The Keeper

Louise pulled the duvet that covered her up to her neck against the coldness of her discoveries only to add to her chill. She looked under the duvet and realized all her clothes had been taken and the duvet left in their place. The duvet smelled clean and comforting against the cold stench of the room, but who would do this, take her from her home, take her clothes, but care enough to leave her a clean duvet to cover herself and keep out the cold? Who and why? She closed her eyes and prayed he hadn’t touched her. Her hand slowly moved down her body and between her legs. Fighting the repulsion she touched herself gently. She felt no pain, no soreness, and she was dry. She was sure he hadn’t raped her. So why was she here?

As her eyes adjusted further to the gloom she discovered she was lying on a thin single mattress, old and stained. He had left a plastic beaker of what looked and smelled like fresh water, but the thing she noticed most, the one thing that brought tears stinging from her eyes, was when she realized she wasn’t just in this terrible room, she was locked in a cage inside the room. All around her was thick wire mesh interwoven through its solid metal frame, no more than six feet long and four feet wide. She was locked inside some sort of animal cage, which meant there were only two possibilities: he’d left her there to die, or he would be coming back, coming back to see the animal he’d caught and caged, coming back to feed his prize, coming back to do whatever he wanted to her.

She wiped her tears on the duvet and once again tried to take in all of her surroundings, looking for any sign of hope. One end of her cage was clearly the way out as it was blocked with a padlocked door. She also noticed what appeared to be a hatch in the side, presumably for the safe passage of food between her and her keeper. Fear swept up from the depths of her despair and overwhelmed her. She virtually leapt at the door, pushing her fingers through the wire mesh and closing her fists around it, shaking the cage wildly, tears pouring down her cheeks as she filled her lungs ready to scream for help. She froze. She’d heard something, something moving. She wasn’t alone.

She looked deep into the room, her eyes almost completely adjusted to the low light levels now, listening for more sounds, praying they wouldn’t come, but they did, something moving. Her eyes focused on where the sounds had come from and she could see it, on the opposite side of the room, another cage, as far as she could tell identical to the one she was locked inside. My God was it an animal in there? Was she being kept with a wild animal? Was that why he’d taken her, to give her to this animal? Driven by panic she started shaking her cage door again, although she knew it was futile. The sound of a voice made her stop. A quiet, weak voice. The voice of another woman.

‘You shouldn’t do that,’ the voice whispered. ‘He might hear you. You never know when he’s listening. If he hears you doing that he’ll punish you. He’ll punish us both.’

Louise froze, the terrible realization she was not the first he’d taken paralysing her mind and body. She lay absolutely still, listening, disbelieving, waiting for the voice to speak again, beginning to think she had imagined it. She could wait no longer. ‘Hello,’ she called into the gloom. ‘Who are you? How did you get here?’ She waited for an answer. ‘My name’s Louise Russell. Can you tell me your name?’

A short, sharp ‘Sssssh,’ was the only reply. Louise waited in silence for an eternity.

‘We need to help each other,’ Louise told the voice.

‘I said be quiet,’ the voice answered, sounding afraid rather than angry. ‘Please, he might be listening.’

‘I don’t care,’ Louise insisted. ‘Please, please. I need to know your name.’ Frustration brought more tears into her eyes. She waited, staring at the coiled shape lying on the floor in the other cage, until eventually the shape began to unfold and take on a human form.

Louise looked at the young woman now sitting, legs folded under herself in the cage opposite. She looked around and confirmed to herself there were no more cages in the room, her eyes soon returning to the other woman. Louise could see that she was still pretty, despite her unkempt appearance – her short brown hair tangled and her face pale and dirty, any signs of make-up long since washed away by tears and sweat. She had bruises on her body and face, as well as a badly split lip. She looked to be in her late twenties, slim and as far as Louise could tell from a sitting position, about the same height as she was. In fact almost everything about her was similar to Louise. She couldn’t help but notice the other woman had no mattress or duvet, no covers or bedding of any kind, and all she had to wear were her filthy-looking knickers and bra. She looked cold, despite the fact the room was reasonably warm, although Louise couldn’t see an obvious source of heating. She guessed the room might be next to a boiler room or maybe the fact they were underground, as she suspected, kept it warmer than outside. But why was this other woman apparently being treated so much worse than she was? Was she being punished? Was that why she wouldn’t speak, for fear of further punishment? What would he do to her next – remove her underwear, the final humiliation?

