The Retribution by Val McDermid
‘You’re not the only one,’ the woman said sourly. ‘I’ve not seen her tonight, but her old man was round looking for her last night.’
‘I thought he’d been warned off?’
‘Maybe so. He’s turned the volume down, that’s for sure. But he still hangs around, watching her every move. She turned on him last night, though. Told him to fuck right off.’
‘How did he take that?’
‘He didn’t have much choice, she went off with a punter.’
‘So what was he saying to her to wind her up?’
‘I wasn’t paying a lot of attention. I was trying to earn a fucking living. He was going on at her about how it’s not safe on the streets. That somebody’s killing whores like us and she should come home. She said she’d rather take her chances out on the street than with him. And he said he’d do anything she wanted if she’d just give up selling herself on the streets. And she said, “I just want you to stop this. Now fuck off.” Then she walked away and got in this bloke’s car.’
‘Have you seen them go at it like that before?’
The woman shrugged. ‘He’s been trying to freak her out about there being a serial killer out there.’ She curled her lip in disdain. ‘Like we don’t know there are bastards out there who get off on hurting us. You don’t do this job if you’re worried about health and fucking safety. We all know it, all the time. We just try not to fucking think about it.’
‘What did he do then, her dad?’
She tossed her cigarette end on the pavement and ground it out. ‘He did what he was told. He fucked off. Now I’d like you to do the same.’ She waved her fingers at Sam in a shooing motion. ‘Go on, you’re ruining my trade.’
Sam backed away and watched the woman totter to the kerbside on insanely high heels. What he’d learned didn’t take them much further forward. But it was corroboration. And when you were building a case, sometimes that was the best you could hope for.
51
There was something blissful about the way the blue light carved a line through the traffic. Cars and vans scuttled sideways like crabs when they spotted her. Carol especially loved the ones who were pulverising the speed limit till they saw her in their rear-view. Suddenly they’d brake and slew into the middle lane with an air of, ‘Who, me, guv?’ When she passed them seconds later, they’d always be staring resolutely straight ahead, their vain pretence glaringly obvious.
Sometimes people genuinely didn’t see her. They were lost in music or Radio 4 or some football phone-in on Talk Sport. She’d get right up behind them then give them a blare on the horn. She could actually see one or two of them jump. Then they’d jerk the wheel and she’d be past them, so close she imagined them swearing.
It was exhilarating, this feeling of finally taking action. It felt like forever since she’d stood in the barn looking down at Michael and Lucy’s bodies, a viscous sea of time that dragged at her feet and stopped her making any progress. She wanted to move forward, to bury the horror. But she couldn’t even start while Jacko Vance walked free. At liberty, he was an affront to her sense of justice.
It wasn’t death that Carol wanted to mete out. She knew a lot of people in her shoes would be satisfied with nothing less. But she didn’t believe in capital punishment, or even private vengeance that ended up with bodies on the floor. She and Vance were oddly at one on this point. She wanted him to live with the consequences of what he had done. Every day, she wanted him to know he was never going to look at an unfettered sky again.
And she wanted him to know who had put him back behind bars. Every day, she wanted him to hate her more.
Vance couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in Halifax. It must have been back when he was making his hit series, Vance’s Visits. He knew he must have been there before, because he clearly recalled the spectacular road curving down from the motorway round one side of the bowl of hills that cradled the town itself. Tonight it was a basin of lights, sparkling and twinkling below. It must have been hellish in Halifax after the Industrial Revolution. All those wool mills, spewing out smuts of smoke and clots of coal dust, filling the air with noxious fumes and filth, and nowhere for it to escape to, held tight in the embrace of the hills. He could understand the working man’s attraction to getting out to the dales and the moors to breathe clean air, to feel like a human being and not just a part in the vast machine.
