A Cross to Bear: A Jack Sheridan Mystery

by Vogel, Vince

  “He’s certainly got some opinions” was Jack’s reply.

  They all went into Jean’s place, and Jack introduced Helen to his grandson. She gave the boy a sad smile and said hello, the boy feeling an instant pity toward the woman. Jean offered the two dinner, some roast beef with vegetables in the oven awaiting Jack’s return. Helen thanked her but said she wasn’t hungry. Jack on the other hand, having eaten nothing all day except a sandwich he’d grabbed back at the station, eagerly took her up on the offer. Once she’d fetched Jack’s dinner, Jean got a bottle of wine out and filled three grateful glasses. While they sat around the dining table—Jack eating, Helen and Jean drinking—Tyler sat in the lounge watching television.

  “So how was work?” Jean enquired innocently.

  Jack’s fork paused before his mouth, and he glanced over at Helen.

  “Can we talk about something else?” he said.

  “That bad?”

  “Yeah, that bad.”

  A few seconds silence reigned, but Jack knew it wouldn’t last.

  “So how do you two know each other?” Jean asked.

  “I used to work with Helen’s husband,” came Jack’s answer.

  It was a simple, preprepared answer.

  “Oh,” Jean let out, taking a sip of her wine. Jack knew there’d be more, though, so he tucked some food into his mouth before she had the chance to follow it up. “And,” she began inevitably, “I don’t want to pry, but how come you can’t go home tonight, love?”

  Helen’s eyes dropped to the table, and her lips trembled.

  “Jean,” Jack gently chided once he’d swallowed his food, “can we knock the questions on the head? Something bad happened, let’s just leave it at that.”

  Spotting the pitiful look that hung on Helen’s face, Jean realized that there were some questions she shouldn’t ask.

  “I’m sorry, love,” she said to Helen, reaching her hand across the table and placing it warmly on top of the sad woman’s. The latter smiled gently, and a few tears flaked off her eyelashes.

  “It’s a bastard, isn’t it?” Jean said, giving Helen a soft look of understanding. “My Glenn was a bastard. He cheated on me something awful. Did it with—”

  “Jean!” Jack cried out in exasperation, his mouth full with food. Swallowing, he added, “Just leave off, alright?”

  “I’m sorry, love.”

  “It’s okay,” Helen said, smiling at Jean.

  Thankfully for Jack, that was the last of her questions, and the three of them merely chatted away innocently while Jack finished his dinner and they finished the wine, Jean opening a second bottle. When he was done with dinner, Jack looked at his watch and realized it was ten. Tyler needed to be in bed. Jean and Helen remained around the dinner table polishing off several more glasses while Jack took the boy back next door and up to bed. Once Tyler had washed himself and brushed his teeth, Jack tucked him into bed.

  Having finished, he gazed down at the boy.

  “Do you think mum’ll come back?” Tyler suddenly asked.

  The question caught Jack out and brought to the surface many of his own concerns involving Carrie.

  “Of course she will,” Jack reassured, though he wasn’t absolutely certain in his heart. “What makes you think she won’t?”

  “It’s happened before.”

  “When?”

  “When I was littler. She took me to my aunty Karen’s, even though she’s not really my aunt, only a friend of mum’s. I was there for a long time.”

  “And she never came and got you?”

  “I ended up at Barbara’s.”

  “Who’s that? Another aunt?”

  “No. She’s a foster mum. Aunty Karen had to call Social Services, ’cause mum didn’t come back for so long.”

  “What was Barbara’s like?”

  “Terrible. She was really strict, and some of the other children there weren’t very nice. I had a fight with one boy because he kept stealing my stuff. That’s when I done this.”

  The little boy pulled his left arm out of the bedsheets and showed the underside of his forearm. Jack spotted the semicircle of dotted white marks across the brown skin.

  “He bit you?” Jack enquired.

  “Yeah. His teeth went all the way in. He wouldn’t let go either. Barbara’s husband, Josh, had to pull him off. It hurt real bad. But I didn’t cry.”

