Night Angels

by Danuta Reah

  The woman had looked at her. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t see you.’ She was fumbling in her purse, not quite meeting Anna’s eye. She had pushed a coin towards Anna who was frozen for a moment and then took it.

  ‘Thank you…’ But the woman had already walked away. She looked at what the woman had given her. A two-pound coin. She could buy…something that was hot and filling, something cheap and plentiful. She needed to eat, get her strength up. There was a van selling chips down near the market. She had bought a bag and slipped down a side street to huddle over their warmth as she ate them. Some youths had pushed past her, knocking her against the wall. ‘Gyppo!’ one of them had shouted. She froze. ‘Gyppo!’ and a burst of raucous laughter as they vanished round the corner.

  She had felt better after she had eaten, more able to think. She had spent the rest of the money on a bag of broken biscuits in the market, and a cup of tea. She needed to plan. She would have to walk back to the house where her room was; she couldn’t afford the bus fare. It would take her about half an hour, a daunting prospect in the cold, in her present state. Then she could wait until it was quiet, and slip in. She would collect her stuff, her papers, maybe some clothes. If it was quiet, if there wasn’t anyone around, maybe she could have a wash. She wouldn’t be able to put anything in the meter so the water would be cold, but at least she would be clean. Once she had got her papers, she could get away.

  Now it was dark enough, and the obscuring fog would help. Maybe no one was watching for her, maybe no one knew she was there. But she couldn’t be sure. Angel! Eighteen months ago. ‘I always collect,’ he’d told her. ‘Don’t try and cheat me.’ But Anna had. She had run away. Her mother had helped her, had spoken to her in the voice that Anna could still hear, Anna-kin, Anna, you must go before it’s too late. She had watched and waited for her chance, had been as quiet and as good as he wanted her to be, done anything he had asked her to do. And all the time she had thought, Tomorrow. Tomorrow I will be gone. Or the next day. Soon.

  Six months ago. The room had been dark, just the light from the table lamp making a pool of yellow by the bed. Angel had brought the man himself. ‘He’s my special friend, Anna,’ he’d said, smiling, and running his hand down her face in a gesture that was half caress, half threat. Anna had tried not to see the man’s face, his eyes that were already appraising her in her silk and lace. He had smelt of alcohol and some kind of sweet chemical that only partly masked the smell of sweat, of excitement. Angel had given her a long look, a look she couldn’t quite decipher. She felt her stomach clench with apprehension. There was something wrong. And then he went, and for the first time she felt as though some protection had been taken away from her.

  She suppressed her fear. Angel protected her. She was valuable. ‘My investments always pay. Remember that. You’ll be all right with me.’ She smiled her smile, bright and inviting, hearing Angel’s voice giving her his approval. ‘That’s right, sweetheart.’ She retreated behind the mask and let the mechanical doll take over. But the alcohol the man had drunk gave him problems, and his anger at this had inflamed his cruelty, or maybe he had just wanted an excuse to do the things he wanted but didn’t dare admit he wanted. Anna knew the stimulus of cruelty. Her mother, her sisters, even the little one, had died in a frenzy of excitement driven by the knife, the fist and the flame. Anna had seen the bodies.

  The man had pinched her nipple until she couldn’t stop herself from crying out, had sunk his teeth into the delicate skin high up on the inside of her thigh. She couldn’t understand why someone didn’t come in and stop him. She struggled, and called out. He knelt on her, pinning her legs with his weight. He put his hand round her throat and squeezed. She could feel her breath start to cut off, feel the pressure building up in her head. ‘Angel owes me,’ he said. ‘So you’ll do what I say, bitch.’

  He smiled at her and relaxed the hand round her neck. She could see the sweat shining on his face. ‘You love it really, don’t you, you dirty gyppo cunt.’ He jammed his fingers inside her and she clenched her teeth against the pain. ‘Don’t you?’ Her stomach heaved. ‘Don’t you? Don’t you?’ Each time he asked, he rammed his fingers in harder.

