The lift in the block wasn’t working but even if it had been Kelly would have walked. After working so many cleanups for Ray McCarron she knew that she couldn’t stand being enclosed with the stink of old urine for more than a couple of floors without a face mask.
Not that the stairwell was much better. She climbed the rancid concrete steps with care but encountered nobody lurking besides a couple of rats. They eyed her boldly and without alarm as she passed.
The flat she was after was on the seventh floor in the south-west corner which meant it was unbearably hot in the summer months. Kelly had never been there but it seemed familiar nevertheless. She’d heard all about it many times—there hadn’t been much else to talk about.
The door opened a chain’s-length to her knock and a single unknown eye in a white face peered at her warily through the gap. There was a TV or a stereo playing loudly in the background, raised voices. Kelly felt defeat wash over her.
“I’m looking for Tina—” she began, and heard commotion somewhere deep inside the flat.
The door slammed but before she could turn away it was thrust open again—fully this time—and Tina Olowayo towered in the aperture.
“Kel!” she yelped and the next moment Kelly found herself lifted off her feet and spun around, engulfed in a mammoth bear hug that threatened to crack half her ribs.
Tina was six foot in flat shoes with blue-black skin and the sinewy muscled build of an athlete. When Kelly had first met her, in a winter-cold exercise yard up in the North East, the woman had seemed a bitter angry giantess railing at the injustices of the world.
She’d been even more angry at anybody who was—or had been—remotely connected to the police and she’d sought out Kelly as a means of retribution.
Fortunately Kelly had been forewarned of this impending confrontation far enough in advance to do a little homework. So when Tina had stepped forward from the crowd cover provided by other inmates, flexing, and thrown down her challenge, Kelly was ready for her.
She’d simply stood her ground and told Tina outright that her lawyer had been a bloody fool to have missed the obvious forensics cock-up in the case that had sent Tina down.
Tina could easily have ignored this as bravado but she didn’t. Uneasily, warily, the two of them sat and talked until their hour outside was up. They talked again every chance they got. Six months later Tina’s ten-year sentence was overturned on appeal and she was free.
She left Kelly behind still serving time but Tina told her she wouldn’t forget that she owed her big time. She told Kelly that she was always welcome in the dirty little corner of Brixton Tina called home—if Kelly was ever desperate enough to venture there.
It was nice to discover, Kelly thought as she struggled for breath, that some people remembered their promises.
At last Tina put her down and whirled her inside all in the same effortless move. She was wearing a T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. Her hair was shoulder length and in braids. The white kid who’d answered the door silently clipped the security chain across again and sloped past them into the kitchen.
“Hey Elvis—make yourself useful and put the kettle on,” Tina called after him. “My friend, she like tea. Try not to bugger it up.”
Elvis gave a mumbled reply that Kelly took to be assent.
Tina dropped an arm across her shoulders and steered her into the living room, pressing her down onto the squashy sofa as she muted the TV. Then she stared down at Kelly for a couple of beats, flipping at the brim of the baseball cap and trailing along the blossoming bruise across her cheekbone with one finger. Her grin fell away.
“You in trouble deep, girl,” she said.
“I swear to you I didn’t kill him.”
Tina put her hands on her hips. “We talking years ago?” she asked. “Or yesterday?”
“Either,” Kelly said with a bloodless smile. “Both.”
“Yeah but can you prove it?” Tina asked. “’Cause we both know—bottom line—that’s what counts. Everything else is just blowing smoke up your arse.”
“I don’t know,” Kelly said wearily. She waved at the dressing still covering the cut on her forearm. “I think I was drugged. I’ve put a sample in to a private lab so I’ll know in a couple of days. Until then—” she shrugged “—I need to stay out of the way of the police.”
“And you only just coming to me now?” Tina sounded offended.
Kelly chose something close to the truth. “I wanted to keep trouble away from you,” she said. She glanced up at the woman standing over her, caught something in her face that made her pause. “What?” she asked suddenly tense. “What have you heard?”
“That the filth is the least of your problems right now,” Tina said grimly. “There’s a price on your head, girl. A big one. And they’re not hanging the payout on getting a conviction, if you know what I mean.”
“A price?” Kelly repeated, shocked. “Who the hell has put a price on my head? Not the police surely?”
Tina shook her head. “Ain’t you listening?” she asked. “This is not a reward—it’s a bounty. All nice and unofficial. And somebody much worse than the cops. What you done to upset a honky gangster called Harry Grogan?”
57
DI O’Neill stuck his head round the door to the CSI’s office and rapped his knuckles lightly on the wood panel.
At his desk by the window Bob Tate glanced up from a report.
“Ah Vince. Good, good,” he said beckoning. “Come in laddie and close the door behind you.”
O’Neill was briefly reminded of Chief Superintendent Quinlan. Tate was already heading for the vending machine in the corner of the room asking over his shoulder, “Moo and two?”
“Excuse me?”
“Ah sorry—milk and a couple of sugars?”
“Is it tea or coffee?”
“Hmm, that’s a debatable point. Nominally coffee I would have said but without further analysis it’s hard to be sure.”
“In that case, yes to both.” O’Neill perched himself on the edge of the desk and waited, trying to curb his impatience until Tate returned carefully balancing a paper cup of steaming dark brown liquid. “So what do you have for me?”
“You’ll have seen the pathologist’s report on young Douet, I assume?”
O’Neill took an experimental sip and regretted it instantly on grounds of both taste and temperature. He managed to swallow before shaking his head. “I think it’s waiting on my desk. I was just on my way back to the office when I got your message.”