A Step Into The Dark

by Vince Vogel

  Candy gazed up at a wide grease stain on the ceiling with a look of complete concentration on her florid face. Eventually, she looked down at Jack and shook her head.

  “I can’t think of anyone. No.”

  He finished his tea, thanked the girl and left. Once he was in the car, he got his phone out and dialed Alice.

  “He was Gemma Gibbs’ secret admirer,” he told her when she answered. “Except no one knew who he was or what he looked like. He was leaving her secret messages on napkins that he left lying about. It’s his handwriting. But they never knew who it was.”

  “I knew there was something about this one,” Alice said. “It was like he knew her. He must’ve introduced himself to her at the park and she rejected him. That’s why he followed her and killed her. The first one was personal.”

  “I just hope that—”

  He was interrupted when the phone vibrated against his ear. Taking it away, he checked the screen.

  “I got another call coming,” he said to Alice. “It’s the dive team.”

  He put the phone down and answered the second call.

  “DS Sheridan?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hodges of the dive team here. Can you come and meet us?”

  “Yeah. What you got?”

  “I think we found her.”

  46

  At the reception of the Orchard Unit psychiatric hospital, Alice had to hand over her wallet, keys, belt, pen and notebook. The place was some prefab yellow slab in west London. Inside, she’d found a security desk, and, once she’d had any potential weapons taken from her, she was escorted through two sets of barred doors and down a corridor of white painted bricks.

  Eventually, she was led into a room where Tina Shaw sat in a chair facing a grated window.

  “Tina, love?” the nurse called softly into the room.

  The girl turned around. Her eyes were glazed and reminded Alice of when she’d found her in Tommy Lewis’ kitchen making a sandwich, having washed the child molester’s blood off of her. She was wearing a blue dressing gown, white pajamas and slippers.

  Alice took a chair from a corner and parked herself beside the girl. The nurse left and Tina went back to fiddling with her hands and staring out the window at the blue sky beyond.

  “How are they treating you?” Alice asked.

  “Alright. It’s not as bad as I thought it were gonna be. They lock the window, though.” She nodded toward it. “I tried and it’s impossible to open it without a key.”

  “Why would you want to open the window?”

  “I don’t know. For fresh air, I guess.”

  The two were silent for a moment and Alice joined the girl in looking out of gaps between the grate.

  “Have your parents been to see you yet?”

  “Yeah,” she groaned. “Mum came down. Dad couldn’t be arsed. She gave me an earful. Reckons the papers’ve been round. Says I’ve embarrassed them. Says it’s embarrassin’ havin’ a nut for a daughter.”

  “Maybe she doesn’t deserve a daughter in the first place.”

  Tina turned to Alice and grinned.

  “Can’t say I even wanted social services to call them,” the girl said. “Better off leavin’ them alone on the couch, the lazy buggers. Mum said she had to get an emergency loan from social to afford the train fare down. Said I weren’t worth the hassle of havin’ to pay it back through her benefits.”

  “People like her don’t see much worth in themselves. It makes it harder then to see worth in anything else. You should ignore her. Nothing someone like that says means anything.”

  “But she’s right in a way. I’m in here. I killed a man. I’m guilty o’ murder. I’ll probably never get out. What is the point?”

  “Don’t think like that, Tina. I’ll make sure the judge in your case knows exactly what circumstances you killed Tommy Lewis under. That it was self-defense.”

  “Maybe I should’ve let him kill me,” the girl snapped.

  “No! Don’t allow people like Tommy Lewis and all those other terrible people make you feel like you’re nothing. They reduce people to nothing so that they’re easier to coerce into doing their will. They do it because they’re nothing themselves and the only way they can manipulate you is by making you think you’re even worse. Don’t give in to them.”

  Tina leaned into Alice and rested her head on the detective’s shoulder. She took Alice’s hand and began playing with the fingers.

