The Retribution

‘Do you verify the information people give you when they check in?’

‘Verify it how?’

‘Like, do they have to show any ID? Do you check the registration matches the car?’

Trehearne looked at him as if he was an alien. ‘All I’m supposed to be bothered about is if the credit card works. If they want to lie about their names and addresses, who gives a shit?’

‘Yeah, why would you want to keep accurate records?’ Kevin’s sarcasm was lost on the kid.

‘Exactly. More trouble than it’s worth.’

‘Can you print me a copy anyway?’ Kevin said. ‘Do they fill in registration cards?’

‘Yeah, but we just bin them once we’ve put the details on the computer.’ He gave a smug little smirk. ‘No DNA for you tonight, Mr Copper.’

Kevin thought this was looking increasingly like the place. Anyone who’d ever been here once would know exactly how perfect the layout was and how slack their processes were. ‘I know it’s going to be hard for you to cast your mind back, Robbie, but do you remember any of the staff or the customers complaining about a room being wet underfoot? Or a really wet bathroom? Unusually wet.’

‘That’s a very fucking strange question,’ Robbie complained. ‘Like, bathrooms are full of water. Baths and showers and toilets and basins. They’re meant to be wet, you know?’

Kevin had children. He knew that you loved them unconditionally, whatever they did or said or turned out to be. But he was struggling to believe that anyone could love Robbie Trehearne. ‘I said, “unusually wet”,’ he said, struggling to keep a grip on his patience.

Robbie excavated his ear with his index finger then inspected it. ‘I don’t know what night it was, OK? But when I came on duty one teatime, Karl said did I know if anything weird had gone on in number five. Because the chambermaid said all the towels were soaking wet. Like, dripping wet. And the carpet in the room was soaked through, over by the bathroom. That what you mean?’

‘Yes,’ Kevin said, taking another look at the screen. Room 5 had been let that night for cash to someone called Larry Geitling. The name meant nothing to him. But it was a start, at least. ‘I’ll need to talk to the chambermaid.’

‘She comes on at six tomorrow morning.’

‘Tonight?’

Trehearne giggled: a soft, unnerving sound. ‘I don’t know where she lives. I don’t even know her second name. Buket, that’s what we call her.’

Misunderstanding, Kevin frowned in disgust. ‘You call her “bucket”? What? Because she’s a cleaner? You can’t even be bothered to use her name?’

‘Boo-ket, not bucket. It’s her name. She’s Turkish.’ Trehearne looked delighted to get one over on Kevin. ‘I don’t have a mobile number for her. The only way you’ll get to speak to her is if you turn up when she’s working. Six till twelve, that’s her hours. Or you could maybe catch her at the carpet warehouse down the road. She cleans there eight till ten some nights.’

It wasn’t satisfactory, but there was nothing Kevin could do about it. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back. And she better be here, Robbie. Or there’ll be all sorts of trouble for you and your boss.’

35

Vance had made six stops at service stations between Leeds and Worcester. At each one, he’d bought a plastic five-litre container and filled it with petrol. At the last one, he’d gone inside the main concourse building and bought a packet of cigarettes and a lighter. On the outskirts of Worcester, he slipped out of the heavy early evening traffic and booked into an anonymous motel. It had been a long day, and he was tired. Tired people made mistakes, but that was something Vance couldn’t tolerate in himself.

The receptionist barely glanced at him, so engrossed was she in a conversation with a colleague. ‘Breakfast is half past six till ten,’ she intoned automatically as she handed him a plastic oblong. ‘Your key works the lights, you put it in the slot by the door.’ Another novelty, Vance thought.

In the room, he drew the curtains, kicked off his shoes and undressed to his Calvin Kleins. He slipped between the sheets and turned the TV on to a news channel. The double murder made the second item on the news after the latest uprising in the Arab world. No ID yet, of course. A copper with a dense Yorkshire accent talked of tragedy and lines of inquiry. In other words, Vance thought, they had absolutely nothing on him. There would be forensics, of course. He hadn’t bothered to cover his trail. He didn’t mind them knowing he was responsible. What mattered was staying ahead of the game so he could complete his agenda before he left the country.

His own headline came towards the tail of the bulletin. He was, apparently, still on the loose after his daring jailbreak. The police officer they’d wheeled out in front of the camera looked furious to be there. He was a big guy with a shaved skull, skin the colour of strong tea and shoulders that bulged tight under his suit. He looked like he was better suited to sorting out a closing-time brawl than solving anything that needed finesse and intelligence. If that was all he had to contend with, Vance wasn’t too worried about being recaptured.

He set the alarm on his phone then closed his eyes for the nap that would leave him prepared for his next act of revenge. When he woke up, it was dark outside, the night a grimy grey with low cloud blocking the sky and greasy rain on the window. Vance took out the laptop and pulled up a set of camera views. The substantial Edwardian villa still showed no sign of life. It was what he expected. The bastard who lived there had more than enough going on to keep him busy right now. But it was always better to be careful.

He wondered what was happening back at the barn. The police investigation should be well under way by now. He’d save that for later, though. He wanted to crack on with his remaining task for the day. Vance pulled on a pair of jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, then headed for the car.

The satnav was already programmed with the address, a quiet street off the main A38 overlooking the dark blank of Gheluvelt Park. He pulled straight into the gravel driveway of the house he was interested in, amused at the notion that he was currently appearing on his own camera. It was a double-fronted house in mellow red brick with the deep bay windows and imposing doorway outlined in pale cream. Heavy curtains were visible, tied back at the margins of the windows, and the garden looked well cared-for. This was a house that many would envy, Vance thought. But not for much longer.

He swung the car round so that the bonnet faced towards the street. Then he made three trips to the back of the house, taking two containers of petrol each time. Finally he brought a bundle of free newspapers he’d picked up at one of the service areas. The rear wall was crisscrossed with wooden trellis that carried clematis vines to the upper floor. That would be one ignition point.

The unscrupulous investigator Terry had hired for Vance had provided details of the alarm system. Disappointingly, he’d failed to discover the code to disable it. That wasn’t the end of the world. It would just make life a little more complicated. Vance went back to the car and returned with a backpack. He peered through the windows, making sure he had the right rooms. His first choice was a living room with plenty of flammable furnishings and wooden shelves full of vinyl and CDs that would provide plenty of fodder for the fire once it had taken hold. The other was a study lined with bookcases stuffed with hardbacks and paperbacks. Again, a perfect source of fuel for the blaze.

Vance took out a plunger with a suction cup on the end and fixed it firmly to one of the small panes of glass in the study window. Then he took a glass cutter and carefully excised the pane from its frame, holding the plunger tight with the prosthesis. He edged it free, then poured two containers of petrol through the gap. He repeated the exercise at the living-room window, then threw the remaining petrol over the trellis and the fat stems of the clematis. He bunched some sheets of newspaper together, pushing them almost all the way through the window before he ignited them with the lighter. The petrol vapour by the window whooshed into flame and it spread almost instantly across the carpet.

Vance grinned in delight. He stuffed bundles of newspaper between the trellis and the plant stems, then lit those, watching long enough to be sure that the fire was going to catch. Finally, he set light to the study, enjoying the way the flames sped along the floor in the shape of the petrol splashes.

He’d have liked to stay, but it was too dangerous. He’d go back to the motel and watch the fire take hold on the cameras. He wasn’t going to phone this one in. He didn’t want the fire brigade to arrive too soon, and someone was bound to spot it eventually. It would take a while – the house wasn’t overlooked at the back – and that suited Vance. Nothing less than complete gutting would do.

He walked briskly back to the car and drove sedately out of Tony Hill’s driveway.

After her second near-miss in half an hour, Carol admitted belatedly to herself that she probably shouldn’t be driving. But she’d had no choice. This was news that had to come from her. She couldn’t let her parents find out from a stranger. This was her responsibility in every sense and she had to shoulder it. She pulled off the motorway at the next services and ordered hot chocolate and a blueberry muffin to raise her blood sugars and combat the state of shock that still had her in its grip.

She stirred her drink compulsively, unable to remember ever feeling this bleak. After the rape, when she’d been convinced she couldn’t be a police officer any more, she’d thought it was impossible to descend any lower. But this was far worse. Before, she’d been determined to restore the damage done to her. This time, she could be as determined as she liked, but it wouldn’t bring back her brother or her friend.

Carol had never needed a wide circle of friends. She’d always been content with a small group of intimates, a handful of people she could trust with everything that mattered. Michael had always been one of those; with only a couple of years between them, they’d managed a closeness denied to many siblings. When he’d got together with Lucy, Carol had been afraid that she’d lose that straightforward sharing they’d always known. She’d been afraid that she and Lucy would become competitors for his attention. At first, it had been sticky. There were always going to be jagged edges between a senior cop and a defence brief. But the more they’d seen of each other, the clearer it became that they were kindred spirits. Their professional lives were both underpinned by a desire for justice; what divided them became less important as time passed. And so Lucy had ended up as one of that close circle. And now, in one day she had lost two of the people she loved most, and sent a third into exile.

She picked at her muffin, tearing it apart with agitated fingers. She’d never been so angry with Tony. He should have seen the possibility that Vance’s revenge would take as perverse a form as his previous crimes. There had never been anything straightforward about the way his mind had expressed itself. No reason to think prison would have changed that. It was obvious to her now, but she wasn’t the psychologist here. It should have been obvious to Tony from the get-go.

Carol finished her drink and got back on the road. Progress was horrendously slow. Nobody would choose to drive down the M1 on a Friday night unless they had to. The traffic congealed in unpredictable clots, then suddenly the jam would disperse and everyone would hammer the pedal to the metal till they hit the next blockage. The faces that were lit up by passing headlights were frazzled, enraged or bored. Nobody looked cheerful or happy to be there.

She’d just passed the turning for Nottingham when she remembered her poor old cat, Nelson. There was no way she’d be getting home tonight, and at seventeen, Nelson was too old to be left without fresh food and water overnight. Normally, she could have asked Tony to take care of him. But right now she never wanted to speak to Tony again. There was a spare key in her desk drawer, she thought. Paula could be relied on not to snoop if she had access to Carol’s flat. Once upon a time, she probably would have. Carol was pretty sure Paula had been a little bit in love with her for a long time. But being with Elinor had damped down those feelings. Now she could trust her just to feed the cat.

Wearily, she scrolled down to Paula’s number on the car’s computer screen and tapped the mouse. Paula answered on the second ring. ‘Chief,’ she said. ‘We’re all so sorry.’ There was no doubting her sincerity.

‘I know,’ Carol said. ‘I need you to do something for me.’

‘Anything. That goes for all of us. Anything we can do to help.’

‘I’m not going to make it home tonight. There’s a key to my flat in my desk drawer. I need you to feed Nelson.’

There was a momentary pause. ‘Just feed him?’

‘Food and water. There’s some cooked chicken and rice in the fridge in a plastic box. And dried food in a plastic bin on the floor.’

‘Carol … ’ Paula spoke gently. Carol was taken aback. She couldn’t remember Paula ever using her name.

‘What?’ She sounded more abrupt than she’d intended. But she didn’t think she could handle kindness right now.

‘The word is that Vance might have killed Michael and Lucy.’

‘That’s right.’

‘I don’t want to seem paranoid, but … well, I could take Nelson back to ours. You wouldn’t have to worry about him then.’

For a moment Carol couldn’t speak. Her throat seemed to close in a precursor to tears. ‘Thank you,’ she said, not sounding like herself at all.

‘No problem. Do you have a cat carrier?’

‘The cupboard under the stairs. You don’t mind?’

‘I’m glad there’s something I can do to help. If there’s anything else you need, just say. That goes for all of us,’ Paula said. ‘Even Sam.’

Carol almost smiled. ‘I’m on my way to tell my parents. I’ve no idea when I’ll be back. I’ll talk to you soon, Paula. Thank you.’

There was nothing more to be said and Paula was smart enough to know it. Carol drove on, turning over what she knew about Vance and his history. But nothing helpful surfaced. The last time she’d felt this powerless, she’d spent months trying to find solace in the bottom of a bottle. The one thing she did know right now was that she was determined she wasn’t going there again.

By the time she left the motorway, the traffic had thinned out. Her parents had retired to an Oxfordshire village a couple of years before, hoping to indulge their twin passions for gardening and bridge. Her father enjoyed watching the village cricket team and her mother had taken to the Women’s Institute with puzzling glee. They’d suddenly become caricatures of middle-class middle-Englanders. Neither Carol nor Michael had grown into adults who had anything in common with their parents, and last time she’d gone to stay, Carol had run out of things to say depressingly early in the visit.

On a Friday evening, the only sign of life in the village was light. The thatched pub was spotlit, and most of the houses round the green displayed the discreet glow of lamps from behind curtains and blinds. There were few street lights, and no huddled groups of adolescents lurking beneath them. The closest anyone here came to anti-social behaviour was making too much noise when putting the empties out for the recycle truck.

Carol turned down the narrow lane that led to her parents’ house. It was the last of three, and as she pulled up outside, her headlights caught the reflective markings of a police car tucked into a gateway a little further down the lane. Carol stilled the engine and got out, waiting for the Family Liaison Officer from the car to come and check her out.

The FLO appeared to be about Carol’s age, but that was where any similarity ended. She was a dumpy woman with dark hair shot through with wiry grey strands pulled back in an unflattering bun beneath her uniform hat. Her skin showed the remains of virulent acne and her eyes were set close together on either side of a sharp nose. But when she smiled, her face softened with kindness and Carol could see why she’d ended up doing a job that few officers relished. ‘DCI Jordan, is it?’ she said. ‘I’m PC Alice Flowers. I’ve been on station since half past four, and nobody’s been near the house. I could see the occupants moving around, so no need to worry that anything happened before you arrived.’ She had a faint Oxfordshire burr in her voice which was as reassuring as her smile. ‘I just want to say how sorry I am about your brother.’

Carol acknowledged her words with a tip of her head. ‘I’ve never been very good at the death knock,’ she said.

‘That’s nothing to be ashamed of,’ Alice said. ‘Shall we get it over with, ma’am?’

Carol reached into the car and grabbed her coat, slipping it on and turning up the collar. She gave a sharp sigh. ‘Let’s do it,’ she said, squaring her shoulders. Please God, she could hold it together.

They walked up the flagged path between the box hedges that her father kept clipped to precisely knee-height. A wooden porch jutted over the path and Carol led the way. Alice stayed a couple of discreet steps behind her as she rang the doorbell. Silence, then a scuffle of feet, then a light snapped on over their heads.

The door opened and Carol’s mother appeared, looking like an older and less stylish version of her daughter. The look of mild curiosity on her face gave way to astonishment. ‘Carol! What a surprise. You should have phoned.’ She broke into a smile. Then, as she took in the expression on Carol’s face and spotted the uniformed officer behind her daughter, her face froze. Her hand flew to her mouth. ‘Carol?’ she said, her voice unsteady. ‘Carol, what’s happened?’

36

Kevin plonked himself down on a corner of Paula’s desk. She didn’t even look up from the report she was skimming. ‘What?’ she said.

‘The cleaner from the motel, the one who reported the wet carpet? She cleans at the carpet warehouse in the evenings. I thought I’d take a run over there and see what she’s got to say. Do you fancy coming with me?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ve nearly finished going through these door-to-doors, then I’m going round to the chief’s flat to collect her cat. He’ll be starving if I leave it much longer.’

‘Aw, come on, Paula,’ Kevin wheedled. ‘You know you’re better with women than I am.’

‘In every possible sense,’ Chris called over from her desk.

Kevin pretended to be offended. ‘At least I’m admitting it. She’s Turkish, Paula. She’s probably working off the books. I’ll scare her. You’ll get her to talk.’

Paula groaned. ‘I promised I’d pick up Nelson.’

‘Is Elinor in?’ Chris said.

‘She should be.’

‘I’ll do it, then,’ Chris said. ‘I’m going out anyway to talk to the street girls, see if any of them have seen anybody dodgy with the dead women. I’ll pick up the cat and drop him off with Elinor. I’d take him back to ours, but I don’t think the dogs would be very happy.’

‘Problem solved, then,’ Kevin said, relieved.

‘There’s a key to the flat in her desk drawer,’ Paula said, resigned to her fate. She reached for her jacket and followed Kevin.

The carpet warehouse was as cheerless as Christmas for one. The shutters were down over the big display windows at the front, but they eventually found a small door tucked away round the side. The light that should have illuminated it had burned out, which was probably a blessing in disguise. Kevin hammered on the locked door and eventually it was opened by a skinny woman with the blue-black skin of equatorial Africa. ‘What?’ she said.

‘We’re here to talk to Buket,’ Paula said.

‘Nobody here,’ the black woman said, shaking her head for emphasis.

‘Buket works here. She’s not in any trouble. We just need to talk to her.’

The woman half-turned her head. ‘Not here.’

‘We’re from the police,’ Paula said. ‘No trouble, I promise. But I need to talk to her. You have to let us in.’ Little white lies, the kind that just trip from a copper’s tongue after enough time in the job.

The woman stepped back suddenly and let the door swing open. ‘No trouble,’ she said, disappearing round an array of carpets on a giant metal frame. In the distance, they could hear the motor of a vacuum cleaner. The echoing vastness of the prefabricated metal warehouse competed with the sound absorbency of so much carpet to make it hard to figure out where the noise was coming from. They did their best to follow it and finally emerged in an open area where carpet samples mounted on boards were stacked in wooden holders. A small plump woman with a hijab was wielding an industrial cleaner with surprising energy.

Paula walked round into her eyeline and waved at her. The woman literally jumped in surprise, then fumbled with the power switch. The motor’s note died away, leaving a faint resonance. ‘Are you Buket?’ Paula asked.

The woman’s dark eyes widened and darted to each side as if seeking an escape. Kevin let her see him and gave what he hoped was a reassuring smile. ‘We’re not from Immigration,’ he said.

‘We don’t care if you’re here legally or if you’re being paid cash in hand,’ Paula said. ‘We are police officers, but there’s no reason to be afraid of us. Come on, let’s sit down.’ She pointed to a desk with a couple of customer chairs in front of it. Buket’s shoulders slumped and she let herself be led to a chair. Kevin had no idea how Paula did it, but it impressed him every time she led an unwilling witness to communication.

‘Are you Buket?’ Paula asked gently.

‘That is my name,’ the woman said.

‘And you also work at the Sunset Strip motel?’

Again, the darting eyes. Her olive skin seemed paler and she bit her lower lip. ‘I not want trouble.’

‘We’re not going to cause you trouble. We want to ask you about something that happened a little while ago at the motel. OK?’

‘I don’t know anything,’ Buket said immediately.

Paula pressed on regardless. ‘One of the rooms you clean was very wet.’

Buket’s face cleared, as if she’d been given the all-clear after some hideous medical procedure. ‘The room was wet, yes. This is what you want to know?’

‘That’s right. Can you tell me about it?’

‘So much water. Towels are heavy and drip everywhere. Bathroom floor is wet, big puddles. Carpet near bathroom is so wet it goes—’ she made a liquid, sucking sound – ‘under feet. I tell manager, I not want trouble.’

‘Did it look like the bath had overflowed?’

Buket frowned. ‘Over …?’

‘Too much water from the bath?’

She nodded vigorously. ‘From the bath, yes. Water is clean, not dirty. Not from toilet. Nice smell.’

‘Can you remember which room it was?’

‘Five. I am sure.’

‘And did you see the people in room five at all? Did you perhaps see them leave in the morning?’

Buket shook her head. ‘I saw nobody from five. I see other people, but not from five. I leave it till last room in case sleep late, but when I go in, nobody is there.’

Paula looked at Kevin. ‘Can you think of anything else to ask Buket?’

‘Just her surname and address,’ he said, smiling at Buket but talking soft and fast. ‘We’ll need to get fingerprints and DNA to eliminate her when the forensics team get stuck in to room five. Good luck with that.’

