The Blood Whisperer

by Zoe Sharp

  When she looked up, Elvis was still in the doorway, defiant. A slim-bladed knife had appeared in his right hand.

  “Elvis don’t do this,” Kelly pleaded, getting her feet back underneath her very slowly. “It’s not worth it.”

  “What do you know about that?” he threw back at her. He swallowed, tried to purge the whiny note from his voice and failed. “Where else am I gonna get hold of that kind of dosh? It’ll get me started, y’know? It’ll put me on the map.”

  He wants to buy drugs most likely, Kelly realised. Ten thousand would allow him to buy in as a mid-level dealer without having to claw his way up from the bottom of the pile—if he didn’t end up dead in six months from stepping on too many existing toes. Either that or he was going to expand his budding stolen electronics sideline, like the laptop sitting on the table just behind her right hand . . .

  “You really think they’ll pay you?” she asked. “You think that little blade will stop them coming in here and taking what they want and leaving you with nothing except a bad taste in your mouth?”

  “Shut it!” He seemed jittery, wired, unable to keep his feet still. Kelly’s eyes flicked between the knife and the body behind it, trying to gauge experience and intent. Not much of either, she judged, but an unhealthy dose of desperation made him just as dangerous.

  “Put the knife down, Elvis and we can all walk away from this—”

  She saw the sudden flare in his eyes. “Nobody’s walking away!” he yelled, lunging forwards.

  Kelly’s fingers closed on the corner of the laptop. She dragged it off the table and flung it round and out, aiming straight for the boy’s head.

  Then she leapt for the knife.

  65

  Dmitry shot through a set of lights as they flicked up to amber, narrowly avoiding the front wing of a black cab as he did so. The cab driver jumped on the horn. Dmitry barely had time to curse before he was bullying the Range Rover through the choked-up traffic.

  I should have used the Mercedes, he recognised. But for this job he needed the extra space not to mention the car’s off-road capability. Unmarked graves were much better dug in the middle of nowhere.

  In the passenger seat—seemingly unfazed by the wild ride—was Viktor, who’d driven Steve Warwick out for his meeting with Harry Grogan on Lambourn Downs. Viktor sat with his massive arms folded, chewing gum with his mouth open and his brain shut.

  Viktor might be stupid as an ox but he was strong as one too. This time Dmitry was taking no chances with that goddamn woman. He’d brought backup.

  His phone buzzed insistently. Without bothering to check the caller, Dmitry threw his iPhone across to Viktor to answer. After his low-slung Mercedes the Range Rover handled like a pig, rolling alarmingly under hard cornering even if it did stick to the road. He needed both hands on the wheel.

  Viktor fumbled with the phone’s touch screen controls.

  “Da?” There was a long pause during which time the big man’s brow furrowed deeply. He dropped the phone to his shoulder. “How long Brixton?”

  “I don’t know!” Dmitry snapped. “Traffic is awful in this city. No respect!” As if to demonstrate, he leaned on the horn in response to a bus that was attempting to creep across into his lane. “I only got the call a half hour ago. We are almost there.”

  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.�
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  “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 run-down 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.”

&
nbsp; 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.