The Blood Whisperer (41 page)

She must have made some sound though, because Ray McCarron shifted on the sofa and said groggily, “Wassup, Kel?”

“Nothing . . . I don’t know.”

He struggled upright awkwardly, hampered by the stiffness and the aches he hadn’t quite learned to compensate for. He pushed the blanket aside and rubbed his good hand—carefully—across his face. She heard the scuff of stubble against his palm.

“Care to elaborate?”

Still feeling her way, Kelly hesitated. Marshalling her thoughts was akin to rounding up hyperactive sheep with a lame collie. The more she tried to get them in order, the more they scattered.

Eventually she said, “O’Neill let me go. He had the chance to arrest me and he didn’t do it. In fact he pointed me in the direction of the person who probably supplied the ketamine I was dosed with.”

“So you’re wondering—if he’s in bed with Allardice—why would he help you?”

“Supposing he did it because he knows I was innocent. Because he knows who killed Callum Perry and it wasn’t me.” It still felt good to say the words.

Grumpy from sleep McCarron gave a small tic of impatience. “We’ve been over all this, Kelly love—”

“But
supposing,
” she interrupted, “what O’Neill
doesn’t
know—and what he
needs
to know—is the identity of the copycat. Who copied Perry’s murder to set me up a second time?”

McCarron drew in a breath as if to begin an argument that never quite made it into words. He frowned, as much as his wounded face would perform such a manoeuvre.

“I don’t get it,” he said at last. “Why would they care?”

“Because it means somebody else knows their secret. Somebody else knows I was framed successfully once and they’ve tried to do it again.”

“But this time it didn’t go according to plan,” he murmured. “You didn’t wait around to be arrested and even if O’Neill magically vanishes away the blood evidence you collected, you can still prove you were drugged.”

It was her turn to frown. “But I didn’t know about traces staying in my hair until O’Neill himself told me,” she said. “Why would he do that?”

“Because he needed you to do his legwork for him,” McCarron said. “He can’t go at this from anything other than the official angle—that you’ve gone off the rails again. Anything else opens him up to too many difficult questions. Clever bugger! He feeds you just enough for you to go crashing around in the undergrowth while he and flaming Allardice sit on their backsides and wait to see what breaks cover.”

“By that you mean they’re waiting to see who manages to kill me, I assume,” Kelly said surprised by the note of calm in her own voice. She thought of the two attempts by the Russian she now knew as Dmitry—first at the racecourse and then via Elvis at Tina’s flat in Brixton.

If the law didn’t get her first then sooner or later he was going to catch up with her. And then what? He was Grogan’s man but Grogan had fed her a little info too.

It’s like a game of tactical tennis and I get the nasty feeling I’m the ball.

“I could always give O’Neill what he wants—where to find Dmitry,” she said. “After that it’s up to him to follow the trail of who hired him and why.”

McCarron regarded her steadily. “And what happens to you in the meantime?”

Kelly allowed herself a small smile. “Ah, now that one I hadn’t quite thought through,” she admitted.

She turned away from the window and put her empty mug down on the corner of the desk. “I can’t help wishing you’d sent Les and Graham to do the Veronica Lytton job.” Her smile was small and tight and sad. “Useless, I know, but if I’d been just that bit slower, Tyrone would have made a start cleaning the bathtub and I would never have seen anything amiss.”

“Aye I know, lass,” he said softly. He lifted the cast arm an inch or so off the sofa. “If wishes were horses beggars would ride, eh?”

Horses.

Matthew Lytton and his racehorses.

Racehorses he’d owned at one point or another with Harry Grogan.

And when Lytton had come to her flat the morning after McCarron’s attack he’d known all about her past. All about the trial and how it had gone down.

What else had he known?

What else had he used?

Kelly blinked, looked away from McCarron’s suddenly intent gaze. “I better go,” she said quickly. “If I know Les, he’ll be in soon.”

“It’s barely six o’clock on a Saturday,” McCarron said. “We do call-outs only at weekends, remember?”

