Angel of Death

by Ben Cheetham

  ‘Mark Baxley might feel differently. That is, if he could remember what you did to him.’

  A pained rage sucked Angel’s face white. ‘I only did what you and your friends forced me to do. What I had to do to survive.’ Her forehead twitched with uncertainty as the full import of Marisa’s words swept over her. ‘Mark Baxley.’

  ‘Oh, yes, didn’t you know? Didn’t Stephen tell you? That little boy was his son.’

  A kind of dazed horror clouded Angel’s eyes. ‘You people aren’t human. You’re…’ She strained to find the words to express the depths of her disgust. ‘You’re the slime of the earth.’

  ‘You should be grateful to us. You’re only alive because we let you live.’

  ‘You should have killed me and put me out of my misery.’

  ‘Believe me, if it had been up to me, I’d have shot you full of drain cleaner and dumped you in the sewer where you belonged. But Stephen wouldn’t hear of it.’ A patronising sneer came into Marisa’s voice. ‘He was quite intelligent for a working-class type. But when it came to you, he was a love-blind fool.’

  ‘Love?’ Angel’s voice was shrill with incredulity. ‘He let you rape me. He forced me to take part in the rape of his son! Is that what you call love?’

  ‘No, that’s what I call business.’

  ‘Is that what that night was about, business?’

  ‘Business, money, pleasure. It all comes down to the same thing – getting what you want. Nothing else matters.’ Marisa looked at Angel with a pitying contempt. ‘That’s what you people with your poor pathetic lives pretend not to understand. Until you have a taste of it yourselves. Then, all of a sudden, you’re like rabid dogs, ready to bite anyone who gets in your way.’

  Angel had heard enough. She panned the gun back and forth between Marisa and Herbert. ‘Take your clothes off.’

  Marisa crossed her arms. ‘No.’

  Angel’s finger twitched on the trigger. ‘Take your fucking clothes off!’

  ‘OK, OK!’ cried Herbert, pulling off his dressing-gown. He shivered in awkward nakedness, his penis shrivelled with fear to almost nothing.

  Marisa gave him a look of utter contempt. ‘You’re almost as pathetic as her.’

  ‘I’m trying to save our lives!’

  ‘I’ve already told you, Herbert, nothing you say or do…’ Marisa trailed off with a sigh. ‘Oh, what’s the bloody point?’ Her gaze returned to Angel. ‘Either shoot me or fuck off. Because you’re not going to get another word—’

  Marisa was cut off by the concussive boom of the gun. The bullet slammed into her chest, punching right through and shattering a wine bottle behind her. A whoosh of air flew out of her lungs as she hit the floor. She tried to take a breath, but choked on the blood flooding her throat. More blood pooled from under her blouse. With a piercing scream, Herbert threw himself down beside her, pressing his hands against the wound, vainly trying to staunch the bleeding.

  ‘Where’s your desk, and how do I open its hidden compart­ment?’ Angel demanded to know.

  Herbert showed no sign of having heard. Wail after wail burst from him. His naked body shook and streams of foaming saliva flowed from his mouth, as though he was suffering a seizure. Angel repeated her question, but there was no getting through to him. She took aim at the back of his head and pulled the trigger, splattering Marisa with blood and skull fragments. He collapsed across her body in a deathly embrace. A silence almost as deafening as the gunshots descended over the basement. For a long moment, Angel stared at the corpses. Then, like someone surfacing from a dive that had taken her far deeper than she’d expected, she sucked in a great, gasping breath. Her gaze travelled the basement again. She hated the place almost as much as she hated its now dead owners. She would have liked to tear it apart brick by brick, so that no one would ever be able to go there again. But even if she’d been able to do so, she knew it would accomplish nothing. Whether or not the basement physically existed, it would always be a part of her and she a part of it.

  Angel climbed back up to the hallway. She turned off the basement light and slid the oak panel shut. A grumble rose from her stomach, suddenly making her realise that she was hungry. Hungrier than she had been in years. She went to the kitchen. There were the remains of a cooked chicken in the fridge. She tore at the meat, gulping it down like a ravenous dog, only stopping when her stomach began to cramp. She drank some milk to settle it, then started searching for Herbert’s desk.

