A Step Into The Dark

by Vince Vogel

  “Who?” Ross wanted to know.

  “She hasn’t given her name.”

  “Then I suggest she comes forward with any accusations.”

  “Could be why he attacked them,” another journalist proposed. “To cover up an affair with a teenage girl.”

  Ross was looking even more confused. But being a man of strong convictions, he waved it away and stood up straight on the podium .

  “I think,” he began in a slightly haughty tone, “that the press should stick to reporting and let the real police come to their own conclusions based on hard evidence and not hearsay. If this mother wants to come forward with information, then let her.”

  “Then tell us, Commander,” another reporter shouted out, “why did you bring David Burke in?”

  “Look.” Ross was beginning to lose his fabled patience. “Last night, the killer struck again; which I’m sure you’re aware of. Now tell me how you think David Burke was involved if he was sitting in one of our police cells?”

  “He could be in partnership with someone,” was shouted out.

  “Nonsense,” Ross retorted. “We’ve seen nothing from our enquiries so far that would suggest two men working in unison. Certainly not one of them being David Burke.”

  David Burke was at the back of the station, watching the press conference on a television. Several police officers stood with him. Detective Constable George Lange was to the side by the back doors of the building, standing with the custody officer, a serious-looking man with perpetually knitted brows. They were going over the route they’d be taking to get David home.

  Lange glanced over at Burke and noticed that he was almost white.

  “You seein’ this?” he asked the detective constable, turning to him from the screen.

  “It’ll die down,” Lange said, trying to sound optimistic.

  Everything was in place.

  The custody officer opened the doors. They all came out into the yard and made their way to a police van that stood in the middle. David Burke couldn’t help glancing sideways at the gate as they loaded him into the van. The press were lining it, a volley of flashing cameras going off, a swarming crowd of bodies which several police attempted to push back from the gate.

  Lange got in the back with Burke and a police constable. Another officer and the custody man, he of the frown, got in the front. They pulled away and stopped before the gate. Burke sat the whole time with his eyes closed. Lange watched him. David appeared to be muttering something, his lips constantly moving. But Lange couldn’t hear exactly what was coming out.

  They began edging bit by bit through the crowd. Some people began banging on the sides, rocking them slightly. It was the public come to cause trouble. Burke stayed with his eyes closed, all the way until they broke through the throng and were moving steadily along the London streets.

  When they pulled into the one Burke lived on, there was already a police cordon set up at the top of the cul-de-sac, the van having to edge through another thick clot of press. “David! David!” they cried out.

  “They think I did it,” David Burke couldn’t help saying across the van to Lange.

  The detective constable gave a soft face, a kind of half-apology hidden in there somewhere. The van stopped and the back doors were opened onto bright sunshine. Inside the house, Burke found his wife and stepson. Micheal Burke ran straight up to him and embraced his father. Catherine, meanwhile, stood farther on in the hallway chewing her nails, watching them with shimmering eyes.

  Lange followed him inside and David Burke turned to him.

  “I’m alright now,” he said to the detective constable. “You’ve done enough already.” There was a distinct darkening of his tone when he added this last bit.

  Lange asked Catherine if the liaison officer was still there.

  “We sent her away,” she replied in the ghost of a voice, removing her nails from her mouth for the few seconds she spoke before placing them right back.

  “Well,” Lange said next, “if you need anything—”

  “Yes yes,” David Burke interrupted irritably. “We’ll call or at worst shout down the road.”

  “Okay,” Lange said gently and then backed out the door.

  David Burke was quick to march up and shut it the second Lange was on the path on the other side. For a second or two, he leaned his face on the door with his eyes closed.

  Turning back to his family, he attempted a smile. But it was half drowned by the otherwise sad expression his face held. Micky stood before him with glimmering eyes. But it was Cath that most worried David. She looked at him like those press would have looked at him, had they the chance.

  “Micky,” she said, “I need you to go up to your room for a bit. I need to talk with your dad.”

  Micky turned to her, a look of mild fear on his boyish face.

  “Mum, please,” he said to her with hope and despair simultaneously existing in his voice. “It’s not him.”

  When his son said this, David Burke’s heart froze. He realized that one of the biggest fears he’d suffered in that cell last night was true: that his wife suspected him.

  “Why else would they bring him home?” Micky went on. “And what about the fire last night they say was the same guy?”

  “Micky, go up to your room,” Catherine Burke snapped at her son.

  The teen turned around to his father.

  “It’s alright, Mick, mate,” David said.

  With dropped shoulders, Micheal passed his mother at the foot of the stairs and slunk up to his room, turning back to his father when he was halfway up.

  Once he was gone, Catherine signaled for David to follow her into the lounge. She shut the door and they then faced each other in the center of the room.

  “Why’d they pull you in, Dave?” she almost demanded.

  “It was a silly coincidence.”

  “A silly coincidence!? They had me for an hour going over everything. Wanted to know where you were when it happened. Why would they want to know that?”

  “They put two and two together and got five. That’s all.”

