by Ben Cheetham
Jim turned onto a backstreet and pulled over opposite a bar with blacked-out windows and a blue-and-red neon sign depicting a busty woman straddling the words ‘The Minx’. A pair of burly bouncers filled the doorway. Knocking back the dregs of vodka, Jim got out of the car and approached them.
The bouncers exchanged an amused glance at the sight of Jim’s unshaven face. ‘Haven’t you ever heard of a razor, mate?’ one remarked sarcastically, scanning him with a handheld metal detector.
Jim resisted the urge to smash his fist into the man’s face. The detector beeped on his jacket pocket. He took out his car keys. The bouncer scanned him again, and when the detector remained silent, gestured for him to go on in.
‘Twenty quid admission,’ said a heavily made-up woman in tight leather gear behind a Perspex screen. ‘And another twenty for a lap-dance. Touch any of the girls and you’re out.’
Jim paid and entered a room gaudily decorated in red and purple. Paintings of scantily clad women adorned the walls. There was a mirrored bar in one corner. Tables and chairs were arranged around a square stage with six dance poles in the centre of the room. Spotlights cut through the gloom, illuminating a woman wearing only a thong and high heels. She pumped her body against one of the poles in time to loud hip-hop music. Several curtained booths where private dances could take place lined the left-hand wall. At this early hour, none of them were occupied. A scattering of punters were watching the performance, sipping overpriced drinks.
Bryan Reynolds was nowhere to be seen. But Jim knew he would be showing his bastard face soon enough. He’d spent sufficient time surveilling Reynolds over the years to learn his routine. Almost every evening between eight and nine o’clock, Reynolds headed out to The Minx. He usually made his way straight to an office at the back of the club, where he’d spend the next few hours locked away, getting down to his real business. Not that any proof that the club was a front for his drug dealing had ever been obtained. The place had been raided several times, but not a single grain of dope had been sniffed out. Reynolds was scrupulous about keeping his clean businesses separate from his dirty ones. Doubtless he would also be scrupulous about sticking to his routine after what had happened at the hospital. And nor was there any doubt that he would have a cast-iron alibi to account for his whereabouts at the time of the shooting.
A woman in a red bikini-top, matching micro-skirt and thigh-high boots teetered towards Jim and asked, ‘Do you want a private dance, honey?’
Jim shook his head. He bought a beer and settled himself at a table to wait for Reynolds. He didn’t have to wait long. The same dancer was still going through the motions on stage when Reynolds strolled in along with the shaven-headed, brick wall of a man Jim had seen at his house. Reynolds was dressed in a Miami Vice-style pastel-blue suit. His thin blonde hair was freshly slicked back. As usual, his wolfish lips were split into a broad grin. ‘Send us up a bottle of Cristal,’ he shouted to the barman. Clearly he had something to celebrate.
A fresh wave of fury washed over Jim, jerking him to his feet and sending him barrelling towards Reynolds. The smile disappeared from Reynolds’s lips as he saw Jim bearing down on him. He stood rooted to the spot, a look in his eyes that said he could barely believe someone was daring to come at him in his own club. Jim grabbed him by the front of his jacket and slammed him against the bar. ‘You won’t get away with it, you fucker!’ he rasped. ‘You won’t if it kills me. Do you—’
Jim’s voice was choked off by a beefy arm wrapping around his neck. As the skinhead wrenched him away from Reynolds, Jim drove his elbow into the bigger man’s ribs. The skinhead loosened his hold fractionally, his breath whistling through his teeth. Jim hit him again and he let go, doubling over. Refocusing his rage-swollen eyes on Reynolds, Jim made another grab for him. But the gangster was over his initial surprise. A semi-amused smile played across his face as he dodged out of Jim’s reach. Jim drunkenly overbalanced, staggering to one knee. At the same instant, the bouncers charged in. One punched Jim in the face, sending him sprawling.
‘Easy, lads,’ said Reynolds as the other bouncer aimed a vicious kick at Jim’s groin. ‘He’s a copper.’
The bouncers drew away from Jim as if they’d been told he had the plague. Reynolds jerked his thumb at the doorway. ‘Get back on the door.’ The skinhead straightened, massaging his ribs. ‘You OK, Les?’ asked Reynolds.
