Keep Her Close

by M. J. Ford

  ‘Detective Masters,’ she said, ‘the Welfare Unit mandated six hours as a minimum, but I’d be keen for you to continue. I feel there’s quite a lot more for us to talk about.’

  Jo wasn’t sure that she agreed. Really, she felt she’d spent plenty of time in the past.

  ‘But it’s my choice?’

  ‘Thames Valley Police will ask me for a recommendation, but ultimately it is your decision,’ She paused. ‘But … Jo, don’t play down what you went through. And don’t underestimate the impact it could have on you psychologically.’

  Jo started to put on her coat, trying to hold back the mental images from the previous case assailing her. Ben’s dead body, his throat slashed. Her nephew William’s terrified screams as he was snatched from his bed. The pale, distorted form of Dylan Jones as he tried to strangle her.

  ‘I won’t,’ she said. ‘This has been really helpful, but I just want to get back to work properly.’

  ‘I understand that,’ said Dr Forster. ‘How are you faring with the anxiety medication?’

  ‘I stopped taking it,’ Jo said. There was no reason to lie.

  ‘Fair enough,’ said Forster. ‘Are you doing anything nice for your birthday?’

  Jo glanced up sharply. It wasn’t for a few days, but she was sure she’d never mentioned it. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘On your file,’ said Dr Forster. ‘I’ve an eye for detail.’

  ‘The answer is not much,’ said Jo. ‘Thirty-nine is hardly a big one, is it?’

  ‘After the year you’ve had, that’s a questionable assertion,’ said Dr Forster. ‘Goodbye, Detective Masters. Look after yourself.’

  * * *

  The grand Georgian house where Dr Forster had her practice rooms was in the leafiest part of north Oxford, between the Woodstock and Banbury roads. It didn’t take much detective work to establish that the sleek Mercedes coupé parked outside belonged to her, as the number plate read F0RST3R. That level of narcissism seemed rather out of character for the diminutive psychologist, and Jo assumed therefore it had been an ill-conceived gift, perhaps from a partner.

  As she wrapped her scarf around her neck against a freezing wind, Jo felt the vibration near her hip. She reached a gloved hand into her purse for her phone. The text was from her brother.

  Would you mind heading to the house? Estate agent has lost key! Viewing at 1.30. P x

  It was twenty to already.

  No probs, she texted back. How’s the beach?

  Her brother had decided the family needed some time away, and Jo got that. For all the shit she’d been through that year, her nephew Will had suffered worse, and his school hadn’t put up a great fight about the absence. Not that ten days of winter sun would go far to erase the mental scars of being taken from his bed by Dylan Jones, a man raised in isolation and depravity, who looked like something from a horror movie.

  Her phone pinged as a picture message came through. It was a selfie of Paul, tanned and healthy, seated at some poolside bar with what looked like a strawberry daiquiri, ornately garnished with a pineapple slice and a Jamaican flag.

  Not jealous, she replied, pocketing her phone and pulling on her gloves.

  And really, she wasn’t. Much. Though the thought of the sun on her face was appealing. It was quite some time since she’d had a proper break. In fact, the last prolonged period of annual leave had been Padua with Ben, about fifteen months ago. A top-floor apartment overlooking some piazza or other, a warm Mediterranean breeze tickling the blinds, the muffled chatter of the restaurant customers below. Afterwards, they’d calculated it was during the holiday that she’d conceived. Ben had even suggested that Padua would be an acceptable name if it turned out to be a girl.

  ‘Enough, Josephine,’ she muttered to herself.

  She drove back out of Oxford towards Horton, the village where she’d grown up and where Paul, until recently, had occupied the family home with his wife and two children. Maybe she needed to talk to Lucas about going away. They’d been together almost six months, so a holiday wasn’t moving too fast. Somewhere hot preferably. Sandy. Cocktails (virgin for teetotal Lucas, obviously). Somewhere free from the bloody footprints of the dead. Lucas preferred winter sports, but surely he could be coaxed onto a windsurfing board. The estate agents selling her brother’s house – The Rookery – were under strict instructions to drive potential viewers in from the other end of the crescent. It seemed a rather pointless subterfuge to Jo – they’d find out soon enough what had happened nearby at Sally Carruthers’ ‘House of Horrors’, as the papers had called it.

