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

by Sarah Pinborough

  Cass remembered the picture hanging at a slight angle in the Jackson house. Recently rehung? A fake, maybe?

  ‘Do you think the wives know?’ he asked. His skin tingled, and it had nothing to do with the nicotine.

  ‘You’re ahead of me.’ He laughed again, clearly enjoying himself. ‘My guess is no. Both families have two lots of bank accounts, with money being transferred from the main one held in only the husband’s name to a joint one, which is where the women do their spending from. And boy, do those women spend. Their luxury items come to more than my salary and that’s considerably better than it was before you lot did me a favour and kicked me out. They’ve got health spas, central London gym memberships, top hairdressers - and don’t even get me started on the clothes.

  ‘They haven’t reined, not one bit, since their husbands fucked up, so every month they’ve been adding a couple of grand to the problem. Both families were right on the edge of losing everything. I’d love to have heard that conversation. ’ He laughed drily.

  ‘So they’re broke.’

  ‘No. They were broke.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘This is where it gets interesting. Six months ago Miller and Jackson each received three payments of fifty thousand pounds over the space of one month.’

  ‘How much?’ His back stiffened against the seat. ‘A hundred and fifty each? Where from?’

  ‘That’s the fun bit. I can’t trace the money. Not fully. But that alone tells us plenty.’

  ‘How could that amount of money suddenly appearing in someone’s back account not flag up any enquiries?’

  ‘These days the banks are so glad to have any money coming in that they don’t look far. And banking’s a nanny state now anyway. The Big Brother of all banks does the regulating, so if the money’s coming from The Bank itself, who’s going to dare to run secondary checks?’

  ‘The money came from The Bank?’

  ‘Well, it was transferred out of there, at any rate. Each transfer came from a separate account there. The info cost me, which in turn means it’ll cost you, but I got the details. Neither of the two accounts had ever been used for any other banking - basically, they were a tunnel to get this money into the Jackson and Miller private accounts without raising any eyebrows.’

  ‘Explain.’

  ‘The Bank has layers of accounts. It would have to, being as big as it is. It operates as many subsections, as well as a whole. But it has to run one numbers system so it can audit itself. It uses different sequences of account numbers that can be recognised quickly, both in-house and in the wider financial sector, and they’re allocated on importance, or priority, or however you want to put that. Some of those account sequences make people jump higher than others. These two tunnel accounts started with the digits 251, and that’s considered pretty high-up in the system.’

  ‘How the hell do you know this shit?’ Cass took a deep breath. His jigsaw was finally coming together.

  ‘I told you: it cost me. I’m like you, Cass, I’ve got friends in lots of places, and they’re not all the kind to get themselves nicked on a DUI charge either. Anyway, my contact did some probing for me, and he got the number of the accounts that transferred the money into the 251 accounts. And this is where you’re now on your own.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘The accounts started 7777. No one I know, not in the banking or the financial sectors, has ever heard of a 7777 account. Not inside The Bank, not in whatever’s left of the economy outside of it. And trying to trace it from within

  The Bank caused my mate’s computer to crash. More than once.’

  ‘What were the account numbers?’ Cass’s heart was thumping as he dragged his small notebook out of his pocket. ‘Have you got them on you?’

  ‘Sure. Hang on.’

  The rustling of paper at the other end matched his own as he flicked through the pages to find the numbers he’d scribbled down from the moleskin book they’d found under the bed at Solomon’s bedsit. His blood chilled and then raced as Jordan read the numbers aloud. Both were listed on the page, and both had failed written next to them. He grinned. Bingo.

  ‘Perry Jordan, you’re a genius.’

  ‘They mean something to you?’ He sounded surprised.

  ‘Yes, they do. Send your bill and a copy of everything you got over to me at the station, will you?’

  ‘Already on it, mate. The courier’s on his way.’

  ‘I’ll see him there. And Perry, mate, I owe you.’

  Cass could almost hear the grin.

  ‘Yep, you do!’