‘I think he’s busted one of my ribs.’
Reynolds nudged Jim with his foot. ‘Did you hear that? You’ve hurt him. That’s police brutality, that is.’
‘Fuck you, you murdering cunt,’ Jim gasped through his bloody teeth.
Reynolds touched his heavily muscled chest as if to say, Murderer? Moi? He glanced at Les. ‘Check him.’
The skinhead patted Jim down and yanked up his shirt, exposing a pale, flabby gut. ‘Look at the state of you,’ said Reynolds with a sneering laugh. ‘You’re an embarrassment to your profession.’
Jim fixed him with a look of burning hatred. ‘You think you can do whatever you want, don’t you? But you’re wrong. You’ve crossed the line this time. No one kills a police officer and gets away with it.’
Reynolds’s grin faltered. ‘Whoa, killed a copper? I’ve done some shit in my time, but it’s sort of a golden rule of mine not to kill coppers. It tends to be bad for business.’
‘Well you’ve made it the personal mission of every cop on the force to see to it that your business is fucked.’
‘Really? So where are they? All I see is one drunken old excuse for a cop.’ Reynolds’s lips curled upwards again. ‘You know what I think, Monahan? I think you’re losing the plot, going senile or something.’
‘You’re going down, Reynolds. I’m going to put you in a hole so deep you’ll never see daylight again.’
‘That sounds like a threat.’
‘It’s a promise.’
‘Well here’s another promise.’ Reynolds bent down, pushing his face close to Jim’s. His voice dropped to a level audible only to the two of them. ‘If you come to my house or club again, you’d better have an army at your back, otherwise I might just be tempted to break my golden rule.’ He looked at Les and jerked his chin at Jim. ‘Help him up.’
‘Put a hand on me and I’ll break it,’ warned Jim. Grasping a table, he struggled to his feet. He coughed and spat at Reynolds’s white suede shoes.
Reynolds attempted without success to dodge the oyster of bloody phlegm. ‘You motherfucker! These shoes cost more than you make in a month.’ He glared at Jim, his hands twitching as though longing to beat him to a pulp.
Jim returned Reynolds’s stare with eyes that seemed to say, Go on then, do it. Do it if you dare! A single punch in front of witnesses would be all the excuse he needed to haul him to the station.
Reynolds’s tongue flicked at his lips. As if expecting to see a camera, he glanced around suspiciously. ‘No chance,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘You’re not getting me like that.’
Now it was Jim’s turn to curl his lips into a taunting sneer. ‘What’s the matter? Lost your bottle?’
Reynolds tried to recover his own smile, but only managed a predatory grimace. ‘You really are fucking crazy, Monahan. You’re out of control. You want a piece of advice, get a new line of work before you hurt someone and yourself.’
‘Thanks for the suggestion,’ Jim said in a tone of mock gratitude. ‘And here’s some advice for you: let Mark go. If you do that, I’ll only put you in prison. Hurt him and I’ll destroy you.’
A crease appeared between Reynolds’s eyes. ‘Do you mean Mark Baxley?’ His voice was still laced with menace, but now there was something else in it too – concern? ‘Has something happened to him?’
Jim gave a sarcastic clap. ‘You’re good. I’ll give you that.’
‘Look, whatever it is you think I’ve done, you’re wrong.’
‘Just remember what I said. And believe me, I’ll do it.’ Although Jim’s words were slurred at the edges, his eyes were diamo
nd-hard with promise. He turned to stagger outside to his car.
‘Wait,’ said Reynolds, following him. ‘If Mark’s in trouble, I might be able to help.’
For the slightest moment, a splinter of doubt pricked at Jim. Was it possible Reynolds wasn’t lying? He shook his head. The bastard didn’t know how to do anything but lie. ‘Yeah, that’s it, keep playing your games. See where it gets you.’
Jim drove out of the city centre towards Doctor Reeve’s house. Garrett was right, the doctor hadn’t done a thing wrong. What’s more, his background was as clean as a whistle. More than clean; it was a shining, exemplary model of hard work and decency. But even so, Jim couldn’t bring himself to mentally scratch him off his list of suspects. The doctor exuded the unshakeable confidence of someone who couldn’t even conceive of failing at anything. In Jim’s experience, that kind of arrogance was often a cover for who a person really was. And the best way he knew to find out who a person really was, was to watch them without their knowledge.
