A Matter of Blood (29 page)

His mouth hanging half-open, he sat back against the sofa. In the armchair, Christian mirrored his actions. Cass barely noticed. The obvious was horrific, but it had been staring him in the face for two weeks and he just hadn’t seen it. What if the hitmen
had
made a clean kill? What if they’d got exactly whom they’d been paid to kill?
What if the Jackson and Miller boys had actually been the targets?

His hand was shaking as he lit a cigarette. Adrenalin buzzed through him. He hadn’t bothered to do any checks on the Jackson and Miller families, because they had all been so focused on the boys as tragic victims in the wrong place at the wrong time. He cursed himself.

He picked up the phone, but paused before dialling. His first instinct was to call Claire and bring her up to speed, but he stopped himself. He’d given her quite enough to do that hadn’t been approved by the DCI or Bowman, and the last thing he wanted was to get her into trouble. And there was the darker consideration that someone, somewhere, had set him up over this case. Right now it was safer to keep any developments out of the office. He didn’t feel guilty - they’d bloody suspended him, after all.

He scrolled through, looking for the right number. Perry Jordan owed Cass a favour. He’d been a bright PC with a promising career ahead of him - until one of his mates was brought in for a urine sample. Jordan, young, stupid and thinking himself the man, did the sample himself. He got caught. End of career.

Cass had liked the boy - he had that edge that you only got being London born and bred, and his mistake had been misplaced loyalty, not personal gain. He’d have made a good copper, given time, but there was another use for his talents. Cass knew a PI who was looking for someone, smoothed the way. Six years on, Perry Jordan was pretty much running the business, and doing well. It was the force’s loss.

The phone was answered with a grunt.

‘Did I wake you?’

‘Jones?’ A muffled yawn.

‘It’s gone nine. Wakey wakey, rise and shine.’

‘Easy for you to say. I’ve been doorstepping a dodgy house in Bermondsey all fucking night.’

‘Anything interesting?’

‘Ha! I wish. Rich bloke with a cheating bird who likes a bit of rough on the side.’

Cass gave him a second to wake up fully. ‘I need you to do something for me.’

‘Don’t tell me you think your missus is cheating . . .’

A small knife turned in Cass’s gut. Who knew what Kate was doing? Definitely not him. ‘No, it’s nothing like that.

I need you to do some digging around on two families for me. I want their financial details - mortgage payments, bank loans, personal histories, you know the drill.’

‘It’ll be a pleasure to use my brain for a change. Names and addresses?’

Cass told him.

There was silence for a heartbeat as the penny dropped at the other end. ‘The boys that got shot. You want a full file.’

‘That’s right.’ He tried to keep his tone light.

‘Can I ask why you’ve come to me?’ Jordan asked after a moment. ‘Surely you could get this done in-house - not with my flair and brilliance obviously, but you’ve got more manpower, and it’ll be free.’

‘I want to keep this under the wire until I know what I’m looking at,’ Cass said. He paused. ‘And if you could keep it under your hat I’d be grateful.’

‘Don’t need saying, mate.’ The PI sounded fully awake now and Cass knew he’d got the subtext clearly enough. ‘But even with my genius I’m going to need a day or two.’

‘Understood. Thanks.’ He knew Jordan would prioritise it; he doubted he’d get the work done quicker in-house, or as thoroughly. As he ended the call, Cass was buzzing. Maybe at last he was getting somewhere. He realised Christian had vanished at some point during his conversation with Jordan, and he wondered if he should be concerned about how laissez-faire he’d become about the random presence of his dead brother. He decided that with everything else going on, the ghostly visitations came pretty low on the list of things to be worried about - and he couldn’t help but admit to himself that seeing Christian’s face every now and then was easing the pain of his loss.

He made some toast and drank more coffee before tidying the house so he didn’t need to mess around after seeing Father Michael, he could just pick up his stuff and head back to London. The idea of staying in some grotty hotel wasn’t very appealing, but everything he needed to do - finding Mr Bright, stopping this self-proclaimed Man of Flies, working out who’d framed him - was back in the city. And if things had worked out as planned, Mr Ali Khan would have been found by now and Cass would be back at work by tomorrow latest.

