‘There’s no need to be facetious,’ Armstrong growled. ‘The transcript is unreliable. That’s a fact.’
‘Aren’t you in the slightest bit curious about the Mr Bright character?’ Hask asked. ‘Even if just to understand why we were put off trying to find out more about him?’
‘I don’t see his relevance. Not to Jones’ case.’ Armstrong’s face had coloured slightly; whatever goodwill they’d worked up while investigating the so-called Angel of Death was gone. ‘Jones was a murdering bastard. He brought the station down and then added shame to it. I’m sick of people defending him. And investigating this Mr Bright isn’t going to change Jones’ guilt.’
‘Well, it’s not as if we’re overloaded with leads.’ Ramsey’s voice was light despite Armstrong’s clear aggression. ‘This Mr Bright character has shown that he’s capable of manipulating situations – who’s to say he didn’t manipulate Cass Jones?’
‘You’re suggesting this Mr Bright set Jones up?’ Armstrong half laughed. ‘That’s ridiculous. Set up for murder once, we can believe. Twice? You’re having a laugh.’
‘Unless of course,’ Hask looked down at his piece of paper, ‘that’s exactly the reaction he knew we’d have.’
‘Jones would think so too. That would go some way to maybe explaining why he ran.’ Ramsey stared at Armstrong. ‘It’s worth looking into.’
‘You can’t seriously believe that Cass Jones is innocent?’ Armstrong paced in a circle, his hands on his hips. ‘After everything? All the secrets? His research into the victims, thinking they had something to do with his missing nephew? It’s classic paranoid behaviour – you even said that yourself, Hask!’
‘And if his behaviour is exactly as you would define it, then yes, it is,’ Hask said. He couldn’t deny it. The surface analysis was exactly that; Armstrong was right to feel certain that Cass was guilty.
‘We just need to make sure that everything is exactly as it appears.’ Ramsey stood up. ‘And as I’m in charge of the Jones investigation, I want to be sure for myself. I thought he was a good man – troubled, maybe, but pretty tough. So I’m going to play this my way and try and keep an open mind for now.’ He stared at the sergeant. ‘Innocent until proven guilty, remember?’
‘You’re both as crazy as he is.’ Armstrong spat the words out and then stared at them both for a moment as if he were seeing them for the first time. ‘You’re clutching at straws – and wasting police time.’
‘Your opinion is noted, sergeant,’ Ramsey said and then gestured at the door.
Armstrong took the hint, closing the door hard behind him.
‘Well, that went well,’ Hask said.
‘The arrogance of youth.’ Ramsey leaned back in his chair. ‘He’s a good policeman, though. And to be fair, he’s probably right. But in the meantime, I think it’s time we paid a visit to Perry Jordan. See what he can tell us.’
Night had fallen, bringing a freezing chill with it. Hask felt the ice in the air stinging his face on the short walk between the car and the apartment block. If Perry Jordan’s expression was anything to go by, they’d brought the cold in with them. He’d started his professional career as a policeman, but it looked like he’d definitely lost any residual affection he might once have had for his first employers – except for maybe Cass Jones. Jordan had been politely compliant throughout the investigation thus far – he wasn’t a fool – but he hadn’t offered up anything extra, not even with pressure coming from Commander Fletcher and the ATD. Perry Jordan was loyal to Cass Jones; that much was clear.
An open beer bottle sat on the coffee table next to an empty one and the ashtray was half-full. Hask checked his watch. It was only just gone six; Jordan had started early. He looked at the computer desk in the corner; he could make out a small pile of bills half-hidden underneath a newspaper. Jordan must have tried to cover them up before letting the police in, but the red payment slips were visible. So business must have dried up since the police investigation and careless talk in the papers about Jordan being an accessory. Two months probably wasn’t long enough for that kind of muck to be washed off.
‘You lot might think all he’s the son of the devil,’ Jordan picked up his beer, ‘but Cass Jones was – is – my friend. He would never have told me anything that could damage me. You know everything I know.’
‘I don’t believe that for a second.’ Between Ramsey’s height and Hask’s physical bulk they filled the small room. Hask wished that the investigator would just ask them to sit down; that would at least make it feel less like they were squaring up for a fight.
