Keep You Close

by Lucie Whitehouse

  Lowering the blankets gently back over him, Rowan eased herself out of bed. Adam stirred. ‘Are you all right? Can’t you sleep?’

  ‘I’m okay, just a bit of a headache. I’ve got some aspirin downstairs – I’ll be back in a minute.’

  In the kitchen, she navigated her way to the sofa by moonlight. She’d had to get up: she couldn’t take lying there any longer. Listening to his soft breathing, feeling his warmth radiating across the bed, her brain skipped from one anxiety to the next and all she’d been able to think about was losing him. How long would it take before she could fall asleep easily, secure in the knowledge that the morning wouldn’t see her life as she knew it torn out like a page from one of Marianne’s sketchbooks?

  From over by the window came a sudden drilling sound. She jumped but then she saw a spot of greenish light on the work-surface near the back door. A phone, the vibration as a message arrived. But her own mobile was in her bag and Adam’s was upstairs; he’d brought a charger and plugged it in next to the bed.

  By the time she reached it, the light had faded but when she pressed the button, the home-screen brightened again. The text was from a magazine she’d never heard of – the new issue was available to download – but the photograph behind it showed Bryony and the dark-haired girl who’d been with her that day at St Helena’s. Bryony’s phone – of course, Rowan remembered now: Adam had picked it up when she fell, put it on the work-surface here as they’d come into the kitchen.

  Back on the sofa, she pulled Jacqueline’s old tartan blanket around her shoulders. When she’d realised it was Bryony outside, she hadn’t known whether to laugh with relief or be frightened. No armed attacker or housebreaker, then, just a teenage girl – but a teenage girl who’d been close to Marianne.

  Could Bryony have been involved in her death? What if Adam was wrong and the Greenwoods had got wind of Marianne’s doubts about the relationship? Could Bryony have lured her to the roof, pushed her off? But no, of course not: Marianne had been alone, hers the sole set of footprints in the snow.

  Thirty-three

  Rowan heard the doorbell above the static fizz of water into the shower tray and tensed immediately. ‘I’ll get it,’ Adam called on the landing and his feet drummed down the stairs. She still had shampoo in her hair but she turned off the water and opened the cubicle door. Bryony, she hoped, come to collect her phone, but when she made out the burr of voices, it was deep. Male. Wrapping herself in a towel, she walked carefully across the room and turned the door handle, letting in a blast of cold air that made the hairs on her arms stand on end.

  ‘Would you mind if we came in?’

  The voice reached up the stairs and Rowan closed her eyes. She knew it, that amiable middle-class tone with its hint of Ironbridge. Theo. A wave of pure panic washed over her, hot then cold, as a hand took hold of her heart and squeezed.

  The door closed and the voices receded as Adam took Theo into the sitting room. Rowan’s heart was racing now, the beats falling over one another in their haste. She thought of her mother, the coronary she’d had at twenty-eight. Momentarily, she was paralysed by fear but then she stuffed the towel onto the rail and turned the water back on. She rinsed her hair roughly then, as quickly as she’d ever done it, she dried off and dressed.

  At the top of the stairs she listened but coming from the sitting room now, the words were muffled beyond audibility. She went down slowly, heart still galloping. As if he’d been waiting for her, Adam called her almost at once and Rowan barely stopped herself giving a shriek of alarm.

  Theo was in the same spot on the sofa that Jacqueline had had the day Seb died, and as she came into the room, Rowan saw the emotions play across his sunny expressive face like the shadow of clouds on a whitewashed wall: surprise, amusement, interest. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Good to see you again.’

  Next to him sat a skinny man still wearing a black outdoor jacket. He seemed younger than Theo, late twenties probably, but perhaps that was only the comparative smoothness of his skin, the lack of laughter lines around eyes that were looking at Rowan now as if they wanted to absorb every detail.

  ‘This is DS Grange,’ said Theo. ‘Rowan Winter.’

  Adam looked between them. ‘You know each other?’

  ‘We were at college together,’ Rowan said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Theo, ‘we were,’ and, eyes sparkling with innuendo, he glanced at Adam in his crumpled T-shirt and then her wet hair. Oh, fuck off, she wanted to say, you’re the one who’s bloody married.

