A Cross to Bear: A Jack Sheridan Mystery

by Vogel, Vince

  “This is making less sense by the minute,” he remarked, before taking a long toke.

  “How do you mean?” Lange asked from the driver’s seat.

  “He kills Anna around the beginning of last month, and we find the body on the sixth. The second is found four weeks later. Then Becky is found a little less than four weeks after that. Now this one four days later.”

  “Maybe he’s gone into overdrive, his needs increasing all the time. They say that the longer a killer goes on, the stronger the need to kill is in him.”

  “It’s too soon, George. Whichever way you look at it.”

  Just then a familiar car pulled up alongside them, and Jack groaned as he recognized the pockmarked face of Jonny Cockburn in the driver’s seat. Once Cockburn had switched his engine off, he turned to Jack and smiled. Both men wound down their windows.

  “Fancy seeing you here,” Jonny announced.

  “You driving around randomly again, Jonny?”

  Cockburn merely smiled at the detective.

  “You two heard about Canvey Island?” he enquired.

  “No,” Jack replied blankly, blowing smoke out his window and filling the journalist’s car with it.

  “Jacob Earle’s main warehouse has been firebombed. Loads of dead apparently. There’s gonna be one hell of a shitstorm.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because that particular warehouse was where Earle’s smuggling enterprise was based. I reckon once they put the fire out, your lot are gonna find a lot of interesting things in there that Mr. Earle won’t easily be able to explain away.”

  “The hidden are revealed,” Jack remarked, and he once again instinctively thought of Alex. Somewhere deep inside, he suspected that the rogue soldier had something to do with this all. Nothing definite had been given him yet, no piece of absolute evidence to point at Alex, but Jack felt it must be the case. A hunch, you could call it.

  “So is it another?” Jonny asked, nodding toward the woods.

  “Another what?”

  Cockburn frowned slightly and tipped his head to the side.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Yes it is, Jonny. They found another one of your blow-up sex dolls. It’s got a terrible puncture, but she should be good with a bit of duct tape. I’ll admit, we’re getting a bit tired that you keep leaving them lying around.”

  “No jokes, Jack. Serious now. Is it?”

  “Why else would you be here, Jonny, if it wasn’t for one of your contacts at the Met telling you something, huh?”

  “Why else would you be here either, Jack?”

  “Random driving, Jonny. Just like you.”

  The two were silent for a moment, and Jack continued to pull away on his cigarette. His mind flitted back to the girl in the tree and the way the timing was all wrong. Once again, he began to see Becky as something else, somehow separate. Unique. He thought again of her diary. Was there anything more in it that he hadn’t spotted? He’d read it to the end, the pages going blank soon after the entries introducing Gemma. Then his mind suddenly settled on another thought related to it all, and he looked across the cars straight into Jonny Cockburn’s eyes.

  “There is something I wanted to speak to you about, Jonny,” he said, pointing the end of his fag straight at the journalist.

  “Oh, and what’s that, Jack? Another joke?”

  “No. Four years ago, you covered that gypsy camp going up in smoke out in Hertfordshire.”

  “Oh, that bollocks.”

  “Why bollocks?”

  “The whole thing was some sort of cover-up, but no one was willing to talk. Not the pikies and not the cops.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “I go up there, right, and the place is burnt to a crisp, the shells of caravans everywhere. They pull two completely destroyed bodies out of the ash. Can’t even identify them through dental. So I began trying to get the pikies to tell me who they are. Ask what’s happened, like. Offered them money, the lot. But they basically told me to piss off, and eventually one of them pulled a shotgun out and I was off. Then there was the cops.”

  “What about the cops?”

  “They were real heavy-handed with the pikies. I mean, I’m not their biggest fan, but it did look like they were the victims in it all. The police on the other hand didn’t seem to agree. They stormed in there and instead of asking questions started arresting them. A few of the boys in the camp even ended up doing some time for various firearms and stolen-goods offences afterwards.”

