by J G Alva
He felt something at his back, and realised that he was at the railings once more. The axe swung forward to meet him, aimed roughly for the centre of his forehead, and he did the only thing he could do: he moved in under it, his left arm coming up to interrupt the swing of the shaft, his right hand grabbing the teenager’s shoulder and pulling him toward him.
Sutton head-butted the teenager as hard as he could.
He saw stars, and a fiery redness of pain seemed to split his forehead in two, but the boy went down as if he had been hit with a hammer, dropping the axe with a clatter.
Sutton felt liquid on his face. He reached up.
Blood.
Sutton picked up the axe and started running.
Smoke rolled across the roundabout like fog, obscuring pockets of his surroundings. Cars and vans, and parts of cars and vans, littered the roadway, so Sutton had to dodge between the vehicles – even jumping and sliding over a bonnet once – as he made as direct a line as he could to Bellafont’s motorhome. Sometimes, there were people hidden behind the cars, sometimes cowering, sometimes waiting…they would cry out when they saw Sutton, either in fear, or to attack. The journey became a nightmare series of snapshots, with the smoke suddenly pulling back to reveal the next trial, or another body, abandoned in the street.
When he reached the motorhome, the distant sound of sirens came trickling into his ears.
Fuck.
The back end of the motorhome was a blackened, twisted mess, but Sutton couldn’t make out any bodies amongst the wreckage.
The front end was more or less intact; the vehicle had been split into two almost in a clean line at its midpoint. A table hung out of the rear of the front section like a tongue. Two long seats, their cushions burning fitfully, bracketed the table like dog ears.
Sutton saw the safe hanging out of the cupboard under the seats. He couldn’t believe it. He had not suspected that the Cult might have taken it. He suffered a moment of indecision. There were things in there that nobody could see…he was torn, but in the end there was nothing he could do. It was intact, and it was shut, so he shouldn’t have to worry. He would retrieve it later.
Sutton left it where it was and quickly ran to the front of the vehicle and darted a look inside.
It was empty.
Bellafont was gone.
The sirens were getting closer.
Sutton looked around. There was a Beefeater restaurant behind still more railings, but it was dark; nobody in there. Further along the pavement there was a bus shelter, and beyond that, a high wall along the edge of St James’ Park. But the street was empty, with no trail to follow.
They were gone.
◆◆◆
CHAPTER 23
There was an Odeon on Union Street.
Sutton saw Fin sitting on the concrete steps in front of it as he trotted along the street in the gathering light of dawn.
Fin rose when he saw him. He looked thunderstruck.
“Jesus Christ,” he exploded.
Sutton frowned.
“What?”
“You’re covered in blood.”
Sutton looked down at himself.
He was splattered with blood and other bits of gore. His right knee had been ripped out of his trousers, and his T-shirt had two long tears across the width of it.
“Are you alright?” Fin asked.
“I’m fine. You?”
“Is it…is it done?”
Fin looked at the axe uneasily.
Sutton dropped it. It clanged loudly on the pavement.
“No. It wasn’t him – the man who walked across the Bearpit to meet me. Just someone made up to look like him.”
“Fuck. Like me, you mean?”
“Yeah.”
“What do we do now?”
Sutton shook his head.
“I don’t know.”
Fin looked aghast.
“God, this is a nightmare.”
He couldn’t argue with that.
“Come on. Let’s go back to Dot’s.”
◆◆◆
Darren came back to himself in the car.
The motion of the vehicle wasn’t comforting; in fact, it made him feel sick. His face felt twice the size, and sore. But even though it hurt, it was his head that caused him the most consternation, this foggy disconnected nausea. He knew this feeling. He had drunk too much again. His hurting face was the consequence of that: he had done something, gotten into a fight, or made a scene. He had to stop drinking. The thought rebounded around his head: got to stop drinking, got to stop…you can’t go on like this, you can’t.
Until he remembered that he had stopped. For three years.
He opened his eyes.
The left one only admitted a weak orange glow, but he could see through the right one well enough.
He was in handcuffs.
He stared at them a moment, trying to work it out. He had been tied to a chair. Hadn’t he? Then how had he gotten here, handcuffed, inside a moving vehicle? Why was his face hurting? It was all jumbled in his head. He tried to lick his lips but couldn’t. It was as if he had dipped his head in hard forming plastic.
With great difficulty, he looked around.
Two people were sitting in the front of the car. He didn’t know the younger one. But he recognised the other man.
Pat.
It came back to him then, in a sickening rush…at least most of it anyway.
He had attacked Bob, put him in the hospital probably.
Fresh nausea washed through him then, and for a moment there was a very real possibility that he was going to be sick over himself…but it passed.
He was sitting in the back with two other people. He didn’t know them, although their faces were vaguely familiar: an attractive slim blonde and a boy.
The boy.
How had he ended up here?
The car slowed to a halt.
Pat was talking, but Darren struggled to make out the words. He gave up. He looked out his window instead. The Station. They were at Bridewell Station. There was a large chunk of time that was missing. Because he had been drinking. Why had he been drinking?
