by Val McDermid
Philip Hawsley was first, for no better reason than living nearest. As he followed him into a preternaturally tidy front room that smelled of furniture polish and air freshener, and looked like a heritage museum recreation of lower middle class life in 1962, Tony registered all the signs of the obsessive compulsive. Hawsley, who could have been any age between thirty and fifty, constantly ran his fingers over the buttons of his beige cardigan to check they were all in place. He studied his fingernails at least once a minute to ensure they hadn’t grown dirty since he last looked. His greying hair was cropped in a short, military style and his shoes were polished to mirror radiance. He invited Tony to sit, pointing out the chair he wanted him to occupy, and offered no refreshment, sitting down very precisely opposite the psychologist, ankles and knees pressed firmly together.
‘Quite a collection,’ Tony said, glancing round the room. An entire wall was given over to shelves of video tapes, each labelled with a date and name of a programme. Even from where he was sitting, he could see the vast majority were Vance’s Visits. A laminated wall unit held a series of albums and scrapbooks. Half a dozen books sat on a shelf above the unit. Pride of place went to a large framed colour photograph sitting on the wall-mounted gas fire. It showed Hawsley shaking hands with Jacko Vance.
‘A small tribute, but mine own,’ Hawsley said in a prissily camp voice. Tony could imagine all too vividly how he would have been teased as an adolescent. ‘We’re the same age, you know. To the very day. I feel our fates are inextricably linked. We’re like two sides of the same coin. Jacko is the public face and I am the private.’
‘It must have taken years to amass all this material,’ Tony said.
‘I’ve dedicated myself to maintaining the archive,’ Hawsley said primly. ‘I like to think I have a better overview of Jacko’s life than he does himself. When you’re so busy living it, you don’t have time to sit and reflect on it the way I do. His bravery, his common touch, his warmth, his compassion. He’s the complete man of our time. It’s one of life’s little paradoxes that he had to lose part of himself to gain that pre-eminence.’
‘I couldn’t agree more,’ Tony said, naturally falling back into the conversational techniques that years of working with the mentally ill had delivered into his repertoire. ‘He’s an inspiration, is Jacko.’ He sat back and let Hawsley’s adulation flow over him, pretending to fascination when what he felt was disgust for this killer who disguised himself so well that the innocent and ill fell for his every pretence. Eventually, after Hawsley had relaxed enough to inch back from the edge of his chair into an approximation of comfort, Tony said, ‘I’d love to see your photograph albums.’
The crucial dates were carved on his memory. ‘For the purposes of our study, we’re going to be looking at precise points in people’s careers,’ Tony said as Hawsley opened the cabinet and started taking down albums. Every time Tony mentioned a month and year, Hawsley chose a particular volume and laid it on the coffee table in front of Tony, open at the appropriate pages. Jacko Vance was clearly a busy man, doing between five and twenty appearances a month, many of them related to charity fund-raising, often for the hospital in Newcastle where he did volunteer work.
Hawsley’s memory for detail when it related to his idol was phenomenal, a mixed blessing for Tony. On the plus side, it gave him plenty of time to scrutinize the images before him; the minus side of the equation was that his droning voice came close to sending Tony into a hypnotic trance. Soon, however, Tony felt a quiver of excitement that snapped him back to full attentiveness. There, just two days before the first of Shaz Bowman’s cluster of teenage girls had disappeared for good, was Jacko Vance opening a hospice in Swindon. In the second of Hawsley’s four photographs of the event, Tony saw a face he’d memorized, right next to Jacko Vance’s gleaming head. Debra Cressey. Fourteen when she vanished. Two days earlier, gazing up adoringly at Jacko Vance as he signed an autograph, she’d looked like a girl in paradise.
Two hours later, Tony had identified another missing girl next to Vance, this time apparently in conversation with her. A third possibility was straining upwards on tiptoe to steal a kiss from a laughing Vance. But her head was half-turned from the camera, making it hard to be certain. Now all he had to do was to extract the photographs from Hawsley. ‘I wonder if I could borrow some of these photographs?’ he asked.
