A Matter Of Blood (The Dog-Faced Gods Trilogy)

by Sarah Pinborough

  ‘But I did get promoted. And now the wives would speak to you, if you’d let them. Although God only knows why you’d want to hang around with the tennis club brigade.’

  She let out a derisive snort. ‘You should be a DCI by now. They were only forced to promote you this far because you’re so bloody good at your job.’ She made it sound like an insult, and the words stung like one. ‘You might as well live at the station, and for what? You think they don’t still all talk about it? Talk about you?’ She barely paused for breath. ‘I hate the way they look down on us. And I hate that you don’t care.’

  She’d run out of steam. Cass sat up, swinging his legs over the side of the bed. He didn’t turn to look at her; he knew her face pinched tight when she was angry, her delicate features pulling in on themselves and making her look mean and bitter. He didn’t need to see that.

  ‘That’s not living with it, Kate. That’s just living with the consequences of it. It’s a different thing entirely.’ He searched in the gloom for his underwear and pulled it on. ‘Trust me.’

  ‘Why can’t you just tell me why you did it? Why can’t you just tell me that?’

  He tugged his jeans on and a sweatshirt. ‘I’m going for a drive.’

  She stared at him and her shoulders slumped forward. He’d seen Macintyre do just that movement on the grainy film of the boys’ shooting. The fight had gone out of her. The argument was over, for today at least.

  He left her sitting silently in the gloom, but when he reached the bedroom door he turned. She looked tiny and fragile on the vast bed, and he thought for a moment that her eyes were shining with the hint of tears. He hadn’t seen her cry for a long time.

  ‘I’m sorry, Kate,’ he said. ‘I can’t tell you, because I can’t remember. You know that. I don’t know why I did it, and that’s all there is to it. Some days I don’t know what were my reasons and what were those they told me to say, or what I thought I should say. It’s all a mixed-up mess in my head. It was a long time ago. I was a different man.’ And I really don’t want to think about it.

  Downstairs, the lights were still on, and the brightness felt almost judgemental as Cass passed by. He picked up his car keys and Artie Mullins’ envelope. He shook out the bunches of notes that would be dished out to the team on Friday night in the car park at the back of The Swan on Kilburn High Road. He rummaged through until finally he saw a small folded wrap of shiny paper probably cut from some trashy porn magazine. Inside it would be a gram of cocaine, maybe two.

  Right at that moment he was grateful to Artie for his occasional gifts. He didn’t have a habit, but he’d be lying if he said he didn’t have an occasional hobby. He listened for sounds of movement from upstairs before quickly chopping a line on the back of the envelope. The house remained silent.

  He pulled a note from its batch and rolled it before quickly snorting the white powder up through his right nostril. By the time he’d replaced the note and resealed the envelope, his front tooth was going numb and the powder was trickling pleasantly down the back of his throat, dispelling his tiredness as it powered its way into his system. Cass smiled. It was strong stuff, cleanly cut.

  He looked upwards, seeing through the bland plaster-work to the memory of the tiny figure on the bed upstairs. Would she ask him to stay? He lingered for a moment, almost willing her to scream at him, but Kate stayed silent. The door clicked shut behind him. As the buzz reached his head, he found it easier not to care.

  ‘You’ve got to look up, Charlie.’

  It’s raining and they’re standing under the awning of the betting shop. Birmingham unravels around them in a network of littered streets that darken under the constant muddy downpour from the steel-grey sky. The chips are hot in their paper wrapping and the older man grabs a handful and his lips smack together as he eats them. This afternoon is all about learning to make the most of simple pleasures, and despite the dirty water that’s blown into their shelter on the wind and soaked the bottom of his jeans, Cass feels happy. He likes this man. He can’t help it. He smiles.

  Brian Freeman grins back, the expression making a Picasso portrait of his face. Brian ‘the brain’ Freeman had had his nose broken four times by the time he was seventeen. His jaw is slightly misaligned on the left side, shattered during a fight with three Chelsea football fans, back in the day when he was a young man and football hooliganism was how a respectable bloke spent his weekends. Brian had once said that the fighting gave blokes purpose, whatever that was. A grin cracking his wrecked face, he’d said there was nothing like the buzz of kicking a few heads in on a Saturday afternoon to get you ready for a night on the town. He is fond of the memories, even the painful ones, the simple pleasures to be had in the thrill of a kick-in.

