A Cross to Bear: A Jack Sheridan Mystery

by Vogel, Vince

  His phone vibrated in his pocket, urging Jack out of his darkened daydreams. When he opened his eyes, he realized they were soggy with tears. He wiped them and irritably pulled his phone out. It was George Lange, a young detective constable aged twenty-seven, fresh out of uniform and only a year on the job with Upper Hackney CID. He reminded Jack of himself at that age, and Lange’s youthful face, untainted by years on the job, often irritated him.

  “You do realize what day of the week this is?” Jack fumed into the phone.

  “I do, sarge. But I’ve been told to call you by Mr. Caldwell. It’s urgent.”

  “Sunday was the answer I was looking for, Detective Constable. The day of rest. And as a Roman Catholic, I’m due a day of rest. This is something that Mr. Caldwell should very well understand. And something…”

  “So that means you were at church today, then, sarge?”

  This immediately cut Jack off.

  “You don’t have to go to church. Just rest,” Jack grumbled back, taking another sip of whiskey.

  “Well, as much as this is going to spoil your day of rest, DCI Caldwell—our boss—has requested that you attend a crime scene with me.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s him.” Jack instantly sat up in his chair. He knew who “him” was. “He’s killed again.”

  3

  “Do you really have to smoke in my car, sarge?” Lange complained to Jack with a sideways glance, an irked look on his face.

  Lange’s light brown complexion fitted his handsome face, and he was immaculately dressed, as always, his neat dark brown hair draping to the side. He had the groomed look of a man well looked after by a woman at home, a nice girlfriend that made sure he left the house each day looking his best. This rattled Jack even more.

  “Yes,” Jack replied, holding his fag up to the gap in the window. “I’ve been gagging for one all day, and I can’t smoke in the house.”

  “You live alone, though, don’t you, sarge?”

  “So?”

  “Well, why can’t you smoke at home if there’s no one else there to object?”

  “Because I can’t.”

  George Lange shook his head and concentrated on driving them through the dreary afternoon rain. Jack concentrated on his fag and the mug of coffee he’d brought with him. There was no hope of sobering him up, but at least it would shield the smell a bit. He glanced out the window at the rain-blurred city, wishing inwardly that it would wash away for good. This city could be cruel to its people. Too cruel.

  They stopped at traffic lights, and Jack surreptitiously gazed out at a filth-covered young couple sitting on a tattered sleeping bag with their backs hunched against a shopfront, a whitewashed window with a big “closed down” sign hanging in it. The waif girl hugged into the bony flank of her fella, and he held a thick sheet of cardboard above their heads in an attempt to keep the worst of the downpour off. Their dirty, pockmarked faces were struck with looks of wretched ignominy, their eyes reaching out to Jack from across the field of rain. They must have only been in their early twenties, their lives already shells of existence.

  Jack took another drag of his cigarette as Lange drove away from the lights, the shivering couple disappearing in the wing mirror. They were traveling through the outer parts of the city, a weedy tangle of boarded-up places. It was now a city of empty husk buildings that appeared to replicate the lives of the listless creatures that inhabited this space. A world away from the tourist traps of Big Ben and Buckingham Palace. There they promoted life. Here it was living death.

  “You watch the footy?” Lange asked, more out of a need for something to say than anything else.

  “Yeah. I watched it,” Jack said in an echo of a voice. “Millwall had a go, missed a bunch of chances, and then West Ham scored two goals at the end. You watch it?”

  “Yeah. With some of the others at the station.”

  Silence resumed and Jack’s attention returned to the passing streets, until they too disappeared.

  Leaving behind the citified detritus, they entered the countryside roads of London’s borderlands. The emergence of treelined roads and the splash of green to add to the gray hardly brought Jack out of his drunken despondency. Over the years, the woods around London had come to mean something wholly unsettling to Jack. Having investigated murder in the city for nigh on three decades, these wooded enclaves had called out to him on many occasions offering up a body, and he always wondered how many more were trapped beneath the soil, waiting to be found and therefore call out.