  “That’s good. I probably would have.”

  “Really?” Tyler exclaimed.

  “Yeah. Look I’ll show you something.”

  Jack pulled his shirt out of his trousers and lifted it up. To the left of his abdomen, slightly above the hip, was a large latticework of scarring, a patch the size of a man’s hand.

  “What was it?” Tyler wanted to know.

  “During the Brixton riots in eighty five when I was a uniform cop, I was in the back of a van traveling to the scene of some of the worst fighting when we hit some breeze blocks that had been put in the middle of the road. Someone had covered them in plastic bags and cardboard to hide them. The van hit them doing about fifty, and we flew up in the air and toppled over.”

  “Wow!”

  “It wasn’t very wow at the time, I can tell you. It was like being in a tumble dryer with nine other blokes, some of them big heavy guys too. Anyway, when we came to a stop someone decided it would be nice to throw a petrol bomb at us. It hit the van and exploded, covering the whole thing in flames.”

  “Did you get out?” Tyler eagerly asked.

  “I’m here, aren’t I?”

  The boy grinned at his own stupidity.

  “Oh yeah,” he exclaimed softly.

  “I did get out. Some of the guys were knocked out and in a bad way, but me and a couple of others weren’t too bad and managed to kick the door out.”

  “Was that when you done it?”

  “No. I did this going back in and pulling out two more blokes. It was when I was carrying the last one across the road that the van exploded. I was about ten meters away and the power of it spun me around, throwing the bloke I had ahold of onto the ground. When it had gone off, a piece of something hot hit me in the hip.”

  “Did it hurt?”

  “It bloody killed! My uniform melted to me where it hit. They had to cut it off me and then remove the burned fabric from my skin. I still have the uniform up in the loft to this day with the burned-out hole. They ended up pulling a piece of red-hot metal from me too. I nearly died that day. And when I was being rushed to hospital in the ambulance, I cried.”

  “You cried?”

  “Yep. Like a baby. I thought I was going to die.”

  “That’s all right, then. If you thought you were gonna die. I never thought I was gonna die when Lindon—that was his name—was biting me. I just kept smacking his head, but he wouldn’t let go.”

  “You know you shouldn’t fight,” Jack felt the need to say.

  “But he was nickin’ my stuff.”

  “You should have talked to him.”

  “He’s mental! I couldn’t talk with him. Once he told me about the time he broke a boy’s arm at another place he was at.”

  “Sounds like a nice lad,” Jack joked.

  “Well, he weren’t,” the boy grumbled. There was a little moment of silence between the two, and then Tyler added, “Even though you cried, I still think you were brave for going back and saving those other men.”

  “I won’t lie to you, Ty, I was very scared. But sometimes there’s more to things than just yourself. Do you know what I mean?”

  “Like the Good Samaritan. He helped the Jew who had been beaten and robbed, even though he was his enemy.”

  “I know that story well. My mother used to be a nun before she had me and would read me the Bible every night. The tale of the Good Samaritan means to love your neighbor as you love yourself no matter what. When I ran back to that van, I loved those men inside as I loved myself, and so would have done anything to get them out.”

  “Did you get a medal?�
�

  “Yeah, I did.”

  “Can I see it?”

  “It’s up in the loft with everything else from back then, including my army uniform.”

  “You were in the army too?”

  “Yeah, for a couple of years.”

  “Did you go to war?”

  “Kind of. I fought in the Falklands.”

  “Did you see people die?”

  Jack gazed at the boy for a moment, not sure how to answer.

  “Yeah, I did,” he finally said. “But that’s for another time. You need to go to sleep now.”

  “You promise?”

  “Promise what?”

  “To tell.”

  “Of course. I’ll tell you a bit about it tomorrow night.”

