The Silent Pool (2 page)

‘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’ 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.

Erasmus planted himself on a stool next to Dan. Dan didn't even look round.

‘OK, Erasmus. Here's the deal. You push me off my stool and then I get up off the floor and hit you hard, Jackie Chan style. You hit the deck and beg me to stop.’

Erasmus signalled the bored looking bar man who rolled his eyes but nevertheless wandered over to take his order.

‘Mineral water,’ said Erasmus.

Dan turned his head and gave him a look of contempt.

‘Then, the girls come over to check I'm OK and I'll explain we are long lost brothers fighting in a
Legends of the Fall
type way over our massive inheritance. They get all emotional over the display of testosterone and wealth and we take them back to the Shangri La for some Schezuan then onto the Malmaison for an afternoon of
Heat
magazine type debauchery. If it's good enough for celebrities, it's good enough for us. What do you say?’

‘How's Grace?’

Grace was Dan's long-suffering wife. Dan groaned.

‘Ahh you've gone and dumped icy water all over my fantasy man. It's not fair, especially given the gift I'm about to give you. And just because you're on the wagon, though you know I think sex addiction is just a made up Hollywood thing?’

Erasmus noticed that the blonde sitting at the corner table was sneaking looks at him that were lasting a couple of moments too long. He pondered the possibilities for a second and then discounted them. He decided to ignore Dan's comments about his sex addiction. It had been a mistake to tell him about it when trying to talk Dan into getting help for tackling his own demons

‘Gift?’

‘Yeah, what does every PI in this city want?’

‘To get a job anywhere else?’ said Erasmus.

‘You need to be careful. We can be a proud bunch here. Especially when southern jessies like you start slagging us off.’ He gave Erasmus a mock punch to the head.

‘You know I love this place. What did you tell me Carl Jung said? “Liverpool is the pool of life”,’ said Erasmus.

‘That's right. And don't you forget it. I am about to do you a massive favour. I know you used to do that secret squirrel stuff when you were in Afghanistan.’

Erasmus groaned. ‘I told you last month, I'm through with it all, I'm studying to be one of you lot. Going over to the dark side.’

Dan mimicked the plucking of an arrow from his chest. ‘I'm wounded, truly I am, but hey, you'll be in need of funds?’

Erasmus didn't reply.

‘I have a client. A very beautiful and potentially very rich client.’

Dan took a sip of his drink and paused for a moment. He smiled as Erasmus took the bait.

‘Go on.’

‘She has an unusual problem.’

‘Tell her to go to the clinic,’ said Erasmus.

‘You wouldn't say that if you saw her, Raz. She's stunning.’

‘Your judgement on such matter is suspect.’

Dan turned and waved at the women sitting in the corner booth. They giggled and one of them, the elder one, by Erasmus’ reckoning, raised her drink in response. Reluctantly, Dan turned back to Erasmus.

‘I see the inner beauty. Look, it's straightforward. My client's husband is missing. She needs you to find him.’