by J G Alva
Except for the third room.
Sutton stared in, more puzzled than ever.
In the centre of the room was what appeared to be a dentist’s chair.
It was rusty, the fabric in the seat and the head rest torn and discoloured; it had been here for some time, perhaps years, perhaps decades. But what hostel, or rooming house, had a dentist chair placed in it?
He stared at the chair, illuminated starkly by the torch light.
It seemed to mock him, as if he should know why it was here. It disturbed him, for some reason he couldn’t fathom. It made his skin creep.
And then it came to him, like a flash.
He knew where he was. Where he had to be. The only place this place could be. The only one that fit all the facts.
The prison door.
The dentist’s chair.
No windows.
Derelict.
Abandoned.
He had to be in the abandoned hulk of Barrow Gurney Mental Hospital.
*
CHAPTER 4
FRIDAY
Fastrack Deliveries operated out of a lot on the Oldmixon Industrial Estate a couple of miles inland from the sea front; it was a place that was comprised of about seventy percent tarmac and thirty percent buildings, three units of differing sizes in a line down one side of a six foot high fence topped with barbed wire.
While he was in Weston, Sutton thought he might visit Fastrack. It wasn’t too far out of his way, and he wanted to know more about it. He wanted to understand why Gavin had foolishly decide to become involved in what was an obviously risky escapade, a decision that was so at odds with the Gavin that he knew that he was having trouble swallowing it. Talking to the people directly involved might prove more illuminating.
He could see that the offices and admin were housed in the first building. The last two looked to be warehouses, for sorting and loading. As Sutton pulled in to one of the visitor slots in front of the office, a van was being loaded from the last block. The Fastrack logo was etched on the side of the van, letters in italics meant to indicate a speedy delivery service.
A girl sat at a desk directly inside the front door. Her face had at least an inch of make-up over every part of it; she was very shiny. Her blonde hair was so blonde it had to have come out of a bottle, and was long enough to cover most of her back, except where it had been clipped back from her face in a strange sort of quiff. She informed him around a wad of gum that Mr Shepherd, manager of Fastrack, was busy as of this moment, but she would see what she could do. Sutton mentioned that he was a long-time friend of Gavin Thompson, and it stopped the gum rolling around in her mouth for perhaps three seconds before she recovered and picked up the phone to talk to Mr Shepherd.
He sat in one of the plastic chairs opposite the gum chewer and took the time to look around. Six desks arranged like walls in a maze filled the area beyond the small front hall. Only three of them were occupied, a man and two women. All three had headsets clipped to their young heads, and were busy dealing with delighted or dissatisfied customers.
When he turned back the blonde receptionist was staring at him with something like challenge on her shiny face. She was perhaps nineteen, and had respectable dimensions that would guarantee her an admirable line of male admirers on any Saturday night. A mole sat on her top lip, twitching as she chewed her gum.
“Sorry to hear about your friend,” she said. “I liked Gavin. He was a funny guy.”
“Is that right?”
She tilted her head forward, a nod of sorts.
“A little old for me, but a nice guy. You don’t meet many working here.” She smiled. “They usually just stare at my tits.”
Sutton smiled.
“How long have you been working here?”
“About a year and a half.” She shrugged. “I was training to be a beautician, but it was too much like hard work.”
Sutton kept his face straight as he said, “really?”
She nodded, completely serious.
“I like your hair,” she said, tilting her head to the side. “Not many guys can get away with hair that long, but it looks good on you. I suppose you got to be a man’s man to look good with hair like that. There aint any doubting that with you. Do you work out?”
“When I can.”
She nodded.
“You look like you do. Big shoulders. I do a lot of running. You know. To keep my bum in shape. Otherwise it just gets bigger and bigger. Mr Shepherd will be free in a minute.”
“Thanks.”
She stared some more, and then the phone rang, and she went to work. There was no perceptible change between her phone manner and the manner with which she engaged someone in idle conversation; no attempt at professionalism; she just was as she was.
When she finally put the phone down, he was looking out in to the office, but he could feel her eyes on him.
“Do you get out in Weston much?” She asked.
He turned to her.
“No.”
“That’s a shame,” she said, re-arranging some items on her desk. “I thought if you were out this Saturday night we could get together for some drinks.”
When did girls get so forward? Sutton was not naive enough to believe that it was a symptom of today’s society, because ladies of a certain type, pretty enough to be confident of their appeal to members of the opposite sex, had always been this forward, but as he grew older, and the girls got younger, he seemed to become more rather than less shocked by it.
He smiled, and was about to answer her when the intercom on her desk buzzed. She pressed a button and a tinny almost unrecognisable voice warbled out of it. She spoke some words, and then clicked off.
“You can go in now.”
He nodded, and rose.
“I’m Felicity, by the way.”
He smiled.
“I bet you are,” he said, and went in to meet Mr Shepherd.
*
Sutton liked puzzles, and as people were puzzles – not only to each other, but also to themselves – he liked people too.
