A Step Into The Dark

by Vince Vogel

  “Yeah.” The begging face was gone. Replaced by guilt.

  “Tell us what that was about.”

  “We were picked up driving in my car. Some girl had been attacked in an alley and a witness gave Chris’ description. We got picked up, but it wasn’t him, so they let us go.”

  “The girl insisted on dropping it,” Jack went on for him. “Refused to press charges or cooperate with police. Even as the nurses were putting forty stitches into her left cheek. She was scarred for life by your mate.”

  “It weren’t him.” He didn’t bother giving a face this time.

  “I think we can gather your association with these people,” Alice said next. “However, what we’re after for the meantime is Tommy Lewis. How many times have you been to his house?”

  “I don’t know. Countless, I suppose. The bloke has a thing for young girls and… Well, other things.”

  “You take him drugs?”

  “No comment.”

  “Does he ever invite you in?”

  “Sometimes, while the girl gets ready, or at the end if she’s asleep, he’ll let me into the house. He loves showin’ me all his stuff.”

  “Like what?”

  A startled look came over him. They know, went through his head like a message board.

  “Stuff,” he said curtly.

  “He show you this,” Jack said, laying out the next photo from the folder.

  It was Tommy’s gun collection hanging in the basement of Lewis’ house.

  “Yeah,” Matt Brown muttered. “He liked showin’ me. I thought he was real lonely, ’cos he loved showin’ them off. Talkin’ about them for ages. Tellin’ me about each gun.”

  “Did you ever see anyone else at the property?”

  He had to think about it until eventually his face brightened and he said, “Yeah. Once.”

  “Who was it?”

  “Some son.”

  The hairs on both detectives’ necks went up.

  “Did you ever see him?” Alice asked.

  “Yeah. I bumped into him. Tommy never even told me he was there. He scared me. Came up from the basement into the kitchen when I’d just dropped some gear off to Tommy. I didn’t think no one else was in the house and suddenly I turned in the kitchen and there’s this big bloke standin’ behind me. Tommy came in and said it was his son, David or somethin’.”

  Alice looked confused, but Jack felt something forming in his head. He’d been prepared for this. He took another photo out.

  “Is this him?” he asked.

  “Yeah. That’s him.”

  It was a photograph of David Burke.

  “Interview suspended,” Alice called into the recorder. There was the scrape of chairs across concrete and both detectives were out in the corridor.

  “Burke lied to us,” Alice said.

  “No, he didn’t,” Jack put back. “David Burke has been telling the truth all along. It’s not David.”

  “What?” She was frowning at him.

  “Come on,” he said, taking her by the arm and whisking her out of the station.

  89

  Detective Constable George Lange was a little nervous as he drove an unmarked car at speed up the M4. Even if he did have unmarked armed police vans front and back, he couldn’t help constantly checking the rearview mirror to make sure the one behind was still there.

  It was the cargo on the back seat that worried him. The Burkes; Catherine holding Micky, and David sitting nervously beside them. They were heading for a service station fifty miles north of London. Once there, Lange and his colleagues would hand the family over to a Relocation Team for protection. The plan was for them to be housed out of the way until this was all over.

  They looked as nervous as George Lange felt and he decided to spark up a conversation, more for his own peace of mind than anything else.

  “So I see you’ve got one of those Maori tattoos,” he said into the back to David Burke, having been intrigued by the pattern that climbed up the side of Burke’s neck. “Does it cover the rest of your body too?”

  “Most of it,” Burke muttered back. “I got it in the army when I was twenty.”

  “I was always thinking of getting one, but then I joined the force. Kinda put a dampener on the whole thing. They don’t like it when it’s visible.”

  “Yeah. They don’t mind so much in the fire service. But to tell you the truth, you’re better off out of it.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I don’t like it. I look in the mirror and it don’t mean anything. At least when Maoris get it done, it’s an initiation: a rite of passage. They earn it through manhood, usually after fighting the other men of their tribe or gang. It’s proof that they’re a warrior and no longer a boy. But I was still a boy after I got it done.”

