Eyes of the Wicked

by Adam J. Wright

  That conjured a gruesome image up in Dani’s mind. Would anyone really ride a motorbike with a dead person strapped to them? It was possible, but not likely. And if Tanya had been tied to the killer, there’d have been a lot more DNA and particulate evidence.

  “Guv, there’s a track!” Matt said, pointing at the muddy stream bank. In the frozen soil, the edge of a tyre tread was clearly visible.

  “Looks like he tried to stay in the water but veered off course a little here,” she said. Taking her phone from her pocket, she took a photo of the tread mark and then called Ray Rickman.

  When he answered, she said, “We need a SOCO team at Brambleberry Farm. On the moors behind the barn. We’ve got a tyre track.”

  “All right,” Rickman said. “Give me an hour to get some people together and I’ll meet you down there.”

  Dani hung up. She and Matt needed to explore further upstream in case there were any more tracks, but she didn’t want to lose the location of this one. She moved a few feet away from the stream and kicked a large “X” in the snow with her boots.

  Then they moved on, following the stream for at least another quarter of a mile without seeing any other sign—other than the broken ice—that a vehicle had come this way.

  Moving through the frozen, snowy landscape was tough. There was absolutely no way Tanya’s body had been carried very far in these conditions. The vehicle that had left the track in the frozen mud had to belong to the killer.

  The difficult conditions on the moors also meant that Abigail couldn’t have gone far on foot either, especially considering the fact that she’d been barefoot when the Woods had found her. There was no way she’d escaped from captivity and then run for miles over the moors to arrive at the road. She’d travelled to that location by some other means.

  She rang Battle.

  “Got anything for me?” he asked gruffly when he answered.

  “We’ve found a tyre track in a stream behind Brambleberry Farm. SOCO are on their way. But that’s not why I’m calling. There’s no way Abigail got to your location by walking over the moors. I think she might have jumped from a vehicle.”

  “All right,” he said. “I’m listening.”

  “Melissa and Jeff Wood assumed that Abigail came from the moors and ran into the road. We assumed the same thing. But what if she’d been on the road a few moments before, in a vehicle? She jumps from it and runs onto the moors. Assuming the killer is driving, he pulls over and tries to find her. He can’t. And he can’t draw a lot of attention to himself or his vehicle, so he gets back in and drives away. Abigail waits until she sees a car coming, maybe one that has a couple in it because that seems safer, and then she runs out in front of it and gets in.”

  There was a silence on the line for a moment, then Battle said, “It makes more sense than her running for miles over the moors in the dead of winter, I’ll give you that. So this search we’re conducting is pointless. Our man was never here, other than in a car on the road.”

  “It seems to be the most likely explanation,” she said.

  Battle sighed. “We haven’t found anything out here anyway. I’m going to call it a day and send everyone home. See you back at headquarters.”

  “Okay, guv.” She hung up and slid the phone into her coat pocket.

  “I think you’re right,” Matt said. “There’s no way Abigail travelled far on foot.”

  In her head, Dani created a mental timeline of the night of December 21st and the morning of the 22nd. Assuming Abigail hadn’t spent too long on the moors before running in front of the Woods’ Volvo, the killer had been driving in that area at around ten o’ clock at night. Where was he going to or coming from? Why did he have Abigail in the vehicle with him?

  Sheila Clifton heard the hammering in her barn at around 6:30 the following morning. So between 10 p.m. on the night of the 21st and 6:30 a.m. on the morning of the 22nd, the killer had driven some sort of vehicle along this frozen stream, transporting Tanya Ward’s body to the barn. That was a large window of time and did nothing to narrow down his likely location.

  Tanya must have already been dead by 10 p.m. on the 21st, when the killer was on the road with Abigail, because her blood was all over the nightgown Abigail was wearing when the Woods picked her up.

  “Why was she in the car with him?” she asked Matt. “Any ideas? He’d already killed Tanya, so where was he taking Abigail?”

