The Keeper (30 page)

‘Sure. If that’s what you want.’

‘It is,’ he told her and walked into the still busy main office.

Through the Perspex windows of his own office he could see Anna, waiting for him.

‘How did the interview go?’ said Donnelly. ‘Did he cough for it?’

‘No,’ Sean answered dismissively. ‘It’s not him. We need to think again. What’s she still doing here?’ He jutted his chin towards his office.

Donnelly shrugged his shoulders. ‘Said she wanted to wait for you.’

‘Great.’ Sean headed for his door, entering without speaking.

‘How did the interview go?’ she asked.

Sean exhaled as he sat heavily in his chair. ‘It’s not him, if that’s what you mean.’

‘But you knew that already, didn’t you?’

‘Bloody hell, not you as well.’

‘It was clear from his previous crimes it wasn’t him.’

‘Wait a minute. You need to slow down a little. He could easily have been our man. His previous crimes had enough similarities to make him a viable suspect. Don’t try and be too clever. That’s a sure way of fucking things up. Anyway, are you planning on wasting the whole weekend here?’

‘I wanted to hear about the interview.’

‘And now you have.’

‘I’d like to listen to it in full, if that’s OK with you.’

‘Why, given that Lawlor’s not our man?’

‘For research purposes. He’s still a serial sex offender, even if he didn’t commit these particular crimes. I’d like to listen to what he had to say.’

‘How d’you know he said anything?’

‘Let’s just say I have faith in your powers of persuasion.’

Suddenly he was suspicious of her. Why had she been attached to the investigation? Was her brief to help him – or to study him? Whatever her motive, he was beginning to admire her persistence. Clearly she wasn’t going to be shaken loose easily.

‘Sure,’ he said, and tossed her a working copy of the taped interview from his desktop. ‘That’s the only copy I have, so don’t lose it. I’ll need it for the unused material schedule.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Don’t mention it.’ He got up and put on his raincoat. ‘I’m done. I’m going to go home and remind myself what my wife looks like. I recommend you do the same. Back here tomorrow, six a.m., if you can stomach it.’

‘I’ll be here,’ she assured him.

‘Yes,’ he answered, ‘I had a feeling you would be.’

Thomas Keller sat alone at his kitchen table scooping baked beans straight from the saucepan he’d heated them in, swallowing without chewing or tasting, eating to remove the distraction of hunger, not for pleasure, his mind needing to concentrate elsewhere – the cellar and the woman it held. He looked up at the clock hanging from the wall – it was almost midnight, too late to pay her a visit – that would be rude, not the right thing to do. Better to let her sleep and then see her in the morning, once she’d had time to rest and realize this was all for her own good. He smiled happily when his eyes alighted on the freshly washed women’s garments drying on the clothes horse in the corner of the room, just as they had done a few days before, after he’d taken them from Karen Green. They were the only clothes he’d washed for weeks. He could hardly wait to see the joy in her face when he gave her the clothes that would by then be freshly pressed and ironed.

He grabbed the saucepan from the table and tossed it into the already full sink, the sound of china breaking not registering in his thoughts as he took the last clean fork from his shambolic cutlery drawer and negotiated his way through the house to the back door. Picking up an economy-sized tin of cheap cat-food, he slowly and quietly opened the door and stepped into the cold night, searching the trees and hedges that surrounded the back of the single-storey house for the bright eyes that shone in the dark, waiting for him. He tapped the fork on the side of the tin, the sound penetrating deep into the woodland. He made a ‘pssst, pssst,’ sound as he dug out the solidifying food and slopped it into chipped, dirty bowls that littered the area at the back of the house. It wasn’t long before he heard the faint rustling sounds in the hedges and saw the occasional blink of mirrored eyes as the stray cats examined him from a safe distance, sniffing the air scented with an easy meal.

‘Come on,’ he encouraged them softly. ‘Pssst, pssst, pssst, come on. Come and get some supper, pssst, pssst, pssst.’ But they kept their distance, circling him in the darkness, calling to each other, unwilling to show themselves to him, sensing something in him they feared. He grew impatient waiting for them to approach. ‘Don’t you want this food? Not good enough for you? Ungrateful demons is what you are. Fine – have it your way.’

