A Cross to Bear: A Jack Sheridan Mystery

by Vogel, Vince

  Once the briefing was over, Jack made his way along the sky-blue corridor to the detectives’ office. There he found Lange at his desk chatting with the evening guy, Detective Constable Paul Watts, who sat on the corner of the desk, leaning over Lange. Wattsy, as he was commonly referred to, was in his midthirties and showed the beginnings of an epic belly sticking out of his white shirtfront. He had short jet-black hair and always wore a smile on his still-youthful face. In all, he wasn’t a bad bloke, and that was what most people said about him. But he was lazy. And it was for that reason that Jack had him put on the evening shift, as it was the most routine.

  “Hello, Jack,” Watts said at the sight of him coming in through the door.

  “Wattsy,” Jack grunted in return.

  “This must feel right up your street.”

  “What’s that?” Jack asked disinterestedly as he sat himself down at his desk.

  “This sick bastard nailing girls to crosses. What with your experience with nutters and all.”

  Jack tried his best to ignore him.

  DC Watts was of course referring to Jack’s time in the Special Crimes Unit at Scotland Yard. During his twenty years there, Jack had brought down some of the most notorious killers to have stalked the country, let alone London. There were books written about Jack Sheridan.

  But Jack saw that as another time. Another man. Now, all he wished for was to disappear. To fade into the background of his low-end station. In truth, he was deeply annoyed that this freak had turned up out of the blue on his patch. He wanted to go back to the simple life of chasing simple gangbangers and simple killers. Men who committed murders in a straightforward manner, for reasons other than the mere passion of killing. For money. For revenge. A sudden burst of uncontrollable anger. Nice uncomplicated cases that he could solve or not solve without the added pressure of media prestige that serial killers and freaks invariably got. What Jack wanted from now on in his life was routine. Routine in everything, from his work to his life. A routine of no alarms and no surprises.

  “You got any leads yet?” Watts asked.

  “If you had’ve attended the briefing, Wattsy, you’d know,” Jack said as he glared into the screen of his computer.

  Jack clicked on the files he wanted and began printing them off.

  “Ha! Look who’s talking,” DC Watts retorted cheerfully. “I hear you never go to a briefing.”

  “I just came from one now. One that you were supposed to have attended.”

  “Things must be bad if Jack Sheridan is going to briefings.”

  “Technically I was giving it.” He then looked up from the computer screen at Lange and added, “George, are you still looking at that CCTV?”

  “I was.”

  “You found anything else? Any vehicles?”

  “Nothing, sarge. The streets around that place are very quiet. I’ve taken down a few number plates of cars where there’s two people in them. The footage is too grainy to see who it is, though.”

  “Sounds like a no-hoper,” DC Watts commented.

  “It is,” Lange agreed. “Except for three cameras that are directly along the route she was supposed to take, the rest of the cameras are way out. The chances she happened to come past one of them is extremely remote.”

  “But we need to eliminate it, George,” Jack stated. “That’s what ninety percent of detective work is: elimination.”

  “Yeah, but it’s bloody hopeless, though,” Watts groaned. “I mean, there’s no chance.”

  “I hope you won’t be taking that attitude tonight, Detective Constable Watts,” Jack said to him in an officious tone.

  “What do you mean?” Watts’s face twisted into a frown.

  “Because Detective Constable Lange is finished for the day, and it’s your turn to go through those cameras. I want everything logged, and I’ll be checking it all in the morning. Don’t think I won’t. I want a full account of those videos.”

  Watts’s face dropped.

  “You’re kiddin’, right?”

  “I don’t kid, Detective Constable.” Then addressing Lange, he said, “Come on, George. It’s time we were knocking off.”

  Lange got up from his seat, a cheeky grin on his face, and waved his hand across the computer screen.

  “It’s all yours, Wattsy,” he said to his colleague with a playful wink.

  “You bastards,” the detective constable grumbled under his breath.

