The Keeper

by Luke Delaney

  He left the kitchen and headed upstairs, unconcerned about stepping on any unseen forensic evidence, utterly convinced that the killer had never been near the stairs. At the top of the stairway he was confronted by three doors, two partially open and one fully so. He went through the fully open door first and found exactly what he had expected – a brand-new, fully loaded backpack lying on the stripped double bed next to the last few items waiting to be packed away. Alongside the backpack was a larger than normal travel wallet that drew him to it. He flicked it open with one finger and studied the contents: a passport, Australian dollars, travellers’ cheques and insurance documents. She’d been well prepared and organized, clearly she’d lived an orderly life, as did Louise Russell. Was that important to the man who took them? Did his knowledge of them go beyond where they lived, encompassing how they lived – and if so, how did he come by this information? What was his window into their lives?

  Another question hit him. Why hadn’t her brother checked inside and found what he had found? He considered Terry Green for a while, trying to remember what he had felt when he’d first seen him, whether he’d missed something. Could it be that Terry had killed his own sister and then taken Louise Russell in some twisted attempt to replace her, to avoid feelings of guilt and remorse, loss and sorrow? The replacement angle felt right, but everything else felt wrong.

  He moved slowly around the bedroom, but again could get no sense of her, no trace of her perfume or shampoo, her body or hand cream. Her house was a desert to him. He checked the other bedroom as a matter of course and found she’d been using it mainly as a storage room; it was full of neatly piled cardboard boxes that had once contained the items now spread around the house, although there was an unmade single bed pushed into the corner for the use of overnight guests who didn’t share her bed.

  Sean slipped from the bedroom and quietly crossed the hallway to the bathroom, beginning to feel more like an intruder than a cop. The bathroom was little different from the rest of the house, sterile and unyielding, everything cleaned and tidied away before she left for her adventure of a lifetime. He opened the large mirrored door to her oversized bathroom cabinet, looking for some hint of her life before the madness came, and was confronted by a multitude of bottles and jars, lotions and potions that only women would ever consider covering themselves in. Most of them had been at least partially used, seals broken and bottles half-emptied of their strange-coloured liquids. He examined them closely, absorbing their pleasant clinical fragrances, moving things around so he could see deeper into the cabinet and her life now past. She clearly cared for herself, but there was nothing exotic here and most of the brands were familiar to him as they would be to almost anybody: Nivea, Clarins, Radox, Chanel and dozens more, all left behind because they’d been used – people liked to take unopened toiletries when they headed off on a long journey and she’d clearly been no different.

  Feeling as if he was being suffocated by the soulless house, Sean hurried back downstairs, needing to get out as fast as he could. He was on the verge of flinging open the front door when he remembered that Terry Green and Sally would be waiting on the other side for him, so he paused to compose himself, only emerging when he was sure he appeared calm.

  On stepping out, he immediately noticed an absence on the driveway. ‘Her car?’ he asked as he approached Sally and Terry. ‘She had a car, right, so where is it?’

  ‘It’s in storage,’ Green answered.

  ‘How so?’

  ‘She had no room in the garage for it, and she thought it would be safer in storage than left on the drive.’

  ‘Storage where?’ The urgency in his voice was tangible. ‘Did she tell you what storage firm she used?’

  Green thought for a moment. ‘It was over in Beckenham, I know that. Had one of those obvious names, like We-Store-4-U.’

  Sally was already typing the details into her iPhone. They all waited in silence for a couple of minutes until Sally spoke.

  ‘Yep, here they are – We-Store-4-U, Beckenham.’ She enlarged the telephone number and tapped it, moving the phone to her ear, walking away from Sean and Green while she made her inquiry. Sean’s concentration was so firmly fixed on Sally he all but forgot Green was there, watching as she paced the driveway talking into her phone and waiting. Finally he heard her say ‘Thank you’ before hanging up. She stepped back towards them, shaking her head. ‘The car was booked in for storage, but it never turned up. They tried calling her, but got no answer.’

