A Cross to Bear: A Jack Sheridan Mystery

by Vogel, Vince

  Less than five minutes after entering the building, the men left behind a total of twenty-three bodies. They ran out of the gate to several vans waiting up the road. The back doors slammed shut, and the vans motored away at speed.

  The first piece fell to Jacob Earle.

  DAY FIVE

  46

  The birds were busy singing the dawn chorus outside while the twilight began to seep in through the window and turn the darkness blue.

  Dorring was sitting in a chair facing the door, a silenced PPK on his lap, Chloe asleep on the bed beside him. As vigilant as he was, his eyes hadn’t been on the door for some time. Instead, he had spent most of the night watching the girl sleep, her slender body breathing in and out under the sheets, a peacefulness to her face that only appeared to exist within unconsciousness. In Alex’s ears rang the melodic humming that often attacked him during silence. It belonged to two persons—Katya sitting cross-legged on the floor by his chair and Tatyana who was doing something behind him at the window.

  He would slip his hand down and place his fingers through the little girl’s hair, feeling the warm wisps tremble through them. In his head their humming grew louder, reaching a crescendo, filling his whole heart with their verse, and he shivered all over to hear it, to feel Katya’s hair and to know that Tatyana was messing around behind him. Occasionally, he would forget that neither really existed and he’d become afraid that their noise would wake Chloe. Then, with the returning knowledge that it surely wouldn’t, he’d become even more despondent than he already was.

  “Huh!” Chloe exclaimed suddenly, waking up with a shock. She instantly sat up in bed and looked at Alex with wide, terrified eyes, her face snow-white and a frosty sweat rapidly pushing out from her pores. Gradually, her features settled and she glanced around her, as if reassuring herself that she was safe.

  “Bad dream?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” she replied, taking a bottle of water from the bedside cabinet and drinking from it.

  “What about?”

  “I don’t know,” she answered in a sleepy voice, placing the bottle back and gathering her knees under the quilt. “I never remember them.”

  “You choose not to remember. But they’re still in there somewhere.”

  “Maybe.”

  They remained silent for a minute or so, but their eyes continued to gaze at each another. Chloe wasn’t put off by the stare. Far from it. Alex appeared to gaze upon her in the same way he would his younger sister. She’d never had an older brother and would have loved one. Someone to look out for her. To make sure no man ever hurt her.

  “Did you even sleep?” she enquired.

  “You never remember your dreams; I never sleep.”

  “What—never?”

  “I drift in and out, but for no longer than an hour or so. Sometimes I don’t even know if I’m dreaming or awake. Often the two become one.”

  She eyed him curiously for a moment.

  “Must be really bad,” she remarked.

  “I think it is” was his reply.

  “Something to do with your wife and daughter?”

  Alex was about to say something but stopped himself. Instead, he stated, “You need to stay here.”

  “You’re goin’ again?” she blurted out.

  “Yes. I have answers to squeeze from forked tongues. And after that, we need to move again.”

  2.

  Jean kissed Jack longingly goodbye at her door as he left that morning, her dreamy eyes following him all the way while he walked to his own front door.

  “Morning,” Jack called out as he came into the house, but got nothing in reply.

  When he closed the door behind him, he smelled burning and briskly made his way to the kitchen. Upon opening the door, he was greeted by a bale of smoke.

  “What the—?” he exclaimed as he waved the smoke to the side, revealing the sight of Tyler standing on a chair and burning something mercilessly on the hob. “What’re you doing, Ty?” Jack called out, making it across the kitchen to the window and opening it.

  “I got up on my own,” the boy said, looking over his shoulder. “No one was here, so I cooked something.”

  It was at that moment that Jack saw the four frazzled black forms of charcoaled bacon stuck to the frying pan in front of the boy.

  “You like it crispy?” he sarcastically asked Tyler when he took over at the stove, turning the hobs off and lifting the boy off the chair. “Marsha’ll go nuts if she saw this.” He threw the frying pan into the sink and covered it with water from both taps. A plume of steam instantly flew up, and Jack rushed to the back door. He opened it and began fanning the smoke and steam out.

