Drawing Blood

  DRAWING BLOOD

  By James Alva

  CHAPTER 1

  NOW

  Hell, Sutton Mills finally decided, was not a place, but a condition.

  But when he woke, he could be forgiven for thinking the former was true.

  Woke wasn’t quite correct though, as that implied a normal return to consciousness…and there was nothing normal about this. Tangled shreds of a couple of terrifying dreams faded as quickly as he tried to hold on to them. There was a growing sense of self, of identity, as his mind fought its way back from oblivion. Finally, it was the discomfiture of the cold seeping into his bones that brokered the last of his resistance to awareness.

  And through it all, pain, centred in his head but also in each of his limbs; a dull ache in time with his heartbeat.

  His sight, the last of his senses to be engaged, was also the one to offer the least in the way of illuminating his surroundings. He knew that he was on a hard floor, that the place he was in was damp and musty, that there was no heating to speak of…but what it looked like, he had no idea. Nothing came in to his vision, after he opened his eyes, nothing but a lack of any kind of stimuli.

  Black.

  Oh fuck.

  For a moment, a deep well of fear seemed to travel up through his body, all the way from his feet. He held his hand up and couldn’t see anything.

  Was he blind?

  Please God, no.

  He fought the panic. He could feel it at the edges of his mind, like a swarm of bees; he fought it back, talking to himself in his mind calm down, you don’t know anything yet, just stay calm, you can panic when you know more.

  So what did he know?

  Physically, he knew that something unpleasant had happened to him. His mind was foggy, fully refusing to work properly, in part due to a large swathe of pain through most of his head but mostly just because the chemistry of his brain had been messed up. Or that was what he hoped. There was also something else: groping for it in the dark, he found the lump just under his hairline, a tender spot where he had somehow bashed himself…or been bashed. It felt huge to his groping fingers.

  This was hell, he thought: alone, in pain, blind. He could think of nothing worse.

  What was just as alarming was that he could find no memory to explain this injury…to explain any of it. How was he here, when did it happen? He went searching for an explanation in the recesses of his mind, but the fish hook of retrieval didn’t snag anything that might offer up any kind of a revelation. For now, he was just here.

  Okay. Better leave that until his mind was working properly.

  First order of business: physically exploring the dimensions of his hell.

  He tried to sit up. His muscles felt stiff and sore, but he put this down to coldness and inactivity rather than any real damage. He struggled upright, and his back met a wall. He shifted his hands to brace himself against it, and as he did he knocked something loose. It skittered away in the dark; from the sound, it was metal, a pipe, with something rattling around inside it. He dared not allow himself to hope. He spread his hands wide, searching for it. The effort caused his head to throb painfully, but in only moments his hand closed over the object.

  He picked it up, felt along its edge, and with his thumb found the button.

  He pressed it.

  A bright beam of light punctured the dark.

  Sweet Christ. He hadn’t realised how terrified he’d been until he could see again. He let out an explosive breath, his chest shaking with something, fear or relief or hilarity, he couldn’t determine which. He cast the light around. Immediately in front of him was the concrete floor, dirty with dust and stones, and a little further on he was shocked to discover an edge, with metal railings sunk into it…and beyond the edge, nothing. A void.

  He scooted forward and shone the light over the edge.

  Ten feet below, stone steps ended at a small empty square of floor in front of an open doorway. The doorway was dark.

  If he had thrashed around upon awakening, if he had rolled over more than once…he’d have gone over the edge. The fall probably wouldn’t have killed him, but there was a chance he could have broken his neck.

  Imagine: paralysed, in this place.

  He shivered.

  He cast the torch about, to his left.

  There, on the concrete, was evidence that his imprisonment wasn’t accidental, but by design: a large clear plastic bag containing sandwiches and a bottle of water.

  So. They didn’t want him to die. Not right away.

  Beyond the bag, stone steps led down to a small landing, and then switched back on themselves, finishing at the square of floor below. The steps were littered with brick dust, and the walls, once white, were discoloured and peeling. Mottled black mould covered one corner near the ceiling, and it turned Sutton’s stomach to see some kind of distorted mushrooms growing out of the wall; they glistened wetly in the light from his torch.

  Where was this place? Its abandonment was obvious, and this fully quashed any hopes that he might be accidentally discovered. He decided it could be anywhere, and that it was pointless to speculate. There would be a list of abandoned buildings in Bristol as long as his arm. He could be in any one of them.

  So okay. Why was he here?

  If not to die, then for what purpose?

  Punishment. He was to suffer. It had to be. He’d been given food, a light, and he was on the whole unharmed. The pain he felt was from lying on a cold hard floor for a significant amount of time, and the bump on his head could be from a fall, and the rest could be symptoms of whatever drug it was they had used to put him out still lingering in his system.

  But who was punishing him?

  What did they hope to gain by locking him away?

  He had no idea. His head wasn’t working right, and the memories wouldn’t come.

  The most recent memory he had was of the reading of the will, but that felt like a lifetime ago…

  *

  CHAPTER 2

  FRIDAY

  “The detective will be here in about ten minutes.”

