Besides, he’d completely failed in his attempts to get Carol to talk to him. He’d been trying her number every few minutes, but it kept going straight to voicemail. At first, he’d hoped she was in one of the few remaining black holes for phone reception, but he couldn’t sustain that optimism for much longer. To begin with he’d left messages, but he’d stopped doing that. There were only so many times you could caution someone against recklessness without them feeling fatally insulted.
The only thing left that he could think of was to try and shock her into inaction. So, at the next service area, he pulled off the motorway and wrote a text. ‘I love you. Don’t do ANYTHING before I get to you.’ He’d never said it before. It might not be the most romantic of occasions, but it should, he thought, freak her out enough to stop her in her tracks. As soon as she turned on her phone, she would see it. Before he could pause to consider the wisdom of his words, he sent it.
Tony got back on the road, wondering how Ambrose was doing. Maybe that had been his team that had hammered past in the outside lane a while ago. He wasn’t sure whether to be happy or anxious about that possibility. He considered calling Ambrose, but before he could do anything about it, Paula rang. ‘Can you talk?’ she said.
‘I’m driving but I’m hands free,’ he said.
‘I think you were right,’ Paula said, filling him in on Sergeant Dean’s information. ‘I’m just waiting for Stacey to come back with an address for me. She’d done the preliminary checks, only with the wrong gender. Now she’s gone back to try again. So far, Fletcher’s name’s not coming up on any of the Skenby flats.’
‘Try his wife’s maiden name,’ Tony said.
‘You think? They’ve lived there for at least ten years, according to Sergeant Dean.’
‘With some people, covering your tracks is second nature. They do it just because they can, not because there’s any specific reason for doing it.’
‘I’ll get Stacey on to it.’
‘Good. I could do with something working out tonight.’
‘Having a bad time?’
‘I’m kind of scared, Paula. I think Carol’s on a collision course with disaster and I don’t know if I can stop her.’
‘That sounds a bit melodramatic, Tony,’ Paula said gently. ‘And the chief doesn’t really do melodrama.’
‘I think tonight might be the exception.’
‘Is there anything I can do?’
‘No, and I don’t even want you to try. You need to bring Eric Fletcher in.’
‘He can wait.’
Tony sighed. ‘Actually, Paula, I’m not convinced about that. He’s escalating both in terms of the gaps between his killings and the risk-taking involved in choosing his victims. He’s close to the tipping point. If Kerry doesn’t give in to his demands soon, he’s going to run out of options.’
‘Then what? He’ll kill himself? Good luck to him, if he does,’ she said contemptuously. Paula cared a lot less about keeping the bad guys alive than Carol did. She’d always thought it was because she’d lost more than her boss. But maybe that wasn’t true. Maybe they just differed on that fundamental point of principle.
‘If he can’t scare her home, he’ll bring her home,’ Tony said.
There was a long silence while Paula digested what Tony meant. ‘Then I’d better chase Stacey up for that address,’ she said quietly.
‘Do that. I’d like to get through tonight without any more bloodshed.’
Carol hit the speed bump so fast her suspension squealed and she had to wrestle the wheel to keep moving in a straight line. If anyone was watching the CCTV whose camera lights glowed red above her, they’d hit the panic button. People who lived in secluded estates like Vinton Woods paid for security because they didn’t want the kind of toerags who hit speed bumps at fifty miles an hour tooling round their streets. Carol tapped the brakes and tried to drive more in keeping with her
As she passed the mock Queen Anne houses, Carol noticed no signs of life. Yes, there were lit windows and cars in drives. But the only thing with a pulse that she saw was a sheepish fox who skulked out of her headlights as she rounded a bend. She had to acknowledge Vance had made a smart move. The kind of people who craved this sort of soulless existence simply wouldn’t notice if a serial-killing jailbreaker moved in next door, as long as he drove a nice car and didn’t come knocking on their door because he’d run out of milk.
She pulled over to the kerb and consulted the map she’d loaded on to her smartphone. Vinton Woods was too new to appear on her car’s GPS system, but she’d found the developer’s map on their website. She worked out where she was in relation to Vance’s house and set off again. Within minutes, she was driving into the cul-de-sac where his house was situated. She tried to make it look like she’d taken a wrong turning, reversing in a neighbour’s gateway and heading straight back down to the feeder road.
In her fleeting glimpse, there had been no obvious sign of presence. Carol drove to the end of the street and considered her options. She wanted to take a closer look at the house, but there was no easy way to do it. There was no casual footfall on these pavements. Nobody walked anywhere, because there was nowhere to walk to. No cars were parked on the street because everyone had driveways and garages enough for all the cars their households could possibly support.
She cruised back along the feeder street slowly, noticing that the house opposite the entrance to the cul-de-sac was in darkness. There were no cars in the drive either. Carol decided it was worth taking a chance, so she reversed into the drive and parked in front of a garage door. She had a clear line of sight past Vance’s neighbours to his house. It was the perfect spot for a stake-out.
It didn’t resolve the problem of getting a closer look at the house. But maybe she didn’t need to get up close and personal with the bricks and mortar. As far as she could see, none of the windows facing down the cul-de-sac was curtained. There was no light visible within the house. Unless Vance was in the dark in a room at the back of the house, the chances were that the house was empty. And if he was asleep in a back bedroom, Carol would be best advised to stay put. Who knew what motion sensors and cameras he had in place around the perimeter to alert him to intruders. Everything he’d done so far had been well considered and well planned. The house would be the same.
