The Double Life of Cassiel Roadnight

by Jenny Valentine

  “Why?” Floyd said, and he could barely keep the disgust out of his voice. “Why would you want to be someone else? Why would you steal from someone like that?”

  I thought about that moment in the hostel, stuck in a storeroom, looking at Cassiel Roadnight’s face and seeing my own.

  “Because he was handed to me on a plate,” I said. “Because I am nobody and I have nobody. Because there was really nothing to lose.”

  Floyd said, “I look at you and I still see him, even though I know.”

  “Don’t look at me then,” I said. “I’m sorry for what I did, but I can’t help what I look like.”

  He didn’t stop looking. I was like a really good forgery I suppose, and Floyd was an expert, studying me for differences, for tiny things that were left out.

  I asked him how he knew.

  Floyd looked away then. He said, “I didn’t know straight away. But when I did, it was obvious really. You’re very different.”

  “How?”

  “Cassiel was never my friend for a start,” Floyd said. “I was a joke to him. The only time he ever asked me for anything was at Hay on Fire, the night he…”

  “And that’s how you knew?”

  “You didn’t know anything,” he said. “You asked so many questions.”

  “True.”

  He shrugged and smiled. “And weirdly, you’re nicer than he was. You’re just different.”

  “You just said we were the same.”

  “If you’re not looking, you are. I was really looking.”

  “Wasn’t everybody else?”

  “People don’t look,” Floyd said. “They see. It’s different.”

  “How?”

  “People see what they expect to see, what they need to. Edie and Helen saw what they needed.”

  “And you?”

  Floyd shrugged. “I suppose I’m one of the few who didn’t need Cassiel to come back. So I could see you.”

  “And Frank?”

  “Frank knows you aren’t his brother. Frank always knew.”

  I thought about Frank, how he had welcomed me in. I felt again his brotherly hug, his warmth and excitement and affection. Could they really have been pretence? Was he really that good a liar? That cold and controlled and heartless?

  “How can you be so sure?” I said.

  “Because Frank killed him,” Floyd said. “Frank killed Cassiel.”

  “You said that,” I told him. “And nobody believed you.”

  “But you do,” Floyd said. “I think you do.”

  I asked him why, if Frank knew who I was (or who I wasn’t), he hadn’t said anything. Why hadn’t he chased me from the house or given me to the police or hung me out to dry?

  “Why was he so nice to me?” I said.

  “You’re not thinking,” Floyd said.

  I said I was too tired to think.

  “Frank’s never going to give you away,” Floyd said.

  “Why not?”

  “He needs you, if you think about it. Frank needs you more than anyone else does.”

  If Floyd was right, and Frank had killed Cassiel, then I was his alibi. As long as I was there being his brother, I was proof that his brother was still alive.

  It was obvious, if you were looking for it. And it was chilling. I had walked into a trap of my own making.

  If Floyd was right, Cassiel was dead and I was living with his killer. If Cassiel was dead, then Frank and I both had a terrible secret and we needed each other to keep it.

  But how could Floyd be so sure?

  “Tell me who you are,” he said again.

  “Nobody.”

  “How are you nobody? What does that mean?”

  “I woke up one day and I was on my own, and nothing I knew was true,” I said. “Not even my own name. That’s what that means.”

  “What’s your name?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t have one.”

  “What do people call you, apart from Cassiel Roadnight?”

  “My grandad called me Chap,” I said.

  “Chap.”

  “Yep. But it’s not my name. And he wasn’t my grandad. We weren’t related.”

  “Chap what?”

  “Chap nothing.”

  “Where do you live, Chap Nothing?”

  I looked at him. “Why do you want to know? Are you going to send me back there?”

  “Where are your mum and dad?” he said.

  “I don’t have a mum and dad,” I said. “I don’t have anyone. I live wherever I want.”

  “Did you run away?” he said.

  “Nobody’s looking for me, if that’s what you’re getting at,” I said. “Nobody’s missing me. I didn’t run away. I got lost. I don’t exist.”

