The Takers and Keepers

by Ivan Pope

  She placed her hand over his. Jesus, he thought, this is terrible. He pulled his hand out and, reaching in his pocket for a pen, scribbled his mobile number on the till receipt.

  ‘Just give me a call if anything comes up.’ He stood up quickly. ‘Bye Jen.’

  He strode off fast, down the road. As he moved away his eyes filled with tears and, when he thought he was far enough away, he balled his hands into fists and croaked out under his breath bastards, bastards, bastards, bastards.

  He renewed his search for Roger and pulled out ten years of research, endless notes over newspaper clippings, looking for a pattern. He considered going back to Belgrade, but in his heart he knew there was no way of finding out where Emily had gone until somebody wanted him to know.

  Jenkins got in touch, he wanted more stories. London Strife was going through one of its periodical cash flow crises, and he needed drama. ‘You could do something on that Spanish story. Can you tie that in to London?’

  A recent headline had caught their attention: after a year missing a child had been found in the early morning, wandering in the port region of the northern Spanish city of Santander. The boy had disappeared while at a supermarket with his family. The police had made investigations and had quickly decided that the stepfather was complicit. He had been arrested and was still in prison, his trial due, but now the child had emerged, white and shaken but seeming in good health. As with most of these cases, a blaze of publicity accompanied the initial revelation, with photographs and commentary from local judiciary and police. Allen was amazed at how the press in Europe seemed to be allowed, even encouraged, to press in on lost and damaged children, taking photos and asking them questions.

  It reminded him of the outcome of the Detroux case a few years previously. The Belgian paedophile had kidnapped two girls and locked them in a secret cellar annex, from which they were released during a police raid. Rather than extract the young girls in a private fashion, the police had brought the scantily dressed children out in the full glare of television and press lights, ensuring a further humiliation was heaped upon them. It was akin to abuse, he thought, like the creation of pornography by the free press. The images circulated after these raids were certainly collected and pored over by the sort of men that Allen cultivated for their contacts and their knowledge.

  ‘Fuck that,’ Allen responded. ‘I want to write about London. I think we need to make the case that this is a trafficking centre, that girls and young boys are brought here as part of the underground railroad, and then distributed.’ He wasn’t sure if this was even true, but there were things he wanted to say.

  Jenkins held out the offer of a proper job, but he had to write what was asked of him. Even Santander. ‘Maybe I can even find you a publisher,’ he said. ‘Get a book going again.’ He wanted to help, but Allen had heard it all before. He didn’t want to fall into that trap again.

  In July two boys larking around on a demolition site hammered at a metal door they came across until it sprang open. Entering it, they found a succession of small rooms built from scrap metal. When a woman with long hair and fingernails emerged from one of the rooms they fled in terror to the police.

  Allen called Herman and begged him for further information but found a wall of indifference.

  ‘Nothing to do with your missus, mate,’ he said. ‘This is ours, keep away from it.’

  Several times he had visited the sites of recovered people, the cellars, basements and underground spaces where crude prisons had been fashioned. Sometimes at the invitation of good contacts in the police, more usually months afterwards on his own initiative, he had clambered down into deadened spaces, pulled out false doors, propped up weighted traps and cages in order to clamber into the human pens that others had ingeniously created. Those spaces haunted his dreams, even when he wasn’t dreaming his feet traced the outlines of forgotten cells. He had once been in a small space where two children had died when the air system, for what it was worth, had failed. The space had been thoroughly disinfected, yet to Allen’s senses it carried the imprint of desperate and dying innocents. He wondered why children took to imprisonment better than adults. After interviewing some escapees, he knew this to be the case. And still.

  He kept writing. He had to, to earn a living, and it kept him closer to the world where Emily was. So he rustled things up without enthusiasm and then was ashamed of them, although he knew eventually something might bring a lead, a word. He realised it was a far more complex world he was dealing with, that it overlapped with his world out here. It was only a matter of time, though that time might be years.

  He knew someone still cared about Jennifer.

  And he knew someone had Emily.

  Down There

  This is a life.

  The first week was blanked out.

  The first month a nightmare.

  The first year an existence.

  The next eighteen years, an ordinary lifetime.

  Around the base of the wall she had scratched a record of one vertical scrape for every time, every fifth visit getting a horizontal stripe across the preceding four. She’d seen this once in a film about the Count of Monte Cristo. She knew it worked, but she never counted the total. It was just for the record, for her record.

  Over time you could forget nearly everything. You forgot the things you knew, and you then forgot what you had known, coming to exist in a self-created world where your only references were what was around you and what occurred regularly.

  At the same time, you learned a lot of new things. Abigail thought she’d grown up fast, she was rather proud of her grown-up self. She looked forward to a day when she saw her parents again – they would be proud of her, she felt.

  Abigail could remember her family, she thought. Some days she could remember them clearly, other days she started to doubt that she’d ever known such a wonderful world. Those were the days in which the cold seeped deep into her bones, the smell of mould became overwhelming and the lights went off inside and outside of her.