Hawsley shook his head vigorously, looking deeply shocked. ‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘It’s vital that the integrity of the archive is maintained. What if I were called on and there were missing items from the inventory? No, Dr Hill, I’m afraid that’s completely out of the question.’
‘What about negatives? Do you still have them?’
Clearly offended, Hawsley said, ‘Of course I do. What kind of sloppy operation do you think I’m running here?’ He rose and opened the cupboard in the wall unit. Negative storage boxes were stacked on the shelves, each as obsessively labelled as the videos. Tony shuddered inwardly, imagining the painstaking listing of every negative in the box. Not so much anal retentive as banal retentive.
‘Well, could I borrow the negatives so I can have them copied?’ he asked, determinedly keeping the edge of exasperation out of his voice.
‘I can’t let them out of my possession,’ Hawsley said stubbornly. ‘They’re significant.’
It took another fifteen minutes to find the acceptable compromise. He drove Philip Hawsley and his precious negatives to the local photographic shop where Tony paid an extortionate sum to have prints made of the relevant photographs while they waited. Then he drove Philip Hawsley home so he could replace the negatives in their proper place before their companions noticed they’d gone.
Driving down the motorway to the next name on his list, he allowed himself a short moment of triumphalism. ‘We’re going to get you, Jack the Lad,’ he said. ‘We are going to get you.’
All Simon McNeill really knew about Tottenham was that they had a second-rate football team and they killed a copper during a riot some time in the eighties when he’d still been at school. He didn’t expect the natives to be friendly, so it was no surprise when his appearance at the local electoral roll office was greeted with less than rapture. When he explained what he wanted, the stick insect in a suit behind the counter cast his eyes heavenwards and sighed. ‘You’ll have to do it yourself,’ he said grudgingly. ‘I haven’t the staff to spare, especially with no notice at all.’ He showed Simon into the dusty archives, gave him a ten second run-down on the filing system and left him to it.
The results of his search were not encouraging. The street where Jacko Vance had grown up had consisted of about forty houses back in the sixties. By 1975, twenty-two of the houses had disappeared, replaced, presumably, by a block of flats called Shirley Williams House. The eighteen remaining houses revealed a steady turnover of registered electors, few people seeming to remain for more than a couple of years, particularly during the grim poll tax years of the mid-eighties. Only one name remained constant throughout. Simon pinched the bridge of his nose to ease the beginning headache. He hoped Tony Hill was right, that all this would bring them closer to nailing Shaz’s killer. The image of her face rose painfully before him, her startling blue eyes bright with laughter. It was almost more than he could bear. No time to brood, he told himself as he shrugged back into his leather jacket and set off to find Harold Adams.
Number 9 Jimson Street was a tiny terraced house in dirty yellow London brick. The little oblong of garden that separated it from the street was choked with empty beer cans, crisp packets and takeaway food containers. A scrawny black cat stared up malevolently as he opened the gate, then sprang for freedom with a chicken bone in its teeth. The street smelled of decay. The desiccated shell who opened the door after much rattling of bolts and turning of locks looked as if he must have already been an old man when Jacko Vance was a boy. Simon’s heart sank. ‘Mr Adams?’ he asked, without much hope of intelligent response.
The old man cocked his head in an effor
t to defeat his stoop and look Simon in the eye. ‘You from the council? I told that woman already, I don’t need a home help and I don’t want meals on wheels.’ His voice sounded like a hinge in desperate need of oil.
‘I’m from the police.’
‘I never saw anything,’ Adams said swiftly, moving to close the door.
‘No, wait. It’s nothing like that. I want to talk about somebody who lived here years ago: Jacko Vance. I want to talk about Jacko Vance.’
Adams paused. ‘You’re one of them journalists, aren’t you? You’re trying to con an old man. I’m going to call the police.’
‘I am the police,’ Simon said, waving his open warrant card in front of faded grey eyes. ‘Look.’
‘All right, all right, I’m not blind. You lot are always telling us, you can’t be too careful. What d’you want to talk about Jacko Vance for? He hasn’t lived here for…let me see, must be seventeen, eighteen years now.’