There was something about working late on a Friday night that pissed off Detective Sergeant Alvin Ambrose more than any other. It was the end of the school week, the night when the kids could stay up a bit later. He liked to take them swimming on a Friday night. It made him feel like a normal dad, the kind of bloke who did things with his kids that didn’t get interrupted because of the stupid, the addicted and the drunk.

He was even more pissed off because he was stuck on his own in the CID room. Whatever Patterson’s agenda was right now, it still didn’t seem to include taking responsibility for the CID team he was supposed to lead. He’d walked away mid-afternoon, telling Ambrose to get on with it. Because there was so little doing, Ambrose had sent most of the team home, but on standby. Nobody knew where Vance would be spotted next or when. They had to be ready to roll at short notice when they had something definite to go at. He had officers out talking to prison staff who had been off-duty at the time of the escape, but other than that he couldn’t actually think of anything constructive to do.

The worst irony of all was that, in Ambrose’s experience, nothing worth working late for had ever happened on a Friday. He’d had great results over the years, spectacular arrests backed up with genuine confessions. But never on a Friday, for some reason. So there was a double resentment for Ambrose. That was before he even added on the bitterness of being at the beck and call of a bunch of mad bloody Geordies who couldn’t even speak proper English.

The reason he was chained to his desk was the trickling through of results from Northumbria Police’s search of Terry Gates’s house and the lock-up where he stored his market-stall gear. Ambrose had wanted to go up there himself to conduct the search, but his boss had said there was no need, that the cops in Newcastle knew how to conduct a search. Which translated to, ‘I don’t have the budget for you to go gallivanting.’

So here he was, waiting for the next pile of nothing from the North East. So far, Terry Gates had not lived up to Tony’s promise of carelessness. All of the paperwork that Northumbria Police had scanned in and emailed down to Ambrose had been connected to Gates’s own finances, either private or professional. There were two computers, however. One at the lock-up, which appeared to be solely for the business, and another, more modern machine at home which showed signs of attempts to clean up its hard disk. Both were on their way by secure courier; they would be with Ambrose in the morning. He’d tried to get hold of their local forensic computer expert, Gary Harcup, to put him on standby for the arrival of the computers, but so far Gary hadn’t got back to him. The fat twat was probably too busy playing some online game to have bothered checking his messages. After all, it was Friday night for geeks too.

Ambrose was wondering whether he could reasonably call it a day when the phone rang. ‘DS Ambrose,’ he sighed.

‘Aye, it’s Robinson Davy from Newcastle here,’ a voice as deep and sonorous as Ambrose’s own announced.

‘Hi, Robinson.’ What kind of first name was ‘Robinson’ anyway? Ambrose thought it was only Americans who indulged in the weird habit of giving people surnames for Christian names, but it seemed to be a feature of the North East as well. So far today, he’d spoken to a Matthewson, a Grey and now a Robinson. Madness. ‘Have you got something for me?’

‘I think we just might have, Alvin. One of my lads found a SIM card taped under a desk drawer in the lock-up. We fired it up, to have a look at the call record. The funny thing was, there was no call record. It looks like it had never been used to make calls. But one of my lasses knows her way around this kind of thing and what she found was he’d used the calendar. It’s full of appointments – times and dates and places, mostly down in London. There’s phone numbers too, and email addresses.’

This was the first piece of evidence that resembled anything like a break, and Ambrose felt that quickening of interest that usually came before a breakthrough. ‘Can you transmit this information to me? Print it out, or whatever?’

‘The lass says she can upload it to the Cloud and you can download it from there,’ Davy said doubtfully. ‘I haven’t a clue what she means, but she says it’s easily done.’

‘That’s great. Just ask her to email me with the instructions when it’s ready. Thanks, Robinson, that’s great work.’

Ambrose put the phone down, grinning like an idiot. It looked like the law of Friday had finally been broken. He reckoned that deserved a celebration. Maybe he had time to nip out to the pub for a quick one before the information came through from Newcastle. It wasn’t as if he’d be able to do much with it tonight.

As he stood up, a uniformed PC burst into the room. He was pink-faced and eager. For a moment, Ambrose wondered if some accidental encounter had led to Vance’s capture. Too often, serial killers were unmasked by chance – the Yorkshire Ripper because he’d used false plates on his car; Dennis Nilsen because the human flesh he’d flushed down the toilet had blocked the drain; Fred West because one of his kids made a joke about their sister Heather being ‘under the patio’.

‘You’re pals with that profiler, aren’t you? The one who’s moved into that big house down Gheluvelt Park?’ He sounded excited.

What had Tony got himself into now, Alvin wondered. He’d already had to dig his pal out of one embarrassing situation at the house. It sounded like there might be another in the pipeline. ‘Tony Hill? Yeah, I know him. What’s happened?’

‘It’s his house. It’s on fire. According to the patrol car lads, it’s a total inferno.’ It suddenly dawned on the young cop that his glee might not be entirely appropriate. ‘I thought you’d like to know, sir,’ he wound up.

Ambrose hadn’t known Tony Hill for long. He couldn’t claim to know the man well. But one thing he understood was that, somehow, that house on Gheluvelt Park meant far more to the strange little psychologist than mere bricks and mortar. Because he counted Tony Hill as a friend, that meant Ambrose couldn’t ignore the news he’d just been given. ‘Bloody Friday nights,’ he muttered angrily. He reached for his coat, then stopped as a terrible thought hit him.

He swung round and glared at the young PC. ‘Was the house empty?’

His dismay was obvious. ‘I – I don’t know. They didn’t say.’

Ambrose grimaced. Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, it could.

37

Although she’d always known Carol lived in a basement flat beneath Tony’s house, Chris had somehow expected it to be more than it was. She was accustomed to senior officers going for the biggest mortgage they could get away with in order to buy the swankiest house they could afford. Living as Carol Jordan did here in three rooms with a tiny kitchen and a shower room felt curiously temporary, as if she hadn’t quite decided whether she liked Bradfield enough to stay. Back in the day, they’d been unwitting neighbours in the Barbican complex in London. Those spacious, elegant and striking apartments were the sort of backdrop a woman like Carol Jordan should have. Not this subterranean bolthole, attractive though it was.

Scolding herself for behaving like the host of some reality TV makeover show, Chris found the cat carrier under the stairs and scooped Nelson up. Once she’d wrestled him inside, she carried him upstairs and stowed him in the back of her estate car. One more trip to get his food and then they were done.

She found the chicken and rice Paula had told her about, then went through to the utility room to pick up the dried food. ‘Better check there’s enough,’ she said under her breath, reaching out to lift the lid.

A metallic snap, then a rush of air and liquid struck her full in the face. For a moment, all Chris knew was that her face was wet. She had long enough to wonder why there was water in the cat-food bin before the searing agony hit her. Her whole face felt on fire. Her eyes were screaming nuggets of pain within a larger hurt. She tried to scream, but her lips and her mouth stung with the same smarting sting and no sound emerged. But even in the grip of the maddening pain, something told her not to rub it with her hands.

Chris fell to her knees, struggling not to let the agony take over every part of her. She backed away, managing by good luck to make it through the doorway and away from the spreading pool of acid. Now her knees and shins were starting to smart with the burn of the corrosive liquid.

Groaning, she managed to reach for her phone. Thank God it was a BlackBerry, with keys you could feel. She pressed what she thought were three nines and through the terrible insanity of pain she managed to growl the address to the operator who answered.

She could manage no more. Unconsciousness fell like a blessing and she toppled sideways to the floor.

By the time he’d picked up his car, Tony felt like he’d stumbled into a remake of Planes, Trains and Automobiles. Franklin had refused to give him a lift in a police car to the nearest rail station. ‘My officers are investigating a double murder, not running a taxi service,’ he’d grunted, turning on his heel and walking away.

Tony didn’t know the address of the barn, let alone how to give proper directions, so he couldn’t call a taxi, even if he’d had a number, which left him with no option but to set off on foot. It was tiring to walk long distances these days. A while back, a patient at Bradfield Moor had gone off his meds and run amok with a fire axe. Tony had stepped in to protect other staff and had ended up with a shattered knee in exchange for lives saved. His surgeon had done her best, but he’d ended up with a limp and a refusal to undergo any more surgery for as long as he could manage without it. Now his knee was stiff every morning and ached when it rained. Not that Carol would have been thinking about that today.

After a mile or so limping in the rain, he came to a marginally less narrow road and turned left, guessing that was the direction for Leeds and, ultimately, Bradfield. He stuck his thumb out and kept walking. Ten minutes later, a Land Rover pulled up. Tony climbed in, moving a reluctant Border collie in the process. The man behind the wheel wore a flat cap and brown overalls; an archetypal Dales sheep farmer. He gave Tony a quick glance before they drove off and said, ‘I can take you to the next village. You can get a bus from there.’

‘Thanks,’ Tony said. ‘Miserable day, isn’t it?’

‘Only if you’re out in it.’

And that was the end of the conversation. He dropped Tony at a little stone bus shelter, where the timetable informed him that there would be a bus for Leeds in twenty minutes. From Leeds, it was a forty-minute train journey to Bradfield. From the station, a ten-minute cab ride to his car.

After all that time with nothing to think about but the events of the day, Tony was tempted to go to bed and pull the covers over his head and stay there. But that was no kind of answer to what ailed him. He needed to go to Worcester, for two reasons. Worcester was the heart of the search for Vance. He could work with Ambrose, analyse whatever information came into the manhunt and do what he could to help put Vance away. For good, this time.

But Worcester was also the place where he had found peace. He couldn’t explain, but the house that Edmund Arthur Blythe had left him had settled the constant restlessness that had always eaten away at him. Nowhere had ever felt like home before. And it made no sense. OK, Blythe had been his biological father. But they’d never met. Never spoken. Never communicated directly until Blythe had died and left Tony a letter and a legacy.

At first, Tony had wanted to ignore everything to do with the man who had abandoned him and his mother before he was born. Even though he was objective enough to understand that walking out on Vanessa was always going to be a strategy that had huge appeal. He’d thought that long before he knew the circumstances surrounding Blythe’s decision to walk away.

Then he’d gone to take a look at the house for himself. On the face of it, this was not a house he would have chosen. It wasn’t a style of architecture that particularly appealed to him. The furnishings were comfortable and matched the house, which meant they felt old-fashioned to him. The garden was meticulously planned and beautifully executed, and thus entirely beyond the capabilities of a man who hired a gardening service to mow his own patch of lawn once a fortnight.

And yet, he’d felt this house close around him like a security blanket. At some deep level, he understood it. It made no sense and it made perfect sense at one and the same time. So tonight, when the relationship at the core of his life had fractured, he wanted to be where he’d felt most whole.

So he got behind the wheel and started driving. There was no escape from the thoughts that revolved in his head. Carol was right. He was the one who was supposed to figure these things out. It wasn’t as if he was lacking data. He had the burning examples of Vance’s past to work with. The root of his serial murders had not been lust, it had been revenge for his loss of control over someone else, and for the future he’d lost. And that revenge had been, as this was, indirect. When he’d finally been captured and the nature of his crimes understood, someone else had ended up carrying the weight of his guilt because she was convinced that, if she hadn’t thwarted him, he would never have killed. She was wrong, of course. Vance was a psychopath; at some point the world would not have bent to his will and he would have resolved it with extreme violence.

Knowing all this, he should have understood how Vance would have designed his vengeance. As he saw it, Tony, a handful of police officers and his ex-wife had wrecked his life. He’d had to live with that. Every day in jail, he’d been confronted with the life he’d lost. So for revenge to be appropriate, his enemies would have to live with loss. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Not a day would pass now without Carol shouldering the terrible guilt of her brother’s death. Vance’s equation was clear: Michael and Lucy had died because of what Carol had done to him. Her arresting him had been the first step on his journey away from the life he loved. Now the first step on his journey of revenge had destroyed the people Carol loved.

How long had Vance been planning this? It had all the hallmarks of something that had been going on for months, if not years. First, he’d had to build his record of perfect behaviour in jail. That couldn’t have been easy for a prisoner with such a high profile. Cons won status by fucking with big-name prisoners. Then there was the nature of his crimes. Kidnapping, raping and murdering teenage girls was bordering on nonce behaviour. To have overcome these obstacles must have taken all of Vance’s charm, not to mention substantial investment inside and out.

Of course, money had never been a problem. Vance’s wealth had been accumulated by legal means, so the authorities were powerless to prevent his team of financial wonder boys from playing musical chairs with his fortune. By the time the civil lawsuits against Vance had worked their way through the courts, the bulk of his fortune was safely stashed away in some offshore haven. His only remaining asset in the UK had been the converted chapel in Northumberland where he’d held his victims hostage before leaving them to die. Eventually it had been sold to a Canadian with a taste for the ghoulish and who didn’t mind its macabre history. The proceeds had gone to the relatives of the dead, but it had been a fleabite compared to the wealth Vance had salted away.

So when he’d wanted money for bribes or sweeteners, there would have been channels to get that to where it needed to be. That was the obvious solution to the question of how Vance had stayed safe in jail, how he’d bought himself time and space to play the role of the perfect prisoner. Which in turn had put him in a position where he could manipulate a psychologist into putting him on a Therapeutic Community Wing.

Tony wished somebody had taken a moment to keep him posted on Vance’s adventures in jail. He’d have moved heaven and earth to have him put back in the general prison population. It was an article of faith for Tony that everyone deserved a shot at redemption. But the terms of that redemption weren’t constant. They shifted according to the nature of the individual; men like Vance were simply too dangerous to be allowed to take their second chances at large.

So while all this planning had been going on inside, Vance had been making his arrangements on the outside. Maybe the way to figure out how to stop him was to work out what he would have needed to put in place ahead of his escape. As he’d discussed with Ambrose, the obvious conduit for those arrangements was Terry Gates.

For a start, Vance would need a place to stay. Terry couldn’t shelter him at home or anywhere connected to his business; that would be far too obvious. So there had to be somewhere else. A house, not a flat, because Vance needed to be able to come and go with as little observation as possible. Not in a city street, because there were still too many people who watched and wondered in cities, people clued into the zeitgeist who might recognise him from his TV days. Not in a village either, where his every departure and arrival would be public property. Some suburban estate, perhaps. A dormitory community where nobody knew their neighbours or cared what was going on behind closed doors. Terry would have been the straw man who did the viewing and the buying, the front for Vance’s money. So they needed to dig into Terry’s activities on that front.

The next question was which part of the country Vance would opt for. His prime targets were Tony, Carol and Micky, his ex-wife. Bradfield or Herefordshire. The other cops would be the second-tier targets – Bradfield again, London, Glasgow, Winchester. Tony thought Vance would avoid London, precisely because the cops might assume he’d head for somewhere he knew well. On balance, he thought Vance would hole up in the north. Somewhere near Bradfield, but not in the city itself. Somewhere close to an airport so that when the time came to get out of the country, it would be straightforward.

Tony was in no doubt that Vance planned to get out of the country. He wasn’t going to attempt to build a new life on this small crowded island where most of the population had a strong memory of what he looked like. So he’d also have at least one new identity in place. He made a mental note to Ambrose to have all airports alerted to pay special attention to anyone with a prosthetic arm. With all the electronics in his state-of-the-art prosthesis, he’d drive the metal detector crazy. Vance had gone to jail before 9/11; he would have no experience of contemporary airport security, and that might just be his Achilles heel.

But if he’d thought that through, he’d be leaving on a ferry. And the north was the less obvious ferry route out of the UK. He could get to Holland or Belgium from Hull, he could go from Holyhead or Fishguard to Ireland and from there to France or Spain. Once he was on mainland Europe, he was gone.

Or he might have a separate artificial arm with no metal components. Something that looked good enough to bypass casual inspection even if it didn’t actually work. Tony groaned. There were so many possibilities when you were dealing with a smart opponent.

Maybe he should leave the practicalities to Ambrose and his colleagues and focus on what he supposedly did best. Finding a way through the labyrinth of a twisted mind was his speciality. Even if he felt he’d lost the knack, he had to try. ‘What’s your next target, Jacko?’ he asked out loud as he moved into the middle lane of the motorway, out of the line of trucks he’d been mindlessly inhabiting for the past twenty miles.

‘You’ve been doing your research. You’ve given somebody a list of names. You sent them out there to pry into our lives, to find who we love so you know who to destroy for maximum impact. You got them to plant cameras so you could keep watch on your targets and pick the best moment. That’s how you killed Michael and Lucy. You didn’t just chance upon them making love. You were watching and waiting for an opportunity. And that was the perfect one. You could get in without them knowing, you could creep up on them and slash their throats before they knew what was happening. Having sex with Lucy as she lay dying was just the icing on the cake. It wasn’t part of the plan. You just couldn’t help yourself, could you, Jacko?’

The car behind him flashed its headlights and he realised his speed had dropped back to fifty. Tony tutted and put his foot down till he was back at seventy-five. ‘So your spy told you Carol loved Michael and Lucy. That she spent some of her time off walking in the Dales with them. That if you wanted to make Carol suffer, that was the best way to do it. So somebody’s been poking round Michael and Lucy’s lives and somebody’s been in that barn planting cameras.’ Another area for Ambrose to look into. Maybe he’d have more luck persuading Franklin to follow a line of inquiry that included Vance. ‘Bastard,’ Tony muttered.

‘So then we come to me,’ he said. ‘Who do I love? Who have I ever loved?’ His face twisted in a painful grimace. ‘There’s only you, isn’t there, Carol?’ He sighed. ‘I’m not much of a success when it comes to the human stuff. I love you and I’m completely crap at doing anything about it. He’s not going to kill you, though. Your job is to suffer. And maybe he means Michael and Lucy to be a double whammy. You’ll suffer every day, and I’ll suffer because it’s hurting you. And if Vance really gets lucky, it’ll be too much for us and you’ll drive me away. That would do it for me. That would reduce my life to a shell.’ Unexpected tears welled up in his eyes and he had to swipe the back of his hand across his face. ‘If your man’s done his homework, Jacko, you’ll know how to hurt me. Through Carol, that’s the way to go.’

That left Micky. Deep in Herefordshire with the faithful Betsy, keeping her head down and breeding racehorses. That would have been Betsy’s doing, he’d have put money on it. Betsy came from thoroughbred stock herself, that English county stock where women still wore tweed and cashmere and had Labradors at their heels and wondered, really wondered what the world was coming to. Tony smiled at the memory of Betsy, brown hair with strands of silver caught back in an Alice band, cheeks like Cox’s Pippins, running a TV show in exactly the same way as her mother probably ran the local village. He suspected she ran Micky Morgan too. That when Micky’s world had fallen apart, when TV turned its back on employing a magazine-show host whose husband was on trial for murdering teenage girls, when her millions of fans recoiled in shock, it had been Betsy who had ignored the wreckage and moved them on to the next successful thing.

The next successful thing had been the racing stud. Tony had known nothing about it till he’d seen the stories in the media that morning. But it made perfect sense. Racing circles were a law unto themselves and they were still a haven for posh girls like Betsy. Micky would have fitted right in. Good looking enough to improve the scenery, but not inclined to be a problem with the husbands. Well-mannered, personable and good company. Let’s face it, Tony thought, there were plenty of people in the racing community with chequered pasts that seemed to pass without notice. Betsy had got it right again.

All of which made Betsy the obvious target for Vance’s rage. Never mind that she was the one whose clever plan had facilitated his sadistic campaign of murder all those years before. It hadn’t been her intention, obviously, but the mariage blanc she’d concocted between her own lover and a man who wanted cover had been the perfect mask for Vance. While Micky and Betsy had blithely thought the lie was for their benefit, it had instead provided a hellish alibi for a serial killer. But Vance had gone to jail and they were still together. Tony couldn’t imagine that was a state of affairs Vance would be happy about.

To his surprise, the exit for Worcester was almost upon him. He left the motorway, making a note to impress on Ambrose the importance of protecting Betsy. Her death would be satisfying in itself, but it would also destroy Micky. Double whammy again, just like the last one.