  ‘Of course they didn’t. Son-of-a-bitch took her car just like he—’ Sean stopped himself from mentioning Louise Russell in Green’s presence.

  ‘Just like what?’ Green asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ Sean lied. ‘I need you to tell me about her car – make, model, colour, registration if you know it.’

  ‘A Toyota, I think,’ Green answered, thrown into confusion by Sean’s questions. ‘I don’t know the number plate.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ Sally intervened. ‘The storage people gave me the details – a red Nissan Micra, index Yankee-Yankee-fifty-nine-Oscar-Victor-Papa.’

  ‘Good,’ Sean said. ‘Get it circulated.’

  Sally immediately began typing numbers into her phone.

  ‘And when you’ve done that, take Mr Green’s statement – everything he can tell us about Karen’s last-known movements and her intended trip to Australia, names of recent boyfriends, etc, etc.’

  Sally nodded as she waited for her call to be answered. ‘Anything else?’ she asked, phone pressed to her ear.

  ‘Plenty,’ said Sean grimly, ‘but let me worry about that. You take care of the car and statement – I need to get back to the office, set the ball rolling.’

  Sean had no sooner started the engine than his phone rang. He took the call while pulling away from the kerb, well practised at one-handed driving.

  ‘Inspector Corrigan? This is Dr Canning.’

  ‘Doctor. D’you have something for me?’ Sean asked.

  ‘I thought I ought to let you know the body from the woods has been moved to the mortuary at Guy’s where I plan to carry out the post-mortem later this afternoon, if you’d care to join me.’

  ‘I’ll be there,’ he confirmed, images of the terrible wounds the pathologist would be inflicting on Karen Green’s body invading his mind.

  Trying to keep one eye on the road, Sean scrolled through his phone for Donnelly’s number, tapping it to call and waiting a few seconds before it was answered.

  ‘Guv’nor. What’s happening?’

  ‘According to Karen Green’s brother, no one’s seen her for nine days. All the indications are she was taken eight days ago, the morning she was due to travel to Australia.’ Sean muttered a curse at a bus pulling out in front of him, then resumed: ‘Louise Russell’s been missing four days, which means we have at best three or four days to find her before she ends up like Green.’

  ‘What’s our next move?’

  ‘Get hold of Roddis, have him divert some of his forensic people to Green’s home address. Tell Zukov and O’Neil to expand their checks on the local Sex Offenders Register to include anyone with previous for using artifice to gain entry into private dwellings. Our boy’s sticking to what he knows will work.’

  ‘I thought our suspect didn’t have previous. How could he be on the register?’ Donnelly asked.

  ‘He might have an overseas conviction,’ Sean pointed out, ‘or maybe somebody just fucked up when it came to printing him, I don’t know, but let’s not assume anything.’

  ‘OK, I’ll see to it.’

  ‘There’s one more thing I need you to do, but keep it quiet.’

  ‘And what would that be?’

  ‘Tell Featherstone I need his authority to circulate a request to have all MISPERs of a similar description to our victims reported directly to us. But no rubbish, just ones where there are suspicious circumstances surrounding their disappearance – handbags not taken, phone left behind …’

  �
�Hang on, guv – we have two victims, one dead and one missing, we know their identities, so why are we looking for more MISPERs? If he’d killed someone before Green, we’d already know about it.’

  ‘I’m not thinking about what he did before,’ said Sean grimly, ‘I’m thinking about what he’ll do next.’

  ‘Next he’ll probably kill Louise Russell unless we can find her first,’ Donnelly argued.

  ‘No,’ Sean told him. ‘Next he’s going to grab someone else. He needs to replace Green. The way I see it, he’s on a seven to eight day cycle. Green went missing eight or nine days ago and Russell four. Green turns up dead this morning, which means for at least three days he kept them together. If he follows that pattern, he’ll need to grab another within the next day or so.’

  ‘You mean he kept them at the same time, not necessarily together,’ Donnelly corrected him.

  Sean was silent for a few seconds, giving himself a chance to work out how to explain his conviction in a way that would make Donnelly buy into it.

