A Cross to Bear: A Jack Sheridan Mystery

by Vogel, Vince

“It doesn’t. But it makes her different.”

  Chloe shook her head at him.

  “Billy was evil. He killed those girls. He admitted it. Why do you think he didn’t?”

  “I don’t think that at all. But you have to admit that Becky was strange.”

  “How’d you mean?”

  “Well, firstly Billy goes to the trouble of selecting women he knows won’t be easily identified. Because they work for him, he knows for certain that they can’t be traced. That’s being careful. He wants to have his fun and not get caught. But then he takes one hell of a risk with Becky. He goes out into the public, and he takes her while she’s on her way home. She’s got a mum at home and— ”

  “A mum at home!” Chloe exclaimed with vexation. “What sort of mum did she have, huh? The type of mum who, when Becky went and told her she was being abused, accused her of lying? Sided with the guy who raped her own daughter? That woman in there made her lose her mind. So don’t go tellin’ me she had a mum.”

  “Did Alex tell you all that?”

  “No,” Chloe replied, her face going a little paler than it already was. “She told me.”

  “When you were together at the studio?”

  “Yeah,” she muttered, turning her eyes down to the table.

  Jack glanced over at Danny, who was sitting watching them both with wide eyes.

  “Still doesn’t answer the question as to why Billy Doyle would risk so much going for Becky. Breaking his pattern and causing himself to be exposed. Especially to someone like Alex. Did Becky also tell you about Alex?”

  “How do you mean?” she muttered.

  “When you chatted at Sensual Sin. When you thought she was Roxy. She’d already told you one of her innermost darkest secrets—i.e. her stepfather’s abuse—after only knowing you five minutes, so surely she told you about her trained killer brother. About him being in the SAS.”

  “I don’t know,” she mumbled, gently shaking her head as she did, her eyes fixed to the flowery pattern of the tablecloth.

  “Because Billy really made a huge mistake killing Becky, didn’t he? Look what it brought down on him. The Doyles’ whole world is nothing but embers now. All because Billy killed a girl who’d have someone come after her. Did Becky ever mention that the only way she’d ever get her brother home would be if she was killed?”

  Chloe looked up from the cloth and into his eyes. Something had passed through her; she felt an inner urge to let it all out, to confess to this stranger everything. But the anger that had festered in her for so long, which drove her to such unspeakable ends and still existed even after her revenge was complete, that anger impelled her to bottle up her confession and spite this smug pig.

  “Like you said,” Chloe put to him in a wrathful tone, “I only knew her for five minutes. So why would I know that?”

  Helen continued to sit behind, Alex rubbing his back as he gazed forlornly at the wall, his darkest secret slowly bleeding out his mouth.

  “I killed a lot of Arabs one day in Beirut while in the SAS, and the bastards back here cheered. I held them off for seventeen hours until they captured me. What followed was a month of torture. I never gave them a word. Kept my mouth shut. Even when they drowned me ten times in one day, bringing me back with a defibrillator each time.” Helen gasped when he said this. “I thought I was dead but felt like playing a silly game with both them and myself. Trying to stay alive while annoying them into upping the game all the time. Anyway, in the end I was rescued by sheer good luck when Mossad stormed the place. The Israelis handed me back to the British, and they, in turn, offered me an even worse job than the one I already had. It entailed espionage, and though the training almost broke my sanity, I was eventually admitted into a secret wing of MI6. I essentially became a killer for the British government and its allies overseas. One of my first missions was to infiltrate the house of an international arms dealer named Sergei Shatov. In order to achieve this, I had to first spend six months in a Turkish prison with his brother, Igor, to earn the man’s loyalty and trust so that he would introduce me to his brother when I got out. Luckily, Igor was a marked man in the prison, and I managed to save his life on three separate occasions. When I was released, I was welcomed into the Shatov homestead with open arms and given a job in security. During my time there, I lived under a false name and fed information back to the British while pretending to be on Shatov’s side.”

  “I don’t understand,” Helen interjected. “What has this got to do with their deaths?”

