A Cross to Bear: A Jack Sheridan Mystery

by Vogel, Vince

  “Sorry,” Lange said slowly. “Just trying to make small talk, I guess.”

  “We talked in the car, George. I came to the pub to drink.” With that, Jack knocked his pint back in one and banged his fist down on the bar, signaling for the lethargic barman to fetch him another. “Also, I wanna read my book,” he added.

  Jack dipped his hand into the inside of his coat and brought out Becky’s journal.

  “Ugh!” Lange exclaimed. “I don’t see why you’re bothering with that, sarge. Concentrating on one victim. It’s a serial killer. He’s following a pattern. He picked Becky at random because she was on her own. He was probably passing as she came out of Arradine. Heck, maybe she wanted to earn some extra money by getting into his car. That’s why her bike was locked up. She was just unlucky. I don’t get what you think you’re gonna find in that thing.”

  “Perhaps I’m merely showing a macabre interest,” Jack put to him in a knowing tone.

  “Probably off the case anyway,” Lange grumbled.

  “Probably,” Jack repeated, opening up the journal and peering inside.

  Following that, Lange consumed his time playing the fruit machines while Jack sat reading the diary. Every now and then, the old boy at the back would silently shuffle up to the bar, cough, and impel the barman to pour him another pint of what Jack would have guessed as puddle water had it not come out of a beer tap. Looking at the sticker on the back of the pump, Jack saw that it was the cheapest beer on offer. Regardless of the quality, each time the barman filled his glass, the old man would rub his hands together and lick his lips in anticipation of his murky pint.

  Watching him on one occasion as he disappeared back to his corner with his pint, Jack turned back to the barman and asked if the old boy was a regular.

  “John is, yeah,” he answered. “Lost his wife a few years back. Now he’s got no one. Spends most of his days comin’ in here. He makes no harm.”

  Jack took another look over his shoulder at the man as he resumed his former position of gazing into the never-never. With a shudder of sadness passing over him, Jack turned back to the diary.

  Having read more about Becky’s past, missing her brother, not always seeing eye to eye with her mother, hoping that she wouldn’t have another breakdown, and of course about the Beast, he finally came to something new and his curiosity was pricked.

  I thought that I’d finally write about the closest thing I’ve ever had to a sister. No. That’s wrong. She WAS my sister. We were spiritually bound together. No blood could have brought us closer. I want to write about Gemma.

  “Gemma,” Jack said quietly to himself.

  Since I started writing this, I’ve been getting around to it. But I guess I haven’t mentioned Gemma yet because it hurts so much to think of her still locked away in that place. Still trapped in the dark. God I miss her. I lie awake at night thinking about her. For nine whole months, she was my life. My soul. I remember the first time we met. I’d been brought into Rampton the night before and wasn’t speaking to anyone. All I wanted was to fade from view. They kept me medicated all day because I was in a manic state. I was completely unfunctional. I crawled into myself, into the hollow space inside my mind. As everyone else ignored me, she came up and sat next to me. I remember feeling something on my shoulder, and when I turned, I saw her blonde hair and realized that she was cuddling up to me. Even though I was completely numb with drugs, I felt her there. Felt the warmth of her soul next to mine.

  Over the coming weeks, she stayed by my side while I’d sit there staring into space. She wouldn’t push me into anything. Didn’t press me to speak. Didn’t ask me endless questions like the other girls in there. Just sat with me. Cuddled me. Showed me I wasn’t alone. For five whole weeks she did that. It made me somehow more comfortable to be there in that room with everyone else. I was so fogged up with drugs, sitting in my dressing gown and nightie, surrounded by loops. To have someone simply be next to me was comforting. I began to get to to the point when I would panic if I turned and didn’t see her blonde hair. Then after those five weeks I heard her voice for the first time. She said, “It hurts to be alone. No one should ever be alone.” And that was all. I didn’t even reply. Merely gazed forward into the fathomless space of my mind, her words holding me in their arms.

