Tattoo

by J G Alva

  Mike had never truly lost that feeling – not of betrayal, no, that wasn’t right – of injustice. It wasn’t fair. It had never been fair. They were all out to get him.

  Now, down here in the dark with God knows what, it didn’t seem that important. Jesus Christ, was Beef dead? Was that the sound he had heard? Beef hitting the floor, dead?

  Mike did not speak again. He even controlled his breathing; the sound of his pounding heart in his ears he could not control however. Slowly, he began backing away, his hands trailing along the walls. King was here. Somewhere. He had to get out. But where was the entrance to the passage? In the dark, stumbling around, he had become disorientated, and he didn’t know where the fuck he was, not in relation to the door anyway. And what was King doing? He couldn’t hear him, but he was there somewhere, in the room.

  Then the lawnmower sound started up again.

  And he heard someone laughing.

  *

  Guy looked at his watch.

  He was almost out of time.

  He quickly wrapped what remained of Marcus Firth in the clear plastic sheet and then heaved him on to his shoulder.

  It wasn’t until he was almost back outside that he remembered that he had not hosed the body down.

  Shit.

  He looked at his watch again, hesitated.

  Fuck it, he thought. He could wash the body when he got there.

  *

  CHAPTER 10

  Sean was angry.

  He had driven to the Galleries Shopping Centre car park in Broadmead to meet them at Sutton’s bequest, and they had waited until he came down to join them on the first level. The car park is a dark, dirty concrete building tagged to the back of the shopping centre, open to the air, and cold, but always smelling of car exhaust and burnt rubber.

  As they waited, Sutton felt tense, and he rolled his shoulders inside the jumper he had changed into back at his flat, to try and get some of the tension out of them. He watched a young couple wander to their car with their five year old child clinging to them; they were young, and kissed openly and passionately. At this display, the child hit the mother on the leg; he didn’t like being ignored.

  Sean came down the ramp from the next level up with a scowl on his face. Now all three of them were trotting along the line of parked cars to the stairs, keeping well within the designated pedestrian area, marked off by bright yellow lines on the tarmac.

  “You should let me call it in,” Sean said, not for the first time.

  “But we don’t know,” Sutton said.

  They arrived at the stairs, and Sean pushed through the door, startling a young mother with a toddler, and started down.

  The stairwell was unwashed concrete, stained and littered with cans and plastic bags; it smelled vaguely of urine.

  “Jesus Christ, if you fuck this up…”

  “Sean,” Robin said, dismayed. “For God’s sake. He’s the only who’s worked this out.”

  “It’s unlikely that I’m going to find anything anyway,” Sutton said. “I mean, he’s not disposing of a victim today-“

  “How do you know that?” Sean demanded. “Huh? You got him on fucking speed dial?”

  “Sean,” Robin said, but Sean looked anything but apologetic about his outburst.

  They turned and started on the next flight down.

  “What about Eleanor Mason?” Sutton asked him. “Did you manage to find out what other properties she owns?”

  Sean shook his head.

  “There are no other properties.”

  Sutton frowned.

  “What?”

  Sean nodded.

  “She doesn’t even own the one on Manilla Road. She rents it.”

  That didn’t make sense. She was rich; everyone knew it. Ellie, renting?

  “Explain it to me again,” Robin said. “The tattoos, I mean. I don’t understand.”

  Momentarily distracted, Sutton then turned his attention to Robin. He slowed to let her go passed him, and then followed behind.

  “The tattoos are more than just a branding, more than just a calling card,” he said. “More than just a fuck you to the police. They’re clues, to where he intends to leave the next victim. Listen: the first victim was Victoria Jenkins; her tattoo was the skull with the crown and the key in it. You remember the key? Well, if you turn it upside down, the teeth of the key look like a three doored archway into a church. There’s that little cross on the top? The next victim, Susan Bell, was found at the bottom of Broad Street. Now, Broad Street leads down to St. John’s Gateway, which is the only remaining gate of four into the original city of Bristol, when it was walled, and is a church with three arches in it. A gate of kings, if you will.”

  “The crown,” Robin said.

  “Yes. Victoria’s tattoo told us where he was going to dispose of Susan.” They were now on the bottom level, and Sean banged out through the door and onto Broadweir. The sound of passing traffic was suddenly very loud to Sutton’s ears, and after the dimness of the stairwell even the flat grey sunlight of the overcast afternoon made him squint a moment. “The tattoo on Susan Bell’s arm was of the gun. If you turn it up on its side, you can see the design of a church inside the gun. And something else. It looks like black ink is trailing from the firing pin, but its not. Its molten lead. So the next victim was dumped outside of St. Mary Redcliffe church. This is where, historically, a revolutionary method of creating lead shot was discovered, by a man named William Watts.”

  Sean had stopped on the pavement outside the door, looking tense and unhappy.

  “Why was it revolutionary?” Robin asked.

  “Do we even need to know?” Sean said.

