A Cross to Bear: A Jack Sheridan Mystery

by Vogel, Vince

  “What is the matter with you, Debs?” he enquired.

  “It’s this silly bloody case Caldwell’s got me on,” Brown replied.

  “What case?”

  “Get this,” she said, looking over at Jack. “Some friends of his—obviously Masonic—come back from holiday this morning and think that they’ve been broken into.”

  “They think?” Lange put to her.

  She grinned.

  “Yep. Think. They think they’ve been broken into.”

  “So what’s missing?”

  “Nothing is missing at all,” Debbie Brown said, appearing as though she would have laughed if it hadn’t been for the fact that the joke was most clearly on her.

  “Nothing?” Jack exclaimed with an incredulous frown.

  “Nothing,” Brown repeated.

  “Signs of entry?”

  “None. That’s why I’m pissed off now, because I’ve got to fill in a report on a nonexistent crime. What do I write it up as? Break-in by ghost!?”

  “Couldn’t Caldwell have gotten uniform to sort it?” Jack said.

  “No. The couple whose house it is wanted to see a plainclothes detective.”

  “So why do they think they’ve been broken into?” Lange put to Brown.

  “Get this. The wife—who clearly suffers from some serious OCD—said that things had been moved. The glasses in the kitchen pantry were in an odd order. I had to take bloody pictures of it. Then she found the cleaning bottles under the sink were also in an odd order. I mean, who puts their cleaning products in order anyway?”

  “I had a girlfriend once,” Lange remarked, “who used to tell me off for rearranging all the shampoo bottles in the bathroom.”

  “Well, your ex is nothing on Caldwell’s mate. She even handed me a sealy bag with two hairs in it that she’s adamant aren’t theirs.”

  “What did you do with them?” Lange asked.

  “I took it to Caldwell, and guess what he said?”

  “To give them to the lab,” Jack answered, standing up from his chair and taking his coat that was hanging on the back.

  “Exactly right,” Brown said, pointing her pen at Jack. “And that’s why I have to doctor a crime report so that it passes and gets tested. The wife even asked me if I’d dust for prints. She wanted forensics down there. How would I explain it to them? I can’t even explain it to myself!”

  “Well, good luck, Debs,” Jack said as he made his way to the door. “You coming, George?”

  “Yeah,” Lange said, smiling to himself over Brown’s predicament, rising from his chair and taking his own coat. “Good luck, Debs,” he said as he passed Brown on his way to the door. The DC simply grunted at them both and continued to curse away at the computer.

  40

  A glowing full moon glared down upon the world from the night sky, snugly settled within a gap in the clouds, the rain pouring mercilessly upon the lamplit Barnet suburb. As they sat silently in the car, Alex and Chloe were consumed by the sound of it incessantly rapping its fingers upon the roof, both of them gazing out the window through the watery veil at the redbrick blur sitting innocuously among almost identical houses at the end of the cul-de-sac. Outside, the last of the news vans were packing up, and the vultures were leaving for the day.

  “So this is where your mum lives, then?” Chloe asked.

  “Apparently,” Alex said as he waited for the media to go. “She didn’t live here when I was at home.”

  “Looks nice. I wish I had’ve grown up in something like this.”

  “Not me,” Alex muttered. “They all look the same. Everyone hidden behind their red bricks.”

  “Whatever you say. Still looks nice.”

  They were silent some more, and Alex continued to spy on the house with a trepidation verging on hostility.

  “You gonna go see your mum?” Chloe felt the need to say once the last news van had driven past them.

  He turned to her and gave a half grin.

  “I guess I should,” he said.

  “It’ll be good for you.”

  “Will it?”

  “Family’s important. I’d do anything to be able to see my mum again.”

  With this final prompt, Dorring left the car and walked the short distance along the pavement to his mother’s door. Standing right outside, he was about to knock when he heard raised voices the other side and felt the need to hold back.

