“You’ll ride with us back to the house?” his father-in-law suggested stiffly when they reached the lane where people were climbing into their cars. Lytton had approved the hire of the Bentley they’d wanted, even though the distance from house to church barely allowed it to warm up.
“I have my car here,” Lytton said, gesturing to the Aston Martin.
They sniffed at that, said they’d see him at the catered lunch in half an hour, and left.
Lytton headed off into the surrounding graveyard, pulling his wool overcoat a little tighter around him to ward off the sharp and sneaky wind. He found her by the wall right in the far corner, still with the ridiculous topcoat wrapped around her and a small rucksack tucked at her feet.
“Kelly!” He hurried the last few strides finding he was suddenly breathless. “What are you doing here?”
“I came to see you,” she said. “I asked at the house and the caterers assumed I was a late guest of some sort. They gave me directions.” She fingered the lapel of the coat. Beneath it he could see a bright shirt and khaki cargo pants. “I didn’t know, until I got here . . . I borrowed this from one of the chauffeurs so I wouldn’t look so obviously out of place inside. I didn’t realise . . . I’m sorry.”
“I’m not—sorry you’re here, that is,” he said, feeling a genuine smile start to form. “But what I actually meant was . . . The last I heard you were in Holloway. How did you . . .?” He groaned. “Oh please, tell me you didn’t scale the bloody walls?”
She laughed and he realised he’d never heard her laugh and he liked the sound of it, husky with just an edge of badness to it.
“What, you think at this very moment some deputy US Marshal is organising a hard-target search of every henhouse, outhouse and doghouse between here and Islington?”
He knew she was trying to make light of it by paraphrasing The Fugitive but somehow that only made the situation seem more desperate.
Heedless of what happened the last time he grabbed her, Lytton closed in and gripped her upper arms, forced her to focus on his face.
“Kelly, please, this is serious. If you’re on the run I can help. I know a guy with a fast cruiser moored at Lymington. We can have you out of the country by tonight.”
She went very still. “You’d do that?” she said. “For me?”
“I won’t see you go back to prison for something you didn’t damn well do.”
She stepped in, looked up into his eyes. “They didn’t let me go, Matthew,” she said with gentle deliberation, “because they didn’t need to. I was never really on remand. Not this time.”
He tried for incisive. Instead all he managed was a stuttered, “W–what?”
“O’Neill asked for my help to catch the guys who set me up—just sit tight in solitary for a few weeks and let him get on with it,” she said. “Allardice did the dirty work, but it was Chief Superintendent Quinlan who Callum Perry was trying to blackmail. He was the one who decided to get rid of Perry and use me to take the blame.”
“And O’Neill can prove all this?” Lytton demanded.
“That’s what he’s been doing,” she said. “They’ve had forensic accountants tracing the money, including the funds Allardice transferred out to Spain to start his bar. O’Neill had to play along and wait until Quinlan took his retirement package and went out with a new payoff before he could arrange to have the pair of them grabbed.”
“Which he’s now done,” Lytton guessed, and heard the utter relief in his own voice.
“Which he’s now done,” Kelly echoed, satisfaction in hers. “I’ve been in Spain seeing this thing through. Got back this morning and came straight up here.” She nodded to the rucksack at her feet.
“Well I’m glad you did,” he said. “Am I supposed to ask why?”
She gave him a smile that was almost shy. “O’Neill told me you offered to post my bail. I wanted to . . . thank you. In person.”
He realised he was still grasping her upper arms and he loosened his grip, slipping his hands round onto her back and tracing the outline of her shoulder blades, the indentations of her spine, with his fingertips. He watched her face all the while, saw what he hoped to see and began to draw her closer.
At the last moment Kelly brought her hands up and wedged them against his chest.
“No,” she said, but when he would have released her with a muttered apology she added, “not here, that’s all. I mean, I want to, don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t sure if you did, but . . . I meant not right outside the church where you’ve just held your wife’s memorial service.”
“Where, then?” The question came out more starkly than he intended.
Another gust of wind whipped between the gravestones and she shivered. “Anywhere that isn’t so damned cold would be a good start.”
Matthew Lytton smiled.
“I hear the Bahamas is very nice this time of year . . .”
—END—
From the Author’s notebook
The whole idea behind THE BLOOD WHISPERER came about because I was playing around with the theme of trust. As a London crime-scene specialist Kelly Jacks trusted what the evidence she collected was telling her and she enjoyed the particular trust of her colleagues who nicknamed her The Blood Whisperer because of her affinity with the work she carried out.
Then that trust is betrayed. Everyone she’s ever known lets her down and turns away from her. And when she’s tried and convicted of a violent crime she even loses trust in herself over her own innocence or guilt.
So the story is also about the rebuilding of Kelly’s ability to trust—in the evidence, in herself, and both in the people she’s known for years and those she’s only just met. I was originally going to call the book THE CARRION CREW, a play on the name of Kelly’s mentor and boss of the crime-scene cleaning firm, Ray McCarron, but was worried it had too many horror overtones for a crime novel. Then my husband suggested THE BLOOD WHISPERER and that fitted just right.
Although I’ve been writing the Charlie Fox series for some years now, that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in exploring other characters and other situations. I hope, however, that fans of Charlie Fox will find much to like in another strong female protagonist—Kelly Jacks.
Acknowledgements
Getting this book to fruition seems to have been a long and tortuous path, and I’m eternally grateful to the various people who test-read it, either in small chunks or the whole thing, some of them several times: JT Ellison, Sarah Harrison, Kate Kinchen, Kirsty Long, Michelle Wilbye, Tim Winfield, and all the members of the Warehouse Writers Group in Kendal. You have the patience of a whole congregation of saints.
Further editorial input came initially from Stephanie Glencross, and latterly from Rhian Davies. Thank you both so much for your efforts.