The Blood Whisperer

by Zoe Sharp

  “What? No of course not!” McCarron seemed genuinely upset. “That’s not how it was.”

  Kelly reminded herself that she’d worked for him, alongside him, for eight years before her disgrace and then again for almost a year since her release. She’d thought of him as her mentor and certainly her friend.

  Dammit, that hurt. It lent a certain acidic bite to her words. “So how was it exactly?”

  He sighed. “Look, when I got the call to say you’d been found with a body I was as shocked as everyone else,” he said. “I was certain you were innocent. I pushed to be lead on it but then I began processing the scene.” Another sigh. “It looked pretty damning Kel. Even you have to admit that.”

  “It was supposed to look damning,” she said. “All I know is that Perry called me out of the blue saying how he’d heard my name in connection with the case, saying he could give me information about the involvement of somebody important—his words. He asked me to meet him. That’s the last thing I remember until I woke up with his corpse.”

  “The scene was a nightmare,” McCarron said grimly. “Whoever it was who killed the lad, they made a right mess of him. He’d been butchered.”

  Kelly suppressed a shiver. “I remember,” she murmured. She didn’t think she’d ever forget the sight that met her eyes when she came round.

  “I couldn’t believe you could have done something like that,” McCarron went on, a pleading look on his face. “I worked every inch of that place looking for something to exonerate you.”

  “But you didn’t find it.”

  “No, that’s the trouble,” McCarron said heavily. “I did.”

  80

  In his office in central London Matthew Lytton found himself too distracted to concentrate on work. The meeting with the detective DI O’Neill had irritated him like an out of reach itch and he was determined to scratch it.

  Normally, if he needed expertise he didn’t possess he called in a specialist. Today he was breaking his own rule.

  But with good reason.

  He had never been a big fan of computers. They were a necessary evil rather than a front-line tool to him and he preferred to get out there and make things happen. Warwick on the other hand was completely at home with a keyboard and a mouse so Lytton left him to get on with that side of things—even to the point of asking his partner to help out with his initial background search on Kelly Jacks.

  Maybe that was a mistake, he conceded.

  Nevertheless it hadn’t been too difficult to run a search of the records on the office server for the property O’Neill had mentioned. When he found the file he realised why he hadn’t remembered it. Although in theory everything had to be approved by both of them, in this case the property purchase had been handled almost exclusively by Steve Warwick. It wasn’t unheard of, but it was certainly unusual.

  Rather than read it on screen he sent the whole file to the printer and read the pages as they spat out of the machine. It was only when he reached the financial section that he realised part of the document seemed to be missing.

  He checked the file on the computer and found that some of the information was simply not there. Normally for this kind of purchase they would have used their standing arrangement with an investment bank but there was no reference number in the appropriate section. Instead Lytton found the cryptic note that the purchasing had been financed by a “private investor” which was unusual enough he certainly should have remembered it.

  Frowning, he carried the printout down the short hallway to Warwick’s office but when he put his head round the door he found the desk unoccupied.

  Lytton was about to leave when he heard a noise from inside the room. He pushed the door wide and stepped through. There was a figure standing over one of the filing cabinets, who spun with a soft gasp. An armful of manila folders went splashing to the carpet, spilling their contents.

  “Oh!” Yana Warwick cried. “I am so clumsy. So sorry.”

  “It’s all right Yana,” Lytton said hurrying forwards. “It’s my fault for startling you. Please don’t be upset.”

  Even so, it took five minutes and loan of a handkerchief before he could calm her enough to ask questions.

  “I was looking for Steve. I needed to ask him about an investor for a conversion job we did a few years ago. There seems to be some data missing from the file. Do you know where he’s gone?”

  Yana shook her head. “He not tell me,” she said, so firmly that he suspected she knew and had been instructed not to say. As it was she shrank away from him with anxious eyes as though he might blame her. “He leave me to do filing, yes?”

  But her gaze strayed to the mess of paper on the office floor and Lytton felt her agitation rising again.

  “I’ll help you put all this back together again,” he promised quickly.

  If anything, the offer seemed to distress her further. “No! No, I must do it.”

  He gripped her shoulders and forced her to meet his eyes. “Hush Yana, it’s my fault so please let me help you put it right.” He paused, uncertain how to proceed. “Look, if you’re unhappy with Steve. If he ever hurts you or threatens you, you don’t have to stay with him,” he said at last. “You know that don’t you?”

  She regarded him mutely for a moment then gave a helpless shrug. “I have nowhere to go,” she hedged as if an outright declaration of intent might be held against her later.

  Lytton let go, straightened up. “You’d be taken care of,” he said. “I’d see to that.”