Pat and the other detective got out of the car. Pat came around to Darren’s door and opened it. He grabbed Darren’s arm and pulled him out. Darren almost tripped over the edge of the footwell. The blonde followed behind. The other detective helped the boy out on the other side.
Darren looked up at Pat, squinting to make him out; he was a shadow amongst shadows, in the dim light of a new dawn. For a moment, it were as if his old mentor was at the end of a very long tunnel, a million miles from Darren…and then in the next he was too close, each pore a gaping manhole in his face. Darren tried to pull away from him but Pat resisted.
Fuck you, Darren wanted to say. Fuck you. Let me go.
Then: chaos.
Darren was thrown back against the car suddenly.
Pain flashed up his back.
People running. Shouts. The girl screamed, and it was cut off. Somebody fell to the floor at his feet. Darren looked, and it was Pat. His shirt was bloody. What…?
He looked around blearily. The other detective was fighting a tall guy, fighting on the street, each man trading powerful blows to face, shoulders, chest and stomach. Two other men were leading the boy and the woman to a white van parked on the opposite side of the road, in front of a café.
He knew what was going on.
The Cult.
But the boy was his. He’d found him, nobody else.
Darren started walking toward the van.
A side door was opened, and the boy and the woman were forcefully pushed inside.
If he wasn’t quick, he was going to miss his chance.
Halfway to the black rectangle of the door, someone looped an arm around his throat. They squeezed. A bright bolt of pain seemed to split his head in two as he clamoured for air. His face throbbed, fully six times the size it should be…or at least it felt that way. With his cuffed hands, he t
ried to loosen the grip on his throat, but it was like trying to wrestle with a tree trunk. He had no strength to speak of anyway.
I helped, he tried to say, but all that came out of his mouth was a gurgle.
It seemed to continue forever, this painful state of limited options, neither getting closer to dying nor sensing any inclination from the tree trunk arm toward loosening. He could hear voices, but could not make out the words. His captor spoke little; the voice was coming from inside the van.
Then the arm around his throat was gone.
He stumbled forward, keeping his feet but wavering, his hands up. He took a deep breath. His throat was raw.
“I helped,” he croaked, to the black rectangle of the door…to anyone who would listen. “It was me. I helped.”
He felt rough hands on him then, pushing him, urging him inside the van.
He fell in, rolling on his side, his head hurting worse than ever, his throat sore and burning, his face settling into a dull and omnipresent throb. The side door was closed and he was plunged into darkness suddenly, they all were.
He sat up, propping himself against the wall of the van. The blonde was to his right, the boy almost opposite him, with two strong and defiant men sitting to his left and right. Someone climbed into the front of the van – Darren felt the vibration – and then started the engine. There was a pause, and then the van pulled out into the road.
They were going.
There was someone else in the back of van. Darren hadn’t noticed because he was dressed in black, and there wasn’t much light, just what came through a small square of grating in the partition that separated them from the driver’s cabin. The man sat with his back to the driver’s seat, facing them. Darren struggled to make him out. He was wearing a hood, so he couldn’t see his face.
After the vehicle had been on the road for a couple of minutes, the man pulled back the hood, revealing his identity.
Darren knew who it was.
So did the girl apparently, as she began screaming.
It was Bellafont.
◆◆◆
“There were two police officers, two detectives,” Dot explained.
“Oh Christ.”
Sutton rubbed his eyes.
“They took them. I tried to stop them-“
“Dot, it’s okay.” Sutton let his hands drop. He looked around. The IV bag of vodka and the clear piping had been coiled and was on the kitchen table. “They took Darren Board as well?”
She nodded.
“Toby, Aimee and Darren.”
“Where were they taking them?”
Dot shrugged.
“I don’t know. He threatened to arrest Aimee if they didn’t go with them.”
“Bridewell Station,” Sutton said to Fin, and he nodded. “Has to be. So we need to-“
Dot’s phone rang then.
All three of them stared at it, as if it were a snake.
Dot looked at Sutton, and he nodded for her to answer it.
She picked it up.
“Hello?”
She listened and then interrupted with, “who is-“
More listening.
Then she looked at Sutton.
Her expression made something cold and unpleasant drop into his stomach.
Wordlessly, she passed the phone to him.
He took it.
“Hello?”
“I have the girl.”
A hissing whisper, like a child, but Sutton knew who it was.
“Have you…is she hurt?”
“No. I mean…not yet.”
Sutton tried to pick out some background noises, which he thought might help him deduce where the man was. There was just the faintest of echoes, but it was a flat echo. A small room, but stone; like a bathroom. But where?
“What do you want?” Sutton asked. Why was he calling? They had the boy…what did they need him for?
“You’ve got something you need to do,” he said.
Sutton frowned.
“What-“
“Come to The Lord Mayor’s Chapel,” he said hurriedly, still whispering. “Knock three times. I’ll let you in. Then…finish it.”
“Finish what?”
A pause.
