The Chosen Ones

by Howard Linskey

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX

  As Tom drove her home he told Helen, ‘At least you didn’t miss much while you were down there. Only a General Election with a Labour landslide.’

  ‘Can’t believe I didn’t even vote.’

  ‘Me neither,’ he smiled. ‘I was a bit busy.’ Then he said, ‘You also missed what’s-his-name.’ Tom always made a point of not using Peter’s name.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Probably for the best, judging by the voicemails he left me when I didn’t show.’

  ‘Was he worried about you?’

  ‘No, he just assumed I’d stood him up deliberately, and his messages got angrier and angrier. There was quite a lot about how humiliated he felt.’ She smiled. ‘Your message was much nicer.’

  ‘I was genuinely worried. There was a lot of work to be done and I didn’t fancy doing it all myself.’

  ‘I’m touched,’ she said, ‘and I have to admit you were right about Peter. People don’t change.’

  The job had taken far longer than anyone expected and now they were forced to wait for DC Wallace, who had driven back to HQ for something he loosely described as ‘a special tool’. The newer shipping crates were simpler to break into but nothing they had tried so far had worked on the doors of the dented, heavily corroded old shipping crate set aside from the others, and they stubbornly refused to yield.

  In their impatience, while they waited for DC Wallace to return they were beginning to speculate that the whole exercise might just be a complete waste of time.

  ‘Why would he need it anyhow?’ asked one of the officers tasked with opening the crate. ‘He’s got the newer ones over there and a bunch of rooms underground. I’m betting, when we finally pop this bugger open, all we are going to find is a bunch of rusted tools lying in a pool of mucky water.’

  Before Bradshaw could contradict him, one of the other men said, ‘And maybe we’ll discover the bodies of every person who’s disappeared from this county in the last twenty years. That cross your mind at all?’

  ‘It did,’ the DC conceded. ‘I’m not saying we should give up.’

  They didn’t give up. Instead they waited and stood around smoking and talking, about politics (‘Nothing ever changes, not really’), football (‘Newcastle United will never win ’owt, no matter who’s playing for them. They’re bloody cursed, man’) and women, specifically DI Tennant and whether they would or they wouldn’t (‘I definitely would, as long as she didn’t expect me to call her ma’am during it’).

  The other men laughed at this, but Bradshaw grew tired of their pathetic appraisals of Tennant. ‘She’d eat you alive,’ he said, and he walked away from them.

  Bradshaw strode towards the highest point of the dip so he could wait for the return of DC Wallace. He was already trudging across the field towards them. Bradshaw was expecting him to be carrying an expensive power tool and was surprised to see him loosely holding something that looked more like an iron bar with a grip on one end.

  ‘What’s that, then?’ he asked when Wallace finally reached him.

  ‘It’s a sort of skeleton key for shipping crates.’ He was out of breath. ‘I’m not joking. We picked this one up when we lifted a bloke who was using it to break into them after dark.’

  ‘Can you use it, more to the point?’ asked Bradshaw.

  ‘We’ll see, won’t we?’

  Cigarettes were extinguished and everyone gathered to watch DC Wallace. He placed the open end of the bar over the protruding seal in the middle of the shipping crate, took a step back and pushed outwards from the other end. It took him a few goes but soon the seal began to give and then quite suddenly it bent backwards so it was away from the doors and no longer preventing them from opening.

  ‘Nice one, Bob,’ said another officer, who had an enormous crowbar and a heavy-duty metal hammer. He placed the narrow end of the bar into the gap between the doors and struck the opposite end with the hammer twice until a small gap opened up between the doors and the crowbar slid in. He placed the hammer on the ground and put his weight on the crowbar then levered it until the left-hand door began to slowly open, scraping on the ground as it did so. Others started to help, and several pairs of hands pulled the door till it was dragged entirely back. Wallace used the hammer to bash the right-hand door then, striking it from the inside until it swung outwards. Both doors were now wide open and the light from the outside illuminated the shipping crate for the first time in years.

