Sudden Death

by Phil Kurthausen

  Yet, Stephen had heard the man ask the question. He stood for a moment, stung by the cold wind full of salt and industrial metal particles that whipped in off the Mersey. He needed a drink.

  There was a Starbucks opposite the council offices and although Stephen never went in there due to the possibility of bumping into ex-colleagues or striking teachers, this morning he needed to sit down and make sense of what had just happened. He ordered a double espresso and took a seat in an armchair facing the window. He sipped the bitter liquid hoping it would kick-start his brain, remove the fugue that been responsible for his imagination misfiring.

  From here he could see the four teachers who made up the picket line outside the entrance to the council building. They stood around a brazier and carried hand-painted dayglo signs covered with slogans demanding to be paid. Not an unreasonable request, but an impossible one as the city’s finances stood.

  The pickets looked like PE teachers, thought Stephen, and he bet that was why they were chosen. Every morning they subjected the few remaining council workers who still had jobs to a torrent of verbal abuse.

  In the warmth of the coffee house, Stephen began to make sense of what had just happened. Stress was a killer and he knew from past experience that it could make people do the strangest of things. He must have misheard, there was no other explanation other than someone else knew and that was impossible. Stephen made a mental note to speak to his boss, Emma, about his workload when he got into the office.

  He let out a breath that he felt he’d been holding for the last ten minutes and took a sip of the coffee. Disgusting, he thought, he even let out a little laugh. He checked his wristwatch. He was late and had to get moving.

  He looked across at the picket line. A fifth man had joined the group. He had his back turned to Stephen. The man was wearing a corduroy jacket with patches on the elbows and Stephen decided that the man was probably a Geography teacher.

  Stephen took another sip of his coffee and then looked up again.

  Fifty yards away, on the opposite side of the street, the man was standing still as office drones flowed around him. Suddenly he turned around and looked directly at Stephen. He wasn’t moving, he was watching; watching him. Stephen saw the man move his head slightly to one side and then smile.

  Stephen recognised the man instantly.

  He felt his sympathetic nervous system go to full thrust, chemicals flooding his muscles and brain, preparing him for action. It was the same feeling that Stephen, a poor flyer, felt seconds before take-off when the plane stood on the edge of the runway and opened its throttles, no turning back.

  Stephen’s world shrank to one choice: run or die.

  He ran.

  He jumped out of his chair and ran out of the café. He risked a quick look across the street, the man had vanished but Stephen knew he would be near. He snapped his head left and then right. Right. Towards the docks was the only real option.

  He plunged into the crowd of commuters and early morning tourists sending Styrofoam coffee cups flying and eliciting furious insults in a host of different languages. He didn’t have a plan; he just had to get away. He ran – legs pumping, muscles burning – focusing only on the narrow tunnel of pavement immediately in front of him.

  He passed a policeman holding a submachine gun, guarding the entrance to the James Street train station. The policeman barely gave him a glance as he streaked past: Stephen didn’t fit the current profile.

  He ran fast and hard, not daring to look back. He knocked a businessman’s briefcase flying, papers scattering behind him. As he ran down James Street his legs carved longer strides as the road sloped downhill towards the Mersey and the Pier Head. He turned left, if he could get to the Albert Dock there would be more tourists, people he could hide among, maybe jump in a cab down there and put some real distance between him and the man.

  There was no sound of pursuit, just the passing traffic and the howl of the wind. He kept running. He shot across the street and was vaguely aware of the sounds of cars slamming on brakes and swerving, horns blaring, more cosmopolitan insults being flung.

  He ran through the wrought iron gates of the Albert Dock. The dock’s refurbished and refitted Victorian bonded warehouses now housed apartments, bars, shops, museums and the northern branch of the Tate. It was a perfect place to lose somebody, full of tourists even at this time in the morning.