  “Yes, you do,” Floyd said. “You’re sitting right here. I can see you.”

  “Well you’re the only one who can.”

  I asked him why he was so sure Cassiel was dead. I asked him why he was so certain Frank had killed him when even the police hadn’t listened, when the whole town thought it was crazy.

  “I wasn’t sure until this morning,” Floyd said. “I knew, but I wasn’t sure until you called.”

  I asked him what had happened, what had changed.

  “Mr Artemis,” Floyd said.

  “Who is that?” I said. “Who’s Mr Artemis anyway? Is it a code? That’s what I thought it was.”

  Frank shook his head. “It’s not a code,” he said. “It’s the darkest part of Frank’s dark secret.”

  “So tell me what it is. And how do you know it?”

  Floyd laughed quietly to himself.

  “What’s so funny?” I said.

  “Frank is going to be shitting himself right now.”

  “Tell me why exactly.”

  “Only Cassiel knew the truth about Mr Artemis. Only Cassiel and Frank. Nobody else in the world knew, and that’s why Frank had to kill him.”

  “You know about him.”

  “Only because of what Cassiel gave me the night he vanished. Only because I worked it out.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “To Frank,” Floyd said, “you’re either Cassiel back from the dead, or you’re his perfect watertight alibi and you just sprung a huge leak. Either way, Frank is bricking it. He’s back to square one.”

  I thought about Frank’s face, about the horror I’d seen on it, the glimpse of another person beneath, chaotic, lunatic, evil.

  “What about Edie?” I said. “And Helen?”

  Floyd shook his head. “They don’t know anything,” he said. “I’d bet my life on that.”

  “Or mine,” I said, a little sharp. “Mine seems to be the one you’re betting with.”

  A man and a dog opened the gate from the footpath to the warren. It creaked on its hinges and groaned shut. It wasn’t that close, the sound was very small, but we both looked up. Floyd looked up and ducked at the same time.

  “Is it Frank?” I said.

  “Can’t tell from here.”

  I thought about how empty this place was. How easily Frank could come and kill us both and walk away without a witness, without anyone seeing except the grass and the trees and the river. The grass and the trees and the river had never seemed more callous to me, had never seemed more useless.

  All this time I’d been worried about Frank seeing through me, about Cassiel showing up. I needn’t have been. I was safe in Cassiel’s place, the perfect piece in Frank’s puzzle. I was home free and I didn’t even know it.

  And Mr Artemis had ruined everything. Floyd had made me ruin it.

  I wanted to be angry with him, but I couldn’t. Wasn’t what I had done so much worse?

  “It’s not Frank,” he said, still looking. “Cos it’s not his dog. And I think that guy’s got grey hair.”

  “OK,” I said. “Tell me about Mr Artemis. Tell me how you can prove Frank is a killer, and then tell me what we are supposed to do about it.”

  He was quiet for a bit. We sat with our back
s to the water, scanning the common.

  Then Floyd said he wasn’t stupid. He said maybe he looked it. He was willing to concede that. He said, “People see what they want to see, remember?”

  “You don’t look stupid,” I said. “You look odd.”

  “Odd is stupid out here,” he said. “It’s a pretty straightforward place.”

  I didn’t know why he was saying all that. I didn’t see how it was relevant.

  I asked Floyd why Frank hadn’t come after him. I said, “How come he didn’t get to you when you accused him? If he killed Cassiel just for knowing, how come you’re not dead for going to the police? What makes you so safe?”

  Floyd shrugged. “Frank destroyed the evidence,” he said, still watching the man and his dog. “I’m sure the first thing he did was chuck all Cassiel’s stuff on the fire. He thinks there’s nothing left to condemn him.”

  “True.”

  “And he thought I was too stupid to bother with, like everyone else does.”

  “Right,” I said. “You’re alive because you’re stupid.”

  “That’s my point,” he said. “I’m not stupid. I made copies.”

  “Copies?”

