The Blood Whisperer

by Zoe Sharp

  She dumped Ray’s car keys on top of his in tray where she’d seen him put them himself a hundred times before. It was only as she turned to go that she saw a dark shape rising from the sofa on the far side of the room.

  Heart bounding, Kelly dropped into a crouch. There was a second’s buzzing silence and immobility then a calm familiar voice spoke out of the darkness.

  “No need to panic Kelly. I’ve been waiting for you.”

  109

  Ray McCarron reached out with his good arm and switched on a small lamp next to the sofa. It spread soft fingers of light across the comfortably untidy office. His domain. Across the other side of the room Kelly was still poised for flight, tense on the balls of her feet. She looked different—and not necessarily in a good way.

  “I suppose I really should ask for your keys, seeing as how you’ve resigned,” he said casually and watched her gradually uncoil.

  “I suppose you should,” she agreed.

  He could almost get both eyes open again but even so the light was too dim for him to read her face clearly and he could glean little from her voice.

  She asked, “How did you get here?”

  “Without my car you mean?”

  “I was more thinking without two working arms. Taxi?”

  “Les gave me a lift,” McCarron said.

  She raised an eyebrow at that, glanced around. “He locked you in and left you here alone in the dark?” she said flatly. “What happened—did he resign too?”

  “I asked him to do it,” McCarron said. “Not the first time I’ve slept on this old sofa and you know as well as I do the alarm sensors only cover the ground floor.”

  So I knew I’d be safe up here.

  It had still taken some mental girding to set foot in the place so soon after . . . so soon. But of all his employees Les had been with him the longest—almost since the start. He was the one most likely to speak out if he thought McCarron was taking a wrong turn. McCarron was heartened by the fact Les agreed to drive him over without protest. Neither of them mentioned Kelly, as if by some tacit agreement. McCarron was heartened by that too.

  Les told him to stay in the car while he opened up, ostensibly to keep him out of the rain. McCarron watched from a distance while he disabled the alarm and briefly checked the building before he came back to help him out. McCarron thanked him profusely but Les had shaken off the gratitude like beads of water from his waxed cotton jacket, given him a gruff goodbye and departed.

  Two hours later McCarron listened to Kelly arrive.

  “Want to tell me about it?” he invited now.

  She let out a long breath. “Not really,” she said.

  But she did, going through it from the moment she’d taken his car until her return to the office. It took about forty-five minutes and he interrupted her account as little as he could. There was weariness about her rather than anger, but that was OK. McCarron was angry enough for both of them.

  “That bastard Allardice,” he growled when she was done. “If—”

  “Don’t, Ray,” she said, her voice muted. “Believe me, you can’t say anything I haven’t already thought, but louder and with a whole lot more expletives.”

  He swallowed the bile. “So what do we do now?”

  “‘We’?” Kelly said. “To be honest I don’t know what anyone can do. Allardice retired with a farewell party, a gold watch and a pat on the back, and I left in chains. You really think anyone’s going to take action now against one of their own?”

  “You were one of their own too, Kelly love. Didn’t seem to stop them back then.”

  “And now I’m a fugitive and a murder suspect.” She sighed. “I’ve no chance of proving who really did what six years ago. Too much water under the bridge. Best I can do is hand over what I know to DI O’Neill and let him figure it out.”

  “O’Neill . . .? Not Vince O’Neill?”

  Kelly went still. “You know him?”

  “I know of him.”

  “But didn’t he come to see you in hospital—after you were attacked?” she asked. “Ty-Tyrone and I met him there that first night.”

  McCarron noted the way she stumbled over the boy’s name but didn’t comment. Instead he lifted the cast an inch or two. “Kelly love, the amount of morphine they’d given me you could have told me the Dalai Lama had arrived with his ukulele to give me a medley of George Formby classics and I wouldn’t be able to contradict you with any certainty.”

  “And he didn’t come back later? O’Neill, I mean.”

  “No. If he had, well I would have said something when I saw you earlier today.” He glanced at the clock on the far office wall. It was a little after one in the morning. “Yesterday,” he corrected.

  “Come on Ray—I know that tone of voice. What is it about O’Neill?”

  McCarron hesitated. “He worked with Allardice.”

  She frowned. “So did you.”

  “Yes but not like that, Kel. There was a bit more to it than that.”

  Her only reply was an eyebrow so arched he had no trouble making out the gesture.

  “Allardice always liked to have a blue-eyed boy under his wing—no, nothing like that,” he added catching her cynical sniff. “A kind of sidekick.”

  “Robin to his Batman?”

  “Not quite. More like Igor to his Dr Frankenstein. Someone he could build up, who’d owe him and be grateful later down the line.”

  That produced a fleeting smile. “And O’Neill was the chosen one?”