  “I guess.”

  “I like it,” Micky mentioned. “I wanna get one when I’m older.”

  “And I keep sayin’,” David put to the teen, “when you’re twenty-one you can ruin your body any way you like. But until then, you should leave off.”

  “You’ve only gotta be eighteen,” the boy retorted. “Two more years and I don’t need no permission.”

  “But that doesn’t mean you’re mature enough to get one.”

  The mood had lightened and they chatted for the remainder of the journey. When they reached the motorway services, they were practically empty, only a few cars littering the gray asphalt of the carpark. They pulled up close to the building, a hexagonal thing with a tall, glass front that resembled the entrance to a church.

  Armed police secured the area while they sat in the car. A blacked-out van pulled up alongside them. Lange told the Burkes to wait and got out. Two men emerged from the van. They were armed with pistols.

  “They all good?” one of the men asked.

  “Yeah. All ready for you,” Lange replied.

  He signed some paperwork they handed him and then told the family to use the bathroom, as the drive would be four hours without a break. The armed officers and Lange went with the Burkes across a food court, the sun shining brightly through the glass ceiling and giving the place a life it wouldn’t otherwise have. A fountain stood in the center, but it was switched off, the stagnant water lifeless like the rest of the place. Around the edges stood franchise burger bars, a chicken shop, bored staff leaning on the counters with apathetic expressions, newsagents at the side, bargain bins overfilling with special offer junk that nobody wants, customers complaining about the inflated prices.

  “Just because it’s in the middle of nowhere,” they’d say, “doesn’t mean they have to take the piss.”

  Lange waited at the entrance of the toilet with two of the armed officers, their guns concealed under the trim of their coats. While the family were using the facilities, Lange stood telling anyone that approached that they couldn’t use the toilet.

  “You management?” asked one ruddy-faced father holding his son’s arm aloft, the boy crossing his legs as best he could on the other end.

  “No, I’m police,” Lange replied, holding up his ID.

  The man looked like he was going to spit before walking away.

  “You’ll have to do it against a car,” he yelled at the boy while he dragged him away.

  The family returned all refreshed. Micky went into the newsagents and bought some snacks. Catherine looked through the magazine rack. David, meanwhile, stood at the edge, close to Lange and watching his family like a hawk.

  “You all good?” the detective asked.

  “Yeah,” David grunted back.

  They left the services and Lange said farewell to the family. Catherine and Micky thanked him while David Burke was a little standoffish. Lange put it down to the issues over his arrest and ignored the strange behavior. But then something odd occurred.

  When the family were walking away, Lange became confused. Gazing after them, the detective did a double-take.

  Surely not, he thought. I must be wrong.

  Lange got in
the car and started the engine. A little later, he was rejoining the traffic as it flowed back to London, the place he always seemed destined to return to. It can’t have been, he remarked in his head as he cruised along. It was probably on the other side of the neck. But the memory of what he saw—or rather what he didn’t see—wouldn’t leave. It had startled him and he had to be wrong; because there was no explanation for it. None at all. The best he could think of was that the sun had gotten in his eyes and distorted what he saw.

  “Yeah that’s it,” he said aloud in the car.

  His phone went and he answered it to Jack Sheridan.

  “Sarge, what’s up?”

  “Are you with David Burke?”

  “No, I just dropped them off with the protection unit.”

  “Well, get this, George: I think the man we’re after is none other than David Burke’s secret twin brother.”

  And there it was. The crystal bullet went careering through George Lange’s brain and the explanation he’d been fishing for was there: the reason David Burke’s tattoo was missing from his neck was because it wasn’t him.

  The family was sitting in the back of the van, Micky busy watching the countryside pass by in a green blur. Catherine squeezed David’s hand and he looked down. A poisonous anger rose up inside of him like bile. It was like an abscess bursting and leaking its poison through his system.

