Tony smiled. ‘So bring your bed. The one in your room’s a bit of a monstrosity anyway. I can sell it, or give it away, or put it in the garage so there’s something to put back when you’ve had enough of living with me and need to be on your own again.’ He gave her a nervy, anxious look, seeking reassurance.
She ran a hand through her hair, turning shaggy into spiky. ‘I don’t think that’s going to happen.’ Her smile was uncertain too. ‘We’ve spent years taking very small steps towards each other. We never do anything in relation to each other unless we’re belt-and-braces sure of it. I can’t believe this is going to end in disaster.’
He stood up and moved round the desk to put a hand on her shoulder. ‘We won’t let it. I’ll get someone from the antiques centre round to value the bed. And now, I’m going home. It’s ten o’clock and I’m knackered. I’ll talk to you tomorrow, OK?’
She covered his hand with hers. ‘OK.’
‘I know you think I’m overreacting,’ he said, drawing away and moving to the door. ‘But I know what men like Vance are capable of. And it’s taken us so long to get this far, I couldn’t stand to lose you now.’
Then he was gone.
Vance woke up with a start, heart racing, all his senses on full alert. For a moment, he had no idea where he was, thrashing around in the big bed and getting tangled in the unfamiliar duvet. Then the silence sank in and he remembered. He was not where he expected to be. He was miles away from his confined cell in HMP Oakworth. He was in Vinton Woods, in a house owned by a Cayman Islands corporation whose sole director was Patrick Gordon, the name in one of the passports in the briefcase Terry had given him.
He rolled over and snapped on the bedside lamp. Its white glass shade cast a soft light over part of the room. That was novel in itself. The light in his cell at Oakworth had illuminated every corner, exposing its limits and its limitations. But this glow left things to the imagination. Vance liked that.
The bedding, though, was lamentable. That would have to go. Terry had been working class to the core. He really believed that black satin sheets meant you’d arrived.
Vance looked at his watch and was surprised to see it was barely ten o’clock. He’d been asleep for about six hours, but now he was in that peculiar state of still being tired and yet alert. Something had woken him up, some anxiety that had invaded his dreams, and now he couldn’t quite grasp it. He got out of bed, enjoying the feel of soft, rich carpeting beneath his feet. He had a piss, realised he felt hungry, and padded downstairs to the kitchen. Another freedom to luxuriate in.
He switched on the lights, pleased to notice there was no obvious sign of his earlier violence. He wasn’t naïve enough to think he’d destroyed all the forensic traces of what had taken place, but he wasn’t anticipating any forensic scientists examining the place. To the casual observer, to the estate agent who would soon be selling the place, there was nothing amiss.
Vance opened the fridge and laughed out loud. Terry had clearly done a commando raid on Marks and Spencer. Ready meals, fresh meat and veg, fruit, milk, champagne and freshly squeezed orange juice. He pulled out the fizz and popped the cork one-handed while he decided what to eat. He settled on some Chinese appetisers, but struggled to make sense of the oven controls. Eventually he worked it out, but the edge had gone from his good mood.
As he poured a second glass of champagne, he recalled what lay behind the spike of anxiety that had awoken him. He hadn’t checked the camera feeds. That was mostly because he hadn’t actually explored the house before exhaustion had knocked the feet from under him. If he’d seen a computer, it would have reminded him.
He prowled through the darkened house, not wanting to draw attention by snapping lights on and off. He found a dining room, a TV room, a sitting room and finally, tucked away at the back of the house, a study. The soft moonlight from outside was enough to navigate by and he crossed to the desk, turning on a lamp that cast a pool of light over the dark wooden desk. Terry had clearly run out of imagination by the time he’d got to the study. A big desk, an extravagantly padded leather chair and a credenza were the sole furnishings. A laptop sat on the desk, a printer on the credenza. Vance assumed the oblong box on the window sill that flashed a trembling array of blue lights at him was the wireless router. He’d seen pictures of routers on the Internet, but never the real thing until now.
He flipped open the laptop. Terry had wanted to get an Apple. He said it was better for what Vance wanted. But he knew his learning curve was going to be steep as it was – the computers he’d been able to access in Oakworth had been old and slow, the access to the Internet severely restricted. He couldn’t help laughing. What the fuck were they thinking, letting someone like him loose on computers? If he’d been in charge, he would never have allowed inmates access to mobiles or the net. If you wanted to stop prisoners communicating with the outside world, then ban mobile-phone coverage from the prison. Never mind inconveniencing the staff, if you were serious about keeping a grip on your prisoners, you had to do shit like that. He’d bet you couldn’t get a mobile signal in a gulag.
He could hardly believe how quickly the machine booted up. It was a thing of beauty compared to what he’d grown used to. He went back to the kitchen to fetch the briefcase and opened it on the desk beside the laptop. Vance took out a small address book and thumbed it open at ‘U’ and directed the web browser to the first of a list of urls on the page. It opened an anonymous-looking website that asked for a password. Then he went to the letter ‘C’ and typed in the first string of letters and numbers on the page. ‘C is for camera,’ he said aloud as he waited for the page to open. Seconds later, he was looking at a screen divided into quarters. One quarter was in complete darkness. One showed a brightly lit kitchen; beyond that, a dining area; beyond that still a sitting area with a vast inglenook fireplace. It looked like a barn conversion, judging by the scale and the hammer beams in the ceiling. Another showed the same open-plan space but from the other end. A man was sprawled on a long leather sofa. Greying blond hair, indistinct features, a T-shirt with a logo Vance didn’t recognise, and a pair of boxer shorts. Over to one side, a woman was sitting at a desk, tapping on a laptop. Beside her was a glass of red wine. The fourth quadrant showed the top of an open staircase leading to a gallery bedroom. It was hard to make out much detail, but it looked as if there was a bathroom and a dressing room behind the main area.
Vance watched, fascinated, a self-satisfied smile on his face, as nothing much happened. So many private investigators, so few scruples. Ask around and you could find one who would do more or less anything, as long as you could find a way of dressing it up in some guise that made it sound remotely legitimate. It hadn’t been cheap to get the cameras in place, but it had been worth every penny. He wanted to be sure exactly how the land lay before he took on this act of revenge.
He closed down the window and repeated the process with another access code. This time, the views were external. They showed a large Edwardian house set in a good-sized garden. The cameras showed the approach to the front door, a view of the living room from the outside, a wide shot of the back of the house and the driveway. In the light from nearby street lamps, the house appeared to be empty. The curtains were open, the windows dark. Vance nodded, still smiling. ‘It’s not going to be dark forever,’ he said, moving on to the third access code.
Again, four camera angles. A gravel drive leading to a long, low farmhouse covered in some kind of creeper. Very English. He could see what looked like a stable block in the distance, lit by floodlights. Next, the block itself. He’d seen places like this all over the country; the brick and wooden frontages of stable yards where horses occupied the stalls, paid for by the largesse of rich men and women and tended by ill-paid workers who loved the beasts more than most of their owners ever would. A figure passed across the yard, his movements jagged. A beam of light arced out from one hand. He shone the light jerkily on each door in turn before disappearing from sight. The third quadrant showed the rear of the house, while the fourth was a long shot of the approach to the drive. Parked across the entrance was a horsebox, making it impossible for a vehicle to pass. Vance’s smile grew broader. Anticipation was so sweet.