The Retribution thacj-7

by Val McDermid

  ‘Where were you?’ Still keeping it light, not quite sure what she was looking for.

  ‘I was in the car.’

  ‘What? You couldn’t be bothered following up?’

  Kevin pursed his lips. His fingers stopped dancing and clutched his knee. ‘That’s not actually how it went.’

  ‘So how did it go?’

  ‘Does it matter? Sam got what we needed. It doesn’t bother me that he followed his nose and came up trumps.’ He shifted in his chair, trying for nonchalant and missing spectacularly.

  Carol sized him up. Now she had a clearer idea of what had gone on. Sam had left Kevin in the lurch and chased his own gut instinct. Stupid behaviour at any time, but especially when there was a killer on the loose. ‘You know you should always work in pairs when you’re dealing with people who understand the power of screaming “foul” at every opportunity. Sam left himself exposed, and you shouldn’t have let that happen.’ By Carol’s standards, it was the mildest of reprimands, but it was enough to make Kevin’s milky skin flush dark red.

  ‘I understand,’ Kevin said, his expression mutinous. ‘I didn’t realise he was going to conduct the interview there and then.’

  Carol shook her head, a wry smile on her face. ‘And how long have you been working with Sam?’

  Kevin stood up. ‘I take your point.’

  Carol followed him into the room, looking for Paula. But while she’d been talking to Kevin, Paula had disappeared. ‘It’s like the bridge of the Marie Celeste in here,’ she said aloud.

  ‘I’m still here.’ Stacey’s voice came from behind the monitors. ‘I’m looking at footage from traffic cameras.’

  ‘Shouldn’t some uniform from traffic be doing that?’

  ‘The truth? I don’t trust them to do it properly. They get bored too easily.’

  Carol walked back to her office, unable to keep from smiling. Her bloody-minded, arrogant specialists were never going to be conventional team players. God help the commanding officers who ended up with the members of her squad. It almost made her want to stay, just to see the fun and games.

  Vance had only been on the loose for a matter of hours, but that had been long enough for Maggie O’Toul to get her defences in order. So far, the media hadn’t discovered that she was responsible for advocating Vance’s transfer to the Therapeutic Community Wing, but she clearly realised that was going to happen. When Ambrose turned up for their appointment at the Probation Service offices where she was based when she wasn’t at Oakworth, the receptionist acted as if she’d never heard the name. He’d had to produce his ID before she would even acknowledge the existence of Dr O’Toul. It didn’t help his mood.

  Maggie O’Toul’s office was a cubicle on the second floor with a view across the street to a former cinema turned carpet warehouse. When Ambrose entered in response to her, ‘Come in,’ she had her back to the door, staring out the window as if something remarkable was happening in the world of carpets. The office was crammed with books, files and papers, yet they were organised in such a way that the overall impression was one of neatness. It wasn’t much like any space where Tony Hill was working.

  ‘Dr O’Toul?’ Ambrose said.

  Slowly, apparently reluctantly, she swung round to face him. She had one of those weakly pretty faces marked by anxiety that always made Ambrose feel like he had the upper hand. He thought her looks were the kind that used to be called ‘elfin’ when Audrey Hepburn was a star. Her face was framed by artificially dark hair in a gamine cut which emphasised the fact that she wasn’t going to revisit fifty. ‘You must be Sergeant Ambrose,’ she said, her voice weary, her mouth turning down at the corners. Her lipstick seemed the wrong sort of colour for her complexion. He didn’t know much about that sort of thing, but he’d always had a good eye for what looked well on a woman. He never thought twice about choosing a gift of clothes or jewellery for his wife, and she always seemed happy to wear what he’d bought. Maggie O’Toul did not look like a happy woman.

  Christ, who did he think he was? Tony Hill? ‘I need to talk to you—’

  ‘About Jacko Vance,’ she interrupted, finishing his sentence for him. ‘Am I to be the scapegoat? The blood sacrifice? The person to stand in the pillory of the Daily Mail?’

  ‘Spare me the histrionics,’ he said roughly. ‘If you know your job at all, you must know that Vance is a dangerous man. All I care about is getting him back behind bars before he starts killing again.’

