‘It’s Christian,’ she said after a long pause. ‘He’s dead. And his wife. And son.’ She paused. ‘It looks like murder-suicide. I’m so sorry.’
And then the world collapsed.
On the way home Cass saw the world around him too clearly, every image over-bright, with too much colour. His feet moved like lead through the house as Claire burbled apologetic goodbyes. Cass heard her as if they were both underwater. The cream walls were too clean, and he flinched away from them. Lilies in a vase on the table by the door yawned towards him, leering from their open mouths. Beneath them, tucked under a large conch shell, a pile of letters was stacked, white envelopes against the red mahogany table, and he felt like he was choking in blood.
‘How?’ he asked finally as they drove through the central London streets teeming with thousands of small lives, all going about their daily business as if there would never be a
last
day.
‘Cass, I can’t . . . Let’s wait until you’re home.’
‘I’m not a fucking child, Claire,’ he exploded. ‘Just fucking tell me!’
‘I don’t know the exact details,’ she said at last. ‘Blackmore just said there was a gun.’
‘A gun?’
‘A shotgun.’
‘That can’t be right.’ Cass stared through the windscreen and shook his head. Bile rose in his throat and he swallowed it back down. Somewhere up ahead the lights turned green, but he didn’t really see them. Beneath the numbness, his brain twisted, trying to make some sense of it, but this was all wrong. That Christian was dead was wrong; that Jessica and Luke were dead was wrong. That Christian had killed them? And with a shotgun? He couldn’t find a place for that to sit in his head. He tried to picture his baby brother, the shy, clever youngest son, loading cartridges into a weapon and then quietly blowing the life out of his wife and child. It played like a badly acted movie behind his eyes. The role was miscast. It wasn’t Christian.
‘Where the hell would Christian get a shotgun from? Christian wouldn’t know what to do with a gun. He wouldn’t know how to load it, let alone fire it.’ He shook his head fiercely. ‘This is not right. Christian couldn’t do a thing like that.’
I maybe could
, he almost added.
I could, but not Christian.
Claire said nothing and even though he was immersed in the first flood of his grief, Cass could understand why. She wasn’t going to point out the obvious to him. In this world they lived in anyone could get a gun if they had the money for it - and not even a lot of money, not these days. Everyone knew someone who operated on either side of the law, or in the grey area between the two. Christian might have been naïve but he could have gone into any one of a hundred pubs and got himself a shotgun, for no more than a couple of hundred quid. Even if he had no connections himself, all it would have taken was a few weeks of sitting and drinking quietly in the same gaff, making sure his face was familiar before approaching someone. Anything was possible . . . Anything but the idea that Christian would kill his family. Kill himself, maybe. But never his family.
The car moved into Muswell Hill, taking Cass on his normal route home, but the trees lining the roads were making unfamiliar shapes against the sky. The cars looked too wide. Everything was an inch out of place. The world was an inch out of place.
‘He’s been trying to speak to me.’ He spoke into the window and condensation formed against the glass. He couldn’t look at Claire. ‘He’s been calling my phone for days. Work and home.’ He paused. ‘I didn’t speak to him. Even last night I said I’d be home when I knew I wouldn’t be.’
‘We’ve had a lot on.’ Claire pulled over in front of his house. ‘It’s not your fault.’
Cass made no move to get out. ‘Isn’t it?’ He lit a cigarette and felt the hot smoke burn against his dry mouth. ‘He had something on his mind. I wasn’t listening.’
‘Did he say what it was?’
‘No.’ The short conversation of the night before played over in Cass’s head. ‘Nothing that made any sense. I cut him off.’
Pain caught the back of his throat and for an awful moment he thought he was going to break down and start crying like a child, sitting there in Claire’s car, Claire, whose heart he’d once broken in a quiet way. And his wife was probably sitting in their lounge doing some crying of her own. Nothing changed. He swallowed the well of emotion.
Christian was dead
. He heard the words in his head, but still they refused to take root.
A warm hand rested on his knee. ‘You couldn’t have known, Cass. These things . . .’ She shrugged. ‘They’re unpredictable. You can’t tell when someone’s going to snap.’
‘Christian wasn’t the snapping kind.’ He pulled hard on the cigarette, creating a barrier of stinging smoke between them.
