The Blood Whisperer (44 page)

Warwick didn’t wait for a second invitation. He hopped up onto the table and rolled obediently onto his stomach, sucking in a breath at the cold against his flushed skin.

Myshka opened her bag and brought out the suede-thonged whip he knew so well, along with a skein of silk scarves. She deliberately placed the whip close to his head while she fastened the first scarf from the nearest table leg to his wrist, stretching first one arm and then the other out wide.

In moments, it seemed, he was spread-eagled at her mercy. She picked up the whip and stood in front of him, trailing the thongs through her fingers. It was all he could do not to groan out loud.

“You really have been very,
very
bad boy,” she said solemnly.

I know, I know, so do your wonderful worst, darling. Don’t keep me hanging!

She moved out of his line of sight and he trembled at the fleeting brush of the soft suede along his body from shoulder to calf. Then he heard the warning swish. He just had time to tense before the whip landed across his upper thighs and buttocks and a bellowed cry escaped him at the unaccustomed force of the blow.

“I told you
silence
!” Myshka hissed and she hit him again—if anything, harder this time.

“Christ, woman! What the devil d’you think you’re playing at?”

He heard her stride across the room and when she returned she had his tie bunched in her hands.

For the first time, a prickle of unease came to him.

“Myshka, what the—?”

But as he opened his mouth to protest she stuffed the balled-up tie inside. It was Hermes and not only would such treatment see it ruined, but she shoved it so deep he started to choke at once. He shook his head angrily, tried to regurgitate the tie without spitting on it too much. What the bloody
hell
was the mad bitch playing at—today of all days?

“What is matter, darling—not having fun?” she asked, her voice icy. “Maybe it is not so nice having something pushed down throat, yes?”

He snarled his fury behind the gag.

The sudden staccato knock on the door made him jerk in panicked surprise. Suppose it was Matt? Or, worse still, someone from the racecourse?

He heard Myshka’s footsteps again, heading for the door and his protests rose in pitch and volume.

Don’t let anyone in, you stupid bitch. I’ll die of embarrassment, being caught like this.

She opened the door and a man walked in without showing any apparent surprise at what lay before him. With a cold wash of shock Warwick recognised the young thug with the dead-cold eyes who’d scared him so badly that day he met with Grogan out on the Downs.

“You remember Dmitry, of course,” Myshka said.

The young thug stared at him without expression. After a moment he reached inside his jacket and pulled out a long black cylinder which he handed to Myshka.

A throaty murmur of appreciation emerged from between her lips. She flicked her wrist sharply to extend the baton to its full, lethal length and admired it with chillingly sensual delight in her face.

She tried an experimental slash and the air zizzed with the power of this new weapon.

“All this time we are together you think you are big dog, in control,” she mocked. “Now
I
am big dog, yes?”

For the first time since he’d entered the private box and delivered himself into her hands, Steve Warwick realised he might just have made the biggest mistake of his life.

Or the last one.

“Oh Stevie boy, I’m going to make you suffer for this!”

Matthew Lytton uttered the threat under his breath as he stalked the corridors of the main building. He and Warwick should be out in the paddock, mixing with the VIPs, glad-handing and hobnobbing and doing all the rest of the things they’d originally conceived this damned event
for
in the first place.

But still there was no sign of the man.

Lytton tried Warwick’s cellphone for the twentieth time. Switched off. The answering machine on his home number picked up after half-a-dozen empty rings.

Lytton thrust his own phone back into his inside pocket and let out a fast annoyed breath.

“Something troubling you Mr Lytton?”

Lytton turned to see the cocky DI O’Neill approaching from the direction of the stairwell. With him was a younger man who also had “copper” written all over him.

What the
hell
are you lot doing here?

“I’m the main sponsor for this event,” Lytton returned with creditable calm. “You’d expect a few hiccups.”

“Anything you’d like to share?”

“No. Anything
you’d
like to share?” He glanced from one detective to the other, letting annoyance win out over concern. “Why are you here?”

