The Keeper

by Luke Delaney

  ‘Do what?’ Deborah asked.

  ‘Throw whatever’s on the tray in his face, in his eyes. Then, as many times as you can, as hard as you can, hit him with the tray, scratch his eyes – if he has the stun-gun, grab it and use it on him. While he’s disorientated, get the key. He always seems to keep it in his trouser pocket – the left one, I think. If he starts to fight back before you have the key, kick and punch him, keep kicking him, keep punching. You can do this, I know you can.’

  ‘I went to school in New Cross,’ said Deborah. ‘I know how to kick and punch, believe me.’

  ‘Good,’ said Louise. ‘Once you’ve got the key, slide it along the floor towards my cage and I’ll let myself out – I can get my hand through the wire and reach the lock, I’ve already tried it. Once I’m out, I’ll join you and we’ll kick the bastard to till he’s almost dead, agreed?’

  ‘Agreed.’

  ‘Then we drag him into one of these stinking cages and lock him in.’

  ‘As easy as that,’ Deborah mocked.

  ‘No,’ Louise answered. ‘But if I’m going to die, if I’m never going to see my husband again, when the truth of what’s happened here comes out, I want him to know that I tried, I fought back, I wasn’t meekly slaughtered like some farmyard animal. I want him to be proud of me. I want him to know.’

  ‘OK,’ Deborah agreed. ‘So once we’ve got him locked in a cage, then what?’

  ‘We leave him,’ said Louise. ‘We leave him there. For ever. Let the bastard starve to death.’

  ‘But the police – what about the police?’

  ‘We tell them nothing about this place. We tell them he kept us in a dark place somewhere we didn’t know. Then he blindfolded us and drove us back to our homes and let us go. We can’t help them find him, we don’t know anything about him. And all the while he’s down here, rotting in this cellar, screaming for help that never comes.’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said Deborah. ‘We should tell the police.’

  ‘So he can be locked up in some cushy prison for a few years and then they let him go? No, he deserves more than that.’

  ‘Then we’d be murderers.’

  ‘No. We’re not going to kill him, we’re just not going to keep him alive.’

  ‘It won’t work. Someone will miss him, his work – his family. They’ll find him before he dies and no one will know what he’s done. He’ll be free. He knows where I live. He’ll come after me – and you too.’

  Louise thought for a while, refusing to abandon her revenge. ‘No, you’re right. We can’t leave it to chance.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘When he took your clothes, soon after I could smell fire.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘I think he burned your clothes, somewhere close by.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So he must have petrol or something.’

  Neither woman spoke for a while, each alone in their own thoughts of fire and screaming, the smell of burning flesh and acrid smoke swirling around in their dark dreaming.

  ‘I can’t do that,’ Deborah shuddered.

  ‘You won’t have to,’ said Louise. ‘I’ll do it. I want to do it. I want to hear him scream. I’ll make sure the fire’s burning well and then I’ll close the door. If the fire doesn’t kill him, the smoke will.’

  ‘And when they find him?’

  ‘We tell the police he said he was going to kill himself. When he let us go, he told us he was going to punish himself, take his own life. That’s why he was locked in the cage, to punish himself. He was looking for redemption.’

  ‘They won’t believe it.’

  ‘He’s a rapist and a murderer. D’you think they’ll give a damn what happened, what really happened?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘They won’t. And we’ll never have to think about him again; never have to worry about him waiting for us every time we step outside. We won’t wake up every night thinking about him, seeing his face every time we close our eyes. We’ll be able to move on, live our lives the way we wanted to before this fucking bastard decided it was up to him how we lived and how and when we died.’

  ‘There’ll be so many questions though,’ Deborah argued. ‘Maybe we should just tell the police?’

  ‘No!’ Louise barked at her. ‘I won’t be a victim. I’ve been stuck down here for God knows how many days and I’ve had plenty of time to think and I know one thing – I won’t be a victim, I won’t have people feeling sorry for me, patronizing me, always checking on me, asking me if I’m all right, cops and journalists hanging around my home, having to stand up in court and tell the whole world what happened while he sits smugly in the dock reliving his sick fantasies through my testimony. And what if he gets off? What do we do then? No, I can’t let that happen. I’d rather watch him burn. I want to see him burn.’

  Silence hung in the room. Louise’s fingers curled around the wire of the cage, her head cocked to one side as she listened for Deborah’s answer.

  ‘OK. OK, I’ll do it. I’ll try. It’ll be like fighting my brothers when we were growing up … But I won’t help you burn him. If things work, if somehow they work, I’ll help you get him into the cage. I’ll even help you lock him in. But I can’t help you start the fire. I can’t do that.’

  ‘You don’t have to,’ Louise assured her.

  ‘And once we’re out of here, we go our separate ways. We never see each other again and we never speak about what happened. We stick to the story and never change it, no matter what anyone says or tells us they know, we stick to the story – he killed himself, just like he told us he was going to. Agreed?’

