The Takers and Keepers

by Ivan Pope

  Despite the seeming enthusiasm of Jennifer’s mother, Allen found it impossible to arrange another meeting. There was a string of excuses, then she evaded his phone calls. After a while he realised that there wasn’t really going to be a book, at least not if the mother had anything to do with it. He gave in and wrote up what he had for the magazine. A day in the life of Jennifer Ransome. He felt some guilt in using their discussions, but something had to be done with the material – it was too interesting to leave sitting in the laptop. He kept the most perplexing details to himself, talk of the man who had held her and Jennifer’s belief that she knew where she had been kept. He still held out a slight belief that she would come back to him with more.

  Jenkins was not ecstatic. Great article, he said, pity to lose the book. ‘I’ll work on it, promise.’

  Allen continued to wonder about the woman he’d talked to, the girl that she had been and the man who’d kept her all those years, The Prick, and her dreams of fame. Fame for nothing, the modern world, that was what it all came to. Locked up for a lifetime, all it gave you was the idea of a ticket onto television. Maybe she deserved it, he thought.

  As expected, the police were very unhappy and, under the command of Pete Herman they descended on the Ransome house and tried to intimidate the family. The family were ready with their lawyer and the press and fought against it, hard. They’d become settled in the big house and didn’t want to be thrown out. Allen saw the horror of inflicting this sort of treatment on such a vulnerable person, but it was no longer his story. He’d trodden on what the police regarded as their own inviolate territory and he had little choice but to back far off. Herman took a shot at Jenkins, threatening his business. ‘I’ll raid you, take everything you’ve got for evidence and screw you to the floor,’ he said.

  ‘It’s all there in print,’ Jenkins said. ‘Help yourself.’

  ‘Fuck you, we’ll get a court order,’ Herman said. ‘We’re well within our rights. It’s you that is walking on thin ice, how fucking dare you go in there and pump that poor girl for information—and then splash it all over the country? You better watch your back.’

  Irate policemen were one thing, but London itself started to bug Allen now. The weather, which had been sunny in a clear, spring-like fashion, had now turned wet. Every time he went out it drizzled on him, the rain running off his leather coat into the pockets, making everything wet and driving him crazy. He cursed the dampness and waited for spring to return. He had another problem, a lack of work. Usually a new job turned up every few weeks, just enough to keep him going. In between writing he emailed around and wrote up story ideas. He tried to start up again on his own book idea, Lost, buried, abandoned: A history of the taken children but the proposal was nowhere near finished. He picked at it but he just couldn’t get Jennifer’s story out of his head.

  What he had suspected at the start, what he’d caught various glimpses of over a few years of talking to scum and writing up the shadowy world they knew about, was slowly coming into view. He knew that across Europe, all across the world, people rotted in cellars. Not a lot, but enough. They were the taken, the missing of the earth. Any trawl of the local or national press would turn up stories of the missing. The default view of the police, and of their families, was that they were most likely dead. No matter what circumstances they disappeared in, they never used their credit cards or bank accounts. They didn’t contact friends or lovers. They didn’t turn up in casualty wards or seeking dental treatment. All contact with the modern world ceased. It was reasonable to assume that they were dead and buried in some shallow grave.

  A few of them would escape, many of them die. Some of them raped daily and existed on an appalling diet of whatever the captors would give them or could smuggle for them. Other takers did nothing with their prey beyond locking them in the dark and keeping them there. Some were ill-educated and poor, but others were educated and affluent. There seemed to be no logic to the process, no discernible pattern to explain who would catch and keep their prey and who would be killers. There were no statistics, just the dark secrets, people growing whiter by the day, not knowing what day or season it is, their flesh turning to jelly as they live out their lives, long or short, at the mercy of their keepers. Some lived in base abject misery in damp, cramped boxes, others in palatial luxury in custom-built mansions underground, living a life of pretended splendour more squalid than the worst imprisonment, the deepest wet cellar. No matter what circumstances were constructed for these poor unfortunates, they lived out lives of the utmost banality in conditions that would be described as beyond human imagining, were it were not for the fact that humans had very much imagined them into being.

  A week later, while he mucked about with a story that was already overdue, a response came, from the internet, as he had known it would.

  He liked these moments, when a gap in his attention ensured there would be something to read. People said you could get addicted to email, to the internet, and he felt sure he was addicted on some level. He found it hard not to check his post every few minutes, no matter what he was doing. When something had taken him away from his workroom for a while, he felt an honest pleasure at getting back to check the email.

  did you like the viddy i have something for you, if you are still interested and are ready to travel? you are interested in our keepens i believe? i have a proposal, I think. we met once, a long time back in Lartin, you left me there, you lucky bastard.

  you’ve made a name for yourself alright, I’ve been following your career, you’ve been writing about me ha ha. I can give you some good shit on your subject, real stories, not the made-up crap most people spout, ha, ha.

  i can show you some of our keepens, it can be arranged i think you’ll find things are bit different to what you might imagine.

  email me back but don’t go spouting your mouth off or the door will close so quickly you will feel like a keepen yourself as always, your friend

  The email system it was sent from had stripped all identity from the sender. The message remained anonymous with no clues to the origin. It could be local, could be the other side of the world. From the language he guessed Eastern Europe, but he really had nothing to go on, just a hunch.

