A Step Into The Dark

by Vince Vogel

  “You’re going for the insanity plea, aren’t you?” the detective said.

  “Yeah. And we’ll get it.”

  “How so?”

  “I’m not going into that with the lead detective on the case. We’ll be on opposite sides of the divide pretty soon. You’ll get your chance in front of a jury and I’ll get mine.”

  “I hear you’re having some neurological specialist examine him for brain injuries.”

  “So you’ve been spying?”

  “Is it true?”

  “You’ll have to find out.”

  Jack gazed across the mess of the desk, his eyes attempting to penetrate the man opposite. Peter Hill felt himself flinch under the weight of those cold eyes, forced to turn away.

  “Look,” the lawyer said, “I don’t get why you’re here. I mean, it’s not a question of his guilt in the crimes. He confessed. Isn’t your job finished now?”

  “Not when instead of going to the very place animals like Kline deserve to be, he’s going to some cushy little place where he’ll be treated like a victim.”

  “But what does it matter? He’ll be off the streets.”

  “But not punished. Not in the way he should be.”

  Once more, the two men gazed across the messy desk, their eyes peering through the dim, dusty air. Again, the lawyer had to look away.

  “Have you ever seen his victims?” Jack asked.

  “Like I said, general guilt was established long ago. I’ve gone over some of the reports. My people have been through some more of it. But we only need the parts that help with the insanity plea. So no, I haven’t really seen his victims.”

  “I suppose it makes it easier to help a man like Kline when you can isolate yourself from the horror of what he’s done.” Jack turned his head to the television with the VCR at the bottom. “That work?” he asked, nodding toward it.

  “Yeah, but I’d rather you didn’t. I’ve got everything primed. We’re going for insanity.”

  “And you believe your client’s insane?”

  Jack glared into the other man’s eyes when he said this. He was like a confessor at the gates of Hell staring into the lawyer’s soul. Peter Hill gulped, his Adam’s apple rising up his red throat. The eyes looked away. He was sweating.

  “Yes,” he finally said, though the word sounded uncomfortable in his mouth.

  Jack knew. Knew the lawyer didn’t care for the truth. Only cared for what he could pull out of his magician’s hat and further his law career.

  “Then watch the video,” Jack put to him.

  “If it gets you out of my office.”

  The lawyer set the video up and they were shortly sitting before it. Peter Hill pressed play on a remote control and the picture flicked on. Immediately, the sound of someone howling pitifully flooded the room.

  “Oh God!” Hill murmured, recoiling in his chair and turning his eyes away.

  The screen was filled with an elderly woman covered in bruising and dried blood. She was crying as two female nurses helped her out of her bloody nightgown. They were in a hospital room, being filmed by a police constable who’d taken the woman there after answering her 999 call. The two nurses had tear-covered faces as they went about helping the broken woman. When she was naked, they turned her gently around so the police photographer could document her back.

  “You’re doing so well, Elsey,” one of the nurses said gently.

  The back was almost completely purple. It looked like she’d come off a motorbike and gotten road rash. On her buttocks, bite marks stood out, dried drips of blood hanging down from them. The back of her white hair was matted in blood. When they turned her around to the front, the lawyer once again winced, looking away from the screen sharply.

  Her eyes were almost completely closed over. The face was bloated and covered in stitching. He’d bitten her cheek and the wound stood out proudly on her withered face. Watching those images, you got a sense that her attacker had tried to make a point of displaying his own brutality on the poor woman. He’d overstepped every last mark of decency. Human or otherwise.

  She constantly sobbed as they pictured her, the two nurses practically holding her up and almost wailing themselves. Even the video camera was shaking.

  “He left Elsey Turner alive,” Jack said as they watched the old woman. “She’s now practically bed-ridden in a nursing home. They say she’ll probably be dead within the year. Your client sodomized her repeatedly over a two-hour period. He held a knife to her throat. He told her he was going to kill her. She’s a seventy-six-year-old former children’s nurse. She was a nurse during the Second World War, in which she won a medal when she helped evacuate a school from a bombing raid. Then for the next three decades, she looked after sick children until retirement. What a way to end her life, huh?”

  Jack was looking across the desk at the lawyer again. The latter was watching the video through his fingers, hands clasping his face.

  Another video came on.

  A woman’s screams erupted inside the office and Peter Hill scrambled to the remote to lower the volume. An elderly woman was struggling as nurses attempted to calm her, two of them holding her down on a bed while a doctor prepared a syringe, another nurse gently stroking the old woman’s face.

  “Rita James,” Jack announced. “She’s dead now. This video was taken by her daughter after she and her family arrived one Sunday morning for a roast dinner to find her shivering in a wardrobe, covered in blood. He’d broken one arm and her jaw. She died four months later in a hospital after she stopped moving, talking or eating. Completely nil by mouth. I’ve never known someone to simply give up like that. Have you?”

  “These could still be the acts of a mad man,” Peter Hill stated.