  He could only hear parts of an argument. “I just don’t know,” he heard the exacerbated voice of his mother say, the first time he’d heard it in many years. “But even she told you it was bollocks,” he heard a man’s voice come back. Then he heard nothing but the faint murmurs of a discussion.

  The voices stayed low for some time, so Alex knocked hard on the door.

  As he waited for it to open, he felt his heart begin to beat hard in his chest, and his palms became noticeably sweaty. He gazed back down the road at the car and wondered whether it wasn’t too late to go back. What was he doing? he asked himself. Why had he come here? Surely it would have been better to stay away.

  Dorring went to walk off, but the moment his heels were about to turn, the door opened. There standing before him was his mother, the first time he’d seen her in person for eight years. He immediately observed that her face was flustered, an indication of her earlier argument. But the look dropped when she recognized her son, her mouth gaping open and a look of utter incredulity stretching her features.

  “Hello, Mum,” Alex said.

  “Alex!” she exclaimed, her eyes now as wide as her mouth. She looked at him as though he were a ghost, as though he were nothing but the crafty rendition of her overwrought nerves. She clasped her wide mouth with her hand and sounded as if she were screaming into her palm. “Alex!” she once more ejaculated and moved forward off the threshold toward him. An inner urge made him recoil from her, but he controlled it and let her throw her arms around him as she began weeping pitifully into him. “My boy,” she sobbed. “I’ve missed you so much.”

  Steven Cuthbert came wandering out to see what was up and came across the son draped in his mother, Dorring not sure how to respond, his eyes glaring down at the pitiful woman and his arms slowly enveloping her.

  They stayed like that, mother and son, for over a minute, Helen appearing to emotionally exorcise something out of her. Then, holding on to Alex’s arm, she led him inside, wiping her eyes and nose all the time, her whole body trembling, her husband drifting behind them, seeing his stepson in the flesh for the first time. They all went into the dining room and sat around the table. It took Helen some time to let go of Alex’s arm, and she gazed at her son’s face the whole time, a proud smile lighting up her countenance.

  “This is Steven,” she said once they’d all sat.

  “Pleased to meet you at last,” Cuthbert said, striking his hand across the table.

  Dorring said nothing in reply, just shook the man’s hand and looked him dead in the eyes while he did so. Steven was unable to stay within the tractor beam of Alex’s eyes and quickly looked away. Once the handshake was over, the three of them sat around the table, Helen gazing misty-eyed across at her son, Dorring gazing back with a blank expression, and Steven’s eyes stuck to the table.

  “Uh!” Helen burst out with. “I forgot to ask. Would you like a drink, Alex?”

  “No,” Alex replied curtly. “I won’t be staying long. I just wanted to see you and ask a few questions.”

  His mother frowned at him.

  “What questions?” she asked.

  “Questions like how my sister ended up nailed to a cross in Epping Forest.”

  Helen’s frown deepened, and Steven joined her in taking on an injured look.

  “What do you mean by that?” Helen wanted to know.

  “Look,” Steven interjected, glancing at his wife and then at Alex, “can’t we keep things civil? I mean, it’s terrible what’s happened, but do we have to get straight to the point?”

  Dorring slowly swivele
d his head so that his eyes met Cuthbert’s.

  “I don’t know who you are, Mr. Cuthbert,” he said. “I’ve never met you before.”

  “You would have had you stayed in contact,” Helen rebuked. “Where have you been all these years?”

  “Mother,” Alex stated firmly, swiveling his hawk eyes back to her, “the places I’ve been and the things I’ve been witness to would only add more to the gray of your brown hair. It would keep you up at night to know what your son has been doing. For your sake, it is better you fill your head with other things.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You’re in the SAS, aren’t you?” Steven asked.

  “I was. But not now. No, now if I told you what I did, I’d have to kill you.” He placed his look back on Cuthbert at this last sentence, making his mother’s husband shiver at the cold steel of Alex’s eyes.

