A Cross to Bear: A Jack Sheridan Mystery

by Vogel, Vince

  Watching her laugh, Alex began to feel a gentle warmth take hold of him, and he realized that it was joy. Genuine joy. The light in the room appeared to become brighter, and a halo of it surrounded Chloe. It had been so long since he’d had actual pleasant company, and he was enjoying having the girl around. For all her cynicism and weight of pain carried upon her shoulders, she could also display a child’s carefree spirit. He had been completely sincere when he’d said earlier that she could be happy again.

  However, as is often the case, the light dimmed once more as though clouds were covering the sun, and Alex began to hear the humming of ghosts in his ears. He searched the corner of the room to the right of Chloe and saw Katya in the arms of her mother, Tatyana’s hair covering her face. Like the nineteen-year-old girl, Alex could never experience the light without immediately falling into darkness.

  Chloe watched his gaze wander over to the empty corner and observed the deep sadness that began to contort his features. Tears shone in his eyes as Alex’s attention was pulled into the melancholy and frightened face of Katya. That mark upon her forehead appeared to suck him toward it, dragging him into her, the sound of the air whistling through it merging with the humming, his head filled with their dirge, all of it boring into his mind.

  “Hey!” Chloe said, grabbing his arm and pulling his eyes away from the scene. Her heart immediately sunk at the sad face that gazed back, teardrops flaking from his eyes. “You okay?” she added.

  He wiped his tears and continued to gaze at her.

  “I’m sorry,” he finally said. “I sometimes…” But he stopped, unwilling to open himself up. “Yeah” was all he managed.

  He picked a piece of quiche up and began nibbling on it, averting his gaze from Chloe’s sympathetic expression.

  “You sure you’re okay?” she went on, her hand still grasped on to his forearm.

  “Yeah.” He nodded. “I’m a little like you, Chloe. The past hurts.”

  She softly took the quiche from his hand and placed it back on the plate. Then she settled her arms gently around his sinewed body and rested her chin upon his shoulder. At first, he was unsure what to do but gradually his own arms reached around the girl. He felt instinctively that he held on to something truly comforting. A drowning man to a buoy.

  “There’s nothing wrong with needing people, Alex,” she whispered into his ear. “Even I need people. I need you. I needed you before I ever even knew you existed. I’ve always needed you. It was like I was waiting for you to rescue me. To dive into the water and pull me out. To protect me. You’re a good man, Alex Dorring. A good man.”

  “I don’t feel like one,” came his hollow reply in her ear. “I’ve done such terrible things, Chloe. Unforgivable things. I looked at Steven Cuthbert today and wondered if I was any better than a thing like him.”

  “You are,” she said firmly.

  They continued to hold each other on the bed, surrounded by their picnic, the gray world going by outside their little one-windowed hovel, the whole of smoggy London splashing about its business in the perpetual rain, the two of them ignoring it all and existing in a world of nothing except them, two lost souls floating on a cosmic river.

  56

  A dead-faced man with short pitch-black hair sat upon the end of a bed in a rundown East London hotel. He sat rigidly with his legs apart, and his large hands rested on his knees. His eyes stared blankly out of the small window straight in front of him, a litany of peeling yellow wallpaper surrounding it.

  Outside, the ink-smeared sky threatened to open and release a deluge onto the dirty city below. Dressed in an olive bomber jacket over a plain white T-shirt, black jeans, and white Adidas trainers, the man looked like so many other people walking the city at any time, blending into any crowd, hiding among the typical.

  But he certainly wasn't typical. Oh no. He was a trained beast. A torturer. A killer. A man whose profession was to hurt people terribly and to end life. And to do it all as a ghost upon the wind. To exist among the shadows until primed into the light.

  His phone went off on the bed beside him, breaking him out of his Zen-like composure. He slowly swiveled his neck and looked down at it. It was the call he’d been expecting. He answered.

  “Agent 442,” came a female’s voice.

  “Control,” he acknowledged in a deadpan.

