The Blood Whisperer

by Zoe Sharp

  “You never did get around to telling me,” she said casually gesturing to the cast and the bruises, “why Harry Grogan sent you that warning message?”

  The colour dropped out of McCarron’s face like a pulled plug. Watching him, she realised there had never been any doubt for him about who was pulling Allardice’s strings. She nodded as if he’d spoken and got to her feet.

  “Kelly, I—”

  “No Ray don’t say it,” Kelly interrupted. “But has it occurred to you that if you’d come clean about half this stuff Tyrone might not be dead?”

  She reached the door to the hallway and pulled it open before pausing briefly, eyes skating over the defeated figure stooped on the sofa. “I guess you can take this as my official resignation.”

  84

  McCarron listened to the front door slam behind her. Hard enough to rattle the glass in the bay window.

  He laid his head against the back of the sofa again and closed his eyes. Even though he’d known deep down this day might come, as time went on he’d buried the possibility beneath layers of hope and foolishness.

  McCarron had nurtured Kelly Jacks from the moment she’d started working under him. He’d recognised raw talent along with stubborn determination and a painstaking attention to detail that had her finding minutiae even he might otherwise have missed.

  For a while the cops she worked with had loved her. They’d dubbed her their own private blood whisperer. Someone who seemed to be able to coax evidence out of the most unpromising of scenes.

  She looked at things with a cool clear eye and a depth of imagination that enabled her to reconstruct the most complex and baffling crimes. He’d been immensely proud to call her his protégé, never thinking for a moment that the tenacity he so admired would be the cause of her downfall.

  Never thinking either that his growing affection for her would be so obviously apparent to others. Or such a useful weapon against the pair of them.

  McCarron had always thought of Kelly as another daughter. His own had come late and there had never seemed to be enough time to be a good father. Next time he looked, Allison was a discontented teenager, he and her mother were divorced and he’d lost his chance to do the right thing.

  Kelly had been a worthy substitute.

  But not anymore.

  McCarron felt the loss as a bubble rising through his chest. It reached his throat and was released on an anguished gasp.

  He rocked forwards on the sofa, his cast left arm cradled awkwardly in his lap and wept.

  85

  “The chief super’s been looking for you,” DC Dempsey said as soon as O’Neill arrived back in the office from his clandestine meeting with Kelly Jacks in Lambeth. “He was in a right mood because your cellphone was off.”

  “Bully for him,” O’Neill muttered, shouldering out of his jacket. “How’s the surveillance going on Allardice?”

  “I put a couple of guys on it,” he said. “They picked him up just outside his hotel and have been on him ever since.”

  “Good,” O’Neill said but his mind was already galloping on. “Now, do me a favour will you—see what we’ve got on Harry Grogan?”

  Dempsey rolled his eyes and swivelled back round to his computer keyboard. “Anything in particular you’re after? Only the last time that name cropped up I practically needed to nick a shopping trolley from Tesco’s for the paperwork. There’s masses of it.”

  O’Neill paused. He thought of the conversation he’d had with Jacks about the accent of the man who’d come after her and the voice on the phone reporting Tyrone Douet’s murder.

  “Yeah—look for any Russian connections.”

  86

  Kelly drove west along the M4 motorway in an old Vauxhall Omega estate. The car belonged to McCarron as did the cellphone in her pocket and the satnav she’d found stuffed into the glovebox.

  She hadn’t gone to visit her boss with robbery in mind but on her way out she saw his cellphone and car keys lying on the hall table and had snatched them up almost out of temper.

  He owes me.

  Once outside, she weighed the objects in her hand and debated the petty satisfaction of throwing both over the hedge into the neighbour’s ornamental water feature.

  Sense and desperation overcame more frivolous urges.

  McCarron’s car was parked on the short driveway. He always backed in so it was facing outwards and ready for a quick getaway. Tempting.

  Kelly glanced over at her beat-up Mini sitting by the kerb on the far side of the road. She’d been back to fetch her own mode of transport as soon as she’d walked away from O’Neill. It had seemed a good way to test if he was telling the truth about her flat no longer being under surveillance.

  Nobody had leapt out to arrest her when she’d clambered in through the skylight which suggested that he might be.

  She’d debated on the wisdom of driving around in a car that was registered in her name but it was better than using public transport.

  This might be better still. After all, she very much doubted McCarron was going to call the cops. And it wasn’t like he was going to be using the car any time soon.

  She thumbed the key fob to blip the locks and climbed in before second thoughts could stick their nose in. McCarron himself, she knew was not in any state to come running out after her.

  The V6 engine fired first crank. She put the car straight into gear and pulled away without looking back.

  Kelly wasn’t used to an automatic gearbox and compared to the Mini the old Vauxhall was like driving a low-slung tank on the quiet residential streets.

