The Takers and Keepers

by Ivan Pope

  Then from the stillness came a small voice.

  ‘Over here.’

  She swivelled her head, staring intently into the darkness. A mass of bees seemed to buzz in front of her eyes, turning anything that might be there into a fuzzy grey mass. I’m going crazy, she thought, I can’t see anything.

  ‘Where is here? What the fuck is this place?’

  She felt strange, swearing at the darkness, but desperation overcame her reserve.

  Then out of the grey fuzziness the person appeared. A small, framed woman in a baggy dress. This time Emily kept her nerve, not flinching. She supressed the desire to scream.

  ‘What the fuck are you?’

  The woman stared at her for a long time then turned again into the darkness. She seemed to move effortlessly through the murk. After a while she returned and handed Emily a cup, touching it against her hand. It was filled with cold water and Emily gulped at the cool liquid. It had a calming effect and her heart slowed to a reasonable rate.

  ‘Where are we?’ she asked.

  ‘Don’t know,’ said the girl.

  ‘How did I get here?’

  ‘He brought you in yesterday.’

  ‘Who is He?’

  ‘Man,’ the woman said. ‘The man.’

  She took a breath, calming a thousand fears.

  ‘Who are you?’.

  ‘I’m Abigail.’

  ‘How long have you been here?’ she asked, but the woman said nothing and moved slowly back out of sight. Then, out of the darkness, her small voice said, ‘Always.’

  Somewhere in the darkness, as Emily fell back to sleep, a baby started to cry.

  Home

  It took Allen a week of hitching and hiking to get home from Belgrade. He slept in ditches and had a very difficult conversation at the UK border before he could get into the country. He anticipated an angry girlfriend: his lack of contact would not look good. He steeled himself for an argument in which he would again fail to tell her just what had gone on, how strange his trip had been, how close to disaster he had come.

  In the flat Emily’s things were scattered in her usual manner. A pile of schoolbooks sat on the kitchen table. Her toothbrush sat in the glass, nothing out of place, nothing unexpected, but she wasn’t there.

  The police arrived an hour after he got there. Two very young constables and Peter Herman. DI Herman was a happy man. ‘We’re investigating the disappearance of your girlfriend. Her mother reported her gone days ago.’

  Missing. The word entered him like a bullet and suddenly the worst seemed possible. Fuck, fuck, fuck, suddenly he felt cold and sick. The air disappeared from his lungs and a strange sound, a wheezing, grating gasp, emanated from deep inside him. His legs softened and buckled. He reached out to hold on to Herman’s shoulder.

  Herman disdainfully flipped the hand away and said. ‘We haven’t got much to go on, she might have done a runner or you might have done her in, we don’t know at this point. But we’d like to know when you last saw her and what you’ve been doing this last week.’ He took out a notebook. ‘That’s another thing we’d like to ask you about,’ he said. ‘We know you arrived at Dover without a passport. Where have you been?’

  He could tell them about his trip, but where would it get him, would they even believe him? If she had been taken, and if Roger had anything to do with it, the problem was here in London, on his territory. He needed to sort it out, and fast.

  ‘What about the day you left?’ Herman asked. Allen knew the reasoning, but there was nothing. A suspect who had been out of the country – even the police had to acknowledge that it was unlikely – unless a body emerged. That could do for him.

  ‘I’ve been away,’ Allen protested. ‘Research, out of the country. I’m a journalist. I don’t know anything?’ He realised immediately how awful that sounded.

  Eventually they arrested him for entering the country illegally and took him, handcuffed, to Finsbury nick. They put him in a holding cell. It wasn’t a hardship. He had been in prison before, much harder prisons than this, and for much longer periods. He understood how to survive within a small space enfolded deep within a building. He often thought this was what gave him an insight into, and sympathy with, the people he wrote about.