He stopped off at a supermarket to pick up a six-pack of Coke and some ProPlus. If he was going to sit on the doctor’s house all night, he needed something to stave off sleep. He swilled back a double dose of the tablets. He hadn’t driven much further when he noticed his heart was palpitating. The next second, his breath was coming short and shallow. He wound down the window and sucked at the air, but it was as though he was trying to breathe through a wet blanket. He pulled over and closed his eyes, rubbing at his chest with a tingling hand. Images of Amy’s bloody body rushed at him. His eyelids snapped back up. His face was clammily cold and the palpitations were becoming painful.
That reluctantly decided Jim. Doctor Reeve would get a pass – for now. He turned sharply in the road, prompting a chorus of horns to blare. As he raced back to the hospital, cramping pains radiated down his arms. And suddenly, for the first time in as long as he could remember, he felt scared. He wanted to phone Margaret and ask her to be there for him at the hospital. But he knew he had no right to do so.
TV vans clogged the pavement to either side of the car park’s entrance. Beyond them, reporters were talking into cameras under the glare of handheld floodlamps. Jim parked up and, clutching his chest, swayed his way into A & E. His breath coming in staccato gasps, he said to the receptionist, ‘I think I’m having a heart attack.’
20
All day long Angel had lain on the sofa thinking about Doctor Henry Reeve, chewing over what she was going to do to him. She would take her sweet time killing him, that much she knew. With Herbert and Marisa things had happened too quickly. There’d been no chance to really savour their fear. She’d been too concerned with finding out the names of their fellow perverts. Well now she had enough names to keep her in the business of revenge for as long as she could evade being killed or captured. Sure, she still didn’t know the identity of the other surviving man from the basement – the Chief Bastard – but she would cause all the pain in her power to try and make the doctor give him up. And if he held out, well, she would just have to ferret the name out of Herbert’s black book.
A feeling deep inside told her that, one way or another, she would get what she wanted. It was such an alien sensation that it took her a while to identify it. Confidence. She was starting to believe in herself, in her ability to do something other than get men off for money. For years she’d kidded herself that her talent for providing pleasure gave her some sort of control over the men who came to her. But the bitter truth was, they were the ones in control. Even with the submissive punters, she did what they wanted, what they desired. Well not any more. Now she was the one calling the shots, and not only that, she wasn’t afraid. Oh God, she wasn’t afraid!
The heroin high had long since worn off. But even so, at that moment of realisation, Angel had felt as if she was rising out of her body, leaving the husk of her old self behind. She was changing, becoming something new. Something too powerful to be stopped. She’d thought the gun gave her that power. But she saw then that she was wrong. It came from inside her. It spoke to her in a voice as loud as thunder. It told her that shooting her victims was too easy a way for them to die. She needed to kill them in a way that sent a message to the world. The question was, how? You will know how when the time comes, the voice had assured her. And until then, they will live in fear, always looking over their shoulders, never knowing when death will come for them.
Several times during the day, Angel had heard the wail of sirens – sometimes so faint as to be barely audible, sometimes loud enough to cause her to peer through the barred window. With teeth-grinding slowness, morning had worn into afternoon. Driven by hunger-pangs, she’d rooted through the wreckage of the kitchen and found a couple of labelless tin cans and a box of stale cereal with mouse droppings in it. She’d forced down a few mouthfuls of the cereal before tossing the box aside in disgust. It had taken over an hour to hack the tins open using a rusty nail and a brick to hammer it in. One contained baked beans, the other chopped tomatoes. She couldn’t imagine that drug dealers had much use for chopped tomatoes. She’d wondered whether they dated back to her previous stay in the flat. Stephen Baxley had used to buy in tins of them to make pasta sauces. She’d eaten the beans, but left the tomatoes untouched.
It was dark outside now. Angel checked the time on her phone. Nine o’clock. The waiting was finally over.
