Angel of Death

by Ben Cheetham

  Mark landed in a winded heap at the bottom of the stairs. Seeing that the flames were giving chase, he grabbed the bannister and hauled himself upright. He limped towards the kitchen as the petrol pooled by the front door ignited. A piercing scream sliced the air as, in a final crazed attempt to kill his son, Stephen threw himself over the bannister. Flaring like a comet, he hurtled towards Mark. His scream cut off abruptly as he hit the floor headfirst behind him.

  A burst of flames searing his back, Mark half staggered, half collapsed into the kitchen. He kicked the door shut, blocking the fire’s advance. Then he sagged against the work-surface, his temples throbbing as his brain struggled to assim­ilate what had happened. He felt as though he’d like to close his eyes and sink into oblivion – not just to escape the pain of his wounds, but to escape the pain of knowing that his dad had tried to murder him. His dad had tried to murder him! His own dad! It was beyond insane. It was so incompre­hensible as to scarcely seem real. It was real, though. The blood streaming from his arm was real; the pain radiating through his body and mind was real.

  Mark knew he had to keep moving. He had to find medical attention. Of even more immediate concern, the door wouldn’t hold the fire for long. Already its paint was blistering and flames were licking at its edges. He found himself wondering whether he cared. Did he really want to continue living in a world where this could happen? Yes, exclaimed something inside him, perhaps the same deep-rooted survival instinct that had given him the strength to fight his father. Another thought struck him like a fist, jerking him fully upright, eyes wide and searching. Where were his mum and Charlotte? Had his dad tried to kill them too? In one horrifying instant, he got his answer.

  ‘Oh God no!’ cried Mark, the words tearing out of his throat as if formed from broken glass. ‘Please no. Please, please.’ He threw himself towards his mum, landing on his knees in a slick of still-warm blood. ‘Mum! Mum!’ He felt her wrist for a pulse. He put his ear close to her mouth, listening for breath. There were no signs of life. How could there be? There was a hole in her chest big enough to push his fist into. His gaze transferred to Charlotte. Not that he recognised her blood-masked face, but he knew from her clothes and hair that it was her.

  Mark began to shake violently. Vomit pushed up his throat, spewing from his mouth and nose. He collapsed beside his mum, moaning and clutching at her. There was nothing left inside him. There was nothing left outside him. Everything was gone. His whole family had been blasted into a bloody ruin of flesh and bone. Better to die with them than to live on with the pain of the loss. He squeezed his tear-filled eyes shut, the rushing crackle of flames filling his ears. In his mind’s eye, he saw his father’s monstrously blank face peering over the gun sight. ‘Come on!’ he shouted hoarsely. ‘Kill me! Kill me and get this over with!’

  As if in response, a barely audible groan came to his ears. He snapped his eyes open, half expecting to see his dad risen from the dead like some horror movie bogeyman to finish him off. His dad wasn’t there, but what he did see astonished him almost as much. Charlotte was twitching as if an electric current was being passed through her. She was alive! It seemed impossible. The top left quarter of her skull was gone. But there was no denying what he saw. Suddenly his survival instinct kicked in again, ordering him to get up and help his sister. Slowly, painfully, he obeyed.

  Mark hooked his good arm around Charlotte. She was a slim little thing, but her limp body seemed as heavy as a sandbag. His breath coming in agonised gasps, he somehow managed to lift her and carry her towards the back door. Halfway there, his injured leg buckled. As he fell, he twisted his body between the floor and Charlotte. He cradled her head against his chest, taking care not to touch her wound. He lay for a moment trying to catch his breath, but his lungs seemed reluctant to inflate. He tried to get up, but was too weak. He saw that the fire had broken through the door. Tongues of flame were leaping into the room. Smoke swept like storm clouds across the ceiling. There was maybe a minute, maybe only seconds left before it would light up Charlotte’s petrol-soaked body like a struck match.