  ‘Yes!’ She shut her eyes, trying to make her mind switch off, trying to make the doll take over so that she wouldn’t feel what was happening to her, wouldn’t be there while he did…whatever else he was going to do.

  She thought about her mother. Anna…before it’s too late! Her mother had fought for her life, for her children’s lives. Her mother hadn’t submitted and sent her mind scuttling away to some hiding place where nothing mattered. The man was muttering angrily now, ‘Dirty bitch, dirty…’ a litany of abuse that was inflaming him more and more. Angel had said he would take care of her, but she was already torn and bruised. What use would Angel have for her? Angel was letting him do this to her. The man was pulling her on to her knees, putting his hands round her neck again, freeing her arms. It was now. If she got it wrong, if she made him so angry that he killed her, maybe the first blow would bring oblivion. Maybe that would be better. She reached out and gripped the table lamp, knowing there was slack on the flex, pulling at it to make sure it wasn’t caught up. Now! Her first swing barely touched him, the awkward angle making it impossible to get any force behind her arm, but he pulled back in shock and amazement. His face was beginning to change from incredulity to anger as she swung it again and caught him on the side of the head. The drink had made his reflexes slow, and he lost his balance and fell to the floor. And now, her mother was watching over her. He hit his head on the side of the table as he fell, and stayed crouched on the floor, his hands against his head, making a strange moaning sound.

  She was off the bed in an instant. She had no clothes apart from the lingerie that Angel had her wear when she was working. The drunken man’s clothes were draped over a chair. He had put them there carefully, folding them as he took them off, as she had smiled at him, the way Angel told her to. She pulled on his sweatshirt, letting it hang loose like a dress. It was enough. The summer night was warm. She didn’t have time to waste. She hesitated, then reached into the pocket of the jacket draped over the chair. Her fingers closed round a fat wallet and she shoved it inside the shirt. She resisted the impulse to look at the man on the floor again. He was still making that moaning sound. Someone would realize what had happened, someone would come. She called her mother’s face into her mind, and smashed the base of the lamp against the window. The glass shattered. She could hear the sound of running feet as she swung her leg over the sill. She was three stories up. Mama, help me now! She strained sideways, her fingers touching the drainpipe as she slipped. The web of pipe-work on the back wall slowed her fall into a scrabbling descent and she landed on the ground with no more than a few grazes.

  Water splashed on to her head from an overflow, and she staggered to her feet…the drip drip of the water…and away into the night.

  She had run away from Angel. She had cheated him. She had hurt, maybe killed his friend and stolen his money.

  There was no one to help her. She was on her own.

  7

  Sheffield, Monday evening

  As she closed her front door behind her, Roz welcomed the sense of peace. The day had been a mixture of frustration and tedium, of tasks started that were impossible to complete, and of nagging, unfocused anxieties. At lunch, Luke had determinedly kept away from the subject of Gemma, talking instead of the software they were developing to analyse the interview data, of the latest gossip in the department about the Joanna/Peter Cauldwell feud.

  This led on to a discussion about where the group was going – casual, work-related chat. On any other occasion, it would have been a pleasant and relaxing half-hour, very typical of the times that she and Luke used to spend together shortly after she came to Sheffield, when she was finding her feet in her research post.

  But that had been an oasis of calm in the middle of an increasingly frenetic day. She made herself coffee and wande
red into the study to stand and stare into the depths of the mirror. It was dark outside, and only the reflected moonlight illuminated the room. It had been a bad day, one that had brought out the worst in Joanna, her normal smooth efficiency turned into a hectoring panic as she tried to deal with a situation she couldn’t understand.

  Then there had been the report. When Joanna had greeted her with the news of DI Jordan’s phone call, Roz had confidently said that Gemma’s report could be sent at once, something that had mollified Joanna a bit. ‘You should have sent it off on Friday,’ she said. ‘It was obvious that Gemma wasn’t planning to come in to finish it.’ It hadn’t been obvious at all, but Roz had left it, knowing that Joanna needed something to be angry about, something that didn’t matter, something that she could deal with. ‘And there’s another Manchester meeting next Monday,’ Joanna went on. ‘I can’t go. You’ll have to attend that. You’d better contact someone and get them to send you the minutes.’

