The Retribution thacj-7

by Val McDermid

  ‘Possibilities?’ Calman said, sounding as if he’d never heard the word spoken before. ‘We like to concentrate on the likely answers. Experience shows that’s usually where the truth lies. We’re going to be giving you blanket coverage. Both driveways will have officers on duty and we’ll have other armed officers patrolling. I know you’ve got your lads out walking the fields. I’ll be talking to them, making sure they know what the parameters for action are. I don’t want you to worry, ladies. I just want you to take care.’

  They’d stamped out into the yard, leaving Micky and Betsy to stare at each other across the table. Betsy had spoken first. ‘Has he called you?’ she asked.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Micky said. ‘He wouldn’t be so crazy. And if he was, you think I wouldn’t tell you?’

  Betsy’s smile was strained. ‘Funny old thing, loyalty.’

  Micky jumped up and rounded the end of the table. She hugged Betsy close and said, ‘You are the only loyalty I have. I only married him because I wanted to be with you.’

  Betsy reached up and stroked Micky’s hair. ‘I know. But we both knew there was something off-kilter with Jacko and we chose to look the other way. I was afraid he might expect that of us again.’

  ‘You heard Calman. They think he’s coming after us, not coming for tea.’ She kissed Betsy’s forehead. ‘They’ll keep us safe.’

  She couldn’t see the expression on Betsy’s face, which was probably just as well. ‘Officer Calman and his merry men? If you say so, sweetheart. If you say so.’

  The suburban street was quiet at this time of day, parking spaces easy to come by because so many were out at work. Vance drew up a couple of doors down from his target and turned off the engine. He didn’t have camera feeds on this house. He’d decided it was too risky. Carol Jordan was a worthy opponent; he wasn’t going to take chances with her. But his investigator had come up with invaluable information that would make Vance’s next act so much easier.

  He took out the tablet computer and checked the camera feeds back at the barn. As he’d expected, Jordan and Hill were there. She was climbing down the ladder from the bed gallery, leaving him behind. It was tempting to watch, but all he needed to know was that they were far enough away for him to have time for his task. He snapped a pair of nitrile gloves over his hands and smiled.

  Everything he needed was in another of the lightweight nylon holdalls Terry had obtained for him. One last look round to make sure the coast was clear. Then Vance gently lifted the bag and headed up the path to Tony Hill’s house. He cut round the side of the house, past the side porch that covered the stairway down to Carol Jordan’s basement flat.

  At the back of the house, he carefully put down the bag then moved to a small rockery in the corner. One of the stones was fake, its hollow interior containing a key to the back door. The investigator’s notes had read, ‘Hill is a classic absentminded professor. He forgot his house keys on two of the five days I observed him.’ Happy days, Vance thought as he let himself in.

  He prowled through the ground floor, allowing himself a few minutes’ grace to get a feel for Tony Hill, the weird little bastard who had thought he could get one over on Vance. Billy No Mates, according to the investigator. Carol Jordan seemed to be the only friend in his life. So the more he hurt Carol Jordan, the more he would hurt both of them.

  Under the stairs was the door that had to lead to the basement. There were bolts on the door, but they were undone. So too was the mortice lock. The door opened to the touch. So much for the fiction that theirs was the formal relationship of landlord and tenant. These two were in and out of each other’s space, as unterritorial as a flock of sparrows.

  The converse never occurred to him: that here were two people who each respected the other’s privacy so much they had no need for locks to enforce it.

  Vance ran lightly down the stairs to Carol’s domain, almost tripping over an elderly black cat who still got up to greet new arrivals in his world. ‘Fuck,’ Vance yelped, staggering, desperate not to drop his burden. He managed to right himself, giving his shoulders a shake.

  He placed the holdall on the floor and set off on a tour of the premises. He found what he was looking for in the tiny utility room off the hallway. On the floor, a bowl of dried cat-food and another of water. Next to them, a plastic bin half-full of dried cat-food. Vance gave a little giggle of delight. How beautiful it was when things went according to plan.

  He brought the holdall through and unzipped it, closing the door behind him to keep the cat out. First he emptied the cat-food into a carrier bag. He took out a powerful coiled metal spring, held together by a plastic clip. He placed that in the bottom of the bin, attaching the clip to a sensitive mechanism connected to its rim. He took out a pair of acid-proof gauntlets and pulled them over his gloves. Then with infinite delicacy, he opened the polystyrene container in the holdall and lifted out a glass vessel. Clear oily liquid sloshed gently against the sides as he lowered it on to the spring. He removed the lid, exposing the sulphuric acid to the air. Finally, he fixed a photoelectric cell to the mechanism inside the bin and closed the lid.

