The Lost Sister (20 page)

The first Deborah Brown knew of Wickes was a phone number scrawled on a piece of paper.

A friend had given it to her, telling her in no uncertain terms that she was in trouble. That this man could help her.

And she needed help. She knew it, then.

She needed a white knight.

Or she was going to die.

I asked, “How did your friend know Wickes?”

Deborah shook her head. Her gaze slipped to the floor. She swivelled one foot. A child-like gesture. “I don't know. This girl, she was in my class. She…I didn't have many friends, not really. She…she listened. I think he may have done some work for her dad, I don't know.”

I let it go. It could slide for now, I figured. We'd get the full story once this situation was under control.

“I knew that in my heart. That unless someone took me away from everything, I was going to die. By my own hand. Or…someone else's.”

Three nights after the incident where she broke into the Furst household and watched their –
her
– baby sleeping, she was woken from a light sleep by someone banging on the door of her sister's place. She'd been staying there since leaving the flat she'd been sharing with other art students.

The reason for the move?

She told me,
personal issues
.

Given the rest of her story, that could have meant anything.

“Couldn't have been past nine in the evening,” she said, talking about the banging on the door. She'd been sleeping a lot in those days. For all she slept – and with the black depression that was shrouding her more than ever, she was sleeping a lot – she never felt like she could get enough rest. She was always tired, crawling back under the covers the moment she tried to get up. The world was too much for her. All she wanted was an escape.

I understood the feeling.

Wished I could reach out, let her know she wasn't alone.

But I wasn't talking to her as a friend. Not as a confidante or a sympathetic ear.

I was an investigator.

Searching for the truth. Couldn't afford to distort it by throwing my own feelings into the mix.

Detachment. My professional watchword.

The one quality I strived for and rarely reached.

“They were ugly,” she told me. “The two of them. I remember that. One of them had stupid hair, looked like Peter Stringfellow jacked out on steroids, you know?” She laughed at little at the memory. “They told me that I knew why they were there.” And she did, but claimed not to anyway; some tiny part of her hoping they'd believe her, think they'd made a mistake and just walk away.

Didn't happen of course.

The two of them beat her. Hard.

“They just walked right in. I tried to close the door, but they kicked it back. I remember stumbling back and closing my eyes. Opening them again and seeing this fist right in front of me. Then I didn't know what had happened until I was on the floor. They kicked me, you know? I couldn't help but remember when I was six years old and this boy thought it would be funny to punch me in the stomach. This older boy – Gary, that was his name, Gary Smith, I had such a crush on him – he stepped in and grabbed the other boy. Told him, you don't punch girls in the stomach. It's wrong. Plain wrong.”

I remembered being told the same thing when I was young. Among the many sins you could commit – and given Scotland's Calvinist heritage, the litany of sins were a shared memory we all had of childhood – punching a girl in the stomach ranked somewhere just short of genocide.

The two thugs beat Deborah hard. Landed her in hospital. A broken wrist, shattered ribs and black eyes you couldn't disguise with just a pair of sunglasses like they did in the films.

She lied about what happened, of course. Knew that the attending doctors in the A&E didn't believe her. But then, she knew what would happen if she told the truth.

She made Kathryn keep quiet, too.

“It was our first real fight as sisters,” she told me. “I mean, we fought over things when we were younger, but this was the first time it felt like maybe there was no way back from what either of us said that night. I'm amazed she ever talked to me again.”

Say what you like about their methods, the hired muscle had made their point.

The worst part was that I knew David Burns wouldn't have given a fuck about the pain Deborah suffered. For all his grandiose talk of being a family man in touch with the people, he was a cold-hearted bastard who wouldn't blink twice at any atrocity committed in his name.

But, of course, he wasn't so cold hearted that he would get his own hands dirty. Oh, no. He was too much of a fucking coward for that.

Deborah told me she needed air.

I let her step out the back door. Everything was under control. We had time.

What was important: Mary was safe. We knew where she was. The ticking clock had turned mute.

