Eyes of the Wicked

by Adam J. Wright

  “Hi,” he said. “I’m Tony, a psychologist. I was wondering if I could speak to Abigail.”

  Mr Newton shrugged. “She hasn’t spoken a word to us, so I don’t see why she’d tell you anything, but you’re welcome to try.”

  “If it’s all right with Abigail, of course,” Tony said, turning to the dark-haired girl who regarded him with inquisitive eyes. At least he saw was no fear there, which was positive.

  She looked him up and down and gave him a barely imperceptible nod.

  “Would you like to sit down?” he asked her, indicating a chair by the bed.

  Abigail shook her head.

  “Okay, that’s fine. Do you mind if I sit down? I hate hospitals.”

  She smiled.

  Tony dropped into the chair, feeling much more secure now that he was sitting than he had done when he was on his feet. “Okay,” he said, taking off his beanie and unzipping his coat. He puffed out his cheeks. “It’s very warm in here.”

  “They never turn the heating off and the windows don’t open,” Mrs Newton said.

  “A wonderful breeding ground for bugs and germs,” he said. Turning his attention to Abigail, he said, “Do you know that I had to force myself to come inside this building? In fact, if my colleague outside the door there hadn’t distracted me, I probably wouldn’t be here at all.”

  He wondered again if Ryan’s distraction tactics had been deliberate.

  “Well, that may not be strictly true,” Tony admitted. “I wanted to speak to you so badly that I probably would have overcome my fear on my own. But talking to my friend made it much easier. It helped me do something I was afraid of.”

  He pulled his jacket off awkwardly and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “I suppose you’re wondering why I’m afraid of hospitals.”

  Abigail said nothing but watched him intently.

  “A couple of years ago,” he said, “the Canadian Government contacted me. They wanted me to help them find a very bad man. So I went all the way to Canada. Have you ever been to Canada?”

  She shook her head.

  “Well, it’s a long way from here. It takes eight hours to get there on a plane. And it’s very cold. At least it was when I was there. Anyway, I worked with the police there to track this man who had been doing terrible things to people in places that were all situated around a lake called Lake Erie. Lake Erie is huge. It’s one of the Great Lakes and its surface area is almost ten thousand square miles.”

  He caught himself going off on a tangent and said, “Anyway, it’s big. So as well as physically searching for this guy, the police were also trying to find him by using psychology, which is my field of expertise. I tried to put myself in his shoes so I could predict what he was going to do next. We didn’t have much luck. I was certain I knew a lot about the person we were looking for but there were no leads so there was no one for me to match against my profile.”

  He took a deep breath before continuing. “One day I hired a Jeep Wrangler and went for a long drive. I had a few days off and I needed some time to think. Two girls were missing, and I was trying to work out how I could help the police get them back to their families. So I drove around for a while and stayed in some cheap motels and tried to get inside the head of this bad guy we were chasing.”

  The scar in his side felt suddenly itchy but Tony resisted the urge to scratch it. He realised his hands were gripping the arms of the chair so tightly that his knuckles had gone white. “I came to a small town called Lakeshore,” he said. “Lakeshore, as the name implies, is on the shore of a lake. Lake St Clair, which is much smaller than Lake Erie. Anyway, I stopped for petrol—or gas, as they call it over there—and as I was paying for it, a sudden chill came over me. It was like my brain was sounding an alarm in my head, telling me to get out of there. I looked at the guy who was serving me and he looked at me and as our eyes met, I knew. It was him. The man we were looking for was right here in front of me, handing me my change.”

  As he remembered those eyes looking at him across the gas station counter—and the feeling that they were reaching into his soul—he gripped the chair even tighter. “I should have called my police colleagues but what could I tell them? I met a guy at a gas station who I thought was the Lake Erie Ripper? No, that wouldn’t bring them to Lakeshore. They’d already told me that I was overworked and getting too close to the case; that was why they’d given me those days off in the first place. So if I called them and said I’d bumped into the Ripper, they’d just think I was being paranoid or delusional.”

