A Step Into The Dark

by Vince Vogel

  “And truth,” the passenger added.

  Again the raisin eyes of the driver flicked up to the mirror, narrowing as they studied the strange figure sitting in the back.

  They arrived at the destination, the taxi pulling into a little side street that ran off Regent Street, around the back of Oxford Circus tube station. A crowd of people had to move out of the way as the cab squeezed through the clot of people that thronged in the alley. The whole area was teeming with bodies, tourists, shoppers, the place filled with a coagulated mass of human activity. As they sat in the cab, the driver setting the meter, a series of faces passed the windows, the bustling crowd moving around the car like a river runs around a boulder.

  The driver turned to the little window that separated them and slid it to one side.

  “That’ll be fifteen quid, boss,” he said.

  But he frowned when the other man simply sat like a corpse, hands resting on the prostrate bag, eyes dead and disinterested.

  “Fifteen, mate,” the driver felt the need to repeat.

  “Was your father ever cruel to you?”

  The driver frowned. The weird ones didn’t usually get in until after midnight, he said to himself. Not the middle of the bleeding day.

  “Fifteen,” he repeated.

  “You said cruelty teaches respect. Does that mean that your father beat you regularly to teach you some?”

  The driver’s brows were closing in on one another from across his long nose.

  “How’d you mean?” he put to the other man.

  “Exactly what I said. Did your father beat you often?”

  “No more than me and my brothers deserved.”

  “But how do you know if you really did deserve it? How do you know your father wasn’t simply making things up? Setting you rules he knew would be unavoidably broken. All so he could feel the hardness of his leather belt on your soft skin. Hear your cries, your sobs, your entreaties. To know that he was Mr. monster in that moment as he crushed you like a bug.”

  “I don’t think my father ever enjoyed it.”

  “I think he did. I think he got some inner satisfaction from it that he couldn’t attain in any other area of his life. A day of being spoken down to by the boss is easily converted into a night of beating down your children. I think he and your mother did disgusting things to each other while you lay on your front weeping into the bedsheets, your raw behind throbbing. It made him throb too. Gave him his manhood back.”

  The driver’s frown had turned into a look of shock. The other man was grinning at him from the back seat.

  “The fare’s fifteen,” the cabbie repeated firmly.

  The passenger reached into his jacket pocket and the driver was glad that he was finally going to pay. However, it wasn’t money or a wallet that emerged in his hand. No.

  Outside, the flow of people moved rapidly around the cab in the narrow mouth of the alley, minding their own business, somewhere to go, things to do, people to meet.

  BANG!

  The loud explosion made them jump and they stood stock-still, the river of people freezing over. It’d come from the taxi. The windscreen was covered in blood. They gazed into the car with confusion. Someone stared into the back of it and witnessed a man placing a black balaclava over his head. Having done this, he casually turned to the man peeking in, raised something in his hand and another loud explosion echoed in the alley. The man at the window flew back, glass and blood flying out, knocking several people over. He bounced into the wall of a jewelers shop and slid down it, resting in a seated position, his face blown apart and the crowd around him spattered in blood.

  Panic erupted and people began to scream and dart out of the alley. Some didn’t know where the gunshots had come from and ran from further down the alley towards the cab. These were the first he shot.

  Having removed the Tavor TAR-21 assault rifle from the holdall, he stepped out of the cab and fired severed streams of bullets into them as they ran in panic towards him, the runners hitting the ground as the bullets sailed into them. One woman was hit in the stomach and she fell to the ground, screaming and wailing. The sound of her pain pleased him, so he left her there, thrashing about.

