Sudden Death Read online

  She hesitated for a second. This first moment before they spoke was always the worst; the moment of anticipation. Would he still feel the same way? Would the spell be broken?

  A sickness replaced the excitement. She should say something. Would he finally recognise her as the girl she was, not the lover she wanted to be?

  Letters began to appear on the screen.

  Hey Babe, I’ve been thinking about you all day. I’ve missed you, I want you, I need you.

  The nerves blossomed inside her giving birth to an almost overwhelming feeling of pure love.

  She began to type quickly, not using text speak, which she knew he hated, and was, as she now agreed, the sign of a weak mind.

  I’ve missed you too. I spend every moment waiting for us to be together … do you feel the same way?

  She hit send and then the nerves were back. Was it too much? She always worried that this was the case. She wanted nothing more than to reveal herself to him, to let him know her, but the magazines, her friends always said no. You had to be a player, follow the rules of the game, hide yourself in case you came across as too keen or, the very worst thing that turned all men off, needy. The other girls teased her at school, said she was too fat to be loved, to know love, but they knew nothing of real love. She had seen them with their silly tales of love bites, grubby unfulfilling sex and there was nothing there that matched this love. She bit her nails as she waited for his response.

  It came.

  I feel the same way. You know how I feel. The love we have is everything. I miss you when we are apart. Sometimes it’s too much for me to bear. It’s like a pain, a pain that needs more pain to block it out.

  She knew what this meant. It was their code.

  Her fingers glided over the keyboard. Once she had typed and sent her message she jumped off the bed and went to the wardrobe. Hidden at the bottom under her old and forgotten soft toy collection – he had mentioned some time ago that he thought such things childish in a woman and she had agreed, removing them from her bed that night and consigning them to the wardrobe gulag – was a small tin, the type that some of her more foolish school friends kept their dope hidden in, which she carefully picked up and took with her back to her bed.

  Excitedly, she opened the tin and pulled out its contents.

  His message was on the screen waiting for her.

  For us, to bring us together and take away the pain.

  This was theirs and nobody else’s. She understood that he couldn’t be with her, it was impossible; she had seen the pictures of his daughters, the daughters his wife would kill if he left her. Ethan was in an impossible position; their love was all they both wanted, all that mattered. In this universe what else was important? She typed quickly.

  I am yours Ethan. For ever. I’m opening myself now.

  She nearly added some kisses automatically but they had agreed that this was another childish affectation and she remembered this just in time, her finger aborting the landing before it touched down on ‘x’.

  She took off her jumper and slowly unbuttoned her blouse before pulling it down, exposing her left shoulder. The skin was pale and soft and she let her fingers trail lustfully over the flesh there. It was new and unbroken, unlike her right shoulder, which would carry the marks of her love for ever.

  She picked up the craft knife and brought the blade down onto her skin. It was sharp and the pain, such as it was, was more sweet and lovely than all the summer mornings of childhood. She inserted the knife deeper now, feeling the flesh resist and then yield as she drew the blade forward, cutting into her skin, marking herself for love, for pain, for him. Blood, their sacrament, warmed her skin and she let it rest there for a second before placing the knife on the tin lid and picking up the cotton wool from the opened tin and dabbing at the sticky warm redness. The white wool darkened quickly and she needed two more buds to remove the blood that collected on her skin.

  Her heart rate was up and she could feel it pounding in her chest and through her veins. She placed the cotton buds carefully on the tin and turned back to the computer. A message was waiting for her.

  This is for us and us alone. Did you do it my sweet? Did it take away your pain?

  It was true, it was always the same, the exhilarating, ecstatic pleasure. But already she could feel the darkness at the horizon inching closer inside her, soon it would be all she could feel and then she would be alone, curled up and waiting, praying for it to pass. Only he could save her from this.

  Yes, but I will miss you.

  There was a longer than usual pause. She fretted again, this time causing the darkness to accelerate rapidly, the weight of it starting to crush her, blocking her out.

  The response was all she could have wished for.

