by Jessica Moor
They talk. Or rather, he talks. She says little, focusing on enunciating her few words clearly. She nods and smiles and occasionally lets her hand brush against his thigh. He doesn’t seem to understand what she’s inviting him into and looks her square in the eye every time they touch. It surprises her how unimpressed he seems. He doesn’t appear to particularly enjoy her touch, but he doesn’t step away either. After a few minutes he puts an arm around her shoulders, continuing to yell something that she can’t hear over the music.
Then, without warning, he puts a hand on the back of her head and crushes his mouth against hers.
She opens her lips, as if obeying a cue. His tongue makes a measured, inspecting progress around her mouth. Her body seems prepared to let him in.
He doesn’t keep buying her drinks. He doesn’t even keep kissing her for long. Once the terms of their embrace have been set, he goes back to talking. About how he’s thinking about going into the army.
Katie is sobering steadily, but she doesn’t let the ebbing warmth around her eyes force her to consider whether she’s making a mistake.
Over Jamie’s shoulder, she sees her friends swaying towards the exit and disappearing up the stairs.
They return a few seconds later, their faces dressed up with expressions of pantomime horror. They gesture at her to join them. She flaps a hand at them behind Jamie’s back as if to say, Go on! Her friends leave, eyebrows raised. Katie allows the same hand to slide around Jamie’s waist and pull him closer.
Jamie frowns at her.
‘You know, I’m not that kind of guy.’
Her hand, which was sliding down towards his bum, stops abruptly.
‘And you don’t seem like that kind of girl either.’
The pause is filled by the throb of the music. Katie feels a slow cascade of shame burning through her chest. She withdraws her hand, and Jamie catches it. He takes it in both of his own and spreads the fingers, inspecting it carefully as if assessing its worth. He looks at her and smiles. For the first time, he seems really good-looking.
‘Let me get to know you. Properly.’
Katie doesn’t say anything. It didn’t feel like the kind of request she needs to answer out loud.
‘Can I walk you home?’ he asks. He laces his fingers into the hand he’s captured.
She doesn’t want to walk home. She’s wearing high heels and it’s over a mile. Besides, she isn’t sure what they’d talk about on the way. Suggesting they get a cab would feel somehow tone-deaf, and she doesn’t think he’ll want to sit with her on the night bus, exchanging the banalities of increasing sobriety while she tries to avoid spearing McDonald’s chips on her heels.
‘Trust me. I’ll be worrying about you if you go off by yourself.’
She laughs, but he doesn’t.
‘Look, I’m not going to try it on with you, if that’s what you’re worrying about. Just want to deliver you to your door, safe and sound.’
Why is she making this so much more complicated than it needs to be? If there was anything to worry about with Jamie, then she shouldn’t have accepted the drink he gave her. But she did, and there’s no harm done.
‘I can get a cab,’ she says, even though she doesn’t mean it.
‘Not a chance. Do you know how many women are raped by unlicensed minicab drivers?’
She makes to take a little step from him, but his hand is resting in the small of her back and it seems to stop her from moving, though he’s not actually exerting any force.
She nods, though she’s not sure what part she’s agreeing to.
‘Let me just go to the loo quickly.’
He grins and leans forward to kiss her lightly on the forehead. It feels more abruptly intimate than all their previous contact.
* * *
• • •
There is no quickly, of course.
Katie stands in the queue for a single bathroom stall, watching as the girls around her, clearly strangers, move into a slurring sisterliness as they wait. One of them puts a little white pill in her mouth. She catches Katie’s gaze and holds out her hand. Katie shakes her head.
She stands in front of the mirror, looking deep into her own irises. To see if they are any different from usual.
But she sees only herself – only the usual blankness. Her eyeliner has flaked off and is lying in the creases of skin underneath her eyes. Her face looks greyish in the bathroom light, underneath the red flush from the hot club. The swaying glow is nearly gone.
She steps back, rocking on to the balls of her feet to see her outfit better, how the tight (too tight?) black top blends into the black polyester skirt, which has started to go a little grey. She notices that a part of her flesh – her flank? The part between the waist and the buttock – is bulging a little, like a joint of beef before the string has been snipped off. She wonders if she ought to take off her knickers, to smooth out the line.