She ignored it.
‘Cass,’ she said, softly, ‘this isn’t your fault. Don’t try and make everything your fault because you made one difficult call ten years ago. Isn’t it time you started to forgive yourself ?’
‘This
really
isn’t the time for that, Claire.’
Cass didn’t look at her, and eventually she sighed in defeat. ‘You want me to come in with you?’
He laughed dryly. ‘I don’t think so. Kate doesn’t know what happened while we were split, but you know what women are like. I think she
knows
. There’s only so much I can take in one day.’
The hand slid away from his leg, leaving only an echo of its warmth. ‘Well, if you need me, just call.’
‘I’ll see you in the morning. I’ll be in by half-seven.’
‘You don’t have—’
‘What else am I going to do? Sit around and look at old pictures and cry?’
‘That’s what most people would do, Cass, yes. It’s what you do when you lose someone.’
Cass pushed the door open and flicked the butt into the gutter. The cigarette smoke was making his nausea worse, and he had this awful feeling that if he sat there long enough, flames would start to lick at his feet and neither of them would ever get out.
He gave her an awkward smile. ‘I know you’re probably right, Claire. But I’d go mad.’ He sighed. ‘I can’t let these cases slide, either. We owe those boys, and those poor dead women. Time won’t wait for me to deal with my own shit.’
‘I’ll pick you up in the morning, then.’
He frowned.
‘Your car’s still at the station, remember?’ she smiled. ‘If you change your mind about coming in, just let me know. Even if I’m already outside, okay?’
‘Thanks.’ He got out of the car. ‘But I won’t change my mind.’
‘I don’t expect you will.’
The look of gentle pity on Claire’s face, probably not that different from the one he’d given to Clara Jackson and Eleanor Miller barely forty minutes previously, was enough to make him shut the car door and walk away. Cass knew he, of all people, did not deserve pity. Christian, Luke and Jessica deserved the pity. For a second he felt surrounded by dead children, all pointing accusingly at him. Forgive himself? How the hell was he ever supposed to do that? Claire kept the car running behind him but he didn’t turn back. As he got to the front steps she pulled away and he let his shoulders slump.
There was too much weight on them.
Kate sat on the sofa, rocking backwards and forwards, her pale skin blotchy with tears. Sergeant Blackmore stood at the fireplace beside a man Cass didn’t recognise. They nodded awkwardly at Cass and he returned the gesture. Kate didn’t look up but pulled the cushion she was hugging closer to her chest. He flinched at the thought that she’d probably gain more comfort from an inanimate object than she did from him. Maybe it was time he stopped fighting it. He let people down. It’s what he did.
‘It’s true, then?’
Blackmore nodded. ‘Sorry, sir.’
‘Don’t be. You didn’t shoot them.’ From the corner of his eye he saw Kate flinch. She never could stand his roughness, but he didn’t know any other way to deal with pain.
The unknown man, thickset, in his fifties, stepped forward. ‘Detective Inspector Jones, I’m DI Ramsey. From Chelsea nick.’
An American accent, and phrasing slightly odd. ‘Not originally, I take it.’
‘No. I guess home is really Eerie, Pennsylvania, but I left twenty years or more. Wouldn’t recognise the place if I saw it now - and it certainly wouldn’t recognise me.’
‘Were you on the scene?’
Ramsey nodded. ‘Yeah, I’m Murder Squad, like you. Responding car called us out. You know how the drill goes. I got there at about two this morning.’
‘How were they found?’ Cass’s voice sounded like a stranger’s in his head. Was he really talking about his little brother and his family? The world glimmered as his breath hitched and stuck in his lungs as shock took a brief hold of him. For a moment it was as if a watery glow, like early autumn sunshine, coated Ramsey, shining out from the corners of his eyes. Cass blinked and it was gone.
‘Your nephew was shot in his bed. Died instantly. He wouldn’t have known anything about it.’
‘And Jessica?’
‘The shot must have woken her up. She was found in the doorway of the main bedroom. He shot her once in the chest at point-blank range. She would have died instantly too.’ Ramsey kept his voice level. ‘It looks as if your brother then went downstairs. He shot himself in the lounge.’
‘Christian would never do something like that.’
Ramsey shrugged and Blackmore looked down at his feet.
