Sudden Death (35 page)

Erasmus shrugged. ‘Who can tell, Wayne? You need to see a doctor, not one connected to Babak or the club.’

‘But the transfer?’

‘If you want it will still go ahead the Russian club medical won’t test for regressive genetic diseases unless you have a family history of it, and you don’t as far as the world is concerned: your father killed himself because he was depressed. It’s your choice, Wayne. Transfer and at some point in the future it will come out, and you will have to come home, or get in the driving seat and spend your days doing what you want. Stay here, play for Everton a while longer, play with your son and decide what matters most to you.’

‘Steph,’ whispered Wayne. ‘But the transfer, the money, it’s what every football player should want.’

‘You’re not every football player, Wayne. I’ve learned recently about sock puppets. They are fake accounts on the internet, people pretending to be someone they are not. They set them up to give their work good reviews, they want to influence people to do things that they wouldn’t normally think of doing, or maybe had just considered. You don’t be somebody else’s sock puppet if you don’t want to be.’

Wayne shook his head.

‘But the money would set me and Kyle up for life. Maybe I owe it to my son to go through with the transfer? It will save Everton as well.’

Erasmus looked Wayne in the eyes. Wayne had started to cry.

‘It’s your choice, Wayne, not Cowley’s, not Babak’s, not Steph’s, not Frank’s, not mine. Yours.’

‘I don’t know what to do.’

Erasmus stood up and put his hand on Wayne’s shoulder.

‘You will, son, you will.’

CHAPTER 46

Erasmus leaned back in his car seat and let out a long sigh. He wanted to go home and he didn’t mean back to his apartment.

He called Karen but the line went straight to voicemail. As soon as he hung up he received an incoming call. It was Pobrosky.

‘We’ve had to let him go.’

The hairs on his arms stood to attention.

‘Why for Chrissakes?’

‘Ben has an alibi. You know Rebecca didn’t ID him and the internet dating picture is his own whereas the “Ethan” picture was just a stock photo image?’

‘So, he used the internet dating profile for real life and the Ethan profile for his grooming?’

‘There’s more. When the emails were sent to the Australian girl he was on a teacher-training course in Bristol, and he was teaching at the time of death for Louise. He had only just arrived at the school when you saw him, he’s been having an affair with another teacher, Jennifer, and she says she was with him all evening and dropped him off at the school five minutes before you beat the shit out of him. His lawyer just gave me a kicking, Erasmus, and I don’t like that. You should know they are talking about suing you for the broken jaw you gave him.’

‘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?