The Keeper (45 page)

‘And she did.’

‘Yes. Her flat was on the ground floor – it was summer. How was she to know there was a monster like Richards watching her – waiting? She left a kitchen window open and eventually he built up the courage and he slipped inside and he killed her. He killed her then he mutilated and sexually abused her dead body – cleaned up as best he could and left. But there was something else in the photographs that stood out for me, something that only Charlie Bannan had also seen and considered.’

‘What was it?’

‘A doll.’

‘A doll?’

‘Larger than normal, right in the middle of the crime scene, sitting on the chair opposite the couch where Rebecca was butchered.’

‘And you thought he’d used it as a replacement for the child who wasn’t there?’ Anna caught on. ‘You thought he took the doll from somewhere inside the flat and placed it as if it was watching him rape and murder the mother?’

‘Yes,’ he told her coldly. ‘But blood spray patterns on the doll indicated that it hadn’t been present when she’d had her throat cut, but had been present when the other wounds had been inflicted.’

‘So he inflicted an incapacitating and ultimately fatal blow and as she lay bleeding to death he went looking for the child, to make him watch the rest, only he couldn’t find him, so he replaced him with the doll before finishing his …’

‘His performance,’ Sean finished for her. ‘And yes, that’s what I believed happened. It had to be the same man. Only trouble was, the Rebecca Fordham team had already charged Ian McCaig, who’d killed himself while on remand waiting for his trial. McCaig was clearly unstable from the outset, but he was no killer. The media frenzy around his arrest and the public hatred drove him over the edge. He just couldn’t take it. Everyone took his suicide as his admission of guilt.’

‘But not you?’

‘No and not Charlie Bannan either. As far as we were concerned, the Parkside Rapist was still on the loose and therefore so was Rebecca’s killer. It just couldn’t be McCaig – he was all wrong for it. So why had they charged him in the first place? I’ll tell you why, because some fucking historical criminologist reckoned he could be the one. But there’s no way he could have been. McCaig’s only conviction was for indecent exposure, a crime of self-degradation. Rebecca’s killer was all about the degradation of others. Two traits that can never exist in the same offender. They’re opposite ends of the spectrum – night and day, light and darkness. But the team investigating Rebecca’s murder wouldn’t entertain the idea they had the wrong man. Bannan had pleaded with them to listen, but they wouldn’t. So we met with the criminologist ourselves and asked her to consider a possible link between Rebecca’s murder and the Parkside rapes.’

‘And?’

‘She agreed they appeared to be linked.’

‘So she admitted she could have been wrong?’

‘She said she’d never told the Fordham Team McCaig was guilty, just that he fitted elements of the profile. But the damage had already been done. The investigating team had allowed themselves to be influenced by an outsider and it had led to a catastrophic mistake. Anyway, a few weeks later we found Lindsey Harter and her four-year-old daughter raped and murdered in their own home. The brutality of the attack left us in no doubt it was the same man who had killed Rebecca. The same man who was committing the Parkside rapes. When we looked at the blood spray patterns around the area where the mother had been killed it became apparent that something had been removed from the scene after she’d been killed – something or
someone
who’d been sitting in the chair opposite. So we had the daughter’s body and clothes examined for traces of her mother’s blood and Christ, we found plenty. The blood spray patterns confirmed it – the killer had made the daughter sit and watch him sexually and physically mutilate her own mother before leading her to her own bedroom and killing her too.’

‘Just like the doll,’ Anna said, pulling her coat tight against the cold of the day and the chill of what she was being told.

‘Yeah. Just like the doll. Later we arrested and charged Christopher Richards with the murder of Lindsey and her daughter Izzy. He admitted his guilt. But when we asked about Rebecca’s murder, he denied having anything to do with it. The criminologist continued to deny her involvement in the conviction of McCaig. Maybe she’d been misunderstood – maybe she was just scared of her reputation being destroyed. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know.

‘It took until 2007 for DNA tests to finally prove that it was Richards who murdered Rebecca. He pleaded guilty to Manslaughter on grounds of diminished responsibility. We’d been right, Charlie Bannan and I – we’d been right all along. A young mother and her four-year-old child, both raped and murdered unnecessarily. Dozens of other women raped by Richards after he’d killed Rebecca – all because the investigation team stopped listening to their own instincts – allowed the world of academic theories and clinical papers into their world – the real world. My world. These things don’t belong in my world.’

