“But you never needed it,” she cut in, her voice cool. “Not when you knew—you knew—that I was innocent. That doesn’t require any great leap of faith.”

He took in a shaky breath and found he couldn’t think of a damned thing to say.

After a moment Kelly dropped her gaze away, continued sweeping briskly. When she had the spilt coffee and glass in a manageable pile, she unfolded a newspaper from the stack he’d put aside for recycling and scooped it all into the centre, wrapping it up carefully afterwards.

“Where’s your bin?”

“By the back door. Look Kel—” he began, but she was already gone. He heard the lid of the wheelie bin slam shut, the back door close again as she returned.

“If that was your only jar of coffee will tea do?”

McCarron could only nod. He hadn’t budged from his perch and now he watched her while she moved easily around his kitchen, digging out teabags, a box of longlife milk he kept in for emergencies and a teapot that hadn’t been used since his wife moved out.

“You’re looking . . . well,” he managed.

She glanced over her shoulder with what might have been a fleeting smile. “I can’t say the same for you. You should have stayed in the hospital.”

“I’d have been gaga inside a week.”

“Hmm,” she said, apparently absorbed in prodding the teabags inside the pot, “it’s no fun being detained against your will is it?”

McCarron winced but knew he deserved that—and plenty more besides.

“What do you want Kelly love?” he asked quietly. “An apology?”

“What use is one of those?” She shook her head. “No Ray I want an explanation. Because right now the only reasons I can think of for you helping set me up are threats or bribery.” She put the lid back on the teapot and turned to face him, folding her arms. “So which was it?”

79

McCarron said, “It started with Allardice—you remember him?”

The name conjured up a face instantly in Kelly’s mind. An arrogant copper who’d handled her numerous interrogations and made no secret of the fact that he was convinced from the outset she was guilty as sin.

And a second memory hit her almost in rebound to the first. O’Neill’s words back at the café.

“. . . That takes a coordinated effort rather than a series of blunders by people who had access to all the evidence . . .”

“There may be many things I’ve forgotten, Ray, but DCI Allardice is not one of them.”

“Well you were never going to be his bosom pal after you argued with him about that dead prostitute case. Know the one?”

“The girl who was beaten to death in that dingy little hotel near Euston,” Kelly said. “They put it down to some random customer who got carried away. I still hold that she was deliberately murdered.”

They had moved through into the front sitting room. The majority of the floor space was taken up by an old-fashioned floral suite that was so big it stopped the door opening fully. There were old family photographs on the tiled mantelpiece and glass-fronted display cabinets in the alcoves on either side, crammed to bursting with knick-knacks forlorn beneath a layer of dust.

Kelly had been invited round once or twice before but previously the room had always seemed to fade into the background compared to her vigorous boss. Now it was the dominating factor and he looked suddenly very old and vulnerable, swamped by his surroundings.

His condition didn’t help and he was clearly tiring. When he lowered himself with great care onto one end of the sofa and leaned his head back it was hard to tell where the greying antimacassar ended and he began.

“Allardice was all over that hooker murder from the beginning even if he kept away from things officially,” he said at last, taking a sip of the tea she handed to him. “It was only when it dragged on that he put himself in charge.”

“The most basic questions weren’t answered,” Kelly said, her voice level but with an underlying hint of stubborn. “What was a high-class working girl doing in a dive like that? And her injuries—she’d been tortured before she was killed. What did they want to know? And the place had been not just wiped down but professionally sanitised—”

McCarron held up his uninjured hand in submission. “All right, all right. I remember you weren’t convinced.”

“Maybe because there was a lot about it that was unconvincing.”

McCarron started to shake his head, caught himself just in time with only a minor flinch. “We were there to deal with the what, where and how not the why,” he reminded her.

“Allardice didn’t seem to give a damn about any of that,” she countered. “He just wanted the whole thing closed.”

“He wasn’t alone there. As you pointed out, the girl was part of a high-class stable. There were plenty of supposedly very respectable people sweating when you wouldn’t let it lie.”

McCarron shifted uncomfortably against the cushions although whether he was trying to find an easier position for his ribs or his conscience Kelly couldn’t be sure.

“Afterwards I heard a rumour Allardice might have taken a kickback from somebody high up to put it to bed—if you’ll excuse the pun,” he said. “Too much scrutiny from the law being bad for business. And he always did have a very . . . casual attitude towards women in general and pros in particular.”

Kelly tried to work out if she was surprised by this information. From what she remembered of the chauvinistic detective, probably not. His view of the proper role of women was formulated somewhere back in the Stone Age and had not been updated since.

“Well he got his way didn’t he?”

McCarron didn’t reply straight away and when he did his voice was strained. “You let it be known you weren’t happy to let that one go love,” he said. “You kept digging. It became almost . . . an obsession.”

“She was twenty-three years old,” Kelly said stonily. “She deserved justice.”

“I’m not saying she didn’t. Just that sometimes you have to pick your battles. And that one you were never going to win.”

“Did you help Allardice set me up for the Perry murder to stop me digging?” she demanded. “Is that what happened?”

“What? No of course not!” McCarron seemed genuinely upset. “That’s not how it was.”

Kelly reminded herself that she’d worked for him, alongside him, for eight years before her disgrace and then again for almost a year since her release. She’d thought of him as her mentor and certainly her friend.

Dammit, that hurt. It lent a certain acidic bite to her words. “So how was it exactly?”