  “All I ever wanted was a mum to make proud,” the girl said as they gazed at the blue sky beyond the grate.

  “Me too,” Alice muttered.

  They sat like that for a while. Two lost souls finding each other in a fleeting moment by the sun. Alice took out her phone and held it in front of Tina.

  “What’s that?” the girl asked.

  “I’ve had a team of officers going about photographing places that are similar to the one you described the other night. The place they kept you in. They’ve been looking at buildings beside cemeteries with churches in them. Nearby train tracks and surrounded by abandoned blocks. Here’s the fifteen they found. Take a look.”

  The girl peeled herself away from Alice and let go of the hand. The fleeting moment was gone. She took up the phone and began scrolling through the pictures.

  She got all the way to number seven and nodded her head.

  “That’s it,” she said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah. That’s the place. I only ever saw the front of it at night, but that’s it.”

  It was a block of flats on the corner of a dilapidated road of houses. Everything except the red-brick three-story block on the corner was boarded up. Across the street was a cemetery backed by a railway, church in one corner.

  “Okay, I’ll get someone on it,” the detective said.

  “Be careful.”

  “We’ll have to watch them first. Get a feel for the place and eventually get a warrant. We can’t just go straight in. So we’ll be very careful.”

  “Then make sure you have guns. They’ve got them.”

  “How many men usually are there?”

  “Usually two blokes with guns. The rest is a bunch o’ women that look after us and the other girls.”

  “How many?”

  She began counting on her fingers, her eyes gazing up at the ceiling.

  “There’s usually six women and then eleven girls.”

  “Well, soon we’ll have them out of there.”

  Alice gave her a solemn look and the girl’s face melted into melancholy. She thrust herself forward and threw her arms around the detective, the girl sobbing her heart out.

  What future she had left to her, Alice didn’t know. She’d been abused and it had led her to murder. Would this abuse tarnish her life forever? Alice had to admit that it was sure to.

  Just as her own abuse had tarnished hers.

  47

  Jack met the body at the mortuary and was currently standing in a brightly lit autopsy room. White rusty tiles glimmered at him and the typical chemical stench hung in his nostrils. After nearly forty years, however, Jack was used to it.

  Standing next to him was the head of the dive team and a local detective. The pathologist—a young woman with short, black hair and a serious expression—was busy seeing to the body.

  She’d been in too terrible a state to be identified by a parent and Jack would have never put them through it anyway. In the end, the fingerprints had confirmed the body as belonging to Gemma Gibbs.

  It had been a delicate process to retrieve them. Having been exposed to water for so long, the epidermis had come away from the flesh, but was still intact. To get a better print, the pathologist had pulled it away completely from the hand and worn it like a glove. Jack had seen this done before, but it never ceased to haunt him. Watching someone wear another’s skin.

  Having identified the body, they went about examining the corpse. As he’d expected, she was in a terrible state. Much of the skin had come com
pletely away and parts of her were now no more than exposed bone. It was obvious that she’d been hit by something while in the water. Only half the flesh was left on the skull and there was considerable damage done. The bone was scored and crushed on one side. They’d found her sunk in some deep sediment fifty meters from the eyes, the diver having spotted a hand glinting in his flashlight beam.

  The usual tests were done. Death was thought to have been caused by asphyxiation before she’d entered the water. Having examined what was left of the lungs, the pathologist determined that there wasn’t enough stress marks or bloating to the walls to be from drowning, though she admitted that with them being in the state they were, it was almost impossible to tell in any definite sense.

  “What about the damage to the skull?” Jack asked.

  “That’s what I’m getting to next,” the pathologist barked back at him.

  The local detective and the dive man turned to him and rolled their eyes. She was definitely in charge here.

  Doing as he was told, Jack continued to watch and patiently waited for her to get to the damaged skull. When she did, the pathologist peeled back the skin and began looking at the abrasions and breaks.

