Sudden Death Read online

  ‘She is, she was, hang on, I’ll go and check.’

  He heard the phone being placed down and then her footsteps as she ran up the stairs to Rebecca’s room. He didn’t have to wait long for her return and he knew immediately that something was wrong. She was trying to remain calm but terror was in charge now.

  ‘Rebecca’s not there. Please God. How did you know?’

  ‘Pete told me she was going to meet Ethan.’

  ‘Oh Christ,’ she cried.

  ‘OK, here’s what you’re going to do. Try her mobile and call me back if you get in touch with her. I am going to find her.’

  Karen’s voice was thin and wavery. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘I don’t know but I do have a hunch. I’ll call you back.’

  ‘Erasmus?’ There was a catch in her throat.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Find her.’

  ‘I will,’ he said with more conviction than he felt.

  Erasmus hung up and hit another number. A female voice answered.

  ‘Hi, is that Cat?’

  ‘Erasmus Jones, I didn’t think we would be talking again so soon.’

  She sounded pleased to hear from him. Her voice playful and, did he imagine it, flirtatious? He wondered what her boyfriend Ben would have made of that? Erasmus had got the distinct feeling that Ben was the jealous type.

  ‘Listen, Rebecca has gone missing and I remember you telling me about the place, the Hill where some of the kids thought suicides took place. Where was that?’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Hang on.’

  He heard shuffling as though she was moving. When she came back on the line she was whispering.

  ‘Sorry about that. Ben doesn’t like me taking work calls after school. The place is Thor’s Rock on Helsby Hill. There is an overhang of sandstone and a little cave. We used to go there as kids as well. If you don’t know it you’ll never find it though. I can meet you at the visitor’s car park at the Hill and show you the way.’

  He knew it, it was the hill that overlooked the Stanlow oil refinery and every flight in out of Liverpool flew over it. Usually on approach it felt like you could reach down and almost touch its sandstone face.

  ‘OK, I can get there in twenty minutes. What about Ben?’

  ‘Don’t worry about him. I’ll tell him I’m going to see one of my friends to talk about problems in her relationship. He will have switched off before I’ve finished the sentence. I’ll be waiting for you.’

  Erasmus left a twenty on the table and left Keith’s at a brisk pace. It took him two minutes to run to the flat and jump into his Golf. He was over the limit but he had no choice. He eyed the ashtray. It was full of copper coins. If he was pulled over those were going in his mouth, an old army trick they had used to fool the military police’s breathalyser kits. Not big, not clever, but effective.

  Erasmus floored the accelerator. It was 5.25 pm and Rebecca was mean to be meeting Ethan in thirty-five minutes. It would take him twenty minutes to get to the bottom of the hill and then God knew how long to get up it and find the rock that Cat had mentioned.

  It actually took seventeen minutes for Erasmus to make it to the car park at the bottom of Helsby Hill. Gloomy and ominous in the fading winter daylight, it looked to Erasmus like a smaller, squatter version of Devil’s Tower, the mountain in Close Encounters of the Third Kind that had drawn Richard Dreyfuss’s character towards it.

  His phone guided him to the car park, a small, empty asphalt space in dense woodland. There was only one other car in the car park, a red and white Mini. Erasmus pulled over next to it. He could see Cat inside.

  His phone rang. It was Pete.

  ‘She just logged on again from her mobile. Asked him when he was coming, he said he was on his way up the hill now.’

  Erasmus had a bad feeling.

  ‘OK, I’m here now. We are going up the hill.’

  Cat stepped out of her car. Her hair was tied back, framing her large eyes and mouth. She looked even prettier than Erasmus remembered. She handed him a torch.

  ‘Here, it will be dark by the time we reach Thor’s Rock.’

  He took the torch and turned it on. The light was fading fast now and the shadows of the trees hanging over the car park were merging into darkness.

  ‘Thanks. Listen, I think Rebecca’s internet boyfriend Ethan is on his way up there as well. He could be dangerous.’

  She looked at him quizzically.

  ‘He has a name now?’