‘Put it this way.’ Jordan’s mouth twisted in a slight smile. ‘You know everything that you need to know. Everything that I’m obliged by law to tell you.’
‘Did he ever ask you to find out anything about a Mr Bright?’ Hask asked.
‘Who?’ Perry Jordan broke his stare with Ramsey and looked at Hask. ‘Who’s he?’
‘His name came up in the both the Man of Flies case and the Miller and Jackson shootings.’ They needed Perry Jordan on side and giving him the standard police we’re not at liberty to share that information responses wasn’t going to get them anywhere. ‘He met Adam Bradley in the flat where Carla Rae was later killed and sent him to Paddington Green with the DVD of the shootings.’
‘What?’ Perry Jordan was visibly shocked. He took a small unconscious step back. Whatever aggression had been bouncing between the three men had, for now at least, slipped away.
‘We also believe he knew the Man of Flies killer, Solomon,’ Ramsey said.
‘He sounds like quite a character.’
‘Did Cass Jones ask you to do any traces on him? Get any personal information?’
‘No.’ Jordan shook his head. ‘Why would he? Surely your lot would have done all that.’
‘That line of inquiry was closed down early on,’ Hask said.
‘Closed down?’ The PI sat down on the arm of the sofa.
‘There was a lot going on. Mr Bright was deemed irrelevant.’
Perry Jordan looked from Ramsey to Hask, his expression thoughtful. Hask could almost hear his brain ticking over. There was a quirky cockney charm about the ex-policeman, but it was deceptive. Jordan was no fly-by-night kid any more. He was earning his wrinkles.
‘So why are you asking about him now?’ he asked.
There was a moment of silence. Hask understood Ramsey’s reluctance to share their thinking with someone who was a key witness in the case against Cass. It could damage them, and Ramsey was old school: there was police business and there was civilian business. Perry Jordan might have been the former once, but he was now very much the latter. If it were down to him, Hask thought, he’d be straight with the PI, but this was Ramsey’s case, and he’d already probably overstepped the mark by giving so much information on Mr Bright already.
‘I’m just trying to explore all the avenues while I can,’ Ramsey said eventually. ‘This man, like Solomon, had a clear interest in Cass. Jones was set up once – we just want to be sure that he wasn’t set up again.’
‘I can’t help you. He never asked me about a Mr Bright.’
‘Well, thank you anyway,’ Hask said. He looked over at Ramsey. Staying here and pressurising the man wasn’t going to get them anywhere. Frustrating as it was, if Perry Jordan had any more information for them, they were going to have to wait for him to give it up in his own time.
‘We’ll let ourselves out then,’ Ramsey said and led the way towards the front door. Hask followed. They were halfway there when the PI spoke.
‘You know, it’s only paranoia if it’s not real.’
They stopped and turned, staying where they were in the corridor. Jordan was still in the sitting room, still perched on the side of his sofa.
‘What do you mean?’ Ramsey asked.
‘Luke – the missing nephew? I did all that research for Jones. You want my opinion? Someone did swap that baby intentionally. I don’t know why, but they did. And the dead men knew s
omething about it – which means someone wanted that secret to stay hidden.’
‘We’ve already worked through that possibility,’ Ramsey said softly. ‘Some kind of baby-smuggling ring, maybe. Cass lost it and killed them.’
‘The thing is,’ Perry Jordan continued, ‘I don’t believe it was Cass who killed them – and not because I think he’s a good man – I’m not convinced that he is – but because he never came after me.’ He sipped his beer. ‘I’m the nail in the coffin for his evidence trail. Why didn’t he come here and kill me? Or at least take my notebooks and papers? It doesn’t make sense.’
‘You’re his friend,’ Ramsey said.
‘Yes, I am, but cold-hearted paranoid psychotic killers tend not to have friends. Or if they do, they tend not to care that much about the friend’s survival compared with their own. If Cass was everything he’s been painted to be, I’d be dead by now.’
