The Retribution

by Val McDermid

  She knew she wasn’t the most beautiful of women. Her nose was too sharp, her face too angular. But she’d always dressed and groomed to make the most of what she had, and it was gratifying that men still gave her the once-over. Not that she was remotely interested in any of them. It had been years since she’d expended any time or energy on anything that went beyond flattery or flirting. Her own company was more than adequate for her.

  As she ate, Vanessa kept half an eye on the screen. Lately, the news had felt like a daily retread. Middle East unrest, African unrest, government squabbling and the latest natural disaster. One of her employees had been making everyone laugh round the water cooler the other morning, doing an impression of an overly religious neighbour delivering doom, gloom and the four horsemen of the apocalypse over the dustbins. You could see her point, though.

  Now the newsreader seemed to perk up. ‘News just in,’ she said, her eyebrows dancing like drawbridges on fast forward. ‘Convicted murderer Jacko Vance has escaped from Oakworth Prison near Worcester. Vance, who was convicted of the murder of a teenage girl but is believed to have killed many more, disguised himself as a prisoner who was booked on a day’s work experience outside the prison.’

  Vanessa harrumphed. What did they expect? Treat prisoners like it’s a hostel and they’ll take advantage. ‘Prison officials have declined to comment at this stage, but it’s understood that former TV presenter and Olympic athlete Vance hijacked a taxi that had been hired to take the other prisoner to his workplace. Over now to local MP, Cathy Cottison.’

  A plain woman in an unflattering neckline appeared on St Stephen’s Green outside Westminster. ‘There are many questions to be answered here,’ she said in a strong Black Country accent that Vanessa struggled with. ‘Jacko Vance is a former TV star. He’s only got one arm. How on earth did he fool the prison staff enough to get out in the first place? And how is a prisoner like Vance anywhere near the sort of prisoner who goes out on day release? And how come a prisoner gets in a taxi by himself, without an escort? And how does a one-armed man hijack a taxi without a weapon? I will be putting these questions to the Home Secretary at the first opportunity.’

  Vanessa was paying serious attention now. Heads would roll over this. And where heads rolled, recruitment opportunities were not far behind. To her disappointment, the news angle was left behind as they segued into the back story of Vance the athlete, Vance the TV personality and Vance the killer. Her focus began to drift away, then suddenly, a familiar figure appeared on the screen. ‘Psychological profiler Dr Tony Hill, seen here with a police colleague, was instrumental in exposing Vance’s crimes and bringing him to justice.’

  Of course. It had completely slipped her mind that Tony had been involved in the Jacko Vance case. Most mothers would have been proud to see their only son featuring so positively in a national news story. Vanessa Hill was not most mothers. Her son had been an inconvenience since even before he’d been born and she’d managed to sidestep anything approaching a maternal response to him. She had set her face against him from the beginning and nothing he had done had changed her position. She despised him and scorned what he did for a living. He wasn’t a stupid man, she knew that much. He had the same knack for insight that she possessed. He could have turned his gifts to good use, made a success of himself.

  Instead, he’d chosen to spend his days with killers and rapists and the scum of the earth. What was the point of that? Honestly. Remembering he’d been thwarted by her bastard son almost made her feel like rooting for Jacko Vance. She turned away in disgust and took out her phone to check her emails. Anything had to be better than watching that rubbish on the telly.

  15

  There was something desperately sad about the flat that Nicky Reid had shared with Suze Black. The worn-out furniture had clearly been culled from the meanest of second-hand shops. The scenic photographs on the walls looked as if they’d been cut out of magazines and slotted into cheap IKEA frames. The carpet was threadbare, its colour lost in the mists of time. But it was both cleaner and tidier than Paula had expected. It felt like a room put together by a pair of kids playing at keeping house.

  Nicky caught her observant eye and said, ‘We’re not scum, you know. We try to live a decent life. Tried.’ He pointed to a bowl of oranges, apples and bananas on a side table. ‘Fruit and stuff. Proper food. And we pay the rent.’ He crossed one skinny denim-clad leg over the other and folded his hands over his knee. The campness of the posture undercut his attempt at dignity and Paula felt even more sad for him.

