A Cross to Bear: A Jack Sheridan Mystery

by Vogel, Vince

  “I take it it all got found out.”

  “It did, George. Col found out. See, Beth and I had been up to it for three years by that point, and he’d slowly started to suspect something was up. He’d even come to me with it. Didn’t suspect it was me, but suspected Beth was cheating, and—like the fucking loser I am—I told him not to worry. That Beth loved him and would never do that. And do you know what the worst thing is?”

  “No, sarge. I don’t.”

  “The worst thing was that I didn’t stop. Even when my best friend came to me in tears about his wife cheating, I didn’t do the decent thing and stop. I had no decency, George. None at all. In the end, Col hired someone to follow Beth and we were caught.” Jack went to take a drag on his smoke, but it had burned down to the end. He immediately took another from the packet and lit it. “That day will haunt me for the rest of my life,” he started up once more. “The day everything fell to pieces. I was in the office at Scotland Yard. Col was off somewhere I didn’t know. I got a call. It was from Marsha. She was screaming at me. Screaming that Col had called and told her everything. He’d emailed her photos of me and Beth booking into a hotel, kissing in the car, all the shit you usually see in the films. She slammed the phone down on me, and I immediately called Beth. She answered and was in a frantic state. I could hear Col shouting in the background. Could hear how hurt and angry he was. She’d barricaded herself in the bathroom and had already phoned the police.” Jack drew in more cigarette, hoping that it would cure his leaping heart. “Then I heard Col burst in through the door, Beth screaming, and the phone went dead… I called back… nothing. So I got in my car and drove round there, making sure the police and ambulance were already on the way.” Jack didn’t take a drag this time, merely gazed forward, his eyes misting up even more. “I got there just after the police and ambulance… They were taking Col out the front door… He was handcuffed and covered from head to toe in blood… When I ran out of my car, he stopped and looked at me. Looked me right in the eyes without the slightest tinge of anger on his face. ‘I couldn’t help it, mate,’ he said. ‘Couldn’t help it.’ I raced into the house, showing my badge to the uniform at the top of the stairs, and was let through to the bathroom, the door smashed off its hinges.” This time Jack did take a lug of smoke, his hand vigorously shaking. “She were on the floor… She were on the floor lying in a pool of her own blood… Not one inch of that floor was white anymore… it was all blood. Everything in that room covered in it… She was on her back, twisted up, like she’d fought with everything she had until the end. Murdered by her own husband… They say she had over a hundred separate knife wounds all over her body. Crime of passion. When the arresting officer came upon the scene, he found Col knelt over her repeatedly plunging a knife into her motionless body… Said he’d never get that wet thumping sound out of his head…” Another long drag on his cigarette. “And that wasn’t the end of it. No, I had to be shown even more. That night when I finally got home, I found my wife unconscious on the sofa, an empty bottle of Prozac on the coffee table beside her. She’d taken an overdose. I called an ambulance, and they took her to hospital where her heart stopped three times… I watched through a hospital room window with my seventeen-year-old daughter held in my arms as they resuscitated my wife—her mother—three times. I contemplated the loss of everything in one day. Beth. Col. Marsha. But she survived. Part of her anyway. Her brain had been starved of oxygen for too long, and she’d suffered massive brain damage as a result. A month after she’d done it, I sat with Carrie, each of us holding one of her hands, when they switched the machine off. We fully expected her to stop breathing. That’s what the doctors had said. But she lived. Not the way she used to live. But her heart remained beating all the same. At the time, the guilt ate away at me like a festering disease. I had been so deceitful. Wickedly so. In a moment of higher thinking, I decided to be truthful to my daughter. I told her everything. The first thing she did was smack me round the face. The second was to pack her bags and leave my life. Then came the disciplinary action and ostracization at work, and in just over a month, I lost everything. Kicked out of Scotland Yard, busted down to a detective sergeant at a shitty little East London station, and returning home each day to an empty house.”