  “Obviously the body was hit by something,” she said. “And I’m sure I can confirm it as being a boat.” She took a magnifying glass and placed it over the head. Piercing her eyes, she took some tweezers and began removing something from the bone.

  “Metal fragments?” Jack asked.

  “Wait,” she snapped back.

  Her assistant handed her a dish and she placed something on it before coming away from the body and putting it under a microscope.

  “Just what I thought,” the pathologist said as she eyed it all.

  “Which is?”

  “Metal,” she proclaimed, turning to them. “She was struck by the propeller shaft of a barge. Most likely one of the large commercial ones that have them exposed underneath. It explains the terrible damage to her—being pulled into the shaft and mangled. It also explains why the body sunk and wasn’t ever spotted on the surface. He must’ve killed her, dropped her in the water and left. Then later on, the boat hit her, mangled her up, and then sunk the body. That’s why she was never found.”

  “So he hasn’t done anything to the body to make it sink?”

  “No. He got lucky.”

  Jack watched the rest of the tests. When it was determined that there was nothing of the killer except the girl’s death left on the body, Jack walked out of the mortuary, got in his car and drove to see Mr. and Mrs. Gibbs.

  As he sat opposite the parents with a sorry look on his face, they held each other and sobbed their hearts out, a picture of their little girl in their hands.

  “Are you sure it’s her?” the mother bawled.

  “Yes.”

  “But who?” the father demanded, his face crushed by it all.

  “I aim to find out, Mr. Gibbs. It’ll be all I think about for the foreseeable future.”

  He was being honest. Jean—who knew him better than any living person—would attest that her boyfriend would be thinking about their dead daughter and her killer for a long time. Heck, even once he’d caught the man responsible, he’d still see her torn up body laying on that mortuary slab. Because each new murdered soul ended up inside of Jack. His mind was a catalogue of the dead. Their faces imprinted on him.

  Gemma Gibbs was merely the latest.

  13.

  “We found the ex-wife,” Detective Sergeant Victoria Sharp was saying down the phone to George Lange while he drove into central London. “Carolyn Burke. Poor woman now resides in a psychiatric ward. Being married to Lewis must’ve messed her up. Anyway, she has a son, but there’s no name registered as the father on the birth certificate, and Lewis never formally adopted the boy when he married her six months after the birth.”

  “Could still be Lewis’ kid.”

  “Yeah. That’s the other thing. Carolyn Burke gave birth when she was still only fifteen. Married Lewis a week after her sixteenth birthday.”

  “Sounds a lot like it could be Lewis’ kid.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “You got a name and address for the boy?”

  “Well, he’s not a boy anymore. He’s twenty-eight. And I didn’t get as far as searching him out. I found no address for the name of David Burke with that date of birth. But he could have changed the name. Anyway, before I got any further, Newman called and ordered me to stake out some block of flats next to a cemetery. I’m driving there now.”

  “Is this to do with the girl found with Lewis?”

  “Yeah. She identified some of the pictures we made. So it looks like I get to spend most of my night in the car, watching the place.”

  “Sorry to hear that. Well, thanks for finding this out for us, Vicky.”

  “Any time, George,” she replied in a slightly coquettish tone.

  Lange couldn’t help smiling to himself while he drove along with the flow of inner city traffic, the tall back of a red bus towering before him.

  “Still, thanks. I’ll get onto finding the son.”

  “I’ll text you over everything I’ve got.”

  “Cheers.”

  “Bye, George.”

  He put the phone down and the text came through. He then put in a call to the team back at the Yard and it wasn’t long before they were calling him back.

  “You’ll never believe this, George,” an excited voice said.

  “What?”

  “David Burke is Carolyn Burke’s son.”

  “As in David Burke, the stepfather of Micheal Burke?”

  “The very same.”

  48

  The gray ribbon of motorway was relatively quiet and Jack drove absentmindedly between bright green wheat fields that swayed in the warm, summer air. There was a tranquility about it all that gave the detective a level of peace.

