by J G Alva
Sutton stared down the steps in horror, afraid she had done some serious damage to herself, before she stirred, sitting up with difficulty. There was blood around her mouth. She brought a hand to her lips and looked at the blood on her fingertips as if she did not where it was coming from, or exactly what had happened.
Sutton went down to her and scooping her up in his arms, climbed back up the steps to his flat.
Once inside, he carried her down the hall to the Lounge, and then gently laid her on the sofa.
“Put your head back,” he said. “I’ll get something to soak up the blood.”
The Lounge was separated from the Kitchen only by a breakfast bar. It was a long room that ran the length of the building, with a wall of patio doors that faced the river, and gave access to the narrow balcony outside.
There was a hand towel, and Sutton balled it up and took it back to Robin, pressing it gently to her mouth.
“Where is the blood coming from?”
Robin stuck her bottom lip out; her teeth had punched a long hole in it.
“Can you hold it there?” He asked, offering the towel to her.
She took it, and moaned, more in frustration than in pain.
“What’s the matter?”
“I feel like…”
“What?”
She took the towel away from her mouth, examined the blood on the towel; a stark red blob the size of an apple rested in the middle.
“Like an idiot.”
Sutton smiled.
“It was an accident. Does it hurt much?”
She leant her head back on the sofa, stared at the ceiling.
“No. It’s just my lip. It’s not bad.” Her eyes flicked to him. “Sorry. I’ve been out of it. The car crash…”
He smiled again, taking the armchair beside the sofa. It was good to be off his feet, he reflected. His muscles, some of which felt as if they had been forced to exert themselves against their own better judgement, unwound slowly. He sighed.
“I think you did alright,” he said.
“PTSD.”
“What?”
“Post Traumatic Stress Disorder,” she said, examining the towel again. She refolded it, return it to her injured lip. “I think I was in shock. That bump woke me up.”
“Shock therapy?”
“Mm. Something like that.” She examined the towel again. “The bleeding’s slowing down.”
“Think you’ll survive?” He asked with humour.
Her eyes were dark and serious.
“I think it’s the least of my worries.”
*
“Talk to me,” she called.
He poked his head around the corner. She lay the length of the sofa, her head resting on the arm, looking at the ceiling.
“What?”
“At least until my head clears. Tell me about yourself.” She paused. “Tell me about your first case. The one with the painting. That got you into all of this.” She indicated the room around them, but what she really meant was his vocation.
The kettle clicked off, and he poured the boiling water into two mugs. Sutton debated, straining the teabags and then adding milk before answering her.
“Sutton?”
He brought the mugs into the Lounge and laid hers on the coffee table in front of her. He returned to the armchair
“What?” Robin said, noticing his expression.
“It’s not the happiest of tales.”
“Still, I’d like to hear it.”
Sutton paused, debating. There could be no harm in telling it, at least not to her…although it might cost him something dredging his mind for the memories.
He began, “it was ten years ago now…”
*
There was a family we were friends with…my mother and father were friends with. The Becketts. Rose’s first husband had been one of my father’s closest friends in the Army: a Captain. When he died, Rose and my mother stayed friends, but when she remarried, the friendship went a little sour…more my father’s doing than my mother’s, I think. He was a little old fashioned like that.
On this night, ten years ago, Rose called me. She was almost hysterical. Her son was missing. John. He was nineteen at the time. I’d sort of taken him under my wing after his father had died. He was a funny, dark haired boy, intense, always moving, full of energy. The death of his father seemed to take all that energy from him. It became apparent that that was not all that had changed in him however.
I had no idea why she had called me, besides my connection with John, as it had been years since our famiiesy had been close. Maybe it was also habit: my father had helped her first husband, why wouldn’t his son help her now?
Rose hadn’t seen John for almost a month, hadn’t heard from him in over a week. The Becketts lived in Pill; you know, just over the bridge. Only they weren’t the Becketts anymore. Now they were the Clarendons, and they had money. Russell Clarendon came from a long line of property owners, I think, and the house in Pill was a big one. It was a Grade 2 listed building, one of the oldest ones in Pill, a five bedroom detached house with a real fireplace and a wine cellar.
I’d visited only once since Rose had remarried. What I remembered most about the house had been the paintings. The Clarendons liked their Art. They weren’t serious collectors, and by that I mean they didn’t try to bid for Picasso’s or Cezanne’s at Sotherbys. But they had some nice pieces. Russell Clarendon, Rose’s second husband, was especially fond of the Newlyn School artists, some noteworthy Cornish painters from the end of the nineteenth century.
When I arrived the place was in disarray. I calmed Rose down enough to get her to tell me what had happened, because her hysteria seemed unfounded. He was a nineteen year old boy. A week’s absence was surely not noteworthy.
They had been burgled in the night, she told me…this was the reason the house was such a mess. Both her and Russell had been at a charity event. What had really upset her was the fact that there were no signs of forced entry, and the alarm had been deactivated. The only people who knew the code were her, Russell, the security company…and of course John.
