Текст книги "The Blood Whisperer"

Автор книги: Zoë Sharp

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Текущая страница: 26 (всего у книги 34 страниц)

120

“Am I glad to see you!”

Kelly gaped at the girl who stood in the open doorway, her mind a complete blank.

The girl didn’t seem to notice this reaction right away. She was slightly on the plump side with skin the colour of strong café latte and an air of bustle about her as she hurried into the cloakroom. “Oh, please tell me you’re the new girl?” she blurted out as Kelly remained frozen with surprise. “We are so short-staffed it isn’t true. Today of all days, and then we were told you couldn’t make it. I mean, disaster or what?”

Kelly saw the girl’s eyes flick over her features and instinctively put a hand up to her discoloured face. “I nearly didn’t,” she said, rueful. “But I need the work, you know?”

The girl rolled her eyes. “Don’t I know it,” she said. “I’m Shula by the way. You?”

“Ellie,” Kelly invented quickly.

“Did they explain anything to you?”

“Erm, no,” Kelly said. “They just dumped me here and assumed somebody else would tell me.”

Shula rolled her eyes. “Typical. Well, we’ll soon get you sorted out.” She pointed to a rack of clothing. “Pick out something that fits—white shirt, waistcoat and either black trousers or skirt, whichever you prefer.”

Kelly thought of the climb she’d just made and her leap from the walkway last time she was here. “Trousers, I think.”

“Don’t blame you. I don’t have much of a choice—don’t have ankles, see, just calves that go all the way down. About a size eight are you? Lucky girl.”

Spending time in prison had rid Kelly of whatever inhibitions she might once have had about undressing in front of a stranger. She stripped down to her underwear without a qualm and was soon pulling on the uniform Shula helped her select.

“We’re supposed to have the wife of one of the sponsors helping organise the hospitality but she hasn’t deigned to put in an appearance yet,” Shula said rolling her eyes. “Losing Mrs Lytton was a disaster—she was originally taking care of things and there wasn’t nothing she didn’t know.”

“What happened to her?” Kelly asked innocently.

Shula pulled a face. “She died suddenly. Not here,” she added quickly as if worried about scaring Kelly off. “And the other bloke’s wife was supposed to take over but she’s been a non-starter I can tell you. Scurried around the place like she was counting the silver and never showed up again after that.”

Kelly nearly asked more about Yana Warwick then realised she shouldn’t even know the name and shut up.

“What happened to your face—boyfriend?” Shula’s eyes lingered with a certain amount of sympathy. When Kelly just gave a shrug she added, “Don’t worry—we’ve all been there. Tell you what, the girls are always leaving their make-up bags lying around. Let’s see if we can’t steal you a bit of foundation, take the edge of those bruises. He caught you a belter didn’t he?”

And five minutes later, when Kelly stepped out of the cloakroom with her newfound friend, she realised she was wearing a far better disguise for helping her blend in on the racecourse than anything she could have borrowed from Matthew Lytton’s dead wife.

121

Steve Warwick was sweating inside his suit as he walked from the VIP car park towards the main racecourse building. It had nothing to do with the exercise and everything to do with the woman on his arm.

Her face a mask of cosmetic perfection and dressed in a voluptuous but politically incorrect fur coat, Myshka was looking her mysterious very best.

“Matt’s going to flip out,” he complained, flicking her nervous little glances. “He’s expecting to see me with Yana not—”

“It will be nice surprise for him then, yes?” Myshka said, her voice as sultry as her walk.

Warwick swallowed. “Darling I thought we agreed it would be best—”

“No!” Myshka interrupted. “We did not agree. You made decision. I did not agree.”

And Warwick finally realised with a feeling of panic in the pit of his stomach that by allowing Myshka to dominate him in the bedroom he’d also allowed her to take too much control of things outside of it.

“Look darling, let me at least go and have a talk to him before he sees us together—explain things, hmm?”

He held the door open for her, ushered her through. Myshka waited until they were in the lift gliding upwards before she turned him to face her. The way she let her eyes focus on his mouth had his breath hitching in his throat. Damn, she could always do that to him with just a look.

She trailed one of those deadly red-tipped acrylic nails along his cheek, gripped his chin just a little too hard. Lust began to curl through his belly.

“He will understand soon, and we still have a little time,” she murmured. She leaned close to his ear, her breath stirring the delicate hairs on his lobe as she whispered, “And I do not have on any underwear . . .”

122

McCarron’s mugging story did not gain him free entry to the racecourse but it did see him escorted through the disabled entrance by an elderly steward with too kind a heart for the job.

It did not take much after that to feign a weakness that required a brief rest at the First-Aid post, located in the main building. The steward walked him in and delivered him into the care of the uniformed paramedic in charge who’d been drinking a cup of tea and reading a racing paper.