  “Robert Kline is not mad,” Jack assured him. “He chose his victims not at random like some mad man, but with delicate care. They each fit a certain profile. Mad men only profile to their madness. For example; if they’re obsessed with conspiracy theories, they might harm government officials or politicians because they fit their enemy type. But it wasn’t madness that drove Kline to pick those old women; it was his need and their weakness. He chose those women because they were frail and vulnerable. The same as all his victims. Whether they were children or the elderly. He’s a coward, Mr. Hill. Madmen aren’t cowards. They do mad things that bely their normal behavior. Robert Kline has always stuck to what is—for him—normal behavior. He picked weak, vulnerable women to fulfill his needs—firstly sexual and later on, murder.”

  “But you forget the abuse he suffered at the hands of his mother. Surely, even you can see that these women represented his mother to him.”

  “These women were much older than his mother was when she was supposed to have abused him. Also, his mother was West Indian, with dark skin. His victims crossed a number of racial types, so he never specifically chose one for their resemblance to his mother.”

  “But they represented motherhood. Something he felt appalled by.”

  “Tell me, how many boys grow up out there with a shitty mother these days?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Plenty. But they don’t all go about raping and killing. Not all of them step over the line because not all of them are horrible people like Robert Kline. Even as a child, he used to bully people. Used to pick on kids that were smaller. When he was ten, he killed a dog because he wanted to see what it was like. In the end, these poor women were dogs to him; nothing but matter for his needs.”

  Another woman came on. This one didn’t scream. She couldn’t. Her wide eyes gazed blankly at nothing. Not even the brightly lit mortuary she lay in. She’d been strangled so hard that her neck had been broken, her head tilted at an odd angle.

  The lawyer let out a withered sigh.

  “Do I have to watch any more?” he asked.

  “Margery Foster,” Jack said, ignoring the question. “As you can see, he broke her neck. He also removed one of the breasts, which was never found.”

&n
bsp; The camera panned down the body to the wound. Peter Hill instantly lurched forward and gagged, shoving his hand over his mouth. Without turning back to the screen, he reached for the remote on his desk and switched it off.

  The lawyer sat with his eyes closed, head tilted back, trying to recapture his breathing and push his nausea back.

  “Evil bastard,” he couldn’t stop himself from muttering under his breath.

  “It’s always easier, Peter,” Jack began, “when we don’t see the human side of things. Easier to further our careers and enhance our reputations if we ignore the people behind all the marks on reports. Those women deserve justice, Peter. They deserve the biggest punishment on offer going to the man who did those awful things. Not have him sitting in some hospital ward watching television and taking happy pills the rest of his life. He deserves to spend his time in Hell’s waiting room. The walls crawling with hatred for him until he finally ends up in the fiery pit.”

  “Okay,” Hill muttered without opening his eyes.

  “Pardon?”

  The lawyer opened his eyes and turned sharply to Jack.

  “Okay, okay. I’ll blow off the insanity plea. It’s gonna piss a lot of people off and cost me some money. I got a bloke staying in a four-star hotel in London, waiting to analyze him for his new book. Star witness at five hundred quid a day. All for nothing.”

  “I’m sure a few thousand pounds is a fair price to pay for the saving of your soul.”

  “As an atheist,” Hill put back, “I prefer to think of it merely as the right thing to do.”

  “Whatever your reasons, Peter; you’ve made the right decision.”

  66

  “You awake there?” Alice asked.

  Jack wearily lifted his head away from the window and looked across the car at her. Outside, on both sides, they passed plowed fields. A blue tractor glinted in the distance, a swarm of gulls and other birds following closely behind.

  “I was daydreaming, was all,” Jack said, settling himself back in the seat and gazing forward at the thin stretch of road.

  “Did you hear anything that I said?”

  “You were talking?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I wasn’t listening. Sorry.”

  “Okay,” she went, gazing back out front. “So I was saying that the tech lab were unable to get any trace on the SIM card that called Jonny last night.”

  “Obviously,” Jack grunted.

  “Well, to be on the safe side, I’ve placed an armed guard on his son’s hospital room.”

  “Sure,” Jack sighed, returning his eyes to the passing fields.

  Alice turned to him from the road. He looked drained of life, as though some unseen force were living off of him, sapping his energy like a spider until it dried him out completely.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Nothing. I’m all good.”

  “But you don’t sound good. Don’t look good. And it’s not like you were in great shape to begin with.”

  “I’m alright, Alice.” He turned from the window and tried to smile. It didn’t come off very well.

  “You should talk.”

  “I do. Once a month.”

  “Not just with a psychiatrist. You should talk all the time with people. Be more open. You always seem to carry so much around with you. Like you’re filled with misery. You know what they’ve nicknamed you back at Scotland Yard?”

  “MOG?”

  It stood for: Miserable Old Git.

  “So you’ve heard?”

  “Some of them call it to my face.”

  Alice grinned and turned to him.

  “Honestly,” he added.

  They reached the prison.

  Robert Kline was already waiting for them in a room that shone under the strip lighting, the yellow walls glistening like wet skin. Kline sat hunched behind a small table. His deep-set eyes studied both detectives when they came through the door and a smirk rose momentarily up one side of his thick lips. He looked tired, the skin around the eyes as black as space and the whites the color of exposed flesh.

