“Can you move your people in close enough to hear anything?”
The liaison grinned at him. It would have been smug had he not been young enough to be buzzed by the job. “Better than that,” he said. “Bill, give me audio and filter out whatever background chatter you can.”
The camera zoomed in unobtrusively to show Allardice looking around, all casual, before he picked up the receiver and dialled.
“Hello? You know who this is . . . I’m on my way back to sunny Spain mate. Job’s done. Looks like we can rely on young Vince to put it to bed all neat and tidy . . . Yeah well, you owe me—big time—and I’m like a bloody elephant. I never forget to collect on my debts . . . Yeah, cash is always ‘acceptable’ mate. You know where to find me.”
He put the phone down, looked around again and wiped his hand on the leg of his trousers before striding away.
“Sweating about it, weren’t you Frank?” Dempsey murmured.
“They’re calling his flight,” the liaison said. “Do you want an intercept?”
Dempsey shook his head. “Watching brief only—them’s my orders.”
The liaison grinned again. “Well the Spanish authorities are a lot more amenable about extradition these days aren’t they?”
“Too right.”
One of the techs—the guy called Bill—broke off from his computer keyboard long enough to scrawl something on a pad and rip off the sheet, handing it across. “That’s the number your man called. You should be able to trace it easily enough.”
Dempsey read the digits and hoped his eyes hadn’t bulged as much as it felt they had.
“Oh yeah,” he said. “We’ll trace that one. No problem.”
159
Matthew Lytton stood by the open window of the room that had once been his study and stared down into the rear courtyard where a large white van stood parked.
This time there was no crime-scene cleaning logo on the side of it, no Tyvek-clad figures reclining in the front seat. And no Steve Warwick about to stroll breezily through the door behind him.
Instead, the van belonged to a local catering company. He could see the serving staff in their uniforms unloading trays, stacks of tablecloths and crates of glasses from the rear. Just for a second his imagination painted one of them into a slight figure with choppy black hair and a loose-limbed stride. The illusion ballooned and then burst as soon as the girl turned in his direction.
It wasn’t Kelly Jacks.
Lytton sighed. “No,” he muttered under his breath, “I guess you have no reason to be coming back here.”
Considering he hardly wished to be here himself, he couldn’t blame Kelly for that.
In his hand was a cup of coffee and he lifted it to take a sip, checking his watch as he did so.
By this time tomorrow, it will all be over.
It was a month after the Lytton-Warwick Cup. A month since the death of Steve Warwick and Yana—or Myshka, or whatever the hell she was called.
And a month since he had last seen Kelly.
Tomorrow morning was the memorial service for Vee. Her parents had pushed for the service in the church of the local village, on the spurious grounds that it dated back to Saxon times and therefore had some kind of worthy pedigree. Lytton failed to see quite what that had to do with anything, except perhaps to subtly remind him of his own lack of breeding.
Having a memorial service at all was at his in-laws’ request, although ‘insistence’ might have been a better word. But Lytton had not argued against it. Perhaps now it had emerged that Veronica did not, after all, take her own life they felt the need for some kind of public vindication.
Nor had he objected to footing the cost, which they had automatically expected of him. And when he glanced over the sizeable guest list and found he recognised very few names, he hadn’t raised objections about that either.
Some of those travelling from further afield would begin arriving that afternoon, ahead of tomorrow’s performance—there was hardly another word to describe it. His mother-in-law had pointed out it was silly for them to cram themselves into local B&Bs—there were no suitable large hotels close by—when the house itself had a surplus of rooms standing empty. Lytton had agreed on the basis that she organised it. It was only habit that made him oversee the details before he paid the bills.
The result was that he felt somewhat detached from the whole exercise as if he was the manager of the venue rather than an active participant.
After all, Vee’s body had already been laid to rest. He’d said his goodbyes, made his peace, and played a small but not insignificant role in uncovering her killer.
What else was there?
A gust of wind chicaned through the open window and nipped at the fabric of Lytton’s shirt. It was getting colder, he realised. Autumn had crept up when he wasn’t looking and soon it would be winter. Before long the stores would be putting up Christmas lights and advertising late-night shopping, and then the winter sun getaway advertising would start.
“Maybe it is time for that holiday,” he wondered aloud.
There was nothing to stop him going, except a lingering sense of waiting.
Waiting for Kelly.
As for the rest of it, that was getting sorted, slowly enough. The insurance company was stalling paying out on the key-man policy on Steve Warwick until the criminal investigations were complete. They had been clearly suspicious of Lytton’s own possible involvement too. But considering Yana had also had a bloody good go at adding him to the body count, his legal team were confident they would settle. It was only a matter of time.
The inaugural Lytton-Warwick Cup had not exactly gone according to plan, but it had certainly gained so much publicity—good and bad—that next year was a done deal. The TV people had already signed up, although Lytton had told them in a dry tone that he couldn’t promise peripheral events would be quite so . . . exciting in future.
And he’d changed the name slightly. Calling it the Lytton-Warwick Memorial Cup now seemed doubly appropriate.
The police had finished questioning him weeks ago, the business had been put into a holding pattern and the country house was already half packed up and on the market. He had an exclusive and very private resort in the Bahamas all picked out for his own personal getaway.
All he hadn’t been able to bring himself to do was get on a plane.
Lytton stepped back from the window and swallowed the last of his coffee, placing the empty cup down on the desktop. His broadsheet daily was still spread across the surface and his eyes slid again to the news item on Kelly Jacks.