She gave him an arched look. “Do you really think he’s going to leave you here supposedly alone all night and not ‘just happen’ to pop by and check on you?”

McCarron’s own smile was rueful as he heaved himself upright. The effort left him swaying. “You’re right,” he said, “but I can call him on the way and tell him not to bother. You’ll have to drive, after all.”

With a feeling of sinking futility, Kelly asked, “On the way where?”

“The racecourse,” McCarron said with apparent innocence. “Today
is
this big shindig of Lytton’s isn’t it? And while you’re beating some answers out of him Kelly love, I can be having a nice little flutter.”

Harry Grogan stood in the stable yard watching his heavily padded grey colt bound up the ramp into the waiting horsebox. The colt was on his toes and dragged the lad alongside him in his eagerness to be off.

Standing next to his owner, the trainer nodded approvingly and said, “Knows what’s coming and can’t wait to get up and at ’em you’ll see, Mr Grogan.”

Grogan heard the unforced confidence in the man’s voice and silently echoed it. The colt was the best he’d ever had. A man could spend a lifetime searching for such a horse and never find it.

The lad tied the colt up in his narrow stall and secured the partition behind him before jogging down the ramp again. There was a buzz in the yard even this early, the rough breath of animals and people mingling under the floodlights.

Grogan stood back and watched the scene—part of it and yet apart from it. He squinted up towards the sky. The sun was just beginning to inch over the horizon, promising a fair mild day. Good going, not too warm. Perfect.

“He’ll do his best,” he said. “Can’t ask for more.”

The trainer flashed him a quick relieved smile, acknowledging miracles hoped for rather than expected, before he nodded and hurried away. Grogan watched him go. They’d almost finished loading the horsebox, swinging the ramp closed, starting up the rumbling diesel.

Grogan heard the grit of boots on the concrete behind him and turned to find Dmitry waiting at a respectful distance.

“We should go,” Dmitry said shortly. “Traffic.”

Grogan took a last glance around, refusing to be hurried, before turning at last towards the Range Rover. Dmitry had left the engine running, the heater on.

As they walked, Grogan skimmed his eyes over the younger man. “Viktor?”

There was a small hesitation before Dmitry shook his head. “Gone.”

Grogan said nothing, just waited for the rear door to be opened and climbed inside.

Almost as soon as he had settled himself in the warm leather and the car moved off, his cellphone rang. Grogan checked the display before he took the call.

“Sweetheart. To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Darling,” Myshka’s voice drawled in his ear. “How do I not call on your big day?”

Something about the way she said it gave Grogan the feeling he was being mocked, but with Myshka it was hard to tell.

“Where are you?” he said instead.

“Getting ready,” she said. “I want to make myself beautiful for you.”

Not you I’ll be looking at, sweetheart. Not today.
He grunted. “Don’t be late.”

“Do not worry.” Her voice was a breathy purr. “I would not miss it for world.”

Grogan ended the call and slid the phone back into his pocket and he wished, not for the first time, that his Irene was still with him. Like the old days.

But he allowed nothing of this regret or nostalgia to reach his impassive face.

“Bastard!”

Myshka slammed the phone down and stared at herself in the mirror. She was fresh from the shower, hair wrapped in a towel and face bare.

She felt tired and looked old. Perhaps that was why she had called Grogan, in the hope that he might offer some throwaway reassurance that she need not go to any special effort. Something like:
“You’ll always be beautiful to me sweetheart.”

She should have known better than to expect flattery from a pig like that.

Myshka sat very straight and stared at her own reflection. She didn’t need to lean close anymore to see the lines around her eyes, across her forehead and beginning to ring her neck like an old chicken.

She would always have a striking look she knew, because of the way she’d learned to carry herself, the way she’d been taught to dress. But soon people would speak of her in the past tense—“
she used to be such a beauty”
—in hushed tones. As if she hadn’t the sense to die young before everything began to leave her and she was left only with her memories of faded glory.

