The Retribution by Val McDermid

Author:Val McDermid
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Mystery, Psychological Thriller, Fiction
ISBN: 9780748125784
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
Published: 2011-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

32

The office was a good place not to be. The shadow of what had happened to Carol hung over them all like a pall, Chris thought as she drove down the spine of the Pennines and into Derbyshire. She sipped coffee as she drove. It had cooled to a point where anyone sampling it would have been hard pressed to say whether it was warmed-up iced coffee or leftover hot coffee. She didn’t care. All she wanted it for was its capacity to keep her awake. She was beginning to feel welded into the car seat after yesterday’s excursion to Kay Hallam’s mansion.

In an ideal world, she’d have got her hands on a copy of Geoff Whittle’s banned book about Vance the cop killer and hunkered down in a corner of the office to read it before she went head-to-head with its author. But this seemed to be one of those rare cases where ‘banned and pulped’ meant what it said. There was no readily available copy of Sporting Kill, and even if there had been, there was no time for that kind of homework. Not now that the killing had started. Nobody was blaming Vance publicly yet for the double murder of Michael Jordan and his girlfriend, but everyone in the MIT squad room knew exactly who to hold responsible.

It had taken Stacey approximately six minutes to come up with a current address and phone number for Geoff Whittle, and the information that he seldom left his Derbyshire cottage these days because he was on the waiting list for a hip replacement. Given long enough, Chris suspected Stacey could have found a version of the text online somewhere. But long enough was what she didn’t have.

All these years later and still it felt personal, this pursuit of Vance. Shaz Bowman’s death had changed so much about how Chris viewed herself. It had stripped away the lightness from her, turning her into a more sober and more serious person. She’d stopped looking for love in all the wrong places and made conscious decisions about how she wanted to live, rather than drifting into the next vaguely interesting thing. Working with MIT in Bradfield had offered her the chance to be the kind of copper she’d always imagined she could be. She had no idea how she was going to live up to that now.

The dull browns and greens of the Dark Peak gave way to the broken light grey and silver of the White Peak. Late lambs staggered around, coming right up to the edge of the road that curled down Winnats Pass before skittering away as the car approached. When the sun shone out here it felt like an act of God.

Castleton was a village for tourists and walkers. Chris and her partner came out this way occasionally in the winter with the dogs, enjoying the landscape when it was emptier. Already in late spring, the streets were busy with strolling visitors, stepping off the narrow pavements into the road.

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