  There was a study on the ground floor, its walls lined with books. A desk with a computer on it occupied the centre of the room. There were three drawers on either side of the desk. She emptied their contents on the floor, feeling around for any catches or levers that might open a hidden compartment. There were none. She shoved the monitor and keyboard off the desk and rapped her knuckles all over its surface, listening for hollow sounds. Again, there were none. With a grunt of effort, she tipped the desk over and checked its underside. Nothing. She returned her attention to the drawers, stamping on them as hard as she could. But they were too strong to break apart that way.

  Angel frowned thoughtfully at the desk, then ran from the study to a rack of keys she’d noticed in the hallway. Plucking a key from a hook labelled ‘Garage’, she headed for the back door. To one side of the house was a detached garage. After lifting its door, she groped around in the gloom for a light-switch. The garage contained a silver Mercedes and a mud-flecked scrambler motorcycle with a helmet on its seat. An array of tools hung on the walls. She took down an axe and returned to the desk.

  She hacked the drawers apart first. When that turned up nothing, she started on the main body of the desk. With manic urgency, she struck blow after blow, until the desk was reduced to little more than firewood. Lathered in sweat, she flung aside the axe, shouting, ‘Fuck! The bastard lied to me.’ She shook her head. No, Herbert had been telling the truth. The way Marisa had reacted told her that much. In which case… In which case, fucking what? Her temples were throbbing so much she could barely think. She massaged them. ‘In which case…’ she murmured. ‘In which case, he must have meant another desk!’

  Retrieving the axe, Angel dashed upstairs and darted from room to room. One of the bedrooms clearly belonged to a teen­age boy. The bed was unmade. The floor was strewn with clothes and motorbike magazines. Band and movie posters papered the walls. She wondered whether Marisa and Herbert had a son. And, if so, whether he knew what went on at his parents’ parties. The possibility was as chilling as it was repulsive.

  Whoever the bedroom’s occupant was, they might return home at any moment. Angel quickened her search. There were dressing-tables and chests of drawers, but no desk. That could only mean one thing – the desk was in some other place entirely, maybe another house, or an office. She nodded to herself. An office, that had to be it. Herbert must have meant his work desk.

  Angel went into the master bedroom. Water was flooding into the room from an en-suite bathroom where the bath was running. Herbert’s clothes were slung over the end of a king-size bed. She rifled through his trouser pockets, but they were empty. Next she checked the top drawer of his bedside table. It contained a fat leather wallet, inside which was several hundred quid and a business card with ‘Winstanley Accountants and Business Advisors’ printed on it, along with a telephone number and an address on the Fulwood Road. She’d heard of Fulwood but never been there. Her dad had despised it and all the other well-to-do south-western suburbs. As far as he was concerned, they weren’t the real Sheffield. But then what the fuck did he know? His ambition had never stretched further than getting pissed with his mates and caring for the pitch of his beloved Sheffield Wednesday.

  Taking the business card and flinging aside the money, Angel headed back to the study. She flipped the computer monitor upright, booted up the hard drive and logged onto the internet. As she’d done many times before when Deano had sent her out to meet punters at various locations around Middlesbrough, she googled the address and brought up a map. The
Fulwood Road started in Broomhill, not far from Sheffield University and the Children’s Hospital. The hospital was familiar to her. She’d been taken there for various childhood ailments, but never because of any injuries inflicted by her dad – her mum had always kept a store of antiseptic creams, plasters and bandages to treat those.

  Angel returned to the key rack and unhooked a bunch of keys marked ‘Office’. She turned to leave, but hesitated. Fulwood was on the opposite side of the city. It would take hours to get there on foot, and she couldn’t risk travelling by bus or taxi. Two of the remaining sets of keys on the rack were marked ‘Car’ and ‘Motorbike’. She’d never learnt how to drive, so the Mercedes wasn’t an option. She knew how to ride a motorbike, though. A boyfriend from her school days had owned a small Honda. He’d taught her on factory wasteland in Burngreave. One time when a passing patrol car had spotted them, he’d also shown her how easy it was to outrun the police on a motorbike.