‘My name’s Karen Green.’

The sound of the voice froze Louise. It took her a few seconds to find her own voice.

‘I’m Louise. Louise Russell,’ she answered. ‘How long have you been here for?’

‘I don’t know. He’s got my watch.’

‘Can you remember what day it was when he took you?’

‘Thursday morning,’ Karen told her. ‘What day is it now?’

‘I don’t know. I can’t be sure. I remember it was Tuesday morning when he …’ Louise struggled to find the word. ‘When he attacked me. Do you know how long I’ve been here for?’

‘Quite a while. Maybe even a day. You’ve been out the whole time.’

Louise slumped against the wire mesh of her cage, trying to comprehend the fact she could have been missing for a day and still not been found. And then a more chilling thought swept over her; Karen had been missing for almost a week and yet here she was, rotting in a mesh cage and, up until now, alone – except for him.

‘Do you know what he wants?’ she asked Karen in a sudden panic. ‘Why are we here?’

‘No. I don’t know what he wants, but he always calls me Sam.’

Louise remembered he had called her Sam too. I’ve come to take you home, Sam. Just like I promised I would. She felt the sickness rising in her stomach, the foul, bitter bile pushing up through her throat and into her mouth. They were replacements for someone else – replacements for whoever the hell Sam was.

Another wave of exhausting fear washed over her, a tangible, physical pain. They were being held by someone who was insane, someone impossible to reason or rationalize with. Hope drained from her.

Louise looked across at Karen and was reminded of her lack of clothing and the only thing she feared almost as much as death itself. ‘Has he touched you?’ she asked. There was a long silence and she watched Karen shrinking and coiling into the foetal position, hugging herself silently.

‘Not at first,’ Karen answered in little more than a tearful whisper. ‘When I woke up he’d taken my clothes, but I don’t think he’d touched me. He left me a mattress and duvet, like he has for you, but later he took them away and he … he started to hurt me. At first he was almost gentle. He injected me with something that stopped me struggling and then he did it. But now he’s always angry with me. He does it to punish me, but I haven’t done anything wrong. I haven’t done anything to make him angry.’

Louise listened as if she was listening to her own future being described, her body stiff with panic, her muscles cramping with tension. ‘What happened to your clothes?’ she asked. ‘You said he took them when he brought you here, but he gave you back your underwear. Why didn’t he give you the rest back?’

‘These aren’t mine,’ Karen explained. ‘My first few days here he let me wash, then he gave me some clothes and made me wear them. But last night – I think it was night, he came and took them off me, except for what I’m wearing. I didn’t know why he took them until he brought you here.’

Louise too realized why he had taken the clothes and knew that soon she would be wearing them. She retched bile, capillaries in her eyes rupturing, leaving them pink and glassy. The silence was suddenly shattered by the metallic clank of something small and heavy hitting against what sounded like sheet metal. A padlock being opened, Louise guessed, and for a second dared to believe it could be their rescuers. The fear and dread she heard in Karen’s voice soon chased her hopes away as she instinctively backed into the furthest corner of her cage.

‘He’s coming,’ Karen told her. ‘Don’t speak to me now. He’s coming.’

Sean and Sally entered their murder inquiry incident room at Peckham police station shortly before four on Wednesday afternoon. The office was both unusually busy and quiet, the detectives from Sean’s team taking advantage of the lull between new investigations to catch up on severely overdue paperwork. They hadn’t picked up a murder case in weeks, despite there being no shortage to go around. The other Murder teams working South London were getting more than a little annoyed that the regular flow of violent death seemed to be passing Sean’s team by. Though glad of the respite, Sean increasingly had the feeling he was being saved for something he knew he wasn’t going to like.

As they crossed the room he saw Detective Superintendent Featherstone through the Perspex of his partitioned office. He caught DS Donnelly’s eye as he walked and with a barely noticeable twitch of his head indicated for Donnelly to follow them. As Sean approached Featherstone, he began to get the feeling this was the day he’d been dreading. They entered the office and Featherstone stood to greet them. ‘A little bird tells me it didn’t go so good at court today,’ was Featherstone’s hello.

