A Cross to Bear: A Jack Sheridan Mystery

by Vogel, Vince

  “This is Jack Sheridan,” Alex said. “He’s the detective I told you about. The one we heard on the bug at my mother’s house.”

  “So he’s a good guy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So where’s Billy now?” Jack enquired, taking his eyes off the girl.

  “Billy’s gone to the dogs,” Alex replied nonchalantly.

  “So what now for you, then?”

  Alex gazed into space, and Jack handed him the bottle. He took a swig, handed it back, and said, “I don’t know. I guess I’ll have to go into hiding. The people I work for are coming after me. They won’t stop until I’m either dead or locked away with them.”

  “So you’re just going to disappear?”

  “That’s all I can do.”

  “We’re going away,” Chloe stated, taking the bottle from Jack as he held it out and swigging it herself.

  “You’re going with him?” Jack put to her.

  “Yes,” she replied, gasping slightly from the liquor’s burn. “Me, Alex, and Danny.”

  “Who’s Danny?”

  “A friend of ours,” Chloe replied, gazing straight into Jack’s eyes as she said it.

  Jack felt more assured by the minute, his hunch unraveling into a full-fledged resolution.

  “Is there anywhere we can take you, Jack?” Alex asked.

  “Are you gonna see your mother before you go?” the detective replied.

  Alex studied him for a moment, his face caught in thought.

  “She’s at my place,” Jack added. “I took her there when it all came out about Steven Cuthbert.”

  “How is Cuthbert?” Alex put back to him. “Did he confess his crimes?”

  “Yes. But that doesn’t answer my question. If you’re buggering off for good, the least you can do is come back to mine and say goodbye to her.”

  Alex chewed his lip, thinking it over.

  “Okay,” he finally relented.

  72

  On the back seat of the car, Jack sat uneasily next to the scrawny figure of Danny, Alex driving and Chloe in the passenger’s seat. In his shivering hand, the detective held a fag and pressed his face to the half-open window as his mind raced. Every so often he would glance over at the boy next to him, who casually leaned up against the door gazing at the passing wet streets, and then at the girl in the front, a smile on her lips as she too gazed at dreary old London as it passed by. He couldn’t help looking at them. They were the answer to so many loose ends. In the last few days, he had read and heard so much about Gemma that she had come to represent a type of phantasmic myth to him. Now, he was sitting in a car with her and Pat, and they were with Alex of all people.

  They reached his house, and Jack asked them to stay in the car while he went next door and checked on his grandson.

  “You’re late, again,” Jean barked at him when she opened the door.

  Jack instinctively glanced at the car and then back, while she stood with her hand on her hip in the doorway.

  “Jean, love,” he said in a low tone, “I need you to keep Ty here no matter what. Okay?”

  For the first time, she observed the pale color of his face.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked, an element of worry trickling through her.

  “I’ll explain later. Has he been good today?”

  “As gold. He came shopping with me and was a big help.”

  “Did Carrie call?”

  “Yeah. Didn’t she get ahold of you after?”

  “No. My phone’s been on silent for a while. How was she?”

  “She was okay.”

  “What about Helen?” was Jack’s next question.

  “I went round at lunchtime, and she was up. I checked on her not long ago and made her some soup. Obviously she’s still really upset.”

  “Thanks, love. Now I need you to keep yourself and Ty in the house. Can you do that?”

  “Yeah, but you’re makin’ me worry.”

  He leaned forward and kissed her on the lips.

  “Don’t worry,” he whispered. “Just stay inside.”

  Jack went back to the car.

  “You coming?” he said through the window to Alex.

  Alex got out while the other two stayed put.

  “They not coming?” Jack asked Alex.

  “Do they need to?”

  “I’ll make them a brew.” Jack popped his head through the window. “You two can come inside if you want?”

  “We’ll let him see his mum on his own,” Chloe stated.

  “Nonsense. Him and his mum can talk in the lounge, and we’ll go to the kitchen. You both look like you could do with a brew.”

  “You got any food?” Danny asked bluntly.

  “Plenty. Come in and I’ll make you some.”

  Chloe glanced into the back, her face slightly perturbed, and Jack knew why. She didn’t want Alex’s mum seeing her.

  “We’ll go straight through to the kitchen,” Jack went on.

  “Come on, Chloe,” Danny said. “I’m starvin’.”

  “Okay,” she said reluctantly.

  “I’ll take Alex to see his mum, and then I’ll come back and get you,” Jack said, purposely reassuring Chloe that she wouldn’t be seen by Helen.

  Jack took his head out the gap in the window and walked to his front door with Alex. As he turned the key in the slot, he turned to Dorring.

  “Nervous?”

  “A little. The last time I saw her I wasn’t exactly cordial.”

  “Well, be easy on her this time. She’s suffered terribly and already feels to blame. She’s not. Not at all. And you should remember that.”

  “I’ll be civil, Jack.”

  They stepped through the door, and the detective led Dorring across the hallway to the lounge, where they could hear the muttering sounds of the television emanating from within. When they entered, Helen was curled up on the couch vacantly watching TV. The second she glanced toward the doorway and saw her son, she leaped up from the couch, bolted over to him, and threw her arms around his large frame.

