vance bought a cup of coffee and found a table for two in the furthest corner. Although it was near the toilets, he could angle his screen away from prying eyes. Ignoring his drink, he quickly booted up and ran through his camera sites. Nothing at all at Tony Hill’s house, though the gateway had been boarded up and ‘Danger! Keep Out!’ signs had been posted. From the other camera shots, he could see why. The building was gutted. No roof, no windows, just a partially collapsed shell.

The third scene was the one that made him want to shout abuse at the screen. But Vance knew he had to maintain the appearance of calm. The last thing he wanted was to draw attention to himself. Teenagers were notoriously solipsistic, but even so, it only needed one sharp-eyed observer to create all sorts of problems. Still, seeing the stable block still standing filled him with rage. While he watched, Betsy herself came into shot with an armed policeman, a pair of spaniels at her heels. She was gesturing to various aspects of the relatively undamaged stable block as they walked, clearly having an animated conversation. She didn’t seem to be suffering at all, the bitch. He wanted her on her knees, weeping and tearing her hair out, locked into painful mourning. Maybe next time he should do the dogs. Cut their throats and leave them on Micky and Betsy’s beds. That would show them who had the power. Or maybe he should just do Betsy.

He took a deep breath and clicked on to the last set of active camera feeds. Clockwise, it showed the driveway and frontage of a detached stone-built villa that looked somehow unmistakably Northern. It wasn’t a big house – it looked like three reception rooms and three bedrooms, but it was solid and well maintained. In the driveway, outside a detached wooden garage, was a two-seater Mercedes.

Next was a modern kitchen that had the pristine air of somewhere that’s only ever used to reheat meals supplied by Waitrose or Marks and Spencer. The lights under the wall cabinets were on, casting a cold glow on pale wood worktops. Beyond the kitchen the ribs of a conservatory loomed pale through the darkness.

In the third view, a camera with a fish-eye lens had obviously been mounted in a corner of the half-landing on the stairs. It was possible to see up to the head of the stairs and through an open door that led to a bedroom, and also down the stairs to the front door, whose stained glass glowed faintly, backlit by the street lights outside.

The fourth feed showed a living room that looked as if not much living went on there. There was no clutter; no books or magazines, just an alcove lined with DVDs. A long, deep sofa almost as big as a bed and piled with cushions was at the heart of the room. In front of it, an elaborately carved wooden coffee table that held a trio of remote controls, a wine bottle and a single half-full glass of red. An open briefcase sat on the floor at one end of the table. On the opposite wall was an ornate Victorian fireplace. Where one might have expected a complicated overmantel, there was instead a plasma screen TV that filled the whole chimney breast. The room resembled the most private of cinemas, a sad screening room for one. As he watched, a woman walked into the room wearing a loose kaftan, golden brown hair in a shoulder-length bob tucked behind her ears. The definition wasn’t good enough for much detail, but Vance was surprised to see that the woman neither looked nor moved like someone on the downward slope of her sixties. She picked up two of the remotes and curled into the sofa, adjusting cushions and pillows so that she was comfortable. The screen sprang into life. The angle made it impossible for Vance to identify what she was watching but she seemed intent on it.

Which was all he needed to know. He wasn’t planning on finesse. An elderly woman in the house alone wasn’t exactly a challenging target. Especially since there were no obvious weapons in the room – no convenient fire irons or hefty bronze statues. He’d take his chances with a wine bottle.

He watched for a couple of minutes more, then folded his laptop shut and walked out, throwing his untouched coffee in the bin. Nobody paid any attention. Once that would have pissed him off. But Jacko Vance was slowly coming to appreciate the beauty of anonymity.

Tony did not believe in omens. Just because he was hammering up the motorway well over the speed limit and he hadn’t had any encounters with the traffic police didn’t mean the heavens were aligning in his favour. At one point, a flashing blue light had appeared in his rear-view mirror, but he’d pulled over and the liveried police car had thundered past without a second glance. Clearly someone else was behaving with even less regard for the law than he was. It still didn’t mean the gods were on his side.

Besides, he’d completely failed in his attempts to get Carol to talk to him. He’d been trying her number every few minutes, but it kept going straight to voicemail. At first, he’d hoped she was in one of the few remaining black holes for phone reception, but he couldn’t sustain that optimism for much longer. To begin with he’d left messages, but he’d stopped doing that. There were only so many times you could caution someone against recklessness without them feeling fatally insulted.

The only thing left that he could think of was to try and shock her into inaction. So, at the next service area, he pulled off the motorway and wrote a text. ‘I love you. Don’t do ANYTHING before I get to you.’ He’d never said it before. It might not be the most romantic of occasions, but it should, he thought, freak her out enough to stop her in her tracks. As soon as she turned on her phone, she would see it. Before he could pause to consider the wisdom of his words, he sent it.

Tony got back on the road, wondering how Ambrose was doing. Maybe that had been his team that had hammered past in the outside lane a while ago. He wasn’t sure whether to be happy or anxious about that possibility. He considered calling Ambrose, but before he could do anything about it, Paula rang. ‘Can you talk?’ she said.

‘I’m driving but I’m hands free,’ he said.

‘I think you were right,’ Paula said, filling him in on Sergeant Dean’s information. ‘I’m just waiting for Stacey to come back with an address for me. She’d done the preliminary checks, only with the wrong gender. Now she’s gone back to try again. So far, Fletcher’s name’s not coming up on any of the Skenby flats.’

‘Try his wife’s maiden name,’ Tony said.

‘You think? They’ve lived there for at least ten years, according to Sergeant Dean.’

‘With some people, covering your tracks is second nature. They do it just because they can, not because there’s any specific reason for doing it.’

‘I’ll get Stacey on to it.’

‘Good. I could do with something working out tonight.’

‘Having a bad time?’

‘I’m kind of scared, Paula. I think Carol’s on a collision course with disaster and I don’t know if I can stop her.’

‘That sounds a bit melodramatic, Tony,’ Paula said gently. ‘And the chief doesn’t really do melodrama.’

‘I think tonight might be the exception.’

‘Is there anything I can do?’

‘No, and I don’t even want you to try. You need to bring Eric Fletcher in.’

‘He can wait.’

Tony sighed. ‘Actually, Paula, I’m not convinced about that. He’s escalating both in terms of the gaps between his killings and the risk-taking involved in choosing his victims. He’s close to the tipping point. If Kerry doesn’t give in to his demands soon, he’s going to run out of options.’

‘Then what? He’ll kill himself? Good luck to him, if he does,’ she said contemptuously. Paula cared a lot less about keeping the bad guys alive than Carol did. She’d always thought it was because she’d lost more than her boss. But maybe that wasn’t true. Maybe they just differed on that fundamental point of principle.

‘If he can’t scare her home, he’ll bring her home,’ Tony said.

There was a long silence while Paula digested what Tony meant. ‘Then I’d better chase Stacey up for that address,’ she said quietly.

‘Do that. I’d like to get through tonight without any more bloodshed.’

