‘That’s exactly why I’m hammering up the motorway right now,’ Tony said, keeping his tone level to try and take the heat out of the situation. ‘When are you leaving?’
‘Within the next five minutes. When did she take off?’
‘Stacey spoke to her directly after she spoke to you. And then she spoke to me. And I left about fifteen minutes ago.’
‘Fuck. This is a nightmare.’
‘There’s one thing you could do,’ Tony said, moving over into the fast lane.
‘What?’
‘You could call Franklin and ask him to intercept her.’
Ambrose snorted. ‘That’s your idea of a solution? We’ll end up with a Mexican stand-off between Jordan and Franklin while Vance hightails it out the back door, over the hills and far away.’
‘Please yourself,’ Tony snapped. ‘I’m just trying to save her life, that’s all.’ He ended the call and coaxed another five miles an hour out of his protesting engine. ‘Oh, Carol,’ he groaned. ‘Please don’t do anything brave. Or noble. Just sit tight. Please.’
Sam Evans had never lost his appetite for getting out on the street and talking to people. He didn’t have Paula’s skills in the interview room, but he was good at drawing people into conversation then sussing out when to charm and when to lean. He could slip straight back into his working-class accent, and that helped when you were dealing with people at the bottom of the heap. Sam opened his mouth and they imagined someone who wasn’t condescending or judging.
When Paula had passed on the background she’d got
from the sergeant in Vice, the obvious next step had been to find Kerry Fletcher and bring her in, out of harm’s way. Paula needed to stay in the office, pulling together any information that might give them a lead on where to find Eric Fletcher. Meanwhile, Sam would do his best to find Fletcher’s daughter.
Temple Fields on a Saturday night was thronged with people. Drag queens, beautiful boys, striking baby dykes with their tattoos and piercings, and Lady Gaga wannabes were the eye candy, but there were plenty of more conventional-looking people out for a good time in the gay bars and restaurants that lined the streets. The area had shifted from hardcore red-light zone to gay village back in the nineties, but the new century had made it more eclectic, with the hippest of the straight young people happy to hang out in what they perceived as the cool clubs and bars. Now, it was a heaving mix, an anything-goes part of town. And there was still a thriving kerbside sex trade, if you knew where to look.
Sam weaved his way through the crowds, alert for female and male prostitutes. Sometimes they saw him coming, smelled ‘cop’ on him and melted away into the anonymous crowds before he could speak to them. But he’d managed to talk to half a dozen of the women. A couple of them had completely blanked him, refusing to engage in conversation at all. Sam suspected they knew their pimps were watching.
Two of the others denied any knowledge of Kerry Fletcher. A fifth said she knew Kerry though she hadn’t seen her for a day or two, but that was probably because Kerry usually worked Campion Way, not the main drag. So Sam had moved down towards the boulevard that separated Temple Fields from the rest of the city centre. There he’d found a more informative source.
The woman was leaning against the wall in the mouth of an alley, smoking and sipping on a coffee. ‘Christ, can’t I have ten
fucking minutes to myself?’ she said as Sam approached. ‘I don’t give freebies to the Bill.’
‘I’m looking for Kerry Fletcher,’ Sam said.
‘You’re not the only one,’ the woman said sourly. ‘I’ve not seen her tonight, but her old man was round looking for her last night.’
‘I thought he’d been warned off?’
‘Maybe so. He’s turned the volume down, that’s for sure. But he still hangs around, watching her every move. She turned on him last night, though. Told him to fuck right off.’
‘How did he take that?’
‘He didn’t have much choice, she went off with a punter.’
‘So what was he saying to her to wind her up?’
‘I wasn’t paying a lot of attention. I was trying to earn a fucking living. He was going on at her about how it’s not safe on the streets. That somebody’s killing whores like us and she should come home. She said she’d rather take her chances out on the street than with him. And he said he’d do anything she wanted if she’d just give up selling herself on the streets. And she said, “I just want you to stop this. Now fuck off.” Then she walked away and got in this bloke’s car.’
‘Have you seen them go at it like that before?’
The woman shrugged. ‘He’s been trying to freak her out about there being a serial killer out there.’ She curled her lip in disdain. ‘Like we don’t know there are bastards out there who get off on hurting us. You don’t do this job if you’re worried about health and fucking safety. We all know it, all the time. We just try not to fucking think about it.’
‘What did he do then, her dad?’
She tossed her cigarette end on the pavement and ground it out. ‘He did what he was told. He fucked off. Now I’d like you to do the same.’ She waved her fingers at Sam in a shooing motion. ‘Go on, you’re ruining my trade.’
Sam backed away and watched the woman totter to the
kerbside on insanely high heels. What he’d learned didn’t take them much further forward. But it was corroboration. And when you were building a case, sometimes that was the best you could hope for.
Sometimes people genuinely didn’t see her. They were lost in music or Radio 4 or some football phone-in on Talk Sport. She’d get right up behind them then give them a blare on the horn. She could actually see one or two of them jump. Then they’d jerk the wheel and she’d be past them, so close she imagined them swearing.