  The DCI sat behind his desk and stared at Cass. ‘But what about Macintyre? I thought this was done and dusted yesterday? ’

  Cass didn’t glance at Bowman, who was leaning against the back wall trying to look nonchalant. Cass knew what he wanted to say. He wanted to say that Bowman didn’t have the balls or brains he was born with, that he was so fucking ambitious that he’d just wanted a quick result and the glory of closing the high-profile case. He wanted to say he’d opted for the easy way, as he always did. He wanted to say that he thought that Bowman and his flash suits and flash lifestyle was a Grade-A cunt. He didn’t say any of that, though. For once he toed the party line.

  ‘Maybe Macintyre has got some shit going down - it would be hard for him not to imagine that this had something to do with him. Maybe his boys gave up the Chechens because they wanted them out of the way.’

  DCI Morgan nodded. Cass knew what he was thinking; he’d be mentally wading through the damage and looking for ways to limit it. As things stood, their position was okay: the press hadn’t been informed yet, and the parents were out of the loop. If it did come out that Bowman had got it completely wrong, well, it wouldn’t look too terrible for the DCI with the Commissioner, not as long as he’d been the one who encouraged the discovery of the truth.

  Cass slid the open moleskin notebook across the desk so that it sat next to the bank account information Perry Jordan had traced. The DCI looked from one to the other.

  ‘But this notebook came from Bowman’s case? The serial killer ?’

  ‘Yes, but we’ve known for a while the two cases have links. Solomon used to work at The Bank, we’ve got proof of that, and this money definitely passed through The Bank, even if we don’t know exactly where it came from. Plus there’s the man who sent in the film of the shootings from the same flat Carla Rae died in. This Mr Bright, who apparently doesn’t exist and couldn’t possibly have anything to do with this, but who Solomon had definitely heard of when I asked him on the phone.’

  He paused and was pleased to see that the DCI at least had the good grace to look awkward. After a moment he went on, ‘The way I see it is this: if we don’t pull Jackson and Miller in and this all comes out later, which it probably will because if Perry Jordan could find this stuff out then the press can pay someone like him too, then it’s going to be another fiasco of police incompetence. And these are dead children we’re talking about here. The newspapers love that shit. They’ll follow the family and they’ll dig. You know how it is. Build ’em up and then burn ’em down.’

  ‘What do you think, Bowman?’ Morgan looked at his other DI .

  Bowman shrugged, his shoulders stiff. ‘We should probably talk to them,’ he mumbled.

  Cass hadn’t expected anything like good grace. He’d had to agree, of course. On the way up to Morgan’s office, Cass had casually asked about the interview times with Macintyre, and after a moment said he must have got the time wrong when Claire rang, though he thought he’d checked his watch. Bowman had said nothing. He hadn’t needed to. Cass could see he’d got the message from the blanched look on his already pale face. Cass wondered if it was forgivable to wish the hospital had found some trace of actual poisoning in Bowman’s blood, instead of the vague suggestions of unidentifiable abnormalities. At least that way he’d be confined to a hospital bed and out of Cass’s way.

  ‘Okay, I agree.’ Morgan brought his atte
ntion back to Cass. ‘Bring them in. But tread carefully. These people have lost children.’

  Cass was already out of the door by the time his boss shouted those last few words. The boys’ mothers had lost children. What these fathers had done with them, he wasn’t so sure.

  It was quiet down on the basement levels of Paddington Green Station, away from the noise and bustle of the offices and main holding cells above them. These interview rooms were rarely used except by the Anti-Terror Division for overflow or by the Murder Squad in extremely high-profile cases.

  If they were lucky enough to catch Solomon, they’d interview him down here. Cass figured that while Isaac Jackson and Paul Miller might not be serial killers, they could use the quiet space. He was pretty sure these men hadn’t had any since their children had died, and there was nothing like feeling cut off from the world to make you reassess your inner demons. Cass understood that.

