Sudden Death (12 page)

Erasmus swivelled around on his seat. He could see now that there were a few more people scattered around the bar, hidden away in booths or dark corners. The girl on her own looked up and caught his eye. He remembered where he recognised her from now. Erasmus hopped off his seat and made his way across the room to her table.

‘Can I join you?’

She didn’t look at him.

‘It’s a free country.’

She was pretty with large dark eyes in an elfin face and an almost impossibly thin frame with large breasts. It seemed to be the type of starved, gym-sculptured body shape that all the girls he saw in here had. It made him hungry. The thick make-up she wore couldn’t quite disguise the dark circles under her eyes though.

Erasmus sat down.

‘Quiet tonight, isn’t it?’

She shrugged.

‘There’s still time.’

He took a sip of his Coke.

‘I met you a couple of weeks ago, with Gary Jones. It’s Natalie, isn’t it?’

Her face lit up and she looked at him directly for the first time since he had sat down.

‘I remember you, you wouldn’t jump, you pussy.’ She didn’t smile but then looked at him with renewed interest. ‘You’re with the club, aren’t you?’

He nodded.

‘Has Gary mentioned me?’

‘What’s your surname again?’ he asked.

‘Cole.’

Erasmus considered lying. It would be easy but something stopped him. There was a fragility about her that made it seem too cruel.

‘I don’t really speak to Gary that much.’

‘Oh.’ She looked away again.

‘But, if you like I can mention that I saw you when I speak to him?’ Not quite a lie. Erasmus had no intention of speaking to Gary Jones, nor, he suspected, would Gary speak to him even if he wanted to.

‘Thank you,’ she said. Her eyes were moistening.

He waited for a second.

‘But I need you to tell me something.’

The hunted animal look returned.

‘What?’

‘What goes on in the Blue Room? What goes on with the players?’

Tough she may have been but she still blushed and looked down at her feet. She snorted, a harsh, cigarette sound, at odds with her carefully manicured and made up appearance.

‘You know the players don’t call it that.’

‘What do they call it?’

‘They call it the abattoir.’

‘Why?’

She flicked her hair to one side.

‘Coz it’s where they bring the new blood, the new girls, the fresh meat.’

Erasmus looked over at the blue door at the back of the club.

‘Nice, and what goes on in there?’

‘Just stuff. We party with them you know, that’s all.’ Her voice faded away.

‘Sure, sure. Tell me, have any of the girls ever sold their stories, or – ’ he picked his words carefully but there was no sugar coating this ‘ – asked the players for help in not selling their stories to the newspapers?’

Erasmus braced himself for a slap or a drink in the face but it didn’t arrive.

‘Are you talking about Jess?’ she said.

‘Jess? Is she your friend?’

Natalie clamped her lips around the straw.

‘Dunno,’ she said out of the corner of her mouth while sucking.

‘Does Jess go into the abattoir with the players?’

Natalie removed her lips from the straw.

‘Jess was a silly bitch who ruined it for us all.’ Natalie was looking over Erasmus’s shoulder. He turned around and saw that Mr Goatee – the barman – was looking at them and talking into his mobile phone.

‘What happened?’

Natalie sucked the last of her drink up.

‘I should go,’ she said.

‘Wait, let me buy you a drink.’ Erasmus pulled out another twenty and put it on the table. Natalie’s little hand shot forward and the note disappeared.

‘What happened with Jess?’

‘She was a stupid cow who couldn’t keep her mouth shut. She blabbed and told everyone she was going to the papers about what happened when we partied with the players, that’s all. We were stopped from going for a while but now things are OK again.’

Erasmus pulled out a business card and a pen from the inside pocket of his jacket.

‘Where can I get hold of Jess? Can you write down the address?’ He handed her the business card and placed the pen on the table. She took the card.

Natalie stood up.

‘I haven’t seen her in months, and I don’t know where she lived, somewhere posh like Aigburth. If you’re a friend of Gary’s why do you need to know?’

Despite his earlier misgivings Erasmus lied.

‘Because it will help Gary. You want to help him, don’t you?’

Her face, beautiful and damaged, lit up again.

‘Yes, I love him.’

