The Blood Whisperer

by Zoe Sharp

  Lytton’s mind reeled, overwhelmed by this latest shock. He stared, incredulous.

  “You?”

  It was as much as he managed before something very hard, travelling very fast, hit the back of his skull. The ceiling cracked open above him in a shower of light and sparks swiftly followed by intense pain, a sense of falling, and darkness.

  130

  Dmitry stood over the inert body of Matthew Lytton, the baton in his hand. He was breathing hard.

  Myshka stood up, unfolding herself like a model. She strolled over with an exaggerated sway, assured and back in control. Then she took hold of Dmitry’s face again and, when he continued to stare down at the man on the floor, she kissed him hard on the mouth.

  He reared back, eyes a little wild.

  “Don’t!”

  Myshka simply smiled at him.

  “Is time,” she said.

  131

  Kelly jabbed a finger onto the call button again, eyes flicking between the floor indicators above each of the two lifts. For a building that only had five storeys it seemed to take forever for the damn things to arrive.

  She had flipped a mental coin and chosen to go down to the office first instead of up to the private box. A mistake, she acknowledged. The office door was locked and she heard no signs of movement inside.

  Of course there were no guarantees that Lytton was even in the building but it was somewhere to start. And besides, her disguise only worked in here. As soon as she went outside her waitress garb would make her stand out.

  The lift indicator on the right rose slowly from the ground floor and reached her level. The doors opened and she had taken half a step towards the opening before she recognised the man inside.

  “Ray!”

  “Hello Kelly love,” McCarron said giving her a weary smile. He was leaning against the back wall looking dog tired. He took in her change of attire, the tray and the concealing make-up in a single brief survey. “You’ve made yourself at home I see.”

  She moved into the lift and the doors slid closed behind her. “How did you get in?”

  “As Matthew Lytton’s mythical guest. I suppose I don’t need to ask you the same.”

  Kelly lifted the tray. “I’m fulfilling his mythical request for coffee,” she said.

  “Where at?”

  “Ah, well that’s more tricky. He’s supposed to be either in his office or he’s got a private box on the top floor. I struck out on the office so I’m giving the box a whirl.”

  “And when you find him?”

  “I’ll pour his coffee and ask him if he killed his wife.”

  “What if he doesn’t want to answer?”

  “Well then he won’t get any mints.”

  McCarron gave a harrumph that almost made it to laughter. The lift reached its designated floor and stopped. The doors opened at a leisurely pace. Kelly was through them almost before the gap was wide enough and would have hurried along the corridor to the boxes had she not realised McCarron was still unable to move quickly. She paused, masking her impatience as she waited for him to catch up.

  But as her gaze swept almost idly across the area surrounding her she froze.

  “Stop,” she said in a low urgent voice. McCarron had worked enough crime scenes to respond instantly to the tone as much as anything else.

  “What is it?”

  Kelly shifted her grip on the tray and pointed, eyes fixed on the floor. “Cast-off,” she said.

  There was a small side table with an arrangement of flowers on it against the wall a little further along. She carefully stretched across to deposit the tray. Unencumbered, she checked the area around her feet before crouching to inspect the blood drop as closely as she could.

  “Still liquid,” she said over her shoulder, keeping her voice hushed. Kelly knew as well as anyone that blood clotted in minutes. For it not to have done so meant whoever left this trail was close by.

  She glanced both ways, wary, then widened her gaze, found a second droplet and a third stretching away along the polished floor. They were elongated ovals with a distinct tail at one end like a comet. The tail was at the front. It would have dropped from the wound and hit the ground at an angle, breaking the surface tension that had held it spherical in freefall.

  “Which way are they headed?” McCarron asked from above her.

  Kelly just pointed, back towards the lifts. From her vantage point she could see the trail stopped neatly by the doors to the second lift. She remembered pressing buttons for both. If the wrong one had stopped, the chances were she could have been faced with the unknown victim—or assailant.

  She rose, stepped back carefully and summoned the lift again. It arrived quickly but was empty when it arrived except for more blood. Stationary cast-off this time, the drops circular, almost 20mm in diameter but with a crown pattern around the edges that told Kelly they’d fallen from a height.

  “Whoever it was, they were either still walking or being carried, and they were leaking steadily,” she murmured.

  “Could just be a nosebleed,” McCarron said quietly behind her. “You know how they can gush.” But he kept still so as not to contaminate possible evidence, she noticed, and his words lacked a certain conviction.

  Kelly frowned, remembering the layout from Lytton’s guided tour. “The private boxes each have their own bathroom,” she said. “If somebody had a sudden nosebleed surely they’d head for one of those rather than drip all over the building?”