Carol hit the speed bump so fast her suspension squealed and she had to wrestle the wheel to keep moving in a straight line. If anyone was watching the CCTV whose camera lights glowed red above her, they’d hit the panic button. People who lived in secluded estates like Vinton Woods paid for security because they didn’t want the kind of toerags who hit speed bumps at fifty miles an hour tooling round their streets. Carol tapped the brakes and tried to drive more in keeping with her Stepford Wives surroundings.

As she passed the mock Queen Anne houses, Carol noticed no signs of life. Yes, there were lit windows and cars in drives. But the only thing with a pulse that she saw was a sheepish fox who skulked out of her headlights as she rounded a bend. She had to acknowledge Vance had made a smart move. The kind of people who craved this sort of soulless existence simply wouldn’t notice if a serial-killing jailbreaker moved in next door, as long as he drove a nice car and didn’t come knocking on their door because he’d run out of milk.

She pulled over to the kerb and consulted the map she’d loaded on to her smartphone. Vinton Woods was too new to appear on her car’s GPS system, but she’d found the developer’s map on their website. She worked out where she was in relation to Vance’s house and set off again. Within minutes, she was driving into the cul-de-sac where his house was situated. She tried to make it look like she’d taken a wrong turning, reversing in a neighbour’s gateway and heading straight back down to the feeder road.

In her fleeting glimpse, there had been no obvious sign of presence. Carol drove to the end of the street and considered her options. She wanted to take a closer look at the house, but there was no easy way to do it. There was no casual footfall on these pavements. Nobody walked anywhere, because there was nowhere to walk to. No cars were parked on the street because everyone had driveways and garages enough for all the cars their households could possibly support.

She cruised back along the feeder street slowly, noticing that the house opposite the entrance to the cul-de-sac was in darkness. There were no cars in the drive either. Carol decided it was worth taking a chance, so she reversed into the drive and parked in front of a garage door. She had a clear line of sight past Vance’s neighbours to his house. It was the perfect spot for a stake-out.

It didn’t resolve the problem of getting a closer look at the house. But maybe she didn’t need to get up close and personal with the bricks and mortar. As far as she could see, none of the windows facing down the cul-de-sac was curtained. There was no light visible within the house. Unless Vance was in the dark in a room at the back of the house, the chances were that the house was empty. And if he was asleep in a back bedroom, Carol would be best advised to stay put. Who knew what motion sensors and cameras he had in place around the perimeter to alert him to intruders. Everything he’d done so far had been well considered and well planned. The house would be the same.

On the other hand, if she stayed put, she would see him as soon as he left the house. She could shoot out of the driveway here and either ram him, block him or follow him. It made sense from a policing point of view.

It just didn’t make much sense from a Carol Jordan perspective. The longer she waited, the more likely it was that Ambrose would turn up mob-handed and fuck up the whole thing. There was only one road in and out of Vinton Woods. If Vance got a sniff that the police were interested, he’d just carry on driving and disappear again. She’d have to try to persuade Ambrose to let her be point man on the operation. They’d have to stay well back, out of sight of anyone driving on to the estate, and trust her to alert them as soon as he showed up. Ambrose had worked under her command before and Carol thought she could probably persuade him that she was to be trusted in that role.

The question was whether she could persuade herself.

The suggestion Tony had passed on via Paula had infuriated Stacey. Not because she thought it was a waste of time, but because she should have got there by herself. She didn’t approve of making excuses for herself – her mother had inculcated her in a culture of taking responsibility equally for success and failure – but she did think that if she’d been sitting at her usual workstation, covering the bases would have been much more like second nature. Trying to run two major operations on a laptop and a West Mercia desktop that had a processor with all the speed of a crippled tortoise had proved trying, to say the least.

Finding the details of Kerry Fletcher’s mother’s death was the work of a couple of minutes. Once she had the woman’s maiden name, running those details against the council tenancy list she’d been accessing earlier that evening was something Stacey could have done with her hands tied behind her back.

Within ten minutes of taking Paula’s call, Stacey was back on the line. ‘You were right about the sixteenth floor. Pendle House, 16C. Sorry, I should have thought it through.’

‘No harm done, we’ve got there now.’

Stacey screwed her face up as if she had a bad taste in her mouth. ‘I know, and I don’t mind when Dr Hill comes up with stuff that’s outside our area of competence. But we’re supposed to be detectives, we should have come up with that ourselves.’

‘The chief would have,’ Paula said, glum in spite of the result.

‘I know. I’m not sure I want to carry on being a cop if Blake assigns me to routine CID work.’

‘That would be crazy,’ Paula said. ‘Everybody knows you’re a complete geek. Why would Blake not want to make the most of your skills?’

‘My parents have relatives whose lives were trashed in the Cultural Revolution. I understand that sometimes people get punished for being too skilled.’ Stacey had never spoken so freely to one of her colleagues before. It was ironic that it was the imminent disbanding of their unit that had liberated her tongue.

‘Blake’s not Chairman Mao,’ Paula said. ‘He’s too ambitious not to exploit you to the full. More likely you’ll be chained to a bank of monitors and only allowed daylight once a month. Trust me, Stacey, nobody’s going to unplug you. All the scut work, that’ll be down to the likes of me and Sam, as per usual. And speaking of Sam – don’t you think it’s about time you said something to him?’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Don’t come the innocent with me, Stacey. I am the best interrogator on this squad, nothing gets past me. Ask him out. Life’s too short. We’re not going to be working together for much longer. You might not see him again from one month’s end to the next. Let him know how you feel.’

‘You’re out of order, Paula,’ Stacey said weakly.

‘No, I’m not. I’m your mate. And I nearly missed out on Elinor because I had my head too far up my arse with work. Then she gave me half a chance, and I grabbed it. And it changed my life. You need to do the same, Stacey. Or he’s going to be gone and you’re going to regret it. He’s a shit and he doesn’t deserve you, but apparently he’s what you want, so do something about it.’

‘Don’t you have an arrest to be making?’ Stacey said, recovering some of her spirit.

‘Thanks for the info.’

Stacey replaced the phone and stared at the laptop screen. Then she stood up and walked across to the window, looking down at the parking yard below, turning over Paula’s words in her head. Apparently there were some things you couldn’t figure out by staring into a screen.

Who knew?

52

Vanessa Hill stretched out and refilled her glass, then settled back on her sofa pillows. She loved this sofa with its textured tapestry upholstery, its deep cushions and its high sides. Lounging on it made her feel like a pasha, whatever that was, or a Roman at a feast. She loved to snuggle among the pillows and throws, nibbling at delicate little snacks and sipping wine. She was well aware that the staff at her recruitment agency indulged in lurid water-cooler speculation about her private life. The truth was that what her success and her money had bought her was the right to please her bloody self. And this was what pleased her – her own company, bloody good red wine, satellite TV and an extensive collection of DVDs. It wasn’t as if she got the chance to cosset herself that often. A couple of nights a week, at the most. The rest was devoted to building her empire. She might have a bus pass, but Vanessa was a long way from retirement.