  There is a way we can be together for ever.

  She began to cry softly.

  CHAPTER 4

  It had been Pete’s idea. The bad ones usually were.

  Erasmus couldn’t say he hated football, it was just he thought the attention paid to it, the billions spent on it, the emotions heightened or ruined by it didn’t seem to be in proportion to the actual physical activity of twenty-two men rushing around a field chasing an inflated ball.

  This clearly put him in a minority of one among the other 38,000 people in the stadium who were roaring, cheering, booing and above all, it seemed to Erasmus, swearing all around him. None more so than his friend and colleague Pete Hoare – surname pronounced ‘Horay’ according to Pete’s wife, Deb, and no one else – who had spent the last twenty minutes introducing the people in the executive seats in which they were sat to some of the rarer examples of Anglo-Saxon English.

  A player in blue kicked the ball lamely to the opposite team’s goalkeeper.

  Pete, dressed in an old style Mod parka over his Gieves & Hawkes suit, leapt to his Italian-leather clad feet.

  ‘Did you see that? What a massive c – ’ Pete’s eyes flicked towards a glamorous young woman, all blonde hair, winter tan and nails who had appeared next to their seats ‘ – creep, massive creep.’ His voice tailed off, drowned by that most English of cocktails: lust and embarrassment.

  The woman looked directly at Pete.

  ‘Creep? If he’d scored that he’d ’av had a goal bonus, five grand yer know, he’s my husband and he’s a massive cunt never mind creep, love!’

  Her thick Scouse accent gave way to a cackle and she tottered away down the steps towards the seats reserved for the player’s guests.

  ‘Nice,’ said Erasmus.

  ‘You’re a snob. You know you would,’ said Pete.

  Before Erasmus could say whether he would or wouldn’t, another very different figure emerged from the entrance to the lounge area at the top of the steps. Erasmus would have placed this man in his late fifties or early sixties. It was difficult to tell because the man’s silky, long white hair, white teeth and tan seemed somewhat at odds with the wrinkles and body flexibility that Erasmus could also see. He was dressed in a navy blue suit and had what looked like a divers watch on his right wrist.

  ‘Here’s our man,’ said Pete and bounded up the steps towards him.

  The man greeted Pete with a sparkling smile. He was Ted Wright, theatre impresario and owner and chairman of Everton Football Club, and the man, who twenty-four hours ago had rung Pete telling him he needed the assistance of Erasmus Jones as a matter of urgency.

  Pete and Ted exchange a few words and then turned and walked down the stairs towards Erasmus.

  Ted showed his teeth again and extended his right hand, the left hand he placed on Erasmus’s shoulder, pulling him towards him.

  ‘Erasmus Jones, great to meet you. I’ve heard a lot about you.’

  He had been around enough alpha male activity in the army to know when someone was trying to assert dominance. At Sandhurst they had watched a video of the then Israeli president Ehud Barak and Yassar Arafat trying to put an arm on each other’s shoulder and shepherd the other through an open door, and it had
been almost comical the way that both had danced and twisted at the door, trying to avoid the other taking the alpha position of the shepherd. Erasmus hated those displays. In his experience they usually led to someone getting hurt so he just shrugged self-deprecatingly and smiled.

  ‘Nice to meet you too, Mr Wright.’

  ‘Call me Ted, everybody does, well that or something much worse!’ He laughed theatrically. ‘Come on down here, I want you to watch the rest of the game with me.’

  Ted placed his hand in the small of Erasmus’s back and gently pushed him towards the plush row of seats five rows further in front.

  Ted turned to Pete.

  ‘Sorry, but only room for one down there.’

  Pete looked disappointed.

  ‘No problem. Let’s hope the boys can turn this around, eh,’ said Pete to the retreating back of Ted.

  Ted ignored him and led Erasmus to the front row of the seating block. These were deep, blue leather seats, a stark contrast to the wooden ones that filled the rest of the ground.

