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

by Sarah Pinborough

  Cass shrugged. ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘He said Jess could see it too. And he knew your parents had been able to, though I don’t know how.’

  Cass did: that photograph. Or maybe it was more than that - maybe Christian had talked about this while their parents were still alive.

  Father Michael was still talking. ‘I told him that perhaps it was genetic. People are capable of strange things, after all, but he laughed at that. He said it might be genetic, but not in any traditional way. He seemed a little paranoid. He said that he was starting to believe that his life was being manipulated, and that perhaps it always had been and he hadn’t seen things clearly until recently.’ He paused, as if searching for the exact words. ‘Until they’d started to show themselves.’

  ‘Jesus Christ.’ Cass shook his head.

  ‘I know. Hearing myself now, I should have picked up the warning signs. But these things came in tiny snippets, in what were otherwise perfectly ordinary conversations. Most of the time he sounded happy just listening to me talking about the old times with your dad, and then he’d tell me how his family was doing, and we’d just shoot the breeze, as the Americans would say.’

  ‘When did you last see him?’

  ‘A couple of weeks ago, after Luke’s last set of tests. I was saying how lucky it was that The Bank gave him private healthcare. He said they gave him more than that, but he didn’t look happy about it. He wouldn’t be drawn, but I got the feeling that he was worried about Luke, and not because of this lethargy he was suffering. It was something else. All he would say was that Luke had never seen the Glow.’

  Cass pulled out his cigarettes and offered one to the priest who took it. Cass noticed the other man’s hand was shaking slightly.

  ‘The old ladies of the parish would kill me if they saw this.’ He took in a long lungful. ‘That’s better. It’s just that . . . thinking about those conversations with Christian: they were like the talks with your father all over again. Uncanny.’

  Cass knew what he meant. He’d come looking for answers, and all he’d found were more questions. Who was this Mr Bright? And why was this Glow so important? Cass dealt in hard evidence, in life and death. You just got on with it. He had no time for the crap that your mind could produce to fuck you up. He gazed over at the far headstones as they sat in silence, smoking.

  Finally, he asked quietly, ‘Do you believe in ghosts, Father ?’

  ‘Depends on the kind you mean. Why?’

  ‘I’ve been seeing Christian.’

  The priest said nothing.

  ‘I’ve tried ignoring him, but he won’t go away.’ He paused. ‘I think he’s trying to tell me something.’

  He turned to look at the old man, all he had left to connect him with his family, and found kind eyes looking wisely back.

  ‘Then maybe you ought to listen, son.’

  ‘Trust me, I’m trying.’

  ‘Then eventually you’ll figure it out.’

  Cass smiled. ‘I hope so.’

  ‘How’s Kate?’

  The question threw him and he laughed, more from surprise than humour. ‘Well, put it this way: I’m heading back to London tonight and I’ll be checking into a hotel rather than going home.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ The priest sounded genuinely surprised.

  ‘Shit happens.’

  ‘Yes it does.’ Father Michael threw his butt down and ground it out, then bent to pick it up. ‘You’ll have to come back again, Cass. It’s been good to see you. It’s a shame it’s such a short visit, but I imagine you’re at your best when you’re working.’

  ‘Something like that.’

  He stood up and shook out his cassock, and with it went the gloom that had settled over them. ‘Come inside for a moment. I think I might be able to help you with your accommodation problem.’ He winked. ‘It’ll be perfect for you.’

  Back at the house Cass made himself coffee and once again sat himself in front of the slim laptop. He opened it up and sighed, staring at the screen. Part of him wanted to throw it across the room and smash it up, venting his frustration in violence, but that wouldn’t get him anywhere other than hauled up on another disciplinary, and there were only so many of those what was left of his career could survive. He rolled his shoulders and thought hard.

  Christian had always been cautious. From what Father Michael had said it sounded like he’d started to veer towards the paranoid, but Cass didn’t believe his brother would have hidden and double-passworded these files if they weren’t important. He was pretty sure at least some of the answers he was looking for were here, and he was running out of time to find them. The laptop had to be back to The Bank tomorrow, there was no getting out of that.

  ‘Come on, think,’ he muttered under his breath as the empty password box flickered, almost taunting him. It had to be something he knew. It had to be. He tried Father Michael. No access. The blank screen mocked him and as he looked away his eyes fell on the envelope of pictures his brother had left, his own name printed clearly on the front.

  Maybe the clue was inside and he’d missed it.

  He paused before opening it, staring again at the writing, so neatly lettered. His full name: not Cass, but Cassius. It looked strange. He never used it - and after a few decisive fights at primary school, neither had anyone else. If Christian were going to use his name as a password, he’d be formal and spell it properly. Just like he had on the envelope.

  It was with a vague chill that he realised that the man who’d called him this morning had used his full name too, and that wouldn’t have been easily available. Someone had been doing their homework. Maybe it was a sign. He typed in CASSIUS and pressed enter.

  ACCESS GRANTED.

  Cass smiled as a surge of excitement ran through him. Bingo! He looked up, half-expecting to see his brother’s ghost standing smiling over him, but Christian obviously had haunting business elsewhere.