The episode of Mad Men faded to black and the titles rolled. She considered whether to watch another episode, then decided she’d watch the news and come back to the drama. She switched away from the DVD player and came in at the tail end of yet another bulletin about unrest in the Middle East. Vanessa harrumphed. She’d soon bloody sort them out. None of those men had balls enough to say what they meant. She’d thought it would revolutionise things to have Hillary Clinton running American foreign policy, but mostly it had just been more of the bloody same. Even the newsreaders were looking weary of it all. The only person who seemed to thrive on it was that miserable woman on the BBC who only ever turned up when everything had gone to pot. Vanessa gave a tight little smile that showed precisely where the botox had been injected. You’d run for the hills if you ever saw her coming down your street with a camera crew.

‘Former TV presenter Micky Morgan’s racing stud was the scene of a vicious attack earlier this evening,’ the newsreader said, showing a little animation now. Behind him, a split screen showed an apparently idyllic farmhouse and stable block, and a shot of Micky Morgan at her most glamorous, those famously lovely legs crossed and angled across the front of the sofa she was sitting on. Not a patch on Anne Bancroft, Vanessa thought. ‘A stable lad and two horses died in a shocking arson attack at her Herefordshire home. Only the quick response of her staff saved the lives of the remaining valuable racehorses that are boarded at the farm for stud purposes. Another of the stable lads was taken to hospital with smoke inhalation. He’s said to be in no danger.’

The screen behind changed to show a live shot of a young reporter standing at the end of a driveway with police officers in the background, the wind whipping her hair into wild strands round her head. She had the faintly startled air of a woman who’s been rousted out from watching the X-Factor. She waited patiently for the anchor to bring her in but he still had script to work through. ‘Micky Morgan used to host the flagship lunchtime show Midday with Morgan. She abandoned her TV career after her then husband, fellow TV presenter and former champion athlete Jacko Vance, was revealed as a serial killer of teenage girls. Vance himself made a sensational jailbreak earlier this week when he escaped from Oakworth prison, a mere forty-five miles from his ex-wife’s farm. Over now to Kirsty Oliver at the scene. Kirsty, are the police connecting this attack to Vance?’

‘Will, they’re not saying anything officially yet. But I understand there has been an armed police presence here at the farm since news of Jacko Vance’s escape became public two days ago. In spite of that, someone managed to infiltrate the stable yard and set a fire in a hay barn behind the main stable block, which you can see in the background.’ She waved vaguely over one shoulder. ‘The farm remains closed off to visitors and we’ve seen no sign of Micky herself or her partner Betsy Thorne, though we have been told that they are in residence.’

‘Nice of you to let Vance know they’re at home,’ Vanessa muttered.

‘Thanks, Kirsty. We’ll come back to you if there’s any breaking news from your location.’ Sincere, concerned face. ‘Police have indicated that they wish to question Jacko Vance in relation to two other incidents – the double murder in Yorkshire yesterday morning and another arson attack in Worcester yesterday evening.’ Photographs of two good-looking thirty-somethings appeared behind the newsreader. ‘In a new development, police have identified the murder victims as Michael Jordan, a games software developer, and his partner, criminal barrister Lucy Bannerman. Michael Jordan’s sister is a detective with Bradfield police, and she’s believed to be the officer who arrested Jacko Vance for murder.’ Vanessa hastily put her glass down and pushed herself upright. ‘Carol Jordan,’ she spat, her face as twisted with distaste as it could get these days.

Few people had ever thwarted Vanessa. Even fewer had got away with it. Carol Jordan was one of that tiny band. She was one of the pieces of grit in the oyster of Vanessa’s life. She could almost bring herself grudgingly to respect the Jordan woman – she had power and was willing to use it, she was ruthless, and she could clearly be single-minded in pursuit of her goal. These were qualities Vanessa herself possessed in overwhelming amounts and she valued them in others. She also suspected that Jordan shared her ability to assess people’s strengths and weaknesses. Where Vanessa used that trait to her own advantage to build her reputation as a shrewd headhunter, Jordan seemed to apply it to bringing criminals to justice. Vanessa couldn’t see the point. Where was the profit in that? It wasn’t that she minded the existence of the police. Somebody had to keep the scum in their place. But it wasn’t the sort of career for anyone who had something about them. And that was why, ultimately, she couldn’t respect Carol Jordan.

Before she could wander too far down the path of her feelings towards Carol Jordan, the bulletin caught her attention again and this time it transfixed her. The newsreader had done with the murder and was moving along. ‘Vance is also wanted for questioning in another arson attack. Last night in Worcester, this house was razed to the ground.’ A photograph of a smoking ruin appeared on the screen. ‘Luckily, nobody was home when the fire started. Police have not released the name of the householder, but neighbours said the previous owner, Arthur Blythe, died last year and the new owner has spent very little time here.’

Arthur Blythe. The name Eddie had chosen to live under after he’d recovered enough to walk away from her. As if he’d wanted to lose himself. She’d deserved that house after what she’d had to go through. But he’d left it to the bastard. Why anybody would leave anything to Tony was beyond her. She certainly wasn’t going to. She was going to get through the lot before she shuffled off this mortal coil. In a year or two, once the economy started to pick up its heels, she’d flog the business she’d spent a lifetime building up. And then she would rack up all the experiences in her bucket list – all four tennis grand slams in the best seats, safaris to see all the great beasts of Africa, an up-close-and-personal cruise in the Galapagos, the Cannes film festival, the Northern Lights and a dozen more besides. By the time she was done, there wouldn’t be two halfpennies for Tony.

The newsreader had moved on to football, but the image of the ruined house was still sharp in Vanessa’s head. It was a funny thing to go for if you were trying to hurt somebody. But Jacko Vance was somebody else Vanessa had a grudging respect for. He was another one who’d made his mind up and gone for it. Never mind that what he wanted was illegal and immoral and half a dozen other glib condemnations that the media would deliver at the drop of a dead body. He was determined to achieve his goals, and if it hadn’t been for Carol Jordan and, presumably, Tony trotting along in her wake like a pet dog, he’d still be doing what he was best at. No wonder he wanted to get his own back. In his shoes, she’d have felt exactly the same.

Vanessa gave a dark chuckle. If she ever spoke honestly out loud, the water-cooler crowd would wet themselves. If you wanted to get on in this world, you had to be mealy-mouthed. She’d have to admit, Jacko Vance had been impressive on that front too. With all his charity work and his supposed support for the dying, he’d got them all convinced that he was little short of a saint.

He hadn’t convinced Jordan, though. And it looked like Vance held Tony responsible too. But burning his house down? It said all you needed to know about what a useless waste of space her bastard son was. At least Jordan had people in her life that it would grieve her to lose. All Tony had was a house. And if you thought Tony was the sort of person who would be bothered by losing a physical possession, your research wasn’t as thorough as it should have been.

Even as that thought flitted into her head, Vanessa felt a cold trickle down the back of her neck. What if the house was just the start? What if Vance’s research had been really shoddy? Carol Jordan had lost her brother. What if Tony was scheduled to lose a blood relative too?

Tony had just joined the Manchester orbital motorway when his phone rang. He was so shocked to see Carol’s name on the screen he almost swerved into the central reservation, his tyres rattling over the studs on the road’s edge like automatic weapon fire. Thoroughly discombobulated, he stabbed at the phone’s answer button and shouted, ‘It’s me, I’m here. Are you OK?’

