Which was all he needed to know. He wasn’t planning on finesse. An elderly woman in the house alone wasn’t exactly a challenging target. Especially since there were no obvious weapons in the room – no convenient fire irons or hefty bronze statues. He’d take his chances with a wine bottle.
He watched for a couple of minutes more, then folded his laptop shut and walked out, throwing his untouched coffee in the bin. Nobody paid any attention. Once that would have pissed him off. But Jacko Vance was slowly coming to appreciate the beauty of anonymity.
Tony did not believe in omens. Just because he was hammering up the motorway well over the speed limit and he hadn’t
had any encounters with the traffic police didn’t mean the heavens were aligning in his favour. At one point, a flashing blue light had appeared in his rear-view mirror, but he’d pulled over and the liveried police car had thundered past without a second glance. Clearly someone else was behaving with even less regard for the law than he was. It still didn’t mean the gods were on his side.
Besides, he’d completely failed in his attempts to get Carol to talk to him. He’d been trying her number every few minutes, but it kept going straight to voicemail. At first, he’d hoped she was in one of the few remaining black holes for phone reception, but he couldn’t sustain that optimism for much longer. To begin with he’d left messages, but he’d stopped doing that. There were only so many times you could caution someone against recklessness without them feeling fatally insulted.
The only thing left that he could think of was to try and shock her into inaction. So, at the next service area, he pulled off the motorway and wrote a text. ‘I love you. Don’t do ANYTHING before I get to you.’ He’d never said it before. It might not be the most romantic of occasions, but it should, he thought, freak her out enough to stop her in her tracks. As soon as she turned on her phone, she would see it. Before he could pause to consider the wisdom of his words, he sent it.
Tony got back on the road, wondering how Ambrose was doing. Maybe that had been his team that had hammered past in the outside lane a while ago. He wasn’t sure whether to be happy or anxious about that possibility. He considered calling Ambrose, but before he could do anything about it, Paula rang. ‘Can you talk?’ she said.
‘I’m driving but I’m hands free,’ he said.
‘I think you were right,’ Paula said, filling him in on Sergeant Dean’s information. ‘I’m just waiting for Stacey to come back with an address for me. She’d done the preliminary
checks, only with the wrong gender. Now she’s gone back to try again. So far, Fletcher’s name’s not coming up on any of the Skenby flats.’
‘Try his wife’s maiden name,’ Tony said.
‘You think? They’ve lived there for at least ten years, according to Sergeant Dean.’
‘With some people, covering your tracks is second nature. They do it just because they can, not because there’s any specific reason for doing it.’
‘I’ll get Stacey on to it.’
‘Good. I could do with something working out tonight.’
‘Having a bad time?’
‘I’m kind of scared, Paula. I think Carol’s on a collision course with disaster and I don’t know if I can stop her.’
‘That sounds a bit melodramatic, Tony,’ Paula said gently. ‘And the chief doesn’t really do melodrama.’
‘I think tonight might be the exception.’
‘Is there anything I can do?’
‘No, and I don’t even want you to try. You need to bring Eric Fletcher in.’
‘He can wait.’
Tony sighed. ‘Actually, Paula, I’m not convinced about that. He’s escalating both in terms of the gaps between his killings and the risk-taking involved in choosing his victims. He’s close to the tipping point. If Kerry doesn’t give in to his demands soon, he’s going to run out of options.’
‘Then what? He’ll kill himself? Good luck to him, if he does,’ she said contemptuously. Paula cared a lot less about keeping the bad guys alive than Carol did. She’d always thought it was because she’d lost more than her boss. But maybe that wasn’t true. Maybe they just differed on that fundamental point of principle.
‘If he can’t scare her home, he’ll bring her home,’ Tony said.
There was a long silence while Paula digested what Tony
meant. ‘Then I’d better chase Stacey up for that address,’ she said quietly.
‘Do that. I’d like to get through tonight without any more bloodshed.’
Carol hit the speed bump so fast her suspension squealed and she had to wrestle the wheel to keep moving in a straight line. If anyone was watching the CCTV whose camera lights glowed red above her, they’d hit the panic button. People who lived in secluded estates like Vinton Woods paid for security because they didn’t want the kind of toerags who hit speed bumps at fifty miles an hour tooling round their streets. Carol tapped the brakes and tried to drive more in keeping with her
Stepford Wives
surroundings.
As she passed the mock Queen Anne houses, Carol noticed no signs of life. Yes, there were lit windows and cars in drives. But the only thing with a pulse that she saw was a sheepish fox who skulked out of her headlights as she rounded a bend. She had to acknowledge Vance had made a smart move. The kind of people who craved this sort of soulless existence simply wouldn’t notice if a serial-killing jailbreaker moved in next door, as long as he drove a nice car and didn’t come knocking on their door because he’d run out of milk.
She pulled over to the kerb and consulted the map she’d loaded on to her smartphone. Vinton Woods was too new to appear on her car’s GPS system, but she’d found the developer’s map on their website. She worked out where she was in relation to Vance’s house and set off again. Within minutes, she was driving into the cul-de-sac where his house was situated. She tried to make it look like she’d taken a wrong turning, reversing in a neighbour’s gateway and heading straight back down to the feeder road.
In her fleeting glimpse, there had been no obvious sign of presence. Carol drove to the end of the street and considered
her options. She wanted to take a closer look at the house, but there was no easy way to do it. There was no casual footfall on these pavements. Nobody walked anywhere, because there was nowhere to walk to. No cars were parked on the street because everyone had driveways and garages enough for all the cars their households could possibly support.