  Jack got up, took his coat off the peg, and retrieved the files from the printer.

  “And after you’ve done that,” Jack said as he passed Watts on his way out, “I need you out to Barnet to help with the door to door.”

  “For fuck’s sake,” Watts muttered.

  “Good night, Wattsy,” Jack announced as he left the room with Lange.

  “Dickheads,” the constable grunted inaudibly after them.

  13

  By the time Jack arrived home, the clouds had opened and the rain was once again falling in a deluge upon the city of London. He ran from the car onto the porch and took his shoes off on the newspaper he’d laid out prior to leaving that morning. He also made sure to shake his coat outside the door before hanging it neatly on the hook in the hallway.

  Then he ventured into the kitchen, placed the files and the newly purchased bottle of Jameson’s Irish whiskey on the table, and made his way to the boiler cupboard. He switched the heating on, closed the cupboard, took a glass from the cabinet, and sat down. Pouring himself a drink, he read the letter that his next-door neighbor Jean had left him on the table.

  Jack, it read, I’ve left you some casserole in the oven. It’s lamb. I hope you remember what day it is tomorrow. I’m sure you haven’t forgotten. The flowers are ready for you to pick up in the evening, and your suit can be picked up from the dry cleaners too. Both places are open till six, so don’t be late. Give my love to Marsha when you see her, and we’ll speak soon.

  All the best,

  Jean x

  Jack pushed the note to the edge of the table and brought the files in front of him. He didn’t want to think about tomorrow, and the mere mention of it in the note made him instinctively pick his glass up and take a big gulp of whiskey. It also made him itch for a fag, and with a groan he pushed the files forward and made his way to the back door.

  Outside, under the umbrella, he stood smoking, draining the cigarette with each drag, burning his lips as he did. He was dreading tomorrow. Dreading standing in his suit with flowers in his hand. Dreading seeing Marsha.

  He came back inside after finishing his fag, washed his hands, and retook his seat. Feeling a little better, he had another swig of whiskey and began going through the files.

  With the rain lashing down on the windowpane, he began flicking through Becky’s arrest sheet from two years ago. It had apparently precipitated her breakdown. Jack wanted to see if there were any clues as to why.

  She’d been arrested in a popular red-light district in the car of one Reginald Smith. The arresting officer pulled up to the rear of Smith’s car and was apparently not spotted. When the officer got to the window, he saw what he believed was a sexual act taking place. The act was listed as oral copulation. Jack balked when he saw that Smith was sixty-three. What was a seventeen-year-old girl doing giving an old man a blow job in a car? Jack had seen her home. Surely she wasn’t so in need that she’d sink that low to earn some money. Then he thought of Lauren saying that Becky used to do drugs and Coop made her do things. Maybe her habit and manipulative boyfriend were pushing her into selling herself.

  When Becky and Smith were brought back to the station, Becky wouldn’t talk and Smith called for his lawyer. Turned out that Reginald Smith was a local QC. In the end, he got the whole thing dismissed, accepting the smaller charge of lewd public conduct, and the two were let go. Becky, having also accepted a street caution for the lewd conduct charge, was handed back into the custody of her mother. That was it.

  Jack surmised that Becky’s behavior must have been th
e culmination of something. There was no other criminal history on her. The way he saw it, Becky Dorring was crying out, and this was a part of it. Whether she had of gotten into that car to pay for a habit or because she was crying out in some other way, she was still in pain. Jack began to wonder whether that’s what had happened on Saturday. Whether Becky had gotten into some stranger’s car to earn a little money. Only this time, instead of a rich QC, she got a killer and became part of his deluded game.