‘I’d be better if you didn’t leave stupid attention-seeking messages on my phone,’ she said. There was nothing friendly in her voice. ‘Where’s Vance?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ he said.

‘Not much of a profiler, are you?’

He ignored the insult. He thought she was just trying to wind him up. He hoped, anyway. ‘Where are you?’

‘I’m at Vinton Woods. I’m staking out the house, but I don’t think he’s there. Where’s Ambrose?’

‘Same as me. On his way to where you are.’

‘I tried to call him but he’s not answering. There’s only one road in and out of this development. I think they should hold position away from the estate. If Vance gets a sniff of them, he won’t even turn off the main road and we’ll have lost him. And this time there won’t be some convenient clue on Terry Gates’s hard drive.’

‘That makes sense,’ Tony said.

‘I know it makes sense, but I can’t communicate that to Ambrose. I don’t know if he’s blocking my calls, but I can’t raise him. You need to call him and tell him. He’ll listen to you. He thinks you’ve got a handle on what’s going on.’

She was losing it, he thought. She was losing it and he was still too far away. ‘Even if I can get through to him, he won’t listen to me. I’m not a cop. I don’t have any operational command here. You need to talk to Patterson. Or go further up the chain of command. This isn’t something I can do, Carol.’

‘You don’t want to do it, you mean,’ she said, her voice low and bitter. ‘You can’t help yourself, can you? Because you fucked up, now you’re overcompensating. Somehow you’ve got to protect me. You’d rather let Vance escape than have me confront him, because you think I’ll fuck up and get killed. Well, you’re wrong, Tony. I know what I’m doing. If you won’t help, fuck you.’

The line went dead. Tony smacked his fist on the steering wheel. ‘Masterful,’ he shouted. ‘Fucking masterful.’ His self-disgust plumbed new depths as his rage simmered down. The one good thing was that Vance hadn’t been there when Carol had arrived. The confrontation might only be postponed, but at least it hadn’t happened yet.

He drove on, his mind racing over what he knew and what the possibilities might be. Why had Vance not returned to his base camp? He’d been on the road a long time. He’d need to rest properly, not in a hotel room where he had no control of his environment. He’d need to change his appearance somewhere nobody would notice that he looked different going out from coming in. The instinct of the predator was always to return to his lair. So why was Vance not in Vinton Woods? Where could he be? And why?

Tony chewed on the problem as he skirted Manchester and Stockport, Ashton and Oldham and shot out on to the M62. In a few miles, he’d hit the motorway link for Bradfield. He was getting close to Vinton Woods now. He could argue the toss with Carol on the ground.

But still the question of Vance’s whereabouts nagged him. ‘You want us to live with the pain,’ he said. ‘Most people would think Carol’s the only one who’s had that kind of pain so far. It’s like she got the full dose, but me and Micky, we’ve just got our starters.’ He gripped the wheel so tightly his knuckles hurt.

‘Even if you meant it to be enough, it all went pear-shaped at Micky’s. Two horses and a stable lad dead, that’s sad, but it’s not really a tragedy, even for Betsy, who loves the horses. You’re not going to be able to let that rest. But not tonight. Not while the place is crawling with cops. You’re going to have to wait.’ He sighed in exasperation. ‘So all the more reason for you to go back to your hole in the ground, the place you think you’re safe. Rest. Regroup. Plan. Then do something to Micky that she’ll carry like a scar for the rest of her life.’ It felt right. It had the shape of Vance’s thinking. It had taken Tony a while to crawl back inside Vance’s mind. But now he was sure. He didn’t just know with his head. He empathised. He understood what made Vance tick, what he needed and what would satisfy him.

‘You thought this was going to be quick and dirty. You’d gallop through your list, and you’d feel vindicated. But now you know it’s not that easy. The suffering needs to be very particular … ’ His voice tailed off.

If the horses weren’t enough, the house wasn’t enough. In Tony’s world, it was as shattering and disruptive as a bereavement. However, that wouldn’t be how others saw it. Vance might have got it, if he’d been doing the watching and the deciding himself. If he’d seen Tony in the house with his own eyes, he’d have known precisely what he was achieving. But he hadn’t. He’d had to rely on the reports of others. Others who couldn’t creep about inside strangers’ heads with any degree of insight.

In those circumstances, the house couldn’t be enough. Carol would be the obvious person to take from him. That would rip his heart out, no doubt about it. But Vance couldn’t kill Carol, because her ongoing pain was integral to his satisfaction. And what had happened to Chris, not Carol, would that have been enough? Maybe. But if a disfigured and damaged Carol wasn’t enough, that didn’t leave many options. Tony’s life was not overburdened with friendships. There were plenty of acquaintances, colleagues, former students. There were a handful of people he thought of as friends, but they weren’t close in the way that Vance would need. Besides, from the outside, they probably didn’t appear to be more than workmates. If he went for a drink with Ambrose or Paula, it would look like colleagues having a couple of beers after work. No big deal. Only someone who knew Tony a damn sight better than Vance possibly could would have grasped the importance of those connections. When it came to revenge, they didn’t even register.

And if revenge was to be worth anything, it had to matter deep down. Tony understood the atavistic importance of getting your own back in the right way. All through his life, his mother had used him as an emotional punchbag. She’d belittled him, criticised him, made fun of him. She’d made sure he grew up without a father, without a refuge, without love. She hadn’t cared whether he succeeded or failed. And he’d grown into an emotionally limited, dysfunctional man, saved from ruin only by fragments of other people’s love and the gift of empathy.

When he’d first found out the full scope of Vanessa’s treachery and lies, he’d sworn he never wanted to speak to her again. But the more he’d grown into the idea of changing his life and accepting the hand Arthur Blythe had offered from beyond the grave, the more he’d wanted her to know that, in spite of her best efforts, he was not destroyed. That the man she’d driven from his life had found a different kind of strength, one that could circumvent Vanessa’s confrontational negativity. And that had healed some vital part of Tony’s spirit. He couldn’t think of anything that would piss her off more than knowing that.

So he’d driven over to Halifax one afternoon and waited for her to come home. She’d been surprised to see him, but she’d asked him in. He’d said what he had to say, raising his voice and talking over her when she tried to undercut him. Eventually, she’d shut up, settling for an expression of amused contempt. But he could read her body language, and he knew she was raging with impotent fury. ‘I’m never going to enter this house again,’ he said. ‘I’m never going to see you again. You better make your funeral arrangements in advance, Vanessa. Because I’m not even going to be there to bury you.’

And he’d left, a lightness in his heart that was completely alien to him. Getting your own back was a wonderful thing. He understood exactly the sense of release that Vance was looking for.

Then it hit him. He’d visited his mother’s house. A watcher would have had no idea why he was there or what had gone on inside. He’d just have seen a dutiful son visiting his mother and coming out of the house with a smile on his face and a spring in his step. The watcher had made his report and Vance had leapt to the wrong conclusion.

All at once, Tony knew exactly where Jacko Vance was.