  It smelt of mould and decay, of contents undisturbed for a very long time, and they could still make out the shapes of the larger items inside the crate. All eyes were instantly drawn to one thing. Like the other crates, this one contained a camp bed. The bed lay in the far corner, had a stained, discoloured mattress on it and a pile of … something.

  The men exchanged looks and, without a word, Bradshaw and Wallace stepped into the crate to take a closer look. As Bradshaw drew nearer he could make out a body: a badly decomposed human figure dressed in rags that may once have been a dress. It was little more than a heap of bones that had rotted till they had turned black. The figure was curled up in a foetal position and, as Bradshaw drew nearer, he saw the hairless human skull, its sightless eyes and a mouth that was wide open, as if frozen in a final scream of anguish. Around its neck he could just make out a tarnished chain that clung to what remained of the corpse. As he moved closer he noticed it still held a simple faded cross.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN

  The last enemy to be destroyed is death.

  ‒ 1 Corinthians 15:26

  They hadn’t been able to get much out of Samuel Keogh. He would claim he was too ill to talk to them or that his life had no meaning now and it would soon be over, so why should he bother to help them?

  Bradshaw had to step aside while more senior men tried to persuade Samuel to talk, then they brought in Professor Flannery to see if he could understand the man and, when that didn’t work, someone had the bright idea of sending for a priest. The latter was sent packing because he was ‘no more than a godless Satanist in league with the Pope!’

  ‘He must be a Protestant then,’ observed Bradshaw wryly. ‘What a pity nobody bothered to check.’

  ‘It wasn’t my idea to send him in,’ said Kane.

  ‘I’d like to have a go,’ Bradshaw told him.

  ‘What makes you think you’ll get anything out of him when no one else has? He’s just a religious nutter.’

  ‘But I’d like to try,’ Bradshaw told his DCI, ‘and I think I’ve earned the right.’

  Samuel Keogh was held in a secure hospital bed while he was treated for various ailments. They had managed to at least stabilize the open sores on his body and limbs and reduce the effect of the severe blood poisoning he was suffering from, which was most likely caused by a deep, infected cut from a rusty car he had worked on.

  His voice was a weary rasp, the croaked words of a dying man. ‘I’m done anyway, and everyone knows it, so what difference does it make whether I explain myself?’

  ‘It doesn’t really,’ said Bradshaw calmly. ‘I understand. I understand completely, in fact.’

  The man looked at him warily but there was the merest trace of interest in his eye. ‘Do you?’

  ‘Yes,’ affirmed Bradshaw. ‘It doesn’t really matter what we do in this life.’

  The man regarded the detective closely. ‘Are you mocking me, Copper?’

  Bradshaw shook his head, ‘ “Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” ’ he announced placidly.

  Keogh was surprised. ‘That’s Matthew?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Are you a God-fearing man, Mr …?’

  ‘You can call me Ian,’ he answered. ‘Most certainly. Isn’t everyone?’

  ‘Not everyone, no.’

  ‘Well, they should be,’ he said. ‘ “The Lord will take vengeance on His adversaries, and He reserveth wrath for His enemies.” ’

  ‘That’s right,�
�� agreed Keogh, ‘so spaketh the Lord. You’re a believer?’

  ‘I have faith, yes,’ said Bradshaw, ‘so help me to understand and let Him in turn understand. Only then will you be sure of everlasting life.’

  ‘It’s over. There’ll be no trial. Look at me. I haven’t got long. I don’t think I even have the strength left to tell you what happened.’

  ‘But you must, Samuel,’ Bradshaw urged him. ‘Only God can judge you, but how can He do that if He does not hear you? Remember Proverbs?’ he asked the man. ‘ “Whoever conceals their sins does not prosper, but the one who confesses and renounces them finds mercy.” ’

  Samuel looked at Bradshaw with wonderment. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll do it.’

  ‘Come in, Kane,’ said the deputy chief constable, who had summoned the DCI to his enormous office on the top floor. ‘It’s about these expenses you’ve been incurring.’ Edward Tyler held up the papers he’d been scrutinizing.