“You’ll know when you get here. If you don’t…” Another pause. “I will cut the woman.”
He hung up.
◆◆◆
CHAPTER 24
“Why would he do that?” Fin asked.
Sutton was washing his face in the kitchen sink.
Dot handed him a towel, and he took it gratefully.
“I don’t know,” he admitted.
“A trap?”
Sutton took a slow breath, thinking about it. Absently, he passed the towel back to Dot. It was pink with old blood.
“Possibly. But not in the way you think it is.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Give me half an hour,” Sutton said. “Then call the police.”
“You’re not going?” Fin looked aghast.
“Fin-“ Sutton shook his head. “Half an hour. Then call the police. Give them the location. By then it will be over…or I’ll be dead. Either way, they won’t expect it. And you’ll save Aimee and Toby.”
“Sutton, you’re not fucking invincible-“
“You think I don’t know that?” Sutton said testily. “Listen to me, Fin: as a man, you are only as good as what you do, not what you say you do. If I don’t do this…then I’m not the man I’ve always told myself I am. Do you understand?”
“No,” Fin said, shaking his head. He looked deeply upset.
“You were always a good friend, Fin,” Sutton said, grasping his shoulders. He smiled. “The little brother I never had.”
“Sutton, you don’t…” Alarmingly, there were tears in Fin’s eyes. “If you hadn’t found me at that crime scene, all those years ago…I’d hate to think where I’d be now. I owe you more than I can possibly say…”
“Nonsense. You don’t owe me anything. And you’d have been just fine. You’re like that reed in that story, you know? The one that bends in the wind, and survives even though the Oak goes over. The reed that held up the world.”
Compulsively, Fin hugged him.
“Fucking hell, Sut.”
Sutton patted him on the back and then extricated himself.
Dot was wiping a tear away from the corner of her eye.
“I have to go,” he said simply to both of them, and then left by the front door.
“Oh bollocks,” Fin said, after he had gone. He wiped at his eyes, as if they hurt.
“He’s always been this way,” Dot said, as if that made it right. “Perfectly content to walk through the fires of Hell.”
“He’s a fucking idiot,” Fin said miserably.
Dot nodded.
“Or the best man I’ve ever known,” she said philosophically. She smiled then. “Apart from my late husband, of course.”
◆◆◆
Aimee wished they’d move the body of the vicar.
It lay in a dark nook on the far side of the main entrance, behind a fold out picnic table covered in leaflets. The robe had fallen back and one defenceless ankle lay exposed, clothed in a grey sock and a black shoe.
Three drops of blood on the old stone floor next to it were like punctuation points.
“This is one of the oldest churches in Bristol,” Clive said, from slightly behind her. He held a knife pointed in her general direction, to stop her running, but he needn’t have worried: she wouldn’t be leaving without Toby. “It used to be a hospital, in the 13th century – the Hospital of St Mark. It’s said that it provided food and care for one hundred poor people a day…and it’s meant to have done that for three hundred years. It’s partly why we chose it: it harks back to an earlier, better age.”
While Clive spoke, Aimee kept a close eye on Toby…although close wasn’t necessarily the right word: he was all the way at the far end of the church, in the chancel, the morning sun illuminating hi
m with pillars of Technicolor light from stained glass windows. They were not much more than silhouettes from her vantage point in the nave.
Toby, the three bodyguards…
…And him.
She didn’t know why she had screamed when he had revealed himself in the back of the van. An involuntary reaction, she supposed. But it had seemed to her in that moment that her worst nightmares were coming true.
“We were going to stand on the grass,” Clive continued, his voice almost wistful. “We were going to stand in front of the City Hall. That was the plan. A perfect staging ground.”
During the van ride to the church, Bellafont hadn’t said one word, and had barely looked at her. Still, he scared her, but it turned out she was more scared for Toby, because during that short trip Bellafont had hardly been able to take his eyes off the boy.
“This was going to be the beginning of the fall of the Ravenans,” Clive said. He was a small nervous man who seemed uneasy with violence, and very obviously did not like wielding an object that could be used for that very end. But like all these cult people, she didn’t doubt that he would stab her if he had to. “The fall of the Ravenans…and the rise of the New Artisans.”
They were talking now, the figures in the chancel, their heads bent towards each other, intent, Bellafont standing to Toby’s right and capturing all his attention, the younger head turned up to look at him.
Aimee worried that the fascination was not just on Bellafont’s side.
“Now,” Clive said, that wistful note returning, “I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
Aimee didn’t have much hope that they would be rescued. She had seen Detective Harris stabbed (she hadn’t seen what had happened to the other one). Who then knew where they were? A strong hand over her mouth had prevented her from calling out, but at that early hour, there had been no pedestrians to help, and no witnesses to their abduction.
Sutton…
If anybody could find them, it was Sutton. She felt a surge of hope. She wasn’t sure how realistic it was, but she clung to it desperately. Sutton would go to Dot’s, she would tell him about the police, he would follow the trail back to the police station…
And then what?