by Jessica Moor
‘I’ve tried to keep it neat,’ Noah told Whitworth when he headed to the bedroom. ‘Katie liked it neat. I’m not much good at that sort of thing.’
He wasn’t being modest. Everything looked like it had been folded by someone wearing boxing gloves. It felt wrong to paw through all that mess. The idea of Noah trying to restore his dead girlfriend’s things to some semblance of order made Whitworth wince. If anything ever happened to Maureen, his own home would fall down around his ears.
Katie Straw had owned very few things, and all her clothes looked newish. Trendy minimalism, or a new life recently begun? She had made a sort of dressing table on top of the chest of drawers, her personal effects crammed into a few square feet of space. The rest of the room was all Noah. Noah’s cycling stuff, his camping equipment, his guitar.
It was always odd, seeing a dead person’s things. Everything seemed like a tiny corpse, every drawer a mausoleum.
The bed was half slept in. No starfish sprawling for Noah, it seemed. The left-hand side of the bed, the side furthest from the door, looked like it hadn’t been disturbed for a while. A pile of folded laundry sat on it. Katie’s side.
Whitworth wondered if Katie had done the load of laundry before she’d died.
‘Jewellery . . .’ he muttered, shoving a little glass box towards Brookes. Brookes opened it, stirring the contents with his finger.
‘Nice, some of this.’
‘Hm?’ Whitworth glanced at the silvery mass where Brookes’s finger was nesting. Brookes held up a pendant in the shape of a leaf. Silver, Whitworth thought. Or white gold. He’d never been sure of the difference.
‘Bet old Noah didn’t buy this for her,’ Brookes said. ‘I don’t think he’s the type.’
‘You never know. He might be a dark horse.’
Whitworth felt sorry for Noah. He guessed that Katie must have felt much the same.
He thought about the jewellery he’d given Maureen over the years. To say that it had all been a present just for her would be a bit dishonest. It had always given him so much pride to know that he had worked hard to give her nice things. The shy chip of diamond on her engagement ring (they hadn’t gone in for big rocks in those days). The brazen gold of her wedding ring. The fine chain he’d bought her on the day Jennifer was born.
Brookes continued to poke through the jewellery with interest.
‘You a closet jeweller?’
Brookes laughed, picking up a silver bracelet and holding it up to the light.
‘You can tell a lot about a woman from her jewellery, I reckon. Whether it’s real or fake.’
Whitworth had heard truisms like that before. Detectives seemed to have an impulse for it – a need to come up with their own little set of laws for how to interpret humanity.
He picked up a pink canvas makeup bag from the chest of drawers.
Inside was a smashed powder compact, a stub of red lipstick, a little pot of black eyeliner. The enforcers of a daily lie: that the world was a little more beautiful than it really was.
There wasn’t much else to look through. No suicide note, though that wasn’t necessarily a surprise. Notes were more a convenient trope for TV than an actual reality. Whitworth resented that. It made people feel like they were owed a note, and most of them were disappointed. Most of the time, suicide was as inscrutable as cancer.
Brookes was flicking through a box of old photographs.
‘Anything interesting?’
Brookes’s voice was flat when he replied – disappointed, Whitworth guessed: ‘Nothing.’
‘Look,’ he added, emptying out the photographs on to the bed. ‘There’s literally nothing. Look.’
There were a couple of pictures of a child Katie and then a few more snapshots of her and Noah together. They looked happy enough. Or at least, they looked like they knew how to seem happy. What was the difference?
‘People don’t tend to have many physical photos any more,’ Whitworth said.
‘Yeah, but she’s got nothing.’ Brookes looked perplexed now. A budding detective’s instinct? Or just a rigid sense of how things should or shouldn’t be?
‘What’s bothering you about it?’ Whitworth asked. Probe the instinct, he thought. Get it in good working order.
‘Just feels like it’s a bit of a pointless case,’ Brookes muttered.
