Luke Delaney - The Keeper

As he sat in the quiet kitchen, sipping black coffee and pushing a barely touched slice of toast around the plate he sensed Kate’s presence approaching long before he heard or saw her. A few seconds later she drifted into the room wrapped in his old dressing gown and sat down opposite him, her swollen eyes and puffy cheeks hiding her natural attractiveness. Sean smiled in spite of his tiredness and slid his coffee across the table.

She lifted it and took a mouthful, murmured, ‘Thanks.’

‘My pleasure,’ he said. ‘What you doing up so early?’

‘Seeing you.’

‘I’m flattered.’

‘You should be. How’s the case going?’

‘It’s not,’ he answered, prompting her to look up from the coffee that used to be his, recognizing the traces of stress in his voice.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘How come?’

‘I don’t know. I can’t seem to get inside this one’s head.’

‘Doesn’t sound like a good place to be anyway.’

‘Yeah, well it’s the best place to be if I’m going to find him quickly.’

They were quiet for a while, then Kate spoke again.

‘You look really tired.’

‘I am really tired.’

Determined to hide the fear and anxiety she felt every time he walked out the front door, she kept her tone neutral as she asked, ‘Will you catch him soon?’

‘I’ll have him within a week.’

‘You must be confident.’

‘I’m close,’ he confided, ‘I just need to figure out his motivation … I mean his primary motivation. I’m nearly there, but the answer keeps slipping out of reach. It’ll all come together soon though, and then I’ll find him.’

‘What part of his motivation don’t you understand?’

‘Why he keeps them.’ He ran a hand through his hair. ‘I have theories and ideas, but I don’t know for sure and I can’t afford to guess. If you pushed me, I’d say he keeps them to remind himself of an old girlfriend, probably one he had a serious relationship with. That’s the best I’ve got so far, but it doesn’t feel completely right and I don’t know why.’

‘Because it’s not right,’ she said matter-of-factly.

‘Why’s that?’

‘Women keep things to remind them of what they once had or what they once were: photographs, old dresses, their kids’ old clothes, their husband’s old dressing gowns.’ She tugged the gown she was wearing for extra emphasis. ‘Men don’t. Men collect things to remind them of what they want but can’t have: models of aeroplanes, badges of old sports cars, pictures of Page Three girls,’ she added with a grin, but Sean wasn’t smiling any more. He knew he’d been handed an important piece of the jigsaw. Now all he needed was to find out where it fitted.

Sean closed his eyes, his head slumping backwards. ‘Jesus Christ, of course. Of course.’

‘You OK?’ Kate asked.

‘You’re right,’ Sean told her. ‘You’re right. He’s trying to create something he never had but always wanted — maybe even believed he had, but didn’t. I have to go.’ He grabbed his coat, its pockets already loaded with the things he’d need for the day, and headed for the front door. ‘I’ll call you later,’ he promised.

‘No you won’t,’ she whispered when he was gone, a familiar fluttering feeling returning to her chest. ‘You never do.’

Donnelly arrived in the office shortly after five thirty a.m. It was deserted except for the regular cleaner, who dragged a noisy hoover around behind him, emptying wastepaper bins into his white bin-liner as and when he found them. Donnelly gave him nod and a smile, hiding his frustration at not being totally alone. He sat at his desk and pretended to be reading while he waited for the cleaner to reach the far end of the office and disappear through the swing doors. ‘And I thought I had a shit job,’ he muttered to himself as he pushed his weight off the worn-out wooden chair, its green cloth torn and frayed, what little padding it ever had long since flattened. Furtively he wandered around the office, examining each and every desk, flicking through his colleagues’ in and out trays, reading any memos left on desks and flicking through diaries that hadn’t been locked away, not moving from a desktop until he was happy he knew what that detective was up to: how much work they had on, whether they’d been keeping up with their actions and CPS memos and, most importantly of all, whether they were holding anything back from him, business or personal. As far as he was concerned this was his Murder Investigation Team every bit as much as it was Sean’s and it was his absolute duty to keep abreast of everything that was happening within its borders. Any detective sergeant worth his salt would do the same.

Eventually he came to Sally’s desk. It at least appeared neat and organized, but he was well aware she’d been far from herself since the incident with Sebastian Gibran and as her only fellow DS on the team it was his responsibility to make sure she was coping. All it needed was one person to make a serious mistake and the whole investigation could go down the pan. He thumbed through her diary first, the standard four-by-three-inch black Metropolitan Police Friendly Society diary everyone seemed to receive each year. What he saw was page after page of emptiness — no notes, no meetings, no appointments, nothing. Technology had moved on, but detectives were creatures of habit and had been using these little diaries to scribble notes in for decades. They were still faster and easier to use than any mobile phone or tablet, so an empty diary suggested troubled waters. Her in and out trays were the same, just a few old memos and CPS requests that appeared to have been largely ignored, nothing current or apparently important. Clearly Sean had been keeping her away from too much work or responsibility, trying to protect her, buy her some time to fully recover. He was disappointed that she hadn’t felt able to confide in him, but shrugged it off, promising himself that he’d keep an even closer eye on her in future, for her sake and everybody else’s. Making sure her diary was back exactly where she’d left it, he headed for Sean’s open door.

Donnelly slipped into Sean’s office and began to search through the piles of papers that were beginning to form on his two desks, but they contained little of interest and told him nothing he didn’t already know. Sean was too long in the tooth to leave anything sensitive or interesting on public view. He pulled at Sean’s top drawer, one of three hiding under his desk, the same wooden set that everyone in the office would have, but it was locked, as he’d expected. He tried the others and found them locked too. ‘No problem,’ he announced to the empty room, and pulled a set of keys from his trouser pocket, fanning them out in his hand until he located the master key that fitted each and every wooden drawer under each and every desk in the Met. Whistling to himself, he jiggled the long, thin piece of metal into the small slot of the top drawer. After a few seconds he was able to rotate the key through one-hundred-eighty degrees signifying the drawer was open. There would be no need to check the other drawers, he already knew they contained little more than stationery and reference books.

He slid the top drawer open and was relieved to see his prize waiting for him — Sean’s leather-bound journal, the type of thing you buy someone for Christmas when you can’t think of anything else. But Sean had put his to good use and Donnelly knew it. ‘And what secrets will you reveal today, my old friend?’ he asked the book in his hands as he placed it on the desk and began to flick through the pages, skipping past things he’d already read, until he found scribbles and text he didn’t recognize. ‘Well hello and what do we have here?’ It was as if he was partially entering Sean’s mind, a conduit straight to his secret theories and innermost thoughts about this and other investigations. A baffling array of circled names, others crossed out, words of varying sizes, written in different styles as if a dozen people had contributed to the journal, strong, emotive words scrawled in different-coloured pens: love, anger, hate, jealousy, greed, possession, passion, fear, some circled and joined together with lines that snaked across the pages.