The Blood Whisperer

by Zoe Sharp

  To his amazement she landed feet first, neat as a cat, onto the lid of a big green wheelie bin that was directly below. The plastic deformed like a trampoline to break her fall. She catapulted from there to the ground with hardly a break in stride and took off running.

  For a second it was all Dmitry could do to watch her go with his mouth open. He closed it with a snap, slapped the railing hard with both hands in sheer frustration and sprinted back the way he’d come. As he did so he reached for the baton in his jacket pocket.

  Nobody had warned him he was after Catwoman.

  OK bitch, let’s see you dodge this.

  50

  Kelly bolted through the deserted parade ring keeping close in to the line of the building so she’d be harder to track from above. At least she was out in the open although she wondered if that was a good thing or not. Every instinct screamed at her to go to ground.

  She’d had no clue when she made her desperate leap what lay beneath. It was entirely by chance that she’d landed squarely on the lid of the bin squashing it inwards as she did so. A foot or so either way and she’d be on her way to hospital by now. Or prison.

  Or—if the mystery man had succeeded in getting hold of her—more likely to the mortuary.

  A cold shiver sliced across her skin. She’d no idea who he was but at the same time she did know him. She just didn’t know how.

  She ducked into a tunnel that led under the stands and out towards the car park and the exits. At the far end was a set of iron gates. Even from here she could tell they were padlocked shut.

  She cursed and spun. As she did so she saw a door bounce open further along the stand maybe a hundred yards away. The man in the leather jacket emerged, head swinging as he searched for her.

  Kelly retreated into the tunnel again, looked in vain for other doorways leading off it. There weren’t any.

  Double stupid . . .

  Looking over her shoulder she ran towards the gates. If she’d any hopes that the padlock might be looped through just for show they were dashed as soon as she got close. The lock was snapped firmly shut and threaded through a hefty piece of chain.

  Kelly grabbed the padlock. It was old, oiled but worn. She scrabbled out of her pack and dug right to the bottom of the lining for a couple of the grips she’d taken out of her hair.

  She prised one of them almost straight and stripped the blob of protective resin off the end with her teeth, spitting it out. Then she knelt to the padlock trying to remember all the secrets her last cellmate had taught her during long days of boredom about the gentle art of lock-picking.

  Awkwardly she wedged the end of one grip against the central tumbler to hold it under tension and slid the straightened end of the other into the barrel of the lock itself, raking the pins. It was a tricky balance of force and persuasion not helped by sweaty hands and the rampant fear of imminent discovery.

  “Come on come on!” she muttered as she fumbled, almost weeping as the hairgrip slipped. She wiped her hands on the leg of her trousers and tried again.

  Then behind her she heard the grit of approaching footsteps suddenly echoing loudly in the tunnel. The rhythm of them changed, picked up, as their owner began to run.

  Kelly risked a glance over her shoulder, saw the man in the leather coat closing rapidly, and gave the lock one last frantic try.

  51

  Dmitry brought the baton out of his pocket and flicked it upwards to send the inner segments shooting into place.

  The woman was on her knees by the gates, facing away from him. He stopped a metre or so from her and laid the baton across her shoulder just at the vulnerable juncture with her neck.

  “Stop,” he commanded. “Let me see your hands.”

  She froze. Then very slowly she brought both hands up and out to the sides. There was a piece of crumpled wire of some sort in one of them and he realised what she must have been trying to do.

  He smiled, slid the baton under his arm and reached for the tie-wraps instead. Nice and quiet.

  “Picking locks is not quite so easy as they make it seem in the movies, huh?” he said, leaning forwards to grab hold of her arm. “OK let’s go. Up.”

  She lurched as she rose, stumbled against the gates and put her hands out to steady herself. Dmitry let go briefly. As he did so she whirled, whipping her arm round.

  There was a tremendous ringing clatter and something hard and heavy coiled itself stingingly around Dmitry’s knees, pinning them. He tried to stagger back, found he couldn’t move his legs and fell with a roar, spilling the tie-wraps and baton as he went down.

  What the . . .?

  He realised in a brief flash of intuition that she’d hit him with the chain from the gates. That she had indeed managed to undo the padlock securing it with her makeshift pick.

  She tried to hurdle over him but he snagged her ankle and yanked, bringing her down too. The restriction on his legs loosened and he levered up, getting a tight hold of her, pulling her down and rolling her underneath him, using his bodyweight to crush her resistance. She went rigid then began to thrash like a landed shark.

  The baton was out of reach but he’d wanted to use it to subdue not kill her here. That would raise far too many difficulties. He’d just have to do this the old-fashioned way.

