Kelly frowned, remembering the layout from Lytton’s guided tour. “The private boxes each have their own bathroom,” she said. “If somebody had a sudden nosebleed surely they’d head for one of those rather than drip all over the building?”
“Not if it was staff rather than guests.” McCarron gave a one-shoulder shrug and offered her a worn out smile. “Just playing devil’s advocate, Kelly love.”
She didn’t respond to that, backtracking to follow the blood trail upstream towards its source. She found it in the doorway to one of the boxes. It did not altogether surprise her to realise it was the one that had been assigned to Lytton and Warwick.
They hugged the wall outside the box. There were several drops of blood clustered on the smooth floor surface near the handle side where someone might have paused to shut or lock the door before moving off along the corridor. Kelly unbuttoned the waistcoat that formed part of her borrowed uniform and wrapped her hand in the material before reaching for the doorknob.
Just before she got there, McCarron stayed her arm.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” he whispered.
“No, but if I hand it over to the cops at this stage who knows what the hell will happen,” she whispered back.
“It’s not the cops I’m worried about.”
Kelly hesitated a moment then turned away. She retrieved her tray from the side table and came back with it.
“Camouflage,” she mouthed when he looked bewildered. She did not think he needed to know that the stainless steel tray itself, not to mention most of its contents, would also make very handy improvised weaponry.
McCarron let out a long breath then used the corner of his own jacket to turn the handle. Surprise would only offer a momentary window of opportunity, so Kelly stepped through quickly, moving to the side. McCarron followed more out of loyalty than eagerness, she felt sure.
Inside they both stopped dead. On the floor in front of them was a lump shrouded partially by a man’s morning suit jacket and partially by what looked like a fur rug. One lifeless hand stretched out from underneath it as if in supplication. The smell of violence was dark and sickly in the air.
Outside the glass the crowd was roaring home the first winner of the day. Against the scene that suddenly presented itself Kelly had a sharp vision of Romans at the Coliseum baying for slaughter.
It was McCarron who went forward, picked up a corner of the rug with his finger and thumb and peeled it heavily away from the body.
“Well, I reckon we don’t need to search any further for your blood,” he said at last, his voice husky. “Any idea who he is?”
Kelly realised she couldn’t avoid looking at the body any longer and it had nothing to do with general squeamishness. She swallowed as she let her eyes skim over the lifeless features.
Recognition hit her in a cold wash.
132
“Who is he?” McCarron asked. “Or should I ask who was he?”
Kelly Jacks had leaned down to examine cast-off blood spatter across the far wall of the box. “Steve Warwick,” she said without looking round. “He was Matthew Lytton’s business partner.”
“That’s odd.”
“Not really. You’d expect him to be here on their big day.”
“I didn’t mean that,” McCarron said, and there must have been something in his voice because she rose and turned towards him, graceful where McCarron felt lumbering. And achingly tired. He was, he recognised in no fit state to go wading in trying to make sense of a crime scene—and certainly not one like this. Never mind that they’d no right to be here in the first place.
In fact between his conscience and his cast elbow it was a toss-up which was troubling him the most and he’d gone in search of water to swallow a handful of painkillers.
“The bathroom door’s locked—from the inside,” he said now, stepping away and lowering his voice.
Kelly came to him around the edges of the room, careful where she put her feet. She gave the door a cursory glance then fetched the teaspoon from her discarded tray of coffee. She shoved the flat end of the spoon into the centre part of the lock, using it as a makeshift screwdriver and twisting it until the indicator tab went from red to green.
McCarron watched her deft movements with a little stirring of unease in the back of his mind.
“Kelly love—”
She silenced him with a look. “You might want to stand back for this,” she murmured. “Just in case.”
He would have argued but she already had her shoulder against the door, holding the tension off the lock while she nudged it open.
The bathroom was small, lined with tiles and had no external window. The light was on, the extractor humming quietly in the background. The first thing they saw was the white pedestal sink, covered in a pink wash and dotted with clogged lumps of sodden tissue paper. A ruined towel sat in a soggy heap on the floor beneath it.
Kelly pushed the door wider and they both heard a strangled gasp from inside.
It was, McCarron judged, a sound more likely to be made by a victim rather than an attacker. He moved to the doorway.
“It’s all right, you can come out,” he said gruffly. “They’ve gone whoever they are and we’re not going to hurt you.”
Kelly flicked him a brief glance that made him hope he hadn’t been optimistic about the last part but inside the bathroom a figure uncurled itself from a poor hiding place squashed down alongside the toilet bowl and tottered out to meet them.
It was a dark-haired woman, stooped in fear, her makeup streaked from tears and ineffectual scrubbing. She was wearing a dowdy black dress covered with ominous damp patches that gleamed in the lights. She looked terrified.
“Yana?” Kelly’s voice was a mixture of surprise and exasperation. “What the—?”
“You know her?” McCarron asked.
“She’s Steve Warwick’s . . . wife,” Kelly said choosing her words with care.
At that moment the woman Yana seemed to catch sight of the partially covered corpse and dashed across the room to fling herself down on top of it in a storm of weeping.
McCarron could only watch while it took Kelly several attempts to prise her away, by which time the taller woman’s hands and her wild-eyed face were sluiced with the dead man’s blood.
“Leave him,” Kelly said a mite sharply. “There’s nothing you can do for him and you’re contaminating the scene.”
Yana Warwick slumped at the admonishment. Docile now, she allowed herself to be led to a chair and pressed into it. McCarron threw Kelly a reproachful glance. It was coolly returned.