The Keeper

by Jessica Moor

  Whitworth had the idea, just for a second, of calling Nazia back and telling her that she would be all right. That she might be wrong about Katie not being the type to kill herself, but that was okay. She was still young, and she had the right to make her own mistakes, and she should seize and enjoy every one of them.

  But she had already gone.

  Brookes slouched around the corner.

  ‘Noah’s in the station making his statement,’ he reported, eyeing his phone screen dispassionately. He looked up at Whitworth. ‘Might be time for that chat.’

  ‘Chat,’ Whitworth echoed mechanically.

  Nazia’s face. I don’t think Katie killed herself.

  Reflexively, Whitworth folded his arms.

  ‘All right. We’ll head off, then.’

  ‘What about the rest of the interviews?’

  ‘We’ll come back later,’ Whitworth said. After all, it didn’t make sense to linger here too long when the smart money was usually on the boyfriend.

  18.

  ‘There’s a man outside!’

  Sonia had to admit that her heart thrummed at Val’s words, for a second. She hurried to the window faster than common sense could kick in.

  White. Old. Sixties. Grey hair. Fat.

  Not David.

  He raised a hand in greeting, his fluorescent jacket flapping in the wind. The other hand was holding the blue plastic recycling box.

  It was the fucking bin man.

  Trust Val.

  She had already dashed out the front door and was advancing on the poor guy.

  ‘Sorry, love, we’ve run a bit late this morning,’ he said, his words carrying through the open front door and into the lounge. Val was darting around him like an overweight Border collie, producing words that didn’t resolve into sentences, shepherding him off the driveway.

  ‘Yes . . . thank you . . . enough . . .’

  When Val returned it was clear that she had lost the thread of their conversation. Not, Sonia suspected, that she’d ever had much of a grasp on it to start with.

  ‘These men can often try to intimidate you in a courtroom,’ Val interrupted, when Sonia tried to launch into her pre-prepared speech again. ‘But I’m sure you won’t let that affect you, Sonia. We all know how strong you are.’

  Sonia winced, but quickly absorbed the shock and restored her face to its canvas calm.

  Val blinked.

  ‘Oooh, I do like your new hairdo,’ she said, before giving a queenly nod and shuffling off down the hall.

  It was all Sonia could do not to lean against the wall of the corridor and let herself slide to the floor, but she managed to resist. She’d never much liked the look of the carpet in this place.

  She had spent such a long time trying to explain to Katie that strength wasn’t what she needed, but something softer, warmer, milkier, for her moment on the stand.

  It was impossible to explain to Katie, let alone Val, exactly what that something was. Easier to get the bus to Manchester, then another bus to Moss Side, to get her hair relaxed. Thank God Angie had offered to babysit.

  ‘We all need a bit of a pamper now and then,’ Angie had said. Sonia knew she was trying to be kind.

  Sonia had let them leave the relaxant on long after it began to burn her. The strength of the pain in her scalp seemed to push everything out, even the fear of seeing David again.

  He’d look handsome in a suit. Probably the same suit he’d worn to their wedding, if she knew him – and know him she did. He hadn’t gained an ounce since the day they got married. Sonia wished the same could be said for her.

  He’d flash her that grin – that special grin, the one that was just for her – when their eyes met. She could already see it starting to form, in her mind’s eye, as she stared into the salon mirror. He’d go in on a charm offensive. That was always how he got what he wanted.

  The boys would tear away from her and run straight into his arms. She was sure of that, too. She wasn’t sure if it was because they were more scared of him than of her, or they loved him more than her, but they always flung themselves into his arms in a way they never did with her.

  They acted out with her because they knew it was safe to do so. A social worker had told her that, and it had made Sonia feel better, for moments at a time. Her boys could push away from her, cry, wail, frown. It didn’t mean they didn’t need her at the same bone-depth that she needed them.

  But she was too susceptible to a flashed smile from a shining face, a pair of devoted eyes. She always had been. That was why she was in this mess.