‘Depends on your point of view,’ Sean answered.

‘And what’s yours?’ Featherstone asked.

‘Well, he’ll probably spend the rest of his life banged up with the worst of the worst in Broadmoor. That sounds like a result to me.’

‘And who would disagree with that point of view?’ Featherstone enquired. Sean said nothing, but his eyes flicked towards Sally. ‘Nobody gets out of Broadmoor, Sally. That bastard will rot in there. Think of it this way: he’s got a life sentence and we didn’t even have to go to trial. All it takes is a couple of dimwits on the jury who like the look of him and he walks free. Trust me, Sally, this is an outstanding result.’

Sally was unmoved. ‘He should have stood trial,’ was all she said.

Sean decided it was time to move the conversation on. Cops never dwelt on old cases long. It didn’t matter whether they’d had a good result or a disastrous one; within a few hours of the court’s decision the case, though not forgotten, was put aside, rarely to be mentioned again. However, the investigation surrounding Gibran had been significantly different from anything any of them had dealt with. And bad as it had been for the rest of them, it had been much, much worse for Sally – she had almost died, almost been killed in her own home. Physically she had survived, just, but Sean felt that something had died inside her. She’d spent two months in intensive care and then another three with the hospital general population. A month later she’d gone back to work, but it was too soon and she couldn’t cope physically or mentally. A few weeks later she’d returned again and he couldn’t persuade her to take more time off, no matter how hard he tried. That was two months ago; nine months after she was attacked. She couldn’t hope to have truly recovered in that time.

‘There’s no point dwelling on what did or didn’t happen any longer than we have to. What’s done is done. We can’t appeal a decision made at committal so we all need to move on.’ Sean glanced at Sally, who was silently staring at the floor, then turned to Featherstone. ‘I assume you’ve gathered us together for a reason, boss.’

‘Indeed. I’ve got a missing person for you to find.’

Featherstone’s words were greeted with disbelieving silence.

‘A what?’ Sean queried.

‘A missing person,’ Featherstone repeated.

‘Must be someone very important to have an MIT assigned to their case,’ Donnelly surmised.

‘Important, no,’ Featherstone told them. ‘Or at least, not to the general public. No doubt she’s important to her family and friends, and certainly to her husband who reported her missing.’

‘Are we talking foul play?’ Sean asked. ‘Is the husband a suspect?’

‘Yes to the foul play, no to the husband. He’s not a suspect.’

‘How long’s she been missing for?’ Sean continued.

‘Best guess is yesterday morning. The husband, John Russell, left her at about eight thirty to go to work and hasn’t seen her since,’ Featherstone explained. ‘He got home at about six that evening and both his wife and her car were missing. Her handbag was there, her mobile phone etc, but Louise wasn’t. Clearly something’s happened to her and clearly she could be at risk.’

Sean didn’t like what he was hearing. Women who ran off with secret lovers didn’t leave their handbags and phones behind. ‘How far have we got?’ he asked.

‘About as far as I’ve just described,’ Featherstone told them. ‘The local uniform inspector who picked up the missing persons report didn’t like the look of it so he passed it up to their CID office who in turn thought it might be something we’d be interested in.’

‘And when or if they find her body, we will be interested,’ Donnelly chipped in.

‘The idea is we find her before it comes to that,’ Featherstone snapped back.

‘That’s not our brief,’ Donnelly continued to argue. ‘We deal with murders, nothing else. Why don’t they give it to the Serious Crime Group or even leave it with the local CID?’

‘Because,’ Featherstone explained, ‘the powers that be, sitting in their ivory towers in Scotland Yard, have decided to trial a new policy with vulnerable MISPERs who at first sight appear to have come to harm. It’s an extension of the murder suppression and prevention programme.’

‘Then why not give it to the Murder Suppression Unit?’ Donnelly refused to back down. ‘Seems tailor-made for them.’

‘Not quite their remit,’ Featherstone continued. ‘They need a suspect to concentrate on before they’ll take a job.’

‘And we need a body,’ Donnelly insisted.

