The Shadow of the Soul: The Dog-Faced Gods Book Two

by Sarah Pinborough

  The brown eyes were filled with terror, but somewhere behind that there was still an echo of hope. That was unfortunate, for Mr Red at any rate. He was about to become very disappointed. It always astounded Mr Bright just how misplaced hope could be, and this was no exception. Perhaps it was part of being human; perhaps it was that hope that had garnered support for the one who thought he could come against him. Looking at the accounts showed that he had clearly appealed to those who believed they were dying. He shook the thought away. He had never been much of a philosopher, and he didn’t intend to start now.

  ‘I know who your mystery partner is. It doesn’t take long to find these things out if you understand how to look.’

  ‘Who? Who is it?’

  ‘Oh no.’ Mr Bright wiggled a manicured finger back and forth. ‘I think that’s probably quite irrelevant to you now. I also think it is just that you remain in the dark.’ He smiled, but although his eyes twinkled, they lacked amusement.

  ‘This does, however, leave me in a position where I no longer require your services. I think it’s time to terminate your contract with us, Mr Asher Red. I’m sure you understand.’

  Asher Red’s mouth moved slightly, as if he were trying to force more words from somewhere amidst the broken teeth.

  ‘I shall have to be quick about it,’ Mr Bright continued, ‘which I’m sure will be a relief to both of us. I have a meeting with the architects’ – he allowed himself a little humour at his private pun –‘at the site of the new building in an hour or so and I wouldn’t want to be late, so let’s get started, shall we?’

  In the chair, Asher Red made a mewling sound as whatever vain hope he’d had trickled away. After that the air stilled, as if time itself had held its breath. Castor Bright’s eyes burned and he allowed himself to become. He laughed with the joy in liberation, and bright light filled the room, the gold turning to white and then something that shone beyond that. Asher Red began to scream, but Mr Bright barely noticed it. In the moments before the man died, Mr Bright shared his secrets with him – he showed all he was, all he ever had been, ever would be, and all the terrible power and glory that was held in the Glow.

  Mr Bellew liked the cool of his new underground headquarters. He was hidden almost in plain sight. It had been a long time since any of the Network had visited the secondary tunnels and empty spaces they had once used as their headquarters. It had been a novelty when the Underground system had been new more than a hundred and fifty years ago, but that had soon worn off, as very few of their number liked the idea that they were occupying the bowels of a world that belonged to them, rather than rising above it. Mr Bellew had never been interested in metaphor, however, and the old headquarters suited his purpose now.

  He watched the three women strapped down in the strange white pods that were identical to those so far away in the House of Intervention. There had been a lot of screaming from them during the course of the day, but he couldn’t help that. He had had to push them; he had no time to nursemaid them through this. As it was, the changes were happening faster than he or any of the technicians had expected – but then, none of them, including Mr Bellew himself, had ever seen anything like this before. How could they have?

  The physical transformation had come last with those who had passed their gifts on before they died: there was no reason to suspect it would be any different with these women, and he was happy about that. He needed them as they were for now, and as far as he could tell, the only outward sign of the chemical changes that were raging through their simple bodies was the unhealthy sweaty sheen on their skin.

  All three had started projecting almost as soon as they’d been hooked up to the machinery, but it was the Porter girl’s data-stream that was the most interesting. Where the other girls’ screens were filled with random images that made no sense, thus far at least, Abigail Porter was projecting with purpose: the faces were all recognisable; politicians and figures in business, all influential, each driven by very different ambitions. He didn’t need to put questions to her regarding many of these personalities – that information had already been taken at the House, when they all rose to – or were placed in – positions of prominence. The House had indicated who would create balance in this unstable world, and they had been duly elected in accordance with the findings. Mr Bellew intended to add a little unbalance, in order to support his cause – to bring a little chaos back. He smiled at his own joke with a touch of pride. Wit wasn’t normally in his repertoire. Perhaps Mr Bright had taught him something after all.

