The Blood Whisperer (26 page)

O’Neill took his time buckling the seatbelt and starting the engine before he put the car into gear and pulled slowly out of the way. Lytton shot out of his space and chirruped the tyres on the block paving as he dumped the big car into first.

“Wherever you’re going sunshine, you’re certainly in a bloody hurry to get there,” O’Neill said out loud.

He briefly considered tailing the Aston just to make life awkward for its owner. The impulse didn’t last long. Lytton was not above making his feelings felt, O’Neill guessed.
One irate phone call to the chief super—or the press—and I’ll be down-sized onto shit duty in some godforsaken ghetto.

Still it hadn’t been a wasted journey by any means.

He picked up his cellphone, pressed the office speed dial.

“Dempsey?” he said when the line was answered. “Do me a favour will you? Put in a request for Matthew Lytton’s phone records—home, office and cellphone. Let’s see if he’s been in contact with Jacks.”

“You think he might have been boss?”

“Yeah I do.” He cut the call, sat for a moment deep in thought. “Why else,” he murmured to the empty car, “would you refer to a woman—one you claim to have met only once—by her first name? Only a small slip, Mattie boy, but still a slip . . .”

Kelly checked her watch and shut down the laptop. She knew she was cutting it fine to get to Clapham Common in time to meet with Lytton but the last thing she wanted was to hang around somewhere public. She reckoned he’d give her five minutes’ leeway.

She shrugged into her hooded sweatshirt and picked up the backpack which still contained his wife’s borrowed clothes. At least this gave her the chance to return them—or throw them back in his face. Her hand tightened on the straps. She hadn’t yet decided which.

The slam of the front door to the flat made her start. She glanced up to see Elvis slouch into the living room. He stopped when he saw her, eyes circling to take in the closed-down laptop and the backpack she was holding.

“Tina said you was to stay put,” he said sounding aggrieved. “You need anything I’m supposed to get it for you.”

“I need to go out—just for a while,” Kelly said giving him what she hoped was a placatory smile. “I have to meet with someone—someone who might be able to help me.”

Either that or Harry Grogan’s thug will be waiting for me again.

Elvis shook his head, emphatic. “Not a good idea,” he said, moving forwards so he blocked her path to the door. “Erm, what about after dark? Wait ’til then. Safer, y’know?”

Kelly paused, eyeing his agitation with her own sense of disquiet. “I need to go now Elvis,” she said gently. “In fact I’m probably going to be late, so—”

“You can’t leave!”

“Why not?” Kelly gave a cool stare at his outburst. He shuffled his feet, flushing but didn’t move out of her way.

“You just can’t go, all right?” he said, his voice turning belligerent now but Kelly caught an underlying note of panic there too.

She froze. “Elvis, what did you do?”

“Nothing!” But he wouldn’t meet her eyes. “You just stay here, yeah? And everything will be cool.”

“Round here they’d sell their granny for less.”

She remembered Tina’s opinion on the ten-grand price on her head. Alarmed now, she made to push past Elvis but he gave her an unexpected backwards shove. She stumbled, reaching out for the Formica table to stop herself falling.

When she looked up, Elvis was still in the doorway, defiant. A slim-bladed knife had appeared in his right hand.

“Elvis don’t do this,” Kelly pleaded, getting her feet back underneath her very slowly. “It’s not worth it.”

“What do you know about that?” he threw back at her. He swallowed, tried to purge the whiny note from his voice and failed. “Where else am I gonna get hold of that kind of dosh? It’ll get me started, y’know? It’ll put me on the map.”

He wants to buy drugs most likely,
Kelly realised. Ten thousand would allow him to buy in as a mid-level dealer without having to claw his way up from the bottom of the pile—if he didn’t end up dead in six months from stepping on too many existing toes. Either that or he was going to expand his budding stolen electronics sideline, like the laptop sitting on the table just behind her right hand . . .

“You really think they’ll pay you?” she asked. “You think that little blade will stop them coming in here and taking what they want and leaving you with nothing except a bad taste in your mouth?”

