The Retribution (30 page)
He was even more pissed off because he was stuck on his own in the CID room. Whatever Patterson’s agenda was right now, it still didn’t seem to include taking responsibility for the CID team he was supposed to lead. He’d walked away mid-afternoon, telling Ambrose to get on with it. Because there
was so little doing, Ambrose had sent most of the team home, but on standby. Nobody knew where Vance would be spotted next or when. They had to be ready to roll at short notice when they had something definite to go at. He had officers out talking to prison staff who had been off-duty at the time of the escape, but other than that he couldn’t actually think of anything constructive to do.
The worst irony of all was that, in Ambrose’s experience, nothing worth working late for had ever happened on a Friday. He’d had great results over the years, spectacular arrests backed up with genuine confessions. But never on a Friday, for some reason. So there was a double resentment for Ambrose. That was before he even added on the bitterness of being at the beck and call of a bunch of mad bloody Geordies who couldn’t even speak proper English.
The reason he was chained to his desk was the trickling through of results from Northumbria Police’s search of Terry Gates’s house and the lock-up where he stored his market-stall gear. Ambrose had wanted to go up there himself to conduct the search, but his boss had said there was no need, that the cops in Newcastle knew how to conduct a search. Which translated to, ‘I don’t have the budget for you to go gallivanting.’
So here he was, waiting for the next pile of nothing from the North East. So far, Terry Gates had not lived up to Tony’s promise of carelessness. All of the paperwork that Northumbria Police had scanned in and emailed down to Ambrose had been connected to Gates’s own finances, either private or professional. There were two computers, however. One at the lock-up, which appeared to be solely for the business, and another, more modern machine at home which showed signs of attempts to clean up its hard disk. Both were on their way by secure courier; they would be with Ambrose in the morning. He’d tried to get hold of their local forensic computer expert,
Gary Harcup, to put him on standby for the arrival of the computers, but so far Gary hadn’t got back to him. The fat twat was probably too busy playing some online game to have bothered checking his messages. After all, it was Friday night for geeks too.
Ambrose was wondering whether he could reasonably call it a day when the phone rang. ‘DS Ambrose,’ he sighed.
‘Aye, it’s Robinson Davy from Newcastle here,’ a voice as deep and sonorous as Ambrose’s own announced.
‘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.’
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.
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.