The Shadow of the Soul (19 page)

Newton snivelled into the back of his jewelled hand, ‘I didn’t mean it! I didn’t really want to do it.’

Cass didn’t offer any platitudes, but he lit a cigarette and slid a box of tissues across the table. It was a lie, of course. What Newton really meant was that he wished he hadn’t done it now. Then he’d meant it. This was no crime of passion with a handy tyre-iron. This was, in its own way, premeditated. To Cass, anything outside of a moment of instinct was premeditated. Newton had thought this through before he’d started it, and the sneaky fucker had almost got away with it.

‘We know you left your sister’s house before nine. What happened next?’

Newton ran his hand over his greased-back hair, adding more odorous liquid to the dampness of his palm.

‘It had been a God-awful evening,’ he sniffed. ‘They look down on me, you know. Always have. He makes out it’s because I occasionally borrow money from my mother and he thinks that’s wrong in a son, but then I don’t have the luxury of a high-paying job. I had the initiative to go into business for myself, and they’re stupid if they think I don’t
see how they look down on me for what I do … And then of course there’s my lifestyle.’ His words were turning into one long whine.

‘If you could keep to the point, Mr Newton?’

‘I am.’ The angry eyes that darted up to Cass’s were feral and mean and full of self-pity. ‘It’s what started it. Emma asked me if I’d started seeing anyone – its been a while since I last had any meaningful relationship – and although part of me knows she doesn’t really care and just thinks if I met someone then she wouldn’t have to bloody invite me to Christmas, I was almost about to tell her about Joe and then that awful husband of hers made some joke about how I was dead in gay years, surely. I sniped back with something about him not being able to give Emma any children, and after that I left. You can imagine the evening had gone a little sour.’

Newton’s sneer made clear that he felt his brother-inlaw’s barb had been worse than his own. Cass liked him even less for that pettiness. Murder was one thing, and everyone was capable of it in some circumstance or other, but this self-pitying prissiness was something else.

‘You were seeing Joe Lidster?’ Armstrong asked.

‘No.’ Newton shook his greasy head and blew his snotty nose before taking a deep breath and sitting up slightly taller in his seat. ‘But I had hopes. I loved him, you see.’

He met Cass’s gaze with a look that defied the DI to challenge the purity of that emotion.

Cass didn’t give a fuck. He knew enough about love to know that there was nothing pure about it. It was a greedy, selfish emotion that rolled like a pig in the muck of life, and Newton was testament to that.

‘And you killed him,’ Cass said.

‘I got home and heard Joe talking, so I locked up. First of
all I thought he must be on the phone, and it actually cheered me up a bit. I thought I’d persuade him to have a sherry or beer with me, and then I could unwind and laugh about Emma and her awful husband and all their middle-class ways. As I got up the stairs and heard a second voice – a male voice – I realised he’d brought someone back to the flat.’ His mouth tightened. ‘It came as a bit of a shock. He’d never done that before. Anyway, I thought perhaps I’d offer them both a drink, you know, be sociable. I could hear them talking, so I presumed they weren’t actually doing anything and I was curious to see who this man was. It may sound odd, but it encouraged me, that he had a man there, I mean. I hadn’t realised that he’d been looking for someone, so I hadn’t been overly forward.’

Cass could only imagine what kind of clumsy flirtation Neil Newton had been attempting up until then. Their ideas of subtle were undoubtedly miles apart.

‘It was stupid of me. I found that out.’ Newton blew his nose again.

‘What happened?’

‘I went to knock on his door and I heard them. They were laughing. The other man said something about how my home was a “shit-hole”, and he didn’t understand how Joe could live there and not go mad. Then Joe said … He that if the other man met me then he’d understand the flat.’

His brow furrowed and his eyes dried. Cass, Armstrong and the interview room were gone and Newton was back in that moment. ‘They were
laughing
at me. Joe said things about me – hurtful things, worse than anything Emma’s Aaron ever said. He said things about how I looked, and what I wore. He called me a preened chicken who thought it was a peacock – they both laughed a lot at that one.’ He stopped, and blew his nose again.