  ‘I love you too, little brother,’ he muttered into the empty house. A sub-directory opened up on the small screen and Cass reached for his data pen. Whatever all this stuff was, he intended to copy it. On the table his phone started to buzz: the ME’s assistant calling him back. He let it ring out. Whatever the boy wanted could wait; Cass needed to concentrate on what was in front of him. By the time the message tone beeped, he was so engrossed in figuring out what Christian had downloaded from The Bank’s mainframe that he didn’t even hear it.

  Josh’s hands were sweating as the call rang out and went to the answer phone. ‘This is DI Cass Jones. Leave a message.’ That was something. At least Jones had returned his call earlier. He spoke rapidly into the handset, and then paused before adding a final comment. It wasn’t ideal, but hopefully it would do.

  ‘Everything okay?’ Dr Farmer peered through the door from the lab to the small office.

  ‘Yeah,’ Josh said, ‘just had to return a missed call.’ He smiled. ‘Telephone tag. I missed them this time.’

  The ME nodded. ‘That’s normally the way it goes.’ He paused, and Josh felt himself flush under his boss’s scrutiny.

  ‘You okay, son?’ There was a box of surgical gloves just inside the door and he pulled on a pair. ‘You haven’t been quite yourself these past few days.’

  A knife of guilt twisted in his gut. Maybe he should have gone to Dr Farmer first. There was probably a perfectly reasonable explanation for everything. The words sounded hollow, even inside his own head. If there was, then he was having a hard time seeing it. The DI was the only person he could talk to. But still, Dr Farmer was his boss.

  ‘I’m just not sleeping that well. I think it’s this serial guy. The thing with the flies is bugging me.’ That was partly true, but that wasn’t what was stopping him sleeping. He shrugged, sheepishly. ‘And I stayed up late, thinking I was getting a lie-in today. Wanted to crack the next level.’

  ‘Ah, so that’s why you’re tired.’ Dr Farmer’s face crinkled into a smile. ‘Just remember, we charge double for our
weekends, and our clients don’t mind if we work slowly.’ He sighed. ‘Not that we’ve got that luxury today. So come on.’ He turned back to the door. ‘Let’s lay these two to rest. I want them done by five so we can play with fly eggs some more. You’re not the only one who wants to know how that bastard does it.’

  Josh slipped his phone back into his pocket. If he’d been at home like he’d expected when he’d called Sergeant May then he’d have not missed the DI ’s call, and that would have been a weight off his mind - but he’d done his best. He waited for his hands to stop trembling before he headed to the door. God, this was shit. He liked this job. He really wanted to make a career of it, and as much as he could be stupid sometimes, like that dumb stunt he’d pulled at the Carla Rae scene, he was learning to have a great respect for the dead, and the mysteries their bodies held. He’d never have expected to be in a position like this. He wished he’d never . . .

  ‘Come on, Josh, this liver won’t weigh itself.’ Farmer didn’t sound as if he was smiling any more. Bloody double suicide, Josh thought as he went through to face the internal organs of the overweight couple who had decided that this Sunday morning was a good day to die. If they hadn’t been dead already, he’d be tempted to kill them himself. Still, he thought, as he shivered in the cool air of the morgue, Cass Jones would get his message. Despite the diseased liver in his hand, he was starting to feel a bit better.

  Cass’s head thumped as he worked his way through the files. There was too much to take in at first glance, and more than once he found himself wishing he had Christian’s mathematical mind. The sun slid slowly down the sky, but he barely noticed the time passing.

  The Redemption folder, unlike the other work folders Christian had stored on his laptop, was not Windows-based; it looked like it was some sort of a sub-directory, a whole separate system of its own running underneath The Bank’s main computer system. How the hell had Christian even found it? What had happened to have made him go looking?

  Each file housed what he presumed were bank account numbers. Money was flowing in and out through a tangled web of transfers both internal and external, but at the heart of this financial web there appeared to be twenty primary accounts. None of them had names attached to them; they were identified simply by the letter X and a number, 1 to 20. Each account had records going back two hundred years, logging vast sums of money moving in and out. The opening balances were huge too, so somewhere there had to be paper records that hadn’t been input into the system. How far back would they go? The pit of his stomach was icy. Four hundred years? Further? Whose money was this?

  The only account with no outgoings was the final one: X20. All the rest had an annual amount paid in that added to the already huge sums listed. What was that account - some kind of joint savings?

  He put his questions to one side and concentrated on what he could see. Six of the accounts had been closed within the past three years and the money they contained had been divided up equally and transferred into the remaining accounts. Against X3 was the tag FROZEN. Cass couldn’t see why; whoever X3 represented was not short of a few billion in cash. The sums he was looking at were extraordinary: who the hell were these people? Were these the private accounts of the businessmen who had collectively set up The Bank? Or was he looking at something else entirely? Maybe each number represented a group of people - but how could they go back so far? The one thing he knew about people was that they disagreed, especially where money was concerned. If these were joint accounts, then at some time over the past couple of hundred years most of the groups would have fallen out: it was human nature. Even families had a tough time staying together when money was involved. The idea that each of these accounts belonged to a single individual was even more disturbing. Unnamed people in control of such huge wealth meant that whoever they were, they had power. But why were they anonymous?