  ‘I’m pretty sure he kept them together,’ Sean finally explained. ‘To keep them separate would mean he’d need two secure and secluded places, plus he’d have to divide his time between them. I can’t see him doing that. He wants them together, where he can keep an eye on both of them at the same time. Less work for him.’

  Sean wasn’t ready to go into the real reason he believed the killer would have kept the women together. If his vision of the man they hunted was accurate, he would be living out fantasized relationships with his captives, relationships that disintegrated as the days passed. He needed his new victim to witness the plight of her predecessor, perhaps as some kind of warning – Please me, or suffer the same. Whether this psychological torture was deliberate or subconscious Sean didn’t yet know, and wouldn’t until he got closer to his quarry, close enough to start thinking like him, feeling what he was feeling. Only then would he have the full picture with no need to fill in the gaps with guesswork.

  To Sean’s relief, Donnelly accepted his explanation. ‘Sounds reasonable,’ he replied. ‘I’ll let Featherstone know what you want.’

  ‘Good. I’m heading to Guy’s for the post-mortem. Do me a favour and keep everyone on their toes, if they’re not already.’

  ‘They are,’ Donnelly assured him. ‘They understand the situation.’

  Sean ended the call and realized he’d been driving like an unthinking automaton. He checked his mirrors to ensure he hadn’t picked up a traffic unit and pointed his car towards Guy’s Hospital and the empty shell that used to be Karen Green.

  Friday lunchtime and Thomas Keller sat alone in the canteen at work repeatedly stirring a mug of tea that had long ago turned cold, his barely touched plate of food pushed to one side. He was both agitated and excited, unable to settle or concentrate on anything other than the woman he would be calling on later that afternoon. Everything had been planned, from her selection to how, where and when he would take her. He realized he’d started rocking in his chair like an inmate of a lunatic asylum and managed to stop himself before anyone noticed. He tried to chase thoughts of the woman away, aware he needed to appear to be his normal self – meek, mild and unassuming. A nobody. But he knew he would never be a nobody to the one person who had truly loved him. And in a couple of hours he would be seeing her again, saving her from the people who had filled her head with lies about him. Because this time he had really found her. They’d tried to trick him, but despite their lies he’d found her, his one true soul-mate who would never betray him like the others had. He licked his swollen pink lips as his wide staring eyes peered into an unseen distance.

  His daydreaming was suddenly shattered as two workers from the sorting office noisily pulled out the chairs next to him and sat down, making an intentional din as they dropped their loaded plates of food on to the table. ‘All right, Timmy son?’ the older, bigger man asked. ‘You don’t mind if we sit with you, do you, Timmy boy?’

  ‘No,’ stammered Keller, trying not to betray his fear of the men and annoyance at having his sweet daydream interrupted.

  ‘Course you don’t,’ the same man said. ‘Only a sad loser would want to eat on his own all the time, eh, Timmy?’

  Keller forced a slight smile and swallowed the hatred he felt towards them. ‘I don’t mind being alone,’ he told them weakly. ‘And my name’s not Timmy, it’s Thomas.’

  The smaller of the men leaned across the table, his face uncomfortably close to Keller’s. ‘We know what your name is, cunt, and we know you think you’re better than the rest of us – don’t you, Thomas?’

  ‘No,’ he protested. ‘I don’t think anything, I just like to be left alone, that’s all. I just don’t like the things you like.’

  ‘What – like women?’ the bigger man roared. ‘Are you a fucking queer, faggot?’

  The words stoked the raging hatred he felt towards them and their kind in the very core of his being. He could feel the eyes of other would-be-persecutors focusing on him. All around the canteen, ugly grinning faces were turning in his direction, baring row upon row of sniggering stained white teeth. He pushed back from the table and jumped up to his full height, almost knocking his chair over, but his tormentors didn’t flinch. They had no fear of him.

  ‘Better be careful, Stevie,’ the smaller man feigned terror, cowering away from Keller. ‘I reckon he’s gonna do you.’

  ‘Take it easy, Tommy boy,’ the bigger man laughed. ‘I’m shitting myself here.’