  “Who was in charge of it?”

  “Local cops at the beginning, and then Scotland Yard came in once it made the news.”

  “Who from the Yard?”

  “Not sure. I saw Don Parkinson down there. But that was about it.”

  “So what else makes you think it was a cover-up?”

  “While I was out there, I stayed in a local B & B in the village next door. Buntingford it was called. Anyway, in the local pub I got talking to a few of the locals one night, and they kept repeating this story of hearing screeching tires come through the village in the middle of the night when it had happened. Some of them looked out their windows and saw huge four-by-fours racing through the place at one in the morning. A fucking army, they said.”

  “Who’d they say it was?”

  “They didn’t know. But when I asked if they’d spoken to the police about it, they said that the police didn’t want to know and hadn’t even been anywhere near the village to ask questions. Someone even took down one of the registrations of the convoy after it carved them up on the road. Said they went to the police with it. Said the cops assured them it was unrelated.”

  “So why didn’t you write about this convoy of vehicles in your article in the Standard?”

  “My editor pulled it out. I wrote a whole piece about the convoy, and he said that the lawyers stated we couldn’t put it in there. Said it was hearsay. Not part of the official police statement. It was a cover-up from beginning to end.”

  “You ever find out who told your editor to pull it?”

  “He said the lawyers, but I wasn’t convinced. I went and had a snoop around into his contacts at the Met. I found our old friend Don Parkinson.”

  Jack’s eyes narrowed and he thought of something, before moving it to the back of his mind with everything else.

  “You ever have any suspicions who it was that burnt the camp down?”

  “None,” Jonny replied, shaking his head. “I originally thought it was local hoodlums out of control. Then I thought maybe some grudge with a rival camp. But your lot were so against ever bothering to follow anything up and the pikies wouldn’t talk that it all got swept away like the ashes of those bodies. They were so badly burned that the coroner had no choice but to list it as death by burning.”

  “But you got no clue as to who started it?”

  “None.”

  Jack gazed into the trees and took the last toke of his fag.

  “Thanks, Jonny,” he finally said, tossing the smoke into the wet woods.

  “Does that make us friends, Jack?”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  Jack rolled his window up and turned to Lange.

  “You get any of that?” he asked his colleague.

  “Why would the police cover up a fire at a gypsy camp?” Lange put to him with a bewildered expression.

  “I don’t know. But it makes you wonder what all of this has got to do with four dead girls.”

  “Maybe it’s got nothing to do with anything, sarge.”

  “Could be, George. Could be.”

  They both sank back into contemplation, Jack already thinking about his next smoke, when Lange’s phone went off. He answered it and Jack watched as the DC’s face took on a look of surprise.

  “You’re kidding,” Lange exclaimed gently down the phone. He placed his hand over the receiver, turned to Jack, and said, “Steven Cuthbert’s just been found glued to a chair with terrible burns to his groin and face
.”

  “What?” Jack spluttered, sitting up in his seat. “Where?”

  “Some abandoned block of flats on the outskirts of Leytonstone. Uniform got an anonymous phone call, and they found him naked and glued to a chair with horrific injuries.” Lange took his hand away and continued on the phone.

  Jack, meanwhile, turned back to the ceaseless columns of the forest. He felt uneasy with this latest development. Could Alex be responsible? First the masked man in the woods. Now Cuthbert. When Alex was fifteen, he’d been capable of going after very dangerous grown men armed with no more than his frustration. Now he was older and had been trained to kill, could he be engaging in something far more deadly?

  Again, Jack took the decision to keep things to himself. Said nothing to Lange and planned to say nothing to Bishop either. There was something to it all that wasn’t clear. Something hidden beneath the surface. Jack could sense it, sense the hidden reason to it all, but he wasn’t able to conjure it lucidly into his head. Couldn’t put an absolute finger on what it was that he was seeing, as though he weren’t standing far enough away from it.

  Lange put the phone down.

