‘That makes sense,’ Tony said.
‘I know it makes sense, but I can’t communicate that to Ambrose. I don’t know if he’s blocking my calls, but I can’t raise him. You need to call him and tell him. He’ll listen to you. He thinks you’ve got a handle on what’s going on.’
She was losing it, he thought. She was losing it and he was still too far away. ‘Even if I can get through to him, he won’t listen to me. I’m not a cop. I don’t have any operational command here. You need to talk to Patterson. Or go further up the chain of command. This isn’t something I can do, Carol.’
‘You don’t want to do it, you mean,’ she said, her voice low and bitter. ‘You can’t help yourself, can you? Because you fucked up, now you’re overcompensating. Somehow you’ve got to protect me. You’d rather let Vance escape than have me confront him, because you think I’ll fuck up and get killed. Well, you’re wrong, Tony. I know what I’m doing. If you won’t help, fuck you.’
The line went dead. Tony smacked his fist on the steering wheel. ‘Masterful,’ he shouted. ‘Fucking masterful.’ His self-disgust plumbed new depths as his rage simmered down. The one good thing was that Vance hadn’t been there when Carol had arrived. The confrontation might only be postponed, but at least it hadn’t happened yet.
He drove on, his mind racing over what he knew and what the possibilities might be. Why had Vance not returned to his base camp? He’d been on the road a long time. He’d need to rest properly, not in a hotel room where he had no control of his environment. He’d need to change his appearance somewhere nobody would notice that he looked different going out from coming in. The instinct of the predator was always to return to his lair. So why was Vance not in Vinton Woods? Where could he be? And why?
Tony chewed on the problem as he skirted Manchester and Stockport, Ashton and Oldham and shot out on to the M62. In a few miles, he’d hit the motorway link for Bradfield. He was getting close to Vinton Woods now. He could argue the toss with Carol on the ground.
But still the question of Vance’s whereabouts nagged him. ‘You want us to live with the pain,’ he said. ‘Most people would think Carol’s the only one who’s had that kind of pain so far. It’s like she got the full dose, but me and Micky, we’ve just got our starters.’ He gripped the wheel so tightly his knuckles hurt.
‘Even if you meant it to be enough, it all went pear-shaped at Micky’s. Two horses and a stable lad dead, that’s sad, but it’s not really a tragedy, even for Betsy, who loves the horses. You’re not going to be able to let that rest. But not tonight. Not while the place is crawling with cops. You’re going to have to wait.’ He sighed in exasperation. ‘So all the more reason for you to go back to your hole in the ground, the place you think you’re safe. Rest. Regroup. Plan. Then do something to Micky that she’ll carry like a scar for the rest of her life.’ It felt right. It had the shape of Vance’s thinking. It had taken Tony a while to crawl back inside Vance’s mind. But now he was sure. He didn’t just know with his head. He empathised. He understood what made Vance tick, what he needed and what would satisfy him.
‘You thought this was going to be quick and dirty. You’d gallop through your list, and you’d feel vindicated. But now you know it’s not that easy. The suffering needs to be very particular … ’ His voice tailed off.
If the horses weren’t enough, the house wasn’t enough. In Tony’s world, it was as shattering and disruptive as a bereavement. However, that wouldn’t be how others saw it. Vance might have got it, if he’d been doing the watching and the deciding himself. If he’d seen Tony in the house with his own eyes, he’d have known precisely what he was achieving. But he hadn’t. He’d had to rely on the reports of others. Others who couldn’t creep about inside strangers’ heads with any degree of insight.
In those circumstances, the house couldn’t be enough. Carol would be the obvious person to take from him. That would rip his heart out, no doubt about it. But Vance couldn’t kill Carol, because her ongoing pain was integral to his satisfaction. And what had happened to Chris, not Carol, would that have been enough? Maybe. But if a disfigured and damaged Carol wasn’t enough, that didn’t leave many options. Tony’s life was not overburdened with friendships. There were plenty of acquaintances, colleagues, former students. There were a handful of people he thought of as friends, but they weren’t close in the way that Vance would need. Besides, from the outside, they probably didn’t appear to be more than workmates. If he went for a drink with Ambrose or Paula, it would look like colleagues having a couple of beers after work. No big deal. Only someone who knew Tony a damn sight better than Vance possibly could would have grasped the importance of those connections. When it came to revenge, they didn’t even register.
And if revenge was to be worth anything, it had to matter deep down. Tony understood the atavistic importance of getting your own back in the right way. All through his life, his mother had used him as an emotional punchbag. She’d belittled him, criticised him, made fun of him. She’d made sure he grew up without a father, without a refuge, without love. She hadn’t cared whether he succeeded or failed. And he’d grown into an emotionally limited, dysfunctional man, saved from ruin only by fragments of other people’s love and the gift of empathy.
When he’d first found out the full scope of Vanessa’s treachery and lies, he’d sworn he never wanted to speak to her again. But the more he’d grown into the idea of changing his life and accepting the hand Arthur Blythe had offered from beyond the grave, the more he’d wanted her to know that, in spite of her best efforts, he was not destroyed. That the man she’d driven from his life had found a different kind of strength, one that could circumvent Vanessa’s confrontational negativity. And that had healed some vital part of Tony’s spirit. He couldn’t think of anything that would piss her off more than knowing that.
So he’d driven over to Halifax one afternoon and waited for her to come home. She’d been surprised to see him, but she’d asked him in. He’d said what he had to say, raising his voice and talking over her when she tried to undercut him. Eventually, she’d shut up, settling for an expression of amused contempt. But he could read her body language, and he knew she was raging with impotent fury. ‘I’m never going to enter this house again,’ he said. ‘I’m never going to see you again. You better make your funeral arrangements in advance, Vanessa. Because I’m not even going to be there to bury you.’
And he’d left, a lightness in his heart that was completely alien to him. Getting your own back was a wonderful thing. He understood exactly the sense of release that Vance was looking for.
Then it hit him. He’d visited his mother’s house. A watcher would have had no idea why he was there or what had gone on inside. He’d just have seen a dutiful son visiting his mother and coming out of the house with a smile on his face and a spring in his step. The watcher had made his report and Vance had leapt to the wrong conclusion.
All at once, Tony knew exactly where Jacko Vance was.
53
Paula bounced from foot to foot, dragging incessantly on her cigarette. ‘Where the fuck are they?’ she demanded, scanning the approaches to the dingy grey concrete tower where they were waiting. Above their heads were twenty-one floors of egg-box flats, all thin walls and cheap paint and peeling laminate covering cold damp concrete floors. More stolen TVs than hot dinners. Skenby Flats. Bradfield’s answer to Blade Runner.