The Takers and Keepers

by Ivan Pope

  He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable. And it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination — you know. Imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate.

  Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

  For those kept in darkness and those who believe they can never escape.

  Descent

  Allen was barely awake when the video arrived, but he understood immediately.

  You love your keepens, the message said.

  He felt sweaty and stale and shook slightly with a sickly shiver. He knew he smelled of a night in the pub and the detritus of sex. In the kitchen his girlfriend worked, marking a pile of schoolbooks for the coming Monday morning. A mug of cold, milky tea and an untouched piece of toast sat just out of reach.

  The email contained no message, just a link to a video somewhere out on the internet. He paused a moment to calm his shaking hand. When he clicked through it started automatically and he watched with rapt attention, nodding slowly to himself as the film unfolded.

  A video camera, held by an unseen hand, descended slowly into the basement of a house. It panned in the gloom and travelled deeper into the space, down staircases and through small rooms. A hand pushed open a doorway hidden behind a shelving unit and entered the space beyond. At a metal grill the hand pushed it open and proceeded into a small opening through the wall. The descent continues down a ladder. A feeble light illuminates the way. The camera peers into the depths as whoever is carrying it proceeds. Eventually the video steadies and looks into the gloom. A space is revealed, the light is better here. It contains kitchen units and a toilet which appears to be plumbed in. At the end of the room is another small opening in the wall. The camera focuses on this opening as a face momentarily appears and then retreats from view. The camera tracks towards the hole and is poked through. Inside, as the images blur to grey in the dark, a light is switched on and three figures squirm at the light, covering their faces with their arms and turning away. There is no soundtrack, but it is clear someone is shouting instructions. The three turn back to the camera and stare at it in terror. One woman, wearing shorts and a bikini top, and two children dressed in pyjamas. They stare, blinking, until suddenly the light is snapped off and the video ends.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Emily. She was standing behind him unseen, watching, a schoolbook dangling between her thumb and forefinger. She bent closer, trying to see the screen. He moved quickly to shut the video down but he was too slow and the awkward attempt at concealment revealed his excitement. She had come in to ask if he wanted to go out for a coffee, but this had now been swept from her mind. Normally he wouldn’t mind, he rather relished any interest in his stuff, but not this, this was too raw.

  ‘What the fuck was it?’ she repeated.

  ‘Someone just sent it to me,’ he said. ‘I don’t know, nothing much.’

  Why did he have to pretend anything? She knew instinctively it was very much more. He slowly clicked the laptop shut as she said, ‘But what was it? Someone in a cellar?’

  He had almost forgotten how to breathe. He couldn’t answer for fear of revealing the state he had been tipped into, his lungs empty of air while his mind raced for answers.

  ‘Holy fuck,’ she said, louder now. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

  A ghost. Exactly. That was it. He had seen a ghost. He knew he had turned white, as white as the human in the film. He felt sweaty and shivery and would lie down to recover if she wasn’t standing behind him, waiting for an explanation. All the blood had drained from his head and a wave of nausea swept over him.

  ‘It’s nothing. Nothing important. Something for work, maybe. Someone trying to frighten me. Or make me laugh.’

  His attempt to shake her off didn’t work but she wouldn’t fight over it, not in the glow of a Sunday morning.

  ‘I hate that stuff,’ she said. ‘Your mysterious work.’

  ‘It’s not funny, I know that,’ he agreed.

  Go away, go away, go away he thought.

  ‘You know what I mean. All that crap, missing kids, abductors and probably Osama bin Laden hiding in a cave somewhere. It scares me and I really hate it.’

  He turned and stared at her. Did he really know her, was he in love with her, how does this thing work, he wondered? He couldn’t really be bothered to fight. It can’t take much of an effort to understand what I’m doing, he thought.

  ‘I know,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry.’ Not wanting to concede any ground, he could only repeat the same bland apology.

  She stood there a few moments longer, waiting for him to soften and reach out, but he was lost to her now, willing her departure so he could take another look. It’s been a long time coming, he thought, I can wait a few more minutes. Finally, she walked out of the room in silence, leaving an unpleasant absence. He felt relieved but at the same time he hated himself for forcing her away. Quickly he flipped his machine open again, but when it reconnected, he was surprised by the message.

  This video has been removed by its owner.

  Allen

  Sundays were a day of slow-motion progress, from bed to bar to lunch and back to bed again with Emily. She was a pleasure. He knew he was onto a long-term thing, finally.

  He usually tried not to let himself get distracted by emails before he was showered and dressed in the morning, but some days it was easy to give in to the vicarious pleasure of the screen. He hadn’t really been reading any emails, just skimming the spam and the junk that waited for his attention and hitting the delete key. He had work to do, a short piece to finish for The Times, and something longer to get started on for the Americans, The Journal of Familial Depravity. That would be harder, he thought. They would want proper references, the sort of deep research that he didn’t normally have the time or inclination for. He opened up the partly written document, but his attention quickly drifted back to the video.