  81

  If McCarron expected a barrage of questions after his admission he was surprised by Kelly’s response. She sat quiet for a long time, frowning, perched on the edge of one of the brocade armchairs his first wife had bought more for their hardwearing qualities than comfort.

  When eventually she spoke, her voice was low with a suppressed emotion he couldn’t quite identify. “What did you find?”

  He cleared his throat. His head was beginning to pulse and he badly needed to sleep.

  “A smear of blood,” he said at last. “Only small, not even a partial, but it was near the door frame leading out of the room where . . . out of the room. It looked like a bit of cast-off that someone had tried to wipe up.”

  “And was it?”

  McCarron shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “I typed it, just as a prelim. It was O which didn’t tell us much in itself—most of the population is O.”

  “But I’m A and Perry was AB if I remember rightly.”

  He began to nod automatically, regretted it as pain spiked his skull.

  “For heaven’s sake Ray haven’t they given you anything for that?”

  “Half a pharmacy,” he said with a faint smile. “It’s in a bag on the hall table. Kidproof bottles. Can’t get the bloody lids off.”

  She got up without a word and he heard the rustle of plastic, a rattle and the splash of water in the kitchen sink. When she returned she was carrying a glass and the open bottle of tablets. He took it cautiously, the way a condemned man might accept a last cigarette.

  “Thanks love,” McCarron said when he’d swallowed the dose. “I got the sample ready to send off for DNA and went bouncing in to tell Allardice all about it. He was convinced you were guilty and this was the first sign of reasonable doubt we’d found.”

  “And?”

  McCarron glanced at her. There was nothing in her face, her voice, to give him a clue to what she was feeling. Or what she might do.

  “To say he wasn’t pleased was an understatement.” He sighed. “Threw a coffee mug across the office as I recall. As good as accused me of inventing the whole damn thing just to try and get you off the hook.”

  “Which you wouldn’t have done,” Kelly said, her voice without inflection.

  “I didn’t need to,” McCarron returned stoutly. “It was there right enough.”

  “So you calmly refuted his allegation of course.”

  This time McCarron heard the faintest touch of humour in h
er voice. “I threw a waste bin back at him if that’s what you mean? There we were—having a slanging match right in the middle of the incident room—when the boss walks in and asks what the bloody hell we think we’re playing at.”

  “The boss?”

  “Chief Superintendent Quinlan. He’d been told to keep an eye on things from a damage limitation point of view I think. And he wasn’t a happy camper either. Nothing personal but if you weren’t Perry’s killer then whoever did it was still out there and we had no other suspects. That never plays well with the media.”

  “Allardice seemed determined to believe it was me right from the start.”

  “Aye well, Quinlan told us both to go home and cool off. Pick it up again in the morning. Privately he told me to give myself a pat on the back.”

  “But?” she said, sharper this time.

  He sighed. “The next morning Allardice told me to run the tests again—just to be double sure.”

  “And this time—surprise, surprise—the result was different,” Kelly guessed. She sounded resigned.

  “Yeah it was. When the DNA came back the blood was Perry’s after all. I expected him to crow about it but instead he told me not to be too hard on myself. We’d been working round the clock—I must have made a mistake.”

  Kelly simply looked at him very matter of fact. “You don’t make elementary mistakes like that Ray. We both know it.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence.” He gave her another weary smile. “To be honest I couldn’t believe it either, so I checked and rechecked.” He shifted again, winced and took a steadying breath. “I became convinced someone had swapped the samples. I took it to Quinlan. He promised to look into who’d had access.”

  He saw her quick frown. “Whatever doubts you had, they never made it to court.”

  McCarron nearly shook his head again, caught himself just in time. “No they didn’t,” he said flatly. “Quinlan cleared him but Allardice got wind of it somehow. He came bursting into the lab and gave me a gobful—he always was a mouthy sod. Said I’d gone behind his back and I’d make no friends that way.”

  “I hope you reported that too.”

  “I never got the chance.” McCarron took a breath and went on. “That night I had a phone call—withheld number, disguised voice—telling me if I knew what was good for me and those I was close to I’d stop kicking up a fuss. That shook me I don’t mind admitting it, but the real clincher was the next morning. I found a set of photographs pushed through my letterbox.”

  “Of your daughter?” she hazarded. “Is that how they got to you?”

  “No Kelly love,” McCarron said gently. “They were pictures of you.”

  82

  “Gotcha!”

  Frank Allardice lowered the digital camera and checked the results of his efforts on the screen. He didn’t consider himself any kind of a photographer but it always went down well to have a few pictures of landmarks from home to pin up behind the bar. And he was damned if he was going to pay rip-off tourist prices for postcards.

  Besides, until he heard any different his business for this trip was done and he was simply a tourist.

