by J G Alva
“Lisa, you need-“
She tried to knee him in the groin, and he only dodged it at the last minute.
His anger rose up. In hindsight, he was ashamed of his behaviour, but in that moment he was enraged; other lives were at stake, and she couldn’t see past her own pain to realise that.
He used his body to push her against the pillar, one hand cupping her injured shoulder, the other hand around her throat, her good arm caught between the two of them. He wasn’t quite strangling her…but it wasn’t exactly a lover’s caress.
Instead of pain, fear flashed in her eyes.
“I killed Freddie,” he said, releasing his own pain in that moment…or too tired to control it. She must have heard the bitterness in his voice. He was angry, and she was getting it. “We both know it. And you hate me. And with good reason. I’m not going to try to talk you out of that hate. But if someone dies – if someone else dies – because you thought your hate was too…too precious to answer a few fucking questions…”
She shook her head. Tears glistened in her eyes.
“I hate you so much…”
“Good. But you still haven’t answered me. Were you at my flat earlier today?”
She debated a moment, staring into his eyes, looking into them for something, and then said acidly, “yes.”
“You saw the fire? That’s why you were there?”
“Yes. Yes yes yes yes yes.”
He sagged with relief, and then released her.
She pushed him away with her good hand and, when that wasn’t quite enough, she pushed him again.
“Get away from me,” she said. “Get the fuck away. I don’t want to see you again. Ever. Because if I see you I’ll want to kill you. And I don’t want to feel like that. Go. Go on. Leave.” She pushed him again. “Leave. Fucking leave.”
He did.
He wove between the firemen – some of whom had turned to watch their argument – and wound between the vehicles until he was on the main road. An ambulance was coming down the drive, its lights flashing. At last. Sutton jumped on to the grass verge to avoid it.
As he walked, Lisa’s face floated in his mind’s eye: such a bright look of honest hate on such a good face that it was hard to shake away the image.
Eventually, he reached Dot’s car, got in, started it up, and turned it around awkwardly in the road before starting back.
Freddie.
Oh Christ, Freddie, I’m sorry.
◆◆◆
“Jesus, Sutton, what happened?” Fin asked, coming out of the seat in front of the bay window.
Sutton looked down at himself.
His hands were black with soot, and there was a red burn mark over the back of his left hand; he hadn’t even felt it. His clothes were streaked with plaster dust and were ripped or torn in half a dozen places.
“You smell like you were at a bonfire.”
Sutton nodded absently.
“Where’s Aimee and Toby?”
Fin stared at Sutton, shook his head, and then said, “Aimee’s having a shower, I think. And Toby went back to bed.”
Sutton tried to gather his thoughts into some kind of coherent bundle. So tired…
But there was a light burning in the dark.
It would be enough to be able to do what needed to be done.
“Did you find out anything?” He asked, indicating the laptop.
“Sutton, what happened?” Fin asked, distraught. “Did you manage to save your friends, Freddie and Lisa-“
“Fin, I – I just want to know what you found out about those names, okay?” Sutton said, his voice unfamiliar, even to himself. He was so angry he couldn’t look at him. “That’s all I give a shit about right now.”
Fin was silent a moment, then he moved back to his seat by the window.
“I found out some things,” he said. “Not a lot.”
His tone was stuffy. And hurt.
Sutton sat on the sofa.
For half a minute, he stared at the carpet and tried not to think about anything.
But his brain ticked on anyway.
“Okay,” he said eventually. “I’ll look at it in a minute. But for now there’s been a slight change of plan. I need you to find contact details for somebody else. Somebody we’re going to need.”
“Alright. Who?”
“His name’s Daniel Longhall,” Sutton said.
◆◆◆
CHAPTER 18
Pat drove, and felt conscious of each movement, each action. He was especially conscious of the fact that he must appear that he was conscious of each movement and action to Bob, and that Bob was conscious in his own way of how Pat was acting. He kept looking at him; he knew something was up.
Wellow was only a fifty minute drive from Bristol, on A and B roads which were gratefully free of everything but a sparse dribble of traffic. It was still light, but the sun was going down; in an hour it would be pitch black. For now, they were able to see the countryside: hills and glens, the occasional thin swatch of woodland, hedgerows and rhynes demarking distorted rectangles of cultivated fields.
Bob hadn’t called – hadn’t had time to make a call – so if the Cult were still at the location, it was a good chance Bob was the leak. But it wasn’t fully conclusive: if they found them gone, it might just be because they had naturally moved on. And then where would he be?
Then there was Darren to think about. If the Cult was still in residence, Pat’s little ruse hadn’t cleared him either.
What was he doing?
Making things more complicated for himself, he thought. At that moment, he was a poor excuse for a detective. The betrayal was making a mess of his insides, and confusing his thought processes. Like that time Janine had had to work late for a couple of weeks; he could hardly think straight. It had turned out to be genuine overtime in the end, but the idea she might have been seeing someone else had made him physically ill.
“Listen, I know what’s going on, Pat.”
Pat felt a warning dart of worry shoot up from his heart.
“Oh?”
