“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?