Green Light

by JG Alva

  “Please, Sutton,” she said, a pleading note in her voice.

  He didn’t reply.

  She dropped her hand from his arm.

  In a voice gone quiet, she said, “saving someone has to be better than destroying someone.”

  He huffed.

  “We aren’t destroying someone. We’re diverting a destructive force. Would you try to argue with an avalanche?” He sighed. This was going nowhere. “Do you want to know what your mother did for me? Why I owed her?”

  It was a distraction – which she must have been aware of – but it was also a way to reach her. Even though she sat in the front passenger seat, emotionally she might have been on the moon.

  But he could tell she was engaged by the set of her head.

  “The Favour?”

  “Yes. The Favour.”

  “Yes, please. What was it?”

  Sutton looked at her.

  “She saved my life.”

  Angela appeared sceptical.

  “Really? My mother?”

  Sutton nodded.

  “You doubt her. And I can understand why. But you shouldn’t. She was…pretty special.”

  Angela nodded.

  “Okay. What happened?”

  “At the time, I was involved with a married woman.”

  “Oh, Sutton.”

  “And” – he held up a finger to forestall her – “her husband was a Chief Inspector. A good policeman, but a hard man. A very hard man. Grew up poor, and climbed his way up to the top, scooping up his attractive wife along the way. So you can imagine he didn’t take too kindle to our…trysts.”

  “I should think not. Sutton, that’s wrong.”

  “There’s a lot of things wrong in the world. And I’ve never pretended to be a saint.”

  “Still…”

  “I was in love with her, Angela. Or thought I was.”

  Angela stared at him.

  “Alright,” she said eventually.

  “The husband found out about us, obviously. I don’t know how. Maybe he had the sense that something was wrong – he was a policeman, after all. But what he did in response to it was decidedly unpoliceman-like: he used his job – and his power – to try and scare me off.”

  “Oh dear.”

  “I got arrested four times, for one supposed infraction of the law or another. And I got put in the hospital twice.”

  “Shit.”

  “Yes. Looking back, I don’t blame him. I was messing with his wife, after all. But it was a stupid thing to do, really…for him, I mean. He made a martyr out of me. Every time I saw her, I had another bruise, another tale of police brutality. Any lingering affection for her husband was obliterated by the sight of the man she was enamoured with bruised and abused.”

  “So how did Mum get involved?”

  “She knew what was going on – she and my father were close. He confided in her, I suppose. He didn’t know what to do with me. The threats against me were getting worse, and I wouldn’t stop with the woman. So Maggie came up with a plan. Looking back, the relationship could only have ended in disaster, but at the time there was nothing that was going to keep me and this woman apart. So Maggie didn’t sit down with me and try and talk me out of it; she knew that wouldn’t work. Instead, she met with the woman. She knew her, knew them both in fact, the woman and her husband. Maggie asked her to stay away. For my sake. Or her husband was going to end up killing me. Then he would go to prison, Sutton would be dead, and she would have nothing. Six months, Maggie said. Get divorced, and if you still love each other in six months, then it’s meant to be.” Sutton cleared his throat. “When she told me I was furious. I couldn’t accept it. I couldn’t be away from the woman for a day – six months was impossible.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “It’s what Maggie did. She arranged for me to study under a highly respected artist. Based in Italy, mind you. We would be an hour’s car journey from the Sistine Chapel. It…it was impossible to turn down. And she was paying for it all…I couldn’t resist. She knew I couldn’t resist. And it wasn’t like I was losing the woman. In six months, she could be divorced, and we would be free to be together. If I stayed away. And there was no better place to go. For me.”

  “So you went away,” Angela said thoughtfully. “And when you came back…?”

  Sutton shrugged. He sounded bitter, but he wasn’t. Not really.

  “As you probably already guessed, she wasn’t divorced. And I no longer loved her.”

  Angela was silent a moment.

  “Did you love her? When it all started, I mean.”

  Sutton was quiet for a time. The traffic jam seemed to be unclotting; there was movement up ahead.

  “Yes,” he said eventually.

  “I’m sorry.” She hesitated. “No. That’s not true. I’m not sorry. If you had stayed together, I might not have…”

  But she couldn’t continue. To complete that statement was to open the door on a problem that she had turned away from. An awkward silence ensued. Sutton wanted to say so much to her…but in the end he continued as if she had not interrupted.

  “It was the right thing to do,” Sutton said. “Your mother knew that. She could see what was happening. She knew where it would lead. To the woman, I was a romantic fascination, in a trying time in her life. To me, she was my first fully adult relationship. My first love, I suppose. To the husband, I represented everything he couldn’t be, and everything he couldn’t give her. He would have ended up killing me – of that, I have no doubt. He couldn’t stop himself. He was being humiliated. I think your mother saw everything the clearest. When I came back, after six months, it was all over – as if nothing had ever happened. He was retired, and they were travelling a lot. And that was that. I was able to carry on with my life. And your mother never mentioned it. She never said, I told you so. And I appreciated that.”

  “It’s a strange thing to be grateful for,” Angela said eventually. “Thanking the person who destroyed a serious love affair.”