  ‘I’m sorry about Suze,’ she said. ‘What happened to her is unforgivable.’

  ‘If you lot had listened when I reported her missing … If you’d taken me seriously … ’ The accusation hung in the air.

  Paula sighed. Her tone was tender. ‘I understand why you feel so angry, Nicky. But even if we’d gone on red alert when you reported Suze missing, we’d have been too late. I’m sorry, but the truth is, she’d been dead for some time before even you knew she was gone. I know you feel guilty, Nicky, but there’s nothing you could have done different that would have made any odds to the outcome.’

  Nicky sniffed loudly, his eyes bright. Paula couldn’t decide if it was cocaine or grief; judging by Kevin’s body language, he’d already made his mind up.

  ‘She was great – Suze,’ Nicky said, a wobble in his voice. ‘I’ve known her for years. We were at school together. We used to bunk off and go down the video arcade, hang around smoking and playing bingo with the pensioners.’

  ‘You both had problems with school, then?’

  He gave a scornful little laugh. ‘School. Home. Other kids. You name it, me and Suze managed to get in it up to our fucking necks. She’s the only person who’s still in my life from back then. Everybody else fucked me over then fucked off. But not Suze. We took care of each other.’

  Paula reckoned he was relaxed enough now for a harder question. ‘You’re both working the street, right?’

  Nicky nodded. ‘Rent.’ He looked up at the cracked ceiling, blinking back tears from big blue eyes that were the stand-out feature in his narrow bony face with its thin lips and chipped teeth. ‘We couldn’t do anything else. Suze tried working in the corner shop, but the pay was crap.’ He gave a little shrug. ‘I don’t know how people manage.’

  ‘Most people don’t have an expensive drug habit,’ Kevin said, not unkindly.

  Nicky flicked at a tear with the tip of his fingers. ‘So fucking sue me.’

  ‘Suze was doing heroin, am I right?’ Paula said, trying to get back on track.

  Nicky nodded and began picking at the skin round his thumbnail. ‘She’s been using for years.’ He flashed a quick look at Paula. ‘She wasn’t, like, off her tits. Just nice and steady, like. She could cope. On heroin, she could cope. Off heroin?’ He sighed. ‘Look, I know you think we’re shit, but we were doing OK.’ He reached for his cigarettes and lit one. As an afterthought, he offered one to Paula, who managed to refuse.

  ‘I can see that,’ Paula said. ‘I can see how hard you’ve been trying. I’m not here to give you a bad time for any of it. I just need to be sure whether Suze died because of something in her life or because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time.’

  Nicky straightened up, uncrossing his legs and gripping the seat of the chair. ‘There was nobody in her life who would want to do Suze a bad turn. I know you think I’m bigging her up because she’s dead, but that’s not how it was. Look, she was a hooker and a heroin addict, but she wasn’t a bad person. She never had a pimp. She just had a dealer who looked after her.’

  ‘Who was her dealer?’

  He shook his head. ‘I’m not going to name names. That would be stupid and I’m not stupid. Whatever you might think. Look, she was a good customer. And she brought other customers to him, so he took care that nobody gave her a bad time. Nobody poached on her pitch. Everybody knew the score. When those fucking East European bitches turned up at the building site, they thought they
could work the Flyer when the weather turned shitty.’ Nicky smirked. ‘That didn’t last long. Those Russian fuckers think they’re hard, but they’re not hard like Bradfield hard.’

  ‘How long had Suze been working the Flyer?’ Kevin asked. He knew Paula didn’t like her flow being interrupted, but he hated feeling like a spare part.

  Nicky scratched his head, crossing his legs again. Paula wished she had Tony Hill’s ability to read a person’s body language. She’d recently been on an interrogation course that had devoted some time to the subject but still she felt as if she was only skating over the surface. ‘I don’t remember,’ he said. ‘It feels like forever, you know?’

  ‘Did she have regulars?’ Paula asked. ‘Or was it mostly air-crew passing through?’

