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

by Sarah Pinborough

  He pressed the On button and the crystal display came immediately to life. He’d been right. This machine was good. Against the black and silver backdrop a command box opened, demanding a password. Cass stared. He typed in Jessica. It failed. He tried Luke. It failed again. He frowned. Christian was predictable. Whereas Cass’s passwords, as and when he ever needed them, were always completely random, he was pretty sure that Christian would fall into most people’s habit of using a loved one’s name. He typed in JessicaLuke, all one word, and almost pressed enter, but his fingers paused above the keys. Christian’s password would never be made of words. Christian loved his wife and child, or at least he had until that final night, but he thought in numbers. Cass deleted his typing and instead inserted the two numbers 7 and 4. There were seven letters in Jessica and four in Luke. He pressed enter and the red screen disappeared, instantly replaced with a clear homepage. He grinned. Maybe he still knew his brother a little after all.

  He wasn’t sure what he should be looking for, so he clicked on Start and began to rummage through the files. He started with the email application, but as he scrolled down they all looked entirely bland, all work-related. Efficient as Christian always was, the history only went back about six weeks, so anything further back was probably deleted or backed up into the system in The Bank’s London HQ. Most of what remained were from Maya Healey, the assistant Ramsey had mentioned, checking on the progress of various audits and account transfers. Occasionally there was one from his boss, Asher Red, but those were always short and polite, and, to Cass, relatively pointless. Whatever Christian was doing at The Bank, it was impressing the bosses. Mr Red’s communications were all asking Christian if he needed anything, or congratulating him on doing such a fine job. Cass wondered if maybe Asher Red could give DCI Morgan a tip or two on how to talk to your staff.

  The last email conversation was from Christian to Maya on the day that he died. Cass looked at the times. It was probably only an hour or so before he’d called Cass. He was querying some transfers and personal details on accounts. Cass frowned. ‘Please double-check these. This can’t be right.’ Something had been bugging Christian. The sentences were too short and to the point. He scrolled down to Maya’s response, which was to confirm the transfers and details were correct and to ask what he was doing auditing small businesses rather than company ones. Christian answered that a batch had arrived on his desk and he was just working his way through them. Someone must have been off sick. He then asked for a print out of all movement from one of the accounts to take home and look at. Surely, if Christian had taken the statements home, they would have been in the laptop bag, but that was empty.

  He typed the two numbers into his phone. Maybe it was something, maybe nothing, but they would be worth checking out.

  He searched both the Inbox and Outbox for anyone with the surname Bright, but there was no result. He tried a search on the contents of all mail files, but there was still nothing. He gritted his teeth. It was never going to be that easy. His finger moved over the narrow touch-sensitive mouse pad, clicking on various files, most of which contained accounts or reports on various companies. Some of the names he recognised as being part of The Bank group; others came as a surprise. There was also a file with companies that were about to become viable for future purchase. Cass scanned the pages. All joking aside, maybe within ten years everyone would work for The Bank in some form or another. No wonder the moguls that headed it were always smiling.

  He left the individual files alone and explored the drives. There was very little in the way of anything personal, and not a lot that Cass really understood, but nothing struck him as out of the ordinary. He peered at an icon down at the bottom of the list. He almost hadn’t seen it; without a file name attached and in the middle of so many others, it was almost invisible. He clicked on it and as another dialogue box opened the screen behind vanished back to silver and black.

  FILE: REDEMPTION.

  He stared at the word. Redemption. What was it Christian had said to him on the phone that night? It’s about redemption. That’s the key. His heartbeat quickened. Whatever his brother had wanted to talk to him about, it was in this file. He typed 7 and 4 into the password box. The dialogue box changed. PASSWORD ONE: ACCEPTED. Beneath it a blank space flashed next to the command PASSWORD T WO.

