The Retribution Page 12

  Vance stepped out of the car and looked around. Terry’s van occupied the third bay of the garage. The signwriting advertised his market stall, where he sold a mind-boggling range of tools, both new and second-hand. He’d clearly used it to deliver his personal gift to Vance.

  The garage had a workbench running down one wall. Above it, tools hung in a gleaming array. Two sturdy vices were fitted at opposite ends of the bench. If anyone other than Terry had been responsible, Vance would have been enraged. But he knew there was no hidden meaning here. After all, Terry didn’t believe the prosecution’s story of the terrible things Vance had done to young girls with the last vice he’d owned. He took a step towards the workbench, imagining the feel of firm flesh in his hands. ‘I took the liberty of kitting out your workshop,’ Terry said. ‘I know how you like to work in wood.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Vance said. Later, he told himself. Much later. He reached for his most charming smile and said, ‘You’ve thought of everything. This is perfect.’

  ‘You haven’t seen the house yet. I think you’ll like it.’

  All Vance wanted to see right now was the kitchen. He followed Terry through a side door into a utility room furnished with a washing machine and a tumble drier and onwards into a kitchen that was a gleaming monument to modernity. Granite, chrome and tiles were all buffed to a mirror sheen. It took Vance a moment or two to pick out what he was looking for. But there it was, exactly what he needed. A wooden knife block, set to one side of the granite-topped island in the middle of the room.

  Vance drifted over to the island, exclaiming all the while at the very perfection of his magnificent new kitchen. ‘Is that one of those American fridges that dispense ice and chilled water?’ he asked, knowing Terry would be impelled to demonstrate its powers. As soon as Terry’s back was turned, Vance slid a medium-sized knife from the block, slipping the handle inside his shirt cuff, holding his arm loosely at his side.

  As Terry turned back with a brimming glass of water, ice cubes bumping against the sides, Vance raised his prosthetic arm and appeared to draw him into an embrace of delighted gratitude. Then his other hand came up and plunged the knife into Terry’s chest. Up and under, avoiding the ribs, making for the heart.

  The glass of water tumbled to the floor, soaking Vance’s shirt. He flinched as the cold water hit his skin, but didn’t stop what he was doing. Terry made a terrible strangled grunting sound, his face a shocked accusation. Vance pulled the knife back and stabbed again. Now there was blood between them, spreading its tell-tale stain across the front of their clothes. It raced across Vance’s shirt, following the path the water had already made. Its progress over Terry’s sweatshirt was slower, the colour more intense.

  Vance pulled the knife free and stepped back, letting Terry fall to the floor. His top lip curled in disgust as Terry twitched and moaned, hands clutching his chest, eyes rolling back in his head. Vance took no pleasure in the killing itself; he never had. It had always been secondary to the pleasures of inflicting pain and terror. Death was the unfortunate by-product of the things he really enjoyed. He wished Terry would hurry up and get it over with.

  All at once exhaustion hit him like a physical blow. He staggered slightly and had to grip on to the granite worktop. He had been running on adrenaline for hours and now he’d run out of fuel. His legs felt shaky and weak, his mouth dry and sour. But he couldn’t stop now.

  Vance crossed to the kitchen sink and opened the cupboard underneath. As he’d expected, Terry had supplied him with a full battery of cleaning equipment. Right at the front was a roll of extra-strong rubbish bags. On the shelf beside them, a bag of plastic ties. Just what he needed. As soon as Terry was done with dying, he could bag him up, truss the bag and dump him in the back of his own van. He’d work out what to do with the van and its owner at some later stage. Right now, he was too tired to think straight.

  All he wanted was to clean up then crawl into bed and sleep for twelve hours or so. His anticipated celebration dinner could wait till tomorrow, when the rest of his fun would begin.

  He glanced across at Terry, whose breath was now a faint gasp that brought bubbles of pink froth with each exhalation. What the fuck was taking him so long? Some people had absolutely no consideration.

  21

  Detective Inspector Rob Spencer looked more like a car salesman than a detective. Everything about him was polished, from his teeth to his shoes. Sam, who liked to think of himself as a pretty smooth operator, had to concede to himself that Spencer probably edged it. Still, Sam wasn’t the one who was about to suffer gender reassignment without benefit of anaesthetic at Carol Jordan’s hands.

