by Vogel, Vince
But Jack didn’t care. He never cared. Never had. Never would.
It was walking away down the corridor, however, that he remembered something. With a grimace of annoyance, he turned and made his way back to the fuming chief inspector.
“Excuse me, sir,” Jack said in his most charming voice when he’d opened the door and popped his head through.
Caldwell’s screwed-up face turned to him, still red with wrathful indignation.
“What is it now, Jack? More insults?”
“Have you decided on someone to see the family yet?”
“No. I was coming to that.”
“Well, then, in that case, I’ll go.”
“You?”
“Yes. I know the mother.”
“I won’t ask how you know the mother, but that would be helpful.”
Jack went to retrieve his head from the opening in the door, but Caldwell called him back.
“Yes, sir?” he enquired with his hand on the knob.
“Make sure to take Lange with you.”
“I was going to go on my own.”
“I don’t care. I don’t know if Detective Constable Lange informed you, but I briefed him earlier that he’s to stay by your side at all times.”
“I don’t do partners. I feel like I’m repeating myself, but you know that.”
“I want you watched, Jack. No pissing about on this. Lange is to stick by your side from now on. Always.”
Jack merely gave a nod and went on his way, wondering how much pleasure he’d derive from forcing Caldwell’s Rangers shirt down his fat throat.
7
Seven years after the death of her first husband, Helen Dorring had remarried. The second husband’s name was Steven Cuthbert, making her now Helen Cuthbert. Both of them were teachers at Mary Magdalene Comprehensive School, and Jack imagined the widow must have eventually become tired of loneliness and found herself love among the chalk dust and erasers. As it was the half-term school break, the wily detective had taken the gamble that, as teachers, they’d be home.
The Cuthberts lived in a middle of the row suburb in Barnet, just within the northeast border of the M25, a four-lane motorway that traveled around the entire circumference of London, penning it in as it were. The suburb was one of those Barratt Homes affairs—lines of homogenous redbrick houses, a regular Bermuda Triangle of conformity, a sense of déjà vu wherever you turned. A man could get lost if he wandered too long in one of these estates, his internal compass spinning out of control, positive that he’s already been on this very same street at least twice already.
Jack and Lange pulled into the drive of a three-bedroom detached house that looked like all the other redbrick three-bedroom detached houses that circled the typical cul-de-sac. All of them appeared to lean in on one another, like a crowd of people gathered around a fainted body, refusing to give them air. It meant that each neighbor could look out their front window and see everyone else’s house within the blind alley, watchers looking in on each other. When Jack switched the engine off, he looked up to the see the curtains flicker in the window of one neighborly voyeur living two doors down.
“You wait in the car,” he said to Lange.
“Sure thing,” the detective constable agreed without contest.
Of course he wouldn’t contest it. No one wants to be there the moment a mother is told her child is dead.
Getting out the car and approaching the featureless red door of the house, Jack was thankful to find the Cuthberts home. The curtains in the front window were wide open, and he could see a redheaded man of about fifty lounging on the couch watching television. He surmised that this must be Steven Cuthbert. Jack rang the bell, and Redhead didn’t move a muscle. Instead, a midfifties woman answered, and Jack instantly recognized the face of Helen. Though she’d grown a few more wrinkles around the eyes and there were now flecks of gray in her long hazel hair, she was still a pretty woman sporting what he regarded as a good physique. She was dressed in casuals—blue jeans, white T-shirt—and her lightly tanned face wore a pleasant expression.
“Jack,” she uttered with surprise the moment their eyes met across the threshold.
He was surprised she still recognized him. They’d only met a handful of times over the months following John’s death. It had been when Jack had visited her with updates on the progress of the investigation into her husband’s murder. The last he’d seen her, he’d had to tell her that it was over. That, essentially, they’d never catch the killer of her husband. She’d taken it well, considering. A few tears, but no recriminations. She never blamed Jack for the collapse of the case, or anyone else for that matter. Didn’t even ask why the investigation had been closed, and Jack had sensed that she simply wanted to get on with her life. And for all intents and purposes she did. She continued teaching and eventually remarried, placing a line firmly underneath the past.