  She gave a dry little laugh and ran her fingers through her hair. Her nail polish was the same wrong colour as her lipstick, making her fingers look oddly mutilated. ‘I rather think I’m better qualified than you to form an accurate impression of what Jacko Vance is capable of these days. I know it’s hard for you to grasp, but even people who have committed dreadful crimes like Jacko are capable of finding a route to redemption.’

  The phrase smacked of a soundbite from a platform presentation. ‘He’s already put one person in hospital today,’ Ambrose said. ‘What I’m looking for from you is not a lecture about how rehabilitated Vance is. Clearly, he’s not. How you square that in your professional world is up to you. But I don’t have the luxury of breast-beating right now. What I need is a sense of how he will behave, where he will go, what he will do.’

  She was smart enough to know she’d been thwarted. ‘I sincerely think he is no threat,’ she said. ‘Like all of us, he will lash out if he’s cornered or frightened.’

  ‘The man he battered senseless was a taxi driver,’ Ambrose said flatly. ‘I can’t readily see how a thirty-four-year-old taxi driver made him feel cornered or frightened. No matter how crap his driving was.’

  ‘There’s no need to be facetious,’ she said primly. ‘Look, hear me out. I’m not stupid, Sergeant. I’ve been doing this job a long time and I am no pushover. I recommended Jacko for the Therapeutic Wing because in our sessions together he was remorseful and insightful about his past crimes. He fulfilled all the criteria for the community, except for the fact that he would never be eligible for release. But why should someone be denied the best chance to recover from the disaster that is their life simply because they can’t gain a hundred per cent of the benefit from that opportunity?’

  Another soundbite, Ambrose thought. He wondered how much of her career Maggie O’Toul had planned to build on redeeming Vance. ‘Tell me, how did his remorse manifest itself?’

  ‘I’m not sure what you mean. He expressed regret and he unpicked the chain of circumstances that drove him to commit his crimes.’

  ‘What about atonement? Did he talk about that at all? About the people whose lives he’d destroyed?’

  She looked momentarily annoyed, as if she’d missed a trick. ‘Of course he did. He wanted to meet his victim’s relatives and apologise in person. He wanted to make amends to his ex-wife for all the grief he’d brought her.’

  ‘Can you remember which victims he mentioned?’

  ‘Of course. Donna Doyle’s family, that’s who he wanted to speak to.’

  ‘Just them?’

  She drummed her fingers quietly on the arm of her chair. ‘She was his victim, Sergeant.’

  Ambrose cracked a half-smile. ‘The only one he was tried and convicted for. What about the other girls he abducted and killed? Did he give up their names at all? Did he express any regrets for their deaths?’

  ‘As you well know, he has always denied those accusations and he was never charged with any other murders.’

  ‘He was actually charged with one other, but he got off because his pal Terry Gates perjured himself. And he was convicted of killing Shaz Bowman till the Appeal Court threw it out. Did Vance mention them among his sins?’

  Dr O’Toul exhaled heavily. ‘I am not engaging in a point-scoring competition with you, Sergeant. I know my competence. I suggest you stick to yours. I’ll say it again: I think Jacko is no threat. I’m disappointed that he has hatched this plot to escape, but I imagine he simply found prison finally intolerable. My guess would be
that he will leave the country for somewhere he feels safe.’ She smiled, her cheeks subsiding into an array of concentric curved lines. ‘And I do believe he will live a rehabilitated life.’

  Ambrose shook his head in disbelief. ‘You really believe all that, don’t you?’ He stood up. ‘This is pointless. Unless you have a specific notion of where he might be – maybe some place he mentioned, some person he was close to – there’s no point in continuing this interview.’

  ‘I have no idea where he might go. Nor who he knows on the outside. I do think this is a tremendous waste of manpower,’ she added. ‘I wouldn’t have recommended Jacko for this community if I hadn’t known he was a changed man.’

