Luke Delaney - The Keeper

‘I’m pretty sure he kept them together,’ Sean finally explained. ‘To keep them separate would mean he’d need two secure and secluded places, plus he’d have to divide his time between them. I can’t see him doing that. He wants them together, where he can keep an eye on both of them at the same time. Less work for him.’

Sean wasn’t ready to go into the real reason he believed the killer would have kept the women together. If his vision of the man they hunted was accurate, he would be living out fantasized relationships with his captives, relationships that disintegrated as the days passed. He needed his new victim to witness the plight of her predecessor, perhaps as some kind of warning — Please me, or suffer the same . Whether this psychological torture was deliberate or subconscious Sean didn’t yet know, and wouldn’t until he got closer to his quarry, close enough to start thinking like him, feeling what he was feeling. Only then would he have the full picture with no need to fill in the gaps with guesswork.

To Sean’s relief, Donnelly accepted his explanation. ‘Sounds reasonable,’ he replied. ‘I’ll let Featherstone know what you want.’

‘Good. I’m heading to Guy’s for the post-mortem. Do me a favour and keep everyone on their toes, if they’re not already.’

‘They are,’ Donnelly assured him. ‘They understand the situation.’

Sean ended the call and realized he’d been driving like an unthinking automaton. He checked his mirrors to ensure he hadn’t picked up a traffic unit and pointed his car towards Guy’s Hospital and the empty shell that used to be Karen Green.

Friday lunchtime and Thomas Keller sat alone in the canteen at work repeatedly stirring a mug of tea that had long ago turned cold, his barely touched plate of food pushed to one side. He was both agitated and excited, unable to settle or concentrate on anything other than the woman he would be calling on later that afternoon. Everything had been planned, from her selection to how, where and when he would take her. He realized he’d started rocking in his chair like an inmate of a lunatic asylum and managed to stop himself before anyone noticed. He tried to chase thoughts of the woman away, aware he needed to appear to be his normal self — meek, mild and unassuming. A nobody. But he knew he would never be a nobody to the one person who had truly loved him. And in a couple of hours he would be seeing her again, saving her from the people who had filled her head with lies about him. Because this time he had really found her. They’d tried to trick him, but despite their lies he’d found her, his one true soul-mate who would never betray him like the others had. He licked his swollen pink lips as his wide staring eyes peered into an unseen distance.

His daydreaming was suddenly shattered as two workers from the sorting office noisily pulled out the chairs next to him and sat down, making an intentional din as they dropped their loaded plates of food on to the table. ‘All right, Timmy son?’ the older, bigger man asked. ‘You don’t mind if we sit with you, do you, Timmy boy?’

‘No,’ stammered Keller, trying not to betray his fear of the men and annoyance at having his sweet daydream interrupted.

‘Course you don’t,’ the same man said. ‘Only a sad loser would want to eat on his own all the time, eh, Timmy?’

Keller forced a slight smile and swallowed the hatred he felt towards them. ‘I don’t mind being alone,’ he told them weakly. ‘And my name’s not Timmy, it’s Thomas.’

The smaller of the men leaned across the table, his face uncomfortably close to Keller’s. ‘We know what your name is, cunt, and we know you think you’re better than the rest of us — don’t you, Thomas?’

‘No,’ he protested. ‘I don’t think anything, I just like to be left alone, that’s all. I just don’t like the things you like.’

‘What — like women?’ the bigger man roared. ‘Are you a fucking queer, faggot?’

The words stoked the raging hatred he felt towards them and their kind in the very core of his being. He could feel the eyes of other would-be-persecutors focusing on him. All around the canteen, ugly grinning faces were turning in his direction, baring row upon row of sniggering stained white teeth. He pushed back from the table and jumped up to his full height, almost knocking his chair over, but his tormentors didn’t flinch. They had no fear of him.

‘Better be careful, Stevie,’ the smaller man feigned terror, cowering away from Keller. ‘I reckon he’s gonna do you.’

‘Take it easy, Tommy boy,’ the bigger man laughed. ‘I’m shitting myself here.’

Derisive laughter rippled around the room. To Keller it was the cruellest sound of all, a constant malignant companion that had haunted him since his earliest childhood. He imagined locking the doors of the canteen with chains and pumping petrol through the gaps, savouring the screams of panic from within as his tormentors smelled the fumes, then striking the match, letting it fall from his fingers, watching as it slowly drifted to the floor, the flames igniting and spreading like a forest fire through dry bushland, reducing the men inside to charred, twisted statues.

A voice full of hate and bigotry pulled him back to reality. ‘Well, Tommy boy — what you going to fucking do about it?’

Keller turned on his heels and walked as quickly as he could towards the exit without actually running, bursting through the swing doors of the canteen, the slight laughter he left behind amplified into a cacophony in his dysfunctional mind.

He raced down three flights of stairs to the basement and burst into the old storeroom that had become his place of refuge whenever the need to be alone overwhelmed him. There was no lock or bolt, so he had to make do with propping a chair under the handle to ensure he couldn’t be followed or disturbed. Only then did he allow the tears to flow.

Thomas Keller was no longer of this time. He was a child again, abandoned by his mother and a father he doubted his mother had even known for more than a night. They’d promised that he’d be safe and loved in the orphanage, but they’d lied — he wasn’t loved, he was hated. The faces of the other children danced across his mind, impish and venomous as only children can be, hunting in packs, seeking out the weak and defenceless. But Thomas Keller wasn’t defenceless. He had fought back, attacking the ringleader of his teasing swarm, sinking his teeth deep into the child’s cheek until he felt them scraping against bone, the taste of blood sweet and bitter on his tongue and lips. He remembered the child’s terrified screams, the other children also screaming in panic and fright at the sight of blood running down his chin and dripping on to his shirt as he snarled like a rabid dog and searched for his next victim. Strong arms had clenched around his waist and shoulders, pulling him to the ground while belts secured his ankles and wrists, pulled so tight he could feel neither his fingers nor his toes. And then he’d seen the syringe in the hands of a faceless adult, the needle being pushed through his skin, the liquid flowing into his blood and making it freeze, his body becoming limp while his mind raced and whirled.

He remembered being gripped under the armpits and dragged across the floor, through a door into the darkness and down the stairs to the cellar that lay hidden and forbidden beneath the children’s home. The door to the animal cage had been opened and he was thrust inside, his bonds removed by practised hands, the door slamming shut, the metal wire of his prison shuddering as the adult voices moved away. He’d screamed then, screamed for his mother to come and save him, screamed for her forgiveness, although he didn’t know what he’d done wrong, what crime he must have committed to have been sent here. So he kept calling for her, fighting against the drugs that invaded his blood, until a face full of hate and retribution pressed against the wire, hissing at him, ‘Call her all you want, you fucking freak. No one’s coming for you. She hates you — do you understand? She hates you. This is your home now, so start getting used to it, because you’re going to be here for a very, very long time.’