The Ring - An Alex Dorring Thriller

by Vince Vogel

  “You are,” he said, his eyes burning into her. “Can’t you see he’s a sick man!? Got cancer. Where’s your fucking empathy?”

  The lift stopped and the doors opened.

  “My suggestion,” Barker went on, “is to fuck off out of it now.”

  “I’ve never been so insulted,” she exclaimed.

  “I’m not willing to believe that,” Barker said. “Ugly pig in a skirt like you. Now fuck off!”

  The woman’s friend took her by the arm and pulled her gently out. When they were gone, Barker leaned forward and struck the button with the palm of his hand.

  “Fuckin’ assholes,” he muttered as the doors closed and they began going down again. Then turning to John, he added, “You gonna be good?”

  “Yeah. Just the meds, is all. Shouldn’t o’ had that brandy, like you said.”

  The lift reached the bottom and the doors opened. Barker helped John out. A crowd of people were waiting. When they got inside, the two men smiled as they heard their complaints at the state of it, as well as the smell.

  “I hope they never wash that smell out,” John remarked as Barker led him across the lobby to the front doors.

  32

  Like always, the Westfield shopping center was brimming with people. It stood as a beacon of commerce in front of the gate to the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. It had been built at the same time as the park and opened shortly before the London Olympics in 2012, as though it were a monument to England and all it stood for. Consumerism.

  Dorring entered the flow of bodies that moved listlessly like the walking dead amongst the polished surfaces and shop fronts. He went down several escalators to the bottom. It was four floors that went in a curve for several hundred yards. He found the food court and walked its length, gazing at the various people sitting at tables. He spotted Foster. Sitting alone in a corner.

  Dorring took a seat opposite. Foster looked worried.

  “We have to be quick,” he said immediately. “They got to me before you called. I’m to help bring you in.”

  “Who got to you?”

  “Huh! I wish I knew. Someone above me. They got your name from somewhere.”

  The computer taking the photo at the Belgravia, Dorring said to himself. It must’ve scanned my eyes. Found me on the system. So this is how high it goes up.

  “They sent several agents to see me,” Foster went on, “and coerce me into giving you up. There’s two agents close to us on standby. Don’t look. Keep your eyes on me.”

  “You have any idea who it could be?”

  “Not yet. All I can say is that you’ve upset someone very high up in the organization. I don’t know what you’re up to, but it’s very dangerous. So are you going to tell me what it is?”

  “I’m looking for a girl. She’s caught up in this thing with Charles Carter.”

  “Oh, Christ,” Foster mumbled. “So am I to believe it was you who took the manager of the Belgravia?”

  “Yes. He’s in the boot of my car. I’ve not had the heart to let him go yet.”

  “Well, you won’t be able to go back to the car. They’ll have watched you come in. There’s an agent in the security office of this place, watching the cameras. We’ll have to disband for the moment and I’ll try to reach you later.”

  “I need as much intel on something called the Ring.”

  “I’ve heard of it. A band of powerful pedophiles.”

  “That’ll be them.”

  “Okay. I’ll do what I can. For now, you need to strike me and make a run for it. I’ll find you later. You ready?”

  “Yep.”

  Dorring burst up from his chair. Foster did the same and lunged for him. Dorring punched him hard in the jaw and he fell away limply.

  “Get him!” Foster cried out.

  Dorring was already skipping through the people. When he emerged from the knots of tables, a man stood with his palm held out and another hand inside his suit jacket. Plain, featureless face. He was an agent.

  “Come quietly,” the man said.

  On a table to Dorring’s right, a woman drank a steaming black coffee. He grabbed the cup as she went to feed it to her mouth and slung the piping hot drink in the agent’s face. Then he pushed past him as the man clawed away at his scalded flesh.

  Dorring headed through the thronging shoppers, pushing some of them violently out of the way. As he reached an escalator, he was tackled from the side. He bashed into a couple, knocking them to the ground as he went down with the agent on top of him.

  They wrestled. It was quick. The other man attempted to get his pistol and press it against Dorring. But the latter had him by the wrist and was twisting him around. Dorring was a very strong man. The agent had made a mistake.

  “He’s got a gun!” a woman screamed.

  There was a blind panic that moved through everybody close enough to see the frenzied fight on the floor. People began running. Dorring got the guy wrapped up, his legs around the agent’s, one hand controlling the hand with the gun, the other arm around the man’s throat and constricting the windpipe as Dorring lay on his back with the man on top.

  Meanwhile, the agent with the scalding face was working his way through the crowd. By the time he made it past all the people running at him, feeling as though he was battling against the rapid flow of a river, he found his colleague unconscious on the ground. He checked the man’s pulse. He was still alive. Then he checked for his weapon. It was gone.

  Speaking into his comms, he said, “192’s armed. Have we got eyes?”

  “Yeah,” came the voice of another agent who was in the security room observing the monitors. “He’s just entered the corridors for the underground carpark. Fire escape about twenty yards to your left.”

  The agent gazed in that direction. Down a corridor that led to some toilets, he saw a fire escape hanging open. So he went for it.

  “He’s headed left to a stairwell and is going down,” said the agent over his comms.

