by J G Alva
Even with the memory of where the tunnel was going fresh in his mind, Sutton started to become disorientated. His right hand inevitably stretched out in front of him in fear of running in to any obstructions – even though he knew there were none – and his left hand wanted to join its twin; he managed to resist the impulse, but only with some effort. As long as he had a hand on the wall he felt grounded, but it was all still incredibly unnerving; a nightmare journey. He continued to sweat; like a man waiting for the noose. The river bed was surprisingly smooth; Sutton didn’t know why but he had expected gravel and rocks and generally an uneven surface, but there was nothing but silt, as soft as powder. As quiet and as careful as he tried to be, he inevitably sounded like a noisome, uncoordinated one man band. Sutton stopped and waited, but the only thing that came to him was the sound of the water rushing on ahead. Unfortunately, because of the acoustics of the tunnel, the noise bounced back and forth off the walls, layer upon layer; it was incredibly loud. If somebody was in the water up ahead then he would have trouble hearing anything until he was almost on top of them.
And then, unbelievably, he did hear something.
A sound that was different from the normal undisturbed noise of the river, an irregular rhythm, and as he listened, Sutton became convinced that, whatever it was, it wasn’t that far ahead.
He moved on, trying to keep any splashing sounds he was making to a minimum, his hand still using the wall as a guide. The irregular noise went on and Sutton became convinced that what he was hearing a person splashing around up ahead, and that he would have to turn on the torch to verify it…or risk losing his sweaty grip on the reigns of his sanity.
He did not know what he expected to see – some sort of sewer engineer at work on a faulty valve maybe, certainly not the man he was after, not in his heart of heart’s, because he was never that lucky – but nothing prepared Sutton for what was illuminated in the glow of the torch when he turned it on and shone it down the tunnel ahead of him.
Thirty feet away, on the left hand side of the tunnel, a small flat concrete shelf sat above the line of the water. As the torch went on Sutton saw something that took a while for his brain to process, and it caused an unnecessary delay; he did nothing; he couldn’t do anything, his mind was too busy trying to untangle everything that his eyes were showing him.
A pale skinned male body lay on its back on the concrete shelf, one arm and one leg lolling in the water, partially covered by a clear plastic sheet. On all fours over the body was a man, caught in the torch light in that moment as if about to kiss a lover – that was all Sutton glimpsed before the man threw himself off the shelf and in to the river. He didn’t make a sound, just launched himself from the small concrete platform.
The body on the shelf had no head. The stump of neck was very cleanly cut: no ragged flesh, no splintered bone protruding rudely from the meat.
It was him.
He was here.
He almost couldn’t believe it.
Sutton heard him splashing away in the dark, and tried to find him with the torch, but he had gone beyond the reach of it.
He flashed back over to the body but there was no point; the time when anybody could have done anything was long passed.
It was him.
The Head Hunter.
Sutton went after him.
Running through water isn’t the easiest thing in the world to do. Sutton had once been told, at a noisy party on a boat out by Spike Island, that racehorses are trained in surf on beaches to build up their leg muscles, and Sutton could believe it. In moments his legs were aching, and felt like they had ten ton cartoon weights attached to them on thick metal chains; minutes later the weights had been replaced with bank safes. He heard the splashing up ahead but could only get the briefest glimpses of the other man in the torchlight, and not enough to distinguish what he looked like. Sutton noticed him moving off to the right and he followed, angling across the river. In a couple of minutes Sutton was at the bottom of metal rungs cemented into the wall and leading up to a circle of light, in the middle of which an indiscernible silhouette was just clambering to the surface. He was getting away.
Sutton went up the ladder, tiredness creeping in to all his limbs. His breath was coming raggedly in his lungs, and with each pull there didn’t seem to be enough. The rungs were as cold as ice, and wet where the man had clung to them. In about thirty seconds Sutton had climbed them all and was once again re-united with the dull afternoon sunlight.
But the man he had been chasing was nowhere to be seen.
Sutton had come up on Castle Street, a road that ran along the edge of Castle Green, about a hundred feet from where he had left Sean and Robin. Sutton clambered to his feet and looked around. There were half a dozen cars parked along the street, plenty of places he could be hiding, but it didn’t feel like he was anywhere nearby…but Sutton looked anyway. He had the sense – unfounded – that he had lost him. He checked around cars, under them, but there was no one. He waited, silent, watching. A small puddle of water collected around his sodden shoes. The cold came in and bit at him. A small group of old age pensioners moved down the street, talking. The Head Hunter was not amongst them.
Slowly, a last ember of hope still burning in him, Sutton wandered up and down the street, looking beyond, to the roundabout by the Evening Post building, and then down to the other end of Castle Street, passed the Avon Ambulance Service building, trying to find him.
But it was too late.
He was gone.
*
His clothes moving against his skin like icy hands, Sutton walked from Castle Street, back to the Sallypoint, a young man following a path through the park giving his damp clothes a curious look in passing. Sutton felt completely exhausted, a tissue paper creature moving by will alone.
Sean and Robin came toward him as one, once they had spotted him.