  Matt shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine, guv.”

  “He took a big risk, transporting her like that. A risk that didn’t pay off in the end because she escaped. Whatever he was up to, it must have been something important.”

  “Who knows how his mind works?” Matt asked. Then he grinned and added, “Probably not that psychologist.”

  “You don’t rate forensic psychology as a useful field in understanding criminals?” she asked. Personally, she still wasn’t sure what to make of Tony Sheridan, but she’d worked with a helpful psychologist on the snow killer case and knew that behavioural investigation could be useful.

  Matt shrugged. “Well, I don’t know, guv. I prefer something solid, like that tyre track. I’m not sure how helpful understanding the criminal’s brain is, if it’s not going to lead us to his address.”

  Dani sighed and looked over the windswept moors. A killer was out there somewhere. He’d killed at least one woman that they knew of and, if Sheridan was correct, would strike again.

  The evidence they had was scant and didn’t point the finger at anyone. Never mind a list of likely suspects; they didn’t even have a single name.

  “At this point, Matt,” she said. “I’ll take all the help I can get.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  “Samuel, I’m going out,” his mother said. “You get to bed at your normal time. Don’t wait up for me.”

  He turned from the kitchen sink, where he’d been washing the supper dishes. The meal had consisted of bread and some sort of stew his mother had made. She was a terrible cook.

  He couldn’t wait until tomorrow when he’d be at work and would get his meals from service stations, garages, and fast food restaurants. Even food that was made mostly by machines and mass-produced tasted better than his mother’s home cooking.

  She stood by the front door with her going-out clothes on: a long dark blue skirt, high heels, and a colourful low-cut jumper. Her hair was freshly washed, and she wore it down. It reached to well below her shoulders. Her face was heavily made up.

  It was almost as if she were a totally different person to the white-robed woman who wore no makeup and tied her hair back when she was at home.

  This get up was a lure to attract men, in the same way a flower’s colourful petals entice bees to pollen.

  “How do I look?” she asked, grinning inanely.

  “Great,” he lied. He hated her even more when she dressed like this because he knew what she was going to be doing while she was out. Those colourful petals would be falling to the floor of some seedy hotel room somewhere while the latest man she’d picked up watched and waited.

  Samuel was surprised she was going out with the bump in her belly so obvious. Maybe some men were into that kind of thing.

  She took her coat from the hook near the door and leaned forward, offering her cheek to him. “Come and give me a kiss goodbye, then.”

  He sighed, went over to her and leaned toward the offered cheek.

  “Don’t smudge my makeup,” she said.

  He kissed her perfunctorily, the chemical taste of her foundation repulsive on his lips.

  “Bye,” she said, opening the door and going out to her car, a cherry red Nissan. He waited at the door and watched her drive away before closing it and going back into the house.

  He finished the dishes and dried his hands on the tea towel before going to the back door and putting on his coat, boots, and gloves. He left the house and crossed the cold yard to the outbuilding where his ATV quad bike waited.

  He unhooked the trailer and got onto
the bike, starting the engine. It thrummed beneath him, the vibrations rising through his legs and into his body. Samuel put on the black safety helmet he always wore when riding the bike and pushed the visor down. He gunned the engine and rode out of the building, turning the handlebars towards the back of the yard.

  He approached the barn where the hens were kept and rode past it. He glanced at the rock behind the barn that marked Ruth’s grave, but he didn’t stop. Tonight, he was going further than that.

  The ATV bumped over the frozen ground, churning through the snow with no problem. Samuel surveyed the landscape around him. He was alone. Other than the distant lights of faraway villages, there were no signs of life out here. He could be the last person alive on the planet. He wouldn’t mind that. He wouldn’t mind that at all.

