Tattoo

by J G Alva

“Asshole.” Sean’s eyes flicked to Maura. “Excuse me.” She waved a hand at him: the apology was unnecessary. “If he’d just gotten a look at the license plate…” Sean’s eyes were desperate on Sutton’s. “We wouldn’t be sitting here right now having this conversation.”

  “What happened?”

  “This killer, whoever he is, tazered him. Or at least, we think it was a tazer. The delivery guy said it was a four foot pole, like a cattle prod. Maybe a homemade thing, I don’t know. He tazered the guy when he got too close, left him on the floor paralysed, and drove off. Quite frankly, and I told him this, he’s fucking lucky to be alive.” Sean’s eyes flicked to Maura. “I’m sorry about the swearing.”

  “You don’t have to apologise, Detective Bocksham,” Maura said. “This museum has heard worse, in its day.”

  There was silence. Sutton appeared thoughtful.

  “How do you know it’s the same man?” He asked. “I mean, the one who abducted your cousin. You said there were no witnesses to the two previous abductions. So how can you be sure it’s the same guy that is killing and then tattooing these women?”

  “Because of the tazer,” Sean said. “On both Victoria Jenkins and Susan Bell, there was a two prong shaped burn at the neck. That’s how he gets them without a struggle. He tazers them, and then bundles them into his van. They probably have no idea what’s happening to them. I doubt they even see him.”

  The room was filled with silence for a moment.

  “I still don’t know why you came to me,” Sutton said.

  Sean stared at him for a moment, as if weighing him.

  “I know what you do,” he said eventually. “What you’ve done. I know that you find things for people. That you have a gift for finding things. I know that if the police can’t do anything, you can, because you don’t follow the rules. Because if something hard needs to be done, you can do it. You’ve a natural talent, so I’m told, for solving puzzles. And people are puzzles. I know that sometimes you work for free, for friends, and that sometimes you work for money.” He cleared his throat. “I have money.” He looked at Robin. “We both do.”

  Sutton stared at Sean a moment, and then turned his dark eyes on her.

  “And how do you fit into all this?” He asked.

  Robin held her head up, struggling not to let emotion get the best of her, and said, “Andrea is my sister.”

  Sutton did not speak for a moment, and then showing some heretofore unsuspected compassion, nodded softly with understanding.

  “Do you know of any reason why he picked her?” He asked.

  This question was directed at both of them.

  “She fits the profile,” Sean said, spreading his hands. “She’s young, blonde, slim. Pretty.”

  “And you have nothing beyond that?” Sutton asked. “No suspicious characters hanging around? No spurned lovers?”

  Sean shook his head sadly.

  Robin said, “Andrea doesn’t have any spurned lovers. She’s not that complicated. She works in an estate agents in Clifton Village, is easy going, nice. She hates conflict. It’s too much like hard work for her. If anything seems like hard work, she just avoids it. She became an estate agent because all she had to do was talk and look pretty. She likes people. She makes these hand crafted birthday cards that are actually quite good, she-“

  Against her will, a sob escaped her. Robin bit down on it, despising herself for her weakness, and turned her face away. It took perhaps ten seconds, but in that time she was able to stuff her emotions back down inside herself; like beating a genie back into a bottle.

  Sutton was staring at her. She couldn’t read his expression; she just hoped to God it wasn’t pity. She didn’t want to be pitied by him.

  Slowly, he turned to Sean.

  “You don’t need me,” he said. “You could do a better job yourself. You’re already part of the investigation. You already have more expertise, more man power, than I could ever possibly provide you with. So what if you have to bend the rules a bit? You wouldn’t be the first policeman to have done so.”

  Sean looked at Robin again.

  “I’m young,” he said.

  Sutton frowned.

