The Keeper (42 page)

‘Don’t worry, Tommy,’ he reassured him. ‘I won’t hurt you. I’m here to protect you, to keep the other boys away from you – you’d like that, wouldn’t you, to have someone to look after you?’

‘Please, sir,’ the boy pleaded, ‘I’ll be late for my next class.’

‘Don’t worry about that. I’ll make sure you don’t get in trouble.’ Again he stretched his hand out, but this time the boy didn’t move away, even though all his instincts told him to run. The promise of having someone to protect him, an adult to trust, overwhelmed his instinct to survive the moment. The teacher gently stroked his hair before allowing his hand to drift downwards, caressing the side of the boy’s face. ‘But first there’s something I want you to do for me. You understand, don’t you?’

Thomas shook his head. ‘No, sir. What do you want me to do?’

The teacher’s hand followed the curve of the boy’s slim shoulders and slid down his arm, taking Thomas’s hand in his own and pulling it towards the elasticated waistband of his tracksuit.

‘Take it out,’ the teacher ordered.

‘I don’t know what you want me to do,’ the boy pretended.

‘Yes you do,’ said the teacher, still smiling, still holding the boy’s hand. ‘If you want me to help you, you’ll have to do this for me first.’ He let go of the boy’s hand and rested both of his own on the boy’s shoulders. ‘Now do it.’

Tears of self-loathing began to sting the boy’s eyes as he reached inside the teacher’s tracksuit bottoms, feeling the warmth, the coiled pubic hairs scratching and itching his hand as his fingers found the teacher’s rapidly swelling penis. ‘Take it out,’ he commanded, and the boy did as he was told. ‘Move your hand up and down,’ said the teacher between moans of pleasure, his head lolling backwards as his eyes began to close. The boy continued almost frantically pulling at his abuser’s penis, experience telling him that the faster he did it, the sooner his humiliation and degradation would be over. ‘Too fast,’ the teacher managed to say. ‘Do it slowly.’ The boy obeyed. ‘Good. Good. That’s better. You know what to do next.’

‘No,’ the boy pleaded. ‘I don’t know how to do that.’

‘Don’t lie to me,’ snarled the teacher. ‘You don’t think I know? You’d better do as you’re told, you little slut, or I’ll have to tell the children’s home how I caught you stealing from the other boys’ bags – then you’ll be fucked, won’t you, you little slut. When the grown-ups come on visiting days, when they come to find someone to adopt and take back to a proper home, they won’t take you, will they? Not after the staff let them know you’re a thief. Now, do as you’re told.’

The boy felt sick, constricting convulsions in his chest and throat making him gag, but he knew he had no choice. If he ever wanted to be loved again, accepted again, he had no choice. He shuffled forward on his knees and did what the teacher wanted, the man’s ecstatic moans drowning out the sound of his weak sobs. ‘Yessss,’ the teacher hissed, ‘yessss, that’s good, oh you little slut – you little fucking whore. You fucking whore, yes.’

Keller’s body suddenly remembered it hadn’t breathed for minutes, not since the memory returned to haunt and torture him. He breathed in as if he’d just broken through the surface of water he’d been trapped beneath, held under by an invisible force trying to drown him, his eyes springing wide open, the water from the shower washing over his eyelashes like tiny waterfalls. He buried his face in his hands and began to cry like he’d cried when he was thirteen or fourteen years old, alone in the shower with a man who’d promised to look after him. But the man hadn’t protected him, he’d used him over and over again until he grew bored of him, his eyes turning to other vulnerable boys – boys living in care, boys whose parents couldn’t cope with another mouth that needed feeding – and then he’d given Thomas to other men, all of whom had the same special name for him –
The little whore.
He slid down the wall of the shower and cowered on the floor, mumbling as the water filled his mouth. ‘Mummy. Mummy, why did you leave me? You said you’d come back for me, but you didn’t, you fucking bitch. Why did you leave me?’ He curled into a tight ball and waited for the other boys to start kicking and punching him – to start tearing at his skin with their whip-like towels.

Sean and Donnelly pulled up outside Deborah Thomson’s home, finding a parking space squeezed between the gathering forensic vehicles, little white car-vans fully loaded with everything Roddis and his team would need to sweep the scene clean. They walked towards the cordoned-off area and ducked under the blue-and-white police tape, flashing their warrant cards at one of the uniformed officers Roddis had drafted in to guard his precious exclusion zone. As they approached the house, Sean saw Sally standing at the end of the drive talking with Anna. Roddis was close to the front door with two of his team, already resplendent in their dark-blue paper forensic suits, preparing plastic and brown paper bags to receive their anticipated exhibits from inside the house. Sean acknowledged Sally and Anna, but kept walking towards Roddis.