Susan had been standing in the hallway. I didn't know for how long. She came in when Deborah went out the back door and reached out to place her hand on my arm. She squeezed gently.

“It's a mess, aye?”

I nodded.

She said, “Mary's fine. In case you were wondering.”

It felt like a rebuke, although there was nothing in the way she spoke that came across as vicious.

I looked at the back door, which sat ajar.

“I'm glad.”

“I heard what she was saying.”

I nodded, kept looking at the door. “She never meant the girl any harm.”

“But she has to understand –”

I cut Susan off, waving my hand. Didn't want to hear what she had to say.

“You talk a lot about being detached,” she said. “How a good investigator never involves himself in the lives of his clients. How you sit back, refuse to let your emotions get the better of you. Great delusion, Steed. You're nothing but emotions. Why else did you stick with this case?”

I pretended that I hadn't heard. “She's scared for her daughter, you know.”

“But scared of what? That business with Burns, if she hadn't come back –”

“That's not it.”

“Then what?”

I'd taken my eyes from the door. Hadn't noticed Deborah come back inside.

She said, “His name is Wickes. And he's a killer. He was going to kill Mary. Because I loved her. Do you understand? I had to protect her.”

Wickes.

Charming, empathetic and sweet. That's how Deborah described him. At least, her first impressions.

He came to her. She'd called that number, spoken to him and the next day he showed up at her door. Overnight train.

Who could resist a damsel in distress?

That was what he said. Patronising? Perhaps, but I knew what he was like, how his earnestness could make you believe almost anything he said.

He listened to her story without interruption. Didn't ask for clarification, justification or any of that bullshit. Took her at her word. When she was done, he said, “You don't deserve any of this.”

She told him she didn't know why she'd called. Didn't know what he could do.

In the end, she asked him to help her escape. Not just Burns and his thugs, but her mess of a life. She needed to start over again. Hit the reset button. Give herself a second chance.

Maybe that was how she could get rid of this cloud that had hung over her for so long. The one she thought would be lifted when she had the child. When she worked her way into the affections of the Furst family. When she did something that might finally give her life the meaning she thought had been missing.

He did as she asked.

Because he was smitten.

“When he came through the door, he had this look like he'd just been hit on the head by a falling slate, you know? I thought he was handsome, too.”

Deborah smiled at the memory. For a moment, all the worry that had gathered in her features seemed to melt away and I saw this look in her eyes that seemed innocent. A glimpse of who she used to be, perhaps.

Susan said, “This was the man you just called a killer? A psychopath?”

“Don't all the girls love the bad boys.”

I didn't have to look at Susan to know she wasn't holding back the sneer.

“When did he change?” I asked.

Deborah looked at me, and that innocence that had momentarily overtaken her was again replaced by the hardness that she had grown into. She didn't appear older, exactly. Just tougher. The kind of woman who wasn't going to take shite from anyone anymore.

“He changed,” she said, “Slowly. Or it seemed that way to me. Maybe I was just trying to fool myself. Who wants to admit, after all, that they've made that kind of mistake? That the man they find themselves falling in love with is just as likely to kill them as kiss them.”

Susan said, “Tell us.”

He set her up in a one bedroom flat in Glasgow. Arranged protection. Made her feel safe.

“Any time I had doubts, he would tell me, ‘this is the only way you can escape what's happened,' and I believed him.”

There were rules, of course.

No old friends. No contact with family. No telling anyone about her past.

In the end, this boiled down to no talking to anyone without clearing it through him.

He became her constant companion.

At first she found it endearing. Necessary? Aye, she believed that he was with her at all times because he cared. He was protecting her.

When I had talked to Wickes about Deborah, he had harped on about her obsessive nature. Her fixation on people and things. He told me how she couldn't let anything go.

Psychologists have this word:
projection
.

“He hated me talking to anyone. We'd go out, I'd spend all my time with him. Anyone I talked to, I did more or less through him. He censored conversations. Friendships. Kept telling me I needed to be careful. And I believed him because I was young.”

