Angel of Death

by Ben Cheetham

  Ruth aimed the torch at the blackened remains of the dining table and a chair lying on its side. ‘Someone else was shot there. There’s more blood, and there are shotgun pellets embedded in the chair.’

  ‘That’s where the daughter must have been sitting when she got it in the head,’ said Amy.

  Jim grunted cautious agreement. ‘Where’s the other body?’

  Ruth headed into the hall, brushing aside a furl of soggy, smoke-grimed wallpaper. The second body was even more badly burnt than the first. The eyeballs had melted, and the flesh had blistered and cracked away, providing glimpses of the bones beneath. The head rested at an unnatural angle, like a broken corn stalk. ‘Jesus,’ murmured Jim, putting the back of his hand to his mouth.

  ‘Not even he could bring this guy back from the dead,’ said Ruth. ‘His neck’s broken at the base of the skull.’

  ‘Was that the cause of death?’

  ‘It would have been more than enough to kill him, but we won’t know for sure until the post-mortem.’

  Jim glanced up at what was left of the landing bannister. ‘Do you think he fell from up there?’

  ‘Again, I can’t say for sure. But his injuries are consistent with the injuries he would’ve sustained if his head was stretched upwards and backwards as a result of hitting the floor chin first from that kind of height.’ Ruth beckoned for the detectives to follow her upstairs, warning, ‘Tread lightly. We’re not supposed to be up here. The fire’s damaged the joists. We’re waiting for the firemen to set up floor supports.’ On reaching the landing, she pointed at the floor. ‘That’s where the shotgun was found.’

  ‘What sort of condition is it in?’ asked Jim.

  ‘The wooden stock was badly burnt. The rest is undamaged.’

  ‘Any chance of recovering prints?’

  ‘There’s every chance. Fingerprints can survive a pretty severe exposure to fire and water.’ Ruth pointed at a door­frame. ‘Take a look at this, Jim. I almost missed this because of the fire damage, but if you look closely you can see that the wood’s been splintered by the impact of shotgun pellets.’

  ‘And the damage is at roughly shoulder height,’ Amy added.

  The floor creaked ominously as Jim entered the bed­room, which was palely illuminated by the exterior flood­lights. ‘Careful, Jim,’ cautioned Ruth. ‘No one’s been in there yet.’

  Jim’s gaze travelled the fire-gutted room, taking in the collapsed four-poster bed and the rows of singed clothes visible through the door of the walk-in wardrobe. Testing the floor with each step to make sure it would bear his weight, he edged into the wardrobe. He peered inside the safe, whose interior had been shielded from the worst ravages of the fire by its thick metal door. His eyebrows drew together.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Amy.

  ‘A safe.’

  ‘Anything in it?’

  ‘A few thousand quid.’

  ‘Well I’d say that seals it. This isn’t a robbery gone wrong.’

  ‘Looks that way.’ Jim briefly closed his eyes, rubbing his forehead. When he was younger, being around death used to make him feel alive in some perverse way. Now it just gave him a kind of weary, empty headache. Resisting a strong urge to head outside for a cigarette, he said, ‘OK, so what’s the scenario? Mark comes to the bedroom, where his father’s lying in wait for him. The mother and daughter have presumably already been shot. Which begs the question, why shoot Mark up here?’

  ‘Maybe Stephen didn’t want him to panic at the sight of the bodies?’ suggested Amy.

  ‘Maybe,’ Jim agreed tentatively. He made as if aiming a shotgun. ‘Bang. Mark gets it in the shoulder. His father approaches him to finish the job. Mark manages to grab the gun. The two of them struggle. Mark’s shot in the leg.’ Returning to the landing, Jim dropped onto his haunches and ran his fingers over the floor until he found what he was looking for. Taking out a Swiss Army penknife, he dug at the parquet tiles, dislodging a shotgun pellet. He stood up and handed it to Ruth. ‘Father and son struggle some more. Father falls over the bannister. Mark goes downstairs and drags his sister outside.’

  ‘Sounds about right.’

  ‘But that doesn’t mean it is right. What we need to do now is map out the timeline of events. For instance, how and when did the fire start?’