  Unlike the cold feeling he’d had the day before, his own arms instinctively gripped around his mother, and a release happened inside of him, his eyes closing tight and his head resting into her warm shoulder. He was whisked back to the day of his father’s funeral when he had held on to her just as tightly while the coffin had descended into the ground. Back then, he had promised in his head never to leave her, to protect her and Becky always, and like so much in his life, he had failed to live up to it.

  “I’ll leave you two to chat,” Jack said from the doorway, leaving the room and closing the door.

  The detective marched out of the house and fetched the other two from the car, taking them through into the kitchen, where they sat around the table as Jack made Danny a sandwich.

  “So how do you know Alex?” he asked while he fetched some crisps from the pantry for the boy.

  “I knew his sister,” Chloe replied.

  “You knew Becky Dorring?”

  “Yeah.”

  Jack placed the sandwich and crisps in front of Danny, and the boy eagerly took them up, shoving the sandwich straight into his mouth.

  “Was that from Rampton?” Jack said, sitting himself down between them, his eyes fixed on Chloe’s.

  She looked at him with a dead face for a moment, before calmly answering, “No. I don’t know what Rampton is.”

  “It’s an institution for women,” Jack put back sharply.

  “Well, I ain’t never heard of it. I met Becky at Sensual Sin.”

  “You mean that porn studio that got done over last night?”

  “Yeah,” Danny burst out with a chuckle, his mouth full of bread and ham.

  Chloe shot him a look, and he stopped laughing.

  “Yeah. I met her there a while ago,” Chloe stated, swiveling her gaze slowly back onto Jack. “I didn’t know her name was Becky then, I thought it was Roxy. And I only knew her five minutes.”

  Jack nodded along to w
hat she said.

  “So how’d you two get tangled up in all this anyway?” he enquired.

  “Alex rescued me.”

  “Did he?”

  “Yeah. Billy Doyle was gonna do to me what he did to all them other girls, and Alex helped me escape. If your lot weren’t so corrupt, maybe you would have caught him yourselves long before all of this.”

  “And now Billy, Jerry, Davey, and all their mates are dead,” Jack remarked.

  Chloe leaned forward, gazed deep into his eyes, and said, “And all the better for it.”

  “An honest reaction,” Jack replied, gazing straight back into her.

  Alex sat beside his mother on the couch, leaning forward with his elbows rested on his knees, his hands playing with each other, eyes studying the space of carpet between his feet. Helen softly rubbed his back, feeling how taut it was under her fingers. It was the same when he’d been a boy. He’d come home from school frustrated, and she’d rub his back. It always soothed him. She sensed that these past years he’d had no one to soothe him.

  “What have you been doing all these years, Alex?” she asked.

  “I’ve done—” he began, taking his eyes off the carpet and gazing at his moving fingers, “—terrible things, Mum.”

  “But it was your job.”

  “It wasn’t always.”

  “But where have you been? What countries?”

  “Everywhere. The Middle East, Asia, Europe, South America. Wherever they need someone killed, they send me.”

  “Is that with the SAS?”

  He shook his head, his fingers working into each other even more rapidly.

  “No. It’s way past that, Mum,” he stated. “The men I work for these days don’t even acknowledge their existence.”

  “But what else have you been doing? Surely you haven’t only been working?”

  Alex gradually began to hear the melodious humming travel to his ears, and he looked up from his hands. There standing before him was Tatyana and Katya, the little girl in front and the mother’s hands rested on her shoulders. They were both smiling at him, and he grinned to see the sparks of joy on their faces. But then his gaze drifted to their foreheads, and he cowered at the black fluid that trickled out of the holes, his furtive eyes returning to his hands.

  “I had a family once,” he said.

  Helen immediately smiled to hear such a thing from her son.

  Alex reached into his pocket and pulled out a worn black leather wallet. He opened it and took out a picture, handing it to his mother. Helen held it in her hand and gazed at the beautiful blonde woman with the little blonde girl standing in front of her, the mother’s hands rested on the girl’s shoulders. Their faces looked so happy as they smiled at the camera, a sun-drenched golden barley field stretching out behind them. Alex gazed at the photo too and recalled that day at their little place in the Crimean countryside. It had been he who had taken the picture, and their smiles were the results of his antics behind the camera.

  “They’re beautiful,” Helen said, tears filling her eyes as she looked down at the picture with glowing pride. “What are their names?”

  “My wife’s name was Tatyana, and my daughter was… Katya.”

  “Where are they now?”

