The Retribution (14 page)
Tony closed his eyes and put his fists to his temples. ‘Shit, shit, shit. I wasn’t supposed to say anything.’ He dropped his hands to the desk and sighed. ‘It’s not like it sounds. Sharing the house, that would be a better description. Look, Paula, we didn’t—
she
didn’t want the team to know. Because you’d all jump to conclusions and then the sideways looks and the cheesy sentimental crap would start and she’d have to kill you
all.’ He ran a hand through his hair, leaving it standing up in spikes.
Paula just smiled. ‘It’s OK. I won’t say anything. It’s nobody’s business. Frankly, I can’t think of anyone else who’d put up with either of you. And I mean as housemates,’ she added hastily as he opened his mouth to contradict her.
‘You’re probably right,’ he said.
‘So will you help?’ Paula said, closing the subject and getting back to what she really wanted.
‘She’ll kill me,’ he said.
‘Yeah, but not nailing this one will kill her,’ Paula said. ‘You know how she is about unfinished business. Justice not being served … ’
Tony leaned back in the chair and stared at the ceiling. ‘I am going to live to regret this. OK, Paula. Get Stacey to send me the usual package. I make no promises, but I’ll take a look at it after I’ve done the Jacko Vance assessment.’ He straightened up abruptly. ‘And let’s try to keep it a secret for once. Please?’
She stuck her head into her office, where Tony was staring into her computer. A small stack of paper sat to one side, a pen on top of it. She could see scribbled notes, complete with asterisks and underlinings. Tony barely acknowledged her arrival, settling for an inarticulate grunt.
‘Any news on Vance?’ she said. She’d managed to put thoughts of the escaped prisoner to one side while she’d been out of the office, but there was no avoiding it now Tony had squatter’s rights over her office.
He shook his head without looking up. ‘Nothing. I rang Lambert a while back. The cameras picked up the taxi when he joined the M5 heading north and they’re tracking forward
from that. But you know how hard it is to do that stuff in real time. You just need one crap camera and you’re stuck with a load of options to track.’
‘Do you know who’s coordinating the search?’
‘I thought you’d be up to speed on that. Oakworth’s on West Mercia’s patch, after all.’
‘I’ll make some calls,’ Carol said, leaving him to it and returning to her team to check on their progress. Paula was on the phone at the nearest desk, so Carol pulled up a chair to wait for her to finish.
Paula covered the mouthpiece and said quietly, ‘I’m just talking to my contact at Northern – Franny Riley. I’ll put him on speakerphone so you can listen in.’
Paula pressed a button and a deep Mancunian growl emerged from the tinny speaker. ‘… and that’s why we’re so short-handed.’
‘All the same, Sarge, I’m going to need more bodies than that to do a proper door-to-door
and
get the photos out on the street.’
‘Paula, I know. Tell me about it.’ In the background, Carol could hear another voice. ‘Hang on a minute, let me put you on hold, my DI’s just come over.’
Whatever Franny had intended, what he actually did was to put his phone on speaker too. Carol immediately recognised the other voice. DI Spencer, the SIO from Northern that she’d replaced as head of the investigation.
‘Are you tied up, Franny?’ Spencer asked. ‘Only, I need you to take a look at the witness statements on that aggravated burglary.’
‘I’m on to MIT, trying to get the door-to-door sorted,’ Riley said.
‘For fuck’s sake,’ Spencer said, disgusted. ‘I thought bringing them in was supposed to take the load off us? Ever since they came on board, it’s been do this, sort that, check the other.
MIT, what does that stand for again?’ Before Franny could respond, Spencer gave his own answer. ‘I’ll tell you what it stands for: Minorities Integration Team,’ he said, guffawing at his own wit. ‘A pair of lezzas, a jungle bunny, a Chink and a ginger. All led by a gash.’
Carol recoiled in shock. It had been a long time since she’d heard that kind of abuse from a colleague. It was the language of prejudice that was supposed to be history in modern policing. She’d always suspected the canteen cowboys were still riding the range, but they were generally too savvy to show their true colours in front of anybody who might disagree. Apparently it wasn’t just media hype that the old sexist and racist conditioning still existed beneath the surface.
Paula reached for the phone to cut off the call, her face revealing that Carol wasn’t the only one who was horrified. But Carol pushed her hand away and leaned forward. ‘DI Spencer. This is Detective Chief Inspector Jordan. Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, your offensive attitudes have been broadcast to my entire team. My office, now.’
There was a long silence. Then the high-pitched tone of a line gone dead. Carol sat back, feeling faintly queasy. She looked around at her team, who had all stopped what they were doing when Spencer’s words had sunk in. ‘DI Spencer will be here shortly to apologise. If any of you experience any obstruction whatsoever from Northern, I want to know about it. No covering anybody’s backs. We’re not going to be stopped from doing our jobs. Now let’s get cracking. We’ve got three murders to solve.’
Stacey delivered one of her rare smiles. ‘And I’ve got something here that might just help.’
I believe Vance suffers from Narcissistic Personality Disorder. The key to any understanding of Vance is his need to be in control. He wants an environment where he is in charge. It’s always all about him. He needs to manipulate the individuals around him and to be in charge of the way events unfold. Some controlling personalities use threats and fear to keep people in line; Vance uses charisma to blind them to what he is really about. That’s not just because it’s easier to maintain – it’s also because he needs their adoration. He needs to have people look up to him. It’s what his whole life was about before he went to prison and I imagine it shaped his life behind bars.
