The Keeper

by Luke Delaney

  Donnelly repeatedly cursed under his breath as he waded through the piles of information reports on his desk – door-to-door forms, each detailing the description of the person spoken to. Where were they at the time of the relevant abduction? Had they seen or heard anything? There were thousands of these statements, and all needed to be checked and cross-referenced, as did the information reports from the dozens of roadblocks carried out and drivers spoken to, ditto the reports back from officers checking possible venues where the women could be being kept, including the report from PC Ingram and PC Adams, following their brief search of Thomas Keller’s land and buildings. Eventually all the information would be fed into the Home Office Large Major Enquiry System – HOLMES for short. Introduced in the early eighties, this lumbering dinosaur of a database was intended to allow relatively rapid and accurate cross-referencing of every type of document a murder investigation could generate. The intention was to prevent the sort of mistakes that had allowed the likes of Peter Sutcliffe, aka the Yorkshire Ripper, to kill as many women as he did, when simple cross-referencing would have brought his killing spree to a halt after two or three victims. For the most part, it worked well, but it still relied on the killer making a mistake.

  Donnelly blew hard and made his lips and moustache vibrate as he pondered yet another useless door-to-door report before tossing it into the pile he’d designated Not of interest. The pile was growing monstrously high, while the pile designated Of interest remained worryingly small, but Donnelly knew exactly what he was doing, even if he never confided it in anyone else, cutting the reports down to a manageable size so that when Sean eventually read through them he wouldn’t be swamped. The less crap Sean had to sift through, the freer he would be to think, to turn his unquestionable instinct to best use, to pick the diamond from the diamantes and eventually lead them to the man they so desperately needed to find.

  Sensing a presence behind him, Donnelly peered over his shoulder. He had a fair instinct of his own and knew who it was without looking. ‘What d’you fucking want, Paulo?’

  ‘How d’you know it was me?’ Zukov asked with a mischievous smile.

  ‘I used my detective’s intuition – you should try it sometime. Now, unlike you, I’m very busy, so what the fuck you want?’

  ‘I was looking for the guv’nor, actually.’

  ‘Why?’ Donnelly asked, his patience beginning to fail him.

  ‘It’s about that transfer he had me researching, the one of the phoenix that was found on Karen Green’s body.’

  ‘Well, go on,’ Donnelly encouraged an increasingly suspicious Zukov. ‘You can tell me. I’ll make sure the information gets passed on to the boss. Or have you discovered some vital clue that’s going to solve the entire case and you want to be the one who tells the guv’nor yourself? Get all the credit?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘Well then, stop pissing about and tell me.’

  ‘It’s from a box of Rice Krispies.’

  ‘What?’ Donnelly asked incredulously, a broad, sarcastic smile spreading across his red face. ‘That’s it? That’s the ground-breaking piece of information, is it? So we now know what the victim liked to eat for breakfast – Rice fucking Krispies. And how long did you waste finding this out, eh? Two days? Three days?’

  ‘I dunno – three or four.’

  ‘Oh Jesus Christ.’ Donnelly shook his head in disapproval. ‘What am I going to do with you, Paulo? What am I going to do with you?’

  ‘Yeah, well you can take the piss all you like, but it might be important. The guv’nor seemed to think so, anyway. Besides, it doesn’t tell us what she liked for breakfast, at least not now. Might tell us what she liked for breakfast sixteen years ago.’

  ‘What are you on about?’

  ‘The transfer was a free gift in boxes of Rice Krispies sixteen years ago. The manufacturers only did the one run of them, so either Karen Green hasn’t had a bath or shower for sixteen years or for some reason she’d kept it safe for all that time and decided to use it just before travelling to Australia.’

  ‘Is that the information report there?’ Donnelly asked, pointing to the cardboard folder Zukov was holding.

  ‘Yes,’ Zukov answered.

  ‘I’ll take that,’ Donnelly insisted, relieving the unhappy Zukov of his prize. ‘It’s probably nothing. I can’t see its relevance, but all the same I’ll pass it on to the boss, see what he makes of it. As for you, it’s about time you got down to some proper police work.’