  Once he’d finished, Jack looked at the dirty footprints on the chair, the burnt grease all over the cooker, the general mess of the kitchen, and felt panic, expecting Marsha to walk in any moment and barrack him for the mess.

  “Where’s Helen?” Jack asked once the air of the room was cleared and he was at the sink washing the frying pan up.

  “She’s still in bed. I think she was crying most of the night. I got up for the toilet and heard her.”

  Jack sighed and felt a pang concerning the woman’s seemingly never-ending misery.

  “Well, we should clean up,” Jack said. “Then I’ll cook breakfast myself. And in the future, try and stay away from doing it yourself.”

  “I can do it,” Tyler protested.

  Jack merely gave him a look as if to say it certainly doesn’t look like it. The two then began cleaning the kitchen, Jack busy with the hob, still slightly panicked by the impossible prospect of his wife finding her home in this condition.

  While Tyler dried up, Jack went up to see how Helen was. He slowly opened his bedroom door a crack and peeked his head inside. She was fast asleep curled up in the blankets. He pondered whether he should get her up and offer her breakfast; it was the reason he’d gone up there. But seeing her sleeping body and realizing that it was the most tranquil he’d ever seen her, Jack slunk away from the door and back down to his grandson.

  There, he cooked himself and the boy bacon sandwiches and made himself a pot of coffee. It was as he sat watching cartoons on the kitchen set with Tyler that Lange called on his mobile.

  “Missing me that much, George?” he enquired sardonically when he picked it up.

  “Ha ha! No, I called to let you know of a major development.”

  Jack immediately heard the excitement in the detective constable’s voice, and his own ears pricked up.

  “I’m all ears,” Jack said.

  “Well, you may want to hold on to them, because what I have to tell you is pretty remarkable.”

  “Go on, then, don’t keep me in suspense.”

  “You know that case that Debbie Brown was moaning about yesterday?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “The one with Caldwell’s Masonic mate and his OCD wife.”

  “Yes.”

  “You recall Debs saying that the wife gave her two hairs to have examined?”

  “Yes, yes. Get on with it, George.”

  “They were Becky Dorring’s.”

  “What?” Jack exclaimed, sitting up dead straight in his chair.

  “That’s right. Debs got the ID this morning and rang me straight away. She didn’t know what to do.”

  “Get forensics at the address straightaway.”

  “Already have.”

  “Good man. Have you had them have another look at the hair samples?”

  “No.”

  “Then do. Just to be on the safe side. Have you got the address for this couple?”

  “Yes, sarge.”

  “Then send it to me in a text and I’ll meet you there as soon as possible.”

  “Will do.”

  “It looks like we could have a crime scene, George.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “At the very least, it’s another piece of the jigsaw.”

  “Okay, I’ll see you there, then.”


  “You will.”

  Jack put the phone down and gazed around the kitchen. He was standing, not having realized that he’d risen from his chair. He looked down at Tyler, who was joyfully tucking into his bacon sandwich, and said, “How do you fancy another day with Aunty Jean?”

  “Her TV’s bigger than yours” was all Tyler said.

  “Then pick your sandwich up, because we’re off.”

  Jack quickly dressed the boy and wrote Helen a note explaining that he’d be out all day. He left her his mobile number and explained that Jean would be next door throughout. He then raced Tyler to Jean’s, gave her a soft puppy-dog look when she went to protest his foisting of the boy on her again, and kissed her goodbye, whizzing off down the road in his car soon after.

  What this all meant—Becky’s hair being found in Caldwell’s mates’ place—he didn’t know. But he felt assured that he would in time. That somewhere within this web of facts and presuppositions was hidden the identity of the killer. More and more cracks were beginning to appear, and Jack was being given another glimpse inside the mystery of it all.

  Could the emergence of this possible crime scene prove beyond a doubt that it was Cuthbert? Or would it lead Jack onward toward another perpetrator?