  He peered through the small hatch. Isaac Jackson sat perfectly still in his seat, staring ahead. Like Paul Miller, two doors down, he seemed much smaller than he had the last time Cass had seen him, standing stoically behind the plush white sofa. Without the grand house and the beautiful wife and the luxurious furnishings surrounding him he looked like just a broken man weighed down with guilt. That had been clear when Jackson had opened the door to the grim-faced officers and the waiting police car. Cass had seen that look before: a mixture of relief and expectation. It was the expression of the ordinary man who’d done a terrible thing and was ready to pay for it. On Jackson it had been as clear as day. Jackson would break first.

  The wives, distraught and uncomprehending, had immediately called their solicitors. Paul Miller had his man in with him, but Jackson had refused to see his. Cass reckoned he was having five minutes with his conscience, and weighing up how much he could still keep secret. He was pretty certain once Jackson started talking, he wouldn’t be able to stop. He wouldn’t know then that talking about it just created a second version of the horror. It couldn’t get rid of the story etched on your soul. Cass knew that. Your stories always stayed on the inside.

  Cass took a moment to enjoy the quiet himself while Claire fetched coffee. Upstairs, the front desk would be manic while the Incident Room staff fielded continuous phone calls. The press were gathering outside the station, starting to bay for information, for blood. There was nothing his team had been able to do about that. There was no way they could take the men from their homes without bringing the pack back with them - they’d been camped outside since the boys had died. Even though the men - the fathers - hadn’t technically been arrested, that tired old cliché of ‘helping the police with their enquiries’ was fooling no one. Across the city, newspaper editors were putting together instant spreads, covering both sides, one tearing the families apart, the other vilifying the police for their brutality in the face of tragedy. They’d wait to see the outcome before deciding which way to run: good guys hard done by, or evildoers destined to rot in Hell, that’s how they’d be portrayed, regardless of the fact that most people were somewhere in between.

  Claire appeared with a tray. ‘Sorry. Had to go upstairs.’ She looked over at the door. ‘You ready to go in?’

  Cass nodded. He was more than ready.

  Isaac Jackson looked up when Claire placed the hot coffee in front of him and then turned on the audio recorder and gave the time and date. She spoke clearly. This was one interview that was not going to be fucked up on a technicality.

  ‘Have you spoken to Paul yet?’ Jackson’s voice was hollow.

  ‘I thought I’d start with you,’ Cass said. ‘Mr Miller is talking to his solicitor.’

  He nodded, moving like an old man trying to pretend he’s still young. Life had taken its toll on Isaac Jackson.

  ‘I want to make it clear for the record that you are speaking to us without your solicitor and of your own free will. That is correct, isn’t it?’

  He nodded again and Cass looked at him. He cleared his throat and said, ‘Yes.’ His voice was dull, defeated.

  ‘And you understand the implications such a decision may have on any subsequent trial?’

  ‘Yes.’ He would be aware of what the outcome might be. The death penalty had been reinstated for first-degree murder cases two years previously, but with the chronic overcrowding in prisons and the massive rise in lesser crimes, there were movements within government to shift the boundaries further still, adding second-degree, man-slaughter and accessory after the fact to the roster. If Jackson and Miller had had anything to do with their boys’ deaths, they’d be a gist to that group.

  ‘Mr Jackson, during the course of this investigation we have discovered that both you and Mr Miller have had some financial difficulties over the past two years. Is that correct?’

  ‘You could call it that.’ Jackson let out a short laugh, devoid of emotion. ‘I’d call it financial meltdown. Neither of us have ever saved, but we had a knack for picking the right investments to keep ourselves afloat. But we started to make mistakes. We were too cocky. The world had changed and we had not accounted for that. Everything was high risk and we started to make some losses. Big ones. We tried to rectify our mistakes and we made it worse.’ He looked at Cass. ‘You probably know all this already.’

  ‘I have the paperwork, but I’m no financial genius.

  Explain it to me.’

  ‘You don’t have to be a genius to see when sums like that don’t add up.’ He leaned back in his chair and wiped his eyes as he sighed.

  ‘Does your wife know?’

  ‘What do you think?’ After a second he answered his own question. ‘No, we decided not to tell Clara and Eleanor.’

  ‘Why? You thought they would leave you? Both of you?’

