Luke Delaney - The Keeper

‘No he’s not. I’ll cover the scene myself. You stay with Roddis at her house and see what you can milk out of him. Call me if you find anything.’ Without waiting for an answer, he hung up.

‘Trouble?’ said Anna.

‘We’ve found Deborah Thomson’s car. Abandoned. Tooting Common. I need to take a look. You can come, if you want.’

She nodded that she would. ‘Don’t you want to wait to see the family first?’

‘No time for that now,’ he told her, hoping she couldn’t see the relief in his eyes at not having to face them. ‘I need to check out the place her car was found as soon as possible.’ He glanced over at the body of Karen Green. ‘There’s nothing more I can do for her now other than catch her killer. Her family will have to wait.’

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.’