The Retribution

by Val McDermid

  There was a shocked silence in the room. Then a cacophony of voices began shouting questions. You’ve gone too far, Carol thought. You’ve really pissed her off now.

  The police press officer managed to bring some calm to the half-dozen reporters in the room. Then Penny Burgess’s voice rang out again:

  ‘Will you be inviting DCI Jordan’s Major Incident Team to contribute to the inquiry?’

  Reekie glowered at her. ‘I’ve no intention of discussing operational matters in this forum,’ he said. ‘I’m going to say this one more time, and then this press conference is over.’ He half-turned and gestured towards the cleaned-up image Grisha Shatalov had managed to produce. The woman still looked dead, but at least now she wouldn’t give most people nightmares. ‘We are concerned to identify the victim of a brutal murder that occurred in Bradfield some time between Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning. Someone must know this woman. We urge you to come forward in strictest confidence with any information about her identity or her movements prior to her death. Thank you for your cooperation.’ Reekie turned on his heel and marched out, ignoring the questions still coming from the reporters.

  A few moments later, he burst into his office and threw his papers on a small table by the door. Carol swung round in the swivel chair and pasted a sympathetic look on her face. ‘Bit of a nightmare, Penny Burgess,’ she said.

  Reekie glared at her as he subsided into the comfortable chair behind his desk. ‘I still don’t see why I had to deal with her. What’s the point in trying to pretend we’ve not got a serial killer on the rampage? Why can’t we just front up about it? Reveal your team’s on the case?’ He picked up a pen and began tapping it end to end on his desk. She noticed a faint indentation on his finger where a wedding ring should have been. ‘That would reassure people.’

  Carol swivelled to face him. Reekie needed his feathers smoothed down; yet another of the political games she hated having to play. ‘But as you pointed out in there, it would get a lot more media attention. Which is a problem on two counts. One: it’s always harder to run an investigation with the world’s press breathing down your neck, and these days the faintest whiff of a serial killer generates the kind of media shit-storm that makes life impossible for investigating officers. Greedy media on a twenty-four-hour cycle means a level of scrutiny that none of us wants to operate under. And two: this kind of killer revels in publicity. He wants to be a star. He wants to be the centre of attention. Take that away from him, and you put him under stress. And stress leads to mistakes. And mistakes are how we catch them.’

  ‘That’s easy for you to say. You didn’t have to stand up there and lie.’ He kept up the annoying thing with the pen. Carol wanted to snatch it from him, to play the martinet teacher to his sulky small boy. She resisted the urge with some difficulty.

  ‘You didn’t have to lie. Just not reveal the whole story. The one thing that was a relief to me from that display was that her source isn’t at the heart of the investigation.’

  Reekie nodded. ‘I suppose so. If he was, she’d have known about the tattoo instead of having to go all coy about the “signature”.’

  ‘So we’re in the clear for now.’ Carol stood up. Reekie made no move to shake hands or get to his feet. Clearly he still felt bruised from his close encounter with Penny Burgess. ‘Let me know if your guys on the ground get anything on the ID.’

  ‘As soon as we hear anything, you’ll know. Let’s stay in close touch on this one, Carol. We don’t want it to get away from us.’

  Carol turned and made for the door. They always had to have the last word, to remind her who was the ranking officer. At moments like this, she knew exactly why she appreciated Tony Hill.

  17

  Tony Hill was well aware that his responses were not the same as those of other people. Take memory, for example. Even though he’d been drinking coffee with Carol Jordan for more years than he cared to consider, he still found himself standing at the counter in coffee shops or in his kitchen, having to pause while he sorted through the database in his head to recall whether she drank espresso or cappuccino. But he was no absentminded professor. He could remember the signature behaviour of every serial offender he’d ever encountered, both as a profiler and a clinician. All memory was selective, he knew that. It was just that the principles that governed his memory were unusual.