  “What-“

  “You don’t get to work in the MCIU as young as I am without breaking some rules along the way,” he continued. “I’m good. I mean, it’s what I am. I wanted to be in the police force since I was about ten. And I wanted to be good. But being good isn’t good enough. So I break some rules to advance my career.” Sean shrugged; he did not appear apologetic. “I’m not proud, but I’d probably do it all again exactly the same way. But this last time…”

  Sean looked down at the carpet, shook his head, and then sat back on the sofa almost savagely. His stare was hard, angry.

  “I arrested a suspect. I was working in Swindon at the time. A fifty year old man, a drug dealer. You don’t need to know what we went through to find him, but it’s safe to say he was a rather unpleasant man. Anyway, we arrested him, but he was being difficult. Struggling, kicking. Spitting. Rubbing up against me and some of the other officers…You see, he was filthy, hadn’t washed in weeks, and he purposely did everything he could to wipe his filth all over us…Anyway, things got out of hand. I don’t know what happened exactly, there was shouting, and he somehow managed to slip free – it wasn’t like he was going to go anywhere, we were on the third floor of a block of flats, the lifts weren’t working, he could hardly hope to make any kind of a getaway – but still, he was causing havoc, and, I don’t know…” Sean paused, remembering, and then shook himself, like a horse. “I punched him. In the stomach. To subdue him, make him easier to handle. Unbeknownst to me, he had a very large stomach ulcer, that burst when I hit him. Basically, the ulcer was so big, and had eaten up so much of the surrounding tissue, that his stomach pretty much ripped open inside his body. He died within about three minutes, I think. Nobody knew what the hell was going on. Nobody. It was…It was a mess.”

  There was more silence in the room.

  Sean cleared his throat and wiped at his face with a hand.

  “My superiors like me. I do a lot of hours off the clock. I solve a lot of cases. They worked hard to make sure I didn’t lose my job. But I’m on thin ice. And I’m being watched. And I cannot, cannot, break any more rules, because at best they will assign me to something else. At worst, they will fire me. Either way, I’ll be as good as useless to Andrea. With Andrea’s abduction, I can already see them thinking that I might be a liability, that I might turn out to be more trouble than I’m worth.” Sean tried to smile, but it looked more like a grimace. “So I’m on my best behaviour, I’m everybody’s friend. Everybody’s lapdog.”

  He leaned forward, his eyes and voice suddenly intent.

  “But I can feed you all the information. Anything you might need. I can get you access, at least a limited amount. You’ll have a direct line into the MCIU, a direct line into the investigation. Whatever we know, you’ll know.”

  Sutton stared at him, his eyes narrowed, thinking, weighing the task.

  “Two days,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You’re telling me I have two days to find your cousin.”

  Sean swallowed something, looked briefly at Robin, and then nodded.

  “Yes.”

  Sutton leaned forward and brought a hand up to scratch his chin. He stared at the carpet for a full minute before he looked up at Sean.

  “Who told you about me?”

  Sean sat back.

  “Jean. Jean Siddall.”

  “You know Jean?”

  Sean nodded.

  Sutton stared at him again, hard, a penetrating gaze.

  “I’d like a moment,” he said, standing. “Can you wait outside? This won’t take long.”

  Sean nodded and stood. Robin, not quite sure what was happening, stood also, and with Sean’s hand on her elbow, they left the room.

  *

  Robin asked, “what’s going on?”

 
Sean indicated the room with a flick of his head.

  “He’s calling Jean.”

  “Jean? Why?”

  Sean grinned. Robin couldn’t understand the grin.

  “Because he’s going to do it. He’s going to help us.”

  *

  Five minutes later, the door to Maura’s office opened and Sutton came out.

  He stared at them both in turn.

  “Have you got somewhere where I can start?” Sutton asked Sean.

  The grin briefly flickered back to life on Sean’s face, before just as quickly disappearing.

  “The witness. Mike Ruffall. The one that got tazered. He knows more than he’s telling. I thought we could start there.”

  *

  CHAPTER 3

  Bristol.

