Sudden Death

by Phil Kurthausen

  ‘But he’s Ethan.’

  ‘On Match.com. And guess what, it turns out that the profile was registered with a fake credit card.’

  ‘So, he kills girls, what’s a bit of credit card fraud.’

  ‘Doesn’t fit the profile of such killers. They don’t do petty crime, just the big stuff. And anyway the alibi is watertight. He’s not Ethan.’

  ‘Sock puppets,’ said Erasmus.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Nothing. I need to check something out. I’ll call you.’

  Erasmus tried Karen’s number again. Still no answer.

  He called Pete. They agreed to meet in the bar of The Grapes. Both he and Pete agreed on the music played there, soul and indie classics. Pete called it Checkpoint Charlie, the place where two cultures, his and Erasmus’s, could meet over good beer.

  Pete was already there by the time Erasmus arrived at the pub. He was sitting in the corner, pretending not to look at two attractive Spanish students who were giggling in the opposite corner.

  There was a full pint on the table waiting for Erasmus. Pete waved him over.

  ‘Surprised you called. Now you have a girlfriend I thought it would be all, “No I can’t come out to play, Karen says I have to stay in and watch Gok Wan”.’

  ‘Very funny,’ said Erasmus plonking himself down on the small bar stool. He took a swig of the beer. ‘Timothy Taylor?’

  ‘Yup, Landlord.’

  ‘As well as being an anachronistic twat you are a good friend, Pete.’

  ‘If by good friend you mean your only friend you have a point. So, seriously I thought you would be with Karen tonight.’

  ‘She’s out.’

  Pete leaned back in his chair.

  ‘Mmm trouble in paradise so soon. You’re not back to your old ways, are you?’ said Pete eyeing him suspiciously over his pint glass.

  ‘Nothing like that. They’ve let Ben go.’

  Pete nearly spat out his beer.

  ‘You’re kidding me.’

  ‘He has a cast-iron alibi apparently.’

  ‘But if he isn’t Ethan, who is?’

  Erasmus had a heavy dead feeling in his stomach. He didn’t want to articulate it but he thought he knew.

  ‘I need you to check something for me. I want you ring your buddy at the Echo and ask him to look into the death of Alison Shaw. It was a suicide at Karen’s old school, Upton Girls, must have been in about 1992. She mentioned it when I first asked her about Rebecca. I never thought about it at the time. I checked the internet, there’s nothing but the register of deaths. This is pre-Google but it will have been in the local paper. Can you ask him to check the Echo archive and find out whether Alison had a boyfriend or any surviving family? I need you to do this now.’

  ‘You owe me a pint,’ said Pete.

  He pulled out his phone and stepped outside to make the call. Erasmus waited and finished his drink. He looked up and inadvertently caught the eye of one of the pretty Spanish students. She smiled and before he could think, he smiled back.

  Fuck. When would it end, he thought looking away.

  It was a relief to be pulled away from such thoughts when Pete returned. Erasmus looked at him expectantly.

  ‘He doesn’t recall it but it was a little before his time. However he thinks he knows the journo who wrote the piece and he’s given me his address. He’s calling him and if he agrees we can go and see him.’

  ‘OK. Thanks.’

  ‘Nothing says thanks better than a pint.’

  Erasmus went to the bar and ordered two more pints of Landlord. Marvin Gaye’s ‘What’s Going On’ came on. Apt, thought Erasmus. He took the beers back to the table. Pete was on a call.

  ‘OK, Cheers, I’ll tell him.’ He put down the phone.

  ‘Tell him what?’ asked Erasmus.

  ‘Tell you Charles Harington’s address, he’s the journo who covered the story. Turns out he remembers it and he’s happy to speak to you. I’ll text you the address.’

  ‘You’re not coming?’

  Pete shook his head.

  ‘Strict 7 p.m. curfew, Erasmus. You have to make sacrifices in a marriage, you know.’

