A Cross to Bear: A Jack Sheridan Mystery

by Vogel, Vince

  “What else have you got, then?”

  “We think we’ve got a crime scene. A separate incident involving a break-in turned up hair fibers belonging to Becky Dorring. I’m at the address now.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “It’s looking like the killer broke into someone’s home and killed her there. Shiva’s people are in there now gathering evidence.”

  “What about the residents?”

  “They were away until yesterday morning. They came home to find things out of place and called us. Two hairs pulled from the scene came up as Becky Dorring.”

  “Good break.”

  “Yeah. Hopefully we’ll pull something useful from the site.”

  “Let’s hope, Jack. Look, I’ll send a couple of the Yard’s boys down there.”

  “You mean Pierce and Locke?”

  “That’s them.”

  “With all due respect, Tom, I’d prefer it was just myself and George Lange on this.”

  “Nonsense, Jack. They’re working the case too. I’ve told them to share everything they have with you. I’ll get them to call you in a minute, and they’ll meet you wherever you are. Now, I have to go. As you may have heard, the city has descended into gang warfare, and I have to give a press conference in ten minutes assuring the public that it won’t spill onto the streets. Don Parkinson looks like he’s got the shits and constipation all at the same time!” Jack grinned widely at this last claim. “So I’ll speak to you later.”

  Jack was about to say goodbye, but he remembered something.

  “Tom,” he quickly uttered.

  “Yes, Jack?”

  “There’s something else. It may not be anything, but I feel I still need to share it with you.”

  “What is it?”

  “The brother, Alex Dorring—he’s back.”

  “And what’s so strange about that?”

  “Alex Dorring was or is in the SAS. He’s possibly a very dangerous person. I’m gonna check out a few things today.”

  “You think it’s significant?”

  “It could be. His mum, Helen Cuthbert, said he was acting strange. He apparently asked her all sorts of questions about Becky’s death. I need you to contact someone in the MOD about his status. I’d call them myself, but they’ll just fob me off with their confidentiality bollocks. I was hoping that as the deputy commissionaire you could achieve something that I couldn’t.”

  “I’ll see what I can do, Jack. But I must be going. Thanks for the update.”

  “Bye, Tom.”

  Jack slid the phone back in his pocket and took a look down the pathway at the grandiose frontage of the house. Could this have been the place Becky Dorring spent the last minutes of her life? Before she was poisoned and nailed to a cross.

  While Jack pondered this, the big black door of the house was slammed shut by someone inside, and the beastly gargoyle door knocker stared straight at him. There was ugliness hidden everywhere, he thought.

  51

  This time, Dorring almost went too far. Cuthbert’s eyes had reeled into the back of his head, and the tugs on the bag became less frequent. Alex nearly lost the man. But only nearly. He pulled the bag off and Cuthbert’s face had gone blue, his lips a deep purple. A second after it was removed, he burst into life and started to pant, his dead eyes gazing around the room, as though he’d just come back from somewhere else.

  “Look at me, Steven,” Alex commanded, and the man gradually brought his gaze to settle on him.

  “Please,” he muttered weakly, his head lolling to the side on its long neck. “Please.”

  “Don’t worry. I won’t do it again. Just tell me what I need to hear and I won’t ever put the bag over your head again.”

  “What… what do you… want to know?”

  “I don’t want to know it. I need to. Firstly, when did it start?”

  Cuthbert shook his head, and Alex dangled the bag in front of his face.

  “She was thirteen,” came almost inaudibly from Cuthbert’s mouth.

  “Speak up,” Alex insisted with a deathly look in his eyes.

  “When she was thirteen,” he announced a little louder.

  “And you raped her? A little girl?”

  Cuthbert closed his eyes tight, nodded, and wept, “Yes.”

  “Was this still happening up until her death?”

  “No… I stopped… when she was seventeen.”

  “Why?”

  Cuthbert closed his eyes again and muttered, “I found her in the tub. She’d cut her wrists… It was… terrible… I felt bad. Real bad. Like something was rotten inside of me.”

