Текст книги "The Blood Whisperer"

Автор книги: Zoë Sharp

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Текущая страница: 31 (всего у книги 34 страниц)

157

Frank Allardice was having a late supper at Heathrow when his cellphone rang. He’d spent an agonising afternoon and evening waiting for a standby seat that never materialised before finally succumbing to airport food.

He fished the phone out of his pocket and flipped it open, still shovelling overpriced shepherd’s pie into his mouth.

“Yeah?”

“Frank? Where are you?”

As soon as he recognised Vince O’Neill’s voice Allardice thought about lying. Then the public address started squawking about passengers not leaving baggage unattended and that idea was well and truly buggered.

He chewed and swallowed. “At Heathrow, sampling their culinary delights—although ‘delights’ is perhaps putting it a bit strong,” he said easily. “What can I do for you Vince?”

“We picked up Kelly Jacks this afternoon,” he said. “Thought you’d like to know, seeing as you had such a special interest.”

Shit! What do you know?

“Good job,” Allardice said. “Knew you’d get her in the end. Any . . . trouble?”

“You haven’t been watching the news have you?” O’Neill said, amusement in his voice. “Guy got beaten to death at a racecourse, a woman fell from the stands and we found enough explosives to blow the place sky high.”

Allardice whistled, hoped it sounded convincing as surprise. “And Jacks was involved in all that? She’s gone up in the world.”

“Nearly did—she was in the stands at the time,” O’Neill said.

He paused and Allardice had to force himself not to jump into the silence like a guilty man. At the next table a fractious family were scarfing down chips with everything, surrounded by enough carry-on luggage to outfit a small town. Allardice hoped they were not on his flight—when he eventually got one.

“So pat-on-the-back time from old man Quinlan,” he said at last. “Feather in his cap to have Jacks safely under lock and key before he hangs up his spurs eh?” He was suddenly aware that he was using one cliché after another but O’Neill didn’t seem to notice.

“Yeah . . . listen Frank, I was hoping to be able to deal with Jacks quietly but with everything that’s happened, well, it’s all going to have to go by the book. We’ve been giving her the third degree and I have to tell you that your name keeps coming up.”

Allardice felt his heart suddenly start to punch against the inside of his ribs. “Stands to reason,” he said gruffly. “I put her away last time. You’d expect her to hold a grudge.”

“Hmm, but it’s getting harder to keep a lid on things and I’m sure the last thing you want is to end up helping us with our enquiries.” O’Neill sighed. “I would have thought there’s sod all we can prove after all this time but I just wanted to give you a heads up. It’s opening a bit of a can of worms to be honest.”

Allardice put his fork down slowly. “Thanks Vince,” he said. “I mean, obviously there’s nothing in what she says but I appreciate the warning.”

“No sweat,” O’Neill said. “I’ll do my best to minimise the damage, shall we say?”

“Yeah,” Allardice said. “Thanks again. I owe you.”

O’Neill’s laugh was jarring. “And I’ll collect—you can be sure of that. You can show me the sights next time I grab a cheap last-minute package to Spain.”

Allardice tried to put the uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach down to the shepherd’s pie but he forced a cheerful note into his voice.

“The beer’s on me, old son,” he said. “Definitely.”

158

“He’s on the move!”

DC Dempsey followed former DCI Allardice’s progress through the airport on a series of CCTV monitors. He was in the security control room at Heathrow surrounded by more surveillance equipment than he’d ever seen in his life.

The camera operators were slick he had to admit. They kept track of Allardice as he moved from one zone to another, always overlapping. Dempsey was amazed anybody managed to get away with anything.

Half of him was a little freaked out by it all and the other half was bubbling with suppressed excitement. The kind of thrill you only get when you’re closing in on a target and he has no idea whatsoever that he’s been rumbled.

“He’s heading for the payphones,” his liaison officer said. A youngish guy, thickset and purposeful.

“Can you move your people in close enough to hear anything?”

The liaison grinned at him. It would have been smug had he not been young enough to be buzzed by the job. “Better than that,” he said. “Bill, give me audio and filter out whatever background chatter you can.”

The camera zoomed in unobtrusively to show Allardice looking around, all casual, before he picked up the receiver and dialled.

“Hello? You know who this is . . . I’m on my way back to sunny Spain mate. Job’s done. Looks like we can rely on young Vince to put it to bed all neat and tidy . . . Yeah well, you owe me—big time—and I’m like a bloody elephant. I never forget to collect on my debts . . . Yeah, cash is always ‘acceptable’ mate. You know where to find me.”