  When he’d finished, the air of the car was thick with cigarette smoke and Jack’s narrow eyes gazed forward into the echoes of the past.

  “That’s really harsh, sarge,” Lange eventually managed. “I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t deserve pity, George. I shit in my own shoes, I should be made to wear them.”

  “At least it taught you humility.”

  “Oh, it taught me that, George. In abundance. Now, having gotten all that off my chest, I need a drink. Drive us to the pub.”

  “But we’re on duty.”

  “You may be, but I’m probably about to be suspended. I fancy a pint. You don’t have to join me, just drive me.”

  “You got anywhere in mind?”

  “One that sells alcohol.”

  Lange gave a bemused expression and started the car. The pub it would be.

  32

  Billy Doyle’s ordinarily impassive face grew darker by the second as he received the news of his uncle’s death. It was coming to him over the phone via their contact in the Met. The porn prince was sat in his little study at the back of the house, seated on an antique leather chair behind a huge Louis XIV mahogany desk with serpentine legs and gilt edges. On the wall behind him, standing directly above his head, was the mounted head of a black rhino, its angry eyes surveying the room. The room was all hunting mascots, bookshelves, leather-bound furniture, and Rococo Georgian England chic, resembling the study of some earl or duke of long ago.

  “Yes, I’ll tell him immediately,” Billy said. “And it definitely looks like a shootout?” There was a pause as the bent copper on the other end informed him that it did indeed look like that, before warning Billy away from retaliation, telling him to try and make peace with the Earles. “I’m not sure how the old boy will take that,” Billy replied. “After all, this is his younger brother we’re talking about, and my father loved his younger brother. And if this witness saw a single survivor dressed in a ski mask shoot Davey, then it proves that it was the Earles. He was their man. He was sending a message from them.” The bent copper asked Billy if there were any current beefs between them and the Earles. “None. Jacob’s been putting the pressure on us a little, upping his fee. But rather than create waves, we’ve been following a pattern of giving in to his demands. We can afford it, so it’s better to keep him happy. The money Davey was bringing them today was what they’d expected. No shortchanging. This is a move by them, plain and simple. They want to provoke us into a fight and move in on our territory.” The man from the Met mused for a moment and then told Billy to hold his father’s anger until he found out more on it. He was at the crime scene now awaiting the results from forensics.

  But Billy Doyle wasn’t listening. The bent cop was wasting his time. Billy knew what his father’s reaction would be: pandemonium. He’d want blood. And in truth, so did Billy. Not in any vengeful sense. He’d been close to his uncle but felt very little in the way of an emotional bond with the man. No, it was simply because he’d become extremely bored of late that Billy wished for disorder and chaos. Bored to the teeth. Life did very little to gee up Billy Doyle. He was a man that had become desensitized to it. Found it mundane. Like his father, he was Epicurean in his view of life as pleasure. But his ability to feel pleasure had become dulled over time. He realized now that it had been too much too soon. Being part of such a perverse and violent family, he’d witnessed a lifetime’s worth of depravity by his early teens, so by the time he’d emerged on the other side of puberty, he needed more than the simple titillation of the average boy. His tastes were harsh and cruel, and he was forced to peel back the envelope of his own depravity more and more each time. He had done awful things in his life, but he didn’t dwell on them as some do. No, he felt
no shame. No guilt. Not even a minuscule of regret. There was never a moment’s reproach. What Billy felt for these evil acts was joyful nostalgia.

  So it can be easily understood that a war would certainly spice things up for Billy Doyle, keep the boredom a little way from his door, so to speak. If it was how the Met man said it was, then the Earles had made a move on them. There was no way that Davey had gone there to start anything. The guns they brought with them were merely for show. It was a simple cash drop. First, Jacob Earle kept putting the squeeze on them over costs, and now they were killing his uncle and eight of their men. This was a declaration of war. There could be no other way to read it.