  He headed that way, pushing past shoppers coming in the other direction. He hit the concrete steps of the stairwell, practically jumping down them.

  “Down one more floor,” the comms said. “He’s entered the carpark. The door will have 4G written on it.”

  The agent reached the floor. 4G. He burst through the door and into a lot filled with cars, rows of them, strip lighting on the low concrete ceiling, people walking about.

  He gazed at his surroundings, looking for signs of Dorring.

  “Straight on and then right at the end of the row you’re on,” said his comms. “He’s gone into 4F.”

  The agent put his head down and went that way, running past a family that was busy loading shopping bags into the trunk of their car. They watched him go by, having watched Dorring run past less than a minute earlier. The agent turned right. Headed along the next row.

  “Where is he?” he growled into the comms.

  “I lost him about twenty yards along.”

  “What does lost mean?”

  “He ducked into a row of cars to your right and I’ve been unusable to locate him since.”

  The agent began checking along that row.

  “He could be anywhere,” he whispered into his comms. “I can’t see a bloody—”

  He didn’t get any further. The red brake lights of the car directly to his right roared into life. He froze on the spot, grabbed his pistol, swung his body to face the car and fired into the back window, shattering it. The car tires screeched and the agent flung his arms up as the back end slammed into him. He dropped the pistol as he grabbed onto the spoiler with both hands, grappling it as the car forced him backwards, dragging his feet along and threatening to pull him all the way under. The wind in his lungs was obliterated out of him when he smashed into the parked car behind, taking the full impact of the collision. It didn’t kill him. He heard and felt his back snap apart, his body pinned at the midriff. He beat down on the car with his fists as the tires screeched and spun and filled the car
park with white smoke, Dorring crushing the man between the car he’d stolen and the one parked behind. Then he felt his hips break and his pelvis crumble as they were pulped between the cars.

  Dorring flipped the car into first and went forward, back into the gap it had pulled out of. The agent dropped to the floor. The pistol was about seven yards away. He began crawling towards it, his legs dragging limply behind. He reached the gun as the car went into reverse and came hurtling back at him from the gap. As his fingers reached the grip of the gun, the back wheel came over him. He was caught in the footwell and it scooped him up backwards so that his head and upper body were pulled into the wheel arch by the tire; like a mechanical wheel pulling a belt. The car jumped back into first and turned. The motion pushed his body out and he lay dead on the ground, a crumpled mess of broken bones.

  A woman who’d heard it all came running over. She screamed wildly when she spotted the dead man.

  Dorring didn’t stop at the barrier. He stuck close to the car in front and followed it through. The security guard came running out of the booth at him and Dorring pointed the pistol at him, so that he immediately turned on his heels and ran back behind the little wooden shed.

  Then Dorring roared off into the city, knowing that he had to get rid of the car as soon as he could.

  33

  Barker and John pulled up outside the branch of Thompson and Thompson Property Management that dealt with the Rigsby Road building. Inside, they found a small office of people tapping away on computers or speaking on phones. When they walked through the door, a thirty-something woman with long, bleached white hair glanced up from her desk and smiled.

  “How may I help you gentlemen?” she asked.

  Barker held his identification up and the smile dropped.

  “I’m DS Barker,” he asked. “I’d like to know who deals with the Rigsby Road property?”

  She frowned at him.

  “I’ve never heard of the place,” she said. Then, looking over her shoulder at a man sitting at a desk behind hers, she asked, “Dave, who deals with a property at Rigsby Road?”

  It was Dave’s turn to frown.

  “Could be Carlton,” he said.

  She turned back to the two men standing in front of her desk.

  “I’ll have a look on the computer,” she said. A few seconds later, she flipped the monitor around so they could see. “Yes. Dave was right. Carlton James looks after that property and several others.”

  “And where is Carlton James?”

  “I don’t know. He was supposed to be in this morning, but never showed. He’s rarely ever here. Deals with his own list of properties and we have very little to do with them.”

  “Can I grab the list of other properties he looks after, as well as Carlton’s full name and details?”

  “Of course.”

  “Hey?”

  It was Dave. The guy sitting behind her.

  “Shouldn’t you have a warrant?” he asked.

  “It could be arranged,” Barker replied. “But if I do come back with one, I won’t just have them go through Carlton James’ stuff. I’ll have them go through everything. It’ll be worse than any audit you’ve ever had. You’ll have to close up shop for a week. If you want me to do that, I will.”

  Dave shook his head. Then he went back to typing on his computer and minding his own business.

  The white-haired woman printed the details off and the two men thanked her before leaving. Then, she followed them with her eyes and when they were out of sight of the shop front, she got her mobile out and dialed Carlton James’ number. Like it had all morning, it rang to the answering machine.

  34

  Having dumped the car he’d taken from the shopping center carpark, Dorring stole another from a side street and headed straight back to the hotel.

  It was as he drove past that he noticed something.

  He parked way up the road and approached the building from the back. A large, fenced off area hugged it from all sides except the front. Dorring scaled the fence and dropped into a vast area of demolition. Everywhere stood piles of red bricks and lumps of concrete from the former buildings. In a far corner, a digger stood on top of one pile, scooping up the bricks and emptying them into the back of a truck.