  Fuck. He lit a cigarette. He added Christian’s name in numbers, 9, to the tally. Nothing. He tried rearranging them. There was nothing again. For ten minutes he tried various combinations of words he thought might be significant to Christian, right down to the name of his first pet, a short-lived hamster called Woolly. Nothing worked. He’d even tried CASS but, as expected, that had failed. He sucked on the butt of the cigarette until it was damp, and then ground it out. What the hell would Christian have used?

  He shut the computer down and leaned back in the chair for a moment. There was no point in just typing in random words; he’d end up trying for all eternity. Christian had been coming down to the house for a while, that’s what Father Michael had said. Maybe the clue to the password was here somewhere. He looked around at the bland lounge. Whatever it was, it wasn’t in here. The sun had dispersed the last of the clouds and Cass opened the window slightly to air out the smoke before heading back upstairs.

  What had been his own bedroom as a child was pretty much as it was the last time he’d been here, made up as a small spare room and completely impersonal. It hadn’t housed any of his junk since he’d left home. Once his parents had moved his stuff into the attic - or chucked it out - they’d given it a lick of paint and bought some new furniture. There was nothing of Cass left in it. He paused in the doorway, remembering dark blue walls and the stars his dad had painted on the ceiling. Even when he’d hit his mid-teens he’d kept those walls. He’d pretended that he couldn’t be bothered to change things, but really he loved them. It was the smallest room in the house, but he’d liked its position at the other end of the house from the rest of the family. As the older brother he should have claimed the biggest bedroom, but it had never crossed his mind. With a small smile, he pulled the door closed and headed down the long landing to his brother’s room.

  As they had done with Cass’s, his parents had also redesigned their youngest son’s room into a nice spare, with a small double bed at its centre. This was obviously where Christian had slept on his visits. One of their dad’s old suitcases was open on the bed. Cass looked at it. This wasn’t a case that had been used for holidays in the years before they died; the scuffed tan surface looked more like a relic from the sixties or seventies, with flight labels dirty with age stuck to its rough skin. Inside it was lined with frayed pink silk.

  Cass sat on the bed. It was full of old photographs: a case full of memories. For a moment he didn’t touch them. His mouth dried. In the far corner a sepia-tinted image stood out, showing a stiffly dressed couple smiling awkwardly, their hands resting on a small boy’s shoulders. Cass didn’t recognise them, but they had to be grandparents, maybe even great-grandparents. He’d known none of them, on either side; his family were cursed when it came to living to a ripe old age. He felt the ache inside again. They were all gone apart from him, even little Luke.

  He swallowed and reached into the case, ignoring the older black and white photos, instead picking up a handful of the coloured ones. The gloss on some had stuck them together and he carefully peeled them apart. His mum and dad twinkled at him from under their Christmas cracker paper hats. They were laughing. The next one was taken on the same day, probably by his mum. It was his dad, him and Christian. He stared at the teenager he’d been. His skin was smooth and his smile was open. Although he was looking into the camera, his father and Christian were both staring at him. His dad looked proud and Christian had something close to awe on this face. There was a lot of love in both their eyes, you’d have to be blind not to see that.

  He picked up a different picture, his father again, now as an older man. He was in the garden doing something to a rose bush,
thick gardening gloves covering his calloused hands. His skin was rough like Cass’s, but it was cracked in a kind smile. Silver glittered in his dark hair. Cass swallowed. This must have been taken not long before they died, maybe a year or two at most. He looked like his dad, he suddenly realised. Christian was blond, like their mother, but he and his dad had the same shaped face, same build, even similar mannerisms. How had he never noticed this resemblance before? He looked more closely. Their eyes were different though: both dark, yes, but his dad’s were gentle. Care shone in them. He wasn’t hard like Cass.

  ‘Come home, Cass. We can talk about it. Please come home. It wasn’t your fault.’