  ‘Ro, come and have a seat.’ Adam touched the cushion next to him and the gentleness of the gesture, the care it implied, was an arrow in her chest. ‘Chief Inspector …’

  ‘Please, call me Theo. Rowan and I are old friends.’

  Adam gave a sort of half-nod, evidently uncertain. ‘There’s some bad news, Ro.’

  ‘A body was found earlier this morning, Rowan.’ Theo seemed to train his eyes directly on her face. ‘It hasn’t been confirmed yet – the formal identification is later today – but we’re confident it’s Michael Cory.’

  Blood boomed in her ears. ‘Cory?’ she heard herself say. Was she imagining it, the focus with which both he and the other man were looking at her? Her face felt suddenly alien, as if it were beyond her control and might betray her at any moment.

  ‘It was a dog-walker who found him – isn’t it always? – up early along the river.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Down near Iffley.’ The slightest lift in Theo’s eyebrow told her he’d found that an interesting question, was making a mental note.

  The floor banked like the deck of a ship in high seas. ‘What happened?’ she said, from a distance.

  ‘We can’t say at the moment.’

  Can’t or won’t? Were they holding back information, laying a trap?

  ‘He has a serious head wound,’ said Grange. ‘Whether it was an accident or not, we don’t know yet. We’ll have to wait for the post mortem to be clear about the actual cause of death. Whether he was alive when he went into the water or …’

  ‘As Mr Cory’s agent in the UK,’ said Theo, ‘James Greenwood is going to identify the body for us.’

  ‘Gallerist,’ Adam said.

  ‘Gallerist, sorry, yes.’ Theo nodded. ‘He was the only British contact we could find online.’

  ‘James said they should talk to us.’ Adam reached out and took Rowan’s hand. ‘He told them that Marianne and Michael were friends and he was going to paint her.’

  ‘Actually,’ said Theo, ‘it was you that Mr Greenwood mentioned specifically, Rowan. Both he and Mr Glass tell me you’ve been spending time with Mr Cory lately.’ Forgive me if I’d forgotten how morally upstanding you are.

  Putting her hand over her mouth, she looked at Adam. His eyes were wide and serious but he seemed not to have picked up on Theo’s subtext.

  ‘We met three or four times,’ she said. ‘Four. We were supposed to have coffee yesterday …’ She looked at Adam again as if to say, This is why we couldn’t get hold of him. We were trying to call him and all the time … ‘He was asking me about Marianne,’ she told Theo. ‘About what she was like as a teenager and in her early twenties.’

  ‘You were talking?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, looking him in the eye, ‘we were.’

  DS Grange turned sharply to Adam. ‘But you hadn’t talked to him yet, Mr Glass? As Marianne’s brother.’

  ‘Not yet.’ Again, Adam seemed not to hear the real question. ‘Perhaps he was being sensitive, giving me some time. He called me on Wednesday, late afternoon. I’ve still got the message on my phone, I think, if you need it.’

  ‘Thanks. Yes.’

  ‘Do you happen to know by any chance, Rowan,’ said Theo, ‘where Mr Cory was staying?’

  She hoped her look conveyed the full weight of her disdain. ‘He had a room at the Old Parsonage.’

  Grange made a note in his book.

  ‘The thing is,’ said Theo, looking first at her, then at
Adam, ‘I’m sorry but I’m sure it will have occurred to you already – the fact that Mr Cory has died so soon after your sister, Mr Glass,’ a small nod of respect, ‘raises obvious questions. Two artists of their stature – and friends. That Mr Cory appears to have died here in Oxford, too – though that has yet to be confirmed, of course. He was living in London, Mr Greenwood told us, so …’

  ‘They’re going to look into Marianne’s death again,’ Adam said, squeezing her fingers. Rowan watched Theo watch him.

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ he said. ‘There are coincidences, even big ones, but this …’ He shook his head. ‘We have to proceed on the basis that there’s a connection.’

  ‘Do you have any idea what that might be?’ Adam asked.

  ‘No, not yet. It’s too early. The body was found at seven this morning so we’re still right at the beginning of things.’

