by Jessica Moor
Praise for The Keeper
“Jessica Moor is a new young writer I believe in. She’s smart, she’ll reach a different generation, she has plenty to say that is political and necessary. And she can tell a story. She’s versatile, unafraid . . . with a voice of her own.”
—Jeanette Winterson, bestselling author of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and Written on the Body
“Jessica Moor marshals her material cleverly. . . . Her portraits of the women and their backstories are varied and credible; they made me want to shout out in anger.”
—Val McDermid, bestselling author of A Place of Execution
“Reading The Keeper is a visceral experience . . . cleverly reminding us that for some women simply existing in a man’s world is more dangerous than anything else.”
—Araminta Hall, author of Our Kind of Cruelty
“The Keeper is extraordinary. Humane, compelling, and absolutely furious in the best possible way. I read the last chapters with my hand clapped over my mouth.”
—Flynn Berry, author of A Double Life
“The Keeper is wickedly paced and utterly chilling, making space for the interior lives of its victims and their gradually shrinking worlds, all the while exposing the failures of the systems that are supposed to protect them. As compulsive as it is heartbreaking.”
—Rosie Price, author of What Red Was
“A timely and thought-provoking novel that explores issues of power and control with a sensitive and deft touch.”
—Nuala Ellwood, internationally bestselling author of My Sister’s Bones
“Sharp, incisive writing, and frighteningly believable characters. And what a twist.”
—Simon Lelic, internationally bestselling author of The New Neighbors
“Pacy, absorbing, and electric in its detail, The Keeper is compassionately, furiously true. Men should read this book, and I’d be shocked to meet a woman who doesn’t find some part of herself here.”
—Beth Underdown, author of The Witchfinder’s Sister
“Extraordinary and compelling.”
—Cara Hunter, internationally bestselling author of Close to Home
“Intense and compassionate . . . it made me feel seen.”
—Hanna Jameson, author of The Last
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE KEEPER
Jessica Moor grew up in southwest London. She received a degree in English literature at Cambridge University before working in the culture and charity sectors and obtained an MA in creative writing from the University of Manchester. She lives in Berlin.
To access Penguin Readers Guides online,
visit penguinrandomhouse.com.
PENGUIN BOOKS
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
penguinrandomhouse.com
Copyright © 2020 by Jessica Moor
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
The publisher is grateful for permission to quote from the poem “School Note” from the collection Between Ourselves by Audre Lorde, copyright © 1976, 1997. Reproduced here by kind permission of the Audre Lorde estate.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Moor, Jessica, author.
Title: The keeper / Jessica Moor.
Description: [New York] : Penguin Books, 2020.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019055793 (print) | LCCN 2019055794 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143134527 (paperback) | ISBN 9780525506317 (ebook)
Subjects: GSAFD: Mystery fiction.
Classification: LCC PR6113.O547 K44 2020 (print) | LCC PR6113.O547 (ebook) | DDC 823/.92—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019055793
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019055794
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Cover design: Lucy Kim
Cover images: (woman) Nika Pailodze / Getty Images; (paper tear) Moment / Getty Images
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Contents
Praise for The Keeper
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Chapter 1.
Chapter 2.
Chapter 3.
Chapter 4.
Chapter 5.
Chapter 6.
Chapter 7.
Chapter 8.
Chapter 9.
Chapter 10.
Chapter 11.
Chapter 12.
Chapter 13.
Chapter 14.
Chapter 15.
Chapter 16.
Chapter 17.
Chapter 18.
Chapter 19.
Chapter 20.
Chapter 21.
Chapter 22.
Chapter 23.
Chapter 24.
Chapter 25.
Chapter 26.
Chapter 27.
Chapter 28.
Chapter 29.
Chapter 30.
Chapter 31.
Chapter 32.
Chapter 33.
Chapter 34.
Chapter 35.
Chapter 36.
Chapter 37.
Chapter 38.
Chapter 39.
Chapter 40.
Chapter 41.
Chapter 42.
Chapter 43.
Chapter 44.
Chapter 45.
Chapter 46.
Chapter 47.
Chapter 48.
Chapter 49.
Chapter 50.
Chapter 51.
Chapter 52.
Chapter 53.
Chapter 54.
Chapter 55.
Acknowledgements
Author’s Note
for the embattled
there is no place
that cannot be
home
nor is.
– Audre Lorde, ‘School Note’
Death?
Seen him. Loads of times.