  It was the final image that Porter was projecting that caught his interest: a man he knew nothing and everything about: Cassius Jones. Over and over again, the dark-haired, angry-looking policeman flashed onto one or all of her screens, and she would start to hum some old piece of music he didn’t quite recognise under her breath. As soon as she broke the silence, the others would join in tunelessly and their screens would blank out for a brief moment. The man’s image bothered Mr Bellew. Mr Bright thought no one else had paid much attention to his tracing of the bloodlines, but they’d all paid attention when he brought the Jones family together. Both sides had been direct descendants. This projection was the boy’s uncle – the boy whose hidden presence – along with some lingering loyalty from days long gone by – had made it so hard for Mr Bellew to get support … at least until the Dying had come among them. That changed things. But still, many saw the boy as some kind of saviour. Mr Bellew sat on a fence. They all knew whose bloodline it was, and that one could go either way – cruel or kind, saviour or destroyer. As far as Mr Bellew was concerned, the boy and his family were just the joker in the pack: maybe they’d be something, and maybe they’d be nothing. The House of Intervention had always been silent on that one. Any questions had drawn a blank, ever since Castor Bright had brought Alan and Evelyn Jones together, and yet here was Cassius Jones, on Abigail Porter’s screens. Still, he thought, the policeman was not his immediate concern. He needed to get these women ready for the tasks he had planned for them.

  ‘Try again,’ he said. The projecting was all well and good, but if they couldn’t reflect, then it was all pointless. They had the potential to be the perfect assassins: they were each highly trained in self-defence and gun usage, and understood the top politicians in each of their home countries. They knew the layouts of buildings and the movements of leaders. If they could master reflection and be in several places at once, then he could cause more than enough unrest – not perhaps for what the sick expected from him, but for his own ends. The sick were dying anyway, and once he was done, then perhaps it would be best if they died more quickly.

  The Russian girl spouted gibberish as the machines whirred around them, enhancing whatever abilities were coming naturally – or perhaps unnaturally – to them now that they were changing, and the American began to cry, whispering softly to her God. She needed to learn that he was her God now. He looked back at Porter. Why did he get the feeling she was fighting his commands? She could do better than this, he was sure of it.

  ‘Try harder,’ he growled at her, and nodded to one of the technicians. Three more lights came on down the side of her pod and the girl gasped. Her eyes glowed silver – and then it happened: a second Abigail Porter appeared beside Mr Bellew. He smiled. For someone who had been known simply as a general, a man of brute force, he was getting better at these games.

  ‘It hurts,’ both Abigail Porters said, ‘oh God, it hurts!’

  ‘Don’t stop now.’ Mr Bellew looked from one to the other. ‘Now you just have to make the Reflection hard.’

  A shimmery image of the American appeared on the other side of him. It wasn’t as strong as Abigail’s, but it was there, and he got her soft tears in stereo too. Mr Bellew laughed aloud as the Russian finally managed a brief flicker of herself on the other side of the room. He was Charlie, and these were his Angels.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Back at the station, energy hummed through the team filling the Incident Ro
om. Everyone was up, everyone was on. Even through his own tiredness and jangling nerves he could feel it in himself: it was the hard buzz that was felt when getting a result on someone’s death. They had Amanda Kemble in custody, and now Richard Shearman. Everything was wrapping up – as far as the team was concerned, anyway. For Cass there were still lots of answers he needed, and he intended to get them.

  Armstrong was striding into an office further along from Cass’s when he grabbed him. The sergeant almost jumped.

  ‘Where’s Dr Shearman?’

  ‘Number 3. Look, the DCI wants to talk to you—’

  ‘I’ll go up in a second. I just need to check on the doctor.’

  ‘Okay,’ Armstrong said. His hand held the door to, leaving only nothing of the room visible through the small gap. Someone on the other side was on the phone. The words weren’t clear, but Cass was sure whoever it was had an American accent. Ramsey? Was Ramsey here?

  His heart tripped over its own beat and he stared at Armstrong, whose gaze slipped away as a voice called his name from behind them both.

  A constable held up a receiver.

  ‘Got Phone Records on the phone for you.’ The constable smiled. ‘No pun intended.’