  They pulled into the mud and puddles of a car park and were immediately faced by a line of several police cars with their lights flashing in the murky rain.

  “Why the high presence?” Jack asked Lange as the latter parked next to them.

  “It was the Territory Support Group who were first alerted.”

  “Of course,” Jack said, surprised at his own naivety. “It was the big fight today.”

  “Yeah. It was two of the fighters that initially found the body. The TSG were here monitoring their activity, videoing them and making sure it didn’t get out of hand.”

  “Why didn’t they stop it?”

  “They haven’t got the numbers for that anymore, sarge.”

  “No. I guess they haven’t.”

  “They just form a cordon and monitor. Try to see if they can identify anyone later.”

  “So, getting back to it, two of these brawlers alerted the TSG out here and they called us?”

  “Yeah. The call came in to Upper Hackney. When they described the condition they found the body in, I called up Caldwell.”

  “Why bother Caldwell?”

  “Because he wants me to report instantly to him on anything new.”

  “You should tell him to concentrate on the budget and making sure there’s enough paper in the printers, instead of concerning himself with our cases.”

  “Would do, sarge, but he is the boss.”

  Jack sighed and looked back out the window at the heavy rain. Not half an hour earlier, he’d been sat in the warmth, a whiskey in his hand, listening to his record collection. Now he was in the middle of the woods in the pissing rain about to see a dead body.

  “You got an umbrella?” Jack enquired while he leaned forward to see through the visor of rain cascading down the windscreen.

  “No.”

  Jack looked at him with raised eyebrows.

  “You don’t own an umbrella?”

  “No, I own an umbrella. I just don’t have one in the car.”

  “I wish you’d have said, George. I could have grabbed one from the house.”

  “I didn’t think. Sorry.”

  Jack opened his door straight out onto a dirty brown puddle.

  “It gets worse,” he said as he struck his foot straight down into it.

  Under the deluge of water, the two made it to the police cordon, where they found several uniform officers guarding the police tape at the edge of the wood. Around them, a few pockets of football-shirted men stood together wearing looks of concern, the discovery of the dead girl having eased their violent tendencies. Jack and Lange flashed their badges and were let through.

  “Scotland Yard boys and forensics are further down that track,” one of the officers shouted through the blistering storm while he held the tape up for them to pass under. “You’ll see them in about a hundred meters.”

  “Have either of you boys got an umbrella?” Jack said loudly once he was through.

  Both men shrugged.

  Jack and Lange walked along a mud trail of parallel puddles leading through an avenue of spindly black-limbed trees, the sound of the furious rain echoing in their ears. They trundled on with mud-drenched shoes and socks until they saw a high-visibility jacket blinking in the gloomy distance.

  Jack recognized the jacket’s smug face the moment he and Lange were a few meters from him. His name was DCI Chris Pierce of Scotland Yard, a member of the Metropolitan Police’s Special Crimes Unit. His bleach
ed white complexion shone in the rain, and his tall, thin body always brought to Jack’s mind a tapeworm. Everything appeared stretched out on Pierce, from the thin-cheeked tall head to the long bird’s legs dangling from his bony ass. Jack imagined that the man’s dick must resemble a drummer’s stick.

  “Good of you to turn up, boys,” Pierce said cheerfully, glancing down at the two men’s mud-clod shoes. “Should’ve brought your wellies,” he added, showing off his own green boots.

  “Never mind soddin’ footwear,” Jack snapped. “Where’s our body?”

  “Not really your body, though, is it, Jack.”

  “If I’m not mistaken, this is Epping Forest, is it not? And isn’t Epping under Upper Hackney’s jurisdiction? Or is one of us in the wrong place?”

  “But Epping is in London, and London is Scotland Yard’s jurisdiction. Not just some shitty little corner, but the whole thing.”

  “Don’t test my patience, Chris. You know how this works.”

  Pierce said nothing and simply pointed into the woods.

  “That’s better,” Jack said as he passed on his way.