  Sutton nodded.

  The young solicitor indicated a seat in front of her desk, and she herself sat behind it while he got comfortable.

  There was an awkward moment of silence.

  Diane Gable was perhaps twenty eight or twenty nine. She was thin, pale, short at five foot six. She wore a pale grey suit jacket with a pencil skirt. For her height, she had surprisingly short legs; not what one would call attractive. Her hair hung down in two curtains parted with mathematical precision down the centre of her head. Her scalp could be seen in the parting, white and sterile. She wore black framed glasses with peaked corners: cat eye glasses. Her lips were thin. A pale mole could be seen on her chin. With a few tweaks, she could have passed for that morose lady with the pitchfork in the famous Grant Wood painting…or she would be able to in twenty years anyway.

  Diane cleared her throat and said, “have you been to the reading of a will before?”

  Sutton shook his head but said, “only once.”

  Diane nodded curtly.

  “They are all pretty much the same. We convened a team to process Gavin’s will, of which I was a member. And Gavin named me executor. As such, it has been up to me to sort through Gavin’s financial affairs, to catalogue the value of his estate, and to notify the appropriate people or organisations of his death. As you may already know, Gavin had few relatives; in fact, only one is mentioned in the will: a cousin, living in Wales.”

  Sutton nodded; the Thompsons originally hailed from Wales, at least on Gavin’s father’s side.

  Diane continued, “he won’t be making an appearance today, as he is having his gall bladder removed.” She shuffled some folders on her desk and then said,
“only one other person is mentioned in the will, and that’s you.”

  As if the shock of Gavin’s death hadn’t been enough, he was now forced to be the benefactor of his friend’s demise. He didn’t want any of it. They had been friends since they were sixteen, but before three weeks ago, he hadn’t spoken to Gavin in almost two years. Not since just after his wife had died.

  Sutton blamed stubborn pride. Gavin had retreated in his grief, as if it was a burden he alone must bear. Sutton had been there when Gavin had met Rachel, the woman who would become his wife. He had been an usher at their wedding, watching while Rachel cried at the exchange of vows. He had been a party of, or a witness to, a hundred other moments that defined them as a couple, but it still wasn’t enough for Gavin to let him help. A stubborn man. Funny, witty, loyal, but stubborn beyond any reasonable standard.

  “The bulk of the estate,” Diane said, “and by that I mean the house, will be sold to cover Gavin’s remaining debts. Unfortunately, his financial situation was not a good one, so there is little of any value, but what there is has been left to the cousin.”

  Diane saw Sutton relax but didn’t remark on it.

  Instead, she said, “what I have for you is only this envelope, and this item.”

  She rose and passed them to him. The “item” was a small grey lockbox.

  Sutton took them both and returned to his seat and sat frowning down at them both.

  He tried to open the lockbox, but couldn’t.

  “Do you have the key?” He asked.

  She frowned.

  “I assumed you would have.”

  Sutton shook his head. He had no key. Why leave him a box he couldn’t get into?

  He turned his attention instead to the envelope, wondering perhaps if the key was inside it.

  But to his consternation he found that it wasn’t.

  There was only a single sheet of paper which contained a list of names and addresses written in Gavin’s neat, obsessive handwriting.

  RICHARD FARROW

  RITA SCHOFIELD

  ROBERT WAVERLEY

  GRACE CHAPEL

  MICHAEL TURNBILL

  Sutton frowned down at it, and then turned to Diane. There was a carefully controlled look of not-quite curiosity on her face, so he turned it around for her to see.

  She leaned forward, adjusting her glasses to read it.

  “Who are they?” She asked him.

  Sutton shrugged.

  “I have no idea. I thought you’d know.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t.”

  “Right.”

  Sutton folded the envelope and put it in an inside pocket of his jacket.

  The awkward silence returned.

  The detective had taken longer than the promised ten minutes. Diane looked pained by the fact, glancing at both the watch on her wrist and the clock mounted on the wall.

  “Do you know when the funeral will be?” Sutton asked.

  Diane shook her head.

  “The body hasn’t been released by the police yet. I suppose it won’t be until the investigation is closed.”

  “You’ll let me know?”

  She nodded.

  “Of course.”

  More silence.

  Sutton looked around the office. It was in the back of the building, and the one window looked out on to a restaurant car park next door. Diane Gable wasn’t senior enough to have one of the larger officers at the front of the building, that looked out and down on to the main thoroughfare: the Boulevard, a main road leading to Weston-super-Mare High Street.

  Still, even though it was small it wasn’t cramped. The desk and the two chairs opposite took up most of the space, with a bookcase and a filing cabinet pushed against the wall opposite. There were two water colours of sailboats, proficient if uninspired, and not painted by anyone he knew; a local artist perhaps, as in both he could see the small lump of Steepholm on the horizon. Beneath the window was a dark wood sideboard, with framed photographs on it: Diane with an older man on a boat, laughing, the wind blowing her hair into her face, the large luminous lifejacket making her seem child-like in comparison; Diane in a graduation robe and mortar board, holding up her degree certificate, her happy parents flanking her; Diane with two children at a fireworks display, the children too old to be her own: a niece and a nephew. On the end of the sideboard there was a space, with a distorted dust free rectangle in evidence: a missing photograph.