  So he hit her in the face with his closed fist, just once. In Dmitry’s experience that was usually all it took to make a woman compliant enough to handle.

  She whimpered and went still under him, trembling.

  “That’s better,” he hissed. “Be a good girl and you won’t get any more.”

  He stretched sideways for the tie-wraps to secure her but as soon as his body was off centre, her hand darted up clawing her nails into the soft skin behind his ear, dragging him down and away.

  At the same time she bucked her hips, getting one knee up and Dmitry found himself sprawling onto his side. He just had time for the anger to flare before the same knee landed hard in his groin and all such thoughts shrivelled in the face of a sickening pain.

  She bounced to her feet, snatching up the chain.

  “Bastard,” she ground out. “Nobody hits me and gets away with it!” And she kicked him twice in the kidneys. Hard.

  Pain encased his torso. For several moments Dmitry lay shallow-breathing around as much of it as he could. He was only dimly aware of the woman snatching up the baton and darting through the gates. On the other side she refastened the chain around them, snapping the padlock shut. He was vaguely aware of her flinging the baton away across the car park with a distant clatter.

  Then she was gone. It was some time before Dmitry was able even to consider the possibility of going after her. By then she’d disappeared.

  52

  “Where the hell is she?” Warwick grabbed hold of Yana’s shoulders and gave her a rough shake. “What did you say to her?”

  “I s-say nothing!” Yana protested. She was crying, the kind of ugly weeping that afflicts some women whose faces go puffy and reddened and their noses stream.

  “Leave her alone Steve,” Lytton said tiredly. “It’s not her fault.” But even as he spoke he could not bring himself to feel utterly sorry for a woman who was so damned passive all the time. He couldn’t imagine Kelly sitting there sobbing, letting anyone manhandle her.

  Kelly.

  “She s-say she always plan to run out on y-you,” Yana managed, desperation in her voice. “That s-she taking you for ride.”

  “What?”

  Yana flinched back at the suppressed anger in Lytton’s voice. Even Warwick flicked him a concerned glance.

  “That w-what she s-say!” Yana insisted, hands clutched whitely together around a soggy tissue in her lap, her voice turning sullen. “That she use you.”

  Lytton straightened slowly, trying to work out if he was surprised or not. Not, he realised after a moment. Just disappointed.

  He turned away, stood by the rail looking down onto the racecourse and sucked up the cold feeling of regret. Behind him he he
ard Warwick still chastising his wife in low tones, her mumbling replies. He tuned it out.

  He’d thought he was good at reading intent. Had to be in this business. People gave you their word and you had to work out instantly whether to take it at face value or not.

  But some people you met and just felt a connection. He’d thought Kelly was one of those. Turns out she was little more than a con artist, simply after what she could get and dumping him at the first opportunity.

  Question was, why now? What had she learned here or from Veronica’s office that made her decide to up and run?

  “Matt?”

  He turned, found Warwick hovering by his elbow. “What is it?”

  Warwick sighed. “Look, I’m sorry chap. I can see you’re cut up about this.” He paused. “I guess it’s better this way though.”

  “Better?” Lytton asked not turning his head.

  “Yeah before you get in too deep with this girl.” He glanced around, lowered his voice. “Jesus, Matt she could bring nothing but trouble to us.”

  Lytton turned. “You never did explain that one did you?”

  Warwick shrugged. “This place, Matt. We’ve got a lot staked on the prestige of this damned race. One breath of scandal and people will stay away in droves. It will finish us.”

  “You exaggerate.”

  “Oh really?” Warwick leaned on the rail alongside him, close enough to force himself into Lytton’s eyeline. “What is this girl to you? Like Yana says, she was using you and now she’s taken off. Well good riddance. Get over it.” He took a breath, looked about to say more then shut his mouth into a compressed line and went back to his wife.

  Lytton was left standing there looking down. Steve was right, he thought. He should forget about Kelly and be thankful the encounter hadn’t cost him more than it had.

  So why was that easier said than done?

  53

  Kelly sat at the rear of a bus heading back into London, keeping the baseball cap pulled well down over her forehead and her face turned to the glass. Rain was just starting to fall from a darkening sky. It suited her mood.

  The adrenaline that had fired her escape from the racecourse had receded leaving her tired, heavy-limbed and aching. Her face felt bruised and tender, already starting to swell around her cheekbone. And her hands shook with reaction like she was suffering a chemical withdrawal. She kept them tightly gripped around the pack on her knee and thought back to events in the tunnel below the stands.

  This time he had a weapon and still I attacked him.

  Remembering brought on a sense of panic so acute she could hardly breathe.

  Wait a minute—this time . . .?