All manner of terrifying scenarios had gripped Rose: John had been kidnapped, John was being forced, they were going to be blackmailed for John’s life; I think she expected a severed finger in the post at any moment.
Russell was in the den, talking heatedly to the police. Because there were no signs of forced entry, there was some debate on whether a crime had actually been committed; I assumed the police were concerned that they were being embroiled in a large scale domestic incident, and that the crime was one of disagreement or longstanding feud, not a theft. Russell was convinced of John’s guilt – or at least his complicity in the event – and wanted to find him and have it out with him there and then, but Rose and I persuaded him otherwise; it seemed that the two of them had not gotten on since Rose had remarried, and such a meeting could only have one conclusion, irrespective of John’s guilt or innocence.
I agreed to find John; as an old friend, and something of an adopted older brother, maybe they thought he would talk to me…or that I could get through to him. You see, John was having problems. He hardly spoke to his mother anymore, and he spoke to his stepfather even less. The problems had started in college, with declining grades and a conviction for possession of drugs. He was mixing with the wrong crowd, they told me, and attempts to get him to see the error of his ways had had the opposite effect, had pushed him further from them. They had paid for him to see a Therapist, but with little success. Currently, John lived in a flat in the centre of town. He did not work. They had thought cutting him off would force him back into their loving arms, but I could tell by their rueful faces that the folly of that assumption haunted them.
I remember as I left the house that I saw that the wall above the mantelpiece was empty. On that hallowed spot had hung Russell’s favourite piece, a Harold Harvey called After The Swim. A very nice piece, very indicative of the Newlyn School. I think it was wo
rth about £30,000 at the time, is probably worth considerably more now. Russell caught me looking and was quite vocal about his theft; it was the loss of this piece, more than any of the others, that seemed to cause him the most outrage. Outrage, and yes, hurt.
I spoke to John’s Therapist. Rose and Russell had paved the way for my questions, and Dr Johnstone did his best to answer them. I was surprised to find we shared a love of Art; he had some rather pleasant pieces on his walls also, specifically a Edwin Henry Landseer. Unfortunately, Dr Johnstone wasn’t as helpful as I’d hoped. The loss of his father at a formative age, and his mother’s marriage to another man had served to compound John’s feelings of alienation and isolation. His lack of self-worth had pushed him to seek solace in drugs, and his subsequent dependence on drugs had decreased his self-worth even further, and given rise to self-loathing. It was a classic case.
Where was John? Nobody answered at his flat, and his neighbours were of little help. He was universally disliked, it seemed, by all who knew him; he held loud parties until the early hours of the morning, and more than one resident had complained to the landlord about him. The landlord too was unhelpful. If John had friends, then they did not live in the same building as him. I spoke to the police but they had encountered similar dead ends.
It seemed like I was going nowhere. I mean, I’d never done anything like this before. What was I to do, where was I to go?
So in the end, I did the only thing I could think of to do.
I broke into his flat.
Inside, I found a lot of things that didn’t help me. Bills and books, but not paintings, and certainly nothing to indicate where John was.
Amongst the debris however was something of interest: a card for a garage in Stokes Croft. I knew of it, knew that the people who ran it were bad, knew that some of the customers were badder.
What was also interesting about it was the fact that John did not own a car.
Later that night I paid them a visit. As you can probably appreciate, they weren’t very cooperative. But some of the paintings were there, in a back room; that was good enough for me. And the owner, a particularly unpleasant man by the name of Scally, told me enough to be going on with…after I’d threatened to lower the hydraulic vehicle lift on to his head, that is.
It all turned out to be John’s idea. Can you believe it? That sweet young boy who somewhere along the line had taken a wrong turn. He had unfinished business with his stepfather, Scally told me. Old scores to settle. They were meeting at the abandoned tower block in Broad Quay, opposite the Hippodrome. Do you remember it? It’s gone now, torn down, replaced.
By the time I arrived, Russell was already there. John had started a fire in one of those big rusted oil drums, and he was feeding some of Russell’s paintings in to the fire. Every time one went in, Russell screamed, as if he was being tortured…which was exactly the point, I imagined. John had a knife that kept Russell at bay, and they were talking, and John looked mad. I didn’t recognise him; there was certainly no resemblance to the capricious boy I’d known in my youth. And more paintings went in the fire. John burnt them all, until only one was left, Russell’s favourite, Harold Harvey’s After The Swim.
It was too much for Russell, and he charged John. John didn’t really know how to use a knife, but he still managed to cut Russell just the same. I rushed in to try to help, and nobody could have been more surprised than John when I grabbed him. The knife skittered away in the dark, but John didn’t need it, he was strong, energised by madness or desperation or both, he was like an octopus, like a wild dog, it was impossible to keep hold of him, and certainly impossible to stop him from hurting himself or anyone else.
He lifted me up and spun me around, a five foot eight inch ten stone boy, lifting me up, and he swung me toward a supporting concrete pillar and drove me into it, and the pain…the pain was pretty spectacular. I let go of him and fell to the ground.
