Her voice drifted off.
“Who did he meet, Erin?”
She flushed again, her attention suddenly fixed on a few stray grains of salt that had lodged between the table and its fold-out flap, chasing them along the crevice with her fingernail.
“No-one,” she said. “Just a friend. She died—somebody beat her to death. ‘Occupational hazard’ was how your lot described it to me. Jesus, her own mother wouldn’t have known her after what they did.”
“In a little hotel near Euston station,” Kelly supplied, the memory reaching forwards to wrap itself clingingly around her. “They tortured her and left her body in the bathtub.” And when Erin glanced at her, alarm spiking, she added, “I wasn’t always on the run Erin. I worked that case. If it helps, I never stopped looking for answers.”
Erin sat up abruptly, glared at her with eyes that had begun to redden. “No! No, it doesn’t help. You just don’t get it do you? The more you people poked into it, the more Callum got the idea into his head that there was a cover-up going on.”
Confused by her vehemence, Kelly said, “I think he was right.”
She’d aimed to calm her but had the opposite effect. Erin shot to her feet, scraping her chair back, paced over to the sink and turned to lean against it, restless. She had bunions on both feet, Kelly noticed, the big toe squashed over into the others. A throwback deformity from all that time spent loitering in killer heels.
“He was right—that was the whole point. But Callum decided it was a good way to make some easy money. Bonus pay he called it, so I could get out of the game—especially . . .”
“With a baby on the way,” Kelly finished for her.
Erin’s eyes dulled down, lost some of their fire. “Yes,” she whispered. She looked at the fridge directly across from her with its coat of artwork. Some of the pictures had ‘For Mummy’ across the bottom in an uneven childish hand.
Not ‘For Mummy and Daddy’ then . . .
“He didn’t understand who he was dealing with—not regular punters who could be squeezed for cash so their wives didn’t find out. These were people further up the food chain. People with influence and more to lose.”
“They wouldn’t pay him to go away,” Kelly guessed. “Because they couldn’t afford to have him keep coming back.”
Erin shook her head, her face screwed up with the memory. “It all got turned around on him somehow, so instead of Callum having something over them, they had something over him. He was so scared. And then . . . he was dead.”
Kelly watched her rock silently for a minute, then asked carefully, “Who’s ‘they’, Erin?”
“Callum always swore there was some shady Mr Big lurking in the background but I only know one—one of yours,” she said, bitterness creeping in now. “A copper. Who else could arrange to have him killed like that—as an example to the rest of us?”
“Who?”
She hesitated as if even now the threat lingered, distant but no less disturbing. “Allardice,” she said at last. “Detective Chief Inspector Allardice.”
No surprises there then.
“And he’s the one who threatened you—and Jade?”
“Always was a cold-blooded bastard,” Erin said. “I mean, who else would take down one of their own to get rid of Callum?”
Somewhere deep down it was the name Kelly had been expecting but it still hit her with a jolt to hear it out loud. Maybe that was why it took her a moment to catch up with the significance of the rest of it. “You knew?” she demanded. “You knew I was set up?”
Erin nodded. “Callum was coming to you because he thought you might actually do something with what he had, even if he daren’t do it himself. He thought you were on the level. He thought he could trust you.”
It was Kelly’s turn for silence. Relief warred with outright bloody anger that yet another person had known she wasn’t a murderer and had done nothing about it.
She was a junkie hooker with a kid on the way, argued her reasonable half. What could she have done? Who would have taken her seriously?
“Allardice is gone,” she said. “Retired. I don’t even think he’s in the country anymore.”
Erin gave her a cynical glance by way of response. “Gone, huh? Well he was here a few days ago, trust me. Large as life and definitely twice as ugly.”
“What—here in your flat?”
“No, even he wouldn’t go that far,” Erin conceded. “He turned up outside Jade’s school when I went to collect her.” She shivered, wrapped the towelling robe a little tighter. “Just to let me know he could still get me any time he liked. To remind me to keep my mouth shut. So—you were never here and I never spoke to you, right?” Her mouth gave a twist that might have been intended as wry but came across bitter. “Sorry, but I’ve got my daughter to think about . . .”
“I understand.”
Kelly pushed back her chair and rose, suddenly needing to be out of the suffocating little flat where Erin had burrowed with her child—knowing it wasn’t entirely safe but staying anyway.
As she passed on the way to the back door with its easy-pick lock and no inside bolt, she paused, waited until Erin looked at her.
“I didn’t kill him but I’m very sorry,” Kelly said softly, “for everything that happened.”
An expression of stubbornness settled across the younger woman’s features. “You made him think he could get something out of it. It was like waving a bottle of drink at an alcoholic,” she said. “You might not have put the knife in yourself but you put temptation in his way and he . . . couldn’t resist it.”
106
O’Neill had let Dempsey drive to Reading, reckoning the DC was still young enough to enjoy a fast run along the M4. It was late by the time they left London and traffic on the motorway was sparse.
Before they hit the road, O’Neill had pulled together what they knew about Brian Stubbs. It came to the sum total of not a lot. Name, age, profession, marital status (divorced, no kids), immediate family and address. Apart from a couple of brushes for drink-related affray offences—for which Grogan’s slimy brief had successfully argued extenuating circumstances—it seemed Stubbs slept with a clear conscience.
How he’d sleep from here on in was anybody’s guess. And, if the state of the man who was led into the interview room was anything to go by, things were unravelling for him pretty fast.
Even after spending a relatively short time in the cells, Stubbs was dishevelled and off balance. O’Neill had been told he’d refused legal representation and found that intriguing. Like he didn’t want anyone to know.