Cass felt his frustration rising. ‘I know it’s the normal response from a relative, to disbelieve. I fucking
know
that.’ He swallowed hard and lowered his voice. ‘I’m just saying that Christian
really
wasn’t the type.’
‘According to your wife he’d been trying to reach you for a few days? Is that right?’
‘Yes. But I spoke to him briefly yesterday. He didn’t sound suicidal.’
‘He was agitated.’ Kate’s voice cut in, a monotone. She followed it with a loud phlegm-riddled sniff. ‘When he rang here last night he didn’t sound right.’
‘I thought you said he sounded fine?’ Cass stared at his wife, aware of the sharpness in his voice but unable to stop it. Kate met his eyes and for the first time, after everything they’d gone through in their marriage, he was sure he saw hate burning there. He winced.
‘I said what you wanted to hear.’ A tight smile twisted on her lips as more tears spilled from her red eyes. ‘You weren’t going to ring him anyway. You never do.’
The truth stung him, and although his immediate reflex was to deny in, he bit the words back. It was a pointless argument. She was right. If she’d told him, it probably wouldn’t have made any difference. He looked back at Ramsey. ‘Something was bothering him, yes.’
His fellow DI’s hooded eyes were thoughtful. ‘I sense there’s more.’
Cass shook his head a little. ‘It’s just the way he sounded. He wanted to talk to me. I mean,
really
wanted to.’ He looked at Kate. ‘And my wife’s right; I haven’t been good at staying in touch. Ever since our parents died I’ve let our relationship slide. We’re both grown-ups, with jobs that take up a lot of time. We spoke more frequently when Luke got ill, but even that wasn’t that often. But the past few days, he’s rung a lot, trying to catch up with me. He had something he wanted to tell me. It just doesn’t make sense that he’d do this
without
having spoken to me first.’ Suddenly exhaustion seeped into his shoulders and he felt himself sag. ‘It doesn’t feel right.’
‘There often isn’t a lot of sense in suicide, boss,’ Blackmore said.
Cass glared at him, and was pleased to see Ramsey send him a sharp look too. The young man shrank back slightly against the wall.
‘I understand where you’re coming from,’ Ramsey said, stepping forward, ‘but you’ve got to let me run this and see how it plays out. And although we’re treating this as murder-suicide, with no current outside suspects, there are two murders, and so the process is the same as always. Mark Farmer’s the ME on the case, and you know he’s the best. And if there’s evidence of any outside interference at the scene, then trust me, the lab boys will find it.’ He paused. ‘That’s the best I can tell you.’
Cass nodded. Bile rose in his throat again, burning the soft tissue that was already sore from the cocaine he’d taken the previous night. This was too surreal, a bad trip. He still hadn’t thrown the wrap away, and he caught himself wondering if maybe one small line - just a small one - would make the world a little better. It wouldn’t help the pain, but it might just ease the huge tumour of guilt that was growing inside him. He squeezed the thought away.
‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘You’ll let me know when I can start arranging things?’
Things: caskets, flowers, cold graves
. None of the words fit with Christian in his head.
‘Will do.’
‘If you need me I’m normally on my mobile. I’ve got two heavy cases on the go, so that’s the best way to reach me.’
The other DI didn’t look surprised, nor did he try to persuade Cass to stay at home, and Cass liked him for that. Ramsey led the way out into the hallway, and after saying goodbyes, and telling Blackmore he’d be in tomorrow morning, Cass closed the door. The house felt like a tomb around him.
Now Kate’s sobs echoed out from the lounge. She was taking it hard, he thought, and considered going to her, maybe putting his arm around her - but instead he ran to the downstairs bathroom and vomited loudly.
When he was done, he sat there with his head resting against the cool tiles until the heat left him and he started shivering. It felt surprisingly good. Eventually Kate peered through the door and handed him a glass of water.
‘Are you okay?’ The words were awkward. Her voice was thick with snot and the remnants of tears, and she didn’t sound like herself. She stayed in the doorway, on the other side of the threshold.
‘Do you think Christian did it?’ he asked.
His throat was dry and he drained the water, fighting his stomach as it immediately tried to reject it. He didn’t answer her question. Given the situation, and the fact that he was curled up against the wall of the toilet, he figured the answer was clear.