  Then the hairdresser had sculpted her hair into blameless waves.

  ‘Like Michelle Obama, yeah?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Sonia agreed, staring into the mirror. ‘Exactly.’

  19.

  Then

  Jamie picks her up. Her mother asks him in, but he says no. He waits in the car until Katie is ready.

  She is wearing a carefully selected knee-length dress. Most of her clothes are at least knee-length now; Jamie says he isn’t keen on her dressing up too much. The words he uses are ‘getting all dolled up’, but with Jamie sometimes you have to read between the lines. She is sure it means nothing more than looking what most boys refer to as ‘fake’.

  ‘I like real girls,’ he says.

  So she finds it easier to wear what he wants. He doesn’t exactly say anything, but she prefers the evenings when she isn’t wondering if her dress has ridden up too high or if her top is too low.

  When she gets into the car he barely glances over at her. Usually when they go out together, he tells her that she looks pretty, but now he only says, ‘Okay,’ then releases the handbrake, frowning into the rear-view mirror as if something is chasing him.

  Katie’s phone buzzes.

  ‘Who’s that?’ Jamie asks.

  It’s Ellie. Cheeky midweek wine Wednesday night? x

  ‘Vodafone,’ Katie says. She deletes the text before she can consider replying.

  They pull up to a small, ugly semi-detached house in a part of town that isn’t exactly poor, but not as affluent as where Katie lives.

  The front gardens are maintained with a degree of neatness that Katie knows her dad would have referred to as ‘lower middle class’.

  A black-and-white cat comes out of the back garden. It miaows raucously at Jamie as he leads Katie down the front garden path. He bends to scratch it behind the ear.

  ‘Hello, missus,’ he says to the cat, with more attention than he paid Katie over the course of the whole car journey.

  He takes out a key. It seems odd to Katie, to think of Jamie having keys to somewhere. She’s so used to him standing on her doorstep, ringing the bell. Her mother has suggested that they give him a key, for ease’s sake, but Katie said no, not quite knowing why.

  At the very first sound of the key scraping in the lock, a small, slim figure starts to move behind the swirled frosted glass of the front door.

  At the same time as Jamie pushes the door open, it’s pulled back. A neatly dressed blonde woman, shorter than Katie, stands in the hallway. She smiles determinedly at Jamie, and he scowls back at her.

  ‘Hi, Mum.’ His voice is without inflection.

  Katie knows he’s nervous. His mother seems to know that, too. She turns her smile on Katie like a rotating camera.

  ‘Well, hello,’ she says.

  She extends her hand with a formality that Katie feels compelled to mirror.

  ‘Aren’t you going to introduce us properly?’ she asks Jamie, after a few seconds of silent hand-shaking.

  He raises his eyebrows. ‘Christ, give me a second, will you?’

  Then he seems to relax, and a careful smile appears on his face. ‘Mum, this is Katie. Katie, Mum.’

  ‘Karen,’ says Jamie’s mum. ‘So lovely to meet you at last, Katie. Jamie�
��s told me all about you.’

  ‘No, I haven’t,’ Jamie mutters under his breath, then follows his mother through the hallway.

  He doesn’t hold out his hand or gesture in any way for Katie to join him, but she follows anyway, wiping her feet ostentatiously on the mat, then, after a few seconds of dithering, taking her shoes off. She follows him into the living room in stockinged feet.

  In a small dining area, the table is set for three. Two candles are burning, though it is still light outside and all the house lights are turned on. Karen hurries back to a kitchenette that rears unexpectedly away from the sitting room.

  ‘We’ve had an extension put in,’ she says, and seems a little embarrassed by it. ‘It’s only tiny, but it helps us.’

  Katie nods.

  ‘It’s lovely. Great’ – she gestures around – ‘space.’

  ‘It’s just a roast, I’m afraid,’ Karen says, bending down to open the oven, as if the comment is an apology. ‘I hope that’s all right with you.’ For a second, she looks stricken. ‘You’re not a vegetarian or anything, are you?’