  “We may have tracked down 192.”

  “Where is he?”

  “I’ll send the coordinates over.”

  “Thank you, Control.”

  The phone went dead, and a message instantly came through. 442 checked it, memorized it, and placed the phone in his pocket. He then got up from the bed, walked to the far corner, and picked up an aluminium case similar to the two Alex had. Carrying the case, he left the room.

  Downstairs in the shabby reception, he tossed the key onto the desk, making the little old woman there jump.

  “Leaving so early?” she enquired after him.

  But he didn’t answer, never even turned back, and simply left through the door. The woman tutted to herself and picked the key up, placing it on a hook behind her, before returning to the little portable television tucked under the desk.

  “It takes all sorts,” she muttered to herself.

  57

  Jack made his way through the stench of disinfectant along a series of meandering hospital corridors. He was at Whipps Cross on his way to speak to Steven Cuthbert.

  Once the medical staff had pried him off the chair and begun seeing to his wounds, Cuthbert had been read his rights by the police officers present. The moment they did that, he’d demanded to speak to Jack Sheridan. He would only speak with him. Caldwell had called Jack and given him the news. This had forced he and Lange to drive back to Bayfield Road from Epping. Jack had then picked up his own car and gone to see Steven Cuthbert, while Lange joined the uniform officers going door to door in the area asking questions.

  Coming to the corridor of Cuthbert’s ward, Jack immediately saw the uniform officer sitting down reading a magazine outside the room. When he was a little closer, the policewoman stood up, guiltily placed the magazine on the chair, and smiled at him.

  “Hello, sir,” she said.

  “He said anything?” Jack asked, coming up to the door and glancing in through the window. He saw a very sorry-looking Steven Cuthbert lying on his back and staring up at the ceiling. The top of his head was bandaged, there was dressing on the backs of the arms stuck out the sheets, and a white cloth tent had been erected around his groin.

  “Nothing, except that he’d only talk to you,” the constable replied.

  “How’re his injuries?”

  “He’s got severe burns to his upper legs and private parts. Apparently the skin’s all pink and peeling off. They say he’ll need a skin graft, but he’s ignoring the doctors. He’s got another serious burn on his forehead. Looks like he was burned with a brand. And he’s got grazes all down his back, and the backs of his arms and legs where someone glued him to a chair.”

  “Bloody hell,” Jack muttered, gazing into the room at the troubled face of Cuthbert.

  “Was it him that killed Becky Dorring?”

  Jack turned his eagle eyes sharply on the officer.

  “What makes you say that?” he wanted to know.

  “Just that he’s her stepdad, and they found him in this state with a computer full of… well… stuff.”

  “Try and leave the detective work to the detectives, constable.”

  Jack twisted the handle and went inside. Cuthbert turned away from the ceiling and faced him. Jack didn’t say hello and merely sat himself down in the chair next to the bed, facing the wall at the end of it. Cuthbert returned his eyes to the ceiling.

  “They said you wanted to talk to me,” Jack stated, leaning back in the chair with his legs outstretched and the laced fingers of both hands resting on his stomach.

  Cuthbert took a while to answer, and Jack waited patiently, gazing nonchalantly at the greasy stain on the ye
llow wall opposite.

  “Yeah,” Cuthbert muttered. “Are you going to take a statement?”

  “I’ll leave that to someone else. It would have to be done back at the station anyway. Recorded and everything. I’m simply here to clear a few things up. Firstly, I want to know if you’ll cooperate with us. We’ve got you hook, line, and sinker for what we found on the computer with you. Officers searched it and found that you’d used your own PayPal account to purchase several of the files. Later today, they’ll conduct a search on your house, which will probably turn up more evidence. So to save your wife the ignobility of the neighbors seeing the police search her house, I’d like you to tell me now if and where anything else that may be of interest is hiding.”

  “There’s a USB in a locked tool cabinet in the garage,” Cuthbert instantly answered, his voice trembling. “The key is at the back of the left-side drawer in the workbench. Everything I have is on that. There’s no more, I swear.”