O’Neill pursed his lips for a moment, clearly debating how much to tell him. Lytton saw a twitch of consternation cross the younger detective’s face as if he thought O’Neill might withhold something vital. Lytton waited, not patiently but refusing to be manipulated.

“Big day for you then,” O’Neill said at last. “Where’s your partner—Mr Warwick isn’t it?”

So they were not here to tell him Warwick had been involved in some kind of accident. Lytton’s relief turned back to irritation.
Where is he?

“That’s one of the hiccups,” he said, deciding nothing would be gained by evasion. “I’m trying to find him. I suppose he could have been caught in traffic.”

O’Neill pulled a face. “We had no problems on the way down,” he said. “Mind you, DC Dempsey here thinks he’s the next Lewis Hamilton so maybe that might have had something to do with it.”

Lytton stepped in close, getting in O’Neill’s face.

“I’m busy, detective inspector. Get to the point.” He didn’t miss the way the younger guy Dempsey shifted to intervene if he had to.

“Get on all right with your partner do you, Mr Lytton?”

That rocked him back. “Well enough. Why?”

“What about his wife?”

“Yana? I hardly see anything of her. She helps out in the office sometimes—she was giving Veronica a hand to organise the hospitality for this event.”

“They get on?”

Lytton sighed, could tell from O’Neill’s stubborn expression that asking questions of his own was not going to speed things up. “Veronica thought Yana was a little mouse who needed to stand up for herself more. She thought Steve bullied her.”

“Russian, isn’t she? One of these mail-order brides?”

“Russian, Ukrainian—something like that,” he agreed shortly. “I don’t know how they met. Steve was in Russia for a time looking at property deals, trying to cultivate some contacts. When he came back he brought Yana with him.”

“You suspicious about that?”

Lytton gave a short laugh. “Wouldn’t you have been? I thought she was after him for a passport and would be off like a shot as soon as they’d made it legal.”

O’Neill and Dempsey exchanged a look. “Maybe she was after him for more than that.”

“Meaning?”

“You and Mr Warwick have company life insurance on each other don’t you?” O’Neill said. “Quite sizeable sums.”

Lytton shrugged. “Key-man policies are standard business practice for companies like ours with a small number of vital personnel,” he said. “And it’s the company that holds the policies, not us.”

“But not so long ago you upped the payout from half-a-million to ten, I understand. Whose idea was that?”

“Steve’s. He said we should keep up with inflation although I don’t see what the hell business that is of yours,” Lytton snapped. “It’s all perfectly legal.”

“I’ve no doubt,” O’Neill said mildly. He paused and then added in an almost careless tone, “Now your wife is deceased you have no living relatives.”

“No, I—”

“And Mr Warwick?”

“What? He’s an only child—parents died in a car accident years ago.”

“What about his wife’s relatives?”

“Yana? I don’t know,” Lytton muttered. “I think she has family but we’ve never talked about it.”

“You might like to bear in mind sir, that your value to your business associate might have undergone a fundamental shift, shall we say.”

“You’re joking,” Lytton bit out, anger rising out of fear like smoke from fire. But his mind spun away in a hundred different directions. All of them left a cold trail of sickness through his belly. He thought of his smiling cocksure partner, sometimes infuriating but with the charm and the banter.

Not Steve, not . . .

He looked up, met O’Neill’s gaze. “You’re talking like Steve’s going to try and bump me off, for Christ’s sake.”

“In our experience Mr Lytton, most people are killed by people they know—people they’re close to.”

“So you’re telling me what—that I should check the brakes on my car on a regular basis? Get someone in to taste my food?” And he thought suddenly of Kelly Jacks, so convinced she’d been drugged that she’d taken a bag of her own blood for test.

It was uttered with a smile, an attempt to lighten a mood that was oppressive but O’Neill gave him no reassurance in return. “Know anything about explosives do you?”