  Reaching back inside the cab, he zipped the holdall up and placed it on his back, the straps tightly fixed to his shoulders. Then, while the city around him erupted into chaos, he strolled out of the alley, raised his rifle and sprayed a group of people as they ran past the mouth. He caught their legs, sending them keeling over, face-first onto the deck. He then sent another spray into their backs as he casually strolled past. He was at the foot of Carnaby street where it joined with Oxford Street, basically a wide junction. A coagulated mass of people pushed each other along, their screams filling the air. A police constable was on his radio. He aimed at him and sent a swarm of bullets into his chest, the cop dropping down, the radio on the floor beside his dead feet. Every face that was nearby screamed and ran in directionless panic. He lifted the rifle and began pumping bullets into the mass, feeling as though he were gradually killing some gigantic animal made up of various moving parts and flailing limbs. The screams rose like smoke from a fire, the crowd dispersing in opposite directions. Some came running towards him and he blasted them quickly. Other ran down side roads and attempted to hide in buildings, hammering on fire escape doors. These became the easiest of targets, the people on the other side of the doors always refusing to open it. Some got brave. Saw him and tried to engage. One guy threw a bottle at his head. Another, a brick. He would enjoy shooting these people the most. The brave ones, he called them. One man hid behind a bin and tried to jump out on him as he passed. The man grappled with the rifle, but the Shooter managed to push him off and send a blast into him. As the man lay on the floor holding his exposed guts, the Shooter came to him, took his knife from his belt, and sent it into the side of his head, having to hold the head down with his boot as he pulled it back out.

  Other people hid under cars. It was a clever idea. But he did like finding these ones and sending a string of bullets into them. Under one car, he managed to shoot the fuel line and ignited the thing, having shot the woman underneath in the legs. When he reached the end of that street, he turned back to see that the car had become an enraged fireball, screams pouring out from underneath it. He had to admit that the woman sounded like a pig. The sound pleased him and when he turned back around, he began laughing loudly as he sent more and more bullets into them.

  “PIGS!” he screamed as he aimed rapidly from one to the next, sparing no more than a few bullets for each. “PIGS! All of you. PIGS! Every one of you. Slaves for paradise. Slaves for me. Run, PIGS! RUN!”

  79

  The phone went off the second they’d pulled up outside a two-story terrace of gray houses, the row standing in the shadow of a tall, equally gray tower block.

  Alice answered the call when they got out of the car.

  “What’s up?” Her face twisted with alarm and then dissolved into a look of horror. “Okay, keep me informed,” she said before placing the phone back in her pocket.

  She looked over the roof of her Mondeo at Jack.

  “He’s struck again,” she said in a dull voice. “The junction at Oxford Street and Regent Street. He’s already fired at crowds and there’s several confirmed deaths.”

  Jack leaned against the car feeling terribly helpless, his head hanging between his shoulders. A wave of frustration descended over him like a cloak and he gritted his teeth together. Here they were running around following a trail of breadcrumbs while he ran around committing atrocities. They were essentially trapped in his game, and it bit right into Jack’s nerves.

  “They got him on CCTV?” he asked, looking up from the dirt between his feet.

  “Not for the last few minutes, apparently. He began in a frenzy and then disappeared just as quickly.”

  “I take it he was masked. No ID.”

  “None. Wearing a balaclava and entering the city in a Hackney carriage.”

>   “Was there a camera in it?”

  “No. He chose a taxi without one.”

  Jack glanced up at the heavens. It was a relatively clear day with a few wisps floating in the blue. Oxford Street would have been full to the brim. Basically, fish in a barrel.

  Poor souls, Jack said to himself. What wrong have they done him? With any luck, he’ll bump into the boys from tactical. Hopefully, he’ll get his wish and die in a hail of bullets and we’ll unmask the bastard while he lays stone cold on the slab. Leave it to the newspapers to rake over his life posthumously and leave Robert Kline to rot in his prison cell. Let the game end with a bullet through the brain.

  “We better go see her,” Alice said.

  Jack sighed and they both walked off. For now, they’d have to play.

  The gate had been kicked in years ago and flapped on a set of rusty hinges. Detritus overhung the narrow pathway and they had to keep tight to the gray, broken down fence. A rotten mattress leaned against a couch and Jack had to perform a type of sideways limbo dance to get around it.