  Then, thinking again about the video that had come and gone, he realised that the person who placed it on YouTube must have been sitting at their computer waiting for him to take a look at it. And once they’d seen him arrive and view the material, they removed the video.

  They knew that one look would be enough for him, which meant they knew who and what he was. It was an offer, an invitation.

  He had been chasing this world for a long time, and it had made him infamous and feared in certain small circles. Infamous among the public and publishers who loved the cruelty and gore of his stories, but hated his closeness to the perpetrators. Feared among the smaller circles of the perpetrators and the traffickers who operated in the darkness and to whom any light was bad news.

  While slowly learning the byways of the fast-growing trafficking business over the preceding ten years, Allen had identified and slowly drawn out another scenario – the holding and keeping of the human cargos that the traders dealt in. And beyond that he had heard stories, rumours and whispers of a deeper layer of horror – those who held and kept captives not for days or weeks as part of a trade, but for years as part of a personal ambition. They were the Keepers and the people they held became keepens over time. Not the keepens of storybook and legend, but the undead, existing underground in cages and cellars for decades. The lost, assumed dead, who were kept alive in the dark.

  He went back to his email.

  Thank you for your video. I am interested. What do you offer? Allen

  He clicked send and waited.

  Later.

  I think you do know this, a group of people who help each other, who support the network. They creating keepens. My friend has one. Yes, Allen, he has one, held deep down there. Others have them too. You should see this pl
ace, it’s a basement of families in the dark.

  You know, a lot of people are held in different places, under the ground. I can introduce you, if you want, take you there. If you are interested in a visit to see this once and for all come to visit us, then maybe you will understand, you will feel the power.

  Over the rest of that day, alone in his flat, Allen carried on an email conversation with an unknown person at the other end. He didn’t stray far from the screen, checking and rechecking for new responses. His heart raced every time a new email arrived.

  Finally.

  - You’ll have to be my friend. You’ll have to be one of us. I can’t take you as a journalist, it’s too dangerous.

  If I can, I’ll get you down to visit one. But you won’t know where it is. Maybe a blindfold, a car journey. I’m not sure.

  They are my friends.

  I wouldn’t go to the police, not with my background.

  -Why are you doing this? asked Allen in reply. What do you want?

  -Come and meet me. Then we can talk said the friend.

  -Come and talk? Where? asked Allen.

  -Belgrade.

  - Who are you? But this time there was no reply.

  Allen read the exchange again a couple of times and then picked up the phone to Jenkins.

  ‘I think I have a story here,’ he said. ‘Any chance you could send me to Belgrade? If this is real it’s a big story.’

  ‘If?’ asked Jenkins.

  ‘Oh, it’s real alright. Just, well, sometimes people exaggerate. And sometimes they don’t.’

  Jenkins haggled, but within twenty minutes it was agreed. Allen emailed back.

  -I’m coming. Make arrangements. I’ll get the bus from London.

  He emailed Emily at her work.

  Em, I’m going to Belgrade for a while. I’ve got a new contact, think it’s serious. I think it’s the big one. Back soonest, love you.

  He knew she hated it and would hate this more than most but he was on a roll.

  I’m doing this for you, he thought.

  And then straight back came the reply.

  Please don’t go, I’m scared for you. Don’t go on your own. I don’t think I can handle it.

  I love you, he thought. But I must go.

  Once he was sure he was going, that it was as real as it could be, he stood up, crossed the room and knelt in front of a small cabinet. Reaching underneath it with an extended hand and stretched wrist, he felt for his quarry. It had been there a long time, wrapped in clingfilm and attached to the underside of the cabinet with blue tac. He detached it carefully and drew it out, then carried it back to the desk.

  He sat down and considered his prize. Like a boy with a favoured treasure, he held his secret which denoted the depths to which he would descend and which had to be kept from the world.

  He pulled at the film, stretching and tearing the covering until an envelope was released. He gingerly pulled out a photograph. It was a picture of a young woman holding a baby. Next to them stood a small child. The picture had been taken with a flash; the eyes are reddened as if they are a devil family. The background is a darkened room, no furniture, rough grey walls. The ceiling is low. She is not smiling and has a very pallid, very white face, hair flattened to her skull. She stares at whoever holds the camera with the look of quarry as the hunt approaches its end, a thousand-yard stare. The child is stony-faced. The baby is held tight to the woman’s chest.

  In the background, almost obscured in the darkness, is a wooden chair and a small wooden table with a bucket and a shoebox on it. There is also the edge of an inflatable child’s castle. He has spent dozens of hours poring over this photo. It is his one true relic.

  He turns the photo over.

  On the back, in biro, was written in an educated and controlled hand, My keepen family. 2002

  On it is written with a childish hand. Roger? Maybe long term. europe, uk, club? 2001 LM mine

  Stuck to the back with Sellotape is a passport photo of the head and shoulders of a smirking young man with thick red hair, wearing a shirt and tie and a tweed jacket.

