Tanners Dell: Darkly Disturbing Occult Horror (17 page)

She picked up straight away.

“I’ve got stuff to tell you,” she blurted out.

“Stop! Becky listen – I’ve got help for Kristy but you need to find out from Nora when Crispin Morrow’s off duty. Do it right now, will you? Michael is terminally ill and it’s urgent we go in as soon as possible. He’s got just days. I’ve never seen such a rapid decline and—”

“What – terminally ill, did you say?”

“Stage four prostate cancer as of two weeks ago!”

“Two weeks,” she said bleakly.

“Exactly.”

“Oh my good God.”

“Yes. So we need to act fast. His family are coming tomorrow so let’s see if we can fix it up for the day after? Do you have Nora’s private number? Keep her out of the loop as much as you can by the way, just give her the bare bones – that Kristy deserves some religious support and as Crispin Morrow won’t allow it then it will have to be when he’s not there – and that’s the extent of her involvement. We don’t want any harm coming to her.”

“I’m on it. Doing it now. I’ll ring you back in a bit.”

***

      
 
Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapeltown, Leeds

Monday night

In the end it hadn’t been too big a job tracking him down. Toby rubbed his hands together in the freezing night air as he queued for fish and chips on the street corner. On a night like this only the most hardy and desperate of prostitutes stood out on the pavements waiting for kerb crawlers. Scantily dressed in pelmet skirts, their bare legs were mottled from the cold and they huddled together smoking and chatting – most of them just teenagers - with scraped back hair and dead eyes.

Whilst wolfing down greasy chips with a plastic fork, he surreptitiously observed the kind of punters cruising by. Middle aged men most of them. ‘Pathetic bastards,’ he thought. ‘Imagine being that sad you had to pay for it!’

Ruby would have been one of these girls not so long ago. From what Becky told him, she’d been a user from the age of fourteen but her memories were addled to say the least. Had she been a prostitute then too? And did Jes bring her here at such a young age or was it after she left the mill when she’d have been around twenty? He shook his head. The girl could have been anywhere and done anything – off the radar like so many other lost kids. In many ways she was lucky to be alive because this was the underworld, and once you crossed the line you could easily vanish into thin air and not be missed.
There but for the grace of God…

He finished off the chips and looked around for a bin. Right, now his stomach was full he could start looking for Jes.

“Hi, gorgeous! You want good time, yes?”

He swung round to face a young girl with slanting eyes and a deadpan expression. The accent was eastern European and she flashed open a faux fur coat to reveal black PVC hot pants and a bra top with holes cut out of it. Her skin was pearl white, her body that of an emaciated twelve year old.

“No, love. Just looking for a mate.” He indicated she should fasten her coat up. “It’s freezing. Maybe you could help me find him?” He gave her his can of coke, which she immediately cracked open and knocked back. “Name of Jes? Dark hair, forties…”

Passing headlights caught the girl’s stoned expression. “Ah yes, Jes. Everyone they know him.”

Toby blinked, his heart racing. Had he found him already – with the first girl he asked on the first street corner in Chapel? “Really? That’s amazing. I haven’t seen Jes in ages.”

“You want come with me?” she said, moving closer. Her face was devoid of all the hope and animation a young girl should have as her God-given right. “Twenty pound - is good, yes?”

“I’m not looking for that, love. Honest. Just me mate – if you could tell me where he lives?”

She shrugged and held out her hand. “Five pound. You are his friend. I take you.”

Okay, well she might be taking him to a couple of thieving thugs and leave him for dead but he handed her the money and took that chance. He could run faster than anyone else he knew if the worst came to the worst.

The girl snatched the note and stuffed it down her bra top, then led the way to a row of boarded-up shops a few blocks down. Here the yards were strewn with discarded take-away cartons and litter lay decomposing in the drains. He followed her down a gennel and through an alleyway to the back of one of the terraces, then up a wrought iron fire escape and eventually through a heavily scuffed door covered in graffiti. Once inside the word, ‘seedy’ sprung to mind as the distinctive aroma of marijuana lingered in the air, along with ingrained tobacco and the stench of human sweat. “You follow,” she said, scooting down the dimly lit hallway past several rooms pumping with heavy base music. Right at the end of the corridor she stopped and knocked sharply on one of the doors.

“Fuck off!”

She turned and shrugged. “He is in.”