  “What happened to you?” Helen enquired, narrowing her eyes at him. She’d never seen such coldness on his face, even when she’d known him to be a serious person as a teenager. Now what she saw was her son carved in marble.

  “So now that we’ve caught up,” Alex began coldly, having ignored his mother’s query, “I’ll get back to the point. What happened to my sister?”

  The couple looked at each another.

  “Someone killed her,” Helen said, her throat tightening at the words.

  “But who?”

  “A killer,” Steven Cuthbert replied with a bemused expression.

  “What about before that?”

  “I don’t get it,” Cuthbert went on. “Are you saying that her death is our fault?”

  “No. I merely want to know what might be your fault. Like how my sister ended up being arrested for solicitation at seventeen, attempted suicide twice, and spent nine months incarcerated in an institution. That may very well be your fault, Mr. Cuthbert. Did my sister like you?”

  “Of course she did,” Helen defended her husband. “Becky was like a lot of teens in that she didn’t always see eye to eye with us. But she was growing up.”

  “Was the online pornography her growing up?”

  The two looked shocked. Helen took on a look of utter confusion, and Steven went completely red.

  “What… what online… thing?” Helen bleated, the tears already in her eyes.

  “You didn’t know?” Alex put to her. “I can give you the URL if you want. But I warn you, it’s graphic.”

  “No,” Helen blurted, shoving her hand over her mouth and bursting into tears.

  Steven Cuthbert placed his arm round his quivering wife.

  “She’s really sensitive at the moment,” Steven said to Alex. “You shouldn’t say these things.”

  “I merely wish to get to the bottom of the sewer. I want to know why Becky attempted suicide twice. I want to know why she ended up feeling such despair that she’d try to end it.”

  Rage filled Helen’s eyes as well as tears while he said this.

  “If you know about all this,” she seethed, “then you should know when it was she first tried to kill herself. Do you know when that was, Alex?”

  He gazed at his mother for some time before asking when it was.

  “That first time she tried to kill herself—the time I found my twelve-year-old daughter with a stomach full of vodka and pills—was two days after you emailed her to say you couldn’t stay in contact. She was in pieces—because of you. So she decided to take an overdose.”

  Dorring’s face became taut, and he stared angrily at his mother. When he’d checked over Becky’s information, he hadn’t even guessed that the date she was rushed to hospital after taking the overdose had been so shortly after he’d cut contact. With this latest revelation, a fog of shame slowly filled him up and clouded his mind. He buzzed with a thousand recriminations coming at him all at once, and everything around him became a swirling blur.

  Alex suddenly smashed his fist down on the table, making the other two jump in their chairs. He abruptly got up, the chair sailing out from behind him and hitting the wall. Then, like a cornered animal, he started to dash his eyes around him in a way that suggested he didn’t know where he was. Helen and Steven watched him with an element of fear as he began mumbling to himself.

  “Yes, Katya,” he said to something unseen in the corner, “this is Grandma. Yes, I know I shouldn’t shout at her. No, I’m bad. Me. She doesn’t deserve this.”

  Helen’s face took on a look of worry at the sight of her firstborn child going into some kind of manic episode, his gaze appearing to shine out on another world that only he could see.

  “Alex?” she softly uttered to him. “Are you okay?”

  He stopped sharply and gazed at her as though he’d only just realized her presence.

  “I should never have come,” he blurted out and began making his way to the door.

  His mother got up from her chair, Steven trying to stop her. But she shrugged him off and followed her son into the hallway.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Alex replied, stopping at the door, his hand parked on the knob, wide back facing his mother.

  “Stay here some more. Please. I haven’t seen you in so long. I only want my son to be here a little longer. Is that so much for a mother to ask?”

  “It isn’t. But I’m afraid I’ll only disappoint you.”

  “My son could never do that.”

  “I’m sorry, Mum, but I don’t think I’m your son anymore.”