“Ah, first customer of the day,” the paramedic said jumping up. He let out a low whistle as he cast a professional eye over McCarron’s healing wounds and intricately cast arm. “Coming out today in this state, you must really like to put a bet on, old man.”

“Well Matthew offered to send a car, bless the lad, but I told him I’d rather make my own way,” McCarron improvised, shrugging off the jacket he’d only managed to get half on in the first place.

“Matthew?” the medic asked. He slipped an inflatable cuff around McCarron’s good arm and began to pump it up.

“Hmm? Oh, Lytton, of course.”

The medic faltered. “Lytton as in the Warwick-Lytton Cup—that Lytton?”

“Aye lad. Why else do you think I’m here ‘in this state’ as you so rightly put it?”

The medic flushed. “I’m very sorry sir. I didn’t realise . . . you should be wearing a tag, see, to show you’re a VIP.”

“And that makes a difference to how you treat people does it?” McCarron asked with ominous calm.

“Well no, but—”

“I’ll be sure to mention that to Matthew,” he said. “Now, where would I find him?”

123

The police presence around the racecourse was being organised by a uniformed chief inspector called Cheever. Initially he didn’t take kindly to a couple of plainclothes cowboys from north of the river trying to ride onto his patch and start any kind of a ruckus.

He explained this to O’Neill and Dempsey in terms that left them in no doubt of his feelings on the matter. O’Neill mentally labelled him an arse within moments of meeting the man. The mental picture was completed by the fact Cheever was almost entirely bald and had a cleft chin.

“So, you’ve no hard intel there are explosives at my racecourse—or anywhere within a hundred miles of here for that matter, hmm?”

“No sir,” O’Neill said with a scrupulous politeness he tried hard to maintain. “But we’ve been watching this drama unfold and we can’t ignore the fact that all the players are here—in one place. Today. If Warwick really is planning to get rid of his partner then—”

“Ah but that’s exactly my point, hmm?” Cheever interrupted. “It’s all a big ‘if’ isn’t it? You know—if you’ll pardon my saying so—jack shit for certain.”

O’Neill felt the muscle in his jaw hinge clench, heard the squeak as his teeth clamped together.

“No sir.”

Cheever nodded. “Well then. I am not prepared to evacuate this facility, causing disruption and no doubt panic—not to mention a world of bad press—solely on the basis of your gut instinct.”

“Sir, surely public safety is—”

“My concern,” Cheever snapped. “And I’ll thank you not to try and tell me how to do my job detective inspector!” He paused, glowering. “If you can provide one iota of hard evidence I’ll act on it. Until then I’d thank you to get out of my command post and stay out of my way!”

O’Neill turned away, Dempsey silently on his heels, and stepped down out of the Portakabin Cheever had commandeered. The door wasn’t quite slammed behind them but it was a close-run thing.

“Bloody tin pot dictator,” Dempsey said sourly once they were outside. He hunched his shoulders. “What now, boss?”

“We find him his bloody evidence,” O’Neill declared. “And make him eat it.”

124

Steve Warwick shouldered his way into the private box with his fist wrapped in Myshka’s hair and his mouth clamped onto hers. As soon as they were inside he groped for the key to click over the lock and backed her roughly against the wall alongside the door. She gasped in pleasured pain. Warwick’s hands dived for the hem of her dress, gathering it up towards her waist.

“Stop!” she commanded, before he could discover for himself if her boast about a lack of underwear was true.

But he stopped anyway. Experience had taught him that Myshka’s games might be cruel, but they were always so satisfying in the end. He let the edge of the dress fall back into line, smoothed his hand across her hipbone and cupped her, not gently, through the material instead.

She gasped again, her eyes bright with a feral excitement he didn’t think he’d ever seen in her before.

Hell, if horseracing turns you on this much, darling, I’ll take you to bloody Ascot every week.

She batted his hand away, drew herself to her full imperious height. “Strip,” she ordered.

Warwick glanced at his watch even as he reached to unknot his tie, his expression wolfish.

“Whatever you have in mind, darling, we’ll have to make it quick,” he said, shrugging out of his suit jacket. “The race will be—”

Myshka moved in closer, pinched his chin between a steely forefinger and thumb. “Silence,” she rapped. “Your clothes—take them off. All of them.”

He fumbled in his haste to comply, but at least still had enough of his wits to hang the jacket on the back of a chair and fold his trousers to avoid creases. No point in making it too obvious what he’d been up to when he got back out there—especially not to Matt.

Myshka strolled over to the big slab of a conference table which stood near the slanted glass front wall of the box. He tried to make a grab for her as she past him, but she jinked her hips out of reach and smacked his hand away again.

