A Step Into The Dark

by Vince Vogel

  “It still happens, Liz. Walthamstow may have avoided another scandal since baby Peter, but they still happen every five years or so years throughout the country. One of your lot makes the right choice and some kid is abused to death. What do you really know about Renton Williams?”

  “We know enough, Mr. Sheridan. Mr. Williams approached us months ago and we’ve been compiling evidence ever since. Only when we completed our assessment did he decide to petition the court for Tyler.”

  “And what was your assessment?”

  “We started by looking into his criminal record. His last offense was over six years ago, for which he earned an early release for good behavior. He completed the initial part of his parole in the same manner and is soon to be off license. His convictions were thefts related to drugs. Having completed a state-funded program, he is now clean—thus lifting his main reason for criminality. As well as that, he has completed several educational courses and now has a stable job. As for his home life, he lives with his girlfriend in his own home. He’s responsible in our mind.”

  “You know about his previous violence?”

  “Mr. Williams himself told us that he used to have a temper and that he had been rough with the boy’s mother. However, he assures us that he has matured since and that the relationship had been volatile from both sides.”

  “He broke my daughter’s jaw when she gave him too much lip. What’re you gonna do when he does something similar to Ty when he gets lippy? Because he’s a sharp kid like his mum and doesn’t think twice before letting someone know what he thinks.”

  “Mr. Williams assures us that this period of his life is over. During his incarceration and then afterwards in separate programs, he got to talk about his experiences of violence with professionals and understand their root causes.”

  “I take it that each of these programs was a condition of his early release?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “And neither does the priest when the singers play lip service.”

  “Look,” Liz Jenkins said, pulling at the hem of her skirt and adjusting her position, “I see that you’re very concerned about the welfare of your grandson, but I can assure you that Mr. Williams has been through every test. He’s petitioned for custody. Unless yourself or your daughter can prove that you or she is a more suitable parent, I’m afraid the courts will sway to Mr. Williams. So I suggest you tell Tyler at the earliest possibility and get him ready. As for the meetings, I’ll be around tomorrow at five p.m. I spoke with your girlfriend earlier and she said he’d be home then. We’ll arrange a time for Mr. Williams to see Tyler then.”

  Jack felt a weakness sap at his body. Felt himself pressed into the leather of his chair. It was hopeless, he couldn’t help thinking. He was about to lose his grandson and there was nothing he could do. He was sure that Renton Williams was not a good man for Tyler to grow up around. He’d felt something off about him when he’d been around the man’s flat. Felt it oozing out of his frightened girlfriend, Bonny. Jack’s hunch about the man was so strong, he felt it couldn’t be wrong. He was sure of it. The man was both a coward and a bully. The way he’d turned on Jack told the detective as much. First, he was playing the big man, chasing after and grabbing hold of Jack. But the moment Renton realized the other man wasn’t to be manhandled, when Jack turned with bared teeth, he crumbled to the floor. Jack wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d called out for his mum. But that’s what scared him. That combination of bully and coward was the deadliest when it came to women and children, or generally less physically imposing people. Men like Renton would break a woman’s jaw, knowing she wouldn’t fight back. He’d lay into a kid knowing he wouldn’t, either.

  “You done?” Jack asked the social worker.

  “I have two letters here,” Liz Jenkins said. “One for yourself and one for you to hand to Carrie at the next convenient opportunity.”

  “Let’s see them then.”

  She reached into the folder and brought out the letters. She handed them to Jack and he snatched them from her.

  “That all?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Then you can put that mug of tea down and piss off out of my house.”

  The woman looked stunned before doing as he asked.

  “I’ll see myself out,” she said.

  “You’re damn right, you will,” Jean put to her.

  The front door went and they heard the woman’s heels clacking on the concrete driveway. Jean came over to Jack, sat on the armrest and slipped herself around him. He was staring into space, possible oblivion, trying desperately to think of something to claw his way back up. But everything was a straw floating on the surface and he was sinking quickly.