  “Do you know they searched the house? Took your car away? Did they tell you that?”

  “Honestly, babe, let me explain.”

  “Then explain, Dave.”

  He couldn’t look her in the eyes. All these years, he’d attempted to shield her from the worst parts of his life, but in truth, he’d been shielding himself. He wanted her and Micky to be a little piece of paradise away from his troubled childhood. A fresh life away from the hurt.

  Catherine could see that he’d been hurt when she’d first met him. Could see that it was painful to recall things. So she’d not pressed him and in turn, he’d not given her much about his upbringing except that it had been hard. That it had been him and his alcoholic mum and that he’d done most of the caring.

  David sat on one end of the couch and she another.

  “I told you it was just me and Mum always,” he began. “Well, for a time she was married.”

  He went on to tell her about his mother having him at fifteen. “Mum basically bribed Tommy,” he said, “because she wanted to escape her own mother. She’d run away from home and had been having an affair with him. When she got pregnant, she told Tommy that it was his and that if he didn’t marry her, she’d go to the police and prove the baby was his through blood. This would prove he’d slept with her when she was fourteen. So he married her the second she turned sixteen and took us away.”

  “But he wasn’t your dad, I take it?” Catherine said.

  “No. She held it over him, but in the end, he found out for himself, and, well, that was it.”

  “But what’s this got to do with you being pulled in?”

  “From what I gathered by their questioning, the gun that killed Micky’s mates came from Tommy. See, he was always into guns and had a big collection.”

  “They traced the gun?” she asked with widened eyes.

  “It looks like it.”
/>   “Then it has to be this Tommy guy.”

  “It can’t be.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he’s dead, babe.”

  “Then I don’t get it: what’s it all to do with you? You said you haven’t seen him since you were eleven.”

  “I haven’t, but the police thought otherwise. Apparently someone saw what they thought was his son hanging around. When they looked into Tommy, they found me.”

  “And they thought you’d been the one hanging around him?”

  “Yes. They seemed convinced of it. But it has to be someone else.”

  “Did this Tommy guy have children?”

  “No. I was the closest he had.”

  “So it was all just a coincidence?”

  “Yeah.”

  She reached her hand out and took his. Tears coated her eyes, dulling their blue luster.

  “I haven’t been able to sleep,” she said in a scratched voice. “The phone’s been goin’ off the hook, too. All the other parents wanted to know what happened.”

  “It’s just some weird coincidence, babe.”

  “But what could it mean, Dave?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve been wracking my brains to think why Tommy Lewis could end up having something to do with this, but nothing comes to mind. I was thinking of going to see Mum.”

  “You think she’ll be able to tell you?”

  “I don’t know. Probably not. But sometimes she mentions things out of the blue. Becomes clear for a few seconds. Like the last time I visited, she kept goin’ on about her own mum. Made me promise not to take her back there.”

  “What was so bad about your grandmother?”

  “My grandmother,” David began in a solemn voice, “is a terrible person. She used to rent my mother out to men she was seeing. Her own daughter. We used to sometimes visit her. Go around this flat that stank of cat piss. Meet this miserable old bitch that used to give us soggy biscuits with our lukewarm tea. We’d sit in this cramped, flea-bitten flat until they’d invariably argue and we’d leave, the old woman shooing us all the way down the cold, stone steps.”

  “That’s terrible, David.”

  She leaned forward and fell into his embrace, throwing her own arms around him and holding him as tight as she could. She’d been so worried when he’d come through the door. Worried that the man she loved and trusted with the life of herself and her son could be something else. It must be dreadful for women who are married to killers only to find out many years later when the police arrive. Must destroy a part of them to know that they loved a monster. Worry about what that makes them.

  Another victim is the answer. Another victim of the chameleon nature of killers.

  68

  1982.

  Jack’s mother was busy with the washing when the front door opened behind her. An instant smile spread her cheeks and a pang of excitement slipped up her spine. She tore herself away from the sink, rapidly dried her hands on a tea towel and quickened her little legs across to the hallway.

  There, she found her son decked out in his green army uniform, a scarlet beret pitched to one side on his head. He was dumping his bag when she grabbed hold of him by the neck and pulled him down to her lips.

  “Jack, my boy!” she screeched, laying a firm kiss on him.

  “Alright, Mum,” he tried to protest, “let me get my boots off.”

  She made him a cup of tea, and, when she brought it in, couldn’t help blushing with pride at the sight of her son the soldier. He sat casually, legs apart, slunk in the chair. But it did nothing to ruin the picture of him in that uniform.

  She did, nonetheless, see something else in her boy. A discomfort that was hidden underneath. As he sat with his tea, his eyes shone with what she was sure was guilt.

  “You know,” she began in her Gaelic accent, “even though it’s a darned British uniform, I still get goosebumps seein’ you in that thing.”

  His mother being Irish, the word ‘darned’ often found itself as a prefix to ‘British’.

  “I’ll get out of it,” he said, placing his mug to the side and moving to stand.

  “No. You can wait, can’t you?”

  The look in her eyes sank his heart; she glowed with pride.