‘We’ve improved since then,’ Anna pleaded, all too aware of the cases to which he referred. ‘We’ve learned from our mistakes, we know so much more now.’

‘Why don’t you save what you know for the next time you’re in court, so you can use it to help some other bastard like Gibran get away with murder.’

Anna’s mouth hung slightly open for a few seconds. ‘I don’t deserve that,’ she said.

He closed his eyes and rubbed his temples, letting the anger and bitterness sink back into the dark places that littered his corrupted soul. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t …’

‘I think we should just go.’

‘Fine,’ he agreed. They both climbed into the unmarked car and prepared for a long, silent journey back to Peckham.

Thomas Keller lay on the stained and soiled mattress, a filthy duvet pulled up to his chest. It was early evening outside and still light enough to see without turning the overhead light on. Underneath the duvet he wore his tracksuit bottoms and an unwashed T-shirt. He could see her, see her so clearly, as if she was lying in the bed with him – the only person he ever really loved. The only person who ever really loved him.

They were alone together, a long time ago when he was only twelve years old, in her garden, bathed in August sunshine, warm and strong, early in the summer’s evening, the smell of freshly cut grass from the surrounding gardens filling their heads. Alone where no one could see them, away from prying eyes that would try and stop them if they could see them together. He stroked her long brown hair, occasionally glancing at the transfer of a phoenix on his forearm while she hummed and made a daisy chain, her identical transfer vivid in the bright light – transfers they’d put on each other, a symbol of their never-ending love. She turned to him, smiling. ‘What you thinking about, Tommy?’ she asked, her gentle, kind voice like an angel speaking to him, his one and only escape from the harshness of his reality.

‘I was thinking of you.’

‘Why, do you love me?’ she giggled.

‘Yes,’ he said, not afraid to tell her – not afraid to tell her anything.

‘Enough to stay with me for ever?’

‘Yes.’

‘Don’t be silly – we’ve only been friends for a week.’

‘But I’ve known you for a lot longer than that,’ he protested.

‘No you haven’t,’ she insisted. ‘Not properly.’

‘I’ve watched you for a long time. Watched you with the others. But I knew you weren’t like them. I knew you were different.’

‘They’re OK,’ she said unconvincingly.

‘To you maybe, but not to me.’

‘They just don’t understand you, Tommy. They think you think you’re too good for them or something.’

‘Is that what they told you?’

‘Not exactly, but I know what they say to each other.’ Thomas Keller didn’t respond. ‘You should just ignore them when they’re being mean to you.’

‘I do, mostly, but one day I’ll show them all what I can do. Then they’ll be sorry they picked on me.’

‘What do you mean?’ Sam asked, looking up from her daisy chain, peering into his brown, almost black eyes.

‘Nothing.’ He suddenly leaned forward, his lips pursed, but she bent away from him.

‘What are you doing?’ she said, still smiling, but more anxiously now.

‘I wanted to kiss you. That’s all.’

She watched him as he looked away and stared at the ground, a sense of pity and friendship overwhelming her resistance. She knew what the other children at school did to him, physically and emotionally tormenting him whenever a teacher wasn’t there to stop them or sometimes even when there was, but she had never joined in. By befriending him she had risked her position as one of the popular kids, one of the in-crowd; her friendship had been enough to confer on him a degree of protective cover. All the same, his attitude towards her did concern her a little. From the very first time she had spoken to him, just a week ago, when she had intervened to stop a group of boys from tearing his school books to pieces, his intensity towards her had seemed … unnatural. She’d told herself it wasn’t surprising – clearly she was the only friend he’d ever had. Her parents and older relatives had always been amused and charmed by her natural instinct to protect the innocent, embarrassing her with tales of when she would rescue writhing caterpillars from attacking ants or free moths from the spider’s web, and now she had Tommy – another insect to be saved from the ants. She leaned close to him and quickly kissed him on the cheek.

