‘If this is Grace I’m talking to, I want you to know that I’m here to help you,’ said the detective. ‘It’s not too late. You can still go home.’
A lump Angel couldn’t swallow formed in her throat.
Home.
The word filled her head with a storm of mixed emotions and memories, an almost schizophrenic clash of wants. She wanted to vent years of pent-up anger on her mum for not protecting her from her dad’s drunken rages. She wanted to look in her dad’s eyes and tell him she would kill him if he ever again laid a hand on her or her mum. But most of all she wanted to fall asleep in her mum’s embrace and wake up to find the last fifteen years had been just a bad dream.
The detective spoke in a reassuring tone. Part of Angel wanted to trust him, to believe he was telling the truth. But it was only a tiny, almost imperceptible part. Other men had spoken to her in equally reassuring, if more insidiously seductive tones in the past. They’d promised to help her and take care of her, but done the exact opposite.
‘All you need do is talk to me,’ the detective was saying. ‘You don’t have to do it now. You can call me anytime, day or—’
Angel cut him off, deciding that there was no point beating herself up about phoning her mum. In fact, it might have done her a favour. The phone call from this detective was a warning that she hadn’t been nearly cautious enough. From now on, things would be different.
As Angel made her way to the high street, her eyes continually shifted from building to building. Old ones had been torn down, new ones had been or were in the process of being built, but many familiar sights remained, haunting her with memories. Her gaze lingered on a cafe her mum had always taken her to when they went shopping; a pub she vaguely recalled being dragged to by her dad after a Sheffield derby match; a chippy she used to eat in with her mates. As though she’d walked smack into an invisible wall, she came to a stop at the corner of a backstreet. She couldn’t see if it was still there from where she was, but at the far end of the street there used to be a bar called The Minx. A seedy-looking place with blacked-out windows. Not the kind of place you’d expect a respectable businessman like Stephen Baxley to be familiar with. But that was where he’d first taken her on the night her life had changed forever.
As abruptly as she’d stopped, Angel started walking again. She went into a chemist’s and bought hair-dye, scissors and a set of non-prescription brown contact lenses. From a clothes shop she bought a black hooded top and matching jeans. She wandered around until her whore’s eye saw what it was looking for – a hotel that was big enough for its customers to remain anonymous, and rundown enough to hire out rooms by the day or hour. She paid for a couple of nights and signed a false name.
Angel’s room overlooked a busy roundabout encircled by office buildings, shops, bars and nightclubs. There was a double bed with some white towels folded on it, a dressing-table with a kettle and a small supply of coffee sachets, teabags and biscuits, and a windowless bathroom. In other words, it was identical to a thousand other hotel rooms she’d spent a thousand other nights in. The only difference was that this time there was no punter to service. She was hungry and bone-weary. But before she attended to those needs, there was another need that was more powerful. She took out a wrap of Mexican brown. After shooting up, she lay for several hours in the soft clutch of her high, cut off from pain and fear.
It was mid-afternoon when Angel rose and went to the bathroom. She cut her hair boyishly short, then dyed it red – an intense blood-red to match her mood. She drank a cup of tea and ate a couple of biscuits as she waited for the colour to take. She’d never dyed her hair before. Its jet-black colour was the one thing about herself that she’d always loved. With the contact lenses in, she barely recognised herself. She didn’t much like her new look. It made her appear younger yet somehow less attractive. But it was a small price to pay if it helped her achieve her purpose.
After changing into her new clothes, Angel put her heroin and her needles into a plastic bag. She knotted the bag and stashed it in the toilet cistern, then exited the hotel. She hailed a cab and told the driver to take her to Brightside Lane. The taxi left the city centre behind and entered an industrial area of towering steel mills and cavernous warehouses interspersed with pockets of sooty terraced housing. Angel stared out of the window, her eyes glittering with a strange intensity, as if she was watching for some sort of sign.