  Having put the phone down, Billy left his study and marched straight to his father’s bedroom. Thankfully, he found the limbless creature awake, sitting up in bed watching television, propped up on a pile of large gold pillows, a half-naked girl either side of him, one of them feeding him a bacon sandwich, the other with her hand underneath the purple silk sheets performing another more salacious action. The room was all blacks, purples, and golds, lava lamps, and faux Venetian statues of naked ladies in ever more impossible poses. It was nouveau riche vomit. Billy always despaired at his father’s crude tastes.

  “Billy boy!” the Fat Man declared the moment his son came into the room, a piece of bacon flapping around on his fat bottom lip and the stumps of his arms raising up in salute.

  “Candy, Alice, leave now,” Billy commanded the girls. They stared at him incredulously for a moment until he clapped his hands and screamed, “Fuck off!”

  They didn’t need to be shouted at twice by Billy Doyle. They knew him as a particularly spiteful person. So, like pigeons being shooed off by schoolchildren, they dispersed quickly from the room.

  “What’d you do that for?” his father asked him with a frown when they’d left.

  Without a word, Billy marched to the drinks cabinet in the corner and fixed his father a large Scotch on the rocks. He plopped a long straw in it and placed it on a tray that was already laid out on the bed.

  “A drink?” Jerry let out.

  “You’ll need it.”

  “What’s happened, Billy?”

  “It’s Davey. The Earles have killed him.”

  Jerry’s eyes widened and bulged from his skull.

  “How?”

  “Something happened at the drop. Our guy from the Met says that nine of ours were killed, including Davey, and nine of theirs, including Deck. But some old man walking his dog saw it and said there was another one in a ski mask. The witness said they saw him shoot Davey in the face. He was the only survivor. It’s Jacob Earle, Dad. He’s made a move.”

  Jerry was shaking. A wave of frustration was moving through him, tensing every sinew of muscle left in his bulbous body, tears trickling from his eyes, and he was making a wheezing sound. He wished like never before that he had arms and legs right now, because he wanted to thrash about, to break things, to smash holes in walls, rip mirrors off, put his foot through wardrobes, smash everything in sight.

  “Davey never hurt them,” he finally managed to mutter. “He was always stopping me from goin’ after them. He was a friend to them, Billy. It was him that talked me into supportin’ them when they went after Franky. I’d known Franky since school, and I backed them over him. And for that they’ve killed my fuckin’ brother?”

  He shouted this last part, a jet of spittle flying across the purple sheets. Billy took the long straw of the drink and placed it to his father’s lips. Jerry tugged on the straw and took in a large gulp of Scotch.

  “Poor Davey,” he gently wept when the straw was back out of his mouth. “I promised my old man I’d look after him. When he was sick, I promised Dad that I’d always look after him. He made me swear it. And now he’s dead, Billy.”

  “It’s very sad,” Billy said in a rather emotionless, officious tone, “but what are we going to do about it?”

  His father’s face seethed in a storm of bitterness, and more spittle flew from his mouth as he said, “I’m going to call that little Somalian prick now. That’s what I’m going to do. Billy, fetch my phone.”

  Billy went to the bedside cabinet and took his father’s phone from the top and then the Bluetooth earpiece from the drawer. He attached the earpiece to his father’s ear and dialed the number for him.

  Jacob Earle instantly answered.

  “Okay, mate,” Jerry said as calmly as he could, boiling rage demanding he shout. “Where’s Deck?”

  “Don’t give me that ‘where’s Deck’ shit—you know exactly where Deck is you fat, limbless cunt,” Earle spat back at him.

  “After everything we did for you.”

  “Everything you did for me! Is that why you made your play today, is it?”

  “My play?” Jerry burst out with immense fury. “This is all on you. I lost my brother today.”

  “Deck was like a brother. Why’d you do it, huh? Why fuck me after all this time?”

  “I already know it was you!” Jerry screamed out. “Stop trying to deny it. You’re muggin’ me off, you Somalian immigrant fuck. You bit the hand that fed you, son. And for that I’m gonna put you down.”