  That was an understatement. The Canadian police had thought him a bit eccentric from the moment they’d met him. He didn’t blame them; he was a bit eccentric. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t do his job. As time passed, though, and he became embroiled in the Lake Erie Ripper’s thought processes, some of the officers he worked with amended their assessment of him from eccentric to downright weird.

  He forced himself to release his grip on the chair. “So I got back in the Jeep and drove it a few yards down the street. Then I sat there and waited. I needed to know where this man lived, and the only way I could do that was by following him home. If I was right, you see, and he had those two missing girls hidden away somewhere, the only way I was going to find them was by finding out where his house was.”

  “Is this relevant?” Mr Newton asked.

  Tony nodded. “Yes, it is.”

  “I don’t see how—“

  “When he came out of the gas station, it was getting dark,” Tony said, cutting Newton off. He focused all of his attention on Abigail, who was listening with interest.

  “He got into a beat-up old car and drove home,” Tony told her. “I followed. I waited outside his house for half an hour after he went inside, wondering if the missing girls were in there. Finally, I couldn’t stand waiting there and not doing anything any longer. I got out of the car and crept up to the house. As I got closer, I noticed that the front door had been left open. So I went inside.”

  He took a deep breath as he felt an anxious tightness in his chest. The next part of the story—what happened after he entered the house—was the stuff of nightmares. He wasn’t going to recount that now, to Abigail. What was important was that she realised that, like her, he was a survivor.

  “He was the Lake Erie Ripper after all,” he said, his voice breaking as he tried to keep his emotions in check. “When I’d recognised him in the gas station, he’d recognised me as well. He knew I’d followed him home. And he’d left the door open to lure me inside.”

  Abigail’s eyes widened.

  “What happened next is something I can never forget, no matter how much I’d like to. But I won’t go into that now,” he added when he saw Mr Newton’s alarmed face. Despite what Abigail’s father feared, Tony wasn’t about to add to his daughter’s mental anguish by telling her what happened in that house.

  “Suffice to say, I ended up in hospital,” he said. “That’s why I hate the places; they remind me of that time. A time in my life when I was utterly broken.”

  He leaned towards her and said, “The doctors and nurses wanted me to tell them what had happened but for a long time, I wouldn’t speak of it. I just wanted to lock it all away. I thought that if I pushed it deep down inside myself, it would be as if it had never happened.”

  He paused, remembering his refusal to speak about what had happened in the Ripper’s house. He’d frustrated all of the medical professionals who were trying to help him come to terms with the traumatic event but at the time, it had seemed more important for him to refuse to acknowledge that the event had happened at all.

  “The thing is, I was wrong. Keeping it all inside of me just meant it had a place to fester and grow. My mental state got worse. I couldn’t sleep. The memories, unspoken, were becoming more and more overwhelming. It wasn’t until I finally spoke aloud what had happened in that house that the memories lost their power over me.”

  He shrugged. “Abigail, I’m not telling you that y
ou have to speak to me right now. Or ever. You might feel that you can only tell your mum about what happened. Or your dad. And that could be some time from now. But I just want to say that when you’re a survivor, like we both are, then it seems easier to try and forget everything that happened to you. But it’s acknowledging that it happened and getting on with your life that makes you a true survivor.”

  He got to his feet and smiled at her. “I’m not going to try and force you to say anything.” He fished in his inside pocket and found one of his business cards. “But if you ever feel that you want to talk to a fellow survivor, this is my number.”

  He handed her the card and she stared down at it in her hand.

  “Right,” Tony said. “I’d better get back. I hope you all have a safe journey home.”

  Nodding to Abigail’s parents, he turned to the door.

  “He told me about his sister,” Abigail said.

  Tony turned back to her, relief making him smile.

  Mrs Newton’s hand flew to her mouth and tears sprang into her eyes. “Abigail!”

  “He told me about his sister,” Abigail repeated, looking up at Tony. “He told me lots of stories.”