He swept down from the high motorway into the valley below, keeping an eye out for a possible temporary base. He needed somewhere with wi-fi, so that he could check that his target was where he hoped she would be. It was too late for coffee shops, always supposing Halifax had anything so cool. And he didn’t want an Internet café, where people could peer over your shoulder and wonder why you were looking at CCTV pictures of a woman in her living room when she was clearly well past the age of sexual fantasy.
As he rounded a bend, he saw the golden arches of a McDonald’s. He remembered Terry telling him that, when all else failed, you could always count on McDonald’s. ‘Coffee, grub, or the Internet, you can get it there.’ Vance shuddered at the thought. Even when he’d pretended to have the common touch, he’d drawn the line at McDonald’s. But maybe for once he could make an exception. There must be a quiet corner where he could drink coffee and get online.
At the last minute he swung into the entrance and parked the car. He grabbed his laptop bag and went inside. The restaurant was surprisingly busy, mostly with teenagers who were fractionally too young to persuade even the most short-sighted bartenders that they were old enough for alcohol. Their desperate need to feel cool had driven them out from houses where Match of the Day was the natural late-night Saturday fare into the unforgiving glare of McDonald’s lighting. They slouched around the place with their milkshakes and colas, the boys with baseball caps at any angle except the conventional, the girls with an astonishing amount of flesh on display. Vance, who considered himself a connoisseur of teenage girls, felt faintly queasy at the sight. He had no interest in girls who had no sense of dignity. What was there to break down when the girls had already given everything away?
Vance bought a cup of coffee and found a table for two in the furthest corner. Although it was near the toilets, he could angle his screen away from prying eyes. Ignoring his drink, he quickly booted up and ran through his camera sites. Nothing at all at Tony Hill’s house, though the gateway had been boarded up and ‘Danger! Keep Out!’ signs had been posted. From the other camera shots, he could see why. The building was gutted. No roof, no windows, just a partially collapsed shell.
The third scene was the one that made him want to shout abuse at the screen. But Vance knew he had to maintain the appearance of calm. The last thing he wanted was to draw attention to himself. Teenagers were notoriously solipsistic, but even so, it only needed one sharp-eyed observer to create all sorts of problems. Still, seeing the stable block still standing filled him with rage. While he watched, Betsy herself came into shot with an armed policeman, a pair of spaniels at her heels. She was gesturing to various aspects of the relatively undamaged stable block as they walked, clearly having an animated conversation. She didn’t seem to be suffering at all, the bitch. He wanted her on her knees, weeping and tearing her hair out, locked into painful mourning. Maybe next time he should do the dogs. Cut their throats and leave them on Micky and Betsy’s beds. That would show them who had the power. Or maybe he should just do Betsy.
He took a deep breath and clicked on to the last set of active camera feeds. Clockwise, it showed the driveway and frontage of a detached stone-built villa that looked somehow unmistakably Northern. It wasn’t a big house – it looked like three reception rooms and three bedrooms, but it was solid and well maintained. In the driveway, outside a detached wooden garage, was a two-seater Mercedes.
Next was a modern kitchen that had the pristine air of somewhere that’s only ever used to reheat meals supplied by Waitrose or Marks and Spencer. The lights under the wall cabinets were on, casting a cold glow on pa
In the third view, a camera with a fish-eye lens had obviously been mounted in a corner of the half-landing on the stairs. It was possible to see up to the head of the stairs and through an open door that led to a bedroom, and also down the stairs to the front door, whose stained glass glowed faintly, backlit by the street lights outside.
The fourth feed showed a living room that looked as if not much living went on there. There was no clutter; no books or magazines, just an alcove lined with DVDs. A long, deep sofa almost as big as a bed and piled with cushions was at the heart of the room. In front of it, an elaborately carved wooden coffee table that held a trio of remote controls, a wine bottle and a single half-full glass of red. An open briefcase sat on the floor at one end of the table. On the opposite wall was an ornate Victorian fireplace. Where one might have expected a complicated overmantel, there was instead a plasma screen TV that filled the whole chimney breast. The room resembled the most private of cinemas, a sad screening room for one. As he watched, a woman walked into the room wearing a loose kaftan, golden brown hair in a shoulder-length bob tucked behind her ears. The definition wasn’t good enough for much detail, but Vance was surprised to see that the woman neither looked nor moved like someone on the downward slope of her sixties. She picked up two of the remotes and curled into the sofa, adjusting cushions and pillows so that she was comfortable. The screen sprang into life. The angle made it impossible for Vance to identify what she was watching but she seemed intent on it.