  Sutton ignored him and said to Robin, “as I understand it, at the time lead shot production was far from perfect. The trick was in getting the lead shot into as perfect a spherical shape as possible. If you want lead shot to come out of a barrel more accurately and have a better chance of hitting its target, it needs to be as evenly rounded as possible. Right? Well, Watts actually used St. Mary Redcliffe church itself to help develop his manufacturing method.”

  “Isn’t that a little at odds with what the church is all about?” Robin asked, pitching her voice loudly as a car with a noisy engine sped passed.

  Sutton smiled.

  “You would think so, wouldn’t you,” he said.

  Sean was looking impatient, so Sutton pointed to his right, up what was left of the hill. Sean took off at once.

  Sutton and Robin followed.

  Sutton continued, “the idea was to drop molten lead from a great height so that gravity smoothed all its surfaces, like a raindrop, making it a perfect circle, before it landed in a tank of water at the bottom, where it instantly cooled and hardened. But Watts needed the height of the church tower to give gravity enough time to shape the molten lead. The church tower itself was the tallest structure around at that time.”

  Sean stopped at the curb and waited for the traffic to clear before crossing. Robin and Sutton ran after him.

  Robin said, “so…what? He’s a history nut?”

  “Local history, yes, it would seem so,” Sutton said. “A part of his madness, perhaps.”

  Robin said, “and the tattoo on the last victim is of this place?” She indicated Castle Green with a nod of her head as they entered it.

  Castle Green is a square of raised land overlooking the river, a park, cut through with winding paths of concrete; it was once home to the original Bristol Castle, which had existed on Castle Green, in one form or another, since the 11th century. Now all that remains are one or two walls, little higher than your knee, buried under sod, and the hollowed out shell of St. Peter’s Church. Sutton couldn’t remember if St. Peter’s derelict condition was a consequence of disregard, or whether it had been hit during the Blitz. The end result was the same, of course: walls without a roof, windows without glass, the bare skeleton of a former place of worship.

  “Not exactly,” Sutton said, with a small smile.

/>   “Where to?” Sean interrupted.

  Sutton pointed.

  “Down there. Passed the church.”

  They started off.

  Sutton continued.

  “The tattoo shows a castle alright, and this” – he indicated all of Castle Green with a wave of his hand – “is the only one that we have in Bristol, but if you look at the tattoo, there is a circle around the image of the castle. And I happen to know enough about Bristol to know that there was a moat around this castle a long time ago.”

  “A moat?” Robin said, frowning.

  There was a small scattering of pedestrian traffic, some couples strolling idly along the edge of the green, a homeless man on a park bench.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Sean said suddenly, turning to them. “Why would he tell us where he is going to leave the next victim? Does he want to be caught?”

  “I don’t know,” Sutton said, because he was right, it didn’t make sense. “I don’t know what he’s thinking.”

  “Freud had a theory about that,” Robin said. “He called it the Death Drive.”

  “What’s that?” Sutton asked.

  “Freud had the idea that there is a primitive urge towards death in all of us. I suppose, a kind of balance. He theorised that in every living thing there is a need to exist, a pleasure principle, what the Greeks called Eros, but that there is also another principal, namely that which wants to live, wants to die again. I can’t remember what year it was, but Freud wrote something like, ‘only the collaboration and the conflict between the two primal drives, Eros and the Death Drive, explain the colourful variety of life’s phenomena, never one of them alone.’ Just as this man – whoever he is – wants to live and continue killing these women, so he wants to be caught, and put to an end.”

  “Well,” Sutton said; he was impressed.

  “This has been a game from the start,” Robin said. “The impossible objects in the tattoos, they’re pictorial puzzles. The fact that he disposes of the bodies almost exactly seven days after he abducts them…that’s part of the game too, one of the rules. He leaves clues in the tattoos to tell you where he’s going to dump the next victim, but he washes down the bodies and cuts off their heads so you can’t identify them…He’s playing against the police.”

  “For what?” Sean said.

  “The only thing worth playing for, I suppose. Victory.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” Sean muttered.

  Robin shrugged.

  “It doesn’t have to make sense. Not to us, anyway. But it probably makes sense to him.”

  “We’re here,” Sutton said, with a nod of his head.

  ‘Here’ was the Sallypoint, the original passage from inside the castle to the moat that had circled it at that time; supposedly used by the defending troops if the enemy had scaled the drawbridge. They could come down through the Sallypoint and surprise any attacking forces.

  It was a narrow stone archway leading into the side of Castle Green, protected by a steel gate. A formidable looking padlock hung from the gate. Sutton eyed it, and then hefted the crowbar in his hand.

  Sean looked at the crowbar with something like distaste.

  “That’ll make it an illegal search,” he said.

  “It was already open when you got here,” Sutton said, putting the end of the crowbar between the edge of the gate and the padlock. “Kids probably. You two, keep an eye out. I don’t want to be caught vandalising council property.”

  “How did you work it out?” Robin asked him over her shoulder, surveying the surrounding area. “The tattoos, I mean?”

  Sutton paused, thinking.

  “I had an idea, right from the beginning. All the victims had been left at some very interesting places.” He shrugged. “After that, the pieces just came together.”

  Dissatisfied with his answer for some reason, he shrugged again, and turned back to the task at hand.