  He turned to her and she smiled. He grinned mercilessly back at her, an odd look showing all his teeth, which made her frown. He gripped her hand tightly, squeezing the knuckles together, and she pulled it away.

  “Ouch!” she exclaimed gently, a flash of anger in her eyes.

  Thrusting his hand into the back of his trousers, he abruptly pulled a knife out, set its end to the back of the passenger’s neck and thrust it forward through the spine.

  The car juddered a little, the driver startled by the sight of his partner keeling forward with force. He glanced sideways; the man in the passenger side was dead. There was screaming coming from the back.

  “Dad, what’re you doin’?” Micky called out as he watched what he thought was his father pull a magnum from the same place he’d got the knife.

  The driver felt the hard metal press into the back of his skull and a piece of paper was placed on his lap. An address was scrawled on it.

  “Drive us to this place,” a voice hissed from the back seat.

  Lange hadn’t been able to reach them on the phone and the armed boys were already too far along on their way back to London. He reached the service station, jumped out of the car and leapt across the food court, the sunlight glimmering off the still, green water of the fountain.

  In the toilet, he soon found David Burke bound and gagged on the floor of a cubicle, a cut to the top of his head trickling with blood.

  “Where are they?” Burke spluttered the second Lange pulled the tape from his mouth.

  “I don’t know. What happened?”

  “Some guy. He looked just like me. He knocked me out. What’s he gonna do to them?”

  90

  Home birth. No pregnancy registered under the National Health Service. A secret. Secret conception. Secret pregnancy. Secret birth. But the secrecy didn’t end there. No. There was a secret baby, too. David and another.

  “Show us the register book for visitors,” Alice demanded as they came into the reception of the psychiatric hospital where Carolyn Burke lived.

  They went through the names. David Burke visited every week. Sometimes twice. They quickly gathered that the double visits were when David actually came. The rest were his brother. They searched back through the records. The visits had been sparse to say the least until three years ago. Since then, he’d been seeing his mother every week. The last visit had been the day before. David had been in a cell at the time, so yesterday’s visit had to be the twin. He’d given them ample chance to catch him.

  They raced to Carolyn’s room. She was back by the window, a blade of sunshine settling over her face and dropping across her lap. It appeared not to bother her agate eyes as they glimpsed into a world of her own.

  “Carolyn,” Alice said as she came over to the woman, kneeling before the wheelchair like a beseeching subject. “You had twins, didn’t you?”

  The woman was mumbling something, but it was obvious that the movement of her lips had nothing to do with what had been asked. Alice took hold of the poor woman’s cheeks and steadied the avoiding eyes so that they looked at her. The blank, glass eyes. They may as well have been marbles sticking out of her sockets.

  “Carolyn. Where’s the other child? Where did you put him?”

  A little life sparked in her, like an old television with a busted tube being turned on for the first time in years. Her lips creased into a crooked half smile.

  “They took him from me,” she whispered gently, a certain lucidity to her all of a sudden. “Said I couldn’t take care of two. Said he’d be better off. But they lied. Where they put him was much worse. Much worse.” She looked distraught, the eyes turning from Alice’s face. They began glancing around for something that even Carolyn didn’t know, something to deliver her from misery perhaps. Her hand raised to her face and tears fell from her eyes. “Anything would have been better than where they put him,” she added in a sob.

  “Where was that, Carolyn?”

  “Agh!” The hands raised and began beating the face. Alice grabbed one, but lost the other. It took hold of Carolyn’s cheek and began clawing it, ripping down the flesh in jagged lines. Jack dashed over and took hold of the woman, the two detectives surprised by the strength in the invalid’s skinny arms. Nurses bolted into the room and took over.

  “Let’s go see the old bitch with the cats,” Jack said once they were out of the room.