  Jack took out his little notebook and wrote this down.

  “Did you sexually abuse Becky Dorring?” came Jack’s next question.

  Cuthbert closed his eyes tight, his face contorting, and muttered, “Yes.”

  “At what age did this start?”

  “When she was thirteen up until she was seventeen.”

  Cuthbert began sobbing once he’d said this. Jack simply shook his head.

  “Then the next question is: did you kill her?”

  “No” shot out of Cuthbert’s weeping mouth.

  “Then where were you the night of her disappearance?”

  Cuthbert shut his eyes tight and let out an inhuman groan. There was shame in this creature, Jack thought. At least there was that.

  “I was with a girl named Jenny Kelly,” he wept.

  “And who’s she?”

  “A girl I teach at Mary Magdalene. She’s sixteen. You can call her and check it out.”

  Jack closed his eyes and wiped his hand briskly down his face, gripping his stubbled chin at the end. It goes on, he thought.

  “You got her address?” he asked.

  “44 Sandhurst Avenue, Barnet. She lives with her parents. Don’t make it hard on her.”

  “It’s too late for that, Steve. How long has this been going on?”

  “Two years.”

  “Bloody hell! Since she was fourteen?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are there any more?”

  Again Cuthbert closed his eyes tight and muttered an affirmative yes.

  “Then I need you to detail them all when you eventually give your statement. For now we’ll leave it at that.”

  “You believe me that I didn’t kill her?”

  “Why incriminate yourself so much? I’m sure someone’s placed the fear of God in you, and I believe that within that fear you’re being sincere. I’ll have someone check out your alibi. I’ll get them to tread as softly as they can. But not for your sake. No, for the poor girl who’s going to have to answer some pretty embarrassing questions. However, when this is all done and everything comes out—because it must come out—then there’s gonna be a lot of tears from everyone concerned, including this Jenny girl.”

  Cuthbert’s eyes screwed up, and several tears trickled down his cheek.

  “What am I going to do, Jack?”

  Sheridan didn’t know what to say. In truth, he wanted to drag the bastard out of bed and kick him around the room. But that wasn’t the thing to do. Not the thing to do at all.

  “For one,” Jack began, not taking his eyes off the stain in front of him, “you need to prepare for your life being exposed to everyone. Because the press are gonna go to town on you—pedophile teacher molests own stepdaughter and pupils at school. Your mum, your dad, brothers, and sisters are going to get a lot of hassle over the coming months. Imagine your old mum having to answer questions on her doorstep about her pervert son. A lot of parents suffer terribly after this sort of thing. Often society blames the parent. The neighbors shun them. Their friends don’t return their calls. People point and even spit at them in the local supermarket. Some businesses refuse to serve them at all. Because we’re a people that like to blame and judge, aren’t we? It’s not good, but it’s somehow intrinsically in our nature.” He shook his head at this last part. Tears streamed down Steven Cuthbert’s face, billowing from the wide eyes that stared fearfully at Jack. “But that’s your family. What you personally need to get used to is a long time in prison, where you’ll be hated by every prisoner except your fellow sex offenders. I won’t beat around the bush on this—it’s going to be very tough for you. You’ll be known as a ‘beast.’ Do you understand what that means?”

  “Yes,” Cuthbert muttered, his eyes concentrated on Jack’s face.