  ‘Been up to your old games again?’ Herman said when he first came to interview him. Allen knew exactly what he meant and how it was intended to be a threat, but he ignored it. His time incarcerated was the result of a fairly predictable set of circumstances. His early life had been one of drift and had ended badly. None of it was a secret, but he didn’t spread it around. He had left school at sixteen and drifted around the world, taking badly paid jobs in order to continue his partying in whatever city he found himself. In Australia he’d almost become a serious player in the drugs market before a close shave with the police frightened him into leaving the county. In a moment of madness after returning to the UK he had joined the army and a short, unhappy, period followed. Aldershot, Germany, Northern Ireland, Cyprus, wherever they wanted him to go.

  In the army he had a sideline as a dealer, supplying drugs off-base to the locals, an outshoot of his previous life. He wasn’t much of a dealer, just a party boy who liked to make some spare change on the side. It was more of a habit, all of his friends had been doing it, buying and selling, whatever drugs swept through. It was a way of life while he sorted himself out, how to get out of the army, what to do next.

  Then he sold some pills to a contact who sold some on to two schoolgirls looking for a party night out. They both died during the night. They were just children, fifteen-year-old kids who’d never done much of anything wrong before.

  It couldn’t have gone more wrong, and for the first time in his life he’d seen how destructive high-profile exposure could be. The tabloids took up a hue and cry against him, calling for an exemplary sentence and then demanding, in a week of madness, the return of the death penalty. A killer of children they called him. The babes in the wood, poisoned by scum.

  The press had made it into a big story, man kills girls, like he was some sort of perverted murderer, and by the time they were done with him he’d ended up with a four-year sentence, and it seemed almost unbearably generous. He accepted it, kept his head down and did his time. Self-loathing sent him into a spin of depression. The army threw him out and he spent most of the sentence in solitary, for his own protection they said, though he felt it was more punishment. In the end it wasn’t that hard. He spent a lot of time in the library, reading about the world, did some learning, repented publicly. They let him out after two years, on parole. He couldn’t travel. Get a crap job, they said, so he did. Then he’d met Emily.

  Interrogation. Herman had obviously made up his mind about events even before the first interview.

  ‘You’re pretty famous, aren’t you?’ he started. ‘Mr Kimbo, I’m suggesting that you know more about where your girlfriend has gone to than you want to let on. Overdose, was it? You been playing around with the hard stuff again?’

  Allen kept his mouth shut. The lawyer that Jenkins had sent over objected, and Herman moved back to a more reasonable line of questioning: when had he last seen Emily, where had he been, what had he been up to?

  Even before the end of that first interview, Allen had decided to tell them about Roger. He was fairly sure Roger was involved. He needed to get out, to do his own detective work. Wherever Emily was, she might not be coming out for a long time unless he could … what? He could hardly bear to think about it, so he offered to help the police. ‘I’ve got contacts,’ he said. ‘If you let me out, I can help you.’

  He told them some of what he knew. The police did know of Roger, but they thought of him as a smuggler who worked with East European gangs. He’d never figured greatly on their intelligence reports. Herman wasn’t interested that Allen was brandishing his name.

  ‘He’s a people smuggler,’ Allen said. ‘He’s been doing it for years.’

  Herman looked bored. ‘If you think boosting u
p your old cell mate is going to get you a free pass, you’re going to have to give me a bit more than that.’

  Allen told them how he’d met Roger when they shared a cell and while they weren’t really friends, he had kept vaguely in touch. Roger had become, in the years after the opening up of Eastern Europe, an acknowledged expert in government circles on these networks, the sources of supply, the methods and origins and the destinations of these hapless individuals. He had quickly understood the hooks that this trafficking had in the governments and police forces in the East, but also how they would corrupt institutions in the affluent West. Germany, Austria, Italy and then France, Britain and the northern Scandinavian countries fell for the available charms of his imports. He had developed an interest in the abundant supply of young women from the depths of the newly capitalist countries around the rim of Russia. These women were discovering, to their horror and their country’s shame, that there was a huge demand in rich Western nations for their services, sexual and otherwise. And that there were plenty of hard men who would stop at almost nothing to supply this demand. In a few short years, the value of this industry rose to match and then briefly supersede that of international drugs networks.

