A Step Into The Dark

by Vince Vogel

  They didn’t answer her. Outside, Alice got her phone out and sent a dispatch to the address. Fifteen minutes later, they were pulling up outside the driveway of Peter Hill’s house. Police tape was already draped across the gate. Two constables had found the smashed window at the side, entered the property, and found Mr. and Mrs. Hill bludgeoned to death upstairs.

  Peter Hill was slumped in the doorway of his bedroom, the top of his skull dented inwards like a divot on a deflated soccer ball. Jack stood over him on the landing for a moment, gazing into the man’s dead eyes.

  Was this his fault? he asked himself. Had he started the ball rolling when he asked the lawyer to abandon his client? Did that lead to this? Had Jack blindly led this poor man and his wife to their deaths?

  Blindly, Jack repeated in his head. I didn’t know. I couldn’t know.

  “Jack?” Alice called from inside the bedroom.

  He left Peter Hill and walked into the room towards the bed. The sheets and the headboard were originally white, so you really saw the blood. A lump underneath the duvet denoted the wife. Jack didn’t see her head at first. Only saw the blood rising up the headboard and splattering across the walls. Alice was on one side of the bed looking down and a police photographer was the other side.

  When he came next to his colleague, Jack saw that there was no longer a head poking out of the covers. Instead was a deep red stain filled with pieces of yellowed skull, matted hair and teeth. The mattress was black in the center of the gore.

  “He’s continued to hit the head until nothing was left,” the photographer felt the need to point out.

  “We’ve been played again,” Alice remarked.

  Jack said nothing. Merely gazed at the headless corpse.

  I was blind, he said to himself. I could never have known this would have happened.

  70

  Kline was back in his cell. The whole nick was going crazy around him. He’d heard the guards raiding cells on the landing below. Heard men scream his name out as they were dragged away to solitary in cuffs.

  “You’re dead, old man,” a voice hissed into his cell from the one next door. “Fucking dead.”

  “BEAST! BEAST! BEAST!” the rest of the cellblock shouted in unison, shaking their cell doors, rattling things on the bars, making any noise they could. Kline felt like some European explorer of centuries ago lost and cut off in the jungle of a remote African country. Hearing the unseen natives through the vegetation and knowing that they were closing in.

  “You hear that, old man?” the voice hissed. “They’re calling your name.”

  The cell door opened sharply and Kline sat up. A trustee came in, holding his food on a tray. He walked right into the center, turned to Kline, smirked, and then dropped his dinner onto the floor with a clattering of dishes, food spitting up everywhere.

  “Oops,” the inmate said right in the old man’s face. “Butter fingers.”

  He left the cell and was replaced by a furious-looking guard.

  “PICK IT UP!” the aggrieved-looking man screamed at Kline.

  The old man lifted himself up from his bed and went to steadily get down on his hands and knees. As he did, the end of the guard’s truncheon crunched down on his spine and he nearly fell forward onto the food.

  “Pick it up,” the guard snarled down at him.

  Kline rearranged the spilled dishes and began wiping the food up off the floor and tossing it back into them.

  “Don’t you leave a fuckin’ drop down there,” hissed spitefully from the guard’s mouth.

  Once he’d used his hand as a scoop, the side of it black from dust, Kline lifted the tray up and stood before the guard.

  Glaring into Kline’s eyes, the man said slowly, “Now eat every fuckin’ drop.”

  Kline sat down on the edge of the bed with the tray on his wide knees. He took up a spoon and began eating. The guard stood right in front of him, watching with bulging eyes and utter contempt written on his face.

  Kline didn’t want to give him the satisfaction, so he ate the lukewarm, disgusting food heartily, glaring back up at the guard. He was sure there was fecal matter, pubic hair, snot and God-knows-what in there, but he wouldn’t give in and gag. He’d spent nearly thirty years eating other people’s matter, what did it matter now?

  “Ugh!” Kline cried out as a sharp pain stabbed into the roof of his mouth like electricity.

