A
lthough the sun was shining brightly through the windows of the small house in Lewisham, it dulled in the sombre atmosphere of the sitting room, as if aware that the good spirits normally associated with it weren’t welcome here. Cory Denter had died four days ago, and his grandparents and aunts had travelled from Trinidad to support the family in their grief. Large women dressed in black sipped tea and talked softly, their white eyes rimmed red from crying. The pain in the room was almost palpable. Cass had felt it too many times before.
‘I’m sorry to disturb you,’ he said, quietly. ‘I won’t take up much of your time.’
‘Take whatever time you need, please.’ Cory’s mother looked up at him with almost desperate hope.
He knew why; all around the house were proudly framed pictures of this now-broken family unit, of Cory, smiling throughout the years of his short life. The whole family looked to be always smiling – but not any more. The future held only echoes now. And poor Cory’s mother just wanted to know why.
‘I’m not sure what you want.’ Mr Denter watched him with suspicion, and Cass knew what that meant too:
Don’t go bringing hope here if you can’t deliver. Don’t you do that to us
,
not now
. ‘The car is gone. We didn’t want it here.
There was too much …’ His voice cracked slightly as the sentence drifted away unsaid.
It didn’t matter; Cass knew the end of it.
Too much blood
.
‘There wasn’t anything in it anyway, just the usual – maps, service book, chewing gum. Some CDs.’ Mr Denter’s eyes welled up, as if the memory of each item was stabbing him somewhere inside.
‘Can I see his room?’
‘He was always a good boy.’ Mrs Denter looked up from the sofa. The hope had turned to a vague dread. The
why
wasn’t always good to know. ‘Always.’
‘I’m sure he was, Mrs Denter.’
She shrugged, the weight heavy in her shoulders. ‘I just don’t understand. I don’t understand.’ The tears came, hot and fast from the endless well inside her, and big black arms engulfed and held her tight as an older Jamaican woman muttered soothing words in an accent like rum. Cass watched them with something close to envy. It would feel good to be held in an embrace like that. It had been a long time since he’d felt anything other than the grip of the dead.
He looked at Mr Denter and they shared a look that spoke more than words ever could, and for an instant Cass was back looking down the barrel of a gun at wide brown Jamaican eyes. He closed the memory down and followed the dead boy’s father out of the room of crying women and up a narrow staircase.
At the top, Mr Denter spoke again, more softly this time.
‘Was my boy in trouble? Had he got himself mixed up in something?’ The man’s Adam’s apple bobbed nervously up and down, a mix of needing the
why
and the fear of it, that perhaps his child had secrets of his own already, and a life that was separate, darker.
‘No,’ Cass said, ‘there’s no evidence to suggest that. Really.’
Mr Denter didn’t look convinced, and Cass didn’t blame him. The police didn’t investigate routine suicides, everyone knew that – these days the police didn’t investigate half the crimes they were supposed to, let alone small personal tragedies like this one. Still, Mr Denter didn’t look like someone who argued with the police. He was a good citizen.
‘Well—’ He shrugged helplessly from the doorway, as if his grief barred him from entry. ‘It’s exactly as he left it. We haven’t … moved anything.’
Cass nodded. He could see the Denters’ whole lives in the neatness of this room. There were a couple of football posters on the wall, a set of clothes draped over the chair in the corner; a skeleton was standing against the back wall, next to a chart of the body’s organs. The bed was made. Next to it was a desk, on which was stacked a pile of medical textbooks and folders of work, alongside the small lamp and a pen pot. Cory Denter had been the product of a hardworking family who had clearly scrimped and saved every penny so that their precious son could have a better life. It looked like Cory had appreciated it, too: there was a small photograph of him and his parents on a boat somewhere bright and sunny. They were smiling like that feeling would last for ever. It was the only photo in the room.