Now, however, the past was going to repeat itself and land a terrible new blow upon poor Helen Cuthbert.
“Hello, love,” Jack said. “Can I come in?”
“Of course,” she said with a slight frown, a nervous tick beginning to play in her heart. “What brings you here?”
“I’d prefer to say inside, Helen.”
The tick grew larger in her chest.
“You’re worrying me, Jack.”
“I’ll explain inside when you’re sitting.”
So much for trying to postpone the mother’s anguish, Jack thought. Helen was filled with immediate angst. In both his words and manner, she sensed that Jack was going to say something terrible in her house.
“Is this about Becky?” she frantically asked, her expression becoming more and more disconcerted. “Because we reported her missing yesterday, and we still haven’t heard anything. They said they’d send a liaison officer round. I wasn’t expecting you.”
“Helen, go and sit in the living room with Steven,” Jack gently advised her.
She gazed at him with shimmering eyes, searching his own for evidence of what was to come. Having spotted something ominous, she placed a quivering hand over her mouth, turned, and went through to the lounge as he’d instructed. Jack stepped into the hallway, shut the door behind him, and took his coat off on the mat, the words “Welcome Home” written across it.
The perfumy aroma of potpourri hung in the clean air, and the place was neat and tidy. While he removed his shoes, Jack glanced around at the happy faces in the framed photos on the walls, then at the two large clay vases filled with cotton stalks reminding him of clouds snagged in dry twigs. His gaze drifted to a tall glass-doored cabinet full of trophies, a picture of a young Becky dressed in a white-and-blue gymnastics leotard, holding up a medal draped around her neck on a ribbon, a large smile draped on her innocent face.
Jack made his way into the lounge, where Helen was sitting next to her husband on a large cream leather couch. The television was now switched off, and Steven was sitting up straight with his thick arm around his wife’s slender shoulders. Steven Cuthbert was medium build, about six foot, with short-length copper hair. His pallid skin was covered in innumerable freckles, engulfing his face and flowing down his forearms that stuck out of the short sleeves of his white polo shirt. It gave Jack the impression that Cuthbert had been spattered with mud. He wore a slightly reticent expression, and as his eyes followed Jack into the room, the detective got the faint impression that, despite the doormat’s unequivocal greeting, he certainly wasn’t welcome.
“Have you found her?” Helen asked with a frantic note in her voice.
“We have,” Jack said, his words feeling hollow in his mouth. “I’m so sorry Helen, but— ”
Before he got any further, the mother was already buried in her husband, screaming tears into him, his arms clasped around her.
“What happened?” Steven Cuthbert asked, looking up from his inconsolable wife.
“Yesterday afternoon a female body matching Becky’s description was discovered. I can’t go into the circumstances of
her death because it’s an ongoing investigation, but we’ve identified that the body is Becky through both fingerprinting and DNA analysis.”
“It’s a mistake,” Helen suddenly announced, lifting her wretched eyes. “You hear all the time that mistakes like this are made.”
“It’s not a mistake, Helen. I wish it was. I wish I wasn’t here telling you this, but these things don’t lie. We’ve been very thorough.”
She glanced up at Jack while he stood there looking all repentant for the terrible news he was delivering. Seeing the same look in his eyes she’d spotted at the door, her expression collapsed and more tears burst from her.
“How?” she murmured. “How did my little girl die?”
“At this stage, I can’t divulge that sort of information, not before an official autopsy.”
“Was she murdered?” screeched from the mother’s gasping lips. “Did somebody kill my little girl!?”
