The Jackdaw

by Luke Delaney

  ‘But when will that be?’ she demanded. ‘Days? Weeks? Months?’

  ‘Days,’ he answered without hesitation.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because I can feel it,’ he tried to explain. ‘It’s like I don’t know what I’m looking for yet, but I know what I’m not looking for.’

  ‘Well, that makes a lot of sense,’ Kate replied sarcastically.

  ‘It’s hard to explain,’ Sean told her. ‘It’s like having the answer to a question on the tip of your tongue. So close, yet so far away, until suddenly one thing, one small thing, makes everything fall into place. Sometimes I dream about this giant machine with millions of cogs inside, but none of them are turning. I look down and in the palm of my hand I see I’m holding a tiny cog – the smallest of them all – and I know what I have to do: I have to work out where it goes in the machine to make it go. That’s how I feel now: I have all the pieces I need … I just need something, one thing, to tell me where they fit.’

  Kate listened with concern to her husband, the father of her two daughters. At times like this she realized how far away he was, not just from her and the girls, but from everybody: trapped in his own crippling world of death, pain and desperation, the responsibility of finding and stopping the bringers of suffering dragging him down into the dark depths of despair like an anchor of misery. How she’d like to cut the chains free and watch him swim back to the surface and breathe again.

  ‘You need to get away from all this, Sean,’ she told him, the sadness in her voice barely concealed.

  ‘Like I said, I will,’ he replied. ‘As soon as I’ve found this one I’ll take some time off. I’m owed plenty of leave.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant,’ she answered. ‘I meant forever. Before we lose you. Before you lose yourself.’

  ‘Lose myself?’ he questioned, his voice devoid of emotion. ‘Have you ever thought that at last maybe I’m finally finding myself? Becoming whatever it is I’m really supposed to be.’

  ‘And what the hell is that, Sean? What are you supposed to be?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he told her honestly, ‘but am I really this?’ He looked around the kitchen as if it was his world. ‘Wife. Children. Terraced house in Dulwich – pretending to be normal.’

  Kate sat next to him, pulling her chair close. ‘So you can think differently from most people, but you still have the right to be happy. What your father did to you when you were a boy is in the past now. You don’t have to carry it on your back for the rest of your life.’

  ‘Don’t I?’ he snapped at her. ‘How would you know? How would anyone know? The one good thing I can do is find the madmen and the evil men quicker than most, and the only reason I can do that is because of what my so-called father did to me.’

  ‘You don’t know that for sure,’ Kate argued.

  ‘Yes I do,’ he insisted, ‘and so do you. Whether I like it or not there’s a part of him inside me. That’s why I can think like them, or at least I used to be able to − right now I feel nothing.’

  ‘Maybe that’s a good thing,’ Kate told him, ‘a sign you’re finally laying the ghosts of the past to rest.’

  ‘You mean changing?’ he asked.

  ‘Like you said,’ she explained. ‘Perhaps you’re finally finding that part of yourself as a man that your childhood took away.’

  ‘But what if I don’t want to change?’ he argued. ‘What if I … liked knowing there was something in me I couldn’t control? Something no one can control. Maybe I don’t want to become like everyone else. Maybe I accept what I am more than you think.’

  Kate leaned away from him slightly and looked into his eyes. They were darker and more lifeless than she’d ever seen them before.

  ‘Then I’d say you need help, Sean, before it overtakes you. Before you become something you won’t like. Before you become like the people you’ve spent your whole career chasing. Before you end up having to hunt yourself.’

  ‘You’re being over-emotional,’ he accused her. ‘Hunt myself – I can’t even hunt down this clown.’

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ Kate softened a little, despite her deepening concerns. ‘You’re exhausted. How can you think clearly enough to run your investigation properly? This bastard you’re after can take all the time in the world, but you can’t. He has the advantage, Sean.’

  ‘It’s not just that,’ he explained, his eyes wide and fearful. ‘It’s not just all the day-to-day crap endlessly piling up on my desk or even Addis and his ridiculous demands that concern me. It’s something else.’

  ‘What?’ Kate asked, though she was afraid of what the answer might be.

  ‘Maybe I can’t think like this one because we’re nothing alike,’ he told her. ‘Because we’re not the same.’