  Jo pulled up outside to find the estate agent and a couple already waiting. She climbed out of her car and apologised, then scrambled for the key to let them in.

  ‘It’s a beautiful house,’ said the young woman.

  ‘Oh – it’s not mine,’ said Jo quickly, as they walked inside. ‘My brother’s on holiday.’ She let the estate agent past as well, then turned to go. ‘I’ll leave you to it?’

  ‘Do you have to rush off?’ he said. ‘I’m sure Mr and Mrs Daley might have some questions.’

  ‘Oh … sure,’ said Jo, with little enthusiasm. She followed them in. The house was immaculate inside – Amelia had hired professional cleaners to keep on top of things while they rented in central Oxford. Most of the furniture had been moved out already. There’d never really been any question of them staying here, not after what had happened just a stone’s throw from the end of the back garden. The heating was on, but Jo resisted taking off her coat. The sooner she could be on her way again, the better.

  ‘I’ll take you upstairs first,’ said the estate agent. ‘Save the best parts until the end!’

  Jo waited in the entrance hall while the estate agent led the Daleys to the first floor. She heard various exclamations of surprise and delight as they inspected the bedrooms, the family bathroom, and as they came downstairs, both were smiling. They checked the living room, the study, and the under-stairs cupboard before going to the kitchen.

  ‘Oh wow!’ said the woman.

  Jo drifted in behind them. From the slight tension in the estate agent’s face, Jo guessed he’d been fully briefed on the background to the marketing of The Rookery. The brutal murder of Detective Ben Coombs, not ten feet from where they all stood. The kidnapping of William Masters, her six-year-old nephew, from the upstairs bedroom by a psychopath. With a vague smile pasted across her features, Jo found her eyes drifting to the island, wondering if the cleaners had missed even the tiniest spot of blood. Dylan had plunged the broken bottle right through Ben’s carotid. The coroner said he’d probably lost consciousness in a matter of seconds. He’d have known that was it, thought Jo, and it brought the sudden threat of tears to her eyes, which she surreptitiously blinked away.

  The Daleys, though, were oblivious. ‘The light in here is amazing!’ said the man, gazing up at the glass panes of the orangerie-style extension.

  ‘And those bi-folds open right onto the garden,’ said the woman. She touched her stomach as she said it, and Jo wondered if she was pregnant, imagining her children gambolling in and out of the kitchen in a scene of domestic bliss. Or maybe they already had kids. A house this size didn’t make sense for a couple.

  Jo looked briefly out of the back herself. The branches of the trees at the bottom of the garden were bare, giving a view out towards the fields. Sally Carruthers’ barn, where she and her husband had kept Dylan Jones for three decades, had been levelled, leaving a bare patch of earth. She looked at her watch. An hour until her shift started.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I really must be going.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ said Mrs Daley. ‘I think we might do another circuit.’ She looked to her husband, who nodded happily.

  ‘Shall I draw up the paperwork now then?’ asked the agent, with a cocky smile. ‘Only kidding … take some time to think about it.’

  ‘Have you had many other viewings?’ asked the young man.

  The briefest pause. ‘
A few, yes. But I happen to know the vendors would entertain any offers, even if under the guide price.’

  You bet they would, thought Jo. She wondered about the logic of not being completely honest with the potential buyers. These days, even though the survey wouldn’t explicitly say ‘Someone was murdered in the kitchen six months ago’, a perfunctory search of the address online would bring up a host of news stories laying out the gory details. She even considered telling them herself. Imagine if they moved in, then found out …

  The estate agent was giving her a wary look as if he could read her discomfort. Offloading The Rookery would probably garner some serious kudos in the sales office. Three per cent well earned.

  ‘Nice to meet you both,’ she said.

  The woman frowned. ‘Sorry, do I know you from somewhere?’ she asked.

  Maybe the front pages of the Oxford Times and most of the national press? She’d been variously described as a ‘Hero Detective’, ‘Brave Policewoman’, and in one of the tabloids, ‘The Clown Killer’. Thames Valley Police had insisted on a photo shoot, much to Jo’s dismay. Another attempt to polish her up for public consumption. To ‘control the message’, as the media officer had said repeatedly.