  It wasn’t long before Jack and Lange saw people walking about dressed in white overalls, resembling ghosts wandering about among the rain, trees, mud, and leaves. It was the forensics team. Approaching them, Jack saw the small white tent that had been put up over the body.

  When they reached it, Jack took a pair of rubber gloves from his coat pocket and told Lange to wait outside. Having put the gloves on, he entered the tent. Inside, crime scene investigator Shiva Patel was leaning over the body taking pictures. The detective’s eyes were immediately drawn to the outstretched girl, to her wide staring eyes, blue lips, and ankles crossed over each other, a single large nail going through both into the wood underneath. Two other nails went through each palm, the fingers curling inward due to the onset of rigor mortis and resembling dead spiders. Gazing along her naked body, Jack couldn’t believe how lacking in color she was. She was almost as white as Shiva’s overalls. Like the others, she was nailed neatly to a well-made wooden cross. Like the others, she was young, late teens or early twenties, her blue eyes fixed open, pretty with a head of flaxen blonde hair—always blondes—and like the others, she had been crucified.

  Jack returned to her face. Though the blue eyes appeared to desperately reach out into some void that only she could see, there was a certain serenity to her, a peacefulness that Jack had also sensed when close to the bodies of the other two girls. Observing the numerous marks on their skins, the bruises, needle scars and other blemishes, Jack assumed they’d led sad lives. This one was no different. As Jack’s eyes traveled along the arms to where her hands were nailed, he spotted the pink lines on her wrists, shining from the pallid skin like silky worms. This girl had suffered too. They’d all suffered, and now they were at peace.

  “It certainly looks like our man,” Jack stated.

  “I think so too,” Shiva replied without looking up, rolling on his film.

  Patel was a tall man of Indian origin, though his clean English accent placed him firmly within the realms of the British middle class. Jack had known him since his days at Scotland Yard, and the two had formed a tight alliance ever since, each respecting the other’s ability at their particular profession.

  “You think you have much of a crime scene?” Jack enquired.

  “Not really. The rain’s destroyed anything we may have had.”

  “How long’s she been dead?”

  “Unlike the others, this one’s pretty fresh. From taking her temperature, my early analysis is that she’s only been dead for a day at most. Of course, I’ll know for sure once we get her back to the office.”

  Shiva continued to take his pictures, and Jack continued to stand over him studying the body. The camera’s flash went off, and Jack felt himself taken back to another time. It had happened with the previous bodies as well, a distinct feeling of déjà vu attacking him.

  It was Christmas Eve fifteen years ago. Jack was waiting at Shoreditch Police Station for a contact to meet him there. He was still Scotland Yard back then, and this contact had some important information on a traitor high up in the Metropolitan Police Force who was apparently in bed with several London gangsters—a big wheel that had turned the wrong way. The contact was late, and it wasn’t until Jack heard the screams coming from the street outside that he learned why. A van had shot past and thrown something out of its back doors onto the pavement, right outside the station. Jack came out to the sounds of uniform coppers shouting for people to get back. A sizable crowd had gathered around whatever it was that had been so unceremoniously dumped, and many of them were crying out in distress. Jack pushed his way through and would never forget what he saw on the other side.

  On the ground was the blood-covered body of Detective Sergeant John Dorring—the contact Jack was supposed to meet. Dorring had had his throat slit open so far that at first Jack mistook it for a wide, smiling mouth. And if that wasn’t enough, whoever had killed him had stretched his body out and nailed it to a crude wooden crucifix. Jack noticed one wailing woman attempting to make her way to the body and an officer holding her back. “John! John!” she shouted, her face contorted into a desolate grimace. It was Dorring’s wife, and a short distance behind her stood a four-year-old girl being held by a teenage boy, their anguished faces laced with tears. They were Dorring’s children. They’d come to meet their father from work on Christmas night. Those grieving faces left a stain on Jack that’d never vanished since that dreadful day.

  “I’ll leave you to finish,” Jack said. “When do you reckon you’ll have prints and DNA swabs done?”

  “We should have the area finished in an hour or two. There’s not much more we can do in this rain, so I’ll get confirmation later tonight.”