‘Stop here,’ Angel said, her gaze fixing on some tall, dirty-white letters on a factory building. The letters read ‘SB Engineering’. Stephen Baxley hadn’t told her he owned the factory. He’d never really told her anything about himself besides his first name. She’d gone through his wallet while he was sleeping and found a business card with ‘Stephen Baxley CEO’ and his company’s name printed on it. At the time, she didn’t know what CEO stood for, but she guessed it meant he was someone important. She’d also found a photo of Jenny Baxley. She still recalled the acid bite of jealousy she’d felt at the sight of her. It was the only time she’d felt jealous over a man.
Noticing a couple of police cars parked outside the factory, Angel paid the cabbie, got out and hurried on her way. The flat was a mile or so from the factory – close enough that Stephen Baxley could visit easily, but far enough away that there was little chance of anyone he knew seeing him there. As far as secrecy was concerned, it also had the advantage of being situated on a dead-end street of otherwise derelict terraced houses overlooking an equally derelict foundry. The flat where Angel had lived for almost eight months after running away was above an empty corner-shop. It was only a few miles from her parents’ house, but back then it might as well have been on the other side of the world.
The shop was still empty but had obviously been occupied at some point of late. The steel plates welded over its windows and the CCTV camera overlooking its steel-reinforced door suggested it had peddled something entirely different from newspapers and cigarettes. Two metal tubes protruded from the door. Angel had seen similar setups at drug dens in Middlesbrough. Punters put their money into one of the tubes, and the other spat out heroin, crack or whatever else their poison was. From the look of it, the property had recently been raided by police. The CCTV camera’s wire had been cut. The door bore the marks of a battering-ram. Most tellingly, a scrap of blue-and-white tape dangled like a banner of shame from the tubes.
Angel looked up at the flat’s barred window. Her mind flashed back to the seemingly endless days and weeks she’d spent lounging around the flat’s cramped confines, watching TV, reading whatever books and magazines Stephen Baxley brought her, eating whatever food he prepared. She’d lived like a hermit in the one-bedroomed flat, every part of her life controlled by Stephen, only going outside when he took her to his friends’ parties – not that they were parties in the sense that she’d understood the word. No presents had been given, unless you called ecstasy pills and wraps of coke presents.
She closed her eyes, racking her memory to recall the journey from the flat to the house where the parties had been held. She saw herself in the passenger seat of Stephen Baxley’s Mercedes, watching the passing city through its tinted windows. Holding the picture in her mind, she started walking. The car turned left. After a short distance, it turned left again. It followed the same road for half a mile or so, before making a right, passing the Northern General on its left. Angel walked fast, pausing occasionally to study some feature of the landscape – a thin line of woods, a green expanse of park, housing estates, more trees, more houses, a light industrial estate with a supermarket. Her calves ached. Beads of sweat wormed their way down her cheeks. One mile, two, three miles passed. Suddenly there were ploughed fields to either side of the road. Maybe a mile to the north more houses were visible. A dark line of trees marched across the western horizon.
Angel headed towards the trees, walking more slowly – not because she was tired, but because there were fewer landmarks to guide her memory. After passing some farm buildings, she paused at a fork in the road, her forehead wrinkled. ‘Which way? Which way?’ she muttered, closing her eyes, looking into a place in her mind that she’d done everything she could to avoid for the past decade and a half. She saw trees sweeping by on her left.
Nearly there, Angel
, she heard Stephen Baxley say. She felt the touch of his warm, damp hand against her cheek. Her eyes snapped open. Little shudders of revulsion running through her, she took the right-hand fork.
After another ten minutes or so, she stopped at the end of a gravel lane on her left that ran between two islands of trees separated from the main body of woodland by a couple of fields. The lane’s entrance was marked by a white post that stood out in her mind like an exclamation point. A sign with ‘Treetops Farm’ painted on it in black lettering hung from the post.
‘Treetops Farm,’ murmured Angel, her chest suddenly tight with the knowledge that she’d found what she was looking for.
The house was hidden from the main road by the trees, but an image of it emerged from her memory like a ship from a bank of fog. It was a large red-brick house with tall chimneys, a pillared porch, windows like eyes and a door like a big black mouth. She recalled vividly how, the first time she’d stepped through the door, for a crazy moment she’d had the feeling that the house was swallowing her up.
