The Keeper Read online

  The little ‘police only’ canteen was enshrined in the force’s myth and legend, as well as serving the best carvery meat in London. It didn’t take long for Sean to find Detective Sergeant Sally Jones sitting alone in the tiny warm room, nursing a coffee. She sensed Sean enter and looked straight at him. He knew she would be reading his face, seeking answers to her questions before she asked them. Sean wound and weaved his way through the tightly packed tables and chairs, apologizing when necessary for disturbing the rushed meals of busy detectives. He reached Sally and sat heavily opposite her.

  ‘Well?’ Sally asked impatiently.

  ‘Not fit to stand trial.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake!’ Sally’s response was loud enough to make the other detectives in the canteen look up, albeit briefly. Sean looked around the room, a visual warning to everyone not to interfere. ‘Jesus Christ,’ Sally continued. ‘What’s the fucking point?’

  Sean noticed Sally unconsciously rubbing the right side of her chest, as if she could feel Gibran hammering the knife into her all over again. ‘Come on, Sally,’ he encouraged. ‘We always knew this was a possibility. Once we’d seen the psychiatric reports it was practically a certainty.’

  ‘I know,’ Sally agreed with a sigh, still rubbing her chest. ‘I was fooling myself that common sense might break out in the judicial system. I should have known better.’

  ‘It’s entirely possible he is actually mad.’

  ‘He is completely fucking mad,’ Sally agreed again. ‘But he’s also absolutely capable of standing trial. He knew what he was doing when he did what he did. There were no voices in his head. He’s as clever as he is dangerous, he’s faked his psych results, made a joke out of their so-called tests. He should stand trial for what he did to …’ Her voice tailed off as she looked down at the cold coffee on the table in front of her.

  ‘He’s not getting away with it,’ Sean assured her. ‘While we’re sitting here he’s already on his merry way to the secure wing at Broadmoor. Once you go in there you never come out.’ Some of England’s most notorious murderers and criminals were locked up in Broadmoor; their faces flashed through Sean’s mind: Peter Sutcliffe aka the Yorkshire Ripper, Michael Peterson aka Charles Bronson, Kenneth Erskine aka the Stockwell Strangler, Robert Napper the killer of Rachel Nickell. Sally’s voice brought him back.

  ‘Gibran killed a police officer and damn nearly killed me. He’ll be a bloody god in there.’

  ‘Don’t be so sure.’ Sean’s phone began to vibrate in his jacket pocket. The number said ‘Withheld’ meaning it was probably someone calling from their Murder Investigation Team incident room back at Peckham police station. Sean answered without ceremony and recognized the strange mixture of Glaswegian and Cockney at the other end immediately. DS Dave Donnelly wouldn’t have called unless there was good reason.

  ‘Guv’nor, Superintendent Featherstone wants to see you back here ASAP. Apparently something’s come up that requires our “specialized skill set”.’

  ‘Meaning we’re the only soldiers left in the box,’ Sean answered.

  ‘So cynical for one so young.’

  ‘We’ll be about an hour, travelling time from the Bailey,’ Sean informed him. ‘We’re all finished here anyway.’

  ‘Finished already?’ said Donnelly. ‘That doesn’t sound good.’

  ‘I’ll explain when I see you.’ Sean hung up.

  ‘Problem?’ Sally asked.

  ‘When is it ever anything else?’

  Louise Russell’s eyes began to flicker open, her mind desperately trying to drag her from the chloroform-induced sleep that held nothing but nightmares of smothering, darkness, a monster in her own home. She tried to see into the gloom of her surroundings, the blinking of her eyes beginning to slow until finally they remained frozen wide open with terror. My God, he had taken her, taken her away from her home, her husband, her life. The fear fired through her like electricity, making her want to jump up and run or fight, but the effects of the chloroform weighed her down. She managed to push herself on to her hands and knees before slumping on to her side, using her forearm as a makeshift pillow. Her breathing was too rapid and irregular, her heartbeat the same. She tried to concentrate on conquering her fear, to slow the rise and fall of her chest. After a few minutes of lying still and calm her breathing became more relaxed and her eyes better able to focus on her new surroundings.

  There were no windows in the room and she couldn’t see a door, only the foot of a flight of stairs she imagined would lead to a door and a way out. One low-voltage bulb hung from the high ceiling, smeared with dirt, its light just enough for her to see as her eyes began to adjust. As far as she could tell the room was little more than thirty feet wide and long, with cold unpainted walls that looked as if they’d been whitewashed years ago, but now the red and greys of old brick were showing through. The floor appeared to be solid concrete and she could feel the cold emanating from it. The only noise in the room was water running down a wall and dripping on to the floor. She felt as if she must be underground, in a cellar or the old wartime bunker of a large house. The room smelled of urine, human excrement and unwashed bodies and, more than anything else, absolute fear.

  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 pun
ish 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.