A Matter of Blood (38 page)

With the phone still in hand, he chewed his bottom lip. ‘Fuck it,’ he muttered, and dialled his home number. There was no one there. After a moment he tried Kate’s mobile. The phone rang out and just as he’d given up, she finally answered.

‘What do you want, Cass?’

He could hear her sniffing loudly at the other end. Surely she couldn’t still be crying about Christian and Jessica?

‘I just wanted to—’

A siren wailed loudly in his ear, cutting his sentence off. What did he want to do? Talk to her? Make everything right? Come home? Were either of them capable of that? Another siren joined the first and it was a long minute before it was quiet enough for them to speak.

‘I wanted to check you were okay.’ It sounded feeble. Shit, it
was
feeble.

‘This isn’t the right time, Cass. I can’t talk now.’ She sniffed again. ‘I don’t want to talk.’ Her breath hitched. ‘It’s all your fault. I can’t sleep and it’s all your fault. If you hadn’t . . .’ Her sentence tailed off.

‘If I hadn’t what?’ She sounded so angry, and it tugged at some place inside him.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she sighed, the fight gone from her as quickly as it had flared. ‘I’ve got to go.’

She didn’t even wait for him to say goodbye before hanging up. Cass stared at the receiver and thought for a second about calling her back before replacing it in the cradle. Even if he did, she wouldn’t answer. He needed to concentrate on the things he could actually do something about. Kate wasn’t one of them right now.

He flicked on the computer and typed
Paradise Lost
into the search engine, then scrolled through the results to find an example of the text. His eyes moved over the words, but he took nothing from them. Fucking poetry. He’d hated it at school, and it still left him cold. He navigated away and browsed through the many sites that claimed to explain it as the story of Satan and his followers and how they fought God and were cast down from Heaven. He scrolled through, skim-reading for ten minutes or so. His dad wouldn’t have liked this. For at least part of the text Satan was portrayed as some kind of hero taking on a despotic God, before creating Pandemonium out of Chaos. The last word rang a bell and he thought of the music that had been playing when poor Carla Rae had been found. Hadn’t Hask said it was called something to do with chaos? Well, he didn’t need the profiler to tell him that David Solomon clearly had some issues with organised religion that he was addressing in his own dark, perverse way.

The later sections of the poem focused on Adam and Eve and their eviction from Paradise, but it was all heavily worded and nothing leapt out at him. After scanning through the notes on the screen he shut the computer down. He’d seen enough. Analysing it in any detail was Hask’s job; he was an eminently better person to do it than Cass.

He went into the station database and searched for the most recent Macintyre interview. He turned the volume down low before clicking play.

‘Interview commenced at 11.45 a.m. Those present: Samuel Macintyre, Detective Inspector Gary Bowman and Detective Sergeant Mat Blackmore.’ Blackmore’s voice was tinny through the small speakers on either side of the screen. Cass listened as Bowman took over, firing questions at the gangster, demanding answers. Papers shuffled and Blackmore announced that DI Bowman was showing the suspect a series of photos of the dead boys. It was all routine stuff, and it had all been done by Cass himself over the course of the previous two weeks. Then came the application of pressure, the threats that the police would be like a second skin on Macintyre’s arse until he had no businesses left if he didn’t tell them what the fuck had happened that afternoon.

Bowman moved on to the subject of Artie Mullins, but not in the way Cass had expected. Instead of pushing the blame onto the rival crime lord, Bowman hinted that if Macintyre didn’t give them something to go on, then they’d make sure that Artie heard that Sam was implicating him in the attempted hit. It was a good tactic, Cass gave him that, but it wasn’t enough to make Macintyre suddenly give up the info that he might have been set up over a dispute with some Chechens -
which was exactly what he did next
. And then to suddenly drop the names of two villains who had admitted they’d been conned into revealing his plans for the day? None of it rang true. It was all too slick.

For a start, if Macintyre thought some of his own men had been dumb enough to almost get him killed, they wouldn’t be walking around, let alone be able to come in and give statements. They’d be fucking lucky if they got away with just having their kneecaps smashed. It was far more likely that their bodies would be washing up on some Thames mudbank, bloated and rotting. People like Macintyre dealt with their own shit. They didn’t hand it on a plate to the police.