  But the object of his photographic aim this time was not the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace, or a red double-decker bus. He’d been trying to get a clear shot of the two guys who’d been tailing him all morning and he’d just managed to snatch a full-face angle of the second man before he ducked his nose into a news-stand.

  “Too late matey,” Allardice said under his breath, studying the faces. “I wonder who you are and who sent you? As if I couldn’t guess . . .”

  He’d long decided that much as he missed his old haunts in London the weather was something he could do without. It was getting noticeably chilly over here and he was uncomfortably aware of his joints in a way he never seemed to be when he was back in good old España.

  He’d got out of the habit of city life which was too crowded and in too much of an all-fired hurry. Too much pushing and shoving.

  The press of people had not, however, prevented him from spotting the two guys who attempted to tail him from the little hotel near Earls Court. He supposed they weren’t doing a bad job but he’d been too long in the game for them to pass unnoticed.

  He had toyed with them for the best part of an hour, putting them through their paces while he strolled around the Embankment area apparently at ease. Eventually his patience wore thin. Beneath it was temper.

  So when his cellphone rang and he recognised the number he snapped, “What do you want?” into it by way of greeting.

  He listened in silence while the voice at the other end of the line imparted hurried information.

  “Thanks, but I’ve already spotted them. Still, better late than never, eh?”

  83

  “Pictures of me?” Kelly repeated dumbly. “Doing what? I mean, when were they taken?”

  “Some were of you at work, out in the street, at the supermarket, sitting in a restaurant with that young DI you were seeing,” McCarron said. He hesitated. “But the others were taken later—of you on remand.”

  “On remand . . .?” Her voice trailed off as the implications sank in. “How the hell did anyone get pictures of me then? Doing what?”

  McCarron could hardly meet her eye. “In the exercise yard mainly but there were some obviously taken inside and, erm, one of you in the showers.”

  “That’s sick,” Kelly murmured, a shimmy of disgust rippling across her arms bringing them up in goosebumps. “In all kinds of ways.”

  “I don’t think the pictures were meant to be perverted—not in that way,” McCarron said miserably. A deep flush had stolen up his neck and was mingling darkly with the bruises on his face. “I think they were just to show how . . . vulnerable you were. How easily they could get to you.”

  “And who is ‘they’?”

  He sighed. “I wish I knew Kelly love. Trust me, I wish I knew.”

  She was silent, trying to put the sense of violation behind her. It lingered.

  Eventually she looked up and said, “What about Allardice? You must have suspected him.”

  McCarron’s expression was a mix of discomfort and shame. “Of course I did,” he said. “But you have to remember that Allardice was a copper’s copper. He may have had a reputation for cutting corners but he got the job done and a lot of people respected him for that. If I’d accused him again so soon it would have smacked of a witch hunt. I’d been getting the cold shoulder enough after the first time.”

  Despite herself, Kelly could sympathise. She knew what the cold shoulder was all about. She thought of David again, standing in her hallway, leaving his key on the side table, demanding the return of the one he’d given her to his own flat. The pain was a distant memory but one that still had the power to hurt. Not love, she recognised now, just betrayal.

  “I suppose it never occurred to you that just by showing those pictures in court—obviously taken without my knowledge or permission—it might have been enough to suggest that someone had it in for me. Might have been enough to stop me being sent to prison?”

  McCarron opened his mouth, closed it again. “Things happened so quickly. And I never thought you’d be convicted,” he admitted. “I was worried about you but I never thought . . .”

  No you didn’t think, Ray. That was the trouble.

  “But I was convicted.” Kelly struggled to keep the temper out of her voice. “And you stood by and let it happen.”

  For the first time he reacted with anger of his own, driven by anguish. “What the bloody hell else was I supposed to do Kelly?” he pleaded. “They were threatening to hurt you, cripple you, if I tried to intervene. Even if I’d got Quinlan to believe that Allardice might—and it is a might—be involved it’s obvious someone on the outside was pulling his strings—” He broke off, let out a slow breath. “I had no choice but to keep my bloody mouth shut.”

  “Even if that meant me going to prison where it would be a damn sight easier fo
r anyone to get at me,” she snapped.

  And regardless of whether McCarron had toed the line they’d tried anyway, she realised. More than once. It was fortunate that she’d been a fast learner and had developed a quick-hardening survival instinct to cope with the early attacks. She’d thought they were random or caused by her connections to the police.

  If Tina hadn’t come along when she did, hadn’t befriended me, I’d probably be dead by now.

  And in that moment an image formed like a rapid bubble inside Kelly’s head—of Elvis trying to collect the bounty on her head. Maybe that prize money had been up for grabs for longer than any of them had realised.