Officially, Jack wasn’t to say. Not when her daughter’s death was part of a very sensitive ongoing case. As a father himself, a father to a girl no less, an inner pity urged him to tell this wretched woman every fact and conjecture that he knew, even those inner thoughts he had about the case that he wouldn’t even share with his colleagues. But, as much as he wanted to, he couldn’t give her anything.
“We believe she was at this stage,” Jack answered, giving her all he could.
“How?” was her immediate question.
“Helen, I can’t tell you that.”
“What can you tell us?” Steven Cuthbert snapped at Jack. “You walk in here, tell us that Becky’s dead, and then won’t give us the details. We deserve answers, don’t we?”
“I wish I could tell you both everything, but, like I said earlier, Becky’s death is part of a larger ongoing investigation, and I’m not at liberty to give you certain details.”
Helen’s tearstained eyes narrowed at Jack as a sudden realization germinated in her mind.
“The crucifix killer,” she muttered, her tears temporarily postponed while the thought ran horrified circles in her head. “It’s him, isn’t it? The girl they found in Epping yesterday is Becky?” She looked straight into Jack, and something in his face made her certain. “Oh, God!” she exclaimed, throwing herself back into her husband.
“You mean to say,” Cuthbert began with an incredulous look of anger, “that someone nailed Becky to a fucking cross?”
“I’m not at liberty—”
“Fuck your liberty. Did someone nail Becky to a cross?”
Jack chewed his lip for a second or two.
“Yes. Yes, they did,” he finally stated. “But we won’t know for sure if it’s the same killer until after the autopsy.”
Jack hadn’t wanted to say anything, but he couldn’t help himself. They were the parents of a dead girl. A girl slain in the element of her young life. If anyone deserved answers, then it was them. Protocol demanded that he not divulge in details, but his conscience made it impossible.
“I must ask you not to repeat any of this to anyone,” Jack said to them.
But they didn’t hear him. Helen was too busy crying everything out of her, and Steven simply gazed bewilderedly into space. The time was five minutes past ten. They would forever remember this day and this time. It would be branded on them for as long as they both lived. The day their world came crashing down around them.
“I want… I want to see her,” Helen sniffed.
“It’s unnecessary. We’ve positively identified her.”
“But I still want to see her.”
Jack felt embarrassed by his insensitivity.
“Of course,” he said softly. “I can postpone the autopsy until then. When did you want to see her?”
“Now,” Helen said firmly, and with that she got up and walked out of the room into the hallway.
“Helen,” Steven called out after her. “You can’t go now.”
“I have to,” she shouted back from the hall. Then coming back to the doorway with her coat on, she added in a determined tone, “I want to see my little girl now.”
8
Alex had been driving all night since leaving Tripoli behind. It was now midday, and he was approaching the town of Abu Kammash on the Libya-Tunisia border. A windstorm was sweeping over the steep hills far off to the left of the road, and a fierce current of air cascaded across the desert, lifting up the sand in a billowing shroud that blocked out most of the sun. All the car windows were up, and the wipers tossed the sand back and forth across the windscreen as Alex guided the car through the thick, dusty air.
All morning he’d had the radio switched on, tuned into the Arabic stations. The massacre at the brothel was all over it, but, as Alex had assumed, the death of Ibrahim Shegawi, or any mention of his name for that matter, was conspicuously missing from the reports. Alex had surmised beforehand that the freshly formed Libyan government post Gaddafi wouldn’t want it known that Tripoli held its arms open to one of ISIS’s top recruiters in North Africa. Especially when the country was in dire need of international funding. No, the massacre was being blamed on organized crime—a grudge between despicable pimps. There was nothing about the four dead Islamic State bodyguards. Nothing about Shegawi being found in a room with a hole in his head. And certainly nothing about the trembling eleven-year-old girl who was with him at the time. Even ISIS wanted to keep the circumstances of Shegawi’s death a secret. It didn’t help with your puritanical, conservative Sunni image if one of your top men was known to be a pedophile when not promoting the cause of Daesh.