  Stephen was aware of his breathing now he had stopped: long, gasping breaths that racked his body. He took a lungful of the cold salty air and felt the cracking of his alveoli as they struggled to take in oxygen. Stephen pulled back on his heels, the rubber soles of his shoes sliding and then catching on the cobblestones. Wheezing, he dug out his blue inhaler and took a puff, and after a second, the coolness of the chemicals relaxed his lungs.

  He looked up and there was the man walking through the gates only fifty yards behind him. The man paused and looked directly at Stephen. For a second Stephen was frozen to the spot, he wanted to give up, throw himself at the man’s mercy. Adrenaline saved him, flooding his shaky legs, forcing them to push off and steering him deeper into the dock complex.

  The dock warehouses had been built in a square around a deep water dock, a walkway ran around the inside of the square giving access to the various shops and galleries that had replaced slave quarters and grain storage.

  Stephen tore along the walkway like it was an Olympic running track. He heard nothing save for the thump of the blood in his head. He couldn’t feel his chest now. All he knew was air must be coming in because his legs were still moving. Peripheral vision had gone, replaced by a ring of darkness at the edge of his sight. All he could see were the cobblestones in front of his feet.

  He ran all the way along one side of the dock and then was halfway down the other when he was grabbed by a man standing at the top of some stairs leading down into a basement.

  The man was wearing green Lennon spectacles, a fake moustache and a mop top wig. From some tiny speakers either side of the stairwell the Beatles’ ‘All You Need Is Love’ was playing.

  ‘Here, mate. You need to take a chill pill. Take a walk down Penny Lane, see Strawberry Fields.’

  Stephen didn’t have the breath to reply.

  The man pushed Stephen down the steps into the Beatles Museum. Stephen turned and saw his pursuer emerge around a corner of a warehouse. He wasn’t sure whether he had been spotted so he ran down the steps and entered the museum. Behind a ticket desk sat a bored, spotty youth reading a magazine with a tanned soap star on the cover. He was wearing large headphones and moving his head back and forth in time to a silent beat. Stephen dug in his pockets, finding a twenty-pound note, which he threw onto the counter.

  ‘Keep the change!’ he said to the attendant who ignored him. He entered the museum at a half jog.

  Stephen had been to this museum before. It was one of the first places he and Jenna had gone on a date. He had a fond memory of her posing in front of a life-size wax diorama of the Beatles as he took her photograph. That day the museum had been crowded and full of life. Today it was empty, Stephen the only visitor.

  The museum took the form of a series of twisting underground tunnels that linked rooms charting the career of the Beatles. The tunnels themselves were dimly lit and decorated with painted cardboard Liverpool street scenes from the sixties. There seemed to be no other customers and Stephen quickly moved through a recreation of Brian Epstein’s office and the street where John Lennon was raised. In Epstein’s office he paused to listen for the sounds of pursuit: he could hear nothing.

  He carried on and the tunnels became darker, a recreation of the Reeperbahn in Hamburg, complete with lurid cardboard prostitutes, pimps and drug dealers. The darkness was interspersed with flashes from the green, blue and pink neon lights advertising the Kaiserkeller, the Star Club and striptease acts.

  The silence was broken as Stephen entered another room, tripping the beam of a hidden motion sensor and triggered the sounds of the Reeperbahn:
screams; police sirens; the Beatles playing Buddy Holly’s ‘Rave On’.

  He didn’t hear the first gunshot. Just the crack in the air as the shell passed within an inch of his head, before slamming into the wooden face of a young Stuart Sutcliffe causing woodchip to explode like confetti.

  Terrified, he plunged into the next room at the end of the tunnel, weaving one way and then the other. The passageway was barely lit and he nearly lost his footing, a mistake that he knew would lead to the end of his life.

  Stephen began to sob but he kept running.

  The tunnel opened out into a cellar filled with life-size black and white cardboard pictures of screaming teenage girls and at the far end was a stage with four waxwork models in suits, holding instruments. It was the Cavern. Stephen’s movement triggered another hidden sensor and the screams of a thousand young girls filled the room. ‘Please, Please Me’ began to play.

