“Oh, Dmitry would never turn on her,” said a voice from the doorway. “Would he sweetheart?”
Both women spun to find Harry Grogan had quietly opened the door and was standing in the frame taking in the room at large. Kelly found her voice first.
“What makes you so sure?”
Grogan was staring at Yana as though it was the first time he’d set eyes on her and he didn’t like what he saw. He spoke without shifting his gaze.
“Because she’s Dmitry’s sister.”
148
Grogan took it all in before he stepped into the room. Dmitry was well out of it, limbs threshing weakly. There was an older man Grogan didn’t know on the floor near the table. He looked as though he’d been through the wars and was not out of them yet.
That left the two women.
They couldn’t be more different in looks but there was the same streak of steel running through both of them, he realised. Only, with Kelly Jacks it was forged in fire, clean and bright. He wondered why he’d never seen the sheer contaminated greed in his mistress before.
“Hello Myshka,” he said. “Having fun sweetheart?”
Kelly Jacks raised an eyebrow. “‘Myshka’?”
“Means ‘mousy’ in Russian, I believe,” he noted. “Not exactly an apt description of Yana when you see her like this is it? Bit like calling a short-arse Lofty.”
A smile twitched at the corner of Kelly’s mouth. Yana didn’t quite get the reference but if the stiffening of her spine was anything to go by she knew enough to be insulted by it.
“You know her,” Kelly said. Not a question.
“In the biblical sense,” Grogan agreed. “And for one of the hardest coldest bitches I’ve ever come across, I must say she was . . . passionately inventive between the sheets.”
Yana glared. “If I am a man, cold and hard would be prized.”
“But the shame of it is you’re not,” Grogan said flatly. He glanced pointedly at Dmitry, beginning to struggle feebly to rise like a beetle on its back. “Still twice the man your brother ever was though.”
“Dmitry is good man!” Yana said, hands bunching into fists as if ready to swing a blow. “You never give him chance to prove himself. You treat him like servant—like a dog.”
“I treated him like he was fit to be treated,” Grogan said. “A guard dog that’s used to roughing it but is not allowed inside on the furniture. What—you thought I’d groom him to take over? Some kind of surrogate son?”
Grogan intended the comment to be flippant, but saw immediately from Yana’s face that was exactly what she’d been hoping.
“You should have trust him more.”
“If today’s anything to go by, looks like I’ve been trusting him too much as it is.”
For a moment nobody spoke. The wind blew in through the broken window, flapping around the table. Beyond, Grogan could hear the commentator revving up the crowd ready for the start. If this turns nasty I might never find out if the colt wins.
“So Yana—Myshka whatever her name is—is your girlfriend as well as Steve Warwick’s wife?” Kelly asked. “Not too much trust to be had anywhere is there?”
“She got her claws into me when I was in Moscow a few years ago,” Grogan said. “Saw me as a meal ticket but not a visa.” He flicked his gaze to Kelly. “Never going to divorce my Irene, no matter what state she’s in. “’Til death do us part and all that. So she set her sights on Warwick instead. What have you done with him by the way?”
“He’s dead,” Kelly said. “They beat him to death.”
“Well at least he went out with a smile on his face then,” Grogan said and at her grimace of surprise added, “He was into a bit of S&M on the quiet was young Stevie boy.”
Kelly spread her hands. “I don’t understand any of this,” she said sounding abruptly annoyed by the fact. “What does setting me up for murder and killing her husband gain her for heaven’s sake?”
“Freedom. Power,” Yana said proudly. “And money—a lot of money.”
“Not anymore sweetheart,” Grogan said. “I saw enough coppers milling around outside to scupper any plans you might have had about getting away with it. Won’t be long before they start finding the bodies.”
Yana considered this for a moment, her gaze turning inwards. It was a shame Grogan thought. Yana would have made the ideal right-hand man—if only she had been a man. Intelligent, ruthless and inventive in more places than just the bedroom, she would have been a worthy heir.
Perhaps I should have looked beyond the backside and the boobs, he thought regretfully. Ah well, too late now.
“You’ll have no freedom and no power in prison. Trust me, you won’t enjoy the experience,” Kelly Jacks said, her voice matter of fact without gloating. “And you’ll be a little old lady by the time you get out.”
Yana’s head came up, her gaze glittering. “I not go to prison,” she said through her teeth. “I rather die!”
Just for a second Grogan thought it was merely the woman’s sense of high drama coming to the fore. Then she pulled something from her pocket and held it up. He recognised a BlackBerry, the casing a pale metallic blue.
The Myshka he knew had an iPhone but the device held no special significance for him. If her tense reaction was anything to go by the same could not be said of Kelly.
“That’s Veronica Lytton’s isn’t it?”
Yana smiled, a deep, rich Myshka kind of smile. “Of course,” she said. “I take it from her just before she die. And now I use it to finish this.” She deftly keyed in a number. “Is . . . poetic, no?”
And she hit send.
149
“Holy shit,” O’Neill murmured.
They were down in the basement storeroom and he’d pulled away the cover that Matthew Lytton had pointed out.
Beneath it was a bomb.
At least, it was a pile of paper-wrapped blocks of what looked distinctly like explosives, attached to one of the support pillars. Through a couple of rips in the outer packaging O’Neill could see orange plasticine-like material, soft and malleable.
The blocks were linked together by a mass of different coloured wiring. Nestled in the middle was a cellphone with wires hot-glued into the casing. It didn’t take a genius to work out that was the remote detonator.
O’Neill had been through the basic course for identifying suspicious packages and a frantic voice in the back of his head was yelling, “Semtex!” He even thought he could smell something like anti-freeze and recalled one of the instructors joking that by the time you could smell explosives strongly enough to identify them, you were usually far too close.