by Val McDermid
Vance removed his prosthesis and stepped into the shower, luxuriating in an endless flow of water whose temperature was entirely under his control. It was bliss. He washed himself from head to toe with an expensive shower gel that smelled of real lime and cinnamon. He scrubbed the tattoo off his neck then shaved the goatee off, leaving the moustache. He stood under the water for a long time, savouring the sense of being master of his own destiny again. Eventually, the tattoo transfer began to slip, slithering down his arm like a Dalí print. Vance rubbed his arm against his chest and stomach, helping it to dissolve into a gluey puddle then to disappear down the drain, flushing away all traces of Jason’s body art.
He stepped out of the shower and wrapped himself in a thick towel. It felt impossibly soft against his skin. Next, he covered the artificial skin of his prosthesis in shower gel and eased the tattoo sleeve off, again letting it dissolve and slip away, leaving no sign of what had happened there. As he dried himself, Vance’s thoughts slipped back to Terry. He’d perjured himself for Vance. Who knew how many criminal offences he’d committed in the past year on Vance’s behalf – everything from obtaining false ID to money laundering. He’d set up the practicalities of Vance’s escape. There had never been even a hint that he might betray the man he still hero-worshipped. And yet …
The fact that Terry was the man who knew too much was inescapable. He’d kept the faith for so long because he’d managed to convince himself that Vance was innocent. It was impossible for him to believe that the man who had made his sister’s last weeks bearable could also be a killer. But this time, it would be different. Vance had plans. Hellish plans. And when the terror started, when the full revelation of his revenge became clear, there would be no wriggle room for doubts. Not even Terry could fly in the face of that coming storm. Terry would have to accept some personal responsibility for the havoc Vance planned to wreak. It would be a terrible moment for him. But there was no escaping the fact that Terry was a man who had the courage of his convictions. Having stood four square behind Vance for so long, the realisation of his error would send Terry straight into the arms of the police. He wouldn’t be able to help himself.
Which incontrovertibly made Terry the man who knew too much. For him to reveal what he had done, to lay out the knowledge he possessed would be the end of everything. That was something Vance couldn’t allow to happen.
13
Detective Sergeant Alvin Ambrose tried not to fret too much as he endured the security checks he had to go through to get into Oakworth Prison. Body scans, metal detectors, give up your phones, hand over your radio … If they took as much care with the people they let out, he wouldn’t be here right now.
Not that he should be here, by rights. True, Oakworth was on West Mercia’s patch and close enough to Worcester to make the escape the indisputable responsibility of the city’s CID. That meant, Ambrose thought, that this assignment should have been handled by his boss. But ever since Carol Jordan’s appointment to the job he’d wanted had been announced, it seemed like DI Stuart Patterson had gone on strike. Everything he could shunt Ambrose’s way was dumped on the sergeant’s desk. And so it was with this. Any hope Ambrose had had of seeing his boss take charge had vanished as soon as the identity of the escaped prisoner was revealed. That Carol Jordan had been involved in his initial arrest had simply cemented what was becoming standard operating procedure in their office.
As far as the head of CID was concerned, Patterson was handling the case. The reality was that Ambrose was fronting it up. Never mind that the prison governor would expect a higher rank than sergeant to be leading the hunt for a dangerous escapee like Vance. Ambrose was just going to have to lump it and rely on his formidable presence to get him through. At least he might be able to call on Carol Jordan’s expertise ahead of her arrival in Worcester. When he’d worked with her before, he’d been impressed. It wasn’t easy to impress Alvin Ambrose.
At last, he was through the checks and through the sally port and trailing down a corridor to an office where a surprisingly young man was sitting behind a cluttered desk. He jumped up, holding his swinging jacket front down with one hand, sticking out the other to greet Ambrose. He was tall and rangy, full of bounce. As Ambrose drew near enough to shake his hand, he could see that his skin was crisscrossed with dozens of fine lines. He was older than he appeared. ‘John Greening,’ he said, his handshake as vigorous as his appearance. ‘Deputy Governor. The boss has gone London, talking to the Home Office.’ He widened his eyes and raised his eyebrows. He reminded Ambrose of David Tennant’s rendition of Doctor Who. The very thought made him tired. Greening gestured towards a seat, but Ambrose remained standing.
