Oh Grogan had bailed him out of trouble before, saved his licence a time or two by parachuting in some high-priced silk to argue in his favour.
Without self-flattery, Stubbs knew this was solely because he was a bloody good horse doctor.
The best veterinary surgeons in the country tended to naturally gravitate towards the racing centres of Newmarket or the rolling Downs out past the Chiltern Hills west of London. That’s where the real money was to be made.
Brian Stubbs had once counted among the best of them.
But his father had been a drinker. His mother too, now that he thought back. All too soon the odd glass of wine with dinner had become a bottle for breakfast.
And now it had landed him in the biggest mess of his life. He wasn’t just looking at a temporary ban this time. He was looking at prison.
Sitting on the edge of the thin bed Stubbs rocked forwards and buried his unshaven face in his hands. It didn’t help.
He could still see the old woman on the bonnet, the way her shock had turned into one giant flinch, eyes screwed tight shut, just before she hit the windscreen. It seemed to be permanently imprinted, hard-wired into his brain even with his own eyes closed.
Of course he’d called for an ambulance immediately. And inevitably the police had turned up along with them. They’d been admiring at first, the way he’d calmly taken care of the compound fracture of the old lady’s leg, stemmed the bleeding from a nasty scalp wound.
That admiration hadn’t survived the mandatory breathalyser test.
Trouble was Stubbs never felt drunk. OK, his hands might not be as rock steady as they’d once been but that was simply down to advancing middle age. And if his memory wasn’t quite as sharp in the afternoons, or certain words escaped his tongue, that was because he put in long hours. Dedication, nothing more.
But for some reason his client list had been shrinking over the past few years. There’d been a run of bad luck of course—everyone lost animals occasionally. Couldn’t be avoided.
Looking after Harry Grogan’s horses were now his main—make that only—source of income. So when Grogan’s trainer called in a state, claiming his mollycoddled prize colt was acting up after an intruder had got into his stable, Stubbs knew he couldn’t make excuses not to turn out. Not this close to the big race.
Now, sitting in the cell of the police station where they’d taken him after his arrest at the scene of the accident, he wished he’d thought of something.
“What the hell am I going to do?” The words echoed off the painted walls and bare floor, coming back to mock him. He was not a brave man, he recognised in a sudden epiphany of self-awareness. He would not do well in prison.
But what have I got to bargain with?
The answer came at him so fast it left him breathless. He lurched to his feet, started to thump on the cell door with a clenched fist.
“Hey I want to talk to someone,” he shouted. “I want to make a deal!”
101
“I don’t get what the deal is,” DC Dempsey said. He was trying to shovel sweet and sour king prawn out of the foil container and into his mouth without dripping most of it down his tie in the process. “Why did we take the watch off Jacks’s place? I mean, she must have gone back there to pick up her Mini or how did it end up parked outside McCarron’s place? Shouldn’t we put someone on the place again just in case?”
O’Neill dug into his own pork foo yung like a man a long way from yesterday’s supper. Which he realised was the last time he’d eaten properly. “We haven’t got the budget for a round-the-clock on the off chance—unless you’re volunteering?” he said. He couldn’t resist adding, “And she was pretty good at slipping past you last time anyway.”
Dempsey pinked a bit round the ears at that and doggedly applied himself to his food while the blush subsided.
They were alone amid a sea of empty desks with a late ordered-in Chinese that would have incurred Chief Superintendent Quinlan’s disapproval if he’d still been in the office at that hour. O’Neill reckoned they were fairly safe from discovery.
“Erm, can I ask a question boss?”
O’Neill suppressed a sigh. “You’re not back in school sunshine. Just spit it out.”
“Right, erm. What do Harry Grogan and the Russians have to do with Jacks?”
For a moment O’Neill froze. As far as he knew, the only person apart from him who knew Kelly had been threatened by Russian thugs—or that Grogan had put a price on her head—was Kelly herself. How had Dempsey got onto it?
He glanced across at the detective constable sitting on the other side of the desk. The kid might look like a geek but there was a brain lurking under the surface after all. O’Neill forced himself to chew and swallow with every appearance of calm.
“Go on,” he invited.
“Well I was reading through the file, and the emergency call about the dead wino at the warehouse where Douet was later found, it came from a Russian. Then the tip about Douet came from another guy with an eastern European or Russian accent. In fact, listening to the tapes, it could even be the same guy. And then you ask me to check if Harry Grogan’s got any Russian connections . . .”
His voice trailed off, misinterpreting the scowl of concentration on O’Neill’s face.
O’Neill registered his alarm and hastily rearranged his features. “No, no—it’s a good point,” he said. “We thought there was something hinky about that second call. The floor where Douet was found isn’t readily visible, so how did our mysterious good citizen just so happen to witness the murder?”
“Ah—unless he was there.”
“Shame Matthew Lytton doesn’t have any Russians on the payroll.”
“No, but his partner Steve Warwick is married to one.”
O’Neill let his eyebrows climb. “You mean somebody actually opens those spam emails pretending to be from lonely young Russian girls who dream of love and marriage to a man with a nice handsome British passport?”
“Ha, the only spam I get are the ones offering fake Rolex watches and cheap Viagra.” Dempsey wiped his fingers on a paper serviette then leaned across and rifled through the paperwork balanced on the corner of his desk. “You know you asked me to pull Lytton’s phone records?”
“Anything crop up that might have been to or from Jacks?”
“I didn’t find anything direct to Jacks’s flat or work cellphone but there was a call to Lytton’s office from a throwaway cellphone the day you went to see him.” He handed across a printout with a list of numbers, one of which was highlighted. “Mean anything?”