  Or a photograph removed.

  “Had you known Gavin long?” He asked, turning away from the spot with the missing photograph.

  Diane nodded.

  “Two years. Gavin and his wife drafted wills with a senior partner, but I helped him after his wife died.”

  “You’ve seen him since then?”

  Diane frowned.

  “He made you executor,” Sutton remarked.

  Diane pressed her lips together.

  “Yes. He came in to amend his will.”

  “Recently?”

  “Yes. Three weeks ago.”

  At the look on Sutton’s face, Diane said, “I don’t think there’s any connection. People do sometimes amend their wills and then get hit by a bus two weeks later. Sometimes it’s just a coincidence. Unfortunate, but a coincidence nonetheless.”

  “But he wasn’t hit by a bus,” Sutton pointed out. “He was murdered.”

  “Yes, but…” Diane paused, searching his face, and then said, “it’s not as simple as…” She cleared her throat, and tried to smile. It was a terrible smile; a poor effort. “The detective will explain.”

  “Have they found who did it?”

  “Not that I’m aware of. Not yet.”

  Sutton thought for a moment.

  “What was he like?” He asked. “When he came in to amend his will.”

  Diane frowned.

  “Just like he always was. No different.”

  “Was that the last time you saw him?”

  Diane suddenly looked uncomfortable.

  Sutton caught the look, but it wasn’t just that. She had talked about Gavin, not Mr Thompson. He was more than just a client.

  A friend?

  Or more?

  “You saw him after that?” He pressed.

  “Yes,” she said, over something in her throat. “We were friends. We met socially.”

  “The last time you saw him?”

  Her face was unnaturally tight when she said, “two days before he was killed.”

  “What-“

  “When was the last time you saw him?” She said, talking over him.

  Sutton hesitated.

  “Three weeks ago.”

  “And how did he seem to you?”

  Diane seemed angry or upset. Which was perfectly acceptable, given the circumstances. Her small eyes were sharp and unfriendly.

  “Agitated,” Sutton said. He thought. “Maybe…unhinged.”

  “And before that?”

  Sutton felt a pang of guilt…and thought she might have asked it because she already knew the answer.

  “Two years.”

  “You were friends?”

  Sutton squirmed, the guilt banging louder.

  “He-“

  “You were friends,” she repeated, and it almost sounded like an accusation this time, and not a question.

  There was a brief staring match, before they were interrupted by a knock at the door.

  Diane looked away first, and while she got up to open the door, Sutton wondered if Gavin and she had been in love…or if she had just been in love with him, and in death it was more finally unrequited.

  *

  Detective Richard Hill had finally arrived.

  He came into the room…and filled it. He was in his fifties, was tall and broad, and had a wide face made wider by chubby cheeks. If the face seemed cherubic and jolly, then in contrast the eyes were cold and calculating; it warmed Sutton a little to see it: the last person he wanted investigating Gavin’s murder was a clown. He wore a suit and tie, with an
engraved gold tie clip. The collar of his shirt looked like it was aggravating his thick neck. His greying hair was swept over his head from a parting on the left side. He introduced himself, and Sutton’s large hand was swallowed whole by Hill’s even larger one.

  “Have you got a cushion, Diane?” Hill said. “My back’s playing up again.”

  Diane hopped up and retrieved one from inside the sideboard.

  Hill sighed as he sat down with it at the base of his spine.

  “Thank you, dear,” he said.

  With a glance at Sutton, Diane said, “thank you, Detective Hill, for coming to see us.”

  Hill stared at her, and then nodded and smiled.

  “Of course.”

  “Perhaps you could give Mr Mills some details of the case,” she said, indicating Sutton. “As I explained on the phone, Mr Mills was a good friend of the deceased.”

  “Yes,” Hill said, shifting uncomfortably to face him. “Of course. Anything I can do to help.”

  “Have you caught his killer, is my first question?” Sutton asked.

  “Sadly, no. But we do have a suspect, and are following up on active leads.”

  Sutton sat back, a little annoyed. He didn’t want generic assurances, he wanted the truth. The truth, no matter how terrible, would always be better than a lie…and Sutton was a man with an insatiable hunger for truth. It could be the explanation for why so many relationships he had with women ended up failing. He couldn’t deal with an idealised version of the world, only its brutal undeniable reality, and that left little room for compromise.

  “Can you tell me how it happened?” He asked Detective Hill. “How, and where, and when?”

  Hill looked momentarily uncomfortable, his eyes flicking to Diane. Out of the corner of his own eye, Sutton saw her nod.

  “Very well. Gavin Thompson was killed at 11:24 on the night of the 12th December, in the kitchen of the home he owned. As for how…” Again, Hill looked uncomfortable. “It was blunt force trauma to the head and neck. It wasn’t immediate, but I’ve been assured that he would have lost consciousness soon after the first bow. He wouldn’t have been aware of the rest of the attack.”

  “Okay.”