Текст книги "The Blood Whisperer"

Автор книги: Zoë Sharp

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Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 34 страниц)

66

The cold water hit Elvis in the face like being thrown into the sea. He surfaced through it spluttering and gasping and found himself lying on his left side on the floor of the flat. He’d know that puke-coloured carpet anywhere. There was a bloodied towel under his head.

What happened came back to him in a shameful rush. Kelly getting the jump on him. He didn’t know what she’d hit him with—a truck by the feel of it. He put a hand up to his nose carefully and found it was well mashed.

“B-bitch!” he managed.

“So she was here,” said a man’s voice somewhere above him. Elvis heard the Russki accent and his guts cramped instantly. He squeezed the water out of his eyes before cautiously opening them.

The first thing he saw was a pair of shiny black boots, the kind that army guys or coppers wear. He forced his gaze upwards and found a huge guy standing in them with Tina’s kettle still in his hand. Good job it hadn’t just boiled, Elvis thought hazily. This guy didn’t look the type to check.

What he did look from down here was enormous.

Aware that his throbbing face was a little too close to those heavy-duty toecaps for comfort, Elvis tried to get his left hand underneath him to lever up. A bolt of pain shot through his wrist. He gave a yelp of surprise and almost ended up back on the floor again. The big guy grabbed hold of the back of his sweatshirt and all but dragged him upright.

It was only when he was on his feet that several things came clear to Elvis. The first was that his wrist hurt like a bastard to the point where he felt ready to throw up. The second was the truck Kelly had used to hit him was actually his best laptop which was now lying smashed on the floor near the sofa. He swore again, longer and more inventively this time.

And that’s when he realised the third thing.

The big guy was not alone.

A second man was sitting on the narrow dining chair by the window. He had his back to the light so Elvis couldn’t make out his face right away. The build came across—lighter, not so gorilla-like as the guy with the kettle. Brains and Brawn these two, and it was always Brains you had to watch out for.

Elvis knew if he was going to talk his way out of the mess that bitch had left him in this was the guy he had to convince.

“So,” the man by the window said again. “She was here, da?”

“’Course she was here,” Elvis said. He clocked the Russian accent more clearly this time and the fear it provoked lent more of a snappy edge to his voice than was wise. He tried to temper it with an ingratiating grin. “You think I’d try and diss you? No way bro.”

The man uncrossed his legs, leaned forward and made an exaggerated show of looking around the tiny living room. “And yet . . . I do not see her,” he said. “So the effect is the same, yes?”

Puzzled, Elvis tried a shrug that also wasn’t wise. The room spun crazily. He staggered and nearly fell. The giant grabbed hold of his shoulder gripping hard enough to make him squirm. Elvis’s head was banging and he could feel the sweat breaking out across his forehead, under his armpits. He tried to convince himself it was down to being laid out with a ripped-off Toshiba rather than sheer fright but didn’t believe it.

He wished he still had his blade but Kelly must have taken it with her after she’d nicked it. He still wasn’t sure how she’d managed that. One minute he was in control, the next it was lights out.

Bitch. Look what trouble you left me in . . .

He licked his lips nervously. “Hey bro, I can find her for you. No sweat. She was here ’cause she and Tina are tight. She’ll be back, yeah?”

The man stared at him without expression. “I think she might have been back but you said something—did something—to alarm her, da?”

“Hey I—”

“Something foolish,” the man went on, “that panicked her into running again.”

“She was gonna leave, go out. I just tried to stop her—”

The man gave a snort and muttered something under his breath that Elvis didn’t catch but didn’t need to. He got the gist.

And then without warning the man surged out of the chair and backhanded him across the face hard enough to snap his head round. The blow exploded his already tender nose into a haze of pain, flooded his eyes and sent his body reeling into shock. His knees gave way, his bladder following. He was only vaguely aware of being hauled upright by the meaty hand at his shoulder, held locked tight, immobile.

“If you had not spooked her she would have come back here. Where else does she have that she can go?” the man said, his voice too close, too soft. “I would have been very pleased with you. And you would now be a rich man, da?” He paused. “But instead you are a fool.”

“Hey man, she was here like I told you,” Elvis mumbled driven by self-pity to his own defence. “Not my fault she—”

“Not your fault? So maybe you think I am to blame, da? For being too slow. Maybe you think I am the fool?”

