The Keeper (12 page)

Chloroform
, Sean decided. It was not something he’d ever smelt before, but he knew it had to be. Donnelly broke his concentration.

‘Anything?’ he called out.

‘Chloroform, I think,’ Sean answered. ‘Get hold of Roddis and have him take a look at the car in situ before towing it away to the lab.’

‘Will do.’ Donnelly immediately started punching keys on his phone.

Sean opened the door more fully now, all the while searching for anything that might be evidence, touching nothing, seeing all as he crouched next to the opening, bothered by something he couldn’t think of, something missing. Without warning the answer jumped into his head. It was too quiet. He stood upright and spoke to no one in particular: ‘There’s no alarm.’

Donnelly looked up from his phone. ‘Excuse me?’

‘Why’s there no alarm?’ Sean asked. ‘He locked the car, but there’s no alarm.’ His heart was beginning to pound a little with the conviction he’d found something relevant, but his hope was cut short by the watching AA man.

‘It’s a Ford,’ he said.

‘So?’

‘You lock it with the remote key. One press to lock it and another to arm the alarm.’

Did that mean anything? Sean asked himself. Had the man he hunted been in so much of a panic that he’d fled the scene without making sure the alarm was on? Or had he not wanted the beep of the alarm setting to attract attention to him? Why lock it at all? He’d already left his palm and fingerprints at the Russells’ house.

Sean had to remind himself not to get too tied up in the knots of possibilities. All the same, he couldn’t stop this man from invading his mind. As the case went on he would gradually start thinking like his quarry, until the thoughts of the man he hunted would become his own thoughts. A cold, uncomfortable feeling washed over him. The days ahead would be joyless and stressful, his only hope of relief would be finding Louise Russell and the man who took her. The man who had her now.

He desperately wanted to enter the car, to sit in the driver’s seat as her abductor had done. To check the position of the seat, the mirrors, the steering wheel. Louise’s limp body flashed through his mind, bound and gagged, lying behind the back seat in the boot of the hatchback. He saw a faceless shadow driving the car through London traffic with his prisoner, his prize, in the back, moaning muffled pleas for him to let her go from behind the material wrapped around her mouth. He saw the faceless shadow looking over his shoulder, talking to her as he drove, reassuring her everything would be all right, that he wouldn’t harm her, wouldn’t touch her. But Sean wasn’t about to enter the car and risk damaging or destroying any invisible evidence waiting to be found within.

Donnelly came up behind him and made him jump. ‘Roddis is on his way,’ he announced.

‘Good. Thanks,’ Sean replied, hesitating before continuing: ‘I need to have a look in the back.’

‘Are you sure that’s wise, guv’nor? Roddis will not be pleased.’

‘I won’t touch anything,’ Sean promised. ‘I just need a quick look.’ He moved to the back of the car and searched with one finger under the lip of the hatchback door for the handle, the handle he absolutely knew the suspect would have touched. He pulled the handle and watched the hatch door rise open with a pneumatic hiss. He bent inside as much he could without over-balancing and falling forward, noticing immediately how clean the boot was, like everything else in the car. Everything was perfect, everything except for the slight scuffing on the carpeted surface of the boot and the smallest of scratch marks on the interior panelling close by. Sean knew what it meant.

He pulled away and stood. ‘This is where he had her,’ he told the listening Donnelly. ‘He tied her, probably gagged her and put her in the boot. You can see where her shoes have disturbed the carpet and marked the plastic panel. He’s a bold one, our boy. He snatches her from her own home in broad daylight and casually drives her through mid-morning traffic to this spot. And this is where his own car was waiting,’ he continued, indicating with a sweep of his hand that the suspect’s car would have been on the driver’s side of Russell’s. ‘He pulls up here and waits a few seconds, just long enough to be sure no one’s around. Then he gets out, moving fast, but smoothly. He knows exactly what he’s doing, no panic. He unlocks his own car or van, pulls Russell from the boot of the Fiesta and forces her into the boot of his. If he used chloroform in the house then he’s unsure whether he can control her without it, so he probably gives her another dose before trying to move her – but not too much, he doesn’t want to knock her out and end up with a dead weight. He’s not strong enough – if he was, he wouldn’t be so reliant on weapons and drugs – he’d physically overpower her instead. Once he transfers her to his own car, he locks hers and takes the keys with him. He doesn’t stop to wipe any prints or check for anything else he might have left behind because he doesn’t care whether we find it or not. He has what he wants, the one thing that he cares about. He has her. He closes the hatch door and carefully drives away. Have you checked for CCTV?’