Angel started along the lane but after a short distance stepped off it into the trees. Moving with the wary alertness of a stalking cat, she picked her way through brambly undergrowth. She took out the gun. Just the weight of it in her hand eased some of the tightness inside her. She crouched behind a tree at the edge of a broad lawn. The house was a perfect image of rural tranquillity. It looked the same as she remembered, right down to the flower pots on the patio. There were no cars in the drive. The windows were dark and hung with net curtains, making it impossible to tell from a distance whether anyone was in. She resisted the temptation to dart across the lawn for a closer look. The daylight was softening into evening. Soon enough the house’s lights would tell her whether it was occupied or not. Then she could creep to the windows under cover of darkness to find out if the same couple still lived there.
‘Marisa and Herbert.’ Angel’s lips curled around the names as if they tasted sour. Their faces came to her, like looking at a grainy photograph. Her finger itched at the Glock’s trigger as she recalled the warm smiles and friendly eyes that hid their real selves. ‘Soon,’ she told herself. ‘Soon it will be time.’
Unless they don’t live here any more
, said her mind’s voice. She thrust the thought away. She couldn’t allow herself to consider that possibility. They had to still live here. They wouldn’t move. Not after everything that had happened at this place.
Angel settled down on the damp ground, shivering as the sweat lathering her body cooled. Half an hour passed, an hour, another hour. The daylight dropped to dark, but still no lights came on inside the house.
Have patience
, she kept telling herself,
they might be out for the evening. Even if they’re on holiday, you’ll just have to keep coming back day after day for as long as it takes.
‘As long as it takes,’ she repeated softly, over and over, like a mantra.
She fell silent at the sound of an approaching vehicle, hunkering down even lower as a pair of headlights swept into view. A Range Rover drew up to the house and two figures got out, a man and a woman. The man was several inches shorter than the woman, stocky, and wearing a flat cap. The woman was slim and tall. A scarf was tied over her hair. Angel squinted, but it was too dark to properly make out their faces. They climbed the steps to the front door and entered the house. A light came on in the hallway, but now the man was out of sight and the woman had her back to the doorway. The sound of a dog barking came from inside the house. The woman stooped and Angel caught a glimpse of long, floppy ears and brown-and-white fur. The woman ruffled the dog’s coat, then turned to close the door. Angel only saw her face for a second, but it was all she needed. Her heart suddenly hammering, she rose to her feet. ‘Now’s the time.’ The words hissed through her teeth, sharp and low. ‘Now’s the fucking time.’
Mark couldn’t breathe. Something was being pushed into his mouth, something cold and hard. Bitter liquid dribbled down his throat, making him gag. He tried to raise his hands to his mouth, but a heavy weight seemed to be pinning them down. He jerked his head from side to side to no avail. Waves of pounding dizziness crashed over him. A dense grey fog swirled in front of his eyes. He felt his eyeballs rolling back into his head, and the horrifying thought came to him,
I’m passing out. I’m dying.
He heard a voice that was slow and garbled, but which he recognised as belonging to Stephen. ‘Take your underwear off, Angel.’
The words pierced Mark’s brain like an injection of adrenaline, wrenching his vision into focus. He caught a glimpse of several indistinct figures who seemed to be floating amongst shadows. Then a face blotted them out, so close that all he could see of it were moist purple lips and a fat pink tongue slithering around a mouthful of overlapping, yellowed teeth. The mouth formed words that echoed as if they were coming at him from across a yawning chasm. ‘Are you certain he won’t remember anything?’ The voice was accentless and thick with longing.
Mark’s eyes snapped open. He hauled in a breath, wondering where he was. The pain in his shoulder reminded him. He couldn’t seem to get enough air into his lungs. He groped for the emergency cord. ‘I can’t breathe,’ he gasped as a nurse hurried into the room.
After a quick check of Mark’s vital signs, the nurse said, ‘You’re hyperventilating.’ She took his hands. ‘I want you to look into my eyes, Mark, and breathe with me. In, out, in, out.’
Gradually, Mark’s breathing returned to normal. ‘I had a dream.’