by Zoe Sharp
Allison had recently had her nose pierced just the same as Kelly and he resisted the urge to ask what happened when she got a cold.
After a few moments he set down his mug, cocked his head on one side and said, “Want to tell me about it?”
Kelly didn’t open her eyes. “Old ghosts,” she said simply.
“Should’ve thought about that,” he said, gruff. “Sorry Kel. Never crossed my mind … ” He shrugged. “Sorry. Saw the upmarket postcode and wanted my best team on it that’s all.”
“Flatterer.” She lifted her head, shook it like a dog out of water. “Don’t worry about it Ray. Not your problem.” But the smile she’d intended to be reassuring came out wan instead. “I just walked in there and knew the scene had been staged—and you know as well as I do that it bloody was—and it . . . brought it all back.”
McCarron tensed. “All of it?”
“Well.” She lifted a shoulder, gently swirled the colourless liquid round the inside of the jar without meeting his eyes. “As much of it as I ever remember.”
“I’m sorry love but it’ll do you no good trying to force it.” Even as he spoke he was aware of the hollow emptiness of words. “It’s a done deal. You’ve just got to move on with your life.”
For a moment he thought she was going to say more—maybe even confide in him. Instead she glanced up, eyes glinting.
“Yes Mum,” she said and stuck her tongue out.
McCarron didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed. “Well, at least you haven’t had that pierced yet, I’m glad to see.”
6
“Tell me!” the voice commanded. “Tell me everything!”
As the lash sizzled across his exposed flesh Steve Warwick flinched in pain. He’d sworn that this time he’d take the beating without a sound, like a man, but a traitorous groan forced out past his whitened lips.
His hands were tied over his head to one of the low-slung roof beams. He twisted against the restraint cursing silently but there was no give in the mounting. And although the material itself was soft enough not to mark him it had so far resisted all his frantic efforts to tear himself free.
Blindfolded as well as bound, he strained for every reassuring noise above the hammering of his heart. His tormentor circled with slow footsteps, a deliberate measured pace on the bare wooden floor and he cringed deep inside waiting for the next blow. A hot flood of humiliation had started low in his belly and was creeping outwards. Standing at full stretch like this, naked and vulnerable, he was completely at their mercy.
“I don’t know anything,” he pleaded breathless. “How many more times—”
“Liar!” The woman’s voice cracked out synchronised with the whip and he jerked again. She struck harder this time and his groan mutated into a shocked howl, outrage and pain in equal measure.
The woman laughed. A throaty, husky purr of sound. “You are being very bad boy,” she admonished, her voice tinted with the seductive Russian accent of her birthplace. “You are—how you say?—holding out on me because you know I shall punish you, yes?”
“No! I—”
The whip landed again curling dangerously around his thigh and eliciting a strangled yelp this time. “For God’s sake be careful Myshka!” Warwick snapped. “I’ve a squash tournament this weekend. Not where it will show!”
“Do not presume. To tell. Me. What. To. Do!” The woman punctuated each shouted word with further brutal strokes while he yelled and gasped and shuddered in exquisite agony until his legs buckled and he dangled sweat-soaked from the beam, chest heaving, utterly unable to speak.
She leaned in close enough for her distinctive musky perfume to tantalise his nostrils and whispered against his ear. “You think I am some slut to be ordered around, yes? You think I am like your pathetic excuse for a wife?”
“N-no,” he managed, still panting as he struggled to get his feet under him again and wincing from the fresh weals that laced across his back and buttocks.
Without warning, she stripped the blindfold from his eyes. Warwick screwed them up against the sudden light. It took a few moments before he could squint past his own eyelids.
The fantasy subsided revealing the neat bare bedroom of the top-floor rented flat in Harrow, with its stripped pine floorboards, sturdy exposed beams and conveniently empty office space beneath. The room was dominated by the huge bed with all-white linen and old-fashioned brass bedstead.
Myshka had stepped back and was watching his recovery through narrowed eyes, still fingering the suede-thonged whip longingly. It stung like a bastard but left no lasting scars and damn if she didn’t know how to use it to maximum effect. The best he’d ever had. And having taken the traditional path through the British upper-class educational system Warwick could speak from considerable personal experience.
Myshka herself was a well-endowed brunette, her hair a long gleaming collection of shades from polished oak to copper. He’d always had a weakness for Eastern European girls with their mottled English and exotic beauty. And Myshka knew how to dress to make the most of what she had.
Tonight she was wearing a tightly belted raincoat over long glossy leather boots. The little bitch did that just to tease him he was sure—not letting him see the rest until she was good and ready.
He wriggled his fingers experimentally to return the blood-flow but Myshka made no immediate move to release him. He eyed her impatiently.