  Added to this were the other two victims. Both were believed to be working girls; the fact that they couldn’t be identified pointed to that. It was highly possible that both women weren’t born in the UK or were citizens of the country. There was every chance they were illegal immigrants, most likely from Eastern Europe. That was why no one had come forward to identify the pictures circulated through the media, and no one had reported anyone missing matching their descriptions. Every year thousands of girls are smuggled into London from Eastern Europe, flooding the sex market. Many of them are sold into it usually through a debt owed by the family back home to gangs working in sex trafficking. These girls arrive in droves like cattle to service the indiscriminate john. They’re often kept locked up and on drugs—modern-day slaves—and there was every chance that these two girls were prostitutes working under similar conditions.

  Was that the key—the sex trade? Was our man targeting prostitutes?

  Like an unwelcome ghost, the thought of Carrie selling herself for drugs floated through Jack’s mind. He took another glug of whiskey. Over the coming years after she’d left his house, Jack had gotten to hear about his daughter’s escalating theft and drug problems through the Met’s computer systems. When she was twenty-two, she was sentenced to her first prison term. He’d written to her, that first time and the subsequent two times she’d done time. Every one of his letters had been returned unopened, every visiting request turned down. He was desperate to know what his daughter’s life was like these past ten years. She was twenty-seven now, and Jack wondered if he’d even recognize her if they bumped into each other on the street.

  Having looked at Becky’s file long enough, Jack moved it to the side and brought out the autopsy reports on the other two girls. Like Becky, they were blonde-haired and in their late teens, possibly early twenties. They’d all consumed the sedative Rohypnol in the form of a drink; their stomach linings were covered in it. This had knocked them unconscious. There were no signs of struggle, and it appeared that the drinks were taken wilfully without duress. The killer had then injected them with a lethal quantity of street heroin—the type bought and sold all over London. After that they were cleaned and nailed to a cross. All the girls, including Becky, had died in the same way. They were all nailed to a cross and left in woodland several miles apart in the northeast of London. However, at least three things differed between the first two girls and Becky. One, the cross was of a different type. Only in a subtle sense, but still different. Secondly, rope instead of plastic zip ties had been used to bind her hands and feet to the cross before the nails had been hammered in. And thirdly, she’d been easily identified.

  For some, including those bums at Scotland Yard, this was of no real consequence. For them the changes were nothing and the fact that Becky had been identified seen as a slip by the killer. But it bugged the hell out of Jack. For someone that had killed two girls and been careful that they were unidentifiable, it was an awful gamble to select a local girl walking home at night.

  There was something different about Becky Dorring’s death. Jack just didn’t know what it was yet.

  Gazing down at the photographs of the dead girls’ faces, he heaved a heavy sigh and pushed the reports away. He now took the final set of papers he’d printed off. It was the report he’d written fifteen years ago when he and Col Baker had investigated the death of Detective Sergeant John Dorring of Shoreditch police station.

  They’d discovered that Dorring had been investigating gang activity in the East End of London, notably the Doyle gang. The Doyles consisted primarily of two brothers, Jerry and Davey Doyle. Though of late, Jack had heard that the real Doyle to watch out for was William “Billy” Doyle, son of Jerry. The gang’s official enterprises were the porn industry; sex shops, pornographic films, websites, and satellite channels. But underneath, Jack and Col had found that they were the owners of several brothels and deep into the human trafficking of girls.

  Jerry was the older of the two brothers and unsympathetically referred to as the Fat Man. This appellation was duly fitting. Jerry Doyle was well over three hundred pounds the last time Jack had seen him in person. His round, porcine face had a dead look to it, pendulum jowls swinging from underneath his multiple chins, mirroring the rhythm of his pendulum gut. He didn’t walk, he waddled, swinging his body from side to side to elevate the stumpy legs, his body fat rolling and swinging like a crude ocean of mud. Apparently he’d not been seen in public for the past three years. Some stated that this was due to fears of attempts on his life. But other whispers that had made their way to Jack’s ears had stated that he’d had surgery over complications caused by severe diabetic neuropathy, where the nerve fibers are severely damaged by high blood sugar. It means that the body forms ulcers that never heal, especially on the limbs where the damage is worst. The Fat Man had lost weight the only way he was seemingly able to: his arms and legs had been amputated. He was now no more than a head and gut.

  Davey Doyle didn’t share his older brother’s gluttonous excesses. He was tall and wiry and his face not as hard and fixed as Jerry’s. He was the softer side of the organization and usually acted as a calm influence in times of turmoil. He had always tended to be the more public face of the gang, more photogenic and approachable you could say. But it was the older Jerry who always called the shots, and Davey was essentially a puppet to his will.

  The son, Billy, Jack had never met and knew little about. He was thirty-five and had lived a very privileged life. When he was born, his father was already a rich man, and his nascent ventures into the porn industry were allowing him to make inroads toward legitimate respectability. So he therefore sent his son to one of the most expensive boarding schools in England. Jerry wanted Billy to sound legit, something that he, having grown up on a council estate in Leyton, could never achieve. He wanted his boy to be trained in the world of etiquette. And so he was. Jack had heard that the son sounded very well-spoken and could rub shoulders with the most blue-blooded Englishman. But other reports had reached Jack too. Reports that Billy felt some need to prove he was just as brutal as anyone from the local council estate. He apparently had a macabre lust for violence—sexual, Jack had even heard—and was deeply feared even among his own gang members. The apple never falls far from the tree, Jack had thought. His father had a reputation for being a sick bastard too.

  Jack took a swig of creamy whiskey and glared down at the picture of the Fat Man from the file that he had before him.

  “What have you got to do with this, you fat bastard?” he said aloud.

  He remembered the phone call he’d received from John Dorring the day before Christmas Eve. He’d never even heard of Dorring until that point, and the call came completely unexpected.

  “I hear you’re trustworthy” had been the first thing that John had said to him. He’d gone on to tell Jack who he was and that he wanted to arrange a meeting as soon as possible. In the course of a case he was investigating, he’d stumbled onto something huge involving a senior officer at Scotland Yard. He claimed that the officer was a direct colleague of Jack’s. When the latter had asked for a name, Dorring had said that he couldn’t give him anything until he confirmed it himself. He wanted to bring evidence to Jack. He knew of a meeting between a leading London gangster and the aforementioned officer happening the next day. He would take pictures and bring them to Jack at Shoreditch Police Station by six the next evening.

  He never got that far.

  The first time Jack saw John Dorring in person, he was nailed to a cross with
his throat opened up, his wife screaming out in the middle of the street and his two children staring out into the void of despair.

  Following that, Jack and Col had gone hard after John’s killer. They’d found out that the London gangster Dorring was referring to was Jerry Doyle. Going over John’s case notes, they found very little, however. He’d been very secretive in his pursuit and hadn’t even mentioned the possibility of collusion between the Doyles and someone in Scotland Yard. In fact, Jack and Col had employed an element of secrecy themselves. They’d signed it off as merely searching for the murderer of a fellow cop. But both men were looking hard into who could be colluding with the Doyles from within their own office.

  In the end, though, they were warned off. Both men received photographs of their loved ones—of Marsha putting out the bins, Carrie getting off school, and Beth going to work—and decided the case wasn’t worth the deaths of their families. Jack remembered once more having to sit with Helen and explain that they were closing the case. Today, after he’d told her about Becky, she’d worn that same utterly wretched look upon her careworn face.

  Jack brought his fist down on the face of Jerry Doyle.

  “I hope they amputate the rest of you, you pig.” He then looked up at the ceiling, his gaze going through it. “Why would you create such depraved creatures, huh?” he cried angrily up to it. “Why let us suffer down here and remain silent? You’re just like him, aren’t you? Cruel.”

  He slammed the rest of the whiskey down the back of his throat and trundled off to bed, the lamb casserole untouched in the oven. A terrible feeling had hold of him. He knew that once again in his old life he’d have to face evil.

  But worse than that, he feared that once again, evil would win.