  She headed south from Hillingdon with no initial destination in mind, only wanting to put distance between her and the scene of her most recent crime. It wasn’t until she picked up the signs for the motorway at Heathrow that her mind seemed to unknot itself and her thought-patterns smoothed out into a single decisive strand.

  O’Neill had told her that she’d been dosed with ketamine. Ketamine was used by vets. He’d shown her a picture of the tame horse doctor Brian Stubbs, who Harry Grogan allegedly kept on a short leash. It didn’t take a genius to put together those two facts and form an obvious conclusion.

  But if it was so obvious why hadn’t O’Neill followed up on it himself?

  Evidence.

  So far, Kelly knew the evidence was tilted against her like one end of a seesaw loaded with big fat facts. The detective had no doubt been instructed not to waste effort with side theories when the main case looked so solid. She’d been told the same thing often enough when she’d been a CSI and she knew that not everyone wanted to work off the clock to prove a point.

  So why did O’Neill?

  And why had he told her about Stubbs unless . . .?

  Kelly pulled over to the side of the road sharply enough to warrant a quick blast on the horn from the driver behind her. She waved in vague apology and tapped the screen of the satnav.

  The article she’d found on Grogan—the one with the picture of him and Lytton alongside their winning racehorse—had mentioned where his trainer was based and Kelly had always had a good memory for details. She asked the satnav for the centre of the village and when it had worked out the fastest route, checked the Vauxhall’s fuel gauge. It was registering about two-thirds full. More than enough for a hundred-mile round trip to horse country, even for a thirsty old smoker like this.

  Minutes later, striking lucky with lights and traffic, Kelly was on the motorway being slowly passed by the commercial jets coming in to land at the airport. A constant procession of them hung heavy and awkward in the air overhead, wheels dangling like the legs of a carried dog.

  She cruised at a steady sixty-five, keeping pace with the slower vehicles, not fast enough to attract unwanted attention. And all the while she was trying to work out what she felt about the revelations that had emerged from Ray McCarron.

  She wasn’t sure if she entirely believed him. Not about anything in particular, it was just a general sense of distrust.
/>   She remembered Allardice as if it had all happened yesterday. There had been no light and shade with him. If he couldn’t use an axe to crack something open he wasn’t interested.

  Kelly had spent hours being interrogated by him over and over while he sneered and sniped at every aspect of her life until everything she’d thought she stood for was in ruins around her feet.

  And all the time he’d known that McCarron had found something that might exonerate her. Not just known about it, she noted bitterly, but had in all probability destroyed it.

  But for what gain?

  It all came back to the dead prostitute. The one she had been so naively determined to fight for. Why had Allardice seemingly helped bury that one? And what had Callum Perry done to become the means of Kelly’s own downfall?

  Maybe nothing.

  The thought came jolting in hard. Maybe Perry had committed some completely separate transgression and the method of his demise was just a convenient way of killing two birds with one stone.

  She’d need to look closer into Perry’s life in a way she hadn’t been free to do immediately after his death. And, if she was honest, hadn’t had the heart to since her release.

  All roads seemed to lead her in the same direction. Kelly shook her head. Allardice could wait. Right now her focus was on a crooked vet with access to ketamine and the man who held all his strings.

  87

  The police received the call about Kelly’s abandoned Mini an hour later. One of Ray McCarron’s neighbours rang it in. He lived opposite McCarron’s house three doors down, a small fussy man in corduroy slippers and a baggy cardigan with tissues stuffed into the pockets.

  He was annoyed with himself for not noticing the strange car arrive. Since he’d been medically retired from his job in the Civil Service he’d appointed himself the guardian of the avenue and was constantly on the phone to various authorities about refuge collection timings, wheelie bin transgressions, litter, dog fouling or infringements of the residents’ parking privileges.

  In this case he’d taken a surreptitious stroll past the offending vehicle and been mildly disappointed to notice its tax disc was in order. Nevertheless, the untreated rust patches on the bodywork strongly suggested an owner careless enough to be uninsured which presented what he felt was a real risk to the public.

  Justified by this logic, the retired civil servant hurried inside and speed dialled the local police station from the phone in his front room. While he waited for the call to be answered he stood on tiptoe in the bay window, peering at the Mini as if the owner might try and sneak it away now they’d been rumbled.

  The local nick was used to calls about all manner of real and imaginary petty crimes from this particular concerned citizen, to the point where they drew lots for the hassle of dealing with him.

  On this occasion a young probationer picked the short straw. He made soothing noises while doodling on a scrap of paper but did happen to write down the registration number of the Mini, pompously delivered in the correct phonetic alphabet. In the time it took the man to explain his own importance and demand action, the bored policeman embellished the number by adding a sketch of a hot rod Mini with a naked young lovely sitting on the bonnet.