  Derisive laughter rippled around the room. To Keller it was the cruellest sound of all, a constant malignant companion that had haunted him since his earliest childhood. He imagined locking the doors of the canteen with chains and pumping petrol through the gaps, savouring the screams of panic from within as his tormentors smelled the fumes, then striking the match, letting it fall from his fingers, watching as it slowly drifted to the floor, the flames igniting and spreading like a forest fire through dry bushland, reducing the men inside to charred, twisted statues.

  A voice full of hate and bigotry pulled him back to reality. ‘Well, Tommy boy – what you going to fucking do about it?’

  Keller turned on his heels and walked as quickly as he could towards the exit without actually running, bursting through the swing doors of the canteen, the slight laughter he left behind amplified into a cacophony in his dysfunctional mind.

  He raced down three flights of stairs to the basement and burst into the old storeroom that had become his place of refuge whenever the need to be alone overwhelmed him. There was no lock or bolt, so he had to make do with propping a chair under the handle to ensure he couldn’t be followed or disturbed. Only then did he allow the tears to flow.

  Thomas Keller was no longer of this time. He was a child again, abandoned by his mother and a father he doubted his mother had even known for more than a night. They’d promised that he’d be safe and loved in the orphanage, but they’d lied – he wasn’t loved, he was hated. The faces of the other children danced across his mind, impish and venomous as only children can be, hunting in packs, seeking out the weak and defenceless. But Thomas Keller wasn’t defenceless. He had fought back, attacking the ringleader of his teasing swarm, sinking his teeth deep into the child’s cheek until he felt them scraping against bone, the taste of blood sweet and bitter on his tongue and lips. He remembered the child’s terrified screams, the other children also screaming in panic and fright at the sight of blood running down his chin and dripping on to his shirt as he snarled like a rabid dog and searched for his next victim. Strong arms had clenched around his waist and shoulders, pulling him to the ground while belts secured his ankles and wrists, pulled so tight he could feel neither his fingers nor his toes. And then he’d seen the syringe in the hands of a faceless adult, the needle being pushed through his skin, the liquid flowing into his blood and making it freeze, his body becoming limp while his mind raced and whirled.

  He remembered being gripped under the armpits and dragged across the floor, thr
ough a door into the darkness and down the stairs to the cellar that lay hidden and forbidden beneath the children’s home. The door to the animal cage had been opened and he was thrust inside, his bonds removed by practised hands, the door slamming shut, the metal wire of his prison shuddering as the adult voices moved away. He’d screamed then, screamed for his mother to come and save him, screamed for her forgiveness, although he didn’t know what he’d done wrong, what crime he must have committed to have been sent here. So he kept calling for her, fighting against the drugs that invaded his blood, until a face full of hate and retribution pressed against the wire, hissing at him, ‘Call her all you want, you fucking freak. No one’s coming for you. She hates you – do you understand? She hates you. This is your home now, so start getting used to it, because you’re going to be here for a very, very long time.’

  6

  Sean dumped his car in the ambulance bay at Guy’s Hospital and tossed the police logbook on to the dashboard to warn the hospital’s private security guards not to clamp it. He then used his usual entrance to the giant building, walking through the Accident and Emergency Department doors clearly marked ‘Hospital Staff Only’, nodding at the few faces he recognized and ignored by the rest who rightly assumed what he was. He headed for the main body of the hospital and the relatively new shopping-foodhall complex that was open to staff, public and patients alike. He entered the concourse and searched for his wife, who he’d arranged to meet for a rushed late lunch before he went to see Dr Canning for the post-mortem of Karen Green. He passed the ubiquitous chain cafés and found Kate sitting in Starbucks as they had planned, her head buried in clinical data reports. She hadn’t waited for him before grabbing a sandwich and coffee. He considered not bothering to get himself anything, but the service queue was mercifully short so he grabbed something that he wouldn’t have to wait to be toasted, ordered the simplest coffee he could find on the overhead menu-board and headed for his wife who hadn’t yet seen him arrive. ‘Excuse me. Is this seat taken?’