  A huge gaping hole appeared in the cardboard face of the teenage girl nearest to him. Stephen ducked into a side room from which three further tunnels branched off into the gloom.

  There was a red telephone box in an alcove to the side of the room. There was a gap behind it, a dark shadow just big enough to squeeze into and hide. Stephen almost collapsed into the space. He forced his lungs to slow down, letting his breath come in shallow gasps, but barely enough to satisfy the starving need for oxygen in his lungs. Sweat poured down Stephen’s face, he didn’t dare wipe it away in case he made a noise. He shut his eyes to stop the sweat from running into them.

  There was silence in the room for a second as the digital loop of screaming ended. Stephen heard a sigh and then a figure passed slowly in front of the darkened alcove where he was hiding.

  He watched as the man paused and scanned the room. The man was wearing a rubber Ringo Starr mask. The stage lights accentuated dark shadows on the mask making it grotesque. Ringo turned and seemed to look directly at him as he cowered in the shadow. Stephen held his breath and prayed.

  The man’s head moved ever so slightly towards Stephen’s hiding place as though he was straining to hear something in the dark and then there was a noise, the sound of metal on concrete from somewhere ahead in one of the tunnels that led from the room. His head snapped around and he moved towards the nearest tunnel and disappeared into the darkness.

  Stephen waited for a minute. He needed air. He took out his inhaler and squeezed. The medicine was like cool water on a burn. When he felt the air sticking in his lungs again he decided to move. Instinctively, his fingers went to the small bronze St Christopher that hung around his neck. Once upon a time, he had thought it brought him good luck. He stroked it, took a breath and then slowly, and as quietly as he could, he edged out of his hiding place and started to softly walk back the way he had come. If he could get out now then maybe he could jump a cab on the dock road and make good his escape. He could even warn the others or perhaps the best course of action would be just to leave town, he owed them nothing after all.

  He moved forward through the forest of cardboard teenagers and too late remembered the sensor. There was a click and the screaming started. It was deafening.

  Stephen ran. As he got to the other end of the room, a stride away from the exit, when a bullet slammed into his thigh, ripping apart muscle and bone. He was thrown forward with the impact, one moment standing, the next flat on his back looking at the soot-coloured bricks of the faux Cavern ceiling.

  Stephen screamed, his scream joining the cacophony of screaming girls. He heard someone moving slowly towards him; leather soles on tiles. Careful and methodical steps.

  Stephen tried to sit up. He got halfway and looked at his leg. The remains of his kneecap protruded from an ugly exit wound. Dark arterial blood was pumping, staining the floor brown. Stephen collapsed back onto the floor.

  Fifty-year-old screams intensified in volume as the Beatles launched into ‘Twist and Shout’.

  He had no time to lose. Stephen pulled out his mobile phone and hit speed dial.

  A female voice answered. ‘Hello?’

  Stephen felt the cold steel barrel of a handgun press gently against his temple. Stephen began to sob. The man knocked the phone from his hand. It clattered on the stone floor.

  He could hear a far away, tinny voice. ‘Stephen, is that you?’

  Stephen watched a patent leather brogue crush the phone, twisting and turning until the wires and circuitry spilled out like guts.

  The barrel of the gun was withdrawn from his head. Stephen was beginning to feel cold. He looked up at the man and into the face of the Ringo Starr mask. Ringo pulled out a twisted length of black leather from inside his jacket. He swung it slowly from side to side for a moment and then, almost gently, placed a loop around Stephen’s neck before pulling it tight.

  Stephen felt no pain: endorphins were flooding his brain, the shock blanking the pain out, systems were shutting down.

  In the distance Stephen thought he could hear the sound of sirens, but it could have been the screams producing a Doppler effect as the blood pounded in his skull.

  Ringo raised his gun.

  ‘Answer my question.’

