Angel of Death

by Ben Cheetham

  ‘Whose house was it?’

  ‘It belonged to Herbert and Marisa Winstanley. Do you know them?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well they know you. It was in their basement that you were—’ Angel broke off. She couldn’t bear to think of what had happened to Mark there, let alone say it.

  ‘Herbert and Marisa.’ Mark repeated their names slowly, as if trying to prod his memory. ‘What did they do to you?’

  ‘One of them, I don’t remember which, gave me some wine. It must have been spiked because I blacked out. When I woke up, I was groggy and my arms were being held down by Marisa. Herbert was raping me.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Mark breathed, swallowing hard.

  ‘When they were done, Stephen took me back to the flat. I lay on the bed, not thinking, just numb. He was in tears. Can you believe that? After what’d happened to me, he was the one crying.’

  Mark could hardly believe that. He couldn’t remember ever seeing Stephen shed a single tear.

  ‘He kept saying how much he loved me,’ Angel continued. ‘How he’d do anything for me. And do you know what the craziest thing of all is? I believed him. Why did I believe him?’ She shook her head, her eyes searching the darkness as if she might find an answer there. ‘A few weeks went by before Stephen said he had another friend who wanted to meet me. This time I knew what that meant. I was upset, I said I didn’t want to do it. But he pleaded and begged. Said he needed me to help him, like he’d helped me. Said if I truly loved him, I’d do this for him. He kept at it until I eventually agreed to do it. What else could I say? If I’d refused, he might have chucked me out and I’d have been forced to return home. I’d rather have fucked any number of his friends than risk that happening. So I went back to the Winstanleys’ house. A different bloke was there. He didn’t tell me his name. He just fucked me and fucked off. And that’s how it went from then on. Every few weeks Stephen would take me to the Winstanleys’ place, and afterwards he would feed me his lines about how sorry he was and how much he loved me.’

  ‘He was prostituting you,’ Mark said, with sudden realisa­tion. ‘How could you bear it?’

  ‘At first I couldn’t. But it wasn’t so bad after a while. There was always plenty of booze and drugs around. A bottle of wine and a snort of ketamine, and you don’t feel much of anything.’

  ‘Didn’t you ever think about escaping?’

  Angel expelled a sharp breath. ‘Haven’t you listened to a fucking word I’ve said? Where would I have escaped to?’

  ‘You could have gone to the police.’

  ‘They’d have returned me to my parents.’

  ‘Not if you told them why you ran away in the first place.’

  ‘Maybe, maybe not. You can’t trust coppers to always do what’s right. And even if they had done, I’d have ended up in a home or some other place under someone else’s control. At least with Stephen I had some control over my life.’

  ‘No you didn’t.’

  Mark was right, Angel knew. Stephen had controlled every aspect of her life – what she read, what she ate, who she fucked. The hold he’d had over her had been deeper and more deadly even than her addiction to heroin – he’d made her believe he loved her, and she’d been convinced she loved him too. It wasn’t love they’d felt for each other though. It was something else, something ugly and deformed, born of his perversion and her desperation. But by the time she’d realised that, it was already too late. Her head dropped as though it was too heavy to hold up. She didn’t have the energy or inclination to try and explain to Mark how she’d felt. Besides, the rest of the story was waiting to be told. It gnawed at her mind like a malignant tumour that was too deep to be removed.

  ‘On the day it happened, Stephen turned up at the flat in a right state.’ Angel spoke in a trembling monotone. ‘He was a nervous wreck. Said he had something he needed me to do for him, something our whole future could ride on. He took me to the Winstanley place. Two men I’d never met before were there. One was Doctor Henry Reeve. I don’t know the name of the other one. I call him the Chief Bastard.’

  ‘What did he look like?’

  ‘He’s about your height, but much more well built. And he’s bald with tufts of brown hair sticking out above his ears. And he’s got these nasty, pissy little brown eyes.’

  ‘What about his teeth?’

  Angel was silent a moment, searching her memory. ‘I don’t remember his teeth. I do remember his breath. It stank of cigars and booze and something else, something rotten. Made me want to puke. He was nervous too. All of them were. I overheard him more than once saying to the psychiatrist, ‘Are you certain he won’t remember anything?’’

