by Vogel, Vince
Clenching his eyelids closed, Alex pushed back on the guilt, which was slowly turning to fury. Gaining control over himself, he took the image and entered it into the facial recognition software. This would take some time, so while he waited for it to find her, he went through what there was on his sister’s murder investigation. There wasn’t much. She had been confirmed the third victim of a suspected serial killer. Found in Epping Forest. No signs of struggle. Sedated before being injected with a high dose of street heroin.
But then came the photographs, and his blood froze in his veins.
Recoiling from the screen, he grabbed hold of his mouth. His heart thumped against his chest, and he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. There was his little sister, naked and nailed to a crucifix. It was like their father all over again. A vision came cracking into his mind like a bullet.
It was his father’s bloodied corpse and that of his sister superimposed over it, the father holding the daughter within his crucified form, the two lying eternally within blood. All those emotions Alex had felt that night as a fourteen-year-old boy came crashing back down on him. Only this time, self-recrimination added its fuel to the fires of his head.
Questions screamed at him from the darkness of his soul. Had he left her to die like their father? Was he to blame for her ending up nailed to a piece of wood?
Flicking over the pages of Becky’s police report, he found mention of her earlier arrest. He searched out the report of it and was further dismayed to find that she’d been picked up for solicitation. Again his heart pounded away within his rib cage. He quickly scanned the details, before finding the psychiatric report on her subsequent breakdown.
“Oh, Becky” escaped his lips, which were still largely covered by his hand.
What had he left her to?
Seven years ago, he’d cruelly cut her off like some gangrenous limb and thrown her to nothing. While he’d begun to feel his family fade inside his head, she’d begun to expect too much from him. Her phone calls and emails were beginning to display a gloomy and fragmented mind, a desperation for him to come home and fix it all like some super hero. It had placed too much pressure on him, and his contact with her had felt like drinking black bile. Was that why he’d cut her off? Because her sadness depressed him?
Just then the laptop pinged, letting Alex know that the facial recognition search was complete. He clicked on the window and couldn’t believe his eyes. His sister’s face had been found on a website of girls performing in a pornographic video that had originally gone out live online. Alex’s eyes bulged in his skull as Becky came onscreen holding hands with a black-haired girl, both of them wearing nothing but fishnet stockings and black latex hot pants. The whole of his body began to shake, and he gripped his mouth even tighter. Becky started dancing and writhing with the other girl, an assortment of sex toys in the background of the cheap set.
Dorring switched the video off. He couldn’t see any more. Shaking all over, he checked the aptly named “Sensual Sin” website on the government business directory and felt an injection of pure rage stream through his body the moment he saw who owned it.
The company that ran the website was listed under the names of none other than the Doyle brothers. Images of another time churned up from the inner flames of Alex’s head.
He was fifteen and it wasn’t even a year after his father’s death. Jack Sheridan had just been round their house to tell Alex’s mother that he could go no further with the investigation into her husband’s murder, that he and his partner had reached a dead end. Alex had listened to it all from the upstairs landing. Listened to his mother’s meek words to the detective. She had let Jack leave without even questioning him as to why he was giving up on finding justice for them.
Alex had been incensed. Two days later, having taken that long to find out the detective’s address, he’d turned up at Jack Sheridan’s house and was let in by his wife, Jack being at work at the time. She’d made Alex a cup of tea and been pleasant to him, possessing a mother’s instinct and knowing a lost boy when she saw one. She had struck Alex as a slightly sorrowful woman and he still recalled her sad eyes to this day, sitting with her round that kitchen table for the next hour until her husband returned.
“There’s someone wants to see you, Jack,” she’d said, getting up from her chair the moment her husband came in through the door.
Glancing over at the table, Jack spotted the boy he’d sat with on that sad Christmas Eve nearly a year before.
“What brings you here, son?” he’d asked, taking his coat and shoes off over newspaper laid at the door.
“I’ll leave you two alone,” his wife had said, taking Jack’s coat from him and leaving the room.
Jack came and sat with Alex, eyeing him oddly.
“Why’d you drop the investigation?” Alex had asked in a firm tone.
“We had nothing” was Jack’s instant answer.
“That’s a lie. You came and saw my mother not one month ago to tell her that you and your partner had found something. I want to know what that something was.”
“I can’t tell you that. Does your mother know you’re here?”
“Don’t change the subject, Inspector Sheridan. What did you find?”
“I can call her if you want.”
Dorring still recalled the angry bile that rose up in him then.
“Tell me who killed my father,” he’d demanded.
“You need to go home, Alex.”
“I just want to know. Please.”
He’d glared into Jack’s eyes.
“I know you think you’re old enough for this,” Jack had said tenderly, “but you’re not. You need to let me drive you home.”
“I heard my father mention a man named Jerry Doyle once. He was speaking over the phone, and he didn’t know I was in the house. He was talking about a Fat Man. About how he was close to bringing him down. I saw the name in the papers. He’s some pornography guy. They say he’s got connections with organized crime. Is that who killed my father?”
