Tattoo

by J G Alva

  Blackmail. Fuck. If only there was someone he could blackmail.

  And then it came to him.

  Maybe there was.

  *

  He was able to finish his deliveries by half past three – despite the lateness of his arrival that morning – but Tanya was still working at Georgina’s Salon on Bedminster Parade at four when he parked on double yellow lines just down the street from her place.

  He saw her on the street, on a fag break. She was leaning against the building next to the Salon, one hand cupping her elbow, the cigarette held up to her face, her eyes, suspicious of the pedestrian traffic, following people as they passed…but that was just the way she looked sometimes.

  He studied her for a moment from inside his van; she hadn’t yet seen him. She was short, had a little weight on her, but nothing that he really worried about; on the contrary, a lot of it went on her tits and her ass, and he liked that. She had long jet black hair that she got done cheap; one of the perks of working at a hairdressers, he guessed. There was a naturally unhappy pout to her lips, like her mouth had been stuck on upside down. With her swollen bottom lip stuck out, and that look in her dark eyes, she did something to him, called to him some way…he found her almost impossible to resist. At eighteen, she was a bit young for him, but he liked that, liked her freshness. They had been seeing each other for about five months. He had met her while working for a bit of extra money as a bouncer at the Witch and Tap. He knew she liked it when he got rough with the drunks.

  He got out of the van, and as he slammed the door shut behind him she turned at the sound.

  “Baby,” she said, her face lighting up, tossing her cigarette into the street and rushing toward him.

  “Hey, gorgeous,” he said, wrapping his arms around her.

  They kissed, and Mike felt himself getting a little hot and bothered over her. She was good in bed, was a little shy, liked to be led…and made a lot of noise. He liked that.

  “Hey,” she said, patting her hair back in place where he had been greedily putting his hands through it. “We can’t do this now. I’s got to get back to work.” But she was smiling.

  “You comin’ over later?”

  The pout was back.

  “As long as my Mum don’t gis I shit,” she said.

  “What’s her problem now?”

  “You know,” she said. “She don’t like yus.”

  “You need to come over tonight, bab,” Mike said, running his hands down her back and over the curve of a buttock. A good ass. “We need to be doin’ some celebrating.”

  “Celebratin’?” She said. “What is we celebratin’?”

  “Well,” he said, and kissed her again. “You know that abduction that I saw? The one where that fuck shocked I?”

  “Yeah. Fuckin’ prick.”

  “Yeah. Well. I know ee.”

  “What?” She was shocked. “You never told I that? I mean, how do you know ee-“

  “I delivered to ee once,” Mike explained. “This was like, last year. Ee probably don’t remember I. I remember ee ordered this big fuck off TV. About the size of your arse-“

  “Shut up,” she said, hitting him lightly on the arm; she wasn’t offended, knew that he was playing, knew that he liked her ass.

  “Anyway, I know where ee lives. Out in Clifton. So. I’m goin’ to tell ee: pay I or watch I go to the cops. Ee’s got money, ee won’t miss it if ee gis I some.”

  Tanya was frowning.

  “That don’t sound like a good ideal,” she said, worried. “What if ee tried to fuck yus up like ee did last time, he could-“

  He put a finger to her upside down mouth.

  “Sh. Last time ee caught I off guard. Not this time. This time I’ll be ready for ee.”

  “You said ee were a big fucker-“

  “Will you stop worryin’, woman. I can handle ee. Awright? And then we’s going go out and I’ll buy yus sumfin.”

  She smiled.

  “Like what?

  “What doos you want?”

  She paused, thinking.

  “An holiday?” She suggested tentatively.

  *

  CHAPTER 8

  “So Ellie Mason knows who it is,” Robin said, putting her seatbelt on.

  Sutton slammed the driver’s side door shut, settled in his seat, and then paused, thinking.

  Sutton had parked on St. John’s Road, which ran the length of an ASDA car park where it met Coronation Road at its end. The smell of the river was in the air, muddy and spoiled, not yet diluted by the cough and belch of car fumes from rush hour traffic; Coronation Road was a busy thoroughfare during the day. Right now, with early morning light leaking insidiously into the sky, it was deserted, and looked strange.

  “It would seem like it. Damn it. I didn’t see it.”

  He had sensed that she had been hiding something, but certainly not this.

  “So what do we do now? Go back there?”

  Sutton shook his head.

  “I’m trying to work out why she would cover for this guy. After what we told her. Is it money?”

  “I don’t know. But if Sean gets hold of her, and finds that she knew this guy, knew what he was doing…he would probably charge her as an accessory. Then all the money in the world wouldn’t save her.”

  Sutton looked at Robin, his eyes dark.

  “Unless it’s something else. What if he has something on her? Is threatening her?”

  “What? With violence?”

  “Or with his knowledge of what she used to be involved in. For all we know, she might still be involved in it. And if he was a client, then he could go to the police with what he knows. She’d probably lose everything.”

  “She doesn’t look like a woman who would do well in prison,” Robin said.

  Sutton smiled, but there was an edge to it. He started the engine.

  “She’d probably break down without her mascara.”