  ‘Phone Records?’ Cass studied his sergeant.

  ‘Yeah.’ Toby Armstrong licked his lips. ‘I thought I’d get Amanda Kemble’s call details too – you know, make sure the case against her and Cage is watertight. She must have called him since Angie’s death.’

  ‘Good thinking,’ Cass said, forcing himself to smile. Something was wrong here; he could feel it. Armstrong was nervous.

  ‘I’ll be back up in ten minutes, okay?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Cass walked away, heading down to the interview rooms. He did his best to keep his pace even. Whatever was going on, they weren’t ready to ask him about it yet, and that suited him fine.

  ‘Shouldn’t there be two of you?’ Dr Shearman was sweating despite the coolness of the bland interview room. He’d only been in there ten minutes or so and already large circles were visible around the armpits of his shirt. There was bravado in his voice, but his eyes were all puppy-dog soft and wanting to please. Cass had seen his sort before. Normally he pitied them; not this man, though – this one was too steeped in conspiracy for any sympathy. Two babies had been stolen and several students were dead. Somehow this man was involved in both cases.

  ‘Don’t believe everything you see on TV. We’re busy today. And anyway, you see that bulb up there?’ He pointed to a dead light on the wall. ‘If I was recording this, that light would be on.’ Of course he should have been recording it. The DCI would go ballistic if he knew Cass was alone with the suspect, but he had a feeling that this was going to be the least of his worries shortly. Inside his head, a clock ticked loudly. It had been Ramsey he’d heard upstairs, he was sure of it. What would the Chelsea DI be doing here, other than somehow tracking Dr Powell’s death back to Cass? There were probably other cases on the go that crossed over between the two nicks, but for Ramsey to show up today about a different matter would be too much of a coincidence – and one thing that Mr Bright and Cass appeared to agree on was that such coincidences didn’t exist. The world was shifting again, and Cass was very much on his own. He’d talk to Ramsey later. It hadn’t been Cass on the CCTV image of Gibbs’ killer. Ramsey would trust that someone was setting Cass up – they were friends. And after all, it had happened before and Ramsey had seen the truth. He looked at the sweating doctor whose face was hidden behind a curly beard.

  ‘Let’s think of this as more of an informal chat,’ Cass said. ‘Off the record.’ He laid out the pictures of the dead students in front of him. ‘James Busby. Katie Dodds. Cory Denter. Jasmine Green. Recognise them?’

  Dr Shearman’s eyes narrowed, confused. The tape wasn’t running and this wasn’t a proper interview. That information wasn’t sitting with what he’d expected, and Cass hoped it would unsettle him enough to slip up.

  ‘All I did was try and cure their phobias by hypnosis and exposure while under hypnosis. It was a six-week course. I did nothing to them that would make them self-harm. I was trying to help them.’

  ‘But you didn’t come forward when you saw them in the paper. Surely you must have realised that they had all been through your research facility.’

  ‘I didn’t think it was relevant. They’d all finished their courses with me well before they killed themselves. It wasn’t because of me.’ His words came out in hurried breaths. ‘And I didn’t want to lose my funding.’

  ‘The funding that allowed you to pay them so well? In cash too. I’m sure we’ll be contacting the tax office about that.’

  ‘The cash came from the company that funds me. It’s gifted money. They weren’t doing a job.’

  ‘All these kids did your programme, and yet none of them told any of their friends or even their families.’ Cass looked up from the photos of the dead that smiled on paper but gripped at him with cold fingers in the dark night. ‘Now I might not know much about kids, but I know they talk. So how come they were so secretive?’

  Dr Shearman chewed his bottom lip for a moment and squirmed in his seat. This was no cool cucumber.

  ‘Hypnosis,’ he said eventually. ‘When they came for the induction we tested them for their susceptibility. While they were under they were told not to talk about the programme. The funding company did it. They said they didn’t want the students sharing what they were doing because we might then get inundated by applicants with false phobias just wanting to make some easy money.’