“On the table—now,” she said, patting the smooth surface. “Face down.”

He glanced down pointedly at his rapidly growing erection and gave her a lascivious smile. “That might be . . . hard.”

“But I will make it much harder on you, yes,” she promised in the slightly fractured English that zapped straight to his groin. Her voice was so sultry it should have come with a blood pressure warning.

Warwick didn’t wait for a second invitation. He hopped up onto the table and rolled obediently onto his stomach, sucking in a breath at the cold against his flushed skin.

Myshka opened her bag and brought out the suede-thonged whip he knew so well, along with a skein of silk scarves. She deliberately placed the whip close to his head while she fastened the first scarf from the nearest table leg to his wrist, stretching first one arm and then the other out wide.

In moments, it seemed, he was spread-eagled at her mercy. She picked up the whip and stood in front of him, trailing the thongs through her fingers. It was all he could do not to groan out loud.

“You really have been very, very bad boy,” she said solemnly.

I know, I know, so do your wonderful worst, darling. Don’t keep me hanging!

She moved out of his line of sight and he trembled at the fleeting brush of the soft suede along his body from shoulder to calf. Then he heard the warning swish. He just had time to tense before the whip landed across his upper thighs and buttocks and a bellowed cry escaped him at the unaccustomed force of the blow.

“I told you silence!” Myshka hissed and she hit him again—if anything, harder this time.

“Christ, woman! What the devil d’you think you’re playing at?”

He heard her stride across the room and when she returned she had his tie bunched in her hands.

For the first time, a prickle of unease came to him.

“Myshka, what the—?”

But as he opened his mouth to protest she stuffed the balled-up tie inside. It was Hermes and not only would such treatment see it ruined, but she shoved it so deep he started to choke at once. He shook his head angrily, tried to regurgitate the tie without spitting on it too much. What the bloody hell was the mad bitch playing at—today of all days?

“What is matter, darling—not having fun?” she asked, her voice icy. “Maybe it is not so nice having something pushed down throat, yes?”

He snarled his fury behind the gag.

The sudden staccato knock on the door made him jerk in panicked surprise. Suppose it was Matt? Or, worse still, someone from the racecourse?

He heard Myshka’s footsteps again, heading for the door and his protests rose in pitch and volume.

Don’t let anyone in, you stupid bitch. I’ll die of embarrassment, being caught like this.

She opened the door and a man walked in without showing any apparent surprise at what lay before him. With a cold wash of shock Warwick recognised the young thug with the dead-cold eyes who’d scared him so badly that day he met with Grogan out on the Downs.

“You remember Dmitry, of course,” Myshka said.

The young thug stared at him without expression. After a moment he reached inside his jacket and pulled out a long black cylinder which he handed to Myshka.

A throaty murmur of appreciation emerged from between her lips. She flicked her wrist sharply to extend the baton to its full, lethal length and admired it with chillingly sensual delight in her face.

She tried an experimental slash and the air zizzed with the power of this new weapon.

“All this time we are together you think you are big dog, in control,” she mocked. “Now I am big dog, yes?”

For the first time since he’d entered the private box and delivered himself into her hands, Steve Warwick realised he might just have made the biggest mistake of his life.

Or the last one.

125

“Oh Stevie boy, I’m going to make you suffer for this!”

Matthew Lytton uttered the threat under his breath as he stalked the corridors of the main building. He and Warwick should be out in the paddock, mixing with the VIPs, glad-handing and hobnobbing and doing all the rest of the things they’d originally conceived this damned event for in the first place.

But still there was no sign of the man.

Lytton tried Warwick’s cellphone for the twentieth time. Switched off. The answering machine on his home number picked up after half-a-dozen empty rings.

Lytton thrust his own phone back into his inside pocket and let out a fast annoyed breath.

“Something troubling you Mr Lytton?”

Lytton turned to see the cocky DI O’Neill approaching from the direction of the stairwell. With him was a younger man who also had “copper” written all over him.

What the hell are you lot doing here?

“I’m the main sponsor for this event,” Lytton returned with creditable calm. “You’d expect a few hiccups.”

“Anything you’d like to share?”

“No. Anything you’d like to share?” He glanced from one detective to the other, letting annoyance win out over concern. “Why are you here?”

O’Neill pursed his lips for a moment, clearly debating how much to tell him. Lytton saw a twitch of consternation cross the younger detective’s face as if he thought O’Neill might withhold something vital. Lytton waited, not patiently but refusing to be manipulated.

“Big day for you then,” O’Neill said at last. “Where’s your partner—Mr Warwick isn’t it?”

So they were not here to tell him Warwick had been involved in some kind of accident. Lytton’s relief turned back to irritation. Where is he?