  Katie shakes her head.

  She wants to say something cleverer than yes or no, but the words aren’t there. Jamie still hasn’t so much as looked at her.

  She shuffles a little closer to him, her feet seeming incredibly loud on the thick carpet, and hooks her arm around his. He makes no response that would indicate he’s noticed her presence.

  She leans up to kiss him on the cheek and he bends back, away from her.

  ‘Not in front of my mum,’ he mutters.

  Katie sits down at the table, thinking that it probably isn’t worth waiting to be asked.

  ‘This is lovely,’ she says.

  The candles are bright blue and have already started to drip into white ceramic holders, which look brand new. She wonders whether they’ve been purchased specially for the occasion.

  A bottle of Jacob’s Creek screw-top stands in the middle of the table, with the top off, as if to aerate the wine.

  Karen comes back into the dining area and seems to catch Katie looking.

  ‘I’m not a big drinker, I’m afraid,’ she says. Katie isn’t sure if she’s heard Karen say anything yet apart from her own name in a way that’s neither a question nor an apology.

  The roast is served. The carrots and roast potatoes are shrivelled and the beef is what Katie’s dad would have called ‘well done’, with a rolled eye and the closest thing he ever gave to a snort.

  Karen reaches over to the bottle of Jacob’s Creek.

  ‘Wine?’ she asks Katie.

  Katie smiles. ‘Just a little bit, please.’

  She barely allows the splash to land in her glass before saying with a sharpness that she does her best to dilute, ‘Oh, thanks, that’s plenty for me.’

  Karen reaches over to pour some for Jamie, but he puts his hand over his glass.

  ‘Not drinking tonight, Mum.’

  It’s rarer for Jamie to have a night when he does drink, Katie is starting to notice. He always wants to be in control – she sees it when the two of them go out together.

  Or maybe he just doesn’t like the taste of alcohol. Whatever his reasons are, it looks like self-control to her, and she likes that about him.

  She wishes she could have a little bit more of the horrible wine.

  ‘I’ll just have a taste,’ Karen says, pouring herself a drop even smaller than that in Katie’s glass. She smiles down at it, as if it’s done something to please her. ‘Goodness, that’s lots for me.’

  She is wearing a white linen button-down shirt, the kind of thing that Katie would never dare wear because it would only get rumpled and stained. But Karen obviously isn’t going to let a single drop of red splash it.

  There is nothing to do but eat the food, and as she does she wishes that she hadn’t inherited – for it must have been inherited, surely – that constant inner monologue which makes her feel she needs to pronounce on things one way or another. Why, she wonders, can she never just be?

  Jamie’s mum speaks little, seeming to form all her sentences in advance, with vowels so smooth and rounded they seem like they’ve been polished on their way out of her mouth.

  She asks Katie what she does for work – though Katie is sure that if she’d heard anything about her from Jamie, then she must at least have heard that.

  But then, Jamie has said, they aren’t big talkers in his family. It’s one of the things that she chalks up to a kind of cultural difference, beyond the realm of examination or dispute.

  Once Katie has told Karen what her job is there doesn’t seem much else to say, save that the meal is delicious. It isn’t bad, but Katie finds herself praising it to a degree that feels almost manic.

  But then, anything might have felt manic in the static whiteness of that too-warm room.

  Karen then gingerly asks how Katie’s mum is – a question that feels genuine, but unanswerable. Katie mentally reaches into a drawer and fumbles around until she finds her habitual smile, which she quickly pastes on, then says, ‘She’s doing okay, thanks.’

  She wants to move the conversation back on to something they can at least pretend sits between the three of them, rather than resting so squarely on her. She turns to smile at Jamie and says, ‘This one’s a huge help. He’s been amazing.’

  She’s a little surprised to see the questioning look sit on Karen’s face for a second, before smoothing itself out into blankness.

  ‘He’s always been a very dutiful boy,’ Karen says.

  She smiles at Jamie in a way that seems to pour out some kind of excess. ‘Very conscientious. His work are so lucky to have him.’

