A Cross to Bear: A Jack Sheridan Mystery

by Vogel, Vince

  41

  Jack was driving along Stratford high street listening to Bob Marley and the Wailers’ Exodus, singing along as he followed the streaky red lights of the car in front. The volume was high so that the legendary reggae man could be heard crooning over the top of the rain’s vicious assault on the car. Jack was on his way home, and the evening traffic was chaotic, red buses filling the lanes of dense vehicles, the pavements full of people marching under umbrellas, brooks of fast-moving water running along the curbs.

  As he waited in a queue at some traffic lights, his phone went off and he put it on speaker, turning the music down as he did.

  Not recognizing the number, he answered it with a suspicious “Hello?”

  “Dad,” came Carrie’s voice.

  “Carrie love. Where are you?”

  “I’m safe. That’s all I can tell you.”

  “Have you spoken to Ty?”

  “Yeah, I only this minute got off the phone to Jean. She can still talk, I see.”

  Jack grinned.

  “Yeah,” he said through his smile. “She can talk the hind legs off a donkey!”

  “She was worse than you. Wanted to know everything I’d been up to these past years. How I was. All of it.”

  “It’s because, like me, she cares, Carrie.”

  “I know. But bloody hell! It was like twenty questions.”

  “I suppose she got the same twenty answers I got?”

  “She did, Dad.”

  “What are you up to, Carrie?” he asked in a gentle pleading tone.

  She was silent and Jack got the impression she was on the cusp of telling him, before she sighed and answered:

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “I wish you could,” came his instant reply.

  “Look, I only wanted to call to say I was fine. I spoke to Ty, and he was happy at Jean’s. He got a little upset when I had to repeat that I wouldn’t see him till next week, but he understands. He’s a good kid.”

  “That needs his mum,” Jack finished for her.

  “And he’ll have her. Just once I’ve got everything sorted.”

  There was another pause between the pair as the lights changed and Jack put the car in gear, once again creeping forward through the wet streets, following in a line of meandering vehicles all wanting to get home. Anywhere but this dank night.

  “You need any money?” Jack felt impelled to say.

  “None, Dad. I told you. I’m good. I only need you to look after Ty. How was he last night after I left?”

  “He was okay. We watched the match, and after that he went to bed. He’s not a bad lad.”

  “How was it gettin’ him up this mornin’?”

  “Fine. He brushed his teeth himself without me asking. Then I made him brekky.”

  “Yeah, he told me you burned it.”

  “Hey! I cooked him a fresh one afterwards.”

  “He said you were goin’ through a girl’s diary.”

  “It was work. I’m on this crucifix case.”

  “The girls being nailed to crosses?”

  “The same.”

  “It’s dreadful. You have any idea who it is?”

  “Like you, my dear daughter, I can’t talk about it. But in truth I only have vague ideas.”

  “You still have those hunches you used to get?”

  “They’re not hunches,” Jack exclaimed, upset that his abilities were being trivialized. “They’re more about me bringing everything into a kind of semblance. It’s about looking at the intricate parts of a case and seeing things that are hidden within it all. Piecing things together. A hunch is nothing more than a guess. I don’t come to any conclusion until it fits completely within the parts.”

  “Sounds like an informed guess,” she remarked, bursting into laughter.

  “You’re gettin’ right up my snout, Carrie.”

  But it wasn’t true. Jack felt a wave of joy permeate through him at his daughter’s playfulness. It was like the days of old when they’d wind each other up for fun. Marsha would hate it at times and despair at the both of them, them and their games, often becoming their biggest victim. But she also couldn’t fail to observe the closeness between father and daughter in those moments.

  “Well, I better go, Dad.”

  “Don’t” immediately slipped from his lips.

  “I have to. I just wanted to check in. I’ll try to get you tomorrow. Okay?”