Whitworth hadn’t been expecting to hear that. He bit back a snappy retort and tried to look encouraging.
‘What makes you say that?’
‘As far as I can see, we as good as know she committed suicide. I don’t know why we’re trying to dredge together a reason for it. Why does anyone commit suicide? And instead of tying ourselves in knots, couldn’t we be working on a case that actually helps people who’re still alive?’
For a second, there was a defenceless look in Brookes’s eyes, before he brushed it away. Whitworth wondered if he was trying to sound harder and more jaded than he really was. The boy was pretty new to all this death business, after all.
* * *
• • •
Noah was still sitting under a blanket on the sofa. He was crying. There was something red raw in his face, as if he’d been scrubbing at it with a flannel. Whitworth wondered whether he should say something. The lad might as well take comfort. Brutal as it seemed to say, Whitworth knew that Noah would get over it eventually.
‘I miss her,’ Noah said. His hand was outstretched at his side, his legs stacked on the coffee table, as if he was used to making room for someone else on the little sofa.
Brookes walked over to Noah and squatted in front of him as if he were speaking to a child.
‘Look, mate,’ he said, very gently. ‘I’m so sorry for your loss. We all are.’
‘Thanks,’ Noah snuffled. Tears were dripping off his reddened face and mingling with snot.
‘You just need to keep remembering that if – if – Katie did take her own life, you really can’t blame yourself for it. It wasn’t your fault, Noah.’
Noah didn’t actually look like blaming himself had occurred to him. His eyes grew childish-round, and he started to sob, much louder now.
‘I think we’d better go,’ Whitworth muttered, feeling a cavern of embarrassment opening up in his chest. Why was Brookes able to convey concern so effortlessly, and when had that become a useful quality in a policeman? ‘We’ll keep you updated on everything,’ he said in Noah’s general direction, forming his words very clearly, as if he were communicating with the demented. He couldn’t bring himself to look straight at that awful profusion of tears.
* * *
• • •
‘Bit of a wimp, isn’t he?’ Whitworth said lightly as they picked their way through the cracked paving stones of the front garden path.
Brookes frowned.
‘His girlfriend’s dead.’
‘Right.’
Whitworth knew he’d misjudged things. He really did need to learn to keep quiet more, he realized. Things just weren’t the way they used to be.
* * *
• • •
They took the car around the corner to the chip shop. Halfway between the church hall and the bridge, it was one of the few places in Widringham where they could be reasonably confident of some CCTV.
‘With you in a minute, mate,’ Amir, the owner, said. His accent was somehow completely Pakistani and completely Widringham at the same time. It was twelve noon. The first frying time of the day.
Whitworth nodded. ‘When you’ve got the chance,’ he said. He settled into one of the plastic chairs and listened to the comforting chuckle of the deep-fat fryer.
He ordered two portions of sausage and chips to go with the CCTV tape from Thursday night, and took them to the car, where Brookes was sitting.
‘I’m not eating that,’ he said, glancing down at the sausage.
‘All right
, princess,’ Whitworth said. ‘Watching our figure, are we?’
‘You should be careful about what you put in your body,’ Brookes said.
Whitworth raised an eyebrow. ‘Fine.’ He picked up the sausage with little ceremony and dropped it in his polystyrene container. ‘Have it your way.’
Brookes smirked and started to pick at the chips.
‘Chips are all right, then?’
‘Processed meat is carcinogenic.’
They sat in silence for a minute further.
‘So, Noah, eh?’ Whitworth said rhetorically.
‘Always got to look at the boyfriend, right?’
‘He doesn’t exactly seem like the kind of guy you’d date if you had much self-respect.’
‘You’re probably right.’
‘That doesn’t mean she had to top herself, of course. She could have just left him,’ Whitworth said thoughtfully.
‘Don’t know if it’s ever that easy.’
