by J G Alva
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As Sutton walked to his car, he spotted a man who seemed familiar lingering on the far side of the car park.
He was in his late thirties, and had parked his brown Rover in an awkward corner space. He was leaning against the boot. He was tall, with thick dark hair swept back from his forehead. He wore an old grey suit that needed ironing. He was bent over, rolling up a cigarette, but his eyes came up and found Sutton.
Sutton ignored him and got into his car.
At that moment, his phone rang.
Fin.
“What’s up?” Sutton asked.
“I managed to give the police tree a shake. Chris Masters’ possessions fell out.”
“Okay.”
“I thought it might be an idea to take a look.”
“You never know. Diane has them?”
“Yes. She’s agreed to meet.”
“Okay. When?”
“Whenever you’re ready. If you could pick me up?”
“I’ll be there in about twenty minutes.”
“Okay. See you.”
Sutton hung up, and then started the car. He looked over his shoulder. The man was still rolling his cigarette. Did he know him? Not personally, no, but he had seen him before…he just couldn’t figure out where.
Sutton backed out of his parking space and turned the car toward the exit, his eye consistently flicking to his mirrors to track the tall man in the grey suit.
He was worried because he thought the stranger might be a policeman. He had that air about him.
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CHAPTER 8
Friday, 3rd June
Diane had already ordered a coffee when Sutton and Fin entered the café.
It was late afternoon, and only three other tables were occupied. It was an old, family owned café in the south of Clifton, a relic from another time, and charming because of it. It felt like someone’s front room. Dark furniture, dim lighting and fliers for local events covered every available inch of wall space and gave the café a subterranean feel. Diane looked nervous as they sat down opposite her at the table she had chosen by the window…the one source of true light in the place. He wondered if she was always this skittish, or if she was having second thoughts. Who were these strangers, really? She didn’t know them. It might explain why she had agreed to meet them in a café: it was much safer to meet in a public place.
“So here it is,” she said, retrieving the items from inside a dog-eared padded envelope.
She laid them out on the table.
A wallet.
Some change.
A dozen paperclips.
A fountain pen.
The keyring with the photo Diane had spoken about.
Sutton opened the wallet and went through it. No paper money, and hardly anything else. A few photographs of the sister and his two nieces. And an older photograph: the parents. He had an ID card for the university, complete with an unflattering washed out photo under the laminate. There were a couple of bank cards, and a membership card to something Computer Workshop.
“Any idea what this is?” Sutton asked, holding up the card.
Diane shook her head.
“No.”
“Hm.”
There was nothing else, and no hidden compartments either. He passed it to Fin, who checked it as well. The change came to a whopping total of £2.45.
But the paperclips and the pen…
“Was there any paper?” Sutton asked, holding them up.
“No. This was all there was.”
“Then why have paperclips and a pen?”
“I don’t know.”
The fountain pen didn’t seem particularly expensive. It was black, and wider than most pens. Thick. It was actually too large to reasonably expect it to be used for writing. He checked the nub: dry. As if it hadn’t been used in a long time.
“Can I look at that?” Fin asked, reaching for the pen.
Sutton passed it to him.
Fin examined it, turning it this way and that, and then – with a tug – it came apart. Inside the end cap, a metal USB connection stuck out of the plastic.
“A memory stick,” Fin said. He turned to Diane. “Any idea what’s on it?”
“No. I didn’t even know that was there.”
“Do you mind if I keep it? I’ll take it home and check it out on my computer. Might be something.”
“No. That’s fine.”
Something, some sense, made Sutton looked over Fin’s shoulder, through the window, on to the street. He didn’t know why, but he wasn’t surprised to see the tall man with the rumpled suit on the opposite side of the road. He was leaning against the passenger door of his car. He was once again rolling a cigarette. He was deliberately staring into the café at Sutton. Could he see him? Surely the reflection from the glass prevented that.
Still, the man continued to stare.
“Wait here,” Sutton said, getting out of his seat.
Fin looked up from his examination of the memory stick, distracted.
“What?”
“We might have a problem,” Sutton said, and pointed to the man outside.
Fin turned to follow his finger.
“Who is he?”
“I don’t know,” Sutton said, moving to the front door. “But I’m going to find out.”
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As Sutton crossed the road to meet the stranger, the man nodded as if they were friends.
He lit his hand rolled cigarette, and took a long drag before saying, “alright?”
“That depends,” Sutton said, stopping in front of him. “Why are you following me?”
“Who says I’m following you.”
He had a very soft Bristolian accent, mixed in with the ghosts of a lot of other dialects. Like he’d spent a good amount of time in other places, but had grown up here.
Sutton stared at him.
The man smiled.
“Easy, mate. I’m on your side.”
“Do I take your word for that?”
“You can take her Majesty’s word for it,” he said, showing him his ID. “Unless you don’t trust the Queen.”
Sutton read it: Detective Inspector Charles Leeman.
“I don’t know the Queen. So maybe I don’t. Am I under arrest?”