  “Can you do an old pal a favor?”

  “Are we old pals now, Jack?”

  “I’d like to think so.”

  “And I take it this favor would be to contact you with anything before I call up Scotland Yard?”

  “You always were the smart one, Shiva.”

  “I guess I am, old pal.”

  “So does that mean you’ll call me first?”

  “It does.”

  “Good man. I’ll speak to you soon.”

  Jack left the tent, taking one last look at the girl’s open-eyed face before stepping back out into the rain. In the woods, he found the drowned rat of Lange.

  “Is it him?” the detective constable asked.

  “It looks like it,” Jack replied, taking a slow look around the cold trees. “I don’t think there’s much more we can do here, George.”

  “So what now?”

  “Now, we get out of this rain.”

  Jack walked off, back toward the dry embrace of the car, and Lange followed. As they came up a slope toward the puddled dirt track, they found that the yellow visibility vest had doubled. Chris Pierce of Scotland Yard now stood with his partner, Harry Locke of Scotland Yard. As tall and thin as Pierce was, Locke was as short and fat. He resembled three balls rested upon each other, each smaller than the next—the largest making up the waist, gut, and legs, the next the chest, and finally the smallest, though still big and round, making the head. Dangling from that head was a collection of dutifully clean-shaven chins pressed into each other, and on top, a covering of stubbled brown hair.

  “I was wondering where shithead two was,” Jack said as he and Lange came upon them.

  “Ha ha,” the pair let out mockingly.

  “Is that booze I smell on you, Jack?” tubby Locke stated.

  “No, it’s your wife’s perfume. You should spend a little more on her at Christmas.”

  “I hope you haven’t entered a crime scene pissed, Jack,” Locke went on, trying to be as blasé as possible regarding Jack’s comment on the fidelity of his spouse. “We wouldn’t want to have to inform Detective Superintendent Parkinson about this. Get you kicked off the case.”

  “It was suppose
d to be his day off,” Lange defended.

  “What’d you do—pick him up from the pub?” the wormlike Pierce put to him.

  “No. He was at home.”

  “Ah! Home. The last bastion of the sad old drunk!”

  “All right, George,” Jack said, feeling that his young colleague wasn’t doing a very good job of fighting his corner. “Let’s leave these two alone for the day. Their odd appearance unsettles me.”

  Jack and Lange moved off through the rain, rejoining the mud trail.

  “Yeah, you boys jog on,” Locke shouted after them. “Let the real cops do their job.”

  When Jack and Lange reached the police tape, the mud now splashed up to their knees, they saw that the press had already arrived. Ignoring the questions that naturally came their way as they crossed back into the car park, the two made it to the warmth of the car.

  Lange went to start the engine, but Jack stopped him.

  “I wanna have a fag first.”

  “Can’t you have one while we’re moving?”

  “No,” came Jack’s curt reply.

  Lange merely sighed and ceded to his superior’s wishes.

  Jack liked to sit and think after each crime scene, soak himself in the images he’d just witnessed. He’d sit there smoking and gazing blankly into the space of his own mind.

  This girl was almost identical to the first two, except for one point. The cross was different. The first two had been nailed to more decorative crosses with rounded edges. This cross, though still well made, was much more basic, just four pieces of polished wood butting together in the center. It was a small detail, but it bothered Jack.

  His mind slowly drifted back to the image of John Dorring on his cross. That one was two pieces of wood roughly hacked together, and the postmortem showed that Dorring had been nailed while still alive, his throat opened up as he lay mutilated. These girls, on the other hand, had been euthanized before the act of placing them on the cross. The killer murdered them with an overdose of street heroin after sedating them with flunitrazepam, aka Rohypnol. As well as that, the killing of Dorring had served as a very particular warning. The Shoreditch detective had gotten too far into things he shouldn’t have. His death had been a caution to all those coppers who thought too highly of themselves and decided to stick their noses into other people’s shit. The monster killing these girls, however, wasn’t sending out threats; he was making a statement.