  “Everything. Shatov had a wife, you see. A beautiful woman named Tatyana. I used to listen to him beat her at night during one of his fits of drunken rage. He was an animal. But she was such delicate sweetness that I believed her an angel. I would be charged with guarding her whenever she left his compound. We began to talk, and I slowly fell in love with her and she with me. By the time my mission was coming to an end, she came to me and told me she was pregnant. It can’t have been Sergei’s because he was impotent. At that moment, having found out that I was to be a father, the mission faded from my mind and I got us both out. When Sergei found out, he contacted me by mobile telephone and promised that if he ever found us, he would torture Tatyana while I watched. He would do things to her that would break my mind as well as hers. I can still hear his snarling voice as he promised to make us pay.” Alex paused and the echo of those threats struck him now. He glanced up at Tatyana and Katya, their eyes staring painfully down at him. “But we got away,” he went on. “We escaped to the Crimea and set up in a little lakeside place surrounded by pine trees. Snow in the winter, and radiant sun in summer. Birdsong all year round and fishing too. I can still see the wind shaking the barley and the long grass, hear the creaking echo of the trees bending in it, the sun glittering in the lake’s ripples. It was beautiful. Tatyana had Katya, and we lived four blissful years as three. We watched our little girl grow up into a vibrant wonder, her cheerful nature serving me more bliss than I’d ever felt in my bland existence. I forgot about killing. About Dad. About leaving you and Becky. About all the ills that chewed away at my brain. If I hadn’t have been in hiding, I would have called you and Becky to me then. I would have called to you and invited you to share in my life. It was heaven and I often got confused and thought that it actually was. That I had died and gone to paradise. I’d sit on the dock watching the water, Tatyana laying her head upon my lap and humming, Katya playing with Bruno, the gray mutt we had, throwing sticks in the lake and gleefully watching him jump in and fetch them. It was such a joyous, simple life.”

  Alex went quiet, and Helen observed the gentle smile on his face, his eyes gleaming as though he were back at that lake.

  “What’re you sayin’, mate?” Danny wanted to know.

  “Danny, let me do the talkin’,” Chloe chided. She then turned back to Jack and said, “It’s always the same with you lot. Always looking for something else, never satisfied. Is that what this is? You not happy that Alex did more in three days than your lot managed in thirty fuckin’ years?”

  “I’ll admit that on a certain level justice has been served,” Jack stated. “But not for Becky. Not for Alex.” He let this last statement drop for a moment before continuing. “You owe it to them. You got your justice; now let them have theirs.”

  He looked straight into her when he said this, and she shook her head at him.

  “Get out of my head,” she muttered.

  “You know,” Jack said, “when you shook your head just now, I could see the blonde roots. You’re due another color. My wife used to have to do hers every couple of weeks to stop the roots coming through. Is it the same for you?”

  She continued to shake her head at him.

  “Just say it,” she snarled. “Just come out and say it.”

  Danny, who was glancing between the pair of them as they had their stare-off, stood up from his chair.

  “This is bullshit,” he burst out.

  “Sit down, Patrick,” Jack shouted at him, not taki
ng his eyes off Gemma.

  Patrick did as he was told. He was gobsmacked and didn’t know what was happening. He simply sat there and gazed at Jack, a look of boyish fright on his pallid face.

  “It must’ve been awful to watch your mum and dad die, Gemma,” Jack said in a sympathetic tone. “Julia and Roddy. Because Roddy was your dad, wasn’t he? He was always your dad. Not Billy. Biology has got very little to do with fatherhood. Anyone can have kids. Procreation is a certainty in most of us. But to be a father is something completely different.” Tears began to drop from Gemma’s eyes. “Then to hear that terrible truth from that bastard’s mouth while you hid under the caravan. To watch Billy nail your mum and dad to crosses, then burn the place down. To watch it all from that field, watch everything you ever knew, ever loved, burn. Because that fire didn’t only burn in front of your eyes, Gemma, it burned in here.” Jack tapped the side of his head with his finger. “To find out that you were the result not just of rape, but of incest too. He took everything from you that night. Didn’t he?”