  The next time Carol Jordan opened the cat-food bin, the spring-loaded container of acid would be catapulted upwards into her face. It probably wouldn’t kill her. But the acid would burn into her skin, destroying her features, leaving her disfigured and scarred. She would almost certainly be blinded and in hideous pain. Just the thought of it made Vance feel excited. She would suffer. God, how she would suffer.

  But Tony Hill would suffer more, knowing this time he’d failed to stop Vance in his tracks. The perfect double whammy, really.

  Kevin was fed up. There were, in his opinion, far too many motels near the airport. And Stacey had apparently tracked down addresses for every last one of them. There was a wide range, both in terms of cost and of facilities. Not to mention willingness to cooperate with a pushy cop at a busy time of day. It was a bastard of a chore and it pissed him off that yet again he was assigned to the scut work. He’d made one professional mistake that had cost him his inspector’s rank, but that had been years ago. It seemed that he was never going to be forgiven. Maybe leaving the MIT behind would finally be the route back to promotion.

  He’d split the accommodations into three rough groups. Top of the line were the budget chains, but paradoxically, their front-desk security was often questionable. They were so accustomed to turning a blind eye to groups of students and football fans trying to save money by squeezing eight people to a room that a troupe of lap dancers could have high-kicked their way from the entrance to the lifts without anyone paying attention. The killer would have found it relatively easy to check in with Suze Black without attracting attention, but getting her out might have been more of an issue.

  There was one possibility, where one of the lifts went straight down to a basement car park. Kevin thought it was a long shot – there were too many elements of risk for it to fit with the care this killer took in every other aspect of his operations. But he filed it away as somewhere to come back to if he didn’t make any progress elsewhere.

  At the opposite end were the places that were little more than glorified guest houses. Kevin didn’t even bother ringing the doorbell of those. Suze Black wouldn’t have got across the threshold alive, never mind dead.

  That left a tranche in the middle – privately owned, mostly struggling to keep going in a recession, mostly willing to turn a blind eye to what was going on in their rooms. But still, Kevin reckoned they would mostly also draw the line at a man dragging a dripping corpse across the foyer and out to the car park.

  He was on the point of giving up when he finally struck gold. The Sunset Strip had sunk so low beneath the horizon it was hard to imagine how it had ever been a hopeful twinkle in anyone’s eye. It was a two-storey building covered in peeling terracotta stucco, an irregular quadrangle sketched around parking spaces marked out in peeling whitewash. The units were like individual apartments. On the ground floor, you could
practically drive right up to your door. Perfect for stashing a dead prostitute in your boot without anybody catching sight of what you were up to.

  Kevin parked by the office, which occupied the first ground-floor unit on the left. The fat kid behind the counter looked barely old enough to shave, never mind drink. He had sallow skin, bumpy with subcutaneous spots and eyebrows that bristled in five directions at once. Nondescript brown hair gelled up on the top of his head made him look like a refugee from a comedy sketch show. He barely looked up from the comic book he was reading. ‘Yeah?’ he grunted.

  Kevin flipped open his ID. It took thirty seconds for the kid to realise there was something he was supposed to be looking at. He shifted a wad of chewing gum from one cheek to the other and assumed an expression of weary boredom. ‘Yeah?’ again.

  This was clearly not a time for small talk. ‘Were you working here on the third?’

  More gum shifting, a little light chewing. A hand that looked like an inflated latex glove yanked a drawer open and took out a sheet of paper marked out in boxes. He poked a finger at the third box on the top line. KH, BD, RT. ‘That’s me. RT. Robbie Trehearne.’

  ‘Do you remember anything particular about that night?’

  Trehearne shook his head. ‘Nope.’

  ‘Can I see the register?’

  ‘What about a warrant? Are you not supposed to have a warrant?’

  Kevin took a gamble on Robbie Trehearne being exactly as dim as he appeared to be. ‘Not if you just show it to me.’

  ‘Oh. OK.’ He put the comic book down and turned the computer monitor on the desk so Kevin could also see it. His fingers flew over the keys with surprising dexterity and a page appeared on the screen, headed with the date. Only the rooms that were occupied appeared. Six rooms were listed, accompanied by names, addresses, car registrations and means of payment. Three of the six had paid cash.

  ‘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 me
llow 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.