by J G Alva
“Why did he attack him, Pat?” Pointe asked, his voice very loud in all that silence. “Do you know?”
“The Cult,” Pat said, and then didn’t know how to continue.
Pointe nodded.
“He’s involved with them?”
Pat shrugged.
“He must be.”
“I’m surprised you missed it, Pat,” Pointe said, and the kindness made Pat feel worse…he didn’t deserve such consideration. “There’s very little that escapes you.”
How had he missed it?
“You’re getting old, like the rest of us,” Pointe said.
There was a rustle in the bushes at the edge of the open space and Pointe put his light on it, but in the end it was only a bird, breaking into flight suddenly. Actually, at this hour, it was more likely to be a bat.
“I could have sworn…”
But Pat didn’t – couldn’t – continue. The statement was laughable anyway. What could he have sworn? That Darren wasn’t involved? That it didn’t fit with who he was, who he knew him to be?
He had been wholly, completely, undeniably wrong.
He felt something dying inside of him. He couldn’t explain to himself what it was. It felt like…some kind of joy. The joy of being a policemen, a detective, perhaps…he didn’t know.
He wondered if, after all this was done, that he might not start to think about retiring. He had always dreaded the thought…but now it didn’t seem like such an unreasonable end. He had done all he could to make the world a better place, had devoted his life to it. Now it was time to put the oars away. Let somebody else take over rowing the boat.
At least it would mean nobody else would get hurt because of him.
He came back from these maudlin thoughts to find that he had turned away from Pointe and the Observatory, and was looking back toward the bridge and the Avon Gorge Hotel.
Then he saw it.
A flicker.
A light.
He looked again, but he knew what he had seen.
There was nothing wrong with his long distance vision.
“Lee,” he called.
Pointe turned. He had picked up a fast food carton and was examining it.
“What?” Lee called back.
“We have to go down there.”
He pointed.
“What? Why?”
He turned to Pointe.
“Because someone is watching us from a balcony on one of those houses,” he explained. “And I think they’re using binoculars.”
◆◆◆
Sutton stood just in front of the underpass.
St James Barton Roundabout was a busy hub in the centre of Bristol during the hours of daylight, but now it was mostly silent. A large oval, about the size of a children’s playground, had been sunk into the ground to a depth of about ten feet; the busy roads surrounding it were lined with thick iron railings.
This circular interior was fittingly called The Bearpit…fitting because of what was about to happen inside it.
Surrounding this island of traffic, tall blocks of modern architecture rose up: a high-rise Premier Inn poked into the night sky on Sutton’s left, the bus station bracketing one side of it; the large Debenhams at his back, with its mostly glass façade, obscured much of the night sky on that side; in front of him, the exit to the A38 ran under a suspended section of a Holiday Inn…like that photo of the car driving through a section cut in a giant Redwood. Small box windows – some illuminated, some dark – seemed to offer the challenge of a puzzle or message in the odd shapes they inadvertently formed, but if there was one, Sutton couldn’t decipher it.
The Bearpit, ten feet below the level of the road, was a hodgepodge of half a dozen concrete islands in hexagonal shapes, on which different vegetation grew. There was also a small section housing public toilets and other miscellaneous units whose purpose Sutton could only guess at. There were four passageways into this pedestrianized area: on the left, a passage ran under the road to the bus station; opposite him and to the right, another passageway travelled under the road and came out to one side of the A38; to his right, another passageway came out just before the newly developed shopping district of Cabot Circus; and behind him, this underpass led to stone steps outside of Debenhams. It was one of the reasons he had chosen this location to meet: easy access…as well as the opportunity for a quick escape.
“Hey, Sutton,” Fin said, from behind him. “Pssst.”
“What?” Sutton hissed, not turning around.
“Where they fuck are they?”
“They’re coming. Just wait. Just…be patient.”
There was a screech of brakes suddenly.
Sutton looked up.
He could see a car parked illegally on the roundabout. He knew it; the mural on the side was his own work, after all. The doors opened, and two figures got out. They came to the railings and stared down at him.
He didn’t know what he had expected to see, but he knew he hadn’t expected this. Perhaps he had thought to see the fresh faced boys and girls he had worked and laughed and ate with on the farm; that, perhaps, would not have been so daunting. Perhaps they might even have worn expressions of sorrow and regret…as if sad it had come to this.
But instead, what stared down at him now were two severed animal heads, worn by unidentifiable Cult members: a dog and a stag. They were real, and fresh; incomprehensible as it seemed, two animals had sacrificed their lives to provide these costumes. Sutton didn’t doubt their authenticity, not because he knew the Cult, but because in the streetlights surrounding St James Barton Roundabout he could see that blood had dripped out of the ragged edges of the heads and soaked the shoulders and chests of those who had chosen to wear them.
They were like figures from a horror movie.
More vehicles began arriving, parking along that side of the roundabout opposite him: buses, vans, cars with caravans being towed in their wake. Most of them bore his artwork.
What a terrible honour, to have his work associated with this madness.
Last to arrive was Bellafont’s motorhome.
