The Blood Whisperer

by Zoe Sharp

  Hesitantly, he sat up and reached to his face, half afraid of what he’d find. A sticky mess covered his eyes and he groped for the end of his tie to scrub at it until he managed to peel his eyes open.

  The first thing he saw was the blood. His hands were coated with it, mostly dried and cracking and laced in deep under his nails. His wrists were raw.

  Lytton reached up to his head gingerly but apart from a lump the size of half a tennis ball it felt reasonably intact. He’d seen enough pub brawls in his youth to know scalp wounds could bleed like a bastard.

  Good job I have a thick skull.

  He looked round then slowly and carefully and saw he was in a storeroom. He could hear the commentator starting the build-up to the big race and realised he should have been out there—both of them should.

  Looking down at his hands, at his ruined tie and bloodstained clothing, Lytton couldn’t suppress a twisted smile. Not quite the image of sophistication he’d wanted to present.

  Still, getting out of here was a good plan before whoever had dumped him like this came back to finish the job.

  He was sitting propped up against some kind of packing case covered with a sheet that slid sideways as he pulled himself to his feet. When the room stopped swaying around him Lytton glanced down at it automatically.

  What he saw there had him stumbling back.

  “Jesus Christ . . .”

  141

  When Dmitry’s iPhone rang again he was outside. He was standing on the lower walkway where Kelly Jacks had made her death-defying leap the last time they’d met here, scanning the crowd in vain for any sign of her.

  He was reluctant to venture further out onto the racecourse. Something told him his prey was still in the building and being spotted out here by Grogan would be . . . awkward at this stage.

  “Da?” he said, terse.

  A female tut-tutting noise in his ear made him jerk the phone away as if burned. He checked the display and scowled.

  “What do you want Myshka? I’m busy.”

  “Is that any way to speak to me when I call to help you?”

  “Unless you have access to the racecourse CCTV system and can track one woman in thousands, you cannot help.”

  She sniffed. “No faith. You not need to find her if she find us, no?”

  Dmitry simmered in silence for a moment. He didn’t mind so much that Myshka was the bright one, if only she didn’t have to gloat.

  “Go on.”

  “Where are you?” And when he told her she commanded with supreme confidence, “Get back up here—quietly. I have perfect bait. She will come.”

  142

  The trill of a cellphone caught Kelly by surprise. Not recognising the ringtone, she glanced across at McCarron but he shrugged.

  “I only have one cellphone Kelly love and I believe you may have, erm, borrowed it.”

  She stood, swung to try and get a bearing and then stilled.

  “Oh you have to be kidding me . . .”

  The morning suit jacket over the body of Steve Warwick was moving she saw. It shivered gently with each vibrating ring of what must be his own phone, still in his pocket.

  With great reluctance Kelly patted him down. Half of her was hoping that the damn thing would stop before she found it but luck was not on her side. The display screen showed a number she was not familiar with.

  “Are you sure this is a good idea?” McCarron asked.

  Kelly gave him a lopsided smile. “Hell no.” But she pressed the button to receive the call anyway. “Hello?”

  The tinny speaker emitted a burst of noise so loud and distorted that Kelly almost dropped the phone. It took her a moment to distinguish the voice and another to recognise it.

  “Yana?” she said loudly. “For heaven’s sake calm down. Where are you?”

  “I–in another box, I think,” Yana sobbed. “They bring me here—”

  “Who?”

  “Man who work for Harry Grogan. He grab me. They lock me in here. I frightened!” Her voice rose into a wail on the last word.

  “Stay with me Yana! We’ll come and find you. Don’t worry.”

  “Hurry! She say she kill me—woman who kill Steve. Oh God, they here! I—”

  Her voice chopped off into a harsh shriek followed by a background clatter and then silence.

  “Yana? Yana?”

  McCarron was at her shoulder, his battered face pale enough for the bruises to stand out lividly against the anger. “Where is she?”

  “Grogan’s box by the sound of it,” Kelly said without thinking.

  He wheeled, had nearly made it to the door before she caught his arm—the one without the cast.

  “Ray for God’s sake, what do you think we can do? And how on earth did Yana just so happen to get hold of a phone? This whole thing has ‘trap’ written all over it.”

  “And if it isn’t—what then?” McCarron asked. “I’ve stood by in the past and let people get away with murder Kel. I’m damned if I’m going to do it again.”

  143

  Kelly led McCarron out of Lytton and Warwick’s private box and to the entrance to another that was only two doors down.

  “Are you sure?” he asked.

  Kelly nodded. “Shula gave me a rundown so I wouldn’t get lost with orders.”

  “Shula?”

  Kelly shrugged and indicated her borrowed uniform. “She’s the one who gave me this.”

