“Look, it might just be coincidence love, but after you were arrested O’Neill made the jump to CID and he’s been rising fast ever since.”
“Even after Allardice retired?” Kelly said. “Perhaps he’s just a bright boy.”
“And perhaps,” McCarron said grimly, “he knows where the bodies are buried.”
110
Kelly stood near the office window cradling a mug of lukewarm tea. She watched the colour of the sky over the rooftops changing slowly from sodium orange to the pale pink of sunrise.
Behind her, Ray McCarron stirred fitfully under the blanket she’d laid over him when the pills and the pain had finally caught up. She glanced across at the bruised and beaten features, his hair ruffled into a peak like a mini mohican.
Kelly hadn’t slept but spent the remainder of the night in restless contemplation of what to do. What she could do. There weren’t exactly a lot of options open to her.
Give up. Run. Fight.
She’d tried the first option before—surrendered to the authorities. That hadn’t worked out so well. Running wasn’t much of a long-term prospect either. Might be feasible if she were a criminal mastermind with half a dozen secret offshore bank accounts at her disposal. But Kelly had less than twenty quid left from raiding the petty cash tin in McCarron’s desk. That wouldn’t get her to Southend-on-Sea, never mind the South Seas.
She tried to look at her situation with a cool and logical mind. She knew she couldn’t stay ahead of the police for much longer. Whatever O’Neill’s motives in letting her loose, she wasn’t naïve enough to think it was anything but a temporary reprieve.
Kelly sipped her tea and frowned. She still couldn’t work out what the detective’s motives were. If he was Allardice’s young apprentice as McCarron suggested then why hadn’t he simply arrested her outside the Forensics building in Lambeth?
An answer—maybe even the answer—arrived so suddenly, so fully formed, that she jerked from the force of it then tensed, holding very still as if to move would scare it away again before she had chance to totally appreciate the nuances.
She must have made some sound though, because Ray McCarron shifted on the sofa and said groggily, “Wassup, Kel?”
“Nothing . . . I don’t know.”
He struggled upright awkwardly, hampered by the stiffness and the aches he hadn’t quite learned to compensate for. He pushed the blanket aside and rubbed his good hand—carefully—across his face. She heard the scuff of stubble against his palm.
“Care to elaborate?”
Still feeling her way, Kelly hesitated. Marshalling her thoughts was akin to rounding up hyperactive sheep with a lame collie. The more she tried to get them in order, the more they scattered.
Eventually she said, “O’Neill let me go. He had the chance to arrest me and he didn’t do it. In fact he pointed me in the direction of the person who probably supplied the ketamine I was dosed with.”
“So you’re wondering—if he’s in bed with Allardice—why would he help you?”
“Supposing he did it because he knows I was innocent. Because he knows who killed Callum Perry and it wasn’t me.” It still felt good to say the words.
Grumpy from sleep McCarron gave a small tic of impatience. “We’ve been over all this, Kelly love—”
“But supposing,” she interrupted, “what O’Neill doesn’t know—and what he needs to know—is the identity of the copycat. Who copied Perry’s murder to set me up a second time?”
McCarron drew in a breath as if to begin an argument that never quite made it into words. He frowned, as much as his wounded face would perform such a manoeuvre.
“I don’t get it,” he said at last. “Why would they care?”
“Because it means somebody else knows their secret. Somebody else knows I was framed successfully once and they’ve tried to do it again.”
“But this time it didn’t go according to plan,” he murmured. “You didn’t wait around to be arrested and even if O’Neill magically vanishes away the blood evidence you collected, you can still prove you were drugged.”
It was her turn to frown. “But I didn’t know about traces staying in my hair until O’Neill himself told me,” she said. “Why would he do that?”
“Because he needed you to do his legwork for him,” McCarron said. “He can’t go at this from anything other than the official angle—that you’ve gone off the rails again. Anything else opens him up to too many difficult questions. Clever bugger! He feeds you just enough for you to go crashing around in the undergrowth while he and flaming Allardice sit on their backsides and wait to see what breaks cover.”
“By that you mean they’re waiting to see who manages to kill me, I assume,” Kelly said surprised by the note of calm in her own voice. She thought of the two attempts by the Russian she now knew as Dmitry—first at the racecourse and then via Elvis at Tina’s flat in Brixton.
If the law didn’t get her first then sooner or later he was going to catch up with her. And then what? He was Grogan’s man but Grogan had fed her a little info too.
It’s like a game of tactical tennis and I get the nasty feeling I’m the ball.
“I could always give O’Neill what he wants—where to find Dmitry,” she said. “After that it’s up to him to follow the trail of who hired him and why.”
McCarron regarded her steadily. “And what happens to you in the meantime?”
Kelly allowed herself a small smile. “Ah, now that one I hadn’t quite thought through,” she admitted.
She turned away from the window and put her empty mug down on the corner of the desk. “I can’t help wishing you’d sent Les and Graham to do the Veronica Lytton job.” Her smile was small and tight and sad. “Useless, I know, but if I’d been just that bit slower, Tyrone would have made a start cleaning the bathtub and I would never have seen anything amiss.”
“Aye I know, lass,” he said softly. He lifted the cast arm an inch or so off the sofa. “If wishes were horses beggars would ride, eh?”
Horses.
Matthew Lytton and his racehorses.
Racehorses he’d owned at one point or another with Harry Grogan.
And when Lytton had come to her flat the morning after McCarron’s attack he’d known all about her past. All about the trial and how it had gone down.
What else had he known?
What else had he used?
Kelly blinked, looked away from McCarron’s suddenly intent gaze. “I better go,” she said quickly. “If I know Les, he’ll be in soon.”