“A pity,” the man said, his tone brooding. “Then he is of no further use to me.”

Kelly found she was shivering, had to wrap her free arm around her body to stop the shakes vibrating into her voice.

“Killing him will cause you more problems than it solves,” she said quickly, thinking of Tina—clean and sober and happy. “Not least with the police. They’re already looking for you over Tyrone’s death. Why make them look harder?”

He was silent for a few long seconds then he said, “A nice try but I think you will find it is not me the police look for.”

Her brain went numb unable to think of a single argument that might stand a hope of persuading him. The voice sounded again almost softly in her ear.

“Thank you for standing so still Miss Jacks. It makes you so much easier to trace . . .”

Kelly jerked the phone away as if it had burned her ear. She snapped it shut, cutting off the call and threw it away from her. It skittered across the concrete and disappeared after the knife down the broken drain.

She was running before it hit the murky water below.

68

Standing in the living room of Tina’s flat over the inert body of Elvis, Dmitry smiled.

Of course he had no way to track the cellphone she was using. He was not the police, after all. But the bluff had been worth it for the panic it had so obviously caused.

Once you had an adversary on the run, he had learned, keeping them running until they were too exhausted to run any further was always a good thing. If all their efforts went into retreating they had no time or energy to attack.

And Kelly Jacks was tiring, he could sense it. He may have failed to corner her here but it was one more place of safety now closed off to her. So overall this was not quite the disaster it might have been.

He nodded to Viktor. “Come. We go.”

The two men stepped over Elvis’s legs and walked out. They left the front door casually ajar behind them.

69

Lytton arrived at Long Pond on Clapham Common almost half an hour behind time. He was filled with the impotent rage of a man who’s tried to hustle through Central London traffic and been frustrated at every turn.

He’d been calling the cellphone number Kelly had used to make contact but it came back ‘not possible to connect’. So for the last couple of miles he’d been rehearsing his apologies. By the time he parked up as close to the edge of the Common as he could find a space his edginess at the meeting had twisted through concern into anger.

And to cap it all she wasn’t there.

He waited, walked, just in case she’d been delayed too but after another half an hour passed he knew. The anger smouldered beneath the surface. She hadn’t had the guts to wait for him not even for a lousy thirty minutes.

“Face it man,” he said out loud. “She’s stood you up—again.”

That kind of thing was getting to be a habit with her.

He sighed, rechecked his watch. Only another minute had passed.

Lytton tried to work out why he was giving her any time at all. She was a convicted criminal, a wanted fugitive and there was compelling evidence to suggest this was a repeat of her earlier crime—a man murdered in a frenzy of reasonless rage.

So why did he feel some kind of pull towards her?

It couldn’t simply be sexual attraction. She wasn’t his type and with Vee not even buried it was hardly appropriate to give in to a burst of hormones.

No there was more to it than that.

He stood on the asphalt path that ringed the pond, his back to the basketball courts and the skate park, staring across the dark flat water towards the road on the far side. His dad had brought him here sometimes if he was suffering an uncharacteristic bout of fatherliness. They’d bring stale bread to throw at the ducks and watch the richer kids sail their model boats.

His dad had always tired of it first, his patience directly related—Lytton only realised much later—to the length of time the pubs had been open.

Lytton shook himself inside his cashmere coat. A lot of water had passed under the bridge since then, a lot of distance travelled.

And look at me, he thought, standing here again, all wistful for something else I can’t have.

He shot a cuff, checked his watch and turned his back determinedly on Long Pond with its old memories and new disappointments.

Kelly Jacks, he decided, could damn well fend for herself.

70

Kelly wasn’t sure how she got through the rest of the day or the night that followed. Probably, she coped much the same way as she’d learned to get through her time locked up inside—by thinking only from one moment to the next. No long term plans, no goals. Just staying alert to the here and now, reacting if she had to, coasting if she didn’t.

She arrived at the north side of Clapham Common over an hour late for her meeting with Lytton. It came as no surprise to find he had not waited around for her. If she was honest she wouldn’t put money on him having turned up in the first place.

She was not to know that she’d missed him only by three minutes.

All the way down from Camberwell, Kelly had cursed the knee-jerk impulse that made her dump the cellphone. It was the only place she had noted Lytton’s own cellphone number—stored in the phone’s memory rather than her own.

She tried to call Tina but the only phone boxes she came across did not accept coins and she had no other means to pay. The thought of ducking into a restaurant or shop and begging use of their phone did not appeal. Her face had been too widely shown for that to be a safe option.

For the first time she felt truly isolated. Isolated from people she could trust—people she’d believed she could trust. She knew she couldn’t reach out to her family even if she knew how to get in touch.

Don’t call a number for so long and it fades from the memory.

By the time she had reached the north-eastern edge of the Common itself she’d been almost in pieces, unable to go forwards or back. The realisation that Lytton was not there—might never have been there—was the last punch that knocked the stuffing out of her.

She sat for a long time on the bench furthest from Long Pond, hunched over, staring at the ground in front of her feet. It was covered in fallen horse chestnuts from the trees nearby, cigarette ends and the kind of soft drink ring pulls that were supposedly redesigned to reduce litter.

There were no model boaters on the pond itself, just a resting squadron of Canada geese. The traffic behind her formed a constant drone enlivened only by the regular overhead hum of jets stacking for Heathrow out to the west.