The Retribution

by Val McDermid

  He’d been horrified. He’d protested at her decision, declaring his willingness to be by her side till the end. But she’d been adamant. ‘It’s all arranged, lad. I’m putting everything in order then I’m taking myself off to the hospice. I hear they couldn’t be nicer in there.’

  Then they’d both cried. It had been hard, but he’d respected her wishes. Five weeks later, one of the dinner ladies had called him over and told him Joan had died. ‘Very peaceful, it were,’ she said. ‘But she’s left a bloody big hole round here.’

  He’d nodded, not trusting himself to speak. But he’d already discovered that Joan had taught him how to negotiate that bloody big hole for himself. He wasn’t the same boy she’d befriended.

  It was years later, when he was doing postgraduate work on personality disorders and psychopathic behaviour, that he understood the power of what Joan had done for him. It wasn’t overstating the case to say that Joan had saved him from what lay in prospect when she had snatched him out of the dinner line. She’d been the first person to show him love. A brusque, unsentimental love, it was true. But it had been love and even though he’d had no experience of it, he’d recognised it.

  In spite of Joan’s intervention, though, he’d never quite mastered the art of making easy connections with others. He’d learned to pretend – ‘passing for human’, he called it. He didn’t have a raft of mates like most of the men he’d worked with. He didn’t have a backlist of girlfriends and lovers like them. So the few people he cared about were all the more valuable to him. And the thought of losing Carol Jordan gave him a physical pain in his chest. Was this what the precursor to a heart attack felt like?

  There was more than one way to lose her. There was the obvious – the fact that she’d made it clear that she didn’t care if she never saw him again. But there was always hope that he could change her mind. Other ways were more final. In the state she was in, she would place little value on her life. He could imagine her deciding to go it alone against Vance, and he feared that would only have one outcome.

  Then it dawned on him that he might not be the only person capable of saving Carol from herself. He reached for his phone and called Alvin Ambrose. ‘I’m a bit busy just now,’ the sergeant said when he answered.

  ‘I’ll keep it brief, then,’ Tony said. ‘Carol Jordan’s on her way to confront Jacko Vance.’

  50

  Paula looked at her watch, feeling glum. She was inches away from giving up on Vice and going home. Right now, she should have been sitting in her kitchen, drinking red wine and watching Dr Elinor Blessing applying her surgical skills to carving a leg of lamb. She hoped there would be some left over after their dinner guests had eaten their fill. She yawned and laid her head on her folded arms on the desk. She’d give them five more minutes, then to hell with it.

  She woke with a start because someone was standing next to her. Blinded by the pool of light from her desk lamp, Paula could only see the outline of a figure against the dimly lit squad room. She jerked upright and pushed back in her chair, scrambling to her feet. A low laugh came from what she could now see was a woman. Middle-aged, middle-height and middle-weight. Dark hair in a neat bob. Face a bit like a garden gnome, complete with button nose and rosebud mouth. ‘Sorry to disturb your nap,’ she said. ‘I’m Sergeant Dean. From Vice.’

  Paula nodded, pushing her hair back from her face. ‘Hi. Sorry. I’m DC McIntyre. I just put my head down for five minutes … ’

  ‘I know who you are, pet.’ The accent was from the North East, the cadences blunted from years spent elsewhere. ‘No need to apologise. I know what it’s like when you’re in the thick of it. Some weeks, you wonder if your bed was only a dream.’

  ‘Thanks for coming in. I didn’t expect you to give up your Saturday night.’

  ‘I thought it was easier to come in. And besides, my husband and my two lads are off to Sunderland for the late kick-off game, they’ll not be back till gone eleven by the time they’ve had their post-match curry. So all you’re keeping me from is crap telly. What Bryant had to say sounded a lot more interesting. Care to fill in the blanks?’ DS Dean settled herself comfortably in Chris Devine’s desk chair and propped her boot heels on the bin. Paula tried not to mind.

  Slightly wary of the Vice cop’s obvious interest, Paula explained Tony’s theory as best she could then smiled apologetically. ‘The thing with Dr Hill is that his ideas can sound … ’

  ‘Stark staring mad?’

  Paula chuckled. ‘Pretty much. But I’ve worked with him for long enough now to know that it’s kind of spooky how often he gets things right on the money.’

  ‘I’ve heard he’s good,’ Dean said. ‘They say that’s part of the reason Carol Jordan has such a great success rate.’