53

Paula bounced from foot to foot, dragging incessantly on her cigarette. ‘Where the fuck are they?’ she demanded, scanning the approaches to the dingy grey concrete tower where they were waiting. Above their heads were twenty-one floors of egg-box flats, all thin walls and cheap paint and peeling laminate covering cold damp concrete floors. More stolen TVs than hot dinners. Skenby Flats. Bradfield’s answer to Blade Runner.

‘They’re always late. It’s their way of showing how important they are,’ Kevin grumbled, trying to find a spot under the block of flats that didn’t feel like the working end of a wind tunnel. ‘Where’s Sam?’

‘He’s gone out to Temple Fields to see if he can pick up Kerry. You never know, she might be ready to grass him up for all those years of misery.’ Paula exhaled a long sigh of smoke. It seemed to dissolve straight into the concrete. ‘I just don’t get how you keep your mouth shut when a man starts abusing your child.’ Kevin opened his mouth to say something, then shut up, seeing her minatory shake of the head. ‘I know all the feminist arguments about being beaten down and victimised. But you have got to know that there is nothing more wrong than this. Nothing worse than this. Frankly, I don’t understand why they don’t all top themselves.’

‘That’s a bit harsh for you, Paula,’ Kevin said, once he was sure she’d finished. The lift doors groaned as they opened. A couple of lads in hoodies and low-slung sweat pants slouched past them in a waft of cannabis and sweet wine.

‘What would you do if you found out someone had been abusing your kids, and your wife had known and done nothing about it?’

Kevin’s face went into an awkward lopsided expression. ‘It’s a stupid question, Paula, because it wouldn’t happen that way in our house. But I get what you’re saying. You’ve got to know in your head there’s a huge yawning gulf between loving the very bones of them and abusing them. I’m glad I’m not Tony Hill and I don’t have to let that kind of shit contaminate the inside of my head. And speaking of Tony, has anybody heard how he’s doing? With the house and all that?’

Paula shrugged. ‘I don’t think he’s in a good place. As much because of the chief as the house. And of course, he’s upset about Chris.’

‘Any news on that front?’

‘Elinor texted me a while back. Nothing’s changed, and apparently the longer it stays that way, the better her chances of avoiding major lung damage.’

Neither of them spoke for a few moments. Then, his voice soft, Kevin said, ‘When she gets to the far side of this, I don’t know that she’ll thank them for saving her.’

It was no more than Paula had already considered. ‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Don’t go there. Imagine what it’s going to be like for the chief.’

‘Where is she, anyway?’

‘I have no idea. Frankly, I feel like we’re well out of it. And here we go,’ she said, pointing down the walkway to a group of half a dozen officers jogging towards them in tactical support gear. Stab vests and forage caps, door ram and a couple of semi-automatic weapons. Paula turned to Kevin. ‘Did you ask for firearms?’

‘Nope,’ he said. ‘That’ll be Pete Reekie, grandstanding.’

The black-clad officers reached them and milled around, jaws up, trying for hard. None of them was displaying numbers or rank on their jumpers. They made Paula feel nervous.

‘My operation,’ Kevin said. ‘We’re going to do this the old-fashioned way. I’m going to knock on the door and see if Eric Fletcher is at home and whether he’ll invite us in. If he doesn’t, you can do the knock,’ he said, tapping the door ram with his knuckles. ‘Let’s go.’ He pressed the lift button.

‘We should use the stairs,’ the apparent leader said.

‘Please yourself,’ Paula said. ‘I’m on twenty a day and Eric’s on the sixteenth floor. See you there,’ she added, stepping through the opening doors, followed by Kevin. ‘At some point in history, I signed up for what was nominally the same job as them. Doesn’t that feel scary to you?’

Kevin laughed. ‘They’re just boys. They’re more scared than the villains are. We just need to keep them well away from the action.’

They waited by the lifts for the elite squad to make it up the stairs. Paula used the time to smoke another cigarette. ‘I’m nervous,’ she said, catching Kevin’s disapproval.

At last the tactical group arrived and were deployed around the landing. A swirl of rain blew into their faces as Kevin and Paula walked along the gallery. The door of 16C had been badly painted so many times it looked like an entry for the Turner Prize with its array of drips and blisters and scuffs of different colours. Now it was mostly royal blue with dirty white plastic numbers.

Kevin knocked at the door and at once they heard the shuffling scuffle of feet in the hallway. The door was opened in under a minute, bringing a waft of bacon and cigarettes with it. The man who stood there wouldn’t attract much attention at first glance. He was a couple of inches taller than Paula, with fine mousy hair that reminded her of a child’s. He wore jeans and a T-shirt that revealed pale, doughy arms. His face was pudgier than his body, and there was nothing remarkable about his pale blue eyes. But there was an intensity in his manner that was instantly obvious. If they were right about him being the killer, Paula was surprised that he managed to get prostitutes to come along with him so willingly. In her experience, most of the street women had a pretty good instinct for a punter who was a bit off. And Eric Fletcher screamed ‘off’ to her.

They identified themselves and Kevin asked if they could come in. ‘Why do you want to do that?’ Fletcher said. His voice was dull and grating. He cocked his head at an angle, his stare challenging without being defiant.

‘We need to talk to you about your daughter,’ Paula said.

He folded his arms across his chest. ‘I’ve got nothing to say about my daughter. She doesn’t live here no more.’

‘We’re concerned about her well-being,’ Kevin said.

Fletcher raised one corner of his top lip in a sneer. ‘Well, I’m not, ginger.’

‘Do you drive a car, Mr Fletcher?’ Paula asked, hoping a change of tack would unsettle him.

‘What’s it to you? First it’s my daughter, now it’s my car. Make your mind up, love. Oh, but wait. You can’t, can you? You being a woman, and all.’ He made a move to shut the door, but Kevin’s arm shot out and stopped it.

‘We can do this inside or we can do this down the station,’ Kevin said. ‘What’s it going to be?’

‘I know my rights. If you want me to come down the station, you can arrest me. Otherwise you can fuck off.’ Fletcher smirked, catching the look between Kevin and Paula. It was as if he knew how little evidence they had and he wanted to taunt them.

Part of Paula wanted to arrest him on suspicion of murder. Her years of experience told her he had something he wanted to keep hidden. But if she did that, the clock would start ticking and they’d only have thirty-six hours to question him before they had to charge him or let him go. ‘I think you should invite us in,’ Paula said in her toughest voice.

‘I don’t think so,’ Fletcher said. There was a determination in those four words that provoked Paula beyond bearing. She knew they were right and she wasn’t going to let him slip through their fingers.

Paula put her hand to her ear and tilted her head towards the hallway. ‘Can you hear that, Sarge? Somebody shouting for help?’ She moved forward till her leading elbow was touching Fletcher’s chest.

Now Fletcher showed some edginess. ‘It’s not shouting for help. It’s Match of the Day, you stupid bint. It’s football supporters.’

‘I think you’re right, detective,’ Kevin said, moving in behind her. Fletcher was going to have to yield or be pushed aside. He spread his legs and stood his ground. Kevin turned and shouted down the landing, ‘We’ve got someone in here shouting for help.’