  When he arrived, Carol was hidden behind the phalanx of monitors Stacey used to keep the inconvenient real world at bay. Stacey had been running the limited data they had on the three murders through the algorithms of the geographic-profiling software that she’d tweaked to her own specifications. She was pointing out the hotspots they’d already identified. ‘Chances are he lives or works somewhere in the purple zones,’ Stacey said, outlining them with a neat laser pointer. ‘Skenby. Obviously. We didn’t need the program to tell us that. But more data will narrow it down.’

  Spencer peered around the room, looking a little lost. Paula thought he was trying to find a match for himself and, failing that, the next best thing. He fixed on Sam, but as he approached, Sam picked up his phone and pointedly turned away to make a call.

  ‘Can I help you?’ Paula said, in a tone that promised the opposite.

  ‘I’m looking for DCI Jordan’s office.’ Spencer sounded gruff, as if he was trying to assert his right to be there.

  Paula gestured with her thumb at the closed blinds that marked off Carol’s territory. ‘That’s her office. But she’s not in it.’

  ‘I’ll wait for her there,’ Spencer said, taking a couple of steps towards the door.

  ‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible,’ Paula said.

  ‘I’ll decide what’s possible, Constable,’ Spencer said. Paula had to give him marks for bravado. She’d never have dared to make an incursion on Carol Jordan’s turf and attempt to occupy the high ground.

  That was when Carol chose to step out from behind the barrier of screens. ‘Not in my squad room, you won’t,’ she said. ‘My office is occupied right now.’ She came closer, leaving less than half a metre between them. Although she was a good twenty centimetres shorter than him, her presence was by far the more impressive. The look in her eyes would have stripped the gloss off a shinier surface than his. Spencer looked like a man who had come face-to-face with his most embarrassing adolescent memory. ‘Normally, I wouldn’t dream of conducting this conversation in front of junior officers,’ she said, her voice sharp as an icicle. ‘But then I don’t normally have to deal with someone who has managed to insult every one of those officers. In the circumstances, it only seems fair to share.’

  ‘I’m sorry, ma’am,’ Spencer said. ‘Obviously I had no idea my remarks were being broadcast.’

  ‘I’d say that was the least of your worries,’ Carol said. ‘I’ve been an officer in BMP for the best part of seven years now, and I’ve mostly been proud of that. What I heard from you today made me feel glad for the first time that I’m leaving. These are probably the best detectives you will ever work with. And all you can offer them is ill-informed prejudice.’

  Spencer flinched. ‘It was meant to be a joke.’

  Carol rolled her eyes, irritation and incredulity sharing the billing. ‘Do I look stupid? Do I strike you as the kind of person who’s going to go, “Oh well, that’s all right then”? How exactly is it a joke to demonstrate ignorance and bigotry in front of junior officers? To make it seem acceptable to denigrate your fellow officers for their skin colour or sexual orientation?’

  Spencer fixed his gaze somewhere above her head, as if that would help him escape her disgust. ‘I was wrong, ma’am. I’m sorry.’

  ‘When this case is over, you’re going to have a lot of time to fi
gure out just how sorry. I’m going to talk to HR and make sure you are sent on every available equal ops and multicultural education course for as long as it takes you to understand why your behaviour is unacceptable anywhere in 2011. And to set the ball rolling, you are going to make a personal apology to every member of this squad before you leave here today.’

  Spencer was shocked into meeting her eye. ‘Ma’am—’

  ‘It’s Detective Chief Inspector Jordan to you, Spencer. I’m not the bloody queen. Now, you’ve got a lot of credibility to recover with my team. You can make your apologies before you leave. But meantime, we’ve got some information that should move things along. We’ve ID’d the third victim.’ She turned on her heel. ‘Stacey?’

  Stacey walked her chair out from behind the monitors, a tablet computer in her hand. ‘Leanne Considine. She was arrested in Cannes for soliciting.’

  ‘In Cannes? You mean, like Cannes in France?’ Spencer looked and sounded bemused.

  ‘The only one I know of,’ Stacey said.

  ‘But how do you know that? How did you find that out?’

  Stacey gave Carol an enquiring glance. ‘Go ahead,’ Carol said.

