1
‘Over at last,’ former Detective Superintendent Jeffrey Brandt sighed to himself, opening his front door to be greeted by the silence and stillness inside. The evening had been his retirement party; a forced and turgid affair, full of awkward speeches and false promises to keep in touch. Yet Brandt had accepted it with apparent good grace, conscious that it was a necessary process in his metamorphosis.
No longer with a wife to insist he remove his shoes, he merely shrugged of his coat; heading into the sitting room and straight for the drinks cabinet. He had resisted the temptation to combat the discomfort he’d felt at all the attention by over-indulging. Now safely home he could celebrate in earnest. For despite his feigned sadness at leaving the police, he could remember little in his life more worthy of celebration than this.
As relieved as he was to finally be embarking on a more rewarding path, it wasn’t as though Brandt wanted to forget the past. Not only would it serve as a reminder of how far he had come, and how much he had sacrificed along the way, he would need to draw on the skills he had honed over his long and distinguished career if he was to be successful in this new one.
When he started in the police Brandt viewed the job as a crusade for good and righteousness. Of average height and build, he had always looked unremarkable but, stood in his uniform at the passing out parade, his dark hair swept back with the aid of Brylcreem, and with his parents and girlfriend proudly watching on, his blue eyes had sparkled with anticipation of what was to follow. His enviable service record and reputation for solving even the most complex of cases suggested his vocation had been a success.
But Brandt knew the truth.
Over time the crimes he was investigating, the affronts to decency and humanity, now only seemed viewed as unpleasant and inconvenient by-products of the modern age. Society had become so desensitised to violence, be it real or fictional, that what he was doing hardly seemed to matter anymore. That it mattered to the victim and their close friends and family, only made it worse when some kid out of law school was encouraged to pick holes in each bit of evidence he had gathered, and every investigative method he had used. With juries seeming increasingly unwilling to reach guilty verdicts, and with many of those few convictions made. subsequently overturned, it had all become so pointless.
Realising that the job he had held so dear could not serve to rouse the people from their slumber of indifference, Brandt had welcomed his impending retirement. Freed from the shackles of the rule of law, he would use all his knowledge and experience to reverse the decline. For Brandt had a particular talent, one that could not be taught and one that was ostensibly in contrast with a conviction to do good; the ability to connect with the murderers he hunted on an emotional level. His empathetic understanding of what drove them to kill had allowed him to establish motive in the most apparently random of crimes. What Brandt had failed to appreciate about this gift was that the longer he spent looking into the deepest and darkest recesses of the human psyche, the harder it had become for him to lock it away afterwards.