  Then there were the days that he came to visit.

  Remembering rain.

  The clock

  Routine

  Soup

  Eventually the child returned from the darkness holding a shimmering ovoid, a hard-boiled egg in its shell, out on the palm of her hand.

  ‘A present for you,’ she said in a strange sing-song tone.

  Emily shivered back against the wall, as if she could fall through it to get away from this person.

  ‘Eat,’ the person said.

  ‘Get away from me.’ She slapped the egg out of the child’s hand and, jumping from the bed, ran into the darkness, colliding with the wall, face first. She sat down in a heap, blood running from her nose, and cried slowly, for an hour or so. Then, driven by hunger and fear and desperation, she looked round and crawled in the dark to where the egg had rolled. She reached for it, stretching out her arm and picking it up with fingertips.

  It seemed strange to peel and eat an egg in those surroundings and she was aware that her hands were filthy, but she took the egg carefully and cracked it on the side of the bed. After cramming it in to her mouth, almost whole, she felt calmer. Looking around, she noticed that the elder child, the one who had brought the egg, was still watching her in the distance.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Thank you so much.’

  The child spectre looked at her for a while and then smiled.

  ‘Modher sent it.’

  For several long days Emily lay in the darkness thinking about Allen, about her mother, of the sunshine, the world outside. Sometimes she thought ‘Fuck you, Allen, this is all your fault, you and your fucking abductions’, and she wanted to scream out in the darkness. But sometimes she remembered him with fondness and wanted him to come and rescue her. On these days she felt calmer, though she knew it was ridiculous.

  The vapid children would appear out of the gloom and sit on their haunches, watching her and waiting for her to make a move. They
now brought her food – bread, tinned fruit, eggs. She grew used to the ritual in the half-light, the way these young people understood this space and were at peace with it, whereas she struggled every moment to restrain her urge to panic, to cry and shout and run into the corners. Whoever their mother was, she remained hidden away somewhere at the back, in a room to which Emily was not invited.

  Her eyes adjusted to the stygian depths and her ears also started to tune in to activity within this realm. She started to understand how it operated – there was a family living in some rooms in the depths, they had access to food and water, they cooked in there. A toilet was plumbed in, there must be outside world reasonably close and a feed of water into this place. But for all her explorations and her pondering on what and how, she came no closer to a solution to her obsession – a return to where there was light.

  She made friends with these gentle, strange girls who came and went from the softly clicking door at the back of the space. They showed her around the pitch-dark space, how to find the toilet, where a dripping tap gave water. They brought her food every day from their own secret space and extra blankets for her bed and as the days passed, she became more relaxed in the darkness. She felt her way around, noting where the space grew colder and where it was warm, trying to work out the size and scope of the rooms, where she was and what might lie beyond. If she asked the children where this place was or anything about how they came to be here they said, ‘You mus ask that of modher.’

  ‘So where is mother?’ she replied, and smiled, but they only gestured with their heads into the gloom.

  ‘Take me to her,’ said Emily.

  When her children came and told her, there’s a lady here, they said, she is nice, they said, she needed some time to think about that. This whole life she had been alone, for so many years she’d lived here with no-one, then her children. So how can you explain eighteen years in a dark cellar? And how do you explain two children, two children that weren’t there when you were taken in. How can you explain falling in love with the man who kidnapped you from your childhood and who locked you in the dark for your whole life, who made you his wife by force? Who raped you over and over until you came to accept his love, until you came to enjoy sex with him because you knew nothing else? How could you explain two children born into the damp hole, who have known nothing in their lives but dark and decay. At least you knew light, the sky and the countryside before your life changed to this. At least in a previous incarnation you had walked on grass and swam in water. Down here your children had known nothing but concrete and the packages of food that were brought by their father, your lover, your jailer, their captor. What sense did that make? That whoever you had once been no longer existed, that this life was the only life, everything in the world existed down here, that there was nothing else. That your life now is black and white like an old-fashioned film and if old life was in colour you no longer could think of that. How could you make a start at explaining that to this woman who you didn’t know and who you didn’t trust.

  Every time he came and did that thing she made a tiny doll baby from scraps of wool and cardboard torn up and put it in the back room. No-one else was allowed in that room. A funny peculiar, not funny ha ha thing about him was that he let me make rules and he obeyed them.

  But there were some things there were no rules about, but we understood the rules.

  You have to accept that I am my own person. You might not think much of me, living in a hole, but I am a family person. This is my family.

  You might ask how I know that I live underground. Well, first he has told me many times where I live. He has also told me why I live here, and that I will never be freed.

  There are things that I will not reveal. These things are my things. As you can imagine no doubt, it has been necessary to create a story of my life that works for me on a daily basis – to speak nothing of my children. I wanted them to be proud of me.

  There are things that I will not reveal to you. There are things that even he does not know. These are my things.