  ‘Because you were paying so well.’ Cass leaned forward. ‘Why were you paying so well?’

  ‘I paid what I was instructed to pay.’

  ‘I thought you were in charge of your own research, but maybe you’re just someone else’s puppet. Who funded you?’

  ‘A company called HMG Investments. They’re part of The Bank.’ Dr Shearman had started to peel skin from the edge of his thumbs with his fingernails. If he wasn’t careful he’d start to bleed.

  ‘Of course they are. Flush5 is owned by The Bank, isn’t it? And yours is a Flush5 facility. But give me a name.’

  ‘Look—’ Dr Shearman eyes pleaded for some kind of clemency as he spoke. He clearly didn’t know Cass Jones at all. ‘I hadn’t seen those students for weeks before they died. I barely remembered their faces, let alone their names. I don’t actually do the treatments, I just supervise and look at the results. The only time I even think about the names is when he comes to see the brain scans.’ He stopped abruptly, his eyes guilty.

  ‘He?’ Cass asked softly.

  ‘No one. Nothing.’

  ‘Someone other than you had an interest in their brain scans?’

  ‘I’m saying nothing until my solicitor gets here.’ Dr Shearman ran one hand over his curls. They shone with sweat. He wasn’t holding together well.

  ‘You’ve done all right for yourself, haven’t you?’ Cass kept his tone light. ‘A very nice place of work right in the heart of town. No grotty hospital ward for you. None of that will stop five manslaughter charges being brought against you, though. You might not get a life sentence, but you will rot in prison for the rest of your miserable life.’

  ‘But I didn’t—’

  ‘It doesn’t matter that they finished your supposed fucking programme weeks before they died,’ Cass growled. ‘It’ll be easy to say that something in your secretive research set them off because there are no other links, don’t you understand? People will take answers where they can find them. Add into that the likelihood of the court finding out that a baby died in the your only shift at the first-ever Flush5 ward in the Portman Hospital all those years ago and you’ll look like a total incompetent. Flush5 won’t go anywhere near you – they’ll find a way to hang you out to dry and distance themselves.’ He watched Dr Shearman’s eyes dart this way and that as if he could miraculously find an escape route from this situation, before adding, ‘Especially as the baby didn’t
die, did he, Doctor?’

  ‘How do you—?’ Dr Shearman recoiled as if punched hard in the face. ‘Oh Christ, I always knew it would get messy. I should have known.’ He rested his head on his hands and took two deep breaths. Cass thought perhaps he was trying to stop himself crying. Weak people always thought the bad things they got involved in were somehow not their fault because they hadn’t thought them through properly. It was an excuse that he never swallowed. No one thought anything through – they just made random selfish choices. Some people were just better at accepting the outcomes than others.

  ‘Who looked at the brain scans?’ he asked.

  ‘A man called Bright. Mr Bright. Whatever happened to those kids it was to do with him – not me. Something about their scans interested him and he asked me for their addresses and files.’ He shrugged, a helpless gesture in a helpless man. ‘I gave them to him and that was it.’

  As his head reeled, a small part of Cass wondered how his body could even be feeling surprise. It had to be Mr Bright. Of course it did – everything always came back to Castor Bright. He was everywhere Cass turned, and he always had been, even when Cass had been blissfully unaware himself.

  ‘I never wanted to be in straight medicine,’ Dr Shearman continued. ‘I thought I did when I started out – it sounded romantic. But I didn’t have the nerves for it. There were too many incidents, things that went slightly wrong. Not enough to cause any inquiries, but enough to raise eyebrows. I found the pressure of having people’s lives in my hands just too much. I locumed for ages, and I thought that I was probably going to end up as GP in some inner city surgery where they couldn’t be too choosy. I’d never make partner. I knew then that I should have gone into research rather than general practice – I’d always been more interested in the workings of the mind rather than the body, but I figured it was too late. No one was giving out research grants any more, and certainly not to men like me.’ His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. ‘Then I was approached by Mr Bright. I should have trusted my first instinct and said no, but he was offering me my dreams – financial support through my retraining, a facility …’