She hadn’t gone to visit her boss with robbery in mind but on her way out she saw his cellphone and car keys lying on the hall table and had snatched them up almost out of temper.

He owes me.

Once outside, she weighed the objects in her hand and debated the petty satisfaction of throwing both over the hedge into the neighbour’s ornamental water feature.

Sense and desperation overcame more frivolous urges.

McCarron’s car was parked on the short driveway. He always backed in so it was facing outwards and ready for a quick getaway. Tempting.

Kelly glanced over at her beat-up Mini sitting by the kerb on the far side of the road. She’d been back to fetch her own mode of transport as soon as she’d walked away from O’Neill. It had seemed a good way to test if he was telling the truth about her flat no longer being under surveillance.

Nobody had leapt out to arrest her when she’d clambered in through the skylight which suggested that he might be.

She’d debated on the wisdom of driving around in a car that was registered in her name but it was better than using public transport.

This might be better still. After all, she very much doubted McCarron was going to call the cops. And it wasn’t like he was going to be using the car any time soon.

She thumbed the key fob to blip the locks and climbed in before second thoughts could stick their nose in. McCarron himself, she knew was not in any state to come running out after her.

The V6 engine fired first crank. She put the car straight into gear and pulled away without looking back.

Kelly wasn’t used to an automatic gearbox and compared to the Mini the old Vauxhall was like driving a low-slung tank on the quiet residential streets.

She headed south from Hillingdon with no initial destination in mind, only wanting to put distance between her and the scene of her most recent crime. It wasn’t until she picked up the signs for the motorway at Heathrow that her mind seemed to unknot itself and her thought-patterns smoothed out into a single decisive strand.

O’Neill had told her that she’d been dosed with ketamine. Ketamine was used by vets. He’d shown her a picture of the tame horse doctor Brian Stubbs, who Harry Grogan allegedly kept on a short leash. It didn’t take a genius to put together those two facts and form an obvious conclusion.

But if it was so obvious why hadn’t O’Neill followed up on it himself?

Evidence.

So far, Kelly knew the evidence was tilted against her like one end of a seesaw loaded with big fat facts. The detective had no doubt been instructed not to waste effort with side theories when the main case looked so solid. She’d been told the same thing often enough when she’d been a CSI and she knew that not everyone wanted to work off the clock to prove a point.

So why did O’Neill?

And why had he told her about Stubbs unless . . .?

Kelly pulled over to the side of the road sharply enough to warrant a quick blast on the horn from the driver behind her. She waved in vague apology and tapped the screen of the satnav.

The article she’d found on Grogan—the one with the picture of him and Lytton alongside their winning racehorse—had mentioned where his trainer was based and Kelly had always had a good memory for details. She asked the satnav for the centre of the village and when it had worked out the fastest route, checked the Vauxhall’s fuel gauge. It was registering about two-thirds full. More than enough for a hundred-mile round trip to horse country, even for a thirsty old smoker like this.

Minutes later, striking lucky with lights and traffic, Kelly was on the motorway being slowly passed by the commercial jets coming in to land at the airport. A constant procession of them hung heavy and awkward in the air overhead, wheels dangling like the legs of a carried dog.

She cruised at a steady sixty-five, keeping pace with the slower vehicles, not fast enough to attract unwanted attention. And all the while she was trying to work out what she felt about the revelations that had emerged from Ray McCarron.

She wasn’t sure if she entirely believed him. Not about anything in particular, it was just a general sense of distrust.

She remembered Allardice as if it had all happened yesterday. There had been no light and shade with him. If he couldn’t use an axe to crack something open he wasn’t interested.

Kelly had spent hours being interrogated by him over and over while he sneered and sniped at every aspect of her life until everything she’d thought she stood for was in ruins around her feet.

And all the time he’d known that McCarron had found something that might exonerate her. Not just known about it, she noted bitterly, but had in all probability destroyed it.

But for what gain?

It all came back to the dead prostitute. The one she had been so naively determined to fight for. Why had Allardice seemingly helped bury that one? And what had Callum Perry done to become the means of Kelly’s own downfall?

Maybe nothing.

The thought came jolting in hard. Maybe Perry had committed some completely separate transgression and the method of his demise was just a convenient way of killing two birds with one stone.

She’d need to look closer into Perry’s life in a way she hadn’t been free to do immediately after his death. And, if she was honest, hadn’t had the heart to since her release.

All roads seemed to lead her in the same direction. Kelly shook her head. Allardice could wait. Right now her focus was on a crooked vet with access to ketamine and the man who held all his strings.

87

The police received the call about Kelly’s abandoned Mini an hour later. One of Ray McCarron’s neighbours rang it in. He lived opposite McCarron’s house three doors down, a small fussy man in corduroy slippers and a baggy cardigan with tissues stuffed into the pockets.

He was annoyed with himself for not noticing the strange car arrive. Since he’d been medically retired from his job in the Civil Service he’d appointed himself the guardian of the avenue and was constantly on the phone to various authorities about refuge collection timings, wheelie bin transgressions, litter, dog fouling or infringements of the residents’ parking privileges.

In this case he’d taken a surreptitious stroll past the offending vehicle and been mildly disappointed to notice its tax disc was in order. Nevertheless, the untreated rust patches on the bodywork strongly suggested an owner careless enough to be uninsured which presented what he felt was a real risk to the public.

Justified by this logic, the retired civil servant hurried inside and speed dialled the local police station from the phone in his front room. While he waited for the call to be answered he stood on tiptoe in the bay window, peering at the Mini as if the owner might try and sneak it away now they’d been rumbled.