  Kane knew he hadn’t done anything dodgy but wondered if he had inadvertently done something that might appear to be dodgy. ‘Which expenses, sir?’

  ‘The additional manpower for the investigation into the missing women. The journalist.’

  ‘Oh, that,’ said Kane, relieved.

  ‘Or should I say journalists?’ Tyler let the last letter of the final word linger, making it sound particularly damning.

  ‘I did get prior approval for that, sir.’

  ‘To hire this Carney chap as an investigator,’ Tyler nodded slowly, ‘but not to pay two journalists.’

  Kane noticed a slight gleam in the senior officer’s eyes. It was almost a look of triumph. This wasn’t about the budget. This was about slapping Kane down for allowing Bradshaw to embarrass him.

  ‘They come as a team. Their fees have never been a problem before.’

  ‘They should have been. This bill is far too high. You can pay one of them, but not both, and that’s my final word on the matter.’

  Kane wasn’t prepared to accept that, ‘You’re telling me to go back to two people who have worked with us, helping to save lives and risking their own in the process, and now you won’t pay them? What the hell am I supposed to say?’

  The deputy chief constable’s voice was icy. ‘That you exceeded your authority, Detective Chief Inspector. I don’t much care which name you put on the form when you resubmit it, as long as there is only one.’

  ‘They’ll never work with us again,’ protested Kane.

  ‘Oh, believe me,’ snapped Tyler, ‘you are entirely right about that.’

  Listening to Samuel Keogh’s long, self-serving account of his life was exhausting, but Bradshaw persevered. He wrote it all down, too: names, dates, every crime the man had committed in the name of his God.

  ‘My father was an ungodly man who cared for nothing but Mammon. Bible studies made that obvious to me.’ Samuel explained how he had studied chemistry at university but left college before graduating and joined the RAF, to escape the pull of the family business, much to his father’s fury. It was while serving in the forces that he had his epiphany. Mankind was going to destroy itself and most of the planet with it. Being on the front line, he could see how easy it would be. One trigger-happy reaction to a single misunderstood blip on a radar screen would unleash a disaster of Biblical proportions.

  Samuel owed it to God and his family to make arrangements for the coming of Armageddon and beyond, when the world would be reborn and repopulated.

  ‘That’s why you took the women?’

  ‘To save them, yes.’ He nodded at his own selfless act. ‘Only five, though, because of the room we had and the supplies. I couldn’t take more.’ He said that with regret, as if he had let down others who could not be saved.

  ‘But they didn’t understand, did they?’ probed Bradshaw.

  ‘No.’

  ‘They resisted, even though you tried to explain.’ Bradshaw was offering up a possible version of events. ‘That’s why you had to subdue them. Methoxyflurane? From your studies, you knew what it could do.’

  ‘It eases pain,’ he explained, ‘and they were sometimes in pain.’ He said this as if he had been administering morphine to a wounded soldier, not rendering a woman unconscious so he could rape her.

  ‘That wasn’t the only reason, though, was it?’

  ‘They were my wives in the eyes of God.’ He was wild-eyed and angry again suddenly. ‘They would not submit to me. I had a right, and they had to help me repopulate the world, but they couldn’t do that if they refused me.’ He looked bewildered then. ‘but they were all barren. Not one of them was fertile.’

  ‘The Methoxyflurane made them ill. You used it on them every time and it damages the internal organs. That’s most likely why none of them ever got pregnant.’

  ‘I never knew that,’ he said.

  ‘And one of them got out,’ said Bradshaw, ‘but she was already too far gone to survive, even before the car hit her.’

  ‘I was sorry when she wasn’t saved.’

  ‘So you replaced her, but what happened to the others?’

  ‘Dead,’ he said. ‘All dead in the end. They got ill and just gave up. I buried them by the magnolia trees.’

  ‘Did you always replace them?’

  ‘At first, in the early years, yes. I wanted five, always five, but when my health was taken from me I couldn’t do it any more.’

  ‘Chris took over then.’

  ‘He thought God would make me well again and we’d go on like before, only with new wives.’

  ‘You were trying to create an Eden?’

