Luke Delaney - The Keeper

‘You don’t actually expect me to believe that Dave Donnelly doesn’t know where to get an after-hours drink from, do you?’

‘Aye, well,’ Donnelly stuttered, embarrassed and delighted at his infamy.

‘And do me a favour,’ Sean added, ‘take Sally and Anna with you, will you? Just keep your phones handy. I’ll call if anything breaks.’

‘Fair enough,’ Donnelly cheerfully agreed and swept from his office back into the main incident room, gathering up Sally and Anna despite their protests and ushering them towards the swing-door exit and away.

Somehow their leaving made Sean breathe easier, as if he’d been relieved of a burden he hadn’t even known he’d been carrying. He rubbed his eyes hard, waiting for the mist to clear before staring at the small mountain of papers and reports he had to plough through. He couldn’t let go of the feeling that he already knew the answer, so why had his search of the Crime Reporting Investigation System drawn a blank? Could he really be so wrong? ‘No,’ he whispered to himself. ‘I’m right, I know I am.’ He pulled the pile of reports towards him and began to read, at first without enthusiasm, sheet after sheet of pointless bits of information, but as he sank deeper into the ocean of intelligence he forgot what he was doing and where he was, drifting away on a tide of possibilities. Every so often, he read something that stabbed excitedly at his chest. But there were still too many possibles, too many people stopped and questioned whom the interviewing officer had thought a little strange or uncooperative. Too many men who’d appeared keen to avoid telling the police of their whereabouts at the times of the crimes. Too many disused factories and smallholdings to allow any one thing to stand out. He needed something to cross-reference itself — a nervous postman stopped at a roadblock or living on an abandoned farm. If he could find that in amongst the deluge of information, if he could find that one report, he knew he would find his quarry.

The next time he looked up and into the main office it was empty and in as much darkness as any police room ever is. He quickly looked at his watch and then his phone, suddenly remembering he hadn’t called Kate all day. Now it was two a.m. and too late to do anything other than drop himself in it even more. If he didn’t phone he faced a few frosty hours next time he saw her, but if he did and woke the kids, it wouldn’t improve his popularity. He considered sending a text, but decided it was too late to try anything.

He looked away from the phone and back to the slowly diminishing pile of reports on his desk, resisting the urge to go home and grab a few hours’ sleep before everything started all over again the next morning. Lifting another piece of paper to read, he promised himself that after this one he would pack it in for the night. One more report, then he’d head home to the short fitful sleep full of nightmares that waited for him — Louise Russell’s near-naked body lying in woods, her accusing eyes pleading with him for the answer — why? Why hadn’t he been able to find her in time?

He looked at the paper in his hands, his eyes so tired he could hardly focus, the sick feeling in his stomach and the pounding in his head reminding him he had forgotten to drink or eat since brunch with Anna. His eyes flickered until the words settled and formed. It was an information report submitted by two uniformed officers checking possible locations where the abducted women could be being kept. Their names — PCs Ingram and Adams. They’d visited a disused poultry factory out in Keston, on the Kent-London border. The report said the land was poorly maintained and hazardous, but that it contained a small abode and numerous outhouses. The man living on the land gave the name Thomas Keller, twenty-eight years old, five foot nine inches tall, slim, white, identification checked out OK and nothing particularly suspicious or untoward noted. Sean frantically scanned the report for Keller’s occupation, but none was shown. ‘Damn it,’ he cursed quietly. ‘Fuck.’ He began to move his index finger backwards and forwards under the name Thomas Keller, backwards and forwards, until finally he tossed it back on to his desk before cursing again.

‘Christ, I’m fucking losing it,’ he accused himself, convinced the tiredness was close to making him hallucinate. ‘Go home,’ he told himself. ‘For Christ’s sake, just go home.’ He hauled himself from the chair he’d been stuck in for more hours than he could remember, pulled on his coat, filling the pockets with the trappings of his life and headed towards the exit. By the time he reached the swing doors the name Thomas Keller had all but been wiped from his mind — just another name on another information report. One of hundreds.

He lay in his bed tossing and turning until he could take no more of the hellish images that tore around inside his head. Demons that always came in the night, dancing behind his closed eyelids, never allowing him to escape his cursed life — not even in sleep. Tonight had been worse than usual, somehow more intense and vivid, as if he was reaching the climax of his very existence. Finally, maybe the end was near. The end of this life and the beginning of the next. He threw the soiled duvet off his overly slim, ugly body and stood in the darkness, the moonlight from outside the only illumination, blue and cold.

Almost without thinking, as if he was unaware of his own intentions, he tugged his tatty underpants down past his hips and let them fall to the floor, stepping out of them and grabbing the tracksuit bottoms from the bedpost and pulling them over his hairless, vein-ridden legs before recovering his hooded top from the floor and struggling into it, searching in the faint light for his training shoes and pushing his neglected feet into them. He grabbed the cellar keys from the chest of drawers where he kept so many special things and walked through the cramped, dingy house to the bathroom, taking a phial of alfentanil and a syringe from the cabinet, drawing fifty-millilitres into it before replacing the safety cap over the needle and marching to what served as the front door, stopping only once more to recover the cattle prod from the same kitchen cupboard where he kept his shotgun. For a moment he considered also taking the stun-gun as he would have normally, but tonight, for some reason he didn’t. The cattle prod and alfentanil would be enough.

He stepped out into the bitter night, the clear skies allowing the temperature to drop dramatically, the freezing, still air catching him by surprise, causing his breath to shallow until his lungs adjusted to the cold mixture he forced into them. As he strode through the night across the derelict yard, great plumes of breath burst from his mouth, clouds of condensation reflecting the moonlight before dying to nothing. He unlocked the padlock and pulled the metal door to the cellar open, its scraping and screeching turning him to a statue as he listened to the darkness for signs of danger, only daring to move once the resonating sounds of the door had faded. Slowly he began to descend into the faintest yellow light below, the underground cavern significantly warmer than the world outside. He reached the bottom of the stairs and stepped into the cellar, not speaking, waiting in the gloom, listening for the women, allowing his eyes to adjust to the man-made light, feeling calmer than usual, more in control, more instinctive, as if whatever was going to happen was somehow by his unconscious design — clear and unstoppable. Fate. His and theirs.

After a few minutes he walked purposefully to the cage in which Louise Russell cowered in the corner, her eyes wide with terror and suspicion, unblinking, following his every slightest move, waiting for him to speak. But he just stood next to her cage, staring in at her through the wire and faint light, until finally he turned his back on her and walked mechanically to the string that hung from the ceiling and acted as a light switch. He pulled the string and washed the room with the weak light. She could see the cattle prod clearly now, the memories of how he’d used it to torture Karen Green still painfully fresh — how he’d used it to make her compliant the night he had taken her from her cage and led her to the stairs, half helping her, half dragging her, ignoring her pleas and promises to do whatever he wanted her to, just so long as he let her stay. Life in the cage was better than no life at all.