A Step Into The Dark

by Vince Vogel

  Jack walked off into a small room to the side. It was once the changing rooms. The fire had burned all the way through one of the walls. Jack led Tyler and Jean around the weeds, the bottles and the beer cans. He led them out of the shell. A large bush of twisted vines held onto one of the walls from outside. Jack went up to it and did his best to pull the weeds back a few inches.

  “Come here,” he said to Tyler.

  The nine year old jogged over and Jack got him to place his head in the clearing he’d made.

  “You see that?” Jack asked. “The symbol.”

  “You mean the one that’s been scratched there?”

  “Yes. The one that’s a diamond with a cross going through it.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, that’s his symbol. His mark. He left it on all his fires and used to draw it on the video cassettes he sent us.”

  Tyler removed his head and looked to be musing.

  Looking up at his granddad, he inquired, “Did he ever kill anyone?”

  Jack gazed into space with blank eyes for a moment. Shaking his head, he turned to his grandson and said, “No.”

  24

  2003.

  It wasn’t true, what Jack told the boy about the Fire Starter not killing. He did.

  They were up to seven fires by that point. Seven fires. Seven videos of him growling away. Telling them how they’d never catch him. How he was going to make them all pay. How he was so smart while they were so stupid. After the fourth video, things got even weirder.

  He sent them one where it appeared he was masturbating out of shot. It certainly added yet another sinister aspect to the arsonist. But it wasn’t the first time Jack had come across it. Believe it or not, it is actually a habit of many arsonists, though relatively uncommon, that the fire becomes entangled in sexual connotations and becomes a sexual act in itself. They become aroused by the sight of the flames licking up into the air. The Fire Starter was what psychiatrists term a ‘pyrophiliac’. Someone who gains sexual arousal from fire or the setting of fire.

  It’s the power part, Jack always surmised. The feelings of power they get from having caused so much damage. Of the fire’s ability to destroy things rapidly. Perhaps it is the only time in their lives that they feel such power. And with power, they feel sexually alive in a way that they don’t in their normal life.

  This eighth fire, however, was even more disturbing than all the predecessors. Because this time he’d killed.

  Jack didn’t wait for the video on this one. He’d been called out of bed by a fire investigator he knew. A man who’d been following the Fire Starter for some time as well. A man by the name of Bob Taylor.

  It was three a.m. when Jack rolled up on the road of government blocks. The fire was long out. The gray stucco on the seventh floor where the flat had been was covered in black soot, the windows busted and charred. The residents stood about in their pajamas as Jack was walked through the cordon by Bob.

  The man was silver-haired and short. A veteran of fire investigations. He wore huge rimmed glasses over his face and they made his eyes look unnaturally large. Though his job often brought him into contact with the most harrowing aspects of fire, he always managed to wear a cheery disposition whenever Jack greeted him, before he exchanged it for a solemn one the moment they were on the job.

  “How many dead?” Jack asked as they walked into the block and took the stairs up to the seventh floor.

  “Only one. The rest of the block was alerted by the fire alarms before it got a chance to spread to the surrounding flats.”

  “The dead have a name?”

  “Donald Johnson. Seventy-six. Retired taxi driver. Lives on his own since his wife died six years ago. Gets on well with the neighbors, by all accounts. They seemed pretty upset when they learned it was his flat.”

  “What makes you think it’s our boy?”

  “Because I saw him.”

  “You saw him?”

  “Not up close or even directly. I’ll show you when we’re there.”

  They reached the flat. The whole of the seventh floor was completely burned out. Fire officers were shoveling some of the debris into metal tubs and clearing some of the wreckage away. The fire had been out several hours, but the heat within the concrete structure of the block was still immense and Jack immediately began sweating.

  Bob led him into the apartment. They walked through a narrow hallway. All the possessions were charred or completely turned to ash. Patches of carpet were still intact in places and the wallpaper had survived in spots. In the lounge, only the outline of furniture could be made out, the walls completely black. The stench of the smoke was almost intoxicating as the investigator led Jack to where a photographer stood in front of a pile of smoldering ash. The man was taking pictures of it.

  When Jack reached the spot, he saw exactly what he was taking pictures of. Mingled in with the ash was a skull and chest bone. Two meters in front of this was the burned-out remains of a television sitting on top of another pile of charred timber.

  “He was watching telly,” Bob began as they stood there. “Must’ve been asleep. Probably died before he even awoke, as there’s no sign he ever got up or struggled.”

  “Smoker?”

  “No sign of cigarettes or ashtrays and when I asked his next-door neighbor, she told me he didn’t. Plus, you can smell the petrol.”

  “All I can smell is indiscriminate smoke.”

  “Forty years of training my nose like a bloodhound, Jack. Trust me, it’s there and I’m sure we’ll find evidence of it.”

  “What else makes you think it was started externally?”

  “We found scratching on the barrel of the lock. He’s used his pick set again, the little shit. Come in through the front door. Doused the old man and then set light to him. Probably watched him burn before leaving.”

  “But what makes you think it’s our man?”

  “Come here.”