‘There is none,’ Donnelly told him.

‘Then he knew there wasn’t,’ Sean insisted. ‘He’s a planner. None of this happened by accident. Have the access road checked for cameras. You won’t find any, but check anyway.’

‘It’ll be done,’ Donnelly promised.

Sean closed the hatch door carefully. He looked into the woods, just as the suspect would have done when he was checking the car cark before moving her. He still couldn’t see the man’s face, but already he felt as if he would recognize him in a second if he saw him. Something he didn’t yet fully understand would enable him to pick this one out in a crowd if only he could get close enough. That’s what he had to do now: let the evidence, let the facts get him close enough to allow the dark thing inside of him to take him the rest of the way to finding this madman.

In the early spring the trees still looked wintery and foreboding. Sean felt himself shiver, as if he was being watched. As if he was being watched from the inside by some spectre he knew he would eventually find himself face to face with.

‘I’ve got a really bad feeling about this one,’ he confessed to Donnelly. ‘I don’t think it’s going to end well.’ He pinched his temples between the middle finger and thumb of one hand and tried to squeeze the growing pressure in his head away before it exploded into a full migraine. ‘You wait here with the motor,’ he said. ‘I need to get back to the office and start trying to piece all this together. People are going to be sticking their noses into our business, so we might as well be ready with a few answers. When Roddis gets here, leave him with the car and head back to Peckham for a scrum-down.’

‘I’ll be there as soon as I can.’

Sean didn’t hear Donnelly’s reply; he was already climbing into his car looking for Superintendent Featherstone’s mobile number with one hand while starting the ignition, releasing the hand brake and fastening his seat belt with the other. He still hadn’t got around to setting his phone up to be hands-free. Again he cursed the uneven road as he bounced along, driving too fast and making it even worse. He had to wait longer than he’d wanted to before Featherstone answered.

‘Boss, it’s Sean.’

‘Problem?’ Featherstone asked bluntly.

‘Your missing person case,’ said Sean. ‘I’m afraid it’s an abduction case now.’

‘Any idea who took her?’

‘Whoever it was, I don’t think she knew them.’

‘A stranger attack,’ Featherstone said. ‘That does not bode well.’

‘No, sir,’ Sean agreed. ‘It does not.’

‘What do you need from me?’

‘Have you got anyone in the media who owes you a favour?’

‘Maybe,’ Featherstone answered cagily.

‘I need to get an appeal out tonight,’ Sean explained. ‘Ask for public assistance. He took her in broad daylight and transferred her from one vehicle to another in a public place. It’s possible someone saw something.’

‘If someone has taken her, won’t an appeal spook him?’ said Featherstone. ‘We don’t want to force his hand. I don’t want to push him into—’

‘I understand,’ Sean agreed, eager to cut to the chase, ‘but I have no choice. Her family have already worked out what’s happened, and now we’ve found her car dumped close to a wood in Bromley. If we don’t pull out all the stops to find her, we’re leaving ourselves wide open. It’s a shitty call to have to make, but we have no choice.’

‘All right,’ Featherstone reluctantly agreed. ‘I’ll call in a few favours, see if I can get my face on the telly tonight – but no promises. I’ll catch up with you later.’ He hung up before Sean could reply.

He tossed his phone into the centre console, finally controlling the car with two hands, relieved to be back on a smooth road, suddenly remembering he needed to call Sally, again cursing himself for not having set up his hands-free system. He found Sally in his contacts and called her number while pushing his car through the increasingly dense traffic, all the while wishing he had more time – more time to simply sit and think, to try to become the thing he had to stop. The sooner he did, the sooner they would catch the man who dumped Louise Russell’s car near the wood. The man who Sean knew would soon dump her body as casually as he’d abandoned her car, unless he could find him first. Find him and stop him, any way he knew how.

Sally paced up and down the street outside the Russells’ home under the pretence of checking on the door-to-door team’s progress, but in truth she just needed to get out of the office and get some fresh air, to be away from sympathetic and suspicious eyes alike. She knew Sean was trying to prevent her becoming involved in the main body of the investigation, his way of protecting her, but it wasn’t making her feel any better.