He tapped his fingers against the desk in frustration. He could see why the DCI and his superiors were going along with it. Everyone was screaming for an end to this case, and Bowman had delivered it. Macintyre walked away, no doubt some poor Chechen fucker would turn up dead from some kind of ‘accident’, Bowman could close the case, and the whole thing would go away, with no one ending up in prison and everyone in pocket. It was shit. He played the interview again. Something else was bugging him, but even after listening through it twice more, he couldn’t place it.

It was only when he got in his car to head back to The Bank to meet Maya Healey that he realised what was wrong. It was the timing. Blackmore gave the start time of the interview as 11.45 in the morning. It didn’t fit. When Claire had rung him, he’d been driving down to the house and it had only just gone eleven, and she’d said that Macintyre was already in the interview room. He pulled too fast out of the car park, almost colliding with a Panda coming the other way. Without even waving an apology, he steered into the road. The fuckers. They used that first forty-five minutes to set up with Macintyre how the recorded interview would proceed, and then started the official interview afterwards. Dusk was creeping over London, light and dark fighting for supremacy of the sky. He thought of the interview, and Bowman, and his own life. Maybe that grey area was all any of them could hope for, but if Perry Jordan came back with something on either Jackson or Miller, then Detective Inspector Bowman was going to regret trying to clean up too soon.

 

He parked up in one of the side streets, fed the meter with a ridiculous amount of money and leaned against the corner wall, his tall frame swallowed up by the shadows of the encroaching night. Although the SIS Building was most dramatic when seen from across the river, Cass thought the rear view, with its sharp, angular lines, was equally impressive.

His eyes moved upwards, taking in the sleek slash of steel against the black backdrop of the fallen night, juxtaposed with the shining glass windows, lit from within. He counted up the floors to the eleventh, where Christian’s office sat empty, waiting patiently for a new executive to fill it. His eyes drifted upwards again and then he frowned. He counted again from the floor to the top. The numbers were wrong. The lift had buttons for twenty floors. He was tallying more than that. He checked twice more. The count came back the same each time. Even if he took out a couple for the computer system base and archives, there would still be more than the twenty floors numbered in the lift. Why would they have floors that weren’t accessible? Was there a separate lift, or a staircase that he hadn’t seen? It didn’t make sense. He breathed quietly, his brain whirring.

Buildings were something that he understood. In the black months after Birmingham, he’d spent a lot of time studying architecture. He had needed the solidity of buildings, the reality of them, and he couldn’t shake that last instruction, to ‘look up’. His brow furrowed. Maybe when the place had been MI6 HQ they’d needed some separate floors for security purposes. The question was: what was The Bank using them for now?

He was still staring upwards when he realised the plump figure of Maya Healey was about to scurry past. She jumped slightly as he reached out of the gloom and touched her arm, and even when she realised who it was, her face stayed tight with tension. She didn’t start to relax until they were sitting in a pub around the corner from her home, several safe miles from her place of employment. He couldn’t blame her. He was quite certain Mr Asher Bastard Red would not be impressed to learn she was meeting the troublesome policeman away from his watchful gaze.

‘Thanks for meeting me.’ Cass slid the large glass of white wine across the table to her. She’d asked for a Diet Coke, but he’d persuaded her that they should have a drink for Christian. She hadn’t argued. Cass wondered if Maya had ever argued with anyone in her life. He doubted it.

A smiled flickered briefly as she clinked her glass quietly against Cass’s pint mug. ‘You don’t look like Christian,’ she said and a flush mottled her neck, as if perhaps she should have started the conversation with a more expected nicety.

‘We weren’t really very similar, in either looks or personality. I think he was the better man - in both departments, ’ Cass said, a little surprised at himself for revealing that.

‘He was a good man.’ Her smile stretched sadly. ‘He was a very good man. I shall miss him terribly.’ Her eyes flickered across his. ‘It must be awful for you. I can’t even imagine.’

Cass nodded awkwardly. ‘That’s why I wanted to talk to you. To understand his life better. Did you work with him ever since he joined The Bank?’