  It was something he had heard before, he thought as he headed out of the pub.

  CHAPTER 47

  Charles Harington’s house was a thirties semi-detached in a suburban street opposite Calderstones park. It was a place that Erasmus knew well, his father had often brought him here as a child and showed him the standing stones. He had encouraged him to look at them and imagine the druids moving between them like white wraiths performing their rites. Even now, standing just across the way from the park and the stones, he could still see in his mind’s eye the ghostly white figures of his childhood imagination.

  His reverie was broken by the door opening. A man in his late sixties, white hair, distinguished looking, stood there. He was immaculately dressed in a three-piece tweed suit and not at all what Erasmus had expected. This must have registered on his face.

  ‘Erasmus Jones I presume? And don’t look so surprised; journalists used to dress properly, you know, not like teenagers like they do now. Don’t just stand there, come on in.’

  ‘Thank you,’ was about all the answer Erasmus could muster.

  Erasmus followed Charles into the sitting room. There were two Chesterfields arranged in front of an open fireplace. Charles beckoned Erasmus to sit in one of them and then he sank, making a noise of relief and pleasure as he did so, into the other.

  ‘It’s too late for tea, can I get you a dram?’

  ‘That would be good.’

  There was a small mahogany table next to Charles’s chair set with a couple of bottles of malt whisky, tumblers and a water jug. Charles poured two large measures, not bothering with any water, and then passed Erasmus a glass.

  ‘Cheers.’ Charles raised his glass, fixing his eyes on Erasmus’s.

  Erasmus held his stare and raised his glass.

  ‘Cheers.’

  ‘My old dad used to tell me you can’t trust a man who won’t hold your gaze when toasting’

  ‘Glad to see I passed the test. Thank you for seeing me at such short notice.’

  Charles sipped his whisky.

  ‘You get to my age and any distraction, even the bloody Jehovah’s Witnesses, seem like a welcome break from Radio 4 and daytime TV.’ He chuckled, small red lines on his face expanding with the mirth. ‘But the fact is I remember the story and was intrigued to know why someone would be asking about it after all these years.’

  Erasmus didn’t hesitate. ‘Because the woman I love and her child may be in danger because of it. Can you tell me what you know?’

  Charles leaned back in his chair. Somewhere in the house a clock chimed.

  ‘I can but it’s not a nice story.’

  ‘I need to hear it. A girl’s life may depend upon it.’

  He closed his eyes and began to speak. ‘Alison was a precocious child. Her mother, an alcoholic by the way, had left the family home when she was eleven and she was brought up by her father. He was a professor of philosophy at the university, much older than his wife and, as I can testify having interviewed him, rather distant and curmudgeonly. Now I realise that is something that comes to us all if you live long enough. I got the call on a Monday morning. It’s a statistical fact that most suicides take place on a Monday or certainly are discovered on a Monday after the maudlin stretch of misery that is a Sunday afternoon.’

  Erasmus sipped his whisky. It tasted of peat bogs and cold, misty evenings.

  ‘Suicide. Alison was discovered by her father officially. She couldn’t face going to school so she did herself in. Not uncommon especially around exam time.’

  ‘Was it exam time?’

  Charles shook his head.

  ‘No, Alison killed herself because she couldn’t face going into school again, all right, but it wasn’t the work. She left a diary, you see. Her father showed me some extracts. It was heart-breaking stuff. She was
bullied to death and I have no doubt about that. She didn’t leave a note but her diary told the whole tale. She was a red head you see, I saw pictures of her, she was a pretty girl and I have no doubt she would have grown up to be a beautiful woman. But there were kids at her school who made her life a misery, calling her names, beating her up and worse.’

  ‘What do you mean worse?’

  ‘There was a clique of girls, they befriended her, or rather she thought they had befriended her. This was an almost exquisite torture, quite psychotic in the way that only children and the seriously criminally mentally ill can be. They took her to dances, came round to her house, played with her and eventually she started to open up to them for the first time in her life. She shared secrets with them, her fears, her hopes, and her loves. And this was a mistake.’

