by J G Alva
At the bottom of the steps, two rats, large and unafraid, stared up at his light, their noses twitching in the air. They eventually moved as he reached the bottom, and then only reluctantly. They were not familiar with human beings, and so were unafraid. He wondered if they would bite. He certainly didn’t want to add to his problems by contracting whatever it was that they carried, so he took pains to avoid them, and any of their kin.
The layout of this lower level was much the same as the floor above it…almost exactly the same, except that there were no steps leading down to a further subterranean level: this was as deep into the ground as the building went. Because there seemed to be no other source of light, Sutton merely assumed that he was underground, but down here he found evidence to confirm this: as he swept the light down the long hall he found plant roots growing out of the walls, snaking down to the concrete floor like brown veins. The rooms were the same as the floor above, but with less furniture: small, bare, rotten, fetid, one broken wooden chair in the fourth room pushed into a corner…the only evidence that man had lived and breathed in these rooms. No, not rooms; cells. This was where the inmates were kept. Perhaps the more troublesome ones. Its archaic design held no consideration for comfort: in no room were there toilets or sinks. He wondered what it must have been like to be consigned to these rooms, and couldn’t quite stifle a shiver. If he had been consigned to hell by an antagonistic patron, then they had been unwittingly led to it by their loved ones. Even worse.
What he had hoped to find – and which in the end he did not – was something he might use to force the impenetrable steel door. A crowbar would have been the ideal discovery, but any sort of sturdy metal bar might have done the trick. As it was, he found nothing of any use. All the wood would splinter in his hands from water damage, were he to put any pressure on it. The lights on the walls were housed in plastic mouldings; nothing useful there. At the end of the hall, he was not surprised to discover a large mound of bricks and mortar piled almost to waist height, the remnants of the initial collapse that precipitated the hole in the two floors above…but brick was no good for what he needed. One rat sat atop the pile and squealed angrily at him. The creature’s fur was matted, something hung from a corner of its mouth, and one eye was blind.
It was enough.
He turned around and went back upstairs.
*
Sitting on the landing by the door, he turned off the torch and tried to think.
His mind seemed to be clearer, but he felt there were still memories yet to be uncovered. His panic and fright were still there, faithful companions, but added to them was a new guest at the table: shame. It was his own foolish behaviour that had gotten him in to this mess. He could feel a little pride at his methods and the limited success they had produced, but here he had obviously been blundering about like a bear at a picnic: ignorantly looking into hampers, and completely unaware of a ranger sighting down the barrel of a gun at him. If he died here, it would be his own fault, and he felt ashamed of himself and his incompetence. The reward was humility…but the price was the increasingly insurmountable obstacle of maintaining his sanity in the face of almost certain doom.
He couldn’t die in here. He just couldn’t.
He wouldn’t.
Anger was better than shame.
Anger was better than fear.
He promised himself that he would survive, and escape, just so he could see their face, when they realised they had failed. Whoever they were.
Lost in his thoughts for revenge, he almost didn’t realised that he could see.
Out of the dimness, a specular highlight from the railings at the edge of the landing could just be discerned.
He turned, and could quite clearly see a thin strip of white cold daylight leaking under the bottom of the door.
He’d had no idea he was so close to the surface.
My God.
He thought he’d been buried deep in the earth.
He started shouting.
“Help! Help! Can anyone hear me?”
He put his face to the floor and shouted under the door, through that thin gap that allowed light in and, based on the laws of the universe, must also allow the sound of his voice out.
He shouted for a long time.
A long time in which nobody came.
With an altogether different stab of fear piercing him, he realised he was losing himself, realised he was close to being unable to stop shouting.
With a great effort of will, he put a lid on it.
His heart was beating wildly, and his throat was raw, but he had control of himself.
He listened, his ear as close to the bottom of the door as he could get it.
He heard nothing.
He listened for a long time, but there was no answering voice, no scuffle of feet, no sign of any kind of activity in the nearby vicinity.
He sat back against the door and tried to tell himself that it was going to be alright.
He could feel the fear returning, crawling up his back and belly: he was alone, there was no one, no one was coming, he was going to die down here.
He had to calm down. Had to.
Think.
Think, for fuck’s sake.
Okay.
Good points.
He had water. He hadn’t used much. Good.
He felt alright. Not stupendous, but not sick anymore. Thank God.
He had food.
He knew where he was.
And the light…
The light was good.
It meant the torch would last a lot longer.
When he’d first woken in this place, it must have been night. Now it was day, and he had some light, and this place wasn’t quite the closed coffin he had thought it was. Thank God.
His spirits soared…and in that same moment came crashing down.
My God, only one day. How was he going to cope?
Not even a full twenty four hours…and it had felt like forever. He was never going to make it. It wasn’t the food, or the water; it was his mind. And not knowing. He couldn’t go on indefinitely. Look at yourself, look at you now, it’s not even been a day and you’re a mess.
No one was going to come for him either.