  “I think we’ve lost him,” he muttered, and she pulled his sad face into her lap and held it there.

  62

  Jonny was woken sharply by his phone vibrating in his pocket. It made him jump, the booze having plunged him into a deep sleep. Taking the phone out, he glimpsed furtively about for nurses and doctors; it wasn’t supposed to be on and he’d forgotten to switch it off earlier on.

  He had to rub his drunk-hazy eyes when he saw Sue mobile written across the screen.

  “Who?” Jonny muttered into the phone, completely stunned.

  “I’m sorry about your family,” a man’s voice said. “But I had to show that I was for real. I couldn’t afford everyone wondering if the letter was a hoax. I hope some day you’ll understand. It wasn’t personal.”

  Jonny couldn’t breathe. His chest refusing to budge. Choking on the utter hatred that was exploding within him.

  “Why me?” he spluttered.

  “Like I said; a statement. Now I want to get off the subject. I’m sorry they’re dead, but they had to die. Now, no more questions about your family. Ask me something regarding my work.”

  “You’re sick.”

  “It’s better if we don’t think of this as a sickness. In the realms of normal behavior, I suppose I am sick. However, I do not class myself in those realms. I am a monster. I attempted to avoid that, but it is the truest thing about me. By embracing the monster, I am, for the first time in my life, taking control.”

  “What did you mean by ten?”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere. Ten previous victims, obviously.”

  “Where?”

  “I would have thought you’d already guessed how to find them. Isn’t that why you had your friends in the police raid an old man’s cell?”

  “So it really is you?”

  “Of course. I’ll be making another statement shortly.”

  The line went dead and the room shrank around Jonny. With a trembling hand, he leaned down the side of the chair and lifted the bottle of scotch to his lips.

  Why me? he thought as he slugged it down.

  63

  It looked a peaceful house. A low wattage lamp stuck out of the porch and subtly lit the bright green ivy that covered the two-story mock-Georgian structure. Several latticed windows gazed out like eyes across a shingle drive, a hedgerow of holly cutting it off from the pavement. On the post of the gate, a black and white tomcat sat proudly cleaning his paws underneath the silver light of the moon.

  It certainly looked a peaceful house.

  Gripping the iron bar, he moved forward past the cat, who merely paused his licks and gazed nonchalantly at the midnight visitor. The neighborhood was one of those sleepy suburbs that never expects to be woken up by violence. Everyone slept peacefully in their charmed, Middle-England existences.

  Moving as silently as a shadow, he reached the side of the house and came to a door. Using the end of the bar, he blew out the glass, stretched his hand inside and unlocked it.

  By the time he was at the foot of the stairs, a light had gone on at the top, a dim glow reaching down to him in the hallway. He entered it, stepping up into the light, his fingers gripping the bar, his teeth clenched. Anger rose up in him like bile, bubbling and gurgling, every cell in his body shak
ing.

  “What the bloody hell!?” A gray-haired man emerged out of his bedroom, gazing along the landing, a bewildered look on his sleepy face.

  Quickening himself, the intruder made the last few steps in one bound. The man never even moved. His eyes rapidly dilated and his muscles recoiled. A look of horror contorted his face as the shadow grew over him. A sudden downward motion with terrible violence. A wet crunching sound and the man’s body folded under him. Crumpled in the doorway of his bedroom, his gray hair instantly matted and a trail of red threaded down his forehead. His eyes were still staring up when the second blow caught him between them and the head fell forward like a slaughtered sheep in an abattoir.

  He pushed the door open. The wife was screaming. She’d been screaming for a few seconds now, but he only heard her when he came away from the husband. She was trapped at the end of the bed, holding all her sheets into her as though they could somehow protect her from the inevitable.

  “Please! Help!” she screamed.

  “Who are you calling to for help?” he asked her.

  “Please, take whatever you want. Please.”