  She’s an old old lady with something of a murky past, but if her clothes are a little moth eaten around the edges, she can still hold her own against the fashions of this bright new millennium. Her original Saxon name was Brigstow – the place by the bridge. And it was the river that was her life blood. She is now comprised of about 410,000 people, and if her national importance has slipped a little over time, know that she was once the port for the Americas, importing exotic spices from all over the world and loading them on to ships to cross the great pond. If her history seems glorious and interesting, then know too that it has its dark side, and that she was once a hub for the African slave trade. Every great entity casts its shadow, and Bristol is no exception, it is just that in her shadow hide things that are best not seen in the light. The same could be said for all of us.

  The river still forms an integral part of modern Bristol, even if it has been dammed and diverted and polluted by the hand of man. You would think, with such an incredible tidal flow in the Bristol Channel, that nature would be able to keep her watery veins clean, but it’s a tough battle that she has no hope of winning. Bristol itself bloomed from the edge of the river like a dark flower, gradually expanding over hundreds of years to envelope the surrounding settlements, so that it seems top heavy, roughly in the shape of a squashed kidney, with the river cutting through its centre like a stretched letter J tipped on its ass.

  It was to the river that they were travelling now, in Sean’s grey Audi A3 Sportback, Sutton in the back seat. He had to bend his head a little to avoid the roof of the car.

  The car cost something; Sean was doing well for himself.

  “So tell me a little bit about this witness, this Mike Ruffall,” Sutton said.

  “He’s twenty seven, lives alone, works for an electronics firm based in Clifton,” Sean said, coming down the hill on Jacob’s Wells Road. “He’s one of their delivery drivers. They sell TV’s and DVD players. He’s a little rough around the edges. Has some minor convictions for GBH. Pub fights, mostly. Spent a couple of years in Dartmoor. Was banned for eight months for drink driving.”

  “So he knows you,” Sutton said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, he knows the police. He’s had run-ins with them. So he probably doesn’t really like the police that much.”

  Sean chewed on that for a while.

  “Yeah. He was sort of hostile, when I talked to him.”

  “You think that’s why he might be holding something back?”

  Sean thought about that for a moment in silence.

  “Yeah, could be,” he admitted.

  “Does he have money?”

  “Not really. He rents. The place is a shit hole. He owns his own van, but I think that’s more from his brother-in-law. His brother-in-law owns the firm where he works, gave him his job.”

  “Right.” Sutton paused. “Did you put a little pressure on him?”

  Sutton saw Sean smile in the rear view mirror.

  “Maybe. Maybe a little. But it’s nothing he hasn’t seen before, I don’t think. He just buckled down the more pressure I put on him.”

  Sutton thought about that. If pressure didn’t work, then he’d have to find something else to use.

  Robin turned in her seat to look at him. He raised his eyebrows in enquiry. She looked like she wanted to say something, was undecided, but after a brief hesitation, managed to get it out.

  “What do you think you can do with him? I mean, that the police haven’t done already?”

  Sutton thought a minute, looking out of the passenger window. They had crossed the New Cut and were following the line of the river toward Bedminster Bridge.

  “Pull in up here,” Sutton said, pointing.

  Sean looked in the rear view mirror at him.

  “What?”

  “Pull in here. Right there. By the shop.”

  Sean angled the car toward the curb, and before the car had fully stopped, Sutton was out and moving quickly toward the shop.

  “What’s he doing?” Robin asked.

  Sean stared through the windscreen and watched as Sutton went inside.

  “I have no idea,” he admitted.

  *

  Mike Ruffall lived in Bedminster, not too far from the river, on a steep street that ran like a child’s chalk line passed a Mosque at the far end. The houses were old and unhappy, crammed shoulder to shoulder against each other like spectators at an overcrowded tennis match.

  Sean parked on double yellow lines and pointed at the third house from the end.

  “That one there,” Sean said. “But I’m not sure if-“

  He stopped when the front door opened, an elongated rectangle of light spilling across the pavement and into the street.

  A figure appeared, spoke a few moments with someone inside whom they could not see, and then trotted happily down the front path and into the street. She was young, with dark hair, and had a little weight pooled around her middle.