His blundering had included not advising anyone of his itinerary. Not that he could recall anyway.
So even if there was someone looking for him, then they would not know where to look.
It was a sorry state of affairs, but there simply wasn’t anyone who cared enough to actually make the effort to find out where he was.
He had always prided himself on his independence, but now it would appear as if he had liked his own company a little too much.
No. I’m not going to die in here, alone. I refuse.
His mind went back over what he could remember of the last few days, ranging over the memories to see if there was something he had missed. More had come back, he realised, in the hours he had been exploring.
So there had been the reading of the will, meeting Hill, the visit to Fastrack, and then searching Gavin’s house. The list. He had almost forgotten about the list.
That was what he remembered: he had started researching names on the list.
*
CHAPTER 7
SATURDAY
The list.
Sutton awoke the next day with the list at the forefront of his mind. He stood at the balcony doors with a hot cup of tea and thought about it. It was too cold to go outside, but he stood at the windows and took in the view: the harbour, the gorge, the two thirds of the suspension bridge visible spanning it, the dull low cloud leaching colour from everything. Just letting things percolate in his mind.
The list meant something otherwise Gavin would not have passed it on to him, but what? A list of the people he had defrauded with his scam? A list of potential suspects in his murder? Or something else?
And there was the money to consider, presumably left for him to find. He had counted it, and it had come to a grand tot
al of £7,540.
Sutton. To cover the basics. Gavin.
He supposed the real question was: was it dangerous?
If he contacted all the names on the list, would he be stirring up a hornet’s nest?
The potential was there. After all, Gavin was dead. The idea that it was connected couldn’t be dismissed.
But he had to have answers. He was a lover of puzzles…and Gavin knew that.
How inconvenient that Gavin hadn’t left a long list of instructions as well as the names: go here, do that, talk to them, mind X. Sutton supposed it was a rudimentary precaution, nothing more; Gavin hadn’t really thought he was in any real danger.
Stupid, stubborn, prideful man.
Using his mobile, Sutton rang all the numbers, one after the other, on the list. Of the six names, four were not there to answer the phone (he did not leave a message for the impersonal female voice that requested he do so), one was answered by a woman who had no idea who Michael Turnbill was, and one turned out to be a receptionist.
“Robert Waverley?” She said.
“Yes. Can I please speak to him?”
There was some unidentifiable shuffling. Whoever she was, whatever the environment, it was busy, with people talking in the background, and phones ringing without being attended to.
“Unfortunately, Dr Waverley is currently with a patient-“
Doctor Waverley.
“-So he is unable to come to the phone, but I can book you an appointment to see him, if you’d like?”
“I would.”
“Okay. Well. We have a last minute cancellation, so how would Monday at 10 o’ clock suit you?”
In the background, a baby started crying.
“That would be fine.”
“And the nature of the visit?”
What’s your malady? Sutton thought with amusement.
“Personal,” he said.
“Very well. Your name and address?”
He gave it; she wrote it down.
“We’ll see you Monday then. Oh, by the way, there is a £50 fine if you don’t turn up for your appointment. See you at ten.”
She hung up abruptly.
The whirlwind twenty first century, Sutton thought; everyone’s in a rush.
*
Richard Farrow wasn’t the closest, but he was the first name on the list, so Sutton drove to Redland and parked his car on the opposite side of the road from the address and tried to decide how he was going to get the answers he needed for questions he didn’t know to ask.
The building was red brick with white trim, a peaked roof, three floors, and two bay windows; late Georgian or early Victorian. Nothing stirred behind net curtains, and letters stuck out of the letterbox. Sutton knocked all the same, and wasn’t surprised when no one answered.
There was a gate to the back garden, and Sutton thumbed the latch; it was unlocked. Tentatively, he poked his head around the corner of the building. A long garden in the shade of two large Oak trees confronted him. In the middle, a grandiose water fountain held centre stage…but the water was brown and stagnant and choked with leaves. A long modern rectangular extension had been added to the back of the house, two thirds of which were glass. An old woman sat bent over in a padded bamboo chair at the far end of it, looking sightlessly out into the garden. As Sutton watched, a man with white hair appeared behind her, leant down to talk to her, and when he received no response, turned away. In turning, he caught sight of Sutton, and with a frown walked toward the back door.
He opened it and, with the frown still on his face, enquired, “what are you doing?”
He was in his sixties. He wore a pale blue jumper over a chequered white shirt. The cheekbones were high and somehow regal, and the back was ramrod straight. He spoke very precisely, like a Sergeant Major. Not a Sergeant Major, Sutton thought, but someone used to giving orders: a retired CEO perhaps. Or an airline pilot.
He set no alarm bells ringing in Sutton, or set any antenna quivering with any sense of danger.
“I’m sorry,” Sutton said, “I knocked on the door-“
“We don’t want anything.”
“I’m not selling anything.”
The frown deepened.