  The Chelsea fans, two trainee bus drivers and a train engineer, left Brian and his mashed-up face for dead. It wasn’t a clever move, not finishing the job. Brian and his brothers, George and Bill, tracked them down. They didn’t kill them, but gave them such a beating that the train engineer would forever after struggle with words of more than two syllables. One of the bus drivers spent two months in hospital not only drinking through a straw but pissing through one too. The last anyone heard of the third one, he wasn’t leaving his wheelchair in a hurry. No one ever saw them at a game again.

  Brian Freeman gave up fighting not long after that. Not because he didn’t like it - he fucking loved it (he grins whenever he says this too - wide, like an excited child) - but because he discovered he had other talents. He’d left the fighting to Bill and George because he’d realised, he told ‘Charlie’ while tapping the side of his weatherbeaten head, that he had what most of the muscle didn’t. He could think. He had the smarts.

  ‘You’ve got to look up, Charlie.’

  Cass is so absorbed in the hot chips, the chill in his toes and the sheer freedom of the afternoon, that for a moment he’s almost forgotten he is ‘Charlie’. This is strange, because most of the time he finds it hard to remember he’s Cass. A bus stops in front of them and Cass sees his face reflected in a filthy window. He wonders if that’s his face or Charlie’s, but then sees his eyes. The eyes are the same. His eyes, whoever he is.

  ‘Oi, you muppet! I’m talking to you.’

  Brian nudges him, and he turns. The old man repeats himself. ‘You’ve got to look up, Charlie. Wherever you are, make time to look up.’ He points a thick finger, and Cass follows it above the top of the bus. He swallows his chips.

  ‘You see, Charlie? How about that, then?’

  Even through the grey rain, the skyline is extraordinary. From where he is standing Cass can see the glass elegance that is the new Regency Tower, standing like a shard of diamond amidst the grit of the sixties and seventies buildings surrounding it. His eyes move up to the peak, one hundred and twenty feet above the ground. There’s no grime on it; the steel and stylish green glass somehow maintain their shine, despite the lack of sunshine, or perhaps in defiance.

  ‘Don’t just look at the obvious, mate. Look around it.’ Brian’s voice has dropped into gruff softness, the tone reserved for a favoured grandson. Cass smiles and thinks that if Santa had a brother who hadn’t lived up to family expectations, then maybe he’d have a voice like Brian Freeman’s: cruel and kind, rolled into one.

  He does as he’s told. As his eyes narrow and focus he takes in the curves and shapes, finally starting to appreciate each unique building. He spies a clock embedded high up in the face of what he will later learn is a Georgian building. His smile breaks into a small hiccough of surprised laughter. The clock is too far up the wall to serve any useful purpose, apart from anyone happening to look out of the opposite building at the same level. Whichever long-dead man designed that feature had placed it there purely for his own pleasure: a secret thing, only for those who bothered to look up.

  His eyes drift. Gargoyles that have been completely invisible during the year he’s spent in Birmingham suddenly reveal themselves, rising proud from their arches. Even from so far away Ca
ss thinks he can see tiny details like grimaces and wrinkles on their monster brows.

  He stands like that for several minutes, drinking it all in.

  ‘You see, Charlie,’ Brian smiles, still chewing on the cooling chips, ‘simple pleasures can be had in just looking up.’

  ‘You’re not wrong,’ Cass agrees. His London accent is thicker than it is naturally, because Charlie is supposed to be the nephew of Andy Sutton, a player in one of the north London firms. Sutton is legendary across the country, but he is also on the police payroll. The kiddie porn charge is dropped, and Cass is suddenly Sutton’s newly invented nephew Charlie. Everyone’s happy.

  Cass has been using this accent so long he wonders if he’ll ever find his own accent again. ‘It’s fucking amazing,’ he says.