  After that she talked more and more until I began answering. Finally, we ended up sharing a room, and at night we would spend the hours in the dark talking about all the things we’d never talked about to anyone before. I told her all about my dad being murdered, about Alex leaving, about him disappearing from my life. I even told her about the Beast, about feeling worthless and only being able to feel any value through sex. In the end, I told her everything. I couldn’t stop. It was like all the stuff I’d spent so long locking up inside was flowing out of me.

  In my time at Rampton, Gemma helped me more than anything else. She listened to me. Then she’d tell me about her life, and I would cry to listen to it. She’d suffered so much. All the girls in Rampton have suffered so much. Most of them had been abused. Some awfully so. Gemma’s parents had been killed when she was fifteen. She never said how. Only that it was terrible. Then she had to live on the streets. At fifteen she was sleeping rough in parks and under bridges. Waking up with some pervert touching her up under her sleeping bag. When she was barely sixteen, three men woke her up in the middle of the night while she was sleeping in a children’s playground and gang-raped her. She told the story so coldly. So matter-of-fact. Like it had just happened and there was no more to say about it. I lay in bed that night crying my eyes out. My life was simple compared to hers. She told me she’d first started selling herself at sixteen. She said it had been better to sell it than to have it taken from her anyway. I began to focus on my own life. I began to realize exactly what I had, rather than what I didn’t. Her sad stories gave me inspiration. One night she told me all about how she’d ended up at Rampton. She said that she’d attacked a guy she was supposed to have sex with. They were at his place, and she hadn’t been feeling well in her head at the time. This old man started touching her, and she lost it. She smashed a mirror and ended up cutting him badly. She didn’t go into detail. Just said she blacked out and couldn’t remember having smashed the room up and attacking the police when they got there. First she was taken to the station, then to Rampton for psychiatric assessment, then she was committed. That was the night I told her about the Beast.

  After I’d told her, she was silent. Then I heard her tiptoeing across the floor and felt her creep into my bed and hold me in her arms. She told me that all men are beasts. She told me that only her father and the uncles she’d known growing up were any good. But she added that even they were eventually eaten by beasts. Until we slept, we held on to each other and cried in the darkness. It was one of the most cathartic experiences of my life. It was like all the bad was bleeding out of me.

  Jack snapped the diary shut, stood up from his stool, downed the remaining half of his pint, and announced to Lange, “Drink up, George, we’re off to Rampton Psychiatric Facility.”

  Lange finished his Coke, gave the fruit machine a despairing look, the thing having eaten twenty quid in the last twenty minutes, and followed Jack out of the pub, the latter giving the lonely old man a nod as he passed. The man gave him a faint smile in return, as though he recognized something of himself in Jack.

  34

  Dorring parked the BMW up in a side road that ran parallel to the main street where their next hotel sat. It was a busy location full of people, and they certainly wouldn’t be seen as out of place carrying two large suitcases. Across from the hotel sat a marketplace full of stalls selling everything from fruit and veg to classic records and homemade jewelry. Alex surmised they’d be taken for market traders lugging their merchandise around. Stretching across the top of the street and over the market was a railway bridge, graffiti running all along its rusted cast-iron side. On from the sprawling market, the road was lined with Asian-owned textiles shops,
selling cloth from all around the world, women in saris and men in turbans selling it in great lengths. Outside these shops, the pavements seethed with the thronging masses, and Dorring and Chloe immersed themselves into it as they came out onto the main street.

  Though his head hardly moved, Alex’s eyes were everywhere, taking everything in while they scythed through the crowd. It was then that he spotted a young man in a shabby green Lambretta coat standing across the road with his gawping eyes pointed straight at them. When Alex made eye contact with him, the young man ducked his head down, as though he didn’t want to be seen, and continued on into the thick crowd the other side. With imperceptible side glances, Alex kept his eye on the boy as the latter trotted along the moving crowd, doing his best to keep level with them.