  Bob led Jack away from the charred remains of the old man and his chair. They left the flat and went out to a stairwell. As they entered it, Bob turned to the wall beside the door and pointed up about seven feet. Part of it was coated in soot. Concentrating his eyes, Jack saw it. Scored into the plaster. Four inches square. The same symbol that was drawn on the video cassettes. A diamond with a cross going through it.

  25

  The tech lab went through Micheal Burke’s laptop and phone. They easily found the source of the texts and social media messages. Stuart Chadwell hadn’t put much effort into hiding himself. Enough for his targets not to directly know it was him, but not enough for a computer forensic analyst to get to the bottom of it.

  It was confirmed that the bile which had been poured onto the teenagers had come from Stuart Chadwell, just as Micheal Burke had suspected. Nevertheless, Alice wasn’t quite up to suspecting a teenage boy capable of mass murder yet. For one, the shots showed that the killer had distinct experience in the handling of firearms. A powerful gun like a .44 magnum is likely to jump out of a skinny kid’s hand. He’d have to be very experienced to handle it and to shoot as accurately as the killer had. Could a seventeen-year-old boy gain this experience? And what about the theft of the other guns? Why would he send hateful messages to them—implicating himself—if he planned to go on further rampages?

  No, Stuart Chadwell was no more than a hateful teenager with an anger problem to Alice. She would visit him about the messages and shake him up some, but as far as the investigation went, she wouldn’t be pulling him in.

  He lived in a road of nice houses. Terrace, but not tenements. Single family houses with nice painted facades and not a crack in sight beneath the baskets of hanging flowers. Stuart’s house was white with a little hedge of neatly trimmed holly bordering the front.

  His father wore a pleasant smile when he answered the door. Gray-haired with a large pair of glasses on his thin nose and wearing corduroys and a cardigan. He looked a little confused but not put out when Alice raised her ID and stated her
name.

  “I’m here to speak with Stuart Chadwell,” the detective then said.

  “May I ask what this is about?”

  “I need to chat with Stuart over some comments he’s recently made on social media.”

  The father went red and furrowed his brows.

  “He’s been at it again,” he complained. “Ugh!”

  “You’re aware that he has been abusive online before?”

  “Yes. Our daughter recently brought to our attention some things he’d been saying online. We took his computer away, but it appears it hasn’t stopped him. Well, you best come in.”

  He stood out of the way and Alice stepped into a warm and homey house. Everything was bright colors, yellow furniture and sky blue walls, as though the idea were to invoke a sunny day on the beach.

  “He’s out in the shed,” Mr. Chadwell said as he led her through the house into the kitchen. “We call it his lair. He doesn’t like us going in there. Even when I want to use my own tools.”

  In the kitchen, a woman was sitting at a table on a laptop. She looked up at them when they came in.

  “It’s about Stuart,” Mr. Chadwell said to his wife.

  “Oh no,” the woman sighed. “What about?”

  “This online stuff. I told him it was only a matter of time before someone complained about it. Now he’ll learn.”

  They left the kitchen via a French window and made their way across a trimmed lawn. The shed stood at the end of a long but slightly narrow garden, high fences blocking out the neighbors on either side. Someone had pinned a pirate flag of a skull and crossbones on the door.

  “He usually locks it,” Mr. Chadwell said when they reached the shed. He slipped a finger into a slight gap in the door and lifted it. The sound of something falling on the other side was heard and Mr. Chadwell removed the finger before opening the door.

  The boy had his back to them but turned sharply as the door opened. He was skinny and bloodless with spiky black hair, dressed in black jeans and T-shirt. He was hunched over something. Alice was keen to see what it was.

  “Dad!” Stuart Chadwell exclaimed as they entered the shed.

  His eyes were wide but went even wider when he saw the detective standing just behind his father, his face taking on an ever increasing look of horror. He appeared even keener to hide what was on the bench.

  Alice stepped into the shed and pushed the teenager out of the way. He moved to the side and watched her with that horrified expression plastered to his anemic face. The detective stood before a workbench, on top of which was some type of crude contraption made from two metal tubes taped together with fuse wire hanging out of one. The other tube lay open and he appeared to have been assembling the fuse for it when they’d interrupted him.

  Alice turned to Stuart Chadwell and demanded to know what it was.

  “A science project,” he muttered weakly.

  “This is a homemade pipe bomb,” she put back to him.

  “What the bloody hell have you been up to?” his father shouted at him.

  The teen had gone deeply sheepish and merely looked down at the ground. Alice didn’t waste another second. She swooped forward, twisted him around and snapped the cuffs on his wrists. After that, she escorted him out to her car and left him on the back seat while she called an M.O.D. bomb disposal squad. Then she called local police and had them send a dispatch of uniformed officers to evacuate the street and cordon it off for the M.O.D.

  That done, she went back inside the house and asked for the boy’s computer equipment. His parents agreed immediately, and, once the uniform dispatch had arrived to take over the scene and await the M.O.D. boys, she drove Stuart Chadwell to the nearest police station for questioning.

