The Blood Whisperer (27 page)

Eventually she took the coward’s way out, composing an apologetic if slightly defiant text message and sending it fast before she’d time to change her mind.

As she slipped the phone away again it clunked against something hard in the other front pocket. She reached in and pulled out the knife she’d taken away from Elvis.

Another blade . . .

An image of Tyrone’s mutilated body flashed into her mind, hard and strong enough to rob her of what little breath she’d managed to retrieve.

There was no blood on this one but that hadn’t been for lack of trying. Elvis had taken a determined if inexperienced swing at her. He hadn’t counted on reflexes honed from half a dozen attempts to cut her up while Kelly had been inside.

Attacks using cell-fashioned hidden shivs were as common as they were inventive in there. Some inmates viewed being stabbed as so inevitable they took regular ice-cold showers to try and prepare their bodies for the shock, train themselves to power through it. They claimed it worked. Kelly felt avoidance was the better option but sometimes you didn’t have a choice.

Nevertheless, she hadn’t survived for five years by running away from trouble. She’d learned to meet it head on. So as soon as she’d seen the knife she had reacted on full-auto with speed and aggression.

Now cooling rapidly, she thought of Elvis and remembered again the strange internal wrenching noise his bones had made as she’d twisted his wrist up and round to break his grip. She had not hesitated, not for a moment.

But she was not in prison any longer. She was back in civilisation and supposed to behave accordingly. It just seemed that there had been no transition between in and out and when she was under threat the lines blurred altogether.

For a moment she felt a hollow churning up under her ribcage and thought she might vomit. She bent over again and leaned her forehead against the brickwork in front of her, cushioned by her forearm. Gradually the sickness subsided.

Her head came up slowly and she realised she’d no clue where she was. She’d fled without thought to direction. It took a few minutes’ staring at the nearest street sign for her to place the area and realise she had strayed north into Camberwell. Totally the wrong direction for Clapham Common.

Lytton!

A glance at her watch told her she was already late for their meeting. Would he wait for her? And for how long?

Would he turn up at all?

As her vision cleared she noticed there was a drain a few feet away fed by a fractured drainpipe. The brickwork was grey and furred with damp. Kelly wiped the handle of the knife on the inside of her sweatshirt and dropped it into the broken grid. Looking at the rest of the building it would be a long time before the owner got around to calling Dyno-Rod.

The phone buzzed in her pocket. She pulled it out again and gave the display a cursory glance. She recognised the Brixton code but not the number. Tina’s work perhaps? She flipped the phone open with a sense of trepidation.

“Tina?”

“Ah, sadly no,” said a cool voice in her ear. A voice that sent a bolt of reactive fear straight through to her bones. “Hello Miss Jacks.”

The Russian.

“What do you want?” she demanded hearing her composure rip like silk. “What have I done to you—or Grogan?”

There was a pause then the man said, “Better for all of us if you do not know.”

“Better for you, you mean,” Kelly shot back.

He laughed, a brief chuckle. “
Da.
This is true. Please be assured Miss Jacks it is nothing . . . personal.”

“Oh and that makes me feel
so
much better.”

“Your young friend here, I regret that he is
not
feeling better.”

For a moment Kelly was puzzled.

“You mean Elvis? He’s no friend of mine,” she said, partly because it was true and partly because instinct told her that claiming any kind of relationship with the youth would probably make things worse for him.

“A pity,” the man said, his tone brooding. “Then he is of no further use to me.”

Kelly found she was shivering, had to wrap her free arm around her body to stop the shakes vibrating into her voice.

“Killing him will cause you more problems than it solves,” she said quickly, thinking of Tina—clean and sober and happy. “Not least with the police. They’re already looking for you over Tyrone’s death. Why make them look harder?”

He was silent for a few long seconds then he said, “A nice try but I think you will find it is not
me
the police look for.”

Her brain went numb unable to think of a single argument that might stand a hope of persuading him. The voice sounded again almost softly in her ear.

“Thank you for standing so still Miss Jacks. It makes you so much easier to trace . . .”

Kelly jerked the phone away as if it had burned her ear. She snapped it shut, cutting off the call and threw it away from her. It skittered across the concrete and disappeared after the knife down the broken drain.

She was running before it hit the murky water below.

Standing in the living room of Tina’s flat over the inert body of Elvis, Dmitry smiled.

Of course he had no way to track the cellphone she was using. He was not the police, after all. But the bluff had been worth it for the panic it had so obviously caused.

Once you had an adversary on the run, he had learned, keeping them running until they were too exhausted to run any further was always a good thing. If all their efforts went into retreating they had no time or energy to attack.

And Kelly Jacks was tiring, he could sense it. He may have failed to corner her here but it was one more place of safety now closed off to her. So overall this was not quite the disaster it might have been.

He nodded to Viktor. “Come. We go.”

The two men stepped over Elvis’s legs and walked out. They left the front door casually ajar behind them.

Lytton arrived at Long Pond on Clapham Common almost half an hour behind time. He was filled with the impotent rage of a man who’s tried to hustle through Central London traffic and been frustrated at every turn.

He’d been calling the cellphone number Kelly had used to make contact but it came back ‘not possible to connect’. So for the last couple of miles he’d been rehearsing his apologies. By the time he parked up as close to the edge of the Common as he could find a space his edginess at the meeting had twisted through concern into anger.

And to cap it all she wasn’t there.

He waited, walked, just in case she’d been delayed too but after another half an hour passed he knew. The anger smouldered beneath the surface. She hadn’t had the guts to wait for him not even for a lousy thirty minutes.

“Face it man,” he said out loud. “She’s stood you up—again.”

That kind of thing was getting to be a habit with her.