“Who said anything about an arrest?” Leeman put his ID away.
“Then am I being investigated, Detective Leeman?”
“Call me Chip,” Leeman said, blowing smoke out of the side of his mouth. “Everyone does.”
“Chip.”
“See. That was easy. Now we’re best mates. Come on. Hop in. Let’s go for a ride.”
Chip opened the car door.
“I don’t want to go for a ride.”
“You’re a prickly little shit, aint you,” Chip said, but smiled to take the sting from his words. “Honestly. You’re not in any trouble. It’s fine. Get in.”
Chip circled his car and got into the driver’s side.
Sutton stood on the road a moment. He could see the dim impression of Fin’s face pressed to the glass as he stared out. Sutton waved him off, and then climbed into the car.
“Where are we going?” Sutton asked.
Chip grunted. The car smelled of stale cigarette smoke. The ashtray was overflowing.
The detective stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray and started the car.
“Buckle up. We wouldn’t be setting a good example if you didn’t.”
He smiled.
Sutton shook his head and fastened his seatbelt, and the detective pulled away from the curb.
◆◆◆
They drove in silence for a time.
Chip took them to Whiteladies Road, and then down the hill to the Triangle. He crossed the Triangle on to Queen’s Road. He stopped behind a line of cars at the traffic lights on to Park Street. He coughed roughly into his hand. A smoker’s cough.
“Where are we going?” Sutton asked again.
Chip didn’t answer
for some moments.
“I got this friend,” he said, tapping the steering wheel with one hand. The light changed, but they didn’t make it past the junction before the lights went back to red. Too much traffic. Chip pulled up the handbrake. “This mate has got a bee in their bonnet. So I said I’d help out, if I could. You know all about that. So I’ve heard.”
He tapped Sutton playfully on the arm.
Sutton didn’t reply.
Chip sighed.
“To be honest, I think it’s a load of bollocks. But I said I’d look. So I’m looking.”
“Looking for what?”
Chip grinned.
The lights changed, and Chip took off the handbrake. Slowly, they rolled down Park Street.
“Looking for what?” Sutton repeated.
“You’ll figure it out.”
At the bottom of Park Street, Chip put on his hazard lights and then pulled to the curb in front of the Lord Mayor’s Chapel.
Chip turned in his seat to face him.
“The problem is, I can’t go back to my mate with nothing. Do you know what I mean? Otherwise, what kind of a friend would I be?”
“Why have you stopped here?”
“I thought you were meant to be smart. That’s what I heard anyway.”
“What do you think you know about me?”
Chip tilted his head and then, as if reading from a file, said, “Sutton Henry Mills, age thirty eight, born July 22nd, 1979. Parents: Henry Reginald Mills, British Army, retired at the rank of Captain – and Catherine Elizabeth Mills nee Blanco. Listed as homemaker. Grew up in Bristol but spent a significant portion of his life living abroad with his father after his mother passed in a freak boating accident. Henry Mills died 19th November 1995, at which point the young Sutton Mills was placed in the custody of Tom Headley. For two years. Then we have two flags in your file: grievous assault with a deadly weapon, and breaking and entering. Both cases dropped due to lack of evidence. And then after that…blip.” Chip made an exploding motion with his hand. “Nothing. Nada. Like you fell off the earth. Keeping secrets from our beloved government, are we, Sutton?”
Sutton didn’t reply.
Chip tutted disapprovingly, and then put the car in gear.
“Onward and upward, amigo. Lots more to see.”
◆◆◆
The next stop was the Bear Pit, the large roundabout next to the Broadmead Shopping District. Chip parked illegally just after the turning to the bus station. He put his hazards on again.
“Come on,” he said, and exited the vehicle.
Sutton shook his head. He was beginning to understand what this was all about…but he wasn’t quite sure where the detective was going with it.
He got out of the car. Chip was already twenty feet away.
He stopped and turned to give him an encouraging wave.
“Come on, me old mucker,” he called cheerfully. “We haven’t got all day.”
Sutton followed Chip to the zebra crossing. When the lights changed, Chip rushed across the road, his hair flying, and Sutton followed.
They now stood at the railings around the edge of the Bear Pit. Sutton remembered this place. It looked very much different in daylight. And they had repaired most of the damage, so that was good. A large semi-circle of concrete sunk twenty feet into the earth in the middle of a busy roundabout, subways connected it to various parts of the inner city. At that moment, two dozen people were either milling or passing through it.
“I hate this place,” Chip said loudly, over the noise of the busy traffic that surrounded them. He retrieved his smoking paraphernalia from inside his jacket, and started rolling another cigarette. “It’s fucking dirty, it’s grey, you get every kind of asshole down there, either drinking or doing drugs…My original patrol covered this area, when I was a PC. You could always find discarded needles in the bushes. If you looked. And you got mums walking their kids through it…If you ask me, they should fill it in. Just pour concrete into it until it’s gone. Probably half the crime rate in Bristol overnight.”