‘Hardly surprising,’ Ambrose said. ‘In the circumstances.’
‘Nobody is more embarrassed than us about Jacko Vance’s escape.’
Embarrassed seemed a woefully inadequate word to Ambrose. A serial killer had walked out the front door of this man’s jail. In his shoes, Ambrose would have been paralysed with shame. ‘Yeah. Well, obviously there’ll be an inquiry into a screw-up of this magnitude, but that’s not what I’m here for right now.’
Greening looked peeved. Not angry or ashamed, Ambrose thought. Peeved. Like someone had criticised his tie. Which frankly would have deserved all it got. ‘I can assure you there’s no indication of corruption among our staff,’ he said.
Ambrose snorted. ‘That’s almost worse, don’t you think? Corruption might have got you off the hook with less pain than incompetence. Anyway, I’m here now because I need to talk to Jason Collins.’
Greening nodded stiffly. ‘The interview room’s set up for you. Audio and video streams. We’re all very surprised at Jason’s involvement. He’s been doing so well on the Therapeutic Community Wing.’
Ambrose shook his head in disbelief. ‘A prize student, obviously.’
Greening nodded towards the officer who had escorted him in. ‘Officer Ashmall will show you to the interview room.’
Dismissed, Ambrose followed the officer back into the corridor, through another sally port and further into the labyrinth of the prison. ‘Did you know Vance?’ Ambrose asked.
‘I knew who he was. But I never had direct contact with him.’
That closed down that conversation. Another right-angle turn, then they stopped outside a door. The officer unlocked it with a swipe card and held the door open for him. Ambrose stood just inside the doorway for a long moment, taking in the man sitting at the table that was bolted to the floor. Shaved head, goatee, tattoos. As reported. Collins raised his head to meet Ambrose’s eyes with a flat contemptuous stare. ‘What are you looking at?’ Ambrose had experienced that kind of challenge so often in his years on the force that it bounced off without leaving a mark.
He said nothing. He looked around the room, as if sizing up its grey walls, strip lighting and tiled floor for an estate agent’s brochure. The room smelled of stale bodies and farts. It almost made Ambrose nostalgic for the days of cigarette smoke. Two strides took him to the empty chair opposite Collins and the prison officer left them to it, pointing out the button Ambrose should press when he was done.
‘Jason, I’m Detective Sergeant Alvin Ambrose from West Mercia police and I’m here to talk to you about your involvement in Jacko Vance’s escape.’
‘I know what you’re here for,’ Jason said, his voice sullen and heavy. ‘All I know is that he asked me to swap cells last night.’
Ambrose burst out laughing, a deep hearty roar that filled the room. Collins looked startled and afraid. ‘Do me a favour,’ Ambrose said once he’d recovered himself. ‘Cut the crap and tell me what you know.’
‘I don’t know nothing. Look, it was supposed to be a joke. He reckoned he could pass for me, I reckoned he couldn’t. I never thought it would get as far as it did.’ Collins smirked, as if to say, ‘Prove me a liar.’
‘It must have taken a lot of planning, for a joke,’ Ambrose said sarcastically.
Collins shrugged. ‘That wasn’t my
worry. He was the one who reckoned he could get away with it. He was the one had to make it work.’ He gave a thumbs-up sign with both hands. ‘Fucking good on him.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
Collins shrugged again. ‘Believe what you like. I couldn’t give a shit.’
‘You know your days on this wing are over, right? You’re going back to Cat A. No privileges. No comfy duvet or private bathroom. No touchy-feely therapy sessions. No prospect of a cushy day out of jail. Not till you’re an old man. Unless you’ve got some information that can cut you a break.’