  “It took me a while to forgive her,” Sutton admitted, with a smile. “The Favour wasn’t promised straight away.”

  “It’s a wonder that you did.”

  Sutton shook his head, wryly amused.

  But his mirth quickly died, as current events reasserted themselves in his mind.

  “What’s more of a wonder is that you can forgive Barry,” he said.

  Something in his tone must have alerted her to his decision, because she touched his arm again and said, “you’re not going to break him?”

  Sutton shook his head.

  “He’s already broken but…we’ll try it your way. See if the moral high ground produces results.”

  *

  CHAPTER 24

  The house on Sion Hill was in the middle of a sweeping renovation.

  A long, narrow terraced house, the front of it was adorned with a bustling array of builder’s scaffolding. There was no front door, and the hollow interior consisted of bare brick, rough concrete floors, and no furniture. They’d torn the small front garden up, so that all that was left were three mounds of rubble. Sutton didn’t know if she was even here – it was late – but there was a light on inside so, holding to Angela’s hand, they negotiated their way through the garden and into the empty interior.

  A narrow kitchen area – pipes and wires exposed and rudely protruding from the walls on either side – led to a small concreted back garden. Dorothy ‘Dot’ Salting was sitting at a metal garden table with her husband, Ted, drinking tea. A small string of bare bulbs hung on nails on the back will lit the area.

  Sutton called out to them and, after a moment of surprise, they called and waved back.

  “What on earth are you doing here at this late hour?” Dot asked, almost comically surprised.

  Dot had been a nurse since before Sutton was born, and the night shifts and the hard work had taken their toll on her: she was only fifty but
looked older; her hair had already gone completely white; deep lines etched her face. But she retained that defiant spark, which meant her gaze was alive and direct. She missed nothing.

  “I need your talents,” Sutton said.

  *

  In the morning, Sutton visited Finley Henk.

  The young man passed him a mobile phone and said, “my…friend messed around with it. Like you asked. So apparently, if you call this guy’s number with it, it will look like his aunt is calling him.”

  Sutton took the phone.

  “He’s still in Bristol?”

  “Yes.”

  Finley passed him a sheet of paper. It was a map, with a route marked out in red.

  “And this is…?”

  “This is the route he’s taken every day. For the last four days.”

  Sutton looked at it, and then grunted. No surprises there.

  “Great. How much?”

  “£500.”

  A shocked pause.

  “Your friend doesn’t come cheap.”

  “Nope. But you get a free phone out of it.”

  “Why, thanks.”

  “He’s usually a lot more expensive. You got a discount.”

  “How come?”

  “My mate doesn’t like guys who hurt girls. His stepdad used to hit his Mum.”

  “Okay. Well. I haven’t got that sort of money on me. I’ll have to do a bank transfer.”

  “That’s fine.” Fin nodded. “I hope this works. Your plan. For the girl’s sake. Her face…I mean, fuck. Excuse my language.”

  Sutton nodded.

  “I know.”

  He didn’t feel overly confident, but this was the way she wanted it done, so this was the way they were going to do it.

  Sutton stared at the phone, and then put it in his pocket.

  “I’ll let you know how it comes out,” he said. “If you’re interested.”

  The boy nodded.

  “I am.”

  *

  “So what’s supposed to happen?” Angela asked nervously. She was wearing a baseball hat that had been pulled low over her features.

  The café was on the ground floor of a corner building, and two large floor-to-ceiling windows at the front and the side meant that any patrons had an almost unrestricted one hundred and eighty degree view of the street corner. A zebra crossing straddled the mouth of the side road. The main road at the front of the building was as a busy one way system.

  Sutton looked at his watch.

  He should be walking past any time now.

  “It’s almost lunchtime,” Sutton explained, without looking at Angela. He was fixed on the street outside, ready for their mark. “Fin’s been monitoring his phone, and he’s made this same trip every day for the last four days. He comes along here, crosses at the zebra crossing, then goes on down the road to the pub. As soon as I spot him, I’ll text Dot, and then she does her thing with the phone I gave her, the one Fin’s friend did his thing with.”

  “Do you think he’ll fall for it?” She asked.

  “You heard what Dot was like after ten minutes of listening to those recordings and practicing. If I closed my eyes, and listened, it was like I was back in that horrible house.”

  “God, yes.” Angela shivered.

  “As long as she sticks to the script, and as long as we don’t get hit with something in the eleventh hour, we should be fine.”

  “Eleventh hour? Like what?”

  “Like if he loses signal halfway through the call. If he gets cut off and tries to call his aunt back, he’ll get the real one, and then we’ll be fucked.”

  “Here he comes,” she said, making Sutton realise that Angela had distracted him from the window after all.

  Getting slow, he thought. Getting forgetful.

  Getting old.

  Sutton was shocked to discover that Barry Sheffield did indeed look a little bit like him…and also shocked to discover that he had seen him before: the day they had been following Daniel, the morning after the engagement party, this man had been outside of one of the university buildings, leaning against the gate post. Not that he had doubted Angela when she said she had been seeing him everywhere, but his own involvement hit with a more concussive blow.