He looked up, joy and fear etched on his face, confusion and excitement, his lips swelling with the blood of embarrassment and desire. He’d never felt quite like this before – a stirring in the very pit of his stomach; a tightening feeling in his groin. He knew what to do next. Some of the older boys at the children’s home had made him watch their secret DVDs. He knew what men were supposed to do to women – especially when they loved them – the older boys had made that very clear. He leaned towards her and kissed her on the cheek. To his pleasure and surprise she didn’t pull away, so he kissed her again and again, moving across her cheek to her beautiful red lips, the taste and warmth of her skin firing through his entire body like electricity, making his heart pound out of control, his breathing reduced to tiny gasps.

She giggled nervously, placing a hand on his chest as his lips searched for hers, probing and slipping on the side of her face. She tried to twist away, but felt his hands slip under her armpits and begin to hold her in place, pulling her closer to him. She pushed hard at his chest again with both hands, the increasingly fraught struggle making them over-balance and fall sideways on to the grass, his lips never ceasing their search for hers.

‘No, Tommy,’ she managed to say. ‘Stop it, please. Stop it, Tommy, you’re hurting me.’ She felt a hand slide under her top and grope her chest for breasts she didn’t have yet, his jagged fingernails clawing at her soft skin. And then he was on top of her, his hand pulling and tugging at the buttons and zip of her jeans, her hand pulling at his wrist, tears beginning to seep from her green eyes as she fought to free herself from him. But the madness had made him too strong and she felt his powerful thin fingers push themselves into her knickers pressing hard on her crotch. ‘Stop, Tommy. Please, you have to stop.’ But he didn’t, a single finger pushing its way inside her, the pain and shock electrifying her body, making her do the only thing she could think of doing.

Her shrill scream ripped through him like a bullet, freezing time as he became totally still, his eyes wide and round, misty with sexual desire that he knew now would never be fulfilled. For that second nothing in the world existed except the two of them, locked in their grotesque embrace. He felt her lungs filling with air, watched her mouth spread wide open, every muscle in her body tense as she prepared to shatter the very air around them with another scream. The horror of the situation punched him in the chest and shocked him to action before the scream could leave her mouth, his hand clamping over the opening in her face that threatened to destroy him once and for all.

She blinked mechanically as she realized what was happening, the tears being pushed from her eyes and rolling down her temples and disappearing into her hairline. ‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ he told her. ‘You shouldn’t have done that. I … I … only wanted to prove to you that I love you. You want me to show you that don’t you?’ She tried to shake her head, to show him she didn’t, that she just wanted him to go and never speak of this again to anyone, but it was too late – too late for both of them.

The silhouette loomed up behind him, the sun glaring into her eyes making it impossible to see who it could be, but suddenly the weight of Tommy’s body was no longer on her as he appeared to be flying backwards through the air, the angry voice of an adult breaking through her hypnotic nightmare – the voice of her father. ‘Get the fuck off my daughter, you little bastard. What the fuck d’you think you’re doing?’ She watched her father raise his hand to strike the boy and despite the horror of a few seconds before she couldn’t let him.

‘No. Don’t hit him.’ Her father looked at her silently, the rage in his heart making her words sound distorted and unclear, but her pleading eyes told him what she was saying, begging him to spare the boy who had tried to violate her. ‘Please,’ she asked. Her father lowered his hand and stared at Tommy as if he was filth, stared at him the way he was used to being stared at. Then he dragged him from the garden and through the gate that led to his car, her voice following them all the way. ‘Please don’t hurt him, Daddy. He didn’t mean to hurt me,’ as she tried to defend him through her confusion and shock, despite her feelings of revulsion.

Her father spun on her, his finger raised to her face. ‘You wait here till I get back.’ He grabbed Tommy by the back of his neck and pointed his face back at his daughter’s. ‘Take a good look at her, son, because it’s the last time you’ll ever see her. Understand?’

The boy said nothing as he was pushed into the boot of her father’s car, the slamming of the lid bringing darkness and fear as they drove the short distance to the children’s home. Then light rushed into the boot, blinding light, as strong arms pulled him from the car and pushed him along the path to the entrance. Her father made sure all the staff and children knew what he’d done, that he didn’t want to press charges, so long as the boy stayed away from his daughter. No need to get the police involved, the staff at the home could deal with it – just so long as the boy stayed away.