The Keeper (22 page)

‘Why would you want to do that?’ Canning asked, perplexed by the break with procedure.

‘I need to know if she’s the one that triggered his behaviour.’

‘How will the swabs help you know if she was the one who caused him to behave in this extreme way?’

‘Not caused,’ Sean corrected him, ‘triggered. The cause of his behaviour has its roots deep in his past. God only knows what’s happened to him during his life to make him what he is now, to make an angry boy grow into a dangerous man. Maybe Karen Green showed him some kindness or affection that drew him to her, but he misinterpreted her, made more of it than there was and so she pushed him away. He couldn’t handle the rejection, so he did something about it. He did this. If the swabs contain cream and perfume that we also find at her house, then I’ll know they were hers and therefore that she could well be the one he’s always coveted. But if they’re not, then he made her use them because he was trying to make her someone else.’

Canning lifted several plastic phials from the portable table he kept his tools on and handed them to Sean. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘take them, if you think it will help.’

‘Thanks.’ Sean slipped them carefully into his breast pocket. ‘They will. I look forward to your report.’

‘You should have it in a couple of days, but you already know the main findings.’

‘Anything else? Anything at all?’ Sean asked.

‘Perhaps one last thing,’ said Canning. ‘I took scrapings from under her finger and toe nails, which of course contained soil and dirt, but at a first look under the microscope they appear to contain something rarer. I’ll have to send them to the lab for a proper examination, but my guess would be coal dust. I’ll know for sure after it’s properly analysed.’

‘Coal dust?’ Sean’s dancing eyes reflected his racing thoughts. ‘Coal dust?’ he repeated.

‘At a first guess, yes.’

‘He kept her underground. Before he killed her, he kept her underground – in an old cellar or coal bunker.’

‘That’s a logical suggestion,’ Canning agreed.

Sean nodded, turned and headed for the exit, his mind already swimming with images of cold, stone dungeons underground.

Sally was pacing up and down in front of Karen Green’s house, still waiting for forensics to arrive. She’d finished interviewing Terry and sent him on his way almost an hour ago, and was beginning to feel as if she was being deliberately isolated from the rest of the team and excluded from the main body of the investigation, but couldn’t be sure if her feelings were manifestations of paranoia or real. One thing she knew that was real was that cops looked upon colleagues who were struggling mentally as if they had an infectious disease that could spread to them. It was like failure, always deserted, always an orphan – a mandatory sentence of solitary confinement. It reinforced her conviction to hide her troubles as best she could and mention them to no one. The phone she clutched in her palm made a noise like a small hungry animal and vibrated. She saw it was Sean. ‘Guv’nor!’

‘Have forensics got there yet?’ he asked.

‘No.’

‘Good. Listen, I need you to go inside the house and gather up any moisturizers, creams, lotions and perfumes you can find. Check out the cabinet in the bathroom – that’s where I remember seeing them when I took a look around this morning. Once it’s all been bagged and tagged, bring them straight to the lab at Lambeth. I’ll meet you there – understood?’

‘Understood, but …’ he hung up before she could ask for an explanation, doing little to lessen her paranoia.

Shrugging her doubts away, Sally looked at the two keys she held in her non-phone hand, turning and lifting them towards the locks. Anxiety rushed at her, paralysing her, refusing to let her move no matter how hard she tried. She surrendered and lowered the keys, despondent to have been seemingly defeated by a task she would have given little or no thought to before Sebastian Gibran attempted to tear her life away.

She managed to stop the tears before they grew too heavy and rolled from her eyes. She took a couple of deep breaths. ‘Come on,’ she whispered, ‘just fucking do it.’ Her hand began to rise, slowly, nervously, wary that at any second the anxiety could return and seize control of her body. She jiggled the mortise lock until she felt it smoothly slide from its secure position with a satisfying heavy click. Then she recovered the key and swapped it for the Yale key, again jiggling it into the precision-made slot, but with more difficulty this time, haunted by memories of the night when she’d fumbled with her own keys, at her own door, panicked by some sense of fear, some sense of being watched – and she’d been right, her primal instincts had been spot on, but she’d ignored them, with almost fatal consequences. As her memories threatened to incapacitate her, the door suddenly popped open and she found herself stepping inside, the silence and stillness within foreboding and oppressive. She thanked God it was daytime and closed the door behind her, looking along the simple, bright hallway with dread.