  He put down the spoon and with trembling fingers reached into his mouth. It was razor sharp, slicing the fingers when he took hold of it and pulled. The guard was smiling, a look of satisfaction on his face. Kline tugged it hard and the needle of glass came out. His whole mouth went warm and tasted of blood. He gazed at the bloody splinter for a second.

  “Put it on the side and continue eatin’,” the guard seethed down at him, the heat of his breath making Kline’s forehead sweat.

  Glaring up at him with a look of resolve, Kline reached for the spoon, blood dribbling out of his mouth, and began shoveling the ignoble nourishment into his mouth again. Rather than please the guard, it made him swoop forward with an angry scowl and smash Robert Kline around the head with his truncheon, sending man, tray and food onto the floor. With the old man flat out, the guard blew a whistle.

  While he waited for the others, he spoke down to the old man.

  “They say you’re in cahoots with this killer. That you know who he is, but you’ll only tell if they give you some cushy deal. Well, we’re gonna see if we can’t beat it out of you.”

  Kline’s eyes caught sight of the door as two of the larger prisoners came in, holding lengths of rubber hose. They looked down at Kline with bloodthirsty grins.

  “Now, boys,” the guard said aloud, “try not to kill him.”

  The guard stepped out of the cell and the two men immediately laid into the old man, who lost his breath straight away, his lungs going numb, and struggled to regain it as the thick rubber thumped into his flesh and shook his bones.

  71

  The noise of the press could be heard through the open window of the kitchen. David Burke stood with his hands leaning on the edge of the sink, staring absently across his garden at the red bricks of the house at the end. He could make out the outline of someone standing in an upstairs window. They were gazing down at him and he’d waved at one point, but his neighbor hadn’t waved back. It appeared that he was under suspicion from every angle.

  “Psst!”

  He lowered his gaze from the window and saw a face poking over the top of the fence. Frowning, David stepped outside and walked to the fence at the end.

  “Simon?” he said as he came to the gaunt face.

  “Yeah, mate,” the other man replied in a hushed voice. “You gonna let me in?”

  David came over to the fence. There was a thin strip of alleyway between the two back gardens of the houses. The other man stood in this.

  “Cheers, mate,” Simon said when David let him into the garden through a gate.

  “How’d you get past all the reporters?”

  “I knocked at Gail’s house,” he said, pointing behind him at the place David had been staring at. “But they weren’t in. So I let myself around their gate and came through.”

  “How’re you bearin’ up?”

  Simon froze as if the question had turned his blood to stone. For the first time, David got a good look at him and realized from his bedraggled appearance that he hadn’t slept. As well as that, he looked slightly inebriated. But it was to be expected. After all, his son had been one of the victims at Boreham Wood.

  “I’m alright,” Simon said. “Sue’s a state. Got her sister with her at the minute.” The two men looked at each other for a moment. Simon appeared to be waiting to say something. He finally said it. “So what’s goin’ on?”

  “You mean with me?”

  “Obviously.”

  “Nothing. I got pulled in for questioning yesterday.”

  “What was it all about?”

  “Nothing. Honestly.”
<
br />   Simon stood gazing with narrowed eyes at him. There appeared to be a level of antipathy seething underneath the sadness in his face.

  “You gonna invite me in for a cuppa?” he said.

  “Sure.”

  David turned and they both went inside the kitchen. Simon took a seat at a breakfast bar while David put the kettle on and prepared two cups.

  “Where’s Cath and Micky?” Simon asked.

  “Cath’s gone to the supermarket and Micky’s upstairs sleeping.”

  Simon didn’t say anything to this. He simply nodded to himself as though checking off some point on a list. Soon they were both sitting on opposite sides of the bar with their teas. Simon pulled out a small bottle of brandy and slipped a nip into his drink. He offered one to David but the latter held his hand up as the bottle hovered.