  Sutton turned in his seat, his arm over the back of Robin’s headrest, and began backing the car out into the road.

  “But it’s something, Sutton,” Robin said eagerly. “We need to get to her, to find out who this guy is-“

  There was a flash of light in that moment, and Sutton saw Robin’s face in it, as if caught in a camera flash; saw the urgent expression turn to one of horrified surprise, and the fear leapt from her face to Sutton’s heart, exploding within it…before the world itself exploded, and Sutton would understand later that she had seen the headlights from a car travelling from the other end of St. John’s Road toward them, had seen the other car headed straight for them, on a collision course.

  There was sound: the crunching of metal, the breaking of glass, all pushed together into a loud bray of destructive noise, but some errant part of Sutton’s mind was able to pick it apart, as if in slow motion, and identify each sound, and to assign it to its proper source.

  And there was movement: a sliding under them, as if the world had tilted off its axis, or an earthquake were splitting the earth’s crust. It was like he was pushed, like hands had shoved him from behind.

  And then time returned to its normal speed, everything trying to catch up on itself. The impact pounded Sutton’s senses, totally overloading them, drowning his consciousness from all sides so that he didn’t know what was happening, could not guess, had as much cognition as a teenager on a roller coaster ride…or a fragment of rock in a bottle being shaken by an interested geologist. His brain did a quick recalibration. He knew that they were spinning, that most of the impact had been absorbed by the rear of the car. Robin was screaming. They were showered with pieces of shatterproof glass. The car lifted slightly, twisting, and then dropped back to the ground with a loud crunching bang.

  A car engine roared away.

  And then silence.

  Slowly, the world came back to them.

  His ears were ringing.

  “Robin? Are you okay?”

  He reached out to her, caught one of her flapping hands; she was sha
king.

  “Oh God, oh God, what happened?”

  Sutton looked out of the now shattered rear window, but could not see much passed the boot; it had been buckled, and stuck up, blocking his view.

  “Somebody ran into us. Are you sure you’re okay? Nothing hurts?”

  He still held to her free hand, but the other one patted her body, as if to check it.

  “No, no, I’m fine, I think. I…I think I’m okay.”

  “Stay here,” he said.

  “Sutton-“

  He climbed out.

  There was something wrong with the world; it was not on an even keel. He stumbled slightly, his hand on the car to steady himself. The shape of the roof under his hand was wrong, strange, not uniform. He made an assessment of the damage to it: whoever it had been who had hit them had clipped the rear of his Rover, and the back right side looked like it had been the victim of a meteor impact. The impact had driven ripples into the rest of the bodywork almost all the way to the front of the car. The windows were smashed, all except the front windscreen, which was starred.

  The car would probably need to be scrapped.

  He scanned the street.

  The car that had hit them was gone.

  There had not been enough time for it to have gotten far. So where was it?

  Two hundred feet away, on Coronation Road, a car was speeding toward the Bedminster Bridge roundabout; that had to be it. Without thinking about it, Sutton gave chase. He was calculating: he wasn’t hurt, there was a chance he could make it. On his right, the ASDA car park stood between him and where the Coronation Road eventually swung around to the roundabout. Sutton jumped over the low stone wall into the car park. There were traffic lights near the bridge; the car would have to stop. He might be lucky.

  He pistoned his legs, pounding the tarmac, the wind in his hair blowing away most of the cobwebs in his mind. On a diagonal, the car park looked to be about the length of a couple of football pitches. He was now halfway across. In the distance, he could see that the traffic lights had changed to red, and that the fleeing car was slowing as it approached them, easing up behind another car that sat waiting at the lights. Sutton saw a brief flurry of sparks from the front driver’s side wheel. So the car was damaged. Good. Three quarters of the way across. The air was starting to burn his throat now. Come on. Almost there. The lights changed. Damn it. The first car was pulling on to the roundabout. The other car’s brake lights flashed off, and it began pulling away. Fuck.

  At the far edge of the car park was another stone wall, and Sutton vaulted it easily. It was still too dim and he was too far away to be able to make out the driver of the vehicle. As it began to gain speed, Sutton saw sparks once again issue from behind the right front tire. He hoped it was damaged enough to slow it down a little.

  The car turned on to Bedminster Bridge roundabout, a doughnut of tarmac that straddled the river, with two gardens tagged on to each end. Sutton crossed the road at full speed, breathing hard now. The car was circling the roundabout, aiming for the road directly opposite. He jumped off the pavement and cut directly across, on to the green on the western edge. There was movement in the car – the driver had spotted him – and with a roar from the engine, the car suddenly spurted forward, pulling to the right until the driver corrected it, the car in front of it oblivious until it was rudely shunted out of the way – there was a clang of impacting metal, a squeal of tires – and then the car in front was on the curb beyond the roundabout, and had stalled. There were sparks, the engine roaring, and then the car to which Sutton had attributed so much effort to catching had turned off the roundabout and was gone.

  Sutton slowed and then stopped. He wouldn’t be able to catch it now. He was breathing hard and the blood was pounding in his ears, but besides that he felt good. He didn’t know it but he was grinning.

  It had been too dark that early in the morning to be able to see anything of the identity of the driver, but not of the car itself.