  Paula bristled. ‘Don’t underestimate the chief. She’s a helluva detective.’

  ‘I’m sure she is. But we can all use a bit of help now and again. And that’s the reason I’m here. Whenever other detectives are interested in my turf, it’s time to take a personal interest. None of us wants our carefully cultivated contacts rubbed up the wrong way.’

  Now that Dean had laid out her stall, Paula felt more comfortable in her presence. ‘Naturally,’ she said. ‘So, can you help me?’

  Dean dug into the pocket of her jeans and took out a memory stick. ‘I’ll share what I can. Bryant said you were interested in new lasses?’

  ‘That’s right. I hear there are more new faces because of the recession.’

  ‘That’s true, but a lot of them are inside workers, not on the street. How new are you interested in?’

  ‘A month before the killings began?’

  ‘I like to keep my ear to the ground,’ Dean said, digging into the pocket of her jeans and coming out with a smartphone. ‘I also don’t like putting anything on the computer that doesn’t have to be there. Especially when it comes to vulnerable young women.’ She fiddled with the phone then gave a grunt of satisfaction.

  ‘There’s no hard and fast way of dealing with the crap out on the streets,’ Dean said, thumbing through a list. ‘It’s all a bit ad hoc, you might say. When new faces show up, we try and get alongside them. Sometimes a little bit of leaning is all it takes, you know? Especially with the more or less respectable ones. A mention of how a criminal record will fuck up everything from their childcare to their credit rating and you can see the wheels going round. But that’s a tiny minority. Once they’ve got as far as walking down that street, there’s mostly no going back. So what I’m looking for there is to develop sources. And just to keep an eye out, you know?’

  ‘Nobody wants bodies turning up.’

  ‘Aye, well, I like to think we mostly manage to step in before it gets that far. My bonny lads tell me I’m living in cloud cuckoo land. But at least I try to get their names and a bit of background so we know what to put on the toe-tag, if it comes to it.’

  ‘So what are we looking at here?’

  ‘Forty-four square miles of BMP force area. Nine hundred thousand population, give or take. At any given time, there’s somewhere around a hundred and fifty women working as prostitutes. When you think that about fifty per cent of men admit to having paid for sex, them lasses are working bloody hard for a living.’

  ‘Not much of a living, either,’ Paula said.

  ‘Enough to keep them in drugs so they don’t care what they’re doing to earn the money for the next fix.’ Dean shook her head. ‘I bloody hope I’ve brought my lads up with a better attitude to women, that’s all I can say.’ She took her feet off the bin and sat up straight. ‘The time frame you’re looking at, I’ve got three names for you.’

  ‘I’m just glad it’s not more than that.’

  ‘We’re getting into summer time. The nights are lighter and the punters are more wary of being recognised when they’re kerb crawling.’

  ‘I never thought of prostitution as being seasonal.’

  ‘Just the street stuff, pet. Indoors goes like a fair all year round. I
f you were interested in indoor, this list would be more like a dozen. So here we go. Tiffany Sedgwick, Lateesha Marlow and Kerry Fletcher.’

  Paula couldn’t believe her luck. ‘Did you say Kerry Fletcher?’ she said, excitement quickening in her.

  ‘Does that ring a bell?’

  ‘Kerry Fletcher’s female?’

  Dean looked at her as if she’d lost the plot. ‘Of course she’s female. You didn’t ask me about rent boys. Why? Does the name mean something?’

  ‘It came up earlier in a different part of the inquiry. Given the context, we thought it was a bloke. Kerry, it could be a bloke’s name.’ She frowned. ‘That makes no sense.’

  Dean smiled. ‘You can check it out for yourself. You’ll find her most nights down the bottom end of Campion Way. Near the roundabout.’

  ‘Do you know anything about her?’ Paula scribbled the name in her notebook, opening up her email program and starting to type a note to Stacey.

  ‘I know what she told me about herself. How much truth there is, who knows? They all make stuff up. Good stuff and bad stuff. Whatever they need to feel all right about themselves.’

  ‘So what did Kerry tell you?’ Paula liked a bit of job-related chit-chat as much as anyone, but right now the only thing she was interested in was Kerry Fletcher.

  ‘Well, she’s a local lass. I suspect that bit’s true, because she’s got a broad Bradfield accent. She was born in Toxteth Road, round the back of the high flats in Skenby.’

  Paula nodded. She knew Toxteth Road. What the local cops said was that even the dogs went round mob-handed down there. It was also in the area Stacey had identified from the number plates. ‘Desolation Row,’ she said.