  She got into a car not twenty feet from where they were parked, and Sutton said to Sean, “are you getting-“

  “Yeah, yeah, I got it.”

  Sean was writing the registration down on a little notepad he had produced from somewhere.

  “Girlfriend?” Sutton remarked.

  “Probably.”

  Robin said, “isn’t she a little young?”

  Neither Sutton nor Sean replied; they both knew how the world worked, sometimes irrespective of any rule book.

  Sean unclipped his seatbelt. Sutton climbed out of the back.

  “Stay here, Robin,” Sean said severely, leaning into the car with his hand on the door. “This is not a very nice man.”

  Robin nodded, and Sean shut the door on her.

  *

  The house smelled of cigarettes, alcohol, and mould. And something else. Sutton wasn’t sure what. Neglect, perhaps.

  It was falling to pieces. The extent of the decay was shocking. The walls were cracked and peeling; mould was eating at the window frames; and some great structural fracture had taken place recently, so that the floor had dropped on one side of the living room, rending a large tear in the wall beside the fireplace all the way from the floor to the ceiling. It was subsidence, but Sutton had never seen anything so severe, and certainly not in a building where someone was in residence.

  Over it all was a layer of nicotine that had turned the once white walls to a sickly diseased yellow. Sutton would not have been surprised to see one of the many cracks leaking puss, the building was so badly in need of restoration.

  A pale green sofa exploding with white stuffing and two armchairs were arranged around a coffee table in front of the cold, unused fireplace.

  As Mike took up a position next to the fireplace, and Sean hung in the doorway to the hall, Sutton wandered to a window at the back of the room. Condensation obscured most of what he could see of a small back garden, about as wide as a bus shelter and twice as long.

  It was a depressing abode.

  He turned back around to study Mike. Sutton knew the type, felt the capacity for violence in him. He had a thin face, his jaw narrowing down to a pointed chin. His skin was dry and tough looking, as if he had had to endure severe weather for
most of his working life. He was short, shorter than Sean. His arms were thin, but there was a wiry strength to them, and Sutton bet that he could pack a punch; the idea was not to let him get one in first, or you would feel it. He would fight dirty, and think himself clever, not opportunistic, or without honour, as he would so obviously be; winning at any cost would be his goal.

  Sutton had a terrible habit of comparing people whose bent ran to violence to dogs. Mike was a Jack Russell. Quick, strong, tenacious, but at the same time slightly ludicrous…but you wouldn’t want one to sink it’s teeth into your hand. They never let go. And they live a long time. Mike didn’t take care of himself, that was obvious, but he would probably live to be about ninety.

  He wore an old navy green t-shirt ripped at the bottom edge, and jeans. He had a shaven head, more a symptom of a receding hairline than a design by choice. Tattoos adorned both arms. Sutton could clearly see an ugly looking scorpion, that ran from the inside of his wrist to his elbow. If Sutton had to render him in paint, he’d pick yellow ochre for his teeth.

  “So…what’s yus after?” Mike said, lighting up a cigarette.

  Mike’s accent was broad; a true Bristolian.

  Sutton took note that he did not offer a cigarette to either of them.

  Sean glanced at Sutton briefly.

  “I was wondering if you remembered any more about the abduction,” Sean said.

  Mike shrugged. He blew out a plume of smoke. It hung in the air.

  “Nah.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nuffink.” But Sutton saw his eyes slide away. Sean was right: Mike knew something he wasn’t telling them. “I told yus: ee be tall. Taller than ee.” He flicked a hand at Sutton. “Big. He had hisself blonde hair, cut like ee been in the army or sumfin. Ee had hisself a weird face. Sorta…I dunno. Like ee be younger. Like a kid. All smooth. No lines.” Mike shrugged again.

  “What was he wearing?”

  Mike spread his hands, looking clueless.

  “Fuck knows. Nuffink special. Ee be just in normal gear. Jeans. T-shirt. Like that.”