Sean broke the argument up with a question. ‘How old is she?’

‘Sorry?’ Featherstone’s mind was still tussling with Donnelly.

‘How old is the missing woman?’

Featherstone flicked through the file he’d been holding throughout the meeting. ‘Thirty.’

‘Prime running-away-with-another-man age,’ Donnelly sniffed.

‘She hasn’t run away,’ Sally joined in. ‘A woman wouldn’t leave so many personal belongings behind unless something had happened.’

‘Like what?’ Donnelly asked.

‘Like she was taken,’ Sally answered.

Sean sensed another argument was about to flare. ‘We’ll look into it,’ he announced.

‘What?’ Donnelly turned to him, indignant.

‘Look at it this way,’ Sean told Donnelly. ‘If we can find her before something happens to her, we’ll save ourselves a lot of work.’

‘Good,’ Featherstone said. ‘I want to be regularly updated on this one, Sean. The powers that be are keen for a positive result to keep the media off their backs.’ He handed the missing persons report to Sean who passed it on to Sally. ‘There are a few photographs of her in the file. The only distinguishing mark is a scar from when she had her appendix removed when she was a teenager.’

‘Get some copies of this run up please, Sally, and spread them around the team,’ Sean told her. ‘Dave can give you a hand.’

Donnelly looked as displeased as he felt. ‘Waste of our time,’ he insisted. ‘She’ll be home in a couple of days smelling of aftershave and demanding a divorce.’

Sean gave him a hard look. ‘I don’t think so,’ was all he said. Donnelly knew when to stop pushing and left the office in Sally’s wake.

Featherstone waited until they were well out of earshot before speaking again. ‘How’s Sally?’ he asked.

Sean sucked a breath in through his teeth. ‘She’s getting there,’ he answered.

‘Bollocks,’ snapped Featherstone. ‘Any fool can see she’s struggling, unsurprisingly.’

‘She’ll be OK,’ Sean assured him, a little disappointed in Featherstone’s lack of faith in Sally’s ability to recover. ‘She needs some time and a decent investigation to take her mind off what happened, that’s all.’

‘Is that why you so readily agreed to take on a missing persons inquiry?’ Featherstone asked. ‘To help Sally.’

Sean avoided the question. ‘I didn’t realize I had a choice.’

‘For what it’s worth,’ Featherstone told him, ‘you did have a choice.’ Sean said nothing as Featherstone headed out of his office. ‘Make sure you keep me posted and if there’s anything I can do, give me a call. I know you’re allergic to the media, so if you need me to deal with them, no problem.’

Featherstone was halfway out the door when Sean stopped him with a question. ‘Do you think she’s already dead? Is that why you want me to take this on?’

‘I was hoping you would tell me that, Sean,’ Featherstone answered. ‘And her name’s Louise Russell and she’s someone’s wife, someone’s daughter – and if we do our jobs properly, one day she might be someone’s mother. I think we all need to remember that, don’t you?’

Sean said nothing as he watched Featherstone close the door behind him.

He suddenly felt very alone, sitting in his small warm office, surrounded by cheap furniture and out-dated computers with monitors that belonged in a museum. Even the view out of his window offered nothing but the sight of sprawling Peckham council estates and the travellers’ caravan site on the wasteland next to the police station itself. He started to think about Louise Russell, to imagine what had happened to her and why. Where was she now? Was she still alive and if so why? Had somebody taken her, taken her to do horrific things to her? Should they expect a ransom note? No, he didn’t think so. This felt like madness, as if madness had come into Louise Russell’s life without any warning or reason.

Sean rubbed his face and tried to chase the questions away. She’s a missing person, he told himself. Stop treating her like she’s dead. But he knew it was pointless – he’d already begun. He’d already begun to think like him. Like the madman who’d taken her.

2

Natural light flooded down the staircase and into the room, its brightness temporarily blinding Louise Russell as she blinked to adjust to its harshness, before the noise of a door being quickly but carefully closed took the light away. Louise’s eyes welcomed back the twilight she had grown accustomed to and looked across the room at Karen Green, who was sinking further into the corner of her cage, her fingers curling through and around the wire mesh as if she was bracing herself, anchoring herself against a tide that was about to sweep her away. Louise could hear her trying to stifle her tears as the footsteps on the stairs grew closer. She listened to those footsteps approaching, but they weren’t heavy and dramatic, they were light and made little more than a shuffling, scraping sound that filled her with a fear worse than anything she’d ever experienced.