  ‘One of the things we’ve done at MIT is build informal relationships with our counterparts abroad,’ Stacey said. ‘I’ve got contacts in seventeen European jurisdictions who will run prints for me. It’s got no evidential value, because it’s unofficial, but sometimes it’s useful for showing us where to look. Her prints and her DNA were a no-show on our database, so I tried my contacts. She turned up in France. Four years ago, though, so not the most current info.’ Stacey pinned Spencer with a look and gave a grim smile. ‘Not bad for a Chink.’

  Spencer’s lips thinned to a tight line and he breathed heavily through his nose. Carol’s smile was almost as thin. ‘We do have more,’ she said.

  ‘Leanne’s address at the time was a student hall of residence here in Bradfield. That gave me a lot of options for back-door searching,’ Stacey said.

  ‘That’s another thing we do a lot of round here,’ Sam said. ‘Back-door searching. We like to be a bit more subtle than kicking people’s front doors in.’

  ‘Ideally, we prefer them not to even notice we’ve been in,’ Stacey said drily. ‘Bottom line is, Leanne is from Manchester. She has an undergraduate degree in French and Spanish from Bradfield University. She is currently studying for a PhD on “Inventions of self in the works of Miguel Cervantes”. Whatever that means. And, as it appears, funding her studies by selling sex on the streets of Bradfield.’

  ‘Some people will do anything to avoid taking out a student loan,’ Kevin said sourly.

  ‘We can’t all be successful capitalists,’ Stacey said. ‘I’ve got an address for her parents in Manchester. And an address for her here in Bradfield.’

  Paula’s mobile vibrated and she checked it out, only half-listening to what was going on around her.

  ‘Excellent,’ Carol said. ‘Sam, Kevin – once DI Spencer has finished with you, get yourself over to her place and see if she’s got flatmates. Let’s start building up a picture of her life.’ She turned back to Spencer. ‘I’d like you to arrange a Family Liaison Officer for her parents, and take personal charge of breaking the news. They deserve a ranking officer, they’ve lost a daughter. Paula, take yourself off to the university, find whoever was supervising her and talk to them. We need to know where she intersected with her killer, and that means filling in the blanks. Leanne Considine encountered a man who brutalised her and killed her. We need to find him before he finds another victim. And one more thing – so far, we’ve stopped this becoming a media circus. Let’s get it done and dusted before we’ve got the Penny Burgesses of this world crawling all over us.’

  22

  Kevin thought it was ironic that the student house where Leanne Considine had lived was a scummy shit-tip compared to the home Nicky Reid had shared with Suze Black. In his world, there was something topsy-turvy about a pair of hookers living in a place that was clean and tidy while four graduate students shared what could only be described as squalor. The kitchen worktops were cluttered with dirty mugs and glasses, takeaway food containers and empty wine bottles. Back in the mists of history, someone had thought it was a good idea to put carpet tiles on the floor. Now they were stained and shiny with use. The thought of coming down barefoot in the morning to make a cup of coffee made Kevin shudder inside.

  Only Siobhan Carey had been at home when they’d arrived. Kevin had broken the news of Leanne’s death and confirmed the identification with the photo Grisha had supplied them with. He’d expected her to fall apart. Young women mostly did, in his experience. But in spite of clearly being shocked and saddened, Siobhan had stayed calm. No hysteria, no floods of tears, no throwing things at the walls. Instead, she’d texted her housemates, who had made it back inside a quarter of an hour. ‘We were lucky to get this house,’ Siobhan had said while she rinsed mugs and made tea for the detectives. ‘It’s only a ten-minute bike ride from the university library. That’s where we all mostly work. It saves on the heating bills in the winter.’

  It was the perfect lead-in. Behind her back, Kevin gave Sam the nod. This was one for him. Siobhan had the air of a young woman who was trying a little too hard. There was something about the artful arrangement of her Primark layers, the care she’d taken with her hair and her make-up, that said she understood she wasn’t going to be the first pick on anybody’s list. Her nose was a little too long, her eyes a little too narrow, her body a little too plump. She’d be grateful for some one-onone attention from a good-looking bloke like Sam. And Sam knew just how to charm the birds out of the trees. Definitely time for Kevin to take a back seat.

