The Shadow of the Soul: The Dog-Faced Gods Book Two Page 3

  ‘Yep. Katie Dodds. Just turned twenty-one. I’ll get the file over to you. Someone’s already taken an official statement from the boyfriend here. When I’m done here I’ll get you a copy of the report. Can’t see anyone else being interested.’

  ‘Thanks. It’s probably nothing, but I’ll take a look.’

  ‘Good,’ Josh Eagleton said. ‘They’re only young. They deserve someone to know why.’

  Cass headed back down the stairs. Eagleton was already well ahead of his old boss, in Cass’s opinion. Cass knew all about how the fingers of the dead could grip you; looked like the lab rat was fast learning that too.

  It was still early, and as he’d not showered or shaved before heading out to meet Eagleton, Cass headed home before going to the nick. He had plenty of time before he had to be in, and he wasn’t ready for anyone at Paddington Green to see him looking anything less than professional. Sometimes appearances really were everything; he knew that better than most. He flicked on the kettle in the small kitchen before heading into the shower. His new flat in St John’s Wood was small but functional, and it suited Cass, probably better than the big house in Muswell Hill ever had.

  He stepped under the shower. He’d be glad when the house sale finally completed. He’d sold at a ridiculously low price, the only way to shift it in the dead housing market, but it was worth it, just to draw a line under some of the memories. And it wasn’t as if he was short of cash: The Bank had cleared his brother’s mortgage once he’d proved Christian had been murdered, and that house was now rented out, while the life insurance pay-out was sitting as yet untouched in Cass’s own bank account.

  He let the hot water run over him. Every life could be accounted for by a cash sum. If the world had taught him anything it was that. From betrayal for thirty pieces of silver to Claire May tumbling to her death to protect illegal earnings, to family life insurance, life and death all came down to currency. It left a bad taste in his mouth … he had a bad taste in his mouth and the healthiest bank balance he’d had in years. And on top of all that, his pay packet was going to be substantially bigger, as he was due a whole load of official bonuses after the arrests and convictions of his fellow officers. That was another reason why there weren’t too many people at the station – and in nicks across London – keen to stand by Cass; there was a distinct feeling that he was profiteering from the force.

  He turned up the heat, sending a cloud of steam billowing out through the shower curtain. He could live with all that shit. After all, he’d been through worse. As he scrubbed at his skin he started wishing it was as easy to clean off the memories of the past and the ghosts of the dead: Claire May, his wife Kate, Christian and his family, the lost child Luke … and over everything loomed the dark shadow of The Bank, and the mysterious Mr Bright. He shut it out. There is no glow – the thought beat at his skull every morning, and though he knew it was a lie, he didn’t care; he intended to try and live by that lie. Cass had no intention of taking part in whatever games Mr Bright and Solomon had wanted to play with him and his family. The gritty, real world of crime was all that interested him. They could find another family for their experiments.

  Out of the shower, he quickly towelled himself dry.

  There is no glow. That sentence was replaced with another, equally strange, if less familiar: Chaos in the darkness. Eagleton had been right: he was intrigued. Two girls at two separate universities, both using the same phrase while killing themselves – coincidence? A man had told him recently that there were no coincidences. Cass was inclined to agree with him.

  He drank a quick cup of coffee as he dressed and headed for the door, until the answerphone’s flashing light caught his eye. Two messages had been left while he’d been in the bathroom. The world might be dead on its feet, but it still started work early.

  ‘Mr Jones? This is Edgar Marlowe, from Marlowe and Beale solicitors’ office? It’s really rather important that you call me back on—’

  Cass didn’t give the man a chance to finish his sentence before he hit delete. Another fucking lawyer. The voice sounded familiar, and Cass wondered if he had called before. More than likely; Bowman and Blackmore’s trials were coming up soon, and most of the calls put through to his office were something to do with the fucking case. This one pissed him off though: this was his home number. Who the hell had given them that?

  The next message clicked in: ‘Wondered if you were up for a pint tonight?’