  ‘Agreed,’ said Louise, releasing her grip on the wire of her cage and sitting on the stone floor. After a while she began to laugh quietly to herself, the alien noise disrupting the bleak atmosphere of the cellar, disturbing Deborah, making her feel uneasy and suspicious.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’ Louise struggled to suppress the laughter. ‘I’m sorry, I was just thinking, I’ve just had the most important conversation of my life with a total stranger in a lightless cellar, sitting in a bloody locked cage. It seemed so ridiculous, it made me laugh.’

  A new sense of fear gripped Deborah; not the rush of terror and panic that he brought with him every time he pulled open the metal door, but a trickle of anxiety and concern that the only other person in the world who could help her was slowly sinking into a form of temporary insanity that would render her useless to both of them. ‘Are you sure you’re OK, Louise?’ She waited longer than she’d hoped for an answer.

  ‘I’m not mad, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘Of course you’re not. It’s just … you’ve been down here for days. You’ve been through so much. The things that bastard did to the other—’

  ‘Karen. Her name was Karen.’

  ‘Sorry, the things he did to Karen. The things you saw him do. It must be difficult to keep it all together. I don’t think I could have.’

  ‘If it doesn’t work out,’ Louise told her coldly, ‘you’ll find out. But now, now you need to put the clothes on, or he’ll know something’s wrong.’

  Deborah didn’t answer, but she leaned forward and tentatively took hold of the pile of clothes he’d stripped from Louise, the very act of touching them making her feel complicit in his abuse of her fellow captive. She pulled them towards her and slowly, reluctantly, she began to dress.

  9

  Sean’s universe was a room, inhabited only by himself, an outdated computer system and the forty-three crime reports of people who rightly or wrongly believed they’d been stalked. At that moment nothing else existed: no family, no friends, no past, no future, just the reports and him. Most he’d been able to dispel quickly enough: ex-husbands, ex-boyfriends intent on giving their old partners as hard a time as possible, many had form for other types of petty crime and were not what he was looking for, not the one he was waiting for – not the one he expected t
o jump from the screen and solve the puzzle for him in one moment of perfect realization. Others, but only a few, had drawn him in further, made his heart skip a beat and his eyes narrow: men who had started with flattery, then flowers, moving quickly to over-familiar love letters, too many unannounced visits to the women’s homes and places of work, devoted affection turning to vile threats and desperate pleas for love and acceptance once the inevitable rejection of their advances occurred. The majority of these had been easily scared off by a visit from the police, although a handful had gone on to stalk new victims, victims who looked nothing like Karen Green or Louise Russell.

  Sean read through the last of the reports, but soon realized it was petering out to nothing, just like all the others. The man he was looking for wasn’t here. ‘Fuck it,’ he muttered under his breath. He was sure Karen Green’s killer would have pursued the woman he was now trying to replace with substitutes. But the reports said otherwise. He stared at the screen, waiting for answers and ideas, considering the possibility that the killer might have recently moved to South London from further afield, but he doubted it. He was sure the killer was local, staying in his comfort zone. So what was he missing?

  ‘Christ,’ he muttered, rubbing his hair in frustration, tapping his knuckles on the desk, feeling as if he already knew the answer, that it was inside him somewhere, but he just couldn’t dig it out. He slumped in his chair and spread his arms, talking to himself, theorizing where he might be going wrong. ‘Maybe she never reported it? Maybe she didn’t even know he existed, that he was watching her, always thinking about her.’

  The ringing of his phone slowly pulled him back into the wider world. He wearily picked up the receiver. ‘DI Corrigan.’

  ‘Hi, I’m Rebecca Owen, calling from the lab.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘You submitted samples of moisturizer and perfume, some from a house and some from a murder victim’s body?’

  ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘The samples from the body swabs don’t match any of the cosmetic items taken from the house. They’re not the same.’

  So Karen Green wasn’t the woman he sought replacements for, she was herself a replacement.

  ‘Do you know what the samples from the body are?’ Sean asked.

  ‘Yes. They’re significantly more exotic and expensive than anything submitted from the house, although still not unique or handcrafted, so you won’t be able to narrow them down to a single retail source.’

  ‘I understand, but can you tell me the brands?’

  ‘Of course. The moisturizer is Elemis body cream and the perfume is Black Orchid by Tom Ford.’

  ‘How long have these products been available?’

  ‘The cream’s been around for a good few years, but the perfume’s only been on the market for a couple.’

  Sean looked back at his computer. The last of the stalker reports still flickered on the screen. His search had gone back three years, yet the perfume only two, so his timelines were right.

  ‘You sure the perfume’s only been out for two years?’ he asked.

  ‘Certain,’ came the reply. ‘We’ll dispatch the report to you straight away.’

  He hung up, his mind already analysing the information from the lab, the names of the cosmetics etching themselves into his consciousness. He eased his eyes closed, allowing the images of the hooded man without a face to form behind the lids, going to the woman he’d taken, gently spraying the expensive perfume into the air close to her neck, the microscopic droplets drifting until they came to rest on the soft, taut skin of her throat. He saw the faceless man unscrewing the lid from the jar of Elemis body cream, thin fingers carefully scooping the moisturizer from within, spreading it over warm, olive skin, gently at first, then more firmly as the cream soaked in, his fingers and thumbs forming dimples and valleys as his hands moved across her body. Sean felt an awakening in his own sexuality and tried to remember the last time he’d made love to his wife, but couldn’t. His eyes opened as he chastised himself for allowing a physical want to break his concentration. Once the sexual desires had faded away he closed his eyes again and waited for the scene to return; he didn’t have to wait long, the woman with short brown hair lying on her back submitting to his touch as he massaged the Elemis into her body.

