Nether Street

Nether Street is a residential street on the southern edge of Lichgate, distinguished by the old stone houses lining its sidewalk and by its position at the base of the hill beneath the town. Burke Devore first studies it on a map while trying not to attract attention; later, it becomes the route on which he encounters Everett Boyd Dynes and the site of the killing he had planned to carry out elsewhere. The street’s familiar, settled appearance gives way to the danger imposed on it by Burke’s pursuit.

Location and Orientation

Burke reaches Lichgate after one in the afternoon and buys a local map at a card shop after lunch at the Red Brick Cafe. He does not ask for directions to Nether Street, reasoning that a stranger asking about the street shortly before a murder there could be remembered and described by witnesses. Instead, he studies the map himself. The name initially suggests to him a street alongside the river, but it actually follows the town’s southern boundary eastward toward the river. When he drives there, he sees why it is called Nether Street: the town is built on a hill that slopes down to the south, and the street runs along the hill’s base.

The location is neither suburban nor rural. It is part of the town itself, in a residential district of substantial, mostly century-old houses. Nether Street’s course and its name thus reflect the land beneath Lichgate rather than a position beside the river. Burke’s map-reading and subsequent drive establish the street as a real, traversable route, not merely a name attached to his intended crime.

Houses and Neighborhood

The houses are wide, two-story structures, mostly built of native stone on small plots. Their generous porches and steep A-shaped roofs suit the heavy winter snow. Burke connects their age and sturdiness to the period when the factory was still operating. In his account, the neighborhood would once have housed factory managers, shopkeepers, and dentists: people with secure, comfortable lives who could have believed their world stable rather than transitional. That history is Burke’s interpretation of the streetscape, but it makes the houses evidence of an older local order whose confidence has not survived unchanged.

At number 264, he sees a house like its neighbors, broad, solid, and made of stone. The homes here do not generally have roadside mailboxes; mail is delivered through slots in front doors or into small iron boxes beside the doors, and the mail carrier walks along the curb. A sidewalk carries the ordinary life of the block as well as its deliveries: during Burke’s first pass, a father is teaching his frightened but willing daughter to ride a two-wheeler. The moment makes Burke briefly wonder whether the child could be Dynes’s daughter, but Dynes’s résumé says he has three nearly grown children, so the sight does not fit that description.

Most houses have detached garages, added decades after the houses themselves were built. Some residents have built enclosed passageways between house and garage to cope with the severe winters. These later additions register practical adaptation without changing the district’s older, solid character. The street presents itself as lived-in and ordinary, a place shaped by weather, work, and domestic routines rather than by the violence Burke brings to it.

Burke’s Pursuit on the Street

Burke’s plan is to kill Dynes outside a diner. He intends to switch off his headlights in the parking lot, wait near the entrance, and shoot from his car when Dynes comes down the brick steps. But on a rainy day, as Burke drives north toward Lichgate, he reaches the traffic light at Nether Street shortly before noon and sees Dynes crossing the intersection in a windbreaker and cloth cap. Dynes has left the diner early, and the intended encounter at its entrance has already passed.

Dynes is now walking down Nether Street toward home, briskly moving along the right side past parked cars, with three blocks still to go. The rain is heavy, the road quiet, and the traffic light remains red in front of Burke. He switches off his headlights and turns onto the street when the light changes. The shift in setting turns a carefully imagined attack into an improvised pursuit through an exposed residential area. Nether Street’s curb, sidewalk, parked cars, and houses are no longer details in a map or a neighborhood survey; they become the immediate surroundings of Burke’s decision.

The Killing and the Street’s Significance

After striking Dynes with his vehicle, Burke sees him in the headlights, crumpled on the pavement and moving weakly. Burke tells himself that it has to stop, shifts into drive, and runs over Dynes’s head with the car’s left tires. He then stops and shifts into reverse; in the three mirrors, Dynes does not move. The attack takes place in the rain on the street where Dynes had been walking home, turning an ordinary route between the diner and his house into the scene of his death.

Nether Street matters both as a specific physical setting and as a contrast. Its stone houses, mail slots, sidewalks, and family routines embody continuity and domestic security; Burke’s arrival with a concealed plan makes that same environment a place of sudden violence. His initial concern about being remembered as the stranger asking directions also makes the street part of his effort to control what others might see and recall. Yet the killing does not remain a clean, distant plan: on Nether Street, the rain, the parked cars, and the body on the pavement become concrete circumstances he must confront. He returns to the motel weeping and barely able to drive, a consequence that sharply contrasts with the detached efficiency he had imagined.