  Dorring moved along the fencing until he was directly behind the hotel. Climbing back over, he dropped into the backyard of the place. There was a stairwell that hugged the building and acted as a fire escape. He went up it, his feet touching lightly on the metal steps so that he didn’t jar them enough to produce noise. He reached his floor. He’d made sure to leave the fire escape door ajar when he’d left, so it opened easily from the outside. Placing his fingers in the gap, he slowly prized it open and stepped onto the landing, shutting the door behind.

  He froze and put his ears to the wind for several seconds. He could hear the muffled sounds of Bess barking. It sounded like she was locked in the bathroom.

  Except for that, there was nothing. No voices. Just the dog.

  Stepping lightly along the landing, he came to the door, kneeled before it, distributing his weight evenly so that he didn’t jar the floorboards, and placed an eye to the keyhole.

  Two men were inside there with them. One had ahold of Otis, the old man’s face bloodied where he’d fought. There was a gun to his temple. They’d gagged him too. Across the room from them, Tina sat on one of the beds next to another man. A gun was clamped to the side of her head and another hand held her at the back of the neck.

  Dorring removed himself from the door. Then he thought about things. Began scheming how he’d do it.

  Otis was in a corner directly opposite the door. He was kneeling and the man was standing behind him. He was about six feet tall. The bed Tina and the other sat on was in the corner adjacent to that one. The two men were almost in a line with each other.

  Dorring went to the door of the room next to theirs. Using a key, he gently opened it, trying not to make a single sound. He achieved this and entered. When they’d arrived the day before, they’d rented both rooms on the floor, but only used one. Quiet as a shadow, he stepped across the floor and to the bed. Crouching beside it, he reached underneath and took the rifle. Then he went to the wall, the one that separated the two rooms.

  Taking a knife from an ankle holster, he marked several crosses on the wall. One about six feet up and another about four feet. The whole time, he pictured what he had seen through the keyhole and tried to apply it to the marks in the plaster. Then he stood back from the wall and aimed at the cross six feet up.

  He fired. Then he immediately reloaded the weapon and fired into the other cross. The bullets went straight through the wall, as it was only a wooden partition skinned with plasterboard. He heard a scream and a groan. The groan was from the second bullet. The scream had been Tina’s.

  Dorring was already at the door. He’d dropped the rifle. The pistol he’d taken from the agent was now in his hand. The guy next to Otis was falling down the wall, grabbing at his throat. The bullet had gone side on through the front of his neck and taken out his voice box. He went to aim his pistol at Dorring, who stood at the door, but the latter fired first into his forehead and he was gone before his brains hit the wall behind. The other man had been hit in the shoulder. The blow had come on the right. He’d held his pistol in that hand. It’d been thrown out of his fingers with the shock of the gunshot. Tina had picked it up and gotten away from him. He realized there wasn’t much more he could do. As Dorring had plugged his friend, he’d thrown himself backwards from the bed and smashed through the window.

  Dorring ran to it and aimed the pistol outside onto the street. The man was already on his feet and running. The fall had been no more than ten feet. Dorring fired and the guy jumped to the side, the bullet planting into the tarmac. The range was no good. The pistol didn’t have it. He thought about retrieving the rifle, but the man would be much farther away by then, possibly out of sight.

  So he let him go and came back
inside the room.

  Tina was beside Otis, helping him up. He’d taken quite a beating and there was a cut above his eye.

  “You good?” Dorring asked him.

  “Yeah. Just me pride damaged.”

  “Who were they?” was Dorring’s next question.

  “They didn’t say. Turned up soon after you left. Wanted to wait for you.”

  “They ask you any questions?”

  “Yeah. Wanted to know who we were. Why we had Tina.”

  Dorring turned to the young girl as she led Otis to sit down on a bed. “You know who they are?” he asked her.

  “No. I ain’t ever seen ’em. Honest.”

  “They was with the bloke you drowned,” Otis said. “Wanted to know what we knew about him. Why we was after Jess.”

  “And what did you tell them?”

  “The truth. She’s me daughter. Then they wanted to know where you were. That’s when they got a call. I heard a bit a what was said. Sounded like someone was tellin’ them to wait for you.”

  Dorring’s face had gone pale.

  “We need to leave,” he said. “Now!”

  35

  Carlton James lived in a nice area of north London. Islington. A borough of middle-class suburbs. Good professionals. Decent folk. It was a terrace house and he had the upstairs studio apartment. A very nice and expensive place for someone working in the lower rungs of property management.

  John was feeling better. “It comes and goes,” he’d remarked in reference to the nausea.

  Parking in front of the flat, they got out and climbed the stone steps to the door. They rang the buzzer to Carlton James’ flat and waited.

  Nothing came of it, so Barker rang it again. They waited. Nothing. So Barker called the buzzer for the downstairs flat. It was answered promptly.

  “Hello?” a man’s voice inquired.

  “Hello, my name is DS Robert Barker of the Metropolitan Police. I’m looking for the man who lives in the flat above you. Carlton James.”

  “Have you tried his buzzer?”