  “Yes,” she sobbed loudly, her whole body convulsing with agony.

  “So you ran away. You and your brother here. Went to London. To live or maybe to keep an eye on the Doyles. But you got lost. Who wouldn’t at fifteen in this labyrinth of iniquity, huh?”

  “There was nowhere else,” flooded from her mouth.

  Jack stuck his hand across and took hers as it lay among the flowers of the tablecloth.

  “You took care of him?” he asked softly, nodding in Patrick’s direction as the boy watched on.

  “Yeah… I did.”

  “That must have been terribly hard. You must have made terrible sacrifices to put food on his plate.”

  “I did… I did,” she blurted out tearfully.

  “You should be proud of yourself. What you did takes terrible courage. To go to such lengths to look after your little brother. You’d only just discovered the evil of men, and now you saw a whole other side of it having to earn money on the streets. I mean it with every bone in my body when I say you have my complete respect and pity for what you must have gone through. Is that why you went off on one with that punter? The man you… hurt.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Gemma,” Patrick cried out, “why are you tellin’ him?”

  “Please, Pat. I want to. I can’t hold it all in anymore. It’s eatin’ me up.”

  “They sent you to Rampton,” Jack went on. “You were lost and you found someone.” Gemma nodded, a smile breaking through her tears as she recalled Becky. “She’d been hurt too, and you felt an affinity for her.”

  “I wanted to protect her.”

  “Because you’d spent so long looking after your brother. You met her and eventually she told you her story. Told you about the abuse, about how she’d worked for the Doyles, told you everything. But the thing that caught your attention the most was her brother. She told you about him being in the Special Forces. You began imagining what would happen if you had a brother like that.”

  “She made him out to be this Superman,” Gemma said in an aggrieved tone. “But he ignored her. He was just as bad as the others. He let her down. She told me once that the only way she could ever get him back to London was if she was killed. She told me about her dad and how her brother had been almost killed going after the men that did it. She said he was the bravest person she’d ever known. But he sounded like a coward to me. The way he’d just run away to the army and cut all contact. It never stopped her believing in him, though. She’d say, ‘You wait and see if I ever got killed. He’d have to come back. Then all those men would pay.’ In a way, I was getting them all back for her.”

  “Four and a half years of bliss were spent in that place,” Alex went on. “Then one night I awoke to the sounds of men’s voices muttering in the darkness outside. I slipped out of bed and to the window, where I peered out the curtains and saw the silhouettes of many men in the glare of the moon. They were surrounding the place. Somebody had given us up, and now Shatov’s men had come to take us. So I woke Tatyana, and we got Katya. With the house completely surrounded, the three of us made our way to the cellar and locked ourselves in. All we had in the house was a single pistol and a hunting rifle. I had the pistol and Tatyana the rifle. We stood at the base of the steps, our eyes fixed on the door, Katya cowering behind us, listening to the men crunch through our home as they searched for us. They found the door to the cellar and began hammering at it. In that moment I heard Shatov’s voice whispering in my ear. I heard him tell me all the things he would do to my loves. All the terrible, terrible things I’d have to watch my little girl go through.”

  Alex paused and his mouth continued to move, his eyes fixed upon the wall ahead, the tears cascading down his cheeks.

  “What happened?” Helen asked, looking into her son's face.

  “In a moment of complete lucidity… I… In a split-second decision based on what I knew… I… I turned around from the door and… I shot them.”

  Helen’s hand came away from his back and clasped her mouth, eyes filling up, a scream wanting to escape her lips.

  “I shot my family in order to save them from worse,” he continued, his voice much sturdier now. “Then with both of them lying dead behind me, I waited down there in the darkness for Shatov’s men to come. When they did, I killed as many of them as I could. They’d been promised a hundred thousand dollars a man if they got me alive. Only ten thousand if they didn’t. Through sheer greed, they allowed me to turn that house into a graveyard, and I was so overcome with blind rage that I killed at least seven of them with my bare hands.”