  26

  “Once I’m done in Derby, I’ll come straight back,” Jack said to Jean as she poked her head through the window of his car. “Shouldn’t be any longer than seven tonight. Alright?”

  “Okay.” She smiled before closing her eyes and kissing him warmly. She even went as far as reaching her hands through the window and taking his face, pulling him into her so that he almost feared she’d drag him out of the car.

  Tyler gave him a hug and Jack left them both standing outside the house. Reversing up the drive and pulling back out onto the road, he felt sad watching them diminish in his rearview mirror. As he reached the turn at the end, he saw them turn around and walk to the door, Jean opening it and then the two of them disappearing inside, leaving Jack with a hollow feeling as he drove out of there.

  He switched the stereo on and used the music for companionship.

  At Romford, on the outskirts of the city, he stopped off at Ebury Court Care Home and visited his wife, Marsha. He sat in a chair beside her bed drinking a cup of tea and passively watching the television with her. She was sat up, a large strap across her chest to stop her from falling out, and constantly fidgeted as though she were always uncomfortable. Her restless hands waved about and her facial muscles twitched away. Her eyes studied the television but she appeared not to react to what was happening on the screen. She only saw, it seemed, the box itself. Nevertheless, if Jack was to turn it off, she’d become deeply restless and begin croaking and bawling.

  So they simply sat watching the television in silence, only the odd croak emerging from Marsha, until Jack had finished his second cup of tea and it was time to leave. He kissed her on the forehead and said his goodbyes.

  Like always, Marsha ignored him—or at least appeared to—and kept her restless eyes on the electric box at the end of her bed, the pictures communicating something to her. Perhaps something of her life before. Before she tried to end it and ended up stuck in the limbo of severe brain damage instead. Trapped between this world and the next like a ghost.

  Jack left Romford and was soon driving up the M1 to Derby. To meet with the parents of Graham Dyson, the boy that went missing three years ago.

  27

  Stuart Chadwell sat with his head hanging between his bony shoulders. Sitting beside him in the interview room was his mother. The M.O.D. bomb disposal team had been to the house and found that the device was incapable of firing. None of the required chemicals were present. The boy had merely placed sand in the sealed container. It appeared a prototype or test run.

  The whole street had been evacuated and the level of embarrassment that he’d brought down on his parents had been screamed into his ear by both of them. Having taken Stuart to the police station for questioning, Alice had left him in the interview room with both of them for almost an hour. She’d checked up every so often to see the progress, and each time, she saw the teenager sitting with his shoulders hunched, his mother on one ear and his father on the other, their faces filled with fury.

  The father had then gone home about ten minutes ago to sort things out on that end, while the mother stayed on for the interview. When Alice sat down in the middle of the four dusty white walls of the interview room, the woman was red-faced and the teen was completely white.

  The detective started the tape recorder and opened the interview.

  “We’ve been through your computer, Stuart,” she then said, laying out several photocopies of message exchanges on various social media. “Can you explain this one?”

  The detective laid her finger down on the message he’d sent the day before on Facebook, remarking on the victims’ camping trip. Stuart flicked his worried eyes to it and winced. His mother read it like a hawk before turning sharply on the boy. He winced for a second time under his mother’s glare, as though she were a pipe bomb going off.

  “It was nothing,” he said in a trembling voice.

  “Can you speak louder for the tape?” Alice said.

  “It was a joke. You know, online stuff. Everyone takes the mick. You’re not being serious. Just trying to get some attention. See if you can’t start an argument.”

  “You are aware that approximately thirty-five minutes after you sent ‘I hope you die’ to these eight teenagers, seven of them w
ere dead.”

  The boy sat up in his chair and eyed the detective with utter horror.

  “You… you’re not saying… please…”

  Tears welled and began falling from his cheeks.

  “Are you saying,” the mother began, the scarlet coloring to her cheeks going white, “that Stuart had something to do with this… massacre?”

  “Where was he last night between eight and nine p.m.?”

  “At home,” the mother assured her. “In that bloody shed. Making God knows what.”

  “Did you see him in there?”

  “Well, not exactly. But every time I was in the kitchen I saw that the light was on in there.”

  “But you never actually saw him?”

  “No.”

  “Did your husband?”

  “He was out taking my daughter to a ballet recital until ten.”

  Alice turned narrowed eyes on the teenager. She didn’t believe it was him. He could hardly hold himself up, let alone a large gun. Nevertheless, they’d found other things during the search of his bedroom.

  She took something from inside her suit jacket. It was a hardback diary. Stuart Chadwell winced for a third time when he saw it. The detective laid the book on the table and went back to the interview, the kid’s eyes constantly flicking between her and the diary.

  “Where were you last night?” she asked him one more time.

  “In the shed,” he pleaded.

  “Doing what?”

  He turned sharply to his mother before returning his frightened eyes to the detective opposite, who gave off the impression she was made of granite.

  “Making the thing you found,” he muttered, lowering his eyes from them all.

  “That would be the bomb?”

  “It wasn’t real,” he protested.

  “And what about the fires you started?”

  He’d listed them in the book. That’s why it had been locked away in his desk.