  ‘Of course you’re not the same,’ Kate smiled with relief. ‘He’s a murderer and you’re a cop.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant,’ Sean told her. ‘I’m not like this one, but I am like the others. That’s what helps me catch them – the psychopaths. I am like them – a part of me is – a part of my mind at least. But not this one. That’s why I can’t think like him – because he’s not insane, not even slightly.’

  ‘And what?’ she asked. ‘You are – insane? You think you’re insane?’

  ‘No,’ he answered quickly. ‘At least not technically – not what most people would consider to be insanity. But if I can think like the madmen – exactly like them, as if I’m looking through their eyes sometimes – then there must be at least a part of me that’s close to … madness.’

  ‘And you don’t believe this one is?’ Kate questioned. ‘Mad, I mean?’

  ‘No,’ he confirmed. ‘He knows exactly what he’s doing and why he’s doing it. Cold logical efficiency. He’s working rigidly, unwaveringly to a plan – like a soldier following orders, bombing civilian cities even though he knows he’ll kill innocent people because the final outcome demands it. A clarity of thought that people like me can never have. Our minds, our thought processes are … are a twisted vine of ever moving ideas and thoughts. We’re never still, never at peace. We feel and think things that other people couldn’t even hope to imagine. In a way I sometimes think we’re more alive because we’re so close to …’

  ‘So close to what?’ Kate managed to ask despite her trembling heart.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted, his bright blue eyes suddenly appearing quite black – like a shark’s. ‘To hell. To damnation. But I’m increasingly sure this one’s more like you and everyone else than he is like me. He’s not deranged. He has no voices screaming in his head telling him to do it. He doesn’t spend hours talking to himself in the mirror of some filthy bathroom in some hovel and he doesn’t self-harm out of self-loathing. He doesn’t believe he’s an agent of God or the devil. Instead he calculates and he plans and he doesn’t make mistakes and he knows exactly what he wants.’

  ‘And what’s that?’ Kate nervously asked.

  ‘Revenge, emotionless revenge,’ he told her. ‘Like scratching an itch. I sense no rage or fury. Or even confusion or torment. Just a desire to … to even the score. I don’t know.’

  ‘How can you tell?’ Kate couldn’t help but ask. ‘Behind that mask and sunglasses. You can’t even hear his real voice. He just sounds like a machine. But his words seem angry enough.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Sean partially agreed, ‘but even in his words there’s something missing. Something just not quite right.’

  ‘Like what?’ she pressed.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he answered, ‘but he and I are nothing alike. I’ll have to find another way of catching him.’

  ‘I think you need to take a break,’ Kate warned him. ‘Get away from all this before it drags you under. It wasn’t so bad when you were at Peckham investigating – for want of a better word – everyday murders, but now, all you do is chase these madmen. It’s all … too close to home for you, Sean. It’s … it’s unhinging you – resurrecting too many demons from your
past. It has to stop, Sean. It has to stop.’

  ‘I don’t want it to stop,’ he insisted. ‘This is who I am and this is what I do. I don’t want to take a break or walk away and I don’t want to run off to New Zealand and live on a damn beach. I want to stay here and do what I do best. I like being out there hunting these so-called madmen. It’s where I belong – where I need to be. It’s where I feel alive. Without it I’d be nothing.’

  ‘Well thanks,’ Kate snapped at him. ‘Thanks a bloody lot. So me, me and the kids are nothing to you? You’d rather be out there chasing bad people in the dark than be here with us? Jesus, Sean. What’s the point?’

  ‘That’s not what I meant,’ he tried to recover, spreading his arms. ‘You, the children, home – you’re my sanctuary. But I’m not defined by being a husband and a father. That’s what I am, not what I need to do.’

  ‘You just don’t get it, do you?’ Kate accused him.

  ‘Get what?’ he fought back. ‘When people ask you what you do you don’t say you’re a mother and a wife. You tell them you’re a doctor.’

  ‘The difference is I could leave my job, Sean. If we could afford it I probably would. But you couldn’t. It’s not a job to you. It’s an obsession.’ He slumped at the table, unable to find an answer. ‘Make your own damn breakfast,’ Kate told him. ‘I’m late for work.’