He threw the tin into the bushes, the noise of scattering paws and catcalls echoing off the walls as he went from bowl to bowl, kicking them in all directions, the feeling of rejection crashing over him like a foaming tidal wave.

As he stormed back inside, slamming the door, the feelings stirred memories of the last time he had seen the mother who abandoned him, almost eight years ago, just before he’d turned twenty. Emily Keller had made contact with him through the Internet, telling him she was proud that he was now a man and that he’d got himself a job with the Post Office. She’d told him how sorry she was that she’d abandoned him and betrayed him, but she had been so young. She had changed since then – could they meet and start again? He’d agreed to meet her in a café in Forest Hill.

On the morning he’d arranged to see her he’d been glad to wake with a developing cold, his throat sore and the mucus building in his nasal passages. He remembered showering and dressing, taking his time to make himself look as presentable as he could, combing his hair and dressing in his best clothes, his one and only suit that he’d last worn three years earlier for his interview with the Post Office. He’d walked along the busy morning streets, oblivious to the people he passed, ignoring their looks of surprise as he occasionally bumped shoulders, until he reached the café they’d arranged to meet in, the type that has photographs of the food on the glossy but sticky menus.

He recognized her from the pictures she’d attached to her emails: still relatively young, in her mid-thirties, slim with long dark hair that framed her pretty face. She sat at a window table, nervously toying with a steaming cup of tea, looking up as he entered, recognition sparking in her eyes, despite not having seen him since he was four years old, when she handed him over to Social Services for voluntary adoption before sinking into a life of drugs and petty crime – although she’d promised him those days were long gone. He hadn’t sent her a picture of himself, but clearly she knew the young man who had just walked into the café was her abandoned son. A smile spread across her lips and her eyes sparkled with happiness as she rose from the table and smoothed her clothes, wanting to look her best, wanting to make a good impression. He walked towards her without smiling, drawing the mucus down from his nasal cavity and into the back of his throat before contracting the muscles in his neck to push the green ball of secretion into his mouth, rolling it around and tasting the years of bitterness it represented, all the painful memories she’d caused and all the hate he felt for her. When he was close enough to kiss her he filled his lungs as full as he could and spat the phlegm directly into her face, her smile replaced with a look of shock and repulsion. He turned and walked out of the café without saying a word. As the door closed behind him he could hear her screams of revulsion and rejection. He never saw or spoke to her again.

Saturday morning, four thirty a.m., and the iPhone’s alarm chirped quietly on the bedside cabinet, barely enough noise to wake any living creature, but it was sufficient to stir Sean from his shallow sleep, his constantly whirring mind never allowing real rest to come. He grabbed the phone on the second chirp and turned it off, quickly checking to make sure it hadn’t woken Kate. The initial shock of awakening soon gave way to a feeling of dreadful tiredness that threatened to drag him down into unconsciousness. He’d been here a hundred times before and would probably be here a hundred more times before he could ever dream of returning to anything like normal sleep patterns. He knew he had to move now or risk falling into the sort of sleep he wished he’d managed during the night, pulling the warm duvet from his body, exposing its near-nakedness to the cold air of the room. He sat on the edge of his bed rubbing the back of his neck, the muscles in his torso flexing and twitching to life, the lines of his conditioned body as prominent as those of any middle-weight boxer.

Once his mind had caught up with where he was and why he was awake so early, he stood unsteadily and headed for the bathroom, flipping up the toilet seat and waiting to urinate, but it took a long time to come and only lasted a few seconds, warning him of his own dehydration and reminding him of the shortness of his sleep. He decided against flushing and risking waking Kate or the girls and headed for the shower, setting the temperature at lukewarm and stepping in straight away, the cold water bringing him back to life. He washed and dressed quickly and went downstairs feeling passably human. He was aware that the feeling would only last a few hours and then the rest of the day would be a struggle to hold mind and body together and he’d have to push through the pain barrier more than once.

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.