  ‘Bang on. Then when she was five or six, they moved to a sixteenth-floor flat. And that was that for her mother. She never left the flat from the day they moved in. Kerry’s not sure if it was claustrophobia or agoraphobia or fear of Eric – that’s the dad. But whatever it was, she became a prisoner in her own home.’ The sergeant paused for dramatic effect. It was clear that she relished her stories.

  ‘And that made her the perfect bargaining chip for Eric Fletcher,’ Dean continued. ‘He began sexually abusing Kerry when she was about eight. If she didn’t do exactly as she was told, Eric took it out on her mother. He’d batter her, or push her out on the balcony and leave her there till she was a gibbering wreck. And little Kerry loved her mum.’

  Paula sighed. She’d heard variations on this tale so many times, but every time had the force of the first time. She couldn’t help imagining what it must have been like to feel so powerless. To endure a poverty of experience that meant this was a child’s only exemplar of love. When that was all you knew, how could you believe anything else was achievable? The relationships you saw on TV shows must have felt as fantastical as Hogwarts. ‘Of course she did,’ she said. ‘Why wouldn’t she? Until she learned to despise her.’

  Dean looked slightly pissed off. This was her story, after all. ‘And so it went on. Even after she left school and started working at the petrol station on Skenby Road. She had no life of her own. Eric saw to that.’ She gave Paula a shrewd look. ‘It’s what your Tony Hill would say. People become complicit in their own victimhood.’

  ‘You know a lot about Kerry Fletcher.’

  Dean gave her a wary glance. ‘I make it my business to know as much as I can about all of them. A cup of coffee and a motherly attitude goes a very long way on the shit side of the street, Paula.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘The mother died. About four months ago, as far as I can make out. It took a few weeks for it to dawn on Kerry that she was free at last.’

  ‘So she went on the streets? What happened to the job at the garage?’

  ‘When the scales fell from Kerry’s eyes, they made a right clatter on the pavement. She didn’t just want to be free, she wanted to rub Eric Fletcher’s nose in it. He wasn’t getting her for free any more, and she was making other men pay for what had been his.’

  Paula whistled. ‘And how did Eric take that?’

  ‘Not well,’ Dean said drily. ‘He kept turning up where she was working and begging her to come home. Kerry refused point-blank. She said it was safer on the streets than in his house. We warned him off a couple of times, he was making a scene in the street and it was shaping up to turn nasty. Since then, he’s kept a low profile, as far as I’m aware.’

  ‘She said it was safer on the streets than in his house,’ Paula repeated. ‘That sounds like the perfect fit for what Tony was talking about. And he must have used her email address. Of course he did.’ Energised now, she was tapping on the computer keys, composing an urgent message to Stacey to look for an Eric Fletcher in the Skenby flats, probably the sixteenth floor.

  As she sent it, she noticed a message had arrived from Dr Grisha Shatalov. ‘Bear with me a second,’ she said, momentarily abstracted. Paula, it read, We’ve got a torn piece of fingernail embedded in the exposed flesh of the latest body. It doesn’t match the victim’s fingers. It’s almost certainly that of the killer and we should be able to get DNA – enough certainly for identification via STR and Mitochondrial DNA. Hope that cheers up your Saturday night. Give my condolences to Carol if you see her before I do. Dr Grisha.

  Sometimes a case reached a point that was like turning a key in a complicated lock. One tumbler would fall, then another, then it felt like an inevitable matching of pins and key, and the door would swing open. Here, now, late on a Saturday evening, Paula knew it was only a matter of time before MIT would be able to point to their last case with pride in the result. Carol could walk out with her head high, knowing she’d created something, whereas Blake could only destroy.

  It would be a moment to relish.

  Ambrose’s voice had risen to a bellow. ‘She’s what? Who the fuck told Jordan where Vance is hiding?’

  ‘Stacey, of course,’ Tony said, sounding far more patient and reasonable than he felt.

  ‘What the fuck was she thinking? That’s operational information.’

  ‘And Carol Jordan is her boss, not you. She turned her expertise to this problem for Carol, not for you. You shouldn’t be surprised that she is loyal to the person who gave her the chance to shine.’

  ‘You need to stop Jordan,’ Ambrose said, his voice hard and rough. ‘I don’t want her blundering into this. He’s too dangerous to confront single-handed. You need to stop her before something terrible happens.’

  ‘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 t
he 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.