Sudden Death Read online

  ‘Erasmus Jones, we met at the Liverpool Law Society annual dinner last year.’

  Tallow shook his head.

  ‘Mmm. What do you want?’

  Erasmus beamed.

  ‘I wanted to see Jess, is she in?’

  Tallow looked like he might explode. He began to close the door.

  ‘It’s about the Blood House. You know, the bar in town.’

  The door stopped abruptly and Tallow stepped forward and stood inside Erasmus’s personal space. He was a big man, tall and wide, and he loomed above Erasmus.

  ‘Why the fuck would you want to see Jessica?’

  ‘I just wanted to ask her a few questions.’

  ‘About what exactly?’

  Erasmus shifted his weight from foot to foot. His nervous system was a little wired from all the caffeine and nicotine he had carpet-bombed it with to counter the effects of the booze.

  ‘It’s personal.’

  Tallow laughed.

  ‘You want to ask my eighteen-year-old daughter some questions and you won’t tell me what they are? You have to be fucking kidding me.’

  ‘Is she in?’

  Tallow took another step forward, coming within an inch of Erasmus. Erasmus stepped back. He was in no mood, and certainly no physical condition, for a fight.

  ‘My daughter is away travelling in Australia and New Zealand. She won’t be back for six months. Feel free to come back then.’

  Erasmus took another step back.

  ‘Do you know what will help?’

  Tallow looked confused.

  ‘Cold rump steak, lay it on that shiner, it will be gone in twenty-four hours.’

  The look on Tallow’s face told him he had scored a direct hit.

  ‘Get off my property now!’

  Erasmus held up his hand and turned away.

  ‘I’m going, I’m going.’

  He walked down the long path, feeling Tallow’s eyes on him all the way to the gate. He paused and looked at the bins. There was a couple of plastic bin bags spilling out of the recycling bins and one of them, ripped open by a fox, had spewed its contents on the path. There were tins, yoghurt pots, boxes and the usual household detritus scattered around the bins. Something had caught his eye, something that shouldn’t be there. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it. He looked at them for a second longer but it wouldn’t come. He shrugged his shoulders and pushed open the gate.

  Erasmus walked back to his apartment through the park. The previous night’s fog had lifted in the early hours and now his hangover appeared to be easing Erasmus began to appreciate what a beautiful day it was turning into. Cold for sure, but a crystal clear cold made sharper and defined by the weak winter sun and the freezing blue sky. He walked to the centre of the park and took a seat opposite the restored Palm House. He called Pete on his mobile.

  ‘Hey Erasmus, glad to see your work ethic is as strong as ever, 3.30 p.m. and still not in the office. It’s a good job one of us is at the coalface. And thanks for the goodbye last night by the way. Typical.’

  ‘Frank Tallow, you know much about him?’

  ‘Wanker, complete narcissist. Runs a media practice based on his celebrity friends. Was doing well until he backed the wrong horse. He acted for that paedo, Terry TV, and when they lost, it was like he was tarred with the kiddie fiddler brush. I heard the work’s dried up.’

  ‘Interesting. Is he married?’

  ‘Divorced after the paedo thing or more likely the losing all his money thing. Why the interest?’

  ‘I’m coming into the office now. I’ll tell you then.’

  ‘Good. I’ve got something interesting to show you too. I’ve been fishing and caught myself a whopper.’

  CHAPTER 17

  Pete had set his laptop up in Erasmus’s office. Behind him the Mersey frothed and foamed, and the sun caused mini rainbows to appear to float just above the surface of the waves. The sight of the river and the reduced alcohol in his bloodstream was making Erasmus start to feel almost normal.

  ‘Rough night? You look like dog shit.’

  You could always rely on your friends to bring you down to earth. Pete, as ever, was dressed immaculately: a crisp white polo shirt under a maroon Fred Perry cardigan and blue Levis.

  ‘Planning on going down to Brighton to fight with some rockers?’ replied Erasmus.

  Pete laughed at this old joke between them.

  ‘Check this out. Meet Charlie and her new BFF.’

  He navigated to the fictional Charlie’s Facebook page. She had 320 friends, 319 of which were purchased, the 320th, and newest, was Rebecca.

  ‘BFF? Where do you get these sayings?’