“That’s one of the hiccups,” he said, deciding nothing would be gained by evasion. “I’m trying to find him. I suppose he could have been caught in traffic.”

O’Neill pulled a face. “We had no problems on the way down,” he said. “Mind you, DC Dempsey here thinks he’s the next Lewis Hamilton so maybe that might have had something to do with it.”

Lytton stepped in close, getting in O’Neill’s face.

“I’m busy, detective inspector. Get to the point.” He didn’t miss the way the younger guy Dempsey shifted to intervene if he had to.

“Get on all right with your partner do you, Mr Lytton?”

That rocked him back. “Well enough. Why?”

“What about his wife?”

“Yana? I hardly see anything of her. She helps out in the office sometimes—she was giving Veronica a hand to organise the hospitality for this event.”

“They get on?”

Lytton sighed, could tell from O’Neill’s stubborn expression that asking questions of his own was not going to speed things up. “Veronica thought Yana was a little mouse who needed to stand up for herself more. She thought Steve bullied her.”

“Russian, isn’t she? One of these mail-order brides?”

“Russian, Ukrainian—something like that,” he agreed shortly. “I don’t know how they met. Steve was in Russia for a time looking at property deals, trying to cultivate some contacts. When he came back he brought Yana with him.”

“You suspicious about that?”

Lytton gave a short laugh. “Wouldn’t you have been? I thought she was after him for a passport and would be off like a shot as soon as they’d made it legal.”

O’Neill and Dempsey exchanged a look. “Maybe she was after him for more than that.”

“Meaning?”

“You and Mr Warwick have company life insurance on each other don’t you?” O’Neill said. “Quite sizeable sums.”

Lytton shrugged. “Key-man policies are standard business practice for companies like ours with a small number of vital personnel,” he said. “And it’s the company that holds the policies, not us.”

“But not so long ago you upped the payout from half-a-million to ten, I understand. Whose idea was that?”

“Steve’s. He said we should keep up with inflation although I don’t see what the hell business that is of yours,” Lytton snapped. “It’s all perfectly legal.”

“I’ve no doubt,” O’Neill said mildly. He paused and then added in an almost careless tone, “Now your wife is deceased you have no living relatives.”

“No, I—”

“And Mr Warwick?”

“What? He’s an only child—parents died in a car accident years ago.”

“What about his wife’s relatives?”

“Yana? I don’t know,” Lytton muttered. “I think she has family but we’ve never talked about it.”

“You might like to bear in mind sir, that your value to your business associate might have undergone a fundamental shift, shall we say.”

“You’re joking,” Lytton bit out, anger rising out of fear like smoke from fire. But his mind spun away in a hundred different directions. All of them left a cold trail of sickness through his belly. He thought of his smiling cocksure partner, sometimes infuriating but with the charm and the banter.

Not Steve, not . . .

He looked up, met O’Neill’s gaze. “You’re talking like Steve’s going to try and bump me off, for Christ’s sake.”

“In our experience Mr Lytton, most people are killed by people they know—people they’re close to.”

“So you’re telling me what—that I should check the brakes on my car on a regular basis? Get someone in to taste my food?” And he thought suddenly of Kelly Jacks, so convinced she’d been drugged that she’d taken a bag of her own blood for test.

It was uttered with a smile, an attempt to lighten a mood that was oppressive but O’Neill gave him no reassurance in return. “Know anything about explosives do you?”

126

Kelly stuck her head round the restaurant door where Shula was placing cutlery on the tables with all the dexterity of a casino croupier dealing cards.

“Hey Shula, I’ve just been asked to take a tray of coffee and stuff along to a Mr Lytton,” she said with as much casual innocence as she could squeeze into the lie. “Any ideas who he is or where I find him?”

“Ooh, he’s one of the bigwigs. Didn’t you see the signs everywhere? He’s got an office on the next floor down, with the admin people, or he might be in his private box—one of the posh ones they use for conference meetings right at the top.”

“Ah,” Kelly said managing to look sheepish. “They didn’t say and I didn’t ask. Sorry.”

“Never mind. Here, I’ll give you a hand.”

Shula abandoned her table setting and hurried across to the serving area, quickly assembling a tray of cups, saucers, spoons, sugar, cream and a handful of foil-wrapped mints on a plate. She splashed coffee from the filter machine into an insulated cafetière and fastened the lid. Her movements were fast and sure. Almost as an afterthought Shula added a small vase containing a single carnation.

She caught Kelly’s raised eyebrow and grinned at her. “Well he’s a bit of a looker—and he tips all right.”

Kelly picked up the tray, got the balance of it. “Office or private box,” she murmured. She glanced at Shula. “If it was you, where would you try first?”