  “The we’re agreed, fat boy. You know what this means?”

  “I know exactly what this means. It means war.”

  “That’s right, pig man. It means war. Big fuckin’ war.”

  “I’ll see you on the battlefield, Jacob.”

  And with that he had Billy put the phone down.

  “Cunt!” Jerry shouted out at the top of his voice, venting his hatred into the ceiling.

  33

  Jack and Lange were in an East End pub, perched at the bar. It was your average London boozer of worn-out red carpet doing its best to conceal the stains, stack of fruit machines up against one wall, sticky bar at the front, standard chipped mahogany tables and chairs dotted indiscriminately about, dartboard hanging on one recessed wall at the back, cheap wallpaper peeling in the corners, and the gentle smell of stale beer and vomit oozing up from the floor.

  Its doors had only opened ten minutes ago, and Jack and Lange had had to wait in the car for fifteen beforehand. In a far-off corner, an elderly man with a hangdog face sipped at a pint of bitter and gazed blankly into space. The only other person in there with them was the barman, a tall, skinny man in his thirties with Maori-style tattoos all along his wiry arms and neck. He didn’t look Maori. His complexion was a light pink for a start, the pigmentation of boiled ham, and he was built like a stepladder rather than an island warrior. He had a dopey look to him as he leaned on his elbows on the bar and read some tabloid rag.

  In front of Jack sat a pint of lager. In front of Lange half a Coke. In front of each sat their continually vibrating phones. It was Caldwell, or someone acting on his behalf. They’d started ringing half an hour ago, obviously the second Caldwell had gotten off the phone with Scotland Yard. It was clear to all that DCI Caldwell was urgently trying to reach them so that he could spew bile into Jack’s ear. Jack couldn’t be bothered with that. So the two detectives had decided to simply let the phones ring.

  “You not gonna answer that?” the barman asked, looking up from his newspaper.

  “Probably not gonna bother,” Jack said, lifting his pint and taking a sip as he did.

  “But it’s annoying the other customers,” the barman went on.

  Jack turned around and looked at the old boy in the corner.

  “What, him?” Jack softly exclaimed, pointing his thumb over his shoulder at the man.

  “Yeah, him.”

  “He don’t even know what day of the bleeding week it is. I wouldn’t worry about him.”

  “Okay, then. It’s annoying me.”

  Lange leaned forward on his stool.

  “We’ll turn them off,” he politely informed the barman.

  “Good,” the man said in a tone of annoyance. “They’re gettin’ right on my tit.”

  Jack picked his phone up, looked at the screen, and said, “
How many you got?”

  Lange picked his up and read the screen.

  “Five from Caldwell, including texts—ten from his assistant, six from the desk sergeant, and another four that I think are from various people at Upper Hackney.”

  “Well, I beat you on Caldwell. I have twenty-seven calls from Mr. Caldwell. Countless texts. There’s one he’s been repeatedly sending me.”

  “Oh. What does it say?”

  Jack narrowed his eyes to see the screen better.

  “Where the F-star-star-star are you? You’re up to your elbows.”

  “To the point,” Lange commented.

  “I thought so too.”

  Jack turned his phone off, placed it back on the bar, and took another sip of his pint. Lange did the same, and the barman breathed a sigh of relief; he could now turn back to the horse-racing odds in peace.

  For some time the two detectives stared ahead of themselves, Jack sipping his pint, Lange kicking his feet gently against the bar, the barman beginning to get annoyed at this.

  “So you come here often?” Lange asked.

  Jack swiveled his head slowly toward him, and the barman cocked an eye up from his paper.

  “Is that a chat-up line, George?”

  “No,” Lange spluttered, going red. “Not at all. I was just wondering if this was a local of yours.”

  “What makes you think it’s my local, George? Does this man behind the bar look like he knows me? Did I direct us to this specific pub? Or did I merely instruct you to stop here because it was the first place we’d passed?”