  ‘They’re lucky to have anyone who’ll join,’ Jamie says. He stabs at his meat as if it’s annoying him.

  * * *

  • • •

  Katie’s body is still nagging at her, reminding her that she’s hungry. Something about the restless eagerness of Karen’s eyes has made her feel that only the smallest portions of everything are appropriate. The hard knob of overcooked meat. The vinegary red wine. The ice-crystallized vanilla ice cream and flavourless chocolate cake that Karen digs out of the freezer for dessert.

  ‘Anyone for tea?’ she asks brightly after they’ve got up from the table. Katie offers to make it, but Karen shakes her head, frowning a little.

  ‘No, no, you sit down.’

  Katie sits on the sofa next to Jamie. Not the way they usually sit – close, like they’re trying to press any air between them out of existence. Instead, she perches just on the edge of the low sofa. When Karen has receded into the kitchen, she leans over and puts her head on Jamie’s shoulder. But he shrugs her off.

  ‘Not now, Katie. Come on.’

  ‘I was just going for a hug . . .’ Katie does her best not to put on too wounded a voice. Her usual way of looking at Jamie seems to be having no effect on him.

  ‘Yeah, I know. Not here, though. It’s weird with my mum here. She’s funny about that stuff.’

  Karen returns from the kitchen with three mugs of tea on a flowered plastic tray. The tea is more grey than brown. It sloshes close to the rim of the mug as she sets the tray down.

  ‘What now?’ she asks brightly. ‘Bit of telly, maybe?’

  ‘We need to get going, Mum,’ Jamie says sharply. ‘Need to get back to Katie’s place.’

  Karen’s eyes widen briefly, then her lips pull upwards again. The same abstracted smile.

  ‘Of course,’ she says. ‘But you’ve got time for your tea, don’t you?’

  ‘Not really.’

  Jamie’s hands are already reaching restlessly for his car keys, which sit in isolation on the neatness of the coffee table.

  ‘We’ve got to head off.’

  ‘Well, that’s nice,’ Karen says.

  Her voice is so perfectly modulate
d that Katie does a slight double-take. If it wasn’t for the blankness of her face, then Karen could have been reading a script for an advert for a happy family. She has no idea what it is. Every tiny muscle in Karen’s face seems to suggest a smile, yet whatever warmth naturally exists in a smile is absent.

  ‘It was lovely to meet you, Katie.’

  Karen stands up, the three mugs clutched between her hands. She seems like she might be withholding a wince from the hot porcelain, but the lines of her body betray nothing as she walks back into the kitchen.

  * * *

  • • •

  That night Katie watches Jamie while he sleeps. His long eyelashes are spread out over his cheeks, his mouth soft and newborn-like. She turns on to her side and nuzzles into his neck. He gives a little murmur, then turns over to slot his body next to hers. One arm clamps her into his stomach. The weight of it makes it a little hard to breathe, but she feels safe.

  ‘Good night, Jamie.’

  ‘Good night, beautiful.’ He presses his face into her neck. ‘I love you.’

  She takes his hands in hers. Starts to move them over her skin. Lightly at first, as if she is finding her body anew with his fingertips. She keeps moving his hands until she isn’t sure who is doing the moving. It is as if the two of them are locked in the contracted spell of a Ouija board. The impulsion exists somewhere between them; she can’t say whether he is touching her arms, breasts, thighs, stomach because that is what she wants or what he wants. Her will seems to merge with his for whole moments at a time. Her breast is tight in his grip, her hips locked close to his, his breath soft and intentional in her ear.

  Then – ‘Not tonight, Katie.’ He kisses her on the naked space beneath her ear. ‘I think we’d better not tonight.’

  20.

  Now

  They were standing in the corridor, for want of somewhere else to brief. Noah was tucked up in a little room where they usually took witness statements. Not an interrogation room. Whitworth didn’t want Khan getting wind of an official interrogation. That would imply a suspect, which would imply a murder.