  With that, he opened the door and stepped outside. Helen didn’t quite know how to take this, but the dejection in his voice had brought more tears rushing out of her. She felt the arm of Steven come around her shoulder as he slunk up behind her, and it made her shudder. Part of her wanted to throw it off. To dash toward her son and place herself at his mercy. To do whatever she could for him. To follow him out of the door and then everywhere he went from then on.

  But in the end, she merely made it as far as the threshold, where she stood watching him leave through the lashing downpour toward a car, the shadow of someone else in the passenger’s seat.

  Dorring climbed back into the car with Chloe.

  “How’d it go?” she enquired, gazing at the couple standing on the doorstep of their house.

  “Not good” was all Alex gave her.

  “You know,” Chloe began, narrowing her eyes at Steven Cuthbert, “I’ve seen him before.”

  Slumped in the driver’s seat, Alex perked up and turned to her.

  “The husband?” he said.

  “If that’s who he is. I know him from Becky. He came to the studio once and had a row with her about somethin’. Grabbed ahold of her and tried to drag her away, but one of the security blokes scared him off.”

  “Did you hear what they said?”

  “No. But she was crying afterwards. I thought at the time that he was just tryin’ to get her to leave the studio. You see that sometimes. Boyfriends or parents comin’ around and kickin’ off.”

  “Did she ever tell you what was said?”

  “She just kept repeatin’ how much she hated him. But refused to say any more. Like I told you, I didn’t know her that well. She was only at the place for a few months.”

  Alex took another look at the house as his mother and Cuthbert went back inside. He pulled his phone out, pressed something on the screen, and put it on loudspeaker. The sound of a door closing came booming out.

  “What’s that?” Chloe enquired.

  “A bug I placed in a dish of potpourri when I first went inside,” he replied.

  “You crafty bastard.”

  “Yes. I believe I am.”

  They listened in on the couple as they began to talk.

  “Do you think he means to cause trouble?” Steven Cuthbert’s voice could be heard.

  “Of course not,” Helen tearfully answered. “He’s my son. He looked so cold. Didn’t you think?”

  “I’ve never met him, so I don’t have a reference
point.”

  “There’s something wrong with him, and I feel terrible for what I said. Did you see his reaction? He started mumbling to himself. And who was Katya?”

  “I don’t know. I simply want to know if he means to cause trouble.”

  “For who, Steve?” she bawled at her husband. “For the person who did this to Becky? Or maybe you’re worried about yourself. Is that it?”

  “Do we have to get back into this again, Helen?” came the exasperated answer.

  “But I need to know.”

  “And I’ve told you the truth. All along I’ve told you the truth. I can’t believe you won’t let this go. It was nothing more than the crying out of a damaged teenage girl in need of her mother. She lied.”

  “But was it a lie? How can I be sure?”

  “Well, don’t take my word for it. Take hers. She admitted it later on, didn’t she? She came out of that place and she told you straight that she’d made the whole thing up. She wanted to let things lie. Now why can’t you?”

  “Because I can still feel her,” Helen screamed. “Inside. In here. I can feel her, and she’s crying out, Steve. I need to know for sure.”

  “I can’t fucking handle this. I have to leave. You’re killing me. I loved that girl like she was my own daughter. I loved her and I’m hurting too. But you don’t care. You don’t care that some psycho is roaming the streets. That some psycho killed Becky. All you care about is some bullshit from years ago, because the truth is is that you can’t handle your guilty feelings toward your daughter. Your guilt for how you treated her.”

  The sound of an injured scream filled the car, followed by the slamming of the door. Dorring looked out the windscreen and saw Cuthbert leave the house and get into his car, abject fury written all over his features. Steven started his engine and screeched out of the drive, passing Alex and Chloe a little farther down the street.

  Dorring started his own engine.

  “Let’s see where Mr. Cuthbert goes, shall we.”

  He brought the car around the cul-de-sac and began following Steven Cuthbert out of the collection of monolithic red- and yellow-brick houses, onto the streetlamp strips of the highway and off toward wherever.