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 by good luck to make it through the doorway and away from the spreading pool of acid. Now her knees and shins were starting to smart with the burn of the corrosive liquid.
Groaning, she managed to reach for her phone. Thank God it was a BlackBerry, with keys you could feel. She pressed what she thought were three nines and through the terrible insanity of pain she managed to growl the address to the operator who answered.
She could manage no more. Unconsciousness fell like a blessing and she toppled sideways to the floor.
By the time he’d picked up his car, Tony felt like he’d stumbled into a remake of Planes, Trains and Automobiles. Franklin had refused to give him a lift in a police car to the nearest rail station. ‘My officers are investigating a double murder, not running a taxi service,’ he’d grunted, turning on his heel and walking away.
Tony didn’t know the address of the barn, let alone how to give proper directions, so he couldn’t call a taxi, even if he’d had a number, which left him with no option but to set off on foot. It was tiring to walk long distances these days. A while back, a patient at Bradfield Moor had gone off his meds and run amok with a fire axe. Tony had stepped in to protect other staff and had ended up with a shattered knee in exchange for lives saved. His surgeon had done her best, but he’d ended up with a limp and a refusal to undergo any more surgery for as long as he could manage without it. Now his knee was stiff every morning and ached when it rained. Not that Carol would have been thinking about that today.
After a mile or so limping in the rain, he came to a marginally less narrow road and turned left, guessing that was the direction for Leeds and, ultimately, Bradfield. He stuck his thumb out and kept walking. Ten minutes later, a Land Rover pulled up. Tony climbed in, moving a reluctant Border collie in the process. The man behind the wheel wore a flat cap and brown overalls; an archetypal Dales sheep farmer. He gave Tony a quick glance before they drove off and said, ‘I can take you to the next village. You can get a bus from there.’
‘Thanks,’ Tony said. ‘Miserable day, isn’t it?’
‘Only if you’re out in it.’
And that was the end of the conversation. He dropped Tony at a little stone bus shelter, where the timetable informed him that there would be a bus for Leeds in twenty minutes. From Leeds, it was a forty-minute train journey to Bradfield. From the station, a ten-minute cab ride to his car.
After all that time with nothing to think about but the events of the day, Tony was tempted to go to bed and pull the covers over his head and stay there. But that was no kind of answer to what ailed him. He needed to go to Worcester, for two reasons. Worcester was the heart of the search for Vance. He could work with Ambrose, analyse whatever information came into the manhunt and do what he could to help put Vance away. For good, this time.
But Worcester was also the place where he had found peace. He couldn’t explain, but the house that Edmund Arthur Blythe had left him had settled the constant restlessness that had always eaten away at him. Nowhere had ever felt like home before. And it made no sense. OK, Blythe had been his biological father. But they’d never met. Never spoken. Never communicated directly until Blythe had died and left Tony a letter and a legacy.
At first, Tony had wanted to ignore everything to do with the man who had abandoned him and his mother before he was born. Even though he was objective enough to understand that walking out on Vanessa was always going to be a strategy that had huge appeal. He’d thought that long before he knew the circumstances surrounding Blythe’s decision to walk away.
Then he’d gone to take a look at the house for himself. On the face of it, this was not a house he would have chosen. It wasn’t a style of architecture that particularly appealed to him. The furnishings were comfortable and matched the house, which meant they felt old-fashioned to him. The garden was meticulously planned and beautifully executed, and thus entirely beyond the capabilities of a man who hired a gardening service to mow his own patch of lawn once a fortnight.
And yet, he’d felt this house close around him like a security blanket. At some deep level, he understood it. It made no sense and it made perfect sense at one and the same time. So tonight, when the relationship at the core of his life had fractured, he wanted to be where he’d felt most whole.
So he got behind the wheel and started driving. There was no escape from the thoughts that revolved in his head. Carol was right. He was the one who was supposed to figure these things out. It wasn’t as if he was lacking data. He had the burning examples of Vance’s past to work with. The root of his serial murders had not been lust, it had been revenge for his loss of control over someone else, and for the future he’d lost. And that revenge had been, as this was, indirect. When he’d finally been captured and the nature of his crimes understood, someone else had ended up carrying the weight of his guilt because she was convinced that, if she hadn’t thwarted him, he would never have killed. She was wrong, of course. Vance was a psychopath; at some point the world would not have bent to his will and he would have resolved it with extreme violence.
Knowing all this, he should have understood how Vance would have designed his vengeance. As he saw it, Tony, a handful of police officers and his ex-wife had wrecked his life. He’d had to live with that. Every day in jail, he’d been confronted with the life he’d lost. So for revenge to be appropriate, his enemies would have to live with loss. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Not a day would pass now without Carol shouldering the terrible guilt of her brother’s death. Vance’s equation was clear: Michael and Lucy had died because of what Carol had done to him. Her arresting him had been the first step on his journey away from the life he loved. Now the first step on his journey of revenge had destroyed the people Carol loved.
How long had Vance been planning this? It had all the hallmarks of something that had been going on for months, if not years. First, he’d had to build his record of perfect behaviour in jail. That couldn’t have been easy for a prisoner with such a high profile. Cons won status by fucking with big-name prisoners. Then there was the nature of his crimes. Kidnapping, raping and murdering teenage girls was bordering on nonce behaviour. To have overcome these obstacles must have taken all of Vance’s charm, not to mention substantial investment inside and out.