  Bosnia 1992

  A long, straggling column of women and children made its way slowly through the woods in deep shadow. Although the late autumn sun shone on the tops of the trees and occasionally dipped through to the ground, the walkers could only feel cold on their heads and shoulders. They carried possessions wrapped in blankets. Some limped or staggered, supported by their children or family members. They did not talk. As they drew closer it was clear that many bore wounds from bullets or shrapnel, or the cut of a spade or club. Even the children were not spared, many bore wounds. All had closed-down, expressionless faces.

  They had been evicted from ancient family villages and hamlets by Arkan’s fighters, a fearsome crew of Serbs who had descended, heavily armed, on their countryside. The path that they took had been trodden already by many of their compatriots. Although aware of the gathering storm, they had been living as their parents and grandparents had done, quietly on their small family farms or in villages where they were neither noticed nor commented upon. As war came, they hid themselves away and waited for the fighters to pass through the valleys on their way to distant battles. What they found, however, was that the war was not distant and the fighters did not want to pass through their villages. The campaign started with bloody murder inflicted at random by small groups of outsiders who came carrying guns and knives and garrotting wires. The men were quickly and efficiently separated from the rest of the community. Those who offered any resistance or who even looked into the eyes of these incomers were swiftly and brutally murdered with extreme violence. No shred of pity was offered by these thugs. They brutalised fathers, mothers, grandparents and babies in front of their families.

  Men who had not managed to flee into the woods were rounded up and forced onto buses. The posse of northerners whooped and hollered and broke into the village bar. They swiftly drank the contents and set the building ablaze. The streets filled up with corpses scattered in doorways. A United Nations armoured vehicle entered the street from the north and proceeded slowly and inelegantly down the main road. Although the villagers expected it to stop, for the smartly dressed soldier who manned the machine gun in the turret to turn his firepower on the brutes, to effect a rescue, the armoured car just continued through the village and disappeared at the other end. This visitation sent the now drunken rabble into further paroxysms of Dionysian frenzy and they started to pick off the younger women, taking them away from their families and into a large barn beside the road. By the time night fell, the children had long since stopped crying and subsided into empty, hollow-eyed silence. The villagers knew what was expected of them and they swiftly packed up anything that remained in the way of food and clothing and took to the hills, a community scratched out and forced into a march at a moment’s notice.

  They slept in those hills, morbidly afraid to descend to the towns despite the freezing weather. They listened to the sound of artillery, of bombardment and churning truck wheels as village after village, town after town was efficiently cauterised and emptied. This was conquest; and safety, they knew, lay to the south. All were traumatised, some more than others. As they reached the top of a steep incline and started down yet another hill, into yet another small valley, they noticed that there were Western journalists, photographers, watching them pass. To their right, hanging part-way up a small tree, the body of a young woman. Dressed in a red jersey and white stained skirt, she had hanged herself with her own belt. The passers-by took no notice, but the journalists were fascinated and took photo after photo as the remnants of the northern villages passed by oblivious, wall-eyed and deep in their own thoughts of survival.

  They made their way down and, for a change and because they are exhausted, some of them took to the road to cross to the further slopes over which they needed to climb on their journey to safety, kept in motion only by the thought that over the next hill, in the next valley, there might be a sa
fe space, a sanctuary where they could stop and rest. Beyond that they had no thoughts.

  While they are moving slowly and painfully along this road, a large white Mercedes car appears and pulls up slowly alongside the women at the back of the convoy. Fearing for their lives, they motion the car forward. It moves again along the line and draws up beside a small group, two young women, one grandmother and one a young girl. They look unwillingly into the car whose windows are now wound up tight. The men inside are dressed in civilian clothing, not the army fatigues with which they have become familiar and of which they are in mortal fear. A man in the back seat holds a gun, a small machine pistol. But he also holds food and money; a ham, bread, cheeses, biscuits. The women look into the car in wonder and the man motions to the girl. We don’t know her, they say, she was on the hills alone, her parents are … But they tail off here because they don’t know who the parents are and to speculate on where they are is to open a box that is being held firmly closed by force of will throughout the group. She’s not ours, they say, aware that they are crossing a line that ought not to be crossed, but somehow now broken by events.

  The girl looks up, she has learned recently that nobody is to be trusted, but she also notices the bread, the cheese, and that the men do not wear the battle fatigues that clothed those who started this nightmare. She smiles sweetly at the man holding the food. He gestures to her, come on here. He opens the door and invites her to hop in beside him. The interior of the car is inviting, clean, quiet. Her feet are sore, bloody, bruised. Her shoes are worn through, wet and cold. The driver looks around. He reminds her briefly of her father, or so she tells herself, of papa who she has not seen for two weeks. It is not so much a struggle as a negotiation and when the first man breaks off a hunk of bread and holds it out to her she is won over and leaps into the car. The two women in the group hold fast to the car door and hold out their hands for their prize. Bread, ham, cheese and wine is handed over quickly, then the man gestures with his gun and the old fear returns. The women step away from the car and the door is slammed. The driver guns the idling motor and, with a squeal of tyre rubber, the German automobile accelerates along the road and disappears into the mist.