Bob nodded.
“You think I’m the one talking to the Cult.”
He almost jerked the steering wheel in surprise.
“It’s okay,” Bob said reasonably. “I understand. You know what happened with me and the LightSavers. It’s only natural for you to wonder about me, about where my allegiances lie. I can tell you that I’m not the leak though. But you won’t believe me. So I have to prove it. Somehow.”
Bob fell silent then. He scratched his beard, looking thoughtful.
Eventually, he sighed.
“I just don’t know how,” he said. He seemed amused. “I can tell you I hate myself. Surely if I was in the Cult I wouldn’t hate myself. That would be the first thing to disappear. The Cult would want to reassure me, that everything I’d done wrong had led me to them. That it was part of the ‘design’…whatever that was. And I’d want to believe them, to be over it. And as a consequence I’d be more devout than most. In flight from reality, and all that.”
“Why do you hate yourself?” Pat asked.
Bob shrugged.
“For messing up my life,” he said, but it was almost a casual, throwaway statement. “I’m in my forties, single, childless. In the coming months, I might lose my job. It’s a pretty dyer landscape to be facing, to be honest with you, Pat. I’ve failed at everything I’ve ever done…and no man wants to think of himself as a failure. Plus I’ve got a mid-life crisis on the horizon to look forward to…unless it’s already started. I don’t know.” Bob sighed. “I just…didn’t think I’d be here. Like this. I wanted a family. Did I ever tell you that?”
“No.”
Bob nodded, and turned to stare out of the passenger window.
“I wanted a kid. Maybe two. A boy or a girl, I wouldn’t mind. Rachel kept putting it off…she wanted us to be more financially stable. Going undercover was a step up the ladder for me, financially speaking, but I think I did it because
I wasn’t happy at home. That’s not the whole reason…but it’s certainly part of it. And that’s why it happened. You know…With that woman. Because I was depressed, and lonely, and this woman…She idolised me. For the small time we were together. She would look at me…do you know that look? When a woman adores you? I bet you do. I know Janine looks at you like that all the time.”
“I’m not sure that she does,” Pat said uneasily. He didn’t like all this personal talk…and yet at the same time he realised it was completely necessary. He needed to know who Bob was, and Bob was telling him.
“You’re her hero. I don’t think in a lifetime – as a man – that you can expect to see that look more than three or four times on the face of a woman. If you’re lucky. I’ve seen it once…and I don’t expect to see it again.”
There was an awkward moment of silence in the car.
Pat glanced at Bob. He was still staring out of the passenger window, his hand moving restlessly through his beard.
“I’m sorry you’re depressed, Bob,” Pat said. “Is there someone you can talk to? A counsellor perhaps?”
“I hate counsellors.”
“I know, but-“
“I’m talking to you, Pat.”
“I don’t think I’m qualified-“
“Maybe not,” Bob admitted. “But you don’t judge. And that counts for something, I think.” Bob hesitated and then said, “have you thought about Darren?”
“Darren?” Pat said. What did Darren have to do with Bob’s depression?
“As the leak,” Bob expanded.
Pat didn’t speak. He couldn’t talk to Bob about this…didn’t he see that?
Instead, Pat said, “we’re almost there. Ten minutes.”
◆◆◆
When Aimee returned from the shower to the room Dot had given her to change in, Sutton was sitting on the armchair by the table, fast asleep.
He was a mess: his clothes looked burnt, and there were a dozen minor scratches and scrapes that she could see. He was ungainly in repose, his arms thrown over the side of the chair as if he were reaching for invisible wheels; his legs almost spanned the dimensions of the room; and his head lay bent back, his mouth open as if to catch rain water.
Very quietly, so as not to disturb him, she sat on the edge of the bed. Watching him, she unfurled the towel from around her head to continue drying her hair.
She was trying to decide if she resented him. Sutton Mills. She didn’t want to…but circumstances were pulling her in a different direction. It was true that it was she who had introduced Sutton to Greg, posing him as an unorthodox solution to the problem with his son…so it was she who was responsible for putting Sutton in such terrible danger. Part of that guilt had motivated the bathroom incident.
But she still felt guilty, and she didn’t know why she should. He wouldn’t have done it if he didn’t want to. So at least part of the resentment came from that.
The other part was that it was his direct actions that had incited the Cult to retaliate, to embroider them all in this tangled game of cat and mouse…or fox and hound. To embroil her. She didn’t want this; she couldn’t cope. She was an executive, not a soldier. Yes, Greg had set the wheels in motion, it had been his order, but he was dead – God, she still couldn’t believe it, it seemed too incredible to be true – so she could hardly lay the blame at his feet.
And even if Toby had started everything by joining the Cult in the first place, he was just a child; he was hardly responsible. She couldn’t blame him either.
Sutton was alive and whole and although it wasn’t a strong basis for a scapegoat, it would have to do.
Somebody had to take the blame, after all.
“Are you naked under that towel?”
His voice jolted her out of her reverie.
She made a smile of not much mirth.
“One victory fuck is all you get, I’m afraid.”