Tony yawned. It had been a long and stressful day. All he wanted was to fall into bed now, but he knew he’d have to talk to Ambrose first. Never mind. He could at least make the call from a comfortable armchair with a glass of Arthur Blythe’s excellent Armagnac in his hand. He turned into his street, shocked to see a trio of fire engines blocking the road ahead. Police cars were jammed around the fire engines, making it impossible to drive further. The pavements were dotted with bystanders, craning their necks for a better view of somebody else’s disaster.

With a terrible sense of foreboding, Tony got out of the car. The smell and taste of smoke hit him, acrid and dense. He walked up the middle of the road, breaking into a run as he rounded the curve and saw flames spearing the sky, jets of water rising against them. The smoke was making his eyes water, but he could still make out where the fire was. He broke into a run, tears streaming down his cheeks, yelling wordlessly.

A bulky body stepped into his path, grabbing him close and tight. ‘Tony,’ Ambrose said. ‘I’m sorry.’

Tony bared his teeth in a primitive snarl. ‘Never crossed my fucking mind,’ he forced out between sobs. ‘Never crossed my fucking mind.’ He smashed his head into Ambrose’s shoulder. ‘Useless bastard,’ he cried. ‘No use to Carol, no use to myself, no fucking use to anyone.’

38

Paula huddled over the cup of hospital coffee, shivering with shock. Kevin was sitting on the floor in the corner of the relatives’ waiting room, arms round his knees, staring intently at the coarse fibres of the carpet tiles. ‘I keep thinking it should have been me,’ Paula said through chattering teeth.

‘No, it should have been Carol,’ Kevin said, his voice low and rough. ‘That’s who it was meant for. Her cat, her flat. Jacko Vance strikes again. Jesus Christ.’

‘I know it was meant for Carol. But it was me that should have taken the bullet for her, not Chris.’

‘You think she’d have been any happier about that?’ Kevin said. ‘She cares about you both. She cares about all of us. Just like we care about her. The only person who’s got guilt on this one is Vance.’

‘We don’t tell Carol, OK?’

‘We can’t keep something like this from her. She’s bound to find out. It’ll be all over the media.’

‘Blake said they were putting it out as an accident right now. No mention of Vance. Carol’s got enough on her plate, dealing with what happened to Michael and Lucy. She can learn about this later.’

Kevin looked doubtful. ‘I don’t know … ’

‘Look, we’ll tell Tony. See what he says. He knows her better than anyone else. He’ll know whether we should tell her or not. OK?’

‘OK,’ Kevin conceded.

They subsided again, each lost in their own painful thoughts. After a while, Kevin said, ‘Where did you say Sinead was?’

‘Brussels. She’ll be on the first flight she can get. It might not be till morning, though. You should go home, Kevin. One of us needs to get some sleep.’

Before he could speak, the door opened and a tall man in scrubs walked in. His skin was the colour of a manila envelope and his eyes looked as if they’d seen even more than the two cops. ‘You’re Christine Devine’s family?’ He sounded suspicious.

‘Kind of,’ Kevin said, scrambling to his feet to meet the doctor on his own terms. ‘We’re cops. We work in the same elite unit. We’re like family.’

‘I shouldn’t talk to anyone other than immediate family or next of kin.’

‘Her partner is flying back from Brussels. We’re here in her place,’ Paula said bleakly. ‘Please, tell us how Chris is doing.’

‘Her condition is very serious,’ the doctor said. ‘She’s had sulphuric acid thrown in her face. It’s a corrosive, so she has extensive burning to the skin. What makes acid burns worse than fire burns is the degree of dehydration the acid causes. Your friend’s face is very badly burned. She will be extensively and permanently scarred. She has lost the sight of both eyes.’

Paula cried out, covering her mouth with her hand. Kevin reached over and gripped her shoulder tightly.

‘None of that is life-threatening,’ the doctor continued. ‘But she has swallowed and inhaled droplets of acid and that’s a much greater cause for concern. There’s a risk of fluid building up in the lungs. We’ll be watching very carefully over the coming days and hours. For now, we’ve put her in a medically induced coma. It gives her body a chance to start the recovery process. And it keeps her from having to endure the pain.’

‘How long will she be like that?’ Paula asked.

‘It’s difficult to say. A few days at least. Possibly longer.’ He sighed. ‘There’s nothing more I can tell you. You should probably go home and get some rest. There’s unlikely to be any change soon.’

He turned to leave, then looked back at them. ‘Your friend is facing a long and difficult road back to anything approaching normal life. She’s going to need you then a lot more than she needs you now.’ The door swung shut behind him.

‘Fuck,’ Kevin said. ‘Did you ever see that documentary about Katie Piper, the model who had acid thrown in her face?’

‘No.’

‘I wouldn’t recommend you watch it any time soon.’ His voice cracked and suddenly the room was filled with the sound of his sobs. Paula took him in her arms and together they stood in the grim little room and cried for everything that had been lost.

It wasn’t the first time Carol had broken the news of a child’s death. But it was definitely the worst. There was something profoundly wrong about being the one to deliver such catastrophic grief to your own parents’ door. But it was still better than having a stranger play that role, even though she knew her mother would never be able to open the door to her again without remembering that terrible moment.

At the words, ‘Michael’s dead,’ her mother had fallen into her arms. The strength had gone from Jane Jordan’s body; all her power had been routed into the terrible wailing sound that issued from her mouth. Carol’s father had come running from the kitchen at the sound and stood helpless, not knowing what was going on.

‘Michael’s dead,’ Carol said again. She wondered if she’d ever be able to say it without feeling a physical ache in her chest. David Jordan staggered, grabbing at a frail hall table which tottered under his hand. Her mother was still making that hellish sound.

Carol tried to move out of the doorway but it was hard to manoeuvre. To her surprise, Alice Flowers eased her way past them in spite of her bulk, supporting Jane from behind and allowing Carol to come in and close the door. Between them they half-dragged, half-carried Jane into the living room and laid her on a sofa.

David followed them, bemused and lost. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘How can Michael be dead? I had an email from him this morning. There must be some mistake, Carol.’

‘Dad, there’s no mistake.’ She left Alice holding her mother on the sofa and went to her father. She put her arms around him, but he was as stiff as he’d always been in the face of any emotion from the female members of his family. David had been a great dad when it came to having fun or being stuck with your maths homework. But he’d never been the one you went to in any kind of emotional state. Yet still she clung to him, dimly aware that he’d grown thin, a pale imitation of his more vigorous self. How did that happen without me noticing it? An endless expanse of time seemed to pass. Finally, Carol let her father go. ‘I need a drink,’ she said. ‘We all do.’

She went to the kitchen and returned with a bottle of whisky and three tumblers. She poured a stiff measure into each glass then emptied one in a single gulp. She refilled it, then handed one to her father, who stood looking at it as if he’d never seen a drink before.

Jane had run out of steam and was leaning against Alice, a piteous expression of misery on her face. She held a hand out for the whisky and knocked it back exactly as Carol had done. ‘What happened? Was it a car accident?’ she said, her voice cracked and broken. ‘That stupid sports car of Lucy’s. I knew it was dangerous.’

Carol sat down next to the whisky. ‘It wasn’t a car accident, Mum. Michael was murdered. And so was Lucy.’ Her voice rose at the end of the sentence and she could feel tears at the back of her throat. She’d been holding herself together all day and now she was starting to come apart. She supposed it was something to do with being with her parents. Even though she was the one taking the adult role, she couldn’t help slipping into her natural position in the emotional hierarchy.

Jane shook her head. ‘That can’t be right, dear. Michael didn’t have an enemy in the world. You must be confused.’

‘I know it’s hard to take in, but Carol’s right.’ Alice Flowers demonstrated why she was an FLO with the gentle firmness of her tone.

‘What happened?’ David asked abruptly, slumping down on the nearest chair. He tried to drink his whisky but it chattered against his teeth and he lowered the glass again. ‘Was it a burglar? Someone trying to break in?’

Alice Flowers took over again. ‘We believe someone broke in, yes. It may have been an escaped prisoner.’

Jane struggled upright, frowning. ‘The one on the TV? That terrible Vance man? Him?’

‘It’s possible,’ Alice said. ‘Officers are still examining the scene. It’s early days. We will keep you informed, of course.’

‘Vance?’ Jane turned an accusing glare on Carol. ‘You arrested that man. You sent him to prison. This isn’t just some random attack, is it? This is because of you and your job.’

Here it comes. Carol put her hand to her face, fingers clawing hard at her cheek. ‘It’s possible,’ she groaned. ‘He may have been looking for me.’ Or he may just have wanted to rip my heart out and roast it on the fire. Jane looked at her with loathing and Carol understood why. She’d have done the same thing if it had been possible.

‘This is not Carol’s fault, Mrs Jordan,’ Alice said. ‘This is the fault of the man who attacked your son and his partner.’

‘She’s right, Jane,’ David said, his voice dull and toneless.

‘Believe me, Mum, I’d have done anything for this not to happen. I’d have taken a bullet for Michael. You know that.’ Carol couldn’t stop the tears now. They streamed from her eyes, running down her face and dripping from her chin.

‘But he’s the one that’s dead.’ Jane folded her arms across her chest and began rocking to and fro. ‘My beautiful boy. My Michael. My beautiful, beautiful boy.’

And so it had gone. Grief, recriminations, tears and whisky had circled round each other all night. Carol had finally crawled into bed just after three, so tired she could scarcely undress. Alice Flowers had promised to remain till morning, when she’d be relieved by a colleague. She understood Carol’s fear that Vance might not stop at her brother.

Carol lay stiffly under the covers of a bed she’d only slept in half a dozen times. She was afraid to close her eyes, afraid of the images her mind would project if she let down her guard. In the end, exhaustion won out and she crumpled into sleep in a matter of seconds.

She woke just after eight with a dull headache and a panicky fear of the silence in the house. She lay for a few minutes trying to pull herself into some sort of shape to face the day, then dragged herself upright. She sat on the edge of the bed, head in her hands, wondering how in the name of God she could carry on with her job, her life, her parents. Alice Flowers was wrong. Michael’s death was her fault. The responsibility lay squarely at her door. She had not protected him. It was as simple as that.

Knowing that, she didn’t think she could stay under her parents’ roof any longer. She dressed in yesterday’s clothes and headed downstairs. Her parents were in the living room with Alice. They appeared not to have moved. ‘I need to go,’ she said.

Jane barely lifted her head. Listless, she said, ‘You know best. You always do.’

‘Can’t you stay?’ David said. ‘You should be here with us. You shouldn’t be among strangers, not when you’re grieving. We need you here, your mum and me.’

‘I’ll be back,’ Carol said. ‘But I can’t settle while the man who killed Michael is free. Finding killers is what I’m best at. I can’t just sit here, I’ll go mad.’ She crossed to her mother and gave her an awkward hug. She smelled of whisky and sour sweat, like a stranger. ‘I love you, Mum.’

Jane sighed. ‘I love you too, Carol.’ The words felt dragged from her lips.

Carol withdrew and crouched by her father’s chair. ‘Take care of Mum,’ she said. He patted her shoulder, nodding. ‘I love you, Dad.’ Then she stood up and gestured with her head to Alice.

On the doorstep, she straightened up and reached for the familiar persona of Detective Chief Inspector Carol Jordan. It felt as if it was on a very high shelf. ‘I don’t want them left alone,’ Carol said. ‘Vance is out there, taking revenge on the team that put him away. I’m not convinced he’s finished with me yet. So they need to be guarded as well as supported. Is that clear?’

Alice gave her a solemn look. ‘We’ll take good care of them for you. Can I ask where you’ll be?’

‘I’m going to Worcester. That’s where the search for Vance is being coordinated. That’s where I need to be.’ And God help Tony Hill if he crosses my path.

39

The marina was shrouded in morning mist, the brightly painted cabins emerging like dream boats on silvered water. The cabin roofs stretched side by side as far as the eye could see, like an angular ploughed field of black earth. Above the band of mist, the red brickwork of old china warehouses loomed, freshly cleaned and pointed as part of the process of renovation. Saved from dereliction, they’d become the New Jerusalem of the middle classes: loft apartments offering a water view. Once this had been Diglis canal basin, a thrumming focus of industry, one of the hubs in the movement of goods and raw materials around the Midlands. Now, it was Diglis Marina, a centre of leisure and pleasure. It was prettier, there was no doubt about that. And there was still a traditional pub with a skittle alley where people could sit over their real ale and pretend they’d done an honest day’s work.

Tony sat on the roof of his narrowboat nursing a mug of tea. He’d never felt so bleak. Two people were dead and one was maimed because he’d failed at the one thing he was supposed to be good at. And he’d lost the only place he’d ever felt at home. All his life, he’d wanted to find somewhere he belonged. Carol Jordan had been half of that answer; the house had miraculously been the other. And now they were both gone. Carol in righteous contempt, the house razed to a shell. It had been full of things that were fodder to a fire – books, wood, paintings, fine carpets – and now they were reduced to smouldering ash.

He’d never been given to self-pity, which he reckoned was just as well, given how much there was about his life that was so pitiful. Even now, he wasn’t sorry for himself. Anger was at the heart of it, with disgust running a close second. Obviously the ultimate blame lay with Vance. He was the killer, the arsonist, the wrecker of lives. But Tony should have seen what was coming. Not once but twice he’d failed to figure out what Vance would do next. It was no excuse to point to the enormity of what Vance had done, to try to hide behind the fact that his actions were off the scale of extreme. Tony was trained and paid to have insight into men like Vance, to work out what made them tick and to stop them doing what they lived for.

Most people, when they fucked up at work, it wasn’t a big deal. But when he fucked up at work, it cost people their lives. He felt physically sick at the thought of Vance out there somewhere, making his next carefully planned move in his sadistic campaign. The longer this went on, the clearer it was to Tony that he’d been right about one thing at least – Vance was working to a set schedule that had been in place well before he’d made his jailbreak.

After Ambrose had dragged him away from the fire the night before, he’d made Tony sit down and drink sweet tea in the back of an ambulance. He’d stayed with him while the firefighters subdued the blaze. He’d put an arm round Tony’s shoulders when the roof timbers had collapsed with a rending crash. He hadn’t raised an eyebrow when Tony had laid the crime at Vance’s door. And he’d made notes when Tony finally composed himself enough to run through the thoughts that had occurred to him on the drive down to Worcester.

When they’d parted on the wrong side of midnight, Ambrose had been heading for the police station to brief his team and put the wheels in motion. But there had been nothing more for Tony to do. At least he still had Steeler, Arthur Blythe’s perfectly groomed narrowboat. It didn’t fill him with peace in the way the house had, but it was better than nothing. And he’d taken some of the photographs from the house back to Bradfield, so there were still some tangible images of the man whose genes he’d inherited. Tony tried to take some comfort from this, but it didn’t work. He still felt hollowed out and violated.

Then he’d got Paula’s message and understood the full scope of his failure to do his job properly. Vance seemed intent on taking from them everything that mattered. There were two paths he could go down in response to that. He could give in to the pain and the loss, walk away and spend the rest of his life unfulfilled and regretful. Or he could scream, ‘Fuck you!’ at the heavens and get back to stopping men like Vance. Tony reminded himself that there had been years before Carol came into his life, even more years before the house had been part of him. He’d lived well enough in that wilderness. He could do it again.

Tony drained his mug and got to his feet. Like the man said, when you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.

40

A ching with tiredness, raw with anguish, Paula leaned against the car bonnet and lit a cigarette. ‘Can I have one?’ Kevin asked. He was even paler than usual, the skin round his eyes almost greenish in tone. He looked as if he’d slept as little as she had. Sinead had shown up just after midnight and they’d stayed with her for a couple of hours, trying to offer consolation where there was none to be found. Then Paula had gone home and lain in bed staring at the ceiling, one hand cradled between both of Elinor’s.

‘I thought you’d stopped,’ she said, handing the packet over.

‘I have. But some days … ’ Kevin shivered. Paula knew just what he meant. Some days, the most ardent non-smokers yearned for the nicotine support. He lit up with the practised air of a man who has forgotten none of the pleasures of smoking. He inhaled greedily. His shoulders dropped an inch on the exhale. ‘After yesterday … you think you’ve seen it all. And then you see that.’

‘That’ was the contents of a cardboard box left round the back of a freezer food shop near the tower blocks at Skenby. It had been discovered just before dawn by the member of staff detailed to open up the loading bay for an early delivery. The box was about a metre long, half a metre deep and the same wide. It was sitting in the middle of the loading bay and had once held bags of oven chips. That it held something very different now was evident from the dark stains on the cardboard and the leaking pools of reddish brown liquid. The staff member, who wasn’t paid enough to think, opened it up and promptly fainted, hitting his head on the concrete and knocking himself out. The delivery driver had arrived to find him still out cold, next to a box containing a dismembered body. He’d thrown up, putting the finishing touches to the contamination of the crime scene.

The first cops on the scene had called MIT directly, mostly because the top limb in the box was an arm with the word ‘MINE’ tattooed just above the wrist. Paula and Kevin had arrived just as the doctor was formally pronouncing the bits in the box dead. ‘What have we got?’ Kevin asked.

‘You’ll have to wait for the pathologist to give you a definitive answer,’ the doctor recited. Even he looked a little pale and pinched in the grey dawn light. ‘But in the absence of any other indications, I’d say you’re looking at one body that’s been chopped up into its component parts. There’s a torso, a head, two arms, two thighs and two lower legs.’

‘Jesus,’ Kevin said, looking away.

‘Has it been properly dismembered or just hacked apart?’ Paula couldn’t seem to drag her eyes away from the gruesome sight.

‘For all the use that is to us these days,’ Kevin said bitterly. ‘All you have to do is watch that Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall to learn amateur butchery.’

The doctor shook his head. ‘This isn’t even that good. At a guess – and this is just a guess, mind, and don’t tell Grisha Shatalov I said so – I’d say he used something like a circular saw. The way it’s gone through the bone, you can see the cutting marks.’ He pointed with his pen at the top of a femur. ‘That’s mechanical.’

‘Jesus,’ Kevin said again. ‘Any idea how long she’s been dead?’

The doctor shrugged. ‘Not long. The blood’s not oozing, hypostasis is just under way. Given the temperature … I’d say probably not much more than a couple of hours. But don’t quote me, it’s not my job.’

‘Any ideas on cause of death?’ The doctor was moving away now and Paula followed him.

‘You really will have to wait for Grisha for that,’ he said, making for his car.

And so she’d ended up smoking with Kevin while the crime-scene operatives did their thing with cameras and sticky tape and chemicals and the local cops went door-to-door in a bid to find a witness. It wasn’t likely round here. The single-storey arcade of shops stood alone, an island in a sea of cheap housing and people struggling to keep their heads above water. Nobody would have seen anything. Not even the ones who had.

‘He’s ringing the changes, this one,’ Kevin said.

‘I was hoping Tony would come up with something helpful. But obviously he’s got more pressing things on his mind.’

‘Have you spoken to the DCI again?’ Kevin asked.

‘Nope. I hope I don’t have to either. It’s always hard to keep stuff from her. I’ll just have to talk about the cat being safe round at ours, curled under a radiator.’

‘Is that true?’

‘Yes. One of the team at the scene found him in his carrier in Chris’s car. Elinor came and got him.’

‘I tell you, I wouldn’t like to be Vance if she gets to him ahead of the pack.’

‘She won’t do anything to compromise the legal process,’ Paula said, convinced she understood Carol far better than Kevin. ‘She’s all about justice. You know that.’

‘Yeah, but this is her brother,’ Kevin protested. ‘You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t want to make him suffer.’

‘Think about it, Kevin. Vance did this because she’s the one who put him away. He hated being in jail so much that he’s killed two people to get back at the person he thinks is responsible for that. And set that hideous booby trap that was designed to get her. The terrible irony is that it got Chris, who was one of the people who helped put him away before. So don’t you think sending him back to jail is the best suffering she could dish out? And don’t you think the chief’s smart enough to have worked that out for herself?’