‘Mr Corrigan,’ Roddis greeted him. ‘I hope you don’t expect to be allowed in the house dressed like that? You shouldn’t even be inside the cordon.’

‘My apologies,’ Sean answered. ‘And no, I don’t need to go inside, not this time.’ He scanned the house in front of him, a near identical property to the other two scenes. ‘Anything for me yet?’ He made no apologies for his impatience.

‘We’ve had a poke around. There are traces of chloroform on the hallway floor and a couple of full ident fingerprints on the inside door handle which appear to be the same as the ones we took from the other two abduction sites.’

‘How do you know they’re the same?’ Sean quizzed him. ‘They haven’t been to Fingerprints yet.’

‘I keep my own copies on the laptop – the digital age is a wonderful thing. To my untrained eye, I’d say they were a match, but I imagine you already knew it was the same man, yes?’

Sean didn’t answer. ‘I need you to liaise with the door-to-door teams,’ he said. ‘If anyone in the street’s had junk mail pushed through their front doors in the last couple of days, I want them to seize it and hand it all over to you for fingerprinting. I’m assuming you’ve worked out why?’

‘Probably,’ Roddis confirmed. ‘So you think your man’s been posting stuff through other doors, no doubt trying to blend in while he scouted the area?’

‘I do.’ Sean’s iPhone vibrated in his coat pocket. He wrestled it free of the resisting material and touched his finger on the screen to answer. ‘Sean Corrigan.’

‘Inspector Corrigan. How are you this fine day?’ He recognized Dr Canning’s voice immediately.

‘I’ve been better.’

‘Never mind. Thought you’d like to know that I’ve released Karen Green’s body into the care of the Coroner’s Officer. The family are due to formally identify her at 2 p.m.’ Sean glanced at his watch – it was already 1 p.m. ‘Her body has been moved to the chapel of rest. Better for the family to see her there. We’ll make her look as presentable as we can.’

‘Good,’ said Sean, ‘and thank you.’

‘Don’t mention it. By the way, I’ve also identified what made the rather mysterious circular bruises we found all over her body.’

‘I’m listening,’ Sean encouraged, unaware that he’d stopped breathing while he waited for what could be the breakthrough piece of the puzzle he’d been searching for.

‘He used an electric cattle prod. We tested a fair few instruments of torture, but only the prod gave us an exact match.’

Sean breathed again. ‘Son of a bitch. Question now is, where the hell did he get it from?’

‘A farm,’ Canning offered. ‘Maybe he keeps his victims on a farm?’

‘Not many farms in south-east London.’

‘Perhaps he lives further afield than you thought?’

‘No,’ Sean dismissed the suggestion. ‘He’s no farmer coming up from the sticks to snatch his victims. This one likes to stay close to what he knows.’

‘Well, I know better than to argue with you.’

Sean had already moved on. ‘I need you to do something else for me.’

‘Such as?’

‘Run a full screening for toxins in her blood.’

‘No doubt you’re going to ask me if she has traces of anything that could be used as an anaesthetic or a pre-anaesthetic, something that would make a person compliant but not technically unconscious?’

Sean’s eyes darted from side to side, uncomfortable with having anybody one step ahead of him, even Dr Canning, a man he trusted more than most. He suddenly realized what must have happened. ‘You’ve already run the tests, haven’t you?’

‘Of course,’ Canning answered, the satisfaction in his voice barely concealed.

‘And you found traces of alfentanil.’

The satisfaction in Canning’s voice turned to disbelief. ‘How did you know?’

‘I’ll tell you later,’ Sean promised. ‘Could you inform the Coroner’s Officer that I’ll be there to meet the family at the identification.’

‘Of course,’ said Canning.

Sean hung up and turned to Sally. ‘The formal identification of Karen Green will be at Guy’s at two. I could do with you there.’

Sally’s mouth fell open, but no words came out.

‘I’ll go,’ Anna jumped in. ‘I’d like to go. I want to go.’

‘This won’t be fun,’ Sean assured her. ‘Sally has experience with this. You don’t. Sally?’ She looked at the floor rather than answer. He saw she wasn’t ready yet.