  He was going to protest, but he quickly realized it would be hopeless. So he merely said goodbye and felt an instant hollowness when her voice disappeared from the car, replaced by the sounds of the rain and the cars splashing through it. He didn’t put the music back on straightaway and instead mused for a moment.

  It was as he sat deep in thought that Jack stopped at another set of lights. Letting out a sigh that appeared to ripple from his very soul, he looked out the driver’s-side window and saw a rather plush-looking building front. It was a gray-brick five-story affair clamped between other buildings of similar design all stretching along the street. The place was one of those small office blocks that houses solicitors, upmarket estate agents, dentists, and other professions that took up only a floor of space. With an air of indifference, Jack searched its facade for no other reason than something to do while locked in traffic and almost jumped from his seat when he happened to see a large sign for Dr. Benjamin Holby, Psychiatrist. The center two floors of the building all had their lights on, and Jack wondered whether one of those still-alive offices was Holby’s.

  Jack flicked his indicator on, and when the lights turned green, he pulled off into a side road that led to a car park at the back of the building. He parked up in the small fenced-off area of tarmac and made his way to the back door of the building, the rain soaking him during the short journey. He searched the line of buzzers and soon found Holby’s. Making the sign of the cross before he did so, he pressed it.

  Within a few seconds someone answered, the very prim and proper voice belonging to a female.

  “Hi, I’d like to speak to Dr. Holby.”

  “I’m afraid he’s in session at the moment.”

  “Then I’ll speak to him after his session.”

  “The doctor has no more appointments for the day, and the office is out of hours at the moment. May I have your name and number and we’ll get back to you?”

  “My name’s Detective Sergeant Jack Sheridan of Upper Hackney CID.”

  “Oh!” the woman exclaimed. “You’re not wanting to see the doctor on a professional basis?”

  “It’s professional for me. I need to ask him some questions about a patient.”

  “Then I guess you’d better come up.”

  The door buzzed and Jack walked into a stairwell, the heavy aroma of fresh paint in the air, the place clearly having been decorated recently. The doctor was on the third floor, so it wasn’t long before Jack was walking through the door into Holby’s waiting room. It wasn’t anything too upmarket. The furniture was old cracked leather sofas and a nice coffee table with mahogany frame and glass top, the typical stack of magazines sitting upon it. There was a small curved mahogany desk in the far corner from the door and standing behind it was a very neatly dressed woman in her fifties, her permed red hair peppered with a little gray, which Jack found attractive, and her face sporting the slightly leathered appearance of the tanning salon.

  “The doctor will be out in about ten minutes, Detective,” she said to him. “So if you’d like to wait here, I’ll make you a cup of tea.”

  “That would be lovely, Mrs.…?”

  “Call me Suzanne,” she said with a courteous smile.

  Jack took a seat and randomly picked up a magazine. It was GQ. He flicked open the pages and gazed at the models advertising the wears of fashion. It was all about what you looked like nowadays, nothing to do with the contents of your character. Though Jack accepted that it had been like that for a long time. Probably since forever. Nevertheless, it made him fearful to live in a world tha
t put so much emphasis on the superficial while ignoring what was inside. Too much attention paid on what we are, rather that who we are, ignoring the truly important in favor of the absolutely trivial. Maybe that was one of the reasons why shrinks like Holby did so well out of society’s sickness.

  He looked up from the magazine as Suzanne placed his tea on a coaster in front of him.

  “Thank you, Suzanne,” he said with a cheeky smile stretching his cheeks.

  She returned the smile, an element of coquettishness in it, and Jack took in the scent of her perfume. He then watched her hips sway from side to side in her leather skirt as she made her way back to her desk, where she was putting into order some paperwork. The irony of what he’d been thinking only seconds earlier and his lasciviousness now was not lost on Jack, and it only made his grin wider.