  He tensed, and then levering with the crowbar, put pressure behind the gate. It was comprised of thick metal, which he knew he would have no hope of breaking; the stone archway around the gate was much older however, and as such would not be so resistant. The stone began to crumble while he exacted his leverage on it. He applied even more pressure, the muscles in his arms and shoulders tensing.

  “You see,” Sutton said to Robin, straining, “the moat is still here, it’s just been concreted over. Now you’ve got Lower Castle Street and Broadweir on top of it, but below…the moat is still there. The Avon and the Frome feed it. It’s-“

  With a crack, the stone around the clasp crumbled, and the gate swung open.

  Sutton looked around; no one was paying them any attention.

  “Here,” Sutton said, passing the crowbar to Sean.

  Sean did not look happy, but he took it.

  “Torch,” Sutton said, and Robin passed it to him.

  “Sutton, this is a bad idea,” Sean said.

  “But it’s my idea,” he replied. The savage smile was back, and Sean looked at it and did not argue with it. “I’m just going to look around. If I find anything suspicious, I’ll come straight back up here and you can call as many colleagues of yours as you want to come over here and help us. But for now let me just check.” This time, Sutton’s smile was wry. “After all, I could be wrong.”

  He looked at Robin. Her expression was stern. He thought he might have seen some concern there, but her face was such a controlled mask, he couldn’t be sure. She nodded at him, and he nodded back, and then he went in.

  *

  He had the impression that these passages hadn’t been used for some time.

  He passed through a short dank hallway before coming to a set of concrete steps leading down and to the left. There was a big sound of running water coming up from the bottom of those steps, although he couldn’t see anything from where he stood at the top, and for some reason the water sounded ominous; but then again, all water sounded ominous to him. He flashed the torch around, the light dancing in the lines of cobwebs hanging from the archway in front of the steps, moving in the faint breeze coming through the tunnel. The steps themselves and the handrail – obviously new, or new-ish –

  were slick with moisture and mould, and starting down he was afraid that at any moment his foot would slip out from under him and send him tumbling down them to land unceremoniously at the bottom, perhaps breaking his neck in the process. The ancient bricks on either side of the tunnel were slick with water. He looked back but Sean and Robin were several turns behind him, no longer in his line of vision. They were going to keep an eye out. But he felt a curious state of abandonment. The stone steps continued to curl around to the left and down, before they finished abruptly at the water. He went down them, and stopped at the bottom.

  The river Avon.

  The tunnel was red brick, arching over his head. Somewhere further along it branched in to the river Frome, and somewhere further along from that it crept out from under the Hippodrome and sloshed in to the docks, but here, now, it was thick and black, impenetrable to the torch, and it could very well have been an incredible oil leak under the great city of Bristol had it not smelled like an old damp dirty river.

  Sutton clicked the torch off and listened. The river made chuckling noises all around him, but other than that he heard nothing.

  He clicked the torch back on, swung it left and then right, couldn’t decide which way to go, it was anyone’s guess, even logic would be no help against a madman, and finally decided to go left for no good reason whatsoever. However, there was a long moment where he could not step in to the water. He physically could not do it, could not compel his legs to step off the top step; it was as if they had a will of their own, were fighting the will he imposed upon them. Panic came flowing up from the base of his spine and seemed to pull the skin tight all over my body. Oh boy. Not now. Not again. He couldn’t be this weak forever, he wouldn’t allow it, there’d have to be a time when he could overcome this, why not now?

  With a great e
ffort he heaved himself forward, every cell in his body waking and clamouring in alarm.

  And then it was done.

  He was in.

  He hadn’t anticipated how cold it was going to be. It was like stepping in to a bucket of ice.

  And yet he was sweating. The sweat was literally pouring down his sides from under his armpits. He hadn’t conquered any fears at all, they were still alive and well and making his life a misery.

  As quietly as he could, Sutton started pushing through the river on his chosen course, his hand trailing along the edge of the steps until wall took over. Here the wall was wet and covered in mould too, and although the damp underground life was disgusting and somehow obscene, he did not take his hand from it; to do so would be to lose something of his reality, his sense of its concrete solidity. The water came to just above his knees; any deeper and he would have to think twice about going any further. If you were really set on it, the Council let you canoe through these tunnels. If you were really set on it, that is. Even though a part of him would be interested in such an excursion, he really couldn’t think of anything more hideous. Sutton clicked the torch off again and listened. He heard nothing once more but was starting to think that if there was somebody down here, with the torch on he was pretty much announcing his presence; not the smartest course of action, under the circumstances. He clicked the torch on one last time, quickly scanned the terrain in front of him, made a mental note. The tunnel curled gradually to the left, and most of it was cut off from his view.

  Without the light from the torch, the blackness was complete. He might just as well have been blind.

  Keeping the image of the tunnel in his mind, his hand still trailing along the slick, furry wall, he started forward.

  It was a long shot. That the Head Hunter would be here, now, for Sutton to grab him...the odds were astronomical.

  But he had to look.

  After that, Sean could do want he wanted.