  So it came as a surprise to him when he sat down to write a risk assessment of Jacko Vance that he had no recollection of ever having formally profiled him. After Carol had left, he’d closed his eyes and tried to summon up a mental image of his report. When nothing materialised, his eyes had snapped open as he realised that his pursuit of Vance had been so out of the ordinary that he’d written nothing down at the time it was happening. Of course, the hunt for Vance had been unusual, in that it hadn’t originated with a police investigation. It had been the result of a training exercise for the aspiring profilers Tony had been working with on a Home Office task force. And once things had started moving, there had been no time to sit back and analyse Vance’s crimes in those terms.

  To buy himself some time while he considered what he knew about Vance, Tony found one of his previous profiles on Carol’s laptop and copied his standard introductory paragraphs.

  The following offender profile is for guidance only and shouldn’t be regarded as an identikit portrait. The offender is unlikely to match the profile in every detail, though I would expect there to be a high degree of congruence between the characteristics outlined below and the reality. All of the statements in the profile express probabilities and possibilities, not hard facts.

  A serial killer produces signals and indicators in the commission of his crimes. Everything he does is intended, consciously or not, as part of a pattern. Discovering the underlying pattern reveals the killer’s logic. It may not appear logical to us, but to him it is crucial. Because his logic is so idiosyncratic, straightforward traps will not capture him. As he is unique, so must be the means of catching him, interviewing him and reconstructing his acts.

  It didn’t really fit the bill. That was because Lambert wanted a risk assessment, not a crime-based profile. He could keep the second paragraph, he supposed. But the first would have to change. He created a new file and began.

  The following risk assessment is based on limited direct acquaintance with Jacko Vance. I saw Vance in public on several occasions and I interviewed him twice: once in his home when he may have realised he was the object of investigation; and a second time after he had been arrested on suspicion of murder. However, I am familiar with the detail of his crimes and have sufficient knowledge of his background to feel confident in preparing an assessment of how he is likely to respond to being on the run, having successfully outwitted the system and escaped from prison.

  ‘What’s going through your head, Jacko?’ Tony said softly, leaning back in the chair and locking his fingers behind his head. ‘Why this? Why now?’

  A sharp knock at the door interrupted his conversation with himself. Paula stuck her head in, a determined look on her face. ‘You got a minute?’ Before he could reply, she was through the door and shutting it behind her.

  ‘What if I said no?’

  Paula gave him a tired smile. ‘I’d say, “tough shit”.’

  ‘I thought as much.’ Tony took off his reading glasses and studied Paula. There was history between them, a stained and complicated web of connections that had spread out over the years till it had become a sort of friendship. He’d led her through the labyrinth of grief after the death of a colleague who had also been a friend; she’d pushed him into doing the right things for the wrong reasons; he’d made her break the rules then stood in the firing line when Carol had turned her sights on her. Respect was the keystone of their relationship. Just as well, Tony thought, otherwise he might have found it hard to forgive Paula the happiness she’d found with Dr Elinor Blessing, a happiness he doubted he had the capacity for. ‘I don’t suppose this is a social visit?’
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  ‘Can I ask what you’re working on?’ Paula clearly wasn’t in the mood for small talk. Carol must be expected back soon, then.

  ‘I’m doing a risk assessment for the Home Office. I don’t know if Carol said anything to you guys, but it’ll be public knowledge before too long. Some things you can’t keep quiet. Jacko Vance escaped from Oakworth this morning. Because I was involved in putting him away, they want me to stare into my crystal ball and tell them where he’s going to go and what he’s going to do.’ Tony’s sardonic stare matched his tone.

  ‘So you’re not working on our case?’

  ‘You know how it is, Paula. Blake won’t pay for me and DCI Jordan refuses to let me work without being paid. I thought I might be able to call in a favour via the Home Office, but they won’t agree, not now. They’ll want me totally focused on Jacko. No distractions.’

  ‘It’s just stupid, not making the most of your skills,’ Paula said. ‘You know what we’re working on?’

