Luke Delaney - The Keeper

‘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 only 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.’

She wouldn’t be his victim any longer. ‘Why don’t you just tell me what you’re really afraid of, Sean, instead of hiding behind your anger?’

‘I’ll tell you what I’m afraid of, I’m afraid of the fact that I’m running out of ideas and time and so is Louise Russell and so is Deborah Thomson. I’m afraid because the answer to this riddle is buried under ten thousand information and intelligence reports. I’m afraid because the name of the man I’m after is locked in the fucking Post Office sorting depot in South Norwood, but I can’t go look for it because I need a Production Order, and even if I had one I couldn’t use it until Monday, and then only if the powers that be manage to get the union’s agreement. So yes, I am very fucking afraid.’

‘Then let me help you. Use what I know.’

‘No.’

‘What is your problem?’

‘I’ll tell you what my problem is,’ he said rounding on her, ‘twenty years ago I was a rookie cop, barely out of uniform on the Crime Squad at Plumstead, when suddenly I find myself attached to the Parkside Rapist inquiry team. Someone was attacking and raping young women in and around south-east London parks popular with walkers, similar to Putney Heath — mean anything yet?’

Anna shrugged her shoulders without commitment.

‘That’s the first time I met Detective Chief Superintendent Charlie Bannan. He was the most brilliant detective I’ve ever seen, let alone worked with. Every now and then he’d pull a young cop like me aside and run something past them — you know, just to test their mettle, their instincts . One day he drops a photograph of Rebecca Fordham in front of me and tells me he thinks the Parkside Rapist and Rebecca’s murderer are one and the same man, and he asks me what I think. I look at the crime scene photographs, the victims’ descriptions, the excessive use of violence, apparent weapon used, the wounds he’d inflicted and the strong sexual element to the crime. But there’s one glaring difference between this scene and the Parkside Rapist’s scenes — Rebecca had been murdered inside, in her flat, whereas the Parkside Rapist always struck outside, or so it seemed. But I took the file with the crime scene photographs back to where she’d lived, in a flat just off Putney Heath — a mixture of open common land and woods — just like the areas the Parkside Rapist was using. So I checked back further into the files and discovered she’d been walking in the woods earlier in the afternoon on the day she was murdered. And that wasn’t all I found: she’d been walking with her son — her seven-year-old son — but unknown to her killer she dropped him off at a neighbour’s in the same building before going home. Apparently she had a lot of work to catch up on so the neighbour had agreed to look after him for a few hours.’

‘What’s the relevance of the son being with her?’ Anna asked.

‘Because everyone always assumed that the children were irrelevant — that when Richards attacked women who were with their children he did so in spite of them being there.’

‘But not you?’ Anna questioned.

‘No. Not me. I always believed it was his preference to attack women because they were with their children, not that he simply wasn’t put off by the fact they were present.’

‘But as you said, Rebecca Fordham’s son wasn’t with her when she was attacked.’

‘Yes, but he didn’t know that. All he knew was that he failed to attack her while she was in the woods, but now he’d managed to follow her home, and all he had to do was stay out of sight, hiding in the trees, and wait for her to make a mistake.’

‘And she did.’

‘Yes. Her flat was on the ground floor — it was summer. How was she to know there was a monster like Richards watching her — waiting? She left a kitchen window open and eventually he built up the courage and he slipped inside and he killed her. He killed her then he mutilated and sexually abused her dead body — cleaned up as best he could and left. But there was something else in the photographs that stood out for me, something that only Charlie Bannan had also seen and considered.’