by J G Alva
She searched his eyes then.
He had deliberately been unspecific about the veiled threat; better to let her come up with her own idea about what he might do. What did she fear losing the most? Her money? Her looks?
A man walked passed and under his breath, his voice slightly bleary from alcohol, he said, “fucking dyke,” before walking outside.
Veronica’s eyes flickered, and a brief flare of rage burned in them before they cleared.
“I know more about you than I did,” she said, returning to her coffee cup. “I researched you a little bit. While I was away.” She looked up at him and smiled blandly. “I’m not the only one who likes young girls.”
Sutton raised his eyebrows.
“But for all your charm, and your muscles, you live alone. And have done for most of your life. That a man such as yourself, with no obvious physical deformities, should live alone…it has to be Mummy issues.” She leaned close, her eyes searching his. “You never recovered from losing such an important female figure so young…and now you are too scared to get close in case you lose another one.”
It was a measure of her skill that he actually found himself getting angry at her pointless needling…but the realisation that she was affecting him was like a splash of cold water, so he gave up on the anger and made himself relax.
She sat back and continued, “and your paintings are at best mediocre. You’ll never be anything more than an enthusiastic amateur.”
Sutton sat back himself, feeling a smile begin on his face. She had given away more than she had taken.
“I don’t expect a woman who has never known anything but straw relationships to understand who I am,” he said. “I expect understanding would be beyond her. What would be her comparison? At the beginning, young girls she snared with the promises of money and fame…before, disgusted, they rejected her. And in the end, girls who rejected her outright, smelling the waning star, the rot, who incited her wrath only because they confirmed what she already knew, already suspected: that her fifteen minutes were up. Your father died while you were in prison. I read a bit about him…a dedicated Naval Commander. True British patriotic stock: stoic, severe, and reliable. How he must have hated you at the end. His own daughter, this creature that she had become…I bet you probably killed him. Broke his heart. He did have a heart attack, didn’t he? The thing that you are killed him…and you can’t change either one: his death or who you are.”
He saw a muscle pop in her cheek and knew he had gotten to her too.
She smiled then, not a smile that reached the eyes but certainly one that acknowledged their matched verbal fencing skills.
“I’ll be honest with you, although you don’t deserve such consideration,” she said. “In fact, I’d prefer it if you did worry a little over what form my retribution would take…but that too would be something of a revenge. No. The truth is, I don’t actually blame you for what happened to me. I blame that awful young girl for disappearing and putting me squarely in the frame. She’s probably somewhere in the south of France, reading about it and laughing…all because I went a little too far…” Veronica cleared her throat, and fixed him with her blue eyes. Sutton hadn’t noticed before, but her lips glistened with some high end gloss. They looked fat, unreal and unattractive; like worms stuck to her face. “I’m innocent. I know you never believed me – no one did – but it’s true. And that means I owe it to myself to get my life back. Going after you…that wouldn’t be getting my life back. That would be throwing it away. And I’ve lost enough of it already.”
She stood, and the bodyguard propelled himself from the bar to stand beside her. His flat stare was cold and calculating.
Looking down at him, with the bodyguard by her side, she said, “so that’s what I’m going to “do” with you. Absolutely nothing. It’s almost a little sad that you think I would…that you were important enough to figure in someone else’s character arc. But you don’t really figure in mine. I see you as a blundering idiot, nothing more. You thought you were so clever, connecting the dots…but any idiot can make a pattern out of a load of random events. Do you blame a storm for tearing down your fences? No, of course not. What would be the point? A storm doesn’t know that it destroys things, any more than you knew you were destroying the life of an innocent person. Now, if you’re satisfied, I have other things to be getting on with. Please don’t contact me again.” She paused, and then with a direct look added, “ever.”
*
Sutton couldn’t help it.
Sometimes things niggled him, things that the back part of his mind saw and heard that he didn’t, and he almost always obeyed that niggle, however abstract it might seem, however dangerous it might turn out to be.
He was being niggled now.
Surreptitiously, he followed Veronica and the bodyguard all the way back to their car, on the corner of Victoria Square.
She had told him that she didn’t blame him, that she was moving on with her life; he wasn’t sure if he believed her, but Veronica and her protector got into a blue Ford Cortina, Veronica in the back, the bodyguard driving, and he backed them out in to the road and pulled away, and Sutton wasn’t quite sure what to think, not really.
*
The house in Pucklechurch was on the far side of ostentatious.
Behind a screen of fast growing conifers, at the end of a country lane, a new building in an old design had been wrought: a small scale version of a stately home, complete with Roman columns bracketing the large front door. It was too little…and at the same time too much. The stone was newly cut, and seemed to make the building less substantial; it needed a hundred years of ageing to take the sheen of the ridiculous off it. The large forecourt was covered in a layer of fresh gravel, right up to the large concrete steps leading to the front door with its grandstanding columns. Sutton parked, climbed the steps, and knocked on the door.