  ‘A string of murders that looks like a serial. I don’t know much more than that,’ he said. ‘She tries to keep me out of temptation’s way.’

  ‘Well, consider me the temptress. Tony, this is right up your street. He’s the kind of killer you understand, the sort of mind you can map like nobody else. And this is MIT’s last tango. We want to go out on a high note. I want to leave Blake with a sour taste in his mouth when the chief goes off to West Mercia. I want him to understand the class of the operation he’s flushing down the toilet. So we’ve got to come up with the right answer, and fast.’ Her eyes were pleading, a contrast with the fierceness of her words.

  Tony wanted to resist the draw of Paula’s words. But in his heart, he agreed with everything she’d said. There was no rational explanation for what Blake was doing except that it would save some money to close the specialist unit. His conviction that spreading MIT’s skills more thinly would produce more effective outcomes was, in Tony’s opinion, a crackpot idea that would produce the opposite result. ‘Why are you telling me this?’ he said, a last-ditch bid to still the interest quickening in him.

  Paula rolled her eyes and tutted. ‘I thought you were supposed to be the smart one? Because we need your help, Tony. We need you to profile the killer so we can make some progress instead of getting bogged down in the mountain of crap this kind of inquiry produces.’

  ‘She won’t have it. Like I said: there’s no budget to pay me and she won’t exploit me.’ He opened his hands as he shrugged, going for the deliberately cute smile. ‘I’ve begged her, but she won’t take advantage.’

  Paula groaned. ‘Spare me the single entendres. Listen, it’s simple. It doesn’t matter what she wants. Because she’s not going to know. Because it’s going to be our little secret.’

  Tony groaned. ‘Why am I getting that sinking feeling? Whenever you and I go off on our own initiative, it always ends in tears.’

  Paula grinned, her eyes sparkling with mischief. ‘Yeah, but you can’t argue with our results. Every time we’ve gone behind her back, it’s moved the investigation forward.’

  ‘And she’s ripped us a new one,’ Tony said with feeling. ‘It’s all right for you, you get to go home to Elinor. But I’m supposed to be living with her in Worcester—’ The words were out before he could stop them.

  Paula’s face couldn’t make its mind up between astonishment and delight. ‘What? You mean, like now? She’ll have her own flat, like she has now, in the basement?’

  Tony closed his eyes and put his fists to his temples. ‘Shit, shit, shit. I wasn’t supposed to say anything.’ He dropped his hands to the desk and sighed. ‘It’s not like it sounds. Sharing the house, that would be a better description. Look, Paula, we didn’t— she didn’t want the team to know. Because you’d all jump to conclusions and then the sideways looks and the cheesy sentimental crap would start and she’d have to kill you all.’ He ran a hand through his hair, leaving it standing up in spikes.

  Paula just smiled. ‘It’s OK. I won’t say anything. It’s nobody’s business. Frankly, I can’t think of anyone else who’d put up with either of you. And I mean as housemates,’ she added hastily as he opened his mouth to contradict her.

  ‘You’re probably right,’ he said.

  ‘So will you help?’ Paula said, closing the subject and getting back to what she really wanted.

  ‘She’ll kill me,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, but not nailing this one will kill her,’ Paula said. ‘You know how she is about unfinished business. Justice not being served … ’

  Tony leaned back in the chair and stared at the ceiling. ‘I am going to live to regret this. OK, Paula. Get Stacey to send me the usual package. I make no promises, but I’ll take a look at it after I’ve done the Jacko Vance assessment.’ He straightened up abruptly. ‘And let’s try to keep it a secret for once. Please?’

  18

  By the time she made it back to the squad room, Carol was ready for some good news. She’d had to fend off a call from the Chief Constable on the drive back from Northern HQ, during which James Blake had shown considerably more concern for the state of his budget than the lives of the women whose circumstances pushed them on to the streets to sell the one commodity of value they had left. Given his passion for cuts, she wondered how long it would be before some bright spark in government headhunted him.