  “What else they say?” Jack asked, turning to him once more.

  “He’s been rushed to the serious burn department at Whipps Cross Hospital. They found a laptop with him. It was full of underage pornography.”

  “Has he said anything?”

  “Nothing apparently. But he’s in a terrible state. Someone messed him up real bad. Not only have they glued him to a chair, they’ve branded something into his forehead and thrown boiling water on his groin.”

  Jack merely nodded but said nothing. In many respects, Cuthbert had gotten off lightly. He thought about calling Helen and informing her but then decided not to. The woman already had too much on her plate. No, Jack would leave her be for the time being. The way it looked, Cuthbert wouldn’t be going anywhere for the foreseeable future anyway.

  55

  Dorring arrived back at the hotel to find Chloe dressed in new clothing, tight black latex leggings hugging her skinny legs, and a tight black blouse of gauzy material that displayed the outline of her bra. Alex found her very attractive and was slightly stunned by her appearance when he first came in. Her long black hair was different too. She’d tied it into a bun at the back and wore a pair of black button earrings in her ears. Black lipstick adorned her lips, and mascara accentuated the shape of her eyes, the sable color bringing out the shine of her milky skin.

  Noticing him stop and stare at her as he came through the door, Chloe blushed. Which, in turn, brought a dash of red to Alex’s cheeks.

  “You look nice,” he remarked gently, before closing the door behind him.

  Stooping his large frame as he did, the back of his head scraping on the crumbling plaster of the ceiling, Alex entered the room carrying his rucksack.

  “It’s only Primark,” Chloe stated, her vanity making her instinctively touch the bun of hair with her hand. “I used some of the money you left and nipped down the road.”

  “You shouldn’t leave,” Dorring stated in a solemn tone.

  “I know. But I’ve been stuck in those other clothes for days now. And plus… well… I guess I wanted to look nice for you.”

  Having said this, she looked him square in the eyes and twisted her bottom lip within her teeth. The red on Alex’s cheeks expanded.

  “You don’t have to look nice for me,” he said, waving her away and taking his rucksack over to the corner, where he placed it by the suitcases.

  “No, I do. Because I really appreciate what you’re doin’ for me.”

  “What am I doing for you?” he asked, turning to her from the suitcases.

  “Protectin’ me and stuff.”

  “You keep going shopping and I won’t have done a very good job.”

  “I still appreciate it. No one’s ever really protected me before. Well, my dad did. But he’s gone. So… I appreciate it is all.”

  “Your gratitude is well received, Chloe,” he said, taking the chair and sitting himself down in the middle of the room, all that stooping down annoying him.

  “I also got us lunch.”

  “What is it this time? Because the kebab we had yesterday is still haunting my stomach.”

  He made her smile, as he had regularly in the two days she’d known him, and again she felt herself blush.

  “No,” she said, hurrying to some plastic bags that sat on the floor to the side of the bed and placing them on top. “It’s a picnic.”

  “But there’s no field.”

  “The room is our field. Look, I even got a blanket from one of the places round here.”

  She pulled out a red-and-white-checkered blanket from one bag and unfurled it onto the bed.

  “Very quaint,” he remarked.

  She looked up from the blanket with a big grin across her mouth and replied, “That’s exactly what I thought. Traditional, the old man in the shop said. But I thought quaint.”

  She began placing things from the carrier bags on top of the blanket and before long there were sandwiches, pork pies, Scotch eggs, quiches, crisps, dips, and a whole host of biscuits. Alex watched her the whole time with a gentle grin on his face. She displayed such care and pride as she placed each individual item onto paper plates. The crisps were fanned out into a crescent, the pies cut into quarters and intermingled into decorate shapes with slices of quiche and halved Scotch eggs, and the sandwiches were carefully stacked at angles on top of each other.

  “Da dah!” she announced when she’d finished.