She knocked again and pushed it open. A swarthy bloke, handsome in an uncut kind of way, lay on a pock-marked sofa smoking weed. Springing to his feet he glared at her. “Who the fuck’s this?”

Toby stepped forwards. “Go on now, leave us.” he said to the girl, pushing her gently out of the door before closing it behind him. The two men stood facing each other. “I’m Toby – a friend of Ruby’s.”

The flash of recognition in the other man’s eyes told him he’d got the right guy but he’d probably get thrown out in seconds if he didn’t play this carefully. Holding out his hands in an appeasement gesture, he blurted out, “We need help. You are Jes, aren’t you? What a relief! Ruby said I’d find you here. Look mate, she’s in trouble and so is her daughter. Can we talk?”

Jes stared for a moment longer before sitting down again, his arm along the back of the couch. Casually gesturing towards the fridge in the corner, he said, “Help yourself to a beer. Toby, did you say your name was?”

Good. He’d bought himself some time. “Thanks, yeah.”

Jes watched and waited until Toby pulled open the can and sat down. “So…friend of Ruby’s, are you? I didn’t think she had any friends. Isn’t she banged up?”

Toby nodded. “Can’t say I blame her having a go at that bastard, Paul Dean though, can you?”

Jes shook his head, eyes narrowing. “How come you know Ruby? They haven’t let her out, have they? You’re not, you know, like in a relationship with her or anything?”

“Nah, nothing like that! It’s more that I know Becky, the nurse looking after her. Ruby’s still in the nutcracker suite if you know what I mean? Probably forever now. I can’t say it’s surprising really, what with her background.”

Jes never took his eyes off him. “Interesting. A friend of her nurse. So what’s all this about her being in trouble then? And a daughter, you say?”

Toby nodded and took a gulp of lager. The guy was both shrewd and wired. No doubt he had some heavies working for him too: on this side of the line you came up against all kinds of psychos the police wouldn’t even be able to find let alone touch. You could be dumped in a skip before you knew it. “Aye. Like I said, Becky’s asked me to help because Ruby’s worried about her daughter.” He related what he knew about Woodsend, aware that Jes was scrutinising him intently; unnervingly. “I don’t mean to be rude but you’re a last ditch attempt at trying to get some information.”

Jes leapt up. “You’re a copper!”

Fuck.
“Off duty.” He remained sitting but held his arms out wide. “Jes, I’m not interested in you, I swear. None of my colleagues know I’m even here – I’m off patch and off duty. I really am asking just as a friend. We need a lead – anything you can tell me for Becky and Ruby’s sake, not to mention this young lass, Alice. I won’t mention your name and I won’t quote you – I just need something that might help - anything. You’ve got my word.”

Jes towered over him. “I don’t need this shit.”

“No one does, but it’s desperate now. Really…” As fast as he could, Toby related all that Becky had told him, leaving nothing out and including what was in Linda Hedges’ diary. “So you see – everyone who’s tried to help is either dead or seriously ill?”

Finally, Jes conceded Toby’s sincerity and sat down again. “Right. Okay. Well it’s worse than I thought then. I honestly thought, hoped, the whole thing would die out – that maybe it was just something me and Ruby would have to live with and try to forget.”

“Tell me,” Toby insisted, less urgently now. “Tell me what happened there – right from the start. I want to do something about it but I can’t if I don’t know owt.”

“Well there was no point in people like me and Ruby coming to you lot, was there? Even now it’s a dead loss from what you’re saying.”

Toby waited.

“Okay, well what I suspected was all in bits and pieces anyway – none of it could be proved. And every time I got close I got burned – very, very badly burned like you wouldn’t believe. But I tried.”

“How do you mean, burned?”

“Ill. Don’t ask me how the bloody witch did it, but man you’d get so sick you couldn’t fucking move. If you’ve ever tried to detox from smack you might have some idea what it was like. It stopped you in your tracks – you had to get the hell out to save your own skin – then sneak in through the back door again and hope they didn’t sniff you out… It was like that demon witch could smell your blood.”

“Witch? Would this be Ida Dean? Not that anything can be done about alleged witchcraft.”

He nodded. “Exactly. She’s Ruby’s mother, the poor little cow. No wonder she was fucked up and suicidal when I met her. We holed up in Tanners Dell, down in the mill for a while, but she’d wake up screaming the walls down, saying she didn’t know who I was and there were ghosts floating into her face and stuff. Drugs calmed her down. In the end though, we left and I took her to the family camp in Devon. That’s where we found out we had the same genes – my mother was good with her, got her talking, see? Anyway, when she knew we’d the same blood she upped and left. I still would’ve taken care of her but she legged it all the same.”