“Come on darling let me down,” he said aiming one of his killer smiles. “If you don’t give me a couple of minutes’ rest you won’t be getting your reward tonight.”
Myshka pouted and for a moment he thought she was going to refuse. Then she stepped forwards and reached up to unhook his hands, rubbing her body deliberately against his as she did so.
“You promised to tell me all about Matthew’s poor dead wife,” she breathed into his mouth. “Did you see her body? What was it like? Was there lot of blood?”
Warwick pulled a face at this last question, pushing her away far enough to deal with his bonds. “Sorry to disappoint you darling but it was all over by the time I got there. Well almost all over, anyway.”
Myshka’s fingers froze on the knots. “Almost?”
“Yeah, Matt called in some specialist cleaning firm to deal with the mess. They tried to tell him it wasn’t suicide.” His eyes were on the swell of her breasts beyond the tightly wrapped raincoat. “You ask me it was just a scam to try to squeeze more money out of him.”
She finished untying his wrists and Warwick hauled her against the length of him rough enough to make her gasp. As his hands groped her backside he could feel the outline of stocking tops and suspenders under the thin material of the coat. He yanked greedily at the belt.
Maybe this is your lucky night darling and I won’t need a couple of minutes’ rest after all.
“Did it work?” Myshka asked.
“Oh yeah, I’d say so,” he muttered engrossed in his task.
“Pay attention!” She fisted a hand in his hair to drag his head back. “Did he believe them—that she did not kill herself?”
“Ow! Yes, no, I don’t know!” he protested, too surprised to be angry yet. “When I got there everything had ground to a halt while they consulted higher authority. Whoever it was must have told them to stop pratting about though. By the time I left they were hard at it. Matt says they’ve got the place nearly good as new.”
Myshka turned her grip into a caress. “Maybe I should ask them to clean up here when I am done with you, yes?” she suggested. “Who were they?”
“McSomebody-or-other, I think. McCarron—that was it. Big white vans with Specialist Cleaning Services on the side. Can’t be many of those in the phone book,” Warwick said with the beginnings of irritation in his voice. “I wasn’t paying attention. For God’s sake—Matt will have the details if you’re really so desperate to know.”
Then with a grunt of triumph he yanked the belt apart and spread the coat wide. Under it she was naked apart from a le
ather suspender belt and fishnet stockings, her body hair shaved to a minimum. His eyes ran hotly over her perfect pale body, hands following. He wasn’t gentle but she never seemed to want him to be.
She stood quietly accepting of his touch and smiled at him. A beautiful woman who became breathtaking when she smiled. In one hand she still held the green silk tie she’d used to bind him, now torn and distorted beyond repair.
“Your poor tie,” she said with mocking eyes. “Was it your favourite?”
“No I hated it.” He plucked the tie from her grasp and flung it across the room then shoved her backwards until they hit the bed. She went sprawling onto the mattress. He followed her down murmuring against her skin, “It was a present from my wife.”
7
Myshka sat in front of her dressing table mirror. She was alone in the flat. Steve Warwick had satisfied himself and left for some meeting he pretended was more important than it was. Later he would go home to his pathetic little mouse of a wife. Myshka was left to smear away the whore-paint and try to scrub the smell of him from her skin.
She took a long inward drag on her cigarette and blew out a thin stream of smoke towards the ceiling. Warwick did not like her to smoke in the flat—it was not allowed. Myshka gave a tight little smile. She did many things that were not allowed.
A long time ago when she was growing up in a small town ten hours’ train ride from St Petersburg Myshka’s most heartfelt ambition was not to be cold and hungry. Later, when she realised what those things meant, it was her desire not to be poor. After she started to grow in ways that men could not help but notice—and as a result acquired warm furs, a paid-for apartment, meals in the finest restaurants and a generous allowance—she realised not being poor was no longer enough. She wanted to be rich.
So she had made friendships with rich and richer men but even then it did not satisfy the empty spaces in her soul. Being given a new Mercedes-Benz for no other reason that the paintwork matched her eyes was very nice of course, but she remained as much a possession as the car itself.
And as she grew older and the lavish presents came perhaps a little less often it was then Myshka realised that what she really wanted above all else was power. It was better than money because where power went money soon followed. And it was better than sex—which in her experience was all about power anyway.
The acquisition of power was a challenge that sent her pulses fizzing in a way no sexual thrills had ever done.
She stubbed out her cigarette.
“Soon,” she promised her reflection.
She picked up her iPhone, scrolled through the contacts and set it to dial. It took a long time for the call to be picked up with a brusque, “Da?”
“Dmitry,” Myshka said huskily. “I begin to think you not love me anymore.”
“I was in a meeting,” Dmitry said. He had learned his English younger than Myshka and so his use of it was smoother.
Somewhere behind him Myshka caught a sudden burst of loud music and raucous voices.
