“I don’t like it. It’s a risk.”
“Risk of what exactly, Steve?” Lytton asked, his voice dangerously soft. “There isn’t anything you want to tell me is there?”
46
In the Ladies’ room, Kelly changed back into her own clothes with a feeling that was half regret and half relief.
She slid the grips out of her hair, ran her fingers through it vigorously to return it to its usual more comfortable casual style. But as she fastened the belt of her cargoes she glanced at the lavender dress hanging on the back of the cubicle door.
“Nice try,” she murmured to herself, “but it’s just not me anymore.”
She folded the dress as carefully as she could into the backpack aware that it was probably going to need dry cleaning just to get rid of the creases.
She wasn’t expecting company so it was a surprise to find Steve Warwick’s wife Yana waiting anxiously by the doorway when she stepped out of the cubicle.
“Hello,” Kelly said cautiously. A frightened mouse the woman might be but she could still recognise Kelly from the news reports.
Yana ducked her head by way of greeting and hurried over with wide pleading eyes.
“You need go,” she said urgently, fingers grasping Kelly’s arm. Her nails were short and discoloured. “Please hurry.”
“Yana, I . . . Why?” Kelly asked flatly.
The other woman looked about to burst into tears. “My husband is bad man,” she said as if the information was being tortured out of her. She glanced nervously over her shoulder. “He do things that are . . . illegal. I do not know what to do.”
“I’m very sorry but—trust me—I’m the last person you should be asking for help right now.”
“Help?” Yana said, her face blank. “No, no! You no understand. I try help you.”
“What?”
Yana shook her head as though frustrated by her own lack of vocabulary, accent thickening. “He deal with peoples from my home country. How you say? Bad men.”
“Gangsters,” Kelly supplied, her mouth going suddenly dry.
“Da! Gangsters,” Yana said. “That how I came here—as payment. You understand?”
Bastards. “Oh I understand.”
Yana nodded, eyes still flitting to the doorway as if expecting her husband to burst in at any moment and drag her out by the hair. “He and Mr Lytton they talk about you just now. Mr Lytton he say he ‘want you where he can keep eye on you’, yes?”
“Did he now . . .” Kelly’s voice was cold but she felt something shrivel into a hard tight knot in the centre of her chest.
“I work sometimes for poor Mrs Lytton. I know she hear something bad—something that make her very unhappy—about her husband.”
“What was it?”
Yana shook her head. “I don’t know. She not tell me. But after two days she dead. And now I scared.” She was twisting her hands together until the knuckles showed white. “My husband he send text to someone—I think about you. You need go now! Before he hurt you too . . .”
47
In the car park of the racecourse Dmitry shoved his cellphone back into his pocket and climbed out of the Mercedes. Above him towered the modern grandstand, like a giant vee balanced on its side.
He moved without haste across the open tarmac towards the bulk of the stands. As he went he patted the pockets of the leather coat. In one side he had several industrial tie-wraps suitable for immobilising the average adult female without possibility of escape. In the other was the extendible baton he’d used to such effect on Ray McCarron.
Dmitry wasn’t happy having the baton concealed there—it pulled the coat out of line. But he wasn’t expecting to carry it for long.
48
Kelly took the emergency exit stairs three at a time jumping the last batch to each half landing and using the walls as a springboard. If she’d still been in heels she would have broken both her ankles before the end of the first flight.
It had taken too much time to reassure Yana. The woman had suffered minor hysterics as it sank in what her husband and Lytton might do if they worked out she had tipped off Kelly.
“Tell Matt I was planning to duck out on him all along,” Kelly said ignoring the voice in her head that craved Lytton’s approval for her actions in some small way. She closed her mind to it, hardened her voice. “Tell him I was taking him for a ride.” Her mouth twisted. “Well you just can’t trust an ex-con, can you?”
Yana gazed at her with slightly uncomprehending eyes but nodded mutely. Kelly knew the other woman would pass on the message—if only to save her own skin.
“You should get out too Yana,” she said fiercely. “Get out while you still can.”
“I . . . cannot.” Yana shook her head vigorously, gave a wan smile. “And he not force himself on me so much now—he take his pleasure . . . elsewhere.”
That last had Kelly wanting to stay and punch Steve Warwick’s lights out for him but what good would that do other than provide a sense of righteous satisfaction? Kelly gave Yana’s arm a last heartfelt squeeze, and ran.
She shouldered into the straps of the backpack as she went, hardly able to see for the sudden blurring of her vision.
Uppermost was anger, she realised. Anger at herself that she’d slid into trust so easily. She’d thought after David that trusting a man—being attracted to him—would not happen without a long association. And yet she’d found herself going to Lytton within days of their first meeting. She remembered curling into the side of him on the sofa at his apartment and cursed herself for a weak-minded fool.
She kept heading down, eventually finding an open door that led out onto a walkway at the base of the huge covered stands. In front of her was a set of railings that looked down onto the paddock area. Doors at each end of the walkway were marked EXIT. Kelly hesitated a moment then went left.
As she stepped out she glanced upwards. Somewhere above her Lytton and Warwick were still sitting at the table in the members’ bar, hopefully oblivious to her premature departure.
She felt guilty ducking out and leaving him with the bill until she realised she didn’t have a hope of paying it anyway.
Kelly paused, looked around. She swore under her breath that she hadn’t taken enough note of the way in to have an exit strategy planned. How many times had she listened to other inmates explaining their capture because of just such a mistake. Sitting there listening to their stories it had seemed so elementary. Now she wasn’t so sure.
But Lytton had lulled her into a false sense of security. Stupid, stupid, stupid! It echoed in her head to the beat of her own footsteps. Just because he’s charming and attractive, it doesn’t mean he’s not a monster under the skin.