  Donnelly arrived at work a little later than usual, but still early enough to be there before anyone else. He entered the main office and began to wander from desk to desk, checking on every detective under his charge, making sure each had enough work to be getting on with and that no one was either slacking or overstretching themselves. He couldn’t afford anyone falling sick with stress and disappearing for God knows how long. He whistled the same tune he always whistled when he was engaged in clandestine activities and glanced around the office. It was the weekend, which meant no cleaners for a couple of days and the room was already showing the signs of strain: the bins full of takeaway food wrappers and polystyrene cups, the confidential waste sacks stuffed to bursting, although the team had still been using them as an old newspaper depository. It seemed every conceivable work surface was littered with yet more polystyrene cups and abandoned plates, some still with scraps of food on. The whole place would smell to high heaven by Sunday night unless he press-ganged a few unwilling volunteers into a clean-up crew before then.

  ‘Jesus,’ he complained. ‘Look at the bloody state of this place.’ But his moaning was interrupted by the sign of movement coming from Sean’s office. Somehow he knew whoever it was it wasn’t Sean.

  He moved stealthily across the room, no longer whistling or stopping to flick through other detectives’ diaries as he concentrated on the shadow of a figure sitting behind Sean’s desk. Either the figure hadn’t noticed him approaching or it didn’t care as it showed no sign of trying to flee or hide. Donnelly walked the last few steps slowly to the doorway and peered inside. Anna looked up slowly, her own tiredness etched across her face.

  ‘You’re in early,’ Donnelly greeted her, his eyes narrowing a little with suspicion. It wasn’t often he was beaten into the office of a morning.

  ‘Couldn’t sleep,’ Anna confided to him.

  ‘Oh.’ Donnelly shrugged and slumped in the chair opposite. ‘Problems?’

  ‘Just a lot going on in my head right now,’ she told him, ‘with the investigation and everything.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Donnelly smiled condescendingly. ‘It’s a lot easier studying these lunatics than it is catching them, eh?’

  ‘I’m not sure I approve of the label “lunatic”, but yes, this is a little more demanding.’

  ‘You can bet your buns on that,’ Donnelly quipped before looking more serious. ‘To tell you the truth I was surprised you came back for another stint. I thought after the Thomas Keller investigation you would have had enough.’

  ‘Really? Why’s that?’

  ‘The guv’nor didn’t exactly welcome you with open arms, did he?’

  ‘He was understandably suspicious at first,’ Anna admitted, ‘but we soon established a working relationship.’

  ‘A working relationship?’ Donnelly’s smile returned.

  ‘Yes.’ Anna locked eyes with him. ‘A working relationship.’

  ‘Strange that,’ Donnelly faked confusion, ‘because usually the guv’nor won’t have anything to do with your kind.’

  ‘My kind?’

  ‘Yeah – you know – shrinks. Psychiatrists, psychologists, criminologists. Anybody who thinks they can tell him his business. He really can’t stand them.’

  ‘Well then, I’m glad I’ve managed to change his opinion.’

  ‘Change his opinion?’ Donnelly shook his head. ‘I’m not so sure about that. Perhaps if you’d been right about Thomas Keller. But as I remember it you weren’t – Corrigan was.’

  ‘We had some clinical disagreements, but our overall assessments converged.’

  ‘All the same – I’m surprised he didn’t kick up more of a fuss when you were attached to another of his investigations. I expected to see him put up a bit of a fight.’

  ‘Perhaps he realized it would have been pointless, given that it was Assistant Commissioner Addis who asked me to help with the investigation.’

  ‘Of course it was,’ Donnelly smiled wryly, ‘although that puzzles me a little too.’

  ‘Oh.’ Anna swallowed. ‘In what way?’

  ‘Addis may be a pain in the arse bastard, but he’s still a cop – at least of sorts. He doesn’t strike me as the type who’d want outsiders involved in a major investigation – not unless he felt he needed them for something – something specific he couldn’t get from the guv’nor. As much as he and Corrigan can’t stand the sight of each other at times, Addis trusts him to get the job done, despite all his shouting and threats. He knows the guv’nor’s his best chance and he knows he doesn’t need any shrink to tell him how to do it.’