  ‘No.’ The word hissed through Mark’s gritted teeth. He clawed at the floor, dragging himself and his sister centimetre by centimetre towards the back door. He didn’t know what had driven his dad to murderous insanity. And at that moment, he didn’t care. All he cared about was making sure his dad didn’t achieve what he’d planned. Even in the midst of all that agony and anguish, it lent him a perverse kind of strength to think that he would be depriving the bastard of his final gesture of power over his family.

  Grunting and spitting with the effort, Mark grasped the door handle and hauled himself upright. As he opened the door, the heat of the fire sucked the cool night air into the house. The influx of oxygen made the flames momentarily shrink. Then they roared up fiercer than ever.

  Mark knew there was no time to be gentle with Charlotte. He grabbed her arm and dragged her outside. They were about five metres from the house when the petrol ignited. The windows blew out, showering them with glass, knocking Mark off his feet. This time, as he lay fighting to hold on to consciousness, he knew he wouldn’t be getting up again. He barely had sufficient strength to take out his mobile phone, dial 999 and murmur the address to the operator. He let his head roll towards Charlotte. His lips formed faltering words. ‘Hold on, sis… Don’t… die.’

  4

  The mobile phone’s ringtone wormed its way into Jim Monahan’s sleeping mind. With a phlegmy grunt, he switched on the bedside lamp and reached for the phone. Seeing Amy Sheridan’s name, he put the receiver to his ear and asked in a rasping, smoker’s voice, ‘What’s the crack, Amy?’ Even before she replied, he knew it had to be something big for her to disturb him when he was off duty.

  ‘We’ve got a multiple shooting.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘A house just off the Ringinglow Road. Out towards Hathersage.’

  A veteran of over three decades’ service, Jim wasn’t easily surprised, but his eyes widened a little. He’d been expect­ing Amy to say the Manor or the Wicker or one of the other inner-city areas where gun crime, although relatively uncom­mon compared to many major cities, was certainly not extraordinary. Back when he was in uniform, he’d dealt with thefts from vehicles belonging to hikers and climbers who frequented the moors and gritstone crags to the south-west of the city. But in all his years on the force he’d never been called to a shooting anywhere near the Ringinglow Road. His first thought was that they might be dealing with the fallout of a home-invasion gone tits up. There were some big pads out there. It wasn’t unknown for gangs of burglars to cross the Snake Pass from Manchester and turn over four, maybe even five houses in a night. ‘How many shot and how many dead?’

  ‘Can’t say for sure right now. There are two in hospital, both with severe and one with possibly fatal wounds. There may be two dead in the house. The house is on fire. I think the worst of it’s been extinguished, but firemen are still working in the building. I’m texting you the address.’

  Jim’s phone beeped as the address came through. ‘Got it. See you soon.’ He reached for a pack of cigarettes and lit one, reflecting as he often did that his ex-wife, Margaret, would have flipped her lid if she’d caught him smoking in bed. There weren’t many upsides to divorce – especially not when your wife of twenty-odd years had done a runner with another bloke – but that was one of them. He retrieved his trousers and shirt from where they’d been slung over a chair. He spat on his fingers and rubbed at a stain on the shirt. He’d been on his own five years now and he still hadn’t got his head around the washing-machine. Today was the anniversary of his and Margaret’s breakup. The date was carved into his brain. But if someone had asked him when their wedding anniversary was, he would have struggled to remember.

  As Jim pulled on his trousers, he caught a glimpse of himself in the full-length wardrobe mirror – hangdog brown eyes and craggy features, grey-flecked moustache, fast-food belly. It occurred to him that there was a time wh
en he would have been disgusted by what he saw, but not any more. The woman he loved was gone. A lonely retirement was looming. What reason did he have to take care of himself? For that matter, what reason did he have to care about anything?

  He headed down to the kitchen and flicked the kettle on. As he waited for it to boil, he lit another cigarette with the end of his old one. A twinge of guilt passed through him at the thought of keeping the job waiting. It quickly faded. Let it wait, he thought bitterly. Let them all wait. I’ve been kept waiting my whole life, and for what? So I can be alone? His gaze travelled the kitchen. There were still signs of Margaret’s homely touch – a calendar on the wall, a vase on the window-ledge. But the calendar was five years out of date and the vase contained only dust. He closed his eyes, sucking hard on his cigarette.