  “Aye. Allardice started to groom him while he was still in uniform. A word or two in the right ear. A favour or two called in. You know how it goes.”

  “Oh yeah,” she murmured. “And how it doesn’t.”

  “Look, it might just be coincidence love, but after you were arrested O’Neill made the jump to CID and he’s been rising fast ever since.”

  “Even after Allardice retired?” Kelly said. “Perhaps he’s just a bright boy.”

  “And perhaps,” McCarron said grimly, “he knows where the bodies are buried.”

  110

  Kelly stood near the office window cradling a mug of lukewarm tea. She watched the colour of the sky over the rooftops changing slowly from sodium orange to the pale pink of sunrise.

  Behind her, Ray McCarron stirred fitfully under the blanket she’d laid over him when the pills and the pain had finally caught up. She glanced across at the bruised and beaten features, his hair ruffled into a peak like a mini mohican.

  Kelly hadn’t slept but spent the remainder of the night in restless contemplation of what to do. What she could do. There weren’t exactly a lot of options open to her.

  Give up. Run. Fight.

  She’d tried the first option before—surrendered to the authorities. That hadn’t worked out so well. Running wasn’t much of a long-term prospect either. Might be feasible if she were a criminal mastermind with half a dozen secret offshore bank accounts at her disposal. But Kelly had less than twenty quid left from raiding the petty cash tin in McCarron’s desk. That wouldn’t get her to Southend-on-Sea, never mind the South Seas.

  She tried to look at her situation with a cool and logical mind. She knew she couldn’t stay ahead of the police for much longer. Whatever O’Neill’s motives in letting her loose, she wasn’t naïve enough to think it was anything but a temporary reprieve.

  Kelly sipped her tea and frowned. She still couldn’t work out what the detective’s motives were. If he was Allardice’s young apprentice as McCarron suggested then why hadn’t he simply arrested her outside the Forensics building in Lambeth?

  An answer—maybe even the answer—arrived so suddenly, so fully formed, that she jerked from the force of it then tensed, holding very still as if to move would scare it away again before she had chance to totally appreciate the nuances.

  She must have made some sound though, because Ray McCarron shifted on the sofa and said groggily, “Wassup, Kel?”

  “Nothing . . . I don’t know.”

&n
bsp; He struggled upright awkwardly, hampered by the stiffness and the aches he hadn’t quite learned to compensate for. He pushed the blanket aside and rubbed his good hand—carefully—across his face. She heard the scuff of stubble against his palm.

  “Care to elaborate?”

  Still feeling her way, Kelly hesitated. Marshalling her thoughts was akin to rounding up hyperactive sheep with a lame collie. The more she tried to get them in order, the more they scattered.

  Eventually she said, “O’Neill let me go. He had the chance to arrest me and he didn’t do it. In fact he pointed me in the direction of the person who probably supplied the ketamine I was dosed with.”

  “So you’re wondering—if he’s in bed with Allardice—why would he help you?”

  “Supposing he did it because he knows I was innocent. Because he knows who killed Callum Perry and it wasn’t me.” It still felt good to say the words.

  Grumpy from sleep McCarron gave a small tic of impatience. “We’ve been over all this, Kelly love—”

  “But supposing,” she interrupted, “what O’Neill doesn’t know—and what he needs to know—is the identity of the copycat. Who copied Perry’s murder to set me up a second time?”

  McCarron drew in a breath as if to begin an argument that never quite made it into words. He frowned, as much as his wounded face would perform such a manoeuvre.

  “I don’t get it,” he said at last. “Why would they care?”

  “Because it means somebody else knows their secret. Somebody else knows I was framed successfully once and they’ve tried to do it again.”

  “But this time it didn’t go according to plan,” he murmured. “You didn’t wait around to be arrested and even if O’Neill magically vanishes away the blood evidence you collected, you can still prove you were drugged.”

  It was her turn to frown. “But I didn’t know about traces staying in my hair until O’Neill himself told me,” she said. “Why would he do that?”

  “Because he needed you to do his legwork for him,” McCarron said. “He can’t go at this from anything other than the official angle—that you’ve gone off the rails again. Anything else opens him up to too many difficult questions. Clever bugger! He feeds you just enough for you to go crashing around in the undergrowth while he and flaming Allardice sit on their backsides and wait to see what breaks cover.”

  “By that you mean they’re waiting to see who manages to kill me, I assume,” Kelly said surprised by the note of calm in her own voice. She thought of the two attempts by the Russian she now knew as Dmitry—first at the racecourse and then via Elvis at Tina’s flat in Brixton.

  If the law didn’t get her first then sooner or later he was going to catch up with her. And then what? He was Grogan’s man but Grogan had fed her a little info too.

  It’s like a game of tactical tennis and I get the nasty feeling I’m the ball.

