The following risk assessment is based on limited direct acquaintance with Jacko Vance. I saw Vance in public on several occasions and I interviewed him twice: once in his home when he may have realised he was the object of investigation; and a second time after he had been arrested on suspicion of murder. However, I am familiar with the detail of his crimes and have sufficient knowledge of his background to feel confident in preparing an assessment of how he is likely to respond to being on the run, having successfully outwitted the system and escaped from prison.
‘What’s going through your head, Jacko?’ Tony said softly, leaning back in the chair and locking his fingers behind his head. ‘Why this? Why now?’
A sharp knock at the door interrupted his conversation with himself. Paula stuck her head in, a determined look on her face. ‘You got a minute?’ Before he could reply, she was through the door and shutting it behind her.
‘What if I said no?’
Paula gave him a tired smile. ‘I’d say, “tough shit”.’
‘I thought as much.’ Tony took off his reading glasses and studied Paula. There was history between them, a stained and complicated web of connections that had spread out over the years till it had become a sort of friendship. He’d led her through the labyrinth of grief after the death of a colleague who had also been a friend; she’d pushed him into doing the right things for the wrong reasons; he’d made her break the rules then stood in the firing line when Carol had turned her sights on her. Respect was the keystone of their relationship. Just as well, Tony thought, otherwise he might have found it hard to forgive Paula the happiness she’d found with Dr Elinor Blessing, a happiness he doubted he had the capacity for. ‘I don’t suppose this is a social visit?’
‘Can I ask what you’re working on?’ Paula clearly wasn’t in the mood for small talk. Carol must be expected back soon, then.
‘I’m doing a risk assessment for the Home Office. I don’t know if Carol said anything to you guys, but it’ll be public knowledge before too long. Some things you can’t keep quiet. Jacko Vance escaped from Oakworth this morning. Because I was involved in putting him away, they want me to stare into my crystal ball and tell them where he’s going to go and what he’s going to do.’ Tony’s sardonic stare matched his tone.
‘So you’re not working on our case?’
‘You know how it is, Paula. Blake won’t pay for me and DCI Jordan refuses to let me work without being paid. I thought I might be able to call in a favour via the Home Office, but they won’t agree, not now. They’ll want me totally focused on Jacko. No distractions.’
‘It’s just stupid, not making the most of your skills,’ Paula said. ‘You know what we’re working on?’
‘A string of murders that looks like a serial. I don’t know much more than that,’ he said. ‘She tries to keep me out of temptation’s way.’
‘Well, consider me the temptress. Tony, this is right up your street. He’s the kind of killer you understand, the sort of mind you can map like nobody else. And this is MIT’s last tango. We want to go out on a high note. I want to leave Blake with a sour taste in his mouth when the chief goes off to West Mercia. I want him to understand the class of the operation he’s flushing down the toilet. So we’ve got to come up with the right answer, and fast.’ Her eyes were pleading, a contrast with the fierceness of her words.
Tony wanted to resist the draw of Paula’s words. But in his heart, he agreed with everything she’d said. There was no rational explanation for what Blake was doing except that it would save some money to close the specialist unit. His conviction that spreading MIT’s skills more thinly would produce more effective outcomes was, in Tony’s opinion, a crackpot idea that would produce the opposite result. ‘Why are you telling me this?’ he said, a last-ditch bid to still the interest quickening in him.
Paula rolled her eyes and tutted. ‘I thought you were supposed to be the smart one? Because we need your help, Tony. We need you to profile the killer so we can make some progress instead of getting bogged down in the mountain of crap this kind of inquiry produces.’
‘She won’t have it. Like I said: there’s no budget to pay me and she won’t exploit me.’ He opened his hands as he shrugged, going for the deliberately cute smile. ‘I’ve begged her, but she won’t take advantage.’
Paula groaned. ‘Spare me the single entendres. Listen, it’s simple. It doesn’t matter what she wants. Because she’s not going to know. Because it’s going to be our little secret.’
Tony groaned. ‘Why am I getting that sinking feeling? Whenever you and I go off on our own initiative, it always ends in tears.’
Paula grinned, her eyes sparkling with mischief. ‘Yeah, but you can’t argue with our results. Every time we’ve gone behind her back, it’s moved the investigation forward.’
‘And she’s ripped us a new one,’ Tony said with feeling. ‘It’s all right for you, you get to go home to Elinor. But I’m supposed to be living with her in Worcester—’ The words were out before he could stop them.
Paula’s face couldn’t make its mind up between astonishment and delight. ‘What? You mean, like now? She’ll have her own flat, like she has now, in the basement?’
Tony closed his eyes and put his fists to his temples. ‘Shit, shit, shit. I wasn’t supposed to say anything.’ He dropped his hands to the desk and sighed. ‘It’s not like it sounds. Sharing the house, that would be a better description. Look, Paula, we didn’t— she didn’t want the team to know. Because you’d all jump to conclusions and then the sideways looks and the cheesy sentimental crap would start and she’d have to kill you all.’ He ran a hand through his hair, leaving it standing up in spikes.
Paula just smiled. ‘It’s OK. I won’t say anything. It’s nobody’s business. Frankly, I can’t think of anyone else who’d put up with either of you. And I mean as housemates,’ she added hastily as he opened his mouth to contradict her.
‘You’re probably right,’ he said.
‘So will you help?’ Paula said, closing the subject and getting back to what she really wanted.
‘She’ll kill me,’ he said.
‘Yeah, but not nailing this one will kill her,’ Paula said. ‘You know how she is about unfinished business. Justice not being served … ’
Tony leaned back in the chair and stared at the ceiling. ‘I am going to live to regret this. OK, Paula. Get Stacey to send me the usual package. I make no promises, but I’ll take a look at it after I’ve done the Jacko Vance assessment.’ He straightened up abruptly. ‘And let’s try to keep it a secret for once. Please?’
18
By the time she made it back to the squad room, Carol was ready for some good news. She’d had to fend off a call from the Chief Constable on the drive back from Northern HQ, during which James Blake had shown considerably more concern for the state of his budget than the lives of the women whose circumstances pushed them on to the streets to sell the one commodity of value they had left. Given his passion for cuts, she wondered how long it would be before some bright spark in government headhunted him.
She stuck her head into her office, where Tony was staring into her computer. A small stack of paper sat to one side, a pen on top of it. She could see scribbled notes, complete with asterisks and underlinings. Tony barely acknowledged her arrival, settling for an inarticulate grunt.
‘Any news on Vance?’ she said. She’d managed to put thoughts of the escaped prisoner to one side while she’d been out of the office, but there was no avoiding it now Tony had squatter’s rights over her office.
He shook his head without looking up. ‘Nothing. I rang Lambert a while back. The cameras picked up the taxi when he joined the M5 heading north and they’re tracking forward from that. But you know how hard it is to do that stuff in real time. You just need one crap camera and you’re stuck with a load of options to track.’