  Stephen struggled for breath. He shook his head.

  The man took the end of the gun and inserted it into the place where Stephen’s kneecap had been. He twisted the gun back and forth in the fleshy void. Stephen’s scream merged with the screaming joy of a thousand teenagers.

  Ringo took the gun out of the wound.

  ‘Answer my question. Answer it truthfully and correctly and you live.’ The man’s voice betrayed no accent, no passion and, to Stephen’s horror, no mercy.

  Stephen started to cry. He didn’t know the right answer, the answer that would save him. He gave the only answer he could: the truth.

  The man took off his mask.

  ‘Wrong answer, Stephen. Turns out you need more than love.’

  He began to pull the leather cord tight.

  Stephen screamed.

  CHAPTER 1

  Erasmus looked over at the two men in the corner and knew that things were going to end badly. He had agreed to meet Dan here. Now that was looking like a big mistake. He sighed and waited for the inevitable.

  The Mosquito Lounge was one of Erasmus Jones’s least favourite places in the world. It was also the bar where his friend, and main source of work, Dan Trent, liked to conduct business meetings. A relatively new bar that had looked hip four years previously, it now had the settled, tired, post-crash air of resigned desperation. A neon blue mosquito with a red tongue occasionally flashing and giving off a hiss that spoke of an unhealthy combination of poorly wired electrics and water, hung over the stairs that led down to the basement bar.

  The bar was one of the many that had sprung up as Liverpool embarked on its year as European Capital of Culture. Europe had poured millions into the city, mixing with the ever available drug money and government funds to form an intoxicating cocktail of new developments, bars, restaurants and call centres, transforming, on the surface at least, the face of the city.

  Glass and steel had replaced red brick and Victoriana. Manhattan style lofts had replaced flats, stakeholders replaced citizens and, most obvious of all, bars and a hoped for coffee culture replaced the pubs and clubs.

  Now the focus was off, attention and the money switched elsewhere, the city seemed to be breathing a sigh of relief, taking off its glad rags and reverting to a more comfortable, familiar type.

  Before entering the bar, Erasmus had been through a familiar routine of patting his jacket pockets, searching for a packet of cigarettes that he knew wasn’t there. The smell of stale beer and cheap perfume emanating from the stairwell seemed to trigger the receptors in his brain responsible for his nicotine addiction. Finding no cigarettes, he had given a shrug and popped a piece of gum into his mouth before descending into the bowels of the Mosquito Lounge.

  It was dark inside. Ronnie, the septuagenarian owner of the place, thought that daylight polluted a good bar. Hence the
heavy velvet curtains over the tiny street-level windows. It took Erasmus a few moments for his eyes to adjust from the gloomy, slate grey light outside to the subterranean murk of the Mosquito Lounge.

  The room’s walls were lined in purple faux velvet that had been ripped and stained within weeks of opening. The laminated dancefloor that Erasmus crossed to reach the bar was sticky with the residue of a thousand pints of spilled lager. Each step required a conscious effort to lift his foot and move forward. It felt like you could get trapped down here. The bar, like a Venus flytrap, never letting you leave.

  Erasmus spotted Dan. He was sitting in his usual place at the end of the bar and pretending to watch a TV screen that was mutely showing highlights from the day’s general election coverage. Erasmus looked around to find the real source of Dan’s attention.

  In one corner of the room, sat at a small table, were two women, a blonde and a brunette. In this light they could be anything from twenty to fifty years old. By the amount of waxy looking cosmetics that they had slapped on, Erasmus guessed that they probably pitched somewhere towards the higher end of that particular scale.

  The Mosquito Lounge ticked all the boxes that Dan Trent needed in a bar. These were, in order of importance: firstly, his wife would never ever be seen dead in such a place, neither would her friends or any of his colleagues other than those he invited, and finally it attracted a certain type of woman, usually divorced and with low expectations of life, namely the type of women that Dan Trent, loving husband and father of two young boys, liked.