Sudden Death (23 page)

‘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 week 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.

‘Get a fucking grip, Erasmus,’ he said to himself out loud.

He had driven to the office and told Pete about the doll. He had made light of it but it was Pete who had asked the obvious question: Where were the dolls eyes?

It hadn’t taken long for him to find out.

That evening he returned home to his flat and fixed a simple dinner of vegetable pasta. He settled down on the couch after selecting a bit of early Nirvana to play on his Mac, and that’s when he found them. Two small pieces of blue plastic with swirls of yellow unwinding like some alien galaxy, sat perched on the top of the frame containing a photograph of him and his best friend, James Townsend. The picture had been taken at Camp Bastion four years previously and showed them both in full military gear ready to go out to meet a local governor to discuss a land dispute that the Military Legal Service had agreed to assist with. Five hours after the photograph was taken James was dead and Erasmus was on his way to a dishonourable discharge and a life that was changed for ever.

Panic grew in his stomach. Slowly, he stood up and walked across to the bookcase upon which the framed photograph stood. He picked up the eyes and held them in the palm of his hand. He wanted to drink; there was a full bottle of Yamakazi in the kitchen cupboard. It was the only thing he knew that could stop the panic from overtaking him and drowning him in its adrenaline fuelled tsunami.

He headed towards the kitchen but was interrupted by his mobile phone ringing. It was Pete.

‘Hi.’

‘Are you all right? You sound, I dunno, weird, well, more weird than usual,’ Pete asked.

Erasmus told him about the eyes.

Pete didn’t laugh. Pete not making light of something made Erasmus’s panic even worse.

‘I told you that they would turn up. It seems like you’re being haunted, like I said.’

‘I don’t believe in ghosts but I do believe in threats.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The law of unintended consequences. If I start sticking my nose in where it’s not wanted innocent people can get hurt.’

‘James?’

‘Yes, James. Someone is giving me a message to butt out. I would have said it was Steve Cowley or Babak but we are off that case now.’

‘Maybe not,’ said Pete.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I got the results back from my cousin about that drug they are giving to Wayne.’