She turned and looked directly at Tony. Because of the mask she was wearing all he could see were her eyes, their grey-blue sparkling with unshed tears. ‘Now that bastard Vance has my family photo. He’s taken my brother and he’s taken the picture to gloat. Either that or to make targeting my parents easier.’ Her voice was rising, fury taking over from the shock that had cradled her since Blake had broken the news.
‘This is your fault,’ she raged at him. ‘You dragged me into this in the first place. It was your fight, you and your baby profilers. But you dragged me into it, put me on the front line when it came to nailing Jacko Vance.’
The assault was shocking. Carol had never attacked him like this in all the years they’d known each other. They’d argued on occasion, but it had never gone nuclear like this. They’d always drawn back from the brink. Tony had always believed it was because they both understood the power they had to hurt each other. But all those barriers were gone now, torn down in the wake of what Vance had done here. ‘You wanted to be involved,’ he said weakly, knowing as he spoke that truth was no defence here.
‘And you never tried to stop me, did you? You never thought there might be consequences for me. You never have. All the times I’ve ended up risking everything for you. Because you needed me.’ Now the rage had a mocking edge. ‘And now this. You sat there and did your fucking risk assessment yesterday and you never once suggested that Vance might go after the people I love. Why, Tony? Did you not think I would want to know something like that? Or did it just not occur to you?’
He’d known physical pain. He’d been trussed up naked and left for dead on a concrete floor. He’d faced a killer with a pistol. But none of it hurt as much as Carol’s accusations. ‘It didn’t—’
‘Look at you. Finally, you look upset. Is that what’s bothering you now?’ She stepped close to him and pushed him hard in the chest, making him stumble backwards. ‘The fact that you didn’t predict this? Didn’t work it out? That you’re not as smart as you thought you were? The great Tony Hill fucked up and now my brother’s dead?’ She pushed him again and he had to twist away to avoid falling down the stairs. ‘Because that’s what’s happened. You’re supposed to be the one who can figure out what bastards like Vance are going to do next. But you failed.’ She waved an arm at the scene on the bed. ‘Look at it, Tony. Look at it till you can’t close your fucking eyes without seeing it. You did that, Tony. Just as much as Jacko Vance.’ Her hands balled into fists and he flinched.
‘Pitiful,’ she snarled at him. And turned on her heel, almost running down the stairs. Tony looked down and saw Franklin shaking his head at him. He realised everybody in the barn had stopped what they were doing to stare at him and Carol.
‘Can I ask where you’re going?’ Franklin said, putting out a hand to slow Carol as she drew level with him.
‘Somebody needs to tell my parents,’ she said. ‘And somebody needs to be with them to make sure Vance doesn’t destroy them too.’
‘Can you leave the address with Sergeant Moran over there?’ He pointed to a table set up in a corner of the tent where a woman in a puffa jacket and baseball cap sat at a laptop. ‘We’ll ask the local lads to sit outside till you get there.’
‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘You need to be liaising with West Mercia about the hunt for Vance too. I’ll give the details of the investigating officers to Sergeant Moran.’
Tony forced himself out of his frozen state of shock and called down to her. ‘Carol – wait for me.’
‘You’re not coming with me,’ she said. Her voice was like the slam of a door. And he was on the wrong side.
32
The office was a good place not to be. The shadow of what had happened to Carol hung over them all like a pall, Chris thought as she drove down the spine of the Pennines and into Derbyshire. She sipped coffee as she drove. It had cooled to a point where anyone sampling it would have been hard pressed to say whether it was warmed-up iced coffee or leftover hot coffee. She didn’t care. All she wanted it for was its capacity to keep her awake. She was beginning to feel welded into the car seat after yesterday’s excursion to Kay Hallam’s mansion.
In an ideal world, she’d have got her hands on a copy of Geoff Whittle’s banned book about Vance the cop killer and hunkered down in a corner of the office to read it before she went head-to-head with its author. But this seemed to be one of those rare cases where ‘banned and pulped’ meant what it said. There was no readily available copy of
It had taken Stacey approximately six minutes to come up with a current address and phone number for Geoff Whittle, and the information that he seldom left his Derbyshire cottage these days because he was on the waiting list for a hip replacement. Given long enough, Chris suspected Stacey could have found a version of the text online somewhere. But long enough was what she didn’t have.
All these years later and still it felt personal, this pursuit of Vance. Shaz Bowman’s death had changed so much about how Chris viewed herself. It had stripped away the lightness from her, turning her into a more sober and more serious person. She’d stopped looking for love in all the wrong places and made conscious decisions about how she wanted to live, rather than drifting into the next vaguely interesting thing. Working with MIT in Bradfield had offered her the chance to be the kind of copper she’d always imagined she could be. She had no idea how she was going to live up to that now.
The dull browns and greens of the Dark Peak gave way to the broken light grey and silver of the White Peak. Late lambs staggered around, coming right up to the edge of the road that curled down Winnats Pass before skittering away as the car approached. When the sun shone out here it felt like an act of God.
Castleton was a village for tourists and walkers. Chris and her partner came out this way occasionally in the winter with the dogs, enjoying the landscape when it was emptier. Already in late spring, the streets were busy with strolling visitors, stepping off the narrow pavements into the road. Chris took a right in the centre of the village and drove out along the hillside till she came to a huddle of four cottages clinging to the slope. According to Stacey, Whittle lived in the furthest.
Chris parked the car on a grassy verge already churned by tyres and walked back to the house. It was a single-storey cottage built in the local limestone. She reckoned three rooms plus kitchen and bathroom, and not a lot of light. Out here, you could make a small fortune renting out a place like this as a holiday cottage. But as a place to live full-time, Chris reckoned it had major downsides, especially if you weren’t able to get about. Obviously Geoff Whittle’s excursion into true crime hadn’t been as profitable as he’d hoped.
On closer inspection, the cottage was less prepossessing. The paint on the window frames was flaking, weeds were sprouting between the flagstones on the path and the net curtains at the window sagged precariously. Chris raised a heavy black iron knocker and let it crash back into place.
