The Keeper (49 page)

As he looked around his office his attention was drawn to an enlarged photograph of Louise Russell’s face stuck to his whiteboard, her green eyes staring at him, pleading with him to find her – to save her. Involuntarily his hand came from his side and reached out to her, his index finger tracing the outline of her face. He stepped back with a jolt as an image of her yet-to-be crime-scene photographs flashed in his mind. The green eyes were still staring out at him, only now they were lifeless, no longer pleading but accusing – damning him.

When the image cleared he stepped forward and studied her picture again. ‘Are you still alive?’ he asked her. ‘Am I too late?’

The sound of Sally barging through the swing doors helped him look away from the photograph. They nodded hellos at a distance as he watched her go through the same routine of emptying her coat pockets on to her desk as he had just minutes earlier. He moved to the door frame of his office entrance. ‘How’s it going?’ he asked without enthusiasm.

‘Well, it’s barely seven o’clock in the morning, my eyes are sore and so are my feet, it’s Sunday and I’m at work … Other than that, I’m great. How about you?’

‘The same,’ he answered without smiling.

‘Any news on Louise Russell?’

Sean knew what she meant – had a body been discovered overnight or was there still a chance? ‘No one’s called me, so I’m assuming things remain the same.’

‘It’s Sunday, remember,’ she warned him. ‘People walk their dogs later on a Sunday morning. My guess is we won’t be in the clear until about nine-ish.’

‘We should have one more day,’ he argued, ‘provided he keeps to his seven-day cycle.’ He spoke more in hope than belief, the fear that the killer was spiralling towards an end game – an orgy of unrelenting violence – marred his faint optimism.

‘Let’s hope he does,’ Sally muttered, looking away distractedly, searching through the notes and memos on her desk, mumbling to herself more than to him. ‘What time’s that bloody canteen open on a Sunday? Their coffee’s foul, but it’s better than nothing.’

Sean didn’t answer, sliding back into his office and shuffling paper around on his desk only to look up and see the big, white-faced clock hanging on his wall. Sally was right – they had to survive past nine o’clock. Louise Russell had to survive past nine o’clock. If her body hadn’t been found by then, she might still be alive and maybe he had as much as another twenty-four hours to find her before … But even that wouldn’t give him enough time to get a Production Order, serve it and then gain access to the employee records at the sorting office. He needed something to break today – something to fall into place – something that would tear down the brick wall between the madman and him.

In sudden desperation he grabbed a chair and pulled it up to his computer desk, sitting astride it as his fingers began to nimbly type on the keyboard. He called up the CRIS system and punched in the instructions for the same search he’d already carried out with a negative result. ‘I know you stalked the woman they’re replacements for, you must have. You must have watched her and you must have known her and she you. She couldn’t have been some stranger you obsessed over – she accepted you, but then something happened and she was taken away from you, but what and how? I know I’m right,’ he reassured himself. ‘I have to be.’

He typed in the details of the crime he was searching for, the description of a young woman matching that of the three women he’d taken. He pressed the key to run the search and pushed himself away from the desk while he waited for the result, his heart hammering inside his ribcage. ‘I have to be right,’ he told himself, ‘I must have missed something.’ After a few seconds the screen blinked and changed to the results page. The search had returned
no results
. ‘Fuck,’ he called out loudly enough to make Sally look up. Last night’s conversation with Kate began to play over and over in his mind.

… I would assume I’d missed something. I’d go back over everything I’d done and double-check I hadn’t missed anything.

And if you hadn’t? What then?

Then the patient would die …

He pulled himself and the chair back to the computer and began again, this time expanding the age group of the victim by a few years either way –
no results.
He tried changing the length of the victim’s hair; maybe she’d had it cut since he knew her –
no results.
He tried changing the height of the victim a few inches either way
– no results.
He tried removing the specific eye colour –
no results.
Over and over he tried, but it was always the same –
no results.

