A Matter of Blood Read Free

five-thirty and he had to be in Soho in thirty minutes’ time. It was his day to collect.
     
    The dying embers of the day clung to the skyline, and peering blearily out through the windscreen Cass wondered if maybe the world might truly be in the grip of some insanity that was slowly hugging it closer and refusing to let go. Things were going to get better . That’s what the newspapers and perfectly presented newsreaders kept repeating. Cass couldn’t see it though. As far as he could tell, they were all sinking deeper and deeper into the shit, and no one had a rope to cling to, let alone a shovel big enough to dig them out. And as the world got crazier, so did the rules, leading to situations like this one, which had him heading into Soho for a transaction all the bosses over at Scotland Yard must know about but obviously preferred to ignore. Maybe they liked to pretend their shit didn’t stink the same as everyone else’s.
    But then, he figured, lighting a cigarette as the traffic crawled towards the inevitable central London almost-gridlock, what did he know? He’d been wallowing in the brown stuff for longer than he cared to remember. Smoke filled the confined space and he grinned, enjoying it more because it was illegal to be smoking inside the car. Understanding the thrill of breaking rules was what made Cass Jones such a good policeman. Despite his disgruntled colleagues’ assertions that Cass was just lucky when it came to solving his cases, he knew luck had nothing to do with it. Cass was a good copper because he thought like a criminal, and that was all there was to it. He took another long drag before winding down the window, letting the smoke escape to join the other poisonous fumes belching out from the vehicles shuffling their way through the centre of town. The air reeked of life.
    The heaviness he’d felt watching the dead woman’s body being bagged up finally lifted as the car filled with the earthy noises of the city. There wasn’t a place in the world to beat London Town. It was grimy and gritty and cold and damp, but it was a tough old place that had survived for centuries; the ghosts of the past lurked on every street in the shape of the buildings and the plaques that proudly declared their long-gone residents, bolstering the living with the solid anchor of their heritage. It would take a lot to bring London and her Londoners to their knees. They might be buckling under the recession, but the city would find a way to bring them all through. It always did.
    He flicked the butt out of the window and thought of Carla Rae again. London’s residents now at least had the prospect of a serial killer to look forward to. There had been four dead women found in the same circumstances in the space of two months, and in these straitened times, where bad news of some sort or another filled the papers every day, the press wouldn’t pass up a juicy story like this once they’d joined the dots. At least once this was splattered across the pages of the tabloids it might distract the masses from their own misery for a while. Once they’d devoured the details of the deaths - the murders - of those less fortunate, then out of the woodwork would come everyone who’d ever known them, or dated them, or been in the same bar, or who’d just always had the feeling that fate would not be kind. Everyone loved the thrill of it could have been me . It made them feel lucky, when of course there was no luck. There were only choices.
    Cass didn’t care that people would get a thrill from the death of Carla Rae; that was only human nature. What he cared about was that the press didn’t get hold of too much information. The words scrawled across the women’s chests, that they could have. But the eyes were different. They needed to hold back those details if they were ever going to weed out the crazies who would be lining up to confess as soon as the papers hit the stands.
    It was nearly an hour after leaving the tower