“Shut it!” He seemed jittery, wired, unable to keep his feet still. Kelly’s eyes flicked between the knife and the body behind it, trying to gauge experience and intent. Not much of either, she judged, but an unhealthy dose of desperation made him just as dangerous.

“Put the knife down, Elvis and we can all walk away from this—”

She saw the sudden flare in his eyes. “Nobody’s walking away!” he yelled, lunging forwards.

Kelly’s fingers closed on the corner of the laptop. She dragged it off the table and flung it round and out, aiming straight for the boy’s head.

Then she leapt for the knife.

Dmitry shot through a set of lights as they flicked up to amber, narrowly avoiding the front wing of a black cab as he did so. The cab driver jumped on the horn. Dmitry barely had time to curse before he was bullying the Range Rover through the choked-up traffic.

I should have used the Mercedes,
he recognised. But for this job he needed the extra space not to mention the car’s off-road capability. Unmarked graves were much better dug in the middle of nowhere.

In the passenger seat—seemingly unfazed by the wild ride—was Viktor, who’d driven Steve Warwick out for his meeting with Harry Grogan on Lambourn Downs. Viktor sat with his massive arms folded, chewing gum with his mouth open and his brain shut.

Viktor might be stupid as an ox but he was strong as one too. This time Dmitry was taking no chances with that goddamn woman. He’d brought backup.

His phone buzzed insistently. Without bothering to check the caller, Dmitry threw his iPhone across to Viktor to answer. After his low-slung Mercedes the Range Rover handled like a pig, rolling alarmingly under hard cornering even if it did stick to the road. He needed both hands on the wheel.

Viktor fumbled with the phone’s touch screen controls.

“
Da?
” There was a long pause during which time the big man’s brow furrowed deeply. He dropped the phone to his shoulder. “How long Brixton?”

“I don’t know!” Dmitry snapped. “Traffic is awful in this city. No respect!” As if to demonstrate, he leaned on the horn in response to a bus that was attempting to creep across into his lane. “I only got the call a half hour ago. We are almost there.”

The cold water hit Elvis in the face like being thrown into the sea. He surfaced through it spluttering and gasping and found himself lying on his left side on the floor of the flat. He’d know that puke-coloured carpet anywhere. There was a bloodied towel under his head.

What happened came back to him in a shameful rush. Kelly getting the jump on him. He didn’t know what she’d hit him with—a truck by the feel of it. He put a hand up to his nose carefully and found it was well mashed.

“
B-bitch
!” he managed.

“So she
was
here,” said a man’s voice somewhere above him. Elvis heard the Russki accent and his guts cramped instantly. He squeezed the water out of his eyes before cautiously opening them.

The first thing he saw was a pair of shiny black boots, the kind that army guys or coppers wear. He forced his gaze upwards and found a huge guy standing in them with Tina’s kettle still in his hand. Good job it hadn’t just boiled, Elvis thought hazily. This guy didn’t look the type to check.

What he
did
look from down here was enormous.

Aware that his throbbing face was a little too close to those heavy-duty toecaps for comfort, Elvis tried to get his left hand underneath him to lever up. A bolt of pain shot through his wrist. He gave a yelp of surprise and almost ended up back on the floor again. The big guy grabbed hold of the back of his sweatshirt and all but dragged him upright.

It was only when he was on his feet that several things came clear to Elvis. The first was that his wrist hurt like a bastard to the point where he felt ready to throw up. The second was the truck Kelly had used to hit him was actually his best laptop which was now lying smashed on the floor near the sofa. He swore again, longer and more inventively this time.

And that’s when he realised the third thing.

The big guy was not alone.

A second man was sitting on the narrow dining chair by the window. He had his back to the light so Elvis couldn’t make out his face right away. The build came across—lighter, not so gorilla-like as the guy with the kettle. Brains and Brawn these two, and it was always Brains you had to watch out for.

Elvis knew if he was going to talk his way out of the mess that bitch had left him in this was the guy he had to convince.