Dmitry will not leave me.

The conviction was strong, overwhelming. Dmitry had always stood by her. He would always do so.

After today he would be able to do nothing else.

Steve Warwick hammered on the door to the en suite bathroom.

“Hurry up in there, can’t you?” he called sharply through the panelled oak. “What’s taking so long?”

“I want make myself pretty for you,” Yana’s wavery voice called back.

But Warwick was already halfway across the bedroom raking a hand through his still damp hair as he yanked a dress shirt off its hanger and shoved his arms into the sleeves. “Matt’s used to how you look,” he shouted casually over his shoulder. “And he’ll kick up a stink if we’re late.”

“Am coming.”

Warwick sighed impatiently as he fastened his tie in the full-length mirror on the bedroom wall, turned back the cuffs and slipped on cufflinks.

He tried out his trademark killer smile and hoped that nobody would see past the urbane confident appearance he presented to the trembling man beneath. The deadline with Harry Grogan was rapidly approaching. Warwick had no more hope of paying what he owed now than he did when he’d made that absurd deal—never mind the extra eight percent on top.

He felt himself begin to sweat with remembered fear.
Perhaps another squirt of antiperspirant wouldn’t be a bad idea.

“Yana, come
on
!”

As he crossed the room again he glanced at the drab black dress she’d laid out on the bed. Anyone would think she was going to a funeral he thought, not a race meeting.

O’Neill looked like death.

That was DC Dempsey’s first thought when his boss came hammering through the office door. He had a manila folder in one hand and a cardboard cup of vending-machine tea or coffee in the other.

Dempsey wondered if maybe last night’s Chinese hadn’t agreed with him. Or maybe it was something to do with the six-pack the DI had cracked open when Dempsey dropped him off at his flat on the way back from Reading.

O’Neill had tried to get Dempsey to stay and help drink it but judging by the state of him this morning he hadn’t needed any help on that score.

Dempsey wasn’t much of a drinker which was still something to be ashamed of in today’s police force. He hid it well though, getting more than his share of rounds in just so he could slip over to non-alcoholic lager after the first couple of pints.

This morning he’d already been out for a run alongside the Thames in Putney, where he shared a flat with his sister, before he’d bounced into the office.

He was early he knew, but this was his first murder enquiry since coming up out of uniform and he didn’t want to blow it. Nobody, surely, could have predicted that Kelly Jacks was going to climb back into her flat via the damn skylight but he was still anxious to shake off the sting of that failure.

DI O’Neill, on the other hand, looked like this was the last place he wanted to be on a Saturday morning with what appeared to be the mother of all hangovers.

As Dempsey eyed him warily, the DI took a slug from the cup, winced predictably and dumped the whole thing into the first waste bin he passed.

“All right Dempsey, let’s hear it,” he said by way of greeting, dropping into his chair.

And it had better be good.
Dempsey heard
that
bit as clearly as if it had been voiced.

“Um, morning boss,” he said making an effort not to look or sound too healthy. “I’ve dug out what I can on Lytton and Warwick’s company. Not much, unless we’ve reason to get a warrant, but I’ve tapped up Companies House and the Revenue—”

O’Neill held up a warning hand with enough authority to stop traffic. “Impress me with your reasoning later sunshine,” he said. “For now, just cut to the chase will you?”

“Yes boss.” Dempsey flipped through the top few pages of the printout on his desk. “There’s not much out of the ordinary. They make a pretty bloody healthy profit, file their returns on time and pay their taxes. The only thing I found that
might
be interesting is their insurance. They’re both directors of the company and apart from a few office staff everything else is done via subcontractors. I mean, both the wives were on the books as well, but I think that was just a ploy to offset some tax liability—”

“What
about
the insurance?”

“Um, well, they’ve got a key-man policy each. Or I suppose I should call it key-
person
these days. Basically, because there’s only really the two of them they’re both considered crucial to the running of the company. So if either or both of them kicks the bucket there’s a huge payout to compensate . . .”