broke into a grin whenever he looked at Vance. Tony recalled watching Gates work his market stall. He knew when to be technical with the blokes, when to jolly the women along to buy tools they’d never known they needed. He was shrewd with the public and yet he was completely blind where Vance was concerned. ‘Why are you asking?’
‘He was Vance’s only regular visitor. He showed up every month, never missed, according to the records. We asked the local lads to give him a knock. And guess what? He’s not where he should be. Nobody’s seen hide nor hair of him since the morning before Vance broke out. So what’s the score there, Tony?’
Tony closed his eyes and rested his forehead on his hand. ‘Terry had a twin sister, Phyllis, who developed terminal cancer. Back in the day, Vance used to do these hospital visits. It was supposedly his big charity work. At the time, people bought the line that he was giving comfort to the sick. The real reason was a lot creepier. He liked watching the dying. It was as if he fed off the notion that they had no control over anything any more. But like most of the relatives of the patients Vance sat with, Terry never believed there was anything sinister going on. He saw Vance as an angel of mercy who had eased his sister’s passing.’ He straightened up, the flow of his story energising him.
‘He was so locked into that conviction, it was impossible for him to believe Vance was guilty of the crimes he stood accused of. One of the murder charges hinged on a tool-mark. Vance had a bench-mounted vice in his secret hideaway that had a very distinctive defect on one face. And the prosecution had an arm preserved from a murder victim fourteen years before – it had the matching tool-mark in the bone. The obvious inference, taken with all the other circumstantial evidence, was that Vance was the killer. And then along came Terry Gates, who went into the witness box and swore he had sold the vice second-hand to Vance less than five years before. That whoever had owned that vice previously was the killer, not Vance. That undermined the case against Vance on that earlier murder, which made proving he was a serial killer almost impossible, given how little evidence we had.’
‘So Gates actually perjured himself for Vance?’
‘It’s hard to put any other interpretation on it,’ Tony said.
‘He must have really loved his sister.’
‘Too much, I suspect. And after she died, Vance became a kind of surrogate. If he didn’t keep Vance safe, he was letting his sister down.’
Ambrose made a dark, grumbling sound. ‘I don’t get that. The guy’s a serial killer and you perjure yourself to keep him out of jail because he was nice to your sister? People make my head hurt, doc.’
‘Mine too, Alvin.’ He knocked back his espresso in one, blinking and shuddering as the caffeine hit. ‘So Gates still thinks he owes Vance.’
‘Looks like it.’
‘You need to get a warrant for Gates’s house and go through everything. If he’s been Vance’s eyes and ears and hands and legs on the outside, there must be a trail. Vance is smart, but Gates isn’t. He’ll have left tracks. Vance will have told him to destroy everything, but he won’t have. That’s the only place you’ll find a clue.’
‘Sounds like a plan. Thanks,’ Ambrose said. ‘You don’t think Gates will turn up?’
All of his professional instincts told Tony with absolute certainty that Terry Gates would never walk through his front door again. ‘Gates is dead, Alvin. Or as good as. He knows too much.’
‘But why would Vance turn on him when Gates has always been the one on his side?’ Ambrose’s voice was reasonable, not critical.
‘Gates managed to stay in Vance’s corner because he could always convince himself Vance was the persecuted innocent. But whatever Vance has up his sleeve, it’s not going to be pretty. And Gates won’t be able to avoid understanding his involvement. I think when he’s confronted with incontrovertible proof that his hero is a villain, Gates will turn. And Vance is acute enough to get that.’ Tony opened the top desk drawer and poked around the detritus inside, looking for something to crunch. ‘He’ll kill him rather than take the risk. I know it might not look that way, but he’s not a risk-taker. Everything is calculated.’
‘Have you got a team on you?’
Tony glanced out of the window again. ‘There’s a surveillance van outside the house. I’m not planning on going anywhere complicated today. If I go out at all, it will be to Bradfield Moor, which is a bloody sight more secure than Oakworth turned out to be.’ Right at the back, he found an old packet of cinnamon-flavoured Lifesavers. He hadn’t been across the Atlantic for at least two years, but he didn’t think boiled sweets could go off. One-handed, he ripped the packet open and popped one in his mouth. The outside had gone a bit soft, but the heart of the sweet was hard, resistant to his teeth. Tony crunched down on it, letting sugar and spice fill his mouth, making him feel inexplicably calmer.
‘Are you eating something?’ Ambrose said.
‘Will you keep me posted?’
‘I’ll do what I can. Look after yourself.’
The line went dead and Tony stared at a list of files on his screen, taking nothing in. How could he not have taken Terry Gates into account? The oversight shook his faith in himself, making him wonder what else he might have missed. Had he let his concern for Carol interfere with the process of analysis that he so depended on? Without that clarity, he was no use to an investigation. No, scratch that. Without that clarity, he was a liability.
Tony pinched the bridge of his nose, screwing his eyes tightly closed. He visualised a white cube and placed himself at the heart of it. He breathed deeply and regularly, forcing everything else from the front of his mind. When all he was conscious of was white space, he opened his eyes and placed his hands flat on the desk on either side of the keyboard. ‘You kill women who sell sex,’ he said to the empty room. He reached for his glasses and began the long process of crawling into the labyrinth of a killer’s damaged mind.
26
Carol was working her way through the overnight reports when she came upon Sam’s write-up of his interview with Natasha Jones, manager and licensee of Dances With Foxes. The information was useful – a witness to Leanne leaving the club in someone else’s car could be a crucial brick in the wall of evidence that would put a killer away. And the action Sam had suggested was spot-on: ‘Recommend requisition of traffic-camera data on Brackley Road in both directions from club. Time frame 11 p.m. – 1 a.m. on Tuesday night/Wednesday morning. Aim: ID car carrying Leanne Considine away from Dances With Foxes lap-dancing club at 673 Brackley Road.’ But there was something off-kilter about the interview report. For one thing, Sam had been out with Kevin but there was no mention of Sam’s sergeant. All in all, it felt evasive and Carol knew Sam well enough to realise that when he was being evasive, there