Felicity, for all her obvious pride in her appearance – and the somewhat prodigious proportions of the female parts of her – wasn’t an unattractive prospect, but neither was she a puzzle; as such she held no interest for Sutton. He liked attractive women – in that, he was no different from any man – but he liked to think that what attracted him most was an emotional connection…and the emotional connection had to have some kind of intelligence behind it. Felicity might have it, but without much growing up – either in her past, or in her future – she wouldn’t be particularly familiar with it. Did conflict bring growth? Maybe, in some cases. But in others conflict stunted growth. So what made one woman flower while another wilted? It was a puzzle to which he had no definitive answer.
The contradiction, he thought, explained some of it; the fight for one’s self, against the expectation of conformity. Perhaps that was it. And that was dictated by the artist in him. Relationships, and the world for that matter, was a complex place…and if you didn’t grow enough to be equal to it, it eventually swallowed you up.
Is that what had happened to Gavin?
Lee Shepherd was young, had very fine blonde hair styled to look like more than it was, and a mild and forgettable face. The sleeves of his white shirt had been rolled up to the elbows, and the top button had been undone to allow increased blood flow to his busy brain. He was about thirty one or two, but he looked tired.
His office looked as if it was in the middle of some sort of refurbishment. His desk had been pushed against one wall, and a computer was scattered on the floor in the corner, its screen pulsing with a floating Fastrack logo. Towers of paper and hardback books reaching to almost waist height had been placed randomly around the room like some sort of mad obstacle course.
Shepherd had a headset of his own, and was busy wheeling and dealing in to it as he paced back and forth in the small floor space left available to him in the centre of the room. Sutton wai
ted just inside the door for him to finish, which he did promptly, extracting the headset with enough force you could have been forgiven for thinking it had been stitched on, before tossing it carelessly on to his desk against the wall.
“Everybody wants everything yesterday, have you ever noticed that?” Shepherd said, coming forward and shaking his hand. “People are never just happy with a perfectly reliable service anymore. It’s got to be exemplary. I’m Lee Shepherd, by the way.”
“Sutton Mills.”
“What can I do for you, Mr Mills? And forgive the state of my office at the moment. I’m meant to be having some new office furniture delivered and installed, but it hasn’t arrived yet.”
Sutton smiled.
“Needed it yesterday, huh?”
Shepherd laughed, despite himself.
“Well. Quite. I understand from Felicity that you were a friend of Gavin’s.”
“Yes.”
“It’s a tragedy. One of my best drivers. Hard working. Reliable. I wish there were more like him. If Fastrack had a Gavin Thompson in each of its vans we would be one very smooth, very profitable company indeed. Let me tell you something. What is it you do?”
“I’m a painter.”
He blinked.
“Really? That does surprise me. If you’ll forgive me for saying so, you don’t look like a painter.”
“That’s probably part of the reason why I don’t sell as many paintings as I’d like.”
“Well, should you ever consider setting up a business, don’t ever start your own courier company. It’s nothing but a problem, from the minute you wake up in the morning to the moment you go to bed at night. My drivers – except for your friend Gavin Thompson, of course – are a bunch of useless, shifty, unreliable, lazy assholes. Not one of them is anything less than a pain in the ass.”
“This must be a difficult time for you at the moment,” Sutton said.
Shepherd grew careful.
“Oh? Why do you say that?”
“I understand four of your drivers are in police custody.”
Lee Shepherd froze as if somebody had unplugged him.
“Don’t worry. I already know about Gavin’s involvement in the scam that they were running.”
Shepherd started again, normal service resumed.
“Like I said: a pain in the ass.”
“You didn’t have any inkling it was going on? Forgive me for saying so, under your nose?”
Shepherd sat on the edge of his desk, attending to the rolled up sleeves that were gradually coming unravelled down his almost hairless arms, and when he turned to look at Sutton, his face had become ruddy with suppressed anger.
“Do you know how many parcels come through us here, every day? I’ll tell you: seven hundred. Give or take a dozen or so. That’s seven hundred stops spread between nine drivers. That’s about eighty drops a day. And that usually has to be done by two o’ clock, because then they have the collections to pick up. That means that four thousand parcels come and go through Fastrack every week. And you’re asking me if I was aware of perhaps ten parcels a week that might have been suspect? I mean, might have been suspect, because at a glance everything was as it should have been. The paperwork matched up, the parcels came from reputable retailers. Even God might have missed what was happening here, if he was stupid enough to have taken a job here in the first place.”
“Have you talked to the police?”
Shepherd’s back stiffened.
“Of course I have. Although strictly speaking it wasn’t a talk. More like an interrogation.”
“They thought you were in on it.”
“Of course they did. Maybe they even thought I was running it. I told them, in no uncertain terms mind you, that I had enough on my plate running a reputable business. I certainly didn’t have any spare time where I could run some scams on the side.” He paused. “And they were making pocket change.”
“So I hear.”