  ‘I have three daughters remember. “BFF” means Best Friend For ever, or more usually until the end of the school day. Trust me, it’s a jungle out there.’

  ‘So Rebecca is her friend. What do we know?’

  ‘Well, we now get access to Rebecca’s Facebook page. I’ve had the pleasure of looking through that and what I can tell you is that Rebecca likes a lot of shit music that is fairly depressing, she likes taking close-up pictures of shit like salad bowls and posting them as “art”, and she has an unfeasibly large amount of friends, most of whom she has never met. In short, a pretty normal teenage girl.’

  Erasmus sat on the desk. He had hoped for more.

  ‘But don’t look so disappointed, my scruffy friend. You haven’t asked me how Charlie and Rebecca became friends.’

  Pete told Erasmus about posting the tickets for the gig on the forum. He’d had fifty-two replies and Rebecca had been among them. Of course, Charlie had picked her to receive the tickets and they had struck up an Instant Message conversation about Phantom Lust. Pete had been run ragged as he navigated the Phantom Lust website and Google to deal with such conversational gambits as, ‘What do you think of Trey’s new haircut?’ but he had succeeded to the extent that by the end of the conversation he had Rebecca’s email address and they were Facebook friends.

  ‘The tickets are electronic, she has to print them out, so I have to email them to her. Don’t you see?’

  Erasmus, a technophobe, didn’t see.

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I can include a piece of software called a key stroke programme with the attachment. When she opens the attachment it will infect her computer and from then on we can see everything she does from here.’

  Pete tapped his laptop.

  ‘Jesus, it seems unethical.’

  Pete grinned.

  ‘And illegal!’

  ‘I need to speak to Karen before we do this,’ said Erasmus.

  Pete looked disappointed.

  ‘Of course. By the way, are we getting paid for this job?’

  ‘Pro bono. The Jennings case is paying the bills,’ said Erasmus over his shoulder as he headed into his office for a nap.

  CHAPTER 18

  After a short but necessary sleep, Erasmus rang Karen and told her about the sock puppet. She was calmer then when they had last spoken and Erasmus couldn’t help wondering which was the real Karen. The overwhelmed wreck he had seen the other night or this one, who seemed more like the girl he had known? Erasmus had read somewhere that the cells in the human body change completely in a seven-year cycle so that the ‘you’ of today was entirely different organically from the ‘you’ of seven years ago. Maybe it was the same with your personality. Who was the real Karen now? Whichever one it was, one thing hadn’t changed; the way she made him feel. Like the years were stripped away and everything was possible again. She suggested he come over for dinner that evening and Erasmus agreed. Even as he did so he felt the long forgotten twist in his stomach.

  After he put the phone down Erasmus looked at himself in the screen of his mobile phone. Pete was right, he looked like shit: dark circles under his eyes, twenty-four-hour stubble and a hang dog look that would make a hang dog feel better about itself. He would go home and shower, shave and do what he could to make himself look presentable. Shit! What was he th
inking, that he would roll back the years, make something that hadn’t worked work this time? That he could go back to a time before he was broken? He raised a smile to himself and said aloud, ‘Stop overthinking it’. Who knew? Maybe, there was hope for a happy ending?

  Erasmus headed out of the office. Pete barely looked up.

  ‘Another hard day at the office, huh? We will be bankrupt in two months.’

  ‘We could be dead in two months.’ Erasmus shrugged.

  ‘I will be if I stop bringing home the bacon,’ said Pete with a smile.

  On the way back to his apartment Erasmus’s phone rang. It was Wayne. He picked up.

  ‘Raz! Where are you?’

  He made the mistake of telling him the truth. He could hear the sounds of screaming girls and shouting in the background.

  ‘Brilliant, you’re just five minutes away from me. I’m at John Lewis signing shoes. Come and meet me, I need to talk to you.’

  Erasmus started to object but he was talking to an empty line. He checked the time. He didn’t have to be at Karen’s until 8 p.m. and John Lewis was close by, maybe he could pick up a new shirt while he was there.

  But when he arrived at the store he realised that the new shirt wasn’t going to happen. The shoe concession was on the ground floor of the store and it was mobbed.

