The Blood Whisperer (51 page)

It was a bad choice of words, she acknowledged. Or maybe it was apt. She shook her head—such distinctions were currently beyond her.

In all likelihood he wouldn’t go down for it. He would plead self-defence and—regardless of who’d been the last person to touch Yana before she went over—that’s exactly what it was.

Kelly knew her word as a witness would not carry much weight but as far as a jury knew, Harry Grogan was the proverbial pillar of society. He’d already made it clear that he was prepared to look anyone in the eye and swear it had all happened the way McCarron claimed.

She just didn’t know why. Was he hoping such an act would give him a hold over her, or make her grateful enough to stop being such a nuisance?

And if Ray
was
found guilty—what then?
Do I say nothing and let him serve his time? Owning up when it’s all over will create a far bigger mess. They’ll probably send him down for perjury on top of everything else—and me alongside him.

It was a situation not without parallels to the one McCarron had found himself in six years ago. Ironic, in its way.

She tilted her head back and closed her eyes. She was tired, she admitted. More tired than she’d ever been in her life.

She thought of Tina and wondered if Elvis had come out of his coma and whether she would ever again be able to speak to the woman who had probably saved her life in prison.

And sitting there amid the noise and confusion, Kelly felt suddenly very alone.

Matthew Lytton watched Kelly through the side window for a moment. She looked lost and vulnerable, like a child left in the back seat by a parent who might never return.

He took a breath and opened the car door. Her eyes shot wide, twisting instinctively to meet the threat as he slid in alongside her and shut the door behind him.

There was a second of silence between them.

“The child locks are on,” Kelly said dryly. “So I hope you brought a flask and sandwiches because you’re stuck in here with me now.”

I can live with that.

He smiled. They’d taped a dressing over his scalp wound that felt like a comedy hat perched on top of his head. Whenever he moved his face the tape pulled at his skin.

“I wanted to thank you,” he said. “Without you chasing all this down I would never have known what really happened to Veronica.”

“I can’t say with complete honesty that I did it willingly—or for your benefit.”

“I know,” he said. “Result’s the same though.”

She nodded gravely, paused. “Do you think we ever will really know what happened?”

“Yana had Vee’s BlackBerry—O’Neill showed it to me,” he added when she looked surprised. “I can’t think of a legitimate reason for Yana to have kept it all this time and not given it back to me unless . . .” He shrugged. “I never guessed, all this time, that Steve was having an affair with his own wife. How bizarre is that?”

“It’s perfect when you think about it,” Kelly said. “After all she was never going to divorce him over it was she?”

“She was a vampire,” Lytton said. He thought of his charming, flawed partner. O’Neill had shown him the body too. He’d concentrated on the details to make a formal ID, a small scar on the back of Warwick’s left hand, his watch and wedding ring. Anything so he didn’t have to look at the dead man’s face. What was left of it.

“I thought she was Russian rather than Transylvanian.”

He managed a half smile. “Russian, Ukranian—something like that. But she sucked the life out of everybody she came into contact with,” he said. “Steve, Vee, even that brother of hers Dmitry, and Grogan of course.”

She sat up suddenly. “I never asked. Did his colt win the race?”

“By a nose.”

“Oh thank God for that,” she said. “He’d never have forgiven me otherwise.”

Lytton didn’t quite get how it would have been Kelly’s fault but he let that one go. Instead he sighed, rubbed a weary hand across his eyes. “Christ, I need a holiday.”

“You and me both,” she agreed. “But I have a feeling mine might be spent at Her Majesty’s pleasure.”

Frank Allardice was having a late supper at Heathrow when his cellphone rang. He’d spent an agonising afternoon and evening waiting for a standby seat that never materialised before finally succumbing to airport food.

He fished the phone out of his pocket and flipped it open, still shovelling overpriced shepherd’s pie into his mouth.

“Yeah?”

“Frank? Where are you?”

As soon as he recognised Vince O’Neill’s voice Allardice thought about lying. Then the public address started squawking about passengers not leaving baggage unattended and that idea was well and truly buggered.