  Barry Sheffield.

  Stalker.

  Beater of women.

  Underbelly of society.

  Quickly, Sutton sent a text to Dot.

  Barry was about to step out on to the zebra crossing when he stopped to answer his mobile phone. He checked the number, and did not look happy. He turned away from the crossing and walked ten feet down the side road, away from the other pedestrians; they were now able to see his face clearly. Silently, they both watched him. Barry argued for a moment, but soon stopped talking. He listened, his attention fixed on the pavement in front of him. He spoke for a long time at the end of the call, but then he hung up. When he did, a small happy smile seemed to settle on his face. His head tilted back, like a man in a desert basking in surprise rainfall.

  He stood like that for a full minute.

  Had it worked?

  Angela looked at him and smiled a little smugly.

  Sutton could hardly believe it.

  Barry Sheffield turned, halted at the pavement as a bus approached, and then promptly stepped out directly in front of it.

  The bus driver didn’t see him. The bus driver’s attention was fixed on the upcoming zebra crossing. Nobody would cross the road with a crossing only ten feet away. The bus was travelling at approximately twenty miles an hour, and Barry was knocked five feet backward…which didn’t give the bus driver nearly enough time to stop before rolling over him. After it was over, there could be no doubt he was dead.

  It was so sudden, so unexpected, that for a moment Sutton didn’t believe what he was seeing. Like a magician’s trick, he was waiting for the reveal, the prestige…but of course it never came. Beside him, Angela’s shock radiated from her body in undulating waves. The incident played over in his mind, again, and then again, and once more…What had happened? It had seemed, contrary to reason, that Barry had intentionally thrown himself in front of a bus. But why? After such good news, it didn’t make sense.

  Had Dot not kept to the script? She was meant to tell Barry the truth about what had really happened to his parents: the murder, and subsequent suicide, and that none of it was anything to do with him. But what had Dot told him that had made him do this?

  “Maybe he didn’t see the bus,” Angela whispered, her face and voice in anguish.

  “He saw,” Sutton said, flicking through the directory on his phone. He found the number and dialled.

  It rang, and was answered.

  “Dot?”

  “How did it go?” She asked. “Did it work?”

  Happy. Oblivious.

  She didn’t know, didn’t suspect.

  “What did you say to him?” Sutton asked.

  “Well, I had to improvise a bit, but it was basically your script,” she said. She was eating crisps, or biscuits – something crunchy – and her voice was distorted by them. “That I had lied to him all these years. That he wasn’t responsible for his parent’s death. That I was sorry.”

  “And what did he say to you? I saw him talking a lot at the end.”

  “Well, it was odd,” Dot said. “He said he’d had a dream about his parents last night. He said he’d dreamt that they’d forgiven him, and now they just wanted the family to be together again.”

  Well, Sutton thought, he supposed in a way that was now true.

  “Did it work?” Dot asked again.

  Sutton didn’t have the heart to tell her the truth. It wasn’t her problem; she was only doing him a favour; she didn’t deserve the guilt.

  “It worked fine, Dot,” he said. “Thank you.”

  “Of course, Sutton. Any time.”

  She hung up.

  *

  CHAPTER 25

 
“I’m going away,” Angela said.

  Five days had passed since Barry Sheffield had stepped into the road in front of a bus. Five days had passed since he had killed himself.

  She was making tea for them both in her small, tidy kitchen. Her back was to him. Her perfect back.

  Sutton didn’t respond.

  The flat above the shop had seemed particularly clean and tidy when he had entered it, but now he understood it was because various items had been packed away. She was leaving. He shouldn’t have been surprised…but he still felt betrayed. Bereft. He needed more time…and now there was no more time.

  But was he deluding himself? He honestly did not know what to say to her to change her mind. His own mind was blank with some kind of white-noise emotion.

  Angela heard the silence, and then checked his face.

  “You think I’m running away,” she said, making an intuitive leap.

  “Since you said it…”

  “Well. I’m not.” She appeared angry…but her eyes shifted away too readily at the sound of the kettle clicking off.

  “It’s just coincidence then?” Sutton said, smiling mirthlessly.

  “Coincidence?”

  “That you want to run away, and you are already going away.”

  Angela bowed her head as if he had struck her.

  “I’m sorry,” he said softly, guilty for the slight.

  “Sometimes, it’s like I don’t know you at all,” Angela said, without raising her head.

  She poured the boiling water into each of their cups.

  “Fifteen years can change a man,” Sutton said.

  “Surely not that much?”

  Sutton shrugged, unhappy with the way the conversation was going.

  “Depends on what’s happened in those fifteen years, I suppose.”

  She raised her head.

  “Please don’t change,” she said. It was as if she were pleading with him.

  He ducked that.

  Instead, he said, “where are you going?”

  “America,” she said, squeezing out each teabag and depositing them in the swing bin under the counter. Next, she retrieved the milk from the fridge. “California. The plastic surgery capital of the world. My doctor has put me in contact with some specialists over there. Lydia can look after Green Light while I’m gone. And I’ve always wanted to visit America.”