‘Could I come in and have a chat, maybe?’ Simon said, half-hoping Adams would send him off with a flea in his ear.
‘I suppose so.’ Adams pulled the door wide and stood back to let Simon enter. He caught a whiff of the old man smell of spilled urine and stale biscuits before he turned into the living room. To his surprise, the place was spotless. There wasn’t a speck of dust on the screen of the huge TV set, not a mark on the lace-edged arm protectors on the easy chairs, not a smear on the glass of the framed photographs that lined the mantelpiece. Harold Adams was right; he didn’t need a home help. Simon waited for the old man to settle in his own chair before he sat down.
‘I’m the last one left,’ Adams said proudly. ‘When we came here in 1947, it was like a big family, this street. Everybody knew everybody’s business and, just like a family, they was always falling out. Now, nobody knows anybody, but they still fall out just the same.’ When he grinned, Simon thought, his face looked like the skull of a predatory bird whose eyes had somehow survived.
‘I bet they do. So you knew the Vance family pretty well?’
Adams sniggered. ‘Not much of a family, you ask me. His dad, called himself an engineer, but as far as I could see, all that meant was he had an excuse for disappearing at the drop of a hat for weeks on end. Mind you, it wouldn’t surprise me if he earned a bob or two. He was always dressed better than the street, if you get my meaning. Never spent a shilling on the house or the wife and kid that he didn’t have to, though.’
‘What was she like?’
‘Off her head. She had no time for that lad, not even when he was a babe in arms. She’d stick him out the front in his pram and just leave him there for hours. Sometimes she even forgot to take him in when it started raining and my Joan or one of the other women would have to go and knock on her door and tell her. My Joan used to say that some days she was still in her dressing gown at dinner time.’
‘Did she drink, then?’
‘I never heard that, no. She just didn’t like the kid. Cramped her style, I suppose. When he got older, she just let him run wild, then when people went to complain, she’d come down on him like a ton of bricks. I don’t know what went on behind closed doors, but sometimes you’d hear that kid sobbing his heart out. Never did no good, mind.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘He was a nasty piece of work, that Jacko Vance. I don’t care what they say about him being a hero and sportsman, he had a nasty streak a mile wide. Oh, he could be all charm when he thought it would get him somewhere. He had all the wives in this street wrapped round his little finger. They were always giving him little treats, letting him watch telly round their house when his mum locked him out.’ Adams was enjoying himself. Simon suspected it wasn’t often these days that his malice was allowed free rein. He was determined to make the most of it.
‘But you knew different?’
Adams sniggered again. ‘I knew everything that went on in this street. I caught that little bugger Vance once round the back of the lock-up garages off Boulmer Street. He had a cat by the scruff, you know, so it couldn’t fight him off. He was dipping its tail in a jar of petrol when I came round the corner. And there was a box of matches on the ground beside him.’ The momentary silence was eloquent. ‘I made him let the cat go, then I kicked his arse for him, good and proper. I shouldn’t think I stopped him, though. Cats were always going missing round here. People used to comment on it. Me, I had my own ideas.’
‘Like you said, a nasty piece of work.’ It was almost too good to be true. Simon had spent too much time preparing for his assignment in Leeds not to recognize the accepted markers for psychopathy in a background history. Torturing animals was textbook stuff. And this man had seen it first hand. He couldn’t have found a better source if he’d searched for weeks.
‘He was a bully, an’ all. Always picking on the little kids, daring them to do dangerous things, getting them hurt, but he never laid a finger on them himself. It was like he set it up to happen and then stood back and watched. Me and Joan, we were glad our two were grown and gone by then. And by the time the grandkids came along, Vance had discovered he could throw a silly spear further than anybody else. We hardly saw him after that, and good riddance to bad rubbish, if you ask me.’
‘You’ll not find many people with a bad word to say about that man,’ Simon said mildly. ‘He saved some lives, you can’t argue with that. He does a lot of work for charity. And he gives up his time to work with the terminally ill.’