He looked down at his hands, then whispered, ‘I just stood there and listened. I couldn’t bring myself to move even though I felt sick. They were laughing at me as if I was
nothing
. Joe was laughing. He called me pathetic and pitiful – and then he said that I meant well, in my own simpering way.’ He looked up at Cass. ‘Can you imagine? After
everything
I’d done for him? After I’d let him share my home?’

‘He paid rent,’ Cass said. ‘He was your
lodger
.’

‘You don’t understand,’ Newton said. ‘It was all unsaid, but it was there.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘I went back to my room and sat there for a few minutes, just feeling numb and angry. The newspaper was still on the floor, from where I’d been reading in bed the night before, and the whole front page was going on about these student suicides.’ Newton’s mouth twitched nervously. ‘I waited until I heard the other man leave. Then I went down to the shop and got a bottle of GBL from the stockroom and two sets of fluffy cuffs.’ He looked at Armstrong nervously, as if having a bottle of a controlled substance in his possession was somehow going to make the murder charge worse. ‘Then I made two Irish coffees and poured a couple of capfuls into one of them.’

He took a deep breath before continuing and Cass noticed his hands were trembling. Was Newton only just realising the enormity of what he’d done?

‘I took the drinks into his room and pretended to be interested in his new boyfriend. We chatted as if everything was perfectly normal and I told him about what Aaron had said and Joe told me to take no notice and that I was a very attractive man. But this time I could see him laughing – he was just a boy, and he was
laughing
at me. He’d
always
been
laughing at me and I just hadn’t seen it.’ He gritted his teeth at the memory.

‘He started to get woozy pretty quickly. I told him I must have made the drink too strong and said I’d get a glass of water. I came back with the cuffs and the knife. He panicked a bit then, I could see it in his eyes, but he couldn’t get himself off the bed. I wrote the “Chaos in the darkness” sign and then I cut his wrists.’ Newton’s lip trembled and tears spilled over his cheeks. It was the moment. Every killer like this had it: the instant when they saw what they’d done, and what they’d become, when they really couldn’t believe the awfulness of it.

He was speaking almost by rote now, as if all the emotion had been leached from him. ‘It was harder than I expected, and my hands were shaking so much, and I couldn’t look at him. Right then I hated him. I didn’t want to look at those beautiful dark eyes. I left him there and I went back to my room. I changed my clothes and drank my coffee. After half an hour I went to check on him and he was dead. I just had to look at the amount of blood all over the bed to know that. I hadn’t realised—’ His breath caught in his throat. ‘I hadn’t realised there’d be so much blood. He looked so pale.’

Finally, he burst into tears. ‘I loved him.’

Cass watched the man snivel and sob and mutter empty words into his damp sleeves and crumpled tissues. Joe Lidster had been right. Neil Newton
was
a pathetic little man. What Lidster had not yet learned about the world – what he now never would – was that the weak and pathetic could often be the most dangerous.

‘No, you didn’t,’ Cass broke in to Newton’s self-obsessed litany, ‘you killed him. In cold blood.’

The words hit Newton like a slap in the face, and he
blinked several times. Reality was settling in, and it didn’t look like it was a good feeling.

Cass threw a follow-up punch. ‘We will be charging you with first degree murder. You had better get your affairs in order.’

He stood up and headed for the door. Despite the cigarettes he’d smoked throughout the interview, the room was still filled with Newton’s cloying stench. Now, beneath the cologne and the sweat and the hair gel, the pungent smell of fear fought its way to the surface.

‘Wait – first degree murder?’ Newton’s pudgy face had paled. ‘But that— That’s the death penalty, isn’t it?’

Cass said nothing.

‘But they can’t— I mean, I didn’t mean to— Oh dear God! Oh dear God …’

Newton was still muttering pleas to a God that couldn’t help him when Cass closed the door and left him to the booking sergeant. His belt and shoes would be gone soon, and then reality would really grip Newton. There was nowhere to hide in a prison cell. Cass had spent his own time in one a long time ago. But unlike Newton, Cass had got out.

