The Keeper

by Jessica Moor

  But it wasn’t obvious to Nazia.

  ‘So what do you think did happen?’

  Why is she dead?

  It was the kind of conundrum Google should have an answer for.

  ‘Someone did it. Obviously.’

  Onscreen, the next murder was being set up. You could tell from the music. A naked couple were writhing over each other. Jenny grinned and leaned forward. ‘He’s a right dirty bastard, this one.’

  6.

  Then

  They don’t sleep together until their fifth date.

  They kiss, and things like that, but then they seem to hit a wall. Every time they stop, Jamie cites a different reason. He wants to get to know her better first. Sex complicates things. She’s been drinking. It leaves Katie feeling unsure. Unsure of herself, and even more unsure of whether or not she wants to see him again.

  But then she goes home to where her mother lies on the sofa, staring at the TV screen as if it might save her life, and then somehow Katie finds herself surprised to realize that her body has started to long for him before her mind can catch up.

  He always circles back to the same old refrain.

  You don’t seem like that kind of girl.

  But part of her wants to be that kind of girl.

  She realizes now that she had plenty of opportunities to be that kind of girl at uni, but instead she’d spent the first year being the kind of girl who was terrified that her mother was going to die. Then, when her mum got better, being withdrawn had become just part of her personality.

  She’s had flings since then, of course. Not to have had at least something would have been weird, and Katie had no desire to seem weird.

  She seemed to attract a certain kind of guy – the kind of guy who took her quietness as proof that she wasn’t like the other girls, who liked her as a conduit for intense conversations that stretched late into the night. Sometimes those ended in sex, but the sex never felt like the point.

  ‘It’s like they think I’m broken and interesting because my dad’s dead and my mum’s been ill,’ Katie once said to a tangential university friend in a moment of drunken clarity. ‘And it’s like . . . they think that if they tell me about all their problems, then that’ll make them deep too.’

  The friend nodded, but Katie could see that she didn’t really understand. Katie felt the certainty of her pronouncement drain away and realized that she wasn’t even sure if she meant what she said.

  * * *

  • • •

  The great thing about Jamie was that she didn’t feel like she needed to make any of those grand insightful statements, much less ask herself whether they were true or not. Instead, Katie and Jamie’s conversations were rooted in real, concrete things. Her day or his. Everything they talked about was framed in the infrastructure of tight reality – how you got to places, how much you paid for parking once you got there. When they talked about their jobs they talked about what had actually happened, not how it made them feel or what it all meant for that nebulous smudge, the future, on which Katie had always kept her eyes firmly fixed.

  Always until now, maybe.

  Even her mum’s chemotherapy appointments were rendered manageable when they were plotted on to the diary of their conversation, and the parking situation at the hospital had been discussed and requests for annual leave had been entered.

  Katie wasn’t sure exactly when it was that she decided to give a nice guy a chance. Maybe it was the fact that, when they met up, he kissed her on the cheek and asked her how her mum was, all the while making it clear that she didn’t need to dwell on the answer if she didn’t want to.

  Maybe it was the way he pulled her chair out for her when they went out for dinner. Katie knew she should object. She was a feminist, like all her friends.

  ‘Don’t give me that independent-woman crap,’ Jamie would say with a gently teasing smile when she opened her mouth. ‘I can see you’re exhausted. Let me take care of you.’

  Then he’d ask her about her day and be satisfied with vagaries regarding train delays and being too busy to take a lunch break. Then she’d ask him about his day. Work was the only thing he ever got abstract about, so Katie pushed it, out of conversational habit.

  ‘It makes you think,’ he says one time, chewing slowly on a mouthful of spaghetti bolognese (he always orders the same thing, no matter which Italian chain they’re eating in), ‘... you think a lot about morality. Like, on the news or whatever, they always tell you that you’ve got to feel sorry for people. You’ve got to try and understand them. Well, what’s to fucking understand? They do the shit they do because they think they can get away with it, pure and simple.’

  ‘But haven’t loads of them had really awful childhoods?’ Katie says. She feels compelled to make the case for the opposition, even though she has to admit that Jamie’s first-hand experience ought to count for more than her vague middle-class guilt.

  ‘Sure,’ Jamie says, shrugging. ‘But what about the kids who have awful childhoods and don’t pull that kind of crap? The kids who go to school and get their GCSEs or whatever and get some job that pays the bills? What about them? Where’s the sympathy for those kids?’

  Katie has no answer. The old her might have tried her hand at a bit of sophistry, just to punch the conversation into an easier direction. But she has a different self now, the self that’s with Jamie. So she just shrugs.

  ‘It makes you realize that some people just have something in them, and some people don’t,’ Jamie continues. ‘Call it decency, call it respect for the law, call it what you want. Dunno where it comes from, that’s not the point. The point is that it’s real, and it matters.’

  Katie drinks a lot of water so that she has something to do with her mouth. Jamie never orders wine. He says it’s pretentious. She finds she’s never very hungry around Jamie.

  Must be true love to put my daughter off her food, she can imagine her mother saying as she looks down at her still-full plate.

