The Shadow of the Soul (28 page)

‘Ambulance.’ A hand clutched at his arm. The fingers were cold and clammy.

‘Name.’ Cass tried to keep the urgency out of his voice. The wound in the man’s stomach did not look good at all, either the location, or the amount of his blood that was pumping out of it. He didn’t have a hope in hell of surviving.

‘Dr Shearman,’ Powell whispered. ‘Richard Shearman. It wasn’t anything to do with me. I didn’t organise it. I just … I just facilitated it.’ His breathing was a wet rattle. ‘Now call an ambulance,
please
.’

Cass stood up and shifted backwards slightly, keeping his feet out of the sticky red mess. Powell’s eyes followed him. They were full of panic. Cass stared at him.
I just facilitated it
. What the hell kind of word was facilitated? He’d been part of a conspiracy to steal a baby, a conspiracy that had
killed the Grays, who’d just happened to be unfortunate enough to be due to give birth to a baby boy at the same time as Christian and Jessica Jones. A couple who thought they’d been lucky enough to get private care. A couple whose ‘luck’ had always been someone else’s choices. Thanks in part to this man, that couple were now dead and two little boys had exchanged fates, one to be blown away by a shotgun while he slept. The other was out there somewhere.
Faciliated
. Cass felt bile rise within his chest.

‘You don’t understand.’ The man on the ground tried to raise a limp arm, but it flopped back down. ‘I know who you are. You don’t understand.’ Powell flinched slightly, his mouth tugging downwards at the sides. His face had moved beyond grey to a deathly white. ‘Ambulance.
Please.’

‘There’s no time for that, don’t you think?’ Cass’s anger burned cold. ‘You’ve spent enough time in hospitals to know that, surely?’

Powell’s mouth moved again, but this time he couldn’t get the words out. He stared at Cass with whatever small glimmer of life he had left pleading silently to the policeman to
do something
. Cass matched his gaze until the light finally went out of the dying man’s eyes. It didn’t fade. It just clicked off. Death came like that to everyone.

It took a moment before Cass realised his hands were shaking. A chill rippled from deep within his gut. Why did he feel as if he’d plunged the knife into Powell himself? Because part of him was glad the man had died? Because, just for a moment, the dying man had represented everyone who’d ever fucked with his family? Who had killed him anyway, Mr Bright and the Network – because Cass was looking for Luke? If they’d paid him off all those years ago and he’d never said anything, why were they suddenly afraid he might talk now? It didn’t make sense.

He went to the sink and splashed water on his face before turning and leaning against the counter. Whatever the reasons behind it, this was a murder, and he needed to call it in, if one of the neighbours hadn’t already. How he was going to explain his own presence without killing his already half-dead career he didn’t know, but he’d hopefully have something figured out by the time the squad car turned up.

He let his head drop and took a deep breath to slow his heart down. He needed to get his shit together. At least he had the name of the doctor who must have swapped the babies that night. He’d find that fucker, and then there would be hell to pay.

Halfway through the exhale, he frowned. There was a knife under the kitchen table. He stared at it for a long second before crouching to take a closer look. The silver blade was slick with blood, but the handle was relatively clean. Instead of a straight handle, on this one the wood curved slightly at the end where the little finger would be if you gripped it. Small steel pieces in the shape of diamonds ran up the centre. It was exactly like the ones he had at home. He looked round to the far work surface and the full knife block there. Silver handles shone brightly. They didn’t curve.

Back on his feet, he grabbed a tea towel and used it as a glove to yank open kitchen drawers and cupboards, searching in vain for a second knife block. There wasn’t one. He slammed the last cupboard shut with a grunt of frustration before picking the knife up and washing it.

It was
his
fucking knife. From his own fucking kitchen. Jesus Fuck. Someone had been to his house and taken it and then come here and killed Powell. What the fuck for? And
who
? His mind raced. He couldn’t call it in, not now. He’d been set up before, when his brother had died, and he’d
managed to prove himself innocent; this time he had a feeling he was up against someone cleverer and better connected than Sam Macintyre and DI Gary bloody Bowman. He needed to get rid of all trace of himself and get out of there.