  The very English sentence sounded strange in DI Ramsey’s US drawl, but it made Cass smile.

  ‘Meeting up with someone you’d probably like to see. We’ll be at the Fox and Garter on Marylebone High Street at eight.’

  At least Cass knew he still had some friends left on the force, and Charles Ramsey was top of that list. The irritating lawyer forgotten, Cass picked up his keys and headed out into the wreckage of London to face the day.

  ‘Coffee, sir?’ Toby Armstrong stood in the doorway with a mug already in hand.

  ‘Thanks.’

  Cass waved his new sergeant in and took the drink, and for a second there was an awkward silence. Armstrong was, by all accounts, a likeable character and a good policeman, and although Cass didn’t doubt either, he hadn’t yet seen much evidence of the first. At best they had a polite working relationship. They didn’t go to the pub together. They didn’t discuss their personal lives.

  Cass wasn’t bothered by the coolness between them. He was happy as long as the sergeant got on with his job; he could understand why being allocated to the DI who was almost single-handedly bringing down the Met might not be Armstrong’s idea of a great partnership. The sergeant might not have said anything, but it was obvious he didn’t want to get tarred by the Cass Jones brush.

  ‘The Mitchell death?’

  Cass looked up. ‘What about it?’ Barbara Mitchell had been clubbed to death with a tyre-iron in her kitchen a few days before. It was the closest Cass had come to a real case in six months, but it had proved depressingly lacking in anything remotely brain-taxing.

  ‘I did what you said, brought the husband’s secretary in and let her sweat overnight. She broke at four this morning. She started banging on the cell door, desperate to talk. Said he wasn’t with her after all.’

  ‘Got someone picking him up?’

  ‘Already done,’ Armstrong said, ‘and he’s cracked. His confession’s being typed up now.’

  ‘Good work.’ Cass attempted a smile but it was empty. The Mitchell case had been blindingly obvious from the moment he’d first walked into that house and seen the husband’s scrubbed pink hands and spotless clothes as he stood shaking beside her battered and bleeding body, stammering as he claimed he’d found her that way. It had only ever been a matter of time before they had their confession.

  A small huddle of officers gathered in the corner of the Incident Room outside caught his eye, and he frowned.

  ‘What’s going on with them?’

  ‘They’re watching the news,’ Armstrong said. ‘A couple of bombs went off in the Moscow Underground during rush hour.’

  ‘Like ours?’

  ‘Looks that way.’

  ‘Poor bastards.’ He meant it too. For a moment he was tempted to go and join the group and watch the disaster unfold in all its glorious televisual Technicolor, but he shook the thought away. The bombings were someone else’s problem, part of the bigger picture that made up the slowly rotting world. For Cass, all that mattered now were the small tragedies, the tiny deaths – the ones he could actually do something about.

  ‘I’ve got a job for you.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Student suicides. I want to know how many there have been in the past month – no, in fact, maybe go back three months. Get me whatever files we’ve got.’

  ‘London, or nationwide?’

  ‘London for now.’

  ‘Can I ask why?’

  Cass looked up. Claire could have asked why, and he’d probably have told her, but not this career copper w
ho was too worried about his own fledgling reputation to relax. ‘No, Armstrong,’ Cass said quietly, ‘you can’t.’

  There was the slightest twitch in the other man’s jaw and then the sergeant turned and left. Cass watched him. If only the stupid boy would see that someone among the headshed must think highly of him to have teamed him up with Cass in the middle of this shitstorm, then maybe he’d start to be half the copper he possibly could be.

  He closed the door.

  By lunchtime Cass had finished his own bland report on the Mitchell case and Armstrong had printed out all the information he’d requested. He’d had a message from Eagleton, who was running a full autopsy on Jasmine Green, the girl they’d found this morning, and would get back to him as soon as possible. Cass looked at the small pile of papers in front of him and wondered who was more intrigued by this case, the ME’s assistant, or Cass himself. Eagleton’s curiosity had been roused for sure, but as Cass sifted through the documents Armstrong had brought him, he felt a tingle in the pit of his stomach. He’d started to think he’d lost that feeling.