“You need to leave this and go home.”
“Why’d you end the investigation? Are you on the Doyle gang’s payroll?”
“I’m not. But the Doyles aren’t the type of people that a fifteen-year-old boy needs to be worrying about.”
“It is them, then, isn’t it? I can see it in your eyes.”
“And what would you do to fix it if it was the Doyles, eh?” Jack had put to him. “You gonna go round there?”
“I simply want to know who killed my father.”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“I think you can, Inspector Sheridan. That’s who you were investigating. That’s who either paid you off or threatened you. Which was it?”
Seeing that Jack wasn’t going to say anything, Alex got up out of his seat and left. The detective followed him along the drive until the street.
“Don’t do anything stupid,” Jack pleaded. “These people are very dangerous. I can’t stress that enough. Jump in my car and I’ll take you home. Go back to your family and move on. Move on from this and let go of people like the Doyles. They’re drowning in their own shit anyway.”
Alex didn’t listen. He continued into the night.
In the weeks that followed, Alex left every morning in his school uniform and walked across the heath near his house. There he would change into other clothing and go off for the day to spy on the Doyles. He gathered every piece of information on Jerry Doyle that he could and found out where he lived. Following that, he began spying on the house for several days until he was confident he knew how to get in. At the grand old age of fifteen, Alex Dorring was preparing to commit murder.
One night, dressed all in black, he entered the Fat Man’s compound, shimmied up a drainpipe, and evaded the alarms to enter the house via an open bathroom window. He then made it into the room of the sleeping Jerry Doyle. Alex still remembered to this day the pulsating gut under the silk sheets. He pulled a kitchen knife out of the
waistband of his jeans and was about to strike down on the gut when something flew at him out of the dark. A sharp pain traveled up his leg, and something was trying to twist his foot off at the ankle. Looking down, he saw a huge Staffordshire bull terrier clamped to his leg. It hadn’t even growled. Wasn’t even growling now as it mauled him. Alex fell to the floor in agony, screaming out. The Fat Man awoke, turned on the light, and his wife or girlfriend, whoever the skinny brunette in the bed was, began screaming. That’s when the room flooded with people.
They were truly astonished when they saw that it was just some kid who’d broken in and gotten three feet from killing their boss, the knife on the carpet beside Alex confirming his intentions. It took them ten minutes to remove the dog from the leg, its jaws having locked, and the Fat Man had gotten dressed while they pulled it off, shouting obscenities at Alex the whole time.
When the dog was gone, Dorring looked at the huge bite mark covering his calf, blood oozing out of it. He was then dragged outside to some huge dog kennel, the sound of the beasts echoing all around. They took him to a barren concrete room that stank of dog piss. Jerry sat him down and asked why he was there. Alex was straight with him. He told him that he suspected that Jerry was the man who’d killed his father. The Fat Man laughed.
“I’ve killed lots of fathers,” he said. “Who’s yours?”
“John Dorring,” Alex replied firmly, not caring what these men did to him.
“Ah! The cop. Yes. I did kill your dad. We nailed him to a fucking cross. He screamed a lot, I can tell you. Screamed out until someone put a knife across his throat.”
Alex kicked out with his foot, but it was no good—two men held him firmly by the shoulders.
“I wonder if you’ll scream like your old man,” came the Fat Man’s next jibe, and he nodded to two men standing to the side.
Before he knew what was happening, a boot came swinging toward Alex’s face and caught him full on, breaking his nose. For the next ten minutes, four grown men beat a teenage boy savagely while Jerry Doyle sat in a chair and watched, smoking and laughing the whole way through. In the end, they knocked Alex unconscious, and he awoke three days later in hospital. He’d lost half his teeth, broken both collarbones, several ribs, punctured a lung, and been given one hell of a beating.
For the next three years, all Dorring wanted to do was leave London. The beating had left more than mere physical scars; it had left a mental one too, one that he’d been battling ever since: a numbness to his fellow man and a pervasive sense of misanthropy. Over the whole affair of his father’s death, Alex felt let down by humanity itself. He felt that there was no justice in the world, only a mock caricature put on for the masses. His life as a trained killer had only confirmed it. He saw life as that of the animal. No matter how high mankind regarded itself, it was all still dog-eat-dog, anarchic savagery and animalism. In a word: chaos.
That’s how Dorring truly saw things. And that’s what he would bring now to the Doyles. Long-overdue chaos.
18
Doc Holby tells me I should express myself more. That keeping everything locked up inside has hurt me long enough. He told me that was why I punished myself and sought negative avenues of expression like men and drugs. Why I internalized my anger. So here goes, Doc—at the ripe old age of eighteen, I’m writing my first diary.
It was the opening page of the journal that Jack had found at Coop’s. He was sat at his desk reading it, eagerly pursuing the girl through its pages.