And then it was all a blur of noise and movement and black. Paula flattened herself against the wall as the tactical squad batted Fletcher to the ground and cuffed him. They poured into the living room at the end of the hall like they expected Osama bin Laden’s ghost to be hunched over the gas fire. Two of them slipped back into the hall and busted into the first room. Paula saw the corner of a bathroom before the two men backed out and slammed open the door opposite. They stopped on the threshold and one said, ‘Oh, fuck.’

Paula pushed past them and looked in. The only thing it was possible to take in was on the double bed. The remains of a woman’s body appeared to float on a sea of red. She had been slashed to ribbons, her flesh flayed from the bones in places. Just as Tony had predicted, the only intact part of her was her head. Splashes and drips of blood dotted the walls like a modern art installation. Paula turned away, an overwhelming sense of waste choking her. Tony had been right about something else too. There had been an issue of urgency. And they hadn’t been nearly urgent enough.

Kevin was reciting the words of the caution over Fletcher’s prone body. One of the tactical squad was on his radio calling for a full crime-scene technical team, another was on the phone to Superintendent Reekie reporting on what they’d found. If this was a blaze of glory, you could stick it up your arse, Paula thought.

The two cops by the bedroom door backed into the living room. Paula followed them into the dusty disarray and gave the TV an empty glance. ‘It was Match of the Day, after all,’ she said wearily. ‘My mistake.’ Next to the TV, a framed photo had pride of place. A few years younger, it was true, but there was no doubt that the woman on the bed was Kerry Fletcher.

‘She should have come home,’ Fletcher shouted. ‘None of this would have happened if she’d just come home.’

Tony shot up the exit ramp, his tyres squealing as he hit the roundabout and dragged the car round till he was tearing back on to the motorway in the opposite direction. As soon as he could prise a hand off the wheel, he reached for his phone and hit the redial to speak to Ambrose. And went straight to voicemail. The same thing that had happened to Carol.

‘Please, no,’ he wailed. ‘This is crap.’ The phone beeped. ‘Alvin, this is Tony. I know where Vance is. Please, call me back as soon as you can.’

Another five miles back to the M62, then a few more miles to the Halifax turn. What if he was too late? How easy would that be to live with?

His phone rang, shaking him out of his introspection. The voice was crackly and remote. ‘Dr Hill? This is DC Singh. I’m dealing with DS Ambrose’s phone because he’s driving and doesn’t want to be distracted. You say you know where Vance is?’

‘Put Alvin on. This is important, I don’t have time to explain it from scratch.’

There was a crackly confusion of speech. Then Ambrose’s voice boomed out. ‘What the fuck, doc? I thought Vinton Woods was a definite.’

‘That’s where he’s based, not where he is right now.’

‘So where is he right now?’

‘I think he’s at my mother’s house,’ Tony said. ‘He wants blood, Alvin. Bricks and mortar’s just a start. And the only blood I’ve got is my mother.’

‘I’ve got a whole team on their way to Vinton Woods. How can you be sure he’s not there?’

‘Because Carol Jordan is and she says the house is empty.’

‘Can you trust her?’

‘Yes.’ Tony didn’t even have to think about that one. She might not want to be in the same room as him, but that didn’t mean she’d start lying to him about the important stuff.

‘And you think he’s at your mother’s house? Have you got any evidence to back that up, doc?’

‘No,’ Tony said. ‘Just a lifetime of experience dealing with fucked-up heads like Vance. I’m telling you, he wants blood on his hands. He killed Carol’s brother and my mother is the logical next move.’ There wasn’t any point in trying to explain Vance’s likely misunderstanding of the relationship between Tony and Vanessa. ‘I’m on my way there now. I’m probably about fifteen minutes away.’

There was a long interval of static, then Ambrose said, ‘Give DC Singh the bloody address, then. And don’t do anything stupid.’

Tony did the first part of what he’d been told. ‘How far away are you?’ he asked DC Singh.

‘We’re on the M62, a couple of miles before the Bradfield exit.’

He was still ahead of them, but only just. And Vance was a long way ahead of all of them.

54

There were a few cars parked on the quiet Halifax street. Not all of the houses had drives that could accommodate all their vehicles, especially on a Saturday night when people came round to eat dinner and complain about the government. That suited Vance. Nobody would notice one extra parked among the locals. He slotted in between a Volvo and a BMW three houses down from Vanessa Hill and opened up a window on his smartphone that showed the live camera feed from her living room. The image was small and lacked resolution at that size, but it was clear enough to let him see she was still curled up on her regal sofa watching TV.

It was hard to imagine Tony Hill at ease in that room, focused as it was on meeting the needs of one person alone. Where did he sit when he visited? Did they camp out in that sterile kitchen, or was the conservatory the place where Vanessa gave some consideration to the comfort of her guests? Or was it more that her son had inherited his lack of casual social skills from her? Over the years, Vance had replayed his encounters with the strange little man who’d chased him down based on instinct and insight rather than robust forensic evidence. He’d often wondered if Hill was autistic, so awkward was he in social encounters that were not based exclusively on drawing information from the other person. But maybe it was less interesting than that. Maybe he’d grown up with a mother who had no interest in social encounters in the home, so Hill hadn’t learned how to do it at an early enough age for it ever to have become second nature.

Whatever the dynamic here, it wasn’t going to exist for much longer.

Vance gave a last look round to check there was nobody about, then he got out of the car and took a holdall from the boot. He walked briskly up the street and turned in at Vanessa’s gate as if he lived there. He walked past the Mercedes, his rubber-soled shoes silent on the block-paved driveway. There was a gap between the 1930s wooden garage and the house, barely wide enough for an adult turned sideways. Vance slipped into the space and sidestepped his way to the back garden. He hadn’t had a chance to scout out the back of the house; he didn’t even know whether there were security lights. But for once, he was willing to take the risk. It wasn’t as if his target was much of a challenge. An old woman with a bottle of wine inside her wasn’t exactly going to be on full alert if her back garden lights suddenly came on. Even if she noticed, she’d write it off as a cat or a fox.

But as he emerged, no light flooded the patio. All was still, silent but for the distant hum of traffic. He put down his holdall and squatted beside it. He took out a paper overall like the ones worn by the CSI teams and struggled into it, almost falling over as he tried to get his prosthetic arm inside without dislodging any crucial connections. Plastic bootees over his shoes, blue nitrile gloves on his hands. He wasn’t trying to avoid leaving forensic traces. He didn’t care about that. But he wanted a quick getaway and he didn’t want to be soaked in blood on the short drive back to Vinton Woods. That would be the kind of carelessness that deserved to be punished by a random road accident.

Vance stood up, rolling his shoulders and flexing his spine to make the overall settle on his body. He hefted the crowbar in his hand and set the knife down on the sill of the window by the back door. He took a good look at the door, assessing its strengths and weaknesses, and smiled. Someone had replaced the original solid wood door with a modern one whose glass panels rendered it a lot weaker. Luckily, they’d gone for wood rather than UPVC. Contemporary wooden doors were made of soft wood that splintered and broke relatively easily. This was not going to be much of a challenge.

He pushed against the top and bottom of the door to test whether there were any bolts, but apparently Hill hadn’t invited his good friend DCI Jordan round to sort out his mother’s security. It seemed that the door was only secured by the mortice lock and the door catch.