Chip grinned.
He finished rolling his cigarette but had trouble lighting it. Too much wind.
“Here. Give us a hand, mate.”
Sutton held up Chip’s jacket to shield it from the wind as he lit his cigarette.
A sigh of relief when it finally caught…and then a vicious, hacking cough after the first drag.
“You should think about giving up,” Sutton said. “It’s a nasty habit.”
Chip nodded but said, “I’m not sure I’ll make forty, so I can’t say as I’m particularly worried about it.”
“Are we done here?”
Chip checked his expression.
Sutton was getting the impression that, despite his offhand and almost meandering conversation, there was a very real point to what was going on, and Detective Leeman was actually a very smart policeman.
“Alright,” the detective said. “Let’s go back to the car. Just one more stop now.”
◆◆◆
Sutton recognised where they were headed long before Chip pulled to a stop in front of it.
It was the building Freddie had lived in.
Had died in.
All the places they had stopped at had been pertinent to Sutton’s involvement with the Church of the New Artisans: the Bear Pit, where a war had been waged; the Lord Mayor’s Chancery, where the final confrontation had played out; and finally Freddie’s flat, where his friend had died. Leeman seemed to be trying to educate him on the consequences of his actions…as if he didn’t already know. But of course what he couldn’t show him was the consequences of his inaction. Which could have been much worse.
Chip didn’t say anything. He didn’t even look at Sutton.
“What are you doing?” Sutton asked eventually…although by now there couldn’t be any doubt.
Chip turned to him and looked long and hard at his face.
“So you did give a shit about your mate,” he said.
With a voice like lead, Sutton said, “what?”
“I was just checking. But I can see you’re upset. I just wanted to know. You know. For myself.”
Barely restraining his temper, Sutton said, “are you satisfied?”
“It’s alright, mate. Keep your hair on. This is a good thing.”
“It is?”
“Sure. I’m trying to work out what sort of guy you are. And whether or not I should do anything about you.”
“Because of your friend.”
“Now you’re catching on.”
“What did she tell you?”
“Who said it was a she?”
Sutton stared at him.
Chip’s otherwise taciturn face broke into a sudden grin.
“Hey. You might actually be alright at this amateur stuff. You got the sense anyway. But I’d stop doing it for a while, if I was you. For your own sake.”
“Oh really.”
“Look. I’m trying to be a mate here. But my friend is out to get you. With a vengeance. You know what they say about a woman scorned and all that.” Chip pretended his hand was a gun, and fired it at Sutton. “What did she say to you? When she popped round the other night?”
“She tried to get me to confess.”
“I see.”
“That was your idea?”
Chip’s eyes darted to his face. Surprised.
He smiled, delighted.
“Well. There was a chance. I thought it might shake you up, at least.”
“Like this?” Sutton said, and indicated the building…and by inference all the terrible memories it conjured up. I’m sorry, Freddie. I know I keep saying it, but I’m sorry.
“Nah. This is just for me.”
“What does she have on me?”
“Some stuff,” Chip said, nodding. “Some of it is pretty juicy. I mean, she’s a brilliant Criminal Defence Solicitor, so she’s got some sources, know what I mean? But you’re in the clear for now. That’s why I’m saying you should sto
p what you’re doing. Whatever it is. Or you’re likely to give her bullets for her gun, if you get my meaning.”
“Why are you helping me? I don’t understand.”
“’Cause I like you, Sutton. I don’t know why. But I trust my instincts. Despite the Art, you seem to have your shit together. I can respect that.”
“Maybe it’s because of the Art.”
“Whatever. But to be honest, I think this is all bullshit. I’d rather not get involved. It’s a personal thing, and they’re messy – trust me, I know what I’m talking about. But…she’s a friend. You see my dilemma?”
“How you must be suffering.”
“There’s no need to be a cunt about it. I’m helping you out.”
“And I appreciate that. Now, can you take me back?”
Chip stared at him, idly tapping the steering wheel with one hand, and then turned to start the car.
“My advice?” Chip said. “Leave whatever you are doing to the big boys. Or you’ll get pushed off your swing. By me. I don’t want to do it. So don’t make me do it. Okay? That’s all I’m saying.”
“Take me back.”
“Fine. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.” Chip grinned. “Us guys have got to stick together. Yeah? Bros before hoes, and all that.”
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CHAPTER 9
Friday, 3rd June
Fin was waiting patiently on the pavement when Sutton returned to the café.
He asked, “what’s going on? Who was that?”
“A friendly warning.”
“Really?”
“Well. Maybe not so friendly. Maybe it was just a warning.”
Fin stared at him.
“Do I need to start wearing a bulletproof vest?”
Sutton smiled.
“No. But we need to be careful. Where’s Diane?”
“She went home. She could only get the babysitter for a couple of hours.”
“Right. And our next port of call?”
“Home.” Fin brought the memory stick masquerading as a pen out of his pocket and held it up. “I want to see what’s on this.”
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