  It appeared that a depressingly large number of young people felt the urge to end their lives before they’d grown up enough to realise they could live through a whole lot worse shit than the angst that comes from being somewhere between eighteen and twenty-two. As he scanned through their tragedies, he didn’t let his eyes linger too long on the invariably smiling photographs. If you let too many of the dead grip you, they’d pull you down and drown you. He’d learned that fast.

  Over the past three months there’d been nine suicides among London’s student population. Cass put five of them in a separate pile, to be ignored; there was nothing unusual about any of them – a teenager who had always been bullied; a young woman with a history of depression – and more importantly, all five dead had left notes explaining their actions.

  The other four, however, he laid out carefully across his desk. Four suicides in just over two weeks, spread across the capital. The files were sparse on information, even Katie Dodds’. He looked at her photo. Dark hair, pretty. Green eyes. Then he looked at the second image, the words finger-painted in blood on the wall. Chaos in the darkness. No note, other than that one sentence. His eyes flicked over the attached sheet of paper. Popular student, talented artist. No hint of depression.

  The second file was James Busby’s, a twenty-year-old sports science second-year student at the Richmond campus of Brunel University. Cut his wrists in the bath in a student house in Hounslow four days before Katie Dodds slashed hers on her bed in Chelsea. He’d been the rugby team captain. He’d passed all his exams thus far, in the way that the popular kids always do: not top of the class, but doing enough work to get by and still have a social life. Cass’s eyes caught on the final paragraph of the report.

  No evidence of foul play. Deceased sent text to mother from bathroom. Chaos in the darkness. Mother didn’t understand it, she tried to call and received no answer. There was no further communication from her son, who was found dead by another resident of his house thirty minutes later.

  Cass’s heart thumped more loudly. There it was again, in black and white. Chaos in the darkness. What did it mean – and more importantly, what the hell did it mean to these kids? He looked at the last two files. Angie Lane and Cory Denter. Angie had been an accountancy and business student at the South Bank University. She’d been quiet but friendly. Her flatmate had returned to find her dead on the kitchen floor a week ago. There was a pile of chopped carrots on the side. Angie had been cutting up vegetables and at some point decided that cutting her own wrists open was preferable to finishing whatever she’d decided to cook. She left no note.

  Cass jotted down the address of her flat, the name of her flatmate and her parents’ contact details. She might not have left an obvious message behind, but he needed to find out for himself. Cory Denter’s story was similar: he was a second-year medical student at Bart’s with no signs of depression. He’d slit his wrists with a scalpel the most efficient way, vertically, not horizontally, in his car on his parents’ drive in Lewisham. He was a live-at-home student. Cass added his address to Angie Lane’s.

  Cory Denter had died only four days earlier, so he’d go there first. There had been no suicide note for Cory either, and Cass knew full well what he’d be facing when he turned up at the Denter house: all their grief, and wonder – and then, on top of that, he’d feel the awful weight of their expectation that maybe he’d be able to provide the answers for them, to give them some closure.

  He stood up. The parents didn’t concern him so much. Their grief would be painful, but it was their grief, not his own, and he could live with their expectations. He’d done that before. He looked down at the four faces on his desk once more before gathering up the files and putting them in his top drawer. It was the expectations of the dead that he had a hard time dealing with. The dead didn’t let go.

  Chapter Four

  Abigail Porter had become good at being relatively invisible over the years, no mean feat for a woman who stood six foot tall in flat shoes, especially when most of that height was taken up by spectacular long, slim legs. Still, as she stood by the door in Alison McDonnell’s private office it was clear that neither the Prime Minister, nor the Home Secretary, nor David Fletcher, the head of ATD, the Anti-Terror Division, the new hard core at the heart of the country’s counter-terrorism agencies, considered her to be in the room. She was like a ghost imprinted on the wallpaper, there, but not there. As she idly listened to the serious voices, she was pleased about that. Next door, the PM’s admin secretary would be just leaving for lunch. In ten minutes’ time McDonnell would be leaving to meet the other members of the Cabinet for the emergency briefing. Abigail needed two or three minutes of unnoticed time between those two events.