  ‘What’s your point?’

  ‘My point is, if Addis didn’t put you on this investigation to help us find The Jackdaw, then why did he put you on it at all?’

  ‘I doubt anything I can say would dispel your suspicions,’ Anna explained, ‘so I think it’s best we just agree to disagree.’

  ‘Very well,’ Donnelly agreed with a smile that faded as fast as it arrived. ‘So long as we all know where our loyalties stand. We detectives have a nasty habit of unearthing the truth.’

  ‘I know where my loyalties lie.’

  ‘Good.’ Donnelly smiled again and stood to leave.

  ‘And you might find DI Corrigan needs my help more than you think.’ Anna stopped him. ‘I sense his growing frustration at not being able to get into this one’s mind.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So I can help point him in the right direction. I don’t know how or why but he has psychological similarities to some of the previous offenders he’s investigated and it helped him find them. It helped him stop them.’

  ‘Well, this is all news to me,’ Donnelly lied.

  ‘Cut the crap, Dave,’ Anna warned him. ‘You know what I’m talking about.’

  ‘Go on,’ he admitted without saying as much.

  ‘Well, I don’t think he shares any similarities with this one. In some ways you could say whoever The Jackdaw is, is more …’

  ‘Sane?’ Donnelly interrupted.

  ‘I was going to say balanced,’ Anna continued. ‘At least, in some ways. Less emotional, more able to understand the fears and desires of the general public. He understands empathy enough to believe he can control it – how much sympathy the public will have for his victims.’

  ‘And the guv’nor can’t?’ Donnelly asked.

  ‘I think he struggles with empathy,’ Anna explained. ‘I don’t think he has the same fears and desires as, say, you and I. Emotionally he’s on a different scale to most of the rest of us – a scale that runs parallel to our own. When he comes across other people on the same emotional scale as he is he finds it relat
ively easy to empathize and understand them and therefore find them. But this one isn’t like that which is why I believe I can help him with this investigation more than the others. I can profile The Jackdaw better than he can.’

  ‘Let me get this straight.’ Donnelly narrowed his eyes. ‘You think the guv’nor can’t profile this one because The Jackdaw is less insane than he is?’

  ‘I don’t believe either are insane,’ she argued. ‘Certainly not DI Corrigan. He’s just different. He thinks differently. If I didn’t know better I’d say he was still suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.’

  ‘If you didn’t know better?’

  ‘I checked into his past,’ Anna explained. ‘There was nothing that could have caused PTSD, except being shot by Thomas Keller, but that happened long after he was already displaying the symptoms.’

  ‘I’m not sure about any of this psychological mumbo-jumbo,’ Donnelly dismissed it. ‘But what I do know is that he’s one of the best I’ve ever worked with – one of the best I’ve ever seen. If you’re in any way trying to undermine him, or betray him, then things won’t go well for you.’

  Anna’s mouth opened to speak, but no words came out as Donnelly spun on his heel and strode from the office, leaving his words spinning around inside her head, tightening her chest and making her feel sick in her stomach. She’d been around detectives enough to have learnt their greatest of all taboos – the thing they detested more than anything: the unforgivable act of betrayal.

  Sean drove for miles across the light morning London traffic until he reached the derelict building outside Walton-on-Thames that Jackson had unwittingly led them to the previous night, only for them all to be snared in The Jackdaw’s trap. He wasn’t sure what had drawn him back to the scene – he was pretty certain neither he and Sally nor forensics had missed anything – but still he found himself taking the long drive back to the abandoned building, thoughts from the night before spinning in his mind, mixing with the words of the conversation he’d had with Kate only an hour or so before. All his adult life he’d thought he wanted to slay the demons of his past, but now he genuinely feared losing them – was afraid of what he might become without them. He’d rather be damaged goods than live in a picture-postcard world that he knew didn’t really exist. He liked being able to walk down the street and pick out the muggers, burglars and paedophiles from the daydreamers with little more than a glance. He liked being able to predict trouble about to erupt inside a pub or restaurant before anyone else even suspected there was a problem. He liked being able to shake a man’s hand and know whether he could trust him before they even spoke. For the first time he was beginning to see it as a gift, not a handicap.