  In the distance, he saw his destination, a small, insignificant looking dark shape against the snow. Some time ago, he’d considered throwing a camouflage net over it to hide it even better—he’d seen such nets on an army surplus site on the Internet—but the truth was that it was hidden well enough already. And this land belonged to the farm and was fenced off, so members of the red sock brigade weren’t going to stumble across it during their rambles over the countryside.

  He didn’t like ramblers. In the Summer, they seemed to be everywhere, like an army of ants marching nowhere in particular with their ridiculous ski poles, wearing rucksacks that looked like they were made for a polar expedition rather than a stroll over the moors.

  He arrived at this destination and cut the ATV’s engine.

  Removing his helmet and checking the landscape around him again, he went over to the waist high, green-painted, metallic structure and removed his gloves to open the combination padlock that secured the hatch.

  When the padlock was unlocked, he removed it and carefully opened the metal hatch to reveal a ladder that descended into darkness.

  Samuel called this place The Bunker. The land upon which it had been built had been leased to the government in the 50s by his grandfather and they’d built this installation, along with hundreds of others, in case of a nuclear attack by the Russians. It had been a waste of government money. Eventually, the lease had run out and the land on which the Bunker had been built had been returned to the farm.

  The installation may have been useless as far as the government was concerned but Samuel had found a use for it.

  A torch hung from a nail just inside the hatch. He unhooked it and switched it on, casting the beam down the shaft to the room below. The air smelled stale, despite a vent that was built into the metal structure and another, smaller vent that projected through the ground some distance away.

  Samuel supposed that having the girl live here for three weeks was bound to make the place smell. Tanya had been here for a short while as well. He was glad he’d decided to kill her somewhere else and not in the bunker because if he’d done it here, the smell would have been unbearable.

  He climbed part way down the ladder and closed the hatch before descending the rest of the way to the subterranean room.

  He assumed that in the 50s, when the bunker had been built, there must have been furnishing down here and maybe even electricity provided by a generator. The government had stripped the bunker of those things when the lease had run out and now there was nothing more down here than a large space and an archway that led to a chemical toilet. The lighting was provided by battery powered LED lights fixed to the walls

  Samuel clicked one on and turned the torch off. The light cast by the wall light was weak, barely illuminating the sleeping bags on the floor at the far end of the room.

  He remembered how Abigail had begged to be let out of here. He supposed he couldn’t blame her for that; three weeks in an underground room would make anyone desperate to see the sun again. He’d underestimated her, though. Three weeks down here hadn’t made her quite as pliable as he’d thought it would and when he was taking her on her final journey, believing that her spirit had been broken and therefore not taking the precautions he should have taken if he was being sensible, she’d escaped.

  That had hurt his feelings. He’d looked after her every day for those three weeks and spent time with her, sitting in the darkness with her, telling her about Ruth. At times, he’d believed she was Ruth.

  He should have realised his mistake when she reacted the way she did to the woman’s death. That wasn’t how Ruth would have reacted.

  And then, when he was so close to putting right the wrongs of the past, she’d jumped from the van. He still found that hard to believe. One minute, he’d been driving along the road, humming along with the radio, happy that everything was going to be okay, and the next, she was gone.

  He pulled over and searched frantically for her, calling into the night for her to come back, but she vanished so completely that he wondered if she’d existed at all. Maybe he wasn’t here on the moors calling for her in the dead of night but was actually still sitting in his van on that country road in Derbyshire and the past three weeks had been nothing more than a dream. He’d had episodes like this before.

  If the girl hadn’t existed, then neither had the woman.

  That had proved to be untrue when he got back home and found Tanya Ward’s body exactly where he’d left it.

  Realising that the last three weeks had happened, and he had to deal with it, he bundled the body onto the ATV’s trailer and drove it away. He’d been clever and had ridden along an icy stream as he got closer to the barn where he’d already decided he was going to leave Tanya. He’d seen enough cop shows to know that water washed evidence away.

  He grinned as he remembered the pose he’d left the woman in. How fitting. His mother thought she was a saint so what could be more appropriate than a crucifixion?