It was exhilarating, this feeling of finally taking action. It felt like forever since she’d stood in the barn looking down at Michael and Lucy’s bodies, a viscous sea of time that dragged at her feet and stopped her making any progress. She wanted to move forward, to bury the horror. But she couldn’t even start while Jacko Vance walked free. At liberty, he was an affront to her sense of justice.
And she wanted him to know who had put him back behind bars. Every day, she wanted him to hate her more.
Vance couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in Halifax. It must have been back when he was making his hit series,
Vance’s Visits.
He knew he must have been there before, because he clearly recalled the spectacular road curving down from the motorway round one side of the bowl of hills that cradled the town itself. Tonight it was a basin of lights, sparkling and twinkling below. It must have been hellish in Halifax after the Industrial Revolution. All those wool mills, spewing out smuts of smoke and clots of coal dust, filling the air with noxious fumes and filth, and nowhere for it to escape to, held tight in the embrace of the hills. He could understand the working man’s attraction to getting out to the dales and the moors to breathe clean air, to feel like a human being and not just a part in the vast machine.
He swept down from the high motorway into the valley below, keeping an eye out for a possible temporary base. He needed somewhere with wi-fi, so that he could check that his target was where he hoped she would be. It was too late for coffee shops, always supposing Halifax had anything so cool. And he didn’t want an Internet café, where people could peer over your shoulder and wonder why you were looking at CCTV pictures of a woman in her living room when she was clearly well past the age of sexual fantasy.
At the last minute he swung into the entrance and parked the car. He grabbed his laptop bag and went inside. The restaurant was surprisingly busy, mostly with teenagers who were fractionally too young to persuade even the most short-sighted bartenders that they were old enough for alcohol. Their desperate need to feel cool had driven them out from houses where
Match of the Day
was the natural late-night Saturday fare into the unforgiving glare of McDonald’s lighting. They slouched around the place with their milkshakes and colas, the boys with baseball caps at any angle except the conventional, the girls with an astonishing amount of flesh on display. Vance, who considered himself a connoisseur of teenage girls, felt faintly queasy at the sight. He had no interest in girls who had no sense of dignity. What was there to break down when the girls had already given everything away?
Vance bought a cup of coffee and found a table for two in the furthest corner. Although it was near the toilets, he could angle his screen away from prying eyes. Ignoring his drink, he quickly booted up and ran through his camera sites. Nothing at all at Tony Hill’s house, though the gateway had been boarded up and ‘Danger! Keep Out!’ signs had been posted. From the other camera shots, he could see why. The building was gutted. No roof, no windows, just a partially collapsed shell.
The third scene was the one that made him want to shout abuse at the screen. But Vance knew he had to maintain the
appearance of calm. The last thing he wanted was to draw attention to himself. Teenagers were notoriously solipsistic, but even so, it only needed one sharp-eyed observer to create all sorts of problems. Still, seeing the stable block still standing filled him with rage. While he watched, Betsy herself came into shot with an armed policeman, a pair of spaniels at her heels. She was gesturing to various aspects of the relatively undamaged stable block as they walked, clearly having an animated conversation. She didn’t seem to be suffering at all, the bitch. He wanted her on her knees, weeping and tearing her hair out, locked into painful mourning. Maybe next time he should do the dogs. Cut their throats and leave them on Micky and Betsy’s beds. That would show them who had the power. Or maybe he should just do Betsy.
He took a deep breath and clicked on to the last set of active camera feeds. Clockwise, it showed the driveway and frontage of a detached stone-built villa that looked somehow unmistakably Northern. It wasn’t a big house – it looked like three reception rooms and three bedrooms, but it was solid and well maintained. In the driveway, outside a detached wooden garage, was a two-seater Mercedes.
Next was a modern kitchen that had the pristine air of somewhere that’s only ever used to reheat meals supplied by Waitrose or Marks and Spencer. The lights under the wall cabinets were on, casting a cold glow on pale wood worktops. Beyond the kitchen the ribs of a conservatory loomed pale through the darkness.
In the third view, a camera with a fish-eye lens had obviously been mounted in a corner of the half-landing on the stairs. It was possible to see up to the head of the stairs and through an open door that led to a bedroom, and also down the stairs to the front door, whose stained glass glowed faintly, backlit by the street lights outside.
The fourth feed showed a living room that looked as if not
much living went on there. There was no clutter; no books or magazines, just an alcove lined with DVDs. A long, deep sofa almost as big as a bed and piled with cushions was at the heart of the room. In front of it, an elaborately carved wooden coffee table that held a trio of remote controls, a wine bottle and a single half-full glass of red. An open briefcase sat on the floor at one end of the table. On the opposite wall was an ornate Victorian fireplace. Where one might have expected a complicated overmantel, there was instead a plasma screen TV that filled the whole chimney breast. The room resembled the most private of cinemas, a sad screening room for one. As he watched, a woman walked into the room wearing a loose kaftan, golden brown hair in a shoulder-length bob tucked behind her ears. The definition wasn’t good enough for much detail, but Vance was surprised to see that the woman neither looked nor moved like someone on the downward slope of her sixties. She picked up two of the remotes and curled into the sofa, adjusting cushions and pillows so that she was comfortable. The screen sprang into life. The angle made it impossible for Vance to identify what she was watching but she seemed intent on it.