  ‘When things seem like shite around you, just look up. It’ll give you a whole new perspective.’ The old man takes his own advice. On that dank autumn afternoon Cass thinks Brian Freeman looks every one of his sixty-three years. The humour fades from of his eyes as he looks around him. The skin of his neck doesn’t tighten when he lifts his chin but hangs like a wattle. The lines carved around his eyes deepen as he frowns. ‘Sometimes you’ve got to look at things from all the angles, you know?’

  Cass nods. He’s twenty-five years old. He’s clever, but the man beside him is like a dinosaur of knowledge and experience. He has existed in times Cass can only imagine, and has done things Cass has read in files that are endless in their documentation of crime and violence, but that sometimes he can’t reconcile with the person he has come to know. He likes Brian Freeman. He can understand how he came to this life.

  It’s all a mess, of course. Even back then, when his own skin is smooth and his consciousness is merely an empty space in his head, he knows that.

  ‘To get the clearer picture,’ Brian continues.

  Cass nods again.

  ‘And aside from that’ - Brian screws up the rest of the chips inside the paper and tosses it into the pavement bin - ‘buildings are fucking beautiful.’ He sniffs. ‘Here endeth the lesson. Now, come on. Let’s go to the pub and investigate some other simple pleasures.’

  He laughs, loud and gruff, and Cass laughs with him. They laugh like men that rule the world but the world just hasn’t figured it out yet. As he climbs into the waiting taxi, a fat roll of notes stiff in his pocket and without a care in the world, Cass almost believes he is Charlie, and there is no Kate waiting for him patiently in London, who doesn’t know the things he’s doing - and enjoying - in the name of his job. His heart heavy for a moment, he looks at Brian beside him and wonders where the dividing lines are. He’s not sure he can see them any more.

  ‘Home, James,’ Freeman says to the cabbie, and then laughs at his own poor imitation of a posh accent.

  Cass peers out of the window. The world blurs, and mixed in with the streets of Birmingham he sees London’s streets. He frowns. His head hurts. The rain outside is changing colour. It’s not grey any more. It’s thick red. Something warm hits his hand and he looks down, confused. The crimson stands out against his pale skin. Another drop joins it and he feels its heaviness as it thuds into the back of his hand. His nose is running. He turns to Freeman and tries to say - have I got a nose bleed? - but the words stop in his throat as Freeman’s eyes widen, his mouth falling open in horror.

  Cass raises his hand, his fingers seeking out the familiar shapes of his nose and mouth. There is nothing there. He reaches further, his hands sinking into a sticky warm mess. He turns for help, but Freeman has vanished. The seat is empty. Cass leans forward and taps on the plastic division between him and the driver. His heart pounds and his skin suddenly feels terribly cold.

  The cabbie turns round. He has no face either, just the torn fleshy remains where one has once been, sitting in a concave half of his head. He raises a hand and slowly wiggles his forefinger from side to side, as if Cass were a naughty child. There is something cold and heavy in Cass’s lap and he finds he doesn’t need to look down or feel it to know what it is.

  Finally, he screams.

  Cass awoke with a start and his confused eyes focused on the curve of the steering wheel and the grey sleeve of his sweatshirt. They were both very close up. His arm was tucked between the wheel and his head, and it was numb. His car. He was in his car.

  He sat up slowly, every joint in his stiff body screaming at the movement, and looked down at his arm. A blossom of blood stood out in the gloom of the dawn. He peered into the rear-view mirror and saw the crust of red that circled his right nostril. Great.

  Outside, the delivery truck that had woken him completed its manoeuvre, the screeching wheels thankfully falling silent, the brakes hissing in relief. Cass leaned his thumping head back against the seat. His mouth was dry and the inside of his nose burned as he breathed in the cold morning air. The jigsaw pieces of the evening came together in his mind. The picture they formed wasn’t pretty.

  One line had turned into two and then three, and on until he’d done at least a gram and a half; he remembered that. He’d driven; for how long he wasn’t sure. The street lights and the people who wandered in the night had glowed and he’d been entranced by them, he remembered that. He sighed with the memory, and forced a dry swallow. He must have tripped out on the gear. Finally, he’d pulled into the twenty-four-hour Tesco car park not far from the estate in Newham where Carla Rae had died. He was going to get cigarettes and then petrol. That he remembered. He yawned and peered around at the cup holders and side pockets. There were no cigarettes in the car that he could see. He must have just parked up and passed out. The day was not starting well.

