Free A Matter of Blood by Sarah Pinborough Page A

powder was fading.
    Although what was left in the wrap was too light to feel, Cass was suddenly aware of it, lying hot and heavy in his pocket as if it were truly the weight of his shame, all his guilt folded carefully into the shiny piece of magazine. As soon as he could, he’d get to the bathroom and tip it away. Enough was enough. Until the next time , a small voice in the back of his head whispered. Cass ignored it. Maybe there would be a next time, but it wouldn’t be until after these cases were done. The grip of those dead fingers was far too strong. They’d drown him in blood if he let them.
     
    ‘So you’ve got a serial on your hands,’ said Dr Tim Hask, the sentence a statement rather than a question. His green eyes twinkled out of his heavy face as he smiled and a network of fine veins crackled across his full cheeks to a kind of a purple peak on his nose. If the profiler’s body and face had been criminal evidence, Cass thought, they would reveal the sin of gluttony: a love for good food and good wine, and plenty of it. Cass wondered if his own face betrayed his sins in the same way. He hoped not.
    ‘How can you tell?’
    Hask got to his feet with surprising energy for a man of his proportions. He was a few inches shorter than Cass’s six foot, and oval, his body expanding massively at the waistline and tapering down through almost womanly hips to his neatly shod feet. His full head of light brown hair was brushed to one side in an untidy parting, and there were no hints of grey in it. Cass reckoned Tim Hask to be no more than forty, but he didn’t believe that he was likely to see fifty. Morbid obesity was on a sharp rise in England and this man could easily be its poster boy.
    ‘Nothing clever, I’m afraid.’ He grinned warmly, causing his jowls to wobble alarmingly. ‘My services are rather expensive. It’s rare for the police to be able to afford me.’
    ‘I’m afraid we can’t afford decent coffee either.’ Cass passed him the cup. ‘So I apologise in advance to your taste buds.’
    Blackmore had told Cass that Bowman had wanted to call in a profiler after the third body had turned up two weeks previously, but it took the fourth death, Carla Rae, to get the headshed to authorise the expense. Hask was considered top of his field in Britain, and was well respected across Europe and the United States; he didn’t come cheap.
    He looked at Cass. ‘I occasionally help out the Feds, but much of my time recently has been spent psychologically evaluating employees for big companies, and being an expert witness in cases of fraud or industrial espionage. While I obviously deplore the need, it will be nice to get my teeth into something meaty again.’
    ‘The original pictures are in that folder.’ Cass passed it over. ‘There’s a copy here for you to take with you.’
    The profiler shook his head, his eyes growing serious as he pulled the photos out. ‘Thank you, but that won’t be necessary. I’ve already had the file faxed over to me.’ His fat hands carefully arranged each set of photos on the table in the order of the vics’ demise, and then placed the secondary shots of the crime scenes above each pile.
    ‘Maybe we should have done this over the phone, then,’ Cass said, feeling a little put out.
    ‘Absolutely not.’ Hask moved the picture of Carla Rae’s abused body an inch to the left. ‘I so rarely get to work on something that actually means anything these days.’ A small shard of a smile twitched at his cheek. ‘And this is as much about your brain as mine, DI Jones.’
    ‘Call me Cass.’
    ‘Cass, then. My point is: I can’t catch the person who did this. I can only give you suggestions about the person and their motivations. If you get any hunches, then I will probably be able to tell you if you’re headed in the right direction.’ He spread his hands wide across the pictures. ‘These girls need your brain as much as mine - more so, in fact. We have the best