Authors: Phil Kurthausen
Sudden Death (27 page)
‘The girl Natalie says you went round to her house last night and raped her. What were you doing last night? If you have an alibi you are out of here. If not they will charge you and you ain’t likely to get bail.’
Erasmus groaned. Every part of his body seemed to ache but the thought of what he was about to do hurt even more.
‘I’ve got an alibi, but you are going to have to tell them to be discrete.’
‘I have a feeling that DCI Pobroksky is not the type to let emotion get in the way of justice. She probably saved your life today, by the way, I arrived a couple of minutes later, and the Duke was shaking like a jelly on a ship. She had to put two Taser’s into him to put him down.’
‘Tell her thank you and, please, the watchword here is discretion,’ said Erasmus. A sharp pain sliced through his head and he winced.
‘I’ll tell her. No need for the dramatics. Now if you want to get out of here give me your alibi.’
Erasmus told Pete about his night with Cat.
‘You dog, Erasmus, and there was me and Debs thinking you were going to be sucked in by Karen all over again.’
Erasmus shut his eyes and told himself that the guilt he was filling was a ridiculous emotion, he owed Karen nothing. He didn’t believe that for a second though. He had let her down and now he was letting down Cat.
Pete left the room to go and call DCI Pobroksy.
Erasmus must have fallen asleep but when he awoke the curtains to the room were drawn and Pete was back.
‘Awake at last. Good news, Cat came through for you. She confirmed that she spent the night with you. Good job for you she did or you’d be spending tonight in the cells. You are still under caution though and have to remain available for enquires etcetera, etcetera. Pobrosky came down here herself and uncuffed you. You snored right through it. I hope you weren’t planning on hitting on her as well as frankly I don’t think she was too impressed by your sleeping walrus impression.’
Pete was pulling some clothes from a bag. He noticed Erasmus’s quizzical look.
‘Yours are covered in blood, yours and Dukes,’ he offered by way of an explanation. ‘Come on, out of bed!’
Erasmus’s head was still delicate but he swung his legs out of the bed and looked down at the clothes Pete had laid out for him.
‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’
Pete looked offended but it was impossible to tell if this was real or put on for effect.
‘Erasmus, what we have here are blue, rinsed Levis, a Ben Sherman button down shirt, a black Baracuta G9 Jacket and Clarks desert boots. This, my friend, is the finest look you will ever achieve in your sartorially challenged life.’
Erasmus shook his head.
‘I’m going to look like an extra from
Quadrophenia
.’
When he had dressed Pete looked him up and down approvingly.
‘You look ace. So what’s the plan now?’
‘Now, Cowley gets a taste of his own medicine. Come on, we’ve got a rat to trap.’
Erasmus headed towards the door with Pete shaking his head in tow.
Frank Tallow looked like he was living a pretty good life for someone who was meant to be broke. He was sitting at the bar of the Hilton’s PIMA room, the kind of high-end place that catered for lawyers, entrepreneurs and gangsters. It was also the type of bar were you came to network rather than meet friends, and Erasmus watched from a corner table as Frank Tallow networked the life out of the place. He couldn’t help but be a little impressed. Networking was still something he thought train companies and computers should only be allowed to do. It probably explained his devastating lack of success as a lawyer and his sparse client list.
Tallow sat at the end of the plush leather bar, a bottle of champagne on ice beside him, talking to a seemingly inexhaustible supply of similarly suited types who would plant their expensively suited derrieres on the stool next to him, exchange a few words and then move on.
Erasmus had been watching the same scene unfold again and again now for at least thirty minutes and he suspected that Tallow had spotted him. When Tallow looked over for the second time while in the middle of a conversation with a middle-aged man dressed in a tight-fitting blue tonic suit, Erasmus knew for sure.
Erasmus wasn’t hiding. On the contrary he very much wanted to speak to Frank Tallow. In fact everything depended upon it.
The middle-aged hipster speaking to Tallow stood up and moved away to join a crowd of similarly dressed, middle-aged men who were standing further along the bar and ogling a group of young girls sitting at a table next to Erasmus. The girls were pretending not to notice but Erasmus had heard one of the girls describe the group as ‘sad old pervs’ so he knew they were aware of the attention.