  Not for the first time, Jim wondered why he didn’t just jack the job in. What with all the government budget cuts, an application for early retirement would almost certainly be accepted. He recalled the contempt he used to have for those old cops who were simply waiting on retirement. In other lines of work that might have been OK, but in this job it could cost lives. This job demanded everything of you. If you weren’t in it heart, soul and brain, you shouldn’t be in it at all. He waved his cigarette-holding hand as if to brush away the line of thought. If he wasn’t a cop, what the hell would he do? He’d asked himself that a lot recently, and he hadn’t been able to come up with any answers he liked. His passion for the job may have deserted him, but the idea of not doing it any more left him with a cold, shrivelling feeling in his balls, as if he was straddling a deep chasm.

  After warming himself up with a few swigs of tea, Jim headed for his car. He drove at a steady speed through the quiet city streets. He didn’t need to punch the address into the satnav. He knew the streets as well as any taxi driver. A couple of miles out of the city, he spotted the flashing lights of emergency service vehicles illuminating the sky above his destination.

  A constable stopped him at the end of a lane. Jim flashed his ID and the constable drew aside a cordon of blue-and-white-striped tape to let him through. He pulled over at a driveway marked by twin stone posts, noting the CCTV camera mounted on one of them. A heavy-looking gate had been cut off its hinges and balanced against the garden wall. The driveway was clogged with police vehicles, fire engines, an ambulance and several unmarked cars. The fire-blackened house was lit with silver-white halogen floodlights. A haze of smoke hung in the air, creating an eerie effect. Firemen were buzzing around, hunting down any remaining pock­ets of flames. A procession of flashlight-wielding constables, some of them armed with MP5 submachine guns, was scour­ing the garden. A forensics tent had been erected on the lawn. Overhead, a helicopter circled, no doubt scanning the sur­round­ing fields and woodland with an infra-red body-heat detector.

  ‘Where’s DI Sheridan?’ Jim asked a constable.

  ‘In the kitchen, sir. You’ll have to go round to the back of the house. The firemen are finishing up in the hallway.’

  ‘What about the DCI?’

  ‘He’s on his way, but he won’t get here for a while yet. He was visiting relatives for the weekend in Harrogate.’

  The news inspired mixed feelings in Jim. On the one hand, he drew a small measure of satisfaction from the fact that he wouldn’t have to see Garrett’s studiedly grave, self-important face anytime soon. On the other, in Garrett’s absence he was the senior detective. In his current frame of mind, he doubted if he was up to taking control of such a complex crime scene.

  Jim headed down the side of the house. A forensics officer in a plastic suit and shower-cap was kneeling on the lawn not far from the back door, taking samples of what appeared to be patches of oil. Jim knew it wasn’t oil, though. Halogen lights made blood appear black. His eyes followed a blood trail towards the back door, where they came to rest on a pair of legs in heeled boots caked with soot. He lifted his gaze to meet Amy Sheridan’s keen, inquisitive eyes. Her face rarely gave much away, but there was a hint of paleness around the grim line of her lips that suggested she’d seen something that had pierced even her rhino hide. His gaze moved past her into the burnt-out shell of the kitchen, where more forensics officers were busy taking photos, measuring distances, bagging evidence and marking where it had been found with little numbered flags. ‘It’s that bad, is it, Amy?’

  In reply, Amy stepped outside, her nostrils pinching as she sucked in a lungful of smoky air.

  Jim gave her a moment to recover herself, then said, ‘Tell me what we know.’

  ‘This place belongs to a Stephen and Jenny Baxley.’

  A faint frown of recognition crossed Jim’s forehead. ‘Baxley. Why does that name seem familiar?’

  ‘Stephen Baxley owns one of the largest engineering firms in Sheffield.’

  Jim nodded as his memory was jogged. ‘SB Engineering. He’s got a factory over at Attercliffe. So what else do we know about this guy? Has he got a record?’