  Roz had managed to get herself up to date with the Manchester meeting, but she hadn’t been able to give much thought to the report until she came back from lunch, and when she had gone to Gemma’s room to find it, the report wasn’t there. She’d checked the filing cabinet, the desk drawers, the window sills, even the floor and the back of the filing cabinet. It wasn’t there. And then she felt a dawning unease. She could remember reading it on the screen, but had she printed it out? She’d been distracted with the meeting, with the annoyance of Gemma’s non-appearance, and her mind had been on her lecture as well.

  She tried to take herself back to Friday morning. She’d found the file on Gemma’s machine. Then she’d read the report, yes…while it was printing out. She had printed it. Then she’d gone to find Luke – but she’d put the report on her desk, along with the transcript and Gemma’s notes. That was it. There had been a pile of papers on her desk, things for dealing with today. She must have misfiled the report, got it mixed up with her own stuff.

  She’d gone systematically through all her files, knowing how easily a few sheets of paper could disappear – but it wasn’t there. And she hadn’t told Joanna. She’d chickened out. She told herself that it might have got mixed up with papers she’d brought home. Now she not only had to tell Joanna that the report was missing, she had to tell her that she had concealed the fact for a whole day. If the report wasn’t available, then DI Jordan should have been informed at once. It was just something else that would make the group look unprofessional.

  She was tempted to phone Luke and unburden herself to him, but that wasn’t fair. He had Gemma’s sudden departure to cope with, and, in his position, it was better if he were well insulated from Joanna’s wrath. Joanna had already decided, or tried to decide, that it was Luke’s fault the back-up systems weren’t in place. Roz had jumped on that one quickly, and Joanna had grudgingly accepted responsibility. But Roz knew Joanna’s mental picture of Luke would now include someone who hadn’t been sufficiently forceful about the importance of an automatic back-up system.

  She wondered what to do. After the day she’d had, the thought of working on her book was depressing. She toyed with the idea of phoning someone and going out, but that didn’t appeal either. She wandered into the kitchen and picked up the paper that she’d dumped on the kitchen table. Nothing on television tonight. She thought about going to see a film, and hunted round for the local entertainment guide half-heartedly.

  She decided to phone someone, see if anyone had any plans for the evening that could include her. Lorna. Lorna was a teacher at a local comprehensive and would have tales of woe that would put Roz’s bad day into its proper perspective. She’d phone Lorna. But when she got to the hall table where the phone was, she saw that the message light was blinking – three messages. The first one was Joanna, from nine o’clock this morning, asking her where she was. The second one was silence and the sound of the receiver being hung up, and the third one was from her mother. Paula’s bright, answering-machine voice er’d and rambled through the message. ‘…and anyway, it seems ages since we’ve talked, Roz. Phone me.’ Roz sighed. It was true, she hadn’t talked to her mother for several weeks. She hesitated for a moment, then picked up the phone and rang the number.

  Paula Frost was delighted. ‘Roz! How lovely. Now don’t apologize, I know how busy you are.’ She chatted on, filling Roz in on the details of what she and Robert, Roz’s stepfather, had been doing, what various acquaintances – people who no longer had any part in Roz’s life – had been doing, and her own involvement with local politics. Roz reciprocated with news – somewhat edited – from work, talk about her future career plans, the possibility of a visit. She was relaxing now, hoping she was going to get away with it, when she heard a new note coming into her mother’s voice.

  ‘Listen, Roz, it’s lovely to talk to you, but there was something important I wanted to say.’

  Roz stiffened. ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘Oh, listen to you, Roz!’ Her mother said impatiently. ‘We haven’t talked for weeks, and when we do talk, you rattle on about work, work, work. And as soon as you think I’m going to talk about anything else, you’re on the defensive.’