  The aggrieved Zukov sloped away, leaving Donnelly to flick through the report. Zukov was right, the phoenix transfer was indeed sixteen years old.

  ‘Weird,’ he declared and tossed the report on to the pile designated Of interest.

  A deeply disturbing sense of déjà-vu swept over Sean as he and Anna drove to the edge of the police cordon on Tooting Common. A one-time haunt of London’s lowest class of prostitute, the area had changed significantly over the preceding ten years as the soaring house prices in Putney, Barnes and Sheen forced the wealthy and educated to seek new residential areas to colonize, pushing the not so fortunate ever further south or out of London altogether.

  The blue-and-white police tape whistled in the breeze as it surrounded the entire car park. Sean parked quickly and headed for one of only two uniformed officers who were desperately trying to stop dog walkers and joggers from entering the scene to recover their cars. Anna struggled to keep pace with him as he closed on the policeman and flashed his warrant card. ‘DI Corrigan. This is Dr Ravenni-Ceron. She’s with me.’ He ducked under the tape and held it up for Anna to follow. ‘Have you touched the car?’ Sean asked the young cop, looking across the car park at Deborah Thomson’s abandoned red Honda Civic.

  ‘No, sir,’ he answered too quickly. ‘Only to see if it was open.’

  ‘I take it the car was locked,’ said Sean.

  ‘No, sir. It’s open. The keys are still in the ignition.’

  Sean stopped walking for a second, a little confused and surprised. ‘The keys are still in it?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘He’s changed his method,’ he told Anna, although he could barely believe what he was saying. ‘I didn’t see that coming.’

  ‘It’s a minor detail,’ Anna replied. ‘It doesn’t necessarily mean anything.’

  Sean stormed across the car park, talking as he walked. ‘It has to mean something. With this one everything means something. If he’s changed his method, then he’s done it for a reason.’ He stopped when he reached the car, filling his lungs with cool air before he began his cursory examination – an examination that he knew would draw him into another world.

  ‘Maybe someone disturbed him?’ Anna offered. ‘Made him panic and leave the keys in the ignition.’

  ‘No.’ Sean snapped on a pair of rubber gloves. ‘If he’d been disturbed we’d have known about it by now. Uniform would have come poking around and found the car. No. He left the keys behind because he’s beginning to lose control, lose patience. He knows where all this is leading – maybe only subconsciously, but he knows.’

  ‘You still think he’s going to blow up?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sean grimly, pulling the handle on the passenger’s side door and slowly easing it open a couple of inches, his body tense as he prepared for the onslaught of scents that were about to rush from the car. The fragrance of a pine air freshener washed over him first, quickly followed by traces of perfume and make-up. He tried to remember the smell of Black Orchid and was as sure as he could be that this was not the same. What did that mean? Confirmation the killer made his victims wear the perfume of his choice? He tried to pick up a trace of Elemis body cream, but could not. He eased the door open wider and pushed his head into the space, recoiling at a smell he recognized – the same animalistic, musky scent he’d detected on other killers, other criminals he’d dealt with in the past – a smell of fear and desperation, guilt and excitement, a smell all good cops knew meant they had the right man. A scen
t he often feared oozed from his own skin pores. The madman had been here less than a day ago. His presence remained strong, almost as if he was still there inside the car.

  Sean found himself staring at the driver’s seat, unmoving, unblinking, watching as the shape of a man formed in his imagination, a dark hooded top covering his head. As he concentrated, the head slowly began to turn towards him, but the spectre had no face, just darkness where it should have been. In an instant the spectre faded, a solid image turning to gas before disappearing completely.

  With a sigh Sean pulled himself out of the car and walked around to the boot, popping the hatch open, giving the door an initial pull, then allowing the pneumatics to do the rest. Once the hatch was fully open he placed his face as close as he dared to the carpeted floor of the boot and inhaled deeply. Anna saw how pale he looked.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked.