A woman answered, and if Sutton had been forced to describe the owner and his wife, his prediction would not have been far from the truth: a small, stick thin woman in her fifties, her long acid-blonde hair the last vestige of a vibrant youth: a trophy wife. The house was new in an old design; she was old in a new design. Each struggled to be what they could not. She wore a ridiculously over the top ball gown type dress for a Wednesday in December, with straps, webbing, and sequins on the shoulders.
“I was wondering if I could speak to Grace Chapel?” Sutton asked.
The woman blinked up at him. She could not have been much more than five foot, and she had to crane her neck back.
“I’m Grace Chapel,” she said, seemingly shocked…either at his appearance at her door, or her own admission. She cocked her head; a swift, bird-like motion. “Are you here about the repointing?”
Sutton smiled. It was not the first time he had been mistaken for a labourer, or a bricklayer, or a mason. Something to do with his size left little room for an expectation of intelligence.
Before he could answer, Grace said, “we’ve been waiting weeks for the repointing to be done.” She was a fidgety person. She turned and walked back into the house, and all the while her hands fidgeted.
Sutton followed.
The exterior harked back to another age, but the interior was thoroughly modern. Slat-wood flooring covered a wide open space, like a showroom, with everything set back from the front door: on the left, a dining table with eight chairs around it, and behind that the kitchen, white cabinets and cupboards, the two separated by a kitchen island/breakfast bar; on the right, an entertainment area, with a grey modern corner sofa around a large flat screen TV, and behind that a reading area, with an armchair next to a window, in front of two huge dark wood bookcases and a tall floor lamp. Down the centre of the house, a hall cut a line to the rooms at the back.
“Quite frankly, I’d given up hope,” she continued, walking toward the kitchen. “The company you work for simply does not seem to care for its clients. I have called countless times and left simply countless messages-“
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“I’m not here about the repointing,” Sutton interjected, as Grace paused to draw breath.
Grace stood in the kitchen, her dark dress a direct contrast to the white of the cupboards and countertops. Her hands were held up in the air for a moment, as if she were about to direct an aeroplane in to land. Sutton could smell coffee, could hear it percolating away; it was on a pot at Grace’s elbow. The breakfast bar sat on top of still more cupboards, and Grace finally dropped her hands and began searching through one.
“You’re not?” Grace said, blinking.
Her tan wasn’t fake, but it wasn’t flattering either: the sunbed made the ageing neck more evident, where the light hadn’t cooked the folds in the skin.
Sutton smiled again.
“No,” he said. “This is a purely personal call. I was wondering if you can tell me if a man by the name of Gavin Thompson contacted you recently?”
She stared at him, looking shocked once more. An arm twitched spasmodically.
Sutton had the impression that she was a very insecure woman: insecure about her fading looks, about her life, about her ability to deal with her life.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t understand. You’re not here about the repointing?”
“No.”
An arm twitched again, as if batting away a fly.
“Then…?”
“Gavin Thompson was a friend of mine,” Sutton said, moving toward her. “He was murdered very recently. He left me a list of names, and one of those names was yours. So I was wondering if he came to visit you.”
“Oh dear,” she said, a hand fluttering at her throat. She looked upset. “I’m terribly sorry. About your friend, I mean. But I don’t recognise the name. Would you like some coffee? I’ve just made a fresh pot.”
“That would be very nice, thank you.”
“Take a seat, please,” she said.
There were a number of high stools along the edge of the breakfast bar, and Sutton sat precariously on one as Grace poured coffee into two china cups. She brought them with her and passed one to him, and he took a sip.
“Do you know why,” Sutton continued, “your name was on this list?”
Grace looked openly baffled.
“I have no idea.”
Her voice was high edged with anxiety.
Sutton also heard something else: another accent, under the surface; a lingering shadow of a very different, less opulent background.
“He didn’t call you?”
“Perhaps he spoke to my husband,” she said, her hands fluttering bird-like in the air. “But I haven’t seen or spoken to anyone with that name. What did he want to see me about?”
“That’s the thing,” Sutton said, sipping his coffee. “I’m not really sure. I was hoping you would be able to tell me.”
For a moment, it appeared as if Grace was at the end of a very long tunnel.
Then, just as quickly, she wasn’t.
It was a very odd sensation. Sutton wondered if he was tired.
“Perhaps if you described him…?”
“Sure. He was tall, almost as tall as me, had dark curly hair and green eyes. He had a slight Bristolian accent. Does that ring any bells? I’m assuming he would have contacted you in the last two or three weeks.”
“I haven’t spoken to anyone like that,” she said.
Sutton stared at her, trying to see if she was being duplicitous, but couldn’t get a clear reading on her either way.
“I don’t know why my name would be on someone’s list,” she protested. “Unless it was nefarious in some way. My husband seems like a very wealthy man, which makes him a target, but he certainly is not that wealthy.”