I said, “And because you were scared.”

She nodded. Could barely look up at me and Susan, as though she was ashamed to admit the truth.

Soon enough, she was living with Wickes. In his house. And later, in his bed. Because it was easier. Because he had begun to convince her that she was in love with him. “I don't know how it happened,” she said. “Maybe after long enough you become so used to the idea of someone being there that you think it's got to be love because why else would they always be around? Why else would you be thinking about them all the time? He wouldn't let me walk to the shops without him. I told him I needed some company that wasn't him. He bought me a dog.”

I figured it was hardly proof he had a heart.

Although it fooled Deborah for a while.

The dog was named Chess, Deborah claimed after an uncle she had. Maybe his full name had been Chester, although that wasn't a typically Aberdonian name and she'd never thought to ask him.

Whatever the case, she loved Chess the dog; a dark-haired mongrel with a white streak that ran from above his eyes and along the back of his head. He used to love it when she tickled those light hairs and scratched at the skin underneath. His presence helped calm her down. She'd spend a lot of time with the dog outside in the back garden. He was not just a pet. He was – in her words – her confidante.

“Does that sound strange?” she asked us. “That my best friend in the world was a dog? That I told all my secrets to someone who could never offer advice, who probably didn't even understand what I was saying?”

Chess seemed to calm the situation between her and Wickes. The arguments quit, and she began to think maybe things would get better. She was simply going through a period of adjustment.

As the months went by, Wickes stopped giving the dog so much attention, started telling Deborah how she was, “spoiling the mutt.”

“Only when it got bad did I even realise how he'd changed,” she said. “Slipped back into his old ways. He hated the damn dog. Used to tell me I was too lenient with Chess. Started saying how I loved it more than him. Never called the dog by his name. Always,
it
.”

Susan asked, “Did you? Love the dog more than Wickes?”

Deborah hesitated. Reluctant to answer. Then: “Yes. But how hard was that? He'd been my white knight, and then…he became…I felt like a prisoner, you know? He would remind me every day how he had rescued me. I'd traded one fear for another.”

“He frightened you?”

“When I broke the rules…or he felt I wasn't listening to him…He'd get this look in his eyes. As if something was popping back there in his brain. I could see the sparks; the fire. I used to think he was so sweet. And then some nights I'd find myself waking up, scared that I was going to find those big fucking hands round my throat. He was going to kill me, throw me away, because I wasn't being the girl he wanted me to be.”

An unspoken question hung in the air: why didn't she just leave?

But it was a question Susan and I had asked many times before of so many different people. Working as coppers, we'd encountered victims of abuse who stayed in their situation because they were afraid that if they left things would become even worse. Why swap one hell for another?

The event that sealed the deal for Deborah was the death of the dog.

I remembered Wickes telling me about this. Deborah killing the dog rather than letting it be put down.

“We fought about it. He said I loved the dog more than him. Over and over, it became like a little joke in a way. A joke with a bad punch line, but the closest we had to one. I remember he came home one night, saw me feeding some of our dinner to Chess. Just a wee treat, you know? Sometimes you have to spoil them. I mean, where's the harm?”

Wickes didn't see things that way.

“I make him sound like a bastard. But…that was the first time he ever touched me,” Deborah said.

The first time she realised fully what the man was capable of.

She'd traded one kind of fear for another. Her whole life defined by it.

As she spoke, her posture drooped and she cracked the knuckles on her right hand. “He grabbed me by the throat, pushed me against the wall. Told me that I should love him. What the fuck had the dog ever done for me?”

Susan asked, “This was the first time he attacked you?”

“Yes.” Insistent, as though she was making a point. Maybe a part of her still felt bound to defend him in some fashion. He wasn't all bad. No one could be, could they?

But she had always known that something like that night would happen. It was always there, in his attitude. The way he spoke to her. No overt threats, but something lurking beneath his words. Innuendo of the worst possible kind.

And that night she fed the dog scraps of their food, she realised that it was no misunderstanding. No joke.