  * * *

  • • •

  On that fifth date they go for a walk by the river and feed the ducks. Ducklings have hatched and follow their mother across the pond, carving a rippling fan in the sun-flecked surface of the water.

  It’s easy to meet him here, in a shared nostalgia for childhood.

  Katie sits on Jamie’s coat with her head on his shoulder. His neck is warm and smells like soap.

  They don’t talk much. It’s good not to talk sometimes. Instead, they look at the ducks and idly comment between silences that the ducklings are cute and the sunlight is pretty.

  ‘Quack quack,’ Jamie says. He strokes her hand with his little finger and reaches into the polythene bag of bread. You’re not supposed to give ducks bread, but it’s nice to pretend not to know that.

  Sometimes they speak to each other like this. Teasing, bantering baby talk. It puts them on a level playing field, and there they pretend to play. They pretend she’s chasing him and that he’s chasing her, but then he catches her around the waist and it’s real. Realer than real. It’s like an old film, the way they’re kissing, before directors learned how to make kisses look photogenic and showed them for what they were – mutual devouring.

  There’s an intensity to it. A refusal to hold back.

  Maybe, Katie thinks in between kisses, she can stop worrying about being one kind of girl or another. Maybe now she’s just herself.

  * * *

  • • •

  He drives her home.

  ‘My mum might still be up,’ she says.

  ‘No, she won’t,’ he says. ‘It’ll be all right.’

  And it is.

  She leads him to her bedroom then goes into the bathroom to brush her teeth and take her makeup off.

  When she returns to the bedroom he takes her face into his two hands, as if inspecting it for any flecks of grime.

&nbs
p; ‘I love you,’ he says.

  She frowns a little. Takes a step back. She wants to say no you don’t, you don’t know me. But she doesn’t want to hurt his feelings. Besides, maybe he knows her better than she realizes.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says.

  Katie thinks about her mum sleeping across the hall. She’s a light sleeper. If they talk about it too much, then they might wake her up.

  ‘I love you too,’ she says.

  She knows clearly that it isn’t true. She knows that more clearly than she knows most things. But it might become true later.

  He smiles, his body sagging with relief, then steps close to her. He kisses her, running a hand over the curved plane between her waist and her hip. Katie imagines how her flesh must feel to him. Soft, she knows, but maybe firm, too.

  She starts to take her top off, but he catches her hand and says, ‘No, let me.’ She feels like a gift that’s being unwrapped.

  He takes off her trousers next. That’s a little awkward – there isn’t really a sensual way to take off skinny jeans, so she ends up feeling more like a child than anything else. He stays on his knees in front of her. She sucks in her stomach, and he kisses it. She wonders how pale her body must look in the lamplight.

  He’s still fully dressed apart from his trainers, which he took off carefully as soon as they came through the front door.

  * * *

  • • •

  He thanks her after he comes.

  She doesn’t know what to say, so she says, ‘You’re welcome.’

  It’s different, she realizes, having sex with someone who loves you – or at least claims to. You have to be there for them in a different way. You have to look them in the eye and treat their pleasure as somehow interchangeable with your own.

  He goes to sleep immediately afterwards. She cradles his head in the crook of her arm and studies the lines of his closed-eye face. She thinks about how you can see the face of a child in every sleeping adult.

  She can’t sleep all that night, not proper sleep. She can’t get comfortable, but she doesn’t want to disturb him by thrashing about. Her arm cramps under the weight of his head.

  As the sky starts to turn a cool blue, that freshness of vision which sleep deprivation sometimes brings descends over her eyes. She decides that she’s going to make a go of it with Jamie.

  7.

  Now

  The room they entered was so small Whitworth felt like he needed to tuck his knees under his chin, just so that there would be enough space for the two of them to sit down.

  There was a poster on the wall. Are you afraid of your partner? A black-and-white photo of a woman slumped in a darkened room, one hand covering her face. There was a menacing shadow thrown on to the wall beside her. One of its hands was raised.

  Val Redwood sat like a man, her shanks jutting out at sharp angles from the slacks-clad bulge of her belly. In the fluorescent light Whitworth could see a greasy sheen to her black hair. Her red lipstick emphasized the steep downward curve of her mouth. Whitworth wondered what kind of woman would paint on a blood-red mouth so soon after her colleague had been found dead.

  He pulled out his notebook and felt around for a pen. With a deliberate motion, Val Redwood pulled a ballpoint out of her cardigan pocket and offered it to him.

  ‘Er. Thanks.’

  He clicked it into life. ‘Okay, Valerie. Just the usual sorts of questions here. Apologies if you’ve already answered any of these.’

  ‘No apology required for doing your job, Detective.’

  Whitworth blinked.

  ‘Okay. Good, then. So.’

  He propelled himself into the usual routine. ‘Could you tell me what time Katie left this address on the ninth of February?’

  ‘Early,’ Val said.

  ‘How early?’

  ‘Four o’clock, maybe?’ Val shuffled slightly in her seat, like a bird settling into its own feathers.

  ‘How come?’

  ‘She had to go offsite for a work commitment. There was a community engagement event taking place in the church hall.’