All the occupants of the vehicles crowded at the railings. Almost eighty people, women and men, all standing there and staring down at him, most of them with some animal carcass or other draped over their shoulders, or sat on their heads, like crowns. There were foxes, more dogs, a wolf – where did they find a wolf? – another stag, badgers, cows, bulls, pigs. It was a fucking nightmare. Here was an army of madness.
But it was too calculated a scare to truly hit home with him. They had spent too long preparing, for it to have the punch of a truly frightening event. They were bloody and gore-adorned specifically to terrify the enemy, to make them question their resolve.
But of course they didn’t understand him, didn’t really know who he was.
He dared to challenge them. They would not, could not, understand the depths of his grief, the dimensions of his rage.
But they would learn, soon enough.
His mind felt frigidly clear, concise, focused. But underneath a thin layer of opaque ice, a turbulent torrent of emotion was flowing.
Bellafont was the last man to come to the railings. The others made way for him. Clive stood beside him, faithful as always.
“Now,” Sutton whispered.
This was the point at which Fin was meant to poke his head out from the shadow of the underpass at Sutton’s back.
Sutton knew it had worked when a ripple went through the crowd.
“Did it work?” Fin whispered.
“Get the fuck out of here. Get back.”
“Did it work?”
“Yes, yes, it worked. Now go. Fucking go.”
There had been a risk that the Cult would see Fin, think he was Toby, and then just kill Sutton in their rush to get their hands on him. But in Sutton’s opinion it was a minor one; they didn’t have guns, and it was too far away for an arrow to reach.
They would have to come down and get him.
And to do that, the
y would have to negotiate.
Bellafont had disappeared from the railings as suddenly as he had appeared at them. But in moments he was visible as an ominous shadow moving out of the dimness of the underpass that led to the A38. He came toward Sutton slowly, ponderously; like a large circus animal trained to approximate human behaviour. Sutton knew that walk, had observed it half a dozen times when Bellafont had come to the fire to tell them once more the more important parts of the Rise of the Artisans…and the coming War.
And yet…there was something not quite right about the way he was walking now.
Sutton began to doubt himself. Was he remembering it right? It was the man, he was sure of it: the robe was right, the beard was right, the hair was right, the height was right…and yet Sutton was convinced that the carriage was somehow different. Somehow wrong.
The eyes would be the deciding point, he thought. He couldn’t yet see them – Bellafont was too far away – but his eyes were unmistakable and could not be duplicated.
But before Sutton was able to make them out, while Bellafont was still a good ten feet from him, someone shot the leader of the Church of the New Artisans.
Blood shot out of his right temple, his whole body jerked as if an electric current was running through it, and then he collapsed to the floor on his face.
Dead.
◆◆◆
CHAPTER 22
Earlier in the evening, Sutton had been meeting with another madman.
Danny Longhall lived in a small two bedroom house in Henleaze. It was the house of a small suburban family, with a small wooden fence bracketing the flowerbed on the front lawn. It certainly didn’t fit the image of a powerful crime lord and, if what Sutton had heard was correct, that was exactly what Danny Longhall was.
Danny and his men were principally involved in drug trafficking…but they had a hand in other things too. There were eight men in total in the house, engaged in mysterious tasks. Strangely enough, they all looked very much like Danny: shaven-headed, short thick necks, hard unfriendly faces. They could all be brothers. Except for Ben, who was as black as midnight.
The two men that had shown him to the study at the front of the house returned to the kitchen, laughing about something. Sutton heard them through the half open door. There were other men on the property, each involved in their own respective tasks; he had seen them while waiting for the door to be answered, shadows moving in the dark, the occasional wink of reflected light from an eye giving them away.
The only light in the room was a lamp in the corner, and besides that – and the wedge of light coming through the half open door – it would have been pitch black. As it was, Sutton could make out bookcases full of files and folders, some tied with string, others wrapped in elastic bands. The floor was bare wood, scuffed and dirty. The walls were old peeling wallpaper.
Danny sat in an armchair in the cone of light from the solitary lamp. He was reading a paper, and he folded it and massaged the folds while he stared at Sutton. He had a pleasant, almost dreamy look on his face; it was almost as if he were trying to place him in his memory.
“Sutton Mills,” he said, the Bristolian thick and clearly audible. “How long has it been since I seen ‘e?”
“Almost twelve years, Danny.”
“Nope,” he said, clicking his fingers. “I seen ‘e at a private party down on the docks. Four years ago now.”
Danny stood up, slapping the folded newspaper down on to the table beside the chair.
“You was with this blonde,” he continued. “There was this electric blue dress on she. Some kinda funny material. And it was tight to her. The tightest material I’s ever seen. She was all tanned legs. She was dancin’ against you’s like a fuckin’ eel. I remember lookin’ at ‘e an’ thinkin’: he done well.”
“You should have come over. Said hi.”
“Nah. Who was she?”
“Her name was Ebba. She was Swedish. An architect.”
Danny made a face: impressed, Sutton thought.
“Fuck,” he said.
