The Blood Whisperer

by Zoe Sharp

  As he approached on foot across the rough ground the smell of the derelicts was acrid in Dmitry’s nostrils even from a distance but he had smelled worse. He waited a long time in the shadows for suitable prey to make itself apparent. To split from the herd.

  He wanted an older man so he’d be easy to overpower, and skinny enough that he’d be easy to carry. And already drunk so it wouldn’t take long.

  In his jacket pocket Dmitry had a half bottle of Bacardi 151 overproof rum which at more than seventy-five percent ABV was enough to have an effect even on the most hardened of drinkers.

  Just in case, folded up inside his jacket was a plastic body bag.

  Over by one of the oil-drum braziers an argument of sorts broke out. Raised voices and shoving until one old guy with straggly grey hair and a long matted beard found himself scuffled out and away from the fire. He made a couple of half-hearted attempts to regain his place but soon gave up the fight. As he shambled away into the shadows he continued to curse and gesticulate wildly.

  Watching from the darkness, Dmitry smiled.

  22

  The fire was called in anonymously from a public call box—one of the few still functioning in that area of Millwall—and logged at 2:26 AM. The caller was male with what the operator judged to be a slight eastern European accent. Maybe an asylum seeker? It was no surprise that he rang off without leaving a name.

  A single appliance was dispatched to the address given which turned out to be a partially completed warehouse conversion near the River Park Trading Estate. There firefighters discovered the burning body of an elderly male sitting propped against a steel pillar in an unfinished office on an upper floor of the building.

  He was firmly ablaze but the lack of combustible materials nearby prevented the spread of the fire which was quickly extinguished. Broken glass alongside the charred corpse was identified as a container for a particularly potent brand of rum so highly flammable it came with a flame-arrester on the bottle.

  The police were called in as matter of course but the uniformed officers who attended were not about to launch an investigation for one dead tramp. As far as they were concerned the spilt booze, tin of tobacco and dog-eared book of matches found told the story.

  After a cursory examination by the pathologist the body was scraped up and removed. A lone constable was left at the scene with the task of trying to track down the owner of the building—some faceless development company.

  The following morning he eventually managed to find a number for a real person instead of an answering service and received assurances that somebody would be down immediately to secure the building.

  By 8:30 AM upper management had been copied in on an email regarding the damage.

  At 9:00 AM, after consulting with the development company’s parent corporation in Sweden, a recommendation for a firm of specialist cleaners was passed down.

  At 9:15 AM the phone on Ray McCarron’s desk began to ring.

  23

  “Bloody hell, how can you not notice you’ve set yourself on fire?” Tyrone wondered aloud as Kelly indicated and turned into the approach road leading to the trading estate.

  “People fall asleep and start fires with dropped cigarettes every day,” she replied. “And when you’ve pickled yourself in industrial-strength alcohol beforehand . . .”

  “Yeah but if he was so drunk he was like, passed out, how did he manage to be lighting up a cigarette when he went boom?”

  He glanced across from the passenger seat of the McCarron van and noticed Kelly frowning again the way she had done when she’d first looked at the bathroom at the Lyttons’ country place.

  She pulled up outside the old warehouse where the dead guy had been found and leaned forwards to gaze up at the largely glassless windows. “Maybe we’re about to find out.”

  They climbed out, suited up and gathered their gear.

  As they walked in, began to climb the stairs to the upper floor, Kelly asked, “How was footie practice last night by the way?”

  “Stormin’. We’re gonna murder them next weekend I’m telling you,” Tyrone said turning back to flash a satisfied grin down at her. He paused, took a breath. “Hey Kel, you should maybe come and watch.”

  “Be some kind of cheerleader you mean?”

  “Oh yeah!”

  She gave a self-deprecatory snort. “I think I’m a bit old for a short skirt and a set of pompoms, don’t you?”

  “No way!” Tyrone protested unable to entirely keep the longing out of his voice. “You’d look well spanking.”

  Kelly grinned back at him, a kind of teasing sexy grin. “You say that like it’s a good thing.”

  “’Course it is.” Tyrone felt his ears heat and was glad she couldn’t see it. He’d had more than one little daydream fantasy where Kelly came and watched him score the victory goal from the touchline and he got to take her home on the back of his bike after.

  OK so that wasn’t going to happen he thought ruefully, shouldering open a fire door on the landing. The closest he’d got to her was a slow dance at the office Christmas party. But it would still be cool if she could make it to a game. In fact the only reason it might not be a good idea was because he’d never keep his mind on the ball. Saying that, none of the opposing team would be able to either, so—

  The blow took him completely by surprise. To begin with he wasn’t even aware of being hit, only a fierce jolt of some kind and the bare concrete floor coming up fast to smack him across both knees.