  “I’ll take what I came for.”

  He ran at her across the floor of her bedroom and she panicked so much that her whole body froze to stone. Her eyes closed and it was as if she simply waited for the blow to hit her.

  When it came, it was such a hard blow to the side of the head that it broke her neck.

  64

  The pitch black of the solitary cell surrounded Robert Kline like a room full of tar. The coldness of the concrete floor and damp brick wall was a part of him now, as though he too were made of cold stone. His eyes gazed into the never-ending darkness and he saw nothing except what lay beyond the window of his own mind.

  In the opposite corner, he imagined he saw the outline of someone within the thick darkness. She was whispering and the hushed words stuck in his ears. She’d been whispering for a long time, her sobbing voice stretched by despair. A despair that made Kline shiver and came as close to filling him with shame as anything ever got.

  “Please, Father,” she wept. “Save this wretched creature’s soul. Show him mercy and be good to him, for he knows not what evil he does.”

  “Shut up, woman,” Kline barked into the darkness.

  “Somewhere inside of him, Father, there’s a good man.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Forgive him, Father. Let him feel the warmth of your love and return him from darkness. Return him from the dark pit he dwells in now.”

  She’d been at it since they’d put him in there. Heck, she’d been at it every chance she’d had ever since he did what he did to her.

  “Return him from darkness, Lord. Let him know light and warmth.”

  What upset Robert Kline the most was that she’d been wrong that day. She tried to intimate that there was something good inside of him. He’d tried to believe that. When he entered the navy six months later, he’d tried to be a good seaman. But then the first overseas stay had taken them to the port of Manila in the Philippines. Robert Kline found himself surrounded by young girls throwing themselves at foreign servicemen for pocket change. In the sex industry, he’d found a level of acceptance for his debauchery, and in the end, all Robert Kline got out of his seven years in the Royal Navy was debt and VD.

  But at least he hadn’t raped for those seven years as a seaman. That was all to change when he became a civilian once again. In London, the prostitutes were more expensive and not as fresh or pretty as the little girls of Asia. If you wanted quality, you had to pay prices that would take a month’s wage. No. Robert Kline soon found himself in debt, even though he was driving a lorry seven days a week to keep up with his spiralling prostitution bill. Eventually, the Devil led him into burglary, an act he’d committed a few times as a youth.

  It was this that resulted in the worst of Robert Kline being unleashed. Having broken into homes for a few years, something happened. During the burglary of a bungalow, he’d been confronted by the elderly woman living there. Panicked, he’d overpowered her easily and then tied her up with an electrical cord. He’d meant to fill his bag and leave the house. Call the police from a payphone and tell them the woman was tied up inside. He was masked and believed she’d never recognize him.

  However, something whispered in his ear while he went about ransacking the old woman’s house. A serpent’s whisper. As he looted drawers and cabinets, he couldn’t get the image of the old woman bound and gagged on the sofa out of his head. There she was down there, completely helpless. The snake soon won over his black heart and Robert Kline had proved the nun wrong; he went back to that sofa and lifted the trembling woman up to him.

  Ever since then, Robert Kline had felt a level of comfort in knowing who he was. A monster.

  “Forgive him his trespasses, Father,” she went on in the dark, keeping up her constant vigil of him. “Love him and fill him with warmth. Make him see light. Inside, his soul is cut off from Your love. Warm it, Lord. Bring it to Your lips and whisper life into it.”

  “SHUT UP!”

  Robert Kline lifted his stiff and aching body from the cold as fast as he could. His weak limbs almost collapsed under him as he shuffled to the door, knowing instinctively where it was in the darkness. Pushing the alarm bell next to it, he leaned his head against the dank bricks and gritted his teeth, trying to filter her voice out. But she was too strong.

  “Let him know warmth, Lord.”