  And not its license plate either.

  It had been a Renault Clio.

  *

  “Sean? Have you got it? It’s for a Renault Clio.”

  “I got it.”

  “This is the same car that was chasing us this morning. Now it turns up here. You’ve got the license plate number. I need to know who it belongs to.”

  “Okay. I’ll run it through the computer. How are you? How’s Robin?”

  Sutton, sitting on the curb not three feet from his beaten up Rover, his mobile phone against his ear, looked over at Robin sitting next to him. She looked a little pale, and was hugging herself, as if cold.

  “I’m fine. Robin’s fine. Just shaken up, that’s all.”

  Sean’s tone was angry.

  “What is she fucking doing with you? I never agreed to that.”

  “Hey. She’s paying too. She gets to do what she wants.”

  “How’s putting herself in danger meant to help Andrea?”

  Robin knew that she was being discussed and looked up, meeting Sutton’s eyes.

  “Do you want to talk to her about it? I can pass you over.”

  Robin shook her head while in his ear Sean sighed and said, “no. What would be the point? Do you think she’d listen to me?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know her that well.”

  “Well. Take it from me: she’s a stubborn woman. It’d be like banging my head against a brick wall.”

  “I can see how that could be. Listen: how long before you can get back to me with the name of the person who was driving that car?”

  “I’ll put a rush on it. As soon as I have the information I’ll call you. What do we think? Do we think it’s him? The Head Hunter?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s a strange coincidence if it’s not.”

  “Yeah, it would be. But how would he know that we were after him? The only people who know are you, me and Robin.”

  “Hm.” Sean paused. “He might have been hanging around the last crime scene, saw you arrive with me.”

  “Well. Whoever it is, they’ve been following us for half the night. Which is good. It must mean we’re getting close.”

  Sean suddenly sounded cheerful.

  “You’re right. This is good. But…be careful. That’s my fucking cousin.”

  “There’s something else as well. We found the prostitute, the one who almost had her head cut off.”

  “And?”

  “I found her through an old acquaintance, a woman who used to run a bunch of call girls, back in the day. The woman’s name is Ellie Mason. Eleanor Mason. We think she might know who this man was, so we’re going to go back and talk to her.”

  “Why wait? Give me her details now, I’ll get some guys from MCIU to go over and interview her-“

  “No. She won’t talk to you. And you’ll just back her into a corner. There’s a reason why she didn’t tell us who he is, I just have to work out what that might be. It’s best if I go back. She knows me.”

  “Okay. But hurry.”

  “Of course. What about the third victim?”

  “No identification as yet. But I’ve got the tattoo. I’ll bring it next time we meet up.”

  “What is it? Is it as baffling as the last two?”

  Sean sighed.

  “More so. I’m looking at it now. Nobody here has any idea what it might mean.”

  “Alright. Bring it with you. When can we meet up?”

  Sean sighed again.

  “Things are crazy here. I’ll see if I can get away at some point. I’ll call you.”

  “Right. We’re going back to my place now to get cleaned up.” Sutton looked at Robin again; she had her head in her hands. “We’re a mess. I’m not waiting for the police, I don’t have the time. Or the inclination. The car’s a write off anyway. Just find out who that Renault Clio belongs to and get back to me.”

  “It could be him,” Sean said, breathless.

  “Well,” Sutton said. “Let’s hope so.” />
  *

  When they arrived at the Baltic Wharf Estate where Sutton lived, the JCBs and other construction equipment were hard at work beyond the six foot high wall that circled the estate, and a thin cloud of dust floated in the air, and had settled over the cars and plants and the path that led to his building.

  The old remnants of the once busy and prosperous docks were systematically being removed to make way for expensive waterfront housing; there was something sad about the destruction of so much history, Sutton thought, especially in the name of the greedy and indifferent machine of Progress. Of course all that was left of Bristol’s glorious seafaring history were a few sad rusting cranes and abandoned warehouses, hardly items of any aesthetic value, but there was still a brutal callousness to it that Sutton could not reconcile himself with.

  He supposed in one way it was hypocritical, as he now resided in one of the newer waterfront properties himself; the penthouse, no less, which looked out over the river, and included Hotwells, the Suspension Bridge, and Clifton perched precariously on the hill above.

  He had lived in his current abode for three years and could not imagine living anywhere else. It was where he felt he belonged.

  The lift was out, a handwritten sign taped on the door, so Sutton directed Robin to the stairs. He was on the fourth floor, which meant eight flights of steps twisting back and forth on themselves in the narrow stairwell, and Robin negotiated them all in dumb silence.

  At the last flight, Sutton held her back and checked the motion sensor; the light was green, which meant that nobody had been up to his front door…or had tried to get inside.

  As he opened the front panel to key in the security pass code, he had no doubt that it was a necessary precaution. He did not think he was being overly dramatic by admitting that it had once very likely saved his life.

  “Okay, come on up,” Sutton told Robin.

  She took one step, two, and then lost her footing on the third step, and with a yelp of fright fell forward, bringing her chin down on the fifth and sixth steps before sliding to the bottom in a tangle of arms and legs.