  In the middle of the row there were two empty seats. With Ted still pushing gently they made their way along the row, Erasmus muttering ‘sorry’ and ‘excuse me’ every few steps as he bumped into the feet along the narrow gap. Erasmus recognised the new mayor and a minor pop celebrity sitting in this, the rich man’s aisle.

  ‘You take that seat,’ said Ted from behind him, pushing him towards the furthest and most central seat. ‘It’s the best seat in the ground.’ He bared white teeth that would have looked more appropriate on a twenty-five-year-old. ‘It’s my seat.’

  Erasmus let himself fall into the seat and Ted sat down next to him. The seats were wider than those he had left but still Ted’s wide thighs strained against the top of Erasmus’s legs.

  As they took the seats a chorus of boos rang out from the stand opposite.

  Ted smiled, his unnaturally white teeth flashing in the tungsten glare of floodlights, and raised his hand in acknowledgement.

  ‘Arsenal fans?’ asked Erasmus.

  ‘Nope,’ said Ted through a fixed smile, ‘just some fucking ingrates who call themselves fans of this club.’

  The boos were almost immediately replaced by a communal howling as a player in red scythed down a player in a blue shirt. It was the noise of a million disappointments and the cry of a hungry beast looking for meat.

  Ted was so close that his cologne, so heavy and thick it seemed to surround him like a planetary atmosphere, lodged in Erasmus’s throat like a sticky sweet.

  ‘Do you like football, Erasmus?’

  Erasmus had never been a good liar and now was not the time to start. He coughed, clearing his throat.

  ‘I don’t see the point. There are so many books to read, places to visit, women to know so why would I want to spend any of that time on watching a bunch of men chase an inflated pigs bladder around a muddy field.’

  Ted placed his right hand over Erasmus’s left wrist and leaned in close bringing Erasmus closer into the smell of musk that hung over him. It reminded Erasmus of his long dead Uncle Charlie who had washed with coal soap and worn lashings of what his dad called ‘Christmas perfume’; cheap, heavy and sweet. He had an idea that Ted’s cologne wasn’t cheap.

  ‘See over there,’ he nodded towards the opposite stand, ‘down near the pitch, that small standing area?’

  Erasmus saw a part of the stand was fenced off and even from here he could see that this part of the stand was full of teenagers.

  ‘That’s the kid’s pen. I used to stand there, forty years ago now, watching the greats: Ball, Kendall, Harvey. I have been in the theatre business all this time, and I’ve seen and met them all. Queens, princes, the rich, the poor, the brilliant and the best this world has to offer. And do you know what? I learnt everything about life, loss and love in the first seventeen years of my life, standing over there.’

  Erasmus noticed that Ted’s eyes had become moist. He remembered that Ted had, before making his millions in the theatre world, once been a TV actor in a soap opera.

  ‘Dads would bring their sons, it was a rite of passage. All that life has to offer can be found in this game and, more importantly, in this club. This club is my life, and the life of forty thousand others in this ground. It is everything to the working man: his theatre, his palace, his place of dreams and fantasy.’

  Erasmus studied Ted, trying to make out whether any of this was an act, but the tears and the grip on his arm told him that they were not, or that Ted Wright, former actor and theatre impresario, was a master in his line of work.

  ‘Why are they booing you, your fans?’ asked Erasmus.

  Ted leant back in his seat and laughed.

  ‘We win they cheer me, we lose they boo me and send me excrement, and worse mind, through my letterbox. It’s just the way it is.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound like much fun?’ said Erasmus.

  ‘Fun? What the hell has fun got to do with it? I do it because I have to. I’m the guardian of this club! It was here before I was and it will be here after I’m gone and that’s a fact. Tell me, when you were hunting Taliban, was it fun?’

  Erasmus said nothing.

  ‘I know about you, Mr Jones. I make it my business to find out about who I’m going to be working with. Drummed out of the Military Legal Service for picking up a weapon, leaving base and killing two Taliban who had maimed a class of little girls. A rather unusual legal practice and frankly just the type of person who does things because they need to be done, and not because they are fun. Am I right?’