Average height. Brownish hair. Couldn’t tell you what colour his eyes are but I can tell you he’s nothing special to look at.
Death’s just a bloke.
He doesn’t look angry or sad or evil. Just a bit bored.
At the end of the day, he’s a guy with a
job to do. So what happens is he comes up to you and he opens your mouth and then he just pulls the life out of you.
It’s like a dentist pulling out a tooth.
Imagine that.
1.
Then
Katie leans over the bar. She shouts her order in the ear of the bored-looking bartender, whose long ponytail is as pretty and silky as a girl’s. She and her friends have only been in the club for an hour; the watery assault on the senses and calculated euphoria have started to wear off, but they aren’t yet so drunk that they’ve been enveloped by generosity and money has stopped mattering. It’s a wrench to bellow the order for seven drinks.
She’s starting to feel a bit sick. She didn’t have dinner.
Along the bar, a boy is smiling absently at her.
He’s the kind of boy she’d never normally look at uninvited. His face looks like it was painted in bold brushstrokes – blond hair, almost cherubic features. Yet the soft-full lips and long lashes are assembled against high, flat cheekbones, languid bedroom eyes. He looks like he was composed with a purpose, rather than being, like everyone else, the product of random genetic entropy.
He’s beautiful. So beautiful that Katie doesn’t bother to ask herself if he’s her type. He’s everyone’s type, surely. An objective work of art.
He smiles at her more distinctly, his eyes coming into focus. They’re green, not the expected blue. They cut through the club-haze, looking straight at her.
Or maybe not. Maybe that’s just a trick of the light. Katie looks hurriedly away.
‘Forty-two pounds, please.’
The barman holds out the card machine. En garde.
By the time Katie’s finished fumbling with her PIN and has returned her debit card to her bra, the beautiful boy is gone. She takes the tray of mojitos to the cramped grouping of leather pouffes where her friends sit, two to a pouffe. She yells above the noise that she’s going outside for a minute, and leaves, taking her drink with her. She can sense the disgruntled looks shooting from smoky eyes and catching into her back.
She feels guilty. They haven’t all been together like this since they graduated and came back home. Most of her friends are on day release from their relationships – serial monogamists, all of them. Seven years at a girls’ school will do that to you.
* * *
• • •
It’s February. The quiet, wintry air settles Katie’s senses, a cooling shower on her overheated skin.
She drifts towards the edge of the smoking area. Really, it’s just a section of alleyway behind the club with a couple of empty glasses on the floor. For years it’s been ruled over by the same gregarious Polish bouncer, who used to remember her name. There are no ashtrays or seats, only men in sweaty polyester shirts and squeaky brogues, smoking roll-ups and leaning unnecessarily close to speak to eager-looking girls. Their edges seem blurry against the night, as if they might float away like large, pale balloons.
Katie watches it all. No one seems to see her.
She has always done this – wandered off by herself on nights out. Her friends are used to it. Perhaps it’s an odd thing to do, but it helps her and it doesn’t seem to harm anyone else. It soothes . . . something. To call the something an anxiety attack would feel too self-absorbed. But there is definitely something in her that needs soothing. Especially today.
Being here – being home – drags Katie’s heart down, but for now she doesn’t have a choice.
‘Home’ is on the outer fringes of what can reasonably be considered London, though the association is more by map than spirit. It’s a twenty-five-minute train journey from the centre of things, although rush hour stretches out that timespan indefinitely. Here, a lone suicide on the train tracks can throw a whole swathe of London’s workforce into an agony of grumbling, packed as they are on to the slender margin of a single railway line. People move here for the good schools, and stay because the property prices dart upwards, just as surely as gravity pulls everything else down. Fresh graduates return to their parental homes like flocks of migrating birds.
Nothing can go too badly wrong here. It’s difficult to leave. Or maybe it’s just easy to stay.
Being home means being out. Out-out, even though this group of friends made far more sense in the context of ibuprofen in school bags, borrowed class notes, a seemingly endless sense of imprisonment. Being in a bar with them, drinking the alcohol they’d once coveted so distantly, wearing the short skirts they’d been forbidden from – it doesn’t feel quite right.
But they’ve all trickled back home, so here they are. Every day they head into the City to populate Excel spreadsheets in different offices, telling themselves that it’s somehow connected to their degrees, or else just that it’s experience. Going out-out seems like the obvious thing to do with these early pay cheques. Now Christmas is entirely over, they might as well come to terms with the fact that this, for the time being at least, is where they are.
