A Cross to Bear: A Jack Sheridan Mystery

by Vogel, Vince

  “After tonight they won’t be able to. Now I need you to stay in this room away from the door, and don’t leave no matter what. Can you do that?”

  “Yes. But why?”

  “You shouldn’t ask such questions.”

  Alex got up, Sonya still sitting there glaring at the money. He went into the bathroom briefly before stepping back into the room. When he reached the door to the outside corridor, he turned back to the child prostitute and said, “Promise to stay back.”

  For the first time, she turned from the money and saw the pistols in his hands. Her eyes widened.

  “Just stay back,” he said and disappeared out the door.

  DAY TWO

  5

  Jack stood in his back garden under an umbrella, smoking a cigarette, his morning coffee balanced on top of a trash bin lid beside him. His breakfast had consisted of cigarettes, coffee, and Nurofen.

  Staring at his rain obscured lawn, he continued to think about John Dorring’s death. That night, after initially seeing the chaos, he had taken the children back inside the station, away from both the mutilated body of their father and their hysterical mother, who’d plain forgotten her two children in the midst of her swirling paroxysm of misery. He’d led them through to one of the offices in the back. Big brother and little sister had sat together on a small leather couch, huddled into one another, staring into space and not saying a word.

  Without knowing why, Jack had placed his jacket around their shoulders. It wasn’t that the room was cold. It just seemed the right thing to do. He’d asked them if they’d like something to drink, and not a word emerged from their tear-drenched faces. Without pushing for an answer, he left the room and got them both a hot chocolate. At the machine, the station echoed with the wailing cries of their mother. She’d been taken to another room in the station, a paramedic now seeing to her. Jack had glanced across the hall and wondered if the noise was loud enough to reach the children.

  Jack had returned with the hot chocolates and sat with the silent children until the drinks were stone-cold and their aunt and uncle had come to pick them up. Not even when they left did they say a single word to him. He only remembered gazing after them as they went out through the door, the boy cradling the girl, wondering what came next for their young lives.

  His phone going off brought Jack out of his reverie, and he plucked it out of his pocket.

  “Shiva.”

  “Good morning, Jack.”

  “Is it good?”

  “It is now. I just got one hundred percent confirmation back on the body.”

  “You’ve IDed her?”

  “I have. Both prints and DNA.”

  Jack looked up to the heavens at the thick gray sky that encircled the city. In the month the killer had been at large, he’d left them nothing. Neither of the two previous bodies had been identified. Not through prints and not through the DNA database. They were essentially ghosts, Jane Does. Probably living illegally in the UK, and therefore not down on any of their records.

  “Who is she?”

  “Her name’s Becky Dorring. Nineteen years of age.”

  Jack’s head began to ring.

  “Who?”

  “Becky Dorring.”

  Can’t be, Jack thought.

  “Have you got her records up in front of you?”

  “No. Should I?”

  “Are you near a computer?”

  “I’m in my office, so yes.”

  “Can you get the girl’s records up?”

  “Sure. Give me a second.”

  Jack tugged hard on his cigarette, clenching it tight between his lips. Surely it couldn’t be. That would be too much of a coincidence.

  “Got it now, Jack.”

  “What are her parents’ names?”

  “Mother Helen Cuthbert, and father John Dorring. Deceased.”

  Jack’s head really began to ring now, as though someone had struck the inside of it with a hammer. The image of the little girl turning back to him as she walked out the office door came floating up in his mind. That empty look upon her face—it had been the same look she wore yesterday when he’d looked down upon her dead body.

  “What is it, Jack?”

  “Nothing,” he replied, shaking his head. “Have you notified Scotland Yard?”

  “You first is what you said.”

  “Good man, Shiva. I owe you a pint.”

  “And like I keep telling you, I don’t drink.”

  “Yeah, but I still keep racking them up for you, ready for when you start.”

  “I should have my own wine cellar by now.”

  Jack was about to say his goodbyes, when he was struck with a sudden thought.