  ‘Chloroform. He took her all right.’ He looked around at the trees hissing conspiratorially in the wind, unspeaking witnesses to the beginning of Deborah Thomson’s nightmare. Did the man he hunted see the trees as his allies, hiding him from the people who chased him – hiding him from Sean? ‘Always the woods,’ he said to himself.

  ‘Sorry?’ said Anna.

  ‘Always the woods. Always the trees. It’s the city he knows, but it’s the woods where he’s most comfortable. Wherever he lives will be surrounded by trees.’

  ‘That doesn’t narrow it down much.’

  ‘No. No, it doesn’t,’ he admitted and started walking back to his own car. Anna rolled her eyes and followed him, feeling like a lost dog following its adopted owner, half-expecting Sean to try and chase her away at any time. ‘Wait here until forensics arrive,’ he instructed one of the uniformed officers as he walked briskly past them. The officer nodded his reply.

  As they reached the car, Anna managed to slow Sean down by taking hold of his arm. ‘I need to talk to you.’

  ‘I’ve told you, I don’t want to talk about me,’ his eyes moved to the hand wrapped around his forearm and she released her grip.

  ‘Nor do I.’ He looked at her in surprise. ‘I need to talk to you about Sally.’

  ‘What about Sally?’

  ‘She needs help. She needs counselling. I’d like to help her and I think she wants me to, but she could use a push from someone she trusts.’

  ‘Meaning me?’ Anna shrugged her shoulders. ‘I can’t do that. Sally’s a cop, she wouldn’t want anyone to know, including me. If she thought for a second anyone on the team knew she was getting counselling, she’d be destroyed.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Like I said, she’s a cop.’

  ‘I think Sally may be above the stereotypical macho image of a police officer.’

  ‘Because she’s a woman? Trust me, she’s a cop before she’s a woman, and that means she knows the score.’

  ‘What on earth does—’

  ‘We don’t admit to needing help, even when we do. Being physically broken is fine, but mentally …? No one would work with her again.’

  ‘That’s pathetic.’

  ‘I didn’t say it was right, I just said that’s the way it is. If you can persuade her to see you, fine, but for Christ’s sake don’t let anyone else know.’

  ‘Jesus, you’re a strange bunch. Cops, I’m beginning to think you’re all crazy.’

  ‘We’re crazy – what about you? One minute you’re helping the man who almost killed her, next you want to help her. Do you really know what happened to Sally? That night when Gibran broke into her home?’

  ‘Of course. I read the reports before interviewing Sebastian.’

  ‘The reports? And what did the reports say?’

  ‘That she was attacked in her own home and seriously injured by two knife wounds to the chest.’

  ‘That’s nice and neat. Doesn’t tell you how he stood over her while she was bleeding to death on her own living-room floor. Doesn’t tell you about how she watched him searching through her kitchen knives for one to finish her off with. Doesn’t tell you about the four different surgeries she had to keep her alive. Doesn’t tell you about months of breathing, eating and drinking through plastic tubes. Doesn’t tell you about the nightmares.’

  ‘She told you all of this?’

  ‘Christ, she didn’t have to tell me, I saw it.’ Neither spoke for a while. ‘Listen, Anna, I like you, but you’ll only ever be an outsider to us. You’ll never be a cop. You stick around long enough, you’ll learn more than most, but you’ll never be one of us. You’ll never really see what we do.’

  ‘I know,’ she admitted, ‘and frankly I wouldn’t want to be. Working with almost no sleep day after day, hardly eating or drinking, trying to think straight when your mind and body are exhausted … I admire you. I didn’t think I would, but I do. And I admit it, I had no idea it would be like this.’

  ‘You get used to it. I’ll keep going, without sleep or rest if necessary, until I find this bastard and bury him. You never know, I might get lucky – he may blow up and top himself.’

  ‘But not before he kills the women he’s taken. And according to your theory, not before he goes on a spree, settles a few old scores, real or imagined.’

  ‘He’s heading that way,’ said Sean. ‘Leaving the car open, with the keys inside – his control is slipping. Soon the women won’t be enough.’