  She stuck her head into her office, where Tony was staring into her computer. A small stack of paper sat to one side, a pen on top of it. She could see scribbled notes, complete with asterisks and underlinings. Tony barely acknowledged her arrival, settling for an inarticulate grunt.

  ‘Any news on Vance?’ she said. She’d managed to put thoughts of the escaped prisoner to one side while she’d been out of the office, but there was no avoiding it now Tony had squatter’s rights over her office.

  He shook his head without looking up. ‘Nothing. I rang Lambert a while back. The cameras picked up the taxi when he joined the M5 heading north and they’re tracking forward from that. But you know how hard it is to do that stuff in real time. You just need one crap camera and you’re stuck with a load of options to track.’

  ‘Do you know who’s coordinating the search?’

  ‘I thought you’d be up to speed on that. Oakworth’s on West Mercia’s patch, after all.’

  ‘I’ll make some calls,’ Carol said, leaving him to it and returning to her team to check on their progress. Paula was on the phone at the nearest desk, so Carol pulled up a chair to wait for her to finish.

  Paula covered the mouthpiece and said quietly, ‘I’m just talking to my contact at Northern – Franny Riley. I’ll put him on speakerphone so you can listen in.’

  Paula pressed a button and a deep Mancunian growl emerged from the tinny speaker. ‘… and that’s why we’re so short-handed.’

  ‘All the same, Sarge, I’m going to need more bodies than that to do a proper door-to-door and get the photos out on the street.’

  ‘Paula, I know. Tell me about it.’ In the background, Carol could hear another voice. ‘Hang on a minute, let me put you on hold, my DI’s just come over.’

  Whatever Franny had intended, what he actually did was to put his phone on speaker too. Carol immediately recognised the other voice. DI Spencer, the SIO from Northern that she’d replaced as head of the investigation.

  ‘Are you tied up, Franny?’ Spencer asked. ‘Only, I need you to take a look at the witness statements on that aggravated burglary.’

  ‘I’m on to MIT, trying to get the door-to-door sorted,’ Riley said.

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ Spencer said, disgusted. ‘I thought bringing them in was supposed to take the load off us? Ever since they came on board, it’s been do this, sort that, check the other. MIT, what does that stand for again?’ Before Franny could respond, Spencer gave his own answer. ‘I’ll tell you what it stands for: Minorities Integration Team,’ he said, guffawing at his own wit. ‘A pair of lezzas, a jungle bunny, a Chink and a ginger. All led by a gash.’

>   Carol recoiled in shock. It had been a long time since she’d heard that kind of abuse from a colleague. It was the language of prejudice that was supposed to be history in modern policing. She’d always suspected the canteen cowboys were still riding the range, but they were generally too savvy to show their true colours in front of anybody who might disagree. Apparently it wasn’t just media hype that the old sexist and racist conditioning still existed beneath the surface.

  Paula reached for the phone to cut off the call, her face revealing that Carol wasn’t the only one who was horrified. But Carol pushed her hand away and leaned forward. ‘DI Spencer. This is Detective Chief Inspector Jordan. Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, your offensive attitudes have been broadcast to my entire team. My office, now.’

  There was a long silence. Then the high-pitched tone of a line gone dead. Carol sat back, feeling faintly queasy. She looked around at her team, who had all stopped what they were doing when Spencer’s words had sunk in. ‘DI Spencer will be here shortly to apologise. If any of you experience any obstruction whatsoever from Northern, I want to know about it. No covering anybody’s backs. We’re not going to be stopped from doing our jobs. Now let’s get cracking. We’ve got three murders to solve.’

  Stacey delivered one of her rare smiles. ‘And I’ve got something here that might just help.’

  19

  There was added urgency to Tony’s risk assessment now. As if it wasn’t enough to have Vance on the loose, he needed to free himself up so he could approach his new undercover project with a clear head. And he was going to have to find somewhere else to work. It would be hard to keep his progress secret from the person whose office he had taken over, especially when that person was as acute as Carol Jordan.