O’Neill squinted at the sheet and shook his head. “Have you tried calling it?”
“Yeah—not available. If it is her she could be anywhere.”
O’Neill scanned the rest of the numbers briefly but nothing popped. The office was quiet except for the distant droning vacuum of the night cleaning-staff and the whine of an overhead fluorescent tube just about to fail.
“Any of these turn out to be interesting?”
“Well, funny you should ask that,” Dempsey said, diffident. “I mean, it might be nothing but—”
O’Neill fixed him with a hard stare. Dempsey broke off and then grinned at him a little sheepishly.
“OK boss—short version. You wanted me to go through the files on Grogan and look for Russian affiliations, yeah?”
“And?”
“Well lately he’s been getting involved in importing a lot of stuff from all over the former Soviet Union. Craftsman-built furniture, mainly. Artisan rugs, ceramics, that kind of thing.”
When O’Neill still looked nonplussed, Dempsey took a nervous sip of his Diet Coke. O’Neill wondered why he bothered with no-sugar soft drinks. The young DC was as skinny as a park railing. “When I say ‘a lot’ boss, I mean it,” he went on. “Like, by the container-load. Upmarket stuff too. I had a quiet word with a mate of mine who works for Sotheby’s. He reckoned it was worth a fortune to the right buyer.”
“So what’s he doing—smuggling it in?”
Dempsey shook his head. “All above board and legal according to Customs. But—and this is the interesting bit—Grogan employs some guys from that part of the world who are not exactly all above board and legal. They’re listed as ‘advisors’ but I’m not sure what kind of advice they’d hand out unless it was which leg to break first.”
So the Russians were working for Grogan. O’Neill thought of Tina Olowayo’s boyfriend Elvis lying immobilised in his hospital bed. They hadn’t needed to ask which leg to break there.
But what he didn’t understand was why Harry Grogan should be involved in chasing down Kelly Jacks—or setting her up, for that matter. She’d claimed he wanted her badly enough to put up a reward. A man like Grogan had a lot to lose but what secrets did he think Kelly Jacks might be able to expose?
He looked up. “Why ‘funny’?”
Dempsey was concentrating on fumbling for his last battered prawn. He gave up on the conventional chopstick approach and speared it instead. “Huh?”
“You said, ‘funny you should ask’ about Lytton’s phone records. Why?”
Dempsey put a hand to his mouth before he spoke as if not wanting to spray his senior officer with half-chewed food. “Ah, there’s been quite a bit of phone traffic between Lytton’s office and numbers associated with Harry Grogan, that’s all.” He shrugged. “I had to ID the numbers for the trace.”
“So Lytton has been doing some kind of a deal with Grogan. That is interesting.”
“Could be a coincidence boss. After all, Lytton’s into property. For all we know he’s simply buying a shedload of furniture for a new development.”
O’Neill shook his head slowly, aware he was tired and his brain was going round in circles without making much forward progress. He reached for his cup of coffee hoping a hit of caffeine might do the trick.
“Kelly Jacks queries the suicide verdict on Veronica Lytton,” he said. “She and Douet report back to her boss. Next thing, McCarron’s been professionally worked over, Douet’s dead and Jacks is in no position to make any kind of fuss because she’s got enough problems of her own.”
“When you put it like that,” Dempsey murmured, “I suppose it doesn’t seem much like coincidence, does it?”
The phone rang on the desk, unexpected enough to make both men start. Dempsey reached for it. As soon as O’Neill realised from his noncommittal tone that it wasn’t a scramble emergency he tuned out the conversation, letting his mind pick over the information without direction as if hoping something would present itself more clearly from the shadows.
Eventually Dempsey dropped the handset into the crook of his neck, eagerness all over his face.
“Erm, fancy a ride out to Reading nick boss?
“What—now? Why?”
“Well, you know the lab identified a vetinerary anaesthetic in Jacks’s blood?”
O’Neill made a get-on-with-it motion with his chopsticks. “And?”
“Well I’ve got Thames Valley on the phone. They just picked up Harry Grogan’s vet DUI after an accident and he reckons he’s got information we need to hear.”
102
In a quiet corner of Reading Services eastbound on the M4, Kelly Jacks grabbed a couple of hours’ rest. Just another tired late-night driver dozing with the seat reclined and her sweatshirt bunched up behind her neck.
She had the car doors locked to keep out the unwanted world but in the end the disturbance came from inside anyway.
The raucous clamour of McCarron’s cellphone jerked her upright, momentarily disorientated and rife with panicked guilt.
She recognised the incoming number and almost didn’t answer at all, her hand lingering over the keypad. Eventually she let her breath out with a hiss of annoyance and snatched up the phone.
“What do you want Ray?”
Ray McCarron matched her stony voice. “Callum Perry had a girlfriend.”
“I don’t remember anyone coming forward after his death,” Kelly said after a moment’s silence. “Something else Allardice forced you to sit on?”
She heard his sharply indrawn breath and felt a complete bitch.
“I know I can’t begin to make up for anything I’ve done—or not done—in the past Kelly but I’m telling you now,” he said tiredly. “If you want me to shut up and go away you only have to say so.”
She struggled not to apologise, instead giving him a brusque, “Go on.”
There was a pause, then he read out a name and address. Kelly scrambled for a pen in the door pocket and a scrap of paper, her head still muzzy with sleep.
“How did you get this?”
“I copied some of the paperwork and case notes,” McCarron admitted. “I suppose I thought . . . well I don’t know quite what I thought to be honest.”
Kelly decided to let that one go. “Was she interviewed at the time?”
“I don’t know,” McCarron said. “I dropped the bloody file down the stairs and it’s going to take me a while to put it back into any kind of order.”
“Don’t you remember?”
“I was sidelined in pretty short order if you recall,” he pointed out. “And I would have been kicked out if they’d caught me taking this stuff. I shoved it through the photocopier as fast as I could and hightailed it out of there.”