He wrapped the knife in the tea towel and slipped it into his inside jacket pocket before hunting under the sink. With a J-cloth he carefully wiped the handles of the cupboards before retracing his steps back out into the hallway and cleaning every surface he could remember touching. He cleaned the sill and the catch on the dining room window and then checked the hallway for footprints. There were none. He glanced in each of the downstairs rooms, his eyes scanning for anything else that might belong to him that might have been planted to incriminate him further, but there was nothing.

He was checking the upstairs rooms when his phone rang. Armstrong. Shit. He raced down and through the kitchen to the small garden outside and took a deep breath before answering. He couldn’t afford to miss this call; he needed someone to hear him sounding normal. Then he really needed to get the fuck out of here.

‘Yep.’ He was pleased to find his tone was steady.

‘I’ve checked her Oyster card.’

‘What?’ Cass scanned the houses on either side. There was no one at any of the windows; at least that was something in his favour. He needed the sounds of outside, but he didn’t like the chance of anyone seeing him there. He moved under the partial shade of a half-lowered table parasol. If anyone did spot him, then at least they might not see his face clearly.

‘Angie Lane’s Oyster card,’ Armstrong was saying. ‘Well, I didn’t do it, technically the computer did. I just figured out the dates she should have been going to Temple and
punched them in. The laptop told me the rest.’

‘Which is?’ Cass felt like his brain was going to explode. The killer had run from here at least ten minutes before. If he’d called the police himself, intending to get Cass found there, the cars wouldn’t be far away now.

‘Two of the evenings she should have been in Temple, she wasn’t anywhere near the place. Once she was around Piccadilly Circus – she got the tube home from there at 9.30 p.m. anyway – and the following week she was out at Turnham Green. She stayed an hour and then got on the tube back. That was at eight in the evening. She’s looking increasingly separate from the rest.’

‘Isn’t she just?’ Cass said.
Another murder
. He was surrounded by the dead. The first drops of rain began to patter onto the canvas of the parasol. Perhaps the dead wanted to drown him.

‘Where are you?’

‘Stuck in fucking traffic. Any news on her phone?’

‘They’ve promised us the numbers first thing. I wish I’d requested all that in the first place rather than just a cross-reference with the others’ calls.’

‘Well, it didn’t seem important at the time. And anyway, it can wait until the morning. Whoever’s at the bottom of it thinks they’ve got away with it. They’re not running.’ He looked at the wall. Running was exactly what he should be doing.

‘As you’ve done my job for me,’ he continued, ‘I might as well head straight home rather than fight my way to Paddington. You do the same. Good work today, Armstrong.’

‘Thanks, sir.’

Andrew Gibbs waved goodbye to the woman at the Accident & Emergency reception desk and headed out towards
the car park. She was pulling a full double; at least he’d only had to do an extra couple of hours before a relief had turned up. She was a pretty thing too, even with her face hardened from dealing with all the abuse from the drunks and the foolish and the just plain rude all day long. A few years ago, he might have tried to play there, but these days he was just too tired, and there was something grubby about the hospital and the sicknesses of the poor that rubbed off on everyone who worked there. She probably felt it too. Unlike most hospitals in the country, there were very few doctor-nurse relationships in this one. If you were going to sleep with someone, you wanted it to be someone
cleaner
; someone untouched by the grime of the A&E ward.