“Still, we’re not interested. Do you mind removing yourself from my property? You’re trespassing, after all. In fact, how did you get in?”
“The gate was unlocked.”
The man pushed his chin forward.
“An oversight. Hardly an invitation though.”
“Are you Mr Farrow?”
The eyes were steady, and regarded him suspiciously. They were blue; the same blue as his jumper.
“I am. But as I said, I’m not interested in whatever you’re selling, preaching, or distributing. So please leave.”
“I’ll leave,” Sutton said. “But could I ask a question before I do? Just one question.”
No response, but a slight nod of acquiescence.
“Do you know a Gavin Thompson? Did a Gavin Thompson contact you?”
“That’s two questions.”
“I just need to know if you spoke to him.”
Richard Farrow shook his head.
“No, I did not.”
“He didn’t contact you?”
“No.”
“You’re sure?”
Richard Farrow looked even crosser in that moment.
“I’m not in the habit of lying to people. And I may be old, but there’s nothing wrong with my faculties. I said no, and I meant no. I have not been contacted by a Gavin, a Mr Thompson, or a Gavin Thompson. Are you satisfied? Or do I need to call the authorities?”
Sutton nodded, turned and then made his way out of the garden. He shut the gate carefully, walked to his car and got in.
As he was about to pull out of his parking space, he happened to look up and notice Farrow standing at the open gate, staring at him with open suspicion on his face.
There was a moment, and then Farrow turned and went back into his garden, shutting the gate behind him and presumably locking it this time.
*
Fin’s flat was one long subterranean corridor, with a toilet, a cinema room and a bedroom leading off it. Halfway along, it dropped another foot into the kitchen, and the window above the sink looked out at ground level into a small concrete garden. Passed the kitchen was the final and largest room, where Fin did most of his work: the computer room. There were no windows, no other access except by the one door; there were work lamps but no overhead lighting; only one chair but acres of desk space; tall ceilings but no visible walls, obscured as they were by printouts, drawings, maps, notes, and a hundred other varieties of documentation. Against the far wall, six computer screens of various sizes had been mounted, their wires trailing to towers scattered atop desks and under desks and behind desks…all of which could usually found to be working on some mysterious errand or other for their owner, mutely clicking and whirring and buzzing. It was like a war room, and the flat was like a bunker; it was as if Fin expected Armageddon to break out at any moment.
“Well, to start with, the killer had an accomplice,” Fin said.
They stood in the kitchen. Flat grey light bounced off the walls of the concrete garden into the kitchen through the window. A long thin fluorescent buzzed over Sutton’s head. There was washing piled on top of the washing machine, and stacked around its base. In the sink, things were growing on the plates.
“Really? Are you sure?”
Fin nodded.
“I think so,” he continued. “But it’s not one big thing, but a load of little things.”
“How did Hill miss it?”
“That’s the thing, they didn’t miss anything,” Fin said. “Diane managed to get hold of the reports for me, and they are pretty thorough. You’ve got everything: the incident report, inventory of evidence from the house, trace evidence analysis, witness alibis, the autopsy report, everything. I just wonder what Diane had to promise to get them. The whole time I was reading them she look
ed like she was suffering with indigestion. She refused, absolutely refused, to let me take them away with me, so I had to make notes. But when she was in the kitchen I got my 1100D out and took pictures of each page. I came back here, blew them up on the computer and printed them out.” Fin winked.
“Did you have enough resolution for that?”
“Hey. These files are three meg each. That’s more than enough. God bless the DSLR revolution. I took pictures of everything else as well, mind you: the kitchen, the bloodstain, the exits and the entrances, the bookshelves, the living room. I’ve got it all on my computer, in case you need to look at it.” Fin shook his head. “I heard Diane’s spine pop when I gave her the files back. She was wound up so tight I thought she might shoot out of the window like a spring. I like her though. A bit stuffy” – Fin sniffed – “but she gave me a lift back last night, so I can’t complain.”
Fin looked around suddenly and said, “do you want a drink?”
Sutton smiled. Fin could be single minded to the exclusion of everything, including the duties of a host…although Sutton was more inclined to attribute the negligence to the fact that it might be because Fin very rarely had guests. He was a people person who didn’t like to spend his private time with people; perhaps it was this, more than anything else, which they had in common. More and more Sutton was beginning to think that it was the contradiction in people – a large irreconcilable difference between how they felt and how they behaved – that was responsible for the worst parts of a person…and the best. The individual fighting against the collective; the urge to belong, against the urge to be yourself…and how much you needed approval from the collective, against how much you didn’t.
It was a rare few that managed to do without.
“No. I’m fine. Just tell me what you found.”
Fin nodded.
“The problem is, there is an underlying theory that it’s a robbery gone wrong. But no one can be blamed for jumping to that conclusion, because the evidence does kind of point that way: certain items were taken, like a DVD player and some of the dead wife’s jewellery. But certain items weren’t taken, that you’d expect to find missing in a robbery. That are essential items for any robber to take.”
