Luke Delaney - The Keeper

Keller waited for the blow he knew would come. Instead he heard a voice demanding, ‘What’s going on here, men?’

The strong calm voice that carried a trace of Jamaican belonged to the shift supervisor, Leonard Trewsbury. He peered at Locke over the top of his bifocals, refusing to be intimidated by the younger, bigger man. The man who he knew detested being supervised by a black man.

‘Nothing for you to worry about, Leonard,’ Locke pushed.

‘I’ll be the judge of that,’ the supervisor warned him, knowing Locke would back down. ‘And you can call me Mr Trewsbury.’ He maintained eye contact with Locke, daring him to give him an excuse to put him on report or, better still, dismiss him altogether. ‘OK, everybody, let’s get back to work,’ he ordered.

Eyes glaring and vengeful, Locke slunk back to his workstation.

Trewsbury pulled Thomas Keller to one side. He liked the boy. Keller kept himself to himself and worked hard. He came to work on time and was always looking for and willing to do overtime. What he did with his money was a mystery. Trewsbury never asked and Keller never told.

‘You shouldn’t let them push you around,’ Trewsbury told him.

‘It’s all right,’ Keller lied. ‘It doesn’t bother me. They’re just joking.’

‘That’s not what it looked like. Next time Locke or any of his cronies bothers you, you let me know, OK?’

‘OK,’ Keller agreed, the pounding in his heart mercifully receding, the throbbing pain of self-loathing and rage easing in his temples.

‘Good man,’ said Trewsbury. ‘Now let’s get back to work before we fall too far behind to catch up.’

‘Sure,’ Keller replied, trying to sound cool and in control. But inside his soul, where nobody could see, the images of his revenge were playing out cold and cruel, bloody and excruciating. When he was with Sam, when they were finally together as they were meant to be, as he knew she wanted them to be, she would give him the strength to be the person he knew he really was. And then he would make Locke and the others regret their tormenting. He would make them all regret everything they had ever done to him.

Sean turned on to the access road in Norman Park, Bromley, heading towards Scrogginhall Wood. Only in a city would such an insignificant patch of forest be given the title ‘Wood’. His car bumped along the uneven track, bouncing him around inside and causing him to swear out loud. As he passed between the wooden posts that marked the entrance to the car park, he saw there were a number of cars parked there in addition to the police vehicles he’d expected to see. Presumably their owners hadn’t returned from walking dogs or liaising with their extra-marital lovers. He hadn’t decided yet whether he was going to let any vehicles be taken away. One could belong to the man he hunted. He could be lingering in the trees, watching the police, laughing at them. Laughing at him.

He spotted Donnelly sitting on the boot of his unmarked Vauxhall, which was parked next to the uniform patrol who’d found Louise’s red Ford Fiesta. An AA man was standing by in his van, waiting to be given the order to use his box of tricks to open the abandoned car.

Sean pulled up at a forty-five-degree angle to the car that was now a crime scene, blocking any other vehicles from driving too close to potentially precious tyre tracks or footprints. He swung his feet from the carpet of his car to the surface of the car park, disappointed to feel a rough mixture of compressed dirt and solid stone connecting with the soles of his shoes; not a promising surface for recovering useable prints or tracks.

Catching sight of him, Donnelly flicked his cigarette as far as he could away from the found car, aware of his own DNA soaked into the butt, not wanting to end up the subject of ridicule at the next office lunch for having contaminated the crime scene.

Sean made a beeline for the car, calling out to Donnelly while scanning the ground. ‘Let’s start tightening things up a bit, shall we?’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning securing the entire area as a crime scene, not just the car itself. And not dropping fag butts close to the centre of it.’

Donnelly looked in the direction of his discarded cigarette, disappointed by Sean’s lack of appreciation for the distance he’d managed to flick it.

Sean tugged the rubber gloves he’d produced from his pocket over his hands, all the while surveying the ground around Louise Russell’s abandoned car, a mute mechanical witness to her fate. He could see nothing obvious so moved closer to the car, slowly circling anti-clockwise, his eyes passing over every last millimetre of the ground. Donnelly watched silently, knowing when best to leave Sean to himself — to his own methods.

After a few minutes Sean was back at the spot he’d started from. Again he began to circumnavigate the car, clockwise this time, his eyes concentrating on the vehicle itself, searching for anything, anything at all. A trace of the suspect’s blood drawn from his body by a fighting, scratching victim. A scrape from another vehicle that might have left a paint trace or imprinted a memory in the mind of whichever motorist had been struck by a red Fiesta that failed to stop after the accident. Louise had kept the car spotlessly clean — any visible evidence would have been relatively obvious, but he could see none.

If there were clues to be found on the exterior of the car they must be invisible to the naked eye. Perhaps they might yet be retrieved with the use of powders and chemicals, ultraviolet lights and magnification. In the meantime Sean needed to see inside the car, to feel its stillness before Roddis and the forensic boys turned it into a science circus.

‘Let’s get it open,’ he said.

Donnelly strode across to the waiting AA van and tapped on the window. The driver dropped his copy of the Sun and eagerly jumped out, grabbing a bag of unusual tools from the back.

‘Will you be able to get it open?’ Donnelly asked, more out of the need for something to say than because of any doubts.

‘It’s a Ford,’ the AA man answered, heading for the car. ‘It’ll only take a few seconds. Which door do you want opening?’

‘The passenger door,’ Sean told him. ‘I’d appreciate it if you could touch as little as possible.’

‘I’ll do my best,’ he answered, already tugging what looked like an over-sized metal ruler with a hook at one end from his bag. Sean recognized it, known to AA men and car thieves alike as a slim-jim. The AA man peeled back the rubber window seal and slid the metal deep down into the door panel. His face twisted in concentration as he manoeuvred the slim-jim blindly around the mechanics of the door, before suddenly jerking it upwards, an audible click letting all present know the door was now unlocked. The AA man immediately reached for the door handle, but Sean’s hand wrapped around his wrist and stopped him.

‘Hasn’t been checked for prints yet,’ Sean told him.

Once the AA man had been moved away, Sean’s gloved hand stretched carefully towards the handle, one finger hooking under it in the place the suspect was least likely to have touched. He pulled his finger up and waited for the door to pop open a fraction, his other hand poised to stop a sudden breeze swinging it fully open before he was ready. He checked around the now broken seal that separated the door from the main body of the chassis, keeping an eye out for any evidence the wind might threaten to take away — a hair pulled from the suspect’s head as he closed the door too quickly, a piece of material torn from his clothes as he fled from the abandoned car. He saw nothing and allowed the door to open by a few inches, the smell of the interior flooding out and catching him unaware, making him recoil at first. He steadied himself then breathed all the scents in eagerly: cloth, vinyl, rubber and above all else, her perfume, floral and subtle. But there was something underlying the other smells, something trying to disguise itself, trying to stay hidden in the cacophony — the faint trace of something surgical, clinical.