He put the phone down, looked around again and wiped his hand on the leg of his trousers before striding away.

“Sweating about it, weren’t you Frank?” Dempsey murmured.

“They’re calling his flight,” the liaison said. “Do you want an intercept?”

Dempsey shook his head. “Watching brief only—them’s my orders.”

The liaison grinned again. “Well the Spanish authorities are a lot more amenable about extradition these days aren’t they?”

“Too right.”

One of the techs—the guy called Bill—broke off from his computer keyboard long enough to scrawl something on a pad and rip off the sheet, handing it across. “That’s the number your man called. You should be able to trace it easily enough.”

Dempsey read the digits and hoped his eyes hadn’t bulged as much as it felt they had.

“Oh yeah,” he said. “We’ll trace that one. No problem.”

159

Matthew Lytton stood by the open window of the room that had once been his study and stared down into the rear courtyard where a large white van stood parked.

This time there was no crime-scene cleaning logo on the side of it, no Tyvek-clad figures reclining in the front seat. And no Steve Warwick about to stroll breezily through the door behind him.

Instead, the van belonged to a local catering company. He could see the serving staff in their uniforms unloading trays, stacks of tablecloths and crates of glasses from the rear. Just for a second his imagination painted one of them into a slight figure with choppy black hair and a loose-limbed stride. The illusion ballooned and then burst as soon as the girl turned in his direction.

It wasn’t Kelly Jacks.

Lytton sighed. “No,” he muttered under his breath, “I guess you have no reason to be coming back here.”

Considering he hardly wished to be here himself, he couldn’t blame Kelly for that.

In his hand was a cup of coffee and he lifted it to take a sip, checking his watch as he did so.

By this time tomorrow, it will all be over.

It was a month after the Lytton-Warwick Cup. A month since the death of Steve Warwick and Yana—or Myshka, or whatever the hell she was called.

And a month since he had last seen Kelly.

Tomorrow morning was the memorial service for Vee. Her parents had pushed for the service in the church of the local village, on the spurious grounds that it dated back to Saxon times and therefore had some kind of worthy pedigree. Lytton failed to see quite what that had to do with anything, except perhaps to subtly remind him of his own lack of breeding.

Having a memorial service at all was at his in-laws’ request, although ‘insistence’ might have been a better word. But Lytton had not argued against it. Perhaps now it had emerged that Veronica did not, after all, take her own life they felt the need for some kind of public vindication.

Nor had he objected to footing the cost, which they had automatically expected of him. And when he glanced over the sizeable guest list and found he recognised very few names, he hadn’t raised objections about that either.

Some of those travelling from further afield would begin arriving that afternoon, ahead of tomorrow’s performance—there was hardly another word to describe it. His mother-in-law had pointed out it was silly for them to cram themselves into local B&Bs—there were no suitable large hotels close by—when the house itself had a surplus of rooms standing empty. Lytton had agreed on the basis that she organised it. It was only habit that made him oversee the details before he paid the bills.

The result was that he felt somewhat detached from the whole exercise as if he was the manager of the venue rather than an active participant.

After all, Vee’s body had already been laid to rest. He’d said his goodbyes, made his peace, and played a small but not insignificant role in uncovering her killer.

What else was there?

A gust of wind chicaned through the open window and nipped at the fabric of Lytton’s shirt. It was getting colder, he realised. Autumn had crept up when he wasn’t looking and soon it would be winter. Before long the stores would be putting up Christmas lights and advertising late-night shopping, and then the winter sun getaway advertising would start.

“Maybe it is time for that holiday,” he wondered aloud.

There was nothing to stop him going, except a lingering sense of waiting.

Waiting for Kelly.

As for the rest of it, that was getting sorted, slowly enough. The insurance company was stalling paying out on the key-man policy on Steve Warwick until the criminal investigations were complete. They had been clearly suspicious of Lytton’s own possible involvement too. But considering Yana had also had a bloody good go at adding him to the body count, his legal team were confident they would settle. It was only a matter of time.

The inaugural Lytton-Warwick Cup had not exactly gone according to plan, but it had certainly gained so much publicity—good and bad—that next year was a done deal. The TV people had already signed up, although Lytton had told them in a dry tone that he couldn’t promise peripheral events would be quite so . . . exciting in future.

And he’d changed the name slightly. Calling it the Lytton-Warwick Memorial Cup now seemed doubly appropriate.

