The Shadow of the Soul (35 page)

B
ack at the station, energy hummed through the team filling the Incident Room. 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 …’

‘Stick to the story.’

‘He said he needed me to do one small thing. I had to be available at short notice to work a shift at the maternity ward at the Portman in order to deliver a baby to the Gray family. It had to be born within a certain time frame and I’d probably have to do a C-section birth. When the boy was born I had to take him to the hospital administrator – a man called Powell – and then replace the Grays’ child with a dead one, which would be delivered to me at the hospital. That’s what I did.’

‘I totally forgot all about it until Mr Bright came to Encore a while back. He asked me what my new research project was, and when I told him he said he wanted me to use students. Originally I had planned to use older adults whose phobias were far more ingrained. He told me to place ads on the noticeboards in the unions – just very small ones.’

Cass kicked himself for not thinking of checking the boards. Shit, he was getting old – that was basic textbook stuff, and neither he nor Armstrong had done it.

‘Mr Bright wanted his people to do the initial test hypnosis’ – now that Shearman had started talking, he was determined to unload his soul – ‘and then every so often
he would come along and look at the brain scans. Some interested him and some didn’t – I don’t know why. He didn’t tell me, and I didn’t ask. I just gave him their addresses and their files and told him when their six-week course would end. If something happened to those kids it was after they left me! He was my boss. He’d given me everything.’

‘And all in exchange for stealing a baby.’

‘How do you know about that?’ Dr Shearman asked. He was lost and out of his depth. He always had been, but today was the day he was finally realising it.

‘I know about a lot of things,’ Cass said. ‘I know you’re about the only one involved in what happened that night who’s still alive.’

Dr Shearman’s eyes widened. He clearly hadn’t paid attention to the news that day. But then, he probably hadn’t known Dr Gibbs at all; he’d stayed home the night that Dr Shearman worked at the Portman.

‘I also know,’ Cass continued, ‘that you should keep your mouth shut about Mr Bright – this whole conversation – or it’s likely someone will kill you too.’

‘But I can’t.’ Dr Shearman half-rose out of his chair. ‘I can keep quiet about the baby, but if I don’t say anything about Mr Bright, no one will believe those student suicides didn’t have anything to do with me.’

‘Nothing to do with you?’ Cass snorted. ‘You only procured them, right? Who cares what happened afterwards.’

‘But I didn’t do anything – and you know what he’s like! He’s not a man you say no to!’

‘Tell it to the judge.’ Cass had no more time for this man. He had his answers, and as far as he could tell, Dr Shearman’s fate was sealed. There was no way Mr Bright would allow himself to be traced from Dr Shearman’s research facility, and as soon as he heard that the doctor had been pulled in
he’d shut down whatever it was he’d been doing anyway. Without saying another word, he pushed away from the desk and left Dr Shearman to sweat alone.

Back on his own floor, he paused at the coffee machine, as much to gather his thoughts as to get a drink. The coffee was shit anyway, but at least holding the hot cup stopped his hand shaking so much. Dr Shearman would take the flack for what happened to the teenagers, and Cass found that didn’t much bother him, despite it being a miscarriage of justice. Dr Shearman was involved in giving Luke away. He could live with Dr Shearman in jail just for that.