Luke Delaney - The Keeper

Sean and Sally looked at each other — they needed to go.

‘I don’t suppose you have a forwarding address for him?’ Sean asked, more in blind hope than anticipation.

‘No, love,’ Rose answered.

‘What now?’ said Sally.

Sean stared down at the letter in his hand and jabbed at the name. ‘I know this name,’ he said, ‘but how and where?’ He shook his head as if clearing it of a foolish idea. ‘Samantha Shaw,’ he finally said. ‘We need to see her, maybe she knows where he lives.’

‘Shall I tell him you’re looking for him?’ said Rose. ‘You know, the postie. If I see him, shall I tell him to get in touch?’

‘No,’ Sean told her. ‘Don’t worry about it, Rose. I’ll be seeing him soon enough.’

Anna had been at Peckham when she’d received the phone call summoning her to New Scotland Yard, but no one had noticed her slip away. The light Sunday traffic made the journey from one side of the Thames to the other reasonably short and the pavements around New Scotland Yard that were usually swarming with human traffic were deserted. She passed the armed guards clutching their sub-machine guns overtly in a manner that would have been unthinkable on the streets of London little more than a decade ago, flashing her security pass to the private guards manning the metal detectors just inside the entrance and then walking along the long corridor to the back of the building where the main lifts were. She ascended to the penultimate floor where she knew Assistant Chief Constable Robert Addis, Serious and Organized Crime Directorate, awaited.

She entered the reception area expecting to see the ever-present secretary who guarded Addis’s office like a rabid Rottweiler sitting at her desk, scowling at anyone who dared request an audience with the deity next door. But the reception was empty. As she walked deeper into the room she could hear the faint shuffling of paper coming from the adjoining office and began to move slowly towards it, the sudden sound of a man’s voice, loud and bold, making her jump.

‘Anna — glad you could make it. Come in and sit down.’

She took a seat on the other side of the large wooden desk to the smiling Addis, who sat with his hands together as if praying. ‘How did you know it was me?’ she asked. ‘You must get a lot of visitors.’

‘Not on a Sunday,’ he said. ‘Even the great police of the metropolis slow down on the Sabbath. If I was ever going to commit a serious crime I’d commit it on a Sunday.’

‘I didn’t know assistant commissioners were expected to work on Sundays,’ Anna continued. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be at home with your family?’

‘My family understand,’ Addis assured her, the smile falling from his lips. ‘Besides, I’m not expected to work on Sundays — I prefer to. I’ve always found it an excellent day to deal with some of the … shall we say, more sensitive policing matters, when there aren’t so many people around who could accidently overhear something they weren’t supposed to.’

‘Like your secretary?’

The smile jumped back on to Addis’s face. ‘Did you bring it? The report?’

‘I have it,’ she confirmed. ‘It’s as complete as it can be, given the time and circumstances it was prepared under and taking into account the non-cooperation of the subject.’

‘But it’s informative — yes?’

‘I believe so, but I’m having some serious concerns about possible client confidentiality. This doesn’t feel entirely ethically correct.’

‘Client confidentiality?’ Addis mused, his praying fingers tapping against each other. ‘But my dear Anna, I am the client, remember? I hired you to prepare a psychological profile and in exchange you were given access to areas and information others in your trade could only dream about. A mutually beneficial arrangement — I’m sure you’ll agree.’

‘But what about his basic human rights — freedom of information and his right to know?’

‘Anna, Anna, Anna — he’s a police officer. I’m afraid such niceties don’t always apply to us. Freedom of information, the right to strike, health and safety, restriction on working hours — these are not things that are vouchsafed to us. If they were, we’d never get a damn thing done now, would we? So, the report, if you don’t mind.’

Anna sighed and fished in her briefcase, pulling out a file the size of a fashion magazine that she passed across the desk to the serious-faced Addis.

‘It’s all in there,’ she said. ‘Everything I could discover, anyway.’

‘Good,’ Addis replied, finding the temptation to run his fingers over the file too much to resist. ‘And he suspects nothing?’

‘I don’t think so, but I can’t be sure. He’s clearly of a high intellect. I tried to interview him a couple of times, but he saw me coming and clammed up. Most of my findings were through straight observation and speaking to his colleagues.’

‘And what did that tell you?’

‘It’s all in the report.’

‘I’m sure it is, but perhaps you could give me a verbal summary to be going on with?’

‘Very well. As I’ve said, he’s intelligent, highly observant and determined. I wouldn’t call him a natural leader, but his subordinates seem to follow him willingly. They clearly believe in him. He’s anchored by his wife and children. He may not spend much time with them, but they’re enormously important to him and his ability to deal with what he has to deal with. Just knowing they’re there is crucial to him — even if he doesn’t always know it himself. He possesses an extraordinary ability to combine his imagination and experience, and this enables him to visualize past events.’

‘What does that mean, exactly?’

‘It means he can recreate events that have occurred at the crime scenes he attends. In his mind he can see what happened there.’

‘Is he psychic?’

‘No — and personally I don’t believe anyone is. He simply has a highly developed sense of projected imagination. It’s probably not as uncommon as you may think in police officers — especially detectives. If you see something enough times and then later solve the riddle of how it came to be, then eventually you’ll start to see crime scenes differently. You’ll start to see what happened there even before the evidence or witness testimony explains it.’

‘And that’s all he’s doing?’ Addis asked. ‘Combining experience with imagination?’

‘Largely.’

‘But not entirely?’

‘No. Not entirely.’

‘So there’s something else? Something that enables him to have these … insights?’

‘I believe so. Is there anything in his past, some event in his service history that may have caused him psychiatric problems? Something that may have left him suffering from post-traumatic stress?’

Addis shook his head. ‘No. A few minor injuries and some close scrapes, but nothing particularly unusual.’

‘His service history shows he infiltrated a paedophile ring while working undercover. Things appear to have got a little out of hand during the operation. Could that have affected him?’

‘I’m familiar with that operation,’ Addis assured her. ‘Corrigan was returned to normal duties without the need for any special … arrangements.’

‘Really?’ Anna quizzed. ‘Only, I noticed the report said the officer in charge of the undercover side of the operation, DS Chopra, had sufficiently serious doubts about DI Corrigan’s psychological welfare during the operation that he considered terminating it?’

‘An overreaction,’ Addis answered. ‘The operation was successfully concluded and Corrigan did his job. So, something else then? In his past perhaps? Before he joined the service?’