by Jessica Moor
‘Look into this, will you? I’m sure Jenny didn’t go walkabout because of some online loony,’ he said. ‘Imagine she’s heard worse language than that. Profession like hers.’
‘Detective . . .’
‘Look, Val, you can make a report to the station and they can deal with this separately, but I don’t need a keyboard warrior clogging up my inquiry.’
‘And if it’s connected?’
‘It isn’t,’ Whitworth said with a finality he didn’t feel and made a mental note to tell one of the computer whizzes to hurry up.
‘Sir?’ Brookes’s head appeared back around the door of Jenny’s room. Val remained staring out of the window.
‘Yes?’ Whitworth wanted to get out of that bedroom, out of the refuge, out of the endless crushing intimacy of these female spaces. Yet he stood his ground, not wanting the younger man to read his discomfort. Brookes gestured sideways along the corridor, past Jenny’s room.
‘Does look like Lynne’s gone. Should I call it in, sir?’
Why, Whitworth wondered with an ancient sort of weariness, can these bloody women not look after themselves?
‘Well . . .’ He shrugged. ‘She’s an adult, isn’t she?’
‘She’s not well,’ Val added, with a strange sort of excitement. ‘She’s been struggling for a while . . .’
‘And how exactly is going back to her husband going to help her?’
‘Assuming she’s going back to her husband.’
‘Assuming, of course, Mrs Redwood.’ Whitworth took a breath. ‘And if that’s the case, then I don’t see anything to worry about.’
‘Assuming she went back to her husband.’ Val took a deep breath, as if she were about to launch into a lecture in the middle of the bedroom. ‘Assuming she went back, I don’t suppose you’re aware that the average battered woman returns to her abusive partner between five and seven times before she’s finally able to leave for good.’
‘Did he actually hit her?’ Whitworth asked, and Val looked as if she could barely bring herself to spit out the syllable: ‘No. But that’s not the only –’
‘In that case’ – Whitworth was already turning away from Val – ‘I see no reason to think she’s in any immediate danger, and –’
‘Even so . . .’ Brookes said it abruptly, cutting Whitworth off. ‘Just saying, sir . . . she seemed a bit vulnerable. And, of course, there’s the kid. Could be a Child Protection issue . . .’
Child Protection. Yes. That little girl.
Whitworth noticed that Brookes’s cheeks were burning and some of his swagger seemed to have dropped away. Brookes seemed to have a soft spot for little kids.
‘We’ve got to find that kid, sir,’ Brookes said. His voice was quiet, but there was a force of feeling behind it. ‘She’s just a baby. She can’t make her own choices. She’s helpless.’
Val’s head snapped back behind her to look at Brookes. She looked irritated for a second, then said carefully, ‘Well, yes, Detective. I think you might be right there.’
‘Lynne seemed like a competent enough mother to me,’ Whitworth said.
But he knew it was useless. Once the words ‘Child Protection’ had been uttered, they would curse the air they were breathed in. More so, of course, with Val Redwood as a witness. She wasn’t the kind of person who would hesitate to accuse him of negligence.
Whitworth deliberately turned his back on Val Redwood.
‘Fine, then. DC Brookes, I’d like you to lead the efforts to locate Lynne Ward. And her daughter, of course.’
He crossed back over to the threshold. ‘I’m going to investigate Jenny’s whereabouts.’
He saw Brookes’s eyebrows raise a fraction and continued, with a self-justification he knew wasn’t warranted in the face of a junior officer, ‘I think she may be a key witness in this case.’
* * *
• • •
Whitworth wondered if Jenny even had the imagination to try to leave Widringham. But if she did, then the train station was the main artery out. She was very unlikely to have the money for a train ticket, but a snakish type like that would probably be able to wind herself around a kindly train conductor and squeeze every last drop of goodwill out of him.
Brookes was driving them faster than two police officers should strictly have been driving along the narrow roads. But if Whitworth didn’t make the next train, then there was no chance of catching up with Jenny. Brookes was clearly still shaken, his knuckles white on the steering wheel.
‘It’ll be all right,’ Whitworth told him firmly. ‘We’ll find them. We’ll find them both.’
Brookes shook his head. ‘If she’s endangered that kid on our watch, sir . . .’
He left the sentence uncompleted. What was there to say?
* * *
• • •
‘Wait. Stop.’
They were on the bridge. The bridge that would never be just a pretty tourist attraction to them again.
‘Is that . . . is that Noah?’
The tall, scraggy figure standing looking down into the water was unmistakeable.
Whitworth’s mind had been miles from Katie Straw, but the sight of Noah had brought him back to the reason for their mission with a jerk. He glanced at Brookes, who looked perplexed.
‘Back at the scene of the crime?’ Brookes said. His voice was doubtful, echoing the sense of surely not Whitworth felt in his own mind.
Noah’s head was bowed, his shoulders shaking. Did this man ever stop crying?