‘If you stay in a relationship,’ Whitworth said, sketching his idea out in the air with a stubby chip, ‘you’ve got to take responsibility for yourself. No one’s problem but your own. Try telling that to Val Redwood and her lot, though.’
‘That’s different,’ Brookes said seriously, the chips still frozen in mid-air. ‘Those guys they’re getting away from are probably nutters. Violent. Some of them must be, anyway. I mean, real men don’t hit women.’
‘I suppose.’ Whitworth’s voice was absent, but he adjusted it when he realized how lukewarm he sounded. ‘I mean . . . of course. Well said. You know what I mean. On the other hand,’ he continued, ‘if Noah did have something to do with her death, that might make some sense.’
‘He’s not exactly the wife-beating type, though, is he?’
Whitworth thought of Mr Sullivan, the blundering, burly husband of the little woman in the blood-flowered dress. Even kneeling down, he had been almost as tall as his tiny wife. His meaty arms had looked absurd wrapped around her waist, his big face buried in her stomach.
‘Although, I guess . . . what’s the wife-beating type?’ Brookes folded his arms, staring thoughtfully at nothing. ‘He’s boozy as all hell. Drugs, too, for all we know. I mean, I’ve got every sympathy with him being upset and everything. But all those tears could be a cover for something, right?’
‘All good points,’ Whitworth conceded, glad to see that Brookes was able to keep an open mind. That was the most important part of the job, of course. A good detective had the magic combination – an open mind and a sharp instinct. ‘But Noah was in Glasgow.’
‘Could have been and come back. Would have been tight, but manageable.’
‘Not sure that he’s much of a criminal mastermind, Noah. And he’s got his mates to vouch for him.’
‘They were all hammered. That’s not going to stand up in court. Worth pursuing, I think. A girl’s dead, after all. Can’t help to properly rule out her boyfriend.’
‘So you want me to ring up the DI and tell her I’m handing over the case because . . . what?’
Brookes stayed silent.
‘We’d better be getting back,’ Whitworth said. He drove them on the way back, his fingers making a greasy sausage-film on the steering wheel.
* * *
• • •
Whitworth spent the rest of the afternoon in meetings, the most important of which was updating DI Khan on the Katie Straw case.
The whole thing wouldn’t have taken nearly as long, he would have liked to point out, if she hadn’t insisted on having the conversation by video chat, which seemed to cut out every thirty seconds.
‘So what is it that we’re looking at here, Whitworth?’ she asked breezily.
Whitworth started to reply, but the screen froze, leaving the DI’s face trapped in a grimace. Khan was about forty, he knew that, but she was the kind of woman who took good enough care of herself to deceive people into thinking she might be a fair bit younger.
‘Hello?’ There were some odd, disjointed noises coming through, although the screen remained frozen. Whitworth tried again. ‘Can you hear me, ma’am?’
‘Yes.’ The reply sounded as if it were bubbling out from under water. ‘I can hear you fine, Whitworth.’
‘As far as I can see,’ Whitworth enunciated slowly, clearly, ‘all the signs currently point to a suicide. Nothing to suggest otherwise.’
‘But nothing to prove your theory either,’ the voice bubbled back. ‘I’d like something a bit more concrete before we move forward into closing the case. You say there was no note?’
‘No note, ma’am,’ Whitworth replied. ‘Although in my experience it can be a bit naive to expect one.’
The DI’s face reanimated. Her dark eyes seemed to be fixed on Whitworth’s chin.
‘Right.’ She tapped a pen against her forehead absent-mindedly. ‘Do you need me to come in, DS Whitworth? I appreciate you’ve had limited experience of murder cases over in Widringham, so perhaps it would be useful to . . .’
The screen cut out. A pop-up message informed Whitworth that the connection would resume shortly. He shuffled in his chair, taking the opportunity to steady himself with a sip of coffee. Surely, after a lifetime on the Force, he wasn’t still being babysat?
‘No, no, ma’am,’ he said as the DI’s face ballooned back into view. ‘No, we know what we’re doing here.’