Cass carefully opened the cupboards and drawers, but he found nothing untoward – neatly folded clothes, a bank book that showed a young man careful with his money, football kit, jeans and a couple of suits, but no diary, no letters from a girlfriend, nothing personal. Cass would never meet Cory Denter now, but he felt like they were being introduced. A quiet boy. A private man. Someone confident in his life, but who kept his feelings inside.
He flicked through the various student files on the desk, aware of Mr Denter watching him from the doorway. The
sheets of lined paper were filled with neatly written notes, which might as well have been in a foreign language as far as Cass was concerned. Some had diagrams drawn in, then crossed out and redrawn again: this was someone striving for perfection. Cory Denter worked hard. Had he not let his blood drain out all over his car, he might well have been a fine doctor one day.
Cass’s hand froze as he turned the page. More lines of precisely printed words he didn’t understand filled the sheet, but that wasn’t what had caught his eye. In the margin, in tiny letters, he could see one sentence, written over and over, as if doodled absently in a lecture. There were no gaps between the letters, so it appeared as one long nonsensical word down the side of the page:
Chaosinthedarknesschaosinthedarknesschaosinthedarknesschaosinthedarkness
.
Cass’s heart thumped so loudly he was sure Mr Denter could hear it.
Chaos in the darkness
. Another one. He closed the folder.
‘It looks like Cory worked hard.’ Cass kept the file in his hand and his tone light.
‘He did. He was a good boy.’
‘What about his social life? Did he have a big circle of friends?’
‘He had some,’ said Mr Denter, ‘but he took his studies seriously. He stayed in most nights with us. Went to football and cricket at weekends. Maybe he’d go out another night or two in the week, but he was never home late.’
‘Do you know where he’d go?’
‘No. He was a good boy. He was a young man and we gave him his freedom. It wasn’t like he came home drunk all the time, not like some of the other students you see.’ A
wistful smile crossed the man’s careworn face. ‘Not too often anyway.’
‘Can I take this?’ Cass held up the file.
The dread settled in Mr Denter’s face. ‘You would tell me if he’d been in trouble?’
Cass smiled. ‘Mr Denter, I would tell you.’
They stared at each other for a long time, the unknown
why
hanging between them, binding them.
Eventually, Mr Denter said, ‘Take it.’
Outside, Cass got back in his car before calling Armstrong. He had enough evidence that something was linking these deaths to push for a proper investigation, but he wanted to speak to Angie Lane’s flatmate first. Amanda Kemble. He needed to find that sentence somewhere in the dead girl’s belongings, and his gut was sure it would be there. What could possibly link these kids – some kind of suicide pact? But why? Cory Denter wouldn’t see any romance in ending his own life; he’d have come across enough cadavers in his training to see how clinical death was.
He gave his sergeant the task of pulling the girl out of her lectures and taking her to meet Cass at the flat, then hung up on the other man’s questions and lit a cigarette before dialling Eagleton. Armstrong could wait for his explanations. He hadn’t earned them yet.
‘Cass?’ Eagleton spoke first. ‘Spooky, I was just about to call you.’
‘I’ve been looking at student suicides across London. You were right to be curious. So far we’re up to four linked by this “Chaos in the darkness” shit, and I think I’m about to make that five. All slit their wrists in some way or another. They’re all at different colleges.’
‘I might have something else to add to the mix.’
‘Yeah?’
‘I’ll need to see the other bodies to know whether it’s a one-off or not, but I found a series of small lesions across the surface of Jasmine Green’s brain. I’m running some tests to see what might have caused them, but they could go some way to explaining her sudden suicide.’
‘Is this an injury thing?’
‘Could be any number of causes. There was no external trauma to her skull so I would guess not. Could be disease, may be, or a reaction to a chemical. We’ll see what the lab says before I hazard any guesses. If you can get the DCI to give me the rest of the bodies to play with, I’d be very grateful.’
‘I’ll do my best. I’ve got to persuade him that this is actually a case first.’
‘Good luck with that.’