  ‘Roger rose to the top of that business,’ he told Herman. ‘He was smart and well connected and developed new methods and new sources of supply.’

  It was a brutal business, he said. He thought Roger had fallen foul of other mafia figures who wanted to enter the game, and of his own desires. In short, Roger had preferred the keeping of trafficked girls to passing them on. He was an aficionado of the underground chamber.

  Herman said he didn’t really understand why Allen was telling him this. ‘What’s this Roger character got to do with your bird?’ he said.

  Allen told him about Serbia, a part of what he knew about the Takers and Keepers. He didn’t name them and he didn’t give details – he was worried it sounded too fantastical. He told Herman a version of what had happened to him, trying to convince him of a bigger picture, of someone else with an interest in taking Emily. But Herman didn’t want to take the bait.

  ‘But why Emily, Allen?’ he said, repeatedly. ‘Why would this bloke snatch you and then your girlfriend? It sounds like a load of bollocks to me.’

  Allen didn’t really know either. ‘Revenge? Ransom?’ What he did understand was that Roger’s world existed separately from the cops-and-robbers world of policemen like this one. Eventually Herman seemed to realise Allen probably had nothing to do with Emily’s fate and released him. The press hadn’t got wind of the story. Allen knew that when they did it would be a shitstorm. He imagined Herman was probably holding the story in reserve, knowing how quickly his life could be ruined.

  He went to see Emily’s mother who screamed at him, told him to get out of her life, accusing him of murdering her daughter. There was nothing he could say in return, he almost felt that he had.

  After that he got his head down and tried to push the memories out of his head, but he couldn’t forget what he’d seen, where he’d been. And where was Emily? He didn’t want to forget about it but he couldn’t bear to think about it. He didn’t have a solution. He almost wished he hadn’t come back, that it was he who was imprisoned in the dark. Somewhere. Down there. An image of a woman in an underground cell, staring blankly into the light as she danced, haunted him.

  He went back to his old haunts, to his circuit of junkies and sickos, looking for clues, looking for Roger, but there was nothing.

  He probed his contacts in the local force but they’d gone quiet on him, no longer happy to feed him inside information. The heavy hand of a potentially political case had made itself felt. He knew there were coppers who would talk – but they were being kept well away from him. I can help, he told them, I know this world, but he couldn’t provoke any interest.

  He walked through the back streets of London, a long, endless, convoluted journey, again and again, making a visual check of every doorway, every boarded building and potential opening in the fabric of the city.

  On the surface London looked crap in this weather, wet rubbish strewn around the streets, but underneath he imagined it pristine, clean, abandoned but tidy. Why did every city have to be like this, a sump full of people, all concentrating on their own needs, discarding what they no longer wanted, dumping it for someone else to clear up? He knew she was out there, under there, down there, somewhere. The long history of the place had left thousands of forgotten and abandoned spaces under his feet: labyrinths, cellars, tunnels, passages, subways, shafts, burrows, holes, mines, vaults, cantinas, crypts and undercrofts.

  The answer was obvious but he avoided it. The people to go to were the Takers and Keepers. HOW? But they now seemed far out of his reach and out of his league.

  At home he sat, lethargic, in his work chair. There was no work. He checked his emails out of habit and re-read many from the past, looking for a clue. There was no hint of Emily, nothing, the earth had swallowed her up, literally. When he thought about it, he felt sick, but he had to think about it.

  He knew they were watching him; he knew they were digging. Maybe they’d surface Roger before he did. A week passed and Herman got back in touch, slightly contrite now.