Elvis was hazily aware that things had turned upside down against him. It wasn’t fair! It had seemed like easy money. Money for nothing. One phone call and Harry Grogan’s boys would come and grab her and Tina would never know he’d had anything to do with it. And now it had gone to shit and it was all that bitch Kelly’s fault, of—

The blow to his kidneys didn’t feel like a truck. This time it was more like a freight train or one of those big pile-driving cranes Elvis had seen down in the East End. His legs gave out completely and this time the giant didn’t try to hold him up.

If things had been bad while he was on his feet, Elvis soon realised they got a whole lot worse once he was down. He prayed for unconsciousness. It seemed to be a long time coming.

67

Kelly was half a mile away from the flat before she stopped running. She ducked into an alleyway between two rundown shops and doubled over gasping, her hands braced against her knees. She was winded, shocky, and shaking with both effort and reaction.

As adrenaline hangovers went this was shaping up to be a doozy.

A part of her couldn’t believe Elvis had sold her out. Another part—a more cynical embittered part—was more surprised he’d waited so long.

Paid for it though, didn’t he?

The laptop Kelly instinctively flung at him had found its mark with devastating effect. She wondered how long it would be before she could block out all recall of the dull crunching sound that his cartilage and flesh and bone had made as the hefty blunt object struck. That he had threatened her—pulled a knife on her—no longer seemed a good enough excuse for what she’d done.

What the hell am I going to say to Tina?

As little as possible seemed to be the best response.

Slowly, reluctantly, she straightened still breathing hard. She dragged the cellphone out of her sweatshirt pocket and keyed in Tina’s number but her thumb hesitated over the dial button.

Eventually she took the coward’s way out, composing an apologetic if slightly defiant text message and sending it fast before she’d time to change her mind.

As she slipped the phone away again it clunked against something hard in the other front pocket. She reached in and pulled out the knife she’d taken away from Elvis.

Another blade . . .

An image of Tyrone’s mutilated body flashed into her mind, hard and strong enough to rob her of what little breath she’d managed to retrieve.

There was no blood on this one but that hadn’t been for lack of trying. Elvis had taken a determined if inexperienced swing at her. He hadn’t counted on reflexes honed from half a dozen attempts to cut her up while Kelly had been inside.

Attacks using cell-fashioned hidden shivs were as common as they were inventive in there. Some inmates viewed being stabbed as so inevitable they took regular ice-cold showers to try and prepare their bodies for the shock, train themselves to power through it. They claimed it worked. Kelly felt avoidance was the better option but sometimes you didn’t have a choice.

Nevertheless, she hadn’t survived for five years by running away from trouble. She’d learned to meet it head on. So as soon as she’d seen the knife she had reacted on full-auto with speed and aggression.

Now cooling rapidly, she thought of Elvis and remembered again the strange internal wrenching noise his bones had made as she’d twisted his wrist up and round to break his grip. She had not hesitated, not for a moment.

But she was not in prison any longer. She was back in civilisation and supposed to behave accordingly. It just seemed that there had been no transition between in and out and when she was under threat the lines blurred altogether.

For a moment she felt a hollow churning up under her ribcage and thought she might vomit. She bent over again and leaned her forehead against the brickwork in front of her, cushioned by her forearm. Gradually the sickness subsided.

Her head came up slowly and she realised she’d no clue where she was. She’d fled without thought to direction. It took a few minutes’ staring at the nearest street sign for her to place the area and realise she had strayed north into Camberwell. Totally the wrong direction for Clapham Common.

Lytton!

A glance at her watch told her she was already late for their meeting. Would he wait for her? And for how long?

Would he turn up at all?

As her vision cleared she noticed there was a drain a few feet away fed by a fractured drainpipe. The brickwork was grey and furred with damp. Kelly wiped the handle of the knife on the inside of her sweatshirt and dropped it into the broken grid. Looking at the rest of the building it would be a long time before the owner got around to calling Dyno-Rod.

The phone buzzed in her pocket. She pulled it out again and gave the display a cursory glance. She recognised the Brixton code but not the number. Tina’s work perhaps? She flipped the phone open with a sense of trepidation.

“Tina?”

“Ah, sadly no,” said a cool voice in her ear. A voice that sent a bolt of reactive fear straight through to her bones. “Hello Miss Jacks.”

The Russian.

“What do you want?” she demanded hearing her composure rip like silk. “What have I done to you—or Grogan?”