‘Or just mourning?’ Whitworth said. It was half rhetorical. The jolt of seeing Noah had interrupted the flow of adrenalin in pursuing Jenny, but he realized that his heart was still racing. Brookes looked equally caught off guard. The car was idling.
‘Should we . . .’ Brookes made a gesture to get out of the car, but decisiveness tugged at Whitworth, urging him forward. He shook his head.
‘There’s no time. You’ve seen him there. I’ve seen him there. The thing now is to find Lynne and Jenny. Cut back here on your way to the police station and if he’s still there, then see if you can get anything out of him. Else we’ll get him in the station tomorrow.’
* * *
• • •
They arrived too late, and Whitworth missed the train. Served them right for hesitating. The process of tracking Jenny was slowed by the man in the ticket booth, who seemed to have no idea how to recall footage from the security camera. Whitworth found himself in the unusual position of feeling like the technology whizz in the situation. They eventually found her on the CCTV footage of the station platform, boarding the train to Manchester. She had a decent head-start.
It was too late, then. She would be swallowed into the metropolis and have disappeared.
Whitworth rang Brookes while he stood on the platform.
‘Any luck with Lynne Ward?’
‘Steady on, I’ve only been at HQ five minutes.’
Darkness was pooling in the creases of Widringham. Half an hour by train to Manchester, so Jenny wouldn’t be that far ahead of him. But by the time he got into town, all her people would have come crawling out of their cracks, emboldened by nightfall.
‘Look, can you alert the Manc police that we’re looking for Jenny? Give them her description. She boarded the last train, so chances are, by the time I get there, she’ll already be well away from the station. But I’m not interested in just chances. I’m going to follow her there, got it?’
‘If you think that’s best, sir.’
‘I do,’ Whitworth said, with an inexplicable sense of irritation. ‘I do think it’s best. Keep me updated on Lynne Ward.’
He tapped the end call button before he could get any reply from Brookes. Perhaps there was never going to be any reply, but he had an odd compulsion to have the last word.
The train pulled into the station and Whitwor
th got on.
32.
Then
The conversation starts innocuously enough. An invitation to Katie’s cousin’s wedding. They – he – they – rule out attending immediately. It would require overnight travel and they can’t leave Katie’s mother.
To distract him, Katie starts talking about the amount of credit-card debt the cousin’s got into in order to put on an enormous wedding. She feels a little sanctimonious even as she’s saying it, but Jamie seems to warm quickly to the theme of fiscal responsibility, so they keep the conversation up.
‘I feel like it’s more about the wedding than the marriage these days,’ she says. ‘It’s not like getting married actually changes anything. I mean, my mum and dad were never married.’
She sees Jamie frown.
‘Or . . .’ She takes a mental step back. ‘No? What do you think?’
‘I’d want to get married,’ Jamie says. It feels more baldly honest than Katie has understood the calibration of the conversation to be, but she nods.
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah. I mean, wife . . . kids . . . aren’t those what everyone wants?’
‘I don’t know.’
The idea of marriage was as alien to Katie as it was unfashionable. The only married people she knew of her age were either deeply religious or permanently damaged by a bubblegum ideal of love, growing up as they had in the Twilight era.
‘It’s tough. Careers and everything.’
‘You might as well have kids young.’ Jamie was speaking fluently. Speechifying. ‘Everyone knows that there’s . . . like, a window for women. When it’s better. When it makes more sense. All this idea of a career path – it doesn’t take that into account, you know? It’s different for women.’
‘Right.’
‘You know?’
‘Yeah. But I like having a job.’ When had the abstractions died? she wondered. This conversation had abruptly turned concrete.
‘Come on, Katie. You spend the whole day texting me telling me how awful it is. How much your boss is scaring you. How you feel like you do everything wrong.’
‘Yeah, but . . .’ She cast around for something more solid than herself. ‘There’s money, right? Money to consider. You need a certain amount of stability, don’t you?’
* * *
• • •
The conversations snake over a number of days. The parameters change – she doesn’t notice how. But it’s good that they’re talking. It’s good to talk.
‘Look. Just quit. Focus on your mum. You don’t need to worry about money. I don’t make much, but it’s not like we need to pay for accommodation.’
‘But it’s my mum’s house.’
He didn’t live there. Not officially. But what would officially look like? Changing his address at the bank? Registering to vote? All his things were at her mother’s house. They’d accumulated so gradually she’d scarcely noticed.
‘It’ll be yours. Ours.’
She supposes that’s true. It implies an end in sight. Because this can’t continue. This limbo. This nothingness.
‘What do you mean?’
He gives her that look. He’s handsome in certain lights. It always catches her off guard.
‘Let me take care of you,’ he says.
* * *
• • •
It is tempting.
Things were falling apart at work, but then, why should they not?
Why should she have to keep photocopying, diary-inviting, memo-printing, when soon her mother would be dead and no one at the office would care about it any longer than the time it would take for them to sign a card from Clintons?