  Ruth held up the pellet Jim had given her. ‘This might be the answer to that particular question. We found an empty petrol can up here. If the floor was doused with petrol, a gun blast in a downward direction could have ignited it.’

  ‘That makes sense, assuming the house wasn’t already on fire when Stephen Baxley shot his son. Of course, all this is dependent on whether that human pot-roast down there is actually who we think it is.’

  A fireman appeared at the front door and shouted upstairs, ‘You shouldn’t be up there. It’s not safe.’

  ‘OK, mate, we’ll be down in a second.’ Jim turned to Amy. ‘Make sure no one goes near that safe. I don’t want any of those firemen being tempted into pocketing that cash.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m heading over to the Northern General to find out what the situation is with the Baxley kids.’

  ‘Scott Greenwood’s already there. Last I heard, Mark and Charlotte were both in surgery. I’m sure Scott would’ve been in contact if the situation had changed. Besides, the DCI’s expecting you to coordinate things here until he arrives.’

  Jim rubbed his head again. The throbbing in his temples was strengthening, as was the urge to get outside, get away from this house of death, and above all get away from the weight of responsibility. He cleared his throat, which was raw from breathing soot. ‘I’ve seen all I need to see here for now. And I’m sure you and the other detectives on site can handle things.’

  ‘OK, but I’m telling you, the DCI won’t be happy.’

  It was on the tip of Jim’s tongue to say, Fuck Garrett, but he held the words back. He motioned for Ruth and Amy to go ahead of him. As they made their way cautiously downstairs, the fireman asked, ‘How much longer before my men can get to work on securing the joists?’

  ‘Not much longer,’ answered Ruth. ‘We’re about ready to move the bodies.’

  ‘I’ll talk to you later, Ruth,’ said Jim, heading out the front door. With a glance at Amy, he added, ‘Call me as soon as that background check comes in, or if there are any other developments.’

  Amy raised her eyebrows in reply, as if to say, Surely that goes without saying.

  As he returned to his car, Jim found himself supressing an urge to break into a run. He ducked into the driver’s seat and reached for his cigarettes. He sucked in a lungful of smoke, coughed that out and sucked in another little ration of nerve-calming nicotine. Christ, look at you, he thought, catching a glimpse of his bleary-eyes as he reversed the car. You’re so far over the fucking hill that you’re rolling down the other side.

  5

  Angel lay in bed studying the handgun. ‘GLOCK 17 AUSTRIA’ was engraved on its barrel. She took aim at her reflection in the dressing-table mirror, wondering if the number on the barrel corresponded to how many bullets the gun took. If it did, that meant there were fifteen bullets left in the magazine – assuming, of course, that Ryan Castle hadn’t fired any rounds. ‘Ryan Castle.’ She said the name slowly, savouring the feel of it on her tongue. The bastard’s face had been all over the evening news, which she and Deano had watched whilst crunching dry toast – coming down the other side of a heroin high always left them unable to stomach anything more substantial.

  Deano hadn’t been best pleased. Castle’s BMW had been caught on CCTV cruising past an industrial unit south of the Transporter Bridge. That meant coppers would be sniffing around the area, talking to the girls and generally fucking up business. He’d soon brightened up when Angel gave him three hundred quid of what she’d stolen from Castle, plus the rest of the previous night’s take. He’d gone off to see his supplier and stock up on Mexican brown, telling her he didn’t want her to work
the streets tonight. ‘The Old Bill will have scared off the punters anyway,’ he’d said, ‘so there’s no point risking getting hauled in for questioning.’

  Angel’s thoughts turned to the girl Castle had beaten within a millimetre of her life. There had been no mention of her on the news. If the police had connected her to the shooting, they were keeping quiet about it. Angel wondered what had become of her. Maybe she was lying in a hospital bed. Or maybe Kevin had lost his nerve and dumped her somewhere. She dismissed the thought with a shake of her head. Over the years she’d got good at reading people. Kevin was a coward, but he wasn’t a heartless bastard. He wasn’t an idiot either. He’d known Angel’s threat to him wasn’t empty, just as he’d known what she intended to do to Castle. He would have taken the girl to hospital, but he’d have made damn sure no one saw him leave her there. And now, no doubt, he was holed up somewhere, pissing his pants, hoping and praying his car hadn’t been caught on CCTV too.