  Dear mummy, sorry I didn’t come home yet. I crid a lot and missed you so much and daddy too and midgy and smudge. a man took me and he has hidden me in a cellar and I cant get out yet. but I will come out soon and come to find you. if you know where I am please come and find be becasue it is horrible here and dark adn I dont like the dark and the bed is on the floor. plese kiss midgy and smudge for me and I will come home when he lets me free xxxxx abby

  Allen

  Above ground, Allen couldn’t settle or find any interest in what he was doing. Emily was vanished, had been vanished, and the worst of it was that he could imagine where she had gone. When he slept, or when he woke, or in idle moments when he let his mind drift, an image of a spectral woman dancing in a dark cellar came into his mind.

  He moved out of his flat, to a rented house, then on to a different flat further away from their home and after that, a few weeks later, on to another smaller, cheaper flat. Throwing off the comforts of home added distance between him and his previous life. He walked the streets keeping an eye close to the walls and entrances, sometimes walking through the night, eyeing up half-hidden doorways and bricked-up windows that hinted at voids within.

  He continued his research, though the fire went out of it. Always keeping half an eye out for Roger, he wondered around London and dug into his contacts and networks, but it wasn’t a task he could stick to for long. Everyone who might be useful had gone to ground. There was fear going down and nobody wanted to talk to him anymore. They burrowed away from sight and, like their victims, wouldn’t be surfacing anytime soon.

  It dawned on him that he didn’t really know who Roger was. He had to start again from scratch, assembling an image, a picture of him. The stories, clues and evidence mounted, scrap by scrap. He pulled all his research down from his shelves and spent a week combing through it, looking for patterns. Every abduction, every trafficker, every court case. He scanned them all. Each time someone went missing he was there, watching the police search and either find a body or give up as the story slowly drifted out of range. He tracked missing people across Europe, trying to work out a pattern from what was a mishmash of data. Drunks, runaways, domestics, children, mentally ill, crooks, thieves, blaggers, cults, religions, armed forces, work – all these things had the capacity to take people away from their homes in the blink of an eye. So many ways to disappear. Most high-profile cases had nothing in common except for the desperate sadness and anxiety of the families left behind.

  But every few months there was something that didn’t fall easily into one of these groupings. A disappearance with no explanation, no traces. Then Allen could easily imagine a cellar, an abandoned water tank, a hidden railway arch, now containing a frightened, lonely human locked against the light of day.

  Every time he crossed London, and he crossed it a lot, his eyes flickered from doorway to staircase. Every basement entrance, every heavyset door attracted his attention for a moment, but he knew this was no way to find her. He developed a fear of the underground with its myriad tunnels and passages. He knew there were occupied spaces deeper in the system and he feared them.

  He kept his ear to the ground. He understood that she might one day be surfaced, if whoever was holding her decided that something was needed, that cover had to be broken. But all his contacts were silent, as if there was conspiracy to reveal nothing. He thought of Elizabeth Fritzl spending twenty-four years underground with her children and how she had only surfaced when her father became convinced her daughter was dying and Allen shuddered. A quarter of a century. At night he wept quietly.

  Emily

  ‘You have to understand who he is,’ she said. ‘He is my father and my husband and the father of my children. We’ve been together for a long time. I wouldn’t say he’s the best man I could have asked for, but I’ve come to accept him. He is all I’ve got and all I’ve had for a long, long time. And my children know and love him. That’s what a father is, s
urely?

  ‘I decided to go along with whatever he wanted. Sex, obviously. He was calm but forceful. If I tried to stop him, he would punch me to the ground, split my lip, my nose, my eye. Rape me, then leave me bleeding anyway.

  ‘After time I wanted to make him look after me. If he wasn’t going to let me go, I wanted him to suffer for me as much as I was suffering for him.

  ‘If that meant getting him to fall in love with me, you could say that was my plan.

  ‘He never brought johnnies, to stop the babies. I asked him for them. What do you think will happen, I said? He knew, of course. At first, I thought it would bring it to an end, but after a while I realised it was part of the mission. He wanted the babies and that came later. He didn’t care, wanted it to happen. Feed the power.

  ‘After the first years I got used to him. The life became normal.

  ‘I think I’ve been ill. I’m not sure who I am or where I came from. My name is Abigail or Abby or maybe Gail. I’ve been living in a cellar under the ground for years. Since I was younger, I was twelve. There’s a man there, he is my husband, it’s official. He told me, we were married by a priest, so everything became alright. I’ve got his children, they are many years old, they are not babies any more. My husband, he is the father of my children. I never did sex with anyone else before that, so he must be the father. I don’t like him much, but I guess I love him.

  ‘He took me from my parents in a previous life. He told me they didn’t want me, that they had arranged this. I never believed him at first. As I said, I’ve been ill for a long time, longer than I can remember. I take medicine for my illness, every morning. He brings it for me.

  ‘He has looked after me, fed me, clothed me. He has been nice to me, I don’t want him hurt. My home is under the ground. If you could please let me have some of my medicine?

  ‘Where are my children, please can you bring them to me? They will be scared of you, they don’t know about people or the world. They have lived with me in my rooms all their lives, please be gentle with them.