Sutton said to Sean, “call your guys.”
Both Sean and Robin looked shocked.
“He was there,” Sutton continued. “He was dumping a body. Call your guys.”
Sean took out his mobile phone and started dialling.
Robin said, “was it…?”
Sutton shook his head.
“No. It was a man. It’s not Andrea.”
For a brief moment, Robin’s expression broke into something unrecognisable; it was like looking through a crack in the earth to volcanic activity bubbling underneath.
And then she turned away, and she put the back of one shaking hand against her mouth.
But she did not make a sound.
*
CHAPTER 11
Sutton sat on a bench beside the river, two hundred yards away from the Sallypoint, Robin beside him.
Well. He didn’t know how he was supposed to be feeling…except for cold and wet of course, and he surely felt that. He supposed he was struggling with a mixture of elation and disappointment; elation, that he had worked out the clues, had caught him in the act…and disappointment, because he had not managed to catch the man himself. It didn’t matter; any emotion he could wring from himself felt smothered by a layer of exhaustion, he was so tired…like figures seen through a fog. He shouldn’t have been surprised; he had been up for twenty nine hours now. Still…an hour or two under the covers would work wonders on his tortured body. He laid his head back and closed his eyes, just teasing himself with how it would be. Bliss.
Robin sighed.
“I can’t believe you almost had him,” she said.
He opened his eyes. She was looking away from him, toward the Sallypoint, which was now surrounded by police officers and technicians from the Forensic Science Service.
“Hm. Almost.”
“If you’d just run faster…”
“I’m not going to apologise for getting you closer to him than anyone, and that includes the police. I’m sorry, I won’t.”
“I know, I know,” she said quickly. “I just…”
He looked at her. She smiled tremulously
; she looked very fragile in that moment.
“What?”
She spread her hands.
“I just wish this was over,” she said. She hung her head, staring at the tarmac path, and then looked toward the Sallypoint again. She must have been exhausted as well, Sutton thought; God alone knew how long she had been up. She straightened. “Here comes Sean,” she said.
Sean’s trousers were wet up to the knee. Of course he would have to look. Of course he would.
He stopped in front of them. Sutton was too tired to stand up.
When he spoke, Sutton was surprised.
“Good job, Sutton,” he said. He breathed out, long and slow. “I had my doubts about you, even after what Jean had told me, but…I don’t anymore. Good job.”
“But better if I’d have caught him?” Sutton said, with humour.
Sean pulled a face, but eventually nodded.
“By the way, you look like shit,” he said.
“Huh. Thanks.”
“Grey.”
“Well…”
“You both do.”
“I don’t care,” Robin said, and she sounded exhausted.
“Hey,” Sean said. “We’re getting closer. Hang in there.”
“Are we?” She said. “Really? How much closer are we? We still know nothing about him. We still don’t know who he is.”
Sean stared at her until she looked away.
“We know he likes history-“
“So what? How does that help?” Robin had lost it. Her voice was ragged, angry. “What are you going to do, have policemen stake out all the historical landmarks in Bristol? Arrest every one who takes a history book out of the library? It means nothing.”
She hung her head, her arms on her knees, her hands hanging limp.
Sean glanced at Sutton briefly.
“When was the last time you got any sleep?” He asked her, uncomfortable with his own concern for her.
Robin sighed in frustration, her head still down.
“Robin-“
“I can’t go to sleep, Sean,” she said, lifting her head. “Not with this hanging over me. I just…I just can’t.”
Her head dipped down low again.
Sean reached out and put his hand on top of it, in her hair: a reassuring touch. She grabbed his hand above the wrist and squeezed.
“Actually, I’ve been thinking about the historical angle since I realised his fascination with it,” Sutton said. “I was thinking that there might be a way to use it, to find him.”
Sean was frowning.
“How?”
Sutton smiled tiredly.
*
The Accident and Emergency department of Bristol’s Royal Infirmary was a noisy, unpleasant place full of unhappy children, worried mothers, injured labourers, and miserable drunks.
Finley Henk sat in one of the hard backed plastic chairs and held a gauze pad to his forehead. The cut above his eye hurt. What hurt more was the blow to his pride. Once you dared to hope you were finally free of it, it came out of the shadows and grabbed you.
The first thing it did was rob you of your pride.
Then it took your independence.
Jesus fucking Christ, but he was tired of this shit.
Finley Henk was a short man, as short and as slight as a girl, pale and thin with skinny arms, skinny legs, and a skinny torso, and a long almost feminine neck. The neck was offset by a large Adam’s apple, like a knot in the middle of a young spruce. He had a big mop of dark almost black hair on his head like he could be one of the Beatles, and someone had once told him that it looked like too much hair for his neck to handle, because his head always seemed bent over with the weight of it. His eyes were brown and always look tired, like he had stayed up the night before, studying for some big test. Fin didn’t like the way he looked; if he had his way, he’d change it all; a full body transplant. As technology had not quite come that far yet, he supposed he was stuck with it. At twenty two, he could only hope that time might make a different man of him. He had never had a job in his life; Sutton had often joked that he was just too smart to work. And he was smart. Fin thought that this was probably the only thing he had to recommend himself.