  Ambrose headed for the door, pausing as he prepared to step into the corridor. ‘I hope you’re right. I really hope you’re right. I would love to be proved wrong on this.’ He rubbed the back of his thick neck, trying to loosen the tight muscles. ‘And I think you are right about one thing. There are people out there that Vance has unfinished business with. But I don’t think he wants to atone for what he’s done. I think his plan is to make them pay through the nose for what they’ve done to him.’ Ambrose didn’t wait for a reply. He didn’t even close the door behind him. Maggie O’Toul didn’t deserve the satisfaction of a slammed door.

  27

  Paula had not gone far. When she’d seen Carol Jordan heading her way, she’d almost panicked, wondering if her boss had by some sixth sense detected that she was speaking to Tony. But Kevin had been the focus of her attention and Paula had wound up the conversation with, ‘If you’re that near, meet me in the Costa Coffee on Bellwether Street. Five minutes.’ And she’d shot off before anyone could ask where she was going.

  Now she was sitting with the largest skinny latte the coffee shop could provide, waiting for her partner in crime. He didn’t keep her long, plonking himself down at the table opposite her. ‘You not getting a coffee?’ she asked, half-rising.

  He shook his head. ‘Some days, it’s just too hard to choose.’ He frowned. ‘I think the politicians have got it wrong. It’s not more choice we need, it’s less. Too much choice is too stressful. There have been experiments, you know. Rats live longer and healthier lives when they have fewer choices, all other things being equal.’

  Sometimes Paula wondered how Carol Jordan coped with any kind of social relationship with him. His capacity for tangential conversation was beguiling, but hard to handle when you wanted to get straight to the point. ‘Did you get all the files?’ she said.

  He produced a quirky little smile. ‘I assume so. But that’s one of the unanswerable questions, isn’t it? Because I won’t know about the files I didn’t get. It’s like when you’re doing a lecture and you ask if everyone can hear you. Because obviously, if they can’t hear you, they can’t answer the question, so you’re none the wiser.’

  ‘Tony!’

  ‘Sorry. I’m in a funny mood at the moment.’

  Paula scowled at him. ‘We all know you and the chief are watching your back in case Jacko Vance comes after you. Hell, so does anyone who can read. So I will cut you a bit more slack than usual.’

  Tony ran a hand through his hair. ‘I’m not used to people knowing stuff about me,’ he said. ‘I’ve had all these phone calls from journalists wanting me to write profiles of Vance. I don’t think they have any idea how dull a profile is. Even if I was interested enough to return their calls, I couldn’t turn what I do into tabloid fodder. Or even Guardian fodder. I only came out of the house because the phone was doing my head in. And then Penny bloody Burgess turned up on my doorstep.’ He shuddered. ‘You’d have to be some sort of masochist to want to be a celebrity.’

  ‘Is anybody keeping an eye on you?’ Paula asked, suddenly anxious. Tony might be on the far side of odd, but she’d grown fond of him over the years. She’d lost one friend in the course of duty and she knew enough about that kind of grief. Tony had reached out a hand to her then, a hand that had stopped her falling, and she still felt she owed him. There were some debts that could never be paid.

  Tony nodded. ‘So I’m told. There’s been a surveillance van outside the house since before I got home yesterday and there’s a very polite young man who’s keeping tabs on me on foot.’ He made a face. ‘It’s reassuring, I suppose. But I don’t think Vance is coming after me. Simple revenge isn’t his style. He’s much more twisted than that. But how precisely the twist will manifest itself, I don’t know. So it’s been quite good for me to have your case to think about. It keeps me from fretting.’ He peered at her, blinking like an owl in the light. ‘Tell me – what’s your take on Carol? How’s she coping?’

  ‘You’d never know there was anything else going on except for these murders. She’s got her work face on and that’s that.’ She gave a sad little smile. ‘It would kill her to show vulnerability to the likes of us. She needs us to believe in her so she can convince herself she’s indomitable.’

  Tony’s eyebrows twitched up and back again. ‘Have you ever thought of a career in psychology?’

  ‘What? And end up like you?’ Paula laughed out loud.

  ‘They’re not all like me.’ He mugged at her. ‘Just the good ones. You could do this, you know. You’re better than you know.’

  ‘Enough, already. What do you make of it? Is it the same killer, do you think?’