  The shutter on the door slid to the side with a violent fury that appeared to shake the very air of the room. A blade of light cut through the darkness and burned a gold rectangle into the opposite wall. Kline felt the need to recoil from it, to step back, lest it burn or blind him.

  “What?” an annoyed voice called into the cell.

  “I wanna talk now,” Kline hissed back.

  “Who says we wanna let you talk?”

  The prisoner rolled his eyes.

  “Just tell them I wanna speak with Jack Sheridan. No one else.”

  DAY FOUR

  65

  1996.

  They were close to trial and Robert Kline was about to enter his plea. Word was that he was going for guilty through diminished responsibility—essentially insanity—and apparently his lawyer had enough specialists willing to corroborate with the killer’s inability to see right from wrong.

  It worried Jack and Col. Worried them that Robert Kline would end up in some cushy little mental facility when his victims mostly ended up in the ground, having suffered pure terror at the end. That’s what the two detectives wanted for Kline: terror. In prison, he’d be at the bottom. Surrounded on all sides by hate. A beast. Those violent men would give him the punishment he deserved; the rest of his life in fear. In a hospital, he’d be fed and looked after as though he were a patient suffering an illness. Treated like a victim of himself.

  “You know what you’re gonna say to him?” Col asked as they sat in the car outside Peter Hill Solicitors, a glass-fronted building in the middle of a high street.

  “Pretty much.”

  Jack opened the glovebox and took out a VHS cassette tape. Turning back to Col, he gave a face that said ‘Wish me luck’, and left the car.

  The office was busy, everyone at their desks speaking on telephones or typing away on computers. When Jack first came in, he stood there holding the tape and gazing about for someone’s attention he could grab. But they were all too busy.

  “Hey!” he called out gently.

  Still they ignored him.

  “OI!”

  That did the trick. They turned to him sharply.

  “Where’s Peter Hill?” Jack asked.

  A woman in her forties with a neat appearance and tired eyes stepped forward.

  “Mr. Hill is in his office,” she said as the rest of them went back to what they were previously doing. “May I ask what it’s about?”

  “He lent me a video and I’m returning it,” Jack said.

  The woman f
rowned at him, a hundred ripples spreading from the sides of her eyes.

  “I don’t understand,” she said, her voice becoming haughty.

  “Mucky vid,” Jack replied, holding the tape aloft and gazing around her. At the back of the room was a door with Peter Hill Barrister written across it. Next to it, a wide, rectangular window with the blinds drawn. “That him,” Jack added, stepping around the woman.

  She quickly moved to bar his way.

  “I’m afraid Mr. Hill is very busy at the moment. As you may know, we have a rather high profile case on at the moment. So if you wouldn’t—”

  “That’s what I’m here to speak to him about. Your big case.”

  “You said it was the video.”

  “Which is to do with the case.”

  Again the droopy eyelids pinched together.

  “Are you from the press?”

  As she said this, the blinds of the window at the back twitched and Jack saw the ruddy face of a man in his late thirties. The man’s eyes narrowed at the sight of the detective and he came to the door.

  “It’s okay, Helen,” he said when he’d opened it wide enough for his face. He held his hand out and signalled for the cop to come inside. “Come on then, Detective Sheridan.”

  Jack moved around the woman and headed past Peter Hill into the office. The lawyer smiled at his receptionist and then shut the door behind them.

  The room was dimly lit, only a lamp on the desk providing any level of illumination. Two filing cabinets stood like guards at one end and at the other, a desk lay under siege from papers and other mess, such as a collection of soiled takeaway containers. In a corner beside this was a cabinet with a television on top. The detective was glad to see a VCR underneath.

  Jack took an office chair and Hill came around his desk.

  “Go on, then,” the lawyer said once he’d sat down, “what do you want?”

  He took on a causal air, leaning back in a leather office chair, legs crossed, hands resting on his knees, fingers woven. His red complexion gave him an angry bearing, though his expression was one of passivity. He appeared to be sizing Jack up as he waited for an answer.