  Ten minutes were soon up, and Jack glanced over at the door to Holby’s office the moment he heard it open. A short, stout middle-aged woman wiping her eyes with a hanky was first to emerge. Suzanne automatically came out from behind her reception desk and Jack stood up, chucking the magazine back on the pile. Next through the door came a handsome late thirtysomething man in an open-collared white shirt tucked into slim slate-gray trousers. He had a well-manicured beard and side-parted quiff of dark brown hair.

  “Goodbye, Gloria,” he was saying to the emotional woman. “I’ll see you next month.”

  “Thank you, Doctor,” she sniffed as she went out through the door.

  Once Gloria was gone, Suzanne went over to Dr. Holby and told him that the gentleman here was from the police and wished to speak to him about a client.

  “And which client would that be?” the doctor enquired of Jack.

  “A patient by the name of Becky Dorring,” he replied, stepping forward.

  The corner of the shrink’s eye trembled ever so slightly at the name, but he rapidly controlled it. Jack, of course, didn’t fail to notice.

  “I’m afraid I can’t divulge any such information on any of my clients, Detective,” snapped Holby. “It’s client-doctor confidentiality, and it would be unethical if I were to—”

  Jack had moved toward him and placed his finger on the doc’s lips. Holby’s eyes glanced down at the finger, and a look of confusion swept over his face.

  “Do you know how many times I’ve heard this rubbish pour from a shrink’s mouth, whether it be as part of an investigation or on the telly?” the detective asked.

  “I wouldn’t know,” Holby said when Jack had retracted the finger.

  “It’s a lot. I also know how it works. You see, you’ll stand here and tell me how unethical it is. Then I’ll make a call, and in two hours I’ll have my chief superintendent write up a warrant to seize your files. All of them.”

  “On what grounds?”

  “You do know who Becky Dorring is, don’t you?”

  “Of course I do. She was my client for almost a year.”

  “So you also know that she was recently found dead. That she is part of an ongoing investigation into a series of similar murders.”

  “Yes. This crucifix killer.”

  “That’ll be the one.”

  “But serial killers are random in their selection of victims. The likelihood of Becky having known the killer is very low. Surely you know that, Detective.”

  “I never said it was a serial killer. That was the media. I only said a series of similar murders. You’re right, serial killers are usually random. I should know—I’ve hunted enough. But I’d really like to take a look into Becky’s life. I’ll be honest with you, Doc—more honest than I’ve been with anyone else—I think she means something in all of this, and I want to find out what. You were her shrink. She told you things that she didn’t tell other people, that she couldn’t even say out loud to herself. I want to know those things.”

  Holby groaned a little, looked over at Suzanne as though she could help, and finally realized that his back was up against a wall.

  “Come into my office,” the shrink said, before turning to his receptionist and adding, “You can go home, Suzanne. I’ll lock up.”

  Inside Holby’s office, Jack sat in a small armchair the doctor had pulled out of a corner for him. In the center had been the quintessential chaise longue on the thick cream carpet, and Holby had pushed it to the edge to make way for Jack’s chair. The shrink had then seated himself down in a large black leather easy chair, making his presence much larger than Jack’s and giving the impression of power. It was probably how he liked it, Jack thought. Lording it over his patients. Or clients, as the man seemed to prefer. The wall behind the shrink was adorned with the usual scattering of degrees, masters degrees, and PhDs, no photographs of either himself or anyone else. On the other walls it appeared he had a thing for Salvador Dali, with several copies of his paintings hanging there. The only one that Jack knew by name was The Persistence of Memory, the melting clock hanging in the tree always catching his imagination. Other than that, there was a bookshelf and several green leafy plants overgrowing out of pots dispersed all over the room.

  “Becky came to me just after she got out of Rampton,” Benjamin Holby began. “She was better, she said, but was still plagued by events in her life.”

  “Can you tell me what those events were?”

  “Her father’s death, for one. Even fifteen years afterwards, she suffered terrible nightmares of it—seeing her father covered in blood. Then there was her brother’s leaving for the army. She looked up to him. He was the only real father figure she ever had in her life.”