He chewed and swallowed. “At Heathrow, sampling their culinary delights—although ‘delights’ is perhaps putting it a bit strong,” he said easily. “What can I do for you Vince?”

“We picked up Kelly Jacks this afternoon,” he said. “Thought you’d like to know, seeing as you had such a special interest.”

Shit! What do you know?

“Good job,” Allardice said. “Knew you’d get her in the end. Any . . . trouble?”

“You haven’t been watching the news have you?” O’Neill said, amusement in his voice. “Guy got beaten to death at a racecourse, a woman fell from the stands and we found enough explosives to blow the place sky high.”

Allardice whistled, hoped it sounded convincing as surprise. “And Jacks was involved in all that? She’s gone up in the world.”

“Nearly did—she was in the stands at the time,” O’Neill said.

He paused and Allardice had to force himself not to jump into the silence like a guilty man. At the next table a fractious family were scarfing down chips with everything, surrounded by enough carry-on luggage to outfit a small town. Allardice hoped they were not on his flight—when he eventually got one.

“So pat-on-the-back time from old man Quinlan,” he said at last. “Feather in his cap to have Jacks safely under lock and key before he hangs up his spurs eh?” He was suddenly aware that he was using one cliché after another but O’Neill didn’t seem to notice.

“Yeah . . . listen Frank, I was hoping to be able to deal with Jacks quietly but with everything that’s happened, well, it’s all going to have to go by the book. We’ve been giving her the third degree and I have to tell you that your name keeps coming up.”

Allardice felt his heart suddenly start to punch against the inside of his ribs. “Stands to reason,” he said gruffly. “I put her away last time. You’d expect her to hold a grudge.”

“Hmm, but it’s getting harder to keep a lid on things and I’m sure the last thing you want is to end up helping us with our enquiries.” O’Neill sighed. “I would have thought there’s sod all we can prove after all this time but I just wanted to give you a heads up. It’s opening a bit of a can of worms to be honest.”

Allardice put his fork down slowly. “Thanks Vince,” he said. “I mean, obviously there’s nothing in what she says but I appreciate the warning.”

“No sweat,” O’Neill said. “I’ll do my best to minimise the damage, shall we say?”

“Yeah,” Allardice said. “Thanks again. I owe you.”

O’Neill’s laugh was jarring. “And I’ll collect—you can be sure of that. You can show me the sights next time I grab a cheap last-minute package to Spain.”

Allardice tried to put the uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach down to the shepherd’s pie but he forced a cheerful note into his voice.

“The beer’s on me, old son,” he said. “Definitely.”

“He’s on the move!”

DC Dempsey followed former DCI Allardice’s progress through the airport on a series of CCTV monitors. He was in the security control room at Heathrow surrounded by more surveillance equipment than he’d ever seen in his life.

The camera operators were slick he had to admit. They kept track of Allardice as he moved from one zone to another, always overlapping. Dempsey was amazed anybody managed to get away with anything.

Half of him was a little freaked out by it all and the other half was bubbling with suppressed excitement. The kind of thrill you only get when you’re closing in on a target and he has no idea whatsoever that he’s been rumbled.

“He’s heading for the payphones,” his liaison officer said. A youngish guy, thickset and purposeful.

“Can you move your people in close enough to hear anything?”

The liaison grinned at him. It would have been smug had he not been young enough to be buzzed by the job. “Better than that,” he said. “Bill, give me audio and filter out whatever background chatter you can.”

The camera zoomed in unobtrusively to show Allardice looking around, all casual, before he picked up the receiver and dialled.

“Hello? You know who this is . . . I’m on my way back to sunny Spain mate. Job’s done. Looks like we can rely on young Vince to put it to bed all neat and tidy . . . Yeah well, you owe me—big time—and I’m like a bloody elephant. I never forget to collect on my debts . . . Yeah, cash is always ‘acceptable’ mate. You know where to find me.”