“Gavin Thompson wasn’t nefarious,” Sutton said, but then he thought unless he was scamming credit card companies. “But I believe he was in some danger. As you might be too. Perhaps we can help each other.”
“Danger?”
“Gavin was murdered because somebody thought he knew something,” Sutton said, and then had to stop. He suddenly felt at the same time both light headed and sick.
He put a hand on the breakfast bar to steady himself.
“Are you alright, Mr Mills?” Grace asked, a hand fluttering in the air.
She was back at the end of that long tunnel again.
Distantly, alarm bells were ringing in the back of his head.
When had he introduced himself?
He couldn’t remember that he had.
Drugged.
He had been drugged. Fuck. Fuck.
He bolted off his seat, the stool tipping over with a crash. The coffee. The fucking coffee. Oh God, what an idiot. He had to get out, to get to the car and drive away before –
He turned, and the front door looked like it was a hundred miles away.
His heart was hammering, the blood roaring in his ears, but it didn’t seem to be enough to keep the darkness at the edges of his vision from encroaching. It was like someone was pulling a hood over his head. And his mind…nothing sensible seemed to be happening in there. It was all a hurricane, and in it he was trying to direct his arms and legs to get him to the door; a sober man shouting into a storm.
He tried to move.
It was like operating a JCB without training.
He edged forward, but he might just as well have been walking the deck of a ship in high seas.
The door bobbed up and down in his vision, making him feel even more sick.
He closed his eyes, but it didn’t improve things.
Drugged.
By a trophy wife.
Once more, he directed his legs to propel himself forward, but at the last minute the floor seemed to shift and he fell, not quite managing to get his hands up in time to prevent his head from banging on the hard wood floor.
A flash of light, and a dim pain.
And the sense that he was swirling around the plughole…before finally being sucked into it.
*
CHAPTER 11
THURSDAY
As with all things, the panic passed.
Sutton came back to himself, almost as if from a dream…or perhaps more accurately, a nightmare.
He was still where he had been, still in the nightmare: stuck in a crawl space between the floors of an abandoned mental hospital. But he was alive, and in control once more…at least for the time being.
Again, he felt that resurgence of shame, that he had succumbed so easily. No use dwelling on it, he thought. There were more pertinent issues at hand.
He took stock. His head still hurt; no improvement there. The pain in his chest was sharp and unpleasant, but it didn’t feel mortal. There was, however, a large sticky patch down his left side, so he could assume he had lost some blood, might even still be bleeding. Another, lesser pain in his shoulder announced the beginnings of a cramp, and he did what he could, within the confined space, to prevent it from developing, but it blossomed with deadly petals in his shoulder just the same. He gritted his teeth and waited for it to pass; there was nothing else he could do. It felt like someone was pulling the muscles out of his shoulder with a fish hook. It set his head to pounding. He grunted, and moaned, and tried not to aggravate it by moving too much, but it seemed to take forever before it began to loosen.
But it did loosen, and eventually stop.
Jesus Christ.
He was sweating again. His forehead was damp with it.
In his mind the answer was suddenly clear. He was going to have to use brute force to get out from under the cross beam, and if that meant more pain – and possibly serious damage – then he would have to do it. Again, there was no choice, except perhaps giving up and waiting to die…but of course that was no choice at all.
Bracing himself, he put both hands to the cross beam and pushed. His recently cramped shoulder protested, but he ignored it. He strained with effort, and to his surprise, he moved forward an inch.
And there was no pain.
What had happened?
Then he
felt it, like ice turning to fire: whatever he had done went deep.
Fuck it.
He pushed again, and like a cork from a bottle, suddenly came free.
He couldn’t believe it.
He gasped, laughing almost, but this sent a sharp dagger of fresh pain into his side. A new pain, like a knife between the ribs. The pain seemed to move up his body and join the one in his head.
No time to worry about it. He had to move, now, to get out, as fast as he could.
He struggled on, wriggling with his back, bum and his legs, and pulling with his arms. Cobwebs covered his face, and things dropped on to him from the underside of the floorboards: dust, grit, splinters, mould perhaps, maybe even spiders. He struggled on, crawling on his back through the dark interior of that rotten place.
Until he felt a breeze on his face.
He stopped.
He realised then that his eyes were closed, and so he opened them.
Light.
He could see light between the floorboards.
He almost couldn’t believe it. That there might be an end…some part of his mind had convinced itself that the tyranny would go on forever.
Sutton reached up with his right hand and felt the boards directly above him. Cold…and damp.
There was hope.
Mustering whatever strength he had left, he pushed on one of the boards. There was a creak, and a slight bowing upward, but other than that not much happened.
He stopped, took a breath, flexed his arm and tried again.
This time, the board split easily.
Through the crack, he could see the sky. Grey. Overcast. Cold.
Beautiful.
He tried another board, and this too came apart without much effort.
Water damage, he thought, and laughed.
In only moments, he had his right arm and head out, and was taking in great lungfuls of fresh, clean air.
He was free.
Fuck you, he was free.