  Angel got out of bed. Whatever had become of the girl, she had to know. She felt a strange kind of responsibility towards her. As if by saving her life – if that was what she’d managed to do – she’d somehow become responsible for it. She frowned at the gun. The weight of it in her hand was strangely reassuring. She felt a powerful reluctance to part with it, yet she realised it would be crazy to carry it with her. She was known to the local police, albeit under a false identity. If they picked her up for questioning, it would be game over.

  Angel retrieved her heroin spoon from the shoebox. Drop­ping to her haunches in a corner of the room, she prised up a loose floorboard with the spoon’s handle. There was a plastic bag stuffed into the floor cavity. She opened it, revealing a roll of banknotes with an elastic band around them. Her emergency money. She’d scraped it together over the past few months in case she needed to get away from this place, Deano, or some other trouble, fast. There was nine hundred and eighty quid. She knew the amount off by heart. She was certain Deano didn’t know about it, but she counted it every day anyway to be sure. She winced at the thought of what would happen if he ever found it. As far as he was concerned, he owned her and everything she considered hers. So hiding money from him was the same as stealing from him. On more than one occasion, she’d seen the way Deano dealt with girls he believed were holding money back from him. It wasn’t pretty, and nor were their faces once he’d finished with them.

  Angel put the gun in the bag, slid the bundle into the cavity and replaced the floorboard. She pulled on jeans, trainers and a hooded sweatshirt. A pile of unopened bills and junk mail lay by the door. She opened an envelope, tossed its contents aside and replaced them with the remaining six hundred or so quid of Castle’s money. Putting the envelope into her handbag, she made her way out of the bedsit.

  As Angel stepped outside, her eyes were drawn to a police car at the end of the street. Two coppers were talking to Roxy, one of the oldest pros in the game around Middlesbrough. There was every chance Roxy had seen the girl get into the car with Castle, but no chance she’d tell the coppers. Nor would most, if any, of the other girls. If whores were good at one thing besides servicing the desires of punters, it was keeping quiet when the police came around.

  Angel headed in the opposite direction. She caught a bus to the nearby James Cook University Hospital. Standing outside A & E, from where she could see the reception desk through the glass doors, she phoned directory enquiries on her mobile. ‘Can I have the number for Accident and Emergency at James Cook Hospital, Middlesbrough?’ The automated operator service gave the number, telling her to ‘press 1’ if she wanted to be put through. She pressed 1, and when the receptionist picked up, she said, ‘I’m calling to find out if a girl was brought in last night.’

  ‘What’s her name?’ asked the receptionist.

  ‘I don’t know. She’s about sixteen or seventeen years old, skinny, blonde. She was wearing a short white skirt and a black vest.’

  ‘Can I ask who you are?’

  ‘I’m a friend. I just want to find out if she’s OK.’

  ‘Hold the line please.’

  The receptionist hurried from behind the desk. A minute or so later she returned accompanied by a policeman. She came on the line again. ‘A girl fitting that description was admitted last night. She’s on ward sixteen.’

  The girl was alive! To Angel’s surprise, hot tears of joy pushed up behind her eyes. She hadn’t cried those kinds of tears in more years than she could remember. ‘How is she?’

  The receptionist glanced enquiringly at the policeman, placing her hand over the receiver. They exchanged a few words, then she said to Angel, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t give that infor­mation out over the phone. You’re welcome to visit her. Normal visiting hours finished at 8 p.m., but in special circumstances such as this we try to be as flexible as possible.’

  Angel thanked the receptionist and hung up. The policeman jotted something down on his notepad – Angel’s mobile phone number, no doubt. That didn’t matter. No calls made on it could be traced back to her. It was one of Deano’s cloned phones, which he changed every few weeks. She knew she should turn around and head back to the bedsit. The receptionist’s invitation was obviously a trap. But still she hesitated to leave. She felt a strong desire – almost a compulsion – to see the girl. It wasn’t enough simply to know she was alive – people with brain damage that left them unable to talk, walk, or even move, were technically alive. No, she had to know exactly how she was doing. And then there was Castle’s money. She’d promised herself that she would get it to the girl, and it was a promise she intended to keep.