  Outside and above the entrance was a banner announcing: WAYNE JENNINGS ‘THE KING OF GOODISON’ LAUNCHING THE NEW NIKE JENNINGS. THE RULES OF SOCCER JUST CHANGED.

  There was a sepia picture of Wayne dressed in a football kit from the 1890s, sporting his daft grin and holding up a bright lime green football boot.

  Erasmus squeezed through the crowd. He had expected mainly teenagers and lots of girls but the majority of people buying the shoes and hoping to get them signed were middle-aged men. Erasmus had to push through the alpine range of paunches, apologising as he went, and making it clear he wasn’t after a signed boot to get close to the roped off area where Wayne sat signing boot after boot. He pushed his way to the front.

  The queue stopped some five feet from Wayne where a ripped bodyguard stood allowing only one customer at a time into the roped off signing zone. Wayne sat on a faux throne as befitted his nickname. Next to him was an empty chair and then standing in the corner by a pile of shoeboxes was Steve Cowley, talking loudly into the mobile phone clamped to his ear. Steve scowled when he saw Erasmus.

  ‘Hey Wayne!’ shouted Erasmus.

  Wayne spotted him and signalled to the bodyguard to let Erasmus through. He was called a wanker by the bloke at the head of the queue but ignored him and took the seat next to Wayne.

  ‘Great to see you, Raz!’

  ‘And you. I was going to ask what you were up to but I guess it’s pretty obvious.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Wayne as he signed another lime green football shoe. ‘It comes with the job. I just love playing football but Steve says I have to do all of this stuff. What have you been doing yourself?’

  Erasmus had a flashback of stabbing a man’s palm, and later vomiting into his own hands when he failed to make the toilet.

  ‘Online Scrabble fills my time. So what did you want to talk to about?’

  Wayne looked away and signed another boot handed to him by an eager, chubby hand.

  ‘I just, you know, gave you a bell, see what you were doing. These things are so boring!’ He looked embarrassed.

  ‘Oh sure. No problems,’ said Erasmus. ‘How’s the training going?’

  Wayne pulled a face.

  ‘The boss says I’m not pulling my weight but it’s not true. I’m really trying, I always try my hardest.’

  Erasmus looked up and caught a brief glimpse of a girl’s face in a gap through the crowd. It looked like Natalie, the girl from the Blood House, but then the crowd closed and the face was gone.

  ‘I know we haven’t talked about this before but I guess I don’t need to tell you that your form has been a bit, well, less than the high standards you set yourself.’

  Wayne nodded vigorously and looked slightly sheepish. He signed another boot.

  ‘Yup, I don’t know why. The doc says I’m one, one, O.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Oh, one hundred and ten percent. You know, better than the best.’

  Erasmus didn’t have the heart to correct him. It would be like kicking a puppy.

  ‘So, I think it’s just one of those things. You know what they say, form is temporary, class is permanent!’

  ‘That’s what they say, is it?’

  Wayne signed another boot. Erasmus looked into the crowd but there was no sign of Natalie.

  ‘Yeah, you know, they, the lads on Match of the Day, they’ve been giving me a kicking but I know I’ll come good. What do you think?’

  Erasmus laughed.

  ‘I think that I don’t have a clue about football, Wayne.’

  Wayne’s face fell.

  ‘But I think if anyone can it will be you,’ said Erasmus.

  This seemed to cheer Wayne up and he grinned again, and then the bashfulness was back.

  ‘Hey, when I’ve finished here do you want to come back to mine. Steph’s going out. We could play some PlayStation, maybe listen to some albums of my dad’s. He had some great ones, you’d love them, Raz!’

  Erasmus blew out his cheeks. Time to kick the puppy.

  ‘I’m sorry, I have to work tonight.’

  Wayne looked away.

  ‘If I asked Ted he’d say you have to come. You’re my scorta,’ he whispered.

  Erasmus shook his head and stood up.

  ‘I’m sorry, Raz, I didn’t mean that.’

  Erasmus looked down at the boy, because he was only a boy, and winked at him.

  ‘Don’t worry, son.’

  Steve Cowley finished his call. He squared up to Erasmus, sticking out his little pigeon chest.

  ‘Are you upsetting him?’

  ‘Get out of my way, Cowley, or I’m coming through you.’

  ‘You look like shit,’ said Cowley.

  ‘You should see the other guy.’