  He smiled at me, a small, shy, proud smile. “Of everything Cassiel threw at me in his bag. Of everything I handed in to the police.”

  “Evidence.”

  “Exactly. It wasn’t nothing, like the police said. It just took some working out.”

  “And what did it say?”

  Floyd looked at me. “That Frank is in it up to his neck. And that you are not the first person he’s killed.”

  Floyd said Frank was crooked. His flash car, his expensive shoes, his handsome lifestyle were all stolen, all incriminating, all built on quicksand.

  “Everyone thinks he’s this big success,” I said.

  “He is,” Floyd said. “He looks that way, anyway.”

  “So who’s Mr Artemis then?”

  “Who was he,” Floyd corrected me. “He’s long dead.”

  “OK. Who was he?”

  “Mr Artemis was one of Frank’s clients, a wealthy old recluse with a fortune and no family. A perfect steal,” Floyd said.

  “What are you saying?” I asked him.

  “Frank stole him,” Floyd said. “He stole his money and then I reckon he killed him.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Look him up. Lonely old millionaire, died of natural causes. Turned out to be a lot poorer than anyone thought he was.”

  “And you think Frank took his money?”

  “I know he did.”

  “But you don’t know he killed him.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t put it past him. Would you?”

  I thought about Frank’s perfect front, his smart, successful, capable self. Could a murderer hide himself away that well? Could he walk around without a trace of remorse?

  According to Floyd, Frank had a bank account in Switzerland, filled with siphoned-off money. He’d been stealing from Mr Artemis for years.

  “Well how come he didn’t get caught?” I said. “How come nobody knew?”

  “Cassiel knew.”

  “How?” I said. “How do you find out about something like that?”

  “I’ve no idea,” Floyd said. “He’s not here to ask.”

  Cassiel had left details in code, in a notebook. He had records of online transactions saved on to discs. Floyd had spent hours going over them, weeks and months trying to make sense of them all.

  “Everything’s there,” he said. “Frank’s Swiss account, and Cassiel’s account too.”

  “Cassiel’s?”

  “Cassiel was blackmailing Frank,” Floyd said. “I worked out what he was doing. He set up an account of his own. Frank was putting money in there regularly. The amounts were getting bigger and bigger. It was all getting taken away from him.”

  “So Frank had stolen from his client and Cassiel was stealing from his brother?”

  “Yes. Except Frank didn’t know it was Cassiel. Not at first. I guess he just knew that if he got caught he’d go to prison for a very long time. He didn’t know who found out about him. He didn’t know who he was paying. But he paid because he was scared.”

  “He didn’t know it was his own brother?”

  “No. But he found out.”

  “How?”

  “God knows,” Floyd said. “Maybe Cassiel got lazy when he got rich. Maybe he spent too much money. He had the best clothes. He bragged about getting a car the moment he was old enough. He was flash like Frank was, flash and unsubtle.”

  “You didn’t like Cassiel very much, did you,” I said.

  Floyd laughed, but his face was grim. “I didn’t like Cassiel and Cassiel didn’t like me.”

  “So why did Cassiel give his bag to you?” I said. “Why did he trust you with it, if he didn’t even like you?”

  “I don’t know why he chose me. I think he was desperate. I think he chose the first person he saw, it’s that simple. And he said I was the last person Frank would think of.”

  “So why are you doing this?” I asked him. “Why are you bothering?”

  “Murder is murder,” Floyd said.

  “You think Frank killed Cassiel.”

  “I know he did.”

  “And you think he killed this Mr Artemis as well?”

  Floyd shrugged. “I don’t have proof,” he said. “I just think he did. Would he kill his own brother just for money? I think there was more to it than that.”

  “OK.”

  “And if you’ve killed once, I think it’s not so hard to kill again. If you’ve got everything to lose.”

  I nodded. “Murder is murder,” I said. “And a lie is a lie.”

  “Nobody’s died because of you,” he said.

  I thought about Grandad. I thought about Cassiel.

