by J G Alva
Sutton looked at it; he had pinned it to the wall next to the others.
“I have no idea.”
“Nothing historical to do with cats? And what about the crown?”
“Another impossible object,” Sutton remarked.
“Yes, but what does it mean?”
“I have no idea.”
“Damn it, Sutton.”
“What do you want me to say? There’s nothing there. Nothing.”
“You worked out the last ones-“
“Which is no guarantee that I can work out this one.”
“I know, I know, I just-“
Robin stared at the tattoo as well, but with distaste, as if it were diseased.
“What about the victims,” Sutton said, stepping toward the map, a sudden inspiration sparking inside him.
“What about them?”
“I’m wondering…”
“What?”
“We know where he dumped them. But what about where he grabbed them?” He looked at Robin, and then went to his drawing board, found a blue marker pen this time, uncapped it, came back. “Andrea was taken in Clifton.” He marked the location on the map, and next to it noted her name. “What about the first victim? Where was she taken?”
“Uh…” Robin thought. “She lived on Park Street, I think.”
Sutton put a cross on Park Street, and next to it wrote her name.
“Susan Bell?”
“She lived and worked in Redcliffe.”
Sutton put another cross on the map, another name.
“Helen Allen?”
“Sean said she lived on Elmdale Road, in Clifton. Where your car was parked.”
Sutton nodded, and noted down the place, and the name.
He said, “Sean told me Marcus Firth lived in Mangotsfield.”
He too placed this on the map.
They both stared at it.
“You see anything?” Sutton asked, because he didn’t.
Robin shook her head.
“But we’re assuming he took them near their homes,” Robin said. “We don’t know that. Just because he took Andrea outside of where she lives doesn’t necessarily mean that was where he took the others.”
“Alright,” Sutton said. “So…what? What are you suggesting?”
“Well,” Robin said, and paused. “Where did they work? Maybe he first saw them there. Maybe he followed them from there back to their homes. And then he grabbed them.”
“Okay. So Victoria worked in an insurance firm, didn’t she?”
Robin nodded.
“Yes. In Redcliffe.”
This time, Sutton marked the location with a triangle, putting the name next to it.
“Andrea works in Clifton.”
Sutton made the appropriate notation.
He said, “Helen went to the University, on St. Michael’s Hill.”
Robin said, “and Marcus Firth worked in Redcliffe.”
“And Victoria?”
Robin’s eyes were wide.
“Redcliffe again.”
This time, the pattern was very clear. There was an abundance of triangles in the Redcliffe area.
Sutton put the lid back on the marker, stared, pensive.
“He’s in Redcliffe?” Robin said, in a small voice, not daring to hope.
“I don’t know.” Sutton tapped the map with the marker pen. “All the places where his victims worked are within walking distance of some historical part of Bristol. That’s how he picks his victims: he visits these sites, and then sees them as he is wandering around. He follows them, and when he has the opportunity, when no one else is around, he grabs them.”
“What about where his grandfather lived?” She said. “Where was that?”
Sutton tapped the map again.
“That was where we found him,” Sutton said. “Where he was living. It was his grandfather’s house, which he inherited. He moved in after he was released.”
“There’s something…disturbing about that.”
“Well. We know he feels no guilt about his more recent murders. Why should his grandparent’s death have any effect on him?”
“Only that, if he were a normal human being, it would.”
“And we can’t work him out because he isn’t normal,” Sutton said. “And we are. That’s the problem. Trying to get a lock on who he is is impossible. It’s like being commissioned to paint a portrait, without being given a look at who you’re actually going to paint. There’s no point of reference.”
“A blind man trying to explain a colour to another blind man?” Robin said, with some humour.
“Yes.”
Robin looked at the map again.
“But we know things about him,” Robin said desperately. She counted the points off on her fingers. “He likes history. He has a dysfunctional relationship with his mother, which has distorted how he sees sex, love. He’s creative. I mean, the tattoos. They’re creative.”
“He’s intelligent,” Sutton said. “Let’s not forget that. He likes puzzles, games.”
Robin’s eyes went wide with the alarm of a sudden revelation.
“He’s…he’s like you,” she whispered.
Sutton felt more than just affronted…he felt deeply insulted.
And alarmed.
“What? He’s nothing like me.”
“No, I mean, he’s like you, but with everything gone wrong instead of right. Like everything has turned…rotten inside him. What was that word Maura said in the museum? Chiaroscuro? He’s the dark to your light.”
Sutton thought about it, and was so disturbed that his mind automatically shied away from it.
“You mean…if I had a rotten upbringing,” he said eventually.
“Maybe,” she said, her expression thoughtful.
They were both silent a moment as they each looked at this new facet of the mystery before them.
To change the subject, because this sort of introspection was unsettling, Sutton said, “Sean has a new lead.”
“I know,” Robin said. “He told me. The sandstone they found on the sheet wrapped around the last body.”
Sutton nodded.
“Sean thinks Alden might be hiding on a construction site somewhere.”