He put the phone down, looked around again and wiped his hand on the leg of his trousers before striding away.

“Sweating about it, weren’t you Frank?” Dempsey murmured.

“They’re calling his flight,” the liaison said. “Do you want an intercept?”

Dempsey shook his head. “Watching brief only—them’s my orders.”

The liaison grinned again. “Well the Spanish authorities are a lot more amenable about extradition these days aren’t they?”

“Too right.”

One of the techs—the guy called Bill—broke off from his computer keyboard long enough to scrawl something on a pad and rip off the sheet, handing it across. “That’s the number your man called. You should be able to trace it easily enough.”

Dempsey read the digits and hoped his eyes hadn’t bulged as much as it felt they had.

“Oh yeah,” he said. “We’ll trace that one. No problem.”

Matthew Lytton stood by the open window of the room that had once been his study and stared down into the rear courtyard where a large white van stood parked.

This time there was no crime-scene cleaning logo on the side of it, no Tyvek-clad figures reclining in the front seat. And no Steve Warwick about to stroll breezily through the door behind him.

Instead, the van belonged to a local catering company. He could see the serving staff in their uniforms unloading trays, stacks of tablecloths and crates of glasses from the rear. Just for a second his imagination painted one of them into a slight figure with choppy black hair and a loose-limbed stride. The illusion ballooned and then burst as soon as the girl turned in his direction.

It wasn’t Kelly Jacks.

Lytton sighed. “No,” he muttered under his breath, “I guess you have no reason to be coming back here.”

Considering he hardly wished to be
here
himself, he couldn’t blame Kelly for that.

In his hand was a cup of coffee and he lifted it to take a sip, checking his watch as he did so.

By this time tomorrow, it will all be over.

It was a month after the Lytton-Warwick Cup. A month since the death of Steve Warwick and Yana—or Myshka, or whatever the hell she was called.

And a month since he had last seen Kelly.

Tomorrow morning was the memorial service for Vee. Her parents had pushed for the service in the church of the local village, on the spurious grounds that it dated back to Saxon times and therefore had some kind of worthy pedigree. Lytton failed to see quite what that had to do with anything, except perhaps to subtly remind him of his own lack of breeding.

Having a memorial service at all was at his in-laws’ request, although ‘insistence’ might have been a better word. But Lytton had not argued against it. Perhaps now it had emerged that Veronica did not, after all, take her own life they felt the need for some kind of public vindication.

Nor had he objected to footing the cost, which they had automatically expected of him. And when he glanced over the sizeable guest list and found he recognised very few names, he hadn’t raised objections about that either.

Some of those travelling from further afield would begin arriving that afternoon, ahead of tomorrow’s
performance—
there was hardly another word to describe it. His mother-in-law had pointed out it was silly for them to cram themselves into local B&Bs—there were no suitable large hotels close by—when the house itself had a surplus of rooms standing empty. Lytton had agreed on the basis that
she
organised it. It was only habit that made him oversee the details before he paid the bills.

The result was that he felt somewhat detached from the whole exercise as if he was the manager of the venue rather than an active participant.

After all, Vee’s body had already been laid to rest. He’d said his goodbyes, made his peace, and played a small but not insignificant role in uncovering her killer.

What else was there?

A gust of wind chicaned through the open window and nipped at the fabric of Lytton’s shirt. It was getting colder, he realised. Autumn had crept up when he wasn’t looking and soon it would be winter. Before long the stores would be putting up Christmas lights and advertising late-night shopping, and then the winter sun getaway advertising would start.

“Maybe it
is
time for that holiday,” he wondered aloud.

There was nothing to stop him going, except a lingering sense of
waiting.

Waiting for Kelly.

As for the rest of it, that was getting sorted, slowly enough. The insurance company was stalling paying out on the key-man policy on Steve Warwick until the criminal investigations were complete. They had been clearly suspicious of Lytton’s own possible involvement too. But considering Yana had also had a bloody good go at adding him to the body count, his legal team were confident they would settle. It was only a matter of time.