It was as if her senses were tuned in to the minutest sound, shade, smell, movement in her prison. This was the darkest most desperate place and time of her life, yet she’d never felt so alive. She found herself mimicking her fellow captive as she backed into the furthest corner of her cage, the beat of her own throbbing pulse almost drowning out the gentle footsteps that tentatively crept down towards them.

After what seemed both an agonizingly long time and a desperately short time he appeared at the bottom of the stairs and stepped falteringly into the makeshift dungeon. Louise watched as he paused before slowly moving inside, keeping close to the wall. As far as she could make out he was wearing a dark or grey tracksuit top and bottoms. Still he said nothing as he moved deeper into the room, then suddenly disappeared as if by magic. A second later she heard the springy click of a cord being pulled, followed by the yellow glow of a low-wattage bulb spilling into the subterranean room. The light wasn’t strong enough to trouble her eyes or vision, but it made a huge difference to what she could see clearly. She saw that he’d walked behind a fabric screen, the type used on hospital wards to provide some degree of privacy.

It was like watching a silhouette in a puppet show, as he stood on the other side of the screen, his legs still, his arms and hands moving, busying themselves with something that made dull chinking sounds. Louise heard the rasp of a stiff tap being turned and then running water. He was cheerfully humming a tune she didn’t recognize, a sound more terrifying than any scream or screech in the night. Her mouth was unbearably dry with fear, her throat glued shut with rising panic, her eyes as wide as a wild animal that knows it’s about to be torn to pieces by its tormentors, her fully dilated pupils increasing her night vision at a time when she almost wished she could see nothing, hear nothing and feel nothing.

Louise watched as the silhouette became still, although somehow she knew he had turned to face them. She could hear him breathing deeply, as if he was preparing himself to walk on to a stage and meet his audience. Finally he stepped from behind the screen, this unimpressive man, average height, too slim, with scruffy brown hair and waxy skin. But to her he was vile monster, a hideous beast that threatened her in every way – her dignity, her freedom, her very existence. How could this wretch suddenly have so much power over her?

She could see he was smiling, a non-threatening, friendly smile. She remembered his stained teeth and the stink of his breath from when he took her, the memory pushing vomit-tasting saliva from her stomach into her mouth. Other memories rushed forward now – the smell of his unwashed hair, the stench of his stale sweat infested with stinking microbes, and his hands, his witch’s hands, lingering too long on her breasts. Without warning the deluge of noise from her heart and blood fell silent. She realized he was speaking and it was enough to make her stop breathing, for her heart to stand still, just for a second.

‘Sam? Are you OK? I brought you something; something to drink and a bite to eat if you can manage it. It’s not much, but you’ll feel better if you can manage to eat and drink a little.’ He began to walk towards her carrying a tray on which he balanced a plastic mug of water and plate with a sandwich that looked like something a child would make. He walked in a crouched position as he circled her cage, peering in through the wire bars, smiling all the time while his eyes, wide and excited, darted over her body, stabbing her with a thousand needle-points and making her skin crawl.

‘I’ll have to put the tray through the hatch,’ he told her. ‘It’s better that way, until you understand more. You know what I mean, don’t you, Sam? You always understood what I meant, even when nobody else did. That’s why we’re supposed to be together.’

He took a small key from his tracksuit pocket and unlocked the padlock securing the bolt to the cage’s hatch. Louise watched his every move, wary of his hand suddenly stretching out for her through the hatch, but he merely pushed the tray in and held it, waiting for her to take it. ‘Take the tray,’ he told her. ‘It’s all for you. I’ll come back for it later, when you’ve had enough.’ Louise shuffled forward slowly, tentatively, her eyes never leaving his as she took the tray, which she immediately placed on the ground before shuffling back into the furthest corner of her prison.

‘Try some,’ he encouraged. ‘Drink first though, the chloroform can leave you a bit dehydrated.’