Robin frowned, and then shook her head as if a fly was buzzing in her ear.
“But that doesn’t make sense to me,” she said. “He likes history, so why would he hide on a construction site? That would be like an antiques dealer hiding in a B & Q. Surely they represent the worst for him: an end to all those parts of Bristol he loves. To the comforting connotations that must remind him of his grandfather. The last person he felt anything for.”
“I don’t think shooting someone in the back of the head means that you’re fond of them-“
“But he admitted as much to the police. He said he shot him in the back of the head because he loved him.”
Robin was right; it didn’t make sense.
Sandstone.
And then it came to him. Just like that. As if he were hit with a beam of light.
Good God.
“What?” Robin said, seeing something in his face.
“I think I know where he is,” he said.
*
“Try him again,” Robin said, bent over the steering wheel of her car.
Her eyes were intent on the road as she sped along the edge of the river.
Sutton dialed, waited, and then when it wasn’t answered again, put the phone back in his pocket.
“It just goes straight to voicemail. I don’t know if it’s off, busy, or…”
“Then what are we going to do?”
Sutton paused, thinking.
“I’m going to take a look. You’ve got to turn here. On to Redcliffe Hill.”
Dutifully, Robin turned on to the incline, on to the road that would eventually bring them back up to St. Mary Redcliffe Church. At the moment, the church was obscured by the throwaway architecture of council tower blocks, characterless buildings buil
t on a shoe string budget, unsightly and offensive to the eye.
“Sutton, please,” Robin said, a pleading note in her voice.
“I won’t go in any further than the door.”
“No. It’s not safe. What if he’s in there, what if he’s waiting for you-”
“I’ll be careful.”
“Careful isn’t careful enough,” she said, petulant. “Look what happened last time. He almost had you.”
Sutton was thoughtful.
“I didn’t thank you for that, did I?” He said, and he seemed amused, of all things.
“I don’t want your thanks.”
“Thank you, anyway.”
Robin sighed unhappily.
“I want you to find her, but…I couldn’t…if you got hurt…”
“Hey,” Sutton said, touching her hand on the steering wheel. “Look at this way: what if we have to wait for an hour, before Sean answers his phone. What if, in that hour, we find we could have saved Andrea. You’d never forgive yourself, Robin. You wouldn’t.”
Robin did not speak, but her expression was miserable.
“Just here,” Sutton said, pointing. “Turn in here.”
Robin turned in at Redcliffe Parade East and then drove into the Phoenix Wharf car park at Sutton’s insistence.
She killed the engine and sat silent beside him.
Sutton was looking out over the docks, the river alive in the night, lights on boats bobbing like fireflies, the occasional wink of reflected light thrown up by the turbulence in the river.
“Did you know,” Sutton said, “in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Bristol was a hub for importing and exporting exotic and unusual items from distant lands. Ships used to sail in up the channel and dock here before going on to America. The skyline would be wall-to-wall masts. Ships would be so crammed in their hulls would knock against each other.”
Sandstone had been the key.
Sandstone had originally been used in the fledgling glass manufacturing industry in Bristol at the beginning of the eighteenth century. This whole area was sandstone, hence the name Redcliffe. About ten acres of winding, twisting tunnels under Redcliffe had been left behind by the sandstone miners. As Sutton understood it, the caves had also been used for disposing sewerage – not exactly the most hygienic caves in the world, but he supposed those had been different times. Three massive well shafts were constructed, but he thought that only one of them had been used for disposing sewerage. Sewerage was dumped at low tide, and the high tide filled the wells and took it away. By the nineteenth century it was cheaper to import glass than it was to make it, so the industry was abandoned, but the caves were still used, mostly for storage of imports from Africa and the Mediterranean. After the traffic in the channel began to die down, the caves were no longer used, and had been sealed…and pretty much forgotten about.
That was where Sutton believed Alden was hiding. Where he would be most at home.
It would explain why the majority of his victims had worked in Redcliffe; he would have encountered them going to and from the caves.
Sutton took the map out of his pocket and looked at it, trying to remember the tunnels. He had ripped it from a history book on his shelf on the way out. He quickly realised it was impossible to memorise, and put the map away.
“I’ll be quick,” he promised. “I’ll just poke my head in there, see if the place has been disturbed recently. And if anything happens, well…” He shrugged, and tried to make light of the situation with a smile; not an easy thing to do, and he might just have managed it, if it hadn’t been for Robin’s pained expression. “You’re my insurance policy. If I’m not out in” – he looked at his watch –“ twenty minutes-“
“Twenty minutes!” She stormed. “What kind of a quick look is that-“
“Twenty minutes,” Sutton repeated patiently, “then just call the police, because something has happened to me. Have you got it?”
She did not respond.
“Have you got it?”
“Yes,” she said, with acid.
“Hey,” he said, and touched her face.
Her eyes upon him were wide and frightened, like that of an abandoned child.
“It was a caterpillar, by the way,” he said.
“What?”
