The Wire in the Blood. Val McDermid
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Название: The Wire in the Blood
Автор: Val McDermid
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Полицейские детективы
isbn: 9780007327607
isbn:
In his head he was with her, wondering if she was keeping her promise, imagining the excitement burning in her veins. He thought of her as a changed being, charged with the secret weapon of knowledge, convinced she had the edge on every tabloid astrologer because she knew for sure what her future held.
Of course, hers could not be the same vision as his, he realized that. It would have been hard to imagine two more disparate fantasies, so far apart on the continuum that there could exist no single uniting factor. Apart from orgasm.
Imagining her imagining a false future had its own frisson of delight that cohabited and alternated with the sliver of fear that she would not keep her word, that even as he played computer games with the stricken inhabitants of a children’s cancer ward, Donna was huddled in a corner of the school cloakroom revealing her secret to her best friend. That was the gamble he took every time. And every time, he’d judged the roll of the dice perfectly. Not once had anyone come looking for him. Well, not in the investigative sense. There had been one time when the distraught parents of a missing teenage girl asked for a TV appeal because, wherever she’d run off to, their daughter would never miss her weekly fix of Vance’s Visits. Sweet irony, so delicious he’d grown hard for months afterwards just thinking about it. He could hardly have told them that the only way they were ever going to talk to their daughter again was via a medium, could he?
For two nights running, he went to sleep in the early hours and woke at dawn tangled in damp sheets, his pulse racing and his eyes wide open. Whatever the evaporated dream, it robbed him of further sleep, leaving him to prowl the confined spaces of his hotel room, alternately exulting and fretting.
But nothing lasted forever. Thursday evening found him in his Northumberland retreat. Only fifteen minutes’ drive from the centre of the city, it was nevertheless as isolated as a Highland croft. Formerly a tiny Methodist chapel that could never have held more than a couple of dozen, it had been bought when it was reduced to four bulging walls and a sagging roof. A team of local builders happy to have the cash in hand renovated it to very particular specifications, never doubting the reasons they were given for the desired features.
He savoured the preparations for his visitor. The sheets were clean, the clothes laid out. The phone was switched off, the answering machine turned down low, the fax shut away inside a drawer. The fibre optics might sing all night with calls for him, but he wouldn’t be hearing them till morning. The table was covered with linen so white it seemed to glow in the dark. On it, crystal, silver and porcelain were arranged in traditional patterns. Red rosebuds in an engraved crystal vase, candles splendid in simple Georgian silver. Donna would be captivated. Of course, she wouldn’t realize that it would be the last time she’d ever use cutlery.
He looked around, checking everything was as it should be. The chains and leather straps were all out of sight, the silken gag tucked away, the carpentry bench innocent of tools except for the permanently mounted vice. He had designed the workbench himself, all the tools arrayed on a solid piece of wood like the drop leaf of a table attached to the far end of the bench at ninety degrees to the work surface.
One last glance at his watch. Time to drive the Land Rover across the rutted field track to the empty B-road that would take him to Five Walls Halt with its isolated railway station. He lit the candles and smiled with sheer pleasure, confident now that she would have kept faith and silence alike.
Won’t you come into my parlour? said the spider to the fly.
Tim Coughlan had finally had his prayers answered. He’d found the perfect spot. The loading bay was slightly less wide than the factory proper, leaving a recess about seven feet square at one end. At first glance, it looked as if the alcove was blocked off by flattened cardboard cartons stacked on their ends. If anyone had bothered to look more closely, they would have noticed that the cartons weren’t tightly packed and that, with a little effort, it wouldn’t be too hard to squeeze between them. Anyone inclined to investigate further would have found Tim Coughlan’s bedsit, containing a stained and greasy sleeping bag and two carrier bags. The first bag contained one clean T-shirt, one clean pair of socks and one clean pair of underpants. The other held one dirty T-shirt, one dirty pair of socks, one dirty pair of boxer shorts and a pair of shapeless cords that might once have been dark brown but were now the colour of seabirds after the oil slick has trapped them.
Tim slouched in a corner of his space, the sleeping bag scrunched into a cushion beneath his bony buttocks. He was eating chips and curry sauce from a polystyrene container. He had the best part of a litre of cider left to wash it down and send him to sleep. He needed something on the cold nights to carry him forward into oblivion.
It had taken long months living rough on the streets before he’d emerged on the other side of the heroin haze that had robbed him of his life. He’d dropped so low that even drugs were above his reach. That, ironically, was what had saved him. Shivering through cold turkey in a Christmas charity shelter, he’d finally turned the corner. He’d started selling the Big Issue on street corners. He’d managed to put together enough cash to buy clothes from charity shops that looked like poverty rather than hopeless homelessness. And he’d managed to find work on the docks. It was casual, poorly paid, cash in hand, the black economy at its gloomiest. But it was a start. And that was when he’d found his spot in the loading bay of an assembly plant too strapped for cash to afford a night watchman.
Since then, he’d managed to save nearly three hundred pounds, stashed in the building society account that was probably his only extant connection to his past. Soon, he’d have enough for the deposit and a month’s rent on a proper place to live and enough to spare to feed himself while the dole dragged their feet over his claim.
Tim had hit bottom and nearly drowned. Soon, he was convinced, he’d be ready to swim back up to the daylight. He screwed up the chip container and tossed it into the corner. Then he opened the cider bottle and tipped the contents down his throat in a long series of quick gulps. The notion of savouring it never occurred to him. There was no reason why it should.
Opportunity had seldom knocked at Jacko Vance’s door. Mostly, he’d gripped it by the throat and dragged it kicking and screaming to centre stage. He’d realized while he was still a child that the only way he was ever going to come by some luck was if he managed to make it himself. His mother, plagued by a kind of post-natal depression that had made him repugnant to her, had ignored him as far as possible. She hadn’t actually been cruel, simply absent in any meaningful sense. His father had been the one who paid attention, most often of a negative sort.
He hadn’t long been at school when the handsome child with the floppy blond hair, the hollow cheeks and the huge baffled eyes had realized that there was a point in having dreams, that things could be made to happen. His little-boy-lost appearance worked on some teachers like a blowtorch on an icicle. It didn’t take him long to work out that he could manipulate them into playing accessories in his own particular power game. It didn’t erase what happened at home, but it gave him an arena where he began to understand the pleasure of power.
Although he traded on his looks, Jacko never relied solely on the power of his charm. It was as if he СКАЧАТЬ