Sutton struggled to sit up in the chair, moving as if his joints needed oiling. Once upright, he sighed and rubbed his forehead.
“Headache?” She asked, still attending to her hair.
“No,” he grunted. “It just feels like I’ve been asleep for a thousand years…and yet nothing’s improved. It’s all still the same.”
Her hands stopped their drying motions.
“Sutton…” She hesitated. “How’s this all going to end?”
He stared at her.
“Like any religious conflict, I suppose,” he said eventually. “In blood and fire.”
She felt something inside her turn to stone.
“Is that meant to be some kind of joke? Because if it is, it’s not funny.”
Again, he stared at her, a lancing stare, as if he were pinning her to a cross with the points of his eyes.
He looked away when he said, “do you hate me, Aimee?”
“No, of course not,” she said immediately, but her skin prickled in alarm. “What a ridiculous thing to say.”
“It’s not ridiculous,” he said. “And certainly preferable to hating yourself.”
She felt as if she had missed some part of their conversation, some leap, that he had taken and she had not.
“What? Why would I-“
“You had to kill someone,” he said, looking at her again. “For work. That’s an over simplification perhaps, but to a certain extent it is true. Greg wasn’t your father, brother or lover; he was your boss. You got caught up in a war that really has nothing to do with you. After all, you can’t clock out at five and leave all this in the office. I saw your face when you drove that arrow into that boy’s neck.”
“Sutton, please, I don’t want to think about it-“
“And I saw your face afterward. Your head was going down the rabbit hole, looking for alternatives, a way out…anything rather than face what you had done. I thought a distraction might be the answer. An attack on your self-image could only help to stimulate your psychological white blood cells. And you could hate me, without realising that the target was yourself: for not finding another way to avoid killing that boy. I know what you’re like: that you demand the best from yourself, in everything. But it was a situation in which your best self could not hope to survive. You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself.”
Aimee was about to shoot back a retaliatory remark – a snide retort, or some other cutting criticism – when a sob escaped her suddenly. It was so surprising that it completely disarmed her…paving the way for a battalion of similar explosions to erupt, and to envelope her. The only thing she could do to cope was to hide her face in her hands.
She felt movement on the bed, and then Sutton’s arm was around her.
“I’m not like this,” she said, through her tears, shocked and dismayed by her own behaviour.
“I know.”
“I’m tough.”
“You are.”
“I mean, I had to be. Growing up. Nobody else was going to look after me. My parents were too busy loving God and losing their minds. I had to be tough.”
“But you’re not made of granite, Miss Graham.”
“But I’m not a crier. I never cry. Have you ever seen me cry?”
She checked his expression.
He gave her a lopsided, forlorn smile.
“I think these could be called extenuating circumstances. Don’t you?”
She knew he was right, but in that moment she realised that her crying was done, that the brief squall of her emotions had passed and that she felt better for it.
She took Sutton’s hand in her own. It was a big hand. It was thick, tanned and hairy. It completely encased her own. She marvelled a little at it.
“So…thank you, I suppose,” she said awkwardly. “For knowing what was going on in my head…even if I didn’t.”
“It’s not a cure,” he said. “More a reprieve. But no thanks are necessary. I was just returning the favour.”
“The favour?”
“The victory fuck.”
“Oh. That. So this was like a�
��victory headfuck?”
He winced but he said, “when you put it like that…”
“What did Greg do?” She asked suddenly. It had just popped into her head.
Sutton frowned.
“What?”
“You said he hadn’t met his contractual obligations,” she said. “That he had made some transgressions. Then…you tried to strange him. And you whispered something to him. So: what did he do?”
He hesitated.
“Sutton?”
She tugged on his hand.
Sutton’s expression was carefully neutral when he said, “two weeks into my time in the Cult, Grey sent someone else in to get Toby.”
She was shocked. Greg had never mentioned it.
“What?”
Sutton shrugged.
“I assume he didn’t think I was working fast enough,” he said. “He wouldn’t be the first manager to push an employee for more productivity. But he didn’t understand that this wasn’t a line feed, that it couldn’t be rushed. I rushed toward the end, to get Toby out before the Star Shot did too much damage…and look where that’s gotten us.”
“Did he tell you that he was sending someone else in?”
“No. But I recognised him. His name was Ben Feeder, and he was a pretty competent individual. He worked for a private security firm. As soon as I saw him, I knew what had happened, what Greg had done.”
“You keep saying “was”,” she pointed out.
Sutton nodded.
“He was there for two days…and then no one saw him again.”
The repercussions of that statement took a while to sink in.
“You think the Cult killed him?” She asked.
Sutton shrugged again but said, “I don’t have any proof, but I never saw him again. And there were rumours amongst the Disciples: that the newcomer was in truck with Ravenan advisors. I’m guessing that Bellafont and Clive sniffed him out. The thing is, what got me really mad, was the fact that Greg must have told him about me. Ben, I mean. He knew who I was, why I was there. He tried to make contract with me several times, but I managed to avoid him.”
Aimee said in a dead voice, “so he could have exposed you.”
Sutton nodded.