She can tell she’s going to have a hangover tomorrow. She’s a little dizzy and holds on to the sides of the basin to keep herself standing firm.
‘Do you need to go into the cubicle, babe?’
She looks into the mirror at the girl standing behind her. She’s tall – she’d be over six feet if she weren’t wearing heels, which she is – and has the vertiginous limbs of a drag queen. Her tiny dress is a slash of silver, covering only the essentials. Katie shakes her head and the girl steps into the bathroom stall, her long body carving a swaying diagonal.
‘Thanks, darliiiiing,’ she says, stretching out the second syllable with a sensuous yet impersonal smile.
As Katie leaves the bathroom she nearly collides with the beautiful boy she saw earlier. He smiles again, and this time she knows for certain that it’s directed at her.
2.
Now
It was Whitworth’s corpse. So to speak.
The body had been found the previous day, washed up downstream of Widringham. The location, the current, the lividity – all these suggested that the victim had come off the old bridge, which was on DS Daniel Whitworth’s patch.
It was a popular local spot for suicide.
Whitworth had always expected that he’d get over the first bolt of shock on seeing a dead body, but so far he still hadn’t.
It was the way they so intimately resembled people, yet weren’t.
Whitworth had hoped to retire without having to deal with another corpse. Sod’s law, too, that it was a girl. Older than his Jennifer, but not so much older that he didn’t think of her primarily as someone’s daughter. The smooth young skin was drained of colour, the eyes unframed by crow’s feet. Death had no business on those faces.
At least this girl – Katie Straw – hadn’t been in the water too long. Her features weren’t wrecked. It was bad enough that her boyfriend would have to identify her. He didn’t need the shock of seeing that pretty face bloated into a pale monster.
Whitworth noticed crumbs of something black around her eyes. The pathologist said it was eyeliner.
His daughter’s eyes had been dirtied with the same black stuff when she’d rolled them at him that morning. It had been the usual rows – getting into the car, in the car, exiting the car. Jennifer had justified herself in shrill tones over the tinny babble of the radio and drum of the rain, full of sixteen-year-old outrage.
He’d watched her walk away, watched her wait until she thought he couldn’t see her any more, watched her angry stomp morph into a sort of waggle.
Whitworth wondered if a man of almost sixty was just too old to be parenting a teenage girl. He had no energy for dealing with her, not now that all the sweetness seemed to have been sucked out of her and this difficult demi-woman stood in her place.
Maureen, his wife, was always on Jennifer’s side, of course.
But Whitworth didn’t get to feel sorry for himself for too long. The movement of the do
or handle made him throw the sheet back over the body on the slab like a guilty secret.
His trainee, Detective Constable Brookes, entered the mortuary room, followed by a tall, nauseous-looking young man with a scrappy russet beard. There was a greasy sheen to his pale face. As he approached, Whitworth noticed the brackish smell of spirits.
‘Hello’ – he glanced at his sheaf of notes – ‘Noah?’
The young man nodded.
Normally, in a case like this, you’d look very carefully at the boyfriend. After all, if a woman was murdered, then it was fifty–fifty her bloke had done it.
But Noah apparently had some sort of alibi. A stag do up in Glasgow.
‘I’m DS Whitworth,’ Whitworth said. ‘I’m afraid we have to ask you to identify the body. I think DC Brookes has already had a little chat with you about it?’
Whitworth kept his eyes on Noah, as if propping him upright with the solidity of his gaze.
‘Ready?’
How could anyone be ready? But Whitworth had to say it.
Noah nodded again. Jerkily, like a marionette.
Whitworth picked up the corner of the sheet between his thumb and forefinger and drew it back as carefully as he could.
Noah stared down for a few long moments, then abruptly seized the covering and gracelessly yanked it back into place.
‘That’s Katie,’ he said.
Most people went pale when they saw a dead body, but Noah had gone bright red, as if embarrassed.
Whitworth had a feeling he’d seen Noah about before, hovering around the edges of things. Pub fights, pissed-up messes, silly bollocks involving traffic cones. Always arse-over-tits drunk, of course. Probably not terribly bright, but not necessarily a bad kid.
‘Do you have a way of contacting Katie’s family?’
Whitworth was using his kind voice. The voice he always used on people whose futures were crashing down in front of them.
Noah shook his head.
‘Katie’s parents are dead. No other relatives.’