  “I’m only in it because we had to have photos taken,” he explained, feeling suffocated by his attire. “I’ll be glad to get back in T-shirt and jeans.”

  His mother sat watching him and Jack got the impression that she hadn’t listened to a word he’d just said. Something else appeared to be moving through her mind. She knew her son better than he knew himself and she saw hurt inside of him.

  “You didn’t like it, did you?” she asked, leaning forward and widening her eyes ever so slightly.

  She looked at him in a way that only she ever did. A way that opened him up and made him talk. No one ever extracted confessions so easily from Jack as how his mother used to.

  “No,” he muttered, settling back in the chair as she gazed across at him with soft eyes.

  They were silent for a moment. Only the sound of the birds outside the window. Jack watched the dust play in a blade of light as his fingers gripped his knees.

  “You kill men?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” he said, and instantly felt uncomfortable, tightly gripping his knees and turning to the window, where a gray sky went on forever. “Two, I think. Might be more. Wounded some.” He was breathing rapidly, his voice breaking, tears welling. “The two I knew for sure. But some I don’t know.”

  “You said a prayer for them?”

  “Yeah.” He turned back to her. “Every night since it happened.”

  “Would you like to say a prayer with me?”

  He didn’t say the word. Nodded instead.

  She took him by the hand and led him down onto his knees in the center of the room. They then remained with their eyes closed and their hands together, heads bowed.

  “O Lord, Jesus Christ,” his mother led, Jack following, “Redeemer and Saviour, forgive my sins, just as You forgave Peter's denial and those who crucified You. Count not my transgressions, but, rather, my tears of repentance. Remember not my iniquities, but, more especially, my sorrow for the offenses I have committed against You. I long to be true to Your Word, and pray that You will love me and come to make Your dwelling place within me. I promise to give You praise and glory in love and in service all the days of my life.”

  When they finished, he turned to her, fell into her embrace and she held her weeping son.

  “You’re no killer,” she cooed into his ear. “Not my son.”

  69

  “So did he elaborate on these secret phone calls?” Alice wanted to know.

  They were driving back to London. Jack was busy daydreaming, staring out the window. When they’d first set off from the prison, he’d explained what happened with Kline very briefly. Of course, this had barely sated her need for information and now every few minutes, she would bombard him with questions.

  “No,” Jack muttered, looking away from the passing streets. “Just that he wanted to make a deal.”

  “Then we should make the deal. I don’t get why you want to do it the hard way.”

  “Kline doesn’t deserve things easy, Alice. You weren’t there back when he was active. He’s a fucking monster. Raped and murdered anything weaker than himself. It’s men like Robert Kline that make me begin to see some sense in the death penalty.”

  “Then you better hope he talks by tonight, because that’s all I’m giving it. I’ll speak with DCI Hobbs as soon as we get back. Get him to organize a deal.”

  Jack turned flashing eyes on her.

  “You’d do a deal with him?” he bawled across at her.

  “Yes. To stop another maniac, I’d be willing to give in to the small demands of another maniac.”

  “Small demands!? A cushy life? For what he did to those poor women? For what he did to children, Alice?”

  “But it would save the lives of more.”
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br />   “That’s if he even knows anything. That bullshit about there being some buried cache filled with the guy’s identity; you telling me you believe that?”

  “It would be a small price to pay to find out. And if it turned out to be nothing, we’d play no deal with Kline and send him back to prison. Surely it hasn’t escaped your attention that Kline wouldn’t be willing to even ask for this move to St. Bernards if he didn’t think he really had something.”

  “It’s a game to him,” Jack growled. “Even if it’s only a day out in the country to lead us on a wild goose chase, it’ll be something to Kline. Some reward. He’s playing games. Or worse. He’s a part in the killer’s game.”

  “Then shouldn’t we play the next move? Which is Kline. I mean, it’s all we have.”

  “No. It isn’t. We still have the lawyer. Whoever this is went to see him and gave him the message to give to Kline. We see the lawyer, maybe he leads us to him. Then there’s the connection between David Burke and Tommy Lewis. We’ve plenty to go on.”

  “But Kline’s a connection, too.”

  “No. We stay away from Kline and let him stew until we get to the deadest of ends.”

  They reached the front of Peter Hill Solicitors and Jack felt a twang of something. He’d not been back since that day he’d shown Hill the video. Pushing it to the back of his head, he got out of the car and walked into the office.

  It wasn’t busy and the receptionist was at her desk when they walked inside. It was a different woman from before. This one was in her twenties, sported a platinum crew cut and had a ring in one nostril. They both showed their IDs and asked for Peter Hill.

  “I’m afraid,” the woman drawled, “Peter isn’t in at the moment. I think he’s sick, but I haven’t been able to get him on the telephone. Is it urgent?”

  Both detectives looked at each other. They shared an odd feeling and something was instantly translated to the other through their expressions.

  “Can we have his home address?” Alice asked.

  The receptionist gave it to them.

  “Is anything the matter?” the woman asked as they turned to leave.