The sound of a phone ringing in the main office somehow cut through his concentration when other distractions had not. His head spun to look at the big clock – it was almost eight o’clock. Christ, he’d been fruitlessly searching the CRIS database for more than an hour without even noticing the detectives who’d been slowly arriving and filling the office with chatter and noise, including Donnelly – but the phone ringing, its shrill electronic chirping, was something he’d been unable to block out. Why? Once again his heart started kicking and punching his chest walls. He felt his throat grow tight as he watched Sally lift the corded phone from its receiver and hold it to the side of her face as if everything was happening in slow motion, but only to him. He watched her listen to the caller, lip-reading as she responded,
Where?
She wrote something on a piece of paper, hung up and got to her feet, turning towards his office, head down, eyes cast to the floor.

Silently he cursed her for walking towards him with the piece of paper in her hand. He cursed her for answering the damn phone and he cursed her for what she was about to tell him. She reached his door and looked up into his eyes without stepping inside. ‘I’m sorry,’ was all she said.

He felt the life force flowing out of him, as if he’d been shot in the chest at point-blank range, the realization of what he was being told stabbing at his fragile self-belief. He’d failed – failed to solve the puzzle in time – and now she was dead. The madman had killed Louise Russell, but her blood would be for ever on Sean’s hands. Her lifeless staring green eyes would for ever haunt his dreams.

It had been a long night and he hadn’t got to bed until the early hours of the morning, the night’s events leaving him excited but calm, for the time being at any rate. But as the light penetrated through the thin sheets tacked over the windows of his home, his sleep grew increasingly restless – the deep sleep of oblivion replaced by the shallow sleep that allowed the nightmares to come.

He was young, only seven or eight, and already a veteran of the children’s home in Penge, south-east London. Other children had come and gone, but he remained. It was Sunday – the day when the grown-ups came to look at them, to talk to them and take them out for the day and buy them sweets and ice cream, maybe even take them home – just for a day visit at first, then for a night or two, and then, who knows, maybe take them home for ever. The youngest children were usually snapped up quite quickly, especially if they didn’t have siblings, but the older children, the teenagers, rarely left. They used to tell him that if you were still there when you were ten, then you’d stay there for ever.

There had been no day trips for Thomas Keller for a while, no ice cream or visits to
normal
homes – not since his last trip. There had been suspicions even before that –
incidents
. At first nobody could be certain he was responsible. Nobody wanted to consider the consequences if he had been responsible – what that would signify, what that would mean he was. At first it was a case of things going missing, toys belonging to the other children in the family he was visiting. Nobody wanted to make a fuss, after all it was understandable, the other children had so much and he had so little. Nobody wanted him to get into trouble, but they didn’t want him to visit again either, if that was OK with the staff at the children’s home. But then it wasn’t just any toys, it was the special toys – the treasured teddy bears and dollies the children of the host family had had since they were babies. Some turned up, some didn’t, but the ones they found were always the same – slashed open with something sharp, the stuffing pulled out and the limbs removed. Still nobody wanted to make a fuss; he was angry and jealous, it was understandable given what had happened to him – they just didn’t want him to visit again. But it didn’t stop there.

As he grew older and bolder, the family pets became his targets: the tropical fish killed by someone pouring bleach into their tank; the mice and hamsters and gerbils that went missing from their cages and were later found buried in the garden. Again, nobody could be a hundred per cent certain he was responsible. But suspicions had grown stronger when a family’s cat disappeared, only to be found hanging from a tree with a wire cord bound around its neck, swinging gently in the wind, eyes bulging, tongue protruding. They’d gone in search of Thomas then and discovered him, alone in a neighbour’s garden, withdrawn and silent, eyes staring madly with telltale scratches covering his hands and wrists – the cat had marked its killer.

Some at the children’s home had said enough was enough, he should never be placed with a family again. Others argued that they had a duty to try, but that families who had animals, any animals, must be avoided – at least until they could overcome his cruelty towards them. Reluctantly, the doubters agreed.