Collins’ mouth curled in a sneer. ‘Better than information. I’ve got cancer, fat man. I’ll be on hospital wings. I’ll be going home to die, just like the Lockerbie bomber. Nothing you can threaten me with comes close to that shit. So you might as well piss off.’
He wasn’t wrong, Ambrose thought as he pushed the chair back and walked to the door. As it opened to release him from the interview, he turned back and smiled at Collins. ‘I hope the cancer treats you as kindly as Vance treated his victims.’
Collins sneered. ‘You ain’t seen nothing yet, copper. According to Jacko, he’s got plans that’ll make the past look like Jackanory.’
14
Chris Devine felt a dark flush of anger rise up her neck. She had always considered herself well tough enough for the Job. Emotional fragility had never threatened her equanimity. For a long time she’d thought she was unshockable. Then Shaz Bowman had died at the hands of Jacko Vance and Chris discovered she could be as devastated as anyone else. But she hadn’t fallen apart. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. Instead she’d used that pain as an impetus to take the fight to Shaz’s killer and join the impromptu team Tony and Carol had assembled to bring Vance down. Nothing had given her more satisfaction in her entire career.
In the half-dozen years she’d spent on the MIT in Bradfield, Chris had thought about Shaz almost every working day. They’d worked together when Shaz had first made it into CID and they’d been a good team then. At this level, they’d have been unstoppable. This was the kind of work Shaz had dreamed of doing and she’d have been good at it.
Mixed with Chris’s regret was an inescapable element of guilt. Even though she wasn’t Shaz’s boss by then, she still blamed herself for not paying close enough attention to what Shaz had been doing; if she hadn’t been so wrapped up in her own concerns, she might have provided back-up and kept the young detective safe. But she hadn’t and it was a failing she lived with daily. Ironically, it had made her a better colleague, a stronger team player.
Even now there was no shred of forgiveness in her heart for Jacko Vance. His very name still had the power to provoke a surge of anger in her, an anger she suspected would only ever be stilled by direct physical violence. Now, listening to Carol Jordan’s news, Chris could feel that familiar rage burn inside her again. Pointless to engage in recrimination. What mattered was putting Vance back where he belonged and making sure he stayed there. ‘How’s the hunt being organised?’ she said, ramming the lid down on her anger.
‘I don’t have any information,’ Carol said. ‘Nobody’s bothered to tell me officially what’s going on. I only know because the Home Office asked Tony for a risk assessment. And he thinks all of us who put Vance away need to watch our backs.’
Chris frowned. She understood the gravity of Tony’s opinion. She wasn’t sure she agreed, though. ‘Makes sense. He couldn’t stand being crossed,’ she said slowly. ‘That’s why he killed Shaz. Even though she was no threat to him. Not really. He had all the power. But she had the bottle to go up against him and he couldn’t tolerate that.’
‘Exactly.’
‘All the same … I can see why he thinks you and him might be in the firing line. But the rest of us? I don’t think we made it on to Vance’s radar. We were just the little people, and guys like Vance don’t have to pay attention to the little people. There’s no spectacle in the little people like us.’
Carol gave a dry laugh. ‘Funny, I never think of you as one of the little people, Chris. I appreciate what you’re saying, but I still want to cover the bases. What I need you to do is to track down the other three who worked with us and warn them that Vance is on the loose and could be a risk to their safety.’
Chris looked up at the corner of the room and cast back into her memory. ‘Leon Jackson, Simon McNeill and Kay … what was Kay’s surname?’
Sam Evans, on his way out of the room, overheard Chris’s last comment and couldn’t help himself. ‘Not like you to forget one of the laydeez, Chris,’ he teased.
‘Some people are just—’ she shrugged. ‘Forgettable, Bill.’
‘Ha, ha,’ he said sarcastically as he let the door swing closed behind him.
‘She was forgettable, though,’ Carol said. ‘I think she did it deliberately. Melting into the background so people would forget she was there and say something they didn’t intend to.’
Chris nodded. ‘She was a good interviewer. Different to Paula, but maybe just as good. But what was her surname?’