‘Besides,’ Anna continued, ‘if I see the victim’s body and meet with some of her family, it may help me with profiling the offender. And there’ll be a Family Liaison Officer with them too, correct?’

‘There will be,’ Sean agreed. ‘DC Jesson.’

‘Then I can’t see a problem.’

Recognizing her noble intent, Sean decided that if it gave Sally an easy out then he’d take it. ‘OK, but follow my lead and don’t say a damn thing without checking with me first. Understood?’

‘Understood,’ she promised. Sean began to walk towards his car, continually shaking his head. He realized Anna wasn’t following and turned back.

‘Well, you coming or what?’

She rested a hand on Sally’s shoulder and rolled her eyes before walking after him.

‘Women,’ Sean muttered to himself. ‘The one thing I’ll never understand.’

The two women sat together but alone under the dull, jaundicing light of the low-powered bulb that hung above their heads, the sound of water trickling somewhere in the cellar as deafening in the silence as it was maddening. Deborah Thomson clutched her damaged knee and rocked backwards and forwards on the floor of her hellish prison. Her body was drained of adrenalin and she sobbed quietly from the pain and the fear, her last chance of escape and survival surely gone. She was going to die in this dark, damp cellar – or somewhere worse. He would eventually come to take her life. She saw his hands slipping around her throat, squeezing, pushing his fingers into her trachea until it was crushed, the pressure halting the flow of blood through her carotid arteries to her brain, unconsciousness and death soon following.

Her rocking became increasingly frantic and her breathing on the verge of hyperventilation. She looked across the room to Louise Russell, lying silent and motionless but for her constant shivering, her near naked body coiled on the floor, her back towards her, the bones of her spine already becoming more prominent after just a few days without water or food. Deborah knew Louise was growing weaker and weaker – if he didn’t kill her she would probably be dead from hypothermia soon anyway.

A trembling voice made Deborah jump with fright. ‘How could you leave me?’ the weak voice asked. ‘How could you do that?’

It was a while before she could answer, the words stuck in her shrunken throat as if his fingers were already coiled around it.

‘I panicked,’ she managed to say. ‘I was scared, so scared. I saw the light and could smell the air from outside and I just … I just had to get away. I had to get away from here. I couldn’t think of anything else. My mind went blank … and I ran. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’ Her tears ran into the mucus trickling from her nose, making her face shiny and slippery as she tried to rub it away with the backs of her hands. She inhaled deeply to clear her nose and control her crying. ‘If I get another chance I won’t leave you, I promise. I won’t panic.’

‘There won’t be another chance,’ Louise whispered calmly, as if she’d already accepted her fate. ‘You’ve killed us both.’ She rolled over slowly so she was facing Deborah, her eyes wide open and sparkling with life despite her exhaustion. ‘You’ve killed us both.’

‘Don’t say that,’ Deborah told her sharply. ‘You don’t know that.’ Louise didn’t answer, her green eyes staring in accusation.

‘We’d already picked names for them,’ she said.

‘Sorry?’ Deborah asked. ‘I don’t understand. Names for who?’

‘Our children. The children we were going to have. We’d already picked their names. If we had three boys we were going to call them John, Simon and David. If they were girls we were going to call them Rosie, Sara and Elizabeth.’

‘What if you had a mixture?’ Deborah asked, wishing she hadn’t.

‘We never talked about that. Somehow I knew we’d have three boys or three girls, so we never discussed it. Silly really.’ Deborah said nothing. Louise continued, her voice growing a little stronger as her mind temporarily freed her body from her hell. ‘I like the boys’ names – strong and simple, like my husband. He’s called John too.’

‘I remember,’ said Deborah.

‘His name suits him. Honest and strong. Not the most handsome, not the funniest or cleverest, but good and reliable. I don’t know how he’s going to be when he finds out what’s happened to me. I’m worried he’ll never forgive himself for not being there to stop it, for not being able to save me.’

‘You shouldn’t think like that,’ Deborah said, more because it was torture for her, having to listen to it, than out of any wish to help Louise.

‘I miss him so much,’ Louise continued. ‘I even miss the children – isn’t that ridiculous? I miss the children we haven’t even had. We talked about them so often I can see their faces, the shades of their hair, their freckles. I can smell them – somehow I can feel them, yet they don’t exist, and now they never will.’

‘Because of me,’ Deborah snapped. ‘That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it? They won’t exist because of me.’