  “Not if it was staff rather than guests.” McCarron gave a one-shoulder shrug and offered her a worn out smile. “Just playing devil’s advocate, Kelly love.”

  She didn’t respond to that, backtracking to follow the blood trail upstream towards its source. She found it in the doorway to one of the boxes. It did not altogether surprise her to realise it was the one that had been assigned to Lytton and Warwick.

  They hugged the wall outside the box. There were several drops of blood clustered on the smooth floor surface near the handle side where someone might have paused to shut or lock the door before moving off along the corridor. Kelly unbuttoned the waistcoat that formed part of her borrowed uniform and wrapped her hand in the material before reaching for the doorknob.

  Just before she got there, McCarron stayed her arm.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” he whispered.

  “No, but if I hand it over to the cops at this stage who knows what the hell will happen,” she whispered back.

  “It’s not the cops I’m worried about.”

  Kelly hesitated a moment then turned away. She retrieved her tray from the side table and came back with it.

  “Camouflage,” she mouthed when he looked bewildered. She did not think he needed to know that the stainless steel tray itself, not to mention most of its contents, would also make very handy improvised weaponry.

  McCarron let out a long breath then used the corner of his own jacket to turn the handle. Surprise would only offer a momentary window of opportunity, so Kelly stepped through quickly, moving to the side. McCarron followed more out of loyalty than eagerness, she felt sure.

  Inside they both stopped dead. On the floor in front of them was a lump shrouded partially by a man’s morning suit jacket and partially by what looked like a fur rug. One lifeless hand stretched out from underneath it as if in supplication. The smell of violence was dark and sickly in the air.

  Outside the glass the crowd was roaring home the first winner of the day. Against the scene that suddenly presented itself Kelly had a sharp vision of Romans at the Coliseum baying for slaughter.

  It was McCarron who went forward, picked up a corner of the rug with his finger and thumb and peeled it heavily away from the body.

  “Well, I reckon we don’t need to search any further for your blood,” he said at last, his voice husky. “Any idea who he is?”

  Kelly realised she couldn’t avoid looking at the body any longer and it had nothing to do with general squeamishness. She swallowed as she let he
r eyes skim over the lifeless features.

  Recognition hit her in a cold wash.

  132

  “Who is he?” McCarron asked. “Or should I ask who was he?”

  Kelly Jacks had leaned down to examine cast-off blood spatter across the far wall of the box. “Steve Warwick,” she said without looking round. “He was Matthew Lytton’s business partner.”

  “That’s odd.”

  “Not really. You’d expect him to be here on their big day.”

  “I didn’t mean that,” McCarron said, and there must have been something in his voice because she rose and turned towards him, graceful where McCarron felt lumbering. And achingly tired. He was, he recognised in no fit state to go wading in trying to make sense of a crime scene—and certainly not one like this. Never mind that they’d no right to be here in the first place.

  In fact between his conscience and his cast elbow it was a toss-up which was troubling him the most and he’d gone in search of water to swallow a handful of painkillers.

  “The bathroom door’s locked—from the inside,” he said now, stepping away and lowering his voice.

  Kelly came to him around the edges of the room, careful where she put her feet. She gave the door a cursory glance then fetched the teaspoon from her discarded tray of coffee. She shoved the flat end of the spoon into the centre part of the lock, using it as a makeshift screwdriver and twisting it until the indicator tab went from red to green.

  McCarron watched her deft movements with a little stirring of unease in the back of his mind.

  “Kelly love—”

  She silenced him with a look. “You might want to stand back for this,” she murmured. “Just in case.”

  He would have argued but she already had her shoulder against the door, holding the tension off the lock while she nudged it open.

  The bathroom was small, lined with tiles and had no external window. The light was on, the extractor humming quietly in the background. The first thing they saw was the white pedestal sink, covered in a pink wash and dotted with clogged lumps of sodden tissue paper. A ruined towel sat in a soggy heap on the floor beneath it.

  Kelly pushed the door wider and they both heard a strangled gasp from inside.

  It was, McCarron judged, a sound more likely to be made by a victim rather than an attacker. He moved to the doorway.

  “It’s all right, you can come out,” he said gruffly. “They’ve gone whoever they are and we’re not going to hurt you.”

  Kelly flicked him a brief glance that made him hope he hadn’t been optimistic about the last part but inside the bathroom a figure uncurled itself from a poor hiding place squashed down alongside the toilet bowl and tottered out to meet them.

  It was a dark-haired woman, stooped in fear, her makeup streaked from tears and ineffectual scrubbing. She was wearing a dowdy black dress covered with ominous damp patches that gleamed in the lights. She looked terrified.

  “Yana?” Kelly’s voice was a mixture of surprise and exasperation. “What the—?”

  “You know her?” McCarron asked.