There was a pause then the man said, “Better for all of us if you do not know.”

“Better for you, you mean,” Kelly shot back.

He laughed, a brief chuckle. “Da. This is true. Please be assured Miss Jacks it is nothing . . . personal.”

“Oh and that makes me feel so much better.”

“Your young friend here, I regret that he is not feeling better.”

For a moment Kelly was puzzled.

“You mean Elvis? He’s no friend of mine,” she said, partly because it was true and partly because instinct told her that claiming any kind of relationship with the youth would probably make things worse for him.

“A pity,” the man said, his tone brooding. “Then he is of no further use to me.”

Kelly found she was shivering, had to wrap her free arm around her body to stop the shakes vibrating into her voice.

“Killing him will cause you more problems than it solves,” she said quickly, thinking of Tina—clean and sober and happy. “Not least with the police. They’re already looking for you over Tyrone’s death. Why make them look harder?”

He was silent for a few long seconds then he said, “A nice try but I think you will find it is not me the police look for.”

Her brain went numb unable to think of a single argument that might stand a hope of persuading him. The voice sounded again almost softly in her ear.

“Thank you for standing so still Miss Jacks. It makes you so much easier to trace . . .”

Kelly jerked the phone away as if it had burned her ear. She snapped it shut, cutting off the call and threw it away from her. It skittered across the concrete and disappeared after the knife down the broken drain.

She was running before it hit the murky water below.

68

Standing in the living room of Tina’s flat over the inert body of Elvis, Dmitry smiled.

Of course he had no way to track the cellphone she was using. He was not the police, after all. But the bluff had been worth it for the panic it had so obviously caused.

Once you had an adversary on the run, he had learned, keeping them running until they were too exhausted to run any further was always a good thing. If all their efforts went into retreating they had no time or energy to attack.

And Kelly Jacks was tiring, he could sense it. He may have failed to corner her here but it was one more place of safety now closed off to her. So overall this was not quite the disaster it might have been.

He nodded to Viktor. “Come. We go.”

The two men stepped over Elvis’s legs and walked out. They left the front door casually ajar behind them.

69

Lytton arrived at Long Pond on Clapham Common almost half an hour behind time. He was filled with the impotent rage of a man who’s tried to hustle through Central London traffic and been frustrated at every turn.

He’d been calling the cellphone number Kelly had used to make contact but it came back ‘not possible to connect’. So for the last couple of miles he’d been rehearsing his apologies. By the time he parked up as close to the edge of the Common as he could find a space his edginess at the meeting had twisted through concern into anger.

And to cap it all she wasn’t there.

He waited, walked, just in case she’d been delayed too but after another half an hour passed he knew. The anger smouldered beneath the surface. She hadn’t had the guts to wait for him not even for a lousy thirty minutes.

“Face it man,” he said out loud. “She’s stood you up—again.”

That kind of thing was getting to be a habit with her.

He sighed, rechecked his watch. Only another minute had passed.

Lytton tried to work out why he was giving her any time at all. She was a convicted criminal, a wanted fugitive and there was compelling evidence to suggest this was a repeat of her earlier crime—a man murdered in a frenzy of reasonless rage.

So why did he feel some kind of pull towards her?

It couldn’t simply be sexual attraction. She wasn’t his type and with Vee not even buried it was hardly appropriate to give in to a burst of hormones.

No there was more to it than that.

He stood on the asphalt path that ringed the pond, his back to the basketball courts and the skate park, staring across the dark flat water towards the road on the far side. His dad had brought him here sometimes if he was suffering an uncharacteristic bout of fatherliness. They’d bring stale bread to throw at the ducks and watch the richer kids sail their model boats.

His dad had always tired of it first, his patience directly related—Lytton only realised much later—to the length of time the pubs had been open.

Lytton shook himself inside his cashmere coat. A lot of water had passed under the bridge since then, a lot of distance travelled.

And look at me, he thought, standing here again, all wistful for something else I can’t have.

He shot a cuff, checked his watch and turned his back determinedly on Long Pond with its old memories and new disappointments.

Kelly Jacks, he decided, could damn well fend for herself.

70

Kelly wasn’t sure how she got through the rest of the day or the night that followed. Probably, she coped much the same way as she’d learned to get through her time locked up inside—by thinking only from one moment to the next. No long term plans, no goals. Just staying alert to the here and now, reacting if she had to, coasting if she didn’t.

