by Zoe Sharp
Veronica came from a grand family of rapidly declining fortune and though her parents had sniffed and muttered that Lytton “wasn’t quite of our type my dear,” they hadn’t needed tarot cards to see his star was firmly on the rise.
Lytton had come from nothing equipped with no more than an instinct for a deal, a nose for run-down property and the vision to see what it might become. He’d started at the bottom of the building trade and sweated his way up through almost every discipline. Now he had the hands-on expertise to turn that vision into profitable reality.
Veronica supplied class and she did it in spades.
Still their marriage had been more a business partnership than anything else—more so over the last decade. She played lady of the manor here while he spent more time at the London apartment. They’d even talked vaguely of divorce although just as there was nothing holding them together equally there was nothing in particular driving them apart.
He never asked if she’d taken lovers but assumed she had. She’d certainly been discreet. And the two of them still rubbed along all right—still talked, discussed and debated. Perhaps their separate lives had helped give them plenty to say to one another.
But even now he couldn’t find it in him to grieve openly for her as anything other than a vague acquaintance. The knowledge unsettled him.
He wondered if there was anyone else out there, beyond her parents, for whom she meant more.
Lytton had allowed his in-laws to take charge of the funeral arrangements with relief, but also knowing they probably needed the comfort of ritual. Nobody expects to outlive their only child.
He looked again at the wedding portrait as if it showed a pair of strangers. Viewed with a dispassionate eye it had some artistic merit he supposed. A black and white image lightly tinted by the photographic studio. And the frame was heavy and hallmarked if not to his taste.
He hesitated a moment then turned the picture over and removed the back. The frame could be sent to some charity organisation—the inimitable Mrs P would see to it—but the photo inside? He found himself undecided whether to keep it as a memento or throw it away.
Behind him on the far side of the room the door opened after a perfunctory knock. Annoyed, Lytton swung away from the window in time to see Steve Warwick stroll into the room.
If his business partner was not exactly the last person he wanted to see right now he was pretty high up on the list.
“It’s quite all right Mrs P,” Warwick was saying breezily over his shoulder. “He’s expecting me.”
“No I’m not, Steve,” Lytton said. “Go away.”
But Warwick had already closed the door firmly behind him, leaving the flustered housekeeper on the outside. Now he paused and was regarding him with a half-smile playing at the corners of his mouth.
Warwick was a few inches shorter than Lytton. He had a fulsome stockiness that belied his flair and determination on the squash court. Left to his own devices Warwick made business decisions with the same reckless abandon. Maybe that explained why he’d been weeks from bankruptcy when Lytton had bought out the major share of his property development company more than a decade ago. Lytton had mistakenly assumed gratitude would temper his partner’s impulsive nature.
“You want me to leave you to wallow in your grief? Oh, please, this is me you’re talking to. Spare me the theatrics at least,” Warwick taunted, once again damning that hope. He shook his head. “My friend you look like shit.”
“Were you expecting to find me in celebratory mood?”
Warwick laughed. He laughed easily—sometimes too easily at the expense of others. His were classic English blond, bland, blue-eyed good looks coupled to a public school drawl. Warwick often made Lytton feel like a rough-arsed gypsy by comparison—albeit scrubbed up and on his way to the dock.
Warwick came forwards pursing his lips as he gave the quiet book-lined study a cursory inspection. “I can never understand why with all this space you choose to hide yourself away back here,” he said. Another flashing grin. At least Warwick didn’t have typically English teeth. “Unless you let the lady Veronica beat you to the decent rooms of course.”
“You know as well as I do that I’m hardly ever here.” Lytton turned back to the window. The woman was still talking on her cellphone. She seemed somehow familiar.
Kel, the black kid had called her. Kel short for Kelly? Hmm, Kelly . . . He could swear he knew the face but couldn’t place it. Why hadn’t he asked her full name? “I like to see the comings and goings.”
It had been Veronica who’d favoured the pomp and grandeur of a central room at the front of the house above the imposing entrance hall. There she could survey her domain oblivious to what was going on behind her.
Lytton wanted his finger on the pulse. Otherwise you found yourself robbed blind by people who blamed you for not catching them sooner when the company went to the wall.
He prided himself that he’d never lost his grip even if he’d come close to it today—with a cleaner of all people. A moment’s sympathy, empathy—like she knew what it was to lose someone—and he’d almost let her see the truth.
That he didn’t give a damn.
Lytton wasn’t sure how he would have explained if she’d chosen to call him on it, that he’d stopped loving his wife a long time ago. The feeling had been entirely mutual.
“Specialist cleaners? My God that’s a little on the vulgar side isn’t it?” Warwick spoke at his elbow, peering down at the white van below. “I’d no idea such people existed. How very American.”