Despite his intelligence, he still lived a life redolent with restrictions, one of which was that he couldn’t drive; he was forced to use Bristol’s pathetic excuse for a public transport system, an expensive line of buses that rarely arrived on time, if they arrived at all.
At least he had been off the bus before the fit had hit him.
He should have suspected. He knew the feeling, knew when his body was in that proper place: that funny taste in his mouth, the feeling that his senses weren’t connecting properly with certain parts of his brain. And in the last week he had not been sleeping well.
With hindsight, it all added up.
But it had been six months. Wasn’t he over this already?
When he had come to, a grey haired woman who might very well have run soup kitchens in the Second World War had insisted that he check himself in to the BRI. As if this hadn’t happened before. When he showed reluctance, she bullied him into going in, even going so far as to escort him herself up the hill to the hospital. She meant well, but Fin was sick of hospitals; he had been in and out of them all his life.
“Um, excuse me,” Fin said as a nurse brushed passed. He tried for a smile, wasn’t quite sure he was managing it.
The nurse, who had looked intent on some errand, stopped and peered at him with something that looked close to distaste, but was probably more like resentment. More work. As if she didn’t have enough to do already.
“What is it?” She wasn’t unkind, just harassed. She wasn’t a bad looking woman, Fin thought, except for a set of teeth that looked crowded in her mouth.
“Is there any chance the doctor’s going to see me soon? I’ve got an appointment and I need to be there in about half an hour.”
A lie, but he would have said anything to make this go a little quicker.
“We’re very busy,” she said, offering him all those teeth in a false smile of commiseration.
“I know, but-“
But she was already moving away.
Fin pulled the gauze pad down from his brow. Blood had soaked one complete side of it, but the bleeding appeared to have stopped.
He refolded it and gingerly put it back against the cut anyway, just to be on the safe side, and slumped in his seat, settling himself in for a long wait. His muscles ached and his head hurt, and he thought he might have pulled something in his back when he went down.
He really didn’t want to be here.
*
Once upon a time, he had been a reasonably active kid.
He played Football with his friends at weekends, Cricket, Rounders, was even a willing participant on school sport’s days.
But that had changed when, not two months after his twelfth birthday, he had fallen ill.
Even now the doctors had no idea what had happened. He had somehow contracted a central nervous system infection that laid him up for six months. This of course explained his interest in computers, and books; what the hell else was he meant to do when he was confined to his bed? He missed so much school, that they had to put him back a year. His friends no longer felt comfortable consorting with someone who had to spend most of each day in classrooms with the little kids. And despite what the doctors had told him he knew he still wasn’t right, physically that was; he knew it, could feel it, could feel the difference in himself.
The epileptic seizure had hit him two weeks after the new school year had begun.
He would never quite know how to describe it. First of all, there was a sensation of something coming, a knowing, that the attack was on its way. Next there came…a sort of blackness. But there was no sense that time was passing, only the sudden rush of consciousness once it was over, where you knew it had happened, knew that you had been an unwilling prisoner to an animal, a monster that lived inside your own head, and your m
uscles ached, your head hurt, and more often than not you had torn chunks out of your cheeks, or had bitten your tongue, and your mouth was filled with blood.
And the faces. More often than not he would open his eyes to find a cluster of people above him, looking down, a wall of concern. It was embarrassing.
He had what was called Juvenile Myoclonic Epilepsy. The legacy left him by his central nervous system infection. It was most prevalent between the ages of eight and twenty. But he had been living with it for two years passed its expiry date, and he was tired of it. More than that, he was exhausted, in his head and his heart; he had despaired of there ever being an end to it. The doctors told him that occasionally it lasted longer, but that he would eventually grow out of it.
But he was not so sure anymore.
He knew he was maudlin, that he had a tendency to dwell on those darker aspects of his life, but he could not imagine what it would be like to not always have to worry that he might seize, no matter where he was, no matter what he was doing, that his body might not betray him at the most inopportune time. What it might feel like to no longer be weak. He couldn’t even entertain such thoughts; to do so was to invite hope into his soul, and he had had hope thwarted so many times, he wasn’t sure he could endure any more disappointment.
So, quite consciously, he had given up on hope.
He was sure he was better off without it.
*
In the busy waiting room, he didn’t hear his mobile phone ring, but he felt it vibrating in his pocket. He dug it out, wondering who it could be.
He looked at the name on the screen and smiled. He put the phone to his ear.
“Sutton, how are you?”
“As well as could be expected, Fin. How about you? How’s things?”
“Well. I don’t know where to start.”
“That good, huh? Where the hell are you?”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s really noisy. I can hardly hear you.”
“Oh.” A mother, pulling her coughing, snotty six year old behind her, almost tripped over his feet. She glared at him as if it was his fault, and then hurried off. “It’s the Annual Wet T-Shirt Competition in the Marriot. They needed a sponge boy to help soak the ladies. Of course they called me, as the premier sponge boy in the south west of England, and of course I accepted. I’ll tell you, the things you have to do these days just to get by…”