“He said that maybe I'd appreciate him if the fucking dog just went away.”

That night, she'd gone to bed frightened of when he would join her. She lay beneath the sheets with her fingers up at her throat, gently probing at the marks his fingers had left.

The next morning, she got up and he was gone.

She took the dog out to the back garden.

Thought about leaving.

Watched the dog lap up water from the bowl.

If she walked, could he find her? Would he simply forget her?

That day, the sun was high in the sky. Mid July, she remembered. A Monday. Where they lived, the city would sometimes be still and it was possible to ignore the distant sounds of traffic that had kept her awake when she first moved into that tiny flat that Wickes had arranged for her. His own place, she told us, was removed. Isolated.

The dog, Chess, lapped at the water in his bowl with the kind of absolute concentration dogs reserve specially for such occasions. You'd believe that he hadn't had anything to drink in days to watch the way he gulped it down.

Deborah stood by the door, her mind drifting on other thoughts but always conscious of the throbbing at the base of her throat where Wickes's hands had squeezed the tightest. Some breaths came harder than others, and she began to worry that maybe something inside her throat had been damaged. She reached up, traced the outline of the bruises with the ends of her fingers.

Watched the dog.

As Chess looked up from his bowl and straight at her.

“It was like this final understanding passed between us,” she said. “I knew something was wrong, even if for a second he looked so perfectly normal. Absolutely calm. Just…looking at me.”

The dog pitched on his side suddenly, as though his legs had just stopped working. He started making a strange sound, a high pitched keening that sounded so utterly absurd and alien it took Deborah a moment to realise that it was coming from Chess.

“I didn't know what was happening. His legs started kicking and he started foaming at the mouth. I remember thinking…Rabies. The only thing I could think that could cause something like that. But it wasn't. He'd have been angry, aye? Dangerous. Chess wasn't any of that. He was in pain. I think as confused by what was happening as I was.”

The dog was dead in minutes.

When she made to go back in the house to call the police, Wickes was waiting for her. Standing in the kitchen with this strange expression on his face that she couldn't quite read.

She exploded.

Wanted to kill him. Grab one of the kitchen knives, slit the big bastard's throat. All his talk of protecting her, and he killed the one thing that –

She never got the chance.

He beat her wordlessly. Not even a laugh. “That's when he's at his most dangerous,” she said, “When he goes quiet.”

“When he was done, he dragged me into the hall and threw me in the cupboard beneath the stairs. There was a lock on the outside of that door, and I'd never questioned why. I thought he was going to lock me in there. In the dark. Alone.”

I remembered Wickes's version of events, felt my muscles start to tense. Tasted bile in my mouth.

After a while in the dark, she remembered the door opening. Thought that he had come to his senses, that he was going to let her out. She imagined – briefly – a tearful apology, and a promise that this kind of thing would never happen again.

He loved her. Never wanted to hurt her.

What happened was nowhere close to her romantic dream.

He threw the dog's corpse in there with her.

Locked the door.

Left her overnight with the dead dog.

As Deborah told us her story, I reached out and touched Susan's arm. Felt the anger buzzing through her. If Wickes had been there at that moment, I doubt he would have lived too long.

I thought about Wickes's version of events, how convincing he had seemed to me at the time. I had to wonder: did he believe his own lies? Over time had he deluded himself that his version of events was the truth?

Could that excuse in any way the things that he had done?

After the death of Chess and the assault, all of Deborah's fight left her. Rather than allowing her to be free, Wickes had trapped her. She had no control over her life. He had the final say over everything she did. He decided whether her life was worth living.

“When you realise that, when you realise that it's all utterly hopeless, something inside you snaps. You give in. You surrender yourself to the world. What can it do to you now that it hasn't already?”

The dog had been his message. She'd heard it loud and clear.

I looked across at Susan, who had edged away from my touch.

Her jaw had set tight. Her muscles were taut.

Whether her anger was for the dog or Deborah, I wasn't entirely sure.