them jump. Then they’d jerk the wheel and she’d be past them, so close she imagined them swearing.
It was exhilarating, this feeling of finally taking action. It felt like forever since she’d stood in the barn looking down at Michael and Lucy’s bodies, a viscous sea of time that dragged at her feet and stopped her making any progress. She wanted to move forward, to bury the horror. But she couldn’t even start while Jacko Vance walked free. At liberty, he was an affront to her sense of justice.
It wasn’t death that Carol wanted to mete out. She knew a lot of people in her shoes would be satisfied with nothing less. But she didn’t believe in capital punishment, or even private vengeance that ended up with bodies on the floor. She and Vance were oddly at one on this point. She wanted him to live with the consequences of what he had done. Every day, she wanted him to know he was never going to look at an unfettered sky again.
And she wanted him to know who had put him back behind bars. Every day, she wanted him to hate her more.
Vance couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in Halifax. It must have been back when he was making his hit series,
He swept down from the high motorway into the valley below, keeping an eye out for a possible temporary base. He needed somewhere with wi-fi, so that he could check that his target was where he hoped she would be. It was too late for coffee shops, always supposing Halifax had anything so cool. And he didn’t want an Internet cafe, where people could peer over your shoulder and wonder why you were looking at CCTV pictures of a woman in her living room when she was clearly well past the age of sexual fantasy.
As he rounded a bend, he saw the golden arches of a McDonald’s. He remembered Terry telling him that, when all else failed, you could always count on McDonald’s. ‘Coffee, grub, or the Internet, you can get it there.’ Vance shuddered at the thought. Even when he’d pretended to have the common touch, he’d drawn the line at McDonald’s. But maybe for once he could make an exception. There must be a quiet corner where he could drink coffee and get online.
At the last minute he swung into the entrance and parked the car. He grabbed his laptop bag and went inside. The restaurant was surprisingly busy, mostly with teenagers who were fractionally too young to persuade even the most short-sighted bartenders that they were old enough for alcohol. Their desperate need to feel cool had driven them out from houses where
Vance bought a cup of coffee and found a table for two in the furthest corner. Although it was near the toilets, he could angle his screen away from prying eyes. Ignoring his drink, he quickly booted up and ran through his camera sites. Nothing at all at Tony Hill’s house, though the gateway had been boarded up and ‘Danger! Keep Out!’ signs had been posted. From the other camera shots, he could see why. The building was gutted. No roof, no windows, just a partially collapsed shell.
The third scene was the one that made him want to shout abuse at the screen. But Vance knew he had to maintain the appearance of calm. The last thing he wanted was to draw attention to himself. Teenagers were notoriously solipsistic, but even so, it only needed one sharp-eyed observer to create all sorts of problems. Still, seeing the stable block still standing filled him with rage. While he watched, Betsy herself came into shot with an armed policeman, a pair of spaniels at her heels. She was gesturing to various aspects of the relatively undamaged stable block as they walked, clearly having an animated conversation. She didn’t seem to be suffering at all, the bitch. He wanted her on her knees, weeping and tearing her hair out, locked into painful mourning. Maybe next time he should do the dogs. Cut their throats and leave them on Micky and Betsy’s beds. That would show them who had the power. Or maybe he should just do Betsy.
He took a deep breath and clicked on to the last set of active camera feeds. Clockwise, it showed the driveway and frontage of a detached stone-built villa that looked somehow unmistakably Northern. It wasn’t a big house – it looked like three reception rooms and three bedrooms, but it was solid and well maintained. In the driveway, outside a detached wooden garage, was a two-seater Mercedes.
Next was a modern kitchen that had the pristine air of somewhere that’s only ever used to reheat meals supplied by Waitrose or Marks and Spencer. The lights under the wall cabinets were on, casting a cold glow on pale wood worktops. Beyond the kitchen the ribs of a conservatory loomed pale through the darkness.
In the third view, a camera with a fish-eye lens had obviously been mounted in a corner of the half-landing on the stairs. It was possible to see up to the head of the stairs and through an open door that led to a bedroom, and also down the stairs to the front door, whose stained glass glowed faintly, backlit by the street lights outside.
The fourth feed showed a living room that looked as if not much living went on there. There was no clutter; no books or magazines, just an alcove lined with DVDs. A long, deep sofa almost as big as a bed and piled with cushions was at the heart of the room. In front of it, an elaborately carved wooden coffee table that held a trio of remote controls, a wine bottle and a single half-full glass of red. An open briefcase sat on the floor at one end of the table. On the opposite wall was an ornate Victorian fireplace. Where one might have expected a complicated overmantel, there was instead a plasma screen TV that filled the whole chimney breast. The room resembled the most private of cinemas, a sad screening room for one. As he watched, a woman walked into the room wearing a loose kaftan, golden brown hair in a shoulder-length bob tucked behind her ears. The definition wasn’t good enough for much detail, but Vance was surprised to see that the woman neither looked nor moved like someone on the downward slope of her sixties. She picked up two of the remotes and curled into the sofa, adjusting cushions and pillows so that she was comfortable. The screen sprang into life. The angle made it impossible for Vance to identify what she was watching but she seemed intent on it.
Which was all he needed to know. He wasn’t planning on finesse. An elderly woman in the house alone wasn’t exactly a challenging target. Especially since there were no obvious weapons in the room – no convenient fire irons or hefty bronze statues. He’d take his chances with a wine bottle.
He watched for a couple of minutes more, then folded his laptop shut and walked out, throwing his untouched coffee in the bin. Nobody paid any attention. Once that would have pissed him off. But Jacko Vance was slowly coming to appreciate the beauty of anonymity.
Tony did not believe in omens. Just because he was hammering up the motorway well over the speed limit and he hadn’t had any encounters with the traffic police didn’t mean the heavens were aligning in his favour. At one point, a flashing blue light had appeared in his rear-view mirror, but he’d pulled over and the liveried police car had thundered past without a second glance. Clearly someone else was behaving with even less regard for the law than he was. It still didn’t mean the gods were on his side.