  ‘It seems to get tougher every year, being a student,’ Sam said, his voice like hot chocolate on a cold day. ‘They hike up your fees, they raise your rents, they cane you for having an overdraft … ’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ Siobhan said.

  ‘I don’t know how you all manage, especially doing the postgraduate stuff.’ Sam sounded like his heart was bleeding for her.

  Siobhan turned to face him, leaning against the counter while the kettle boiled. Her thin cardigan had slipped off one shoulder, revealing a not particularly expert tattoo of a bluebird. ‘I work four nights a week stacking supermarket shelves,’ she said. ‘Friday afternoon, I deliver the local free paper. And every month I end up having to ask my dad for an extra fifty quid to cover the rent.’

  ‘You’re lucky to have a dad who can afford an extra fifty quid a month. A lot of people can’t find that much to spare these days,’ Sam said.

  ‘He’s great, my dad. One day I hope I can pay him back.’

  When he’s old and sick and needs someone to feed him and change him, Kevin thought. That’s when he’ll be looking for payback. Bet you’re not so keen then, Siobhan. But he said nothing, leaving it to Sam.

  ‘What about Leanne?’ Sam said. ‘What did she do to make ends meet?’

  Siobhan turned away abruptly, saved from answering by the boiling of the kettle. ‘How do you have your tea?’ she said brightly.

  ‘We both have milk, no sugar,’ Sam said, not sure about Kevin but not really caring. What he wanted was to keep the flow of conversation going, especially since Siobhan clearly didn’t. ‘So – Leanne. Did she have a part-time job too? Or did her family subsidise her?’

  Siobhan made a big number out of draining the teabags and pouring the milk. She put the mugs down in front of the two detectives with a little flourish. ‘There you are, guys. Freshly brewed Yorkshire tea. You can’t beat it.’ Her smile was considerably weaker than the tea.

  ‘How long had you known Leanne?’ Sam said, moving away from what had turned out to be a difficult question. He’d circle back to it, but for now, let her think she’d won.

  ‘Just over a year and a half. We’re both attached to the Modern Languages department. She was Spanish, I’m Italian. With her doing her undergraduate degree here in Bradfield, she’d alre
ady snagged this house and she was looking for people to share. She wanted other postgrads, not undergrads.’ Siobhan sipped from her mug and looked at Sam over the rim. ‘Undergrads just want to drink and party. Postgrads are more serious. We’re spending all this money because we’re really serious about what we’re doing. My first term at Exeter, one of the Hooray Henrys in my hall of residence actually threw up over my laptop. Then he called me a stupid working-class tart when I complained. Frankly, you want to be as far away from wankers like that as possible.’

  She was talking too much now, trying to fill the space so Sam couldn’t get back to the hard questions. ‘Totally,’ he said. ‘So you and Leanne got on well?’

  Siobhan’s face puckered in consideration. ‘I wouldn’t say we were friends. We didn’t really have much in common. But we got along all right. Obviously. I mean, here we are, second year in the same house.’

  ‘What about the other two? Have they been here as long as you?’

  ‘Jamie and Tara? Well, Tara moved in when I did. Then, about six months later, she asked if Jamie could come and live with her. They’ve been together about three years, and he didn’t like the people he was living with. Plus, let’s face it, splitting the bills four ways instead of three made sense. Obviously they have to share a bedroom, but Jamie has first dibs on the living room when he needs somewhere to work.’

  ‘And he doesn’t mind being the only bloke in a house full of women?’

  Siobhan snorted. ‘What’s to mind?’

  Sam produced his most silky smile. ‘I imagine there’s a lot more pluses than minuses.’

  Before Siobhan could respond to his flirtatiousness, the front door banged shut. There was a clatter of bikes in the hall, then two people in cycling Lycra and rain jackets stormed in, still unfastening their helmets. They were both talking at once as they entered, focused entirely on Siobhan, barely a glance at the two strange men sitting at their kitchen table. ‘Sweetie, this is awful,’ in a woman’s voice, ‘Are you sure it’s Leanne?’ in a man’s voice. Both southern accents, sounding like presenters on BBC Radio 4. They all hugged and murmured, then the new arrivals turned to face Kevin and Sam.