  After a long period of drift, Allen had ended up in North London, determined to sort out a way forward. Islington was a place he’d never been to before jail, but he liked it for its easy lifestyle and the anonymity of its residents. People came and went with rapidity, that was good. He didn’t have to get to know anyone, they left him alone. Then he met and paired up with a sweet girl, Emily Morgan. She was a teacher, small children. She knew from the first about his past and his time inside, he told her on their first night together, anticipating, perhaps, a longer relationship, or maybe relishing a chance to admit his past. He didn’t want anything hanging over his head.

  Anyway, Islington suited them both with its coffee shops, boutiques, pubs. Although he hadn’t known it before, it turned out to be his sort of life; the drift along busy streets, meetings in cafes, nights in the pub. He even became gregarious, friended, under her spell. He knew people again and he liked them, looked forward generally to seeing them. Her teaching job was in a local school, easy to get to from where they lived. Neither of them was originally a Londoner, but in the way of generations of incomers they’d become attached to the life and the opportunities it offered.

  They rented a basement flat with a tiny garden and a gravelled space at the front where an old taxicab was parked. He had somehow acquired the cab along with the flat. The previous tenant, not wanting to take it to his new property, had proposed leaving it with him in return for an outstanding electricity bill. He’d been trying to work out what to do with it ever since.

  It suited him fine, this life, this flat in an old house. They had one large bedroom and one small second bedroom, box room really, that he used as a study. A kitchenette at the back opened out onto a garden which was more of a walled yard than a proper garden. He
hadn’t ever been the gardening type, but he’d taken to this scrap of land and created a space full of interesting plants in assorted pots. He couldn’t name any of them, but he was amazed at his own creativity, something he’d previously put down as vaguely sissy in others. In the summer he spent long hours sitting out here, writing or marking up printouts of articles.

  He liked it here, he liked this life. He liked the slow, relentless gathering of information, getting it into some sort of order and then forcing a story from the fragments. He never would have thought he could be a writer, but he seemed to have become one almost by mistake. In the army, keeping notebooks would have been insane and led to bullying. Even when he started writing properly, making attempts at writing about his life, he’d never thought it could be serious. After leaving the army he’d worked as a labourer and run a few scams with mates, serious stuff but nothing worth writing home about. He assumed, like his brothers, that he’d fall into some job where his body did the work and his brain was saved for the pub or the bookies. It was unexpected, the slow drift to brain work, but when it came it was unstoppable. He soon had a subject and an audience and didn’t look back.

  It was the same with Emily. She wasn’t really his type, or maybe she was. From an academic family who had pushed her to go through university, she’d come out the other end as a schoolteacher. Not, he thought, that there was anything wrong with being a schoolteacher, but he knew that if he’d had a chance to go to college he wouldn’t have ended up as a teacher.

  He ran a hot bath into which he tipped half a bottle of bubbles. Feeling a bit detached from the world, he lay in the foam thinking about the video. He wished he’d paid it more attention, that he hadn’t been distracted. He was almost buried in foam when Emily came into the bathroom and gestured to him.

  ‘I’m sorry I snapped at you.’

  That was par for the course. She bent down to take a kiss, a peck on the lips, a settlement of their spat. He didn’t reply, not wanting to be hijacked into forgiveness, still angry that she couldn’t see what he saw. He tried to dismiss her with silence, scared to draw her anywhere near his thoughts. She stood her ground and looked at him as he steeped in the bubbles.

  ‘I know it’s your work, I’m sorry. I’m not judging you, but it scares me. I’m not going to pretend. I just don’t like it.’

  He sighed and turned his eyes up to meet hers. She always ambushed him when he was vulnerable, when he couldn’t escape. He stared at her body, realising he now wanted to fuck her. He closed his eyes to escape her gaze.

  ‘Listen, let’s talk later. I’m tired. You know what, I need this story, but if it freaks you out, I’ll leave it. Your choice, you tell me.’

  He tailed off, not wanting to push home his advantage. There was a fundamental difference between them, they knew that. He felt like he’d done too much, seen too much, while she sometimes seemed like a child, fresh out of school. She looked for a quiet life with time to concentrate on her career, hang out with her friends, walk in the hills. She had what he considered strange hobbies: orienteering, rock-climbing. He’d never been one for separate interests and he didn’t really understand what these things, that she’d brought with her from a previous existence, meant. He felt tolerated in that scheme of things but he knew he was not ready to give her up. He didn’t mind annoying her to get his way, but he didn’t want to push her away. There was a calmness in this relationship, the first time he’d known that sort of peace.

  ‘You’ll never give it up,’ she said. ‘Not even if I ask you to. I don’t know why you find it so titillating.’

  Not titillating he thought, that’s the wrong word. He looked at her through half-closed eyes.

  ‘I thought you weren’t going to be like that today.’

  She scowled and turned to leave the room.

  ‘There is something at the end of it all,’ he said.

  ‘Only you,’ she said, ‘that’s what’s at the end of it. Allen fucking Kimbo, always one more lead, one more person to save. You fuck me up, Allen. What you need is a proper job.’

  And that was the sentence he hated most.

  ‘You don’t have to do this. Nobody asked you to do penance for them.’

