Carol withdrew and crouched by her father’s chair. ‘Take care of Mum,’ she said. He patted her shoulder, nodding. ‘I love you, Dad.’ Then she stood up and gestured with her head to Alice.
On the doorstep, she straightened up and reached for the familiar persona of Detective Chief Inspector Carol Jordan. It felt as if it was on a very high shelf. ‘I don’t want them left alone,’ Carol said. ‘Vance is out there, taking revenge on the team that put him away. I’m not convinced he’s finished with me yet. So they need to be guarded as well as supported. Is that clear?’
Alice gave her a solemn look. ‘We’ll take good care of them for you. Can I ask where you’ll be?’
‘I’m going to Worcester. That’s where the search for Vance is being coordinated. That’s where I need to be.’
39
The marina was shrouded in morning mist, the brightly painted cabins emerging like dream boats on silvered water. The cabin roofs stretched side by side as far as the eye could see, like an angular ploughed field of black earth. Above the band of mist, the red brickwork of old china warehouses loomed, freshly cleaned and pointed as part of the process of renovation. Saved from dereliction, they’d become the New Jerusalem of the middle classes: loft apartments offering a water view. Once this had been Diglis canal basin, a thrumming focus of industry, one of the hubs in the movement of goods and raw materials around the Midlands. Now, it was Diglis Marina, a centre of leisure and pleasure. It was prettier, there was no doubt about that. And there was still a traditional pub with a skittle alley where people could sit over their real ale and pretend they’d done an honest day’s work.
Tony sat on the roof of his narrowboat nursing a mug of tea. He’d never felt so bleak. Two people were dead and one was maimed because he’d failed at the one thing he was supposed to be good at. And he’d lost the only place he’d ever felt at home. All his life, he’d wanted to find somewhere he belonged. Carol Jordan had been half of that answer; the house had miraculously been the other. And now they were both gone. Carol in righteous contempt, the house razed to a shell. It had been full of things that were fodder to a fire – books, wood, paintings, fine carpets – and now they were reduced to smouldering ash.
He’d never been given to self-pity, which he reckoned was just as well, given how much there was about his life that was so pitiful. Even now, he wasn’t sorry for himself. Anger was at the heart of it, with disgust running a close second. Obviously the ultimate blame lay with Vance. He was the killer, the arsonist, the wrecker of lives. But Tony should have seen what was coming. Not once but twice he’d failed to figure out what Vance would do next. It was no excuse to point to the enormity of what Vance had done, to try to hide behind the fact that his actions were off the scale of extreme. Tony was trained and paid to have insight into men like Vance, to work out what made them tick and to stop them doing what they lived for.
Most people, when they fucked up at work, it wasn’t a big deal. But when he fucked up at work, it cost people their lives. He felt physically sick at the thought of Vance out there somewhere, making his next carefully planned move in his sadistic campaign. The longer this went on, the clearer it was to Tony that he’d been right about one thing at least – Vance was working to a set schedule that had been in place well before he’d made his jailbreak.
After Ambrose had dragged him away from the fire the night before, he’d made Tony sit down and drink sweet tea in the back of an ambulance. He’d stayed with him while the firefighters subdued the blaze. He’d put an arm round Tony’s shoulders when the roof timbers had collapsed with a rending crash. He hadn’t raised an eyebrow when Tony had laid the crime at Vance’s door. And he’d made notes when Tony finally composed himself enough to run through the thoughts that had occurred to him on the drive down to Worcester.
When they’d parted on the wrong side of midnight, Ambrose had been heading for the police station to brief his team and put the wheels in motion. But there had been nothing more for Tony to do. At least he still had
Then he’d got Paula’s message and understood the full scope of his failure to do his job properly. Vance seemed intent on taking from them everything that mattered. There were two paths he could go down in response to that. He could give in to the pain and the loss, walk away and spend the rest of his life unfulfilled and regretful. Or he could scream, ‘Fuck you!’ at the heavens and get back to stopping men like Vance. Tony reminded himself that there had been years before Carol came into his life, even more years before the house had been part of him. He’d lived well enough in that wilderness. He could do it again.
Tony drained his mug and got to his feet. Like the man said, when you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.
40
A ching with tiredness, raw with anguish, Paula leaned against the car bonnet and lit a cigarette. ‘Can I have one?’ Kevin asked. He was even paler than usual, the skin round his eyes almost greenish in tone. He looked as if he’d slept as little as she had. Sinead had shown up just after midnight and they’d stayed with her for a couple of hours, trying to offer consolation where there was none to be found. Then Paula had gone home and lain in bed staring at the ceiling, one hand cradled between both of Elinor’s.
‘I thought you’d stopped,’ she said, handing the packet over.
‘I have. But some days … ’ Kevin shivered. Paula knew just what he meant. Some days, the most ardent non- smokers yearned for the nicotine support. He lit up with the practised air of a man who has forgotten none of the pleasures of smoking. He inhaled greedily. His shoulders dropped an inch on the exhale. ‘After yesterday … you think you’ve seen it all. And then you see that.’
‘That’ was the contents of a cardboard box left round the back of a freezer food shop near the tower blocks at Skenby. It had been discovered just before dawn by the member of staff detailed to open up the loading bay for an early delivery. The box was about a metre long, half a metre deep and the same wide. It was sitting in the middle of the loading bay and had once held bags of oven chips. That it held something very different now was evident from the dark stains on the cardboard and the leaking pools of reddish brown liquid. The staff member, who wasn’t paid enough to think, opened it up and promptly fainted, hitting his head on the concrete and knocking himself out. The delivery driver had arrived to find him still out cold, next to a box containing a dismembered body. He’d thrown up, putting the finishing touches to the contamination of the crime scene.
The first cops on the scene had called MIT directly, mostly because the top limb in the box was an arm with the word ‘MINE’ tattooed just above the wrist. Paula and Kevin had arrived just as the doctor was formally pronouncing the bits in the box dead. ‘What have we got?’ Kevin asked.
‘You’ll have to wait for the pathologist to give you a definitive answer,’ the doctor recited. Even he looked a little pale and pinched in the grey dawn light. ‘But in the absence of any other indications, I’d say you’re looking at one body that’s been chopped up into its component parts. There’s a torso, a head, two arms, two thighs and two lower legs.’