  Tyler grinned, once more showing off the missing tooth. Jack turned the light off and said good night, before returning to Jean’s. When he stepped into the dining room, he found the two women chatting over glasses of wine and a photo album. He always found it odd how women always loved getting the past out and showing it off to anyone who would look. To him the past was something personal that he kept hidden, only bringing it out when he was sitting on his own with a bottle. But Jean loved to share in her past. Perhaps it was because she wasn’t ashamed of it, whereas Jack was. Perhaps.

  “Did he go up okay?” Jean asked, turning to face Jack as he came into the room.

  “Yeah. I read him a story.”

  “Well, we’ve had another couple of glasses and a look through me photos.”

  “Did she notice how most of them have your ex-husband cut out?” Jack remarked with a wink. There were parts to Jean’s past that she too wished to deny.

  “Yes, she did,” Jean slurred. “And she also explained that she has a bastard as well.”

  Jack couldn’t help thinking that “bastard” was an understatement.

  He asked Helen if she wanted to go to bed, and she replied that she did. After the two women had given each other a long hug goodbye, Jack took Helen back to his own house and set her up in his room. Before he left her, she thanked him.

  “What for?” he asked when she did.

  “For being good, Jack. For not judging me.”

  With a gentle grin from the doorway, he turned and closed the door softly behind him, before leaving the house and going back to Jean next door. When he came back inside, he found that she was already waiting for him in bed upstairs.

  They’d been sleeping together ever since she’d thrown her ex-husband Glenn out over four years ago. That evening Jack had come home from work to find Glenn in the front garden gathering his things off the grass as Jean chucked them out of the window at him. The cheating husband had then left, never to return, saying goodbye to Jack for the last time. Not that they were ever close—Glenn was too much your insurance salesman of the year golf fanatic wanker for Jack’s tastes. He’d always been civil with Glenn, but they’d never been friends. Later that night a knock at Jack’s door was followed by the sight of Jean standing in his doorway wearing a figure-hugging black dress and holding a bottle of wine. Jack knew exactly where it would end and followed the path willingly. They made the same rules as so many make in these circumstances. No commitment. No attachment. Just sex. They would not be moving in together. They would not be introducing each other to their respective family and friends. They would be free to get with other people, if they so wanted. Essentially it was sex. But, essentially, things don’t always work that way, and over the following years Jack had felt the crush of a vice around him. As the pages of subsequent calendars had been torn away, Jean had displayed more definite signs of possessiveness over him, with her reaction to Helen tonight being a prime example. Therefore, Jack had been forced to distance himself as best he could from someone living only a foot of masonry away. Work was always the prime excuse. It always had been with Marsha. And it guiltily was now.

  Though Jack was tired and wearied from the day, it had been over two weeks since they’d last made love, and he went to it with an additional energy he hadn’t been aware of beforehand. Like always, he drove first but gradually let her take over until she was straddled on top and all he had to do was reach his hands up and stroke her pert breasts and body, which were exceptional for her age. There was a vain pride in Jean, especially since her husband left, and for that reason she treated her body as a temple.

  Afterward, they lay in bed, exhausted, Jack on his back smoking a cigarette while Jean held on to his side, her head rested upon his wide chest, quivering from the extensive lovemaking. It was the only time she ever let him smoke in her house. In truth, it was the only time she ever let anybody smoke in her house. Jack stroked her hair with his fingers, and he blew smoke into the ceiling where it hung like cobwebs. She was always silent during these moments, and despite her usual talkative way, she never indulged in pillow talk. It allowed Jack to relax and clear his mind as he watched the smoke melt in the air.

  Once he’d stubbed his smoke out in the ashtray she’d already laid out for him beforehand, Jack cuddled into Jean and the two of them drifted off into sleep. The sex had cleared his mind a little, and he was able to slink into unconsciousness without it being clothed in the general worries of the case, his daughter, his grandson, and every other ghost that plagued him.

  45

  Midnight, Barking, Essex.

  Around the world thousands of people sit hunched over laptops and computers watching images beamed to them live from the Sensual Sin studio in Barking. Streaming straight into their homes, endless footage of women and men performing sexual acts in various capacities from the violent to the plain bizarre. They sit, they watch, they masturbate. All for a fee.

