by J G Alva
Knife Man stood in the doorway to the kitchen. He had hidden somewhere to get behind Sutton. He had a bottle of oil in his hands…a mostly empty bottle. The rest of its contents were surely the fluid that covered the floor at the end of the hall. As Sutton watched, he threw what remained of the bottle at the cooker. There was a strong sharp woosh sound, a burst of light and heat, and then the oil was on fire…with Sutton caught behind it, in the hall, with no way out. All that was behind him was the bedroom, and that went nowhere.
Stuck.
The fire quickly moved from the floor to the walls. The heat and smoke drove Sutton back.
Fuck.
He had to get out.
But there was no way out: no windows, no fire exit, not in this part of the flat…the heat pushed him back, back, so intense he had to cover his face.
Through the flames, Sutton saw Knife Man carrying his injured friend down the hall and out the front door.
Was Lisa alright?
Where was Freddie?
Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.
Sutton turned to the bedroom. What to do, what to do…there was an en suite bathroom, but throwing water on the fire would just disperse the oil, and help the fire to spread. He could wet the sheets and wrap himself up in them, but if the fire was too intense, the sheet would just melt…if he made it, he wouldn’t come out of it looking particularly pretty.
As he debated on what to do, he noticed that the separating wall between the burning kitchen and the bedroom had started to bubble and blister, at least on the hall side.
That meant it must be just a partition wall.
There was a small metal stand at the end of the bed, silver, sturdy: four black pipes on wheels, and welded together with cross supports. At that moment it was home to an array of candles. Sutton swept them off, picked up the stand, and then began swinging it at the partition wall, as far from the hall and its fiery breath as he could make it. If he was quick enough…On the first swing, the stand went into the wall up to Sutton’s wrist, and he kept swinging it, and swinging it, and swinging it, the smoke filling the room so quickly it scared him, his vision blurring as the smoke touched his eyes, coughing, his nose streaming, fuckers, motherfuckers, but slowly the wall gave, until he could see through to the other wise, holy fuck, he swung at it, making the hole bigger, bigger, kicking at it, ripping at it with his fingernails, in the grip of a panic or some kind of survival frenzy, he wasn’t sure, except that it seemed that there were stores of energy where before there had been none, and the wall was coming down, apart, away, in pieces, until, when it was finally big enough, he took it with his left shoulder, running into it like a prop in a rugby match.
He burst through the wall, dust and pieces of plasterboard splitting and falling all around him. He was out. Looking over, he could see how lucky he was: the fire had consumed the cooker and the surrounding cabinets, but without additional furniture had not proceeded much beyond that.
But the main part of the kitchen and the hall was gone, it was just a wall of flame, terrifying in its own right…it could destroy the whole building. Wasn’t there an automatic fire suppression system in all these modern buildings? Why the fuck wasn’t it working?
“Freddie!” He screamed, his throat raw; he started coughing, and it felt like he was trying to bring up shards of glass. “Freddie, where are you?!”
There was another guest bedroom, but he wasn’t in there. He was in the airing cupboard, pushed into the corner beside the boiler, folded like a ventriloquist’s puppet into this tiny storage space.
His friend.
Dead.
He couldn’t deal with this now, he would short circuit.
There was Lisa to think about.
Lisa.
The flames had almost reached the railings, and if he didn’t get her out now, then he wouldn’t get her out at all.
He rushed to the stairs – putting a hand up to ward off the terrible heat – and rushed down them to the bottom.
Lisa was standing on the balcony. She was staring up at the flames, anguish pulling at her features, her dark pixie haircut in disarray, her dark eyes made darker by the smeared mascara, the tears on her face glistening in the flickering orange light like particularly decorative crystals…Sutton could have painted it. She had his jacket on, and looked like a child in the oversized garment. She was clutching her right arm; her hand was bloody from a cut somewhere.
He ran to her.
“Lisa, come on,” he said.
She looked at him as if she didn’t recognise him for a moment, then she nodded.
She held her hand up, the one covered in blood.
He didn’t understand.
“What…?”
She dropped the keys into his palm. They were slick with her blood.
He led the way up the stairs, shielding her from the worst of the heat. The noise of the fire was loud.
Halfway down the hall, she stopped him.
“Freddie…” She shouted.
“He’s dead, we can’t help him, we have to get out.”
He led her down the hall, to the front door, and to safety.
◆◆◆
CHAPTER 17
Bob was reading in the Work Room when Pat returned.
From the doorway, Pat watched him, wondering if he stared long enough whether he might not discover some tick or gesture that would confirm his innocence. No such tick existed, but still…it would be a nice thing to find. Pat felt some conflict within himself at the dilemma, and this obviously manifested as a back ache…everything bad seemed to affect his back. Bob was unaware he was being watched, and simply sat casually at the table with his book. Occasionally, he would scratch at his beard, lick his fingers, and then turn the book’s pages. Other than that, it was just Bob Costar, sitting in a chair, reading. Pat was caught up in a momentary conviction that it definitely was not Bob who was feeding information to the Cult. Pat didn’t always dismiss gut feelings out of hand – as a man with an odd mind, he tended to take them more seriously, as he assumed his oddly wired brain was trying to deliver important information but had to go through other organs to do it – but in order to see through to who was responsible for this betrayal, he needed to.