“So how—”

“Yeah, well she had no place else to go, did she? I found her in the mill again a few weeks later – it was the only place she knew to hole up in. And she was in a really bad way by that time – seriously bad, totally loopy, like she was possessed by the fucking devil or something – so I brought her here to Leeds, to an old mate’s as it was then. We were both addicts and she was desperate for a fix. It was my way of looking after her, I suppose – to take away her pain. It hurt like hell to watch. After that she might disappear for a few days, but she always came back. And sometimes she seemed to know who she was; but most of the time she didn’t. The last time she went AWOL I went looking for her as usual but I didn’t get to her in time. She’d already knifed Paul Dean in his bed.”

“Hang on, I just need to understand something - could we rewind a bit? So you met her when she’d had this child already? She was fourteen, yeah?”

“No, sixteen.”

“Apparently not, no – she must have been fourteen, mate. She’s twenty-seven now and her daughter will be thirteen this year. That’s another reason we’ve got to act fast - because this child is going to get a satanic baptism for her birthday.”

“Fourteen? And she’d already had a baby?”

Toby nodded.

“Jesus wept! So hasn’t this nurse friend of yours reported the child as ‘at risk’ or something? Got child protection involved?”

“Yes but the entire case was closed down yesterday by my senior commanding officer. He says the girl isn’t in any danger from her parents, Ida and Paul Dean, so you—”

“Ernest Scutts?”

Toby blanched. “Er…yeah, but how did—”

“Don’t tell me you don’t know? Oh for fuck’s sake, what chance have we got with you fucking amateurs? I spent years tracking these bastards and so did Ruby, and we were neither of us in a fit state! Yeah, Scutts is in the nasty little coven, as is the friendly local GP, and the Reverend Gordon who preaches sermons every Sunday in Bridesmoor. They’ve got it all sewn up and no one can touch them because of what that witch does to people who try.”

What? Scutts? Holy crap…
“And you’ve known about this for how long?”

“Years. Since before you were born, that’s for sure.”

“How? I mean, how come you’ve got such an obsessive interest?”

Jes strode over to the fridge, handed Toby another can and snapped open one for himself. “My family are gypsies and I was born in Devon. My mother’s dead now but one summer when the camp was in Woodsend she went missing for several months and was never found. Meanwhile some of our women had miscarriages and still births – one of them committed suicide in the woods there. There was other bad stuff too and in the end they didn’t have much choice but to leave. All except Ida – she stayed because she’d got in with Lucas Dean.” He let the information sink into Toby’s brain for a moment. “Paul Dean’s disgusting old father. Looking for him was one of the reasons I found the old mill.”

“Why would you be looking for Lucas Dean?”

“Because of what he did to my mother. She managed to escape eventually, but not without having her life ruined.”

“Why did she never report it?”

“How could she? She was sworn to secrecy else there’d be revenge.”

“By who?”

“Cora Dean. Lucas’ wife.”

“Really? How did she know your mother then?”

“She helped her. My mother escaped while the coven was conducting a black mass. Somehow she got out – she doesn’t remember how because she was half dead after what they did to her, but she bumped into Cora in the woods at about five in the morning. What that woman was doing there at that time I don’t know, but she got her some clothes and told her to run and never ever come back. My mother managed, hitching rides until she found the family at an old haunt in Devon. After that they went over to Europe to get as far away as possible from the curse they believed was on them. When I found out what those pigs had done to my mother though, I came back – decided I’d find out who they were and kill them.”

“What happened?”

“First I had to get to England and find the place. Then I got lodgings and started tracking down the Deans. I was all pumped up but on the very first day in Woodsend it went badly wrong.” He smirked to himself and took another swig of lager. “It was like ‘they’ were waiting for me…Anyway, I met this woman in the woods and something pretty damn nasty happened shortly after – I got so badly sick I thought I was going to die, and it took me a long time to get well again. Anyway, when I came back a few weeks later to try and find out about her, no one knew who she was. Man, it was weird. I couldn’t work out what the hell happened. Had she drugged me or what? So there I was, wandering down to the river to try and work out what to do next, when I saw this girl lying underneath the surface of the water, just waiting to drown and be taken out of the world. I saved her.”