  47

  Steven Cuthbert’s head ached awfully as he gradually awoke from sleep. Last night, he’d drunk half a bottle of Scotch when he’d come back, having found his wife gone. Rousing, he realized that something was tapping down heavily on his chest, causing him some discomfort. His first thought was that it was an angry Helen, just this minute returned home.

  Slowly opening his eyes, he saw the large misty presence of someone standing over the bed, their finger rapping his sternum with some force. As his vision cleared, he saw that it was not his wife but a large man. His gaze trepidatiously rose to the stranger’s face, and he recoiled when he saw that it was Alex.

  “Where’s my mother?” Alex asked, staring nonchalantly down at Cuthbert and taking his finger away from the woken man’s chest.

  “What?” Steven mumbled as he began sitting up in bed.

  “My mother. Where is she?”

  “Out.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. She wasn’t here when I got back. How did you get in?”

  All he got for an answer was a sudden violent movement and his whole body going rigid as Alex plowed a stun gun straight into his ribs, the prongs ripping through the quilt.

  The last thing Steven Cuthbert felt before he was enveloped in unconsciousness was soiling himself.

  48

  Jack was driving to the address of Mr. and Mrs. Paterson-Crowley along a very opulent stretch of northeast London, the wide streets lined with towering plane trees and expensive cars, the three-story terrace houses filled with London professionals. The flat that he and Lange had found Coop in was only three miles away from here. But people in this neighborhood never allowed themselves to imagine the horrors down the road. Simply kept to their own social group and sidestepped the dog shit on the doorstep.

  Jack knew, though. He knew what went on over every part of this city. Every corner. The cries in the dark. The drunk going too far and beating his wife to death. The guy stabbed for the forty quid in his pocket and the trainers on his feet. The smackhead getting lucky and not knowing it, boosting a bag of pure into his bloodstream and drifting off into death. And it wasn’t only the poorer, more dilapidated places either. Even behind the supposed glamor of the middle classes, the facade of ladies and gentlemen, of professional decorum, even there the darkness existed as much as the light. Even there killers existed and only played at the games of normality to hide their beastly forms.

  He thought of Steven Cuthbert. A teacher—figured. A professional by day, child rapist by night. Light and dark. Could he have crossed over to killer? Jack still wasn’t sure. There was something up with Steven Cuthbert, but he wasn’t sure it was that. He hoped with this latest development, he’d find out something more about the killer.

  A half hour after setting off, Jack pulled up outside the address, a nice two-story yellow-brick house with a large hexagonal bay window and perfect hedgerow. The place had been pretty easy to spot, what with all the white vans and police cars parked up along the street outside.

  Jack stepped out onto the pavement and almost slipped on something. When he was steady, he lifted his foot and found a pizza menu stuck to the bottom, the type that they hang on door handles.

  “Bloody thing,” he muttered, ripping it off his sole and chucking it into the gutter.

  At the front gate of iron latticework, he found Lange waiting for him. Behind the DC, down the black-and-red-clay-tiled path, the big black door to the house stood open and Jack could see the white suits working away inside. A little farther up the road, he heard a female voice loudly remonstrating with someone, and when he looked to see, he saw a neatly dressed woman being ushered into the back of a forensics van by a uniform officer, who was trying his best to calm the woman. The sound of her voice immediately annoyed Jack. It was that high-strung nasal voice of the posh, a whiny gramophone British that implied a superciliousness through its mere tone.

  “The wife?” Jack asked Lange, nodding toward the scene.

  “Got it in one, sarge. I’ve left her with uniform. I couldn’t get anything through to her.”

  “I thought she wanted us to dust for prints and take her break-in seriously?”

  “Yeah, but now we’re kicking her out of her house and telling her that she has to have her prints taken. That’s what she’s arguing about now. We need to eliminate everyone from the house.”

  “Where’s the husband?”

  “On his way. He was at work when we got here.”

  “Anyone else at the address?”