  Glancing at the mantelpiece, Rowan saw it was eleven. From first becoming aware of Cory’s death, it had taken the police less than four hours to make it to her door.

  ‘Do you – either of you – have any thoughts? Observations,’ he said. ‘Rowan, if you’d been talking to him … ?’

  She shook her head, vague. ‘No.’

  ‘Anything strike you as off, anything bothering him, that you could tell, the last time you saw him?’

  A mental image of the bare back of his head bisected with blood, the look in his eyes as he’d turned. You.

  ‘No. No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘Um …’ She tried to think. The day they’d driven to the river was the day before yesterday; when had it been before that? Think, Rowan, for Christ’s sake. Quick. ‘Tuesday,’ she said, and her voice sounded firm, she thought, reliable. They’d gone round to the Johnsons’, hadn’t they? Met Martin. She remembered Sarah Johnson telling them that the police had gone to the flats after Marianne died and realised she had to mention it now if it wasn’t going to look suspicious later on. ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘he did something for me that day. A favour.’

  ‘Really?’

  She glanced at Adam. ‘I’d been a bit worried,’ she said. ‘I’d noticed a guy looking over here at night from the flats in Benson Place.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me that.’ Adam frowned.

  ‘I know. I didn’t want to worry you. I thought you had enough on your plate. Michael came round that afternoon and I asked him to come with me to find out who he was, what was going on.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘It wasn’t anything to worry about at all. It was Martin Johnson – do you know him?’

  ‘Martin?’ said Theo. ‘Yes, I know him. He’s a nice enough guy.’ He turned to DS Grange. ‘We spoke to him at the time. He had a bike accident a few years back, head injury, but he’s not dangerous. He saw Marianne’s body in the garden that morning.’ He gave Adam a brief look of apology.

  ‘He was her number one fan.’

  ‘I didn’t know they were friends,’ said Rowan.

  ‘He was one of the people my sister took under her wing,’ he explained to the police. ‘She was good like that, looking out for other people. We always worried that she’d pick up someone dangerous one day but she never did, thank God.’ He stopped. ‘Unless …’

  ‘Let’s not jump to any conclusions,’ Theo said. ‘We’ll talk to Martin, obviously. But Marianne’s death may still turn out to be an accident – Mr Cory’s, too, even. Let’s try and keep those possibilities in mind until we find out otherwise.’

  Adam nodded, looking bleak.

  ‘But Ms Winter,’ said DS Grange, ‘just to go back to Martin for a moment – you said he was looking over here?’

  ‘From his window, at night. A couple of times during the day, too, but it was easier to see him at night, I suppose, with the lights on.’

  ‘What did you think he was doing?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, scrambling. ‘At night, I wondered if he was a Peeping Tom.’

  ‘Forgive me – business and pleasure,’ Theo glanced in Adam’s direction, ‘but when you and I had a drink the other day, Rowan, you seemed to express some … uncertainty about the idea that Marianne might have fallen. Unless I got the wrong end of the stick.’

  Adam shifted next to her and she felt his eyes move to her face. Could he see the crimson spreading up her cheeks? ‘It just felt … odd,’ she said, more to him than to Theo. ‘With her vertigo. We hadn’t spoken for so long, as you know, and that could have changed, I wasn’t sure. I didn’t have any other reason for asking.’

  Adam looked at her for a moment then back at the police. ‘But she’d been worried – Marianne, I mean – that someone might have been getting in here.’

  ‘I remember.’ Theo nodded. ‘We’ll go over our information on that again.’ A faint buzz came from his pocket and he took out his phone and glanced at it. ‘Right,’ he said, looking at DS Grange, who stood up immediately. ‘We’ll have to leave it at that for now, I’m afraid.’

  Adam stood to walk them out.

  ‘I’m so sorry you’re being put through this,’ Theo told him. ‘The only thing I can promise is that if there is anything untoward going on, we’ll do our very best to find out what it is.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Perhaps she was being paranoid, Rowan thought, or perhaps he just hadn’t been able to resist a final cheap shot but as he rounded the door, Theo looked back at her and said, ‘We’ll be in touch.’

  When she heard their shoes on the tiles in the porch, Rowan let her head drop briefly into her hands. She was screwed. Panic swamped her, increasing the pressure on her heart until she could barely breathe.