The police had finished questioning him weeks ago, the business had been put into a holding pattern and the country house was already half packed up and on the market. He had an exclusive and very private resort in the Bahamas all picked out for his own personal getaway.

All he hadn’t been able to bring himself to do was get on a plane.

Lytton stepped back from the window and swallowed the last of his coffee, placing the empty cup down on the desktop. His broadsheet daily was still spread across the surface and his eyes slid again to the news item on Kelly Jacks.

In the days immediately following events at the racecourse Kelly’s face had been plastered all over the front pages. They’d vilified her unchecked as some kind of psychotic rampage killer. Over the weeks that followed she had been tried, convicted and practically crucified in the press all over again.

Lytton had learned that Kelly was being held on remand at Holloway prison but so far she had refused all his requests to see her. Lytton had tried to arrange to pay whatever bail amount was necessary to get out, only to learn she hadn’t asked for bail to be granted in the first place.

And now, today, when he should be giving all his thoughts to the memory of his dead wife and to his imminent guests, Lytton found himself distracted by the image of a small slim woman with wary eyes the colour of good aged brandy. He remembered watching with his heart in his open mouth while she effortlessly scaled the outside wall of the house near Battersea Park, then transformed herself in the lavender dress and jacket for lunch at the racecourse.

He thought of her fierce determination throughout to prove her own innocence. And he wondered exactly when, where and why that fire had gone out of her.

160

Kelly Jacks walked along an all but deserted beach of pale yellow sand, watching as a stately Mediterranean sun winched itself out of the sea to the east, ready for another day.

She wore a skinny top and shorts and carried her sandals so she could walk up to her ankles in the surf where the water felt warm as a Jacuzzi. After only a couple of days her skin had lost its prison pallor and taken on a healthier glow.

Since her arrival here she had eaten seafood so fresh it practically still wriggled, swum, snorkelled and slept like the dead. All the esses, she thought idly.

And if certain faces still haunted her, at least they’d stopped crying through her dreams.

She felt rested, yes, but not yet relaxed.

Not yet.

Further offshore the swell was languid, the water therapeutic as it came and went on the beach, dragging the sand oozing from beneath her heels and between her toes. It would be so easy to stay here, where nobody knew her, to burrow in and hope the rest of the world would forget about her too.

Kelly gave a snort of self-derision. “Yeah, like that’s going to happen.”

She veered away from the water’s edge, trudging through the softer sand and bypassing the serried rows of empty sun loungers with their folded parasols. She headed towards the pretty little promenade with its cafés and bars. Some were already preparing to open for breakfast and the smell of cooking drifted evocatively on the morning air.

She climbed the half-dozen concrete steps and padded still barefoot towards the table of the nearest, where a man sat reading an English newspaper. He was wearing sunglasses and a pale shirt with the sleeves rolled up to reveal a pink explosion of freckles.

“I hope you’ve put sunblock on today,” Kelly observed as she took the seat opposite. “Otherwise they’ll be able to fry eggs on you.”

Detective Constable Ian Dempsey lowered the paper and inspected his scorched arms with a slightly sheepish expression.

“Factor fifty.” He lifted the sunglasses, wincing as the true extent of his sunburn became apparent to him.

Kelly glanced at the headline on the newspaper he’d put aside. Finally, some other disaster had relegated her to the inside pages.

“Maybe the furore has actually begun to die down,” she said without much conviction.

“At least until you get home,” Dempsey reminded her with a cheerful lack of tact. He reached for his cellphone, which lay face up on the table and waggled it at her. “Just had the call, by the way. You ready?”

She slid her feet into her sandals and rose. “I’ve been ready for six years.”

He flushed a little at that. “Um, look Kelly, you are going to let the locals handle things, aren’t you?” he said. He fumbled through the unfamiliar coinage to pay for his coffee, not quite meeting her eye. “I mean, if I’m here as a courtesy then you’re here ’cos somebody much higher up the food chain than me did some serious arm twisting. I don’t want to have to explain, through an interpreter, how justified you were in kicking this bloke’s bollocks into his throat.”

“I’ll be good,” she promised meekly.

He shot her a quick look as if suspecting derision. Then he shook his head and smiled.

“To be quite honest, I wouldn’t blame you if you did let him have it,” he admitted. “But I didn’t say that, of course.”

“Of course.”

Together they strolled along the street, stopping occasionally to read the menu boards. Kelly tried to behave casually, as if their eventual choice was entirely random. The rapid thunder of her heart made it hard to swallow.