“Where are you?” she demanded sharply. “It sounds like a peasants’ market.”
She heard him suck in a breath. Dmitry had once worked in just such a market selling cheap western imitations at anything but bargain prices.
“We are at a hotel,” he said. “There is a wedding party here.”
Myshka sniffed. “And he is there?”
“Of course he is here.” Dmitry’s tone warned her not to start anything. “He is my boss.”
“For now, yes?”
She heard him twist as if to cover her words. “Myshka—”
“We may have a problem,” she said switching to Russian.
“What kind of problem?” Dmitry stuck to the language of their adopted country. Sometimes she wondered if he did it just to put her in her place. Or try to.
“Lytton called in cleaners.”
This time the intake of breath was harsher and more apparent. “Instead of the police?”
Myshka rolled her eyes. “Not that kind of cleaners,” she said. “Kind that come after police. They looked at place where she die and somehow they know.”
Dmitry swore low and vicious but she heard uncertainty beneath the anger. “How?”
“I do not know. You make . . . mistake, perhaps?” She only phrased it as a question to salve his ego just a little.
There was a long silence at the other end of the line and she knew he would be pacing. When Dmitry was under pressure he could not stay still. “What happened?”
Myshka was reluctant to let him off the hook so soon but she said, “In end, nothing. “They report, wait for a time and then are told to clean anyway. I am merely keeping you—how do the English say it?—up to scratch.”
“Up to speed,” Dmitry corrected missing the intended irony. “Who are they?”
Myshka lit another cigarette and gave him the details she had coaxed or goaded out of Warwick—and how she had done it. She knew Dmitry did not like to hear such things. He was a man for whom sex and violence did not mix. A pity.
“And will your sick little puppy keep you up to speed?” he asked when she was through.
“He will do whatever I tell him,” she said and gave a throaty chuckle, “just as long also I tell him he is very bad boy.”
Dmitry swore again. “I have to go,” he said quickly. “Keep me informed, hmm?” And he cut the connection without waiting for her to speak.
Myshka pulled a face and put the phone down slowly. “You are welcome,” she said. “But next time . . . get it right, yes?”
8
Kelly arrived home late to find someone had nicked the low energy bulb in the hallway again. It happened regularly enough for her to keep a small LED flashlight permanently on her key ring. That at least allowed her to navigate the tangled assortment of bicycles and pushchairs behind the front door without breaking anything or impaling herself in the gloom.
Her flat was three flights up on the top floor of a shabby Victorian mid-terrace house. The young letting agent had done his best to extol the property’s virtues as he’d walked her up that first day. But by the time they reached the final dirty landing high under the eaves he hadn’t the heart or the breath for what remained of his sales pitch. He’d allowed her to wander through the scant three-roomed flat in silence.
Kelly had made his day by taking on the lease anyway.
The place had been lavishly described as a “cosy studio apartment in need of some modernisation” which translated as “crummy dwarf bedsit” in anybody else’s language. But it was affordable and a stone’s throw from Battersea Park on the south side of the Thames. And besides, Kelly had just been released from somewhere much worse.
After five years in a cell barely ten feet by eleven with cellmates who snored or sneered or ranted—and even one who tried to suffocate her while she slept—the three-hundred-square-foot apartment had seemed like untold luxury whatever its condition.
Her first task had been to tackle the place like a crime scene, suiting up and sanitising every inch, a two-foot segment at a time. She painted it in pale creams and greys and golds that made the most of the modest skylight and the single window. The transformation had taken up an entire weekend and proved a cathartic exercise.
As she slipped inside tonight and re-engaged the locks she reminded herself yet again that she was shutting the rest of the world out not shutting herself in.
She dumped her keys in the terracotta pot in the two-pace hallway, along with the rotor arm from her ancient Mini. Removing it proved the cheapest way to immobilise the car whenever she left it parked on the local streets.
Not that it was worth stealing but people round here were apt to overlook the more-rust-than-paint bodywork and the kerbed steel wheels if a vehicle fired and ran.
And Kelly had taken advantage of the prison educational programmes to learn motor-vehicle maintenance, so for all its sorry appearance the Mini was endlessly reliable and nipped through gaps in traffic like a jet-propelled skatebo
ard.
She switched on the shaded lamps in the living area, one either side of the sofa that folded out into her bed. It didn’t bother her that the flat was tiny. It was her space, her retreat, her solitude. A place where nobody had the right to roust her in the middle of the night to order her outside so they could pick over her belongings at random.
And it had a priceless feature that the letting agent hadn’t been remotely aware of never mind thought to use as leverage on the rent.
Now, Kelly went into the tiny bathroom and opened up the narrow skylight above the sink. She used the edge of the bath as a single step and levered herself carefully through the opening out onto the roof.