As he made the bed, he thought that even after just one night it didn’t feel so strange being home. Maybe Christian had felt the same, and that’s why he’d never got round to selling the place. He closed up the suitcase of photographs in Christian’s room, but left it where it was. When all this was done he intended to come back and take a proper look at them. Maybe the photos would help lay some ghosts, maybe not, but Cass was surprised to find his curiosity about his family had been piqued.

Downstairs, he put the envelope of photos on top of the laptop and put his suitcase in the hallway. That laptop was still bugging him; he needed to find the password for the Redemption file before he gave it back, and he had only a few hours. There was no getting out of that either, the tone of Ramsey’s voice had made that clear. Cass could respect that. He’d removed evidence from the scene - that alone could get him the sack, especially with his chequered past.

Across the village, church bells pealed out. To Cass, they felt like a summons to his past.

 

 

 

I
t was only midday and already it felt to Claire like it had been a morning of two halves. Her enquiries about the elusive Mr Bright had resulted in a big fat zilch; as far as she could ascertain, he didn’t exist, which struck her as odd, given how common the name was. Ms Middleton, the police liaison officer at The Bank, was a stern woman in her fifties who had made it clear that it would take some considerable time to search The Bank’s employee database for anyone with that name, and if they wanted to include The Bank’s subsidiary companies, then they would have an even longer wait. Claire wasn’t sure if the woman was being obstructive just for the fun of it, or if she had had her orders from higher up - after all, how long could it really take for a name search on a computer database belonging to the most efficient and highly resourced company in the civilised world? - but her over-the-top reaction immediately made Claire want to push deeper.

Claire took over from the constable who’d made the original enquiry and called Ms Middleton back. This time she gave the full name: Castor Bright. So much for the ‘difficult search’ and ‘lengthy wait’ her DC had been promised; within five minutes a one-line email response had pinged into her inbox:
There is no one with the name Castor Bright on our employee database
. Claire forwarded it to Cass’s email account. The queries she’d put out to her journalist contacts were all coming back blank too. It was intensely frustrating.

On the upside, however, Cass’s burger man had been found, and she was now reaping the rewards. Blackmore was looking at her as if she’d screwed someone else, Bowman was so angry that his pale, sickly face was sporting two feverish spots of colour, and Ramsey’s expression was that of someone who was beginning to think he’d ended up in a
Twilight Zone
episode.

‘I can’t believe you thought it was okay to do this behind my back.’ DI Bowman was almost spitting at her.

‘It wasn’t behind your back, sir,’ she tried to explain, ‘I just didn’t see the point of bothering you unless the man could be found.’

‘If I didn’t know about it, May, then it was behind my back,’ he shouted. ‘You do not have the right to tell
my
staff what they should be doing unless you have cleared it with me or my senior officers first.’ He was almost incandescent with fury.

‘They were off duty,’ she said. ‘It was a favour.’ She couldn’t work out why he was so wound up about this - it was clear that he and Cass Jones had no time for each other, but given how understaffed they were, she’d thought he’d be happy to have Cass back to take up his own caseload.

‘Sir,’ she said, keeping her tone apologetic, ‘maybe I didn’t go about it the right way, but it was with the best of intentions. The man’s come in to be interviewed, and his description of DI Jones and his car are pretty spot-on - so Cass Jones couldn’t have been at his brother’s house if he was in the middle of a drunken argument with a burger van man at the Elephant and Castle, could he?’ Facts were facts, after all, she added to herself.

‘He never did have any class,’ Blackmore muttered.

Claire fought the urge to bite back at her boyfriend’s dig at her ex-lover, choosing instead to ignore the jibe. ‘Sir, surely it’s enough to get him back to work, don’t you think? We need him here - especially after the phone call—’

‘She’s right,’ Ramsey broke in, ‘we should get him back. You guys need him to talk you through this phone call he’s had.’ He rubbed his head. ‘And on top of that, I just can’t see him having anything to do with what’s happened to his brother - call it gut instinct or whatever, it’s just not fitting in my head. And Dr Hask agrees.’

Bowman snorted, and Ramsey gave a wry smile before continuing, ‘Trust me, I wish to God he had been there, because now my nice tidy murder-suicide is looking suspiciously like a triple homicide with planted evidence, and I really could have lived without that headache. I’ve got quite enough work on back at my own nick.’