  “How come we had prints and DNA?” he wanted to know.

  “How do we ever have these things. She was arrested.”

  “When and for what?”

  “Let me see. Ah! Here it is. Two years ago she was arrested for underage solicitation.”

  “Bloody hell,” Jack let out, feeling something tug at his stomach. “Was she ever charged?”

  “She was never charged for the solicitation. Just arrested. The whole thing was dropped down to a public lewdness offence, and she only received a three-year caution in the station. Nothing else. It says that she was caught performing fellatio on an older man in his car. The officers were on a routine patrol at night and came by them.”

  “She was seventeen,” Jack muttered half to himself.

  “She was.”

  “When’s the autopsy due?”

  “This afternoon at three. I take it you’ll be in your usual ringside seat?”

  “I will.”

  ‘Well, I’ll see you there. I need to get on.”

  “Okay. Thanks, Shiva.”

  Jack slipped the phone back in his pocket, stubbed the cigarette out, and tossed the butt in the bin. Then he made his way back inside. At the door, he removed his shoes and let down the umbrella, making sure not to enter the house with it still up. Placing the shoes on newspaper inside the door and hanging the brolly on the rack, Jack went into the kitchen, where he immediately washed his cup and dutifully tidied the rest.

  Once that was done, he left the house, got in his car and drove through the pouring rain to Upper Hackney police station, the image of the sad little girl clinging to his mind the whole journey.

  6

  The second Jack walked out of the rain and into Upper Hackney, Joe Peterson, the morning desk sergeant, informed him that DCI Caldwell wanted to see him urgently. Jack waved it away and merely made his way to the detective office at the back of the station, giving a gruff hello to everyone he passed.

  Walking into the office, he found George Lange at his desk.

  “Morning, George,” he grumbled as he made his way to the back of the room where his own desk lay underneath its usual pile of mess.

  “Sarge,” Lange acknowledged, glancing up from his computer screen.

  “Have you heard we’ve got a name to go with our young girl found yesterday?”

  “Yeah. DCI Caldwell just this minute briefed everyone. He was hoping you’d be here.”

  “I never attend briefings, he knows that.”

  “Well, he still seemed pretty miffed you weren’t there. He told me to tell you that he wanted to see you the second you came in.”

  “So Peterson just said.”

  “If I were you, I’d see him now. He’s done that thing were his face goes all red like he’s got a rash or something.”

  “Caldwell and his rash can wait. First, I need you to get me everything you can on Becky Dorring.”

  “Already have.”

  “Good. You know if anyone has been sent to inform the family?”

  “Not yet. They were going to send someone later today.”

  “Well, they can wait. Tell me what you’ve got on our victim?”

  “Not much really. Becky Dorring. Nineteen. Attends Mary Magdalene Secondary School.”

  “She’s nineteen and
still at school?”

  “Took a year out, I guess.”

  “Go on.”

  “Sunday morning her mother calls the local police station to say Becky is missing. But because of Becky’s age and the fact that she hadn’t been missing for twenty-four hours by that point, there was no action taken as yet.”

  “When does the report say the mother last saw her?”

  “Saturday, early evening.”

  “That’s a bit soon to report a nineteen year old missing. What else is in the missing report?”

  “Becky left the house at six and went to study with a friend. The mum said she’d called the friend that night an hour after Becky was due back and the friend told her Becky had left their house at nine. But like I said, no action was taken because it wasn’t twenty-four hours. Apart from that, there’s nothing else in the report.”

  “What else you got?”

  “She was picked up two years ago for solicitation. No charges submitted to the CPS. She was given a street caution— ”

  “Yeah yeah,” Jack said, waving him away. “I got all that.”

  The door opened and both men’s eyes automatically glanced toward it.

  In strolled the rotund figure of Detective Constable Paul Ryan, busy looking at some paperwork he held up to his characteristically confused face. The moment he reached his desk, he glanced up from the papers, looked straight at Jack, and said, “DCI Caldwell wants to see you, sarge. Told me if you didn’t go immediately, I was to inform him that you were here.”