  The realisation drenched down over her in a slow wash, freezing her skin to shivers. The combination finally slotted into place and the lock inside her mind opened up just like the padlock on the chain around the gates. One moment it was shut fast and she was struggling uselessly and the next it lay exposed in her hands.

  The man at the racecourse was the same man at the warehouse on the Isle of Dogs—one of them at least.

  She’d known it partly when she saw him walking towards her. The way somebody moved was individual and distinct. Even so that might not have been enough.

  But the smell of him . . . that was something else again.

  Scent is one of the strongest triggers for memory. Coffee, fresh bread, newly mown grass, lilies. They all produced strong accompanying mental images for Kelly. She sometimes focused on them during the nastier clean-up jobs. It was the only thing that stopped her heaving.

  But this was a combination of odours—some kind of sharp citrus aftershave mingled with tobacco and another faint mechanical note that was harder to define. Not unpleasant in itself just . . . associated with violence in her mind.

  The violence of Tyrone’s death.

  Oh yeah, he was there.

  She cursed herself again for not stopping to question him, search him, but at the time her only priority had been getting away from there as fast as she could. It wasn’t just the man who’d come after her she had to worry about.

  It was who had sent him and why.

  She kept circling back to Veronica Lytton’s death. Was that the start of all this? Or did it start six years ago with another rigged suicide? She couldn’t see what linked the two deaths other than herself. And if someone had indeed set her up the first time around why do it all over again now?

  But she couldn’t deny the path of evidence—from the Lytton job via Ray McCarron’s beating through to Tyrone’s death. Ray had warned her not to go turning over rocks and the only person she’d told that she was going to keep looking was Lytton himself, the morning he’d sought her out at the dead junkie’s flat.

  Kelly swallowed back tears of self-indulgent sorrow. After today there was no denying it. She refused to believe that she’d been followed out to the racecourse by chance. Lytton’s Aston might be easily recognisable but nobody had any reason to suspect she was with him.

  Not unless he told them.

  The thought rose bitter and unbidden but there was no way around it—he was the only one who knew where she’d be. And although she didn’t trust Lytton’s partner Warwick as far as she could have thrown him, by the time he and his wife arrived in the restaurant there surely would not have been time for the man in the leather coat to be summoned for an abduction. Maybe that was why he’d bungled it?

  She remembered the timid Yana’s warning and wondered if things had gone as badly for her as the Russian woman obviously feared. If she’s right about them she took a hell of a risk for a stranger, Kelly thought, humbled.

  But still it didn’t make sense that Lytton would have arranged to have her snatched from so public a place. She’d been at his apartment all night. There had been any number of better—more private—opportunities.

  Get a grip Kel, you’re just looking for excuses for him, she told herself. Face it—you wanted to trust him.

  And she had wanted to, she realised with a sour taste in the back of her throat.

  Badly.

  It was not a mistake she intended to make again.

  54

  Twelve crow-flown miles north-west of Kelly’s bus route Frank Allardice sat in a rented Vauxhall outside a nursery school on the outskirts of Hampstead Heath.

  His quarry had taken some finding. That he was here at all was a testament to palms greased and backs scratched and favours called in. There were still a few aging coppers left whose memories stretched back far enough to when DCI Allardice was a man worth staying on the right side of.

  Allardice humphed out a breath. Those days were fast coming to an end he knew. He shifted in the driving seat and flicked the windscreen wipers to clear the beads of water from glass.

  Bloody country. Always raining.

  He hunched further into his coat, recognising that four years of living in southern Spain had made him soft as far as temperature was concerned. Anything under 20ºC and he was reaching for an extra layer.

  It was a good life out there. He’d sworn he was never coming back but sometimes things you’d thought dead and buried turned out not to be.

  Best to make sure.

  Across the road a gaggle of parents began to gather around the school gates. A few stay-at-home fathers but mostly mothers, they clogged both sides of the road with their four-by-fours and BMWs. The only ones on foot Allardice judged to be nannies or au pairs. It wasn’t just the mode of transport that set them apart—there was a definite distinction in manner and dress.

  Allardice saw the girl when she was halfway along the street, approaching from behind him on the opposite side. He recognised her even in the door mirror which he’d tilted out to give him a wider view.

  “Well hello there Erin,” he said under his breath.

  Watching her walk past him oblivious, Allardice reflected that she hadn’t changed much. Erin never had looked old enough even when she was in her teens and now she was getting on for mid-twenties he would still
have carded her before he’d have sold her alcohol in any of his bars.

  Well, perhaps not.

  She was looking good—hair cut and coloured, skin clear. Although her clothes were not the designer labels sported by some of the other mothers they were clean and reasonably smart.

  She’d come a long way from King’s Cross to the verges of respectability.