Even though the dim light from the lamp was kind, it couldn’t really hide the fact that the years had not been as affectionate to Daniel Longhall. The smile revealed missing and discoloured teeth. He was almost, but not quite, fat. Whereas bodybuilders were lean, this was hard earned muscle hidden under layers of subcutaneous fat; what Sutton liked to call working muscles. Like all the contestants in the World’s Strongest Man competitions, Danny could probably pull an artic with a strap around his waist.
And the scar…
It had not gotten better, it had gotten appreciably worse. If it had been a clearly defined line twelve years ago, now it was a large, deep, irregular pitted channel through his cheek and up his forehead. It was ugly, almost too repulsive to look at, and made the man seem scarier and more terrifying than perhaps he really was.
Which was probably the point, Sutton thought.
“If you had a phone, I wouldn’t have needed to interrupt you like this,” Sutton pointed out.
Danny smiled, shaking his head and wagging his finger. He walked toward Sutton. There was a curious vibration surrounding the man. It wasn’t violence exactly…perhaps it was merely unpredictability.
Danny walked past Sutton and pushed the door shut.
“We aint got no phones,” he said.
“I know,” Sutton said. “Which is why it was so difficult to find you.”
“Not just ‘e,” he said.
“What?”
“No phones, no computers, no fuckin’ gadgets…if it can’t be took apart and put it back together ourselfs, then it aint got no interest for I.”
“That’s why the police can’t get you,” Sutton said, with sudden realisation.
As hierarchies went, Danny’s gang didn’t feature particularly highly as a powerful and influential gang in the British underworld.
But very few of the men involved in it were ever caught, and even fewer went to prison.
Fin had had a hell of a time finding where Danny was living, for the simple reason that there wasn’t much of a presence on the web, not in the ways that search engines make the connections. Danny stayed well under the radar.
“You got a size on you’s,” Danny said appreciatively, checking him. “When I first saw ‘e, you was a skinny fuck. Now I reckon ‘e could go a few rounds. Yus should come visit I for the Friday Night Fights. There’s a proper boxing ring in the building out back. We fight for money. You know. Bets. Fifty men, in a competition. I reckon ‘e could make a bit of dosh.”
Danny liked to fight, Andy had said…and it seemed, in all those years, that nothing had changed. Sutton came to clearly see that it was the one thing about him that defined everything else: the look, the behaviour, the life.
“I was sorry to hear about your brother,” Sutton said.
The smile died on Danny’s face.
“Anything else,” Danny said, and the Bristolian accent was gone. Sutton had forgotten the shock that such a small thing could engender in him. It was a trick, for sure…but it was a neat one. “If it had been anything else, I could have protected him. But cancer…what can you do?”
Your own body turning on itself?
There was nothing that you could do.
“I need your help,” Sutton said.
Danny tipped his head.
“I know. You wouldn’t be here otherwise.”
“Will you help me? Or am I wasting my time?”
“Depends.”
“On what?”
“If I can help you. So. Tell me.”
Sutton nodded. It was a long shot anyway. If he couldn’t help…then he hadn’t lost anything.
“There’s a group of people after me,” he explained. “Religious maniacs. They’ve already killed a couple of my friends. And I’m worried that they’re going to hurt more people.”
“How many of them is there?”
“Eighty. Or thereabouts.”
“Eighty religious maniacs?”
Sutton nodded.
Danny whistled, and began circling Sutton.
Again, he felt that vibration. As if Danny might reach out and start choking him at any moment.
“What do they believe in? What’s their manifesto?”
Sutton thought about how to condense their belief system down into its essential elements.
“That their leader has unique knowledge of an ancient revolution, a class war, to save mankind, in a forgotten civilised past…and that he feels duty bound to support the next one. Which, apparently, is due very shortly.”
“Fuck,” Danny said, impressed. “And there’s eighty of them?”
“Yes.”
“That’s not a group,” he remarked, “that’s an army.”
“Can you help?”
“It depends, Sutton Mills. It depends. What is it you want from me?”
Sutton shrugged and smiled.
“A response. Preferably an armed one.”
“Right.”
“I heard that you sold guns. Guns, machine guns, rifles, automatics, semi-automatics. Ammunition. Grenades.”
“Amongst other things. You going to shoot eighty people?”
Sutton stared at him.
“I don’t know.”
Danny stopped and then leaned in to better see his eyes.
“Maybe you will,” he said softly. “Maybe you’ll kill them all, if I give you the weapons.”
“Will you?”
“Of course. On loan, mind. I’ll want them back. But you can’t carry enough weapons to kill eighty people. Not by yourself. So I can help with that too.”
“What do you mean? How?”
Danny smiled, displaying the brown teeth, the scar flexing on his cheek like a diseased, rotting slug.
“I’ll give you an army of your own. And then we can fucking kill them all. Together. How about that?”
◆◆◆
Fin was halfway along the underpass when he heard the shot, and turned to see Bellafont collapse in the centre of the Bearpit.
Shit.
He ran to the end, and turning the corner almost collided with Bez.
“Woh, shit, sorry,” Fin said, dancing out of the way. His heart was pounding wildly. He couldn’t deal with this sort of stress. His bowels felt like a plastic bag.