  ‘Both.’ He inhaled deeply and let the smoke flow from his nostrils. ‘Some of her regulars were crew that fly the same route all the time. Like, if it’s Tuesday it must be the Dubai lot. She had a few Arab regulars, coming in and out from the Gulf. Some locals who work the cargo terminal.’ He sighed. ‘I don’t know names or anything like that. I never really paid attention. I wasn’t that interested in her punters, if you must know.’

  ‘Did she have a place where she took them? A hotel room, a bedsit, somewhere like that?’ Drowned in a bath, Paula thought.

  Nicky gave a small splutter of laughter. ‘Are you kidding? She was a street-level prostitute. She never worked in a brothel or a sauna. She worked the streets. She fucked them round the back of the Flyer. In their car, if they had one.’ He laughed again, a terrible choked sound. ‘It’s not Pretty Woman, our lives.’

  ‘What about where these guys were staying? The out-oftowners must have had hotel rooms. Did she go back with them?’

  Nicky shook his head. ‘Like I said, Suze was street. She wasn’t going to get past any hotel receptionist with a pulse. Why are you asking about this?’

  ‘We think she wasn’t killed where she was found,’ Paula said.

  ‘They said she was drowned. And they found her in the canal. Why would you think she wasn’t killed there?’

  ‘They found the wrong water in her lungs,’ Paula said. ‘It wasn’t canal water. Wherever she drowned, it wasn’t in the canal.’ She waited while he processed that information. ‘Any idea where that might have been?’

  ‘No fucking idea at all.’

  ‘Did she ever mention feeling threatened?’

  ‘The only time there was ever any bother was with the East Europeans. And like I say, that got sorted out. It was months ago, anyway. If there had been any blowback off that, it would have hit a long time ago. Whoever killed her, I don’t think it was personal. Anybody could have picked her up. Once the Flyer shut its doors, she worked on the street. It’s not like anybody had her back. Out there, she was on her own. It wasn’t like in Temple Fields where I work. We’re team-handed there. Somebody pays attention who I go with. I do the same for them.’ He shook his head. ‘I told her she should find somebody to work with. But she said there wasn’t enough work to go round. I can’t blame her. She was right. Fucking recession.’

  ‘What? People cutting back on paying for it?’ Kevin said, a hint of sarcasm obvious to Paula.

  ‘No, copper,’ Nicky said angrily. ‘More people out on the street selling it. We’ve been noticing that, me and Suze. A lot of new faces.’

  That was interesting, Paula thought. She wasn’t quite sure why, but anything out of the ordinary couldn’t be disregarded in a murder inquiry. ‘Any trouble from the new faces?’

  Nicky ground out his cigarette in an African ceramic ashtray, then lifted the top and dropped the stub neatly below. No overflowing saucers here, Paula noted. ‘There’s been some rucks down Temple Fields,’ he said at last. ‘But not out the arse end of Brackley Field.’ He picked up his cigarette packet and tapped it on the arm of the chair. ‘When will they let me have her body?’

  The question came out of nowhere. ‘Are you her next of kin?’ Paula said, playing for time.

  ‘I’m all she’s got. Her mum’s dead. She hasn’t seen her dad or her two brothers since she was nine. She was in care, same as me. We look after each other. She needs a proper funeral and no other fucker will do it for her. So when do I get to sort it out?’

  ‘You need to talk to the coroner’s officer,’ Paula said, feeling bad about sidestepping a question that had no easy answer. ‘But they won’t release her right away. With her being a murder victim, we need to hold on to her for a while.’

  ‘Why? I knew there had to be a postmortem. I mean, I watch TV, right? I understand that. But now that’s been done, surely I can have her back?’

  ‘It’s not that simple,’ Kevin said. ‘If we arrest someone—’

  ‘If? Don’t you mean when?’ Nicky jumped to his feet and began to prowl up and down the room, lighting a cigarette as he moved. ‘Or is she not important enough to qualify for “when”?’