‘Oh no, I worked with him before then.’ She took another sip, the alcohol or the mention of Christian relaxing her slightly. She was like a nervous cat creeping ever so slightly closer to an offered treat. ‘I was his assistant in his last job, when he was at McGowan’s.’ She leaned across the table slightly. ‘When he was asked to join The Bank, he insisted that I come too. I would never have got a job there otherwise. ’ Her face twisted bitterly. ‘I’m not their type.’

Cass didn’t comment. There wasn’t anything he could say. Timid, she might be, but he doubted she was stupid. She was right: she probably wasn’t their type, but maybe one day she’d realise that that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. There were far worse things to be than ordinary. He smiled.

‘Well, Christian obviously valued you highly, and that’s worth more to me than The Bank’s opinion.’

The flush rose higher on her neck and her eyes darted downwards. Cass swallowed a mouthful of beer. ‘Did you notice anything strange about Christian recently? Did he talk to you about anything that might have been bothering him?’

A hand fluttered to her neck and the tightness formed again, wrinkling the thin skin around her eyes as they narrowed.

Cass refused to drop his own eyes and let her off the hook. ‘Please, Maya. I’m his brother. I’m just trying to understand all this. He tried to speak to me and I wasn’t there for him, and now it’s haunting me.’ It was the truth, although Cass thought she’d run a mile if he mentioned the crimson drops on black lace-up shoes, but something must have resonated with her.

She took another swallow of wine.

‘He did change. After Luke got sick.’

‘What happened?’

‘He wanted to see the results of the medical tests and talk to the experts. The Bank insisted on treating him in their own centre, which they never did for me when I had to have my gall bladder removed.’ Again the bitterness threatened to twist her plump sweetness into something mean. ‘I know Luke’s better now . . .’ Her breath hitched as she realised the awful irony of her words, but Cass just nodded at her to continue. ‘At the time your brother was really worried.’

Cass had a vague memory of Kate talking to Jessica on the phone, and him waving away the silent suggestion that maybe he should talk to Christian. He wasn’t good with illness. He couldn’t cope with it. It was better that Kate handled it.

‘It turned out to be anaemia, didn’t it?’ he said. ‘It was treatable.’

‘Yes, but at first they were worried that it was leukaemia.

It was awful. Christian said that Jessica’s parents had both died young, from blood-based cancers, and of course it played on their minds that Luke had somehow inherited the potential for it.’

Cass nodded, encouraging her to continue while he tried to ignore the pangs of guilt that were tearing at his heart. How had he missed all this? How had this little fat woman supported Christian more than he ever had?

‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I think he did some research into the doctors’ names that were on the reports, but he couldn’t find anything out about them. He wanted to get a second opinion from a specialist at Charing Cross, but it caused quite a fuss and it never happened.
They
wouldn’t allow it.’

Cass wondered if she realised that her voice had dropped to almost a whisper, even though there was no one close to them in the quiet pub.

‘He didn’t tell me what went on, but you know how it is in an office.’ She shrugged. ‘It’s easy to overhear the odd thing. Even in a place like The Bank, you just can’t help it sometimes. From what I could make out, I think he was told that there would be no second opinions, and that there was nothing to worry about. I sensed he was being pressured to feel grateful and not rock the boat. It didn’t stop him though. He tried to make an appointment for Luke through the private practice, but they wouldn’t do it. They said they had no appointments for at least six months.’

She stopped to take a larger sip of her wine. She sounded more confident now. ‘Christian didn’t believe them. He thought they’d been told not to give him an appointment, and he couldn’t understand why.’

‘Did he tell you this?’

‘Yes, one night after work. When we were at McGowan’s, we’d quite often go out for a quick drink when we were done. We didn’t do it so often after the move, but about three months ago we did. Maybe a bit longer than that, I’m not sure. Luke was doing okay and the medicine seemed to be working, but Christian was obsessing about the way the whole thing had been handled. I’d noticed he was more agitated. He’d started to question instructions, and he was staying a bit later, digging around in the computer for God only knew what. I think to start with he was looking for the records of Luke’s medical costs, but I think it went beyond that after a while. I think he was trying to understand The Bank better.’