He sighed. “Look, when I got the call to say you’d been found with a body I was as shocked as everyone else,” he said. “I was certain you were innocent. I pushed to be lead on it but then I began processing the scene.” Another sigh. “It looked pretty damning Kel. Even you have to admit that.”

“It was supposed to look damning,” she said. “All I know is that Perry called me out of the blue saying how he’d heard my name in connection with the case, saying he could give me information about the involvement of somebody important—his words. He asked me to meet him. That’s the last thing I remember until I woke up with his corpse.”

“The scene was a nightmare,” McCarron said grimly. “Whoever it was who killed the lad, they made a right mess of him. He’d been butchered.”

Kelly suppressed a shiver. “I remember,” she murmured. She didn’t think she’d ever forget the sight that met her eyes when she came round.

“I couldn’t believe you could have done something like that,” McCarron went on, a pleading look on his face. “I worked every inch of that place looking for something to exonerate you.”

“But you didn’t find it.”

“No, that’s the trouble,” McCarron said heavily. “I did.”

80

In his office in central London Matthew Lytton found himself too distracted to concentrate on work. The meeting with the detective DI O’Neill had irritated him like an out of reach itch and he was determined to scratch it.

Normally, if he needed expertise he didn’t possess he called in a specialist. Today he was breaking his own rule.

But with good reason.

He had never been a big fan of computers. They were a necessary evil rather than a front-line tool to him and he preferred to get out there and make things happen. Warwick on the other hand was completely at home with a keyboard and a mouse so Lytton left him to get on with that side of things—even to the point of asking his partner to help out with his initial background search on Kelly Jacks.

Maybe that was a mistake, he conceded.

Nevertheless it hadn’t been too difficult to run a search of the records on the office server for the property O’Neill had mentioned. When he found the file he realised why he hadn’t remembered it. Although in theory everything had to be approved by both of them, in this case the property purchase had been handled almost exclusively by Steve Warwick. It wasn’t unheard of, but it was certainly unusual.

Rather than read it on screen he sent the whole file to the printer and read the pages as they spat out of the machine. It was only when he reached the financial section that he realised part of the document seemed to be missing.

He checked the file on the computer and found that some of the information was simply not there. Normally for this kind of purchase they would have used their standing arrangement with an investment bank but there was no reference number in the appropriate section. Instead Lytton found the cryptic note that the purchasing had been financed by a “private investor” which was unusual enough he certainly should have remembered it.

Frowning, he carried the printout down the short hallway to Warwick’s office but when he put his head round the door he found the desk unoccupied.

Lytton was about to leave when he heard a noise from inside the room. He pushed the door wide and stepped through. There was a figure standing over one of the filing cabinets, who spun with a soft gasp. An armful of manila folders went splashing to the carpet, spilling their contents.

“Oh!” Yana Warwick cried. “I am so clumsy. So sorry.”

“It’s all right Yana,” Lytton said hurrying forwards. “It’s my fault for startling you. Please don’t be upset.”

Even so, it took five minutes and loan of a handkerchief before he could calm her enough to ask questions.

“I was looking for Steve. I needed to ask him about an investor for a conversion job we did a few years ago. There seems to be some data missing from the file. Do you know where he’s gone?”

Yana shook her head. “He not tell me,” she said, so firmly that he suspected she knew and had been instructed not to say. As it was she shrank away from him with anxious eyes as though he might blame her. “He leave me to do filing, yes?”

But her gaze strayed to the mess of paper on the office floor and Lytton felt her agitation rising again.

“I’ll help you put all this back together again,” he promised quickly.

If anything, the offer seemed to distress her further. “No! No, I must do it.”

He gripped her shoulders and forced her to meet his eyes. “Hush Yana, it’s my fault so please let me help you put it right.” He paused, uncertain how to proceed. “Look, if you’re unhappy with Steve. If he ever hurts you or threatens you, you don’t have to stay with him,” he said at last. “You know that don’t you?”

She regarded him mutely for a moment then gave a helpless shrug. “I have nowhere to go,” she hedged as if an outright declaration of intent might be held against her later.

Lytton let go, straightened up. “You’d be taken care of,” he said. “I’d see to that.”

81

If McCarron expected a barrage of questions after his admission he was surprised by Kelly’s response. She sat quiet for a long time, frowning, perched on the edge of one of the brocade armchairs his first wife had bought more for their hardwearing qualities than comfort.

When eventually she spoke, her voice was low with a suppressed emotion he couldn’t quite identify. “What did you find?”

He cleared his throat. His head was beginning to pulse and he badly needed to sleep.

“A smear of blood,” he said at last. “Only small, not even a partial, but it was near the door frame leading out of the room where . . . out of the room. It looked like a bit of cast-off that someone had tried to wipe up.”

“And was it?”

McCarron shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “I typed it, just as a prelim. It was O which didn’t tell us much in itself—most of the population is O.”

“But I’m A and Perry was AB if I remember rightly.”

He began to nod automatically, regretted it as pain spiked his skull.

“For heaven’s sake Ray haven’t they given you anything for that?”

“Half a pharmacy,” he said with a faint smile. “It’s in a bag on the hall table. Kidproof bottles. Can’t get the bloody lids off.”

She got up without a word and he heard the rustle of plastic, a rattle and the splash of water in the kitchen sink. When she returned she was carrying a glass and the open bottle of tablets. He took it cautiously, the way a condemned man might accept a last cigarette.