A Matter of Blood by Sarah Pinborough Page B

no one could be bothered to straighten it. His heartbeat quickened. Behind him, the Millers and Jacksons watched from where they stood, enveloped in their own bubble of grief.
    ‘Just tell me what’s happened.’ His voice was low, and every hair on his body trembled. Something in his world had changed beyond recognition, beyond fixing.
    ‘It’s Christian,’ she said after a long pause. ‘He’s dead. And his wife. And son.’ She paused. ‘It looks like murder-suicide. I’m so sorry.’
    And then the world collapsed.
     
    On the way home Cass saw the world around him too clearly, every image over-bright, with too much colour. His feet moved like lead through the house as Claire burbled apologetic goodbyes. Cass heard her as if they were both underwater. The cream walls were too clean, and he flinched away from them. Lilies in a vase on the table by the door yawned towards him, leering from their open mouths. Beneath them, tucked under a large conch shell, a pile of letters was stacked, white envelopes against the red mahogany table, and he felt like he was choking in blood.
    ‘How?’ he asked finally as they drove through the central London streets teeming with thousands of small lives, all going about their daily business as if there would never be a last day.
    ‘Cass, I can’t . . . Let’s wait until you’re home.’
    ‘I’m not a fucking child, Claire,’ he exploded. ‘Just fucking tell me!’
    ‘I don’t know the exact details,’ she said at last. ‘Blackmore just said there was a gun.’
    ‘A gun?’
    ‘A shotgun.’
    ‘That can’t be right.’ Cass stared through the windscreen and shook his head. Bile rose in his throat and he swallowed it back down. Somewhere up ahead the lights turned green, but he didn’t really see them. Beneath the numbness, his brain twisted, trying to make some sense of it, but this was all wrong. That Christian was dead was wrong; that Jessica and Luke were dead was wrong. That Christian had killed them? And with a shotgun? He couldn’t find a place for that to sit in his head. He tried to picture his baby brother, the shy, clever youngest son, loading cartridges into a weapon and then quietly blowing the life out of his wife and child. It played like a badly acted movie behind his eyes. The role was miscast. It wasn’t Christian.
    ‘Where the hell would Christian get a shotgun from? Christian wouldn’t know what to do with a gun. He wouldn’t know how to load it, let alone fire it.’ He shook his head fiercely. ‘This is not right. Christian couldn’t do a thing like that.’
    I maybe could , he almost added. I could, but not Christian.
    Claire said nothing and even though he was immersed in the first flood of his grief, Cass could understand why. She wasn’t going to point out the obvious to him. In this world they lived in anyone could get a gun if they had the money for it - and not even a lot of money, not these days. Everyone knew someone who operated on either side of the law, or in the grey area between the two. Christian might have been naïve but he could have gone into any one of a hundred pubs and got himself a shotgun, for no more than a couple of hundred quid. Even if he had no connections himself, all it would have taken was a few weeks of sitting and drinking quietly in the same gaff, making sure his face was familiar before approaching someone. Anything was possible . . . Anything but the idea that Christian would kill his family. Kill himself, maybe. But never his family.
    The car moved into Muswell Hill, taking Cass on his normal route home, but the trees lining the roads were making unfamiliar shapes against the sky. The cars looked too wide. Everything was an inch out of place. The world was an inch out of place.
    ‘He’s been trying to speak to me.’ He spoke into the window and condensation formed against the glass. He couldn’t look at Claire. ‘He’s been calling my phone for days. Work and home.’ He paused. ‘I didn’t