  “She’s Steve Warwick’s . . . wife,” Kelly said choosing her words with care.

  At that moment the woman Yana seemed to catch sight of the partially covered corpse and dashed across the room to fling herself down on top of it in a storm of weeping.

  McCarron could only watch while it took Kelly several attempts to prise her away, by which time the taller woman’s hands and her wild-eyed face were sluiced with the dead man’s blood.

  “Leave him,” Kelly said a mite sharply. “There’s nothing you can do for him and you’re contaminating the scene.”

  Yana Warwick slumped at the admonishment. Docile now, she allowed herself to be led to a chair and pressed into it. McCarron threw Kelly a reproachful glance. It was coolly returned.

  She crouched so she could force Yana to meet her gaze then asked in a more gentle voice, “What happened here?”

  “B–bad men,” Yana said. “They come to our house—this morning. I getting ready.” She bit her lip as she flapped a hand towards her ruined dress like a kid who’d had a new toy broken by the bullies.

  McCarron claimed to be no expert but he didn’t think the outfit would have been flattering even before it was liberally splashed with blood. And being a man of the old school, he kept such an opinion firmly to himself.

  “And?” Kelly prompted.

  Yana gave her a wounded look but said meekly, “They bring me here. I–I lock myself in bathroom but I hear what they do to him.” She raised her head, eyes brimming. “I hear him screaming—”

  “It’s all right lovey,” McCarron said hastily, trying to avert the inevitable shed of tears. “You don’t need to go over it again.”

  “What about the coat Yana?” Kelly asked. “Where did that come from?”

  Yana stared at her for a moment. “C–coat?”

  Kelly jerked her head towards the makeshift shroud. McCarron had never understood the fascination for fur. In his opinion it invariably looked far better covering the animal that originally owned it. But, he conceded, maybe that had something to do with the price.

  “There was woman with them,” Yana said. She shivered. “I think . . . I think maybe she do this. She is—how you say?—one cold bitch.”

  Kelly straightened, frowning. “Yeah I’ll say she is.”

  McCarron had seen that narrowed-down gaze before. At complex crime scenes Kelly had possessed moments of complete motionless while she mentally teased out a tangled thread of evidence and it had begun to unknot itself for her.

  And if he hadn’t been still sluggish from his injuries and the after-effects of the medication they’d shovelled into him since his op, McCarron reckoned he might have put it together sooner himself.

  He opened his mouth. Kelly shot him a warning glance that cut him off before he had a chance to speak.

  “We’ll make sure this woman doesn’t get away with it,” she promised. “Ray, you stay with Yana. I’ll go find the cops.”

  “C–cops?” Yana said, voice rising. “No cops! I not trust them.”

  Kelly met McCarron’s eyes with a gaze that was flat and implacable.

  “Don’t worry—it’s clear what happened here,” she said grimly. “The evidence speaks for itself.”

  133

  Lytton came round and found his head in a vice being pounded by sledgehammers from the inside. At least, that was what it felt like.

  To begin with it was all he could do to lie very still while he tried to find a way around the pain inside his skull. After a few moments he realised he didn’t have much of a choice in the matter.

  He was lying on his side with his hands bound at the wrists behind him. The ground underneath felt hard, cold and damp. He could feel no wind so he guessed he was inside but couldn’t be sure. His eyes seemed to have been glued shut.

  That was only one reason for the sense of panic that engulfed him.

  Lytton could smell the blood, taste it thick and cloying in his nose and the back of his throat. An image of Veronica dead amid a splash of scarlet ruin, and then Steve Warwick’s sprawled body, hit him with a jolt that took away what little breath he had left.

  Try as he might he couldn’t remember what happened next—only that it had been a shock. Even more of a shock than finding his partner beaten to death on their day of glory.

  But what?

  He bit down on his fear and bucked furiously, bulking the muscles in his shoulders and forearms. He thought he felt something give a little between his wrists, transferring a pressurised stab into his hands. If he didn’t get loose soon he was going to lose all feeling in them.

  The realisation gave him the impetus to try again, a thrashing effort that turned the pain vicious enough to be frightening. The kind of pain that came with serious injury. He lay still, gasping and began to wonder if his eyes were open after all but it was dark. Or if he’d gone blind.

  And in the buzzing blackness he heard the sound of a do
or handle being rattled.

  Lytton froze, straining to hear above the thunder of pulse beating in his ears. In the background he could hear the sounds of the racecourse—the commentator’s voice, the crowds—but muffled and at a distance. So whatever had happened he hadn’t been taken far.

  The rattling stopped. Lytton was wracked by indecision. Did he call out and chance rescue—or would attracting attention mean they’d finish what they’d started?

  He took a deep breath.