  “You blamed yourself?”

  Cuthbert simply nodded, his sobs rippling through him.

  “That’s because you were to blame,” Dorring stated. “And so you didn’t sneak into her room anymore?” Cuthbert shook his head and mouthed no. “Then that brings me to the next question, and I think you know what it is. Did you kill my sister?”

  Cuthbert opened his eyes and looked straight at Alex.

  “No,” he said firmly. “And you can put that bag over my head as many times as you like. I didn’t kill Becky.”

  Dorring grabbed ahold of Cuthbert’s chin, holding his face rigid. He glared into the rapist’s eyes and summed up what he saw. After a few seconds, he let go, throwing the head back, then turned around and went off through the open doorway into the room of steam.

  “You do believe me, don’t you?” Cuthbert called out after him.

  Dorring said nothing and merely returned with a small welding torch and what Cuthbert originally mistook for a potato masher. Alex crouched down in front of him, placing the torch on the floor beside him and holding the masher out before Cuthbert’s eyes. It was then that Cuthbert realized it wasn’t a masher on the end of the handle but something else: metal wire bent into the shape of a word. He quickly gathered that it was “pedo” written backward and instantly balked at what was about to happen.

  “While you were asleep,” Alex said nonchalantly, “I made you this.”

  “What is it?” Cuthbert let out in a shaky murmur.

  “A brand,” Alex answered, picking up the torch and heating the end of it. “Farmers use them to distinguish their livestock. They used to brand convicts too. It was so that everyone knew what they’d done. So that they couldn’t simply carry on as normal once they’d served their time. Nowadays, men like you get caught, do a bit of time, and then return to society hidden. I don’t want you to hide, Steven—I want everyone to see you.”

  With that he took the red-hot brand and brought it up to Cuthbert’s face. He instantly recoiled from the heat, and Alex took hold of the back of his head.

  “Now don’t struggle,” he warned, “because this could become very messy.”

  He pressed the brand forcefully into Cuthbert’s forehead, holding the back of the neck firmly to stop it moving, and the room immediately filled with three things: the terrible sizzling sound, the smell of cooking flesh, and the bloodcurdling scream that escaped Cuthbert’s mouth, his tongue waggling in the wind of his cry.

  Once he’d had it on there for several seconds, Dorring took it off, finding it pull slightly on the burnt, tacky flesh. Cuthbert’s cry died down, and Alex let go of his head, which instantly drooped forward. He then grabbed Steven’s hair roughly and held the face up so he could see his workmanship. The wound was purest white but gradually turning purple, and there, for all to see, was the word “pedo.”

  “Not bad, if I do say so myself,” Alex remarked while Cuthbert sobbed away.

  Alex then walked off through the door, into the steam once more. Cuthbert heard him shifting something about, and soon Dorring returned with a saucepan full of steaming water. Steven Cuthbert was instantly gripped with fresh foreboding.

  “What’s that?” he asked in terror.

  “They call it liquid napalm in prison. But to you and I, it’s simply baby oil in boiling water. They say it strips skin right off and takes weeks and eve
n months to heal.”

  “What are you goin—”

  He got no further. Alex had lurched forward and thrown it all over Cuthbert’s naked groin. He screamed out even more than he did when he’d been branded, and his screaming took a full minute to subside, a deep cracking sound emerging from his throat as the cry strained his vocal cords.

  While Cuthbert convulsed in excruciating pain, Alex crouched in front of him and glared into his eyes.

  “You’re going to confess every little crime you’ve ever committed, Mr. Cuthbert. All those involving my sister and all the other ones that are still hidden behind those eyes. You’re going to tell the police everything. And if you don’t, or I think you haven’t confessed it all, I’m going to find you and finish what has been started here today. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” Cuthbert muttered through seething pain. His crotch felt as though it were melting, and he was unwilling to look down and see the mess that was left.

  “Then we never have to meet again.”