Behind Erasmus there was a noise of a chair being moved to one side. Erasmus turned around and there was Mr Goatee. Two things were apparent: first the barman was well built – stacked he thought it was called – and had muscles growing on his muscles; second he was holding a metal baseball bat in his right hand, which hung down by his side.

‘You, leave now,’ said Mr Goatee to Natalie. She picked up her bag and didn’t look back as she scurried out of the bar.

‘I’m not sure what this is about but I’m leaving too so there’s no need for that,’ Erasmus said, pointing to the bat.

Mr Goatee chuckled and raised the bat menacingly.

‘There’s always the need for the rat basher when there are rats sniffing around.’

Erasmus took a step forward. As he did so Mr Goatee moved to the side, blocking off any escape from the corner table.

‘Are we really going to do this?’

‘Fucking aye!’

Erasmus sighed. He hated violence. People got hurt. Admittedly, it was usually other people.

His right hand dropped to the table and picked up the pen, as he did so, he looked straight at Mr Goatee. He clicked the pen top so the nib was exposed.

‘I’m guessing you’ve turned off the CCTV cameras I see scattered around this joint, and I don’t think we need to worry about witnesses. Last chance, move aside and let me leave and you can go back to thinking that being a barman is part of the creative industries. What do you say?’

Mr Goatee swung the bat behind him.
Amateur hour
, thought Erasmus, who stepped forward inside the arc of the swing, brought his right leg up and then smashed his foot against the side of Mr Goatee’s kneecap. He felt it shift, which usually signalled the end of a fight. But Erasmus had been trained to win fights with overwhelming force, so he didn’t check his momentum and his hip crashed into Mr Goatee’s pelvis, and using Mr Goatee’s own weight he flipped him so that he landed spine down on a cocktail table.

Mr Goatee was still holding the bat so Erasmus drove the pen deep into his palm where he knew a bunch of nerve endings came together. Mr Goatee’s scream was even more high pitched than Erasmus had expected. The bat hit the floor.

Erasmus leaned in close.

‘Here’s a tip you should take. The pen is always mightier than the bat.’

He pulled the pen out of the man’s palm and wiped it on his jacket before placing it in his inside pocket.

Erasmus stepped over him and walked out of the Blood House Bar back into the fog.

CHAPTER 13

Pete hadn’t worried when Erasmus didn’t return from his cigarette. He was used to his friend disappearing to investigate any random thought that popped into his head. As long as Pete had his pint and a problem to solve, he was happy.

Pete knew women as well as anyone he knew. He had had no choice; he was surrounded and outnumbered by them. His wife Debbie had given them three daughters: Lucy was fourteen, Anna was now seventeen and their youngest, Olivia, a recent surprise to both of them, was now two. His was a house where Dad was tolerated almost, but not quite, not really, as a member of the human species.

The house was filled with potions and lotions, and although he had resisted at first he now knew their purpose, their intended effect and, more importantly, the reasons that lay behind their existence in their pastel proliferation in his bathroom and beyond. He rode the emotional tides in the house with the skill of a world-class surfer and he knew when to advise and when to hold them and say nothing. He also knew that his ability to survive so successfully in such an alien environment was being able to take time out to be himself, to engage in manly pursuits and talk man, to be a man.

As such he was very aware of the irony that he was now posing as a woman, or more precisely, a girl. A girl called Charlie.

He sipped his pint and studied his laptop screen. Beer and computers were a divine combination to Pete. He slipped on some headphones and chose an early Who track to drown out the braying vets next door. Heaven.

It hadn’t taken long to set up a profile for the ersatz Charlie. He had decided that a boy, however good looking and mysterious, was the wrong choice. His observation of his daughters, namely the candour with which they discussed things with their friends – something he did everything in his power to avoid hearing since he had heard his darling Anna talking about dildos – compared with the guarded drip of information that was fed to their boyfriends had decided him. From then it had taken minutes to set up the profile.

He made Charlie the same age as Rebecca, sixteen, put her in a boarding school down south and then scanned through some stock photographs of alternative/emo girls of the same age. Not too cool and polished, pretty in a quirky way was required. Soon enough he had it. A picture of a small, pretty girl, with a half scowl, dyed black hair and pale skin. It was an outdoor photo, the girl sitting on a park bench. Perfect.