  “But somebody’s death could go unnoticed. That’s it, isn’t it?”

  “Just because me and Cassiel weren’t friends, doesn’t mean I want to see Frank get away with it.”

  “I understand,” I said. “I get it.”

  Floyd told me again what Cassiel said to him that night, the night he disappeared.

  “He said, ‘I’m finished. He knows it’s me. It’s all over. I’m dead.’ He was terrified. Frank killed him,” Floyd said. “He killed him and he deleted his own account and he took Cassiel’s.”

  “So Frank’s account was Mr Artemis?”

  “No. Cassiel’s was Mr Artemis. You can imagine how that made Frank feel, paying back the money he’d taken from a dead man. Whether he killed him or not, it must have felt like revenge. Frank’s account was under a different name.”

  “And what happened to that?”

  “He emptied it. I think he emptied it and then wiped it. I think he killed Cassiel and then he got into the Mr Artemis account and deleted his own.”

  “Covering his tracks.”

  “Exactly. And then he wiped everything from Cassiel’s computer.”

  “Frank said I did that. He told me Cassiel did that so nobody would find him. He said that’s what the police told him.”

  “Of course he did,” Floyd said. “He knew you didn’t know. He knew you’d admit to anything he said Cassiel had done.”

  I blinked and swallowed and it started to make sense.

  “Cassiel’s account was Artemis, not Frank’s,” Floyd said. “That’s why when you said his name to Frank it would have floored him. You shouldn’t know. That’s why he’s afraid of you, whoever you are. All the money went into Cassiel’s Artemis account on the night he died. After he died. That’s where Frank put it.”

  “Go over it again,” I said. “Just once. Just simply. Tell me what you know.”

  Floyd took a deep breath. He held my gaze and he spoke calmly and he counted off a list of things on his fingers.

  “I know Frank stole money from a rich old man who didn’t live long enough to notice,” he said. “I know Cassiel was blackmailing him. I know Cassiel set up an acc
ount in Mr Artemis’s name and Frank paid money into it. I know that Frank found out it was Cassiel’s and I know that Cassiel tried to run. I know that Cassiel gave me the evidence, hard as it was to decipher. I know that Frank killed his brother and hid his body and transferred all the money.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’ve got the pin number,” Floyd said. “I finally worked it out. A lucky guess, believe it or not. 0511. The 5th of November. I’ve got access to Frank’s Mr Artemis account. There’s more than a million quid in it. I checked.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  Floyd said it was up to me what happened next. He said as far as he could see there were four possible things that could happen.

  “Number one. You could go to Frank,” he said, “and tell him what I know, tell him what I told you.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  Floyd looked at me. His eyes very dark, very matter of fact, unafraid. “There’s a lot of money at stake here,” he said. “You and Frank might decide to kill me, split the cash and get on with your double lives.”

  “Don’t be sick.”

  “You might want to carry on being Cassiel Roadnight,” he said. “Don’t you?”

  I didn’t answer him. “What’s number two?” I said.

  “Number two, you leave me out of it, but you and Frank agree to keep each other’s secrets. That might work.”

  “What for?”

  “I can’t prove a thing because of you,” Floyd said. “If you go on being Cassiel, then Cassiel was never murdered.”

  “I make Frank safe,” I said.

  “Exactly. Which is why he might not kill you. Which is why you might be safe too.” Floyd tried to smile. “It’s a mutually beneficial, symbiotic relationship,” he said. “We did them in biology at school. Parasites.”

  “Nice.”

  “Well, I’m useless without you, and Frank needs you as much as you need him. You could help each other out.”

  “I guess we could,” I said.

  “You’ve got to hope Frank’s thinking that too right now – otherwise you’re dead.”

  “And what about you?” I said. “You know I’m not him. Wouldn’t you say something?’

  Floyd laughed. “Me?” he said. “Are you joking? Who’s going to believe me?”

  He was right. I was safe for as long as I wanted to be. Safe, if you could call it that.