The Keeper (43 page)

‘No,’ Louise answered, her dry, shrunken lips forming a tiny smile. ‘No matter what you did, you didn’t bring me here. He’s the one that did that.’

‘Listen,’ Deborah sighed, ‘I was brought up in New Cross, you know it?’

‘A little.’

‘Then you know what it’s like. I was the only girl with three older brothers and I had to fight for everything. Sometimes I even had to fight my brothers for food or go hungry. I had to fight the other kids at school or forever be picked on. Whatever I got, I got it myself. Where I grew up, there was only one rule – look after number one, because nobody else would. So when I saw my chance I took it, and I was wrong. I should have got the keys and let you out. I should have given you the same chance I had, but I didn’t. I’m ashamed of my instinct, but if your life had been like mine you’d have run too, no matter what you think you’d have done. I promise you, you would have run.’

Neither spoke for a long while. Then Louise broke the silent tension.

‘Are you loved?’ she asked. ‘Like I’m loved by John. Does anyone love you like that?’

‘I don’t know … my mum, brothers.’

‘No, not like that. A man – a man who’s your soul mate. Or a woman?’

‘Maybe there’s a man. His name’s Sam. I haven’t known him long.’

‘Sam – that’s a good name.’

‘I think he’s a good man, but I don’t miss him the way you miss John. I’m alone down here. You have John and your imagined children, but I’m alone. I can’t escape this hell, not even for a second.’ There was another lengthy silence between them. ‘I still keep thinking this has to be a nightmare – that I’ll wake up soon. But it’s been going on too long to be a nightmare, hasn’t it? And the pain, you don’t feel pain like this in nightmares, so I know it’s real, but I still can’t believe it.’

‘We’re here, aren’t we? And we’re real. Out there, people we’ve never met or known will be watching the news, following our story, looking at photographs of us, listening to our families appealing to this bastard to let us go unharmed. But you’re right, we won’t be real to them. They’ll feel nothing for us. To them, we’re light entertainment. We’re only real to the people who love us. No one else cares. Once we’re dead, so is the story and we’ll be forgotten by everyone but those who love us.’

‘Then those who love us won’t give up on us and we shouldn’t give up on them. And the police, they won’t give up on us. They’ll keep looking for us. They won’t stop. They can’t.’

‘The police? How could they possibly find us down here? What could lead them to … him. You’ve heard him, you’ve seen him. He’s completely insane. The police like things to make sense – a motive they can understand. Who could ever understand this lunatic?’ Louise laughed quietly and cynically, the effort making her cough. ‘What policeman on the face of God’s earth could ever understand this madman enough to find him? If there is such a man, then may God pity his soul.’

Sean and Anna entered the mortuary area in Guy’s Hospital and went straight to the chapel that was attached to the complex. He’d been tempted to enter via the autopsy area, to show his face to Dr Canning and to see how Anna would react to being in the company of the dead, but had decided her reaction to seeing Karen Green’s lifeless body would be enough. Inside the chapel was quiet and peaceful, feeling more like a church than a hospital, the walls painted a tranquil dark purple. Someone had even gone to the lengths of hanging long red curtains either side of the door the relatives would soon be brought through, despite the fact there were no windows. A crucifix bearing the body of Christ overlooked the scene below. A coffin-shaped, padded casket lay at the centre of the room on a low table that had been draped in red cloth that spread to the floor. Karen Green’s body lay within.

Sean crossed the floor and looked into the long box. She’d been prepared well, as all murder victims were here, by Dr Canning’s assistant and a little technical help from a local undertakers. A purple satin sheet covered her body, leaving only her face on show. Canning’s team had worked miracles on her facial injuries and had even taken time to prepare her hair as best they could, brushing it neatly to one side so as not to obscure any of her once pretty face. He fought hard not to reach out and touch her face, as if somehow feeling her cold skin would connect him to the man who had ripped her young life away. Anna’s voice close behind him dragged him back.

‘I wasn’t expecting it to be like this.’

‘What were you expecting?’

‘I don’t know. Just … not this.’

‘Did you think we were going to take her family into the main mortuary and slide her out of the freezer, pull back the green sheet and ask “Is this her?”’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You’ve been watching too many TV cop shows.’

‘Maybe.’

‘How many dead bodies have you seen?’ he asked, suspecting he already knew the answer.