  ‘That’s got to be him,’ exclaimed Mark. ‘The man I dreamt about. I heard him say the exact same thing.’

  ‘I assumed what they were talking about had nothing to do with me. I just thought I was there to screw them both. So I got to work on making sure I was too out of it to remember much myself. Next thing I knew, I was in the basement. There was a video camera and all sorts of sex toys down there. And there was a young boy. At first I thought he was asleep, but when I looked closer I saw that he was even more out of it than me. I was horrified. I tried to leave, but they wouldn’t let me. The Chief Bastard kept hitting me. He told me what he wanted me to do to you. It was sick. Beyond sick.’ Angel’s breath came in a shuddering groan. She twisted towards Mark with an imploring note in her voice. ‘I didn’t want to do it. Oh Christ, I didn’t! But you’ve got to understand. Stephen was a manipulative pervert. But the Chief Bastard, he was something else. When I looked into his eyes I just knew he’d kill me if I didn’t obey him. And he’d have enjoyed doing it too. So I… I…’ Her words gave way to a strangled sob.

  There were suddenly tears in Mark’s eyes too. His voice scraped out as though his throat was made of sandpaper. ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I… I’m sorry. I can’t.’

  ‘Please, Grace. I need to know.’

  ‘No you don’t. All you need to know is that you’re alive and they’re dead. All of them, except the Chief Bastard. And if I ever find him, I’m going to make him pay and pay for what he took from us. I won’t kill him fast like the others. I’ll slice him up bit by bit until he begs for death.’

  There was a thrill of anticipation in Angel’s voice that Mark recoiled from. She clearly took pleasure from the thought of hurting the Chief Bastard, just as her abuser had taken pleasure from hurting her. That didn’t make her the same as him, but it did stir up a deep unease in Mark. He silently waited for the rest of the story.

  A long while passed before she continued. ‘After that night, I was done with Stephen, with the Winstanleys, with everything. Stephen tried his usual lines on me, but I wasn’t listening any more. I hardly slept. And when I did, I had nightmares. I wanted to die. I thought about it constantly. I even tried to OD on some sleeping-pills Stephen brought me. But he found me and walked me round until they wore off. That’s when he said I couldn’t stay at the flat any longer. I begged him to change his mind, but he wouldn’t. He said I had to leave Sheffield for my own good. His friend from The Minx knew someone in Newcastle who could put me up. He warned me never to come back to Sheffield. Said if I did there’d be dire consequences for me and my family.’

  A tremor of disgust passed across Mark’s face. ‘The fucker used you and threw you away like a broken toy.’

  ‘He could’ve let me OD. Dumped my body somewhere for the coppers to find. Runaways die like that all the time. Nice and easy, no questions asked. It was a big risk letting me leave. I think maybe in his own fucked-up way he really did care for me.’ Angel frowned in silence for a moment, as though trying to gauge the truth of her words. With a shake of her head, she continued. ‘So one night this Geordie bloke came to the flat. He took me to a house in Newcastle where some other girls were living. Turned out this friend of Stephen’s friend owned a string of brothels and strip-clubs. Most of the girls were junkies. Within days, I’d had my
first hit of H.’ A sigh slipped from her lips. ‘And all the hurt, all the guilt, all the memories went away. After I came down, all I could think about was getting another fix, and another, and… And the rest is hardly worth telling. They bounced me from brothel to brothel, kept me back of house until I was old enough to work the clubs. And when they’d got all they wanted from me, when I started to look like the scag-whore I was, they let me go off with a pimp from Middlesbrough.’

  ‘So what made you come back here after all these years?’

  ‘Something happened. Something that made me realise it was time to start fighting back against all the beatings, the abuse, the rapes. Then I saw on the news what Stephen had done and I knew I had to get payback for what they did to us. And to make some kind of amends for what I did to you.’

  Mark could sense – could almost smell – the guilt emanating from Angel. Hesitantly, he reached over and touched her arm. She stiffened, but didn’t move away. ‘You don’t need to make amends for that. You only did what you had to do.’