  ‘Don’t ask me how we know. We just do.’

  Cat mimicked zipping her mouth shut and throwing away the key and then strapped on a head torch.

  ‘Well, we better get going then. Follow me.’

  Without waiting for him she set off into the trees, following a barely visible path. Erasmus followed her as she set a vicious pace up the steep path that headed straight up through the woodland that covered the side of the hill. Erasmus was fit but he found himself blowing after five minutes. Cigarettes and alcohol had a lot to answer for and he inwardly reproached himself as Cat’s toned legs disappeared around a bend in the path ahead of them. He ran forward in time to see the cone of light from her head torch sweep ahead of him ten yards or so in front.

  He checked his watch: 5.56 p.m.

  Ethan must be there by now, or was somewhere up ahead on the path.

  It was dark now and any fading light strangled by the closeness of the wood that gripped the path. Somewhere to the left of him in the woods there was a crack, the sound of something heavy stepping on a branch. Erasmus stopped and swept his torch around in the direction from where he had heard the sound.

  All he could see were the trees pressing in. He turned back to the path and realised that he had lost sight of Cat.

  ‘Shit!’

  He ran ahead, not scanning the path for obstacles and a second later he tripped on something in the path and fell heavily to the floor, his face smashing into the dirt. He sprang up and carried on running. The path turned again and Erasmus saw, maybe fifty yards ahead, the beam from Cat’s torch for a second before it disappeared.

  She screamed. Erasmus sprinted as fast he could, legs burning with the effort required to tackle the gradient.

  He nearly went flying again but stopped short of the dark object in the path. It was Cat, and she was lying on her side clutching her ankle.

  ‘What happened? Are you OK?’

  She held out her hand.

  ‘Help me up. I’ll be fine.’

  He pulled her to her feet. She looked shaken but otherwise OK.

  ‘Did you see him?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘I turned the corner and someone or something bumped into me from the side and knocked me down. I didn’t see who it was.’

  He looked upwards towards the ridgeline that was now only a hundred yards away.

  Cat set off again.

  ‘Thor’s Rock is on the other side. Come on.’

  She was hobbling but still moved quickly as they approached the top. Twenty or so yards before the top of the hill the trees thinned and then disappeared altogether.

  Erasmus ran past her. It was a mistake.

  He hit the top of the hill and would have kept going but for Cat grabbing the sleeve of his jacket. She yanked him back hard.

  He tottered for a second on the lip of a sheer cliff, the ground falling away for two hundred feet below him, and then both feet were on solid ground thanks to Cat.

  Erasmus blew out the air in his cheeks. He felt like he had been tipped upside down and shaken about like a snow globe.

  ‘Thanks. Funny sort of a hill,’ he said.

  ‘The Rock is just there, about ten o’clock, twenty feet below the top. Do you see it?’

  There was an outcrop, a crooked finger of sandstone that protruded from the face of the cliff. Erasmus could see from here that the top of it was narrow, maybe only the width of a ladder and that either side was a drop of hundreds of feet. After twenty feet or so it
widened out into a bowl with steep sides and you couldn’t see what was at the bottom of that bowl. To do that you would have to walk across the narrows to the lip of the bowl and look in.

  ‘Beautiful, huh?’

  Erasmus turned and was surprised to see Cat staring across the plain towards the Mersey where a million points of light glistened and sparkled from a city that looked like it was made from diamonds.

  ‘I used to come up here and just sit looking at the lights. It’s like the future was meant to be.’

  And it was beautiful, beautiful and cruel. The lights of the massive Stanlow Oil Refinery, billions of watts and thousands of lights on towers, pylons, cranes and topped with huge, naked flames burning the noxious gases that were produced by the refining of oil, were here set against the dark purple twilight: it looked like the fortress of Oz. Cat seemed transfixed by the sight.

  ‘Cat, Rebecca?’

  For a moment he thought she hadn’t heard him and then she refocused.

  ‘She’ll be in the bowl.’