  “For fuck’s sake,” Jack moaned, getting up from his desk.

  DCI Peter Caldwell was a proud man. He was born and raised in the Govan area of Glasgow, Scotland. He was proud to be Glaswegian, even if he had swapped the grime of his home city for the grime of another. He was proud to serve Her Majesty’s police force. Proud to wear its uniform. He was proud of his church-singing voice that puberty had done little to falter. Proud of his stoical wife, Margaret. His boys, Jonathan and Nigel. His two pedigree German Pointer dogs. His four-bedroom detached in one of the nicer suburbs of East London. His membership to a certain masonic lodge. His car. Even his looks made him proud, though at five feet tall and more belly than man, he’d always reminded Jack of a pig walking around on its hind legs, especially with his little tuft of silver hair curling up at the front of his pink head.

  Most of all, though, Peter Caldwell was proud of himself. Proud of his own achievements, which he always saw as coming to him despite the fact that he perceived antagonism from every quarter.

  A knock at the door of his office brought Caldwell out of his paranoid thoughts of unseen tyrannies, and his round eyes flicked reptilian-like toward it.

  “Come in,” he said in his rather put-on well-to-do voice, doing his best to leave as little trace of his beloved Glasgow in it as possible.

  In came the sorry figure of Jack Sheridan, bringing with him a tinge of irritation to unsettle the otherwise phlegmatic detective chief inspector.

  “Ah, Jack! Glad you could join us,” Caldwell announced sardonically. “Take a seat.”

  This last part was spat out like a command.

  Jack disregarded the tone, closed the door behind him, and took the proffered chair opposite Caldwell’s desk. Like every other time he came to sit in this office, Jack instinctively gazed at the framed photographs that stood proudly on the wall behind the rotund DCI. The one that always got Jack was Caldwell in his Glasgow Rangers shirt at Ibrox Stadium. In Glasgow, Protestant-Catholic sectarianism divided even which football team you supported. Celtic were Catholic. Rangers Protestant. Jack was Irish Catholic, and whenever he looked at that particular picture of Caldwell the Rangers fan, he could almost hear his commanding officer’s voice singing out in the midst of thousands of other similar voices to the tune of She’ll Be Coming Round The Mountain, “Won’t you have a chicken dinner, Bobby Sands.” The bastard probably got involved in the Orange march every year as well.

  “Why weren’t you at briefing?” Caldwell wanted to know.

  “I don’t attend. We agreed on this. Briefing is mainly for uniform and anyone that can’t be bothered to keep up to date.”

  “But, like everyone else at the station, you got my email about all senior officers attending while this crucifix killer is still at large.”

  “The ‘crucifix killer’!? Even you’re calling him that now?”

  “Not officially,” Caldwell said, slightly abashed and straightening out his tie as he did. “Just for something to call the degenerate.”

  “You’d think the media would think of something more original.”

  “People are apt to give names to this sort of thing, Jack. One’s as good as any, I suppose.”

  “When are you planning on briefing the public?” Jack put to him, wanting to speed things along.

  “Tomorrow morning after this latest girl’s autopsy. Once we’re one hundred percent sure that this is our guy and that she is in fact Becky Dorring, then I’ll give a press conference. You can’t be slipshod on these things.”

  A moment of silence descended upon the pair. Jack continued to stare across at the DCI, and Caldwell continued to fidget in his seat as though an army of red ants were marching up his asshole. Jack could tell he had something to reproach him about but couldn’t find the nerve to say it.

  “Was that all?” Jack prompted.

  “All what?”

  “All you called to see me for, sir. To bollock me about not turning up to briefing this morning and to inform me that you’ve joined the press in calling the murderer the crucifix killer.”

  “No, that wasn’t bloody well all,” Caldwell fumed, his pig face filling with red mist. “I also wanted to speak to you about your behavior at the crime scene yesterday.”

