The Keeper (44 page)

‘You still think he’s going to blow up?’

‘Yes,’ said Sean grimly, pulling the handle on the passenger’s side door and slowly easing it open a couple of inches, his body tense as he prepared for the onslaught of scents that were about to rush from the car. The fragrance of a pine air freshener washed over him first, quickly followed by traces of perfume and make-up. He tried to remember the smell of Black Orchid and was as sure as he could be that this was not the same. What did that mean? Confirmation the killer made his victims wear the perfume of his choice? He tried to pick up a trace of Elemis body cream, but could not. He eased the door open wider and pushed his head into the space, recoiling at a smell he recognized – the same animalistic, musky scent he’d detected on other killers, other criminals he’d dealt with in the past – a smell of fear and desperation, guilt and excitement, a smell all good cops knew meant they had the right man. A scent he often feared oozed from his own skin pores. The madman had been here less than a day ago. His presence remained strong, almost as if he was still there inside the car.

Sean found himself staring at the driver’s seat, unmoving, unblinking, watching as the shape of a man formed in his imagination, a dark hooded top covering his head. As he concentrated, the head slowly began to turn towards him, but the spectre had no face, just darkness where it should have been. In an instant the spectre faded, a solid image turning to gas before disappearing completely.

With a sigh Sean pulled himself out of the car and walked around to the boot, popping the hatch open, giving the door an initial pull, then allowing the pneumatics to do the rest. Once the hatch was fully open he placed his face as close as he dared to the carpeted floor of the boot and inhaled deeply. Anna saw how pale he looked.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘Chloroform. He took her all right.’ He looked around at the trees hissing conspiratorially in the wind, unspeaking witnesses to the beginning of Deborah Thomson’s nightmare. Did the man he hunted see the trees as his allies, hiding him from the people who chased him – hiding him from Sean? ‘Always the woods,’ he said to himself.

‘Sorry?’ said Anna.

‘Always the woods. Always the trees. It’s the city he knows, but it’s the woods where he’s most comfortable. Wherever he lives will be surrounded by trees.’

‘That doesn’t narrow it down much.’

‘No. No, it doesn’t,’ he admitted and started walking back to his own car. Anna rolled her eyes and followed him, feeling like a lost dog following its adopted owner, half-expecting Sean to try and chase her away at any time. ‘Wait here until forensics arrive,’ he instructed one of the uniformed officers as he walked briskly past them. The officer nodded his reply.

As they reached the car, Anna managed to slow Sean down by taking hold of his arm. ‘I need to talk to you.’

‘I’ve told you, I don’t want to talk about me,’ his eyes moved to the hand wrapped around his forearm and she released her grip.

‘Nor do I.’ He looked at her in surprise. ‘I need to talk to you about Sally.’

‘What about Sally?’

‘She needs help. She needs counselling. I’d like to help her and I think she wants me to, but she could use a push from someone she trusts.’

‘Meaning me?’ Anna shrugged her shoulders. ‘I can’t do that. Sally’s a cop, she wouldn’t want anyone to know, including me. If she thought for a second anyone on the team knew she was getting counselling, she’d be destroyed.’

‘Why?’

‘Like I said, she’s a cop.’

‘I think Sally may be above the stereotypical macho image of a police officer.’

‘Because she’s a woman? Trust me, she’s a cop before she’s a woman, and that means she knows the score.’

‘What on earth does—’

‘We don’t admit to needing help, even when we do. Being physically broken is fine, but mentally …? No one would work with her again.’

‘That’s pathetic.’

‘I didn’t say it was right, I just said that’s the way it is. If you can persuade her to see you, fine, but for Christ’s sake don’t let anyone else know.’

‘Jesus, you’re a strange bunch. Cops, I’m beginning to think you’re all crazy.’

‘We’re crazy – what about you? One minute you’re helping the man who almost killed her, next you want to help her. Do you really know what happened to Sally? That night when Gibran broke into her home?’

‘Of course. I read the reports before interviewing Sebastian.’

‘The reports? And what did the reports say?’

‘That she was attacked in her own home and seriously injured by two knife wounds to the chest.’

‘That’s nice and neat. Doesn’t tell you how he stood over her while she was bleeding to death on her own living-room floor. Doesn’t tell you about how she watched him searching through her kitchen knives for one to finish her off with. Doesn’t tell you about the four different surgeries she had to keep her alive. Doesn’t tell you about months of breathing, eating and drinking through plastic tubes. Doesn’t tell you about the nightmares.’

‘She told you all of this?’

‘Christ, she didn’t have to tell me, I saw it.’ Neither spoke for a while. ‘Listen, Anna, I like you, but you’ll only ever be an outsider to us. You’ll never be a cop. You stick around long enough, you’ll learn more than most, but you’ll never be one of us. You’ll never really see what we do.’

‘I know,’ she admitted, ‘and frankly I wouldn’t want to be. Working with almost no sleep day after day, hardly eating or drinking, trying to think straight when your mind and body are exhausted … I admire you. I didn’t think I would, but I do. And I admit it, I had no idea it would be like this.’

‘You get used to it. I’ll keep going, without sleep or rest if necessary, until I find this bastard and bury him. You never know, I might get lucky – he may blow up and top himself.’

‘But not before he kills the women he’s taken. And according to your theory, not before he goes on a spree, settles a few old scores, real or imagined.’

‘He’s heading that way,’ said Sean. ‘Leaving the car open, with the keys inside – his control is slipping. Soon the women won’t be enough.’

‘I disagree,’ said Anna. ‘You’re reading too much into the keys. If you want to catch him quickly you need to stick with local criminals, ones with juvenile convictions for residential burglaries, particularly ones with a history of defecating inside the houses they broke into. As they grew older there’ll have been a progression to minor sexual offences, gradually becoming more serious. Possibly even rape.’

‘No,’ Sean snapped. ‘He’s beyond that. Besides, he’s got no previous convictions, remember?’

‘Then the police have missed something or the offender is incredibly lucky. Either way, he’s showing all the signs of a sexual predator progressing from burglary to rape and murder. His crimes are a classic expression of power and anger, probably brought on by some cataclysmic rejection. The actual women mean little or nothing to him. The similarities in their appearance is due to the fact they remind him of the person who rejected him, most likely his mother or even grandmother, yet despite her rejection he still loves her and wants to be with her, hence he takes the women who remind him of her.’

‘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.’