  ‘We’re going to do a public appeal, you know: you get up in front of the cameras and make an appeal for information. You get to be on TV. You talk directly to whoever is holding her and ask them to release her. Lay it on thick. There’s probably a slot on Crimewatch in it. The press is interested and they’d like to have you up there so they can check you out. The press will lap it up. You don’t have to show any emotion.’ Allen understood the game. If he wasn’t a suspect, he was seen as a potential connection. It was a test, but he had nothing to hide and nothing to lose.

  They made the appeal, but it turned up nothing. It was as if she had fallen into a void, into the blackest of black holes from which no light could escape.

  Jenni

  As the weeks lengthened into months, he became consumed by Emily. He wanted desperately to catch a glimpse of her, hear her again, to talk to her and, most of all, to extract her from Roger’s grasp. He didn’t want Roger to have her. He could smell her around the house, her clothes in their drawers, her makeup and her books, her toothbrush, her hairbrush, containing traces of herself. And he realised how he loved her, how he’d come to enjoy life when she was around. He fell into a deep despair.

  Then, after one of his periodical visits to London Strife, he stopped for a coffee outside a cafe in Soho to enjoy the sunshine. The medication he was on made the world hazy, but he had started to come to terms with events. As his doctor said, he had to go on living.

  A woman walked past, stopped, blocking the sunshine, looking down at him. He ignored her for as long as he could, studiously avoiding her gaze. When he realised she wasn’t going to move he flicked his eyes up.

  It was Jennifer.

  In the summer sunshine she was a different person—older, thinner, well dressed, smiling. Her hair looked as if someone who knew what they were doing had had a pop at it. She was more grown up, almost sophisticated, he thought, if he hadn’t known what she was really like.

  ‘Mr Allen! Oh. My. God. It’s me, Jenni. Remember?’

  The whole world had moved on, he thought, except for me. He nodded.

  ‘Jennifer. Of course,’ he said. ‘How are you?’

  She let out a little shriek, wanting a better response.

  He forced a smile. ‘You look good. How nice to see you.’

  He half-heartedly motioned for her to sit down next to him. He didn’t really relish her company, not the half-mad girl-woman he had briefly known, but there was something about her now, something confident and alert. She pulled out a chair and sat next to him, a little too close.

  ‘I saw you on the telly. And in The Sun. How cool is that?’ She had, of course, but for the worst reasons.

  She licked her lips and smiled at him again. Any sense of worth still seemed to revolve around the med
ia.

  ‘Didn’t I see you in something?’ he said.

  He knew exactly what she’d been doing: bit part appearances, daytime chat shows, newspaper exposes, commentary ghost-written for her. There was talk of her own show, The Survivor or something. He didn’t think it possible that anyone would do that. Exploit her in that way. But who could tell? These days, anything went.

  ‘Oh, Allen, things are brilliant. I’ve been on the telly. I’ve met so many famous people. My life has changed. And I’m going to do a book. I’ve got an agent now.’

  He felt a small stab of jealousy. That should have been his book.

  ‘That’s really nice, Jen. You’re almost a star, I guess.’

  They chatted about celebrities she had met and the people she was working with. In the middle of it all she suddenly said, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry about your girlfriend, what am I like, going on like this and you must be so unhappy.’

  ‘Yes.’

  He didn’t want to discuss Emily with her. ‘Got any ideas what happened?’

  ‘No.’

  She stared at him as if trying to make up her mind. Then, without waiting for a response, she said: ‘I still see him.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Promise not to tell? The Prick, of course. I see him sometimes. Is that terrible? He won’t really let me go, see, it’s our project. All this, the telly and all that. It was his idea. I told you. It was our plan. And then …’

  Allen waited.

  ‘… I might be able to help you,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Find her. You know.’

  ‘Jen, don’t say that.’

  ‘But, the Prick, he knows things, people. Stuff. He might.’

  This is insane, he thought, but he was now alight, burning with desire for more. Maybe she could.

  ‘I’d like … I mean, if you …’ He tailed off, not knowing where it went.

  ‘It’s ok,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to say anything. I know how to do this. For you. You were nice to me.’