  “She had her stepfather,” Jack put to him.

  “Oh no she didn’t,” Holby immediately retorted. The shrink gazed into Jack’s eyes, giving the latter the impression that he was trying to convey something to him through the look. Jack decided to hold back his questions and simply let the man talk. “Anyway,” Holby went on, “her brother cut all contact with her, and that was the first time she attempted to take her own life. She was twelve. Can you imagine that, Detective? Only a girl and already she takes the decision to leave this earth forever.” The doctor paused for a moment, a thoughtful expression on his face. “Throughout her life,” he continued, “Becky was let down time and time again by men. By almost all the men she came into contact with. Boys at her school just used her for sex. Then she met an older man, Coop, who got her into drugs, and then when he got into debt, he manipulated her into selling herself to pay it off. Every man that girl ever met did her harm. Through her abandonment issues with her father and brother—”

  “But her father didn’t abandon her,” Jack felt the need to interrupt.

  “Becky felt subconsciously otherwise. To her, he had risked his life in his work and paid the ultimate price. Becky felt a level of resentment that a man with a family should take such risks if he had children at home who relied on him. It was why she was so against her brother being in the army. She was petrified that the day would come when they’d turn up on her mother’s door to tell them that Alex was dead. She felt truly abandoned. It led to her feeling worthless in the eyes of men. And men, being the animals they are, saw that in her and took full advantage.”

  “Did she ever mention the Beast to you?”

  The doctor appeared to shudder at the mere mention and was silent for some time, the word “beast” appearing to echo through the room.

  “Yes, she did,” he finally said.

  Jack felt for the first time all day that he was getting somewhere.

  “Can you tell me who the Beast is?” he eagerly asked.

  “The Beast, Detective, is many men. He takes the form of all the evil that men did to her. He appears during Becky’s weakest points. She told me that he watched her both times she tried suicide.”

  “But is he not someone in particular?’”

  “Yes. He first emerged when she was thirteen.”

  “Who?” Jack couldn’t help blurting out.

  The shrink gave him that look again.

  “Her stepfather,” he
finally announced, and Jack felt a cog drop into place. “Whenever he was good to her, he was Steve. But when he abused her, he became the Beast, and she imagined him like that in order to place it all in another world. To detach it all from her normal life. Like many victims, she couldn’t face the reality of her abuse and chose to see her stepfather as two separate things. Steve the stepfather and the Beast that climbed through her window. A bogeyman, if you will. Some people hide their abuse in multiple personalities. Becky hid hers within fantasy. It’s a method of insulating yourself against the wrong in your life.”

  “Why didn’t you come to us with this earlier?”

  “It was a serial killer. That’s what everyone was saying. She’s the third victim. I thought it was random. Then you turn up tonight. I didn’t think the dark secret of a dead teenage girl was needed. And I take the secrets of my clients very seriously. Do you think it could be the stepfather?”

  “I don’t know,” Jack replied. “But I aim to find out.”

  42

  Half an hour later, Jack was pulling up outside the Cuthberts’. He jumped out of the car and into the rain, dashing along the paving stones and up the tarmacked drive to the door. He rang the bell several times, his heart beating frenetically.

  Helen soon answered the door, her face puffy and sad.

  “Is Steve here?” Jack demanded.

  “No. He went out. What is it?”

  “I need to talk to you, Helen.”

  Without an invitation, Jack walked past her into the hallway.

  “What is it, Jack?” she asked, closing the door behind him.

  “Where is he?”

  “He went out an hour ago.”

  “Do you expect him back soon?”

  “I’m not sure. We argued before he left. He could be out until the early hours.”

  “I need you to come into the living room and take a seat. We need to talk.”

  They both went into the lounge, Jack not forgetting his manners and removing his coat and shoes beforehand. They then sat on the couch together, Jack hunched forward, a wrought expression on his face, Helen worriedly gazing at him.