  ‘Not an Eden,’ Samuel corrected him. ‘An Ark.’

  ‘For you and your family and the women you saved. What about your wife? What happened to her?’

  ‘Ingrid was a whore,’ he said flatly.

  ‘Was she?’ Bradshaw forced sympathy into his words.

  ‘I tried to save her, but she couldn’t be saved. I wanted to teach her how to behave, but she couldn’t find it within herself to be happy, even when it was just the three of us. That was why I bought the cottage, the land, the farm and the bunker.’

  ‘How did you know about the bunker beneath the farmhouse? It was so secret the nearest villagers weren’t aware of its existence.’

  ‘I was posted there for a time. You had to sign the Official Secrets Act and couldn’t tell anyone, but I saw it and knew it was about to be decommissioned. It was intended to be a place of last resort for the local government to retreat to in the event of war, but they built a new bunker right under the streets of Newcastle. A few years later I used the money from my father’s estate to get hold of it.’

  It seemed so simple when he explained it. Samuel Keogh had a ring-side seat to the Cold War and used that inside knowledge to snap up the bunker.

  ‘You faked your own death,’ Bradshaw said. ‘Why?’

  ‘So you wouldn’t come looking for me, but if you did, I intended to go through with it anyway. It would have been better than this.’ He gestured to his cell.

  ‘If you intended to commit suicide, why were there no bullets in your gun?’

  ‘Chris must have taken them out, to stop me from killing myself if the police came’ ‒ he laughed without humour ‒ ‘because that would be a sin.’ Bradshaw realized Helen would have been dead now if Chris hadn’t emptied the gun.

  Bradshaw stopped writing for a moment. He had heard it all. Almost. There was just one bit of the story that Samuel hadn’t told him.

  ‘What happened to your wife, Samuel?’

  He evaded the question. ‘It was meant to be just be the three of us. We had the fields and the orchard. It was our Garden of Eden, but it wasn’t enough. Like Eve, she wanted more. They always want more.’

  Bradshaw knew exactly what she wanted: some freedom to come and go as she pleased and not be kept in a prison, whether it had an orchard or not.

  ‘In the end I told Chris. I said, your mother is no good, women are no good. She’s gone. She’s run off and left
us. Chris knew what she was like, she saw and she learned.’

  ‘No, that’s not right,’ said Bradshaw, ‘because your wife didn’t leave, did she, Samuel?’ The other man refused to look him in the eye. ‘A man like you wouldn’t allow it. Do you honestly expect us to believe she ran away and left her daughter with a monster like you?’

  ‘She ran off,’ he mumbled. ‘Ran away with her fancy-man.’

  ‘Bullshit. Who was that, then? If you never let her out of the house? Who was she ever going to meet?’

  ‘That’s what happened.’

  ‘You’re a liar, Samuel. Want to know how I know? We opened that big, old rusty shipping container that’s set back away from the others.’

  Samuel opened his mouth like he was about to say something then he clamped it shut again.

  ‘Know what we found?’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘Human remains. A badly decomposed corpse. It’s your wife, isn’t it? She never left. You locked her in there. Know how we’ll prove it? DNA. We just have to match it to a blood relative, so it’s convenient that we have her daughter in custody. We’ll prove it’s her, if you aren’t man enough to admit it.’

  Samuel put his hands over his ears then. ‘Shut up!’

  ‘I won’t shut up, not yet. I still have one last question. Did you at least have the decency to kill her before you sealed her in there?’

  Samuel started to sob then and when the tears came it was like a dam bursting. ‘Shut up … I can’t bear it …’

  ‘Thought not, you evil bastard. I can’t imagine what that poor girl went through before she died, but one thing is certain, Samuel Keogh. If your God really does exist, you are going to burn in hell for ever for this.’

  DCI Kane spent an uncomfortable quarter of an hour on the phone to Tom Carney explaining he wouldn’t be paid the full amount that he and Helen were owed. The journalists didn’t take it well, as Kane fully expected and, for once, the DCI felt no need to mask the truth or demonstrate any loyalty to the man who had refused to sign off the money they were legitimately owed.