Kelly stuck her head round the restaurant door where Shula was placing cutlery on the tables with all the dexterity of a casino croupier dealing cards.

“Hey Shula, I’ve just been asked to take a tray of coffee and stuff along to a Mr Lytton,” she said with as much casual innocence as she could squeeze into the lie. “Any ideas who he is or where I find him?”

“Ooh, he’s one of the bigwigs. Didn’t you see the signs everywhere? He’s got an office on the next floor down, with the admin people, or he might be in his private box—one of the posh ones they use for conference meetings right at the top.”

“Ah,” Kelly said managing to look sheepish. “They didn’t say and I didn’t ask. Sorry.”

“Never mind. Here, I’ll give you a hand.”

Shula abandoned her table setting and hurried across to the serving area, quickly assembling a tray of cups, saucers, spoons, sugar, cream and a handful of foil-wrapped mints on a plate. She splashed coffee from the filter machine into an insulated cafetière and fastened the lid. Her movements were fast and sure. Almost as an afterthought Shula added a small vase containing a single carnation.

She caught Kelly’s raised eyebrow and grinned at her. “Well he’s a bit of a looker—and he tips all right.”

Kelly picked up the tray, got the balance of it. “Office or private box,” she murmured. She glanced at Shula. “If it was you, where would you try first?”

The emergency stairwell at the east end of the stand was glassed in and afforded a reasonable view down into the VIP car park. Lytton stood on the top landing looking down at the blanket of car roofs parked in serried rows like some bizarre arable crop.

And there in the next-to-the-end line was Steve Warwick’s yellow Porsche. Even allowing for there being more than one yellow Porsche, Warwick could make out the first couple of letters of Warwick’s private registration just to clinch it.

He swore again and spun on his heel. So Warwick
was
here. Lytton had been mad enough at Warwick’s lateness even before his conversation with the police. Now he was fuming.

Lytton had skated close to the wind quite a few times in his career one way or another and his previous contacts with the law and its officers had not always been happy ones. He was aware therefore that O’Neill and his crony could simply have been trying to drive a wedge between him and Warwick. Why, he didn’t know.

So in some ways he was relieved to recognise Warwick’s car down there among the others. Because that meant this story about insurance payouts and explosives was likely to be bullshit. Why would Warwick turn up at all if he was planning something like that?

On the other hand, arriving without letting anybody know and sneaking off for a quickie with his mistress was
just
like Stevie boy. And in that case Lytton had a pretty good idea where he’d be doing it.

And he was just in the right roiling bad temper to break up the party.

Dmitry caught Myshka’s arm as it was upraised for yet another strike. His fingers dug in hard enough to register through the bloodlust that consumed her.

“That’s enough,” he said quietly.

Breathless and glittering, she tried to wrench free but his grip was steel. Her head—her eyes—whipped to meet his.

“It will never be enough,” Myshka said through her teeth. “Years I have been nothing but plaything to this—this
svoloch.
Now is
my
turn.”

Dmitry was silent for a moment, staring down at her. She saw nothing in his gaze and that alone made something of her passion ebb away.

“There is no point beating a man who is past feeling any of it,” he said then as if speaking to a child.

Myshka could have told him the beating was as much her reward as it was a punishment for the man tied to the table but she realised it would not serve her purpose to admit to such emotion. It was . . . self-indulgent.

She relaxed her muscles. He let go and stepped back, peeling the extendible baton from her hand as he did so. He wiped the length of it carefully on Steve Warwick’s carefully discarded jacket. Warwick did not object.

He would never object about anything again.

It was only then, without the fire in her belly, that Myshka looked at what she had done and a cold fear spread slowly up through her. She shrugged it away but her eyes were drawn fascinated to the seep of blood edging across the polished surface.

“It will not spoil things,” she said with more confidence than she felt.

Dmitry twisted the baton’s inner sections back into place with a rough shove that might have signified anger.

“This,” he said with a jerk of his head, “will not look like an accident.”