The Retribution

by Val McDermid

  ‘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 th
e 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.’