She didn’t want to stay in Karen Green’s house a second longer than she had to and had absolutely no intention of snooping around, something she wouldn’t have been able to resist in the old days. Sean said she’d find the things she was looking for in the bathroom, so that’s where she would go and nowhere else. Grab the things he wanted and get the bloody hell out of this mausoleum. She’d bag and tag them properly as evidence once she was safely back outside or in her car. Sally shivered, feeling accusing eyes watching her, asking her why she hadn’t stopped the man who did this to her. She couldn’t stand the silence any longer. ‘Hello,’ she called out, but her throat was dry, her voice coarse and quiet. ‘I’m a police officer.’ She waited for a reply she knew would never come.

After more than a minute of waiting she pushed herself forward, working hard to keep her legs striding one in front of the other. With each step her pace quickened, until she was at the foot of the stairs, then walking up them, looking straight ahead only, focusing on the space above. When she reached the top she was relieved to see the bathroom door was ajar, saving her from having to search around for it. She slowed down again, crossing the upstairs hallway inches at a time, resting the palm of her hand on the door and pushing it open gently and quietly, craning her neck to peer inside bit by bit, prepared for any would-be ambusher. Only once the door rested fully open did she accept she was alone and the room empty.

Stepping inside, she made her way to the cabinet Sean had mentioned, all the time thinking of the excuses she would give if she was disturbed while searching through a dead woman’s cosmetics before forensics had examined them. She pulled on a pair of latex gloves, then opened the cabinet door – and was confronted by shelves crammed with bottles and jars. There were far more than she’d expected, and she immediately regretted not having brought a large evidence bag from her car. She began moving the contents to one side and was relieved to find what she was looking for – a scrunched-up plastic bag, the sort people saved to transport bottles that might leak when travelling. She shook the bag back in to shape and began to pluck items from the shelves and place them in it as carefully as she could. As the cabinet emptied the bag grew heavy until she was satisfied she’d taken anything that could pass as a cream, lotion, moisturizer or perfume.

She closed the cabinet door, anxious to flee the lifeless house before it shrank in on her even further, but the reflection of her own image in the mirror made her hesitate. Her face suddenly looked old and worn way beyond her thirty-four years, her eyes hollow and haunted – joyless. She tried to pull herself away from the troubling picture in the glass, but couldn’t, her hand sliding inside her jacket and almost unconsciously unfastening a single button on her blouse, moving across soft, smooth skin, then suddenly recoiling as it touched the thick raised scar tissue of her upper wound before moving under the material again until it rested on the lower scar under her breast. She closed her eyes for a few seconds, her world suddenly merging with Karen Green’s – two victims of violent men – one who survived and one who didn’t. She felt Karen’s fear and pain, her desperate wish to live another day, her willingness to do anything if he’d only let her live, just as she herself would have done anything for Sebastian Gibran if he’d promised to spare her. She had survived – Karen had not.

Sally pulled her hand from under her blouse and fastened the button self-consciously. Clutching the plastic bag of cosmetics she walked from the bathroom and then the house. She locked the front door and walked to her car without looking back.

Donnelly had remained at the scene where Karen Green had been found. Following the removal of the body the forensic team were busy in the woods, searching for evidence hidden between the trees and under the fallen foliage, gathering as much as they could before the weather turned against them. They might be here for days, but Donnelly had no intention of sticking around that long. He yawned widely and decided to head back to the access road and his car for a smoke. As he sat on the bonnet he saw the familiar figure of DC Zukov walk towards him. ‘All right, son?’ Donnelly acknowledged him. ‘What you doing here?’

‘Thought I’d have a look for myself, see if there was anything I could help with.’

‘You’ve got your actions to complete, haven’t you, same as everyone else?’

‘Yeah,’ Zukov answered, barely disguising his contempt for the routine course of an investigation, the day-to-day mundane tasks that had to be completed, ‘but the guv’nor’s got me wasting my time doing personal inquiries for him, trying to trace the source of a tattoo on the victim’s body that he now tells me isn’t a tattoo after all, it’s just a bloody transfer. What the fuck am I supposed to do with that?’

‘What tattoo?’ Donnelly kept his tone casual, hiding the concern he felt about not being kept informed about every aspect of the investigation.