  ‘I’m not.’ Roz felt wrong-footed.

  ‘Yes you are. Now listen. I saw Graham Highgrove last week.’ Graham was her mother’s solicitor. ‘He’s very concerned about your situation. About the legal implications.’ Paula’s recent tactics had been to place her own concerns in the mouths of others, in an effort to get Roz to listen to her. ‘He thinks you should get a divorce. That would stop that terrible drain on your finances. Darling, I know that you…’

  ‘No, you don’t. I’m sorry, Mum, but I’m not going to talk about it.’ Roz pressed her forehead against the wall. Why, why did she have to have this conversation with Paula once every few months or so? Why couldn’t her mother accept the decisions she had made?

  ‘What good are you doing Nathan by hanging on?’ Paula’s voice was reasonable. ‘It isn’t as if…’

  It isn’t as if you ever saw him. ‘I said I don’t want to talk about it.’ Roz took a deep breath. ‘Please listen to me. I don’t want to talk about it.’

  She heard her mother sigh. ‘Robert and I are very worried,’ she said. Roz doubted that her easy-going golf-playing stepfather gave the matter much thought. He seemed to think that she could look after herself.

  ‘I can’t help that.’ Roz cut the topic short. ‘Now is there anything else?’ They spent another minute or two mending fences, and then Paula rang off, leaving Roz with the shards of the evening scattered around her. She wandered back into her study and shifted the books and papers round on the table she used as a desk. The mirror threw a dark reflection back.

  She didn’t want to think about it, but it wouldn’t go away. Paula was right. Why was she hanging on to a marriage that had died – that had been destroyed – years ago? For better, for worse, in sickness and in health, the good times and the bad times. Partly, it was a safeguard, for Nathan. As his wife, she still had a say. But mostly, it was a promise that the very young Roz had made to the very young Nathan. Would she have expected him to keep the faith? Twenty-one-year-old Roz would have done. Thirty-year-old Roz did not.

  Twenty-one. She had been twenty-one to Nathan’s twenty-six when they had married. They had gone to the Register Office, she and Nathan, with two friends as witnesses, and made their vows as privately as they could. I do solemnly declare…She could still see Nathan’s face, serious for once, his fair hair tidy, his eyes looking into hers…That I know of no reason…

  Hull, Monday evening

  The house was at the end of a side street, backing on to derelict industrial land. The houses were tall, three stories, with elegant patterns in the brickwork at odds with the neglected paintwork and rotting timbers. The traffic from the main road, out of the city to the east coast, made a constant background roar. They’d given Anna the address at the Welfare Advice Centre when she had found her way there two days after she had run away from Angel. ‘It’s
not much,’ Matthew, one of the volunteer workers, had told her, his voice stumbling over his words. ‘But no one will ask you any questions. As long as you can pay them.’

  ‘I have money,’ she’d told him. She could see from his face that he knew how she’d earned it. He’d looked sad, and that sadness made her feel she could trust him. She’d wanted to talk to him, to tell him what had happened. But of course she couldn’t. She couldn’t tell anyone.

  The room wasn’t much, but it was enough. She’d handed over the first week’s rent to the landlord, who had not appeared again, just sent people to collect the money each week. ‘If you’re late, you’re out,’ he’d told her. She’d known what she wanted to do with the money she’d got from the drunken man. It hadn’t been enough for the papers she needed, but she’d been able to save, because Matthew had told her about places where she might find work, casual work, early-morning work, evening work. She’d chosen places she thought that Angel wouldn’t go. Places she had thought were safe.

  She hovered uncertainly at the corner, common sense telling her that no one would be watching the house, not day and night. It was four days since she had been there, she wasn’t worth a constant watch. But someone might have been told, ‘If she comes back…this number…at once…worth your while…’ She would need to be quick, but she didn’t need to be afraid now, not right now.

  Her heart was beating in her throat as she walked down the street, keeping in the shadows. If he saw her, the watcher, let it be as late as possible, to give her a chance to be in, out and away.