Adams screwed up his face in a sneer. ‘I told you, he likes watching. He probably gets a kick out of knowing they’ll be dead soon and he’ll still be strutting around like Lord Muck on the telly. I’m telling you, sonny, Jacko Vance is a nasty piece of work. So, what are you after him for?’
Simon smiled. ‘I never said I was after him.’
‘So what d’you want to go around talking about him for, then?’
Simon winked. ‘Now, you know I can’t reveal the details of a police investigation, sir. You’ve been extremely helpful, I will say that much. If I was you, I’d keep an eye on the television for the next few days. With a bit of luck, you’ll find out exactly why I came here.’ He got to his feet. ‘And now, I think I’d better be on my way. My senior officer will be very interested in what you have to say, Mr Adams.’
‘I’ve been waiting years to say it, sonny. Years, I’ve been waiting.’
Barbara Fenwick had been killed six days before her fifteenth birthday. If she’d lived, she’d have been almost twenty-seven. Her mutilated body had been found in a walker’s hut on the moors above the city, strangled. There were signs that she had had sexual intercourse against her will, though there had been no trace of sperm either inside or outside her body. What made the crime unusual was the nature of her injuries. Where most psychopathic killers disfigured the sexual organs of their victims, this killer had crushed the girl’s right arm to a bloody pulp, shattering bones and tearing muscle till it was difficult to reconstruct which fragment went where. Even more interestingly, the pathologist had been insistent that the injuries were consistent with the application of increasing pressure rather than a single, terrible impact.
It had made no sense to the investigating officers.
The finders of Barbara’s body were in the clear, having been camping and hiking together for the previous six days. Her parents, who had been distraught since her disappearance five days previously, were also under no suspicion. The girl had been alive and well for a couple of days after they had reported her missing and her stepfather had been in the company of his wife and at least one police officer ever since. The parents had said all along that their daughter was happy at home, that she would never have run away, that she must have been abducted. The police had been sceptical, pointing out that Barbara’s best clothes were missing and that she had told her parents a lie about her movements following school the day she disappeared. Added to that, she’d bunked off school, and not for the first time.
It had made no sense to the investigating officers.
Barbara Fenwick hadn’t been a wild, troublesome teenager. She wasn’t known to the police, her friends denied she drank more than the occasional can of sweet cider and no one thought she’d ever experimented with drugs or sex. Her last boyfriend, who had chucked her a month before to go out with someone else, said they’d never gone all the way and he thought in spite of her sexy looks she was probably, like him, a virgin. She’d been doing reasonably well at school and had ambitions to train as a nursery nurse. The last reliable sighting of her had been on the local bus to Manchester on the morning of her disappearance. She’d told the neighbour who had spotted her that she was going to the Dental Hospital for an appointment to do with her wisdom teeth. Her mother said Barbara didn’t have any sign of wisdom teeth, a fact borne out by the pathologist.
It had made no sense to the investigating officers.
There had been nothing in her behaviour to suggest a girl about to go off the rails. She’d been out to a disco with a bunch of friends on the Saturday night before her disappearance. Jacko Vance had been there, making a celebrity appearance, signing autographs for charity. Her friends said she’d had a great night.
None of this had made any sense to the investigating officers.
But it made a lot of sense to Leon Jackson.
Chapter 21
The stone slab was so well engineered that it didn’t even make the sinister grating sound of a horror film. When a small electrical current applied pressure to a particular, precise point, it simply pivoted silently through 180 degrees to reveal the steps that led to the small crypt that no one would any longer suspect existed beneath the converted chapel. Jacko Vance flipped the switch that flooded the crypt with harsh fluorescent light and descended.
The first thing he noticed was the smell, hitting him before his head was far enough underground to be able to see the creature that had once been Donna Doyle. The putrefaction of pulverized flesh mingled with the stale smell of unwashed fevered skin and the acrid reek of the chemical toilet. He felt his stomach turn, but told himself he’d smelled worse in the terminal ward as gangrene devoured the bodies of people who had already had as much amputated as could reasonably be excised. It was a lie, but one that stiffened his sinews.