  But McCarron’s attention had been diverted by the smear of blood on the door handle. “Why grab Yana and then stash her so close?” he wondered aloud. “It makes no sense.”

  “There’s a lot about this that doesn’t,” Kelly said looking up and down the corridor before dragging out her makeshift picks. McCarron noticed that she avoided touching the blood as she delicately raked the pins inside the lock. “Ready?”

  He took a breath, aware of a sudden tremble at the backs of his knees. “Would it make any difference if I said no?”

  Something flickered at the corner of her mouth. “You were the one overcome with gallant bravado a few moments ago,” she said and pushed the door open.

  Yana was sitting slumped at the wide table, a mirror of the one where her husband had been beaten to death. She was cradling her head in her hands and jerked upright when they entered.

  “Are you all right love?” McCarron would have hurried forwards but Kelly put out a warning hand.

  “Of course she is,” Kelly said in a dangerously soft voice. “It’s all going just about according to plan, isn’t it Yana?”

  Yana raised her head slowly, her eyes reddened and her face swollen with tears. She gave a helpless shrug. “I–I not understand . . .”

  “Did you beat your husband to death yourself or just help tie him down while your pal Dmitry did it for you?”

  Yana gaped. She wasn’t the only one. She turned a beseeching gaze on McCarron but Kelly’s voice snapped her attention back again.

  “Don’t look to him for help,” she said. “He might be a soft touch but he can read the evidence just as well as I can. Probably better—when he’s a mind to.” She paused. “You weren’t locked in the bathroom while Warwick was killed, Yana. You were out there with him, close by and unrestrained. Given time I could tell you exactly where you stood for each blow.”

  McCarron cleared his throat. “Kelly love—”

  “You heard us coming and you tried to clean up as quickly as you could and when that didn’t work you made sure the first thing you did was throw yourself weeping on the corpse, hoping the new blood would obscure the old.”

  “She crazy!” Yana’s eyes skipped from one to the other in apparent bewilderment. “I no understand what she saying,” she protested, voice rising with distress.

  “What I’m saying,” Kelly said helpfully, “is that there was a woman in that room all right and she definitely was ‘one cold bitch’ as you put it. But the evidence points to youand she being one and the same. And unlike people, the evidence doesn’t lie.”

/>   Except when it’s made to.

  McCarron couldn’t help the thought sliding through his mind. Yes he’d seen it all, the way it looked, but he vividly remembered working the scene of Kelly’s supposed crime all those years ago when she had also looked so guilty that nobody harboured any doubts. Nobody except him.

  “What I don’t understand is why here and now?” Kelly went on. “Surely if you really wanted to get rid of your abusive spouse you could have dreamed up something less . . . public?”

  He looked at the frightened woman cowering in front of them, the picture of innocence but all the time he kept getting strobe-like images of Steve Warwick’s body, of the blood sprayed around the walls of the room nearby and of the man who’d attacked him in the hallway at the office, beating home the message with each blow. McCarron stared harder and this time he thought he saw a desperate cunning under the show of emotion. He straightened his shoulders.

  “Public’s better than private,” he said aware his voice sounded rusty in his throat. “More confusion, more foot traffic, more evidence to be interpreted. And there’s always the chance to cover it up with some other crime.” He forced himself to look at Yana with an impassionate eye. “Planning a nice fire are you love?”

  Yana gave a gasp that became a howl and then turned to his amazement into laughter.

  And as she laughed it was as though she threw off the timid personality like a cloak. Her shoulders lost their rounded outline, her neck lengthened, her chin lifted.

  “Public is perfect,” she agreed. Even her voice had changed, become strong but with an underlying husky note, almost a purr. “He was big man in public who liked to play games and be spanked like little boy behind closed door. So—more public is better, yes?”

  144

  Dmitry flattened against the wall next to the doorway just in time to hear the laughter. He recognised it and cursed inside his head.

  It was not the laugh of the submissive Yana but of Myshka at her bad boldest best.

  What the hell does she think she’s playing at?

  Dmitry reached inside his jacket and pulled out the Glock. It was the same gun Myshka had used to kill Viktor in the silent woods. He knew he should have buried it with the body but something had warned him to keep hold of it in case of trouble.

  It was not so difficult to obtain guns in a country where nobody outside the police or military were supposed to have them but it would still have taken time. Time Dmitry suspected he would not have.

  He checked there was a round in the chamber and slipped his trigger finger inside the guard, just taking up the pressure on the blade that formed the safety. Then he took a long deep breath.

  He went into the room fast, hitting the door with his shoulder, kicking it shut behind him already bringing the gun up.

  Myshka was sitting at the table like a czaritsa holding court. Not just the chattel of a Russian czar, but more like an empress in her own right. The other two whirled at his entrance but she just sat and smiled at him.