Erasmus waited a few moments, until Tallow glanced up, catching his gaze, and then he got up and walked across to the empty seat.
He sat down and looked directly at Tallow.
‘It’s customary to ask whether a seat is free before taking it,’ said Tallow.
Erasmus took an empty champagne glass from the stack next to the bucket and then poured himself a glass of champagne, shaking out the last few drops of the now empty bottle.
Tallow started to splutter and the capillaries in his face lit up like a blood red Christmas tree.
‘That’s my champagne, you fucking cunt!’
Erasmus took a swig of the champagne and then laughed. ‘Nice. No wonder you had some trouble getting Terry TV off. Tell me, did you pick him up as a client because you move in the same social circles?’
Tallow started forward and grabbed hold of Erasmus’s lapels. Erasmus didn’t resist and he was aware that the conversation in the bar had dropped away, as it always did when violence was excitedly expected.
‘I know people, people who could hurt you, fuck you up real bad,’ snarled Tallow.
Erasmus leaned forward until his lips where next to Tallow’s left ear. Erasmus held up his bandaged right hand. ‘Someone beat you to it. By the way, I know you are blackmailing Wayne.’
The alcohol charged blood in Tallow’s face receded like a crimson tide exposing white salt flats. He sank back onto his bar stool and let go of Erasmus. The bar noise level slowly returned to normal.
‘You are a washed-up piece of shit that doesn’t even practice law. You don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Jessica had an affair with Wayne and she got pregnant. You lost all your clients defending Terry TV and you needed some money. What’s more natural than deploying your legal skills in a negotiation for your daughter’s silence? What loving father wouldn’t do the same?’
Tallow said nothing but he started to pick the skin on the side of his left thumb with his index finger.
‘You went to Steve Cowley, put forward a proposition, a sum of money for her silence, no press, no pack drill and he paid you off. But you came back for more, isn’t that right?’
Tallow looked up now. His lips were pursed but he wanted to speak, he wanted to negotiate but he was unsure of his bargaining position. Erasmus pressed ahead.
‘Negotiations not going too well? That was some shiner.’
Erasmus raised his voice and heads began to turn again.
Tallow shook his head. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘You were broke, about to lose everything – no clients, just debts – and then a gift horse dropped into your lap. But you settled too soon, before this proposed transfer and now you want a second bite at the cherry. That’s right, isn’t it?’
Tallow seemed to regain some of his composure.
‘Don’t you presume to use your piss poor cross-examination on me, Erasmus. I did some digging on you after you called at my house. It made interesting reading. You’re an army reject and a second rate lawyer with the shakes. What did they used to call it? Shellshock? Do you want me to read you some Wilfred Owen,
dulce et decorum est
and all that? Would that make you feel a little better?’
Tallow snorted and then sank the champagne in his glass and jumped off his stool. He unhooked a blue mac from underneath the bar and turned to leave.
‘I know she’s not in Australia, Frank,’ said Erasmus underneath his breath.
Frank almost didn’t pause, almost but not quite, and then he carried on walking out of the bar without looking back at Erasmus.
Pete hated a lot of things. If he was honest with himself, and occasionally, when he had some precious time to himself, away from the kids and Debs, like today, he would ask himself questions about why he hated those things. The usual answer was that he had learned to hate things from his dad. His father, an old-fashioned Labour councillor, had bestowed upon the young Pete a hotchpotch of prejudices that he had been trying to shake with varied degrees of success every since he left home at the age of sixteen to join the army.
The list was a long one but it included Tories, Americans, Tony Blair, Liverpool Football Club, Eccles cakes, the Royal Family, teacups instead of mugs – a sure sign of bourgeois decadence, and last but not least, the Welsh.
Pete’s dad, as a true socialist, never admitted he hated the Welsh, the people who had given him the Labour party, that would have been akin to racism in his book. But the fact was plain to see in every utterance and facial expression that had accompanied Pete’s childhood holidays to Wales.