The anger had left Shepherd as quickly as it had come. Now he sat slumped on his desk, looking almost exhausted.
“I’ll be honest with you, when I found out Gavin was involved I was surprised. But now, the more I think about it, the more I can see how it happened. You have to understand. I don’t run a charity here. The courier business is a cut throat one, and any money I can save on wages I will do. Their pay isn’t...the best. But Gavin was my best driver. He could have come to me and asked for more. I would have grumbled, but I would have given it. At least enough to match the peanuts he must have been getting from this stupid scam he was in on.”
Sutton started shaking his head, even before Lee finished talking.
“I’ve known Gavin a long time. You wouldn’t think it, but he was a proud man. Asking for more money would have been like asking for help. He wouldn’t have been able to do that.”
Shepherd’s eyes had turned inward.
“Yes. I can see that.”
“The police have four of your drivers in custody. Is there anyone else who might have been involved?”
Shepherd came back to the conversation, his eyes narrowing as he stared at me.
“They asked that too. Theoretically, all of them could have been involved. But I don’t think so. I think they have the right men.” His eyes narrowed further. “Why are you asking?”
Sutton sidestepped that.
“The police have a suspect for Gavin’s murder.”
“Oh? I hadn’t heard that. Is it...is it one of my drivers?”
“I don’t know. Do you have somebody on your staff that is just under seven feet tall, has dark hair and is in his forties?”
Shepherd shook his head.
“No. Nobody like that.”
“Well then. You weren’t employing a murderer.”
Lee looked pained at the thought.
“The four men the police have,” Sutton said, looking at him deliberately. “You know them.”
Shepherd nodded.
“Yes.”
“Do you know them well?”
Shepherd gave a bitter bark of laughter.
“Not all that well, it appears.”
“What I mean is, do you know them well enough to say whether they were capable of – if not committing a murder – then of arranging one?”
Shepherd didn’t look happy at considering the prospect.
“It’s my understanding,” Sutton continued, “that it was Gavin’s unexpected absence that led to the scam being uncovered in the first place.”
Shepherd thought for a moment. His phone rang, interrupting him, and he picked up the headset, listened, and then told whoever was on the line, perhaps the nubile Felicity herself, to take a message. He put the headset back down on the desk.
“I’d have to say...no,” Shepherd said eventually. “None of them are bad men. They’re just greedy. And lazy. It looked like easy money so they went for it, but they’re not murderers.”
“No criminal records?”
“None. I don’t hire men with criminal records.”
“Then it was just opportunity.”
“I think so, yes. But look...how well do we really know anyone? Three weeks ago I would have sworn on the Bible that none of my staff were involved in anything illegal. At least not on these premises anyway. Now, I find myself watching them all very closely.” He shook his head. “It’s sad, but I’m never going to trust any of my employees ever again.”
Sutton nodded. He looked around. Whatever had been happening to Gavin, then it wasn’t here. Lee Shepherd had his own problems. Was it possible that the other members of the scam had arranged to have Gavin killed? Yes, certainly. And if they had, Sutton thought that Hill would probably be proficient enough to get that out of them.
There was nothing else for him here to discover.
Unless…
“Can you take a look at some names for me?” Sutton asked, digging out the list from the inside pocket of his jacket. “See if they seem familiar? Perhaps check your records, and see if any
deliveries were made to them.”
“Of course,” Shepherd said, and took the list.
He went to the computer, squatting down on his haunches, and began flicking through files.
In only moments, he stood up and passed the list back to Sutton.
“I’m sorry. There’s nothing on the computer that matches any of those names.”
Sutton nodded, and put the list back in his pocket.
“Thank you for your time, Mr Shepherd.”
Shepherd nodded.
Sutton turned, and was about to open the office door and leave when Lee’s voice stopped him.
“You haven’t answered my question, Mr Mills.”
Sutton stopped, and turned back.
“Sutton, please.”
“Sutton. That’s a hell of a strange name. And you’re a hell of a strange person. Are you really a painter? Or is that just something you tell people?”
Sutton smiled innocently.
“What’s your question, Mr Shepherd?”
“Lee, if you please. I asked you why you wanted to know about this.” He indicated the office and the Fastrack property as a whole with a sweep of his hand. “About the scam. About Gavin’s murder. You never answered.”
Sutton looked down at his feet as he thought about how to answer him. He scuffed his shoes back and forth over the grey threadbare carpet; it made a soft rasping sound, like old sandpaper.
He finally lifted his head to look at him.
“Let’s just say that, important matters like this, like the murder of a friend, shouldn’t be handled by people who never knew him, never cared for him.”
“But that’s the borders of our lives. The chef that cooks your food, the electrician that wires up your house. All important stuff. We defer to these men, these strangers, because they have the skills.”
“But what if you yourself had the skills to wire up the mains to the hairdryer your wife used every night? Wouldn’t you do it yourself, to make sure that it was done right?”
Sutton waited a moment, while Shepherd stared at him speculatively, and then he left.