  ‘We’re still running the background checks.’

  Jim pointed at the bloodstains. ‘What’s that about?’

  ‘That’s where the firemen who were first on the scene found the Baxleys’ fifteen-year-old daughter, Charlotte, and twenty-three-year-old son, Mark. Charlotte had been shot in the back of the head. She was unconscious, but alive. Mark had been shot in the right shoulder and left leg. He was conscious, but barely able to speak. Before being taken to hospital, he managed to say a few words that indicated his parents were dead in the house.’

  ‘And are they?’

  ‘So it seems. There are two bodies in there, one male, one female, but they’re too badly burnt to visually ID.’

  ‘Assuming it is them, do you have any hunches as to what we’re dealing with here?’

  ‘Well let’s just say I don’t think we’ve got burglars to thank for this mess.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘For starters there’s an Aston Martin sitting in the garage. It’s got to be worth well over a hundred grand. Why would burglars leave it behind? Then there’s the murder weapon. Right now it looks like Jenny Baxley and her children were shot with Stephen Baxley’s shotgun.’

  ‘What about Stephen Baxley? Was he shot too?’

  Amy shook her head. ‘The exact cause of death hasn’t yet been established.’ As Jim rubbed thoughtfully at his chin, she continued, ‘I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking the same as me, that Mr Baxley lost the plot and tried to off his family.’

  ‘That’s one possibility. Or maybe it was the son.’

  ‘He called this in.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean he didn’t do it.’

  ‘What about his injuries?’

  ‘Maybe he shot himself to make it look like he’s innocent.’

  Amy’s brow creased. ‘You seriously think he could’ve shot himself not just once but twice?’

  ‘It’s unlikely,’ conceded Jim, ‘but I’ve seen crazier things. I’m just tossing theories around. We can’t discount anything right now, including the possibility that this is the work of some very clever, very dangerous thieves. And let’s not forget that Stephen Baxley was a wealthy man. Men like him don’t get where they are without making enemies along the way. Have you checked the CCTV?’

  ‘We tried hooking its hard drive up to our computers, but it seems to have been damaged by the fire. It’s been sent off to the techies to see if they can retrieve the recordings.’

  ‘Good. Right, enough gabbing. Let’s get inside and see what we can see.’

  Jim pulled on a pair of latex gloves and headed into the house. With a slight reluctance in her step, Amy followed. The kitchen looked like the inside of a blasted-out bunker. A section of the ceiling had collapsed, exposing charred floor joists that radiated a faint heat. Cupboard doors hung off their hinges. Pots, pans and other cooking utensils bobbed around in several centimetres of scummy water on the tiled floor. Nose wrinkling as the water seeped into his shoes, Jim picked his way through the wreckage. A forensics officer
was squatting next to the corpse of a woman, her face burnt beyond recognition, a gaping wound in her chest. The stench of roasted flesh was enough to make even Jim’s jaded eyes water. ‘What’s her story?’ he asked. As the forensics bod turned to him, he recognised the pale, squinting eyes of Ruth Magill, the senior pathologist.

  Ruth removed a half-face dust mask. ‘Hell of a mess we’ve got on our hands here, Jim. I could hardly believe it when I got the call. This kind of thing, well, it just doesn’t happen around here. In answer to your question, she was shot by someone standing just inside the kitchen door, and thrown against those cupboards.’ She directed the almost invisible purple beam of an ultraviolet torch at some scorched cupboards, revealing a faint spray of blood spatters. ‘A cluster of shotgun pellets penetrated her heart. Death would have been instantaneous.’

  ‘Do you think it’s Mrs Baxley?’

  ‘Can’t say for sure, but she fits the description.’ Ruth held up a baggie containing the dead woman’s few surviving strands of hair. ‘Red-haired, about five-five or six, hundred and sixty pounds or so.’ She pointed at several rings on the corpse’s fingers. ‘And she’s married – or rather, she was married.’

  With a meaningful glance at Amy, Jim said, ‘Those look like expensive rings.’