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.
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 Stepford Wives surroundings.
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.