  He looked at the transactions again. Most of the external transfers involved what looked like traditional bank account numbers. Businesses? Foreign bank accounts? And several paid into the same accounts, proving further collaboration between these invisible players other than their contributions to the X20 account.

  His foot tapped and he wished his brother’s ghost would return and maybe give him a hand. If Christian thought Cass could figure all this out just by looking at the numbers, then he’d vastly overrated his older brother. How was this money flowing in and out of the main system? Someone on the other end must know where it was coming from. He looked again at the numbers. The receiving bank accounts outside of this hidden system must be the key. If he could track them, if he could see how all this money was being used, then maybe he’d get an idea of who these people were.

  He exited the account files and browsed through some of the others. He had the distinct feeling that this was only the tip of the iceberg. Some files refused to open, or displayed only computer-generated nonsense text, perhaps corrupted when Christian had tried to copy the information over. One file that did open was a database of what looked like company names. He scrolled down, but it was endless. Some had been famous names in their time, now no longer trading, but most he’d never heard of. Then his eye snagged on one: the Solomon & Bright Mining Corps. Next to it was a series of numbers, the registered company number, maybe, and start and finish dates and shares held, that sort of thing.

  It was going to take someone with a wider understanding of the corporate world to fully comprehend what he had here, but he knew enough to know that it was important. He also knew that no X account holder would have a list of companies unless it was because he or she had a vested interest in them. What was this, some kind of new world order? He thought about the dates on the computerised accounts; maybe not so new.

  He looked again at the Solomon and Bright entry. Could Mr Bright be one of the account holders? Once again, everything came down to this name. He hoped to hell that Claire had dug up some information to share when he got back.

  Each of the saved zipped files was labelled only with an incomprehensible series of numbers or letters, with no clue to content in the name. Most were corrupted, but the last one opened and the coded title vanished to be replaced with one word. POTENTIALS.

  There were fifteen folders, and as Cass looked at the names on the first few - Adams, Begum, Boyle, two lots of Smith - he realised they were surnames. He opened one. A DOS-style screen opened and flashed the words File deleted. Potential voided 1988. He clicked another. The message was the same, except this time the voided date was 1996. He went through the rest. The fourteenth declared the ‘potential’ voided in 2003. At the fifteenth, the name on the file was JONES, the usual DOS screen appeared, but this time there was a series of options: heritage, employment, medical, surveillance. His stomach churned as he clicked on the first. He looked through the list of names, not recognising most until he came to his own immediate family. Some names were in red - his parents, him, Christian, Jessica and Luke - but Kate was in green. If he hadn’t felt so invaded he might have laughed: even in some bloody computer system they were separated. He went into the medical folder next, and frowned. He knew Luke had been seriously ill, but if the figures next to the various dates were medical bills, then the boy had been through a shitload of tests. But this couldn’t be right. There were dates going back to his birth. Cass scrolled down, trying to make sense of the dates and the numbers. Under the initial batch was another heading: SECONDARY, with a single line, See main employee directory, as explanation. Cass began to nod to himself: Christian’s medical cover was provided by The Bank, one of the many perks, so whatever medical costs he’d incurred, like Jess’s pregnancy care, would be in The Bank’s main files. Cass couldn’t see what was so special about the medical costs listed here that someone had to hide them. Questions upon questions.

  The surveillance folder appeared to be a spreadsheet of accounts, a mixture of large payments interspersed with smaller ones: an annual billing system? So who were they watching - Christian? Him? Both of them? And, more impor
tantly, why?

  He looked up from the computer. This was their family home, and suddenly it no longer felt safe. A chill of paranoia crept into him, a familiar, quiet fear that he hadn’t felt in a long time. After Birmingham he’d lived with that watery sensation in the pit of his stomach for a year or more. Every time someone moved quickly around him, he thought he’d been found, and that the lie of the body in the river had been uncovered. If the nightmares didn’t wake him, then the slightest breeze outside the window would. Eventually, time passed and the world moved on, and he’d slowly learned to relax. But now it had flooded right back, feeling like oil in his guts.

  He slipped the data pen into the slot on the side and came back to the start menu. He dragged the file over to the box, and was dismayed when the computer flashed up: COPY FAILED.

  He tried again.

  COPY FAILED.

  He swore quietly under his breath and clicked the help icon. FILE NON-TRANSFERABLE. Well, that was just great. Without the files he had no proof. He rubbed his face, his fingers sinking into creases that felt as if they’d deepened over the course of the day. Proof of what, exactly? That The Bank had accounts dating back hundreds of years? That Mr Bright had a vested interest in the Jones family? That the whole company was some kind of front - for what? If he started spouting stuff like that they’d lock him up. Whatever was going on here might have some bearing on the three cases, but for now he’d keep this all to himself, and see where the normal investigations led. He reopened the files. All of this must have been what Christian wanted to talk to him about. But he had an hour before he had to leave. There was nothing wrong with taking some notes to look over later.