The man at the racecourse was the same man at the warehouse on the Isle of Dogs—one of them at least.
She’d known it partly when she saw him walking towards her. The way somebody moved was individual and distinct. Even so that might not have been enough.
But the smell of him . . . that was something else again.
Scent is one of the strongest triggers for memory. Coffee, fresh bread, newly mown grass, lilies. They all produced strong accompanying mental images for Kelly. She sometimes focused on them during the nastier cleanup jobs. It was the only thing that stopped her heaving.
But this was a combination of odours—some kind of sharp citrus aftershave mingled with tobacco and another faint mechanical note that was harder to define. Not unpleasant in itself just . . . associated with violence in her mind.
The violence of Tyrone’s death.
Oh yeah, he was there.
She cursed herself again for not stopping to question him, search him, but at the time her only priority had been getting away from there as fast as she could. It wasn’t just the man who’d come after her she had to worry about.
It was who had sent him and why.
She kept circling back to Veronica Lytton’s death. Was that the start of all this? Or did it start six years ago with another rigged suicide? She couldn’t see what linked the two deaths other than herself. And if someone had indeed set her up the first time around why do it all over again now?
But she couldn’t deny the path of evidence—from the Lytton job via Ray McCarron’s beating through to Tyrone’s death. Ray had warned her not to go turning over rocks and the only person she’d told that she was going to keep looking was Lytton himself, the morning he’d sought her out at the dead junkie’s flat.
Kelly swallowed back tears of self-indulgent sorrow. After today there was no denying it. She refused to believe that she’d been followed out to the racecourse by chance. Lytton’s Aston might be easily recognisable but nobody had any reason to suspect she was with him.
Not unless he told them.
The thought rose bitter and unbidden but there was no way around it—he was the only one who knew where she’d be. And although she didn’t trust Lytton’s partner Warwick as far as she could have thrown him, by the time he and his wife arrived in the restaurant there surely would not have been time for the man in the leather coat to be summoned for an abduction. Maybe that was why he’d bungled it?
She remembered the timid Yana’s warning and wondered if things had gone as badly for her as the Russian woman obviously feared. If she’s right about them she took a hell of a risk for a stranger, Kelly thought, humbled.
But still it didn’t make sense that Lytton would have arranged to have her snatched from so public a place. She’d been at his apartment all night. There had been any number of better—more private—opportunities.
Get a grip Kel, you’re just looking for excuses for him, she told herself. Face it—you wanted to trust him.
And she had wanted to, she realised with a sour taste in the back of her throat.
Badly.
It was not a mistake she intended to make again.
54
Twelve crow-flown miles northwest of Kelly’s bus route Frank Allardice sat in a rented Vauxhall outside a nursery school on the outskirts of Hampstead Heath.
His quarry had taken some finding. That he was here at all was a testament to palms greased and backs scratched and favours called in. There were still a few aging coppers left whose memories stretched back far enough to when DCI Allardice was a man worth staying on the right side of.
Allardice humphed out a breath. Those days were fast coming to an end he knew. He shifted in the driving seat and flicked the windscreen wipers to clear the beads of water from glass.
Bloody country. Always raining.
He hunched further into his coat, recognising that four years of living in southern Spain had made him soft as far as temperature was concerned. Anything under 20ºC and he was reaching for an extra layer.
It was a good life out there. He’d sworn he was never coming back but sometimes things you’d thought dead and buried turned out not to be.
Best to make sure.
Across the road a gaggle of parents began to gather around the school gates. A few stay-at-home fathers but mostly mothers, they clogged both sides of the road with their four-by-fours and BMWs. The only ones on foot Allardice judged to be nannies or au pairs. It wasn’t just the mode of transport that set them apart—there was a definite distinction in manner and dress.
Allardice saw the girl when she was halfway along the street, approaching from behind him on the opposite side. He recognised her even in the door mirror which he’d tilted out to give him a wider view.
“Well hello there Erin,” he said under his breath.
Watching her walk past him oblivious, Allardice reflected that she hadn’t changed much. Erin never had looked old enough even when she was in her teens and now she was getting on for mid-twenties he would still have carded her before he’d have sold her alcohol in any of his bars.
Well, perhaps not.
She was looking good—hair cut and coloured, skin clear. Although her clothes were not the designer labels sported by some of the other mothers they were clean and reasonably smart.
She’d come a long way from King’s Cross to the verges of respectability.
But not so far. As he watched, she gravitated naturally towards the group of nannies rather than the well-to-do mums, exchanged a few smiles and nods but nothing overtly friendly. They were acquaintances by virtue of their kids, he reckoned, rather than friends.
Well that just makes things easier. Nobody’s going to stick their nose in.
He climbed out of the car buttoning up his coat and crossed towards them mindful of those cruising soft-roaders. A couple of the mothers watched him approach with wary eyes no doubt primed to expect child molesters at every turn. He smiled at them. They did not look reassured.
Erin was standing with her back to him watching the doors to the school across the playground, checking her watch. He stopped a few feet behind her, waited until something tipped her off and she turned.
“Hello Erin,” he said again. “Long time since I’ve bumped into you . . . out on the street as it were.”