  ‘I don’t think there’s much room for doubt. It’s the same person, Paula. The tattoo is postmortem. It’s signature behaviour. But that’s about all that fits the typology.’ He pulled a spiral-bound notebook from his battered leather briefcase. ‘There’s no clear evidence of him having sex with his victims. Kylie had unprotected sex with four men, we don’t know about Suze because of her immersion in the canal, and Leanne’s body has no traces of semen. There isn’t any at the site either.

  ‘Then there’s the victims themselves. There’s common ground, obviously. They were all selling sex. They were all, in effect, street hookers. I know Leanne was working in the lap-dancing club, but her acts of prostitution were not controlled by a pimp or in a brothel. So from that perspective, she was in the same category as the other two. But here’s the thing about his victims. It’s like he’s moving up the social scale of prostitutes. Kylie was as low down the pecking order as you can go. Suze had dragged herself off the bottom of the heap. And Leanne – well, Leanne was as near as you can get to a respectable woman. Now, I know there’s a rule of thumb in this kind of crime that says an offender starts with the most vulnerable of victims and grows in confidence with each kill. But in my experience, that confidence doesn’t generally grow so far or so fast. Leanne is a big jump from Kylie. And that’s odd.’

  ‘Maybe he’s just more emotionally mature than some of the killers you’ve dealt with.’

  Tony shrugged. ‘It’s certainly possible. But my gut reaction would be that, if he’s that emotionally mature, he wouldn’t need to be doing this.’ He spread his hands. ‘But what do I know? I just missed a major trick doing a risk assessment of Vance, so I’m not feeling very bloody infallible today.’

  ‘So is there anything you can tell me that might point us towards the killer?’

  Tony looked disconsolate. ‘The only thing—’ He stopped himself, scowling at the table.

  ‘The only thing …?’

  He tutted. ‘I shouldn’t say this. Because it’s based on nothing more than a feeling.’

  ‘As I recall, your “feelings” have worked out well for us more than once. Come on, Tony. Don’t hold out on me.’

  ‘It’s as if he’s throwing down a gauntlet. Like, “None of you are safe. It’s not just the bottom feeders, it’s all of you.” Like nobody’s safe on the streets with him around. Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, he talked about cleansing the streets. It’s as if this one has a similar ambition. He wants to scare them off the streets.’ He absently picked up Paula’s coffee and took a drink. ‘I don’t know. And there’s something else that’s really bugging me and I don’t know what it is. There�
��s something about the crime scenes, the murders themselves. It’s bothering me and I don’t understand why.’

  ‘Well, he’s doing something different every time. That’s unusual, isn’t it?’ Paula took her coffee back.

  ‘Yes, to the degree he’s doing it. But that’s not what’s bugging me. I’m aware of the degree of difference, that’s all filed away under “unusual but explicable”. There’s something else and I can’t put my finger on it and it’s bloody annoying.’

  ‘Leave it alone. It’ll come to you when you’re in the thick of something else.’

  Tony grunted, unconvinced. ‘It’s weird. I’ve almost got déjà vu about it. Like I’ve seen it all before. But I know I haven’t. I can’t even think of a case in the literature where the killer tattoos his victims postmortem. I wish I could shake the feeling, but it’s bugging the hell out of me. Have you made any progress with the investigation?’

  Paula told him about Sam’s discovery the night before. ‘Stacey’s working on it. If there’s anything to be got, she’ll get it.’

  ‘You might want to ask her to see if she can find any courtyard-style motels between the Flyer and Dances With Foxes. This is clearly territory he’s familiar with. And they do like to stick to where they know. Suzanne Black was drowned somewhere he didn’t have to take her past a receptionist. I don’t think he took her home to his place. He doesn’t take chances like that. But one of those motels where you check in at an office and the rooms are like apartments that open off the car park – that would fit the bill.’

  ‘Good idea. Thanks.’ She drained her coffee and pushed her chair back. ‘I’m going to miss them all. We’re all going to be tossed to the four winds by Blake. I’ll never get another berth like this again. It’s like the end of an era.’

  ‘Blake’s an idiot,’ Tony said. Just then, his phone beeped. He patted his pockets till he found it. ‘Message from Carol,’ he said. ‘She wants me to come in so Chris can debrief us.’