‘None,’ she answered quickly and truthfully. He said nothing, but nodded his head knowingly.

Anna could sense his slight hostility and disapproval, as if she hadn’t earned the right to be there in the same room as Karen Green or to be part of a murder investigation. He’d spent most of his adult life dealing with the unthinkable while she’d been cocooned in universities, giving lectures and writing books. She stepped forward and looked at Karen Green, her crystal green eyes now covered with dead eyelids. ‘She looks peaceful, despite everything she must have been through.’

Sean looked away from the body to Anna, whose eyes were still fixed on Karen Green. He looked her up and down while she wasn’t watching, judging her before responding to what she’d said. ‘She didn’t when she was lying in the woods. She didn’t look peaceful then. They never do. They look … broken, like their souls have been torn away against their will. Death brings no peace.’

She looked at him from the corner of her eyes, feeling his cold blue stare. He was waiting for a reaction – a chance to study her the way she was used to studying others. The sound of his phone ringing made him look away.

‘Hello.’

‘Guv’nor, it’s Sally. Uniform have found Deborah Thomson’s car abandoned on Tooting Common, close to the outdoor swimming pool.’ He didn’t know the area, but the picture in his mind was vivid: a dirt-road leading to a secluded parking area, leafless trees bending slightly in the breeze as if reaching out for the car.

‘Shit,’ he cursed. ‘Have we got anyone left who can cover the scene?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Sally told him. ‘That last box of soldiers you opened is just about empty. We’re running out of people faster than we can replace them. This guy is getting ahead of us, Sean.’

‘No he’s not. I’ll cover the scene myself. You stay with Roddis at her house and see what you can milk out of him. Call me if you find anything.’ Without waiting for an answer, he hung up.

‘Trouble?’ said Anna.

‘We’ve found Deborah Thomson’s car. Abandoned. Tooting Common. I need to take a look. You can come, if you want.’

She nodded that she would. ‘Don’t you want to wait to see the family first?’

‘No time for that now,’ he told her, hoping she couldn’t see the relief in his eyes at not having to face them. ‘I need to check out the place her car was found as soon as possible.’ He glanced over at the body of Karen Green. ‘There’s nothing more I can do for her now other than catch her killer. Her family will have to wait.’

Donnelly repeatedly cursed under his breath as he waded through the piles of information reports on his desk – door-to-door forms, each detailing the description of the person spoken to. Where were they at the time of the relevant abduction? Had they seen or heard anything? There were thousands of these statements, and all needed to be checked and cross-referenced, as did the information reports from the dozens of roadblocks carried out and drivers spoken to, ditto the reports back from officers checking possible venues where the women could be being kept, including the report from PC Ingram and PC Adams, following their brief search of Thomas Keller’s land and buildings. Eventually all the information would be fed into the Home Office Large Major Enquiry System – HOLMES for short. Introduced in the early eighties, this lumbering dinosaur of a database was intended to allow relatively rapid and accurate cross-referencing of every type of document a murder investigation could generate. The intention was to prevent the sort of mistakes that had allowed the likes of Peter Sutcliffe, aka the Yorkshire Ripper, to kill as many women as he did, when simple cross-referencing would have brought his killing spree to a halt after two or three victims. For the most part, it worked well, but it still relied on the killer making a mistake.

Donnelly blew hard and made his lips and moustache vibrate as he pondered yet another useless door-to-door report before tossing it into the pile he’d designated
Not of interest.
The pile was growing monstrously high, while the pile designated
Of interest
remained worryingly small, but Donnelly knew exactly what he was doing, even if he never confided it in anyone else, cutting the reports down to a manageable size so that when Sean eventually read through them he wouldn’t be swamped. The less crap Sean had to sift through, the freer he would be to think, to turn his unquestionable instinct to best use, to pick the diamond from the diamantes and eventually lead them to the man they so desperately needed to find.

Sensing a presence behind him, Donnelly peered over his shoulder. He had a fair instinct of his own and knew who it was without looking. ‘What d’you fucking want, Paulo?’

‘How d’you know it was me?’ Zukov asked with a mischievous smile.

‘I used my detective’s intuition – you should try it sometime. Now, unlike you, I’m very busy, so what the fuck you want?’

‘I was looking for the guv’nor, actually.’