John had found the knife. He stood over me, his eyes wild, the knife an inch from my nose.
“You don’t understand,” he said. His speech was quick, erratic, manic almost. He was thrumming with adrenaline, like a live wire. “He’s like Dorian Grey. Except backwards. He corrupts everything, but he keeps his paintings pristine. Fucking pristine.”
And that was when Russell brought the breeze block down on the back of John’s head.
*
“Did John…die?” Robin asked, horror struck.
Sutton shook his head.
“No. But he was never the same again. A haemorrhage in the back of his head they were too late to operate on caused most of the damage. I think his IQ is now somewhere in the low fifties. He needs twenty four hour care just to look after himself.”
Robin tried to absorb what he had told her; it was as if she were trying to swallow something unpalatable.
“So why did he do it?” Robin asked. “Was it drugs?”
Sutton sighed and gave a small half shrug.
“We all assumed that it was. That coupled with his grief over his father, his exposure to the wrong elements, that he had lost his tenuous grip on reality. In your line of work you must hear of people who end up on the wrong path, with no clear indication of how they got there. That go sour, not because of an abusive childhood, or a life event, but just because they made a couple of bad choices. Sometimes, I don’t know, you just lose yourself, lose who you are.”
“God,” Robin said. “That’s an awful story.”
“I told you it wasn’t particularly happy.”
“Well. I thought-“
“It’s not over.”
She stopped.
With something like dread, she said, “there’s more?”
Sutton nodded.
He reached out and picked up his cup and examined it, all the while trying to think how best to describe to her what had happened.
“Two years later,” he said, “I went to a party…”
*
It was with a girl I was seeing at the time. She was American. She was studying Sociology at the university. She had been invited at the bequest of one of the lecturers, one who had taken a particular shine to her, but as it turned out, the party was being held at the home of John’s former Therapist, Dr Ronald Johnstone.
He didn’t recognise me, but I recognised him alright.
The party was a particularly damp affair, intellectuals discussing intellectual things over wine and cocktails. Both myself and the American were a little bored, and at her suggestion we explored the house. Somebody had thrown all the attendee’s jackets over a bed in the main bedroom, and my American friend started feeling particularly amorous when lying atop them. But any kind of desire I’d felt up until that point was quickly extinguished by what I saw hanging on the bedroom wall above the bed: Harold Harvey’s After The Swim.
I couldn’t understand it. Six paintings had been recovered from John’s heist – five from the garage in Stokes Croft, after I had called the police – and the one John had failed to burn in the office block in the centre. But this was Russell’s favourite; how had it come to end up here?
That night, I broke in to Dr Ronald Johnstone’s office and found the files on John Clarendon and read them all. And it was clear to me what had happened. The files detailed long term abuse by John’s stepfather, and although Dr Johnstone had been helping John through it, in the transcripts it was clear to see that not only had Dr Johnstone swayed John from any confrontation with his abuser, he had actively discouraged John from going to the police on more than one occasion. You remember, Russell and Rose had paid for this Therapist. Obviously, Russell knew Dr Johnstone, and had been able to control the situation – control John – by having Dr Johnstone treat him…and I assume report back to Russell on his findings, and what John might do.
Dr Johnstone could have made his notes – and recordings of their sessions – known to the police at any time, but he had not.
And in exchange for his silence, Russell had given him Harold Harvey’s After The
Swim.
Dr Johnstone liked his Art after all. Maybe he thought it was a fair trade. The Art was unique; John was just another screwed up kid, and they are ten a penny.
*
Here Sutton paused, not sure he could continue, not sure he should continue. There are some stories that are not meant to be told or, having been told once, should be laid to rest for good.
“What did you do to them?” Robin asked, almost fearfully.
By way of an explanation – or by way of avoiding an explanation – Sutton said, “I do what I do because…sometimes, the police aren’t enough.”
He looked at her, and he saw in her eyes that she knew he was right – wasn’t the fact that she had sought him out proof of that? – but he also too saw the dilemma, the scales of morality and justice, weighing and finally tipping in favour of desire instead of impartial justice.
*
“Think you’ll be ready to make a move in a minute?” Sutton said, pinning a map of Bristol to the Lounge wall.
Robin stirred.
“Where are we going?” She asked.
“To see Ellie. But before we do, I want to try and get something straight in my head.”
“When did Sean say he’d call?”
“When he had something to tell me.”
“How long ago was that?”
“About an hour. Why don’t you close your eyes for a bit? You must be tired.”
“No.” A stubborn refusal.
“It might be a while before he calls. And I can go and see Ellie by myself.”
“No. I don’t want to sleep.”
Sutton went to the drawing board in the corner of the Lounge and selected a magic marker from a pot on the table beside it. Red. For blood.
“Is that one of yours on the wall?” Robin asked.
Sutton looked to where she was pointing. It was a portrait in pencil, one of his better ones.