He sighed, rechecked his watch. Only another minute had passed.

Lytton tried to work out why he was giving her any time at all. She was a convicted criminal, a wanted fugitive and there was compelling evidence to suggest this was a repeat of her earlier crime—a man murdered in a frenzy of reasonless rage.

So why did he feel some kind of pull towards her?

It couldn’t simply be sexual attraction. She wasn’t his type and with Vee not even buried it was hardly appropriate to give in to a burst of hormones.

No there was more to it than that.

He stood on the asphalt path that ringed the pond, his back to the basketball courts and the skate park, staring across the dark flat water towards the road on the far side. His dad had brought him here sometimes if he was suffering an uncharacteristic bout of fatherliness. They’d bring stale bread to throw at the ducks and watch the richer kids sail their model boats.

His dad had always tired of it first, his patience directly related—Lytton only realised much later—to the length of time the pubs had been open.

Lytton shook himself inside his cashmere coat. A lot of water had passed under the bridge since then, a lot of distance travelled.

And look at me,
he thought,
standing here again, all wistful for something else I can’t have.

He shot a cuff, checked his watch and turned his back determinedly on Long Pond with its old memories and new disappointments.

Kelly Jacks, he decided, could damn well fend for herself.

Kelly wasn’t sure how she got through the rest of the day or the night that followed. Probably, she coped much the same way as she’d learned to get through her time locked up inside—by thinking only from one moment to the next. No long term plans, no goals. Just staying alert to the here and now, reacting if she had to, coasting if she didn’t.

She arrived at the north side of Clapham Common over an hour late for her meeting with Lytton. It came as no surprise to find he had not waited around for her. If she was honest she wouldn’t put money on him having turned up in the first place.

She was not to know that she’d missed him only by three minutes.

All the way down from Camberwell, Kelly had cursed the knee-jerk impulse that made her dump the cellphone. It was the only place she had noted Lytton’s own cellphone number—stored in the phone’s memory rather than her own.

She tried to call Tina but the only phone boxes she came across did not accept coins and she had no other means to pay. The thought of ducking into a restaurant or shop and begging use of their phone did not appeal. Her face had been too widely shown for that to be a safe option.

For the first time she felt truly isolated. Isolated from people she could trust—people she’d believed she could trust. She knew she couldn’t reach out to her family even if she knew how to get in touch.

Don’t call a number for so long and it fades from the memory.

By the time she had reached the north-eastern edge of the Common itself she’d been almost in pieces, unable to go forwards or back. The realisation that Lytton was not there—might never have been there—was the last punch that knocked the stuffing out of her.

She sat for a long time on the bench furthest from Long Pond, hunched over, staring at the ground in front of her feet. It was covered in fallen horse chestnuts from the trees nearby, cigarette ends and the kind of soft drink ring pulls that were supposedly redesigned to reduce litter.

There were no model boaters on the pond itself, just a resting squadron of Canada geese. The traffic behind her formed a constant drone enlivened only by the regular overhead hum of jets stacking for Heathrow out to the west.

Kelly heard none of it for the insistent voice in her head.

I should have left sooner—if I went there at all.

But she was only too aware that people who are desperate will do desperate things if the price is right. She couldn’t find it in her to hate Elvis for what he’d done but wondered if Tina would ever forgive her for breaking the kid’s bones. Maybe one day she’d find out.

Besides, Harry Grogan had offered ten thousand pounds to anyone who’d give her up. Money like that was life-changing to half the people who lived in Tina’s block. And they were used to keeping an eye out, watching the comings and goings, watching their backs. It was only a matter of time before someone sold her out.

The wind was surprisingly chilly, blowing in all the way across the flat expanse of the Common. Kelly shivered and hunkered down a little further into her hooded sweatshirt, glad of the baseball cap even if it did leave her ears exposed to the cold.

She became aware that the summer, such as it was, had turned definitely into autumn when she hadn’t been looking. There was a smell of dead leaves and wet wool in the air. Before long it would be getting dark.

She needed food and a safe place to hide—or at least somewhere she could slip through the night unnoticed by either Grogan’s touts or the police.

Wearily, Kelly got to her feet. She headed for the Clapham Common Tube station just as the evening commuter rush was beginning to pick up. Most people were fairly unobservant. Better to hide in the crowds and make her pursuers work for their money.

She rode the Northern Line all the way up to King’s Cross tucked in a corner feigning sleep for most of the journey. By the time she emerged from below ground it was dark outside, the notorious surrounding streets garish with shabby lights and crawling traffic. Kelly grabbed a carton of food from a cheap noodle bar whose internal security camera was obviously a fake. She was served by a Korean man whose English was barely adequate to work the till. She hoped she would be one indistinguishable bedraggled white face among many to him. She avoided eye contact anyway, just in case.

The food took away the shakes if not the melancholy. She kept moving, grabbing rest in half-hour snatches in quiet doorways, using her backpack as a makeshift pillow and keeping her arm wrapped firmly through the straps.

Even dressed as she was, Kelly received half a dozen propositions—mostly from nervous middle-aged men in slow-moving cars. She simply shook her head and kept walking. A couple of times, guys who were clearly pimps touting for fresh meat asked if she was OK—did she need food, money, a place to sleep or something to take the edge off? Kelly ignored them too and they didn’t push the issue. They knew enough not to force it when another day or two at the most and she would be seeking them out.

What Kelly did a lot of during that long night was try to get her head together.

By the time the first faint smears of daylight appeared in the eastern sky she had decided on a plan of action.

She was tired of running. Giving up was not an option. If she was going to stay out of prison again she needed to find out
why.
Why was she worth that kind of money to this Grogan character? What had she done that he might want her to the tune of ten grand?