Luke Delaney - The Keeper

He moved slowly around the bedroom, but again could get no sense of her, no trace of her perfume or shampoo, her body or hand cream. Her house was a desert to him. He checked the other bedroom as a matter of course and found she’d been using it mainly as a storage room; it was full of neatly piled cardboard boxes that had once contained the items now spread around the house, although there was an unmade single bed pushed into the corner for the use of overnight guests who didn’t share her bed.

Sean slipped from the bedroom and quietly crossed the hallway to the bathroom, beginning to feel more like an intruder than a cop. The bathroom was little different from the rest of the house, sterile and unyielding, everything cleaned and tidied away before she left for her adventure of a lifetime. He opened the large mirrored door to her oversized bathroom cabinet, looking for some hint of her life before the madness came, and was confronted by a multitude of bottles and jars, lotions and potions that only women would ever consider covering themselves in. Most of them had been at least partially used, seals broken and bottles half-emptied of their strange-coloured liquids. He examined them closely, absorbing their pleasant clinical fragrances, moving things around so he could see deeper into the cabinet and her life now past. She clearly cared for herself, but there was nothing exotic here and most of the brands were familiar to him as they would be to almost anybody: Nivea, Clarins, Radox, Chanel and dozens more, all left behind because they’d been used — people liked to take unopened toiletries when they headed off on a long journey and she’d clearly been no different.

Feeling as if he was being suffocated by the soulless house, Sean hurried back downstairs, needing to get out as fast as he could. He was on the verge of flinging open the front door when he remembered that Terry Green and Sally would be waiting on the other side for him, so he paused to compose himself, only emerging when he was sure he appeared calm.

On stepping out, he immediately noticed an absence on the driveway. ‘Her car?’ he asked as he approached Sally and Terry. ‘She had a car, right, so where is it?’

‘It’s in storage,’ Green answered.

‘How so?’

‘She had no room in the garage for it, and she thought it would be safer in storage than left on the drive.’

‘Storage where?’ The urgency in his voice was tangible. ‘Did she tell you what storage firm she used?’

Green thought for a moment. ‘It was over in Beckenham, I know that. Had one of those obvious names, like We-Store-4-U.’

Sally was already typing the details into her iPhone. They all waited in silence for a couple of minutes until Sally spoke.

‘Yep, here they are — We-Store-4-U, Beckenham.’ She enlarged the telephone number and tapped it, moving the phone to her ear, walking away from Sean and Green while she made her inquiry. Sean’s concentration was so firmly fixed on Sally he all but forgot Green was there, watching as she paced the driveway talking into her phone and waiting. Finally he heard her say ‘Thank you’ before hanging up. She stepped back towards them, shaking her head. ‘The car was booked in for storage, but it never turned up. They tried calling her, but got no answer.’

‘Of course they didn’t. Son-of-a-bitch took her car just like he-’ Sean stopped himself from mentioning Louise Russell in Green’s presence.

‘Just like what?’ Green asked.

‘Nothing,’ Sean lied. ‘I need you to tell me about her car — make, model, colour, registration if you know it.’

‘A Toyota, I think,’ Green answered, thrown into confusion by Sean’s questions. ‘I don’t know the number plate.’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ Sally intervened. ‘The storage people gave me the details — a red Nissan Micra, index Yankee-Yankee-fifty-nine-Oscar-Victor-Papa.’

‘Good,’ Sean said. ‘Get it circulated.’

Sally immediately began typing numbers into her phone.

‘And when you’ve done that, take Mr Green’s statement — everything he can tell us about Karen’s last-known movements and her intended trip to Australia, names of recent boyfriends, etc, etc.’

Sally nodded as she waited for her call to be answered. ‘Anything else?’ she asked, phone pressed to her ear.

‘Plenty,’ said Sean grimly, ‘but let me worry about that. You take care of the car and statement — I need to get back to the office, set the ball rolling.’

Sean had no sooner started the engine than his phone rang. He took the call while pulling away from the kerb, well practised at one-handed driving.

‘Inspector Corrigan? This is Dr Canning.’

‘Doctor. D’you have something for me?’ Sean asked.

‘I thought I ought to let you know the body from the woods has been moved to the mortuary at Guy’s where I plan to carry out the post-mortem later this afternoon, if you’d care to join me.’

‘I’ll be there,’ he confirmed, images of the terrible wounds the pathologist would be inflicting on Karen Green’s body invading his mind.

Trying to keep one eye on the road, Sean scrolled through his phone for Donnelly’s number, tapping it to call and waiting a few seconds before it was answered.

‘Guv’nor. What’s happening?’

‘According to Karen Green’s brother, no one’s seen her for nine days. All the indications are she was taken eight days ago, the morning she was due to travel to Australia.’ Sean muttered a curse at a bus pulling out in front of him, then resumed: ‘Louise Russell’s been missing four days, which means we have at best three or four days to find her before she ends up like Green.’

‘What’s our next move?’

‘Get hold of Roddis, have him divert some of his forensic people to Green’s home address. Tell Zukov and O’Neil to expand their checks on the local Sex Offenders Register to include anyone with previous for using artifice to gain entry into private dwellings. Our boy’s sticking to what he knows will work.’

‘I thought our suspect didn’t have previous. How could he be on the register?’ Donnelly asked.

‘He might have an overseas conviction,’ Sean pointed out, ‘or maybe somebody just fucked up when it came to printing him, I don’t know, but let’s not assume anything.’

‘OK, I’ll see to it.’

‘There’s one more thing I need you to do, but keep it quiet.’

‘And what would that be?’

‘Tell Featherstone I need his authority to circulate a request to have all MISPERs of a similar description to our victims reported directly to us. But no rubbish, just ones where there are suspicious circumstances surrounding their disappearance — handbags not taken, phone left behind …’

‘Hang on, guv — we have two victims, one dead and one missing, we know their identities, so why are we looking for more MISPERs? If he’d killed someone before Green, we’d already know about it.’

‘I’m not thinking about what he did before,’ said Sean grimly, ‘I’m thinking about what he’ll do next.’

‘Next he’ll probably kill Louise Russell unless we can find her first,’ Donnelly argued.

‘No,’ Sean told him. ‘Next he’s going to grab someone else. He needs to replace Green. The way I see it, he’s on a seven to eight day cycle. Green went missing eight or nine days ago and Russell four. Green turns up dead this morning, which means for at least three days he kept them together. If he follows that pattern, he’ll need to grab another within the next day or so.’

‘You mean he kept them at the same time, not necessarily together,’ Donnelly corrected him.

Sean was silent for a few seconds, giving himself a chance to work out how to explain his conviction in a way that would make Donnelly buy into it.