  On her way to the garage, Angel grabbed a torch from a hook next to the back door. She stowed it in the compartment under the scrambler’s seat, along with a flat-bladed screwdriver and a hammer. She pulled on the helmet, hit the kickstart, and twisted the throttle. The motorbike jumped forward, almost throwing her off the back of the seat. She braked and took a moment to familiarise herself with the controls, before opening up the throttle again.

  At the fork in the road, Angel turned right. She misjudged the speed at which she could take the bend. The bike skidded into a grass verge and flipped sideways into a weed-choked drainage ditch. She lay dazed, hidden from passing vehicles. After a while, she picked herself up and checked for injuries. Her clothes were torn in several places and blood seeped from scratches beneath them. But nothing seemed to be broken. She stood the bike up and set off again at a slower speed.

  After a couple of miles, Angel came to the busy Penistone Road. As she rode towards the city centre, the streets became increasingly familiar. Her gaze was drawn to a house where a school friend had lived; a park she used to play at; a shop she’d once stolen sweets from. Her eyebrows tightened as Hillsborough Stadium loomed into view. As a young child, she’d loved the stadium simply because her dad did. Later, when things got really bad at home, she’d hated it for the same reason. She eased off the throttle as she neared her parents’ street. Their house looked the same as she remembered. Same front door. Same blue-painted windowsills. It gave her a strange feeling to see it, as if her helmet’s visor was a window into some long-lost childhood memory. She wondered what would happen if she knocked on the door. Would they even recognise her?

  Angel put some speed on, keeping her gaze fixed on the road as she passed her dad’s favourite drinking haunt, the New Barrack Tavern. She was afraid what she might do if she saw the bastard. In the months leading up to her running away, she used to lie in bed listening to him beat her mum, fantasising about one day being strong enough to stop him. She’d pictured herself hurting him, and hurting him so badly he would never dare raise his fists against her mum again.

  She followed the signs for the Manchester Road, which she knew branched off from the north end of the Fulwood Road. She passed groups of students heading out to the city’s pubs and nightclubs. With their smiling, carefree faces, they seemed to belong to another world – one in which they expected to find happiness and fulfilment, not merely survive. That part of Sheffield seemed like a different city from the one she knew – the streets were broader and leafier, the houses bigger and less stained by the soot of steel-mill smokestacks. When she passed a street sign for the Fulwood Road, she started counting house numbers. After half a mile or so, she pulled over outside a two-storey stone house with bay windows on either side of a porch supported by fluted columns.

  She took the hammer, screwdriver and torch out of the seat compartment and approached the house across a small car park. There were two silver plaques at the side of the front door, engraved with the names of Herbert’s company and a solicitor’s firm he shared the building with. She glanced at an alarm box under the eaves. She had no way of stopping it from going off. Once inside, she would simply have to move fast and hope she found what she was looking for before the police turned up.

  There were three keys on the bunch Angel had taken from the Winstanley house. She tried them in the lock until she found one that fitted. As she stepped into the broad, high-ceilinged hallway, an alarm keypad began to bip at one-second intervals. She swept the torch along the walls. Its beam stopped on a door with Herbert’s name on it. She tried the handle. It was locked. The second of the remaining keys opened it, revealing an office with filing-cabinets lining the walls and a desk to one side of another door. A name plaque on the desk said ‘Christina Low’. Probably Herbert’s secretary, thought Angel, shoving the final key into the door’s lock. After a thirty-second delay, the alarm went off. She was ready for it, but even so she flinched as a piercingly shrill beep echoed through the building.