  “Then you know how much you’ll be hated.” Jack paused and considered the next part. “Going by what statistics I know, I’d guess that in the years you’ll be in prison you’ll be attacked at least ten times in a serious way. You won’t know when, but you’ll feel it coming. In your bones you’ll feel the tension that surrounds you, building up like a drummer’s roll. It may come from any source at any time. That concoction that got thrown over you today may become something you’ll have to get used to. Other times they’ll just beat you. Even worse, they’ll shank you with homemade knives made out of melted toothbrushes with razor blades stuck in them. It’s usually two blades they stick on, so that it creates a set of parallel cuts about a centimeter apart, making it harder for the wounds to heal. They’ll leave terrible scars. Each time you’ll bleed, and each time they’ll fix you up and shove you back on the block. Then there’s the fact that you’ll have your food delivered separately, as you’re usually segregated from the other prisoners at mealtimes for your own safety. That means you’ll have to get used to eating shit and spit and whatever else. Because any chance they get, they’ll mess with you. Every so often they’ll get creative and pop in a piece of glass or a screw, something to cut you up inside. You need to start checking your food, and you need to know that from this day forth, you’re on your own. No one will ever look at you without the knowledge of what you did. You’ll be a pariah.”

  “What are you saying, Jack?” Cuthbert let out, an aggrieved tone to his voice. “That I should kill myself?”

  “I wouldn’t suggest that to anyone. But I wouldn’t deny someone the chance to escape if their life became nothing but misery.” Once he’d said this, Jack stood up and made to leave the room. At the door, he turned for the very last time to Steven Cuthbert and said, “The moment you’re well enough, you’ll be transferred to Upper Hackney to be properly charged and have your statement taken. For your own good, do not leave anything out. I want your whole confession as though we were the Lord God Himself. After that, you can start the rest of your life.”

  “Don’t you want to know who did this to me?” Cuthbert cried out.

  “Not really.”

  Jack turned and left the room. He already knew who it was. It had to be Alex.

  Left on his own, Cuthbert burst into miserable tears, his body convulsing with each sob, a mixture of self-pity and self-hatred running through him all at the same time. One way or the other, his life was over.

  58

  Dorring leaned with his palms on the windowsill looking out at the people thronging along the wet street down below. Behind him, Chloe was on the bed reading a magazine she’d bought earlier. As his hawk eyes scanned the knotted mass on the pavement, Alex spotted a familiar face bobbing along among them.

  Turning back to Chloe, he said, “Your friend Danny is watching us again.” She placed the magazine down and came off the bed, positioning herself beside Alex at the window.

  “Where?” she asked, resting her head on his shoulder. Dorring pointed to the slender shaved head of the boy peering mercilessly up from the endless flow of bodies, like a diver sticking his head up out the water. “He’s worried,” she said once she’d spotted him. “Likes to keep an eye on me.”

  “Are you and
he…?”

  “Are me and he… what?”

  “Together.”

  She turned sharply to him from his shoulder, and her face screwed up into an incredulous scowl.

  “Me and Danny?” she exclaimed. “You do know he’s only a kid? I look after him, but that’s it. I’m not bangin’ him. He’s been through a lot, and so have I. We look out for each other.”

  “I think we should move again,” Alex stated.

  “Really? I was beginning to get used to our little place.”

  “We shouldn’t stay anywhere for longer than two days.”

  “Why? Because of Danny?”

  “Not because of that.”

  “You mean the government?”

  “I mean exactly that.”

  She studied his face carefully for a moment, his eyes still fixed to Danny’s form down on the street. His vacant expression gave nothing away.

  “You never told me why they’re after you,” she put to him.

  “I work for them. I was supposed to come in, and I didn’t.”

  “Come in? What does that mean?”

  “Return to base. Stand down. Not run around with young girls starting gang wars.”

  Chloe grinned when he said this last part. She felt privileged to be the young girl in question and happy that the Doyles were being drawn into something terrible with Alex pulling all the strings.

  “What you gonna do next with the Doyles?” she asked, gazing dreamily at his handsome face as he continued to stare out the window.

  “I’m going to check those tracking devices I placed on their cars the other night and see if anything significant has come up.”

  “You mean see where they’ve been?”

  “I do.”

  Dorring stepped away from the window and walked across the room to one of the aluminium suitcases. Sliding his thumbs across the sensors, the locks clicked and it opened. He took the laptop out, closed the case back up, and sat with Chloe on the bed. As he gazed down at the screen, she came up behind him and rested her chin on his shoulder, her own eyes cast down at the laptop.