She cruised back along the feeder street slowly, noticing that the house opposite the entrance to the cul-de-sac was in darkness. There were no cars in the drive either. Carol decided it was worth taking a chance, so she reversed into the drive and parked in front of a garage door. She had a clear line of sight past Vance’s neighbours to his house. It was the perfect spot for a stake-out.
It didn’t resolve the problem of getting a closer look at the house. But maybe she didn’t need to get up close and personal with the bricks and mortar. As far as she could see, none of the windows facing down the cul-de-sac was curtained. There was no light visible within the house. Unless Vance was in the dark in a room at the back of the house, the chances were that the house was empty. And if he was asleep in a back bedroom, Carol would be best advised to stay put. Who knew what motion sensors and cameras he had in place around the perimeter to alert him to intruders. Everything he’d done so far had been well considered and well planned. The house would be the same.
On the other hand, if she stayed put, she would see him as soon as he left the house. She could shoot out of the driveway here and either ram him, block him or follow him. It made sense from a policing point of view.
It just didn’t make much sense from a Carol Jordan perspective. The longer she waited, the more likely it was that Ambrose would turn up mob-handed and fuck up the whole thing. There was only one road in and out of Vinton Woods. If Vance got a sniff that the police were interested, he’d just carry
on driving and disappear again. She’d have to try to persuade Ambrose to let her be point man on the operation. They’d have to stay well back, out of sight of anyone driving on to the estate, and trust her to alert them as soon as he showed up. Ambrose had worked under her command before and Carol thought she could probably persuade him that she was to be trusted in that role.
The question was whether she could persuade herself.
The suggestion Tony had passed on via Paula had infuriated Stacey. Not because she thought it was a waste of time, but because she should have got there by herself. She didn’t approve of making excuses for herself – her mother had inculcated her in a culture of taking responsibility equally for success and failure – but she did think that if she’d been sitting at her usual workstation, covering the bases would have been much more like second nature. Trying to run two major operations on a laptop and a West Mercia desktop that had a processor with all the speed of a crippled tortoise had proved trying, to say the least.
Finding the details of Kerry Fletcher’s mother’s death was the work of a couple of minutes. Once she had the woman’s maiden name, running those details against the council tenancy list she’d been accessing earlier that evening was something Stacey could have done with her hands tied behind her back.
Within ten minutes of taking Paula’s call, Stacey was back on the line. ‘You were right about the sixteenth floor. Pendle House, 16C. Sorry, I should have thought it through.’
‘No harm done, we’ve got there now.’
Stacey screwed her face up as if she had a bad taste in her mouth. ‘I know, and I don’t mind when Dr Hill comes up with stuff that’s outside our area of competence. But we’re supposed to be detectives, we should have come up with that ourselves.’
‘The chief would have,’ Paula said, glum in spite of the result.
‘I know. I’m not sure I want to carry on being a cop if Blake assigns me to routine CID work.’
‘That would be crazy,’ Paula said. ‘Everybody knows you’re a complete geek. Why would Blake not want to make the most of your skills?’
‘My parents have relatives whose lives were trashed in the Cultural Revolution. I understand that sometimes people get punished for being too skilled.’ Stacey had never spoken so freely to one of her colleagues before. It was ironic that it was the imminent disbanding of their unit that had liberated her tongue.
‘Blake’s not Chairman Mao,’ Paula said. ‘He’s too ambitious not to exploit you to the full. More likely you’ll be chained to a bank of monitors and only allowed daylight once a month. Trust me, Stacey, nobody’s going to unplug you. All the scut work, that’ll be down to the likes of me and Sam, as per usual. And speaking of Sam – don’t you think it’s about time you said something to him?’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Don’t come the innocent with me, Stacey. I am the best interrogator on this squad, nothing gets past me. Ask him out. Life’s too short. We’re not going to be working together for much longer. You might not see him again from one month’s end to the next. Let him know how you feel.’
‘You’re out of order, Paula,’ Stacey said weakly.
‘No, I’m not. I’m your mate. And I nearly missed out on Elinor because I had my head too far up my arse with work. Then she gave me half a chance, and I grabbed it. And it changed my life. You need to do the same, Stacey. Or he’s going to be gone and you’re going to regret it. He’s a shit and he doesn’t deserve you, but apparently he’s what you want, so do something about it.’
‘Don’t you have an arrest to be making?’ Stacey said, recovering some of her spirit.
‘Thanks for the info.’
Stacey replaced the phone and stared at the laptop screen. Then she stood up and walked across to the window, looking down at the parking yard below, turning over Paula’s words in her head. Apparently there were some things you couldn’t figure out by staring into a screen.
Who knew?
The episode of
Mad Men
faded to black and the titles rolled. She considered whether to watch another episode, then decided she’d watch the news and come back to the drama. She switched away from the DVD player and came in at the tail end of yet another bulletin about unrest in the Middle
East. Vanessa harrumphed. She’d soon bloody sort them out. None of those men had balls enough to say what they meant. She’d thought it would revolutionise things to have Hillary Clinton running American foreign policy, but mostly it had just been more of the bloody same. Even the newsreaders were looking weary of it all. The only person who seemed to thrive on it was that miserable woman on the BBC who only ever turned up when everything had gone to pot. Vanessa gave a tight little smile that showed precisely where the botox had been injected. You’d run for the hills if you ever saw her coming down your street with a camera crew.