  He was frozen. He turned the key that was still in the ignition and set the heater to blast. He shivered as the vents and what was left of the drugs in his system blew any last cobwebs away. The clock glared at him. It was five a.m. He groaned and put the car into gear. No rest for the wicked.

  In the morning light that glared through the slatted gaps in the blinds he stripped off and stuffed his clothes in the washing machine, turning it on before heading up to the shower. He didn’t use the en-suite bathroom. In the bedroom he pulled fresh clothes from the cupboards as quietly as he could, although he was sure Kate was awake. She lay on her side facing away from him, and there was a stiffness in the slim line of her back that betrayed consciousness. He wondered how she would react if he ran a finger down that line and whispered how sorry he was for everything. For a moment he thought he might do it, but instead he found his legs carrying him to the spare room to get dressed. There wasn’t enough time for that kind of apology, and anyway, it would be like sticking a plaster over a bullet wound.

  In the end, he left the house without speaking. Their marriage worked better that way.

  Chapter Four

  ‘You’ll be pleased to hear that this is definitely number four.’The ME pulled the sheet back from the body on the metal table with brisk efficiency. Cass peered into Carla Rae’s face and felt nothing. Displayed on the slab like this she was simply evidence. The dead woman in his memory, trapped in the crime scene photographs, she was the victim, not this cut-open, soulless corpse.

  ‘Oh yeah, that’s cheered me up no end.’ Blackmore stayed slightly behind Cass and he wondered if it was just that he didn’t want to get any trace of death on his crisp apple-green shirt. He was warming to the sergeant’s ironic tongue, though. He’d give him that.

  ‘It should do.’ Cass didn’t look up. ‘It means that at least we don’t have to worry about a copycat as well as a serial.’

  ‘Remember,’ Farmer said, ‘serial is a taboo word on this case. We don’t want the press hearing a whisper of it.’

  ‘Like we can stop that! They have better informers than we do.’ Cass folded his arms across his chest. ‘So, what have we got?’

  ‘Cause of death is the same as the other three. A lethal injection of pentabarbitone, delivered intravenously into the arm here.’ He highlighted the small bruise on the inside of her elbow.
/>   ‘Were they all injected in the right arm?’

  ‘Yes - and pretty much in the same spot.’

  ‘Would it be painful?’

  ‘No, not at all. Quite the opposite in fact. Pentabarbitone is a barbiturate - a tranquilliser. It’s called Nembutal in the US.’ Farmer smiled, grimly. ‘It’s the euthanasia drug of choice.’

  ‘And currently the drug of choice in Hollywood,’ Blackmore added. ‘Often the cause of accidental suicide when taken with alcohol.’

  ‘You’ve been doing your homework,’ Farmer said approvingly before turning his attention back to Cass. ‘Your sergeant’s right - although our killer isn’t actually using Nembutal. He’s using veterinary pentabarbitone. It’s what they use to put animals down.’

  ‘What’s the difference?’

  ‘Very little really. Nembutal also contains propylene glycol, and there are no traces of that in any of the victims.’ He paused. ‘The drug works by slowing down the body’s respiration until breathing stops altogether. The woman died quickly and painlessly. They all did.’

  Cass frowned. ‘How hard is it to get hold of this drug?’

  ‘Not that easy. Veterinary surgeries and their suppliers will all stock it. Any pharmaceutical company that makes drugs for vets will also have it.’ He shrugged. ‘But sales and usage will all have to be recorded.’

  The feel of the morgue’s cool air on Cass’s skin was keeping his brain firing, and he was grateful. He was going to need as much help as he could get today. His bones ached, from sleeping in the car and the cocaine comedown. ‘Is it difficult to administer?’

  ‘Not overly. If it’s injected too quickly then the sudden cessation of respiratory functions can cause a heart attack. But that wasn’t the case with any of our victims.’