He finished the cigarette and ground it out under his heel. Then he turned up the collar of his jacket. ‘I suppose,’ he said. ‘So, have you got any bright ideas about how we’re going to ID this one if her prints don’t come up on the database? I don’t suppose we can ask one of the uniforms to take the head round with them … ’ He winked at Paula. Gallows humour was what kept them sane out on the streets. You could never explain it to an outsider.

‘If I thought it would speed things up, I’d do it myself.’ Paula tossed her cigarette end in the gutter and took out her phone. ‘So, what do you want for breakfast? I’ll get Sam to pick up some filled rolls on his way over. Bacon? Sausage? Egg?’

Kevin grinned. ‘Bacon for me. And plenty of tomato sauce. I love it when it oozes out the sides … ’

‘Sick fuck,’ Paula said, turning away just in time to see Penny Burgess bearing down on them. ‘And here comes another one.’

They exchanged looks and bolted for the crime-scene margins, where the uniformed officers would effectively manage the borders. They made it just in time, leaving Penny plaintively calling their names. Paula looked back at the furious journalist and nudged Kevin in the ribs. ‘No morning’s a complete bust if you get to piss off the press, is it?’

Her comment somehow broke the logjam of pain they’d been stuck in since the night before. They were so busy giggling like children they completely missed Penny’s shouted question about Tony Hill’s house being burned to the ground.

Ambrose was briefing his boss when Carol Jordan walked into his squad room stony-faced and blank-eyed. DI Stuart Patterson barely moved his head in greeting. Carol looked like she’d be hard pressed to care less. She ignored the other officers who all paused and turned to look at the new arrival. ‘Alvin,’ she said, pulling out a chair by his desk. ‘Vance: what’s happening?’

Startled, Ambrose looked at Patterson for guidance. The DI carefully avoided his sergeant’s eyes, taking out a packet of chewing gum and unwrapping a stick. ‘This is my operation, DCI Jordan.’

‘Really?’ Carol’s voice walked the line between politeness and insult. ‘So, DI Patterson, what’s happening?’

‘Sergeant? Perhaps you could bring DCI Jordan up to speed, as a courtesy to a member of another force?’

Ambrose gave him a look he normally reserved for naughty children. ‘We were all appalled by what happened to your brother and his girlfriend,’ Ambrose said. ‘I couldn’t be more sorry.’

‘That goes for me too,’ Patterson said, momentarily shamed out of his surliness by the reminder of what Carol had lost. ‘I thought you were on compassionate leave, supporting your parents.’

‘The best support I can give my family is to work the case. I know DCI Franklin is keeping all his options open, but I’m convinced Vance is behind this. Which is why I’m here.’

Ambrose could only imagine the effort it was taking for Carol to hold herself together. Some people might have condemned her for not being with her family at a time like this, but he understood the irresistible drive to be doing something. He also realised that it had its price. ‘We’ve still no positive leads on where he might be,’ Ambrose said.

Patterson snorted. ‘We know where he bloody was last night,’ he said.

Carol’s eyes brightened. ‘You do? Where was he?’

‘Smack bang in the middle of Worcester. Right under our noses.’ Patterson looked disgusted, as if a bad smell were literally under his nose.

Carol leaned forward. ‘How do you know?’

‘We don’t know for certain,’ Ambrose said, a cautionary note in his dark rumble.

Patterson rolled his eyes. ‘How many other people have got that big a grudge against Tony Hill?’

Her eyes widened in shock. ‘Tony? Has something happened to Tony?’

‘He’s OK,’ Ambrose said, wishing his boss would show Carol some of the sensitivity he prided himself on. ‘Well, physically OK. He’s pretty upset, though. Last night, somebody burned his house to the ground.’

Carol started as if she’d been slapped. ‘His house? His beautiful house? Burned down?’

Patterson nodded. ‘Arson. No question about it. Petrol as accelerant. The fire started at the back of the house where it’s not overlooked. By the time anyone noticed it, the fire had properly taken hold. The fire brigade had no chance of saving it.’

‘That house was full of beautiful things that would go up like a Roman candle,’ Carol said. She ran her hands through her hair. ‘Didn’t you have anyone watching it? Christ, this has got Vance written all over it.’

‘That’s what we thought,’ Ambrose said. ‘I’ve got a team going through the traffic cameras now, to see if we can spot what he’s driving. But if he’s got any sense, he’ll have dumped that car and moved on to another by now.’

‘And he’ll have changed his appearance,’ Carol said. ‘We’ve got no idea what he looks like.’

The door was shouldered open at that point by a uniformed PC cradling a computer tower in his arms. Another followed him with a similar burden. ‘Where d’you want these, guv?’ he called to Patterson.

Patterson looked bemused. ‘What are they?’

The uniform hid his impatience badly. ‘Computers. Towers for desktop machines, complete with hard drives.’

Patterson was in no mood to take cheek from a uniform. ‘I can see what they are. But what are they doing here?’

‘They’re from Northumbria. Urgent overnight delivery. So where do you want them?’

‘They’re Terry Gates’s computers,’ Ambrose said. ‘I asked for them. Tony thinks Gates isn’t smart enough to have cleaned them up properly.’ He pointed to a table against the wall. ‘Stick them down there, would you?’

Patterson’s air of discontent deepened. ‘Nobody told me about this. I suppose you’ll be wanting to spend a fortune on Gary Harcup now?’

Ambrose looked mutinous. ‘I will when I can get hold of him. He’s the expert. And we need an expert for this.’

‘The Super will blow a gasket when you blow the budget on fat Gary,’ Patterson said. ‘It’s not like he’s that fast either. Vance will be on the other side of the world before Gary gets anything off those hard drives.’

Carol cleared her throat. ‘Who is Gary Harcup?’

‘He’s our forensic computer specialist. He costs a fucking fortune, he looks like a bear and he’s about as easy to deal with as a bear,’ Patterson said.

‘I can do better than that,’ Carol said.

‘You’re a computer expert? Forgive me, DCI Jordan, but you don’t look much like a geek to me.’ Patterson could be so bloody annoying, Ambrose thought wearily.

Carol ignored him. ‘My computer specialist, Stacey Chen, is a genius. She can do stuff that makes other geeks weep.’

‘That’s all very well, but she’s a BMP officer, not a West Mercian.’

‘She’s a cop. And an expert witness. That’s all that matters,’ Carol said, taking out her phone. ‘I can second her to you.’ Her questioning look was directed at Ambrose. ‘She’s the best.’

‘I’m not going to say no,’ Ambrose said. Patterson turned away in apparent annoyance.

Carol summoned up Stacey’s mobile number. ‘I’ll get her on the road right now.’

‘Doesn’t she have other stuff on? I thought you guys were looking at a serial?’ Ambrose asked.

‘It’s a question of priorities,’ Carol said. ‘And right now, my team knows exactly where their priorities lie.’

41

Putting Humpty Dumpty together again required starting somewhere. So Tony turned on his computer and made himself another brew while he waited for the latest files from Bradfield to download. He sat down and opened the latest email from Paula, sent from her phone less than an hour previously. The news of a fourth victim saddened him and fed his own sense of failure, but there was no room for his personal feelings in his work. His empathy, yes, but his emotions, no.

The presentation of the body sounded even more bizarre than the last. Dismemberment wasn’t as common as people thought. Professional killers did it to hinder identification. But according to Paula, all the pieces were present and intact, so that wasn’t what was going on here. If Tony had been presented with this case in isolation, he could have usefully speculated about the significance of the dismemberment. It might be about exerting the ultimate literal control over a victim. ‘She can’t walk away if she’s got no legs,’ he said. Or it might be about punishment. ‘She’s so evil she needs to be taken apart and put together again from scratch.’

He rubbed his scalp with his fingertips. ‘But that’s not what’s happening here,’ he said. ‘What he’s shown us before is totally different. Of course it’s about control. Serial murder is always about control. But that’s not the point of this.’ He threw his hands in the air. He wanted to pace but the boat was too small. ‘Face it, Tony, the dismemberment could be completely meaningless. Random. The first thing that popped into his head.’

Except that was ridiculously wrong. You didn’t make careful plans to go out and kill, plans that included fake number plates and baseball caps to confound the cameras, then choose a completely arbitrary murder method on the night. There was something structured going on here, even if he couldn’t work out what it was. And the harder he tried to pin it down, the further out of reach it seemed.

Tony drank his tea and stared out of the porthole at the glassy water beyond, letting his thoughts drift. Whatever had been niggling at the back of his mind since the previous murder was squirming harder now, but he still couldn’t nail it. Maybe the crime-scene photographs would help.

He went back to the computer and opened the file. And was reminded that sometimes the world worked the way you wanted it to. When Tony looked at the photographs in sequence, first murder to latest, the images fell into place like a jigsaw. All at once, he understood what he was looking at. It made sense and it made no sense at one and the same time.

‘Maze Man,’ he said softly. It had been an American import back in the nineties. Late-night Channel 5, watched by Tony Hill and three other people, if the ratings were anything to go by. It was a low-budget TV series about a psychological profiler who constantly referred to ‘the maze of the mind’ and wittered on about criminals being lost in the maze, taking wrong turnings, giving in to the soul of the Minotaur. Tony had only watched it because if he’d had a Facebook page, insomnia would be one of the hobbies he listed. That, and because the consequent rise in his blood pressure from watching something so ludicrous reminded him he was alive.

The unrelenting stupidity of its plots and the illogicality of the protagonist’s conclusions were probably what had limited its lifespan to a single series. Chances were, it had probably been revived on some satellite channel in the middle of the night, but it had passed Tony by. However, if he was right, it had not bypassed the man who was killing sex workers in Bradfield.

Excited now, Tony googled Maze Man and clicked on its IMDB entry. Twenty-four episodes made in 1996, starring Larry Geitling and Joanna Duvell. Tony barely remembered her, a cookie-cutter California blonde, but Geitling’s face remained fresh in his memory, all chin and cheekbones and crinkles round the sapphire blue eyes when he went thoughtful. Which happened mostly just before the commercial breaks, as Tony recalled. Geitling’s name rang a vague bell, but he couldn’t put his finger on it and Google didn’t help.

But he knew the name was in his head for a reason. Working on the principle that anything is worth a try, he summoned up Stacey’s patent case-indexing system. It trawled every document scanned or imported into a case and created a master index. He typed in ‘Larry Geitling’ and nearly tipped his chair over when he got a hit immediately. Larry Geitling had been the name used by the man who had checked into room five in the Sunset Strip motel, the room whose carpet and towels had been saturated with water the night Suze Black had gone missing. This was a real connection, not just the mad profiler’s hunch.

He went back to Google and tracked down an episode-by-episode chronology of the series, complete with dismally low-res screenshots, all compiled by some sad bastard in Oklahoma City who was convinced Maze Man was the most criminally underrated show ever produced by American TV. However, Tony was grateful to him today, for this peculiar little website confirmed what had been jittering away at the back of his mind for the past few days. Impossible as it seemed, the four murders in Bradfield corresponded exactly to the crimes in the first four episodes of Maze Man.

He’d been absolutely right when he’d said these killings were not about lust or sex. He didn’t even think they were about power. They were about something completely different. At the heart of these murders was a man who needed to kill, but not for any of the usual reasons. He wasn’t killing because he wanted to watch women die, or because he hated them. The paraphernalia of the murders didn’t matter to him; he hadn’t been able to come up with a coherent way of killing. It was as if he was trying on different methods to see if he could find one that worked for him. He was using the TV series as a source of templates for serial murder. Tony had never encountered anything quite like this, but it made a twisted sort of sense.

So if it wasn’t about the killing itself, what was the motivation for these murders? The answer had to lie with the victims, somehow. But what could it be?

In the meantime, he had something to share. He picked up his phone and called Paula. As soon as she answered, he said, ‘This is going to sound really weird.’

‘I was just about to call you,’ Paula said.

‘Have you had a break in the case?’

‘No, Tony. I was going to call you because I just heard about your house and I wanted to commiserate,’ she said patiently.

Sometimes Tony ran out of road when he was passing for human. He didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing.

‘It’s what friends do,’ Paula said. ‘I’m really sorry about your house.’

‘So am I,’ he said. ‘And about Carol’s brother and his partner. And about Chris. How is she, by the way? Any news?’

‘No change. Which they say is a good thing.’

‘I wish I could do something more positive to put him back behind bars. But I don’t seem to be able to do much with Vance, so I took a look at the stuff Stacey sent me this morning.’

‘I sent it, actually. Stacey’s on her way to Worcester. Play your cards right, she might buy you a coffee.’

Tony was taken aback. How had he fallen this far out of the loop? ‘Stacey’s coming here? Why? What’s happened?’

‘The DCI’s ordered her down to Worcester to drill into the hard drives of a couple of crappy old computers from some geezer called Terry Gates. Apparently he—’

‘I know who Terry Gates is and what we’re all hoping to find on the computers. I just didn’t know Stacey was involved. I thought West Mercia had their own specialist.’

‘Ambrose couldn’t get hold of him. Anyway, the chief decided—’

‘You said that before. How is Carol involved? I thought she was at her parents’ place?’

‘According to Stacey, she’s at West Mercia HQ, calling the shots. Sort of picking up the reins a bit early, you could say.’

The knowledge was like a weight in his chest. He knew Carol would believe she was capable of running an investigation, but he didn’t think she was. She needed time and space to process what had happened and its implications. If she didn’t do that, when the inevitable crash came, she would fall hard and she would fall far. He’d seen that happen to her before and he didn’t know if he could bear it a second time, not when he bore a large share of the responsibility. ‘Great,’ he said heavily. ‘I don’t suppose anybody’s had the bottle to tell her to back off?’

Paula snorted. ‘Like that’s going to happen.’

‘She shouldn’t be doing this.’

There was a long pause. Then Paula said, ‘So, was there a reason why you were calling me?’

‘Are you old enough to remember a TV series called Maze Man?’

‘I don’t know. Am I? Because I don’t remember it.’

‘It was on Channel 5.’

‘I don’t think I’ve ever knowingly watched Channel 5.’

Tony chuckled. ‘You’re such a snob. Anyway, they only made one series. It was about a profiler and a cop—’

‘Sounds familiar. Was she blonde?’

‘You’re not funny, Paula. Anyway, it was pretty crap. But I watched most of it because it was so bad it made me feel like a profiling genius. But here’s the thing. These four murders you’ve got – they’re identical to the murder methods in the first four episodes of Maze Man.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I’m sure. Strangulation. Drowning in a bath and dumping the body in a canal. Inverted crucifixion and throat cutting. And dismemberment and delivery in a cardboard box. And the clincher is this: He’s using the name of the actor who played the hero, the psychologist. Larry Geitling. That’s who he checked into the motel as, right?’

‘Jesus. That’s sick.’

‘I’m sending you a link to a website. Some guy in Bumfuck, Nowhere USA is a Maze Man nut and he’s catalogued every episode. Actually, now I think about it … maybe you should talk to him, see if he’s in contact with any other Maze Man anoraks. Because our killer has to be another Maze Man nut. The series has never been released on DVD or video, as far as I can make out. Our guy must have taped it back in 1997. He must still have it.’

‘Or maybe his video recorder just chewed up the tapes and he’s decided to recreate it for himself.’

‘Have I ever told you how much I hate cop humour?’ Tony said. ‘Listen, Paula, this is really interesting. Serial killers do what they do because something in the process, the shape of how they do it, the act itself – something pushes their hot button. They mutilate breasts because they have issues with femininity. They rape with knives because they have issues with sexual potency. They put out eyes because they have issues with being spied on. Whatever. But this guy – he doesn’t have a hot button. Or at least, he hasn’t found it yet. It’s like he’s working his way through a list of murder methods, trying them out for size. Does this one fit? Does this give me a rush?’

‘What? You mean, he wants to be a serial killer, but he doesn’t know what to do to enjoy it?’

‘Kind of, yes. Either that or each time he’s been so disgusted he’s had to find another way to do it next time.’ Now he was pacing. Three steps one way, wheel, three steps the other way. ‘There’s a reason why he’s killing. But it’s not the killing itself. He’s sending a message with the tattoo, he’s saying, “Look at me, these are MY achievements.” Paula, if he could find another way to achieve his goal, a way that didn’t involve killing, he would.’

‘That’s a hell of a strange profile, Tony.’

‘I know. And worst of all, I don’t see how it takes you any further forward in terms of nailing this guy.’

‘Back in the old days, you’d be right,’ Paula said. ‘But your suggestion that he might be in touch with the Maze Man geek – that’s a cracking idea. Chances are, they’ll have a forum or a weblist or some such nonsense. Or even a set-up that captures all the visitors to the site. Stacey’s going to love this – something to get her teeth into at last, instead of just being a clearing house for Northern’s data. Soon as we get her back, she can get stuck in. Tony, I knew I was right to drag you into this.’

‘The way I feel this morning, it’s me who should be thanking you. It’s good to have a distraction to stop me from throwing myself in the canal.’

‘You don’t mean that,’ she said awkwardly, not entirely comfortable at being in such personal territory with Tony. It wasn’t the sort of area where their friendship normally went.

‘Of course I don’t,’ he lied.

‘So if you’re right about Maze Man, what’s the next murder in the sequence?’

Tony cleared his throat. ‘She’ll be flayed. Her face will be untouched, but her body will be flayed.’

Paula felt faintly sick. ‘What I love about this job,’ she said. ‘Always something to look forward to.’

42

Carol knew she was being a pain in the arse to Ambrose and Patterson but she didn’t care. Their opinion of her was a poor second to tracking down Vance. Ambrose had printed out the list of Terry Gates’s diary appointments and given it to her. ‘I’ve put one of my best lads on this, but we’re not getting very far because it’s a Saturday and nobody’s answering their office phones,’ he’d said. ‘I thought you might like to take a look, see if it kicked up any ideas.’

She thought he was just trying to keep her out of his way, but she didn’t care. She was just grateful for something to do. Carol couldn’t cope with inactivity. It was that quality, rather than her inability to deal with her parents’ grief and blame, that had brought her to Worcester in the first place. Now, left with time on her hands, she wouldn’t be able to avoid thinking about Michael. And that would lead straight to the bottle. This time, she really didn’t want to go down that route. She didn’t want to become the disaster in her own life. She didn’t know whether she’d be able to find her way back a second time.

So she started on the list. She soon realised it could be broken down into three separate trips to London and one to Manchester. The first London visit consisted of three appointments. There were phone numbers, addresses and initials for all three. Patterson had reluctantly set her up with a phone and a computer and she started with a visit to Google, which led her to a company that provided a directory of office tenants throughout London. Two of the addresses appeared on the site, with full lists of the buildings’ tenants, but the third drew a blank.

Both of the companies she’d tracked immediately also had websites. They specialised in providing off-the-shelf companies in countries whose financial regulatory systems were less than transparent. Carol printed out the scant information on each and put them to one side.

She rang the number attached to the third appointment of the day and found herself listening to the recorded message of the City of Westminster Archives Centre. Curious now, she accessed their website. Halfway down the list of site contents, she saw what she thought might have been a likely target for Gates – General Register Office Indexes. If Vance was building new identities, he’d need ID. In the bad old days, a criminal looking to construct a new identity only had to go to St Catherine’s House or, later, the Family History Centre in Islington, where the records of births, marriages and deaths were kept. There, they could find the death certificate of someone around the same age as them, preferably one who had died as a baby or a young child. From there, they could backtrack to the birth certificate and then order a copy of it.

Armed with a birth certificate, other layers of genuine ID could be built up. Driver’s licence. Passport. Utility bills. Bank accounts. Credit cards. And there was a whole new identity that would pass muster in an airport or a ferry terminal.