‘Why?’ Donnelly asked, his patience beginning to fail him.

‘It’s about that transfer he had me researching, the one of the phoenix that was found on Karen Green’s body.’

‘Well, go on,’ Donnelly encouraged an increasingly suspicious Zukov. ‘You can tell me. I’ll make sure the information gets passed on to the boss. Or have you discovered some vital clue that’s going to solve the entire case and you want to be the one who tells the guv’nor yourself? Get all the credit?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘Well then, stop pissing about and tell me.’

‘It’s from a box of Rice Krispies.’

‘What?’ Donnelly asked incredulously, a broad, sarcastic smile spreading across his red face. ‘That’s it? That’s the ground-breaking piece of information, is it? So we now know what the victim liked to eat for breakfast – Rice fucking Krispies. And how long did you waste finding this out, eh? Two days? Three days?’

‘I dunno – three or four.’

‘Oh Jesus Christ.’ Donnelly shook his head in disapproval. ‘What am I going to do with you, Paulo? What am I going to do with you?’

‘Yeah, well you can take the piss all you like, but it might be important. The guv’nor seemed to think so, anyway. Besides, it doesn’t tell us what she liked for breakfast, at least not now. Might tell us what she liked for breakfast sixteen years ago.’

‘What are you on about?’

‘The transfer was a free gift in boxes of Rice Krispies sixteen years ago. The manufacturers only did the one run of them, so either Karen Green hasn’t had a bath or shower for sixteen years or for some reason she’d kept it safe for all that time and decided to use it just before travelling to Australia.’

‘Is that the information report there?’ Donnelly asked, pointing to the cardboard folder Zukov was holding.

‘Yes,’ Zukov answered.

‘I’ll take that,’ Donnelly insisted, relieving the unhappy Zukov of his prize. ‘It’s probably nothing. I can’t see its relevance, but all the same I’ll pass it on to the boss, see what he makes of it. As for you, it’s about time you got down to some proper police work.’

The aggrieved Zukov sloped away, leaving Donnelly to flick through the report. Zukov was right, the phoenix transfer was indeed sixteen years old.

‘Weird,’ he declared and tossed the report on to the pile designated
Of interest.

A deeply disturbing sense of déjà-vu swept over Sean as he and Anna drove to the edge of the police cordon on Tooting Common. A one-time haunt of London’s lowest class of prostitute, the area had changed significantly over the preceding ten years as the soaring house prices in Putney, Barnes and Sheen forced the wealthy and educated to seek new residential areas to colonize, pushing the not so fortunate ever further south or out of London altogether.

The blue-and-white police tape whistled in the breeze as it surrounded the entire car park. Sean parked quickly and headed for one of only two uniformed officers who were desperately trying to stop dog walkers and joggers from entering the scene to recover their cars. Anna struggled to keep pace with him as he closed on the policeman and flashed his warrant card. ‘DI Corrigan. This is Dr Ravenni-Ceron. She’s with me.’ He ducked under the tape and held it up for Anna to follow. ‘Have you touched the car?’ Sean asked the young cop, looking across the car park at Deborah Thomson’s abandoned red Honda Civic.

‘No, sir,’ he answered too quickly. ‘Only to see if it was open.’

‘I take it the car was locked,’ said Sean.

‘No, sir. It’s open. The keys are still in the ignition.’

Sean stopped walking for a second, a little confused and surprised. ‘The keys are still in it?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘He’s changed his method,’ he told Anna, although he could barely believe what he was saying. ‘I didn’t see that coming.’

‘It’s a minor detail,’ Anna replied. ‘It doesn’t necessarily mean anything.’

Sean stormed across the car park, talking as he walked. ‘It has to mean something. With this one everything means something. If he’s changed his method, then he’s done it for a reason.’ He stopped when he reached the car, filling his lungs with cool air before he began his cursory examination – an examination that he knew would draw him into another world.

‘Maybe someone disturbed him?’ Anna offered. ‘Made him panic and leave the keys in the ignition.’

‘No.’ Sean snapped on a pair of rubber gloves. ‘If he’d been disturbed we’d have known about it by now. Uniform would have come poking around and found the car. No. He left the keys behind because he’s beginning to lose control, lose patience. He knows where all this is leading – maybe only subconsciously, but he knows.’