Lytton’s jaw tightened. “You’d rather I’d asked Mrs P to sweep up the pieces of my wife’s skull, wrap them in newspaper like broken glass and put them in the dustbin with the potato peelings and the remains of last night’s supper?”
Even Warwick flushed at that. “Hardly. But we can’t afford for this to get out Matt, can we? Now especially—when the Big One is so close.”
He didn’t need to be more specific. The Big One in question was the Lytton-Warwick Cup—although Lytton wanted to change this to the Lytton-Warwick Memorial Cup since Veronica had put so much work into the arrangements. It was a horse race on the flat over a mile and four furlongs with a purse to rival the classics. The company’s first foray into corporate sponsorship, designed to give them maximum kudos with the type of people Veronica’s parents really would consider social equals.
“I’m assured they’re very discreet.” Lytton said now, nodding to the cleaners’ van.
“Hmm, were you assured they were very industrious too?” Warwick asked still looking downwards. “If so, I might ask for a discount if I were you.”
“There’s some kind of procedural hold-up apparently.”
“Oh?” That got his partner’s attention. “Problem?”
Lytton shook his head. “As far as I’m aware it’s just a delay.” It better had be.
“Matt, delays mean questions. The wrong kind of questions,” Warwick said with anxiety bleeding through his voice. “We need for this to be put to bed and fast. And if those comedians out there can’t do it—”
The strident buzz of his cellphone cut Warwick off in mid-sentence. He fumbled in an inside pocket, eyes still fixed on Lytton’s and flipped the phone open without checking the incoming number.
“Warwick.”
Lytton saw the way his head ducked sharply and didn’t need telling who was on the other end of the line.
“Darling,” Warwick ground out, the tone as much threat as endearment, “I’ve told you not to bother me while I’m working.”
He whirled away, began to pace. Lytton tuned it out. He’d heard Warwick and his second wife having too many domestics to willingly eavesdrop on another. He turned back to the window and stared down into the courtyard again.
This time the van’s front seats were empty and he saw the two cleaners, re-suited, collecting gear from the back. Whoever it was from, that phone call was good news as far as he was concerned.
Unconsciously his
shoulders came down a fraction.
The worst, he thought, might soon be over.
4
“I’ll be home when I damned well please!” Steve Warwick snapped into his cellphone and stabbed a thumb onto the End Call button with triumphant savagery.
“Why did you marry that poor girl if you despise her so much?” Lytton asked over his shoulder, not moving away from that damned window like he was glued to the view.
“Who says I despise Yana?” Warwick said easily, tucking the phone away again. He flung himself down into one of the deep-buttoned burgundy leather Chesterfields, draping an arm along the back.
“Be careful with her, Steve,” Lytton warned. “You can’t afford to pay off another one.”
“Yana and I understand each other perfectly. The advantages of marrying a poor girl from the Eastern Bloc.” He gave a wolfish grin. “She was brought up in a culture that accepts a man has his appetites and believes it’s a wife’s duty to cater to her husband’s every whim. And I mean every whim.”
Lytton didn’t smile in return. “She’s not living in the nineteenth century—she’s here and now,” he said. “In a culture where they have anonymous helplines for abused spouses and muckraking tabloid journalists. So, be careful.”
Prig, Warwick thought, even as he flashed his teeth. You and that cold-hearted bitch you married deserved each other. “You gave Veronica too much free rein my friend,” he said lazily instead. And look where that ended.
“I hardly think you’re in any position to lecture me on how I treated my wife,” Lytton said, glacial. He turned fully into the room so the light was behind him and Warwick couldn’t see his face for shadow. Without expression, his partner’s voice seemed cooler. “Tell me, does Yana know about your mistress—the one you’re planning to visit on your way back to town?”
How the hell do you know that?
But despite his momentary surprise Warwick laughed, automatically smoothing down his green silk tie. “Mistress is such an old-fashioned word don’t you think?” he asked reflectively, crossing his legs and letting his foot swing. “And you’d be surprised. Yana knows everything I get up to without me having to tell her. You may not think it to look at her but she’s a very broad-minded girl.”
Lytton continued to stare at him for a moment without comment then turned back to the window. “Just don’t let it interfere with the job.”
“It won’t,” he assured.
And by the time it does, my friend you won’t be in a position to do a damn thing about it.
5
“You really should get someone in to handle the books for you Ray. Then you wouldn’t have to work late.”
Ray McCarron’s head jerked up from the quarterly accounts to see Kelly Jacks standing in the office doorway with her hands in her pockets.
She was in her civvies—old cargo trousers and a skinny T-shirt that showed a sliver of taut belly between the two. McCarron tried to avoid a wince. His daughter Allison was less than half Kelly’s age and he wouldn’t want her going out at night dressed like that.
Mind you, Allison didn’t have the same kind of self-possession. There was something about Kelly that made trouble step off the kerb and go round her.