  ‘No.’ Angel spat the word out vehemently. ‘I had a choice. There’s always a choice. I chose to survive when I should’ve let them kill me.’

  ‘Bollocks you should have. You were fifteen. A fifteen-year-old shouldn’t have to make choices like that. No one should.’ Mark’s voice was suddenly imploring. ‘If you truly want to do something for me, let go of this thing. I don’t want anyone else to die because of what happened to us.’

  ‘This isn’t just about you and me. It’s about all the other kids whose lives have been or will be destroyed by the Chief Bastard.’

  ‘Go to the police. Tell them what you know. Let them track him down and deal with him.’

  ‘I told you, you can’t always trust the police.’

  ‘So who can you trust?’

  ‘No one. I’d have thought you’d see that after everything you’ve been through.’

  ‘Sure I see it.’ Mark’s tone became steely, forceful even. ‘But I can’t, I won’t, allow it to define who I am. Don’t you see? If I do that, Stephen Baxley and the Chief Bastard will have won.’

  Angel’s pained face drew into even deeper creases. Mark’s words struck deep and true. For most of her life this thing… this guilty rage had consumed, directed and, until the past few days, weighed on her with a paralysing force. She hated it with every ounce of her being. But what would she do without it? Who would she be? ‘I can’t let it go. It’s too late for that. I have to see this to the end.’

  ‘When does it end? When the Chief Bastard’s dead?’

  ‘No. It ends when they’re all dead. Every one of them who’s ever hurt a child.’

  ‘Then it’ll never end, because you’ll never be able to kill them all.’

  ‘Maybe not, but I can try.’

  Mark removed his hand from Angel, releasing a breath heavy with sadness at the thought of her insane quest and the world that had driven her to it. A powerful feeling suddenly came over him that he had to get away from this place, get back to the city, to the hospital, to Charlotte. It seemed to him that if he didn’t do it now, he might be stuck here forever, sharing a dark, lonely limbo with Angel. ‘Do you think we’ve waited long enough?’

  ‘More than long enough.’

  Mark twisted the ignition key so that the dashboard lit up. He turned on the satnav. A blip on the GPS tracking screen pinpointed their location. ‘We’re a few miles south of Rotherham. East of the M1. Where do you want to go?’

  Angel turned the question over in her mind. The priority was to make sure Mark was safe. But where was safe? And what about herself? Where was she to go? Trying to come up with answers seemed to make her limbs feel impossibly heavy. ‘Just head towards Sheffield. When we get there, I’ll tell you where to go.’

  Mark started the engine. ‘Can you put the car in reverse for me?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘It’s easy. You just shift the gearstick into the slot marked—’

  ‘It’s not that. I can’t move my arms.’

  Mark turned towards Angel with a concerned frown. By the light of the dashboard, she looked like a sickly child. ‘Why can’t you move your arms?’

  Angel’s eyes moved, and Mark’s followed them to her stom­ach. He gasped at the sight of blood welling through her vest. ‘You’ve been shot!’

  She shook her head slightly. ‘It was when that fucker hit me in the barn. He had a knife. Take a look at it, will you? Tell me how bad it is.’

  Carefully, Mark lifted Angel’s sopping vest. The wound yawned like a cave in her abdomen. Something dark bulged through it. His mouth filled with bitter saliva at the sight. ‘It’s bad. Very bad.’ He shrugged off his dressing-gown, bundled it up and pressed it against the wound. Angel gave out a hoarse groan. Blood almost instantly soaked through the material. ‘We’ve got to get you to hospital.’

  ‘No! If I go there, I’m fucked.’

  ‘You’ll be even more fucked if you don’t. You’ll be dead.’

  Angel closed her eyes. She knew Mark was right. She hadn’t felt much when the knife went in, except for a winding sensation. But as the adrenaline had worn off, pain had begun pulsing outwards from the wound in white-hot waves. At the same time, numbness had come on in her arms. Now it was creeping through her legs, merciful but terrifying. Her face contorted with savage frustration. That she was dying didn’t matter. It only mattered that she would die before she’d had the chance to kill the Chief Bastard. She looked at Mark, her eyes burning with a fevered light. ‘Promise me you’ll find the Chief Bastard.’