“So,” the man by the window said again. “She was here,
da
?”

“’Course she was here,” Elvis said. He clocked the Russian accent more clearly this time and the fear it provoked lent more of a snappy edge to his voice than was wise. He tried to temper it with an ingratiating grin. “You think I’d try and diss you? No way bro.”

The man uncrossed his legs, leaned forward and made an exaggerated show of looking around the tiny living room. “And yet . . . I do not see her,” he said. “So the effect is the same, yes?”

Puzzled, Elvis tried a shrug that also wasn’t wise. The room spun crazily. He staggered and nearly fell. The giant grabbed hold of his shoulder gripping hard enough to make him squirm. Elvis’s head was banging and he could feel the sweat breaking out across his forehead, under his armpits. He tried to convince himself it was down to being laid out with a ripped-off Toshiba rather than sheer fright but didn’t believe it.

He wished he still had his blade but Kelly must have taken it with her after she’d nicked it. He still wasn’t sure how she’d managed that. One minute he was in control, the next it was lights out.

Bitch. Look what trouble you left me in . . .

He licked his lips nervously. “Hey bro, I can find her for you. No sweat. She
was
here ’cause she and Tina are tight. She’ll be back, yeah?”

The man stared at him without expression. “I think she
might
have been back but you said something—did something—to alarm her,
da?
”

“Hey I—”

“Something foolish,” the man went on, “that panicked her into running again.”

“She was gonna leave, go out. I just tried to stop her—”

The man gave a snort and muttered something under his breath that Elvis didn’t catch but didn’t need to. He got the gist.

And then without warning the man surged out of the chair and backhanded him across the face hard enough to snap his head round. The blow exploded his already tender nose into a haze of pain, flooded his eyes and sent his body reeling into shock. His knees gave way, his bladder following. He was only vaguely aware of being hauled upright by the meaty hand at his shoulder, held locked tight, immobile.

“If you had not spooked her she would have come back here. Where else does she have that she can go?” the man said, his voice too close, too soft. “I would have been very pleased with you. And you would now be a rich man,
da?
” He paused. “But instead you are a fool.”

“Hey man, she was here like I told you,” Elvis mumbled driven by self-pity to his own defence. “Not my fault she—”

“
Not your fault
? So maybe you think
I
am to blame,
da?
For being too slow. Maybe you think
I
am the fool?”

Elvis was hazily aware that things had turned upside down against him. It wasn’t fair! It had seemed like easy money. Money for nothing. One phone call and Harry Grogan’s boys would come and grab her and Tina would never know he’d had anything to do with it. And now it had gone to shit and it was all that bitch Kelly’s fault, of—

The blow to his kidneys didn’t feel like a truck. This time it was more like a freight train or one of those big pile-driving cranes Elvis had seen down in the East End. His legs gave out completely and this time the giant didn’t try to hold him up.

If things had been bad while he was on his feet, Elvis soon realised they got a whole lot worse once he was down. He prayed for unconsciousness. It seemed to be a long time coming.

Kelly was half a mile away from the flat before she stopped running. She ducked into an alleyway between two rundown shops and doubled over gasping, her hands braced against her knees. She was winded, shocky, and shaking with both effort and reaction.

As adrenaline hangovers went this was shaping up to be a doozy.

A part of her couldn’t believe Elvis had sold her out. Another part—a more cynical embittered part—was more surprised he’d waited so long.

Paid for it though, didn’t he?

The laptop Kelly instinctively flung at him had found its mark with devastating effect. She wondered how long it would be before she could block out all recall of the dull crunching sound that his cartilage and flesh and bone had made as the hefty blunt object struck. That he had threatened her—pulled a knife on her—no longer seemed a good enough excuse for what she’d done.

What the hell am I going to say to Tina?

As little as possible seemed to be the best response.

Slowly, reluctantly, she straightened still breathing hard. She dragged the cellphone out of her sweatshirt pocket and keyed in Tina’s number but her thumb hesitated over the dial button.