  On the doorstep, they found a cat’s litter tray where the ratio of fecal matter to litter was seriously dominated by the former. When Alice knocked on the door, a cat bounced down from the sprawling rubbish and rubbed up against Jack’s leg. He leaned down and stroked the tabby, but no sooner had he rubbed the cat’s flank than it made a sharp movement and abruptly bit his finger.

  “Ah! Little shit!” he exclaimed, standing sharply.

  The cat continued to meander around his leg and he was quick to kick it back towards the rubbish. The scraggly tabby snarled at him and darted off when he stamped his foot. At that moment, the door opened behind him and out popped an old face that looked like some mottled growth on the trunk of an oak tree as opposed to a human woman. The barnacled face was almost completely red, except for where it was deep purple. The nose looked like a growth rather than an organ and her bloated lips were almost blue. The bulging eyes studied the detectives under a nest of greasy, gray twine.

  “Who’re you?” she growled through a mouthful of brown and broken teeth.

  Alice and Jack held out their identifications.

  “DI Newman,” Alice said, “and this is DS Sheridan. You might remember him?”

  She cocked a beady eye at Jack. It studied him with absolute suspicion. Or perhaps her mottled face was merely fixed like that.

  “No,” she grunted.

  “We’ll do this inside,” Alice said, pushing past the woman at the door.

  She regretted the decision almost immediately. The place was filled with three things; cats, rubbish, and a thick stench you could taste. She’d boiled fish at some point. Possibly last year, and a lot of it by the smell. It appeared some of it was still there, haunting the place through the sense of smell. Other smells existed within the realms of that dark, dingy and cramped habitat. A sharp odor rose from the damp carpet. Cat’s piss, the detectives acknowledged. It was strong enough to burn their eyes.

  Jack went to take his shoes off, but the old woman told him not to bother. She led them through a dimly lit hallway to the lounge. All the curtains were closed and the only light that existed was from a low-wattage bulb that hung from the ceiling and glowed a sickly orange. The old woman didn’t offer them a cup of tea and they were glad. When they entered the lounge, they found it stuffed with dirty dishes and every side had something hideous growing out of it. On a dusty bureau with its door hanging off, a group of cats were busy with their noses in some open sardine tins, licking what was left—most likely only the memory of the fish that had previously inhabited it. Beneath their feet, it was just as bad. There used to be a pattern on the carpet, but it was so distorted with a layer of grime that it was now like looking at it through a cataract. The couch had no cushions and was covered in cats, the arms of it ripped to pieces by their claws. She offered them instead two wooden chairs, which they took. She placed herself in a chair covered in a blanket and stared across the dim room at them, while her dirt-stained fingers lifted a tobacco tin from the armrest. Popping a thin rollie in her mouth, she lit it and gawped through the smoke with unintelligent eyes.

  “What can you tell us about David Burke’s birth?” Alice asked her.

  “Who’s that?” she snapped back.

  “Your grandson.”

  “Oh. Him. I knew she’d named him somethin’. Didn’t know it were Burke. Heck,” she grunted a gentle cackle, “I’d forgotten his name were even David.”

  “Do you know who his father is?”

  “No. ’Fraid not.”

  “But she had boyfriends, surely.”

  “I wouldn’t know. See, the little bitch ran away when she were fourteen an’ I never see her again till she turn up out the blue one night. Looked like a ghost, she did. Then I sees the lump out the front of her. Bun in the oven. She were sick an’ I put her to bed. That night, she had the baby. Went into labor an’ we had it in three hours.”

  “Why’d you never go to the hospital?”

  “She wouldn’t let it. I wanted to call an ambulance an’ she screamed blue bleedin’ murder.”

  “Do you know where she was while she was away?” Jack asked.

  He gazed into the old woman’s eyes as he placed a smoke between his own lips and lit it. The old woman narrowed them at him. He sensed that her old, whiskey-soaked brain was beginning to recall him and the grilling he’d put her through, before Col had taken over and become her best friend.