But terrorism had closed many of those doors, making it all a lot harder. The certificates were kept away from public gaze. All that was available were skeleton details, attached to an index number that you had to have before you could order the certificate itself. It took a lot more time and patience to set the scam in motion, and it left a paper trail. Carol quickly typed out a suggested action for Monday morning and forwarded it to Ambrose. Some lucky sod was going to have to get on to the General Register and find out whether Terry Gates had commissioned any birth, marriage or death certificates. That would at least provide a starting point for possible aliases for Vance.

Of course, these days nobody bothered with the slow patient layering of a real ID. Forgery had become so sophisticated that providing the forger with a name, a date of birth and a photograph was enough for them to come up with a whole suite of documents that looked entirely authentic. But you still had to have a genuine starting place in case anyone checked. Carol would have bet a month’s salary that Terry Gates had gone to the Westminster index to find a plausible ID for Jacko Vance. Maybe even more than one.

Checking details like the ones on Terry Gates’s SIM card was infinitely quicker and easier, thanks to the resources of the Internet and the databases the police could access. A few years back, what Carol achieved inside a couple of hours would have taken several detectives days of footslogging and questioning people who operated on the fringes of the law. Even though the only human being she’d managed to talk to was an old mate on the Fraud squad, she had a pretty clear idea of what Terry Gates had been doing. Company formation, ID documents, private banks, a private investigations firm that was definitely dodgy and an ex-solicitor who specialised in crawling through the Land Registry to sell property information to scummy tabloid hacks. It pointed to two distinct operations. The first was to create new IDs and set up conduits for Vance to be reconnected with his money. The second goal was clearly directed at tracing and tracking other individuals. Presumably Vance’s vengeance targets. A bunch of detectives were going to be very busy indeed come Monday morning if they hadn’t found Vance by then. At least by that time they would have a clearer idea of the extent of the payback Vance had planned.

She’d almost finished a detailed note for Patterson when Stacey Chen walked in. She looked like she’d stepped out of the pages of a weekend supplement with her perfectly coordinated designer leisurewear and a Henk case. Carol knew, because she’d googled it, that the sleek black carbon-fibre carry-on cost more than ten grand. There was a time when she’d wondered whether Stacey was on the take. Then she’d done a bit more digging and discovered that just one of the software applications Stacey had developed in her spare time had made her over a million a year for the past five years.

Carol had once asked Stacey why she bothered with the day job. ‘What I do at work – if I did it as a private citizen, I’d be arrested. I like having a licence to dig around in other people’s data,’ she’d said. She’d also thrown a quick expressionless glance at Sam Evans, which was an answer of a different kind.

Stacey spotted her and headed over. ‘Thanks for coming,’ Carol said.

‘It sounds a lot more interesting than the Bradfield cases,’ Stacey said. ‘So far, that’s just been routine processing. Though Paula has come up with something that definitely has data-mining prospects.’

‘Really?’ Bradfield had slipped off Carol’s radar completely in the past twenty-four hours. Stacey’s comment reminded her that she had responsibilities elsewhere. ‘She hasn’t said anything to me.’

Stacey’s face gave nothing away. ‘We all thought you had enough on your plate. And it’s such a weird idea, Paula wanted to check it out before she made a big deal out of it.’

‘So what is it?’ Anything to distract her, even if it was a case that felt a million miles away.

‘There’s been another body, did you know about that?’

Carol shook her head. ‘Someone should have told me that, at least.’

Stacey gave Carol a quick run-down on the case. ‘Because this was so distinctive, so bizarre, the connection was indisputable,’ she concluded. ‘There was an obscure American TV series in the late nineties called Maze Man, and these killings mirror the murders in the first four episodes. And there’s a fan site run by a guy in Oklahoma. Paula was going to call him to see if he had any contact with other fans in the UK, but I told her he might clam up. These anoraks are often very protective of each other, they see themselves as lone heroes standing up against the tide.’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘Us being the tide, in this case. Weirdos. Anyway, I suggested I take a look at the site first. They might have a forum, or a visitors’ book, or a Twitter feed that I can raid. I’ll poke about and see what I can find.’ She smiled, dissolving her sternness. ‘There’s always a back door.’

‘Very interesting. And Paula came up with this all by herself?’

Stacey busied herself with the Henk, hefting it on to a desk and opening it. ‘Apparently.’

With anyone else, Carol would have written this off as displacement activity. With Stacey, it was hard to be sure. Still, her instincts said there was something a little off in Stacey’s account. ‘Would I be crazy if I said it sounds a lot like the way Tony’s mind works?’

Stacey gave her a look. ‘Paula’s a big fan, you know that. Maybe his way has rubbed off on her.’

Carol knew the brick wall of loyalty when she ran into it. ‘Terry Gates’s computers are over there.’ She pointed to the table. ‘See what you can do with them. Don’t ignore the Bradfield cases either. His cycle is definitely speeding up.’

Stacey shrugged. ‘I can set programs running on the Gates hardware and work the Oklahoma stuff while I’m waiting for results. With luck, I’ll have something for you later today. If not, tomorrow.’

Stacey’s reassuring competence was exactly what Carol needed right then. It was good to know somebody was on top of things. But if Tony Hill was interfering with the Bradfield cases, she wanted to know. Her brother’s murder had demonstrated that Tony wasn’t the operator he used to be. The way she felt right now, she didn’t think she could ever work with him again. And the last thing she wanted was to be blindsided by him. ‘Thanks, Stacey,’ she said vaguely, already looking for Ambrose and the answer to her next question. Where exactly was Tony Hill?

43

If Vance had needed any support for his conviction that his programme of retribution was the right thing, he would have pointed to his deep and dreamless sleep. No nightmares troubled him, no tossing and turning, no staring at the ceiling praying for unconsciousness. After he’d done his work at Tony’s, he’d brought a Chinese takeaway back to his hotel room and surfed the news channels till he felt sleepy. It wasn’t just that he was interested in seeing how his own exploits were reported; he’d been away from full access to the media for a long time, and he was interested to see how it had developed while he’d been gone.

He couldn’t help feeling a twinge of regret. He’d have been a perfect fit for this multimedia universe. Twitter and Facebook and the like would have suited him much better than a lot of those idiots who basked in the public’s adoration these days. Something else Carol Jordan and Tony Hill and his bitch of an ex-wife had robbed him of. Maybe he should set up a Twitter account to taunt the police with. Vanceontherun, he could call himself. It was tempting, but he’d have to pass. If he’d learned one thing behind bars, it was that everything you did in cyberspace left a trail. He had enough on his plate without the elaborate covering of his tracks that would be involved in thumbing his electronic nose at the authorities. Enough that they knew he was out there and doing his thing.

It was mid-morning when he woke, and he was gratified to find a selection of photographs of the fire on a local news website. Arson was apparently suspected. Well, duh. There was no mention of Vance, and whoever had written the report hadn’t bothered to find out anything more about ‘the owner, Dr Tony Hill’ who wasn’t available for comment. One thing made Vance’s antennae twitch. In the background of one shot, he could see the distinctive head of the cop who’d been on TV talking about his escape. Polished dark skull, watchful eyes, a face that looked like it had encountered a few fists over the years. And here he was at the fire.

Someone was making the right connections. Which was fine by Vance. They could connect the dots as much as they liked, but he was always going to be one step ahead. Take right now, for example. The safest place in the country for him was Worcester. Because they’d be convinced he was long gone. This was the one place they wouldn’t be keeping an eye out for him. He could have walked through the Cathedral Plaza shopping mall without raising an eyebrow. The idea made him laugh with delight.

But safe though he was here, he had no intention of hanging around. He had places to go, people to see. And none of it was going to be pretty. But first, he had to put his final preparations in place. He paid a visit to his cameras. The barn was dead; presumably the police had found a camera and swept for the others. That was why the cameras at Tony Hill’s house and Micky’s farm were on the outside – the police would be looking in all the wrong places. It seemed he’d been right again.

Vance checked out the suite of images from the stud farm in Herefordshire where his treacherous ex-wife and her lover had created their new lives. He’d done Micky and Betsy a huge favour when he’d married Micky. The rumour and gossip that had swirled around Micky was hindering her ascent to the very pinnacle of TV presenting. That had died a death when they’d tied the knot. Obviously she must be straight, for why would Vance marry a lesbian when he could have had his pick of beautiful, sexy women? Cynics tried to shoot the line that Vance was also gay. But nobody believed that. He had a heterosexual track record and never a whisper that he swung both ways.

Of course, the marriage had been a sham. What Micky got out of it had been clear from the start, and she’d been so keen to accept the benefits that she’d chosen not to question his excuse for wanting it. He’d spun her a line about wanting protection from the fans who stalked him, convinced her that what he liked was the nostrings contract between himself and the high-class hookers he used for sex, and promised her he would never embarrass her with some tacky encounter with a kiss-and-tell nobody. That was easier to believe than the truth – that he wanted cover for his other life as a serial abductor and killer of teenage girls. Not that he had ever shared that truth with Micky.

He’d kept to his side of the deal. He expected her to stick to her end of the arrangement in return. But as soon as things got sticky, instead of providing the alibis he needed, she’d washed her hands faster than Pilate. There was nothing that infuriated Vance more than people who didn’t honour their debts. He always kept his word. The only time he’d promised and failed to deliver was when he swore to the British people that he would bring home an Olympic gold medal. But they hadn’t seen it as a let-down, because the reason had been so heroic.

He wished they’d been able to understand his other actions in the same light. He’d done what he had to do. It might not have been the reaction most people would understand, but he wasn’t most people. He was Jacko Vance and he was exceptional. Which meant he was an exception, outside the petty rules the rest of them had to live by. They needed the rules. They couldn’t function without them. But he could. And he did.

Vance checked out the images one by one, watching them intently, zooming in where he could. The shape of the protection that was in place soon became clear. The police were staking out the road approaches to the farm in both directions. The drive was still blocked by a horse box. A police Land Rover stood at the entrance to the back drive, three officers visible inside it. Two pairs of officers in the forage caps of firearms officers patrolled the perimeter of the house itself, their Heckler and Koch automatics carried at port arms.

It looked like the yard itself was being protected by the stable hands, a group of men who appeared to have been manufactured out of pipe cleaners, wire and plasticine. A couple of them had shotguns broken over their arms. What interested Vance was that they all dressed in variations of the same outfit. Flat caps, waxed or quilted jackets, jeans and riding boots. The cops didn’t look twice when one of them walked out of the house and headed for the stable block. Or vice versa.

Which would have been interesting if he’d been aiming to get inside the house. But his plans were very different. And from the looks of this set-up, eminently likely to be successful. Vance showered and dressed and checked out with half an hour to spare. Nothing to attract attention.

He left the car on a side street a short distance from the car-hire firm where Patrick Gordon had already booked today’s vehicle, the kind of SUV that fitted in perfectly in the countryside. It had, as he had specified, a tow ball. He drove back to the previous car, retrieved his petrol cans, laptop bag and holdalls from the boot, and set off for Herefordshire. He had one stop to make on the way, but he had plenty of time. It was a lovely day, he realised as he left Worcester behind.

Time to make the most of it.

As usual when he was thinking, time had slipped past Tony without him noticing. He’d only realised how late it was when his stomach rumbled in protest at having missed out on breakfast and lunch. There were various tins and packets in the cupboards in the galley, but he couldn’t be bothered cooking at the best of times and today didn’t qualify as one of those. So he locked up and went ashore. He considered the pub but rejected the idea. He wasn’t ready for other people, not even strangers.

A few redbrick streets away, he found the perfect solution in a corner chippie. He hurried back to Steeler with a fragrant parcel of cod and chips so hot it nipped his fingertips. The prospect of something good to eat reminded him to hold on to the idea that not everything was shit.

He turned on to the pontoon where his boat was moored and stopped in his tracks. A familiar figure was standing on Steeler’s stern, leaning against the cabin with arms folded, thick blonde hair ruffled by the wind. For a moment his spirits lifted, grabbing at the possibility of a reconciliation. Then he made a proper assessment of her body language and accepted Carol wasn’t here to bury the hatchet and explore how they could best move forward together against Vance.

If that was the case, he had to wonder what she was here for. Standing staring wasn’t going to answer that question. Warily, as if fearing a physical attack, Tony walked down the pontoon till he was level with the boat. ‘There’s probably enough for two,’ he said.

Carol took the olive branch and snapped it across her knee. ‘I’m not planning on staying long enough to share a meal,’ she said.

He’d never got anywhere with Carol by being conciliatory. ‘Please yourself,’ he said. ‘But I need to eat.’ He stepped on board and glared at her till she moved to one side so he could unlock the door and clamber below. He’d left her with no option but to follow him if she wanted to talk.

He pulled a plate out of the rack and unwrapped his fish and chips, tipping them on to the plate. As she came gingerly down the steps, he backed into the main cabin and shoved his papers and laptop to one side so he could eat. He pulled a can of Coke out of his coat pocket and set it beside his plate. ‘Some would say this is more my style than what I’ve just lost,’ he said.

‘I heard about the house,’ Carol said. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Me too. I know it’s trivial compared to Michael and Lucy, but it still hurts. So I have paid a little for my stupidity.’ He tried not to sound bitter. He could see from the narrowing of her eyes that he’d failed.

‘I didn’t come here to beat you up for letting them down.’ She leaned against the galley, arms folded, her pain obvious. So many times he’d imagined her here, daring to indulge little fantasies of them going out for a run on the narrowboat like normal people did. Who was he kidding? They weren’t normal, either of them. Even if they got out of this alive, they weren’t going to turn into the kind of pensioners who pottered around the canal system painting kettles with castles and roses and discussing which pub on the Cheshire Ring did the best steak pies.

Tony popped a chip in his mouth and gasped as the hot potato burned his mouth. ‘Wah! That’s hot!’ He chewed it, mouth open, till it was cool enough to swallow. ‘Sorry.’ Hapless grin, little shrug. Who did he think he was kidding? He’d never had the kind of charm to get out of trouble, least of all with Carol. ‘So why did you come and find me?’

She took a couple of steps forward and woke the laptop from its sleep, picking up the scribbled notes that sat beside it. The screen faded up, revealing a crime-scene photo of a cardboard box open to reveal dismembered limbs. She read aloud. ‘“Maze Man. 1996. One season on HBO. Based on novel by Canadian James Sarrono. Website www.maze-man.com. Facebook? Twitter?” And lots more of the same. What the fuck is all this about?’

He considered lying. Considered claiming he’d pressured Paula for the information because he wanted to try to make it up to Carol. But that was pitiful and one of the things he’d decided in the course of the long night was that he was going to try to do better than pitiful in future. ‘Your team loves you. They don’t want you to go. And the only thing they can think of to give you as a leaving present is a result. So even though they know you’re opposed in principle to me working for nothing, and even though they’ve probably worked out by now that I have to carry the can for your brother’s death – in spite of that, they asked me to help. Because they think I can help. And I think I have.’ He gestured at the papers in her hand. ‘I came up with Maze Man.’

‘That’s your idea of investigative help? A tenuous connection to an obscure TV series that isn’t even available on DVD? What kind of use is that, even if it’s real and not just wishful thinking?’ Her fury burned bright. Tony didn’t think it had much to do with the Bradfield killings. In normal circumstances, she’d have gone with rueful irritation and given Paula an ear-bashing later. This was anger of a different order.

He took his time, breaking off a piece of fish and eating it. ‘The crime scenes are virtually identical. The killer used the name of the star to book a motel room where he probably drowned his second victim. There’s a website which seems to have about a dozen people regularly posting on its forum. If one of them lives in Bradfield, he could be your killer. Or he could know your killer. It’s better than nothing, which is what your team had got until I suggested this.’

Carol slammed the papers down on the table. ‘How can you be bothered with this? How can you give a shit about some weird fuck killing prostitutes when Jacko Vance is out there? You’re in his sights, just like I am. You should be working with Ambrose and Patterson, trying to find Vance, not fucking about here with something that is none of your business.’ She was shouting now, her voice shaking with tears he knew she would do anything to avoid shedding. ‘Clearly you don’t care about me, but don’t you care about yourself?’

Tony stared defiantly at her. ‘Actually, you’ve got that the wrong way round. I probably don’t care enough about myself, but I really do care about you. And Vance knows that. That’s probably why Chris is in hospital right now.’ Even as the words crossed his lips, he cursed his own stupidity.

Carol looked as if he’d slapped her. ‘Chris is in hospital? This is the first I’ve heard about it. What the hell happened to her?’

Tony couldn’t meet her eye. ‘She went to fetch Nelson instead of Paula. Vance got into your flat and booby-trapped the cat-food bin. She got a face full of sulphuric acid.’

‘Oh my God,’ Carol said faintly. ‘That was meant for me.’

‘Yes. I think it was. To make you suffer more and to make me suffer too.’

‘What— How is she?’

‘Not good.’ There was no easy way round the truth now he’d opened the door on it. ‘She’s lost the sight of both eyes, her face is terribly burned and they’re scared about her lungs. She’s in a medical coma to keep her stable and pain-free.’ He reached out for her but she flinched away. ‘We didn’t tell you because we thought you had enough to contend with.’

‘Christ,’ she said. ‘This just gets worse. What are you doing now? Why aren’t you working on Vance?’

‘I’ve already given Alvin all the help I can. He knows where I am if he needs me.’ He felt himself choking up and cleared his throat. ‘I can’t work miracles, Carol.’

‘I used to think you could,’ she said, her face crumpling. She bit her lip and turned away from him.

Tony’s mouth smiled but the rest of his face didn’t follow its lead. ‘You can fool some of the people some of the time … I’m sorry, Carol. I really am. If it makes you feel any safer, I think he’s going to go for hurting Micky next. That probably means Betsy’s the one at risk. Alvin’s done a big production number with the local police, they’ve got armed protection at their place.’ He poked his food with his finger, appetite gone. ‘I don’t know what else we can do. And yes. I’m bloody terrified of what he’s got planned.’

‘Ironic, isn’t it? We’re protecting the woman who enabled Vance’s criminal career all those years. Their fake marriage facilitated him abducting and imprisoning and torturing and raping and killing young women. And you and me, the ones who stopped him, we’re the ones who have lost. She’s going to walk away unscathed again,’ Carol said, anger taking over. ‘It’s so unfair.’ She slumped into the big leather swivel chair opposite him, running out of energy at last.

‘I know. But at least you’re safe here.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I don’t think he knows about this place. I think he’s had someone investigating our lives, watching where we go and what we do and who we see. Those hidden cameras in the barn—’

‘What hidden cameras? Why wasn’t I told about this?’ She managed to summon up her last reserves of outrage. ‘And how the hell did you know?’

‘The techs discovered them while I was still there. Didn’t Franklin tell you?’

‘Franklin tells me about as much as you do, as it turns out.’

Tony let it go. He’d never wanted to fight with her in the first place. ‘Anyway, I don’t think he knows about the boat. I haven’t been here in ages. Saul from the pub keeps an eye on her for me. And when I came down here last night, Alvin got one of the techs to sweep it for me. No cameras, no bugs. So I think it’s off Vance’s radar. It’s a safe house.’

‘He was watching them?’

‘He picked his moment. When they were least likely to notice him walking right up to them.’

‘Bastard,’ she said. She closed her eyes and dropped her head in her hands.

‘There’s a cabin up front,’ Tony said. ‘Nice bed. Arthur liked his comforts. You could catch a couple of hours’ kip before you actually fall over.’

She shook herself, stood up and promptly sat down again. ‘Whoa. Haven’t got my sea legs yet. Thanks but I need to—’

‘You don’t need to be anywhere. Your team in Bradfield know how to run an operation. Alvin Ambrose and Stuart Patterson need some space to prove themselves to you before you’re really their boss. If they do need you for anything, someone will call you.’ He’d never tried harder to make her trust him. Even if it was only until she was awake again, it was worth the effort.

Carol looked around, considering. ‘What about you? You look like shit. Did you sleep last night?’