Which was all he needed to know. He wasn’t planning on finesse. An elderly woman in the house alone wasn’t exactly a challenging target. Especially since there were no obvious weapons in the room – no convenient fire irons or hefty bronze statues. He’d take his chances with a wine bottle.
He watched for a couple of minutes more, then folded his laptop shut and walked out, throwing his untouched coffee in the bin. Nobody paid any attention. Once that would have pissed him off. But Jacko Vance was slowly coming to appreciate the beauty of anonymity.
Tony did not believe in omens. Just because he was hammering up the motorway well over the speed limit and he hadn’t had any encounters with the traffic police didn’t mean the heavens were aligning in his favour. At one point, a flashing blue light had appeared in his rear-view mirror, but he’d pulled over and the liveried police car had thundered past without a second glance. Clearly someone else was behaving with even less regard for the law than he was. It still didn’t mean the gods were on his side.
Besides, he’d completely failed in his attempts to get Carol to talk to him. He’d been trying her number every few minutes, but it kept going straight to voicemail. At first, he’d hoped she was in one of the few remaining black holes for phone reception, but he couldn’t sustain that optimism for much longer. To begin with he’d left messages, but he’d stopped doing that. There were only so many times you could caution someone against recklessness without them feeling fatally insulted.
The only thing left that he could think of was to try and shock her into inaction. So, at the next service area, he pulled off the motorway and wrote a text. ‘I love you. Don’t do ANYTHING before I get to you.’ He’d never said it before. It might not be the most romantic of occasions, but it should, he thought, freak her out enough to stop her in her tracks. As soon as she turned on her phone, she would see it. Before he could pause to consider the wisdom of his words, he sent it.
Tony got back on the road, wondering how Ambrose was doing. Maybe that had been his team that had hammered past in the outside lane a while ago. He wasn’t sure whether to be happy or anxious about that possibility. He considered calling Ambrose, but before he could do anything about it, Paula rang. ‘Can you talk?’ she said.
‘I’m driving but I’m hands free,’ he said.
‘I think you were right,’ Paula said, filling him in on Sergeant Dean’s information. ‘I’m just waiting for Stacey to come back with an address for me. She’d done the preliminary checks, only with the wrong gender. Now she’s gone back to try again. So far, Fletcher’s name’s not coming up on any of the Skenby flats.’
‘Try his wife’s maiden name,’ Tony said.
‘You think? They’ve lived there for at least ten years, according to Sergeant Dean.’
‘With some people, covering your tracks is second nature. They do it just because they can, not because there’s any specific reason for doing it.’
‘I’ll get Stacey on to it.’
‘Good. I could do with something working out tonight.’
‘Having a bad time?’
‘I’m kind of scared, Paula. I think Carol’s on a collision course with disaster and I don’t know if I can stop her.’
‘That sounds a bit melodramatic, Tony,’ Paula said gently. ‘And the chief doesn’t really do melodrama.’
‘I think tonight might be the exception.’
‘Is there anything I can do?’
‘No, and I don’t even want you to try. You need to bring Eric Fletcher in.’
‘He can wait.’
Tony sighed. ‘Actually, Paula, I’m not convinced about that. He’s escalating both in terms of the gaps between his killings and the risk-taking involved in choosing his victims. He’s close to the tipping point. If Kerry doesn’t give in to his demands soon, he’s going to run out of options.’