  “The best I know,” Pauline Chalmers said, “is that she were working—if you know what I mean by work.”

  “You think that’s where she got pregnant?” Alice asked.

  “Most likely. Later on, she claimed it were that bloke she married. Tommy somethin’ or other. Said it were his kid. Made sense. He looked like the sort of flash bastard to go with little girls. But then he found it weren’t his. Kicked her out. Serve her right.”

  “You don’t have a very good relationship with your daughter?” Jack suggested.

  “No, I don’t,” the old woman snapped back. “She’s been nothin’ but trouble since the day she fell outta me. Caused all sort of mischief.”

  “Like what?”

  Pauline Chalmers tugged hard on her cigarette and then suddenly shook with a barrage of coughs for the next minute. She was like an old engine trying to start and failing. Jack half expected a cloud of black soot to splutter out of her mouth at any moment.

  When she’d settled herself, the engine ticking over again, the old woman said, “Let’s just say I weren’t much of a mother and she weren’t much of a daughter. I weren’t supposed to have kids. I was havin’ too good of a time on me own when she came along. I weren’t young. Already in the middle of me thirties, but I was havin’ fun. When she came along, I weren’t willin’ to stop. So in that way, she were trouble from the start.”

  “At least you’re honest,” Jack remarked in a sardonic tone.

  “Only way to be.”

  “Then being as you’re so honest,” Jack went on, “my partner asked you earlier if you recognized me. You said no. But I think you do. So tell me why?”

  She went to take in a pull of her smoke but it had gone out. She fetched the lighter from the armrest, lit it and tugged hard, the amber cherry glowing in the dim room.

  “I know you,” she said, squinting her beady eyes through the roil of blue smoke that escaped her lips, “but I don’t remember much about you. Your old partner I do, though. He had a soft face.”

  “You told him things about Robert Kline, didn’t you?”

  The old woman lurched forward and spat on the floor.

  “Don’t you ever mention that man’s name in this house,” she snarled.

  Even the cats became unsettled, one of them jumping down from a cabinet and hissing at another, before several bolted from the room.

  “I take it you two don’t stay in touch,” Jack put to her.

  “No. That man ruined my life. I lost my job, friends, everything. Even my local wo
uldn’t serve me afterwards. I had to move down here to south London to get away from it. I became a recluse. But I guess I got what I deserved.”

  “Tell us about Robert Kline’s relationship with your daughter,” Alice put to the old woman.

  Pauline Chalmers’ eyes glinted and an evil look thrust her perpetually frowning mug into an odd pout. She looked at Alice as though she would dive off her chair and throttle the detective any second.

  “He were my fella and she were my daughter,” the old woman said in a spiteful tone. “Ain’t nothin’ more to it.”

  “Is that one of the things you told my partner back in ’95?” Jack asked her.

  The dark look turned sharply on him.

  “Get out!” she snapped.

  “Did Robert Kline rape Carolyn?” Jack put to her.

  “Get out!”

  “Is he the father?”

  “Leave me alone!” She lurched even further forward. The face had changed. It was the imploring look of a child. Tears welling in her milky eyes.

  “You let him do that?” Jack wanted to know.

  “Please!” She threw her head into her hands and began sobbing. It would have been pitiful if it hadn’t been so pathetic.

  The detectives got up.

  “Here’s my card,” Alice said, taking one from her wallet and placing it on the armrest of Pauline’s chair.

  With that, they left the old woman to her cats and her self-pity.

  80

  They’d established a mile wide perimeter around Oxford Street with the tube station at its center. Teams of armed men in tactical uniform swept through the place, marching along like ants and separating at each junction. At the glass fronts of buildings, they saw people peeking out from within, either under tables or hiding behind shelves and displays.

  The last CCTV images they had of the killer were him chasing people into the front of the Langham Hotel at the northern end of Regent Street, having moved up the busy road, killing anyone he came across. He’d entered the hotel and that was the last they had of him.