  91

  On the way to Pauline Chalmers, Lange called. Bad news. The brother had David Burke’s family. Pauline Chalmers didn’t answer her door when they hammered on it. Jack didn’t even bother with the pick set. Merely leaned back and slammed his size eleven into it. The cheap, government door fell in easily, slamming into the wall and getting stuck there, the handle smashing through the plasterboard and anchoring it.

  “Pauline!?” Jack shouted out, Alice coming in behind.

  The detectives went from room to room in the filthy den until they found her in the kitchen, surrounded by cats. She was lying on her front amongst the stains of the linoleum. A pool of blood was leaking out of the stump of her neck and there was a foot print on her back where he’d held her down. Many of the cats sat in the claret, licking the sticky mess up. A line of drips led to the kitchen sink. That’s where the face of Pauline Chalmers glared up from the dirty dishes, her bulging eyes almost all the way out of the skull.

  “So that’s that, then,” Alice complained.

  “No,” Jack said. “There’s one more hope.”

  92

  Julia and Ian—from the card on Carolyn Burke’s wall—were Julia and Ian Cross. It had been David Burke who had explained who they were when Alice had contacted George Lange by phone.

  The elderly couple lived in a brick bungalow amongst a council estate of brick bungalows, all looking alike, apart from the differing states of their tiny front gardens. The Crosses were eating their tea when the detectives arrived, but placed their fish and chips in the oven.

  “It’s no problem,” Julia Cross said cheerily as they’d come inside her home.

  She was a little woman with a humped back. It made her lean over to one side when she walked. On top was a permed head of white hair, underneath which was a pleasant set of blue eyes that gazed out from a pair of thick-rimmed glasses.

  Ian Cross was equally small and equally pleasant. He couldn’t help smiling at the strangers and ushering them to make themselves at home in the comfortable living room, colorful doilies covering most of the furniture, a whole audience of photographs lining the walls and furniture. A cocker spaniel lay before a gas fire and only turned his head slightly at the new arrivals.
r />   “How well do you know Carolyn Burke?” Alice asked.

  “As well as if she were my own daughter,” Julia replied. “We lived in the flat next door while Carolyn grew up. Knew her cantankerous old bat of a mum, too.”

  “You didn’t think much of Pauline Chalmers?”

  “She was a terrible woman. Used to beat and abuse that poor girl. Used to invite men back to stay—huh!” Julia Cross rolled her eyes. “If you can even call them men. Flamin’ drunks and scoundrels. Only livin’ there ’cos they needed a place to stay an’ had nowhere else. Waitin’ till somethin’ better came along.”

  “You know of Robert Kline,” Jack said.

  “Yeah. He was one of the regulars. An’ if you ask me, there was always somethin’ queer goin’ on between him an’ Carolyn. She was always so petrified of him. Used to shake whenever he was around.”

  The old woman looked softly across the room at them. The dog growled slightly at the effort of having to turn himself over and resembled a fat steak flipping itself on a grill.

  “Do you know about the circumstances surrounding the birth of her son, David?” Alice asked.

  “Oh my!” Julia Cross gently exclaimed, rising slightly in her chair and fanning her face. “I told you,” she said to her husband, who sat beside a table at the edge of the room. He was nodding.

  “You were right,” the old man muttered.

  “Right about what?” Alice said.

  “I knew it would come back one day.”

  “What would come back?” There was an impatient frown on her face.

  “I know all about the circumstances involvin’ David’s birth, ’cos I was there.”

  “So you know that he was a twin?”

  “Oh yeah. There were two. David and the other one we thought was dead.”

  “Dead?”

  “He was stillborn. Came after David, who was healthy and wailin’ into the night. Then there was the other boy. Nothin’ but skin and bones. Gray skin like a thundercloud. I thought he was dead. Pauline wanted to put him in a shoebox. Get rid of him in the park. I couldn’t let that awful woman do that. So I wrapped him in blankets and kept rubbin’ his back, tryin’ to revive him. An’ then, like a miracle, he started coughin’. He was alive.”