A call to Karen had furnished him with the most important information, the interests and likes and also a stroke of luck that he knew could save weeks of building up a relationship and get Charlie added as a friend and communicating with Rebecca in no time.

The likes were mainly alternative bands, dead poets, a couple of edgy actors and some local clubs that played the type of music that Rebecca was into. He added them to Charlie’s profile. He didn’t have any other pictures of Charlie to add but that was easily dealt with. Another advantage of living with teenage girls was that he knew how they loved taking pictures, and held fantasies about becoming a photographer. He listed Charlie’s main hobby as photography and then added pictures from a stock library of mountains, sunsets and sea views from various countries that he imagined a girl of Charlie’s age and socio-economic background may have visited. Finally, as the piece de resistance he used his iPhone to take an extreme close-up of a beer mat that had one corner turned up. His eldest daughter had gone through a phase of taking extreme close-ups of anything and everything. He hadn’t questioned it, just accepted it as one of the inexplicable things that these strange creatures who he lived with did occasionally.

Another pint and some finishing touches and Charlie was complete and ready to be released into the world. Pete uploaded her profile and disabled the timeline, which would have shown she was new to Facebook.

Armed with the knowledge that Karen had given him, he clicked on a link to a forum dedicated to the American indie band Phantom Lust. Pete, who liked to keep up to date with these things, thought them derivative of the late seventies band Television, and they certainly didn’t come close to the soul and MOD classics that filled up his collection. But still, each to his own. You needed to experience lesser types of music before graduating onto the classics. Pete himself had had his own teenage flirtation with Dire Straits and Pink Floyd, something he would deny to his dying day.

He registered Charlie as charlieitallbreaks97. ‘It all breaks’ was a reference to one of Phantom Lust’s more obscure tracks, which only a proper fan and not a ‘singles’ fan would appreciate. He posted straight away, starting a new thread in the ‘UK Tour’ section. The post was headed ‘tickets for real fans – Liverpool gig’. You see, Charlie had two tickets for the band’s sold-out Liverpool gig – obtained by Pete with a quick call to an old drinking buddy of Pete’s, Tosh Wearing – but she couldn’t go because her ‘bastard Dad’ had decided that he was actually going to use his visiting rights this weekend and take her to visit her grandparents in Scotland. Charlie wanted the tickets to go to real fans only. All could apply. If Becs669 logged in, as she did everyday, and saw the post, the tickets were hers and she would have a new pal into the bargain.

Pete cast his line and considered his sock puppet alive and well.
This deserved another pint
, he thought,
maybe two
.

CHAPTER 14

Erasmus woke up and felt something cold and hard next to him. He shifted and the bottle rolled from the bed and hit the floor with a loud thump. He waited for the smash but it didn’t come.
Carpet is good
, he thought, and then wished he hadn’t as the act of thinking seemed to cause a fissure to open up in his brain. He groaned first at the pain and then at the memory of the night before.

He had come home, opened the Yamakazi and finished the bottle. As far as he could see the only saving grace was that he had made it into bed. He didn’t need to speculate what had happened. It was the panic. The panic had gripped him tightly around his chest as soon as he stepped out of the Blood House Bar. It had sat on his windpipe as he hyperventilated in the car, and then it had crawled, with oxygen depleting tentacles, all over his body, making him cry out with fear.

He hadn’t been able to wait to get home. There was no way he could drive in that condition. He had got out of the car and run to the Tesco Metro on the corner of Castle Street. He had headed straight to the booze section and bought two bottles of Yamakazi. The spotty youth who served him had given him a look of fear. He was puffing, trying and failing to breathe normally, to be normal. It hadn’t worked and the youth had looked down as he served him rather than face the pale, crazy man in front of him.

He had the first bottle open as soon as he left the shop. The fine single malt was harsh when poured straight from the bottle into this mouth. But as soon as the first rush of alcohol was delivered to his brain, it began to dampen the flares and fires that were alight all along his sympathetic nervous system. A quarter of a bottle disappeared in seconds.