‘I never sleep,’ he said. ‘Why would one more night make any difference?’ It wasn’t strictly true. The terrible sleep patterns of most of his adult life had succumbed to the calm of Arthur Blythe’s house. It was one of the reasons he’d loved it so much. But he’d never told anyone, and he couldn’t tell her now. It would feel too much like a desperate reach for pity. ‘Go and sleep, Carol. You can fall out with me all over again when you wake up.’

‘That’s true,’ she said. But she didn’t argue. He watched her walk the few feet to the fore cabin, his heart as heavy as it had ever been. He couldn’t escape the conviction that there was something very final going on between them.

44

You could hire anything in coalition Britain, Vance thought. It used to be that everything was for sale. Now, it seemed, everything was for rent. If you couldn’t afford to own it, you could at least pretend you could. And thanks to the Internet, you could find the person who wanted to meet your needs.

By late afternoon, he had a quad bike on a trailer attached to his SUV. From the same farm shop he’d bought a massive sack of specialist stud feed cubes. How ironic was that, a pair of lesbians running a racing stud? At least it made dressing the part easier. He’d also bought a quilted green gilet, a lambswool sweater, a tweed cap and a pair of riding boots. He was all set.

Two miles from Micky’s farm, he pulled off the minor road on to a track that led through a patch of woodland. Once he was out of sight of the road, he unloaded the quad bike then unhitched the trailer and turned the SUV round, ready for a quick getaway. He changed into his disguise, trimming his moustache into a narrow toothbrush and replacing his Patrick Gordon glasses with a pair of goggles. He loaded the sack of feed nuts on to the back of the quad bike, on top of his fire kit, and started it up.

He drove down the road for about a mile then, as he’d memorised from maps and Google Earth, he pulled into a farm gateway on the right. He bounced across a wide expanse of cropped grass, glad that there hadn’t been much rain lately. On the far side was another gate, which led to a field where half a dozen horses looked up uncuriously as he skirted the edge of their pasture. Now he could see Micky’s farm, the house just visible beyond the stable block and the hay barn.

Vance could feel his heart pounding as he approached. He was taking far more of a risk than he enjoyed. But he was determined to make Micky pay for what she’d done to him. He’d thought of leaving her alone for a while. Wait till the police got tired of keeping an eye on her. Let her fear and fret for months, never knowing when he’d come for her. There would be a certain satisfaction in that. But what he wanted more than that was to get away clean and free. He didn’t want to have to come back to the UK once he’d left. He wanted to be done with his retribution. Pay the bills and walk away.

So here he was, motoring towards Micky’s perfect bloody life. He hoped she was enjoying this last evening of peace.

As the shadows lengthened, he made his way through the final gate and drove towards the barn. One of the stable lads came round the end of the block as he approached and flagged him down. ‘Micky asked me to drop off these stud nuts,’ Vance said casually, his accent as upper crust as he could make it. ‘What’s going on? The place is bloody crawling with police.’

‘You know that bloke Vance that’s escaped from prison? Him that’s on the run?’ He sounded Irish, which was perfect. He couldn’t know all the neighbouring landowners the way a local would. ‘He’s Micky’s ex. He’s threatened her with all sorts, apparently.’

Vance gave a low whistle. ‘That’s hard luck. Tough on Micky. And on Betsy too, poor old thing. Anyway, I better stick these in the barn like I said I would.’

The lad frowned. ‘That’s not our usual brand.’

‘I know. I’ve been having awfully good results with them. Real improvements in condition. I said I’d drop them round so she could give them a try.’ He gave a rueful smile. ‘Promised to do it yesterday, but I’ve been running around like a headless chicken.’ The lad moved to one side and Vance put the bike in gear and moved forward.

The hay barn was an old-fashioned wooden barn that backed on to the stable block. On one side were bales of straw, on the other, sacks and bales of fodder. Vance couldn’t have been less interested. He motored down to the far end of the barn and turned the bike round before he dismounted. He pulled the feed off the bike, then started work.

Vance dragged one of the straw bales closer to the back of the barn so that it acted as a bridge between the wooden wall and the stack of bales. Then he propped it up on the wall so there was a wedge-shaped space underneath. He poured the petrol over the straw, then he packed the empty space with foam chips. Finally, he lit half a dozen cigarettes and stuck them into the foam. If the arsonist he’d cultivated in jail had told him the truth, the foam would smoulder for a while, then the petrol vapours would ignite the straw. The barn was a fire-trap, and the fire would spread into the roof of the stables, bringing the roof down on the terrified horses.

The only downside was that he wouldn’t be around to see it. Hiding in plain sight was a lot harder in rural Herefordshire than it was in a city like Worcester. Vance climbed back on the bike and headed back the way he’d come. This time, nobody stopped him. The stable lad he’d spoken to before actually waved.

People were so easy to fool. The quickness of the hand deceived the eye, every time. He hadn’t lost any of his magic. As Micky was about to find out.

45

Paula was sitting in Stacey’s seat, having been left in nominal charge of the MIT’s computer systems. Stacey had left her with dire injunctions about what not to interfere with. Paula might be willing to chance her arm by going round Carol Jordan, but she knew better than to try the same stunt with Stacey. So three of the six screens were off limits to her. They were processing information constantly but she had no idea what it was about or whether there were any results the team should know. Stacey had assured her that she would monitor the system remotely, which was fine by Paula.

But the remaining screens were her business. The investigation on the ground in Northern Division fed all its data into their computers and that was immediately shared with MIT. Of course, that presumed that Northern were uploading everything that crossed their paths and not making false assumptions about prioritising. She also hoped there weren’t any numpties who thought they could make a name for themselves by hugging their interview product close to their chest so they could pursue their own leads instead of pooling them. Sam had tendencies in that direction, and the last few years had demonstrated that you could only go so far in eliminating the Lone Ranger streak.

So she’d been the one who learned that the fourth victim had been identified. This time, the killer had been a little less thorough in his precautions and he’d ditched the victim’s handbag in a litter bin just round the corner from the body dump. Paula called up the images of the bag, and saw a stained, beaded pouch with a long thin strap. The contents were arranged next to it: a dozen condoms, a purse containing £77, a lipstick, and a mobile phone. A sad full stop to a life, Paula thought.

The phone was registered to Maria Demchak at an address in the Skenby area. Preliminary inquiries – whatever that meant, Paula thought sceptically – had her down as an illegal from Ukraine, probably trafficked, living in a terraced house with a dozen other young women under the protection of a former professional boxer who was married to an ex-lap dancer who happened to be Russian.

‘This is interesting,’ she said. Kevin Matthews, the only officer remaining in the squad room, came over for a look. ‘This one seems to have had a pimp.’

‘He’s getting bolder,’ Kevin said. ‘His first three were loners. Nobody looking out for them when they were out working. But a pimp keeps an eye on his assets. This bastard thinks he’s invincible. Maybe that’s the way we’ll bring him down.’

‘I hope you’re right. He’s getting careless too. We didn’t find any ID or handbags with the other three. Tony said he might be keeping them as souvenirs.’

‘I tell you, this was a really public way to deliver the fourth victim,’ Kevin said. ‘Every single person who shops in that arcade is going to get the full SP on all the gory details. It’s not just going to be Penny Burgess baying for blood. This is going to go national. No, never mind national. It’s going to go international, like Ipswich a couple of years ago.’ He chuckled. ‘I was on holiday in Spain when that was going on. You should have heard the Spanish newsreaders trying to get their tongues round Ipswich. I tell you, never mind Vance. We’re going to be front and centre all over the world.’

‘The chief’s not going to like that.’

‘She’s not here. She won’t have a say. It’ll be Pete Reekie calling the shots on the press conference for this one, and I don’t think he’ll hold back now. Face it, Paula, we’re going to be under siege from the reptiles of Her Majesty’s press tomorrow. And we have got the square root of fuck all to give them.’

Right on cue, Stacey’s desk phone rang. Both reached for it but Paula was faster. ‘DC McIntyre,’ she said.

‘It’s Stacey.’

‘Hi, Stacey. We’ve got an ID for number four—’

‘I know, I told you I’d monitor the case traffic. I’ve got something for you from the Oklahoma website.’

Paula grinned and gave Kevin a thumbs-up. ‘You are a genius, Stacey. Have you got a name for us?’

‘I’ve got a starting point,’ Stacey said repressively. ‘There’s nobody from the UK among the forum posters. But I found a back door into the site and managed to pull up the email archive. About a year ago, an email arrived, which is now in the system inbox on my number one screen. I’m in the process of tracking down the sender, I’ll forward those details on soon as.’

‘Thanks. How’s it going down there? How’s the chief holding up?’

‘I’m too busy for this, Paula. I’ll give you relevant information when I have it.’ And the line went dead.

‘All the social skills of a hermit crab,’ Kevin said.

‘I thought she was getting better, but I’m just going to have to face it: that girl is never going to hold down a seat at gossip central. Let’s see what she’s got for us.’ Paula was already opening the email. She pulled it up to fill the screen and read, ‘Hi, Maze Man man. Love your site. I am a Brit, nobody over here seems to remember the show. I have the whole set on video, but they’re getting a bit worn out. Do you know anybody in England who has a set I could copy? All the best, MAZE MAN FAN.’

A note from Stacey followed. ‘See reply: “Sorry, MMF, no Brits come by here. Good luck with your search.” See email address: am data-mining for Kerry Fletcher on my system. More later.’

Paula turned and gave Kevin a high five. ‘It’s a start,’ she said.

‘It’s more than that. It’s a name. A solid lead, which we have been seriously lacking on this case so far. Let’s see if we can get this whole thing wrapped up before the guv’nor comes back from Worcester.’ He shook his head. ‘Bloody Worcester. I’d barely heard of the place six months ago. Now I can’t turn round without falling over it.’

Paula’s mobile rang and she looked at the caller ID screen then pulled a face. ‘I’ll tell you one good thing about Worcester,’ she said. ‘Penny bloody Burgess doesn’t work there.’

Tendrils of smoke spiralled upwards, melding into one before separating into gauzy wisps that dissolved into the ever-thickening air. Yellow and red pinpricks bloomed on individual strands of straw, blossoming into tiny flames that mostly sputtered and died. But some survived, bursting into flame like a kernel of corn popped in a pan. They crackled and spat, transforming the straws into conduits of fire, carrying the blaze upwards and outwards.

The blaze grew exponentially, doubling its reach in minutes, then seconds, till the pile of bales at the back of the barn was a wall of flame, clouds of smoke trapped to thicken under the roof. Tongues of fire licked at the wooden roof beams, spreading along their length like water spilled on a flat surface. At that point, nobody had noticed what was happening.

It was the roof beams that were the bridge into the stable block itself. They extended into the roof space of the stable so the two buildings could offer each other mutual support, strengthening both in the process. The fire crept along the sturdy joists, delayed but not defeated by the mortar that was supposed to seal their passage into the stable block.

The horses smelled the smoke before the humans did. Uneasy, they stamped and snorted in their stalls, heads tossing and eyes rolling. A grey mare kicked the walls of her loose box, whinnying high and loud, the whites of her eyes stark against the black rims of her eyelids. When the first spears of flame penetrated the floor of the hayloft above the horses, unease shifted closer to panic. Hooves clattered and foam flecked the corners of their mouths.

By now, the fire was moving fast, finding flammable material in its path; wood, hay and straw succumbed quickly. Terrified horses screamed and kicked the wooden doors of their stalls. Even though stable lads were out and about, patrolling in defence of their bosses, by the time anyone caught on to what was happening, the fire was in the driving seat.

The first lad on the scene, Johnny Fitzgerald, opened the nearest stable door on a scene from hell. Horses with rivers of flame running down their backs reared and screamed, their flailing hooves wild weapons against any would-be rescuer.

Johnny didn’t care. Shouting, ‘Fire! Fire! Call the fire brigade!’ he ran towards the chestnut mare with the white mask that he’d ridden out on that very morning, pausing only to grab a rope halter coiled on a hook by the door. Falier’s Friend was one of his favourites, a gentle-tempered mare who was transformed by the sight of National Hunt fences into a speeding bullet of desire to be at the front of the field. Lowering his voice, Johnny approached, talking constantly in a monotone. The horse remained on all four hooves, head swinging from side to side, eyes rolling, snorting and whistling as gouts of flame landed on her back and ran down her side to the ground, where they created fresh rivers of fire. The heat was tremendous, searing Johnny’s nose and throat as he moved forward. The noise of the horses and the fire tore at his heart, fear and pity surging through him. He loved these beasts, and it felt like there was no way out of this without death putting in an appearance.

Johnny wasted no time in getting close enough to toss the halter over the horse’s head and throw back the bolt on the stall door. ‘Come on, my lovely girl,’ Johnny said. Falier’s Friend needed no encouragement. She lunged towards the opening, almost sweeping Johnny from his feet as they both headed out into the yard.

By now, there was a frenzy of activity. The fire’s grip was concentrated at one end of the block, and all around, stable lads and police protection officers were doing what they could to stop it spreading and to rescue the horses. Johnny spent a few valuable seconds trying to calm the chestnut mare, then handed the rope to a cop. He pulled off his sweater and dunked it in a trough of water, then swathed his head in it before he went back in.

If it had been bad before, it was hellish now. He could barely stand the heat as he forced himself forward towards the next horse. Midnight Dancer, a black beauty whose condition was the envy of every yard in the area. Now her glossy dark flanks were dulled with smoke and ash and sweat, her screaming whinny a knife that went through Johnny’s smoke-dulled brain. He burned his hand on the hook that held the nearest halter, but he managed to hold on to the rope.

Lassoing the horse was almost impossible. Tossing head, flashing teeth, twitching ears all made her a treacherous target. Johnny swore softly, trying to make his curses sound like endearments. All at once he was aware of a figure beside him. Through the dense black smoke, he made out the familiar face of Betsy Thorne, his boss and mentor. ‘I’ve got water,’ she shouted. ‘I’ll throw it at her, try to shock her, you get the halter on her.’ It was hard to decipher her words over the crackle of flame, the clatter of hooves and the cacophony of squeals and screams, but Johnny got the gist.

Betsy threw the bucket of water at Midnight Dancer and for a split second, the horse was still. Johnny wasted no time and threw the halter. It caught on the horse’s ears, then slithered down the back of her neck. As Betsy reached for the bolt on the door, there was a loud crack, then a screeching creak. They both looked up as one of the heavy oak joists came away from the roof, a massive flaming missile headed straight for them.

Without pause, Johnny dropped the halter rope and threw himself at Betsy, his slight weight enough to shove her out of the path of the falling beam. Scrambling to her feet, she turned to see Johnny and Midnight Dancer both fatally pinned beneath the still-burning rafter. At the sound of another creak overhead, Betsy swiftly clambered over the dead lad and the beam towards the pale rectangle of the door.

As she stumbled into the yard, Micky swept her into her arms. Betsy pulled away, hot vomit surging from her stomach and splattering the herringbone brick of the yard. Tears were running down her face, and not just from the smoke. As she steadied herself, one hand on the cool wall of a building not on fire, the fire brigade’s engines swung into the yard, splashing blue light on the scarlet flames shooting through the roof.

Betsy panted, legs suddenly weak. So this was what it felt like when Jacko Vance came after your peace of mind. At the thought, she was sick all over again.

46

The boat rocked and Tony’s heart leapt in his chest. Only the impact of a human body had that effect. He tried to scramble to his feet, but the space between the bench seat and the table was too tight. Panicked, he scrabbled for purchase with his feet then nearly wept with relief when he heard Ambrose calling, ‘OK if I come down?’

‘For fuck’s sake,’ Tony said. ‘You nearly gave me a heart attack.’

Ambrose appeared, legs first. ‘You need to get yourself a doorbell. Or one of those brass bells like some of them have got. Be a proper water person.’ He looked around, taking in the laptop and the scattered papers. ‘DCI Jordan was looking for you,’ he said. ‘I told her you were probably here.’

‘Thanks,’ Tony said. ‘Did I mention she thinks her brother’s murder is my fault?’

‘Ah,’ said Ambrose. ‘She didn’t say anything. I thought … ’

‘Any day before yesterday, you would have thought right.’

‘So where has she gone?’

Tony gestured towards the bows with his head. ‘She’s having a kip.’

Ambrose smiled the weary smile of a married man who knows how these things go. ‘So you sorted things out, then?’

Tony shook his head, trying not to show how upset he was. ‘Armed truce, I think you’d have to call it. Exhaustion in a points victory over rage.’

‘At least she’s talking to you.’

‘I’m not sure that’s a plus,’ Tony said wryly. He was spared any further explanation by the opening of the cabin door.

Looking slightly smudged and tousled, Carol appeared. ‘Does this place have— Oh, Sergeant Ambrose. I had no idea you were here.’

‘Just arrived, ma’am. I hoped I’d find you here. I’ve got an update for you both,’ he said, all serious business now his next boss was in the room.

‘In a minute,’ Carol said. ‘Tony, what do you do for a loo here?’

‘The door on the left,’ he said, pointing right. Carol gave him a pissed-off look and disappeared into the head. ‘It’s actually a proper bathroom,’ he said to Ambrose. ‘She’ll be impressed.’

Ambrose looked doubtful. ‘If you say so.’

‘This update – it’s not good, is it? I can tell by the way you were avoiding looking at either of us.’

Ambrose glared at him. ‘You know better than to ask.’ He looked around the galley appreciatively. ‘This is lovely, this. I’d love a boat. Me and the wife and the kids, we’d properly enjoy ourselves with one of these.’

‘Really?’ Tony tried not to sound bemused.

‘Yeah. What’s not to like? Your own boss, no traffic jams, take things easy, but you’ve still got your home comforts around you.’

‘You could borrow it, you know.’ Tony waved an expansive hand in the air. ‘I hardly use it. You might as well.’

‘You mean it?’

‘Sure. Trust me, Alvin. This is not going to be my home. I’m only here right now because I realised this morning that it’s safer than Bradfield.’

Carol emerged in time to hear the last phrase. She’d managed to smooth out the crumples and looked fresh and alert. ‘I wish you’d thought about safety a bit sooner,’ she said, before giving Ambrose the full wattage of a welcoming smile. Tony wondered how she could find the energy to keep lashing out at him. ‘So, Sergeant. What have you got that’s too important for a phone call?’

The corner of Ambrose’s mouth quirked in something that might have been a smile. ‘To be honest, I needed to get out of the building. There’s a kind of energy that builds up when an inquiry isn’t going the way you want. It’s not a good energy, and sometimes you just got to get out of it. I need to get my mojo back. So I took the opportunity to bring you the latest news myself.’ He sighed. ‘It’s not good, I’m afraid, though it’s a lot less bad than it could have been.’

‘Micky?’ Tony asked. ‘Has he gone for her? Is she OK? Is Betsy OK?’

Ambrose nodded. ‘They’re both fine.’

‘What happened, Sergeant?’ Carol cut in, cool and firm, back in full professional command of herself.

‘Vance got through the security cordon.’ He shook his head in amazement. ‘He was on a quad bike with a bag of stallion stud nuts, whatever they are. Dressed like one of the local landed gentry. One of the stable lads stopped him, but he gave some convincing load of tosh about having promised Micky to drop off this special feed. Drove straight into the barn and set a slow-burning fire. Then drove off on this bloody quad bike in full view of the cops. He was out of sight by the time the barn went up.’

‘Was anyone injured?’

‘A stable lad died trying to save Betsy Thorne. She nearly got hit by a falling beam. Would have, if it hadn’t been for the dead lad knocking her clear. A couple of the stable lads have minor burns, apparently. They think the real target was the stable block itself. He was going for the horses.’ Ambrose looked apologetic. ‘Like Tony said: he’s going for what matters to his victims. So they have to live with the consequences of what they did to him.’

Carol’s face froze in a rigid mask.

‘What happened to the horses?’ Tony asked. It was the first thing that came to mind.

‘Two dead, the rest were either out in the fields or else rescued by the stable lads. They were incredibly brave, according to the officers on the ground.’