  “No. They live on their own. No kids, grandkids. Nothing. They don’t even have a cleaner, which is rare for these places. When I asked why she didn’t, she said she didn’t trust anyone else to keep her house in a respectable state. And then—get this—she added that most of the cleaners these days were foreigners and she won’t have foreigners in her house. Toffee-nosed bitch!”

  “I’m gonna have a fag,” Jack groaned, getting his pack out and lighting a smoke. “Did you check their whereabouts? To be on the safe side.”

  “Yeah, all checks out. I called immigration. They were on holiday. Only came back in at Heathrow yesterday morning.”

  “Where’d they go?”

  “Skiing in Canada for two weeks.”

  “Nice,” Jack nodded, taking a puff.

  Just then the woman pushed past the poor uniform and came storming up the street toward Jack.

  “Here we go,” he mumbled to Lange.

  She was late fifties, early sixties, wearing a burgundy skirt suit with a black turtleneck and a necklace of gold clams dangling around it. Her hair was almost white, her nose ending in a sharp point, and she wore black lipstick on her lips, giving her the appearance of a well-dressed witch.

  “You there,” she barked out, pointing her bony finger at Jack.

  He merely pointed his thumb at his chest and mouthed, “Me?”

  “Yes, of course you. Who else did you think I meant? What’s your rank?”

  “My rank?” Jack exclaimed. “Sergeant major, I think. What’s yours?”

  Lange grinned and the woman sprung her dart-like eyes at him. The DC quickly covered the smirk and turned away. Having achieved her goal, her eyes went back to Jack.

  “Don’t play silly buggers with me, officer. What rank are you within the Metropolitan Police Force?”

  “I’m a detective sergeant.”

  “At your age?” she burst out in disbelief. “You can’t have been trying very hard if at your age you’ve only made detective sergeant. All the police officers your age that I know are much higher up than that.”

  “I tell you this for nothing,” Jack said with a casual air, taking a drag on his smoke and looking her square in the eyes, “I’ll enjoy holding you
r hand while they take your prints.”

  “What?” the woman bellowed, Lange flinching. “Is that a threat?”

  “No, love. It’s a promise. Now back to the van like a good lady and let the nice man take your prints so we can eliminate you before we go through your house with a fine-toothed comb for however long it takes us. You, in the meantime, can cooperate fully with this investigation, or you may receive a bollocking from one of your higher-up police friends the next time you see them at some dinner party thing.”

  “Do you know who Peter Caldwell is?” she exclaimed while Jack gently took her by the elbow and ushered her back toward the van.

  “Did he used to play for Spurs?” he joked.

  “I’ll have you brought up. You’ll be lucky if you’re not back in uniform by the evening.”

  Jack stopped sharp and stared into the woman’s haughty eyes with a dark glare.

  “Don’t test me,” he said sternly. “Your house is now a major crime scene in an investigation led by myself. That means that it is mine. DCI Peter Caldwell may be high in your book, but this goes higher. Much. And if you don’t do exactly as I say, I’ll have you up for perverting the course of justice. Then maybe Peter can come and visit you in prison next time.”

  The woman went to say something, something that would pull him down a peg or two, but she stopped herself, her whole chin trembling and her lips contorting into various shapes at the effort. Jack’s words had had effect. She had no choice but to bend to his will.

  “I think this is a bloody travesty,” she blurted out, needing to say at least something. She pulled her arm out of Jack’s light grip and stomped off toward the van. “Okay,” she barked at the uniform policeman, “let’s get these bloody prints done.”

  49

  Ice-cold water crashed into Steven Cuthbert’s face, instantly waking him. He was sitting in a chair, his aching body violently trembling all over. Opening his eyes, he saw the blurry form of Alex standing before him holding a dripping bucket. He tried to move, but his body appeared stuck to the chair. Glancing down at his arms as he tried to lift them from the armrests, he realized that they’d been glued there, the pink skin stretching as he lifted with all his might. Attempting to sit up or move his legs was the same, his whole body glued, and he soon gave up.