  Cat skipped ahead, dropped down the four or five feet to the outcrop and without hesitation danced across the twenty feet of perilous rock that led to the bowl.

  Erasmus hated heights. Always had done, always would. When he was a child he had been taken to the Liverpool Empire to watch a pantomime and his parents had bought seats up in the Gods, so high that you felt you could reach out and touch the ceiling. Once the lights were down and the pantomime had started something had caught the five-year-old Erasmus’s eye: an unopened bag of wine gums that had fallen from a careless pocket and sat lying like Inca gold on the steep stairs at the end of their aisle. Before his mother could stop him Erasmus had made a dash for it, running past his father’s knees and lurching for the bag of sweets. He had tripped and fallen, tumbling and somersaulting towards the balcony that separated the cheap seats from the void that spewed out underneath them to the circle seats far below. Time seemed to slow, and as he completed each revolution, the spinning horizon of the stage had come nearer. He had been sure he would tumble and bounce over the balcony railing that stood only a few feet high. But at the last moment he had been plucked out of the air by friendly hands and then deposited back with his parents who were running down the stairs behind him.

  They hadn’t stayed to watch the pantomime. Young Erasmus had screamed the place down so much so that his parents had left even though it was a rare and barely affordable treat. He sometimes tried to convince himself that he had screamed because he was afraid of being punished but that wasn’t the truth, he screamed because to stay another second up there, hanging in the void, was impossible.

  He felt like screaming now as he watched Cat gracefully move across the finger of rock. He wanted to move but couldn’t. His legs weren’t obeying. In basic training he had conquered his fear through discipline and the screams of his drill sergeant but here, out on the rock face, the old fear took an icy hold. Erasmus began to feel the panic brew in his stomach.

  Ahead of him, he saw the dark figure of Cat silhouetted briefly against the horizon and then she disappeared down into the bowl. He could hear voices briefly before they were lost in the wind.

  He took a step forward onto the sliver of rock. The darkness that shrouded the hill seemed to leap into his mind, forcing his rational self to shrink away from the force of its invasion. He took a deep breath in and took another careful step forward. What if Ethan was in the bowl with Cat and Rebecca right now? What if he was watching Erasmus, waiting for him to get halfway across before attacking him?

  He looked down and immediately began to lose his balance. He began swaying, looking at his hands as they flailed for balance in the air.

  ‘Erasmus!’

  He looked ahead and saw that Cat was coming towards him, leading Rebecca by the hand.

  He regained his balance and quickly edged backwards onto safer ground. Cat and Rebecca joined him.

  Rebecca had been crying, dark mascara hung like shadowy curtains from her eyes. She was holding tightly onto her mobile phone.

  ‘What’s he doing here?’ she said to Cat.

  Cat exchanged a quick look with Erasmus and shrugged.

  ‘Your mum asked him to help look for you.’

  Rebecca looked at him briefly with hate filled eyes.

  ‘Will you take me home now?’

  Once again she addressed Cat only.

  Cat put an arm around Rebecca.

  ‘Sure, come on.’

  Cat began to walk down the hill and then turned and shook her head quickly. Erasmus knew what it meant: he was to say nothing.

  They walked down the hill in silence. As they did so Erasmus hung back for a second and called Karen.

  ‘Have you found her?’

  ‘Yes, we’re bringing her home now.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Cat Snow, I called her, she knew where Rebecca would be.’

  ‘Is she OK?’

  ‘She’s fine. Not very chatty though.’

  ‘Thank God. Erasmus?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Not a problem.’

  The others had gone some way down the path now and Erasmus was alone, surrounded by the trees. He looked behind him, sure he would see someone standing right there, but there was no one. He hurried down through the trees to the car park where Cat was waiting. Rebecca sat in the passenger seat of Cat’s car.

  ‘Rebecca asked me to drive her home.’

  ‘Sure, she doesn’t know me. Did she tell you anything about Ethan?’

  Cat cocked her head to one side and her eyes darted to the left.

  ‘She isn’t saying much but she did say that you scared her boyfriend away before she could meet him. She used some quite strong language about you as well.’