Bowman finally nodded, but he still looked unhappy. ‘Well, at least yesterday’s interview tied up the Macintyre case. Jones can dig in on the serial case.’ He gave a bitter smile. ‘After all, he’s now the Chosen One in our killer’s eyes.’

‘Solved, sir?’Claire looked quizzically at Blackmore. How come he hadn’t told her this?

‘Don’t look so put out, given how much you’ve been doing without keeping anyone else in the loop,’ Bowman said. ‘We didn’t get confirmation of what Macintyre admitted yesterday until an hour ago. He neglected to tell us about a “disagreement” he’d had with some Chechens. Money, of course - drugs or money, isn’t it always? They probably put out the hit. We’re pulling in some names now.’

As the door opened and DCI Morgan peered in and called, ‘May? A word?’ her heart sank. Maybe this was going to turn into a day of three parts. The way things were going, her career heading for the same path as Cass Jones’ - straight to the stagnant pond of no promotion.

She stepped into the corridor, Sam Macintyre and his ‘Chechen disagreement’ temporarily forgotten. ‘Sir?’

Morgan leaned in. ‘I hear you’ve been trying to locate this Bright character your witness claims gave him the film to deliver?’

‘Yes, sir, but I’m not getting very far.’

‘You won’t.’ His voice was cool, and he was close enough that she could smell tobacco on his breath, which came as a surprise given what a big deal he’d made about giving up when the smoking laws changed. She thought he’d succeeded. You never could tell what was really going on with people.

‘Sir?’

‘It’s a wild goose chase. There is no such man. Your witness must have got the name wrong.’

‘No, he was pretty clear—’

‘I said,’DCI Morgan cut in, ‘that he got the name wrong.’

This wasn’t making sense. She ploughed on, ‘With all due respect, sir, how can you be so sure?’

‘Because, young Sergeant May,’ he said, looking at her with old, tired eyes, ‘I’ve been told to be sure.’ His shoulders sagged. ‘Just leave it alone. If this Bright exists, then he’s nothing to do with your case. Bowman says we’re closing the Miller/Jackson case, and now Jones has had a call from the killer we’re looking at a different man, yes?’

Claire nodded, dumbly. She didn’t know what else to do. Who the hell
was
this Castor Bright, to have got the search on him closed down so fast?

‘So no more of our limited resources wasted on this, right? Make the most of the leads you’ve already got.’

Claire’s mobile started to ring but it did nothing to dissipate the tense atmosphere. She stared at her DCI, still trying to find answers in his face, but he remained inscrutable.

‘You’d better answer that.’ He turned and walked away.

She watched him as she dragged the phone from her pocket. It might have been a Sunday, but the station was buzzing - Cass’s call from the serial had them all fired up. If only the boys out reinterviewing the first four victims’ friends and families could find some links to Covent Garden, then maybe they’d even have a chance of catching the killer. She wanted Cass back, and not only for that private comfort she got from having him around. If anyone could do it, then he could. She turned her attention to the phone.

‘Claire?’

‘Yes, who is this?’ She couldn’t immediately place the voice, and she was distracted by Mat Blackmore peering angrily round the door. It was obvious who he thought the call was from.

‘It’s Josh Eagleton. Are you at home?’

‘No, at work. We’ve had some developments so I came in.’

‘Oh.’ As Josh’s voice dropped so she could hear raised voices in the room behind Mat; Ramsey’s defence of Cass probably hadn’t gone down well with Bowman. Great. Blackmore glared at her again.

‘What do you want, Josh?’ She tried to keep the snappiness out of her voice, but failed. At least Mat might stop looking daggers at her now she’d made clear she wasn’t on the phone to Cass - her
boss
. His attitude was beginning to seriously piss her off.

‘I need Cass Jones’ mobile number.’ The young man spoke hurriedly.

‘I can’t give you that.’

‘But I—’

She needed to get back and find out what was going on before it all came to blows. Maybe Ramsey had suggested something sensible - like sending Bowman home to rest. She glared back at Mat. She was tired of him being so angry at her. Maybe she shouldn’t have been so honest when he’d asked her about her past with Cass, back when they’d first started seeing each other. It wasn’t as if either of them had been virgins. Cass always said she was too honest, too trusting. Perhaps he had a point after all.