  Alex instantly looked away from the picture, their smiles becoming deeply disturbing to him all of a sudden. He gazed ahead of him, and there they were again, standing before him in the room, the black oozing from their faces, slipping down their bodies and creating a pool on the carpet. It wasn’t only the sight of them in the room that disturbed him; he could feel them too, feel the air pressing in on him. His mind flashed back to the confines of a filthy concrete cell, only a faint light coming in through the small gap under the steel door, illuminating the room in a gloomy hue. His eyes gazed into the darkest corner of the cell, and there, placed in seated positions, sat the bodies of his wife and daughter, the air thick with their rotting stench. When they’d first put them there, he’d recoiled into the farthest corner away from them. But as the corpses had began to talk to him, he felt that they were indeed still alive. Eventually, he’d moved himself closer so that he could be with them. When they finally rescued him from that terrible place, they’d found him curled up with both rotting bodies, his mind plunged into the darkest depths of itself.

  “They’re dead,” he finally muttered.

  “You like the sandwich, Danny?” Jack asked the boy as his chomping mouth came to the last corner of it.

  “Lovely, thanks. Not that cheap ham either. Good stuff.”

  “Honey-roasted from the butchers,” Jack informed him. “No supermarket rubbish here.”

  Jack turned back to Chloe. They hadn’t really said much to each other this past minute, and a silence verging on awkward permeated the room.

  “So where do you think you’ll all go?” he enquired.

  “Don’t know,” she replied, shaking her head lightly.

  “I suppose disappearing is nothing new to you.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Well, you said yourself, you escaped the Doyles. That would take an element of disappearing.”

  Chloe narrowed her eyes at him.

  “I guess,” she replied in a dubious tone.

  “Is it because you’re a cop?” Danny suddenly asked.

  “What’s because I’m a cop?” Jack said, turning to him.

  “That you’re askin’ all these questions.”

  “You could say that. I guess all of us coppers must have an element of natural suspicion and inquisitiveness.” Jack turned back to Chloe. “So how did Alex find out that it was Billy Doyle that killed those girls?”

  “He told you himself,” she replied. “Billy confessed.”

  “But before that. He wouldn’t have tied him to a tree if he didn’t have a reason.”

  “He put a bug on Billy’s car and found where he was takin’ the girls to nail them to the crosses. We were gonna send a message to the police in the mornin’, tellin’ them where to find it. We may as well give it to you.”

  “That’d be handy.”

  Jack got up and grabbed her a pen and paper. She began writing the address of the garage on it, while the detective sat back down.

  “How’d you get that cut on your forehead?” Jack enquired.

  “Billy Doyle hit me,” she said as she wrote.

  “How’d you end up with Billy?”

  “Bloody hell,” Danny exclaimed. “More fuckin’ questions?”

  “I’m a copper, Danny,” Jack put to him forcefully, turning to him and staring straight into the boy’s eyes. “This happens to be a case I’m working on. You two seem to have more clue to it all than I do. So in that case, I’d like to get to the bottom of things.”

  Danny was about to retort something, but Chloe glanced sharply at him and he stopped himself.

  “It’s okay,” Chloe said, sliding the piece of paper over to Jack.

  He looked down at the address. Some garages in an area of dilapidated houses. He knew the place. Police were constantly being called out to move on squatters in the buildings.

  “Thank you,” Jack said, folding the paper up and placing it in his pocket.

  “I hope it helps,” she said casually.

  “How’d they die, Alex?” Helen asked, her trembling fingers still holding the picture and her eyes unable to leave the face of her little granddaughter.

  Alex’s eyes misted over while Tatyana and Katya continued gaze at him.

  “I… eh… I… you see, I had no choice… and I…”

  Helen looked up from the picture and studied him hard as droplets began falling from his eyes.

  “You can tell me,” she said softly.

  He turned to her, his face so pitiful in that moment that she wanted to throw her arms around him once more.

  “I want to, Mum,” he said. “These past years, I’ve gone so far into the dark that I can’t… I can’t see the light anymore. I’ve become so… out of tou
ch.”

  “I wish I could understand you, Alex, but I don’t. You look like you’re in so much pain. Is it because of them?” She nodded toward the picture. “Because they died?”

  His blue eyes cast their gaze straight into her, and she shuddered to see the darkness that existed therein.

  “What would be the worst thing,” he began asking her, “that I could do to make you never want to see me again?”

  She took in a deep breath of air and, with confidence, declared, “Nothing. You’ll always be my son.”

  “Look, I know this is annoying,” Jack was saying to Chloe, “but I have to ask. I’m gonna need to make a report about this. It isn’t as easy as saying that a girl slipped me a piece of paper with the address on. I have to state in the report what led me there. I need to know why Alex suspected Billy.”

  “Why don’t you go in there and ask him, then,” Danny burst out in annoyance.

  “Danny,” Chloe said sharply, gleaming her eyes at him. She turned back to Jack and said, “I was workin’ at some of their places. Sensual Sin and a couple of the brothels. I saw Billy with those girls, the ones you lot don’t know about.”

  “We know about one. She was from Ukraine.”

  “Yeah. They was both Eastern European or somethin’.”

  “Becky wasn’t, though.”

  “Yeah, but she still worked for the Doyles, and so did them other girls.”

  “Becky hadn’t worked for the Doyles in well over two years, and it had only been a couple of times because her boyfriend was in debt with one of their men. Chances are that Billy never even saw Becky.”

  “That don’t mean he didn’t kill her.”