‘And they didn’t catch him? He just drove away on his quad bike,’ said Carol, exasperated and angry.

‘They found the quad bike in a wood nearby. Along with a trailer. From the tyre tracks, it looks like he was driving an SUV. West Midlands have already got details of the trailer-hire place, they’re hoping to find out what he’s driving. But it’s Saturday evening and there’s nobody there, so God knows when that’ll pay off.’

‘He wasn’t driving an SUV last night, was he?’ Tony asked. ‘One of your people told me one of the neighbours saw a Ford saloon in the driveway before the fire started.’

‘Yeah, we’ve backtracked on the traffic cameras and we think that’s what he was driving. No clear shots of him, though. And we lose him about a mile away from yours. He must have cut through side streets, away from the main roads.’

‘So he dumped that car and hired an SUV,’ Carol said. ‘Have you checked all the car-hire places in the area? He had to make the swap somewhere, and he wouldn’t have wanted to drive the Ford any longer than he had to. It was tainted, it had to go.’

Ambrose looked startled. ‘I don’t think we’ve done that yet,’ he said, sounding worried. So he should, Tony thought.

Carol fixed him with a cold blue stare. ‘You’re really not used to this scale of operation, are you, Sergeant? Not had much experience of coordinating manhunts down here in West Mercia? Struggling with first principles, are you?’

‘We only just found out about the SUV before I left the office,’ Ambrose said. ‘I expect it’s been actioned by now. But I don’t know, because I’ve not been there. We’re not incompetent, ma’am.’

‘No. I’m sure you’re not.’ Carol sighed. ‘Is it me, or does it seem to you that Micky’s got off very lightly in all of this? Compared to me, and Tony? And Chris, of course, who got what was meant for me.’

‘What’s your point?’ Tony said, butting in before Ambrose could say something she’d flay him for.

She blinked hard, screwing up her eyes. ‘She was his enabler for years. Old habits die hard. Isn’t that what you’re always telling us, Tony? What if this fire was just Vance throwing dust in our eyes? What if Terry Gates wasn’t Vance’s only helper on the outside?’

47

Even on a Saturday evening, Heathrow was still so busy that only the security staff paid any attention to the customers. Nobody wondered why a man with dark hair, brown eyes behind glasses, and a moustache might re-emerge from the men’s toilets with dark blond hair in a completely different style, bright blue eyes and no facial hair. For now, Patrick Gordon was back in his box, replaced by Mark Curran, company director from Notting Hill.

He’d left the SUV in the long-stay lot and within half an hour he was behind the wheel of another Ford, a silver Focus estate this time, Bruce Springsteen’s Greatest Hits blasting out of the speakers. Better days, indeed. Tonight he was going to sleep in his own bed, back in Vinton Woods. He might even take a day off tomorrow. Even the Lord rested on the seventh day. He had more acts of vengeance to perform, more spectacular deaths to orchestrate and deliver. Then it would be time to shake the dust of this old, tired country from his heels. He’d originally thought the Caribbean would fit the bill for his new life. But the Arab world was the crucible of change right now. A man of means could live very well in a city like Dubai or Jeddah. There were places in the Gulf where life was still cheap, where a man could exercise his appetites without interference, as long as the price was right. More importantly, these places had no extradition arrangements with the UK. And everyone spoke English. So he’d covered his bases and bought a property in each region.

Vance could almost feel the warmth on his skin. It was time he took what was rightfully his. He’d worked hard for his success. All those years of pretence, hiding his contempt for all the insignificant people he’d had to be nice to, acting like he was one of them. The common touch, that’s what they said he had. As if. The only common touch he’d wanted was the one where he got to slap them senseless.

Prison had almost been a relief. Of course he still had to present a facade to the authorities. But there were plenty of opportunities behind bars to strip off all the false faces and let people see the real Jacko Vance in the full rawness of his power. He loved that moment when so-called hard men realised he wasn’t the pushover they’d assumed; the way their eyes widened and their mouths tightened in fear when it dawned on them that they were dealing with someone who had no limits. Not in the way that they understood limits. Yes, prison had been the perfect place to hone his skills.

But now it was time to leave all that behind him and start a new life where he could focus on the good bits. As he drove through the dark he turned over to the radio news channel for the on-the-hour bulletin. The news of his attack on Micky’s stud should have hit the headlines by now. The headlines bypassed him in a blur of noise: Arab street protests, coalition cuts, prostitute murder in Bradfield. Then the item he was waiting for.

‘The racing stud farm of former TV star Micky Morgan was targeted in an arson attack this evening. A stable lad died in the inferno, while trying to rescue horses from the blazing stables. Two horses were also killed in the fire, which started in a hay barn. But prompt action by the stable staff meant the remaining fifteen thoroughbred racehorses were rescued. The building itself was extensively damaged. Police refused to comment on whether the attack was connected to the escape from prison this week of Ms Morgan’s ex-husband, the former athlete and TV presenter Jacko Vance. But a source close to Ms Morgan said, “We’ve been holding our breath, waiting for that evil man to strike out at Micky. To attack defenceless horses is as low as it gets.” More on this story in our next bulletin on the half-hour.’

Vance slammed his hand down on the steering wheel, making the car swerve, provoking a blare of the horn from behind. ‘Two horses and a stable lad?’ he shouted. ‘Two fucking horses and a poxy stable lad? All that risk, all that preparation for two fucking horses and a stable lad?’ It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t nearly enough. It wasn’t even Micky who loved the horses, it was Betsy. He’d wanted the stables obliterated, Betsy’s second life destroyed, Micky impotent when it came to taking the pain away. The arsonist whose information he’d relied on had got it wrong. Either that or the greasy, greedy bastard had deliberately lied to him.

Rage flooded his body, raising his temperature and making him feel caged inside the car. Vance took the first exit and parked in a lay-by. He got out of the car and started kicking the plastic rubbish bin, swearing at the night. All the tension that had kept him going during the preparation for the attack on Micky’s farm exploded in a sudden rush of violence. ‘Bitch, bitch, bitch,’ he shouted into the sky.

Finally, he exhausted himself and staggered back against the car, a tide of angry misery still engulfing him. What he’d planned, that would have been enough. He’d have been satisfied with that. But she’d managed to get one over on him yet again. He couldn’t allow that to happen. Things would have to step up now. He’d complete tomorrow’s mission tonight. Thanks to his fetish for contingency planning, he’d brought all he needed with him, just in case. Afterwards, he could go back to Vinton Woods and lie low for a few days. He could activate the other camera systems and figure out how to destroy the other cops. Then he could come back for a second bite of the cherry and really make Micky pay.

Anything else was not an option.

Her legion of fans would still have recognised Micky Morgan, in spite of the years that had passed since she’d last appeared on their TV screens. It didn’t matter that there were silver threads running through the thick blonde hair, or that there were lines radiating from the corners of her blue eyes. The bone structure that underpinned her beauty meant she was still clearly that same woman who had smiled into their living rooms four days a week at lunchtime. The constant exercise of working with horses meant she’d kept in shape; her trademark long shapely legs still looked as good as ever they had, as Betsy frequently reassured her.

But tonight, the last thing on Micky’s mind was how she looked. Betsy had come close to losing her life for her beloved horses. If it hadn’t been for the quick wits and quicker hands of Johnny Fitzgerald, she’d have been the one crushed beneath a smouldering beam and Micky might have been without the only person who still made her life worth living. They’d been together for more than fifteen years now, and Micky couldn’t imagine life without Betsy. It went beyond love; it was a shared set of values and pleasures, a complementary set of skills and failings. And tonight she’d nearly lost it all.

The same thoughts and fears kept circling her mind, pushing everything else to the periphery. She knew with her head that Betsy was safe and well, soaking in the tub upstairs to get the smell of smoke out of her hair and skin. But Micky’s emotions were still churning. She really wasn’t paying much attention to the police officer who kept asking her questions she didn’t know the answers to.

Yes, she thought this was Jacko’s handiwork. No, she hadn’t heard from him since he’d escaped. She hadn’t actually heard from him in years, which suited her just fine. No, she didn’t know where he might be. No, she didn’t know who might be helping him. He’d never been big on friends. Just on using people. No, she hadn’t seen or heard anything out of the ordinary that evening. She and Betsy had been playing bridge with a couple of friends from a nearby village when the alarm had gone up.

Micky shuddered at the memory. Betsy had been first to her feet, throwing her cards to the table and running for the door. The police protection officers had tried to keep them from leaving. They clearly hadn’t expected to be straight-armed out of the way by a middle-aged woman who was stronger than either of them. Micky had run after her, but one of the officers had been a bit more together and he’d grabbed her round the waist and manhandled her indoors. ‘It could be a tactic, the fire,’ he’d shouted at her. ‘He could be trying to draw you out so he can take a potshot at you.’

‘He doesn’t do shooting,’ Micky had shouted back at him. ‘You need two arms to target shoot well. And he doesn’t do anything he can’t do well.’

Where that had come from, she didn’t know. Until the events of this week, it had been a long time since she’d thought of Jacko. But since his escape, he’d felt like a constant presence, always at her shoulder, continually watching her and telling her how she could improve. When the police had come to her door, telling her what they believed he was up to, she’d had no trouble believing she would be high on his list of those who should be punished.

If not for Betsy and the horses, she would have run. Daphne, one of the friends they’d been playing bridge with, had counselled her to go. ‘Darling, he’s a brute. You mustn’t let yourself be a target for his spite. Betsy, tell her. She should take herself off somewhere he won’t find her.’

But it wasn’t an option. She couldn’t leave Betsy behind. And besides, how long was she supposed to stay gone? If they caught him in a day or two, fine. She could come back. But Jacko was resourceful. He would have planned his escape and its aftermath in detail and with precision. He could be on the lam for months. For ever. And what was she to do then? No, running wasn’t an option.

The policeman asked something and Micky roused herself enough to ask him to repeat it. ‘I asked if you could give us a list of the people who are turning up to take your horses away.’

‘I can do that,’ Betsy said, coming into the room. The first thing she’d done after the paramedics had given her the all-clear was to get on the phone to anyone in the surrounding area who might have spare stalls in their stables so she could provide shelter for her beloved horses. ‘I’m sorry, I should have given you the details. I was just so desperate to get the smell of smoke off me.’

‘I understand,’ he said.

Betsy was already scribbling names down on a sheet of scrap paper in her small precise script. She passed it to the policeman and put a reassuring hand on Micky’s shoulder. ‘Now, if that’s all, we’d appreciate a little peace and quiet,’ she said, charming but firm. When they were alone, she cradled Micky’s head against her breasts, loose inside her eminently respectable tartan dressing gown. ‘I don’t want another evening like this in a hurry,’ she said.

‘Me neither,’ Micky sighed. ‘I can’t believe he tried to kill the horses. What’s that about?’

‘It’s about hurting us, I think,’ Betsy said sensibly. She let Micky go and went to pour herself a Scotch. ‘Do you want one?’

Micky shook her head. ‘If that’s the case, I’m glad he chose the horses to go after rather than you.’

‘Oh, honey, don’t say that. It cost Johnny his life, don’t forget. And those poor horses. They must have died in utter fear and total agony. It makes me furious. Poor old Midnight Dancer and Trotters Bar. Innocent animals. There’s not much I would have put past Jacko, but harming those glorious, innocent animals is lower than I thought he could sink.’

Micky shook her head. ‘There’s nothing Jacko wouldn’t do if it served his ambitions. We should have realised that before we tied our lives to his.’

Betsy curled up on the chair opposite Micky. ‘We had no way of knowing what his secret life was.’

‘Maybe not. But we always knew he had one.’ Micky fiddled with her hair, winding a strand round her finger. ‘I’m so glad you’re safe.’

Betsy chuckled. ‘Me too. There was a terrible moment when I thought, “That’s it, Betsy. Curtains for you.” And then Johnny came to the rescue.’ Her face grew solemn.

Micky shivered. ‘Let’s not talk about it.’ As she spoke, they heard voices in the hall. What they were saying was indistinct, but it sounded like a man and a woman.

The door opened and a woman walked in. She looked familiar – short blonde hair cut thick and textured, medium height, grey-blue eyes, good looks worn down by tiredness and time – but Micky couldn’t quite place her. The clothes were no clue either – navy suit, decent cut but not extravagant, pale blue open-necked shirt, lightweight leather jacket that brushed the top of her thighs. She could have been anything from a lawyer to a journalist. Her mouth tightened as she looked at Micky and Betsy, apparently relaxed in their farmhouse kitchen. ‘You don’t remember me, do you?’ she said, giving them both a cold stare.

‘I do,’ Betsy said. ‘You’re the police officer who arrested Jacko. I remember you giving evidence at the Old Bailey.’

‘Jacko, is it? The man tries to burn down your livelihood and he’s still Jacko to you?’

Micky looked to Betsy for a lead. Her lover’s expression hardened and a new watchfulness crept into her eyes. ‘He was Jacko to us for years. It’s habit, that’s all.’

‘Is it? Is it really all? Or does it betray your real attitude, Ms Thorne?’ The woman’s voice sounded strangled, as if it was a struggle to control herself.

‘You have the advantage of us. I’m sorry, I don’t remember your name.’

‘You should. It’s been in the news enough this week. It’s Jordan. Carol Jordan. Detective Chief Inspector Carol Jordan. Sister of Michael Jordan.’

The silence that followed Carol’s words seemed to swell till it filled the space between the three women. Finally, it was Betsy who broke it. ‘I’m very sorry. What happened to your brother and his wife was unforgivable.’

‘Partner. Lucy was his partner. Not his wife. They never married. And now, thanks to your ex –’ She tipped a nod to Micky ‘– they never will.’

‘I can’t tell you how sorry I am,’ Micky said.

‘You could try,’ Carol said, eyes blazing.

‘We’re victims too, you know,’ Micky said. ‘Betsy could have died in that burning stable block.’

‘But she didn’t, did she? She had a miraculous escape.’ Carol threw her shoulder bag down on the kitchen table. ‘In my line of work, miraculous escapes are suspicious things, not hallelujah, praise the Lord things. You see, often the miraculous escapes are set-ups. They’re set up to divert suspicion.’ She kept her eyes moving between the two of them, watching their reactions, looking for the tells she’d learned to spot after years at Tony Hill’s side.

‘That’s a pretty outrageous thing to say. An employee of ours died this evening while saving my life,’ Betsy said, her outward show of calm unruffled. Micky knew better, though. She knew that under the surface, Betsy had a temper that would see off the likes of Carol Jordan.

‘Is it really that outrageous? I’m looking at the scale of Vance’s revenge. Tony Hill’s home was burned to the ground. The one place in the world he’s ever felt at home. But all that happens to you is a little fire in a stable block. My brother and his partner were brutally murdered. I’ve never seen so much blood at a crime scene. But all that happens to you is that two horses die. And a stable lad whose name you don’t even bother with. Does that seem proportionate to you?’

‘It was meant to be much worse than that,’ Betsy said. ‘The fire brigade said if we hadn’t had the stable block timbers treated with anti-inflammatory chemicals, the whole roof would have come down. Ja— Vance obviously couldn’t have known that.’

Carol shrugged. ‘Not unless you told him.’ She turned her stare on Micky.

‘Why on earth would we do that? Why would we help him? It’s not as if he’s been a great help to us over the years. His actions destroyed Micky’s TV career.’ Betsy was clipping her syllables tight now, clamping down on her anger.

‘Which suited you just fine, didn’t it? Let’s face it, Betsy, TV was never your world, was it? This is much more like it. Country tweeds and horses. Pukka accents and polo chukkas. Vance’s disgrace did you a favour, I’d say.’

‘That’s not how it was,’ Micky said, her expression pleading. ‘We were pariahs, it’s taken years to rebuild our lives.’

‘You were his enabler, his mask. Practically his accomplice. He hid behind you for years while he kidnapped and tortured teenage girls. You must have known there was something he was hiding all that time. Why should I believe you’re not still facilitating him? Somebody’s helped him set all this up. Why not you? You cared about him once.’

‘This is outrageous,’ Betsy said, her tone a blade that cut through Carol’s tirade.

‘Is it? How does it work, Betsy? I don’t have a big house or a string of horses to care about so I have to lose my brother?’ All at once, Carol sank into the nearest chair. ‘My brother.’ The words came out as a sob. She buried her face in her hands and for the first time since Blake had broken the news, she cried properly. She cried as if she had never cried before in her life and was determined to run through every available variation on the theme. Her whole body convulsed in sobs.

Micky gave Betsy a ‘what do we do now?’ look, but she was too late. Already Betsy was halfway across the room. She pulled up another chair and held Carol close, as if she was her child. Betsy stroked her head and made inarticulate sounds of comfort as Carol cried herself out. At a loss, Micky went to the cupboard and poured three large whiskies. She put them on the table then fetched the kitchen roll.

At last, Carol stopped weeping. She raised her head, gave a hiccuping gulp and swiped her face with the back of her hand. Micky tore off a few sheets of kitchen roll and handed them to her. Carol sniffed and blew and wiped then spotted the whisky. She emptied one of the glasses in a single shuddering swallow then took a deep breath. She looked wrecked, Micky thought. Literally and figuratively. ‘I’m not sorry for what I said,’ she said.

Betsy gave her an admiring smile. ‘Of course you’re not. I rather think you’re a woman after my own heart, Chief Inspector Jordan. But please believe me. It might not look like it from where you’re standing, but we’re Jacko Vance’s victims too. The only difference between us is that you’ve only just joined the club.’

48

After Carol’s whirlwind departure from the barge, Alvin had gone back to HQ. Usually, Tony was glad when people left him to his own devices. Even the people he liked. But right now, every time Carol walked out on him, he was gripped with a fear that it might be for the last time. Her visit to the barge had not been a reconciliation, he knew that. She’d come because she needed something from him and that need had transcended her desire not to have him in her sight. What would happen when all of this was over? The prospect filled him with gloom.

When he hated his own company like this, the only cure he knew was work. And so he turned back to his laptop and tried to put Carol Jordan from his mind. But it wasn’t that easy. He kept coming back to his awareness of her pain. He hated to see her suffer, especially when that suffering could be laid, at least in part, at his door. Worst of all, she’d stormed off. He didn’t know where she was or how to help her.

Tony tried to concentrate, but it wasn’t working. It didn’t help that the saloon smelled of the remains of the fish and chips he hadn’t managed to eat. He pulled the bag out of the bin under the sink and tied it in a knot. Then he climbed out on to the stern and walked up the pontoon to the nearest bin, leaving the doors open so the cool evening air could freshen the interior of the boat. ‘If this was a thriller,’ he said aloud, ‘the bad guy would be sneaking aboard right now and hiding in the cabin.’ He turned back, noting that the boat was motionless. ‘No such luck.’

Back at the boat, he leaned against the stern rail and looked out across the marina. The roofs of the boats looked like black beetles, lined up in rows. A few boats were lit up, their soft yellow light spilling in pools on the black water. In the distance a man was walking a pair of Westies. The voices of a group of young men leaving the pub carried across the marina in a jumble of sound. In the old warehouses, now converted to apartments with views of the canal basin, squares and oblongs of light split up the dark facades in random patterns.

‘Motive,’ he said to a passing mallard. ‘That’s what separates psychologists and police officers. We can’t do without it. But they’re really not that bothered. Just the facts, ma’am. That’s what they want. Forensic evidence, witnesses, stuff they think you can’t fake. But I’m really not all that bothered about the facts. Because facts are like views. They all depend on where you’re standing.’

The duck stopped paddling away from him and came back for more. ‘I need a motive for these murders,’ Tony said. ‘People don’t just kill for the hell of it, no matter what some of them say. In their heads, what they’re doing makes sense. So we’ve got a killer who’s murdering sex workers but it’s not about having sex with them. And it’s not about being turned on by the killing because he’s doing that differently every time. People who are turned on by murder have very specific triggers. What pushes my hot button does not push yours.’ He sighed and the duck lost interest. ‘I don’t blame you, mate. I bore myself sometimes.’