  “Well, thank you very much sir,” the probationer said when the do-gooder paused for breath. Bearing in mind the next unfortunate who would have to deal with him, he added maliciously, “It’s observant members of the public like you that make our job easier. We’ll send somebody round the moment they’re available.”

  After he’d hung up the young policeman scrunched the paper up and dropped it into his waste paper basket then paused. He was still new enough in the job not to have had all the enthusiasm kicked out of him just yet.

  He reached for the paper, flattened it out and idly ran a quick PNC check just for practice. The result made his eyes pop and had him grabbing for the receiver again.

  88

  Kelly lay hidden in the long grass at the edge of a small copse of trees overlooking the racing stables where Harry Grogan had his horses in training.

  It was mid-afternoon. She’d arrived an hour before and left the borrowed Vauxhall parked up in a lay-by, hiking in across the fields to her present vantage point.

  If she closed her eyes she could still conjure the image of the man O’Neill had identified as Brian Stubbs. Sadly, she had no clear idea of how often he made any kind of visit to the stables. O’Neill had described him as Grogan’s resident vet but that didn’t mean he actually lived on the premises, although with animals this valuable she supposed anything was possible.

  Waiting was a frustrating business. Kelly gave it another hour, during which time a young lad made a tour of the loose boxes, looking briefly over each door to check all was well. Occasionally he disappeared briefly inside but otherwise the horses were left undisturbed to while away the afternoon doing whatever it was that horses did.

  Kelly realised she was going to have to come back tomorrow morning—preferably early—with something waterproof to lie on, and food and drink to sustain her during the wait. Some binoculars would be a good idea too she decided, shuffling backwards out of her position and scrambling to her knees in the wood.

  She began to brush the loose leaves and grass from her clothing when the crackle of undergrowth froze her in place.

  She turned slowly. There was a man not ten yards away. He was dressed in a similar style to the clothing Brian Stubbs had been wearing in O’Neill’s photograph but the face was younger and the expression had far more steel to it. That impression was reinforced by the battered double-barrelled shotgun he carried broken open over his arm.

  “This is private property miss,” he said in an ominous tone. “You’re trespassing.”

  “I’m awfully sorry,” Kelly said in her most harmless voice. “I’ll leave at once of course.”

  She started forwards but the man sidestepped quickly and snapped the gun closed with a solid metallic click.

  “Not as easy as that is it?” the man said. He jerked his head. “Boss wants a word. Then we’ll see.”

  Kelly shrugged but her mind was racing. Despite his obvious familiarity with the shotgun she very much doubted the man was prepared to shoot her in cold blood just for a civil offence. On the other hand, being apprehended could be very bad for her. It would only take someone who’d seen a news report over the last couple of days to recognise her face . . .

  She flicked a quick glance at the man’s feet, the deciding factor. He was wearing old black Wellington boots, the tops gaping around his tucked-in trousers.

  Nobody could run fast in boots that loose.

  Kelly darted sideways and set off like a dodging hare through the trees, keeping her head low. Surprise gave her a head start. She’d worked enough crime scenes with shotgun injuries to know that if she managed to pull out a lead of more than thirty or forty yards, the shot would be too spread and too spent to bring her down. She hoped.

  The man bellowed something behind her but she didn’t catch the words. His voice sounded distant, growing more so. She risked a quick look over her shoulder just to be sure and saw him begin to falter as though giving up the chase already.

  When she looked forwards again, she found out why.

  A huge man blocked the path in front of her. He was wearing a suit that strained to contain his bulk, arms forced out from his sides by the slabs of muscle around his torso.

  Kelly tried to stop, to change direction, felt her feet skid on the soft earth. She just had time to see the big guy swing one meaty arm—to register a fist the size of a steam iron heading for her face at an alarmingly accelerated rate—and then she ran full tilt into the waiting punch.

  The sky cracked open in an astounding blaze of light and pain.

  Then darkness fell, and so did she.

  89

  It took Ray McCarron a long time to answer the front door. He was half-hoping it would be Kelly standing there with that casual tilt to her hips and her hands in her pocke
ts. That by ringing the bell instead of finessing the Yale lock again she was somehow making peace.

  Instead when he fumbled the door open he found a uniformed constable waiting impatiently on his doorstep.

  “Mr McCarron, is it?” the policeman asked. “Ray McCarron?”

  “Yes. Why, what’s happened?”

  McCarron noted the policeman’s eyes track over the obvious bruising on his face, the broken arm and the slow careful movements his injuries forced him to make. “Looks like I should be asking you that sir.”

  “I was mugged at work a few days ago,” McCarron dismissed stonily. “There’ll be a report somewhere I’m sure.”