“Thanks love,” McCarron said when he’d swallowed the dose. “I got the sample ready to send off for DNA and went bouncing in to tell Allardice all about it. He was convinced you were guilty and this was the first sign of reasonable doubt we’d found.”

“And?”

McCarron glanced at her. There was nothing in her face, her voice, to give him a clue to what she was feeling. Or what she might do.

“To say he wasn’t pleased was an understatement.” He sighed. “Threw a coffee mug across the office as I recall. As good as accused me of inventing the whole damn thing just to try and get you off the hook.”

“Which you wouldn’t have done,” Kelly said, her voice without inflection.

“I didn’t need to,” McCarron returned stoutly. “It was there right enough.”

“So you calmly refuted his allegation of course.”

This time McCarron heard the faintest touch of humour in her voice. “I threw a waste bin back at him if that’s what you mean? There we were—having a slanging match right in the middle of the incident room—when the boss walks in and asks what the bloody hell we think we’re playing at.”

“The boss?”

“Chief Superintendent Quinlan. He’d been told to keep an eye on things from a damage limitation point of view I think. And he wasn’t a happy camper either. Nothing personal but if you weren’t Perry’s killer then whoever did it was still out there and we had no other suspects. That never plays well with the media.”

“Allardice seemed determined to believe it was me right from the start.”

“Aye well, Quinlan told us both to go home and cool off. Pick it up again in the morning. Privately he told me to give myself a pat on the back.”

“But?” she said, sharper this time.

He sighed. “The next morning Allardice told me to run the tests again—just to be double sure.”

“And this time—surprise, surprise—the result was different,” Kelly guessed. She sounded resigned.

“Yeah it was. When the DNA came back the blood was Perry’s after all. I expected him to crow about it but instead he told me not to be too hard on myself. We’d been working round the clock—I must have made a mistake.”

Kelly simply looked at him very matter of fact. “You don’t make elementary mistakes like that Ray. We both know it.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence.” He gave her another weary smile. “To be honest I couldn’t believe it either, so I checked and rechecked.” He shifted again, winced and took a steadying breath. “I became convinced someone had swapped the samples. I took it to Quinlan. He promised to look into who’d had access.”

He saw her quick frown. “Whatever doubts you had, they never made it to court.”

McCarron nearly shook his head again, caught himself just in time. “No they didn’t,” he said flatly. “Quinlan cleared him but Allardice got wind of it somehow. He came bursting into the lab and gave me a gobful—he always was a mouthy sod. Said I’d gone behind his back and I’d make no friends that way.”

“I hope you reported that too.”

“I never got the chance.” McCarron took a breath and went on. “That night I had a phone call—withheld number, disguised voice—telling me if I knew what was good for me and those I was close to I’d stop kicking up a fuss. That shook me I don’t mind admitting it, but the real clincher was the next morning. I found a set of photographs pushed through my letterbox.”

“Of your daughter?” she hazarded. “Is that how they got to you?”

“No Kelly love,” McCarron said gently. “They were pictures of you.”

82

“Gotcha!”

Frank Allardice lowered the digital camera and checked the results of his efforts on the screen. He didn’t consider himself any kind of a photographer but it always went down well to have a few pictures of landmarks from home to pin up behind the bar. And he was damned if he was going to pay rip-off tourist prices for postcards.

Besides, until he heard any different his business for this trip was done and he was simply a tourist.

But the object of his photographic aim this time was not the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace, or a red double-decker bus. He’d been trying to get a clear shot of the two guys who’d been tailing him all morning and he’d just managed to snatch a full-face angle of the second man before he ducked his nose into a news-stand.

“Too late matey,” Allardice said under his breath, studying the faces. “I wonder who you are and who sent you? As if I couldn’t guess . . .”

He’d long decided that much as he missed his old haunts in London the weather was something he could do without. It was getting noticeably chilly over here and he was uncomfortably aware of his joints in a way he never seemed to be when he was back in good old España.

He’d got out of the habit of city life which was too crowded and in too much of an all-fired hurry. Too much pushing and shoving.

The press of people had not, however, prevented him from spotting the two guys who attempted to tail him from the little hotel near Earls Court. He supposed they weren’t doing a bad job but he’d been too long in the game for them to pass unnoticed.

He had toyed with them for the best part of an hour, putting them through their paces while he strolled around the Embankment area apparently at ease. Eventually his patience wore thin. Beneath it was temper.

So when his cellphone rang and he recognised the number he snapped, “What do you want?” into it by way of greeting.

He listened in silence while the voice at the other end of the line imparted hurried information.

“Thanks, but I’ve already spotted them. Still, better late than never, eh?”

83

“Pictures of me?” Kelly repeated dumbly. “Doing what? I mean, when were they taken?”

“Some were of you at work, out in the street, at the supermarket, sitting in a restaurant with that young DI you were seeing,” McCarron said. He hesitated. “But the others were taken later—of you on remand.”

“On remand . . .?” Her voice trailed off as the implications sank in. “How the hell did anyone get pictures of me then? Doing what?”

McCarron could hardly meet her eye. “In the exercise yard mainly but there were some obviously taken inside and, erm, one of you in the showers.”

“That’s sick,” Kelly murmured, a shimmy of disgust rippling across her arms bringing them up in goosebumps. “In all kinds of ways.”

“I don’t think the pictures were meant to be perverted—not in that way,” McCarron said miserably. A deep flush had stolen up his neck and was mingling darkly with the bruises on his face. “I think they were just to show how . . . vulnerable you were. How easily they could get to you.”