But to realise that goal, he had to acquire self-discipline. He had to train and he had to find a way to organise himself mentally as well as physically. That he had such a phenomenally successful athletic career is testament to how well he succeeded. He was only months away from an almost certain Olympic gold in javelin when he had the accident that cost him the lower half of his throwing arm. At least one psychologist who has interviewed Vance has identified the accident and its aftermath as being a transformative moment, as if Vance had been a mentally healthy individual up to that point. The evidence cited in support of this position is that the destruction of his arm came about as a result of a heroic act.
It’s my contention that Vance has always been mentally disordered. The amputation was a stress point in his life that tipped him over the edge. We have anecdotal evidence of sadistic sexual behaviour before the accident and also of violent cruelty to animals. The level of sadistic torture he exhibited towards his victims demonstrated no learning curve – he was already at a place mentally where this was what he wanted.
I don’t know the details of his escape from Oakworth, but I would be very surprised if they did not involve collaboration from inside and outside the prison. Although it is more than twelve years since he was sent to prison, he still has a cohort of the faithful on the outside. There is a Facebook group called Jacko Vance is Innocent. As of this morning, 3,754 people ‘like’ this. One of those people – and I use the number advisedly, because Vance doesn’t take chances and having more than one person knowingly involved is taking a chance – has helped him. I recommend checking the logs of his visitors. It would be helpful to know who he has spoken to on the phone, but he will almost certainly have had a contraband mobile for any crucial communications.
Do not rule out any of the professionals with whom he has had contact in prison. Remember Myra Hindley and the prison officer who became her lover. They hatched an escape plan that never got off the ground. Vance is undoubtedly a smarter operator than Hindley ever was. We know that he managed to persuade a prison psychologist that he was a fit and proper person
to occupy a place on a Therapeutic Community Wing. Personally, if the only way to keep Jacko Vance off a TCW was to burn down the prison, I’d be there with a can of petrol.
Tony paused and read the last sentence again. It was harsh, no doubt about that. And he hadn’t built his career on slagging off his colleagues. On the other hand, someone who was supposed to be immune to manipulative bastards like Vance had been lulled into putting him where he absolutely shouldn’t have been. Psychologists were trained to understand damage and how it avenges itself; someone had been woefully lacking here and he didn’t feel like covering her back. Not now Jacko Vance was out there and in all probability looking for revenge. Especially since he himself might be one of the targets of his vengeful rage. So he let the words stand, stark in their informality.
There was supposed to be a prison social worker accompanying him to the work placement. It is possible that this individual is also implicated in his escape. If there is a genuine reason for the social worker’s absence, it may also have been engineered by Vance from inside the prison. If, for example, the social worker’s family was under threat of some kind.
Nevertheless, prison professionals must not be above suspicion, both in what has happened and what may happen. Vance has certainly been given support from outside and it is extremely likely that he’s going to continue in that mode.
He pushed his glasses up and rubbed the bridge of his nose. ‘So much for the straightforward stuff,’ he muttered. Everything he’d written so far should be self-evident to
anyone with half a brain. But he’d learned over the years that there was a game to be played here. You had to include the obvious so that those who read the report could congratulate themselves on being as perspicacious as the professional. Then they didn’t feel so aggrieved when you hit them with something they hadn’t expected. Never mind that that was what they paid you for. Deep down, everybody thought what he did was little more than applied common sense.
Some days, he thought they were right. But not today.
Tony rolled his shoulders and laid his fingers on the keys. He took a deep breath, like a pianist waiting for the conductor’s baton, then started typing furiously.
Vance is a planner. He has a bolthole which has been organised by whoever has been working on his behalf on the outside. He will stay clear of his old stamping grounds because he knows that’s where we will look. He will not be in London or Northumberland. Where he chooses to base himself will be dependent on what he plans to do.
This is going to be a temporary base. He will stay here only for as long as it takes to do what he plans to do. He will already have arranged a further destination where he will go to ground and rebuild a life for himself. He would be foolish to try to do this in the UK; I suspect he will have chosen a destination abroad. He has a substantial amount of money at his disposal, so he has a lot of options. It’s tempting to assume he will go for somewhere that doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the UK, but he’s arrogant enough to think he’s not going to be found. There’s nothing in the records to suggest he speaks another language. He needs to be able to communicate in
order to control, so he’ll go some place where English is the primary language. The USA is hard to get into, but once you’re there it’s easy to lose yourself, particularly if, like Vance, you’ve got plenty of money and therefore no need to trouble the social security system. He’ll also want to be somewhere he can have access to the best in prosthetics with no questions asked, so again that points to the USA. And, unlike Australia or New Zealand, they tend not to show UK TV programmes, so there’s little chance of anyone spotting him from reruns of Vance’s Visits. There are also possibilities offered by some of the Gulf states, where privacy is highly prized and where English is widely spoken. Normally I’d say follow the money, except that guys like Vance know people who know how to make the money disappear without a trail.So the big question is what he has planned before he leaves for his ultimate destination. Based on how he behaved towards Shaz Bowman when he thought there was a possibility of her thwarting him, I believe Vance intends to avenge himself on the people he holds responsible for his incarceration.
His prime target will be the police officer who was responsible for tracking him down and arresting him: Carol Jordan, currently a DCI with Bradfield Metropolitan Police. There were other officers involved in the unofficial investigation: Chris Devine, currently a DS in the same force; Leon Jackson, who was a DC with the Metropolitan Police; Kay Hallam, who was a DC with Hampshire; and Simon McNeill, who was a DC with Strathclyde. Given the relatively high profile of my own involvement in the process, I would expect also to be on his list of targets.