  Alex’s face grimaced into an angered scowl as he remembered the feeling of his thumbs plunging down through a man’s eyes sockets, the eyes turning to jelly as he forced them into the skull. Helen, meanwhile, sat beside him trembling all over, her hand firmly trapping her screams in her mouth, the darkness spewing from her own son casting her deep within the shadows of herself.

  “Eventually, they took me somewhere,” he went on. “To a cell. I thought they’d torture me physically. But they didn’t. They merely locked me inside there with the bodies of Tatyana and Katya. At first they terrified me. To see them there, their eyes open and gazing across at their cowering husband and father. I was so consumed with grief that it drove me into the clutches of madness. By the end of the first week, they began to talk to me as my madness took control. By the second I was talking back, holding full conversations with them. And by the time they took me out of there, I was sleeping alongside them, my arms constantly wrapped around their bodies.”

  “Oh, Alex,” Helen burst out and threw her arms around her grieving son.

  “So you come out of Rampton,” Jack said softly, his hand still closed over hers, their eyes gazing into each other, reaching out across a void of pain, “and you went in search of Billy. It’s this part that’s the mystery to me. What happened then?”

  “I went to work for Sensual Sin, to get close,” she confessed. “Maybe close enough to kill the bastards. See, I wanted them all. Billy. Jerry. Davey. But the more I worked there and the more I saw, the more I wanted it all to fall down. Then one night two months ago, me and Pat followed Billy Doyle to those garages. We saw him back a van up to them and put somethin’ in it. Afterwards we followed him to the woods and saw him carry it through the dark. When he left, we saw what it was.”

  “A girl on a cross,” Jack interjected.

  “Yeah. She looked so peaceful. And so much like my mum. I recognized her from the studio too. She was one of the girls that used to go up to their house. That was when me and Pat had an idea.”

  “Take me through that idea, Gemma,” Jack urged her gently on.

  “Gemma, don’t,” Patrick insisted.

  But she didn’t even turn to him this time.

  “It was a dream really,” she said in a hollow mutter of a voice. “Like a special fantasy. I’d first had it in Rampton. When Becky told me about Alex, I started dreamin’ of a
soldier comin’ and rescuin’ me. I created this superhero in my head, like the cross between a soldier and an angel. Then when I got out, I told Pat all about Becky and about her brother. About how she’d worked at Sensual Sin and about how her dad had been killed the same way as our parents. We began sittin’ up at night and imaginin’ her brother comin’ back to London and trackin’ them down. About leadin’ Alex to the Doyles. You see, I knew somethin’ that Becky didn’t. When she told me about her dad and about Alex going after the men he thought were responsible, there was one thing she didn’t know: that it was the Doyles. I did.”

  “How’d you know that?”

  “When Billy killed my mum and dad, he started mouthin’ off about some cop he’d nailed to a cross years ago. About how much fun it had been. When Becky told me about her dad being nailed to a cross and being a cop, I couldn’t believe it. The way I saw it, Alex already knew it was the Doyles that had done that to his dad. If his sister was killed the same way, he’d already suspect them, or at least wanna search them out. Eventually, he’d find out that it was Billy killing those girls and go after him.”

  “But he didn’t kill Becky. You did,” Jack put to her. Gemma looked down from his eyes and nodded. “You snuck Becky in there to make it look like the same guy and to lead Alex to the Doyles. You wanted him to get the revenge that you and Patrick couldn’t.”

  “If it could have been any other way,” she muttered, “I would never have hurt her.” Her eyes flashed up and caught Jack’s gaze once again. “I didn’t hurt her. She never even knew what happened.”

  Jack patted her hand, before removing his own. He felt he had to look away from her eyes too.

  “The pizza menus,” he then put to her. “That was you?”

  “How’d you know about that?” Gemma asked.

  “Don’t worry. Just tell me what it was about.”

  “We often stay at other people’s houses while they’re away. London is full of houses that are empty. We put the menu on the door and then come back later on to see which are still there.”