  Again the slow shake. ‘Oh no, much worse. They’d be disappointed. Let down.’ He sipped the coffee for a moment, then looked at Cass again. ‘Paul and I are reinventions of ourselves. We created the image of ourselves we wanted to be: successful, confident, men who could take on the world and win. Those were the men our wives fell in love with. Only Paul and I knew that we weren’t exactly all that on the inside.’

  ‘Everybody’s different on the inside,’ Claire said. ‘Even your wives.’

  Jackson smiled at her pityingly, as if there were no way she could ever understand.

  ‘You thought they wouldn’t love you any more?’ Cass frowned. ‘That’s crazy.’

  ‘They wouldn’t love us the same. We wouldn’t be the men who took care of things. It would have broken everything.’ He looked down and the desk. ‘Maybe it sounds crazy, but at that point we still thought we could save everything and they would never need to know.’ The clipped accent had slipped since he’d started talking.

  Cass wondered how much of his life had been pretence - sometimes he himself still heard that harder edge of Cockney that was Charlie Sutton in his head. He wasn’t unsympathetic. ‘So what happened?’

  ‘Paul met someone in a casino.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I don’t know exactly. Some high-class place around Baker Street.’

  ‘He was gambling? He had money for that?’

  ‘Of course he didn’t. But it’s the last station of hope for a desperate man, isn’t it? To play the odds on the cards or wheel? And it was easier to pretend to be working late than going home. The strain of keeping up appearances was unbearable.’ His eyes narrowed slightly. ‘I think we were starting to hate each other. You know how it is, it’s easier to blame someone else. Anyway, he got drunk and started blurting out all our problems. He says he doesn’t remember much about what he actually said, but the man gave him a card. Plain white, expensive. All it had on it was a mobile phone number.’

  ‘Who was this man?’

  ‘I don’t know his name. Paul never told me - he said he didn’t remember. But he told Paul that if we called that number there might be a way out of our problems. He said that he’d been in a similar situation and the man on the other end had saved his life, turn
ed it around.’

  ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘We called the number, of course.’

  ‘And who answered?’

  Jackson smiled softly, though his eyes were cold. ‘He said his name was Mr Solomon.’

  Claire’s eyes darted to Cass, but he didn’t look back, despite his own rising excitement. A business card, plain white, expensive . . . he knew the feel of a card like that. Threads were weaving together in his head. Nothing is sacred. People had been tested and found wanting. That’s what he’d said. What test had Solomon set these men that they had failed so spectacularly?

  ‘Where did you meet him?’

  ‘Two days after the first call he rang Paul and told us to come to his penthouse at the Wharf.’

  ‘And who was he?’

  ‘He said he was an investor.’

  ‘Did he work for The Bank?’

  Jackson was about to answer and then hesitated. ‘I’m not sure he worked for them. He said he invested heavily in The Bank. He didn’t strike me as someone who worked for anyone.’

  Cass thought of the empty office and the huge canvas that filled the wall. Jackson had nailed Solomon pretty well. It was also close to the description that Adam Bradley had given of Mr Bright. He found that didn’t surprise him either. Bright and Solomon were bound together in his head, two parts of a whole, twisting around him and his family and his past.

  ‘And then what happened?’

  Jackson shifted in his seat and leaned forward. ‘Have you ever seen The Godfather?’

  ‘With Marlon Brando? A long time ago. Why?’

  ‘We went there expecting to be offered a loan at some extortionate rate.’ A bitter smile flashed across his face as if at a bad private joke. ‘But it was like the opening to that film. We explained our situation and he just nodded and listened. Then when we were done he said he wanted to speak to us each separately. I only know what he said to me.’

  ‘Which was?’

  Jackson sighed. He almost stank of shame. ‘He said he would lend me one hundred and fifty thousand pounds to get myself straight, with no interest on the loan. But I had to cut my cloth accordingly. He said I should talk to my wife, about my work and money problems . . . and if I didn’t do those things, there would be a charge to pay on the money within a year. He was insistent we should learn from our mistakes.’ He looked at Cass. ‘He told me not to discuss any of this with Paul. He suggested it would be better if we eased up on our friendship.’