  Jo shook her head. ‘I don’t think so.’ She bid the Daleys goodbye, and breathed a sigh of relief to be back at the front door. She decided then and there that she’d never visit the house again.

  ‘You can keep my key,’ she called to the estate agent.

  She drove away, taking the longer route to avoid Sally’s bungalow.

  She wondered about dropping in to see her mother at the nursing home. It had been only a couple of days since her last visit, and that hadn’t gone brilliantly. Mrs Masters had made accusations that staff had helped themselves to some money she had squirrelled away at the back of a drawer. She had insisted that Jo find the culprit, which left her with the unenviable task of mediating between the staff and her mother. In the end a compromise had been reached. From then on, all of Jo’s mum’s petty cash would be documented, and stored in the home’s safe.

  Jo took the bypass out towards Wheatley. The issue with the money was a minor awkwardness, because otherwise, reconnection with her mum had been an unexpected joy. In her lucid moments, they talked about Dad and happier times. Madeleine Masters had no idea of the ordeal her family had undergone that year. It wasn’t even a conscious decision not to tell her, more a tacit understanding that the news would unlikely penetrate the thick fog of dementia anyway. There’d been some worry that Will himself might bring it up – after all, he was only six, and could hardly be expected to maintain the family subterfuge – but so far he hadn’t. Unsurprisingly, he wasn’t keen to relive any of that night. Even with his trauma therapist, he was apparently silent on the subject, preferring to focus discussions on his latest passion: astronauts.

  Jo reached the home – Evergreen Lodge – and pulled in along the tree-lined drive. She normally brought flowers or chocolates, but she didn’t think her mum would care. Most the sweets went in a cupboard, to be dished out to staff anyway, and the flowers always wilted in the overheated atmosphere of the residents’ rooms. At the door, she was about to press the buzzer when her phone rang. It was St Aldates station.

  ‘What’s up?’ she answered.

  ‘You busy?’ said DI Andy Carrick.

  Jo looked through the reinforced glass panel. Mrs Deekins was sitting in her normal spot in the corridor, staring at the opposite wall. She could almost smell the place already. Overcooked food, disinfectant, sadness. Radiators cranked to max.

  ‘Not especially.’

  ‘Head over to Oriel College,’ said Carrick.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Jo.

  ‘Missing person,’ said Carrick. ‘Signs of a struggle. A student called …’ he paused, and Jo guessed he was checking his notes, ‘Malin Sigurdsson.’

  ‘You there already?’

  ‘Division meeting,’ sighed Carrick. ‘Pryce is on his way though.’

  ‘Course he is,’ said Jo with a smile. ‘I’ll be about fifteen minutes.’

  She returned to the car, wondering what awaited at Oriel. Missing people were reported several times a week. Most showed up within forty-eight hours, and unless it was a minor, the police rarely got involved. But indications of violence escalated the case to another level.

  She appreciated Carrick giving her the call. Despite being the toast of the town in the summer, she’d sensed the Detective Chief Inspector, Phil Stratton, keeping her at arm’s length for the last few months. There’d been a couple of murders, one a straightforward domestic, the second drug-related, but she’d been sidelined on both cases in favour of Dimitriou and the new kid taking over from the mother-to-be Heidi Tan, Detective Constable Jack Pryce. Sure, they were both competent investigators, but Jo knew she was being treated with kid gloves. Indeed, when she’d asked for a quiet word with Stratton, he’d said as much, though he’d used words like ‘operational sensitivity’ and ‘workplace welfare’. The simple fact was, no one higher up seemed to understand what was going on in Jo’s head. How had she been affected by what had happened? Was she a liability? Perhaps Dr Forster could give an answer in her report. What had she meant that she’d ‘support’ more sessions, anyway – that Jo was still fucked up in the head somehow?

  Jo only had herself to blame. She’d rushed back to work a few days after Ben’s funeral, too soon even by her own admission. It was before she’d started seeing Lucas properly, and she’d felt more alone and isolated than ever, drinking too much and missing sleep. She wasn’t really sure what had happened, but Heidi had found her in the toilets at the St Aldates station, mirror smashed and knuckles bleeding. The scary thing was, Jo didn’t really remember actually lashing out. Heidi had done her best to keep it a secret, but the lacerations had bled enough to need proper medical attention, and the mirror came out of the departmental budget. No one bought Jo’s explanation that it was an accident.