There would be something wrong with her if she was functioning normally. That was what her boss seemed to be implying in her appraisal meeting, doling out the calibrated amount of manufactured kindness.
‘I think that maybe it would be good for you to talk to someone,’ she said, her face fixed firmly on her notepad as Katie sat opposite, her hands clenched in her lap. ‘We’ve got access to a talking helpline. If you need it.’
Katie nodded.
‘Yeah. That might be good. Yeah.’
* * *
• • •
‘Oh,’ Jamie snorted when she told him later. ‘My work has that, too. It’s so they can kid themselves they’re trying to look after you but, really, they don’t give a fuck.’
He looked as if he had been caught off guard, seeing the look on her face, and backtracked. In tone, at least, if not in the substance of his words.
‘I’m sorry, Katie, but it’s true. They don’t care. They want you well enough to function, sure, but they don’t care if you’re actually doing well. They want you well because it’s better for their profits if you’re well.’
He put an arm around her and pulled her close.
‘It sucks,’ he said. ‘But it’s the world of work.’
* * *
• • •
The feeling of constant terror just was. It rattled around her body like lightning, animating it with explosive, useless energy that channelled into a pounding heart, a bolt of terror every time her boss appeared.
She’s standing outside the office and, if you were to look at her, you’d just see a young woman, and you wouldn’t know that it was a young woman who knows she’s going to die any second.
The buildings of the City are going to fall on top of her.
It’s not based on any reasonable thought. So it can’t be reasoned away.
She just sees the glass blocks of the City falling like dominoes. Converging on her.
She sees it. She feels her ribcage being crushed. No wonder she can’t take a proper breath.
She’s left her coat upstairs. It’s so cold out.
Her handbag, too.
But her wallet is in her hand.
So she walks to Bank Tube station, her presence made illegitimate and foolish by the lack of coat.
The walk through Bank is as endless as Purgatory.
The Tube will never come.
But then it does. The faces around her seem to reprimand her, but the Tube starts to pull in with a remorseless roar.
She leans on to the ball of her front foot. It would be easy to jump. It wouldn’t take much. The tracks are only a few feet below, and they look warm. She could curl up on them for a few moments. It wouldn’t take long.
A single soot-stained mouse threads its way across, fleeing the oncoming train, down in this place where it’s always night-time and the only version of daylight comes with the roar of metal.
She leans backwards.
Maybe she’ll fall.
She doesn’t.
The doors are open. The train is almost empty. It’s the middle of the day.
It continues to be the middle of the day all the way home, though she can’t check the precise time. She left her phone in the office.
She feels exhausted and crushed. She’s alone, very alone, even more so when the Tube line makes its final dart into daylight and she understands with a shudder that this is what freedom feels like.
She stays on until the end of the line, long past her own stop. She sits in a bleak train-station café – none of the comfort of a train – and orders a cup of tea, then another, and then realizes she has no idea where she would go once the cups of tea stop.
She asks the man in the café to call her a taxi, and it costs her £50 to get home, but it would have cost her much more not to.
* * *
• • •
For a long time that night she sits on the sofa staring at her phone. Jamie had gone into the office to get it for her. She could call someone. The numbers are all there. Lara, Lucy.
Ellie.
The last text from her says, hey babe haven’t heard from you for a long time is everything okay? Call me if yo
u need anything xxx.
At first, she hadn’t replied because she didn’t know what to do with the live, wriggling piece of kindness that had been handed to her. Then she didn’t reply because she knew she had waited too long, and she was ashamed.
So she deletes the text.
* * *
• • •
In the end, Jamie writes her resignation letter for her. Because this can’t continue. The anxiety. The depression.
It must be her job. It must be.
They’ll find a way. They’ll manage. Her mental health is more important. Sometimes, you need to alter your circumstances. Sometimes, it’s not just a case of thinking more positively. You need to change something.
So she changed a comma or two and signed her name.
There. Easy.
33.
Now
The train to Manchester was by far the quickest route from Widringham. Though it wasn’t a great distance as the crow flew, the road out of town made a narrow, winding progress through the hills. If you got stuck behind a coach or a bus, you were stuffed for the next twenty miles. Whitworth couldn’t afford that, not with a junkie to trace.
Whitworth had taken that train more times than he cared to count. When he was a kid his dad had taken him into Manchester to watch the footie. It probably hadn’t been more than two or three times, but those giddy train journeys shone so brightly in Whitworth’s memory they felt like the main feature of his childhood. His life, even.
Then, as a younger man, he had taken Maureen on dates to see the groups playing at the Apollo – The Police, ELO, Dire Straits. They’d never been up his street, but he didn’t mind admitting now that those had been some good shows.
The first time they’d ever gone he’d promised to take Maureen for dinner before the show. He’d made much of it, told her to put on her glad rags, ironed his shirt with care. But he hadn’t known any restaurants in the area and the only places he could find laughed in the face of a policeman’s salary. So they’d gone for eggs and chips in a caf round the corner from the venue.