  Tony knelt in front of her and said, “Tell me all about them.”

  Chapter Twenty

  “He called me Ruth,” Abigail said. She was sitting on the bed now and Tony was back in the chair. Mr and Mrs Newton stood by the window, watching their daughter with relief on their faces. Tony wondered if they’d believed Abigail might never speak again.

  He wished he had a paper and a pen to take notes, but he wasn’t going to interrupt the girl sitting in front of him. He wasn’t even going to get his phone out of his pocket and find the voice recorder app on it. His full attention was directed at Abigail. She was in a flow state and he didn’t want to break it by distracting her.

  “Ruth was his sister’s name,” she said.

  Tony let Abigail tell her story her own way. Another interviewer might interrupt at this point and ask questions like, “Where did he keep you? What did he look like?” or “Describe the room you were in.” Tony did none of that. Instead, he nodded slightly, encouraging Abigail to continue.

  “It was pitch black. Somewhere underground. There were lights on the walls, but they were dim, and they kept going off. I was there on my own for a long time. Sometimes, he’d visit me in the dark and when he did, he kept saying things had gone wrong, but he was going to make them right again. I didn’t know what he meant by that, so I stayed quiet.”

  “That’s good,” Mr Newton said. “You did the right thing.”

  Tony held a hand up and shot him a look that told him to keep quiet.

  “Sometimes, he seemed to know I wasn’t Ruth,” Abigail continued. “That was when he told me that Ruth was his sister and his mother’s name was Mary. He said Mary hated Ruth and she was the reason his sister was dead. He was going to get revenge.”

  She paused and looked down at the ground. “He…killed someone. Right in front of me.” She didn’t lift her head. Tears dropped from her face onto the tiled floor.

  Mrs Newton made a move towards her daughter but Tony lifted a finger, signalling for her to wait. He reached out and gently placed a hand on Abigail’s shoulder.

  “He said there was something he wanted me to see but he had to tie me up to make sure I didn’t run away. He tied my hands and climbed up a ladder that led to a hatch where I could see the night sky. He told me to climb up as well. He said he had a shotgun and if I tried to run away, he’d use it. I climbed up and then I was in a big open area with a few trees. There was a quad bike with a trailer. I couldn’t see his face because he had a baseball cap on, and a scarf pulled up over his mouth and nose. He told me to get in the trailer, and when I did, he tied the bindings on my hand to a metal bracket on the side of the trailer. Then he took me to a house.”

  Tony wanted to stop her and make her describe more details. She couldn’t see his face but what colour were his eyes? Did the baseball cap have any kind of logo on it? What did the house look like? He knew he couldn’t ask any of these things yet. Abigail had to get the story out in broad terms; the details could come later.

  “There was a basement in the house,” she said. “And in the basement, there was a lady tied to a chair. The lady whose face was on the News. He made me kneel on the floor in front of her. There was a gag in her mouth so she couldn’t speak. Her eyes were wild, terrified. The man walked behind her and picked up something from a shelf. I think it was a hammer. Then he said, “Look, Ruth, I’m going to do what you wanted me to do. I can do it. I can.” And then he…he…” She put her hands to her face and wept. “He killed her,” she managed between sobs.

  The flow state was broken. Abigail had purged herself of some of the emotions tied up with seeing another human being killed.

  Tony looked at Mrs Newton and nodded. She went to her daughter and held her in her arms.

  “Abigail,” Tony said as gently as he could. “Did he only use the hammer? Did he use anything else as well?”

  Abigail shook her head.

  “Not a knife?”

  “No,” she said.

  “What happened after that?”

  “He took me back to the underground place and untied me. He was talking under his breath the whole time, but I couldn’t tell what he was saying.”

  “Do you want to tell me how you escaped?”

  “A long time passed. He didn’t come to the underground room except to bring me food and water. Then, one night, he opened the hatch and said, “Come on, Ruth, we’re going to our special place.” I had no idea what he was talking about, so I stayed in the dark, frightened to go up.