Vance pushed the point of the crowbar into the spot where the door met the jamb. It was a tight fit, but he was strong enough to force it in, denting the soft wood of the door-frame in the process. He pushed harder, trying to put more stress on the lock before he began the serious business of forcing it.

Once he was satisfied he had the leverage right, Vance leaned into the crowbar, using his weight as well as his strength against the wood and metal holding the door closed. At first, his only reward was a faint creak of wood. He put more effort into it, grunting softly like a pianissimo tennis player on the serve. This time, he felt something give. He paused to realign the crowbar’s bite and put everything into shifting the lock body out of the box keep. This time, there was a scream of metal and a splintering of wood as the door burst open.

Vance stood panting on the threshold, feeling very pleased with himself. He shifted the crowbar into his prosthetic hand, checking his grip was secure. It was amazing how well this worked. He could actually ‘feel’ that he was holding something and he could judge how much pressure he needed to apply to keep hold of it. And those bastards had wanted to deny him access to this technology. He shook his head, smiling at the memory of his delight at their defeat in the European Court. But this was no time for basking in past victories. He had work to do. Vance reached for the knife with the seven-inch blade that he’d left on the window sill and stepped inside the kitchen.

To his surprise, there was no sign of Vanessa Hill. He hadn’t made a lot of noise, it was true, but most people were attuned to the sounds of their home at an unconscious level, particularly when they were home alone. Anything out of the ordinary would bring them to their feet to investigate. Apparently Vanessa Hill was either hard of hearing or so engrossed in whatever crap she was watching on TV that she hadn’t heard him break in. Admittedly, the door into the hallway was closed, which might have made the difference between hearing and not.

Vance moved across the kitchen as quietly as he could, lifting his feet high to avoid the shuffle of his bootees on the tiled floor. He inched the door open and wasn’t surprised to hear American voices talking and laughing. He walked down the hall, his movements loose and relaxed now he was so close to accomplishing his goal. First he’d taken Tony Hill’s home from him. Now he was going to rob him of his only relative, his beloved mother. Vance’s one regret was that he wouldn’t be sticking around to see the suffering at first hand.

Two steps away from the threshold of the living room he paused, straightening his spine and squaring his shoulders. The flickering TV light reflected on the shining steel of his blade.

Then he was through the door and round the sofa and brandishing his weapons at the woman sitting upright among the cushions. Her response was not what he expected. Instead of screaming panic, Vanessa Hill was simply looking at him with mild curiosity.

‘Hello, Jacko,’ she said. ‘What kept you?’

55

Tony assumed the blue flashing lights that were gaining on him all the way up the main drag belonged to Ambrose. He turned into the side street leading to his mother’s road just ahead of them and managed to stop them overtaking him before they all took a hard left into her street.

Tony abandoned his car in the road, making no attempt at parking. He ran for the front door, but before he got there, a young Asian man grabbed him in a bear hug and slammed him into the side of the house. ‘No, you don’t,’ he said. Then Ambrose was in front of him, struggling into a stab vest the size of a car door.

‘Take it easy, Tony,’ he said softly. ‘You don’t go in first. Have you got a key?’

Tony snorted. ‘No. And no, I don’t know if any of the neighbours has one. I’d doubt it, though. She’s a very private person, my mother.’

A couple of other officers were hanging back near the gate. ‘We could just ring the bell,’ one of them said.

‘We don’t want a hostage situation,’ Ambrose said.

‘You’re not going to get a hostage situation,’ Tony said. ‘He’s here for a reason. He’ll kill then leave. If he’s still in there, it’s only because he’s in the process of leaving.’ He gestured with his head towards the narrow passage by the garage. ‘You might want to send one of your lads down there in case Vance is going out the back door.’

Ambrose pointed to one of the officers then stabbed his thumb at the gap. ‘Take a look.’ He gave Tony a perplexed look. ‘Let’s ring the bell, then.’ He pointed a finger at Tony. ‘But you stay behind us. Whatever happens, you stay behind us.’

They walked up to the door, surprisingly quietly for such big men. Tony found enough space between Singh and Ambrose to see what was going on. Ambrose rang the bell then stepped back so he was out of reach of anyone swinging a punch from the doorway.

Tony felt his stomach clench. He was convinced he was closer to Vance than he’d been at any time in the past twelve years. Whether the killer was in the house already or on his way here, this was the place where they’d find him. What the cost of that confrontation might be, Tony didn’t want to consider right now. What he wanted was to see Vance caged again and caged for good. No question about it, he was one of the ones who should never have any kind of freedom. It went against the grain of Tony’s heartfelt conviction that rehabilitation should always be the goal of the judicial process, but every now and again, he was forced to accept that someone was beyond help. Unredeemable. Vance was a walking exemplar whose very existence felt like a rebuke. He and his kind reminded Tony that the system’s failures generally created more fallout than its successes.

A light snapped on behind the glass and they could hear a key turning in the lock. The door inched open and Vanessa’s face appeared in the gap, her hair disarranged as if she’d been roused from a nap. Ambrose and Singh held out their ID and garbled their names and ranks. Tony gave a thin smile and waved at her. ‘Hello, Mum,’ he said, sounding as weary as he suddenly felt.

‘That was fast,’ Vanessa said, opening the door wider to reveal a scarlet stain spreading across her kaftan from chest to mid-thigh. ‘I’ve only just rung 999. You’d better come in.’

Ambrose turned and looked at Tony, wide-eyed with shock. Feeling light-headed, Tony pushed past the cops and stepped inside as Vanessa pulled the door back and invited them in.

She pointed to the barely ajar living-room door and said in a matter-of-fact way, ‘You won’t want to go in there. It’s what you lot call a crime scene. But we can go into the dining room. He didn’t go in there at all, so there’s nothing to contaminate.’ She led the way down the hall to another door and swung it open. ‘Don’t just stand there, come through.’

Ambrose took a step forward and nudged the living-room door further open. Tony edged round so he could see past him. A man was sprawled on the floor like a marionette, legs askew, arms out to the side, a blonde wig adrift above his head. ‘It’s Vance,’ Tony said. ‘I recognise him.’ Vance’s overall was ripped open. His abdomen was bright red and blood had flowed on to the carpet around him. His chest was motionless. Tony didn’t know much about emergency medicine, but he reckoned the paramedics would be wasted on Jacko Vance.

‘She killed him?’ Ambrose said, incredulous.

‘Looks that way,’ Tony said.

‘You don’t seem surprised.’

Tony felt as if he might burst into tears. ‘Nothing about Vanessa has ever surprised me. Let’s go and see what she has to say for herself before the local plods arrive.’

They followed Singh and the other officer into the dining room, where Vanessa had settled herself at the head of the table. When they came in, she said, ‘Tony, fetch me a brandy. There’s a bottle and glasses in the sideboard.’

‘I don’t think you should drink,’ Ambrose said. ‘You’re in shock.’

Vanessa gave him the contemptuous look her staff had learned to fear. ‘In shock, be blowed,’ she said, sounding eerily like Patricia Routledge channelling Hyacinth Bouquet. ‘This is my house and my brandy and I won’t be bossed around by the likes of you.’

