Luke Delaney - The Keeper

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.