‘Hallam. Kay Hallam.’
‘That’s it, now I remember. It’s funny, isn’t it? You’d think after an experience like that, we’d all have stayed in touch. Kept an eye on each other’s careers. But soon as the first court case was over, they all scattered to the four winds. It was like they didn’t want any contact to make it easier to erase the whole thing from the memory banks. Then when we all met up for the appeal and the second trial, it was like a bunch of embarrassed strangers.’
Carol nodded. ‘Like when you run into people at a wedding or a funeral that you were once close to, but it’s been so long it’s too awkward. You can’t recover the way you were but you both know it used to be different and there’s something painful and sad about it.’
It was hard to say who was more surprised by Carol’s comments. They had worked together for long enough for Chris to know just how rare it was to hear Carol Jordan speak so clearly from the heart. Both women guarded their privacy, deliberately avoiding intimacy. Close as this team was, they didn’t socialise together. Wherever they opened their hearts, it wasn’t in the office.
Carol cleared her throat. ‘Kay sent me Christmas cards for three or four years, but I think that had more to do with wanting to be sure I would give her a good reference than a desire to stay in touch. I’ve no idea where she is now, or even if she’s still a copper.’
Chris tapped the names into her smartphone. ‘I’ll get on to it. Maybe the Federation can help. At least they should be able to tell me if they’re still serving officers.’
‘Will they give out information like that?’ Carol said.
Chris shrugged. ‘They’re supposed to be our union. You’d think they’d want to protect us.’ She gave a wicked grin. ‘Besides, I have my little ways. They might not be as pretty as Paula’s, but they get results.’
Carol threw up her hands in surrender as Chris swung round and started hammering the keys of her computer with the force of someone who had learned her skills on a typewriter. ‘I don’t want to know any more,’ she said. ‘Talk to me and Tony when you’re done. And Chris …?’
Chris looked up from the screen. ‘What?’
‘Don’t get so wrapped up in this that you forget to watch your own back. If Vance has got a list, you’re on it too.’ Carol stood up and made for the door.
‘So, with all due respect, guv, where exactly are you going all on your lonesome?’ Chris called after her.
Carol half-turned, a wry smile crinkling the skin round her eyes. ‘I’m going to Northern Divisional HQ. I think I’ll be safe there.’
‘I wouldn’t bank on it,’ Chris muttered darkly as the door closed behind Carol.
It was unusual for Vanessa Hill to be at a loose end at lunchtime. Just because food was a necessity, there was no reason not to use eating time purposefully. So working lunches were a perennial feature of her calendar. Either out with clients or in the office with key personnel, planning
campaign strategies and assessing potential markets. She’d been running her own HR consultancy for thirty years now and she hadn’t become one of the leading headhunters in the country by accident.
But today she was stranded. The insurance broker she was supposed to meet for lunch had cancelled at the last minute – some nonsense about his daughter breaking her arm in an accident at school – leaving her in the centre of Manchester with nothing to occupy her until her two o’clock appointment.
She couldn’t be bothered sitting in the pre-booked restaurant alone, so she stopped outside a sandwich bar and picked up a coffee and a filled roll. She remembered passing a car-wash with valet on her way to the restaurant. It was about time the car had a good going over. There was a time when she did that sort of thing herself on the grounds that nobody else would do it as thoroughly, but these days she preferred to pay. Not that it represented any compromise on standards. If they didn’t do it well enough, she simply insisted they do it again.
Vanessa drove into the valeting bay, issued her instructions and settled down in the waiting room, where a TV high on the wall provided a rolling news channel for its customers. Heaven forbid that anyone should be thrown on their own resources, Vanessa thought. She unwrapped her sandwich, aware of being studied by the fifty-something bloke in the off-the-peg suit that hadn’t been pressed this week. She’d already dismissed him as pointless in a single sweep of her eyes when she walked in. She was practised at sizing people up more swiftly than clients often believed possible. It was a knack she’d always had. And as with all of nature’s gifts, Vanessa had learned to maximise it.
