English.
The reason he was chained to his desk was the trickling through of results from Northumbria Police’s search of Terry Gates’s house and the lock-up where he stored his market-stall gear. Ambrose had wanted to go up there himself to conduct the search, but his boss had said there was no need, that the cops in Newcastle knew how to conduct a search. Which translated to, ‘I don’t have the budget for you to go gallivanting.’
So here he was, waiting for the next pile of nothing from the North East. So far, Terry Gates had not lived up to Tony’s promise of carelessness. All of the paperwork that Northumbria Police had scanned in and emailed down to Ambrose had been connected to Gates’s own finances, either private or professional. There were two computers, however. One at the lock-up, which appeared to be solely for the business, and another, more modern machine at home which showed signs of attempts to clean up its hard disk. Both were on their way by secure courier; they would be with Ambrose in the morning. He’d tried to get hold of their local forensic computer expert, Gary Harcup, to put him on standby for the arrival of the computers, but so far Gary hadn’t got back to him. The fat twat was probably too busy playing some online game to have bothered checking his messages. After all, it was Friday night for geeks too.
Ambrose was wondering whether he could reasonably call it a day when the phone rang. ‘DS Ambrose,’ he sighed.
‘Aye, it’s Robinson Davy from Newcastle here,’ a voice as deep and sonorous as Ambrose’s own announced.
‘Hi, Robinson.’ What kind of first name was ‘Robinson’ anyway? Ambrose thought it was only Americans who indulged in the weird habit of giving people surnames for Christian names, but it seemed to be a feature of the North East as well. So far today, he’d spoken to a Matthewson, a Grey and now a Robinson. Madness. ‘Have you got something for me?’
‘I think we just might have, Alvin. One of my lads found a SIM card taped under a desk drawer in the lock-up. We fired it up, to have a look at the call record. The funny thing was, there was no call record. It looks like it had never been used to make calls. But one of my lasses knows her way around this kind of thing and what she found was he’d used the calendar. It’s full of appointments – times and dates and places, mostly down in London. There’s phone numbers too, and email addresses.’
This was the first piece of evidence that resembled anything like a break, and Ambrose felt that quickening of interest that usually came before a breakthrough. ‘Can you transmit this information to me? Print it out, or whatever?’
‘The lass says she can upload it to the Cloud and you can download it from there,’ Davy said doubtfully. ‘I haven’t a clue what she means, but she says it’s easily done.’
‘That’s great. Just ask her to email me with the instructions when it’s ready. Thanks, Robinson, that’s great work.’
Ambrose put the phone down, grinning like an idiot. It looked like the law of Friday had finally been broken. He reckoned that deserved a celebration. Maybe he had time to nip out to the pub for a quick one before the information came through from Newcastle. It wasn’t as if he’d be able to do much with it tonight.
As he stood up, a uniformed PC burst into the room. He was pink-faced and eager. For a moment, Ambrose wondered if some accidental encounter had led to Vance’s capture. Too often, serial killers were unmasked by chance – the Yorkshire Ripper because he’d used false plates on his car; Dennis Nilsen because the human flesh he’d flushed down the toilet had blocked the drain; Fred West because one of his kids made a joke about their sister Heather being ‘under the patio’.
‘You’re pals with that profiler, aren’t you? The one who’s moved into that big house down Gheluvelt Park?’ He sounded excited.
What had Tony got himself into now, Alvin wondered. He’d already had to dig his pal out of one embarrassing situation at the house. It sounded like there might be another in the pipeline. ‘Tony Hill? Yeah, I know him. What’s happened?’
‘It’s his house. It’s on fire. According to the patrol car lads, it’s a total inferno.’ It suddenly dawned on the young cop that his glee might not be entirely appropriate. ‘I thought you’d like to know, sir,’ he wound up.
Ambrose hadn’t known Tony Hill for long. He couldn’t claim to know the man well. But one thing he understood was that, somehow, that house on Gheluvelt Park meant far more to the strange little psychologist than mere bricks and mortar. Because he counted Tony Hill as a friend, that meant Ambrose couldn’t ignore the news he’d just been given. ‘Bloody Friday nights,’ he muttered angrily. He reached for his coat, then stopped as a terrible thought hit him.
He swung round and glared at the young PC. ‘Was the house empty?’
His dismay was obvious. ‘I – I don’t know. They didn’t say.’
Ambrose grimaced. Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, it could.
37
Although she’d always known Carol lived in a basement flat beneath Tony’s house, Chris had somehow expected it to be more than it was. She was accustomed to senior officers going for the biggest mortgage they could get away with in order to buy the swankiest house they could afford. Living as Carol Jordan did here in three rooms with a tiny kitchen and a shower room felt curiously temporary, as if she hadn’t quite decided whether she liked Bradfield enough to stay. Back in the day, they’d been unwitting neighbours in the Barbican complex in London. Those spacious, elegant and striking apartments were the sort of backdrop a woman like Carol Jordan should have. Not this subterranean bolthole, attractive though it was.
Scolding herself for behaving like the host of some reality TV makeover show, Chris found the cat carrier under the stairs and scooped Nelson up. Once she’d wrestled him inside, she carried him upstairs and stowed him in the back of her estate car. One more trip to get his food and then they were done.
She found the chicken and rice Paula had told her about, then went through to the utility room to pick up the dried food. ‘Better check there’s enough,’ she said under her breath, reaching out to lift the lid.
A metallic snap, then a rush of air and liquid struck her full in the face. For a moment, all Chris knew was that her face was wet. She had long enough to wonder why there was water in the cat-food bin before the searing agony hit her. Her whole face felt on fire. Her eyes were screaming nuggets of pain within a larger hurt. She tried to scream, but her lips and her mouth stung with the same smarting sting and no sound emerged. But even in the grip of the maddening pain, something told her not to rub it with her hands.
Chris fell to her knees, struggling not to let the agony take over every part of her. She backed away, managing