Driving toward the border, Alex thought very little of Ibrahim Shegawi. He hadn’t even really thought much about the man before the mission. Shegawi was a target, nothing more. A name and a face to remember so that you knew what you were putting the mark on. Alex wasn’t bothered by the fact that Shegawi helped with ISIS recruitment in Libya and much of northern Africa. Helped brainwash young disillusioned men into thinking they were serving their God when all they were really doing was serving the purposes of men like Shegawi. No, Alex wasn’t naive. He knew not to involve himself in the politics of the thing. To Alex, the world was rotten however you looked at it and from whichever angle it was viewed. He’d learned that a long time ago and was never overly bothered by his target’s ideology, or the hypocrisy that they represented. After all, don’t we all represent hypocrisy? Isn’t man the eternal hypocrite? It wasn’t even the threat they posed to the so-called free world—the terrorists and the atrocities. As far as Alex was concerned, all governments existed in a state of keeping control through terror, whether it be through the monopoly of the law through the courts, or the monopoly of violence through the police and army. Wasn’t he, himself, proof of that?
No, the reason Alex killed these men was because of the inherent baseness of all men. He’d wanted to kill Shegawi more for what he did in that dark world of Dollys and Sonyas than what the so-called strict Muslim pretended to be in the rest of his life. That’s why having killed Ibrahim, Alex went through the brothel shooting every preternatural man in there. When he had left, twenty-six men lay dead among the screaming girls.
His phone went off, and, knowing full well what was about to come his way, Alex drove the car carefully off the road onto a flat area of gravel and answered.
“192,” came the voice of Foster, Alex’s MI6 handler, “please tell me that someone else just happened to execute Ibrahim Shegawi and a whole bunch of local government officials, businessmen, and Libyan elite in a Tripoli brothel last night.”
“I’ve been listening to Arabic radio all morning,” Alex uttered in his typically nonchalant tone, ignoring what Foster had said.
“Did you hear me?”
“I heard you, Mr. Foster.”
“So?”
“Yes, it was me.”
“Did we not agree yesterday—in fact, were you not ordered yesterday—that you were to stand down? The brothel location was too much exposure.”
“You agreed. I didn’t.”
/>
“But you were ordered, 192. Fucking ordered to stand down. Ordered not to go there late last night and begin shooting everyone.”
“Men.”
“What?”
“I only shot the men.”
“Who gives a fuck! You went in there against orders and caused a huge scene.”
“Have you listened to Arabic radio today?”
“Fuck Arabic radio!”
“The morning broadcasts have been interesting, Mr. Foster. In them they keep repeating that the police believe it’s an attack between organized criminals fighting over the Tripoli sex trade.”
“What?”
“All morning on the radio, they’ve been calling it a hit. Part of some ongoing turf war. The chief of Tripoli police seems pretty assured that’s what it is. You see, the police in Tripoli, so soon after the fall of Gaddafi, don’t want the world knowing that they let the chief North African ISIS recruiter do whatever he wanted in their fair city. They’ve removed Shegawi’s body and covered any trace that he was ever there. The Libyans are covering it up for us, Mr. Foster.”
“I haven’t heard anything about this. Just what I got on the wire a half hour ago from an intercepted ISIS communication.”
“Well, you should listen to Libyan radio. The official message is to keep calm, everything’s okay. You should relax, Mr. Foster. Enjoy that nice view of London you have from your office window. It’s still there, isn’t it?”
Foster was quiet for a time, and when he spoke again his voice was much calmer.
“Hopefully I should be able to clear this with Golding,” he stated. “But you need to come back, 192.”
“Come back to where?”
“London.”
Alex was confused. He hadn’t been to London for a very long time, and he instantly abhorred the idea of returning. He’d grown up there and had left the place the first chance he’d gotten. To him, London was a distant memory from a painful past.
“I see on your GPS,” Foster went on, “that you’re thirty miles from the border. Once you’re across, head for Gafsa-Ksar airport and head home via Madrid.”