  “Cath tell you we’re not gonna get the body back for at least another two weeks?” Simon asked as he slipped the bottle back in his pocket.

  “Nah, mate, she didn’t. I’m real sorry to hear that.”

  “It’s fucked. All we want to do is get the funeral out the way and get on with the next step of grievin’. 'Cos no matter what, there’s gonna be nothin’ but grief for the rest of our lives. You know, you don’t get over somethin’ like this.”

  “It’s awful, Sy. Absolutely awful.”

  “You know,” Simon began in a trembling voice on the verge of tears, “I can’t get the image of what he looked like on that table out of my head.” He placed his finger on his temple to illustrate the point. “Every time I close my eyes, I see him lyin’ there with a sheet on his face. I get scared that he can’t breathe under it. Ain’t that weird?”

  “You’ve been through a lot, Sy.”

  The two were silent for a moment, gazing across the dusty air at one another. David heard the sound of feet on the floor above. Micky was awake. It scared David and he didn’t want to say why, not even in his head.

  “So what did the police want?” Simon said, his eyes boring into David.

  72

  The city grew around them as they drove into central London, the stone buildings getting taller and more magnificent, the residential roads giving way to glass towers.

  “I guess we give Kline his deal,” Alice was saying as she steered the car through the busy streets.

  “There’s still other paths to follow,” Jack replied.

  He was leaning out the open window with a cigarette.

  “Like what?”

  “Like finding out what this connection between Lewis and David Burke is.”

  “It could be a coincidence. Someone completely different took those guns.”

  “I think you’re wrong,” Jack put back. “I may have thought it was flimsy before, but the more I think about it, the more I see Lewis and Burke in the middle of this. The killer is showing us things. He wants us to follow his path. It’s a game and he’s giving us a chance. He’s constantly pointing us in the direction of Burke and Lewis and we have to find out the connection.”

  “Well, I’m still going to see Hobbs about preparing a deal. So that we’ve at least got it at the side, just in case.”

  Central London was very busy. They got stuck in traffic, the leering back of a red bus towering over them and cutting out the midday sun. Moving along at pedestrian pace, Jack watched the masses as they moved along the pavement in one great bulk of heads and legs, thronging across the road at crossings, moving up and down stairways into the underground, the city filled with people of all colors, shapes and sizes. The heavy sun appeared to make them multiply, the streets never so busy in the winter.

  Jack caught sight of his face in the polished glass of a building they passed. At first, he thought it was some dilapidated, old man whose ill face sat out of a car. But he soon realized it was his own miserable mug hanging there.

  He wants a garden, Jack said in his head.

  He was thinking about Kline. Some ominous cloud appeared to hover around the killer. A cloud that sought to pull Jack in, too. To hold him tight to Kline as though they were the same man. Jack sensed that something was drawing them slowly together and he was doing everything he could to resist it. He’d tread every hopeless lead to its very end before he gave in to that man. Nevertheless, the storm surrounding Kline appeared to be reaching toward him and he already felt its shadow at his feet.

  73

  The old man could hardly stand up. Practically his whole body leaned face first against the tiles, though he tried to push back against his hands. But each time he maneuvered himself away from the cold wall, the brooms scrubbing his back would shove him up against it again.

  “We’ll scrub the black off him,” one of the men smashing a broom said to the other, who grinned and went to his work as though Robert Kline were a stain on the tiles.

  “Okay,” a guard shouted.

  The two men stepped back from Kline. He almost slid down his front when the brooms left, readjusting his feet slightly and hauling his creaking body back up.

  But he didn’t stay upright for long.

  A blast of ice cold water hit into the base of his back like a heavyweight’s punch and he dropped onto the hard floor. He kept himself in the fetal position, his back facing the thick jet of water, the flesh being pummelled and the spine crunched. About to pass out from the pain, the water stopped and it felt almost as painful to have the pressure suddenly cease, as though his back were gasping for air. He couldn’t help crying out and then he did something he’d been attempting to avoid all day: he began weeping. It wasn’t the pain, it was the ignobility of it. He was an old man, after all. Seventy-six years of age. He shouldn’t be treated like this.