  He hit the LED light, plunging the bunker into darkness, and contemplated his next move. It was obvious to him now that everything had gone wrong because Abigail was no Ruth. The Devil had deceived him into believing she was.

  He would not be deceived again. Instead of waiting until he chanced upon a suitable girl, he was going to go looking for one. He wasn’t going to let the Devil put the wrong girl in his path again. He would search for the right girl to take, the right girl who would be just like Ruth.

  Finding a woman like his mother would be more difficult. Tanya had been chosen specifically. He’d chosen her a long time ago. He wasn’t going to wait that long again.

  No, he wasn’t going to wait that long at all.

  He turned the torch on and ascended the ladder. When he opened the hatch at the top, the crisp night air greeted him. He climbed out of the bunker, locked it with the combination padlock, and got back on the ATV.

  Leaving his helmet hanging on the handlebars, he rode back to the house with the cold wind blowing on his face and through his hair. He felt so alive.

  His mother often spoke about being born again and that was how he felt right now. As the bike thrummed beneath him and ploughed through the snow, spraying cold wet flakes onto his face, he formulated a plan.

  Tomorrow was Christmas Eve. He would be out in the van delivering people’s last-minute purchases and presents. And he would use the time to hunt for two presents for himself.

  A woman and a girl.

  Chapter Sixteen

  December 24th

  When the alarm on her bedside table chirped, Dani reached out from under the covers and turned it off before trying to drift off to sleep again. Today and tomorrow were her days off. She’d booked them months ago, when she’d thought Charlie would be home from Uni and they’d go shopping together in Newcastle.

  Now that Charlie was spending the holiday with her boyfriend’s family, a shopping trip was off the table, so Dani just wanted to sleep. She should have turned her alarm off last night before going to bed, but it had slipped her mind. She’d gone to bed thinking about the tyre track in the stream and a partial boot print that Ryan’s digging had revealed.

  She heard the dogs’ claws on the b
edroom floor and then two sets of paws pressing against the duvet. Barney and Jack knew her routine and as far as they were concerned, the alarm meant it was time to get up. They didn’t understand annual leave.

  Dani sat up in bed and smiled at her two companions. “You two think it’s time for breakfast, huh? Yes, I suppose you’re right.” She sat on the edge of the bed and slid her feet into her fur-lined slippers while the dogs roamed about the room agitatedly.

  “We’ll go for a long walk today” Dani promised as she made her way to the kitchen. She unlocked the dog door, but the German Shepherds remained in the kitchen; they wouldn’t go outside until they’d eaten. She filled their bowls with food and replenished their water dishes.

  While the dogs ate, she put the kettle on and spooned coffee into a mug Charlie had bought her that bore the slogan, You Have the Right to Remain Caffeinated.

  After pouring hot water into the mug and splashing some milk into it, she put a few spoons of porridge oats into a saucepan with some water, added a pinch of salt, and ignited the gas ring beneath it.

  While the porridge was simmering on the hob, she placed a bowl, a spoon, and a plastic container of honey on the counter.

  Barney and Jack, finished with their breakfast, pushed through the dog door and chased each other up the garden, frolicking in the snow.

  Dani took her breakfast to the living room, kicked off the slippers, and sat on the settee with her feet tucked under her while she watched TV. A morning chat show called Live With Jo and Martin was on and the titular presenters—a blonde-haired, buxom woman named Joanna Rose and Martin Parish, a grey-haired man in his late fifties who wore too much fake tan—were discussing the newspaper headlines, all of which involved the discoveries of Abigail Newton and Tanya Ward.

  Jo and Martin couldn’t decide if the two discoveries were linked and if the police should be looking for two perpetrators of two very different crimes or one perpetrator of a single crime that involved both Abigail and Tanya. The media hadn’t been given any information regarding the link Dani and her colleagues knew existed.