  “You have met Dmitry, of course,” she said as if she’d stage-managed the whole thing.

  “Of course,” the woman said, her voice low and bitter.

  Kelly Jacks. It was hard looking at her now to balance her small stature with the trouble she had caused him. And despite the gun in his hand she was looking at him with more anger than fear. She was dressed as a waitress. Clever, he acknowledged. Who noticed waitresses?

  The man, McCarron, seemed more shaken. It could have been the gun or simply the fact that they were face to face again for the first time since Dmitry beat him into unconsciousness. Either way the old man had almost shut down, curled in on himself. He would be no threat.

  “Steve Warwick I can understand—almost,” Kelly Jacks said. “But did you have to kick Elvis into a brain-damaged coma?”

  For a second an image of a quiffed and sneering distant pop star gyrated into his mind. “Who?”

  She shook her head. “You didn’t even know his name did you? The kid in the flat in Brixton. He tried his best to give me to you. It wasn’t his fault he didn’t succeed.”

  Dmitry stared at her with a lack of emotion that was not an act. Why do you care?

  “The race is about to start,” he said to Myshka, not taking his eyes off Kelly Jacks. “Everything is ready. We need to finish this.”

  “Of course,” Myshka said. She rose, graceful. “Any last requests?”

  “Yes,” Jacks said. “Why did you kill Veronica Lytton and make it look like it was connected to that old murder I investigated?”

  Myshka pursed her lips. “Such an ego,” she murmured. “There was no connection except in your own mind. Lady Lytton, she see too much, hear too much and she begin to suspect poor little Yana is not what she seemed, so—” an elegant shrug “—she have to go.”

  She made it sound so easy Dmitry thought, when it was not Myshka who had to see it through. But he remembered the way she’d murdered her inconvenient husband. She had not taken the easy way then . . .

  “A coincidence?” Kelly Jacks’s face was blank with shock.

  “They happen,” Myshka agreed, obviously enjoying her discomfort. “She did not believe in pills, but her husband he shoots and I knew she would so hate to have that lovely face . . . spoiled.”

  “But . . . then you killed Tyrone—the same as . . .” Her voice petered out. She took a couple of tottering paces sideways, steadied herself with hands braced on the back of a chair.

  “You were pain in ass by then.” Myshka smiled at her again. “You can thank Matthew for that.”

  “What?”

  “You did not know? He ask Steve to find out about you on Internet and he delegate to me. Perfect way to deal with you was with your own past.”

  “Myshka,” Dmitry warned. “We do not have time for this.”

  “No,” she agreed. She checked the time. “He will be back soon.” Her eyes drifted over the two of them, the old man and the waitress, as if they were of no account. “Put them with the others.”

  Your word is my command. “Dead or alive?”

  She raised a disinterested eyebrow. “Does it matter?”

  Dmitry considered for a moment then brought the Glock up double-handed and lined up the sights on the centre of the old man’s chest. McCarron caught the movement and his head jerked up, finally coming out of stasis.

  “Wait—”

  “What?” Dmitry asked over the gun. “You think you can persuade me to sit down and talk about it?” As he began to take up the pressure on the trigger a blur of light and dark hit his peripheral vision as Kelly Jacks heaved up the chair she’d been gripping.

  “Take a seat,” she growled and sent it spinning for his head.

  Dmitry swung the gun blindly in her direction and pulled the trigger.

  145

  DI Vince O’Neill was outside on the lower walkway overlooking the parade ring when he heard the shot. He’d been waiting, not patiently, for the head of racecourse security to authorise someone to release him a set of keys for the storerooms when the sound cracked out overhead.

  O’Neill had heard enough gunfire in his time to duck instinctively. He knew there was no mistake even before the glass began to fall around him like deadly shards of rain.

  The panic was instant, blossoming outwards as people scattered. The fear transferred itself to the horses in the parade ring—highly strung at the best of times and already snapped tight with pre-race nerves. They shied and skittered as the people bellied outwards away from the building.

  It was only when the building didn’t follow the glass down—when the rain became a shower rather than a deluge and no bodies fell—that the crowd’s rush ebbed and a morbid curiosity took over. They stopped, began to stare and point.

  O’Neill shifted his gaze upwards too. He saw a blank emptiness at the window of one of the private boxes where he should have been able to see only reflection of sky.

  “The whole pane’s gone,” said the man next to him. “Damn
lucky nobody was killed, eh?”

  But O’Neill didn’t share his relief. He knew what he’d heard.

  Nobody killed? That remains to be seen.

  “Boss!”

  O’Neill turned, saw Dempsey approaching at a run. “Did I hear—?”

  “Yes.” O’Neill grabbed his arm. “Keep your voice down and come with me.” They headed for the nearest entrance, pushing against the flow. “What did Cheever say?”