  “Only him,” Kline said once they were both sitting opposite.

  “What?” Alice snapped.

  “Only him and no recording. This ain’t an interview.”

  “It’s what we say it is, Robert,” Alice almost spat back.

  “I want him an’ no one else. Only three of us need to be in this room in ten seconds—me, him and the guard—or I’m callin’ the whole thing off.”

  Alice narrowed her eyes at him. He was dumb as a statue, staring at her with dead eyes. She turned sharply to Jack. He was sitting back in his chair with his arms folded across his front, an indifferent look on his face as he gazed across the table.

  “Well, then,” she said, getting up from her chair. “I better go.”

  Kline’s eyes watched her leave: all the way up until the metal door clanged shut behind her and they were closed in with one another. Jack felt like all the air had left with his colleague. He was momentarily gripped with an unexplained terror and had to concentrate hard not to run out of there after her.

  Doing his best to breathe naturally, Jack studied the old man opposite.

  Kline obviously looked much older from when Jack had last seen him. But there was something more to his shabby appearance than the mere effects of age. Something that the trivial passing of years cannot bring. It was a distinct weariness that existed in his blank look: the way his hands shook ever so slightly: the way he looked worn out, like he’d suffered some terribly debilitating disease that had weakened him badly. The skin of his face looked hard and dry like a callus. It appeared that he’d spent a long time frowning. Or at least worrying. His forehead was terribly creased and the thin white hair of his head was in stark contrast to the thick black afro he’d sported in ’95. Then there was the eye. The completely blank eye that never moved. The prosthetic. The real one had been gouged out during a particularly gruesome prison attack. Jack also knew Kline had other scars from his time behind bars, the detective having kept up to date, and the effects of these brutal attacks were there for all to see.

  “Okay, Robert,” Jack said, “let’s hurry this along.”

  Kline grinned and his false eye glinted in the electric light.

  “You remember me?” the prisoner asked, leaning forward on the table so that it creaked under his thick elbows.

  “Unfortunately, the monster who raped and beat to death old women in their own homes is a little hard to shake from one’s memory, Robert.”

  Kline smiled, his good eye looking as dead as the other. Jack got his cigarettes out, popped one in his mouth and lit it. Kline watched him the whole time like a dog watches a butcher cut meat. Jack knew he smoked and knew that since he’d been placed in solitary, he’d been without one.

  Blowing smoke in Kline’s face, Jack said, “Who is he?”

  “Really?” Kline replied, breathing in the smoke through his big nostrils.

  “Yeah. As simple as that. Tell me everything you know. Starting with who he is.”

  “I thought you were smarter than that.”

  “So you don’t know who he is?” Jack sat forward and widened his eyes at the old man.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Then I should be going.”

  Jack picked up his pack of Marlboros and slid them back in his pocket. He then stood from his chair.

  “Sit down,” Kline snapped in an irritated voice.

  “Give me one good reason why,” Jack put back to him, placing his hands on the table edge and leaning forward.

  “We talk. Not just letters.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “Who’d you think?”

  “When?”

  “I’ve been calling him.”

  “On the prison telephone?”

  Kline peeked around Jack at the guard.

  “No,” he said, looking back at the detective. “On someone else’s phone. A secret one from one of the inmates.” />
  “How long?”

  “Since the first letter.”

  “How often?”

  “Not much. I can only afford to use the phone every two months.”

  “And what do you talk about?”

  “Are you gonna sit down?”

  Jack tugged hard on his smoke and let the plume causally out once more in the prisoner’s face.

  “Alright,” he said, sitting back down. “So what’s your part?”

  “Ain’t no part.”

  “Then why’s he contacted you and why did you then contact Jonny Cockburn to meet you on the very night your pen pal starts blasting innocent people away?”

  Jack gave him a knowing look, squinting his eyes through the blue fag smoke.

  “Blasting who away?” Kline put back to him with a knowing look of his own.

  Jack’s eyes narrowed.

  “You know who,” he put.

  “I know nothing.”

  The detective frowned at him.

  “Why’s he contacted you?” he asked.

  “Because he found something out between me and someone else.”

  “Who’s the someone else?”

  “You.” Kline pointed his thick finger across the table at him, a devilish smirk stretching his face.

  Jack felt the room shrink.

  “What did he find?”

  “A lot, apparently. See, first and foremost, he’s fascinated by you. Fascinated by beatin’ you. Or at least that’s the impression I get.”

  “What did he tell you, Robert?”

  “Things that only your priest should know.”

  The prisoner leaned back and rocked in his chair, the dull thump of laughter gurgling out of his mouth. Jack went to get up and leave again. Kline abruptly stopped, planting his hands firmly down on the table.

  “Okay okay,” he said.

  Jack resettled himself. His smoke was at its end. Kline’s eyes followed its descent into the scarred table. The detective immediately fetched his pack and lit another.

  “Go on then,” he said, blowing smoke out through his nose. “Proceed. Tell me something he told you about me or I’m walking out of here and never coming back.”