  She flexed her knuckles now across the steering wheel – there were still a few scars. After that, Jo had agreed to the counselling, and then to medication. She told herself it was just to keep Stratton of her back, but she knew she was scared too. She’d seen plenty of PTSD in her career already – officers attendant on scenes of terror attacks particularly, or disturbing child cases – and it wasn’t a road she wanted to follow.

  The problem was that even with Dylan dead, and Sally Carruthers in psychiatric care, the case hadn’t gone away for the Thames Valley Police either. The standards committee had come down hard on Stratton because of the mistakes he’d made in command. Quite rightly, Heidi had said – his eagerness to close the case at any cost had led to poor conclusions. In turn, Jo suspected, he’d decided she was to blame. And she got that, to an extent. She’d been the nexus of the case. Dylan was her childhood acquaintance, the crimes had taken place within a hundred yards of her childhood bedroom. It hadn’t helped either that the internal inquiry reported a day after she received her medal for bravery in the line of duty. Talk about a kick in the teeth for her DCI.

  But maybe this misper was a way to put all that to bed. A couple of solid cases would show him and her colleagues that she was the same Jo Masters as before. Prove it to herself as well. Then she could really bury Dylan Jones for good.

  Chapter 3

  Oriel College was nestled in the cobbled streets between the High Street and Christ Church College. Not Jo’s natural milieu by any means, though she couldn’t help but admire the gothic architecture of the entranceway, and the resplendent, perfectly mown quadrangle of grass inside, still coated on the shaded side with the silvery remains of a lingering frost. A sign read ‘Open to visitors’ – term had ended a week or so before, so the majority of students would have left. The city itself was noticeably quieter, enjoying a brief lull before the panic of Christmas shopping really set in.

  PC Andrea Williams was waiting just to one side of the quad. As ever, the constable’s height made Jo give her a second glance. She w
as at least six-two, possibly the tallest woman Jo had ever met in the flesh, and her dreadlocks gave her the appearance of being a couple of inches taller still. Dimitriou called her Andre the Giant, which only he found funny, and which had earned him a verbal warning when Stratton heard him say it. Dimitriou protested that Heidi had once called him George Michael’s less talented, uglier sibling, on the basis of their shared Greek heritage, and the fact that he had murdered a rendition of ‘Club Tropicana’ on a work karaoke night.

  ‘And I dare you to say it to Andrea’s face,’ Heidi had added. Jo would have liked to see that, because she knew that Williams had been an accomplished judoka before joining the force, only missing out on the national team through injury. She could probably have tossed Dimitriou’s gangly frame from one side of a holding cell to the other.

  ‘Morning, Andrea,’ said Jo.

  ‘Ma’am,’ said Williams. ‘Follow me.’

  They proceeded under a sort of covered walkway (Williams had to stoop), into another quad surrounded by nineteenth-century terraces, then down a set of stairs into a more modern section of housing. Jo had somewhat lost her bearings – these colleges had been reconstructed so many times over the centuries, to no obvious plan, that it was easy to get lost. A set of clipped heels fell into step beside them.

  ‘You’re the other detective?’ said a slightly cadaverous-looking fifty-something woman in a plaid suit, holding out a hand. Jo shook it as she slowed.

  ‘Jo Masters,’ she said.

  ‘Belinda Frampton-Keys. I’m the Vice Provost. I do hope you can get to the bottom of this. Malin is such a promising member of the MCR.’

  ‘The MCR?’

  Frampton-Keys looked confused for a moment, as if the abbreviation should be in common currency. ‘Middle Common Room. It’s how we refer to postgraduate students.’

  ‘Was it you who reported the disappearance?’

  ‘That’s right. Malin’s fellow student, a girl called Anna Mull, was supposed to meet Malin this morning for a coffee. When she didn’t show up and didn’t answer calls, Anna went to her room. Curtains were still drawn, which wasn’t like Malin, so Anna came to find a member of staff. We knocked several times, then entered using our own key. When we saw what was inside, I called the police.’