It was easier said than done.
“Pat,” Bob said, with some surprise, finally noticing him in the doorway. “I didn’t hear you come in.”
Pat looked around.
“Where’s Darren?”
Bob sat back. Pat could finally see the cover; he was reading the Cult novel: Fall of the Ravenans, by Michael Broadbent.
“He’s down in the basement, still doing his research, I think.”
“Okay.”
“I think I know why the Cult have suddenly started acting so…desperate.”
Pat thought he had misheard him.
“What?”
Bob waved him closer, and Pat moved to join him.
“I’ve been reading Broadbent’s novel again,” he explained. “You know. In case there was something I missed.”
“I thought we agreed you were going to look at other cults as well-“
“Yes, yes, but this cult isn’t like any other. So there didn’t seem to be much point to me. But…the War.”
Pat frowned.
“The War?”
Bob tapped the novel.
“The war at the end. Remember? From the summary? The Artisans rise up to overthrow the Ravenans.”
“Oh…yes. I remember.”
“Well, it happens on the Summer Solstice. In the book, I mean. And it just so happens that tomorrow is the Summer Solstice.”
Pat collapsed in a chair next to Bob.
He said, “are you saying…?”
“That they’re going to start a revolution?” Bob gave a curious half-laugh that wasn’t at all amused. “I don’t see how they can. Not with bows and arrows. But if they think they can…then they could cause some trouble for us.”
Bob waited while that sunk in.
“We ha
ve to get them,” he continued. “The Cult. We can’t wait. Not anymore. Even if the case falls apart…it doesn’t matter. If we can round them up, hold them in custody, at least until after the Summer Solstice, then they’ll lose their joie de vivre. Or raison d’etre. Or whatever it is.”
Pat put a hand over his eyes. As if things weren’t complicated enough…
“Pat?” Bob said. He sounded worried.
“You’re right,” Pat admitted, dropping his hand. He wished he was anywhere but here. His back was making itself known, in no uncertain terms. Right where it always ached; like somebody was tapping a six inch dowel into his spine. “We’ll need to assemble the team. Get what people we can from CID and MCIU. As many as we can muster.”
“What about that new division? FIRRST, is it?”
Pat thought about it, then shook his head.
“No. They’re too small, too new. We’ll be fine. How many people are in the Cult? Do we know?”
“I think we estimated eighty…”
“Oh lordy,” Pat said quietly.
A knock on the open door interrupted them.
Sally stood nervously on the threshold.
“Detective Harris? Can I speak to you please?”
“What is it, Sally?” Bob asked, interested.
“Hang on a second,” Pat said to Bob, rising from his chair.
As he moved toward Sally, he noticed that she had a slip of paper in her hand.
“In the hall,” he told her, in a low voice.
She nodded and turned and Pat shot back over his shoulder, “back in a minute, Bob.”
Pat led Sally ten feet down the hall and stopped a little way down from the Gents. Around the corner, at the end of the corridor, two officers were in conversation…but far enough away that they couldn’t possibly be heard.
“What is it?”
She passed him the slip of paper.
“Someone came back, almost straight away, as soon as I released the alert,” she said. “A PC Tomkinson. He said he remembered the murals. He passed them when he was coming back into the station.”
“Where’s this?”
“Wellow,” she said. He didn’t recognise the name. She saw his blank look and said, “it’s just a little village. He was near there because a farmer thought he had suffered a break-in. But it was just his ex-wife.”
“Great. Thanks, Sally.”
He was about to move away but she stopped him.
“PC Tomkinson went back out there to check,” she said. “That’s why I was so long coming to you. I waited.”
“He went back to check? Oh lord. What happened? He came back to you?”
She nodded.
“They’ve set up camp, is what he told me,” she said. “In a field about a mile outside of the village. He saw fires, he said. And they were dancing around the fires. You know. Like Indians. I mean, Native Americans.”
Pat thought about this for a moment.
It was going to be hard to get a taskforce together, especially without DCI Kent…but if he somehow managed it, and then they all went out there and the Cult were no longer there…He needed to check. He didn’t doubt the reliability of the report, but he still needed to verify it.
“Detective Harris?”
Sally was staring at him.
How long had he been staring at nothing, thinking?
What must she think?
“Thank you, Sally,” he said. “You get back to work now.”
She nodded and left.
Pat hesitated before returning to the Work Room.
This is it, he thought. This is his test.
But Pat didn’t want to do it. Finding out Bob was the one who had betrayed them was just going to be terrible…
But he knew he had no choice. He had the carrot, and he was going to have to dangle it in front of the rabbit.
Or should that be mole?
He strode purposefully into the room.
“We have to go,” he told Bob.
“Go? Go where?”
“I’ll tell you on the way.”
Bob got up, the look of surprise leaving his face. He pulled his jacket off the back of the chair and put it on while he asked, “what is it? Did Sally get something?”