‘Believe me, it’s easier to go with the flow,’ Tony said, opening the sideboard and fixing his mother a drink. He took it to her and said, ‘What happened?’

‘He came in through the back door armed with a crowbar and a knife and walked into my living room, bold as brass. Of course, I recognised him.’ She took a sip of brandy and pursed her lips. For the first time since they’d arrived, the mask slipped, revealing age and tiredness normally held at bay by cosmetics and willpower. ‘I’d been expecting him, truth be told.’

‘Expecting him?’ Ambrose sounded as gobsmacked as Tony felt.

‘I do watch the news, Sergeant. And aren’t you a little bit low down the totem pole to be dealing with a murder?’

‘Sergeant Ambrose isn’t here in response to your phone call. He’s here because we have been trying to catch Vance.’

Vanessa gave a dry little laugh. ‘Should have been here earlier then, shouldn’t you.’ She shook her head in exasperation. ‘I saw the news and I recognised that house Eddie left you down in Worcester. I’d already heard about your girlfriend’s brother.’

Ambrose gave Tony a startled glance.

Tony sighed. ‘She is not my girlfriend. How many times?’

Vanessa waved a dismissive hand at him and drank more brandy. ‘Then his attack on the ex-wife. I thought to myself, he started on a high with murder, now he’s on a downward spiral and he’s not going to be impressed with himself over two racehorses and a stable lad who didn’t even merit a name check. So I reckoned he might be daft enough to think that killing me would cause that one some grief.’ She tipped her head towards Tony. ‘Stupid bugger.’ It wasn’t at all clear whether she meant Tony or Vance. ‘So I thought, better safe than sorry. I got a knife out of the kitchen drawer and tucked it down the side of the sofa. I didn’t hear him break in at all. The first I knew about it, he was standing in my living room like he owned the place.’ She gave a shiver. Tony thought it was entirely calculated.

‘He came at me with the knife. I grabbed my own weapon and struck out at him. I took him by surprise. He fell on top of me and it took all my strength to push him away. That’s when I got covered.’ She swept her hand from her chin to her knees. ‘It was him or me.’

‘I understand,’ Ambrose said.

‘Shouldn’t somebody caution her?’ Tony couldn’t quite believe that Ambrose seemed to be falling under his mother’s monstrous spell.

‘Caution me? When all I’ve done is defend myself against a convicted murderer attacking me in my own home?’ Vanessa went for pitiful rather than outraged.

‘It’s for your own protection,’ Ambrose said. ‘And Tony’s right. We should say that you do not have to say anything but it may harm your defence if you do not mention now something you later rely on in court. Anything you say may be given in evidence.’

Vanessa gave Tony one of her indefinable looks. He’d learned the hard way that it meant he would pay for it later. It was one of the pleasures of having her out of his life that these days there could be no later. ‘Thank you, Sergeant,’ she said, giving him a frail smile.

Before anyone could say anything more, there were voices in the hall. Ambrose went out and returned moments later with a couple of local uniformed officers. ‘I’ve told these officers they need to contact DCI Franklin in the first instance,’ he said to Tony. ‘They’ll need a statement from you at some point. But right now, I think you need to get off.’

Tony looked puzzled for a moment. ‘You don’t need me to stay?’

Ambrose gave him the hard stare of a man trying to communicate a meaning beyond his words. ‘The colleague we spoke to earlier? At the marina? I think you need to liaise.’

Now Tony understood. He turned to Vanessa. ‘You’ll be all right?’

‘Of course. These lovely men will take care of me.’ Vanessa stood and walked into the hall behind him.

When they were out of earshot, he said bitterly, ‘You’ve always been handy with a knife, Mother.’

‘You must have realised I was a target. You should have warned me,’ Vanessa fired straight back at him. With her back to everyone, she could show her true face: vindictive, hateful and unforgiving.

Tony looked her up and down, appalled at the thought sneaking around in the darkness at the back of his mind. He believed this really might be the last time he would ever willingly be in the same room with her. ‘Why?’ he said as he walked away.

56

It was midnight when Tony drove wearily on to the Vinton Woods estate. There were few lights visible as he tried to find his way round the development. He made a couple of wrong turns before he finally found himself on the right street. He crawled along, looking from side to side, trying to spot Carol’s car.

Then he saw her, tucked away in someone’s driveway, opposite the mouth of a cul-de-sac. He parked on the street and laid his head on the steering wheel for a moment. He’d reached that point of exhaustion where his very bones seemed to hurt. He dragged himself out of the driver’s seat and walked back towards Carol’s car, barely capable of maintaining a straight line.

Tony reached the gate and stood there, occupying the middle of the drive. The way things were, he didn’t feel he could presume to open the passenger door and get in beside her. It felt too much like invading her space.

A long time seemed to pass but finally the driver’s door opened and Carol emerged. She looked haggard, wired, beyond his reach. ‘You’ll scare him off, standing there,’ she hissed at him. ‘For Christ’s sake. Get in the car.’

Tony shook his head. ‘He’s not coming, Carol.’

A flare of hope livened her eyes. ‘He’s been taken?’

‘He’s been killed.’

She stared wordlessly at him for what felt like minutes, the small muscles in her face shifting between joy and pain. ‘What happened?’ she said at last, her lips barely moving.

Tony stuck his hands in his trouser pockets and shrugged like an awkward teenager. ‘It’s ridiculous.’

‘Tell me what happened.’

‘Vanessa … she stabbed him.’

‘Vanessa? Your mother, Vanessa?’

Incredulity, Tony thought. He was going to have to get used to that. Yes, it was my mother who killed the notorious serial killer Jacko Vance. That was going to provoke a lot of very odd looks. For now, he had to get through the only explanation that counted. ‘He broke into her house. To kill her. But she’d figured it out. Can you believe that? The woman with the empathy bypass figured out what none of us with all our training could work out. That she was on his list.’ He could hear the bitterness and anger in his voice, but he didn’t care. ‘So she had a knife tucked down the side of the bloody sofa.’

‘She went for him?’

He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. ‘She says he went for her and she caught him unawares. Whatever happened, that’ll be the official version.’

Carol giggled, a strangled hysterical sound. ‘Vanessa killed him? She stabbed him?’

‘She’s got better at it since the last time.’

‘How do you feel about that, Doctor Hill?’ There was a harsh sarcastic edge to Carol’s question.

‘I’m not sorry Vance is dead.’ He raised his chin and looked Carol straight in the eye. ‘But if things had gone the other way, I wouldn’t have been sorry about that either. That’s the hard one I’m going to have to live with.’

‘Still a bloody sight easier than the one I’m going to have to live with.’

He spread his hands out in a gesture of helplessness. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘I know you are. That doesn’t make it any easier.’

‘But at least he’s dead now. The damage goes no further. It’s over.’

Carol’s expression mixed sorrow and pity. ‘It’s not all that’s over, Tony.’ She turned away and got back into the car. The engine burst into life and the headlights blinded him. He jumped to one side and watched her drive away, not sure whether it was the sudden brightness of the lights or the bone-weary exhaustion that had brought the tears to his eyes.

Table of Contents

Also by Val McDermid

Copyright

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56