The Shadow of the Soul Read Free Page B

calm her, even though she knew it didn’t touch the problem.
She
was the problem.
    When she slept, she dreamed of running through endless corridors of darkness chasing a strip of glowing gold light that was always out of reach. She wouldn’t remember it in the morning. She never did.
    Katie Dodds had turned the TV off an hour or so ago, and since then had just stared at the ceiling. She was barely aware of the sharp knife in her hand. The news had gone roundin circles all night, and it had all become a blur. The newsreaders talked too fast, and the images were confusing. With awkward fingers she pulled up her sleeves and then sighed, feeling the heaviness that sank back into her limbs. The bulb hanging from the ceiling reflected in the dark shine of her dulled eyes. She wasn’t sure of the time. Four a.m. maybe? It was dark outside, but the thickness of night had faded. Her room was silent apart from her shallow breath, but despite the late hour there was still noise in the rest of the house. Laughter drifted under the bottom of her closed door, but she didn’t recognise it. Her forehead tensed in a small frown. That wasn’t quite true. She did know whose laugh it was, but she couldn’t quite match it up with the faces of the other students in her house. It was dislocated. Just like her.
    As she stared at the ceiling her mouth moved, though she emitted no sound. It had not been a good day. Her brain had felt wrong; not painful, but as if someone had been pulling down on one side of it. Her words hadn’t come out right all afternoon. She’d been glad to get to the quiet of her room, away from everyone. She’d thought about going to the hospital – briefly – but she hadn’t been in any pain outside of this weird confusion, and then with all the bombs going off there would have been no one to see her anyway, and after a while it had all been too much effort.
    Her mind emptied. She tried to focus on something other than the buzz in her ears. Her heart raced and her eyes forced themselves inwards. She gasped. She didn’t want to see. She’d never wanted to see. Her hand tightened around the knife. On the ceiling the bland paint swirled in a million colours, wanting to suck her in. For the briefest moment she thought she saw her own face staring back behind them.
    After a while she became aware of coolness in her wrists.She glanced down. Her left hand dropped the small, sharp knife, as if aware of guiltily being caught after the fact. She frowned again. Shouldn’t it hurt? Shouldn’t all this bleeding hurt? She looked from one slashed wrist to the other as her blood pumped out of her and onto the covers below. She sighed. It took all her effort to dip one finger in the soaking mess and write on the wall beside her the only sentence that would stay in her head.
    When she was done she closed her eyes and died. It came as a relief.

Chapter Three
     
    C ass Jones took the stairs up through the untidy student house two at a time, ignoring the faces that peered nervously out from their bedroom doors. He was tired. He was always fucking tired, and in the chaos of the past two weeks since the bombings, the rest of the force might have caught up with him, but he’d had a bloody good head-start. For Cass, the past six months had dragged on forever, in a constant round of interviews, arrests, statements, and of course the backlash that comes with uncovering corruption among your own. The resentment was far from behind him as the overloaded justice system slowly trundled towards court dates. Still, it wasn’t like he really gave a shit what the rest of the force thought of him. He only had to remember Clare May’s broken body lying at the bottom of the stairs of Paddington Green nick to feel good about the number of careers that were now well and truly over. They’d done it to themselves.
    ‘The constable downstairs says it’s suicide.’
    Cass paused as he took in the scene in the room. ‘So what the fuck have you