  Alex gathered his things and left the man writhing in agony in the middle of the room, his cries echoing in the abandoned building. A part of Dorring felt a level of macabre satisfaction in what he’d done. But another felt guilt.

  As he walked to his car, he felt the presence of Katya alongside him. She said not one word, nor did she hum, and Alex knew the reason for this. It was because in this moment, her father terrified her.

  52

  “How long did they say they’d be?” Lange asked from the driver’s seat.

  Jack checked his watch, a fag dangling from his fingers, the window open slightly. They were in Lange’s car of course.

  “They were supposed to have been here ten minutes ago,” he replied. Jack then saw a car in the wing mirror. It was coming up the road behind them, and he saw two men in it. “This could be them.”

  The car parked a little way behind, and Jack watched the mirror as the dopey figures of Pierce and Locke came out. The string bean of Pierce and the potato of Locke never failed to have a humorous impression on Jack. He opened the car door and leaned out.

  “Oi! Dickheads,” he called, waving at them.

  The two men looked over, frowned when they saw Jack, and began meandering over. Jack shut the door, and the fat figure of Locke came up to the window. He was about to say something when Jack cut him off. “Get in the back. Both of you.”

  Locke sighed and opened the back door, Pierce opening the opposite side, and the two men scooted onto the back seat. Locke was on Jack’s side, and the veteran detective felt the suspension diminish as Locke’s round ass settled into the seating. Pierce was on Lange’s side, so the car became a little lopsided with Jack almost leaning on the door.

  “Have you two ever thought of swapping diets?” Jack asked jocosely.

  “Straight off with the jokes,” Locke put back to him.

  Jack glanced over at Lange and saw he was grinning. At least someone appreciated his humor.

  “Right, down to business, then,” Jack said the moment they were comfy. “What’s up, then, gents?”

  “We’re good,” Pierce answered.

  “I wasn’t asking you about your mood, you tit. I want to know what you know about this case.”

  The two Scotland Yard boys looked at each other, making derisive frowns, before turning back to Jack

  “We’ve got an ID on one of the other women,” Pierce stated.

  “You sly buggers. Who is she?”

  “It’s the first body that was found,” the wiry detective went on. “We got it through Europol. Her name’s Anna Tamara Rebrov. She’s from Ukraine. We got a positive ID from Donetsk police. The fingerprints we gave Europol matched on some records they had on an old arrest. She’s twenty.”

  “Anyone speaking to the family?” Jack asked.

  “Yeah. Someone from the Ukrainian police is going. I’m not sure how they’ll get the body back for burial. Her mother reported her missing about two weeks ago apparently. Claimed that little Anna had stopped sending money over, and they couldn’t get hold of her by phone. She came over on a fake Slovenian passport under the name of Milya Krasic. She was shipped through the Euro Tunnel, so her fingerprints were never taken at the border. It’s our guess that she was working over here in the sex industry, sending money back.”

  “So we do have our link between the killer’s victims. The sex industry.”

  “That’s not all,” Locke piped in, shuffling forward in his seat, the car creaking a little as he did. “There’s something much more solid linking Anna and Becky. Sensual Sin.”

  “What’s Sensual Sin when it’s at home?” Jack asked with a bemused face. “The horse that’s racing this afternoon in the sixteenth at Aintree?”

  “No,” Locke exclaimed, glancing at Pierce. “It’s internet porn. Live streaming and all that. Don’t tell me you don’t watch porn.”

  “I don’t watch porn,” Jack stated firmly. “My mother was once a Catholic nun, and she did about enough to deter me from that nasty shit.”

  “It is the twenty-first century, Jack,” Pierce commented. “It is okay to masturbate.”

  “Oh, I masturbate,” Jack declared. “I just don’t watch porn.”

  Pierce and Locke gazed at him with incredulous frowns, before shaking their heads of the image that had been planted there.

  “Anyway,” Locke continued, “both Becky and Anna worked for Sensual Sin. We have evidence that Becky worked for them two and a half years ago and that Anna was working for them right up until her disappearance. But that’s not the best bit. Guess who owns Sensual Sin?”

