Luke Delaney - The Keeper

‘They won’t believe it.’

‘He’s a rapist and a murderer. D’you think they’ll give a damn what happened, what really happened?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘They won’t. And we’ll never have to think about him again; never have to worry about him waiting for us every time we step outside. We won’t wake up every night thinking about him, seeing his face every time we close our eyes. We’ll be able to move on, live our lives the way we wanted to before this fucking bastard decided it was up to him how we lived and how and when we died.’

‘There’ll be so many questions though,’ Deborah argued. ‘Maybe we should just tell the police?’

‘No!’ Louise barked at her. ‘I won’t be a victim. I’ve been stuck down here for God knows how many days and I’ve had plenty of time to think and I know one thing — I won’t be a victim, I won’t have people feeling sorry for me, patronizing me, always checking on me, asking me if I’m all right, cops and journalists hanging around my home, having to stand up in court and tell the whole world what happened while he sits smugly in the dock reliving his sick fantasies through my testimony. And what if he gets off? What do we do then? No, I can’t let that happen. I’d rather watch him burn. I want to see him burn.’

Silence hung in the room. Louise’s fingers curled around the wire of the cage, her head cocked to one side as she listened for Deborah’s answer.

‘OK. OK, I’ll do it. I’ll try. It’ll be like fighting my brothers when we were growing up … But I won’t help you burn him. If things work, if somehow they work, I’ll help you get him into the cage. I’ll even help you lock him in. But I can’t help you start the fire. I can’t do that.’

‘You don’t have to,’ Louise assured her.

‘And once we’re out of here, we go our separate ways. We never see each other again and we never speak about what happened. We stick to the story and never change it, no matter what anyone says or tells us they know, we stick to the story — he killed himself, just like he told us he was going to. Agreed?’

‘Agreed,’ said Louise, releasing her grip on the wire of her cage and sitting on the stone floor. After a while she began to laugh quietly to herself, the alien noise disrupting the bleak atmosphere of the cellar, disturbing Deborah, making her feel uneasy and suspicious.

‘Are you all right?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’ Louise struggled to suppress the laughter. ‘I’m sorry, I was just thinking, I’ve just had the most important conversation of my life with a total stranger in a lightless cellar, sitting in a bloody locked cage. It seemed so ridiculous, it made me laugh.’

A new sense of fear gripped Deborah; not the rush of terror and panic that he brought with him every time he pulled open the metal door, but a trickle of anxiety and concern that the only other person in the world who could help her was slowly sinking into a form of temporary insanity that would render her useless to both of them. ‘Are you sure you’re OK, Louise?’ She waited longer than she’d hoped for an answer.

‘I’m not mad, if that’s what you mean.’

‘Of course you’re not. It’s just … you’ve been down here for days. You’ve been through so much. The things that bastard did to the other-’

‘Karen. Her name was Karen.’

‘Sorry, the things he did to Karen. The things you saw him do. It must be difficult to keep it all together. I don’t think I could have.’

‘If it doesn’t work out,’ Louise told her coldly, ‘you’ll find out. But now, now you need to put the clothes on, or he’ll know something’s wrong.’

Deborah didn’t answer, but she leaned forward and tentatively took hold of the pile of clothes he’d stripped from Louise, the very act of touching them making her feel complicit in his abuse of her fellow captive. She pulled them towards her and slowly, reluctantly, she began to dress.

Sean’s universe was a room, inhabited only by himself, an out-dated computer system and the forty-three crime reports of people who rightly or wrongly believed they’d been stalked. At that moment nothing else existed: no family, no friends, no past, no future, just the reports and him. Most he’d been able to dispel quickly enough: ex-husbands, ex-boyfriends intent on giving their old partners as hard a time as possible, many had form for other types of petty crime and were not what he was looking for, not the one he was waiting for — not the one he expected to jump from the screen and solve the puzzle for him in one moment of perfect realization. Others, but only a few, had drawn him in further, made his heart skip a beat and his eyes narrow: men who had started with flattery, then flowers, moving quickly to over-familiar love letters, too many unannounced visits to the women’s homes and places of work, devoted affection turning to vile threats and desperate pleas for love and acceptance once the inevitable rejection of their advances occurred. The majority of these had been easily scared off by a visit from the police, although a handful had gone on to stalk new victims, victims who looked nothing like Karen Green or Louise Russell.

Sean read through the last of the reports, but soon realized it was petering out to nothing, just like all the others. The man he was looking for wasn’t here. ‘Fuck it,’ he muttered under his breath. He was sure Karen Green’s killer would have pursued the woman he was now trying to replace with substitutes. But the reports said otherwise. He stared at the screen, waiting for answers and ideas, considering the possibility that the killer might have recently moved to South London from further afield, but he doubted it. He was sure the killer was local, staying in his comfort zone. So what was he missing?

‘Christ,’ he muttered, rubbing his hair in frustration, tapping his knuckles on the desk, feeling as if he already knew the answer, that it was inside him somewhere, but he just couldn’t dig it out. He slumped in his chair and spread his arms, talking to himself, theorizing where he might be going wrong. ‘Maybe she never reported it? Maybe she didn’t even know he existed, that he was watching her, always thinking about her.’

The ringing of his phone slowly pulled him back into the wider world. He wearily picked up the receiver. ‘DI Corrigan.’

‘Hi, I’m Rebecca Owen, calling from the lab.’

‘Go on.’

‘You submitted samples of moisturizer and perfume, some from a house and some from a murder victim’s body?’

‘I’m listening.’

‘The samples from the body swabs don’t match any of the cosmetic items taken from the house. They’re not the same.’

So Karen Green wasn’t the woman he sought replacements for, she was herself a replacement.

‘Do you know what the samples from the body are?’ Sean asked.

‘Yes. They’re significantly more exotic and expensive than anything submitted from the house, although still not unique or handcrafted, so you won’t be able to narrow them down to a single retail source.’

‘I understand, but can you tell me the brands?’

‘Of course. The moisturizer is Elemis body cream and the perfume is Black Orchid by Tom Ford.’

‘How long have these products been available?’

‘The cream’s been around for a good few years, but the perfume’s only been on the market for a couple.’

Sean looked back at his computer. The last of the stalker reports still flickered on the screen. His search had gone back three years, yet the perfume only two, so his timelines were right.

‘You sure the perfume’s only been out for two years?’ he asked.

‘Certain,’ came the reply. ‘We’ll dispatch the report to you straight away.’