‘Of course.’ She seemed to give a strange, slow-motion nod, and the image juddered slightly. ‘I’m just concerned that, given the question mark over the victim’s identity . . .’ The sound cut out for a few seconds, but her mouth kept moving, and when her voice was restored she continued, seemingly without noticing: ‘... the next forty-eight hours we’ll need to look at sending in a specialist squad for a second opinion. We can’t afford to lose evidence if we are looking at a murder.’
‘I know that.’ Whitworth gripped the arms of his swivel chair and smiled blandly at his own image in the corner of the screen.
Trust Khan to bring up losing evidence.
A couple of years ago a man – mid-forties, recently made redundant, estranged from his kid – had jumped off the bridge. The same bridge. Whitworth had known the guy – had known with all the certainty he had in him that he’d find a note begging forgiveness from his ex-wife, and his affairs neatly in order.
The body had been found not too far from the primary school, and Whitworth couldn’t stand to have it near the playground where he’d watched his own Jenny pelt around with her mates. That was the truth of it.
But Khan had gone ballistic that he’d had the body moved before she’d approved it, even though the case had turned out exactly as Whitworth had expected, down to the will placed neatly on the man’s desk.
She was a stickler – that was what you needed to know about Khan. Procedure as substitute for experience.
‘Forty-eight hours, ma’am. I should think we’ll have things cleared up by then.’
‘Great.’ Her eyes swivelled briefly to the camera and seemed to look straight at Whitworth. ‘Looking forward to receiving your update, DS Whitworth.’
He raised his eyebrows and stretched his lips into his acquiescent expression. ‘Looking forward to providing it, ma’am.’
* * *
• • •
When he emerged from the meeting room, well after four o’clock, Brookes was sitting at the desk with his feet up, inspecting Amir’s CCTV footage frame by frame. The pixellated impression of the chip shop had stopped looking like a real place and had started to seem like a video game.
But then – ‘Wait,’ Brookes said. His voice was hard and sharp. The frown he was now wearing seemed to carve up his face into something different. ‘What’s that?’
Whitworth squinted. He didn’t have his glasses on. But through the front pane of Amir’s shop he could see a twiggish figure. It was impossible to tell fr
om the silhouette if it was a man or a woman – it was tall and slight and insubstantial.
The figure paused and cocked its head in the direction of the blurry Katie, as if making a mental note of her. Then it kept walking.
‘Potential witness,’ Brookes murmured. He had a glint in his eye. Whitworth recognized that look – the glimpse of a lead. The possibility that the underlying logic of the world might, after all, be there for the uncovering.
‘Whoever it was recognized Katie Straw,’ Whitworth said, one of the moments of insight that made him feel a little closer to a TV detective. ‘They were following her.’
‘They were following her,’ Brookes echoed, the sentence somehow seeming to take on a different meaning in the grimness of his voice. ‘Question is, how long did they follow her for?’
* * *
• • •
Apart from the chip shop, there was a general lack of CCTV footage in Widringham, particularly the part where the refuge and the pretty old bridge were. Shops tended to be limited to the fudge and tea variety; all the proprietors considered theirs to be family, community establishments with no need for (according to some elderly residents, at least) quasi-Orwellian levels of surveillance. Luckily, the area held no appeal for Widringham’s bored and drug-consuming youth, which meant the high ideals of the Widringham elderly hadn’t bumped up against reality. They thought CCTV was the end of their personal freedom, that Whitworth and his colleagues had nothing better to do than spy on the spyings of retirees. There were posters against ‘surveillance culture’ outside the church – an act of warfare, if ever there was one. There was always the chance that someone might have been peering through their net curtains at the right time.
So they went door to door. Or, at least, they sent Melissa to go door to door. Brookes offered to go, too, but Whitworth told him to keep looking for Katie’s identity instead. No need to tempt the boy, if he was sweet on Melissa.
