“And who is ‘they’?”

He sighed. “I wish I knew Kelly love. Trust me, I wish I knew.”

She was silent, trying to put the sense of violation behind her. It lingered.

Eventually she looked up and said, “What about Allardice? You must have suspected him.”

McCarron’s expression was a mix of discomfort and shame. “Of course I did,” he said. “But you have to remember that Allardice was a copper’s copper. He may have had a reputation for cutting corners but he got the job done and a lot of people respected him for that. If I’d accused him again so soon it would have smacked of a witch hunt. I’d been getting the cold shoulder enough after the first time.”

Despite herself, Kelly could sympathise. She knew what the cold shoulder was all about. She thought of David again, standing in her hallway, leaving his key on the side table, demanding the return of the one he’d given her to his own flat. The pain was a distant memory but one that still had the power to hurt. Not love, she recognised now, just betrayal.

“I suppose it never occurred to you that just by showing those pictures in court—obviously taken without my knowledge or permission—it might have been enough to suggest that someone had it in for me. Might have been enough to stop me being sent to prison?”

McCarron opened his mouth, closed it again. “Things happened so quickly. And I never thought you’d be convicted,” he admitted. “I was worried about you but I never thought . . .”

No you didn’t think, Ray. That was the trouble.

“But I was convicted.” Kelly struggled to keep the temper out of her voice. “And you stood by and let it happen.”

For the first time he reacted with anger of his own, driven by anguish. “What the bloody hell else was I supposed to do Kelly?” he pleaded. “They were threatening to hurt you, cripple you, if I tried to intervene. Even if I’d got Quinlan to believe that Allardice might—and it is a might—be involved it’s obvious someone on the outside was pulling his strings—” He broke off, let out a slow breath. “I had no choice but to keep my bloody mouth shut.”

“Even if that meant me going to prison where it would be a damn sight easier for anyone to get at me,” she snapped.

And regardless of whether McCarron had toed the line they’d tried anyway, she realised. More than once. It was fortunate that she’d been a fast learner and had developed a quick-hardening survival instinct to cope with the early attacks. She’d thought they were random or caused by her connections to the police.

If Tina hadn’t come along when she did, hadn’t befriended me, I’d probably be dead by now.

And in that moment an image formed like a rapid bubble inside Kelly’s head—of Elvis trying to collect the bounty on her head. Maybe that prize money had been up for grabs for longer than any of them had realised.

“You never did get around to telling me,” she said casually gesturing to the cast and the bruises, “why Harry Grogan sent you that warning message?”

The colour dropped out of McCarron’s face like a pulled plug. Watching him, she realised there had never been any doubt for him about who was pulling Allardice’s strings. She nodded as if he’d spoken and got to her feet.

“Kelly, I—”

“No Ray don’t say it,” Kelly interrupted. “But has it occurred to you that if you’d come clean about half this stuff Tyrone might not be dead?”

She reached the door to the hallway and pulled it open before pausing briefly, eyes skating over the defeated figure stooped on the sofa. “I guess you can take this as my official resignation.”

84

McCarron listened to the front door slam behind her. Hard enough to rattle the glass in the bay window.

He laid his head against the back of the sofa again and closed his eyes. Even though he’d known deep down this day might come, as time went on he’d buried the possibility beneath layers of hope and foolishness.

McCarron had nurtured Kelly Jacks from the moment she’d started working under him. He’d recognised raw talent along with stubborn determination and a painstaking attention to detail that had her finding minutiae even he might otherwise have missed.

For a while the cops she worked with had loved her. They’d dubbed her their own private blood whisperer. Someone who seemed to be able to coax evidence out of the most unpromising of scenes.

She looked at things with a cool clear eye and a depth of imagination that enabled her to reconstruct the most complex and baffling crimes. He’d been immensely proud to call her his protégé, never thinking for a moment that the tenacity he so admired would be the cause of her downfall.

Never thinking either that his growing affection for her would be so obviously apparent to others. Or such a useful weapon against the pair of them.

McCarron had always thought of Kelly as another daughter. His own had come late and there had never seemed to be enough time to be a good father. Next time he looked, Allison was a discontented teenager, he and her mother were divorced and he’d lost his chance to do the right thing.

Kelly had been a worthy substitute.

But not anymore.

McCarron felt the loss as a bubble rising through his chest. It reached his throat and was released on an anguished gasp.

He rocked forwards on the sofa, his cast left arm cradled awkwardly in his lap and wept.

85

“The chief super’s been looking for you,” DC Dempsey said as soon as O’Neill arrived back in the office from his clandestine meeting with Kelly Jacks in Lambeth. “He was in a right mood because your cellphone was off.”

“Bully for him,” O’Neill muttered, shouldering out of his jacket. “How’s the surveillance going on Allardice?”

“I put a couple of guys on it,” he said. “They picked him up just outside his hotel and have been on him ever since.”

“Good,” O’Neill said but his mind was already galloping on. “Now, do me a favour will you—see what we’ve got on Harry Grogan?”

Dempsey rolled his eyes and swivelled back round to his computer keyboard. “Anything in particular you’re after? Only the last time that name cropped up I practically needed to nick a shopping trolley from Tesco’s for the paperwork. There’s masses of it.”

O’Neill paused. He thought of the conversation he’d had with Jacks about the accent of the man who’d come after her and the voice on the phone reporting Tyrone Douet’s murder.

“Yeah—look for any Russian connections.”

86

Kelly drove west along the M4 motorway in an old Vauxhall Omega estate. The car belonged to McCarron as did the cellphone in her pocket and the satnav she’d found stuffed into the glovebox.