Heart bounding, Kelly dropped into a crouch. There was a second’s buzzing silence and immobility then a calm familiar voice spoke out of the darkness.

“No need to panic Kelly. I’ve been waiting for you.”

109

Ray McCarron reached out with his good arm and switched on a small lamp next to the sofa. It spread soft fingers of light across the comfortably untidy office. His domain. Across the other side of the room Kelly was still poised for flight, tense on the balls of her feet. She looked different—and not necessarily in a good way.

“I suppose I really should ask for your keys, seeing as how you’ve resigned,” he said casually and watched her gradually uncoil.

“I suppose you should,” she agreed.

He could almost get both eyes open again but even so the light was too dim for him to read her face clearly and he could glean little from her voice.

She asked, “How did you get here?”

“Without my car you mean?”

“I was more thinking without two working arms. Taxi?”

“Les gave me a lift,” McCarron said.

She raised an eyebrow at that, glanced around. “He locked you in and left you here alone in the dark?” she said flatly. “What happened—did he resign too?”

“I asked him to do it,” McCarron said. “Not the first time I’ve slept on this old sofa and you know as well as I do the alarm sensors only cover the ground floor.”

So I knew I’d be safe up here.

It had still taken some mental girding to set foot in the place so soon after . . . so soon. But of all his employees Les had been with him the longest—almost since the start. He was the one most likely to speak out if he thought McCarron was taking a wrong turn. McCarron was heartened by the fact Les agreed to drive him over without protest. Neither of them mentioned Kelly, as if by some tacit agreement. McCarron was heartened by that too.

Les told him to stay in the car while he opened up, ostensibly to keep him out of the rain. McCarron watched from a distance while he disabled the alarm and briefly checked the building before he came back to help him out. McCarron thanked him profusely but Les had shaken off the gratitude like beads of water from his waxed cotton jacket, given him a gruff goodbye and departed.

Two hours later McCarron listened to Kelly arrive.

“Want to tell me about it?” he invited now.

She let out a long breath. “Not really,” she said.

But she did, going through it from the moment she’d taken his car until her return to the office. It took about forty-five minutes and he interrupted her account as little as he could. There was weariness about her rather than anger, but that was OK. McCarron was angry enough for both of them.

“That bastard Allardice,” he growled when she was done. “If—”

“Don’t, Ray,” she said, her voice muted. “Believe me, you can’t say anything I haven’t already thought, but louder and with a whole lot more expletives.”

He swallowed the bile. “So what do we do now?”

“‘We’?” Kelly said. “To be honest I don’t know what anyone can do. Allardice retired with a farewell party, a gold watch and a pat on the back, and I left in chains. You really think anyone’s going to take action now against one of their own?”

“You were one of their own too, Kelly love. Didn’t seem to stop them back then.”

“And now I’m a fugitive and a murder suspect.” She sighed. “I’ve no chance of proving who really did what six years ago. Too much water under the bridge. Best I can do is hand over what I know to DI O’Neill and let him figure it out.”

“O’Neill . . .? Not Vince O’Neill?”

Kelly went still. “You know him?”

“I know of him.”

“But didn’t he come to see you in hospital—after you were attacked?” she asked. “Ty-Tyrone and I met him there that first night.”

McCarron noted the way she stumbled over the boy’s name but didn’t comment. Instead he lifted the cast an inch or two. “Kelly love, the amount of morphine they’d given me you could have told me the Dalai Lama had arrived with his ukulele to give me a medley of George Formby classics and I wouldn’t be able to contradict you with any certainty.”

“And he didn’t come back later? O’Neill, I mean.”

“No. If he had, well I would have said something when I saw you earlier today.” He glanced at the clock on the far office wall. It was a little after one in the morning. “Yesterday,” he corrected.

“Come on Ray—I know that tone of voice. What is it about O’Neill?”

McCarron hesitated. “He worked with Allardice.”

She frowned. “So did you.”

“Yes but not like that, Kel. There was a bit more to it than that.”

Her only reply was an eyebrow so arched he had no trouble making out the gesture.

“Allardice always liked to have a blue-eyed boy under his wing—no, nothing like that,” he added catching her cynical sniff. “A kind of sidekick.”

“Robin to his Batman?”

“Not quite. More like Igor to his Dr Frankenstein. Someone he could build up, who’d owe him and be grateful later down the line.”

That produced a fleeting smile. “And O’Neill was the chosen one?”

“Aye. Allardice started to groom him while he was still in uniform. A word or two in the right ear. A favour or two called in. You know how it goes.”

“Oh yeah,” she murmured. “And how it doesn’t.”

“Look, it might just be coincidence love, but after you were arrested O’Neill made the jump to CID and he’s been rising fast ever since.”

“Even after Allardice retired?” Kelly said. “Perhaps he’s just a bright boy.”

“And perhaps,” McCarron said grimly, “he knows where the bodies are buried.”

110

Kelly stood near the office window cradling a mug of lukewarm tea. She watched the colour of the sky over the rooftops changing slowly from sodium orange to the pale pink of sunrise.

Behind her, Ray McCarron stirred fitfully under the blanket she’d laid over him when the pills and the pain had finally caught up. She glanced across at the bruised and beaten features, his hair ruffled into a peak like a mini mohican.

Kelly hadn’t slept but spent the remainder of the night in restless contemplation of what to do. What she could do. There weren’t exactly a lot of options open to her.