  Though not exactly overwhelming, the British countryside often looked so beautiful to Jack. It was as though it held some subtle magic in its rolling hills and staggering lines of hedgerows. An unspoken magic that didn’t need to be shouted and made parts of the country as beautiful as the Himalayan mountains or the Sahara desert. To Jack, at least.

  Nevertheless, he wasn’t allowed to enjoy the beauty of his surroundings for long. His joy was eventually interrupted by his phone rattling away. It was Lange.

  “What’s up, George?”

  “We’re about to arrest a suspect, Sarge.”

  Jack sat up in his seat.

  “Who?”

  “David Burke.”

  He narrowed his eyes at the road in front.

  “That’s Micheal Burke’s stepfather, isn’t it?”

  “Got it in one.”

  “How’d you get to him?”

  “I went to see the bloke Harry Dunn told you about. Nick Morrison. He told me that Lewis had recently got in touch with an estranged son. That the son was hanging around the place, and being that Tommy only really had teenage girls hanging around the place, it looked like a lead. Then I found out that Lewis was married to a woman called Carolyn Burke for ten years from 1990. You still following me?”

  “Just about.”

  “Anyway, Carolyn Burke had a son she’d given birth to half a year before the marriage. No father named on the birth certificate. David would have lived with Tommy for the ten years of the marriage. The nearest to a son that the bloke had, and also the stepfather of the only survivor. Which is a massive connection.”

  “It is. However, George, why would David Burke steal guns from his estranged ex-stepfather and then attack teenagers belonging to his own son’s social group? Where his son was among them and could easily identify him.”

  “Maybe it was random and he only found out Micheal was with them when he saw him. Why else would he have left him alive?”

  “It sounds a bit flimsy to me, George. Too many coincidences.”

  “Oh yeah!?” Lange exclaimed down the phone in an indignant
tone. “You always told me there were no coincidences.”

  “I didn’t say it was wrong. I just think it’s a bit flimsy to go pulling him in on it straight away. Couldn’t you go and see him first? Or put him under surveillance?”

  “He might be a man responsible for the deaths of seven people and in possession of several firearms. Best not to take chances, Sarge. We need a full arrest team with armed response.”

  “Then wait on it a bit. Stake him out. Gather intel.”

  “Well, it’s too late now. Newman’s given the green light to pull him in.”

  “Then go ahead and be the hero.”

  “You’re just jealous.”

  “Only of your youth and looks, George. Only of your youth and looks.”

  The other man chuckled down the phone.

  “Well, I better be going. We’re nearly there.”

  “Goodbye and good luck, then.”

  “Ain’t nothing to do with luck, Sarge.”

  Jack rolled his eyes and ended the call. He wondered what they had, if anything. A man marries a woman shortly after she gives birth to a son. Ten years later, they divorce. Then eighteen years after that, seven teenagers are shot dead while camping in the woods and it’s highly possible that the gun came from the man. A boy is spared death and his stepfather is the son, his own stepfather having been the man. The only thing for certain was that it was confusing. Was there a connection other than what was on show? Did it even mean anything?

  I suppose they’ll figure it out pretty soon after they arrest the guy, Jack said to himself as he drove into the first cluttering of houses that made up the western suburbs of Richmond.

  Listening to Redemption Song by the Singer—Bob Marley to everyone else—Jack glided into the city, wondering what his next move would be regarding the letters. He wanted to know what Robert Kline had to do with it all. Was there a connection worth seeking there? Or was this random fan mail? The man writing the letters certainly appeared to want Kline’s attention.

  From the little he knew, Jack gathered that the writer had grown up without a father. Or at least not one worth having. He was lonely in this world and had reached out to a man he could relate to. A killer like himself. A father in his own mold. Was that all? Was this a lonely boy seeking the pride of a father? Or were there other communications with Kline? Other letters that the jailed killer destroyed? The devising of some sort of plan between them perhaps?