  Cowley hesitated for a second and then stood aside. Erasmus had a theory that maybe Cowley had seen the other guy.

  At the same moment a John Lewis employee held up his hands and shouted loudly, ‘That’s it, we’re out of boots!’

  A roar of disapproval went up from the massed crowd of thrusting hands – ‘Yer fucking joking, aren’t yer!’, ‘We’ve been queuing for bastard hours!’ People started to boo.

  Cowley looked panicked and for good reason. It seemed every second hand was holding up a phone filming the scene. It was a PR disaster.

  ‘This’ll be all over YouTube in thirty seconds,’ said Erasmus and he gave Cowley a pat on the back.

  Cowley ignored him and stood on the stage in front of Wayne.

  ‘Ladies and gentleman, it’s been an amazing success today and – ’

  ‘It’s not been a fucking success for me, lar,’ shouted a fat pasty-faced man who looked like training shoes were the last thing he would have in his wardrobe.

  ‘And I’m sorry,’ continued Steve gamely, ‘but we’ve sold out of shoes completely, if you leave your name and email details John Lewis will get back to you when they arrive in stock.’

  ‘What about them der?’ shouted the same man, pointing with a chubby hand at the pile of boxes upon which stood fresh trainers, forming the backdrop to the stage.

  Steve turned around and looked at the shoes and then turned back to the crowd.

  ‘They’re display shoes and not for sale.’

  A woman in a velour tracksuit with curlers in her hair jumped on the stage.

  ‘Like fuck they are, I said I’d get our Billy some and I friggin’ well will!’

  ‘Go ’ed love!’ someone shouted. She walked past Steve and grabbed a pair of the shoes.

  Steve took hold of her arm and tried to snatch the shoes back.

  ‘Get yer hands off me, that’s friggin assault!’

  Steve looked around
for help, but none was arriving. Wayne’s bodyguard raised his hands in a ‘What do you expect me to do?’ gesture and then despondently moved forward to help Steve. He snatched the shoes from the woman. Steve looked triumphant.

  Erasmus sensed the mood of the crowd suddenly darken. He stepped back on stage and grabbed hold of Wayne’s hand.

  ‘Follow me, now!’

  At the same time the fat man in the audience clambered on the stage and threw a right hook that landed softly on the bodyguard’s shoulder. The bodyguard’s return punch was fast and landed square in the chubby man’s face, sending him flying back into the crowd. There was a mob cry of anger and then a surge forward and suddenly the stage was filled with flying fists, grabbing hands and shoes scattered like sweatshop confetti.

  Erasmus pushed past Steve and led Wayne through some double doors marked ‘Staff Only’. Beyond was a staircase which they descended until they reached a service door. Erasmus pushed open the doors and they crashed through into a service alley.

  ‘Is your life always like being in The Beatles?’ asked Erasmus.

  Wayne grinned. ‘Pretty much, yeah. I’m not Ringo though!’

  They jogged to the end of the alleyway.

  ‘Wait here,’ said Erasmus and he poked his head out and checked the street was clear.

  ‘Come on, my car is just round the corner.’

  They ran out into the street and then cut through another alleyway that led to the back street where Erasmus had illegally parked his VW.

  ‘Every time I get in this car my value drops by a hundred grand, you know that?’ Wayne winced.

  From behind them came the noise of screaming girls.

  ‘You want to stay here, then?’

  Erasmus opened the car door and Wayne jumped in.

  ‘Where are we going?’ asked Wayne.

  Erasmus looked at Wayne and saw that his hands were shaking. He thought Wayne would get used to the adulation and the attention it brought but maybe it was something no human could ever truly get used to. Wayne noticed Erasmus looking at his hands and he placed them on the dashboard.

  ‘I’ll show you,’ said Erasmus.

  They drove the suburbs of south Liverpool. Wayne fiddled with the ancient radio, seemingly fascinated by the ancient analogue technology that required him to turn a plastic knob to select a radio station. He settled on a commercial channel pumping out RnB. It was like metal shavings being poured in Erasmus’s ears. He grimaced and clung tightly to the steering wheel. Wayne cheerfully began to sing along in a false falsetto. Erasmus speeded up. Eventually they came to Erasmus’s flat. He pulled into the drive.