Luke Delaney - The Keeper

His hands slowly fell from his mouth as he remembered the case of the estate agent from Birmingham, abducted and held captive inside a wooden cage inside a garage. A prison within a prison … ‘A cage! He keeps them in a cage, the cruel son-of-a-bitch. A cage inside a cellar or bunker somewhere. Any time he wants to feel alive he can just walk into that room and stroll around their cage in complete safety, watching them, inhaling their scent and dreaming about the day he’ll be with them. But when his illusions fall apart and he needs to punish them, to force himself on them, he has to go into the cage. He can’t use chloroform, not straight away, because he’d have to get too close, so what does he do?’

He thought back to the post-mortem, trying to recall the marks he’d seen on Karen Green’s sad, broken body, the multitude of superficial injuries, too many bruises to count. And then there were those strange little circular bruises, each with what looked like a burn mark at the centre. He chewed his bottom lip while Anna looked on, fascinated, aware that he had forgotten she was there and that he was now talking solely to himself, unpicking lock after lock, each answer leading to another question, his combination of logic and imagination leading him through the maze.

Sean’s middle finger rhythmically tapped on the desk, subconsciously keeping pace with his own heartbeat, waiting for the answer. ‘He used something to suppress them, something that meant he could keep his distance and still control them, something that left those marks.’ His finger continued to tap away on the desk, every implement of wounding, death and torture he’d ever seen moving through his mind on an imaginary conveyer-belt. ‘I need to know what made those marks.’

Anna broke his trance. ‘What marks?’

Sean turned to her, looking at her as if he was seeing a figure from a dream, something he didn’t believe was really there at all. He snatched the phone off his desk before she could say anything else and called Dr Canning’s office number. He got the answer machine.

‘Doctor, it’s Sean Corrigan. The circular bruises left on Karen Green’s body — I need to know what caused them sooner rather than later. Run the tests as a matter of priority and keep me posted.’ He hung up without further explanation, ideas rushing at him now he’d opened Pandora’s box. ‘Whatever he’s using in the cage, we know how he took them from their houses. They opened the door because they saw a postman, but as soon as they opened the door he hit them with his stun-gun and paralysed them. Then he took his time preparing them — that’s when he used the chloroform, when they were beginning to recover. He used it to put them under, so they couldn’t fight, because he’s not strong enough to carry or drag them into the boot of their own car. He’s weak and he’s a coward and I’m going to fucking find you.’ The phone ringing broke through his swelling rage. He grabbed it, hoping it would be Canning.

‘Mr Corrigan, it’s Sergeant Roddis.’

‘I’m listening.’

‘The unidentified prints found at the Green house and the Russell house definitely came from the same man. Given that they were both recovered from the inside door handles we can assume they belong to the killer. They also match the prints we took from both victims’ cars. I took them to Fingerprints myself and supervised the search. I’m afraid I can confirm they don’t match any on file. Your killer has no previous convictions, not in this country anyway. I’ve sent a copy to Interpol, but even for a murder it’s going to take days if not weeks before they get back to us.’

‘What about DNA?’ Sean asked.

‘It’ll take a few more days to prepare a full profile, but if he doesn’t have any previous convictions it’s still not going to help you find him. It’ll convict him, as will the fingerprints, but it won’t identify him.’

‘I know, I know.’ Sean couldn’t contain his frustration. ‘Anything else comes up, let me know.’

‘Of course.’

Sean hung up, dissecting the importance of what he’d just learned, not simply dismissing the lack of previous convictions as a dead end, but cross-examining it, interrogating it for information and relevance, using it to connect him to the heart and mind of the man he hunted, thinking silently.

So this one doesn’t care about leaving his prints and DNA, because he knows it can’t help us identify him from police records, or because he just doesn’t care? He must know he’s leaving enough evidence to convict himself ten times over, so why be careless?

He suddenly reverted to talking quietly to himself, as if Anna wasn’t there. ‘He’s working to a plan that makes his identification irrelevant. He knows that sooner or later we’ll find him, but he doesn’t care. He’s not even comprehending being caught … He takes the women and keeps them for a week, or close to, then he takes them from their cage to a place he knows and kills them. He worships them at first, then he hates them. The same cycle over and over again, from love to hate, from acceptance to rejection. But he wasn’t just rejected by one person, he was rejected by everyone. He hates everyone?’

His eyes moved from side to side as he began to realize what he was saying. ‘These women are a snapshot of his anger and rejection, even if he doesn’t know it himself yet. When he feels me closing in, what will he do? Walk into a high street, a shopping centre, a school … and what will he use, a knife, home-made pipe bombs, a gun? That’s why he doesn’t care about leaving his prints, his DNA — subconsciously he’s already planned for that day, haven’t you? You’re not going to let anyone take you alive. You’re going to send yourself to hell and drag as many others with you as-’

A knock at his door made him spin around, angry at the interruption. If Featherstone had heard him talking to himself he didn’t show it.

‘Morning, Sean. Anna.’

‘Boss,’ Sean addressed him.

‘Alan,’ said Anna.

Sean’s eyebrows rose at the sound of Featherstone’s never-used Christian name. Clearly they were more familiar than he’d realized.

‘I’m doing another TV appeal for assistance. Do you have anything new I could use, either of you? The telly people always like to have new stuff for the paying public.’

Sean looked at his computer screen, his latest CRIS inquiry still displayed. He considered telling Featherstone about his stalker theory, asking him to appeal to anyone who had been harassed in the last two or three years to come forward, but some instinct and the negative results of his search told him not to.

‘Nothing that you’d want to put in a TV appeal,’ he said. ‘We need to focus our search efforts on decent-sized properties, or isolated plots of land within a twenty-mile radius of where the women were taken. It’s possible he keeps them somewhere other than his home — a disused factory or an abandoned smallholding. Other than that, I don’t have anything. Just do the usual, appeal to family, friends and colleagues who may have noticed anyone behaving strangely lately, keeping odd hours, disappearing without explanation, not turning up for work. You never know your luck.’

‘No problem,’ Featherstone assured him.

‘Actually,’ Sean suddenly remembered, ‘there is one thing.’

‘Go on.’

‘I’m pretty sure he dresses like a postman. That’s how he gets the doors open. Maybe we could ask the public whether anyone’s noticed a postman behaving strangely, someone who’s not their regular postie hanging around an area longer than usual, putting junk mail through their doors when they’d already asked the Post Office not to.’

Featherstone sucked in a long breath, shaking his head like a mechanic about to give an estimate for a car repair. ‘Sorry, Sean, no can do. I’d have to get prior approval from the Post Office before releasing that, and they’d have to get prior authority from their members’ union — and it’s unlikely they’ll be given it. Look, it’s a pain in the arse, but if we put it out there that this nutter’s going around dressed like a postie, by this time tomorrow we’ll probably have half a dozen postal workers in hospital, stabbed or kicked to shit by vigilantes or nervous husbands, not to mention the several dozen that’ll be blocking up every casualty in South London waiting to have the CS gas washed out of their eyes after paranoid women — no offence meant, Anna — have sprayed them. The postie release is a no-go.’