  He shouted at me until I climbed up the ladder. This time, he didn’t tie my hands. I got into the trailer and he drove us back to the house. I thought it was my turn to be tied to the chair in the basement, but we didn’t go into the house. Instead, he put me in a van. I think it was the same van I’d been in the back of when he first took me. But this time, I was in the passenger seat.”

  “Was he wearing the scarf over his face?” Tony asked.

  She shook her head slowly. “That scared me the most. Something about him had changed. Before, when he wore the scarf, I felt like he wasn’t letting me see his face because he was planning to let me go. But when we were in the van, I knew he was going to kill me.”

  Tony wasn’t going to ask for a description at this moment; that could come later. “Did he say anything to you?”

  “He was rambling again. He kept repeating, “This is how it should have been,” over and over. He said other things as well, but I couldn’t hear them. He was talking to himself, not to me. I knew I had to get out of the van, that this was my last chance. We seemed to be in the middle of nowhere, but I thought that if I could run into the dark, I could hide, and he might not find me. But we were going too fast for me to jump out of the van.”

  She let out a long sigh. “Then, in the headlights, I saw a rabbit on the road. It was just sitting there. I thought he’d speed up and try to kill it, but he hit the brakes and the van slowed down to an almost stop. The rabbit leapt into the darkness at the side of the road and at the same time, I pushed the door open and jumped. He tried to grab me, but he was too late. I landed in the grass and ran as fast as I could.

  I heard him calling me…or calling Ruth, anyway…but I kept going. After a few minutes, he drove away. I was cold and I knew I couldn’t stay out on the moors for long or I’d freeze to death. So I crept back to the road but stayed out of sight in case he came back. Then I saw a car coming and I ran out in front of it. There were two nice people inside and they helped me.” She began to cry again, burying her face against her mother’s chest.

  Tony knew he’d got as much information as he was going to get out of Abigail today. She’d taken the first step and told her story. She’d find it easier to tell it again later, hopefully with more details.

  “Abigail, you’ve been amazing,” he said.
“Thank you for talking to me.”

  He stood up and went over to Mr Newton, who was still standing by the window. “Mr Newton, Abigail is making great progress but taking her home today might not be the best idea.”

  Mr Newton sighed. “Well, we’re not staying in this hospital a moment longer, but I suppose we can find a hotel. It’s not like we can drive home in this, anyway.” He waved his hand at the window.

  Tony looked outside. The snow was coming down so thick and fast, he could barely see the car park.

  He gave Newton the same business card he’d given Abigail. “If any of you need to talk to me, my number is on there.”

  He turned to Abigail and her mother. “I’ll see you soon, Abigail. You’ve done brilliantly today. Thank you.”

  Tony left the room and found Ryan leaning against the wall in the corridor, waiting for him.

  “You were in there a while, Doc,” the DC said.

  “She told me what happened to her,” Tony said.

  Ryan’s eyes widened. “Wow, you must be as good as they say you are.”

  “As good as who says I am?” Tony asked as they made their way along the corridor to the lifts.

  “I don’t know,” Ryan said, shrugging. “Just a figure of speech.”

  Tony wasn’t convinced by that explanation. As they got into the lift, he said, “What was all that about earlier? When we arrived you wouldn’t stop talking. What were you up to?”

  “I don’t know what you mean. I wasn’t up to anything. I’m a friendly guy. I talk a lot.”

  “It seemed like more than that to me.”

  “Just banter, doc.”

  Still unconvinced, Tony remained silent during the short lift ride to the ground floor. There was more to DC Tom Ryan than met the eye, that much was certain.

  “So what’s our next move?” Ryan asked as the lift doors opened and they stepped out into the foyer. “Did the girl tell you anything useful?”

  “Plenty,” Tony said, “but nothing that’s going to have us banging on anyone’s door today. She’s going to need time to get all the details out. At least they’re not going home today. They’ve decided to stay.”