  Shortly, they made it through the coagulated pavement to the hotel, which was a five-story affair squeezed in between two slightly larger buildings and only about six meters across. It was innocuous and it was perfect.

  Entering the small scruffy reception, they walked along the trail of faded carpet to where a scruffy moustached man with thinning black hair sat at a counter. He was busy watching a television hung on the wall above the door, and when they came in through it, his eyes never left the screen. He continued to look straight over their heads while they stood and waited for him to notice their presence. Alex already liked this guy. He paid absolutely no attention to who came and went.

  “Uh hum!” Chloe eventually coughed.

  The man’s moustache twitched, and he appeared to sigh. Slowly, he cast his eyes down from the television and pointed them at his two customers.

  “What?” he said curtly.

  “We wanted to buy a television,” Chloe joked.

  The man simply stared at her for a moment, shrugged, pointed out the door, and said in a drawling voice heavy with Indian accent, “They sell televisions up at Sanjay Tech, which is about fifty meters—”

  “I was joking,” Chloe said, stopping him. “We want a room.”

  “Not a television?”

  “No.”

  This time his sigh was clearly discernible. He ducked down from his chair and pulled a registration book out from behind the counter.

  “Name, date,” he started in automatic fashion as he opened it out on the countertop.

  While Moustache went through this, Alex whispered in Chloe’s ear that she should fill it out any way she wanted. The hotel didn’t require identification from UK citizens, so she could write whatever name came into her head. Then he told her that he needed to go outside for a minute. He left her to sign them in and walked out the door, looking straight across the road. There he was—the young man. Staring across at the hotel, as if he was making a mental note of it. Dorring put his head down and walked off to the left. He began weaving between people and, when he was shielded from the other side by a red double-decker bus stuck in traffic, he swooped across the road and joined the crowd on the other pavement.

  Keeping his head down, he walked along in the opposite direction until he suddenly bumped into the boy with the mangy coat, who clearly hadn’t spotted Alex cross the road.

  Dorring grabbed him by the scruff of his jacket and pulled him down a narrow alleyway that led between two textiles shops immediately to their left. Like a spider with its prey, he pulled the skinny boy all the way into the dark inners of the craggy alley, the kid continuously stumbling over garbage and debris on the floor. Alex held him tightly, keeping him upright and on his feet.

  When they were far enough inside, away from the eyes on the pavement, Alex pressed the kid up against the wall and did a quick search of him. The whole time, the kid said nothing and simply trembled in Alex’s hand. Finding nothing, not even a wallet, and being overpowered by the stench, Dorring pushed him away into the wall. The guy merely crouched into a ball and looked up at Alex with glistening blue eyes. He was no older than a teenager, possibly still at school, but not looking like he attended many classes. His hair was shaved down to a thick stubble, one his face had no chance of repeating. His cheeks were pockmarked with acne, and a greasy film appeared to dominate his gaunt appearance. Alex had been amazed by how light he’d been when carrying him down there and realized that for a boy of almost six foot, he was terribly undernourished.

  “Why are you following me?” Alex enquired in a grave tone.

  “I wasn’t,” the boy let out in a squeak.

  “Yes, you were. It’s better if we don’t lie to each other. Makes it easier. So why were you following me?”

  “Chloe,” he mumbled.

  “Who is Chloe to you?”

  “A friend,” he answered in a hollow voice. “My only friend.”

  “How did you find us?”

  “I was walking out the market. That’s when I saw her with you.”

  He looked up at Alex with such a sad countenance that something inside the latter bled for this waif boy.

  “How old are you?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “Where are your parents?”

  The boy continued to crouch there, staring up.

  “Nowhere,” he finally answered. “There’s only me.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Danny,” he muttered. “Danny boy.”

  “Danny!” suddenly echoed from the mouth of the alley.