“The riddle. A hundred feet up in the air, it lies on its back? It’s a caterpillar.”
He smiled, and she grabbed his hand for a moment.
“Twenty minutes,” she said.
“Twenty minutes,” he agreed, and then he left her.
*
The walls made Sutton’s footsteps echo flatly along the tunnel. He flashed the torch around but there was nothing to see really; it was an old tunnel made imperfectly of old brick, cobwebs hanging here and there, small puddles of water at intervals along the length of it. Twenty feet away it ended in another brick wall. He dug out the map again, despair gripping him – looking at the map already, and not even really in the caves yet – and then he put it away and moved further down the tunnel, shining the torch to his left. Eventually, after searching, he picked out another doorway and moved toward it.
A long narrow tunnel was in front of him, the low ceiling making him duck his head, the walls, almost touching his shoulders on either side of him, putting him in the sweaty embrace of claustrophobia. Jesus Christ, he didn’t like small spaces.
Eventually, the passageway ended in a dark room, about twenty feet in diameter. Square depressions had been sunk in the floor, as if this had been once been several rooms, and the separating walls had been demolished.
His torch found both bodies easily enough.
The larger of the two was leaning against the wall, not far from the door. Sutton didn’t know him. He had suffered what Sutton at first thought was a severe beating, until he looked closer and realised that he had been cut up: the arm curled in his lap was not attached, a leg had been sawn off at the knee, and a foot was missing altogether, God alone knew where. Blood had hardened to a dark glaze on the floor around the body.
Sutton had to move further in the room to discover the identity of the other body, as its face had been turned away.
But as he got closer he realised it was not turned away; it had been sawn off. In its place was a ripped cloth of torn skin, with the skull poking through in places: a sliver of jaw bone, a couple of teeth.
The man had a shaved head, and Sutton thought Mike Ruffall before pulling up a coat sleeve and verifying it: on the inside of the wrist was a scorpion tattoo.
Mike.
What a fucking idiot.
There was another door in the far corner, and Sutton headed toward it.
*
Robin stood at the wall looking out over the river, thinking.
She had tried Sean’s mobile again, and once again found that he did not answer; it went straight to voicemail, as it had done the last half a dozen times she had tried. She could not believe that he was stupid enough to have switched his mobile off, or if it had turned itself off automatically or run out of battery power, that he was stupid enough not to check it. She felt betrayed, and on the edge of panic. She didn’t know what to do. Sutton had told her to wait, but she was scared that waiting wasn’t the right course of action.
The river was dark, like oil. Like blood.
She looked at her phone again, and with her face screwed up miserably with concentration, she made her decision.
*
Sutton looked around. His biggest fear had been of fumbling around in the dark, getting lost, calling out for help, and maybe getting the wrong help, but either a generator or mains power had been wired in down here, because small spotlights had been erected in locations around the cave walls, giving, if not brilliant illumination, then at least enough light to navigate by.
Coming in to a medium sized cavern Sutton walked to his left and was able to see passed a wall directly in front of him. A sprawling, twisting passageway beyond this cavern seemed to go on for a great distance, illuminated by ra
ndom spots mounted along its length. Everything in the caves seemed to be tinged with a dirty, orange-red, as if the spotlights were covered in old dried blood, but it was only the reflection of the light from the red sandstone walls. Sutton stopped to listen. There was silence for a good minute before he heard what sounded like a girl screaming, coming up from the long passage.
The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. The girl screamed again. Andrea?
He didn’t hesitate. Careful to keep any noise he might make to a minimum, he trotted along the passageway. He turned off the torch. The girl’s voice came louder, either grunting in pain, or, ridiculously, grunting in ecstasy, Sutton couldn’t tell which. Part of him hoped to God it was Andrea, and part of him hoped to God it wasn’t. Nothing would fill him with greater pleasure than to turn a corner in this labyrinth and come across Andrea gagged and bound, and very much alive, but he had to prepare himself for the fact that he might not find her like that, that he may find her gagged and bound, or hurt…or worse. A circular recess came up on his right, its interior walls painted white, and he was able to see a ladder built in to the rock of the walls, and forty feet above it a circular opening, covered by wood. Orange light leaked through the cracks in this wooden covering: streetlights. So. He was only forty feet below the surface. That was comforting to know. But why then did it feel like he was on another planet, far from the world he knew?
The voice became louder, crying out rhythmically. He realised suddenly that it was beyond the next twist in the passageway. He stopped before reaching it, and then slowly, keeping his back to the wall, moved around it.
He had come to a big chamber, the biggest one he had seen so far, easily a hundred feet across. There was light here, more light than at any other point in these caverns, and Sutton could see everything clearly. He hadn’t found Andrea. There was a table, covered in an array of unrecognisable metal objects, and an old dentist’s chair, and scattered around the cavern were bodies, three of them, but they were so shrivelled and decayed that there was no way they could be Andrea. Next to them was the person who had been responsible for all the noise, and Sutton realised it hadn’t been a girl after all.