Cass carefully took Joe Lidster’s smiling face down from the board and slid it into the buff folder. It was good to have one less to look at.

‘His parents will sleep better tonight,’ Armstrong said.

‘Let’s hope so.’ Cass wasn’t convinced. Answers didn’t always bring peace. They just brought knowledge, which was a different thing entirely. The trick was to make your peace with the knowledge, and not everyone could do that.

He looked at the board, and the young faces that stared
back at his own. There were no answers for them yet. He frowned as he paused at Jasmine Green, so different in the laughing photo from the dead body half in and half out of the television. The earlier conversation with her boyfriend echoed in his head.

‘I want to see their medical records. Jasmine’s boyfriend didn’t know anything useful about a cash-in-hand job, but he did say she had claustrophobia. Let’s see if the rest of them had any personal issues like that. There has to be something.’

‘I’m on it.’

‘Put in the request and we’ll take a look at them in the morning with fresh eyes. We’ve worked hard enough for today.’

This time Armstrong didn’t argue with him. Back in his office, Cass pulled out the piece of paper with Elizabeth Gray’s parents’ address on it. If he left now he could be there by half-seven, even in the rush-hour traffic.

‘You seen this, Cass?’ the desk sergeant asked as he headed out the door.

‘What?’

‘More bombs.’ The man nodded at the TV screen under the high desk wall. ‘New York, this time. These people are fucking crazy.’

Cass watched the images for a second. More burning, more smoke, more death. People pouring out of Metro stations, and the wreck of a bus filling a street. It was London and Moscow all over again – it was the wood, though, and not the trees.

‘Yeah, it’s terrible,’ Cass said, turning his back on the miniaturised devastation. ‘But I’ve got smaller things to worry about.’

*

He was at his car when David Fletcher rang from an unknown number. When Cass answered, he half-expected to hear that beautiful voice from the previous night on the other end. It took a moment before he registered it was the head of the ATD, even after he’d introduced himself.

‘What are you calling me for?’

‘It’s about Abigail Porter,’ Fletcher said, ‘the woman whose sister killed herself.’

‘What about her?’ Tall, willowy limbs, and a flash of silver in her eyes. Cass didn’t need reminding who Abigail Porter was.

‘She’s gone missing.’

‘She’s not with her parents?’

‘No. That wouldn’t qualify as missing.’

For a moment Cass said nothing. Porter was the PM’s bodyguard. The suicide of a sibling was terrible news to hear – Cass knew that himself – but he doubted it would make her do anything crazy. She’d have been psyche-evaluated a thousand times over in her job, and whatever grief she felt would be normal and manageable … Unless she’d just snapped, of course. You could never tell what was going on under the surface.

‘I can only repeat my question,’ he said, eventually. ‘What are you calling me for?’ It’s not my fucking problem, was what he really wanted to say, but David Fletcher was a person who could make his life difficult, and though it might be late in the game to learn diplomacy, Cass had quite enough shit to deal with without adding to it by being unnecessarily rude.

‘Trust me, I didn’t want to. Personally, I don’t see what some fucked-up DI from Paddington Green can do that I can’t.’

‘You’ve read my file, then.’ Cass almost laughed. At least Fletcher was honest.

‘Several times.’

‘And you’re still calling me?’

‘Apparently you have friends in high places. This is a national security issue and I didn’t want to share it with you at all, but it appears I have no choice.’

‘So who told you to call me?’ The first stirrings of a chill knowledge settled in Cass’s stomach.
Wheels within wheels
.

‘My boss, but I don’t know who the fuck told him. And I don’t care. The outcome’s the same. I’m supposed to get you transferred to Special Branch. You need to come in and be debriefed.’

Fletcher sounded like he was talking through gritted teeth, and Cass didn’t blame him. They were both getting their strings pulled, and Cass knew who was doing it: the elusive Mr Bright. What the fuck did he want with Cass now? What did Abigail Porter’s disappearance have to do with him – and why would he give a shit anyway?