She arrived at the north side of Clapham Common over an hour late for her meeting with Lytton. It came as no surprise to find he had not waited around for her. If she was honest she wouldn’t put money on him having turned up in the first place.

She was not to know that she’d missed him only by three minutes.

All the way down from Camberwell, Kelly had cursed the knee-jerk impulse that made her dump the cellphone. It was the only place she had noted Lytton’s own cellphone number—stored in the phone’s memory rather than her own.

She tried to call Tina but the only phone boxes she came across did not accept coins and she had no other means to pay. The thought of ducking into a restaurant or shop and begging use of their phone did not appeal. Her face had been too widely shown for that to be a safe option.

For the first time she felt truly isolated. Isolated from people she could trust—people she’d believed she could trust. She knew she couldn’t reach out to her family even if she knew how to get in touch.

Don’t call a number for so long and it fades from the memory.

By the time she had reached the north-eastern edge of the Common itself she’d been almost in pieces, unable to go forwards or back. The realisation that Lytton was not there—might never have been there—was the last punch that knocked the stuffing out of her.

She sat for a long time on the bench furthest from Long Pond, hunched over, staring at the ground in front of her feet. It was covered in fallen horse chestnuts from the trees nearby, cigarette ends and the kind of soft drink ring pulls that were supposedly redesigned to reduce litter.

There were no model boaters on the pond itself, just a resting squadron of Canada geese. The traffic behind her formed a constant drone enlivened only by the regular overhead hum of jets stacking for Heathrow out to the west.

Kelly heard none of it for the insistent voice in her head.

I should have left sooner—if I went there at all.

But she was only too aware that people who are desperate will do desperate things if the price is right. She couldn’t find it in her to hate Elvis for what he’d done but wondered if Tina would ever forgive her for breaking the kid’s bones. Maybe one day she’d find out.

Besides, Harry Grogan had offered ten thousand pounds to anyone who’d give her up. Money like that was life-changing to half the people who lived in Tina’s block. And they were used to keeping an eye out, watching the comings and goings, watching their backs. It was only a matter of time before someone sold her out.

The wind was surprisingly chilly, blowing in all the way across the flat expanse of the Common. Kelly shivered and hunkered down a little further into her hooded sweatshirt, glad of the baseball cap even if it did leave her ears exposed to the cold.

She became aware that the summer, such as it was, had turned definitely into autumn when she hadn’t been looking. There was a smell of dead leaves and wet wool in the air. Before long it would be getting dark.

She needed food and a safe place to hide—or at least somewhere she could slip through the night unnoticed by either Grogan’s touts or the police.

Wearily, Kelly got to her feet. She headed for the Clapham Common Tube station just as the evening commuter rush was beginning to pick up. Most people were fairly unobservant. Better to hide in the crowds and make her pursuers work for their money.

She rode the Northern Line all the way up to King’s Cross tucked in a corner feigning sleep for most of the journey. By the time she emerged from below ground it was dark outside, the notorious surrounding streets garish with shabby lights and crawling traffic. Kelly grabbed a carton of food from a cheap noodle bar whose internal security camera was obviously a fake. She was served by a Korean man whose English was barely adequate to work the till. She hoped she would be one indistinguishable bedraggled white face among many to him. She avoided eye contact anyway, just in case.

The food took away the shakes if not the melancholy. She kept moving, grabbing rest in half-hour snatches in quiet doorways, using her backpack as a makeshift pillow and keeping her arm wrapped firmly through the straps.

Even dressed as she was, Kelly received half a dozen propositions—mostly from nervous middle-aged men in slow-moving cars. She simply shook her head and kept walking. A couple of times, guys who were clearly pimps touting for fresh meat asked if she was OK—did she need food, money, a place to sleep or something to take the edge off? Kelly ignored them too and they didn’t push the issue. They knew enough not to force it when another day or two at the most and she would be seeking them out.

What Kelly did a lot of during that long night was try to get her head together.

By the time the first faint smears of daylight appeared in the eastern sky she had decided on a plan of action.

She was tired of running. Giving up was not an option. If she was going to stay out of prison again she needed to find out why. Why was she worth that kind of money to this Grogan character? What had she done that he might want her to the tune of ten grand?

And the only way Kelly knew to go about that was simply to gather and follow the evidence, the way she’d been trained to do.