  Erasmus pulled out his phone and checked the display. There was no text or missed call from Karen.

  ‘You see she told them about a boy, a boy she worshiped from afar. They knew the boy, I can’t remember his name now, some scrawny, spotty little handsome shit, you know the type, they never change.’ He chuckled softly. ‘They persuaded him to ask her out and he did “just for a laugh”. Are there four more dangerous words in the English language? He asked her out and she went to meet him and when she met him the girls took pictures of her in a state of undress. It was an exercise in pure mental degradation. Christ knows what she was going through inside. The girls got lucky. Turns out Alison was an unhappy child and had been cutting herself, so when she took her top off the pictures, from their point of view, were even better.’

  ‘What about the teachers?’

  Charles snorted.

  ‘Things were different back then. No one complained about bullying, that would be “grassing”, you just got on with it and if there were casualties along the way then that was just hard cheese. Bullying was virtually on the curriculum of my school, I’m sure yours was the same?’

  ‘So she killed herself.’

  ‘I never thought of it like that. Of course my article just reported the inquest verdict, which was suicide, but I always thought of it as a constructive murder. The evidence that came out about the bullying was all ruled to be largely irrelevant. The coroner said she was depressed about her familial situation, the cutting was proof of that, but I’m sure it was the incident with the girls that drove her to it. You know how she found out that the witches were not her friends?’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘One morning she was late for the first class. The teacher was also late. She arrived in the classroom and went to take her seat next to her “friends” except there wasn’t a chair there. She asked her friends why they hadn’t saved her a chair and they replied that they had. One of them pointed to a chair in the middle of the classroom and then began to clap slowly, the rest of the class joining in. They had rehearsed it, you see. And I don’t blame the other pupils, you know how it is, if it’s not you being bullied then that’s about all you can hope for in school survival. They clapped and she, crushed maybe, who knows, took the seat they had placed in the middle of the classroom. The ring leader of the group then stood up, went to the blackboard and announced to the rest of the class that Alison was no longer to be called Alison but rather would be known as “the ginger stalker” as she had been stalking her and her friends for months and they have had to resort to this naming and shaming in order to stop her pursuing them. So cruel.’

  ‘Kid’s can be bastards.’

  ‘And so she killed herself. Hanged herself by a bed sheet from a light fitting, is what she did. Slowly strangled to death because some girls took a dislike to her. None of this came out in the inquest, by the way, other than a remark that she had been unhappy at school. The insinuation was that there were mental health issues at play in the family. After all, hadn’t her mother been a drinker and run off?

  ‘And what about you? I read the article in the Echo, it just reported a suicide as the inquest verdict, nothing more.’

  Charles looked down at his feet, cupping the whisky tumbler on his knees.

  ‘What could I do? Ruin some other kids’ lives for something as, and I hate to say it but it’s true, so run of the mill for teenage girls.’

  Erasmus knew that Charles was right. Bullying had been rife at his school but he had managed to dodge its worst excesses. But he had watched as others were caught up in its chaotic, often seemingly random, selection of victims and seen how it ripped through their lives like a tornado. He also knew that no one had ever complained of being ‘bullied’, it was a mark of shame, something to be endured and hopefully escaped.

  ‘Do you remember the names of the girls who bullied Alison?’

  Charles shook his head.

  ‘What happened to the family, the other daughter and the father?’

  ‘I heard they moved away, well, you would wouldn’t you. And I haven’t told you the worst yet.’

  Erasmus sank back into the chair, he felt drained.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, officially the father found the body but he told me that it was actually the other daughter who found it. She watched her sister hang herself and slowly choke to death.’

  ‘How old was she?’

  ‘She was five.’

  Bile rose in Erasmus’s windpipe, burning as it went.

  ‘Do you remember her name?’