  His father had called a lot after the shit had well and truly hit the fan during his undercover time. After all the debriefings and the six months spent holed up in the middle of nowhere while the rest of the world cleaned up after him, his dad had kept on calling, saying the same things over and over. Come home. We can talk about it. Cass didn’t want to go home, though, and what was there to talk about? It was done. He remembered the soft kindness in his dad’s voice. Maybe if Alan Jones had got angry Cass would have gone home, but the kindness would have killed him. And really, what could his dad have said - it was all okay? He should forgive himself? It was far from okay, and he didn’t think he could ever forgive himself. He couldn’t see how.

  Aside from what he’d actually done that night, there was some poor stiff who had been dragged out of the Thames and buried in a grave in London under the name of Charlie Sutton. Cass wondered about that poor sod’s family. They’d never know what became of their boy; he was nothing more than a convenient dead body to get a copper off the hook and lay a fucked-up case to rest. Guilt scraped the inside of his skull. They always said not knowing was the worst thing. And that family would never know.

  He looked back at the picture of his dad. Regardless of how similar they might have appeared on the surface, by the time that shit had happened he and his dad were far apart. The old man would have wanted to bring God into the equation, and Cass would have laughed at that. Those that were kind would never understand those that were cruel, and the cruel ones could never really respect kindness. He didn’t know if it was a Freemanism or not, stored away by the part of his mind that was happiest being Charlie, but it summed up Cass and his dad.

  The next picture was of his mum loading up the boot of the car for a weekend away. Cass thought his insides were slowly solidifying into lead. Everything felt heavy, as if the thin sheet of shiny paper were made of some dense matter that was dragging him down. He cursed his dead brother for excavating this suitcase from its resting place in the attic, where surely it had been left to be discovered by the next generation of Joneses . . . although there wouldn’t be one now. He was it. In the picture, his mother’s fine blonde hair was pulled back in a ponytail and she wore a pair of denim shorts. Her legs were long and slim. She was in good shape for a woman who must have been nearly sixty when the photo was taken. She rested one arm on the picnic basket in the open boot and smiled.

  The bed felt strange beneath him as time in his mind stretched between this moment of the present and one five years in the past, with the even older picture drawing it all together. The car Evelyn Jones was standing next to was the same Volkswagen that would later collide with a lorry and flip itself over and over until it came to a crumpled stop in a ditch almost a hundred feet from the road. Eventually, with his parents stuck inside, bleeding and broken, it would catch fire. His mother had been unconscious and his father had used all his energy to call 999 from his mobile. Then he left a message on Cass’s phone, telling him there’d been an accident and that they both loved Cass very much. He called his youngest son after that, and it was Christian who stayed on the phone with their father for the few minutes that must have seemed like for ever until he started screaming, and the phone died in the heat.

  While his brother had been listening to his father screaming, Cass had been busy getting hot and sweaty and fucking Jessica in a seedy hotel in Argyle Square. By the time either of them had picked up their messages from Christian, the blaze was out and his father was dying in agony in the hospital. The doctors said that bits of the steering wheel had melted into Alan Jones’ chest. They didn’t understand how he was even still alive. The woman who smiled out from the photo had briefly regained consciousness, only to scream in pain for a moment or two before she died in the ambulance, a burned husk of something that had once been a smiling beauty with long, slim legs and golden hair.

  Cass had told Christian that he’d been with an informant, and had no signal. Jessica arrived a few minutes later and said she’d been at the gym. Christian didn’t doubt them for a second - why should he? He leaned into Cass’s shoulder and sobbed, and Cass could even now remember flinching with guilt, and the fear that Christian would smell his wife’s sex on his skin. He remembered his disgust at himself, his pity for his brother, and the huge sense of relief that he hadn’t had to be the one on the end of the phone. Amidst the memory of all those teeming emotions he couldn’t recall his grief for the loss of his parents. What had he felt then - nothing? Just guilt?

  As he looked at the photo again he thought he could taste petrol. He felt something, he knew that. He just kept it too far down inside to acknowledge from day to day, just like he would with Christian’s death. It was only in his dreams that the feelings surfaced. Perhaps Hell was here on Earth, a plane in his subconscious where nothing was ever truly over and done with. Cass’s nightmares had punished him for his parents’ drawn-out blazing deaths and the thing that happened in Birmingham . . . sometimes he’d woken up convinced his hands were on fire from where he’d been yanking at that Volkswagen door, desperate to pull his burning parents free.