A few weeks later he had gone on a day visit to the home of a Christian family who believed that between God and themselves any child could be saved. They’d been watching him closely, as they’d been warned to do, but somehow he’d managed to sneak away. There was concern, but no panic – or at least there wasn’t until they realized their five-year-old daughter was also missing. She’d been playing alone in her bedroom with her dolls, and now she was
missing
. The mother had been hysterical and wanted to call the police immediately, but the father had urged her to wait, saying he would go and find them. There was no sign of them in the house, nor in the garden, nor the garage. So he began to search the alley that ran behind the back gardens. And that was where he found them – in a shed in a neighbour’s back garden, his five-year-old daughter standing naked, tears rolling down her face as Thomas Keller stood in front of her, his trousers and underpants pulled to his knees, a tiny erection gripped between the fingers and thumb of one hand while the other pointed the blade of a penknife at the stricken girl.

The Christian father charged in and swatted Thomas to the floor with an open hand. ‘You sick little bastard! I’m going to teach you a lesson you’ll never forget,’ he told him. Then he proceeded to slip the leather belt from his waistband, gripping the buckle and letting the rest uncoil like a whip. Thomas had watched as the man’s big hand eased the shed door closed, raising the belt above his head.

What followed had indeed taught him a lesson, one he never would forget – he was alone and always would be. Totally alone.

After that day there were no more visits for Thomas Keller.

Sean and Sally bumped along the dirt road through Elmstead Woods on the Kent–London border. They’d hardly spoken the entire length of the journey from Peckham. Sean saw two marked police cars and knew they were in the right place. A long strip of blue-and-white police tape closed off the road ahead of where the cars were parked. Sean pulled in behind them and he and Sally climbed from the car in what looked a synchronized movement. One of the uniformed cops who’d been sheltering from the morning chill jumped out of his car and approached them.

Sean held up his warrant card: ‘DI Corrigan’ – he nodded towards Sally – ‘and DS Jones. Why have you taped the road off?’ The woods to his side he expected to be cordoned off, but not necessarily the road.

‘Tyre tracks,’ explained the uniform. ‘Looks like he pulled up on the side of the road, where the ground’s softer. Left some pretty good tyre marks – and footprints too. Two people, by the look of it, one wearing trainers, the other—’

Sean cut him off: ‘The other barefoot.’ He saw the confusion in the officer’s face. ‘The last victim – she was barefoot too.’

The uniform didn’t speak, but his face said everything.

As Sean looked around, breathing in the atmosphere of the woods – he felt the madman’s presence. The place stank of him. They could have been back in the woods where they’d found Karen Green; the two places were so similar he could hardly tell one from the other. ‘Who found her?’ he asked. ‘A dog walker?’

‘No,’ the uniformed cop replied. ‘It was too early for most dog walkers round here on a Sunday. She was found by a birdwatcher looking for pied wagtails, or so he tells me. Good time of year for it, apparently.’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Sean distractedly. ‘Anything suspicious about your birdwatcher?’

‘You’re asking the wrong person, sir. I didn’t meet him. That was another local unit – they took him back to the nick before we got here.’

‘I see,’ Sean answered, still not interested in what he was being told – merely going through the question-and-answer routine the uniformed cops would expect. He knew the man he hunted wouldn’t have reported the body to the police in some self-destructive game of risk. He’d be back in whatever hovel he’d crawled from, dreaming of his night’s work and fantasizing about more good times ahead.

Sean looked at the ground on the edge of the forest where he could make out the tyre-tracks the uniformed cop had mentioned and the accompanying footprints, both of which disappeared into the grass as they headed deeper into the trees. Beyond the treeline his eyes could see nothing, but his mind could see everything – the madman walking close behind Louise Russell as he marched her towards her death, occasionally shoving her in the back to encourage her to keep walking.

‘Guv’nor …’ Sally asked without being heard. Then, louder: ‘Sean.’

‘Sorry. What is it?’

‘You OK?’

‘I’m fine,’ he lied. ‘What about you?’

She shrugged, but he could see the tension and fear in her face. This would be the first time she’d been to a crime scene where the body was still in situ
since she’d almost become a murder victim herself. Sean knew that when she saw Louise Russell’s body she would be seeing herself. ‘You don’t have to do this,’ he told her. ‘I can go alone. You can wait here or search the perimeter for something that might have been missed.’