  Charles thought for a moment and then smiled a sad smile.

  ‘Yes, I think I do remember that. It was Catherine.’

  Erasmus breathed in deeply and tried to calm the swelling tide of adrenaline he could feel rampaging through his body.

  ‘I’ve got to go.’

  In the car Erasmus tried calling Karen again but again the line went straight to voicemail. He considered calling Poborsky but he knew what she would say: this is just a hunch, he had no proof and anyway no one was in imminent danger. Except Erasmus had a terrible feeling that she would have been wrong on that score, very wrong.

  He would need to get proof and for that he needed his computer. He floored the accelerator and headed back to this apartment.

  Fifteen minutes later he parked up on the gravel drive outside his apartment building. As usual for the last few weeks, his was the only car there. While he enjoyed the extra parking space he couldn’t deny that he would be glad when Ali’s old apartment was filled with a tenant again and when Mark and Sue returned from their holiday. The absence of others had made the place seem colder, like the inside of an empty school, now he thought about it.

  He slammed the door and bounded up to the front door. He punched in the entry code and the door clicked open. He kicked a few copies of the local free rag to the side of the door and ran up the stairs, taking them two at a time. When he reached the first floor landing he opened his apartment door and rushed into the living room. His laptop was on the couch and he sat down and fired it up. As it booted up he glanced upwards: something wasn’t right.

  Hanging from the fireplace was a felt doll. In a state approaching a trance, he padded over and picked it up. It had a wide black felt coat covered with spiky golden stars and was topped with a white, almost oriental, face. He moved it in his hand, examining it: its menacing expression, the knowing smile of small, sharp, bared teeth and the malevolent eyes made him feel nauseous.

  His phone buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it out: a text message from Karen. It sent adrenaline like ice crystals running through his nervous system: ‘I’m in your building, Erasmus. Upstairs.’

  He looked up, listening for any sounds from the apartment above but there were none.

  Erasmus walked over to the kitchen and picked up the biggest carving knife he could find. He slipped it down the back of his jeans and then walked out of the apartment. He turned left and stood at the bottom of the stairs for a moment. He had climbed these stairs maybe five or six times in the three years he had lived in the apartment. The last time had been for Ali’s leaving party three months previously. The apartment had stood empty ever sin
ce.

  The suffocating thickness of the silence made him feel like he was underwater. Pins and needles tingled at the ends of his fingers. Focus, he told himself, now would not be a good time for a panic attack.

  Erasmus climbed the stairs slowly, his ears straining to hear sounds that didn’t come. At the top of the stairs there was a small landing and then a corridor that doubled back, replicating the one below on Erasmus’s floor. The door to the apartment was at the end of this corridor and he could see from here that it was slightly ajar. Almost in a dreamlike state he walked towards the door. He paused outside the door and then gently pushed it open.

  He knew the layout of the apartment was the same as he own. He entered the small hall. The door leading to the main living area was open and he walked through even though the sight that greeted him made him want to turn and run fleeing down the stairs.

  The room was empty, bare floorboards and a single bulb hanging from electrical cord in the centre of the room. Tied to the electrical cord was a length of what looked like plastic washing line that had been fashioned into a rudimentary noose. Below the noose was a small three-legged wooden stool.

  He stepped farther into the room. Now he was clear of the door he could see the room wasn’t as empty as he had first thought.

  In the corner of the room closest to the big bay window there was a large, dark mahogany wardrobe with one door open. Inside he could see blankets, what looked like clothes and sheets. As Erasmus’s eyes became accustomed to the gloom of the room he realised that in the midst of those clothes he could see the white of an eye and an iris moving frantically from side to side.

  He moved forward but a familiar voice stopped him in his tracks.

  ‘Take another step and she dies.’

  From behind the wardrobe stepped Cat. She’d dyed her hair a bloody dark red colour and was carrying an old revolver: it was pointed towards the figure in the wardrobe.

  ‘Is that Karen in there?’