  Erasmus breathed in long and hard. Finally, he let the air out. He felt some, but by no means all, of the tension go with it.

  ‘Pete told me you wanted to speak to me about something?’

  There was another roar from the crowd. Ted’s head snapped round towards the pitch.

  One of the Everton players had slipped through the mass of red defenders and was bringing his left foot back to strike the ball. A pulse of excitement shot around the ground, transmitting itself through the people around them and suddenly everyone jumped to their feet.

  To Erasmus’s amazement he found that he too was standing. Never underestimate crowd dynamics, he thought.

  ‘Go on, Wayne!’ screamed Ted.

  A furiously loud shout of ‘penalty’ broke and crashed all around him as one of the Arsenal defenders kicked the Everton player’s standing foot away from him.

  The referee blew his whistle and pointed to the penalty spot. More cheers.

  Ted turned to Erasmus.

  ‘Wayne Jennings, the best player this club has ever produced. You don’t follow football but I presume you have heard of him?’

  Erasmus just shrugged but even Erasmus, a sports hater, had found it difficult to avoid the existence of Wayne Jennings, the Premierships youngest ever goalscorer and England’s new hope for glory. He wasn’t going to let Ted know this though. He wondered at the reasons for his own contrariness, maybe it was a reaction to the fact that he had jumped up with the rest of the fans seated around him, an assertion of grumpy individuality. He knew any number of his ex-girlfriends and colleagues would say he was just being a twat.

  Ted shook his head.

  ‘Score this goal and we’ll win and then be off the bottom. Come on, Wayne.’

  An almost funereal hush had gripped the fans, men held each other in ways they would consider cause for a fight and shame outside of the ground. The tension was palpable as the young striker, Wayne Jennings, picked the ball up and placed it on the penalty spot.

  The opposition goalkeeper moved from side to side and bent his legs at his knees in an effort to distract Wayne. He seemed to ignore the keeper, looking at the ground beneath his feet, until the last second before he looked up briefly and then began to run towards the ball.

  There was the crackling sound of forty thousand breaths being held in the cold, November air.

  ‘Come on, Wayne,’ whispered Ted.

  Two things happened at once. First, Erasm
us noticed that although the crowd were all looking at Wayne running up to take the penalty, there was one face to his right, maybe twenty yards away, that was turned away from the goal, and the action on the field, and was looking directly at him. It was a man, maybe late forties, jet-black hair greased back and a lined face that spoke of an upbringing nearer to the equator than Bootle. The second was Wayne Jennings lifting his left foot to strike the ball, seemed to freeze in mid air, his foot extended back to almost a horizontal plane, and then wobbling as his right foot collapsed under him, before he fell crashing to the ground, his weaker right foot catching the ball by accident and knocking it forward no more than twelve inches.

  The groans were deafening as the opposition keeper raced out and picked up the ball.

  Erasmus looked back from the action and towards the man who had undoubtedly been staring at him. He was gone, his seat now empty.

  ‘Jesus!’ cried Ted.

  He bent over and held his right palm to his forehead. An unhealthy looking flush had appeared on his face breaking through the tan.

  ‘It’s not the end of the world,’ said Erasmus.

  ‘It just fucking well might be. Follow me. To business,’ said Ted.

  Ted started walking back down the row, his girth forcing people back into their seats. He didn’t bother with any apologies. Erasmus followed him and supplied them to the pissed off people that Ted left in his wake.

  Ted, moving faster than his size or age would suggest was possible or healthy, shot up the steps towards the exit. As he did so Erasmus realised why he moved so quickly. Boos and taunts rang out from what seemed like thousands of people in the stands. You wouldn’t want to hang around in this environment, thought Erasmus.

  ‘He’s a fucking wanker, drop him!’

  Erasmus recognised the voice. It was Pete and he was pointing at the pitch. Erasmus tapped him on the shoulder.

  ‘Come on, Pete.’

  Pete looked up and if he was embarrassed by his comments about Ted Wright’s star player he certainly didn’t show it.