Aunt Jane was an honorary title. There was no blood relation between the two. She was Gerry’s mother’s best friend from their schooldays and, though the two had gone in very different directions, the friendship had endured. When Gerry was younger, they didn’t see much of Aunt Jane, who, she later learned, had been serving in both Afghanistan and Iraq, but when she did come to town it was like Christmas. Her energy and enthusiasm for just about everything were infectious, and although Aunt Jane and Gerry’s mother were the same age, to Gerry, Aunt Jane always seemed more vibrant, more fun and far, far more cool. That was unfair to her mother, she now realized, but back then she had just been an impressionable child. Aunt Jane had taught her a few martial-arts moves to use against the boys who pulled her hair at school; Aunt Jane had taken her for a pillion ride on her motorcycle and made her promise never to tell her mother; Aunt Jane had helped her choose the colors that suited her and showed her how to apply lipstick, eyeliner and mascara before she was officially allowed to wear makeup by her parents. And then, of course, she had disappeared back to Afghanistan again as suddenly as she had arrived. A leg injury caused by an IED had put paid to her active service, and she now walked with a slight limp, like Terry Gilchrist, but the army had found her a suitable desk job at Catterick, and she had seemed happy enough to leave the world of action behind.
“Well, look at you, stranger,” Aunt Jane said as they both sat down. “It’s been too long. Why haven’t you been to see me? It’s not as if I’m far away now you’re up in Eastvale.”
“I know. I’m sorry,” said Gerry. “Just, you know, being the new girl and all . . . it’s a hard job.”
Aunt Jane smiled. “No need to tell me that,” she said. “I just miss my old friend Geraldine, that’s all. You must come and see me more often.”
“I’d like that,” said Gerry. Aunt Jane was the only person apart from her mother who called her Geraldine.
“How’s Tess—I mean your mother. I haven’t heard from her in ages, either.”
“She’s fine,” said Gerry.
“Still lecturing at the poly?”
“It’s a university now,” said Gerry. “They all are. Have been for years. But, yes, she’s still working.”
“Dad still drafting wills?”
Gerry laughed. “He’s still working, yes.”
“Good for him. Aidan’s still carrying a torch for you, you know.”
Gerry felt herself blush. Aidan was Aunt Jane’s son, and they had been out together a few times in their teens. “I thought he was married now.”
“Oh, he is,” said Aunt Jane. “Mariette. Nice enough girl. But it doesn’t stop him pining for you.”
“Oh, stop it,” said Gerry. “You’re embarrassing me.”
“You always did embarrass easily. Shall we study the menus? Wine?”
Jane already had a glass full of red wine in front of her, and the bottle stood open on the table.
“Just a drop,” said Gerry. “I’m driving.”
Jane poured her some wine. A bit more than a drop, in Gerry’s opinion, but she said nothing. “And in case you’re wondering,” Jane said. “I’m not. Driving, that is. One of the perks of rank.”
They clinked glasses and Jane put on her reading glasses to examine the menu. In the end they both decided to have moules marinières for starters and settled on pan-fried halibut with black carrots and various foams, ketchups and sauces for Gerry, and for Jane a twenty-eight-day matured fillet steak, cooked rare, with hand-cut chips, onion rings and vegetables. They put in their orders and leaned back in their chairs.
“You were asking about a Mark Vincent,” Jane said finally. “May I ask why?”
Gerry leaned forward and lowered her voice. She had known when she set up the meeting that if she expected to get information she had to be willing to give some, and she trusted Aunt Jane as much as she trusted anyone. More than most, in fact. “He’s a suspect in a case we’re working on,” she said.
Jane narrowed her eyes. “Well, I assumed that much,” she said. “What case? And don’t try to weasel out of it.”
“A shooting. A mass shooting.”
“The Red Wedding?”
“Shhh,” said Gerry, glancing around nervously. “Yes.”