  He carefully put the photo down and noticed his hand was shaking. What was the point of this? The past was done. He sniffed hard, ignored the tears that threatened his vision, and pushed the suitcase away. There was nothing in there that was doing him any good. A sliver of white peered out from under the edge of the case, where it had been shoved aside.

  Cass bent down and pulled it free: a large white envelope made of high-quality paper that felt like linen under his fingers. Even empty, this envelope was heavy. Three words were written in ink in Christian’s neat handwriting, each letter perfectly aligned to the next, as if measured with a ruler. GIVE TO CASSIUS .

  His watery eyes cleared; his breath stopped for a moment. Outside, the sun shifted lower in the sky, beams cutting like lasers through the knotted branches of an old tree, sending a kaleidoscope of patterns in through the bedroom window. A stream of white sliced through Cass’s hand and as he squinted against the sudden burst of brightness, a shadow fell across the suitcase on the bed. A new shadow, from within the house. Cass took a sudden deep breath as he stared at the soft outline, at odds with the sharp edges of the photos and mad lines of sunlight. It was out of place. It was wrong.

  The moment stilled, like a whisper half-spoken. Cass slowly turned his head, knowing what he was going to see. In the silence of their family home, Christian stood in the doorway, neither in the bedroom, nor in the hall, but somewhere in between. His polished shoes still carried the heavy drops of crimson, and his blue shirt was still half in, half out of his trousers. There were bloodstains on his right shoulder, but his head was mercifully intact. The hallway yawned darkly behind him.

  Dust motes danced in the space between the brothers. Cass could feel the sun on his skin through the glass. Somewhere deep inside his heart was thumping madly as he stared at the figure. There were no real ghosts, only those in his head, gripping at him and refusing to let go. But this one seemed so real. Was this madness? Whatever it was, real or illusion, it wanted Cass to know something.

  Christian smiled and raised his left hand to his ear with his thumb and little finger extended, as if holding a phone, and then let his arm drop. Cass noticed how blue his little brother’s eyes were, and he could see the large freckle just below his wrist. He’d
forgotten Christian even had that.

  Cass swallowed hard, though his mouth was so dry it hurt. There were no ghosts. He turned his head back to the suitcase and squeezed his eyes shut. He breathed deeply, counting to three. When he opened his eyes and cautiously looked towards the doorway again, his brother’s ghost was still there. Christian smiled and raised his hand to his ear once again, then stared at Cass for a minute or two. Then he turned and walked silently along the corridor, his feet making no sound on the old floor. His arms were stiff at his sides. Cass watched him until he disappeared around the corner and down the stairs.

  Finally, he let out a breath. His whole body was trembling and his head felt like it had been douched with ice-water. He clumsily pulled his mobile phone out of his pocket and scrolled down to Christian’s number. He pressed the call button and held it to his ear. It didn’t even ring before clicking through to the answer phone declaring that the mobile was switched off. Cass cancelled the call and almost laughed at himself. What had he expected? His dead brother to answer? The O2 service was good, but he didn’t think it could make calls to the other side quite yet.

  The adrenalin that was pumping through him slowly subsided. There were no ghosts. Christian was dead. Whatever his eyes thought they were seeing, Cass told himself, it was all made up inside his own head. He slumped forward a little and rubbed his hands together. He didn’t believe in ghosts. He didn’t believe in life after death. When you were gone, you were gone. That was it. Whatever he was seeing or not seeing was coming from his own mind playing tricks on him, so he could either go quietly crazy, or just ignore it and get on with the crap involved in living his own life. With Cass, it was always going to be the second option.

  He shivered a little and then looked at the envelope. He cleared some more space on the bed and, with another deep breath, and making a determined effort not to look towards the doorway to see if Christian was watching, he emptied it out.