She crouched so she could force Yana to meet her gaze then asked in a more gentle voice, “What happened here?”
“B–bad men,” Yana said. “They come to our house—this morning. I getting ready.” She bit her lip as she flapped a hand towards her ruined dress like a kid who’d had a new toy broken by the bullies.
McCarron claimed to be no expert but he didn’t think the outfit would have been flattering even before it was liberally splashed with blood. And being a man of the old school, he kept such an opinion firmly to himself.
“And?” Kelly prompted.
Yana gave her a wounded look but said meekly, “They bring me here. I–I lock myself in bathroom but I hear what they do to him.” She raised her head, eyes brimming. “I hear him screaming—”
“It’s all right lovey,” McCarron said hastily, trying to avert the inevitable shed of tears. “You don’t need to go over it again.”
“What about the coat Yana?” Kelly asked. “Where did that come from?”
Yana stared at her for a moment. “C–coat?”
Kelly jerked her head towards the makeshift shroud. McCarron had never understood the fascination for fur. In his opinion it invariably looked far better covering the animal that originally owned it. But, he conceded, maybe that had something to do with the price.
“There was woman with them,” Yana said. She shivered. “I think . . . I think maybe she do this. She is—how you say?—one cold bitch.”
Kelly straightened, frowning. “Yeah I’ll say she is.”
McCarron had seen that narrowed-down gaze before. At complex crime scenes Kelly had possessed moments of complete motionless while she mentally teased out a tangled thread of evidence and it had begun to unknot itself for her.
And if he hadn’t been still sluggish from his injuries and the after-effects of the medication they’d shovelled into him since his op, McCarron reckoned he might have put it together sooner himself.
He opened his mouth. Kelly shot him a warning glance that cut him off before he had a chance to speak.
“We’ll make sure this woman doesn’t get away with it,” she promised. “Ray, you stay with Yana. I’ll go find the cops.”
“C–cops?” Yana said, voice rising. “No cops! I not trust them.”
Kelly met McCarron’s eyes with a gaze that was flat and implacable.
“Don’t worry—it’s clear what happened here,” she said grimly. “The evidence speaks for itself.”
133
Lytton came round and found his head in a vice being pounded by sledgehammers from the inside. At least, that was what it felt like.
To begin with it was all he could do to lie very still while he tried to find a way around the pain inside his skull. After a few moments he realised he didn’t have much of a choice in the matter.
He was lying on his side with his hands bound at the wrists behind him. The ground underneath felt hard, cold and damp. He could feel no wind so he guessed he was inside but couldn’t be sure. His eyes seemed to have been glued shut.
That was only one reason for the sense of panic that engulfed him.
Lytton could smell the blood, taste it thick and cloying in his nose and the back of his throat. An image of Veronica dead amid a splash of scarlet ruin, and then Steve Warwick’s sprawled body, hit him with a jolt that took away what little breath he had left.
Try as he might he couldn’t remember what happened next—only that it had been a shock. Even more of a shock than finding his partner beaten to death on their day of glory.
But what?
He bit down on his fear and bucked furiously, bulking the muscles in his shoulders and forearms. He thought he felt something give a little between his wrists, transferring a pressurised stab into his hands. If he didn’t get loose soon he was going to lose all feeling in them.
The realisation gave him the impetus to try again, a thrashing effort that turned the pain vicious enough to be frightening. The kind of pain that came with serious injury. He lay still, gasping and began to wonder if his eyes were open after all but it was dark. Or if he’d gone blind.
And in the buzzing blackness he heard the sound of a door handle being rattled.
Lytton froze, straining to hear above the thunder of pulse beating in his ears. In the background he could hear the sounds of the racecourse—the commentator’s voice, the crowds—but muffled and at a distance. So whatever had happened he hadn’t been taken far.
The rattling stopped. Lytton was wracked by indecision. Did he call out and chance rescue—or would attracting attention mean they’d finish what they’d started?
He took a deep breath.
134
DI O’Neill rattled the handle of yet another locked door and sighed in frustration. This was all taking far too long.
He heard footsteps, turned to see Dempsey approaching along the basement corridor.
“Anything?”
Dempsey shook his head, hunching his shoulders inside his jacket. “Not a very trusting lot are they?” he said. “Every door’s locked up tight.”
“Yeah,” O’Neill muttered, “and if there are explosives here they could be behind any one of them.”
He raked a hand through his hair, pursed his lips. Outside, the noise of the crowd swelled and broke as another stampede of winner and losers romped across the finish line. The headline race was rapidly approaching, he knew, and with it the perfect timing for a monstrous act of violence.
“We need to go back to Cheever,” he said. “Get him to rustle up a dog team.”
“Got to be the fastest way boss.” Dempsey was already turning away. “I’ll keep searching.”
“No,” O’Neill said quickly. “I’ll grab someone from racecourse security with some keys and do that. Why don’t you go and see if you have better luck with the charming Mr Cheever than I did?”
“But—”
O’Neill glared at him. “It might have been phrased as a question, detective constable but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t really an order deep down.”
Dempsey must have known what O’Neill was doing. He hesitated for a moment as if to argue then nodded gravely. “Give me the shitty end of the stick why don’t you?” he said but it was a half-hearted protest. He turned on his heel without waiting for a reply and hurried away.
O’Neill watched him go, aware of the inexorable ticking noise inside his head, his imagination painting a cartoon alarm clock surrounded by wires and sticks of ACME gelignite.
For a start, you can give over thinking like that.