  Chloe climbed up on the bed, trying her best not to wobble the picnic, picked up a sandwich, and wedged it into her mouth. While she chewed away, her eyes looked up at Alex. She swallowed her bite and said, “Ain’t you gonna join me?” Patting the bed next to her, she added, “Come on. Jump up.”

  Alex stood up from the chair, took his shoes and jacket off, and carefully sat himself cross-legged at the opposite end of the blanket. They both tucked into the food, and Chloe would giggle every time they happened to catch each other’s eye. She seemed to be full of childish glee.

  “My mum used to take me on picnics all the time,” she commented excitedly. “We lived in the countryside and would walk for miles to the top of a big hill full of green fields. It overlooked this wide river that always had sailin’ boats on it, and we’d sit watchin’ them. I loved those days.”

  “Where they found my sister—Epping—my mum and dad used to take me all the time. Those were nice days. Sitting in the sun with the birds singing in the trees all around.”

  “Nothing mattered back then, did it?”

  “Nothing at all,” he agreed.

  “We were free. Free to run around woods and meadows without so much as a care in the whole wide world. Nothin’ bad had happened yet. No one had hurt us. We didn’t know how wrong the world was.” She paused and a small tear gathered in the corner of her eye. “It was the closest to happiness I ever got,” she went on in a faint echo. “Just a glimpse… and it was gone.”

  She fell silent, and her expression dropped and her eyes clouded over. She looked down at the sandwich in her hand, and it was as though all those memories of being hurt, all that wrong in the world, was creeping back into her head like a black fog.

  “You’ll feel like that again,” Alex reassured her.

  “Will I?” she muttered, looking up at him with those big sad eyes.

  “You will. You only have to believe it.”

  She shuddered as though his words were a cold wind.

  “Yeah, I guess,” she said, forcing a smile and shoving the sandwich back into her mouth.

  They were silent a little longer, and Alex felt incredibly sorry for Chloe. Sorry that at nineteen she couldn’t think about happy memories or even happiness itself without instantly feeling sad. Because one state would always induce the other in her. A memory from the light would instantly conjure one from the darkness.

  “You didn’t ask abou
t Steven Cuthbert,” he said, looking at her sad eyes and wanting to take her mind somewhere else.

  “Oh yeah. Was it him?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think it would be.”

  “Why’d you say that?”

  “I told you. It’s someone in the Doyles. I’m sure of it.” Her eyes flashed as she said this. “So what did you do to him? Is he dead?”

  She said this last part so matter-of-fact that Alex imagined if he told her Cuthbert was dead, she’d probably just shrug and take another bite of her sandwich.

  “No.”

  “Then what did you do with him?”

  “I got answers. I found out that he’d abused Becky for four years from the age of thirteen.”

  “The dirty bastard!” Chloe exclaimed.

  “I also found things on his computer that the police may find interesting. Then I branded the word ‘pedo’ on his forehead”—Chloe grinned and rocked back and forth at this part—“and threw baby oil and boiling water on his crotch.”

  “Ah!” the girl let out, clapping her hands together. “Serves the pervert right! I wish you had’ve let me come. Did he scream?”

  “Yes. Very much.”

  “I bet he did! Liquid napalm on the dick and balls! He won’t be shoving that up any more children. Where is he now?”

  “Hospital, I’d imagine. I called the police afterwards, and they’ll have called the ambulance.”

  “Will he get arrested?”

  “After I left his laptop open at his feet he will. Plus, I told him to confess to it all or I would kill him.”

  “I’m sure once the skin on his cock grows back, he’ll sing like a fuckin’ bird!”

  “That’s if they get him off the chair.”

  “Why would he not be able to get off the chair?”

  “Because I glued him to it.”

  Chloe laughed so hard at this that a piece of sandwich shot out of her mouth and narrowly missed Alex.

  “Hey!” he exclaimed. “Watch where you’re firing that stuff.”

  “Sorry,” she said through the hand that covered her mouth, her cheeks going scarlet and her whole body rocking with laughter.