‘Like I said,’ Zukov replied, ‘the tattoo of a phoenix on the victim’s arm, only now we know it’s not a tattoo it’s a—’

‘A transfer,’ Donnelly finished for him, ‘yeah, yeah, you already told me that. But why’s the boss interested in her tattoo, transfer, whatever the fuck it is?’

‘I don’t know. He didn’t tell me.’

But Donnelly knew – Sean thought the killer put it there, and the fact it was a transfer and not a tattoo made that all the more likely.

‘He’s got me checking on scumbags with previous for using artifice too, particularly those with previous for sex offences and residential burglary.’

Donnelly had to admire Sean, he was an insightful bastard, always two steps ahead of the rest of them. He didn’t like it, but he respected it. ‘That makes sense,’ he told Zukov. ‘No forced entry into either victim’s home, no reason to believe either knew their attacker. There’s a better than fair chance our boy tricked his way in.’

‘Maybe the guv’nor’s trying to be too clever?’ Zukov argued. ‘Maybe whoever took them just knocked on their doors and they opened them? There’s no artifice there.’

‘Whatever,’ Donnelly said dismissively. ‘I’m off back to the office. You stay here and liaise with forensics, then you’d better get on with the inquiries the boss has given you, or you’re going to be Mr Unpopular. And by the way, if and when you find out anything, any suspects flag-up, tell me first and I’ll let the guv’nor know, understand?’

Zukov was on the verge of putting another question but decided against it. Best to keep his suspicions to himself. Instead he just said, ‘Fair enough, guv.’

‘Good,’ said Donnelly, climbing into his car, the suspension creaking as he sat heavily in the seat. Zukov had to step clear as he pulled the door shut with a slam. The engine roared to life and he pulled away with a wheel spin along the last road Karen Green had ever seen.

It was almost three p.m. on Friday afternoon and Sean was in Lambeth, sitting in the second-floor Forensic Laboratory reception area, clutching his numbered ticket and the body swab samples he’d brought directly from the post-mortem. He glanced at his ticket, the kind they handed out at a supermarket delicatessen counter, and muttered an obscenity under his breath – if Sally didn’t arrive soon he’d miss his turn and would have to take another ticket and start from the back of the queue all over again. Back in the days when the lab was run by the Home Office, it was manned by fellow public servants who were all too ready to impose harsh words and on-the-spot fines for any incorrectly labelled exhibits or ill-prepared laboratory submissions forms. Though he wasn’t entirely in favour of the lab being placed in private sector hands, there was one big advantage from Sean’s point of view. Its employees treated him as a paying customer, entitled to make demands that would previously have been met with howls of derision from the lowly paid scientists running the show.

His not so fond memories were wiped away the second he saw Sally step through the automatic double swing-doors, the items she’d grabbed from Karen Green’s bathroom safe inside plastic evidence tubes that were in turn neatly sealed inside evidence bags. The number counter mounted on the wall clicked around to show 126 – the number on Sean’s blue ticket. He took Sally by the arm and steered her towards the submissions counter. ‘We’re up,’ he told her.

‘It would be nice to know what the hell’s going on,’ she replied. ‘Why you wanted the stuff from her bathroom, for example, and why I had to drop everything and rush to the lab with it.’

‘Sorry, I didn’t have time to explain, but you’ll understand why once you’ve listened to me explaining it to the lab people.’

They completed the short walk from the waiting room to the exhibit reception desk, where a slim bespectacled man in his forties was waiting for them with a private sector smile.

‘Afternoon,’ he greeted them, ‘and what have you got for us today?’

Sean didn’t try to match his friendliness. ‘Two sets of exhibits from two different scenes,’ he said, pushing the swab tubes across the counter. ‘These exhibits are marked with RC, the initials of the pathologist who took them during a post-mortem of a woman whose murder we’re investigating.’ The smile dropped from the receptionist’s face like an Arctic sunset. ‘They’re swabs taken from her skin containing some type of cream and an unknown brand of perfume. These –’ he took Sally’s exhibits from her and pushed them across the counter, careful not to mix them with the others – ‘are cosmetics and perfumes taken from the murdered woman’s house. I’ll keep this simple: I want you to compare the exhibits taken from the house with the exhibits taken from the body and see if any of them match. If they do, which ones? And if they don’t, I need to know what brand the cream and perfume taken from her body are, and I need to know as a matter of urgency. Everything clear?’