Locard’s Exchange Principle had been one of the first things they’d taught her when she began her training as a crime-scene investigator. It had fascinated her—how hard it was to eradicate all possible remainders of yourself.
Ever since her first scenes Kelly had this image in her head of the different strands of evidence swirling around the place like coloured mist. All you had to do was be able to see it.
But in this case the evidence was not physical. It was hearsay and conjecture. Full of might be and what if. She had never felt so lost among it.
Weary, she climbed the stairs to the upper floor. There was enough light bleeding in from outside for her to make her way without bumping into anything. Upstairs had the nutty smell of burnt coffee left too long too brew in the filter machine, mingled with the enzyme cleaner they used at scenes and furniture polish.
She dumped Ray’s car keys on top of his in tray where she’d seen him put them himself a hundred times before. It was only as she turned to go that she saw a dark shape rising from the sofa on the far side of the room.
Heart bounding, Kelly dropped into a crouch. There was a second’s buzzing silence and immobility then a calm familiar voice spoke out of the darkness.
“No need to panic Kelly. I’ve been waiting for you.”
109
Ray McCarron reached out with his good arm and switched on a small lamp next to the sofa. It spread soft fingers of light across the comfortably untidy office. His domain. Across the other side of the room Kelly was still poised for flight, tense on the balls of her feet. She looked different—and not necessarily in a good way.
“I suppose I really should ask for your keys, seeing as how you’ve resigned,” he said casually and watched her gradually uncoil.
“I suppose you should,” she agreed.
He could almost get both eyes open again but even so the light was too dim for him to read her face clearly and he could glean little from her voice.
She asked, “How did you get here?”
“Without my car you mean?”
“I was more thinking without two working arms. Taxi?”
“Les gave me a lift,” McCarron said.
She raised an eyebrow at that, glanced around. “He locked you in and left you here alone in the dark?” she said flatly. “What happened—did he resign too?”
“I asked him to do it,” McCarron said. “Not the first time I’ve slept on this old sofa and you know as well as I do the alarm sensors only cover the ground floor.”
So I knew I’d be safe up here.
It had still taken some mental girding to set foot in the place so soon after . . . so soon. But of all his employees Les had been with him the longest—almost since the start. He was the one most likely to speak out if he thought McCarron was taking a wrong turn. McCarron was heartened by the fact Les agreed to drive him over without protest. Neither of them mentioned Kelly, as if by some tacit agreement. McCarron was heartened by that too.
Les told him to stay in the car while he opened up, ostensibly to keep him out of the rain. McCarron watched from a distance while he disabled the alarm and briefly checked the building before he came back to help him out. McCarron thanked him profusely but Les had shaken off the gratitude like beads of water from his waxed cotton jacket, given him a gruff goodbye and departed.
Two hours later McCarron listened to Kelly arrive.
“Want to tell me about it?” he invited now.
She let out a long breath. “Not really,” she said.
But she did, going through it from the moment she’d taken his car until her return to the office. It took about forty-five minutes and he interrupted her account as little as he could. There was weariness about her rather than anger, but that was OK. McCarron was angry enough for both of them.
“That bastard Allardice,” he growled when she was done. “If—”
“Don’t, Ray,” she said, her voice muted. “Believe me, you can’t say anything I haven’t already thought, but louder and with a whole lot more expletives.”
He swallowed the bile. “So what do we do now?”
“‘We’?” Kelly said. “To be honest I don’t know what anyone can do. Allardice retired with a farewell party, a gold watch and a pat on the back, and I left in chains. You really think anyone’s going to take action now against one of their own?”
“You were one of their own too, Kelly love. Didn’t seem to stop them back then.”
“And now I’m a fugitive and a murder suspect.” She sighed. “I’ve no chance of proving who really did what six years ago. Too much water under the bridge. Best I can do is hand over what I know to DI O’Neill and let him figure it out.”
“O’Neill . . .? Not Vince O’Neill?”
Kelly went still. “You know him?”
“I know of him.”
“But didn’t he come to see you in hospital—after you were attacked?” she asked. “Ty-Tyrone and I met him there that first night.”
McCarron noted the way she stumbled over the boy’s name but didn’t comment. Instead he lifted the cast an inch or two. “Kelly love, the amount of morphine they’d given me you could have told me the Dalai Lama had arrived with his ukulele to give me a medley of George Formby classics and I wouldn’t be able to contradict you with any certainty.”
“And he didn’t come back later? O’Neill, I mean.”
“No. If he had, well I would have said something when I saw you earlier today.” He glanced at the clock on the far office wall. It was a little after one in the morning. “Yesterday,” he corrected.
“Come on Ray—I know that tone of voice. What is it about O’Neill?”
McCarron hesitated. “He worked with Allardice.”
She frowned. “So did you.”
“Yes but not like that, Kel. There was a bit more to it than that.”
Her only reply was an eyebrow so arched he had no trouble making out the gesture.
“Allardice always liked to have a blue-eyed boy under his wing—no, nothing like that,” he added catching her cynical sniff. “A kind of sidekick.”
“Robin to his Batman?”
“Not quite. More like Igor to his Dr Frankenstein. Someone he could build up, who’d owe him and be grateful later down the line.”
That produced a fleeting smile. “And O’Neill was the chosen one?”
“Aye. Allardice started to groom him while he was still in uniform. A word or two in the right ear. A favour or two called in. You know how it goes.”
“Oh yeah,” she murmured. “And how it doesn’t.”