  ‘We’re almost certain that all five of the 26/09 bombs were made of Semtex, rather than the usual home-made organic compounds used in 7/7 and 13/12,’ Fletcher started.

  ‘Semtex?’

  ‘Military grade.’

  ‘I take it this isn’t a good thing.’ McDonnell said.

  ‘In itself, it shouldn’t make much difference. Without trying to be crude, it doesn’t matter what it’s made of; if it explodes and kills people, then a bomb is a bomb. What’s of more concern is the lack of any polymer residue at any of the sites. All military-grade Semtex manufactured since 2002 has a post-detonation taggant which leaves behind traces of chemicals, allowing the batch to be identified and traced. And if it’s not military grade, then it should be orange. None of these explosions left residue, and trace evidence suggests the plastique was white.’

  ‘What does all that actually mean?’

  ‘In essence, it suggests that your bombers are both well organised and well funded, and I would suggest that if they’re taking time to purchase Semtex I’d be willing to bet they bought more than they used for 26/09. I very much doubt it’s for sale in small quantities.’

  ‘Small quantities?’ The Prime Minister grimaced. ‘They virtually destroyed Ealing Broadway and Hampstead High Street, and they brought the Underground system to its knees.’

  ‘It’s certainly efficient, but politically, the use of this kind of Semtex raises some questions. The Czechs are either selling old stock on the black market, or manufacturing new – untraceable – product.’ Fletcher sipped his coffee.

  He had strong hands, Abigail noted, with neat, clipped fingernails. He’d be a good lover, she was certain. The thoughts were idle. Two more minutes.

  ‘Oh, that’s great,’ said Lucius Dawson, the Home Secretary.

  ‘The whole world’s in recession and keen to blow the hell out of everyone else,’ said the PM, ‘so what do you really expect? The Czechs aren’t well known for their high-class exports, are they?’ She sighed. ‘Beer, Bohemian crystal and bombs are all they’ve got.’

  ‘We also know the bombs were detonated with mobile phones, and given that at least three of the sites were underground, it’s likely they u
sed the alarm as the trigger – all you have to do is wire a detonator across the vibrate function and it’s done.’

  ‘That would make sense, especially given the precision of the explosions on Ealing Broadway. They were staggered perfectly to cause maximum casualties.’

  Casualties, thought Abigail, was a horribly overused word, a soothing plaster over any number of rotten, cancerous wounds. At the last count, the casualties meant the four hundred and eighty-three people who had died on 26 September, and there were still at least thirty more who might join them any moment. And that was without counting the wounded, those blinded and limbless. Casualties. There was a true horror in the blandness of that euphemism.

  ‘It also means there’s no trace of a triggering call – although even if they had been call-detonated, they’ll all be pay-as-you-go sims, so we’d be none the wiser. The best we could hope for would be to find a common link.’

  ‘That has to stop,’ the PM muttered. ‘I don’t want anyone in this country with a phone that can’t be traced right back to them.’

  ‘With your permission, ma’am’ – for the first time Fletcher sounded hesitant – ‘I’d like to share some of this information with my opposite number in Moscow.’

  There was a slight hitch of breath from the Home Secretary.

  ‘Why? For all we know Russian terrorists were behind these bombs, despite what happened today.’

  Fletcher shook his head. ‘We’ve had none of the normal claims of responsibility, nothing from the Chechens, Al Qaeda or Red Terror. If the Russians were involved, Red Terror would have claimed it by now.’

  ‘You may have a point,’ she conceded. ‘So does this mean we’re dealing with a new terrorist threat?’

  ‘We could be,’ Fletcher admitted, ‘and if we are, then I’m curious about the similarities between what happened here two weeks ago and what happened in Moscow today. Then we’ll be able to gauge the level of threat, and perhaps get some idea of what they were hoping to achieve.’