  “I could always give O’Neill what he wants—where to find Dmitry,” she said. “After that it’s up to him to follow the trail of who hired him and why.”

  McCarron regarded her steadily. “And what happens to you in the meantime?”

  Kelly allowed herself a small smile. “Ah, now that one I hadn’t quite thought through,” she admitted.

  She turned away from the window and put her empty mug down on the corner of the desk. “I can’t help wishing you’d sent Les and Graham to do the Veronica Lytton job.” Her smile was small and tight and sad. “Useless, I know, but if I’d been just that bit slower, Tyrone would have made a start cleaning the bathtub and I would never have seen anything amiss.”

  “Aye I know, lass,” he said softly. He lifted the cast arm an inch or so off the sofa. “If wishes were horses beggars would ride, eh?”

  Horses.

  Matthew Lytton and his racehorses.

  Racehorses he’d owned at one point or another with Harry Grogan.

  And when Lytton had come to her flat the morning after McCarron’s attack he’d known all about her past. All about the trial and how it had gone down.

  What else had he known?

  What else had he used?

  Kelly blinked, looked away from McCarron’s suddenly intent gaze. “I better go,” she said quickly. “If I know Les, he’ll be in soon.”

  “It’s barely six o’clock on a Saturday,” McCarron said. “We do call-outs only at weekends, remember?”

  She gave him an arched look. “Do you really think he’s going to leave you here supposedly alone all night and not ‘just happen’ to pop by and check on you?”

  McCarron’s own smile was rueful as he heaved himself upright. The effort left him swaying. “You’re right,” he said, “but I can call him on the way and tell him not to bother. You’ll have to drive, after all.”

  With a feeling of sinking futility, Kelly asked, “On the way where?”

  “The racecourse,” McCarron said with apparent innocence. “Today is this big shindig of Lytton’s isn’t it? And while you’re beating some answers out of him Kelly love, I can be having a nice little flutter.”

  111

  Harry Grogan stood in the stable yard watching his heavily padded grey colt bound up the ramp into the waiting horsebox. The colt was on his toes and dragged the lad alongside him in his eagerness to be off.

  Standing next to his owner, the trainer nodded approvingly and said, “Knows what’s coming and can’t wait to get up and at ’em you’ll see, Mr Grogan.”

  Grogan heard the unforced confidence in the man’s voice and silently echoed it. The colt was the best he’d ever had. A man could spend a lifetime searching for such a horse and never find it.

  The lad tied the colt up in his narrow stall and secured the partition behind him before jogging down the ramp again. There was a buzz in the yard even this early, the rough breath of animals and people mingling under the floodlights.

  Grogan stood back and watched the scene—part of it and yet apart from it. He squinted up towards the sky. The sun was just beginning to inch over the horizon, promising a fair mild day. Good going, not too warm. Perfect.

  “He’ll do his best,” he said. “Can’t ask for more.”

  The trainer flashed him a quick relieved smile, acknowledging miracles hoped for rather than expected, before he nodded and hurried away. Grogan watched him go. They’d almost finished loading the horsebox, swinging the ramp closed, starting up the rumbling diesel.

  Grogan heard the grit of boots on the concrete behind him and turned to find Dmitry waiting at a respectful distance.

  “We should go,” Dmitry said shortly. “Traffic.”

  Grogan took a last glance around, refusing to be hurried, before turning at last towards the Range Rover. Dmitry had left the engine running, the heater on.

  As they walked, Grogan skimmed his eyes over the younger man. “Viktor?”

  There was a small hesitation before Dmitry shook his head. “Gone.”

  Grogan said nothing, just waited for the rear door to be opened and climbed inside.

  Almost as soon as he had settled himself in the warm leather and the car moved off, his cellphone rang. Grogan checked the display before he took the call.

  “Sweetheart. To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  “Darling,” Myshka’s voice drawled in his ear. “How do I not call on your big day?”

  Something about the way she said it gave Grogan the feeling he was being mocked, but with Myshka it was hard to tell.

  “Where are you?” he said instead.

  “Getting ready,” she said. “I want to make myself beautiful for you.”

  Not you I’ll be looking at, sweetheart. Not today. He grunted. “Don’t be late.”

  “Do not worry.” Her voice was a breathy purr. “I would not miss it for world.”

  Grogan ended the call and slid the phone back into his pocket and he wished, not for the first time, that his Irene was still with him. Like the old days.

  But he allowed nothing of this regret or nostalgia to reach his impassiv
e face.

  112

  “Bastard!”

  Myshka slammed the phone down and stared at herself in the mirror. She was fresh from the shower, hair wrapped in a towel and face bare.

  She felt tired and looked old. Perhaps that was why she had called Grogan, in the hope that he might offer some throwaway reassurance that she need not go to any special effort. Something like: “You’ll always be beautiful to me sweetheart.”