  “Save the suspense.”

  “The Doyle brothers.”

  “You’re kidding,” Jack exclaimed gently.

  “Oh yes. And the studio that’s been all over the news this morning was theirs too.”

  “So what have the Doyles to do with all this, then?”

  “We’re not sure. We were supposed to head over there today and speak with someone at Sensual Sin, but Don Parkinson told us to leave it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because him and his team are all over this gang war that the Doyles are involved in at the minute and don’t want us getting in the way.”

  “But this is a murder investigation. In fact, it’s three. We should be allowed access.”

  “Well, maybe you can go to your best mate, Tommy Bishop,” Pierce suggested.

  Locke turned his fat face to his skinny colleague, and the two of them chuckled.

  Jack ignored the slight and asked, “What’s profiling saying about the killer?”

  “Not much really,” Pierce replied. “Basically that the guy’s got a God complex. But when doesn’t one of these freaks not think he’s some sort of God. He holds death over the victims. That’s his power. He’s showing the world that these girls are sacrifices to the rest of society. Scapegoats for all our sins. They’re essentially worthless to him. Only material for his need to feel like a God and make some sort of statement. We think he’s most likely white. English by birth. Early thirties to early forties. Single. May have previous with working girls, because there’s evidence he has knowledge of their habits. He’s a Christian, though whether he’s practicing or not isn’t clear. He obviously has a crucifixion fixation; the crucifixion of Christ was man’s apparent redemption. We think he may be making a similar statement: that these girls are a symbol of some kind of redemption or possible redemption. Though that theory is shaky at best.”

  It wasn’t much more than what Jack had already come up with himself.

  “Anything else?” he asked.

  “Not so much about this case, but about the massacre in the woods yesterday morning.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Apparently there was a witness. Bloke walking his dog. Said he saw a guy in a black mask talking to Davey Doyle before shooting him.”

  “A guy in a mask? I thought it was simply a Mexican shootout between the Doyles and the Earles. A masked man sounds li
ke someone else got involved.”

  “Parkinson doesn’t know what to make of it. Could be a third gang trying to start a war so they can move in afterwards. Cause as much destruction and clear the way.”

  “Also,” Locke interjected, “one of the bodies had a large hole to the temple. Forensics reckon it was where someone had cut the bullet out because there was no exit wound and no bullet.”

  “Interesting,” Jack muttered, and he thought about Alex being back. Masked man removing a bullet from one of the men. Removing it so no one knew what type of gun had been fired. Had the brother figured out the link between his sister, Sensual Sin, and the Doyles? If he had, Jack was certain Alex—if indeed he was back for revenge—would head straight for the gang.

  “Well, that doesn’t really help our case,” Jack remarked eventually. “You got anything that does?”

  “Not really,” Locke said. “Like we said earlier, Parky’s told us to hold off on the Doyles for the moment. So there’s not much else apart from that. Let’s hope something turns up at this address.”

  “Okay. If that’s all, then you know what that means, don’t you?”

  “What?”

  “That you can both piss off.”

  “Hey, wait up,” Locke protested. “What about what’s happening here. You haven’t told us how fibers of Becky Dorring’s hair ended up in this house.”

  “At the moment we don’t know, so being that I’ve nothing to offer you, the first offer still stands: piss off.”

  “Dick,” the pair muttered in unison, flinging the car doors open and getting out, Jack almost being launched into the roof when Locke lifted his giant ass off the seat. He then watched the two Scotland Yard boys make their ways along the pavement to the house, probably to ask Shiva the exact same questions that he and Lange had already asked. It would be the same answer: they’d have to wait until early afternoon for any results.

  While Jack sat watching the two Scotland Yard detectives disappear through the front door of the house, Lange got a phone call and answered it. With the detective constable muttering away on the phone next to him, Jack continued to gaze about the street at the well-kept bushes, perfect brickwork, and almost sterile appearance of the place, only catching the odd word come out of Lange. Words like “really?” and “bloody hell.”