  Cat smiled and briefly touched Erasmus on the arm.

  ‘Don’t worry about it though. Kids can be bastards even when you are helping them.’

  He couldn’t help but laugh.

  ‘I told Karen I would drop Rebecca off at home. I’ll call her and let her know you’ll drop her off instead.’

  ‘OK, oh, by the way, how did you know she was meeting her boyfriend tonight? Rebecca seemed pretty surprised that we turned up.’

  ‘Masculine intuition,’ he said.

  ‘Bullshit. See you around, Erasmus.’

  ‘See you, Cat, and thanks.’

  She nodded and walked to her car.

  CHAPTER 30

  Karen called Erasmus the following day and had sounded more like the old Karen. She had sat down with Rebecca and they had finally talked about Rebecca’s cutting and her retreat to the darker nooks and crannies of the internet. Rebecca had told Karen that she had started cutting when Tony left the family home and had agreed to see a psychologist to start dealing with her issues. She had also promised to break off contact with Ethan.

  Karen had sounded like the weight of a thousand tonnes of fear had been lifted from her shoulders. ‘It’s a start and every journey begins with a first step,’ was what Karen had told him.

  Erasmus had made the right noises but he couldn’t shake the feeling that someone like Rebecca wouldn’t just comply so easily and that Karen was making the same mistake that all parents had a tendency to make, namely believing what she wanted to believe. He also wondered when the Karen he used to know had started to read self help books and quote quasi-spiritual phrases. He supposed adult life didn’t come with a manual and she wouldn’t be the first to succumb to mystical bullshit to help her through.

  She had thanked him and said she wanted to take him for dinner, as a thank you, the following Saturday. Erasmus had agreed, of course he had.

  He had even managed to speak to Abby, if only for a second, she had finally taken one of his calls and told him she was heading out to play tennis with a friend and would she call him back later. He had been cut off just as he started to tell her that he loved her. She hadn’t called him back.

  But it would have been a good wee
k but for the ‘haunting’. It was Pete who had gleefully labelled it the ‘haunting’ knowing how much that would irk Erasmus, the supreme rationalist.

  The haunting began two days after they had found Rebecca. He had left the flat and had been about to jump in his old Golf when he noticed something propped up against the inside of the front garden wall. His unconscious mind had registered it before he identified it, a jolt of cold electric nervous spikes running from the back of his neck to his toes. He had walked over to the object, picked it up and held it away from his body.

  It was a doll, carefully placed next to the wall so that it looked like it was sitting down. It had clearly been arranged that way and not causally discarded. The doll was about two foot in length, with long, thick, orange curls made of rope that hung over her pale, wide face, and she wore a blood red gingham dress. But there was something badly wrong about her: the dolls hands and eyes were missing. Missing, because someone had taken the trouble to crudely sew up the wrists with surgical stitching and place crosses in the same stitching where the eyes should have been. The sinister coup de grace was the noose made of thick string that hung around the doll’s neck.

  Erasmus had stared at the doll for a few seconds and then walked to the bins and unceremoniously dumped the doll inside.

  He walked back to his car, telling himself that the doll had been thrown over the wall, probably by drunken students. But the dark, primal part of his brain was screaming that this was no coincidence.

  He had opened the car and sat down quickly not noticing the objects on his seat. He realised there was something there as soon as he sat down and, heart beating rapidly, slipped his hand beneath him and pulled out the objects one by one: two small doll hands. Fluffy, white and ragged where they had been torn from the dolls arms.

  He had instinctively thrown them on the passenger seat foot well.

  Sitting in the car, he had the same feeling he had had in the woods on Helsby Hill. The feeling he was being observed. Anxiety, he had told himself as he looked quickly around him. There was nothing but the empty car park and the tall oaks of the park beyond the garden wall. Mark and Sue would be away for another couple of weeks and Ali’s flat was still waiting for a new tenant. There was nobody here, he told himself. Still, he looked up at the blank windows of his apartment block and couldn’t shake the feeling that there was somebody in there looking at him.