  In the Barking studio, the sounds of women and men grunting filled the hot, sexually fetid air of the labyrinthian building. Technicians of different descriptions moved about the place, preparing sets, carrying equipment, and maintaining their technological connection with the outside world. Directors directed the acts, cameramen filmed it disinterestedly, and soundmen recorded it all with boom mics. On stages of varying disorder, people clad in leather, latex, and lace tangled limbs in grinding dances of forced pleasure, a constant wet slapping sound echoing through the dank featureless caves they were filmed in. There is always something unavoidably depressing about these types of places that everyone present feels, even if they’re unwilling to admit it—a creeping sensation that something isn’t quite right. It must have been the same with the brothels of Victorian London. No matter how much vaudevillian entertainment was put on, it was still fundamentally human slavery and venereal disease.

  At the front entrance of the building, two large men wearing black bomber jackets with pistols underneath kept watch of the large iron gate that separated them from the road outside. Since that morning, everyone within the Doyle crew had been put on red alert. Billy Doyle had called in favors from the Eastern European boys, and they’d given him fifty men to help guard the three studios in and around London, as well as the many brothels dotted all around the city. In Barking, the two large Polish men guarding the place were more worried with their residency status after Brexit than anyone attacking the studio. To them, it made much more sense to attack one of the brothels. There was a lot of cash on the premises for one thing, and it would scare all the future punters away for another. The studios had nothing except the staff, equipment, and porn actors. It was legit too, so they could involve the police. At the brothels, they’d be forced to keep it as quiet as they could.

  No, all the cover was at the brothels where it should be.

  Only one problem with that. The Doyles didn’t reckon on Jacob Earle’s understanding of the word “statement.” Earle wanted to make a statement. One that would carry far and wide. He wanted to show the world his war. And that is why, as those two men chatted about whether they should apply for UK passports for their children, the front gate came smashing in, and before they could even jump back and get their guns out, a huge truck smashed both men into the front
of the building, the cab burying itself into the brickwork, the whole place shuddering.

  Inside, everyone jumped as the crash ricocheted through the walls, sending dust racing in and choking the place up. Panic ensued and the sex stopped. People watching at home heard the bang and saw the actors’ reactions. Then they saw the pandemonium.

  Out of a container hooked to the back of the truck, many masked men spilled out the doors and landed heavily upon the asphalt. They marched like big black ants in through the smashed gate. Some technicians, who came to see what was up, flooded out of a door to the side of the main one—which was now covered in truck—and were the first to be gunned down in a hail of bullets. The ants marched over their bodies and up the steps to the door, into the building, more blasts aimed at the fleeing bodies running all around the corridors. They moved along. At each new door, they separated and flooded into the rooms, killing everyone they came across.

  At home, the voyeurs watched the mayhem live, switching cameras to the different rooms, not caring about the extra cost for this service, their macabre desires being fulfilled just like the Sensual Sin slogan had promised. They watched as some of the people attempted to barricade themselves in rooms, only to be met with grenade explosions. Then the flash of gunshots in the midst of smoke. The voyeurs didn’t switch off—just as Earle had expected—and gleefully watched as the same girl they were lustfully watching please herself only moments ago was shot in the face right in front of the screen.

  The building’s tight corridors reverberated with the sounds of screaming and exploding guns. Some people upstairs jumped from the windows and broke their ankles in the process. These were then shot by men patrolling the outside. One girl found her way onto the flat roof and darted across it. In a panic, she was unable to find anywhere to get down safely, and when she saw one of the masked men coming after her, she was compelled by terror to take a run and jump off the roof, trying to make it over the rolling razor wire of the fence and to the pavement on the other side. But her jump wasn’t good enough, and she landed in the bed of wire, becoming instantly caught up, its barbs ripping into her naked flesh. The masked man came to the edge of the roof, took aim, and put her out of her misery.