A typical scenario would have Pete’s dad returning to their Granada saloon with a plastic Spar bag full of Monster Munch and Pacers, and a face like thunder after spending twenty minutes trying to buy said items from a small granite store in a one-street village in North Wales on their way to Anglesey.
As Pete and his sister devoured the food that had been thrown in the back of the car like a keeper launching fish to sea lions, his father would complain to Pete’s mother, ‘They pretend they don’t understand me, Marion, but they fucking well do, I can see them laughing. I fucking hate the buggers. They hate Scousers!’
And all the time he was eating picked onion Monster Munch Pete was thinking, I hate the buggers too!
So when he found himself in Wales, as he did today, he had to remind himself that the reason for his antipathy was his father, and that it wasn’t a dark, strange place where every Spar and pub was full of small, dark haired men and women waiting for an opportunity to snub an Englishman. Which was a difficult position to maintain as he stood behind a middle-aged man in an old British army jumper conducting a conversation in Welsh with the elderly shop assistant behind the counter in the local shop where he had called in to buy some credit for his phone. The shop assistant, a woman with thick stubble, looked over the shoulder of the man she was chatting to, gave Pete the once over and then carried on talking, ignoring him completely.
Pete shifted from foot to foot for a few more seconds and then walked towards the counter.
‘Listen, I need some credit for my phone. Apologies for not waiting but it’s kind of an emergency.’
The shop assistant looked at him as though he had just defecated on the counter while singing ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’.
‘Well, there’s rude of you. Tssk!’
‘It’s an emergency, life and death stuff.’
She said something in Welsh and the man grunted in response.
‘Well, go on then, how much?’
Pete paid and then walked out of the shop. Outside clouds as black as coal were settling above the mountains that towered above him. The first splattering of rain hit his face.
He rang Erasmus.
‘What is it?’
‘I’ve found her.’
There was a sound of shuffling, like Erasmus had jumped out of bed.
‘I’m on my way.’
‘And one other thing. You were right about the nappy wrapper outside Frank’s house. There is a baby.’
It took Erasmus forty-five minutes of pushing his bartered old VW Golf at 90 mph down twisting country lanes and dirt tracks to reach the GPS co-ordinates that Pete had given him. He followed a narrow country track, bounded on both sides by a dry rock wall, until he came to Pete’s old Land Rover parked at the end of the lane which was blocked by a wooden, five bar gate.
He pulled over behind Pete’s car and got out. Erasmus checked his mobile phone but the bars remained resolutely unlit. It had been the same for the last fifteen minutes, since he had turned off a quiet village road and onto the farmer’s tractor trails that cut through the wooded valley. No wonder Pete hadn’t been able to contact him since his call giving him the location.
Erasmus headed towards the gate and then stopped. The gate was hanging open slightly, a long piece of blue string hung from it, blowing in the wind. He walked forward and grabbed the string. It had been cut. Erasmus knew that Pete would never have cut a gate’s tie.
In the field beyond there were tire tracks from at least two cars: they looked very fresh. Erasmus had a bad feeling about this. His stomach cramped with tension and sent bile up his oesophagus. An image of his long dead army buddy James waving goodbye before he left to meet the local governor flashed into his mind. He started to run.
The field stretched out for maybe half a mile and then turned to woodland. At the far end of the field Erasmus could see a narrow gap in the trees where a path just wide enough to take a tractor dipped out of sight. Erasmus headed for the gap. For a moment the wind changed direction, coming straight at him from the trees, rather than from behind as it had been doing. He heard what sounded like a scream. He picked up his pace, sprinting now.
He reached the gap in the trees. What he thought was a path was actually the end of the road for vehicles. Twenty yards beyond the tree line, two 4X4 vehicles were parked. Erasmus recognised one as the same Land Rover sport that had been standing in Frank Tallow’s driveway.
Erasmus didn’t wait. He followed the single-track path through the trees until suddenly the ground dropped away revealing a natural bowl, an old disused quarry some five hundred yards across. At the bottom of the bowl, maybe two hundred yards away, was a small white-walled stone house. A washing line with freshly hung clothes was visible in the garden to the side of the house and the green front door was ajar.