Jane topped up her glass and offered to pour more for Gerry, who declined. “You’re working on that? How exciting. I thought you’d got your man, though. How much of a suspect is he?”
“Hard to say just yet. That’s why I wanted to talk to you.”
“You know I can’t give you any details? National security and all that. The army likes its privacy. We don’t like to be held too accountable for our actions. We don’t like to let people know what we’re up to. We always have a get-out-of-jail-free card up our sleeve.”
Gerry laughed. “I know,” she said. “I’d just like to know anything you can tell me about his military career.”
“Oh, there’s plenty I can tell you. I had a good nose around after you phoned, even talked to some people who knew him. And if it helps you, that’s all well and good, as long as nobody else knows where it came from.”
“I’ve got no problem with that,” Gerry said. “If it helps, I’m just trying to get some kind of confirmation that we’re on the right track. I’m pretty sure of it, but we have no real evidence yet.”
Jane swirled the wine in her glass. “Well, I can’t answer that question for you,” she said. “Mark Vincent was nothing unusual. He had a few problems, but who doesn’t?”
“So how did you, or the army, deal with his problems? And what were they?”
Jane sighed. “You have to understand, dear, that in addition to other things, we’re quite tolerant of our own. As you know, we have internal systems of discipline, rules and regulations. They’re as much meant to protect us from the outside as they are to enforce justice and punishment within the services. To put it bluntly, no matter what the recruitment adverts and friendly websites tell you about careers and what have you, all that goes out of the window in wartime. In wartime, a soldier’s job is to kill people, and we will forgive him an awful lot if he just does that one job exceptionally well.”
“And Mark Vincent did?”
“There was a war of some sort or another throughout most of Mark Vincent’s army career. Like many other soldiers in his position, he saw far more action than any human being should have to see, and he endured it. Don’t you think that takes a sacrifice, maybe rips out a little part of your soul? We also asked him to do things that no decent human being should ever have to do. Whatever we may be, us soldiers are not automatons. We are not without conscience, human feeling, compassion even. At least we start out with those things. In some cases, they get knocked out of us over the years. That may have been the case with Mark Vincent.”
Their moules arrived and both sat in silence for a while to enjoy them. “What was the general consensus on Vincent?” Gerry asked.
Jane paused with her fork in midair. “Mark Vincent was a violent and disturbed young man when he joined up. He had a lot of anger, and we taught him to channel and direct that anger and violence. Which, when you think about it, is hardly unusual in the army. As a rule, we can direct violence against the enemy, but if you’re asking me whether I think he’s the kind of man who could direct it against someone he thought had betrayed or crossed him, then I’d have to say yes. But that’s just an opinion based on an afternoon spent reading files and talking to people about him. And I’m not a psychologist.”
“Don’t worry. I’m not going to quote you,” Gerry said, “Did he ever train as a sniper?”
Jane hesitated before going on. “The army doesn’t like to talk about things like that,” she said, “but yes, he did. He was an excellent shot, and he had no compunction about killing strangers from a distance. It would have been a waste not to train him. And use him.”
“Did he have mental problems?”
“Of course he did. Show me a soldier who doesn’t. Sometimes mental problems can
be valuable assets in the military. Oh, we have our psychiatrists and so on, but it’s not like you can patch up a psyche in a field hospital the way you can a gunshot wound or an IED injury. And it’s not as if our shrinks have the time it takes to spend on fixing these minds. Years of therapy? No chance. Many of them go undiagnosed. PTSD, for example. There’s been a lot of talk about that recently.”
“Did Vincent suffer from PTSD?”
“Hard to answer. I’d reckon that he probably did—at least he suffered some of the symptoms. He was never diagnosed—he never spent long enough with a psychiatrist for that—but in my layperson’s opinion, from what I’ve read, and what people have told me, I’d say he did. According to one report I saw, he suffered from headaches and insomnia, and he had difficulty controlling his emotions and forming relationships with others. There were also issues of substance abuse, again not uncommon in PTSD cases, or in combat, for that matter—just think Apocalypse Now.”