  Paula could sense Kevin tensing alongside her. ‘Here’s how it goes. When we arrest someone, he has the right to ask for a second postmortem. Just in case our pathologist got it wrong. It’s particularly important when there’s some question about cause of death. Or, like in this case, a forensic issue relating to the body.’

  ‘Fuck,’ Nicky spat. ‘The rate you lot work at, we could all be dead before you arrest someone.’ He stopped, leaning his head on the wall. In silhouette, he looked like an artist’s rendition of despair. ‘What happens if this twat gets away with it? How long before you decide to give her back to me?’ He was getting worked up now. There would be nothing more of value from Nicky today, Paula realised.

  ‘Talk to the coroner’s officer, Nicky,’ she said, calm but not condescending. ‘He can answer your questions.’ She stood up and crossed the room to where he stood and put her hand on his arm. Through his long-sleeved top, she could feel hard bone and quivering muscle. ‘I’m sorry about your loss. I promise you, I don’t take any murder lightly.’ She handed him her card. ‘If you think of anything that might be helpful, call me.’ She gave him a thin smile. ‘Or if you just want to talk about her, call me.’

  16

  Carol glared at Penny Burgess, the crime correspondent of the Bradfield Evening Sentinel Times. It was probably as well for the reporter that Carol was watching the press conference on CCTV and not in the same room. From her earliest days in Bradfield, the reporter had alienated Carol, in spite of her appeals to sisterhood and justice. It infuriated Carol that someone who claimed to espouse the beliefs closest to her own heart could deny them so effectively in her actions. What was almost more irritating was that the woman seemed to be bulletproof. No matter that her career regularly seemed to hit the rocks – there she was, still getting those front-page bylines and showing up in the press room looking as expensively turned out as a London fashion journalist. She’d nearly destroyed Kevin Matthews’ career and his marriage when she’d seduced him into an affair and a series of operational indiscretions, but still she sat there in the front row at police press conferences as if she were made of stainless steel.

  Today, she was being as tenacious as ever. Once she got an idea into her head, she was like a serial killer with a victim in her power. She wouldn’t give up until she’d exhausted the possibilities of her prey then finished it off. It was an admirable trait, Carol supposed. Provided you had the judgement to know when the idea was actually worth the pursuit. She’d been driven to the point of public rage by Penny herself; she knew exactly what Pete Reekie was experiencing now. It didn’t help that Penny was actually on to something Reekie wanted to keep under the radar. There was a dull flush across his prominent cheekbones and his brows were drawn down low. ‘As I said right at the start of this press call, the aim of this morning’s exercise is to identify an unknown murder victim. Somewhere out there is a family who are unaware of what has happened to their daughter, their sister, maybe even their mother. That’s the number one priority,’ he said, biting his words as if they were a stick of celery.

 
Penny Burgess didn’t wait for an invitation that surely wouldn’t have come. She was straight in there, coming back at the point she’d introduced some time earlier. ‘Surely the number one priority is to catch a killer? To stop the death toll rising any further?’

  Flustered, Reekie looked around for help. But there was none. ‘That goes without saying,’ he said. ‘But our first step is to identify the victim. We need to know where she encountered her killer.’

  ‘She encountered him on the streets of Bradfield,’ Penny interrupted. ‘Just like his first two victims, Kylie Mitchell and Suzanne Black. Superintendent, do you have a warning to issue to the city’s street prostitutes while this serial killer is at large?’

  ‘Miss Burgess, I have already said there is no reason to believe these murders are the work of one man. The women were all killed in markedly different ways and locations—’

  ‘My source tells me there’s a link between all three crimes,’ Penny Burgess cut in. ‘The killer leaves a signature. Would you care to comment on that?’

  Take it back to her, Carol urged mentally. She’s short on details, that’s why she hasn’t run the story.

  The same truth had finally dawned on Reekie. ‘Can you elaborate?’ he snapped. ‘Because I don’t think you have any idea what you’re talking about. I think you’re just looking for a sensationalist angle. Because that’s the only way you can get your editor interested in the murder of a street sex worker. It’s only got value for you if you can spin it into something that sounds like an episode from a TV series.’