‘I’ll bear that in mind.’ Ramsey smiled softly, and turned back to the door. Hask stood where he was for a moment. Perry Jordan was right. Why hadn’t he even considered that when he was making his own evaluation? He knew the answer, of course: too much work and not enough man-hours. There was only so much good thinking someone could do before needing a break, and there had been very little rest over the past nine months or so. His bank balance was healthy, the rest of him less so.
‘Evidence is a funny thing, isn’t it?’ Perry Jordan hadn’t moved. ‘Sometimes there’s so much of it, and so many cases, that you can’t see the trees for the wood.’
‘What do you mean?’ Hask asked.
‘Those student suicides? Cass’ final investigation before all this madness started?’
‘What about them?’ He had Ramsey’s full attention now.
‘Cass got the result at the same time you were about to try and take him down for murder. The ATD were over at the station, and everything was manic, am I right?’
‘What about it?’
‘I’m willing to bet that after all the dust settled, no one thought to ask what Cass was doing at that private facility in the first place. The place where Dr Shearman, the man you’ve got banged up for causing them, worked.’
Hask felt like he’d been slapped in the face. A doctor. Of course! His heart started pounding as the penny dropped. ‘You gave him the address? He asked you to find Shearman as part of the search for his missing nephew?’
‘No flies on you.’ Perry Jordan smiled. ‘I probably don’t need to spell it out to you, but I will anyway: maybe Shearman’s someone you should talk to. He’s probably had enough time in a cell to be think about his future.’
‘Thank you,’ Hask said with a big smile.
‘You’re welcome, Doctor.’
‘Why the hell didn’t you tell us this before?’ Ramsey said.
Perry Jordan ignored the DI’s obvious anger and looked at Hask. ‘That’s simple – nobody asked me. Shearman wasn’t dead.’
Chapter Twenty
Cass Jones hadn’t expected the surprise Freeman had in store for him to be a human one.
Dr Cornell had settled surprisingly well into the annex flat above the double garage. Cass wasn’t sure if Brian Freeman was keeping him mildly sedated, but he’d been relatively calm for the short time Cass had been with him. Perhaps now that his biggest fear – that of having his life’s work taken from his home – had actually happened, the old professor had found some peace at last.
Osborne had brought him in strapped into a wheelchair, just this side of conscious. It had taken them more than half an hour to unload the van full of papers and junk they’d brought from Dr Cornell’s Oxford home.
Even in an area as exclusive as this one, where houses were hidden behind high gates and walls, the activity was noticeable, so Freeman had made a point of telling a passing neighbour that Dr Cornell was his brother, moving in until his dementia got bad enough that he’d need to go into a home. Something about that amused Cass. They were a strange trio to be united in their fascination with Mr Bright and his Network: an ageing gangster, an ex-copper on the run and now a half-crazy academic. The Network would be trembling in their boots, he was sure.
When Dr Cornell had recovered from the chloroform or whatever Osborne had used to knock him out, Brian Freeman took him in a cup of tea. Cass stood in the doorway and watched as the old gangster spoke softly to the frightened man, sitting on the bed and steadying the cup. Cass couldn’t make out the words, but the tone was softer and kinder than he’d have thought Freeman capable of. Even all those years ago, when Cass had been Charlie and Freeman had started to love him like a son, he hadn’t heard that gentleness.
Dr Cornell’s wide eyes had darted from Freeman to Cass and back again as the old man spoke, and then after a few minutes he’d started to sip his tea. Cass left them to it. His shoulder was aching, and to himself at least he admitted that found something about Dr Cornell disturbing. Whatever happened with Mr Bright and the hunt for Luke, Cass knew that bullets aside, men like he and Freeman would survive. They might add to their mental and physical scars, but they’d most likely live. Even if he didn’t find Luke – or if he found that Luke, like the boy he’d been swapped with all those years ago, was now dead, he knew he’d survive it.
For Dr Cornell, it would be different: he was fragile, and he’d been alone in his belief of this conspiracy for so many years that it had driven him half-mad. Now here they were, he and Freeman, telling the professor that it was okay, that they were on his side and they believed everything he did. Maybe in essence all that was true, but in reality they were using the old man for his information, and then they would do with it exactly what they wanted, regardless of how it might break Dr Cornell. They weren’t good people, he and Freeman, and part of him hoped Dr Cornell would figure that out and protect himself.