Still, it wasn’t as if his social life was a whirl at the moment. For the first time, he’d started to feel middle age creeping up on him, and it wasn’t just a number any more. He was tired, not so much physically – although he was certainly feeling the aches and pains of being on his feet all day – but mentally and emotionally. A&E wards had always been the stage for what ailed society; these days there was so much more wrong with the country. The bug was on the increase, stretching its deadly fingers to grip even the middle classes and the happily married: those who’d believed themselves safe from the original strain of HIV. They’d forgotten the big message of the eighties – to wear a condom – believing love and fidelity went hand in hand. TB and hepatitis strolled casually behind in their more aggressive colleague’s wake. These days executive women worked as call girls to pay the mortgage on the houses they couldn’t sell, while their corporate menfolk turned to drink, and always there were the junkies and the pushers and the petty criminals. The A&E ward was full of those who should have gone to a doctor, but couldn’t afford the charges. Perhaps they’d
hoped whatever was wrong would get better with time. It wouldn’t, though, Dr Gibbs thought sadly. It was life that was ailing them: this grim life and its inevitable end.

It was raining, the drops falling in a steady, gentle rhythm, but he didn’t pick up his pace – it was refreshing, and he needed something to clean out the dark shadows in his mind. It wasn’t like him to be so bleak; his optimism was one of the reasons he’d chosen to work in this field. The policeman’s visit had bothered him: it had made him remember how calm things had been in the Flush5 ward during the few months he’d worked there. Maybe he should have stayed in the private sector – the past ten years would certainly have been different.

His car was parked on the far side of the large lot, in the hospital employees’ section, away from the pay and display machines patients and visitors alike had to fill with pound coins if they wanted to get to the hospital without using public transport. It was all so self-defeating for a hospital that the government held up constantly as an example to prove that it still cared about society’s impoverished and weak and forgotten.

The problem was that when everyone was struggling, those in extremis no longer counted. If ordinary bus driver Joe Bloggs had to pay for his medical treatment, then why the hell shouldn’t everyone else? That was the world’s view. Charity certainly did begin at home. It wouldn’t be long before the emergency services lost their NHS access too, although most of them had already bought into private plans for anything more than a trip to the GP. Dr Gibbs couldn’t blame them – he wouldn’t want NHS treatment himself; even with an accident he’d opt for a private A&E ward: have credit card, can travel.

He rummaged in his pocket for his car keys. He got to
help people who needed it though. He had to hang on to that. Most of the time it didn’t seem like so very much, but there were always those magic moments in medicine where you held someone’s life in your hands and then felt the scales tip in the right direction. Life could be worse, he concluded. Working on the NHS A&E ward certainly showed you that too.

The tatty old Ford Focus blipped as he hit the unlock button and he finally picked up the pace a bit as the rain found its rhythm and tumbled heavier to the ground. He’d just reached for the door handle when a young man in a long dark overcoat got out of a car a row back.

‘Dr Gibbs! I don’t believe it!’ he said, grinning as he walked forward. ‘I haven’t seen you in ages!’

Gibbs frowned. He didn’t recognise the young man with the thick black hair at all – not that that meant much; he saw so many people. Had he been a patient? No, he was greeting him like a friend, so perhaps a medical student? That must be it. Even so, his eyes wandered up to the CCTV cameras that whirred on tall posts above their heads, quietly monitoring the activity in the car park.

‘I’m sorry, I can’t quite place you.’ His own smile was awkward, but it didn’t stop the confident stride of the other man, and before he knew it, he was wrapped in a tight embrace, his face pressed into the wool of the man’s shoulder. It smelled expensive. Savile Row. Not a medical student after all then.

‘Goodnight, Doctor,’ the young man whispered in his ear, and before he could pull back, the wind was knocked out by the sharp blow to his guts. He felt his eyes widen and his mouth drop. This wasn’t right – in fact, this was very wrong. The arm around him tightened and a searing pain ran through his insides as the out-of-sight arm jerked suddenly
upwards. He felt the young man tense before stepping back. Blood splattered across the tarmac between them and dripped down the side of his car. Crimson stained the young man’s highly polished black shoes.

‘Why?’ The word wouldn’t come out. He slid down the side of the car and watched the man turn and walk, head down, out of the car park. Wasn’t his car. Just been waiting. Why? He stared at the ground as rain and blood mixed.
His blood
. His life. His
death
. The first wave of panic ran through his veins, veins that were so desperately trying to pump the blood that was so keen to leave him.