  The door opened into a wood-panelled room with shelves of books covering two of its walls from floor to ceiling. There was an ornate desk with a chair behind it and two in front of it. Angel flicked a light-switch, figuring there was little point trying to hide her presence. There were two drawers in the desk with locks for which she didn’t have keys. She hammered the screwdriver between the upper drawer and desktop, wrenching its handle back and forth. The wood around the lock splintered, and after a minute or so of Angel’s violent, straining effort, it gave way. She yanked out the drawer, placed it upside down on the floor and smashed it apart with the hammer. No false bottom. She gave the second drawer the same treatment. Again, nothing. Her blood hammering in her ears almost as loudly as the alarm, she felt around behind where the drawers had been. Her delicate fingers found a tiny hole in the wood. Glancing around frantically, her gaze fixed on a sheaf of papers held together by a paper-clip. She removed the clip, unbent it and inserted it into the hole. Its point pressed against what felt like a spring. She let out a triumphant yip as, with a faint click, a section of the desk carved to look like a fluted column popped open.

  Angel eagerly upended the secret drawer. A little black leather book dropped into her palm. Names, addresses and telephone numbers were listed in the book. Shoving it into her handbag, she made for the exit. In the darkness of the adjoining office, a flicker of light at the window caught her eye. She warily parted the blinds. A car had pulled over behind the motorbike. A man of maybe fifty-five with a moustache and dark, receding hair got out of it and approached the bike. The driver, a younger woman with functionally short blonde hair, remained in her seat, talking on a phone, or maybe a radio. Angel guessed immediately that they were police. Over the years, necessity had forced her to become an expert at spotting coppers. What’s more, their suits marked them as CID. Her brain started racing like a hamster on a wheel. CID wouldn’t be sent to investigate a break-in. Not unless they suspected it was connected to a more serious crime. As far as she could see, that meant only one thing – Marisa and Herbert’s bodies had already been found. Her heart dropped hard into her stomach. She’d hoped to have a day or two at least to formulate her next move before the police got on her trail.

  As the man scanned the building, Angel jerked away from the window. She had to get out of there. Fast! She ran towards the rear of the hallway, trying doors as she went. All of them were locked. She put the front door key in the back door, but it wouldn’t turn. The door was thick and solid. There was no way she could jimmy it with the screwdriver. Her eyes desperately sought a window. There were none. She considered running upstairs, but quickly rejected the idea. Even if there was a way out up there, it would almost certainly involve jumping from an ankle-breaking height. There was only one way to leave – by the front door. Panic swelled inside her. Be calm, she told herself. You need to do this and do it now, before more of the fuckers get here. She reached into her handbag and wrapped clammy fingers around the Glock’s grip.

  13

  Jim knocked on the Kirbys’ front door. L
inda opened it. She was still wearing her dressing-gown and slippers, as if she hadn’t got dressed all day. She put a hand to her mouth, looking from Jim to Amy with a mix of hope and fear in her eyes. Her sleeve slipped down, exposing a hand-shaped bruise on her wrist. Another bruise showed faintly through a thick layer of foundation cream on her cheekbone. Jim felt a spark of anger at the sight. He despised men like Ron Kirby – men who seemed to enjoy nothing more than hurting the ones they were supposed to love. He would have liked to haul Ron down to the station and fling him in a cell. But he knew it would make no difference. In his experience, women who’d been physically and mentally beaten down for as many years as Linda rarely, if ever, pressed charges.

  ‘What is it?’ Linda asked through her fingers. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘We’d like to get your opinion on a couple of things that may or may not concern your daughter, Mrs Kirby. Can we come in?’

  Linda glanced up and down the street as though searching for someone, before motioning for Jim and Amy to come inside. ‘You’ll have to make it quick. I’m cooking supper.’

  ‘Where’s your husband?’

  ‘At the pub.’

  ‘He doesn’t have much liking for the police, does he?’ said Amy.

  Linda chewed her lower lip, reluctant from fear or loyalty to discuss her husband. She stood with folded arms, casting nervous glances out of the living room window. Amy set the laptop down on the sideboard and flipped it open. ‘Take a look at this please, Mrs Kirby, and tell us what you see.’ She opened the file containing the CCTV footage.