  Both men turned and saw Chloe standing there. Her face was aghast with a look of motherly worry. She clambered briskly into the passageway, almost pushing Alex into the wall as she crouched herself down beside the kid. She instantly placed her arms around him, enveloping his wiry frame in her own, and looked sharply up at Alex.

  “You ain’t hurt him, have you?” she demanded, her eyes narrowed into those of a tigress.

  “I haven’t,” Alex assured her. “I only wanted to know why your friend was following us.”

  “He hasn’t hurt you?” she whispered to Danny.

  “No. I’m okay.”

  “What’re you doing here, Danny?” she asked him.

  “I just saw you was all. I thought those creeps still got you. I’ve been worried sick. All I been doin’ is walkin’ around since yesterday not knowin’ what to do. Then a minute ago I see you on the other side of the street.”

  “Are you hungry?” she asked him.

  “Yeah,” he said sheepishly, an embarrassed look on his face.

  “Then come with us for a minute.”

  “He can’t come with us,” Alex protested.

  “Look at him,” Chloe said up to Alex. “Does he look like a threat? He’s just hungry. We’ll give him somethin’ to eat, and then he can go.”

  Dorring seethed a little but bit his lip. This wasn’t how he usually did things—picking up waifs and strays from the street. Picking up Chloe had been one thing, but taking this boy back to the hotel, he could see anything. Hear anything. Then he might tell one of his buddies down at the soup kitchen or the homeless center. One of them could tell another, and then in half a day most of the flea-bitten tramps of London would know they were there.

  But before he could protest, Chloe had already helped Danny up and they were halfway out the alley. Alex merely sighed and followed them across to the hotel. When they walked through the door, without removing his eyes from the telly, Mr. Moustache told them the room was only for two, exhibiting that maybe he wasn’t so clueless.

  “He ain’t stayin’,” Chloe retorted.

  “Hope not,” Moustache said after them as they walked into the damp odor of the hotel’s innards.

  “I got us a room at the top,” Chloe informed Alex when they began ascending the worn remnants of red carpet that covered the stairs. “I got us that room because it’s the only one on the floor. No neighbors. And it’s got a nice view. I had Moustache put the bags up there. He moaned like a little bitch because they were so heavy.”

  Dorring got the impression that she was cheered up by the boy’s presence, though he also suspected her cheery mood was as much to do with trying to smooth over with him
the fact that she was inviting a street urchin into their secret hideout. He said nothing, however, and simply followed them up.

  Stepping inside the chamber of a room, Alex was alarmed to find that he couldn’t stand up fully. Chloe, meanwhile, sat Danny down on the bed, the cases on the floor at its foot, the boy glancing down at them as he took his place.

  “It’s not much,” Chloe said cheerfully, going over to the small recess of the bay window, “but it’s got one hell of a view.”

  She waved her hand at the small porthole of a window, and Alex made his way to it. He pushed aside the yellowed net curtains and looked out over the marketplace and shop roofs opposite, plumes of white steam rising up from the cafes. While he scanned the area, a train rumbled over the bridge down the road, and the thin windowpane shook violently in its frame.

  “Wonderful,” Alex remarked, stepping away.

  Chloe was busy in the rucksack, pulling out some chocolate bars and bags of crisps.

  “Here,” she said, throwing them at Danny. She then took a can of Coke and placed it on the bedside cabinet covered in a million cigarette burns. The boy popped the crisps open and began shoveling them into his mouth.

  “So how’d you get away from them?” he asked Chloe, spitting flecks of crisp everywhere as he did.

  “This man here helped me,” she said. “They put me on my own in some upstairs room. Locked the door and everything. But they didn’t count on me climbing up and breaking through a little window at the back. I got onto the roof and then ran off.”

  “They didn’t chase you or nothin’?”

  “Yeah, they chased me. All the way to the canal. I jumped in the water, and that’s when he saved me.”

  “And who’s ‘he’?” the boy enquired, looking up at Alex.

  “A friend and nothing more,” Alex informed him.

  “Oh! This some sort of no-name thing?”

  “Yes.”