I like the doc—he’s not full of longwinded statements like the others. He just gets me to open up without judging or prescribing. He told me I shouldn’t feel ashamed of the things that have happened to me because they weren’t my fault. My father’s death wasn’t my fault. My brother leaving wasn’t. The things done to me when I was younger weren’t. The things that Coop manipulated me into weren’t. On our second session, I mostly talked to the doc about Alex leaving, and he said that after Dad’s death, Alex was vulnerable himself. That he had never dealt with things. That it was bad for him to be in the Armed Forces with so much trauma held inside. I wonder how Alex is now. I wonder if he ever thinks about me and Mum. If he’s still hurt. If he ever laughs. I don’t think I can ever remember him laughing. Maybe when we were kids and Dad was still alive. God I miss him so much. I miss them both. I miss how Mum was back then. And even though I can hardly remember it, I miss that time. I miss the feeling that everything is how it should be. Even writing in this journal brings Alex to mind, because it was the last thing he gave to me when Mum and I visited him in Germany that Christmas. Mum had told him that I wanted to be a writer. So he got me this journal and told me to open my heart on its pages. Then for the next six years, it sat on a shelf. A bit like my heart, I suppose. I guess I couldn’t face putting my sad existence into words. I felt that to put it on record would be to make it more real than it was, to make my suffering more concrete. It scared me. I just wanted all that pain to stay inside, caged in my head. But starting from now, I’m going to open myself up.
“What’s that you’re reading, sarge?” Lange asked as he came into the detectives’ office.
“A diary,” Jack told his subordinate, not looking away from its pages.
“Whose?”
“No one in particular. Just a diary.”
“Okay,” Lange muttered, rolling his eyes. “Well, you asked me to check in with Scotland Yard, and I did.”
“And what did they say?” He needn’t have asked. Jack knew they’d tell Lange nothing. He’d simply wanted the detective constable away from him long enough to get the diary out of his coat pocket without Lange seeing that Jack had clearly swiped it from Coop’s flat.
“They said there was nothing new their end.”
“What about Becky’s computer?”
“Nothing untoward. She rarely went on Facebook, wasn’t on Twitter, Instagram, or any other social site, and her emails were pretty tame, just prospective universities and stuff like that.”
“Did they ask if we had anything?”
“Yeah.”
“And what did you tell them?”
“That we broke into the ex-boyfriend’s house and Detective Sergeant Sheridan stole a dead girl’s diary.”
Jack looked sharply up from the journal.
“I spotted you pulling it out of your coat and peeking at it while I filled the car up at the petrol station,” DC Lange informed him with a wry smile.
“How’d you know it’s Becky’s?”
“The fact you got it from Coop’s.”
“It could be his.”
“One, I don’t think he’s the type for dear diary. And two, it explains what Lauren meant when she said Coop had something of Becky’s.”
“I’ll give you a two out of five for detective work, George. So obviously you didn’t tell Pierce and Locke.”
“No. I didn’t tell them anything. I should have, but I didn’t.” Lange took a seat next to Jack and peered inside the open pages. “So what’s in it?”
“I’ve only just begun. She mentions a Dr. Holby.”
“Could be a shrink at Rampton.”
“Could be.” Jack then thought of something. “I’ll tell you what,” he began, “you go arrange a visit to the Rampton for tomorrow. I wanna keep looking at this. Plus, I’ll be leaving in a bit.”
“Why’s that?”
“It’s my wife’s birthday.”
“I never knew you were married.”
“Well, I am.”
“But you live alone.”
“I do, George. Three out of five for that detective work. Now run along and arrange the visit.”
Groaning slightly, George got up and left the room to make the call, while Jack continued to nose through the pages of Becky’s diary.
My whole life since I was four has been like an echo of a real life. A simulation running in the background. When Dad died, so too did a part of everything around me. Mum became morose and sad for so long that it was years before she eve
n resembled slightly the person she used to be. Alex was always sad after Dad died but did his best to be there for me. We were so close as kids. He’d always take me to the park, play video games with me, and watch dumb movies. He always had time for me. Like a real dad. It was after he left that things began to really disintegrate. Then it was just me and Mum. She was so sad and alone. That’s why she married Steve. Because she couldn’t stand being on her own anymore. But with him around, she kind of started ignoring me even more than she used to. Maybe because I reminded her of Dad. Reminded her of the day her world was ripped to pieces. She always used to say that to Alex. That he reminded her of Dad, and she always used to cry afterwards. As if the memory was too painful for her. That she would immediately see his dead body nailed to a cross if she thought about him.
Jack skipped along. Until something stuck out at him.
Sometimes I wonder if the only thing that would get Alex back to this country would be my death.
Jack stared at the passage and read it over a few times. It was on a page all on its own. He shook his head, dismissed whatever thought was trying to break through the fog of his head, and carried on reading. Flicking through, he found more mentions of missing her brother, of her mother ignoring her, her stepfather being an asshole, etc., etc. General teenage complaints. But then Jack found something else. Not a person, but a word and a strange fantastical tale. It was a piece all by itself in the diary, on its own separate pages, much like the passage, and very different in tone to the rest of the writing thus far.