They loitered a moment longer, then Dempsey murmured, “Shall we?” and they walked into the dim interior.

Inside, the bar was a mix of old English polished wood and splashes of local decoration, terracotta and brass. A surprisingly successful blend of two cultures that really should not have worked but somehow blended smoothly. Ceiling fans turned lazily to keep the temperature cool and pleasant as a temptation to wander in out of the pre-noon heat and stay late into the evening.

This early, though, the place was empty except for three men sitting at a table in the back. As soon as he saw them enter, one of the men got to his feet and came forward to greet them.

“We’re not quite ready to serve breakfast yet, folks,” the man said, “but can I get you coffees or a . . .” As soon as he got his first good look at the pair of them his voice shrivelled into silence.

“Hello Mr Allardice,” Kelly said in a deadly soft tone. “Remember me?”

Former Detective Chief Inspector Frank Allardice was not a stupid man. He had recognised her instantly and, having done so, it only took another moment for him to size up Ian Dempsey and make him for a copper, even burnt Brit red and in his civvies.

He had too much bottle to actually run, but Allardice shoved past the pair of them and made for the street at a brisk walk. The snarl on his face as he went dared them not to get in his way. Dempsey stepped aside and let him go.

The two men at the back of the bar were on their feet by then. The first watched Allardice make his exit and then he did run, tearing out through the rear kitchen in a flash. The last man hesitated only for a second. His eyes made fleeting contact with Kelly’s before he was sprinting too.

And if the first man was only vaguely familiar she would have known the other anywhere.

Detective Inspector Vincent O’Neill.

“Fleeing at the first sign of customers, eh?” Dempsey shook his head in mock dismay. “Now that’s no way to run a business.”

Outside there was a burst of noise—harsh shouts in Spanish and swearing in English, followed by scuffling feet and the solid thuds of subduing blows. Kelly listened, hoping for more, but it seemed the fugitives submitted with disappointing speed.

Members of the Cuerpo Nacional de Policía poured in through both front and rear entrances, hustling their three handcuffed prisoners before them like they were running bulls.

The tall slim officer who seemed to be in charge shook hands with Dempsey and the two began a brief conversation that was largely conducted in gestures and pidgin.

Kelly edged quietly around the group of cops until she was only a metre or two away from the prisoners. Allardice glared at her with all the arrogance she remembered so well from interrogation. But she saw the sweat on his forehead begin to dribble at his temples, and knew he was seriously afraid. It was only the presence of his fellow detainees that gave him any remaining spine. Like he could take it, just so long as he wasn’t taking it alone.

Her eyes passed to Vince O’Neill. He returned the stare impassively for a moment before offering a wry smile.

“Nice to see you off remand, Kelly,” he said. “Although if you hadn’t been so stubborn Matthew Lytton would have stood bail for you weeks ago.”

Kelly shrugged to hide her pleasure and surprise. “It gave me time to think,” she said, “about the massive civil action I’m going to bring for wrongful arrest, conviction, and imprisonment.”

At that the third man’s head snapped up. His gaze swivelled between Allardice and O’Neill as if trying to work out which of them had sold him out fastest.

“Look,” he began, trying in vain to catch the eye of any Spanish officer who might possess half a dozen words of English. “I don’t know what’s going on here, but I’ve just retired from a very high-ranking job with the British police, and I’m merely visiting two old friends . . .”

But then the lead Spanish officer finally understood what Dempsey had been trying explain, mostly via the medium of mime.

“Ah, si!” the man cried, a huge grin appearing from beneath his generous moustache. He pointed at Vince O’Neill and said, “Clandestino, eh?” and then rattled off orders to his men.

They broke into wide answering smiles. The one standing nearest to O’Neill quickly undid the cuffs, offered him an apologetic shrug.

Kelly watched the realisation grow in the third man’s eyes, that this was no random event but more of a carefully orchestrated operation. That his reputation, his pension and his marriage were about to go to hell and all his dirty little secrets were going to be spread across the tabloids like intestines across a butcher’s slab.

After a few moments she turned away without speaking. There was nothing she wished to say to the man who had engineered her ruin and now would be the instrument of her redemption.

O’Neill nodded his thanks to the Spanish cop, then jerked his head to Dempsey. “Nice work, Ian,” he said. “Your collar, I think.”

Kelly thought Dempsey flushed with pride, but it could have been the sunburn. He stepped forward.

“Ex-Chief Superintendent John Quinlan,” he said in a calm and steady voice. “I am arresting you for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice . . .”