A Cross to Bear: A Jack Sheridan Mystery

by Vogel, Vince

14

  Somewhere on the northeast edge of London was a large mansion surrounded by a small wood and plush gardens of manicured lawns and stone statues of Grecian design. The area was surrounded by a large fence, topped with coiling razor wire, security guards working the gate, and foot patrols walking the grounds inside. A distance away from the giant mock Tudor mansion was a fifty-meter square kennel, where night and day the incessant cacophony of dog barking could be heard. This is where a large number of Staffordshire bull terriers were bred, some for sale, others for fighting.

  Inside a large room deep within the belly of the mansion, a walrus of a man lay on a custom-built leather chair. He was completely naked and covered in a viscous film of red, blotchy skin that was scabbing and peeling in places. Directly below the elbows and knees, his limbs ended prematurely in knots of flesh like the ends of sausages. In front of him, at his feet if he had any, four young women performed sex acts on a red padded mat for the leering fat man to watch. His eyes studied the mass of tangled limbs with lascivious glee, his bulbous tongue occasionally flicking out of his toothless mouth, a stream of saliva on his chin glistening in the electric light.

  A knock hammered through the room, and his attention flitted to the door. A large man, who had previously been guarding it, opened the door and in stepped two men, one middle-aged, his coat-hanger body dressed in a suit, his fair, thinning hair combed back over his pink skull, and the otherwise gentle look on his narrow horse-like face ruined by his glaring eyes. The other was younger, midthirties. His blond hair was neatly parted to the side, and he wore a spiteful look on his handsome but vacant face. He was also dressed in a suit, only he wore his with more authority. The men were Davey and Billy Doyle. The thing in the chair was Jerry.

  The brother and son entered the room, the door shut behind them by the doorman. A skinny young woman wearing nothing but stockings and suspenders, who stood behind the Fat Man, took hold of the headrest and swiveled the chair so that Jerry faced his visitors. Now to his side, the sex scene continued as normal, the girls seemingly held within the lustful bubble of their performance, their moans breaking out in the background.

  “I see you’re busy, Father,” Billy said respectfully, nodding his head toward the girls, “so we won’t keep you long. I just wanted to give you some rather satisfactory news.”

  “Oh, and what is that, boy?” the Fat Man croaked like an old toad.

  “I’m pleased to inform you that we have her.”

  Jerry’s milky eyes widened, and his thin-lipped mouth pursed upward at the edges.

  “Where?” he demanded to know, his fat body becoming as animated as it physically could.

  “She’s at our Barking place under lock and key.”

  “How did you find her?”

  “She came to us.”

  “I don’t understand,” Jerry said, frowning so that his bushy eyebrows looked ready to charge at each another.

  “She was working in one of our studios. I happened to watch part of a broadcast yesterday and recognized her. She’d done her best to change her appearance, but it was definitely her. I could never forget that face. Apparently she’s been with us for some time.”

  “Was she trying to get to us in a bad way, do you think?” Jerry enquired, the eyebrows almost attacking each other across the bridge of his nose.

  “I think she was, Jerry,” Davey interjected, stepping forward and taking the Fat Man’s attention away from his son. “I think that’s exactly what she was doing.”

  “But that doesn’t make her so dangerous,” Billy commented. “She’ll come to understand in time.”

  “I think she’s dangerous for us,” Davey interceded. “I think it’s best we just got rid of her.”

  “Hold your tongue, brother,” Jerry spat forward, his eyes narrowing and the eyebrows moving further into position. “Remember what you’re asking by that.”

  “It’s only my own evaluation of the situation.”

  Billy’s face had become red at his uncle’s words, and the red mist was filling him up. He turned sharply to Davey and with swollen eyes declared, “If she is to die, Uncle, then so too do you.”

  “Don’t get hot, boy,” Davey put back to his nephew, raising his finger to him. “I want what’s best for our family.”

  “She is what’s best for our family,” Billy cried into his face.

  “There’s too many things going on beside business for my liking,” Davey said right back to him in a calm tone, “and this is one of them. I don’t like it. She came to us because she wanted to cause harm. Simple as that.”

  Billy was about to unleash a tirade when his father checked him with a look that said “don’t.”

  “I’m afraid, brother,” Jerry began, “that Billy is right on this. He has my support. This is more than business.” Then turning back to his son, he said, “Keep her at the studio for the foreseeable future, and then eventually we’ll bring her here.”

  Billy gave a sneering smile at this news and bowed gently to his father, while Davey merely shrugged, feeling the insane desires of his family were bringing dark shadows down upon them.

  DAY THREE

  15

  The moment the plane reached the English Channel, the rain lashed against the window and all Alex Dorring saw of the country he was returning to for the first time in almost eleven years was a dreary, blurred mess.

  At Heathrow immigration he was welcomed through as Mr. Joseph Hammond and made his way to baggage collection to pick up the single rucksack holding the few items he had with him. Dorring paid little attention to the people as he walked through the terminal. Even the sound of his native vernacular after so long did nothing to ruffle the feathers of nostalgia in him.

  Near the exit, he went into a WHSmith and bought some large paperclips. He then went into the bathroom and picked a vacant cubicle at the far end. Inside, he sat himself down on the toilet with his bag on his lap. He took out a small medical kit, then removed a bottle of salient fluid and a pair of rubber gloves. He placed the gloves on his hands and the bottle on the floor beside his feet. Then he took a small mirror from his shaving kit and sat it on top of the tissue dispenser so that he could see his face in it. Once the mirror was positioned correctly, the reflection of his eye gleaming in it, he took one of the paperclips and bent it slightly. When that was achieved, he concentrated on the reflection of his left eye in the mirror, the fingers of his left hand holding the eyelid open, and brought the bent paperclip up to it with his right hand. Using it as you’d use a shoehorn on your heel, he slid the clip underneath the eyeball, being careful not to tear the ocular muscles, or indeed the eye they supported. He then gently maneuvered the clip as to flick the eyeball forward. As though removing a car tyre, he moved the clip around in a wedging motion, freeing more and more of the eye up, until it gently dropped forward. He was quick to grab it so that it didn’t fall too far and tug on the optic nerve. He then softly covered it with his hand, so as not to confuse his right eye with the completely disparaging images of the floor.

  Having achieved globe luxation, Alex looked back at his reflection and saw the pink, fleshy cavity with the optic nerve hanging out of it. With his free hand, he reached a finger inside the cavity and hooked something the size of a grain of rice out. It was a tracker that had been sitting at the back of his eyeball. Placing it beside the mirror, he reached down for the salient fluid and washed both the cavity and eyeball before returning it to its socket with the paperclip.

  Following this, his eye was a little sore, as to be expected, and he washed it out with eyedrops. The eye had a habit of drying out quickly if it was out for too long. Feeling okay and the task achieved, he packed up his things, placing the tracker in his pocket, and made his way out of the toilet.

  Walking toward the exit, Dorring passed a knot of people queuing for the escalator that went down into the Underground station. With a deft movement, he placed the tracker inside the unzipped front pocket of a little girl’s Dora the Explorer rucksac
k. The little girl noticed nothing and disappeared down the escalator with her family. Alex didn’t give them a second look as he went on his way.

  In the airport multistory car park, Dorring soon found the car he’d had left there for him five years ago. It was there in case he ever needed to come back and not be traced. No one except him and the company who left it there knew about it. Not even Foster and the people at Uriel. Alex was a careful man. He knew that he may need to hide one day, even from his own government, so he had set himself up so that if he ever needed to, he could land in any of the major airports in the world and have a car registered in a fake name waiting for him. In London it was a seven-year-old black BMW 3-Series, the type of car that could get you around quickly and didn’t look out of place anywhere in England.

  Dorring jumped inside the car and made his way out of Heathrow car park and into the city. The rain was beating down, and the traffic was slow. The dullness of the place, so soon after the dazzling sun of North Africa, immediately had a melancholic effect on him as he maneuvered through the dank streets of gray brick terrace houses and the odd leafless tree rising up out of the pavement.

  When he began passing lines of sumptuous five-story houses adorned with great big doors of brass numbers and decorative knockers, Alex checked his watch. They would be watching. They’d expect him in within two hours of touching down. They didn’t mind if he spent some time doing as he pleased, hence they wouldn’t care that his GPS signal was moving around the London Underground. But they would expect him to eventually make his way back to headquarters. After two hours, they would call. Alex needed to get everything done within that time. While he still could.

  Entering the borough of Kensington, he made his way along a collection of plush businesses, all with very neat facades, hanging baskets of colorful flowers, elaborately decorative signs, and large windows displaying the elegant interiors. Most of them were jewelers and estate agents, their businesses buried like ticks in one of the most prosperous regions in the world. While a short drive across the borough people queued for the food bank, these people dealt in millions.

  The place Dorring was looking for had a similarly opulent business front but with tighter security, even more so than the upmarket jewelers’ shops, which often held single items of merchandise running into the hundreds of thousands.

  When he was a block or two from the place, he parked and made the short walk to JP Hudson Securities. The building was a five-story affair that sat on the V-shaped corner of an intersecting road, its rounded front pointing out like a snooty nose for all the world to see. However, it wasn’t what was aboveground that made this place a formidable fortress; it was what was below.

  The door was opened for Alex the moment he approached it by a neat middle-aged man who appeared to have been waiting on the other side for him. Upon his body, the man was wearing a navy blue suit with a salmon-pink cravat sticking out the top jacket pocket, a salmon-colored shirt with white collar, a navy blue silk tie, and upon his well-tanned, smooth face, he wore a cheery, if slightly smug, look, his pearl-white teeth shining from his mouth.

  “Good morning, sir. How may I help you?”

  Alex handed him a plastic card, and the man took it, knowing immediately what to do.

  “Right this way, sir,” he said, his smug look dropping.

  He ushered Dorring across the sales floor to a polished mahogany door. Holding the card Alex had given him up to a sensor, he entered a code into a keypad. The door opened automatically, the two men standing back as it swung slowly toward them. When they were on the other side of it, Alex saw that the mahogany front was just for show; it was actually two feet of solid steel with locking bars going into the floor and ceiling.

  They walked to the end of a two-meter-wide corridor of gray concrete, a huge contrast to the polished mahogany and decorative wallpapered walls of the sales room. An elevator took them down for about a minute before stopping at the only other floor it went to. Walking out of the lift, they were met by a metal barred cage that blocked their entrance into a large concrete room. Again the man held the card up to a scanner at the entrance and a gate clicked open. They walked through into the cage’s center, and the gate automatically closed behind them.

  “If you’d make your way to the camera, please,” the man softly ushered Alex.

  Dorring took up a position in front of a yellow line marked along the floor and gazed directly into a camera that stood about two feet in front of him on the bars of the cage. A beam of red light shot from it and struck Alex’s eyes as he held them wide open for it. It lasted a few seconds, and his left eye, so soon after luxation, throbbed afterward.

  “State your name and security reference,” an authoritative voice lacking in the charm of the other man came over a tannoy.

  “Agent 192. Identification Number 15528441. Today’s word is Dallas.”

  There were a few seconds’ delay before a red light next to the camera went green and the outer door clicked open.

  “That’s all good, sir,” the neat man said, holding his arm out to conduct Alex on.

  They left the cage and made their way to the corner of the featureless concrete room. There they stopped in front of a large steel disc-shaped hatch that sat buried in the floor. The moment the outer cage door clicked shut behind them, the hatch began to unlock, and soon it was opening up to reveal a set of spiraling metal stairs that disappeared into a void of darkness.

  “After you, sir,” the man said, and Alex began descending.

  No sooner was he a few feet into the darkness than electric lights began to spring into life, lighting everything up. At the bottom, Alex walked into a large safety deposit room, buried deep into the ground. While he stood in the middle, the neat man hurried off to one of the larger box doors that lined the walls of the ten-feet-square room. Using the card, he opened the door and removed two large aluminium suitcases. His small frame struggled to drag them over to Alex.

  “Would you like to check the merchandise?” he said, nodding in the direction of a large table at one of the room’s edges.

  “That won’t be necessary,” Alex stated, knowing that he only had twenty minutes left before Control put in a call about him. If that happened they’d know what he was doing and that he wasn’t where his GPS stated he was.

  Dorring picked up the cases as though they were filled with feathers and made his way out of the building, up the spiral stairs, back into the cage, where he once again had to look into the camera and state his leaving code, and up the elevator. The neat man then saw him to the door, his eyes following Alex all the way till the end of the street.

  The moment he reached the car, Alex loaded the suitcases into the trunk, got in, and drove away. Glancing at his watch, he saw that he only had three minutes to spare.

  16

  No one had seen anything. That was the news awaiting Jack from the night boys when he arrived at Upper Hackney early in the morning. Not one person had come forward to say they’d witnessed a blonde girl on a blue mountain bike between nine and ten on Saturday, and nobody could say for sure if they’d spotted anyone unusual in the area. It had been a quiet Saturday night in the suburbs of Barnet. For all intents and purposes, Becky Dorring had vanished into thin air, only to turn up the next afternoon mutilated in Epping Forest.

  The only thing left of her was the bike. It had been found locked to a lamppost on Reading Road, located at the east-side entrance of Arradine. A local resident recognized it from the photo the police officer showed them at their door and pointed them in that direction. As for Reading Road, it had no CCTV and diverged off into so many different directions that it would be impossible to tell where Becky went after locking her bike up. They did, however, have a new position on their map of last known whereabouts, and another fragment added to the pattern of events. The fact that she’d locked the bike up pointed to her getting into a car with someone. Otherwise why leave it.

  There were still more houses to visit in the outer area, and
the day team would be completing that, but Jack didn’t hold out much hope that they’d find anything. The killer had swept Becky from the earth like a phantom.

  Once he’d liaised with the night shift, Jack went to the detectives’ office, where he found DC Watts’s report on the rest of the CCTV lying on his desk. All that was written down were a few registration numbers and descriptions of cars that had two people in them and were driving away from the area around the time Becky went missing. Having glanced at it, Jack merely screwed the piece of paper up and threw it into the wastepaper basket. None of it was from footage anywhere near to Reading Road. The DC had indeed been correct in thinking the whole endeavor was a waste of time.

  Finding nothing of worth awaiting him in the office, Jack went outside for a smoke and pondered his next move. Standing on the loading bay at the back of the station and watching the rain drip from the veranda, he came to the realization that he had very few options open to him. He flicked his fag into the gutter and went back inside. Reentering the office, he found Lange, who’d just gotten in and was hanging up his coat.

  “Mornin’, sar—”

  “Did you check the boyfriend’s address?” Jack interrupted.

  “Yeah. Darren Cooper lives in Ashburn House, Hackney.”

  “Then put your coat back on. We’re going to pay him a visit.”

  Jack sat watching the wipers swish back and forth across the rain-lashed windscreen, the red shivering brake lights of the car in front the only other thing on view among the gloomy, rain-smeared city. They were stuck in traffic, and Jack was dying for a cigarette. But he never smoked in his own car. Marsha wouldn’t allow it.

  In the passenger’s seat, Lange was watching the news on his phone. DCI Caldwell was about to address the media on the steps outside Upper Hackney, another reason Jack had wanted to leave the station, and the detective constable was eagerly awaiting it.