“Had a bookkeeper once. Made the mistake of marrying her. When it came to the divorce she knew what I was worth better than I did,” McCarron said sourly. “Of course, it would help if I could read anything off the petty cash chits you lot put in.” He sifted through another sheaf of paperwork. “It’s like working with a bunch of retarded doctors trying to decipher this scrawl. I swear Les writes in Mandarin Chinese half the time.”
“Yeah well,” she mocked, “they weren’t still teaching copperplate when we were at school.”
“More’s the pity.” He leaned back in his chair, letting it rock, and regarded her over the top of his reading glasses as she headed across to the small window. There was a tension in her he saw, a restlessness he recognised of old. “Lytton job put to bed is it?” he asked, his voice casual.
She swung away from the window as if changing her mind at the last moment, hesitated then gave a shrug. “It’s done if that’s what you mean. Whether it should have been or not is another story,” she said. “I tried to call your cellphone when I was on the way back. Leave it in your car again?”
“Aye, probably,” he admitted cheerfully. “It’s the only way to get a bit of peace.” He paused. “But it went all right in the end?”
She fidgeted with the papers on the corner of his desk, her concentration apparently consumed with aligning the edges. “All he has to do now is replace a few busted tiles and no-one will ever know.”
McCarron sighed at the bitterness in her tone. “Look Kel, I had a gander at the pictures you sent over and I made some calls,” he said gently. “Several in fact. And I was told in no uncertain terms that I’m not on the job anymore and to wind me neck in.”
Her lips twisted into a brief smile at that. She looked about to speak but stayed silent, pacing around the room. On the far wall was a line of framed photographs. She began straightening them even though McCarron kept them spirit-levelled anyway.
One showed his younger slimmer self, spit-polished in full dress uniform, frozen in the act of shaking hands with some long-retired long-forgotten chief constable who was presenting him with some equally long-forgotten award. Kelly’s eye seemed drawn there longest.
“I looked out the details again,” McCarron said. He twisted to face his computer and peered at the screen. “Veronica Lytton. Suicide. Found fully clothed in the bath with one of her husband’s guns—an RPA Interceptor if you’re interested—alongside her. Fatal gunshot to the head. No other visible trauma. No note, but her fingerprints on the weapon and discharge residue on her hands and clothing. Alone in the house with no sign of forced entry. Husband out of the country. Scene officially released this morning.” He sat up and removed his glasses flinging them onto the desktop. “Far as the police are concerned it’s an open-and-shut case. With the emphasis on shut.”
“Doesn’t make it right though,” Kelly said.
McCarron sighed again, pulled open his desk drawer and brought out a bottle of vodka—the good stuff. There was a jam jar on the desk holding a letter opener and a collection of pens. He tipped out the contents, gave the jar a cursory wipe and poured slugs into that and his empty coffee mug.
“Aye well sometimes this job stinks Kelly love,” he said handing over the jar. “In more ways than the obvious.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” she murmured. They touched rims and sipped in companionable silence.
The office was small, tucked away on the upper floor above the garaging for the vans. No way could he afford to leave them parked on the street overnight. He’d tried it briefly when the business was starting out. The signwriting proved an irresistible attraction for every local toerag with a ghoulish sense of curiosity. After the fifth smashed side-window in so many weeks he’d bitten the bullet and rented somewhere secure.
The loft space above the garaging had seemed an extravagance at the time but as the company had taken off he’d gradually expanded into it. A bit of studding and a dash of plaster and it was now a neat layout of storerooms and offices. He kept a posh executive lair of his own right next door to this one. It was spotless and Spartan with a stainless steel desk that resembled a mortuary table—possibly because that’s what it had once been.
That office presented the kind of clean, uncluttered, efficient workspace that clients expected and admired but McCarron found it impossible to get anything done there. So he hid himself away in this untidy little bolt-hole and only nipped through the connecting door when clients had been buzzed in and were on their way up.
He felt more at home this side of the door. The office was cramped and messy but it was reasonably clean. There was even a scuffed sofa that he’d frequently kipped down on when the working day stretched into the working night, when the business was on the way up and his marriage was on the way d
own like the two facts were on opposite ends of a seesaw.
Kelly sank onto the sofa now, leaned her head back and shut her eyes. She cradled her vodka almost untouched in her lap having taken no more than a taste. And that, McCarron knew was just to be sociable. These days Kelly was careful to the point of paranoia about what she allowed into her system.
Can’t blame her for that I suppose.
He’d never known her go out simply for her own enjoyment, to let her hair down. In fact she didn’t seem to have any friends outside work—something that had cost her dear in the past, he knew.
Sitting there as close to relaxed as she ever got, McCarron thought she seemed young and frail—both of which he knew were just an illusion. But she also looked tired, he realised. The kind of tired that comes from stress as much as physical labour.