“I’ll tell you on the way,” Pat said brusquely. He didn’t like doing this, and as try as he might some of it must at least be showing on his face.
“Okay,” Bob said, after a moment’s hesitation. “But if you want me to set up the taskforce then it might be best-“
“No, Bob,” Pat said, interrupting him. “We have to leave. Right now. Okay? The taskforce will have to wait.”
Bob nodded. Now he looked wary.
“Whatever you say, boss,” he said, staring intently at Pat’s face. “Let’s go.”
◆◆◆
Oh God, Freddie. Oh God.
Outside, at the curb, amidst shouts, footsteps on gravel, and the hiss of water hoses, Sutton tried to count up how long he had known Frederick Percival Hopkins. Sutton had been fourteen…so it was twenty two years. But of course there were gaps and breaks…Sutton had missed four years, when he had been out of touch…and then there were the years lost to Freddie’s drinking. So not twenty two years…but a lifetime nonetheless.
He could all too clearly remember the first time he had met him.
Starting in an English school after being away for so long, everything had been alien to Sutton: the language, the people, the behaviour…even the air. He had to learn it all again from scratch, from the outside looking in. He hadn’t made many friends – that difficult adolescent period forbade anyone with a slight insecurity to befriend an outsider and expose themselves to ridicule – but there were still fewer that he kept in contact with.
Freddie had been so thin he might have been made out of pipe cleaners. He had a thick swatch of blonde hair on his head – who knew he would lose it in all in his late twenties – and an unlined, almost feminine face. Again, who could have predicted the way it would change, getting lined and chopped up and ageing, like an old chimpanzee. He was cocky, inflated with a false bravado; there was a swagger to his walk.
But he was too short, too funny, too self-aware to completely pull it off.
He sat next to him in class; not directly next to him, but in the next aisle over.
That morning, the first morning, the young Freddie Hopkins had leaned toward him with a pssst.
Sutton had turned.
“Hey,” this fourteen year old stranger said. He looked nervously at the teacher; it was Mr Jackson, and Sutton would later learn that as a teacher he was good, and that as a disciplinarian he was a tyrant. “Can you speak English?”
Sutton frowned.
“Yeah.”
At his frown, Freddie said, “someone said you’re from Morocco. You know. That your Dad was a Moroccan spy.”
Sutton was amused.
“Spain,” he explained. “And my Dad was a captain.”
“A captain of what?”
Sutton hesitated.
“The Moroccan football team.”
Who knew that twenty two years later he’d die from a knife attack that had nothing to do with him, and everything to do with that friendship he had made.
God, he felt tired. He had to sleep. He could feel himself coming apart, could feel his thoughts unravelling, like old twine…if he could get his head down for an hour, just an hour…
But he couldn’t. Not yet.
She stood by one of the large metal pillars in front of the lobby…leaning on it, as the time grew long and her strength waned. The ambulance was late. Her face grew paler and tighter as the pain got worse. Either physical pain or the pain of loss…or both.
“Here,” Sutton said. “Let me look at it.”
Lisa didn’t answer. He had tried several times to get her to talk, but it was as if he didn’t exist. She didn’t want to talk to him…she wanted to blame him. And it was easier to bear the pain if you were nursing a little rage…
&nb
sp; Or a lot.
Still, he pulled his jacket from her shoulder and looked at the wound, and she didn’t stop him. Lisa was a small woman, and barely reached his chin. The wound looked vicious, and the white blouse she wore was soaked in blood. But it looked as if it was clotting. She would be alright…at least physically.
“How did they find you?” He asked. He pulled the rip in the blouse open wider to see if there was any other injuries.
Nothing.
“Were you down by the harbour today? Near my flat?”
She swallowed something, but did not speak.
He didn’t have the strength for this.
He had lost Freddie too.
“Did they follow you?”
She remained silent.
“For fuck’s sake, Lisa, this is important,” he said. “Other people could be in danger. If they somehow tied you to me online, then other people I know, other friends, they may be targets…but if you were down at the harbour, or in Southville – if you were anywhere near my flat – then it was just opportunity. But either way, I need to know. So just tell me: were you anywhere near my flat today?”
She did not want to talk, and he couldn’t really blame her.
He just couldn’t indulge her.
Not wanting to do it, but not having the time to finesse her – he had dodged one bout of questions from the police, but he couldn’t reasonably expect to avoid a second, if they happened to come back around anytime soon (and don’t forget the fact that he had broken into someone’s flat) – he pressed on the wound with his thumb.
Not hard – he wasn’t that unpleasant – but enough to get her attention.
And it did. She hissed like a snake, turning to him, and the hate was clearly visible in her eyes: like a sudden reflection of lamplight.
“Were you near my flat this afternoon?”
She twisted away from him, batting his hand away with her good arm.
“Let go.”
“No.”
“You fuck-“
She punched him in the shoulder. For a small thing, the punch had some sting.
He went for her fist, missed it, caught one on the nose for his troubles and saw stars briefly, tried again and this time caught it. His hand enveloped hers like an octopus around a cricket ball.