  He felt something serious give way inside the left joint and his only thought was, Ah bollocks. There goes Sunday’s match.

  Then he was down on his side, grit scouring his cheek. The whole back half of his skull felt as if it had shattered and the pieces were pressing into his brain, building up into pain so bad it paralysed his limbs.

  He blinked slowly and saw a world operating at ninety degrees out of kilter. It looked like Kelly was standing on the wall like in some bizarre sci-fi movie. She was locked in dirty hand-to-hand with a couple of guys who also seemed to be wearing Tyvek suits.

  This puzzled him. Surely the only people who wore those disposable suits were the good guys? He knew Kelly shouldn’t be fighting with them or they’d never get the job done and then the boss would be annoyed. And Mr McCarron was definitely one of the good guys.

  He wanted to yell at the men that he and Kelly were the good guys too but his voice was outside him, too far to call back.

  Either way they had her on her knees now and he could see her mouth working but could hear no sound coming out. He saw one of the men rip back her sleeve baring her arm and if anything Kelly’s thrashing increased. Tyrone was aware of admiration despite his haziness. She was a tiger all right was Kel.

  But even as he silently cheered her on she seemed to fade, losing coordination and focus, the fight going out of her.

  Come on Kel, don’t let the bastards beat you!

  A pair of Tyvek legs and bootie-clad feet momentarily blocked his view and Tyrone even found himself feeling vaguely annoyed about that. Then he noticed the blade of the knife lying flat against the newcomer’s leg. His gaze swivelled sluggishly upwards and saw a distant face above. A cold calm face that he knew would show no mercy.

  Tyrone felt tears of fear and frustration burn his eyes, tried to get his hands underneath him to press upwards and found nothing worked.

  As the man with the knife stood over him the others dragged Kelly over, her feet bumping loosely against the concrete. They put her on her knees alongside him, hands slack in her lap.

  Tyrone’s eyes sought her face in desperation but the Kelly he knew wasn’t inside the face anymore. There was nobody he recognised behind those glazed golden brown eyes.

  Terror clawed into Tyrone’s chest scraping it raw from the inside out, bubbling up his throat, but there was nothing he could do.

  The man with the knife bent over him and Tyrone discovered right in his last moments that death did faze him, after all.

/>   24

  Kelly woke to the smell of blood, a knife in her hand.

  25

  “Emergency services. Which service do you require?”

  “Police,” said a man’s voice. Voice analysis experts would later identify his accent as Russian. “There has been a death—a man has been stabbed.”

  “OK sir, stay on the line. I’m putting you through—

  “There is no time. If you hurry you may catch the person responsible, yes?”

  “Where are you sir?”

  “Don’t waste time. I am in a call box and the number will be on your screens. I have just seen a murder.”

  He gave the address and rang off resisting all efforts to extract his name or keep him talking.

  An exploded gas main and a minor coach crash had local resources tied up longer than they anticipated. It was not until seventeen minutes after the triple-nine call that a patrol was dispatched.

  26

  Kelly sat back on her heels, gazing down stupidly at the knife and the blood.

  Part of her brain was screaming at her to move, to do something. Another part registered the characteristics of the weapon with an almost clinical detachment. A combat survival knife with an eight-inch blade partially serrated along the back edge. Small rips of flesh and skin from the victim still clung to those serrations.

  And yet another part of her mind cried over and over No no. NO! Not again . . .

  It took longer than it had any right to for Kelly to get her feet under her. Her balance was shot. Upright, swaying, she realised she was still clutching the knife tight in her right hand. She bent and put it down with ingrained care for the evidence it contained. The floor tilted crazily underneath her. She staggered and almost fell.

  Oh God what have I done?

  Fragments came back to her, a disconnected vision of blonde girls in college shirts performing high kicks on a sports field. Kelly frowned. What the hell did that have to do with anything? But a moment later the association of words clicked in one after another like the tumblers of a lock.

  Cheerleaders. Football. Wrong football—soccer.

  Tyrone.

  “Ty?” she called, her voice rising raspily. “Tyrone! Where are you?”

  She managed a couple of steps reaching for one of the pillars and leaving a bloody smear across its crumbling paintwork. She was, she recognised casting a trail of physical evidence that was a CSI’s dream.

  “Tyrone?” she shouted again, fear making her tone sharper, more desperate. A couple of pigeons scattered in fright at the sound of it.

  Across by another pillar she saw a blackened mess, making her heart bound into her throat and pump there ferociously. Something had burned with a fierce intense heat, greying at the centre and leaching out towards the edges so that tatters of material remained along with zippers and a belt buckle.

  A man died here. It came back to her suddenly, a whole formed idea. And with it a partial sequence of events. Of her and Tyrone arriving in the van, just another job, of climbing the stairs.

  We came through the doorway talking about football . . . What happened next?

  And then she saw him.

  Tyrone was lying on his back near the doorway to the stairwell. He was very still.

  Kelly stumbled across to him weaving drunkenly. She didn’t need to drop to her knees alongside him to know for certain he was dead but she did it anyway.

  What have I done?

  Tears welled in her eyes blurring her vision but she would not allow them to fall. It had been a long time since Kelly had wept for anyone or anything. She had thought herself all cried out.

  “No,” she said aloud her jaw bowstring taut. “No I did not do this. Not to Tyrone. No way.”

  Why not? Do you think you could kill a stranger but not a friend? Who are you trying to convince?

  She bit her lip, forced herself to look at Tyrone’s body. His Tyvek oversuit was slashed and torn in at least a dozen places across his torso and upper thighs. The placing and number of the wounds was horribly familiar. A frenzied attack by someone possibly out of their mind. Someone suffering a psychotic episode.

  The blood had pooled and spread until the front of Tyrone’s suit had a solid dark red sheen already shading to black. It had haloed around his body, leaching into the dusty concrete particularly around his head.

  There’s another injury there. The realisation came almost automatically. Blunt-force trauma? Tyrone was not the type to go down without a fight but he had fewer defensive wounds than she would have expected. So they’d hit him first—hard enough to put him down where they could do with him as they wished.

  Just because he didn’t fight back might mean he didn’t want to not that he couldn’t whispered a vindictive voice inside her. Like maybe he didn’t believe someone he thought he knew—someone he worked alongside every day—would try to kill him.

  “Concentrate dammit,” Kelly muttered.

  She examined every inch of the floor surrounding Tyrone’s body noting the extent of the blood pool, the level of clotting.

  She crouched and tentatively touched the backs of her fingers to his cheek. His skin was cool to the touch.

  Too long. Too late . . .

  She took a couple of attempts to rise again and made it only then because she clung to the wall by the doorway. Her hand slipped, snagging at her palm. When she looked she found it already grazed from—

  A jagged image flashed into her mind of trying to grab at the rough surface and being dragged away by a fist wrapped in her hair. She reached up, found a tender patch on her scalp.

  “I did not do this.”

  The words echoed in the blank space, but this time—for the first time—they held conviction.

  27

  The patrol dispatched in response to the anonymous triple-nine call sat in traffic within sight of Tower Bridge.

  Behind the wheel was a veteran called Ferris with an undistinguished twenty-three-year career behind him of quietly doing as little as he could get away with. He liked the uniform and the weight that came with it but had long abandoned any kind of ambitions for advancement.

  Alongside him twitching in the passenger seat was an overly keen probationer called Jacobson who was still desperate to make a name for himself. Probably—as Ferris had commented cynically in the canteen only that morning—by doing something heroically daft that would read out in glowing terms at his memorial service.

  “Come on mate. Use your blues and twos can’t you?” Jacobson protested now. “It’s an emergency isn’t it?”

  “And where exactly are all this lot going to go to get out of our way?” Ferris rolled his eyes and flapped a hand towards the line of brake lights visible head. “It’s not like the movies son.”

  Jacobson huffed out a breath. “I know that but—”

  “When you’ve been on the job as long as I have you’ll know that half these supposed emergency calls are hoaxes anyway. Relax. Cop a load of that little darling in the scarlet mini-dress. I wouldn’t mind doing a stop and search on her.”

  “If half the calls are hoaxes that still means half of them are genuine,” Jacobson said stubbornly through his teeth.

  “All right, all right. No need to get your knickers in a twist.” Ferris grinned. “If it makes you feel any better . . .” He hit the lights and the siren.

  The car in front lurched forwards and to the side maybe two feet before it came to a stop unable to go any further.

  “See?” Ferris said. “Now we’ve just pissed everybody off. They think you just want to get back to the station for your tea break.” Which, he thought, was not a bad idea.

  In the passenger seat Jacobson fumed silently.

  28

  The realisation of her own innocence brought Kelly far closer to weeping than the fear of her own guilt.

  She fought not to let it out, not to break down and let the shakes take her. Because if she had not killed Tyrone in a rabid attack then somebody else had.

  And
that somebody had left the murder weapon in her hand.

  It did not take a genius to work out that whoever had set this up so carefully to mirror her earlier crime would hardly then leave it to chance for her to be caught.