She spotted DC Paulo Zukov walking along the street towards her. ‘All right there, Sarge?’ Zukov asked in his usual chirpy, mischievous manner.

‘You’re not in uniform any more,’ Sally reminded him. ‘You call me Sally now. Remember?’

‘Just being respectful,’ Zukov teased. ‘But seriously, how are you?’

‘Don’t try and sound genuine and caring,’ Sally chided him unfairly. ‘It doesn’t suit you.’

It was water off a duck’s back for Zukov. He’d only been in the police six years, but it had been more than enough to harden his shell. ‘Harsh, but fair,’ he replied with a grin, pleased she perceived him as some cynical old detective, despite his young years and short length of service.

‘Have you finished the door-to-door yet?’ Sally asked.

‘Not quite, but we ain’t getting anything interesting anyway and I don’t suppose we will. Door-to-door, waste of bloody time if you ask me.’

‘No one did,’ Sally reprimanded him, her phone vibrating in her hand distracting her from their tête-à-tête. Caller ID told her who it was. ‘Yes, guv’nor.’

‘We found Russell’s car.’

‘Any sign of Louise?’ Sally knew he’d have said so right out if there had been, but she asked anyway.

‘No,’ Sean replied. ‘The official line is that she’s been taken. That’s what I believe.’

‘What’s our next move?’

‘As much media coverage as we can get, roadblocks, start canvassing a wider area and wait for forensics to give us something. Where are you?’

‘Checking on the door-to-door.’

‘They don’t need you there. Get back to Peckham as soon as and I’ll see you then.’

‘OK,’ Sally managed to get in before he hung up, leaving her alone with Zukov.

‘Problem?’ he asked.

‘I’ll tell you later,’ she muttered, a feeling of dread crawling over her skin. A suffocating anxiety was spreading through her body like an unstoppable rising tide turning dry sand wet and heavy. ‘I’ve got to head back to the office.’

The few steps to the car felt like miles and the car door seemed heavy as a drawbridge as she pulled it open, falling into her seat, feeling for the thick scars under her blouse, her breath coming in short sporadic bursts. She grasped the computer case she used as a holdall and frantically searched inside until she found the two small cardboard packets she needed. She popped two tramadol from one and six hundred milligrams of ibuprofen from the other into the palm of her hand and threw them down her throat, swallowing drily. She was glad now she hadn’t concealed a bottle of vodka in the bag as she’d considered doing.

Leaning back with her head on the headrest she closed her eyes, waiting for the drugs to give her some relief, both physical and psychological. To expel the memories of Sebastian Gibran breathing into her face as he waited, expected her to die – of Sebastian Gibran sitting opposite her in an exclusive London restaurant, smiling and flirting and her liking it. The memories forced her eyes open. She found herself gazing up the branches of a nearby tree, dead-looking limbs beginning to burst into life, the little green buds forcing their way through the hard bark. She thought of Louise Russell’s parents, so normal and unsuspecting, dragged from their comfortable life of cruise-liner holidays and early evening soap operas into a world they’d only ever seen fleetingly on the news. She hoped Sean wasn’t planning on putting them in front of the cameras – a tearful appeal from loving parents wanting their precious child returned to them unharmed. She had a horrible feeling he was, but as she shook the thought away more unwelcome images rushed her consciousness. Where was Louise now, right now? Was she looking into the eyes of the man who’d taken her, the man who meant her harm, the way Sally had looked into Gibran’s eyes? Was she feeling sick with fear the way Sally had? Did she feel suddenly weak and vulnerable, as impotent as Sally had – like a victim?

A victim. Sally had never realized how much she feared becoming a victim until it happened. All the power and prestige she’d built up as a detective, a cop, stripped away by a man whose madness ran so deep even Sean had struggled to grasp his motivation. She felt the tears beginning to force their way to her eyes, the pressure of holding them back numbing her brain and dulling her senses, and all the while the questions banging inside her head – could she face another killer now each case was all so much more personal to her than ever before? Could she sit across an interview room from them and resist the instinct to flee or worse? Would she be able to chase a suspect into a dark alley in the middle of the night, alone? ‘You bastard,’ she whispered to the car. ‘I hope you rot in hell.’