The Blood Whisperer (40 page)

If they’d stuck to the explosives, those two, maybe that wouldn’t have been so bad. After all, he knew nothing beyond what he’d told them. Dmitry asked for the introduction, presumably on Harry Grogan’s behalf, and Stubbs had provided it. End of story.

But they hadn’t left it there. The older one, O’Neill, had that same predatory air as Dmitry, that same ability to smell blood in the water and home in on it. It was O’Neill who’d led him gently, sneakily, into talking about his professional life and encouraged him to boast, just a little, of his prowess as a veterinary surgeon.

And then the bastard had dropped the smiling act and said, “Tell me about your supplies of ketamine.”

Stubbs had known right then that he was well and truly screwed. He’d no idea how they’d found out he’d been letting a little of the drug go out through the side door or that the last lot had been acquired by Dmitry. It was only after Stubbs had spilled everything he knew that he discovered it had been little more than a lucky guess.

Bastards!

Stubbs clenched his hands into fists in his lap. Only when they were curled tight did the habitual tremors become unnoticeable.

They’d got him every which way. Not just for being drunk behind the wheel and running down that stupid dozy old woman but half a dozen other charges relating to conspiracy to cause explosions and, to cap it all, possession with intent to supply.

No two ways about it—he was going to prison.

It was only then as the weight of it all piled down and began to crush him that Stubbs recalled a final indignity.

A few years previously, when his reputation had not yet begun to tarnish quite as badly, he’d been working for a trainer with a considerable string. There had been a few mistakes—maybe even the start of the downward slide—and he’d been let go. The trainer had given him an expensive bottle of booze to soften the blow.

It was only much later Stubbs had realised the irony of the parting gift—that he was fired because of his drinking. On principle he had put the bottle away and never opened it.

After Dmitry’s last visit though, Stubbs had noticed the gift was gone and he knew the damned man had stolen it.

Perhaps I should have told those two about that.

He quashed the thought as soon as it rose. They’d probably have tried to pin something else on him. Shame though—the way he was feeling at the moment, drowning his sorrows with a few healthy shots of Bacardi 151 overproof rum was a bloody good idea.

“I could kill for a decent cup of Earl Grey.”

Kelly spoke the words to her own reflection in the Vauxhall’s rearview mirror. She could see only a narrow slot of her face across the eyes, strobed by the passing streetlights and the flare of oncoming cars. Apart from the shadow of bruises around her cheekbone she looked no different from a week ago, before all this had begun.

Before the world at large assumed her capable of killing for a far lesser reason than a good cup of tea.

She headed west from Erin’s flat on the borders of Hampstead Heath and skirted Golders Green. It was only when she got onto the North Circular and saw the distant bright arc of the new Wembley stadium that she realised she was on autopilot heading back to the McCarron offices.

After a moment’s surprise Kelly shrugged and kept going. The Vauxhall was getting low on fuel and she didn’t want to risk filling up. Not in a garage that was covered with CCTV and staffed by people who had nothing to do between customers but stare at the front covers of the newspapers. Her own face had been made uncomfortably familiar over the past few days.

No, she knew the car had outlived its usefulness and taking it back to her boss’s house in Hillingdon was probably not a wise plan. Ray had mentioned his nosy neighbours often enough for her to know the chances were the Mini had been reported by now. If the police had any sense they’d be watching out for her return.

Besides, Ray hadn’t yet shopped her to the police for nicking his car or his cellphone. So the least she could do was park the old Vauxhall somewhere it wasn’t likely to be towed or stripped within a day.

She left the North Circular just after The Ace Café and pulled up carefully on the road outside the office, peering up at the darkened windows. Kelly crawled into the car park, stopped nose-in to one of the up-and-over doors and climbed out. Nothing stirred. It had rained earlier in the evening and the concrete glistened under the streetlights. The smell in the air was of diesel and winter.

Kelly unlocked the main door using the key on Ray’s set, punched in the alarm code and wound the garage door up from the inside without turning on the overhead lights. The ratchet mechanism seemed very loud in the gloom. Kelly was glad to shunt the car inside and drop the door again.

She lifted her backpack out from behind the driver’s seat and gave the controls a cursory wipe down. She’d had plenty of legitimate reasons to have been in her boss’s car but not as the last person behind the wheel. If the techs wanted to drag the vehicle in and go over it with a fine-tooth comb she knew they’d find plenty of evidence. Shed hair, skin cells, fibres, footprints, dirt, sweat or some other source of her DNA.

Every contact leaves a trace.

Locard’s Exchange Principle had been one of the first things they’d taught her when she began her training as a crime-scene investigator. It had fascinated her—how hard it was to eradicate all possible remainders of yourself.

Ever since her first scenes Kelly had this image in her head of the different strands of evidence swirling around the place like coloured mist. All you had to do was be able to see it.

But in this case the evidence was not physical. It was hearsay and conjecture. Full of
might be
and
what if.
She had never felt so lost among it.

Weary, she climbed the stairs to the upper floor. There was enough light bleeding in from outside for her to make her way without bumping into anything. Upstairs had the nutty smell of burnt coffee left too long too brew in the filter machine, mingled with the enzyme cleaner they used at scenes and furniture polish.

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.”

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.”

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.