As Angel rose from the sofa, a tremor shook her. She stared at the envelope of Mexican brown, wondering whether she should give herself a small hit to stave off the withdrawal symptoms. No, said the voice, you don’t need the numbness to survive any more. From now on, you need to feel everything.
Angel concealed the envelope in the chimney-breast along with the rest of her drug-taking gear, then left the flat. There was little traffic and even fewer pedestrians on the streets of Attercliffe. The ranks of factories had long since shut down for the day. She retraced her steps to the River Don, taking care not to be seen, her mind deadly clear and calm, like the eye of a storm.
Sticking to backstreets, Angel threaded her way through the city centre to the boarded-up shop behind which she’d concealed the motorbike. She was taking a big risk, she knew, but it was a good five or six miles to the doctor’s house on Whirlowdale Road. She simply had to have some means of getting there quickly and, if necessary, getting away even more quickly. She’d briefly considered stealing another motorbike. But without knowing how to hotwire an ignition, she would have to mug someone for their keys. And that struck her as an even riskier proposition than retrieving the scrambler.
Angel watched the shop and its surroundings for ten or fifteen minutes from the shadows of an alleyway. Seeing no sign of a police presence, she darted round to the back of the building. The motorbike was where she’d left it behind the bins. Her heart hammering, she kickstarted it and accelerated onto the road. Any second she expected sirens to start up in pursuit, but none did.
She headed south-west through a maze of quiet residential streets. After four or so miles, the band of woodland that shielded Whirlow from the rest of the city forced her onto the Ecclesall Road. By that point she was far away from the busy bars and restaurants that lined the road closer to the city centre. She scanned the street signs on her left. Spotting the sign she was looking for, she pulled over at the end of a broad, leafy street and counted along the houses to Doctor Reeve’s. It was a big, detached place set well back from the road behind a privet hedge. There were no cars in the driveway, but a downstairs light was on. Someone appeared to be in. Of course, that someone wasn’t necessarily the doctor. There was always the possibility that, like Stephen Baxley, the loathsome little toad hid his perversions behind the respectable facade of family life.
Instead of turning onto Whirlowdale Road, Angel accelerated a short distance further along the Ecclesall Road. The houses on the doctor’s side of Whirlowdale Road backed onto a belt of trees that screened them from a playing-field. She mounted the verge and rode far enough into the trees to be hidden from the r
oad. Leaving the motorbike propped against a tree, she felt her way forward in the moon-silvered darkness to the fence at the end of Doctor Reeve’s back garden.
A long lawn led to a patio furnished with a table and chairs. There was no swing or slide, or anything else to suggest the doctor had young children living at home. To the right of a conservatory, light filtered through curtains drawn across French doors. There were motion-sensitive security lights at either corner of the house. An alarm box blinked red under the eaves. The alarm surely wouldn’t be set if someone was home, but of course there was always the possibility that a light had been left on in an empty house to ward off burglars.
One of the downstairs windows had been left invitingly open. That decided Angel – someone was in. She clambered over the fence and ran towards the house. She dropped to her knees and crawled alongside the conservatory, out of sight of the nearest security light’s motion detector. Keeping tight to the wall, she stood and peered through the open window. She found herself looking into a large kitchen. Immediately adjacent to the window was a sink and marble work-surface. At the opposite side of the room a door stood ajar, leading to a gloomy hallway.
Angel carefully moved aside a potted plant on the windowsill. Hardly daring to breathe, she climbed through the window. You’re making it all too easy, Doctor, she thought, lowering herself to the tiled floor. Clearly the doctor hadn’t heard about the Winstanleys’ deaths, or he might have been more concerned for his safety. She withdrew the Glock from her handbag. The gun no longer felt alien in her hands. It was a part of her, an extension of her arm.
Silent as a stalking panther, Angel moved into the hallway. To her right, a stairway led up into darkness. To her left, a chink of light came from under a door. She put her ear to the door. Not a sound. The house was almost eerily silent. A frown crossed her forehead. Maybe no one was in after all. Perhaps the kitchen window had been left open by accident. She rejected the possibility. Even if someone had neglected to close the window before leaving the house, surely they wouldn’t also have forgotten to set the alarm. A prickle of warning raised the hairs on her neck. Something wasn’t right here.