  Silence.

  ‘You’ve done your time. Get out of the shadows.’

  He laughed. ‘It’s not personal. It’s my job, following this stuff. There are real victims, out there. Nobody else gives a fuck for them, do they? That’s what I’m doing.’

  Her face creased, but she held her lips together as she had learned as a girl.

  ‘I love you, baby. You do what you have to do and I’ll wait for you to get finished.’

  She bent, kissed him lightly on the forehead and was gone.

  Please don’t get involved, she had said.

  He’d started his writing career with crap speculative pieces for the trash press and moved on to authoritative pieces for the quality press, when they’d have them. But he had his subject almost to himself, nobody else wanted to cover his beat: the missing and the lost, abductees and prisoners, who disappeared from the world and seldom resurfaced. He’d slowly built up a network of contacts, from prison officers to bent policemen, social workers and probation officers, gangsters and paedophiles. At the start he really had no idea how to find contacts or what they wanted from him, but after a few false starts he’d come to realise that every contact needed something in return. As the work increased and he found he had some spare cash, he fell into a routine of discovering the reward that each source of information wanted. Of course, it wasn’t always cash. In fact, money seldom changed hands. The cons wanted phone cards or, more recently, actual phones smuggled in. The coppers wanted trips to strip clubs or drinking sessions in dark boozers. The social workers wanted nothing at all, apart from maybe covering the cost of petrol and an affirmation of their importance. Whatever, he was happy to play the mind games that built layer on layer his web of contacts. He had a lot of contacts, for sure, and he had inside knowledge of events. But they seldom led to anything concrete.

  At first his subject was trafficking. Girls, women, men, children. From Moldova and beyond, through Serbia and out across Europe, Ethiopia, Nigeria and beyond. Girls, women, boys, men. Mothers, fathers, children. Brothers and sisters. People traded as if they were drugs, alongside drugs, with drugs inside them, for drugs.

  Drugs can be consumed once, but a woman can be consumed hundreds of times. Traded women were much more valuable than pharmaceuticals, and the authorities were seldom interested. A shivering wreck of a human with fear knocked into her over months or years is hardly likely to tell a passing policeman that she never chose this life, that she was abducted at fifteen from her parents’ farm and taken from city to city, fucked by a thousand paying customers.

  He was a self-made expert on the global phenomenon of human bondage, and a specialist on the trafficking from Eastern to Western Europe. It was a trade more valuable than the heroin business, in which the rewards were huge and the punishments tiny when caught. Although the authorities had been working to break the networks for years, they were ineffectual and corrupted in many arenas.

  And beyond the usual trafficking of human flesh, there were deeper and darker processes.

  For years he’d followed rumours of the existence of photographs of incarcerated adults and children, entire families that were created underground. He knew there were some very sick people around – they existed in prisons around Europe and the Americas. Each big story that broke in the international press reinforced his belief that something deeper was going on. The Fritzl case, Priklopil, paedophile rings and sex attack kidnappings. Each brought him more clues, but he could never open the door to the network.

  He had many scraps of information but no whole picture.

  He had been collecting stories of abducted and disappeared people for over five years. As well as a thick file, he had thousands of internet links, fragments of conversations, possible clues and hints of connections.

 
He believed that there were many more people held long term than the authorities admitted. He knew it was happening and he had some idea of the worst offenders, a group who helped each other take and keep victims..

  They called these captives keepen.

  He settled at his desk in the small back room he used as an office. Sun streamed in, highlighting dust that glowed in response. Spring was turning to summer, but the days were still cold. It was a good time of year; things were moving along nicely on the work front. He looked forward to a few months of solid activity, a few trips, visits to crime scenes, a lot of writing and, maybe, progress with a book proposal. He felt it was time to write something more substantive than articles and news stories. He almost had enough material for a real book. He had been thinking about it for a long while, but he was aware he needed something more, something new and unique. He’d put out feelers, hoping to penetrate deeper into that world. Perhaps this was a result.

  The kettle boiling snapped him back from his dreaming. He added ground coffee to the coffee press and poured the boiling water over it. After waiting a few moments, he pushed the plunger down and poured coffee onto the milk. He added a generous spoonful of sugar, stirred and sipped. Hot. He felt it enter his bloodstream while he looked at the email listing, scanning the senders and subjects quickly, looking for the interesting stuff amid the junk. Nothing much, just the continuation of a few conversations and a lot of things that might have been interesting in the past but which now bored him. A lot of things bored him.

  Through his distraction he noticed an email from a friend, Peter Jenkins, a funny but somewhat pompous man who edited and owned a popular London magazine, London Strife. Peter loved scandal, crime, suffering, drama and celebrities who had strayed.

  The email got straight to the point.

  Hi Allen, I’ve got something interesting for you, might be big. Can we talk. Lunch? Peter

  Jenkins had a reputation as a chancer, a publisher with a big mouth and an eye for the bigger story that had served him well. Allen trusted him, knew it was no bullshit. He wasn’t afraid to print anything, he took risks. For that Allen loved him. He loved the magazine and he loved Jenkins.