Katie doesn’t smoke, but she wishes she did. It would give her something to do, and save her from wondering if people think she looks odd out here by herself.
‘Hi.’
The man who steps in front of her, seemingly from nowhere, is thin and dark, maybe an inch or two taller than her. His build is wiry – he probably weighs less than her – but he seems to take up space in a decisive way that she’s immediately drawn to. He looks at her with a directness that makes everyone else’s eyes seem veiled.
‘I’m Jamie.’
He smiles at her, holding out his hand with a formality that she assumes is ironic.
‘Hi, Jamie.’
She feels like she’s being set up for a joke that won’t include her. She waits a couple of beats too long before replying.
‘I’m Katie.’
He doesn’t say anything further, but seems to wait, his mouth smiling and his body relaxed, his eyes following the lines of her face as if examining a map. She shifts, her ankles twisting slightly above her pencil heels. She wonders if her face is red.
‘I didn’t see you inside.’
‘No.’
‘I wasn’t enjoying it much. Came out here. I’m guessing you were feeling something similar?’
She nods.
‘But you must have been enjoying it a bit, or else you’d leave.’
She smiles, because that’s an answer in itself to statements like those.
‘Maybe going to clubs is worth it,’ he says, ‘even if only so you can find the people who aren’t into clubs either.’
She laughs. She doesn’t find his comment funny, but he grins as if he’s expecting a laugh, so she provides it.
They amble in the usual circles of half-drunk conversation. She asks the usual questions. Come here much? What do you think of this DJ? She forgets his answers almost as soon as he gives them, focusing instead on the timbre of his voice. It’s deep and strong and very discernibly male, accented a few layers of privilege below her own.
‘What do you do?’
The question slips out just a second or two before she’s thought about it properly. She shrinks inside. That question wasn’t on the setlist. She’s made this mistake before, and men have looked at her with seasoned disappointment, as if she has just signalled to them a fundamental incompetence at living in the moment.
But Jamie doesn’t seem to mind.
‘I’m a prison officer. Well. Juvenile facility.’
He folds his arms. His movements have the studied sharpness of a newly trained actor.
‘Yeah?’
Maybe this line of conversation is an unexpected rope that she can pull herself along.
‘Do you like it?’
‘No. But the pay’s decent.’
‘Yeah.’ She laughs. ‘I know the feeling.’
‘That’s life, I guess. But it’ll get better, I know it will.’
&n
bsp; His eyebrows are thick and surprisingly black, which gives an air of resolution to all his expressions. He seems like someone who keeps his ideas hard and simple, like daggers that can be drawn cleanly from their sheaths.
Katie likes that.
They keep talking. Her attention, such as it is, sways when the beautiful boy from the bar comes outside and stands alone at the other end of the smoking area. Half is caught following the disintegrating column of ash between his long fingers. Maybe Jamie will excuse himself before it burns away completely.
But he doesn’t, and the beautiful boy doesn’t linger, and Katie and Jamie talk on.
At a break in the flow – if you could call it a flow – she suggests that they go back in. Jamie frowns. She wonders if she has somehow misread him.
But then, to her surprise, he takes her hand and leads her back inside. His grip is warm and dry and firm.
As they go down the stairs together, her mind works through a series of possibilities, like trying a set of keys in a lock.
She could abandon Jamie now and go back to her friends.
She could accept one drink from him and then make an excuse.
She could drink with him into the night. Dance with him, her hands resting on his slim shoulders, a fuzzy heat growing between her thighs as she allows herself an occasional glance at the beautiful boy.
She could get a taxi home with her friends, like they all agreed at the beginning of the night.
She could go home with Jamie.
She could take him by the hand and lead him to a dark corner of the alley behind the club. She could sink to her knees before him and let his hands rest on her head as she takes him in her mouth, like he’s giving her his blessing for a religion she’s not yet sure she believes in.
* * *
• • •
Jamie taps Katie on the elbow. She turns around and he hands her a glass of clear liquid over ice. He didn’t ask her what she wanted so she’s not sure what it is, but she smiles at him and takes a sip, identifying only something strong and chemical.
‘I got you a double,’ he says.
She resolves, before she’s too drunk to resolve on anything, that she’s going to keep drinking, and that she’s going to fuck him. She decides it now, before she can get too caught up in the question of whether or not it’s what she really wants.