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.
There wasn’t much inside: a few photos and a letter. Cass picked up the picture closest to him. It was a Polaroid and it took a moment for him to recognise the two men standing with their shirts off and with one arm round each other’s tanned shoulders, grinning against the backdrop of a desert and a military-looking Jeep. He checked the back and the scrawled writing there confirmed his guess.
Alan and Mike. Lebanon 1970.
His dad and Father Michael
. He looked at it again. 1970. His father had been sixty-five when he’d died in 2010. Cass did a quick calculation in his head. He would have been in his mid-twenties in the picture, nearly ten years before Cass had even been born. He wasn’t even sure that his dad had met his mother by then. How strange that Father Michael had known him all that time. He’d never really given their friendship that much thought. He looked at the two men again. They were like strangers, more than ten years younger than Cass himself was now, and with the boundless enthusiasm of youth screaming out of their white smiles and hippy hair. He carefully put the photo to one side.
The next was one of him and Christian in the garden at the back of the house. He recognised the spot; if he craned his neck he’d be able to see it out of the window. This picture had been taken in the 1980s, on a roll of easy-wind film. Their mother was crouched down, hugging her knees, between her sons but slightly behind them. As she smiled at the camera Cass could see her face was filled with excitement. Cass himself was on the right of the picture, a few inches taller than his blond brother. They both wore shorts, and judging by Christian’s chubby face and knees, his little brother couldn’t have been more than maybe three or four, which would put Cass at six.
His smile faded as the more he studied it, the more he realised what a strange photograph it was. It was the way that they were standing that was odd, facing each other, their expressions serious. Each had an arm raised, with one finger pointing at eye level at the other. It was an unnatural pose for children of that age, who were more often squealing in the mud or pulling worms in two. A memory shifted in the dust in the far recesses of his mind, but he couldn’t quite pull it free.
He turned the picture over.
The boys see the Glow! Yay!
The words were scrawled in his mother’s hand, but someone - Cass wondered if it had been Christian - had circled round the two words
the Glow
. The memory growled, sucking him back for a second into the faded landscape of the picture. He had a scab on his knee that itched. He was six years old and his dad was telling him to look harder. And then there it was. He could see gold coming from his brother’s eyes, pouring out in the brightest light. It made him feel warm just looking at it. The surprise he felt was mirrored in his brother’s face. They had both raised their arms at the same time, and their mother had laughed.
He squashed the memory. It had been a trick of the light, nothing more than a childhood game. Still, it tickled maliciously at him, and he couldn’t deny the hint of fear in the pit of his stomach that he couldn’t explain. He put the photo carefully on top of the first. Something else to ask Father Michael about tomorrow.
It was the third picture that stopped him dead. On the surface, it was just a snap of his mum and dad, who had obviously met by then, although they still looked like a pair of young hippies. His mother’s hair hung in two long plaits and his dad stood behind her, his hands wrapped round her bare waist in the gap between her flared jeans and tie-dyed shirt. With his thick wavy hair that reached his shoulders and the short beard and moustache, Cass thought his dad looked like he’d spent the seventies doing a very good impersonation of Jesus. Beside them stood a middle-aged man, probably in his fifties, with silver hair and a sharp smile. His linen trousers had impeccable sharp creases. They were standing in front of some kind of office, and Cass had to bring the picture close to read the dusty sign. SOLOMON AND BRIGHT MINING CORPS.
Mr Bright. He looked again at the man beside his young parents before quickly turning the image over.
‘Me, Evie and Castor Bright. South Africa 1973.’ Underneath, in the same blue Biro that had circled
the Glow
, Christian had scribbled ‘Bright? But how?’ Cass noted that his brother’s writing had lost some of its neatness. He turned it over again and stared, trying to imagine the middle-aged man in a suit and overcoat. He’d look just like Adam Bradley’s description of the man he met in the Newham flat. Mr Bright. He looked again at Christian’s question. ‘But how?’ The answer was simple. It couldn’t be the same man. It wasn’t possible. Even if he was still alive, the man in the picture would have to be in his nineties by now. One thing was established, though: there was a definite link between a Mr Bright and Christian, and this picture had obviously freaked his brother out. He looked at it again. What the hell had been going on in Christian’s world?
The letter was interesting. It was addressed to Christian at his own office, although the paper itself had no header. It was creamy and expensive, just like the envelope Christian had used. The typed message was short: The Bank would be interested in employing Christian, and he should go to the head offices at Vauxhall Cross. There was a date and a time, and a signature scrawled in black at the bottom, written with what looked like a calligraphy pen. The name was printed under it.
Mr C. Bright
. Castor Bright? The same as the man in the picture? He paused, trying to get his brain to stop spinning. Whoever had got Christian his job at The Bank was related to a man who had known their parents - and now Christian was dead, and someone called Bright was sending videos of botched gangland assassinations to Cass . . . What the fuck was going on?