  “What about my behavior?”

  “It has been reported to me,” he said in a lowered tone, stretching his flabby neck as he said it, “that you stunk of alcohol.”

  “It was my day off. Like briefings, you know I don’t do Sundays. You had George Lange call me up and demand my attendance, so I attended. There wasn’t much I could do. I had a look. Logged my presence and was on my way.”

  “But an officer of Scotland Yard reported that they’d smelt alcohol on your person.”

  “And they were right. I’d had a few drinks on my day off, because—guess what?—it was my day off. I did you a favor yesterday. You should have trusted George to go out there on his own, and the rain made it almost impossible to determine anything anyway.”

  “But I don’t want a constable on this. I want my detective sergeant. Otherwise we could lose the case. Can’t you see they’re trying to take this from us, Jack? Take it from Upper Hackney.”

  There was such a pleading look to his ham of a face when he said this.

  “Let them take it,” Jack retorted. “This sort of thing suits the Special Crime Unit better than us anyway. They’ve got the resources. Let the boys here get back to chasing wannabe gangsters and junky ODs.”

  “I want this, Jack,” Caldwell snorted with utter conviction, slamming his palms down on his desk. “Upper Hackney wants this. Those bodies were found on our turf. This is our crime. They can’t just take it from us. I won’t let them. I know you’ve given up on your career, couldn’t give a shit if you stayed a detective sergeant until you finally fade out of the force altogether. But I want more, Jack. Upper Hackney deserves more.”

  Jack could hear the numbers crunching in Caldwell’s head. For all his “for Upper Hackney” bull, it was a simple numbers game really. A case like this, one that took prestige in the media, usually had resources thrown at it. The government didn’t like its citizens going around thinking they could kill at random, especially with everyone knowing about it. They wanted any killer with this type of status brought down as soon as possible. In post-austerity Britain, a serial killer on your local patch could really do wonders for your annual budget, as well as give the right officers’ careers a helpful boost. Caldwell wanted both. />
  “I remember the day I took you in,” Caldwell went on in a voice that suggested Jack was an ungrateful brat.

  The old detective sergeant sighed and wished he could smoke a fag. Oh, how he wished he could light up now and take a long, stiff lug of smoke, hold it in his mouth, and roll his tongue around in the gray cotton.

  “You were fucked,” the DCI pointed out, not for the first time when trying to manipulate Jack. “Just off of a six-month suspension. Kicked out of Scotland Yard, half the stations in Britain refusing to take you. And what did I do?” He held this question for a second or two, and Jack almost answered it. “I stuck my neck out is what I did. I knew you lived locally, and I stuck my neck out and offered you a position here in Upper Hackney.”

  “And I keep asking where I should send the card and flowers.”

  “Bollocks to your jokes, Jack. Not today. Not when I’ve had Detective Superintendent Don Parkinson on the phone chewing my ass, claiming that my detective sergeant isn’t capable, that he’s a drunk. No. Not after the shit I had thrown at me because of you.”

  The mere mention of Jack’s loathed former Scotland Yard colleague, Don Parkinson, riled him, and he felt that he’d had enough now.

  “What do you want, Peter?” he let out in exasperation. “A thank-you?”

  The red mist of Caldwell’s face turned a deep purple, especially at the sound of his first name being spoken by an inferior officer, and the sight of him made Jack think of a constipated beetroot.

  “No, I don't want a bloody thank-you,” raged from Caldwell’s mouth, “you cheeky bas—” He collected himself, straightened the creases of his angered face, and continued in a calmer voice. “I just want you to do your job.”

  Jack got up from his chair and walked to the door.

  “Where are you going?” Caldwell asked, getting out of his own chair, his sausage fingers clutching tightly to the edge of his desk.

  “To do my job,” Jack said as he opened the door and stepped out.

  “You just remember who’s boss around here,” Caldwell shouted after him.