Gerry had never seen Apocalypse Now, but she didn’t want to let on to Jane. “Drugs?” she said.
“In Mark Vincent’s case, the doctor thought it was mostly alcohol, though other drugs may have been involved. You should remember that pretty much all of this was only discovered toward the end of his military career, shortly before his discharge. He never underwent any serious psychiatric evaluation.”
“I got the impression, reading between the lines,” said Gerry, “that the discharge was dishonorable.”
“Well, that’s true to some extent,” Jane said, “but we prefer a mutual parting of the ways, if we can work one out. I’m sure you have the same policy with bent coppers when you can get away with it. Far less headline-grabbing. And Mark Vincent had certainly served long enough to retire gracefully.”
“He didn’t object?”
“No. He took the package, as they say in business.”
“Did his discharge involve anything to do with a civilian massacre?”
“I know of no such massacre.”
“Kosovo?”
Aunt Jane remained silent for a while. “It takes a long time for these things to come out, for the investigation into allegations to be completed, probably much like your business.”
“So he was?”
Aunt Jane merely smiled.
“I also think he made connections there he used later when he was involved in people trafficking later,” Gerry went on. “Especially young girls in the sex trade.”
“Well,” said Aunt Jane. “I wouldn’t deny that such things happen. Soldiers do sometimes come into contact with criminal elements.”
“But he was also promoted to sergeant at one point. How on earth did that come about?”
“How do these things usually come about? Deceptive appearances. Human error. He was good at getting people to do things, and that’s one trait you want in a sergeant. Leadership quality. Unfortunately, as we discovered too late, Vincent was only good at getting people to do things that benefited himself, not the army as a whole. I never came into contact with him, you understand, so I’m speaking very much as an outside observer here, based on official reports and a couple of off-the-record conversations, but I’m pretty good at reading between the lines, and I’d say Vincent was charming and manipulative when he wanted to be. And he did have a bit of a temper.”
“How did it manifest?”
“Bar brawls, that sort of thing. Fighting in general. Again, that’s not so unusual for a soldier. He was quite a decent boxer in the ring, too. Controlled and disciplined.”
They finished their moules just as the main courses arrived. Jane worked her way through the wine as she ate her bloody steak. Gerry had only taken a few sips of her first glass. Mostly because she was driving, but partly because the rich and complex red wine didn’t go very well with moules or halibut. “What kind of state was he in after he left the army?”
“I’ve no idea what became of him. Maybe you can fill me in on that?”
“Petty crime,” said Gerry. “Assaults, arson, prison, that possible involvement in people trafficking I mentioned earlier.”
“Not surprising. It’s what I would have predicted from what I’ve read. At least the army gave him a rudder to steer by and a structure and shape to his life. Without them, he’d have been lost. I’ve seen his type before, far too often. When they first come to us, it’s generally because someone has told them—either you lot or their parents—that it’s either prison or the army. And when they leave us, as often as not it’s prison they drift toward.”
“I thought the army was supposed to make men out of boys?”
“You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, Geraldine. You ought to know that in your line of work.”
“But was there a specific incident? He was in Iraq at the time, wasn’t he?”
“Yes. Basra.” Jane finished her steak, pushed the dish away. She had finished her wine, and the alcohol seemed to be having no effect on her. “But as I hinted earlier, it was mostly a matter of the Balkans catching up with him. In Iraq it was petty crime, mostly. Black market, that sort of thing.”
“And in Kosovo?”
“Other things. Many just rumors. Most not proven.”
“What sort of things?”
“That he was rough with women. Certain kinds of women. Rumor has it he beat up a prostitute once. There were several unexplained murders. Nothing we could pin on Mark Vincent, of course, but in retrospect . . . One way or another, Mark Vincent became a liability. You can argue that it should have happened sooner, but . . . what can I say? Hindsight makes visionaries of us all.”