  The small cell of the shower room crackled with laughter from all sides as the old man lay naked and wet, weeping on the tiles of the floor, a trickle of pink blood meandering along the flow of water into the drain.

  Footsteps echoed on the tiles and the laughter stopped suddenly. Without turning from the wall, Kline knew exactly who had just walked in.

  “Turn him around,” a spiteful voice ordered.

  Hands grabbed his bruised and battered flesh. He cried out as they hauled him up into a seating position so that he sat facing the warden. The skinny little man glared down at him through his beady little eyes.

  “Robert, Robert, Robert,” the gray-skinned man said, walking up to Kline so that he stood over him. “You’re going to tell those nice detectives from Scotland Yard everything you know or we’ll break you into pieces.”

  “You do that,” Kline spat back from his punch-bloated lips. “I was in pieces long before you ever came into my life, warden.”

  With every last ounce of strength, Kline hurled a bloody ball of spit at the man. It barely made it past his knees. The warden merely shook his head, turned to his men and nodded in Kline’s direction. The latter then watched the warden leave through narrowed eyes. The moment the squat man had turned the corner and was gone, a jet of water smashed into Kline’s chest, knocking every bit of air out of his lungs. He tried to crawl away on his front, but the guard got closer with the hose, made it so the water flipped him over. The jet hit his face, filled his mouth and throat until he was drowning on it. It moved along his body like a well drilled boxer, the jet hitting into his muscles and climbing up him, entering his mouth along with air, the floor an inch deep in water. He began to pass out, to really struggle for breath. He thought he was dead, he began to thrash about, but it was no good. His limbs hardly moved and when they did, the water hit them like a passing car.

  A loud whistle and it stopped, Kline gasping on the floor.

  “Alright, boys,” one of the guards said. “We don’t want to kill him. Remember the fuckin’ headache over Barry Collins? You want the fuckin’ inspectors hangin’ about for a year again?”

  He looked almost dead. Pale and drowned. Like he’d been held in a jar of formaldehyde for the past ten years and had been emptied out. The guard nodded to his colleagues. They swooped over and lifted the old
man up. His eyes were almost rolled into the back of his skull.

  Kline never even knew they were dragging him back up, dragging him through the whole cellblock naked and dripping with water and blood. He never noticed the cries of “Beast” as he was lifted up each staircase, his heels clanging with each and every one of the metal steps on the way up.

  Only when he landed on the cold floor of his cell amongst the detritus of his broken things did he notice anything. The loud bang of his cell door punctuated a break in his ordeal and he would be allowed to gather himself for the time being. It took him four attempts to raise himself with the help of his bed frame. With shaking, swollen muscles, he picked up his mattress and reset it on the bed. He lowered himself down on it with slow and careful movements, but couldn’t stop himself from slipping and landing with a thump. He then twisted himself onto his side and gazed into the yellow wall.

  Something was scratched there and he read it as he always did whenever he felt the hatred of this place grip tightly on his flesh. It was a paraphrased quote from a book he’d read a few years ago. It had struck him as oddly suitable for himself.

  It went: I’ve often thought that had I been compelled to live in the trunk of a dead tree, with nothing to do but gaze up at the patch of sky just overhead, I’d have got used to it by degrees. In the long run one gets used to anything.

  Life is reducible, Kline said to himself as he gazed at his own scratched hand. It’s reducible and man can get used to anything.

  74

  While David Burke had explained what he could to Simon, the other man had worn a face that gave him the impression he didn’t believe a word David was saying.

  “So as you can see,” he went, “it was a coincidence that the same bloke who the gun came from happened to be my stepdad when I was a kid. A coincidence.”

  “A coincidence,” Simon repeated in a mutter, his eyes glazed over and a bewildered look on his bedraggled face.