  His eyes snapped open as he spoke to himself. ‘No. That’s wrong.’ He steadied his breathing and readied himself to try again, his eyes slowly closing, the image of the faceless man returning, but now not touching the woman, not using his own hands to apply the cream or holding the bottle of perfume close enough to spray her himself. This time he left the cosmetics for them to apply it to themselves. ‘Yes,’ he said to himself, ‘that’s what you did.’ A knock at his open door made him jump.

  ‘Not disturbing anything, am I?’ Anna asked.

  ‘Yes, but that’s never bothered anyone round here.’

  ‘Do you want me to leave?’

  ‘Only if you want to.’

  She took it as an invitation and stepped into his office, taking a seat. ‘Working on anything specific?’

  ‘Just trying to get inside this one’s head.’

  ‘Yes. I’ve been told that’s what you do.’

  ‘Oh? Someone been speaking out of school?’

  She moved the conversation on without answering. ‘Is that how you’re able to catch them, by thinking like them?’

  He shrugged, suspicious. ‘I suppose so. I don’t really know.’

  ‘How do you do it? How do you project your imagination so you see what they see?’

  ‘Who says I do?’

  ‘No one,’ she lied. ‘It’s something I’ve noticed from my own observations.’

  ‘You’re not going to start telling me I’m psychic, are you, because I can work a few things out other people can’t?’

  ‘No,’ she laughed. ‘I’ve seen a lot of weird things and interviewed a lot of interesting people with unusual gifts, but I’ve never come across anything that could be described as psychic, or even anything to support the possibility of it. I have however come across people with abilities similar to yours – able to turn their imagination into a tool they can control, almost as if they can just press a play button in their minds and see a scene exactly as it happened, despite not having witnessed it themselves. You often find it in talented filmmakers or writers.’

  ‘Well, let me tell you something, Anna. A lot of shit’s been said about my imagination – and most of it’s wrong.’

  ‘Who else has been asking about your imagination?’

  He ignored her question, but wouldn’t forget she’d asked it. ‘Why are you really here?’ he demanded.

  ‘To help.’

  ‘And what is it you think you can help me with?’

  ‘Well, what is it you’re working on at this moment?’

  He looked her up and down, uncertain whether he should let her into his world. But the opportunity to show her he was right and she was wrong was powerfully seductive. ‘OK, I’ve just heard back from the lab – the cosmetics found on Karen Green’s body don’t match any of the cosmetics we took from her house.’

  ‘Meaning he’s using them to make her more like the person he wants her to be,’ she pre-empted him.

  ‘Yes. That part’s straightforward enough. The point is, he didn’t apply the cosmetics to her body himself, although he would desperately have wanted to. So the question is why? Why deny himself that moment, a pleasure like that?’

  It was her turn to shrug her shoulders.

  ‘Because he’s afraid of them,’ Sean continued. ‘To put the cream and perfume on them himself, he’d have to get close to them. He’d have to expose himself to possible danger, be close enough to have his eyes scratched out, to get a kick in the bollocks, even if they were tied up. Remember, he uses chloroform to dominate them. He’s not confident in his physical ability. But in that case, why doesn’t he use chloroform? Put them under and take his time, massaging the cream into their skin, watching the p
erfume make their skin shine. Why didn’t he just use the chloroform again?’

  Anna shook her head. ‘You’re talking as if all this is fact, but it’s conjecture. For all you know, maybe he did use chloroform. Or maybe they were bound. At this stage—’

  ‘No,’ he snapped. ‘You’re missing the point. The question is why didn’t he just use chloroform?’

  ‘Why is it so important for you to understand his reason for not doing something?’

  ‘Because I need to understand him. Everything about him. What he does isn’t enough. I need to know why.’

  ‘OK, then why didn’t he use the chloroform?’

  Sean pressed his knuckles into his temples and pressed until he could almost feel bone grinding against bone. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, pressing harder and harder, the same question banging in his mind over and over again, making him forget he was not alone. Then suddenly the answer jumped into his head – an answer so simple he couldn’t believe he’d almost missed it.

  ‘He couldn’t use the chloroform because that would ruin everything. If he’d used it, he wouldn’t have been able to smell the cream, the perfume. The chloroform would have overpowered all other scents – and he couldn’t bear that. It’s not enough for them to look like her, they have to smell like her, taste like her. My God, it must have been heaven for him, watching her spreading the cream across her skin, the scent of her mixing with the perfume – and all the time he’s standing there, watching her, smelling her.’ The smile suddenly fell from his lips. ‘But how does he do that, if he’s afraid to be too close to them unless they’re drugged?’