“What was the problem with women?”
“Same problem as with so many men. Women were all sluts to him. Except his dear dead sister, of course. She was an angel.”
“How do you know about that?”
“According to one of the men I talked to, someone who knew Mark Vincent, he used to go on and on about her, showed her photo around. It seems she died when he was quite young. Is this of any use?”
“Yes. We think this may all be connected with his sister’s death.”
“How?”
The waiter arrived with the dessert menu. Jane studied it and decided on a cream-cheese-and-vanilla mousse, while Gerry settled on an herbal tea. Jane gave her a pitying look. “Oh, Geraldine, Geraldine,” she said. “What are we to do with you?”
When the waiter came by, Jane ordered the mousse and a double Rémy. Gerry thought about the bill and swallowed.
When the waiter had gone, Gerry told Aunt Jane about what had happened to Mark Vincent’s sister, and of Maureen Tindall’s role in it.
“And he naturally thought that if this Maureen had turned up, his sister wouldn’t have died?” she commented.
“Yes. I think so.”
“In his eyes, then, she was perhaps as responsible for the loss of his sister as the actual murderer himself?”
“That’s about it.”
“Well, that’d certainly do it, wouldn’t it?”
“It seems so. But don’t say anything, Aunt Jane. It’s only a suspicion. I’m not supposed to talk about it.”
Jane put her hand on Gerry’s arm. “Don’t worry, my dear, your secret’s safe with me. But I’m puzzled. I read about that wedding, of course, and the mother of the bride survived, didn’t she?”
“Yes. But he did kill her only child.”
“Good lord,” said Jane. “How little we really know about people.”
Indeed, thought Gerry. The dessert arrived, along with Jane’s double Rémy and Gerry’s chamomile tea. While Jane tucked into in her sweet, Gerry sipped the tea and watched her with fascination. She didn’t think she had ever met anyone before who gave herself so wholeheartedly to the act of eating.
“What are you going to do?” Jane asked.
“Now? First we have to find him.”
“He knows the area. He’s spent time at Catterick on and off over the years.”
“Right.”
“And he’s got
survival skills. Done all the courses. You know, dropped in the Scottish Highlands with only a Mars bar and a compass. That sort of thing. Passed with flying colors. He could probably live in a box at the bottom of a lake with nothing but cold gravel for breakfast if he had to.”
“Thanks for that, Aunt Jane. He’s been in jail since his army days, though, and it’s more than likely he’s gone a bit to seed.”
“Just letting you know what you’re up against. Never mind the killing skills we taught him. Be very careful. And I think you can ditch the ‘aunt’ by now, don’t you?”
Gerry agreed, but she would always think of Jane as “Aunt Jane.”
“My driver won’t be here for another three-quarters of an hour,” Jane said, “so I might as well have another cognac while I’m waiting, and you can entertain me with stories about your life in the police force until he gets here. Are you sure I can’t tempt you to anything stronger than another herbal tea?”
“I’ll have decaf coffee,” said Gerry in a small voice.
“How daring. By the way.” Jane reached for her bag. “I’ve got a photo of Mark Vincent for you. It’s not a very good one, I’m afraid, and it’s a bit old, but it’s all I could come up with at such short notice.”
15
“It’s him. There’s no doubt about it,” said Banks as they studied the four images stuck to the whiteboard the following day. The whole team had gathered in the boardroom as if for the unveiling of a significant new portrait. In a way, that was exactly what it was, confirmation that Ray Cabbot’s sketch—up there with the three photographs—was of the man they were after, Mark Vincent, possibly the killer of six people, and certainly a person of interest.
It was midafternoon on Tuesday 12 January, and Banks had just got back from Leeds. First Gerry had filled everyone in about her meeting with Aunt Jane, keeping her identity secret, and then Banks told them all about what he had learned from Michael Charlton and Ricky Bramble.
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