  ‘I disagree,’ said Anna. ‘You’re reading too much into the keys. If you want to catch him quickly you need to stick with local criminals, ones with juvenile convictions for residential burglaries, particularly ones with a history of defecating inside the houses they broke into. As they grew older there’ll have been a progression to minor sexual offences, gradually becoming more serious. Possibly even rape.’

  ‘No,’ Sean snapped. ‘He’s beyond that. Besides, he’s got no previous convictions, remember?’

  ‘Then the police have missed something or the offender is incredibly lucky. Either way, he’s showing all the signs of a sexual predator progressing from burglary to rape and murder. His crimes are a classic expression of power and anger, probably brought on by some cataclysmic rejection. The actual women mean little or nothing to him. The similarities in their appearance is due to the fact they remind him of the person who rejected him, most likely his mother or even grandmother, yet despite her rejection he still loves her and wants to be with her, hence he takes the women who remind him of her.’

  ‘No,’ Sean argued, his voice raised in frustration. ‘He hates his mother, his grandmother, everyone who betrayed him, and that means everyone in the world. Everyone except for one woman – the one who showed him kindness and acceptance, at least initially. But it didn’t last. Again he was rejected, but he still loves her; despite the rejection, he still loves her.’ As he spoke he began to drift away from her, melting into the shadow-land, a land inhabited by just two people: Sean and the man he hunted. A land of thousands of questions and almost no answers, but still it was where he needed to go, to keep walking through the fog. His mind stretched out as if trying to see the path ahead before he tripped and fell on unseen hazards. ‘Everybody who’s ever rejected him, he hates. He despises them. Dreams about the day when he’ll have his revenge. Yet in her case, even after she rejected him, he’s gone on loving her. He covets her, craves her, wants to keep the time they had together alive. Why doesn’t he hate her too?’ He sensed Anna was about to speak and thrust an upturned palm towards her to stop her. ‘It doesn’t make sense – she does to him what everyone else has done to him, yet he still loves her – I mean really loves her. Why is she so different?’ It felt as though he was reading a burning letter – the answer smouldering in gentle orange flames, turning to ashes before he could read it to the end.

  Anna was more than just watching him now – she was studying him, his eye movements, how often he closed his eyes, his hand gestures, the movement of his constantly clenching and releasing fingers, the way he occasionally cocked his head to one side as if to hear some whisper onl
y he could detect, the way he rotated on the spot where he stood, turning fully three hundred and sixty degrees one way then back the other. She’d seen this level of projected imagination in some of the killers she’d interviewed, but never so strong in someone sane, and always their imaginations would only satisfy them for so long before their fantasies had to become reality. She continued to study him, even when he suddenly froze, eyes staring at nothing.

  ‘Fuck it,’ he swore. ‘It’s gone.’

  ‘What’s gone?’ Anna asked, hoping he would be able to return to his conscious trance.

  ‘Nothing. It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Sean, I have to say, I think this theory of yours about some mythical woman he’s looking to replace is a red herring that will lead—’

  ‘No,’ Sean broke in. ‘It’s the key to finding him. Find her, we find him.’

  ‘What you believe would indicate he is an Expressive killer, killing as a release of anger and frustration, using the victims as replacements for someone known to him, but I see no sign of that here. His crimes are classically Instrumental: planned, cold, unemotional, an expression of some other as yet unknown desire.’

  ‘Clinical terms,’ Sean barked, his temper rising, swelling painfully in his chest. ‘Instrumental, Expressive – just clever clinical terms. They don’t belong out here. This is the real world.’

  ‘Yes, but these studies can be applied to the real world.’

  ‘Why are you here?’ he demanded, stunning Anna into silence. ‘Why are you really here? You can’t help me, not out here. What, are you trying to give yourself credibility, so the next time you meet your fellow psychiatrists at some convention you can impress them with an account of a real murder investigation? Are you going to tell them all how you helped the clueless police solve the case? No, no, wait, I know why you’re here – it’s for your next book, isn’t it? So you can enthral your readers with tales of horror and bad men who might come for them in the night. That should sell a few thousand copies.’