‘Then what? He’ll kill himself? Good luck to him, if he does,’ she said contemptuously. Paula cared a lot less about keeping the bad guys alive than Carol did. She’d always thought it was because she’d lost more than her boss. But maybe that wasn’t true. Maybe they just differed on that fundamental point of principle.
‘If he can’t scare her home, he’ll bring her home,’ Tony said.
There was a long silence while Paula digested what Tony meant. ‘Then I’d better chase Stacey up for that address,’ she said quietly.
‘Do that. I’d like to get through tonight without any more bloodshed.’
Carol hit the speed bump so fast her suspension squealed and she had to wrestle the wheel to keep moving in a straight line. If anyone was watching the CCTV whose camera lights glowed red above her, they’d hit the panic button. People who lived in secluded estates like Vinton Woods paid for security because they didn’t want the kind of toerags who hit speed bumps at fifty miles an hour tooling round their streets. Carol tapped the brakes and tried to drive more in keeping with her Stepford Wives surroundings.
As she passed the mock Queen Anne houses, Carol noticed no signs of life. Yes, there were lit windows and cars in drives. But the only thing with a pulse that she saw was a sheepish fox who skulked out of her headlights as she rounded a bend. She had to acknowledge Vance had made a smart move. The kind of people who craved this sort of soulless existence simply wouldn’t notice if a serial-killing jailbreaker moved in next door, as long as he drove a nice car and didn’t come knocking on their door because he’d run out of milk.
She pulled over to the kerb and consulted the map she’d loaded on to her smartphone. Vinton Woods was too new to appear on her car’s GPS system, but she’d found the developer’s map on their website. She worked out where she was in relation to Vance’s house and set off again. Within minutes, she was driving into the cul-de-sac where his house was situated. She tried to make it look like she’d taken a wrong turning, reversing in a neighbour’s gateway and heading straight back down to the feeder road.
In her fleeting glimpse, there had been no obvious sign of presence. Carol drove to the end of the street and considered her options. She wanted to take a closer look at the house, but there was no easy way to do it. There was no casual footfall on these pavements. Nobody walked anywhere, because there was nowhere to walk to. No cars were parked on the street because everyone had driveways and garages enough for all the cars their households could possibly support.
She cruised back along the feeder street slowly, noticing that the ho
It didn’t resolve the problem of getting a closer look at the house. But maybe she didn’t need to get up close and personal with the bricks and mortar. As far as she could see, none of the windows facing down the cul-de-sac was curtained. There was no light visible within the house. Unless Vance was in the dark in a room at the back of the house, the chances were that the house was empty. And if he was asleep in a back bedroom, Carol would be best advised to stay put. Who knew what motion sensors and cameras he had in place around the perimeter to alert him to intruders. Everything he’d done so far had been well considered and well planned. The house would be the same.
On the other hand, if she stayed put, she would see him as soon as he left the house. She could shoot out of the driveway here and either ram him, block him or follow him. It made sense from a policing point of view.
It just didn’t make much sense from a Carol Jordan perspective. The longer she waited, the more likely it was that Ambrose would turn up mob-handed and fuck up the whole thing. There was only one road in and out of Vinton Woods. If Vance got a sniff that the police were interested, he’d just carry on driving and disappear again. She’d have to try to persuade Ambrose to let her be point man on the operation. They’d have to stay well back, out of sight of anyone driving on to the estate, and trust her to alert them as soon as he showed up. Ambrose had worked under her command before and Carol thought she could probably persuade him that she was to be trusted in that role.
The question was whether she could persuade herself.
The suggestion Tony had passed on via Paula had infuriated Stacey. Not because she thought it was a waste of time, but because she should have got there by herself. She didn’t approve of making excuses for herself – her mother had inculcated her in a culture of taking responsibility equally for success and failure – but she did think that if she’d been sitting at her usual workstation, covering the bases would have been much more like second nature. Trying to run two major operations on a laptop and a West Mercia desktop that had a processor with all the speed of a crippled tortoise had proved trying, to say the least.