‘Yeah, thanks.’
He started the car and pulled away from the kerb, aware that Cory Denter’s father was still watching from the window of the house of mourning. He’d sewn a seed there, and it would grow, whether he watered it or not.
He stopped for a quick coffee and a cigarette before heading across the river to the address he’d jotted down for Angie Lane. His phone vibrated once in his pocket, Perry Jordan:
Sorry. Nothing new to report
.
Six months ago Cass had promised Charles Ramsey and DCI Morgan that he wouldn’t start an investigation into what had become of his nephew Luke, or who the boy was who had been raised as part of Christian’s family until the investigations into the corruption at Paddington Green station were done. There was going to be quite enough shit flying around without Cass hurling more at an incompetent
NHS, and if it had waited all these years, it could wait a little longer.
He took their point, and in a strange way, revealing that somehow his nephew had been traded at birth could weaken him as a witness. He’d look like a crazy, one who believed he was surrounded by conspiracy theories. Cass took a long last drag and then flicked the cigarette butt out of the window, breaking the law twice in as many minutes.
He wondered what Ramsey and Morgan would think of him if he’d told them everything he’d discovered while investigating the Man of Flies. The Bank, which owned practically every functioning government in the world now, was nothing but a front for a shady organisation called the Network. The man called Solomon had turned into a whirlwind of flies before Cass’s very eyes before he’d died, and the ageless Mr Bright hadn’t even batted an eyelash at it … they really would think he was a crazy then, that was for sure. Although given the way that the investigation had been told to stay away from Mr Bright, maybe Morgan or those above him already had an inkling of that man’s power.
Despite their warnings, he’d put Perry Jordan on a small retainer a couple of weeks ago, just to start quietly digging around to see if he could begin tracing the boy.
So far the tenacious young private eye had found nothing of much use. Cass wasn’t overly surprised. He’d pretty much tied Jordan’s hands by telling him that for now he could only chase paper, not physically talk to anyone. He just wanted to be doing something. The boy was out there somewhere, and now he was his only living relative. Cass had seen the Jones file on Christian’s laptop, and it stood to reason that if Mr Bright and his network were so interested in the Jones family, then they’d be interested in the missing boy too.
*
‘I don’t want to go in there again. I really don’t.’ Amanda Kemble, Angie Lane’s flatmate, stood in the hallway of the small flat with her arms folded across her narrow chest. She twitched, nervous and birdlike, as if she were desperate to flutter away back to the outside world.
‘You don’t have to.’ Rachel Honey put her arm around Amanda’s narrow shoulders before looking at Cass. ‘She’s been staying with me since it happened. She’s handed in her notice and I don’t blame her either.’
Cass was impressed with the girl. ‘If you two want to wait in the sitting room, I won’t be too long. Which was Angie’s room?’
‘Second on the left. Just past the bathroom.’
After a cursory glance into the freshly scrubbed kitchen – there was no hint of what had happened in there, either to the carrots Angie Lane had been chopping, or that she’d bled to death beneath them on the lino – Cass went into her bedroom. Several boxes filled with her belongings were lined against the wall. The first was full of clothes; the second was filled with paperbacks and textbooks.
‘Are you looking for anything in particular?’
Cass looked up to see Rachel Honey standing in the doorway.
‘I could probably help you if you are,’ she continued. ‘I packed her things up, so I know what’s in each of those.’ She nodded to the boxes. ‘Angie’s parents are coming to collect them in a couple of days. I don’t think they could face it until after the funeral.’
‘And when is that?’
‘Tomorrow.’
‘Will you be going?’
‘I’ll drive Amanda there, so yes. I wasn’t as close to Angie as she was, but what I knew of her I liked.’
‘Did she seem suicidal to you?’
The dark-haired girl looked thoughtful for a moment. ‘I would say no, but then I would be wrong. She did kill herself. When Amanda found her she was still alive, and holding onto the knife.’