He left the two men talking and went in search of a sandwich and some painkillers. The old man’s frantic madness made him tired and uneasy.
The house was quiet for the rest of the evening. Cass stayed in his own room, dozing for a while when the pills kicked in before waking and taking a long shower. A TV was on somewhere in one of the rooms, but Cass felt no urge to see what was going on in the world; someone would let him know if there was anything relevant to him. It would be the same old doom and gloom; Alison McDonnell, her career wrecked after the London bombings and the Lucy Porter fiasco, was in the process of being replaced as Prime Minister by her own Home Secretary while the rest of London was scaremongering about the bug. None of it felt like a world he inhabited any more. Where did he live exactly? Had he himself become one of the ghosts that had haunted him for so long?
At about half-twelve he went to find a drink to soothe his melancholy. Soft light poured through a half-open doorway on the ground floor, and inside, Brian Freeman was sitting in an old armchair and sifting through yellowing bits of paper pulled from the mountains of boxes around him. He was so absorbed that he didn’t even realise that Cass was there. The sight reminded him of Dr Cornell. Cass sipped his brandy, then murmured, ‘Don’t spend too much time reading that shit. You don’t want to end up like the mad professor.’
‘No chance of that, son.’ Freeman looked up and smiled. The reading glasses he wore looked out of place on his broken face. ‘Just trying to get all this in some kind of order – an order than makes sense, anyway. He’s got stuff going back years, from all over the fucking world.’
‘So I noticed.’
‘Want to give me a hand?’
Cass thought about it. There would be lots of information in those boxes that would fascinate him – times, events and places that could have lines of connection drawn across them, and that could all be linked, if looked at with Dr Cornell’s eyes, to the Network. The frightening thing was that Dr Cornell was probably right: Cass had seen the X accounts, he’d met Mr Bright and he’d seen what had happened to Mr Solomon when he died. In many ways, that was all he needed to know for now. The rest could wait until Luke was found.
‘I don
’t think so,’ he said. ‘I want to keep my head clear.’
Freeman nodded and returned his attention to sorting the piles.
‘I still don’t understand why you’re so interested in all this. I mean, I understand your grief for your niece, but—’
‘It ain’t grief, Charlie – Cass – whoever you are,’ Freeman said. ‘I just don’t like being fucked with. You should know that.’ Light from the table lamp reflected on the surface of his lenses, creating something that was almost a mockery of the golden glow that Cass couldn’t hide from, and his expression was lost.
‘It’s where you and me are the same, isn’t it?’ Freeman added. ‘Fuck with us and you’re in trouble.’
‘Ain’t it the truth.’ Cass half-smiled. He turned to leave.
‘You still look up?’
The question threw Cass slightly and he looked back at the gangster. After a moment, he said gruffly, ‘Yeah— Yes, I do.’
‘Good.’ There was warmth in Freeman’s voice. ‘At least I drummed something into that thick skull of yours. Now fuck off to bed and get some sleep. Busy day tomorrow.’
Sleep didn’t come; instead, Cass lay in the buzz of silence and stared at the ceiling, wondering about how the world turned. He could never have imagined a time when he’d see Brian Freeman again that didn’t involve one or the other of them becoming dead very quickly. Yet here they were and, despite all the fall-out his undercover work in Freeman’s world had brought to his life, Cass could feel the echoes of his old affection for the man. It wasn’t the same, of course – they had both changed too much for that – but it was still there.
When he blinked he saw brown eyes at the end of a gun barrel. This time, along with the fear, there was sadness and disappointment in their endless liquid darkness. Not for the first time Cass wondered if Freeman hadn’t made him a murderer; perhaps it had always been there. How many other officers would have done what he’d done?
It was a question he’d asked himself hundreds of times over the years, and the conclusion he always reached was that even had he chosen differently, it wouldn’t have made any difference: someone else would have shot the kid, there was no doubt about that, and once they’d shot the kid, Freeman would have wondered why someone with Charlie’s supposed credentials hadn’t pulled the trigger himself. The kid was dead either way, and the officer more than likely.