  Angel skirted along the building until she came to another door. She headed through it, pulling up her sweatshirt’s hood. A sign listed the locations of the various clinics and wards. Ward sixteen was on the ground floor. An arrow pointed her in its direction. More arrows led her along a series of quiet, antiseptic-smelling corridors to a pair of double doors with windows at head height. She peered through the windows. Just inside the doors a nurse was sitting at the nurses’ station doing paperwork. Doorless rooms, each of them containing eight beds, branched off from one side of a corridor. A whiteboard on the wall outside each room listed bed numbers and the names of their occupants. There was no sign of any police.

  Angel lingered by the doors, pretending to fiddle with her phone in case anyone came along. After a few minutes, a red light lit up on the wall opposite the desk. The nurse extinguished it, then made her way to a room near the far end of the corridor.

  Her pulse beating hard in her throat, Angel entered the ward. The beds in the first room were occupied by women reading or sleeping. The girl wasn’t among them. She moved on to the next room. The girl was in the bed by the outer wall, staring blankly at the ceiling, her face a patchwork of bruises and bandages. A low moan escaped Angel’s lips as the thought came to her. The bastard’s turned her into a vegetable. The girl’s head turned towards the sound, and recognition flickered in her features.

  Relief lifting the corners of her mouth, Angel started forward. Her step faltered as the girl darted her eyes warn­ingly at a curtain surrounding the opposite bed. Dropping silently to her haunches, Angel saw a pair of regulation police boots behind the curtain. She straightened, her gaze returning to the girl. A flicker of some kind of understanding passed between them. It seemed to Angel that the girl was trying to thank her with her eyes. She could feel the warmth of the girl’s gaze creeping under her skin, touching parts of her that she’d long since thought dead, and blotting out, if only for a brief instant, the coldness in her heart.

  Angel glanced at the whiteboard. The girl’s name was Nicola Clarke. With one final lingering glance at Nicola, she turned towards the exit. She paused to grab a pen off the nurse’s desk and wrote ‘Nicola Clarke’ on the envelope of money. She left the envelope on the desk and hurried from the hospital.

  Sitting on the bus back to the bedsit, watching the dreary streets pass by, Angel thought to herself that even if she was caught and spent the r
est of her life in prison, it would be worth it just for that one moment of warmth.

  Deano was waiting for Angel. As she stepped through the door, his fist caught her full in the face, knocking her to the floor. ‘You stupid little bitch!’ he bellowed, a vein throbbing between his eyes. ‘What the fuck have you done, eh?’

  The salty metallic taste of blood filled Angel’s mouth as she flung up a hand to ward off the next blow. ‘What you talking about?’

  ‘You know what the fuck I’m talking about.’ Deano pulled up his t-shirt to reveal the gun stuffed into the waistband of his tracksuit bottoms. ‘Where did this come from?’

  Angel realised there was no point lying. Whatever else Deano was, he wasn’t stupid. He knew as well as she did where the gun came from. He just wanted the satisfaction of hearing it from her mouth. Well, she wasn’t going to give it to him. Let the bastard do his worst. She gave Deano a look that said she could take whatever he could dish out. In reply, he flashed a scowling grin at her. Her defiance was like a bone to a hungry dog. Some men acted out their frustrations through sex, some through violence. Deano fell into the latter category. He liked nothing better than an excuse to beat up on someone physically weaker than him. Angel knew this, just as she knew he would go easier on her if she told him what he wanted to hear. Twenty-four hours earlier she probably would have caved in and confessed what had happened. But things had changed since then. She’d changed. She knew now what she was capable of. Deano was a thug, but he wasn’t a killer. It wasn’t her who should be scared, it was him.

  ‘Tell me I’m wrong, Grace,’ said Deano, swatting aside her hands. ‘Tell me you know fuck all about that dead guy.’

  Fire flared in Angel’s eyes. ‘I told you not to fucking call me that.’

  Deano replied with a punch that snapped Angel’s head backwards. ‘Don’t you realise what you’ve done? If the coppers find this thing here, we’ll both go down for murder. Accessories after the fact, that’s what they call it.’ He wrapped the fingers of one hand around Angel’s throat. His other hand hovered threateningly over her. ‘I want to know which of those bitches gave you the gun.’