  She’d had no choice. If she hadn’t done it, it would all have come out anyway. But here in Oxford – should she have gone to London, done it there? That would have taken planning and time – time she hadn’t had. There was no way of knowing how long Cory had intended to stay here but she guessed he wouldn’t have left until he was satisfied he knew the truth about Marianne. Given what Adam had said last night in the car, his commitment made sense now: he’d been in love with her, he’d said so himself, and Marianne had been falling in love with him, too; Rowan didn’t doubt Adam was right about that. Of course Cory hadn’t believed she’d jumped, if they’d just been starting something.

  The light through the window outlined her fingers in blood. At the click of the door and Adam’s feet across the carpet, Rowan put her hands in her lap and composed her face. ‘Oh God, Adam.’ She stood up and went to him. His heart thumped through the cotton of his T-shirt and when she looked up, he was crying.

  ‘How am I going to tell Mum?’ he said.

  Rowan closed her eyes against a mental image of Jacqueline at the funeral.

  Adam swiped his cheeks with the heel of his hand. ‘Ro, what you said to the police about the vertigo just now – you meant it? That really was the only reason you had any doubt that Mazz’s death was an accident?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You promise me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And Martin?’

  ‘I should have told you about that. I’m sorry.’

  ‘If anything else happens, if there’s anything remotely suspicious or you’re worried or frightened, you’ve got to tell me. Straight away. This is serious, Rowan – don’t even think about trying to be a hero. People are dying.’

  She felt a shudder, a frisson in the air like a premonition.

  ‘All right?’ he asked, and she nodded.

  ‘Okay.’

  He let her go and turned towards the window as if to follow Theo with his eyes. ‘That policeman,’ he said. ‘Was he a good friend of yours?’

  ‘Not good – not really. He was kind of on the edge of our group at college.’

  ‘Did anything ever happen between you two? Did you ever go out or … ?’

  ‘With Theo? God, no. And he’s married now. He’s got a son.’

  ‘I didn’t like the way he looked at you,’ Adam said. ‘It
was … predatory.’

  Thirty-four

  Before going back to bed last night, Rowan had turned off Bryony’s phone and put it on the kitchen table so they’d see it in the morning. Now, as she let herself out of the house, she put her hand in her pocket and touched its cold metal back.

  Rain was forecast, and the bellies of the clouds had a bruised grey hue. A woman cycled past, bat-like in a plastic poncho. Gee’s was busy, lunch evidently having struck a lot of people as a good way to deal with an overcast February afternoon, and she glanced through the window at the table she’d shared with Adam.

  Waiting to cross Woodstock Road, she watched a couple come out of the chemist on the corner of Observatory Street, a little girl aged three or four holding their hands. Outside the hairdresser, the woman kissed them both and the man unlocked one of the cars at the kerb and lifted his daughter into the back seat. So normal, so ordinary and so completely alien – the old longing echoed behind her ribs. And yet – and yet … In Rowan’s mind, something was taking shape. She couldn’t see it, it wasn’t fully formed, but it was starting to glimmer, to pull at the corner of her eye like a twitching muscle.

  She’d reached the old Eagle Ironworks when her mobile started ringing. On the empty street, the tone sounded especially shrill and she took it out quickly, hoping to see Adam’s name on the screen. Number Withheld. She hesitated then answered.

  ‘Rowan? Hello, it’s me again. Theo.’

  His charming, summer’s-day voice, as if he hadn’t just tried to slut-shame her in front of Adam. Anger supplanted the alarm. If he’d been there, she’d have struggled not to hit him. She held herself in check: she couldn’t afford to lose control.

  ‘Sorry to bother you again so soon,’ he was saying. ‘It’s just a quick one. I’m trying to get a few things straight – work out a rough chronology. When we were talking about the vertigo this morning, you told Adam that you hadn’t spoken to Marianne for years, and I remember you said the same thing to me at the pub, more or less. I just wondered, how long was it exactly?’

  Could she fudge it, obfuscate? No, there were too many people who knew the truth – Turk, Jacqueline. Adam himself. ‘Ten years,’ she said. ‘The summer we graduated, actually.’