  ‘But I wouldn’t know where to start.’

  ‘There is someone you can possibly trust to help you. Jim Monahan. He’s a cop.’

  ‘How do you know Detective Mo—’

  ‘It doesn’t matter how I know him. Just promise me you’ll find the Chief Bastard. And if the law can’t get to him, promise me you’ll make him pay.’

  ‘OK, OK, but only if you’ll let me take you to hospital.’

  ‘Say it. I want to hear you say it.’

  ‘I’ll find him and…’ Mark hesitated to make the second part of the promise. The Chief Bastard had already taken part of his innocence. There was no way he was about to lose the rest of it over him. No matter what Angel said, he had to trust the law. But he saw that it was necessary to lie if she was to survive. ‘And if the law can’t get him, I will.’

  The wild light in Angel’s eyes faded to a weary resignation, an acceptance that she’d done everything she could, given everything she’d got. Suddenly there was only one place she wanted be, only one person she wanted to see. ‘There’s someone you can take me to. A doctor I know. She’ll patch me up.’

  ‘You need more than patching up.’

  ‘Either you take me to her or I’ll get out of the car right here.’

  Mark looked at Angel uncertainly for a second, then heaved a sigh. ‘Where does this doctor live?’

  Angel told him the address and he punched it into the satnav. He put the Audi in reverse and they set off again. At every rut and pothole the car exploded over, pain blazed up Angel’s spine into her throat, choking off her breath. Her vision was fraying at the edges. Darkness seemed to be seeping into the car like ink, staining its interior blacker and blacker. She focused on the satnav’s robotic voice, holding on to every word like a drowning person clutching a lifebuoy. The road and street names were gradually becoming more familiar. She gagged. Something acrid and coppery-tasting filled her mouth. She spat it out.

  ‘Hold on,’ said Mark. ‘It’s not far now.’

  ‘Not far now,’ Angel repeated, slurring the words. ‘Not far now, not far…’

  Then she saw it. Looming through the night like the ram­part of some ancient fort. Hillsborough Stadium. Mark turned onto her parents’ road and pulled over outside their house. He eyed the two-up, two-down terrace doubtfully. ‘A doctor lives here?’

  He jumped out of the car and hammered on the door. A light came on in the upstai
rs window. A moment later, the door opened on a safety chain. A woman peered through the gap between door and frame. As soon as he saw her timid, questioning eyes, Mark guessed he’d been lied to. Her face was lined with age and worry. It was the face of someone used to taking instructions, not handing them out. ‘Are you a doctor?’

  The woman shook her head, looking at Mark in his blood-stained pyjamas as though she suspected he was a madman.

  ‘Then a doctor doesn’t live here?’

  ‘No. What gave you that idea?’

  ‘I was told…’ Mark tailed off as it struck him that the woman’s eyes had the same feline shape and porcelain-blue colour as Angel’s.

  An inarticulate groan rasped from the car. The woman squinted over Mark’s shoulder. ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Someone’s hurt. Can I use your phone?’

  The woman blinked, uncertain. ‘Look, I don’t want any trouble. My husband—’

  ‘Please. She’s dying!’

  ‘Dying?’ The woman’s uncertainty gave way to frowning concern. ‘Who’s dying?’

  The groan came again. This time it contained a word, only just audible. ‘Mum.’

  The woman stiffened as though she’d heard a voice from a coffin. ‘Grace?’ She breathed the name through trembling lips. ‘Is that you?’ She fumbled at the security chain, struggling with unsteady hands to unhook it. She stepped into the street in her dressing-gown, barefooted. She didn’t seem to notice the cold of the pavement as she approached the car and stooped to look inside it. Her hand shot to her mouth, partly stifling a sound that expressed both shock and horror. Mark’s gaze darted back and forth between the women, and it was like looking at two photos of the same person taken twenty-odd years apart.

  ‘Hello, Mum,’ said Angel, her voice fading even as she spoke.

  ‘Grace, Grace,’ Linda Kirby murmured as if in a trance.

  ‘Help…’ Angel’s voice caught on her pain. She swallowed, then continued, ‘Help me into the house.’