He stood up and jumped back on to the pontoon. Finally he’d found a place to pace. Head down, he walked to the end then turned back and walked the full length again, his limp easing a little as his limbs loosened up along with his brain. ‘So if you’re not doing it for the gratification of the killing, what are you getting out of it? What are you trying to achieve? I don’t believe it’s notoriety. When you want notoriety and you don’t get it, you start sending emails to the likes of Penny Burgess. If there’s someone you want to impress, they’re already in a position to get the message.’ He turned back and walked down the pontoon again, more slowly this time.

‘Let’s think about the victims. One way or another, it’s about the victims. Sex workers. You’re not a religious nutter trying to cleanse the streets. A man with a mission, he’s not going to bother with all this elaborate TV series stuff. It’s the cleansing that matters, not some arcane message.

‘What’s the effect of what you’re doing? What does it achieve?’ He stopped abruptly, possible light dawning. ‘You’re trying to scare them off the streets? Is that it?’ He felt very close to something revelatory, something that would make sense of the information he’d been studying. ‘Not them. Her,’ he said slowly. ‘You need her to stop. You need her to come off the streets. To come home.’

He spun round on the balls of his feet and ran back to Steeler. It felt like he was in pursuit of an idea that might slip away if he didn’t share it. Back on board, he grabbed his phone and speed-dialled Paula. As soon as she answered, he said, ‘He’s trying to scare someone.’

‘Is that you, Tony?’

‘It’s me, Paula. Your killer – he’s trying to scare someone.’

‘He’s scaring a lot of people, Tony.’ She sounded exasperated. He imagined it had been a long day without Carol at the helm to steer them straight.

‘I realise that. But there’s one person in particular he’s trying to scare. He’s trying to make her too frightened to work the streets. He wants her to come home. You can see it in the escalation. He started with the lowest of the low then he worked his way upwards. He’s saying, “It doesn’t matter what rung of the ladder you stand on, the bad thing can still get you.” He wants her to understand that, whatever she’s running from, it’s better than what she’s run to.’

‘Makes sense.’ Paula sighed. ‘But how does that help me?’

‘I don’t know. What about Vice? Do they keep track of the new girls on the block? At least they’d know where to go to ask around. You’re looking for someone who’s not been on the streets for long. She’ll probably have showed up in the weeks before the first murder. See what you can find out. Names, background details, as much as you can nail down. Once you find her, you’ll find him. The man who wants her back.’

‘Why doesn’t he just take her back? He’s been taking these other women off the streets.’

‘He needs to kid himself that she’s come back of her own free will. Remember, Paula, he doesn’t look at the world the way we do. Imagine normal motives, then give them a twist. I think this is all about scaring her home so he can tell himself he’s the one she wants to be with.’

‘I worry about you sometimes, you know,’ Paula said. ‘The way you figure out the twists and turns inside their heads.’

‘I worry myself. Did Stacey get anywhere with the Maze Man website, by the way?’

‘Sort of. There’s no regular frequenter of the site from the UK, but she found an email from a bloke trying to contact anyone in the UK with a full set of videos. He’s using a hotmail address, so it’s hard to get any reliable data. But Stacey’s done one of her magic tricks and established that most of the emails sent from that address have been sent from the Bradfield area. She’s also been running the number plate recognition data and she’s narrowed down his base of operations to an area in Skenby. The high flats and a few surrounding streets.’

‘That’s another step in the right direction. Good luck with it all. Let me know how you get on with the Vice.’

‘Will do. Have you been in touch with the chief?’

Tony closed his eyes momentarily. ‘I saw her earlier. She turned up out of the blue and found me working on your case.’

‘Oh shit,’ Paula said.

‘She’s got bigger things to worry about right now. She’s running away from her emotions. When they finally catch up with her, it’s not going to be pretty.’

‘At least she’s got you in her corner.’

Tony felt the prickle of tears in his throat. ‘Yeah. For what it’s worth. Anyway, you need to get on. Keep me posted.’

He ended the call and turned back to the computer. When all else fails, talk to the machine.

Stacey stared intently at her monitor, occasionally tapping a few keys or clicking her mouse. Ambrose, whose desk was behind hers, looked over from his screen and watched her covertly, admiring the absolute focus she brought to her task. He wished they had an officer like her on their team instead of having to rely on the unreliable Gary Harcup. Gary was good enough, but he wasn’t always around when he was needed, and he certainly couldn’t pull off stuff like this woman could. He wasn’t sure whether all her burrowing was entirely legal, but he didn’t care as long as she came up with the goods and a cover story that would satisfy the CPS and the courts.

As he watched, she pushed back from the screen and turned round, catching him in the act. ‘Result,’ she said, showing none of the triumphalism that normally went with that claim.

‘Really?’ Ambrose got up and went across, peering into her screen. ‘Vinton Woods? What’s that?’

‘An exclusive community within ideal commuting range of Bradfield and Leeds,’ Stacey said. ‘It’s in West Yorkshire, so I guess it’s either part of DCI Franklin’s patch or close to it. I got a fragment of the name from the partially deleted material on Terry Gates’s hard drive and did a universal search of properties that have changed owner at the Land Registry in the past six months. There were a couple of matches, but this is the only one that fits the profile of what would suit Vance.’ She clicked and typed and estate agent’s details of a substantial mock-Victorian house appeared on the screen. ‘This was bought by a company registered in Kazakhstan. The payment came from a Liechtenstein trust who bank in the Cayman Islands. Unravelling all that will take weeks. But it’s exactly the sort of set-up Vance would use to hide behind.’

‘If you say so,’ Ambrose said. ‘It makes my head hurt just thinking about it.’

Stacey shrugged. ‘Well, we know that Vance shipped all his cash offshore after he was arrested, and that there was a lot of it. A house like this would be the perfect base. Even if he’s only here for a matter of weeks, he’s got total control of his bolthole and he’s got an asset he can dispose of when he doesn’t need it any more.’

‘Oh, I believe you,’ Ambrose said. ‘I just can’t get my head round the mind of someone who can be arsed to go to these lengths just for revenge.’

Stacey turned and gave him an indulgent smile. ‘That’s probably quite healthy, skip.’

‘I need to get up there,’ he said.

‘Shouldn’t we get the local lads to keep a discreet eye on it? It’s going to take you at least two hours to get there, even blues-and-twos.’

Ambrose shook his head. ‘This is our pursuit. From what your guv’nor said about Franklin, I don’t trust him not to go in mob-handed like a glory-hunter. This needs careful handling and I think we’ve earned the right to lead it. I’m going up there with a hand-picked team. We’ll call on local support once we know what we’re dealing with.’ He patted her on the shoulder. ‘You’ve done a great job. I’ll make sure my boss knows who’s responsible for this breakthrough. Just don’t speak to Franklin about this. Or any other West Yorkshire detectives.’

Paula hoped someone would be on duty in the Vice squad’s office this late on a Saturday. She expected most of them would be doing whatever it was that off-duty cops got up to on a Saturday night. Anybody working would probably be out on the street on the busiest night of the week for the sex trade. But her luck was in, even if the cop who answered the phone sounded as if he was down to his last shredded nerve. ‘DC Bryant. What do you want?’

Paula identified herself and her unit. ‘I need some info,’ she finished up.

‘Paula McIntyre? You’re the one who got nailed in that undercover that went tits-up a while back, aren’t you?’ His tone was accusing, as if it was somehow her fault that her colleagues’ cock-up had nearly cost her her life. Even thinking about it made the back of her neck sweat.

‘And you’re the division who supplied the detective who caused the problem, but I’m not going to hold that against you,’ she snapped back at him.

‘There’s no need to be like that,’ he grumbled. ‘So what do you need to know?’

‘Does anybody keep intel on new girls on the street?’ she asked.

‘What kind of intel?’

‘Names. Background, that sort of thing. How long they’ve been on the game. Or at least, how long you’ve known about them.’

He sniffed loudly. ‘We’re not fucking social workers, you know.’

‘Believe me, that never crossed my mind. Do you have any intel like that or not?’

‘The sarge keeps a file. But she’s off duty tonight.’ There was an air of finality in his voice.

‘Can you get hold of her? It’s really important.’

‘It always is, with you MIT lot.’

‘It’s four fucking murders so far, DC Bryant. I really can’t be arsed bothering my chief with your snotty attitude, but if that’s what it takes to get a bit of action going round here, I will do it. Now, do you want to phone your sergeant and ask her, or do you want my guv’nor to do it?’

‘You need to take a chill pill, detective,’ he said. She could hear the laugh under his voice. ‘I’ll call her. But don’t hold your breath.’ The phone clattered down at his end.

‘Bastard,’ said Paula. She wondered if there was a way to circumvent Vice, but she couldn’t think of one. Not on a Saturday night with all her social services contacts tucked up in front of the telly with a takeaway curry and Casualty. She’d just have to wait for DC Bryant to get his finger out. Bastard, right enough.

Stacey watched Ambrose get into a huddle with DI Patterson. She was uneasy about his proposed angle of attack on Vance’s putative bolthole. She understood his desire to be the one to recapture Vance. They’d done all the groundwork, after all. It was only fair that they should get to front up the news reports, let their kids see them on the telly and be proud. What wouldn’t be so good would be if their way meant Vance slipped through the net. If that happened, Stacey had a funny feeling it might end up being her fault.

She picked up her phone and called her boss’s number. Even in her present state of mind, Carol was a better judge of operational matters than these very nice men who, with the best will in the world, hardly ever dealt with the level of stuff Bradfield’s MIT handled all the time. When Carol answered the phone, her voice sounded odd. Like she had a cold or something.

‘Hi, Stacey. Any news?’

Stacey reported her discovery of the Vinton Woods address, and what Ambrose was proposing. Carol listened without interrupting, then said, ‘I don’t trust Franklin either. He was completely sceptical about the idea that it might be our friend in the first place. Rather than have him go at it half-hearted, I think we should leave him right out of the loop for now.’ She paused for a moment. ‘I’m going up there. If I leave right now, I should make it ahead of the posse. I can figure out the lie of the land and see what the options are. Thanks for letting me know, Stacey.’

And she was gone. Stacey stared at the phone, not feeling in the least reassured. This was starting to feel like something that was headed full-speed ahead for disaster. And with Jacko Vance in the driving seat, the only guarantee was that there would be nothing half-hearted in what happened next.

49

When Stacey’s call had come through, Carol was almost back in command of herself. Exhausted and mortified though she was, she knew a weight inside her had shifted. She could pick herself off the floor and get a grip on the task in hand. Which was to stop Jacko Vance causing any more damage.

She’d stood up and stepped away from Betsy to speak to Stacey. So she’d already begun the process of separating herself from the two women. One thing she knew for sure was that she didn’t want them to know her plans just in case she’d been right about their loyalties. Carol ended the call and said, ‘I have to go.’

‘I don’t think you’re in a fit state to go anywhere,’ Betsy said, kindly rather than bossily.

‘I appreciate your concern,’ Carol said. ‘But I’m needed elsewhere. I have a team in Bradfield who need their commander. Your ex-husband isn’t the only person intent on destruction right now.’ She picked up her bag and ran a hand through her hair, feeling sweat on her forehead. She supposed she was feverish. It was hardly surprising after that outburst. ‘I can see myself out.’

She wasn’t sorry to get out of the room. Betsy had showed her the sort of kindness that disarms. And yet she’d been very cool about the human victim of Vance’s attack. Thinking about that offset the kindness, which suited her because Carol did not want to be disarmed, especially not where Micky Morgan was concerned. She remained unconvinced the woman was truly free of Vance. It didn’t matter whether it was charisma or fear that held her in thrall, Carol believed there was still something unresolved between them.

Outside, she sat in her car for a moment, gathering her thoughts. She was going to bring Vance down. His capture had her name on it. Nobody had more right to that moment than her. If Ambrose was putting a team together, he wouldn’t have left Worcester yet. She could beat him to it. She bet he wouldn’t drive all the way from Worcester to Vinton Woods with flashing lights and sirens. Neither Ambrose nor Patterson was gung-ho enough. She pulled the blue light out of her glove box and slapped it on the roof of her car and set it going, spitting gravel from her wheels as she took off.

She’d take Vance down tonight or die trying.

Tony wondered how Paula was getting on with the Vice team. They’d always been a law unto themselves, straddling the twilight zone between the respectable and the disreputable. Unless they developed a rapport with at least one segment of the group they policed, they couldn’t do their jobs. That rapport had always gone hand in hand with the easy, sleazy promises of corruption. And historically, a lot of Vice cops had gone to the bad, though not always in the predictable ways. Because they dealt with a perverted reality, their crimes had an unhealthy knack of being less than straightforward.

And Paula had history with them. He wondered whether guilt made them more inclined to help her, or if she reminded them of a period in their history they’d rather forget.

His phone rang, the screen saying ‘blocked’. He wondered whether it might be Vance, calling to gloat. But then he’d never been one of those who had to boast about their crimes. He didn’t kill because he craved attention. He did almost everything else in his life for that reason, but not the killing.

There was only one way to find out. Tony pressed a button and waited. ‘Dr Hill? Is that you?’ It was a woman’s voice, familiar but too tinny for him to identify.

‘Who is this?’

‘It’s Stacey Chen, Dr Hill.’

Well, that made sense. She was probably using some electronic scrambler to disguise her voice. That would fit with her general suspicion about the world around her. ‘How can I help you, Stacey? Well done on that Oklahoma website, by the way.’

‘It was just number crunching,’ she said dismissively. ‘Anyone could have done it with the right software.’

‘How are you getting on with tracing Kerry Fletcher? Has he shown up yet?’

‘I’ll be honest, it’s frustrating and I don’t like to be frustrated by computer systems. He’s not on the electoral roll or the council tax register. He’s not claiming benefit and I can’t find a fit in the right age group in medical records. Whoever he is, he’s been living under the radar.’

‘I can see how that would frustrate you.’

‘I’ll get there. Doctor, I’m not sure I should be ringing you. But I’m a bit worried and you’re the only person who can help, I think.’

Tony gave a little laugh. ‘You sure about that? These days when I’m the answer it’s usually because somebody is asking the wrong question.’

‘I think I’ve found where Vance is hiding when he’s not committing his crimes.’

‘That’s great. Where is it?’

‘It’s called Vinton Woods. It’s between Leeds and Bradfield. The last bit of woodland before you hit the Dales.’

‘Does that mean it’s on Franklin’s patch?’

‘It’s in the West Yorkshire force area.’

‘Have you called Franklin?’

‘That’s the problem. DS Ambrose was there when I found it, so I told him. He’s determined that West Mercia should make the arrest and he ordered me not to tell Franklin or any of the other West Yorkshire detectives.’

‘I can see that would be awkward for you,’ Tony said, still not clear why Stacey was involving him.

‘Just a bit. So I thought I’d speak to DCI Jordan and let her make the call.’

‘Only, she won’t call Franklin either, am I right?’

‘Exactly. She’s heading there now. I don’t know where she’s heading there from, but the chances are she’s going to get there ahead of West Mercia. And I’m afraid she’ll bite off more than she can chew. He’s a very dangerous man, Dr Hill.’

‘You’re not wrong, Stacey.’ Even as he spoke, he was reaching for his coat and groping in the pockets for his car keys. He got one arm in a sleeve then juggled the phone to his other ear. ‘You did the right thing, calling me. Leave it with me.’

‘Thanks.’ Stacey made an odd sound, as if she was about to speak but thought better of it. Then said in a rush, ‘Take care of her.’ And the line went dead.

As he stuffed the other arm in its sleeve and hustled up the steps and padlocked the boat, Tony thought that those four words from Stacey were the equivalent of anyone else in MIT grabbing him by the throat and shouting, ‘If you let anything happen to her, I will kill you.’

‘I’ll take care of her, Stacey,’ he said to the night as he ran up the pontoon and sprinted down the marina to the car park. He didn’t stop to think until he was joining the motorway and realised that he didn’t actually know where he was going. Nor did he have Stacey’s number. ‘You numbskull,’ he shouted at himself. ‘You fuckwit numbskull.’

The only thing he could think of was to call Paula. Her phone went straight to voicemail and he swore all the way through the outgoing message. After the beep, he said, ‘This is really important, Paula. I don’t have Stacey’s number and I need her to text me the directions to the place she’s just told me about. And please don’t ask either of us what this is all about or I will have to cry.’

It wasn’t an idle threat either. In spite of his determination to keep his emotions at arm’s length, Tony was starting to feel fraught, as if the threads that held him together were fraying. It was easy to take for granted how important Carol was to him when she was there in the background of his life. He’d grown accustomed to their companionship, he was used to the lift in his spirits when their encounters were unexpected, he had come to rely on her presence as a constant steadying force.

Growing up, he’d never learned the building blocks of love and friendship. His mother Vanessa was cold, her every gesture and comment calculated and calibrated to get precisely what she wanted from any situation. This was the woman who had taken a knife to Eddie Blythe, her fiancé, when it had seemed the most profitable thing to do. Luckily for Tony, she hadn’t managed to kill him. Just scare him off for ever.

When Tony had been a kid, Vanessa had been too busy constructing her business career to be bothered with the shackles of motherhood and she’d mostly abandoned him to his grandmother, who was equally lacking in warmth. His grandmother had resented him occupying the space she thought ought to be occupied by an unfettered old age and she let him know it. Neither Vanessa nor his grandmother brought their social lives home with them, so Tony never had much chance to watch people interact in normal, routine ways.

When he looked at his childhood, he saw the perfect template for one of the damaged lives he ended up treating as a clinician or hunting as a profiler. Unloved, unwanted, harshly punished for normal childhood mischief or obliviousness, estranged from the normal interactions that allowed for growth and development. The absent father and the aggressive mother. When he interviewed the psychopaths that became his patients, he heard so many echoes of his own empty childhood. It was, he thought, the reason he was so good at what he did. He understood them because he had come within a hair’s breadth of being them.

What had saved him, what had given him the priceless gift of empathy, had been the only thing that ever saved anyone like him – love. And it had come from the most unexpected of places.

He hadn’t been an attractive child. He remembered knowing it was true because that’s what he was always told. He didn’t have much objective evidence. There were almost no photographs. A couple of class photos when the teacher had actually managed to shame Vanessa into ordering a copy, and that was that. He only knew which one was him because his grandmother had pointed it out to him. Usually accompanied by, ‘Anybody looking at this photograph would know which one was the most worthless bastard of the lot.’ Then she’d stab the photograph with her knobbly arthritic finger.

Little bastard Tony Hill. Short trousers that were just a bit too short, a bit too tight, revealing skinny thighs and bumpy knees. Shoulders hunched, holding himself together with arms ramrod straight by his side. Narrow face under a tousle of wavy hair that looked like it hadn’t ever seen anything as poncey as a stylist. The wary expression of a kid who’s not sure where the next slap is coming from, but knows it’s coming. Even then, even there, his eyes had commanded attention. Their blue sparkle was undimmed by everything else. They were the clue to a spirit that hadn’t entirely given in. Yet.

He was picked on endlessly at school; Vanessa and her mother had invested him with the air of the trained victim and there were plenty willing to take advantage of his unprotected status. You could batter Tony Hill and know his mother wouldn’t be up at school next morning bellowing at the Head like a Grimsby fishwife. Last to be chosen for team sports, first to be jeered at for anything, he’d stumbled through school in a state of misery.

He was always last in the dinner line. He’d learned that was the only way to get any dinner at all. If he let all the big kids get well ahead of him, he could hang on to his tray without having his crumble and custard ‘accidentally’ dumped in his stew and dumplings. None of the little kids was interested in tripping him up or spitting on his chips.

He’d never paid much attention to the dinner ladies. Tony was used to keeping his head down and hoping the adults wouldn’t notice him. So he was taken aback one day when one of the dinner ladies spoke as he approached the hot table. ‘What’s matter wi’ thee?’ the woman said, her strong local accent making the question a challenge.