  She looked at him beadily. ‘In fact, I believe it was organized by your office.’

  That caught Whitworth off guard, though he did his best not to show it.

  He had been there that night. Their team had drawn the short straw of outlining the new policing strategy to the Widringham community – which, in practice, referred to a load of hawkish old women. But he hadn’t recognized Katie’s face when he saw her on the slab. She must have had one of those demeanours that willed itself to be forgotten.

  ‘And you spoke to her before she left, did you?’ Whitworth continued. ‘Could you describe her behaviour? Anything unusual? Any clues as to her state of mind?’

  Val’s lips were working furiously against each other, thinning out into nothing then reappearing.

  ‘I was working offsite that day.’

  ‘Offsite too? Where?’

  ‘It was . . . ah . . . publicity work. I was being interviewed about the work of Widringham Women’s Aid on local radio.’

  ‘So you were being interviewed while Katie was working?’

  ‘I was working too.’

  ‘Mrs Redwood,’ Whitworth said, enunciating clearly. ‘I think you know what I’m trying to ask you here. Could you please tell me, unambiguously, whether you did or did not see Katie on either the day or the evening that she went missing?’

  Val Redwood was gripping her elbows tightly, as if to hold herself in. Then she inclined her head in a stately movement. The word ‘no’ was barely audible.

  ‘No, you didn’t?’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’ Her face seemed to slip a bit. ‘I spoke to her on the phone in the morning, but no. I didn’t see her. Not at all. I’m not proud to say so.’

  Whitworth let her words hang for a moment. He knew what he was going to have to say next and couldn’t imagine it would go down well.

  ‘Did the ladies – ah, the residents? – here – did any of them see Katie?’

  ‘Yes,’ Val said. ‘They had a group session with her that day, I believe.’

  ‘In that case,’ Whitworth said firmly, ‘they’re all key witnesses. We’re going to need to question everyone.’

  Val looked at him as if he’d just proposed to begin the investigation by interpreting the spatter pattern of his own piss.

  ‘I can’t possibly allow that,’ she said. Her nostrils flared as she drew in her breath sharply. ‘It’ll re-traumatize them. There’s a duty of care.’

  ‘I’m sure they can cope, Valerie.’

  ‘I’m sure they can,’ Val snapped back. ‘Some of the women here have coped with years of abuse. Decades, in fact. The question is not whether they can cope, but whether they should be asked to cope. It’s not fair on them. This is a delicate, delicate atmosphere.’

  ‘And this is a police investigation into the death of a young woman. Katie’s dead. That’s not exactly fair either.’

  ‘No, it’s not,’ Val responded. ‘And it’s not fair that threats to her safety were not treated with due seriousness when she was alive.’

  So she was back on the internet troll again. Jesus Christ.

  ‘Detective Constable Brookes is looking into that as we speak,’ Whitworth said, in what he sincerely hoped was a soothing voice. ‘We’ll get to the bottom of it, one way or another. But in the meantime I’d really appreciate your full cooperation.’

  Val Redwood was looking at him very intently, her eyes like black marbles. She held the silence for a long time. Then she spoke, but not in reply to what he’d just said.

  ‘Is this a murder investigation, Detective Whitworth?’

  Her tone was bracing, as if she were asking whether she needed a cagoule for the weather outside. Whitworth opened his mouth, then shut
it again. He didn’t want to revert to the uncomfortable silence, but he hadn’t been expecting to have to field this question head on. He was about to mumble something about exploring all lines of inquiry. One of those non-answers he hated.

  But before he could fill the air with any unhelpful reassurances, his phone buzzed. Normally, he would have immediately switched it to silent, but glancing down gave him an excuse to stop looking at Val Redwood, so he did.

  Urgent. Update on Katie Straw. Call me. M.

  ‘Sorry, got to take this,’ he said mildly. ‘Mind if I step out?’

  Val Redwood sighed, as if this request confirmed the utmost disdain she held him in.

  ‘Why not?’ she said rhetorically.

  Whitworth nodded and smiled, pretending courtesy, before leaving. He could hear the stillness in the little key-work room. No doubt Val Redwood didn’t want him moving any further away than absolutely necessary.

  ‘What’s the matter now?’ he said without ceremony when Melissa picked up.

  ‘It’s Katie Straw, Sarge.’ Melissa seemed to be in a hurry to get her words out. ‘I’m afraid we can’t find her.’

  Whitworth rolled his eyes. ‘She’s in the morgue, love.’

  ‘I mean’ – Melissa carried on without picking up on the joke – ‘we can’t find any record of her. Electoral roll. National health-insurance registry. Not even the university she said she went to. Nothing.’

  8.

  Lynne watched her daughter Peony wipe a trail of green snot off her nose with her fist then return to the plastic seesaw in the middle of the refuge’s playroom.

  They’d had to leave all her nice toys behind – bright, good-quality books, soft animals made from natural fibres, a delicate marionette that Peony was allowed to look at but not touch. Those were all still at home.

  ‘She’ll get used to it here,’ Katie had said. ‘Kids are incredibly adaptable.’

  Too adaptable.