Then his shoulders started to shake.
‘She’s all alone.’
It wasn’t clear if he meant she had been alone in life or that she was now alone in death. There was always that funny in-between period when folk weren’t sure if they were supposed to talk about the dead in the past tense.
Either way, it made Whitworth breathe a sigh of relief. No need to tell a mother or father that their little girl was dead. Maybe by her own hand, maybe by someone else’s. As a parent, he wasn’t sure which would be worse to hear.
Now Katie Straw could become a memory. A pile of paperwork.
Noah’s quiet sobs had turned into a kind of wailing. He didn’t look like he was going to be much help to the investigation, for now at least.
It seemed to Whitworth that young men cried so much more these days.
The door opened and Rachel, the pathologist, stuck her head in. She glared at Whitworth, then hurried forward to take Noah by the hand.
‘Come on, love. Let’s get you a cup of tea.’
Noah allowed himself to be led away from Katie’s body. As he left the room he seemed to convulse slightly. Whitworth wondered if he was going to be sick.
Brookes shut the door behind Noah, then strode forward towards the slab. He brushed the sheet back, studying the dead face.
‘Always sad, sir. Suicide.’
Whitworth nodded. It was true.
The body had all the hallmarks of a mundane, self-inflicted death. Your standard-issue female corpse.
There was barely a mark on her, apart from the bold, professional post-mortem wound which slit her from collar to crotch. But her face had miraculously been spared. Lying on the slab, she looked like a painting, marble-white and perfect. Virginal.
‘Noah’s upset,’ Whitworth said.
‘He’s hung over,’ Brookes replied flatly.
‘What does that tell us?’
‘Nothing. In itself.’
Brookes tugged at the sheet to cover an overhanging lock of Katie’s hair.
‘He said he was in Glasgow?’
‘Right.’
‘And he didn’t raise the alarm when he didn’t hear from her?’
Brookes was still holding the corner of the sheet, as if he couldn’t quite let it go.
‘He did not.’
‘Bit weird, isn’t it?’
Brookes paused diplomatically. ‘It’s . . . it’s not what I’d do.’
‘But the other lads say he was there the whole time?’
‘For what it’s worth.’ Brookes shrugged. ‘I don’t consider fifteen pissed-up guys much of an alibi. He could have sneaked off.’
Whitworth made a humming noise of consideration. It felt almost as if he were performing for Katie. For Katie’s corpse. Showing her he cared.
‘You want me to check out the alibi?’
There would be endless CCTV to trawl through. Witnesses to interview, travel records to delve into. They didn’t have those kind of resources and the only way to get them would be to start making noises to the DI about murder.
Katie Straw was young, which did make her death very sad. But she had no life insurance or significant assets, which made it unlucrative. When all was said and done, Whitworth’s gut told him that this was just an unhappy young girl who’d taken the easy way out.
‘Hold that thought for now,’ he said. ‘Go and sort out Noah. Send Rachel back, would you? Need a word.’
* * *
• • •
The pathologist’s report was not particularly helpful.
‘Cause of death was drowning, that’s clear. No sign of a struggle . . . no sexual assault . . . not much by way of unusual marks. Wear and tear from being in the water, like you’d expect. Scar tissue on the arms, I’d say from burns, but it’s a few years old. And . . .’
She peeled back the sheet, like a hotel maid stripping a bed.
‘More scarring. Tops of the thighs. Here – and here. From the placement and the precision, I’d say they were self-inflicted. But again, they’re old.’
She pulled the sheet back over the body, covering it to the neck.
‘Doesn’t tell you much,’ Whitworth muttered. ‘Self-harm’s fashionable these days.’
Brookes was right. As it stood, they had no better theory than suicide. People did kill themselves, after all. It was a fault in their brain chemistry, he supposed.
Noah had reported Katie missing when he got back from Glasgow to find her gone but all her things still at the home they’d shared for the past year. Investigating officers had found an arsenal of antidepressants in her bathroom cabinet. Citalopram, paroxetine, sertraline. Milligrams upon milligrams.
It wasn’t exactly a stretch to think she might have taken her own life.
Noah hadn’t known what the drugs were. According to Brookes, who had been there at the time, Noah had seemed to think they were for some kind of opaque gynaecological problem.
It sounded like she had been a clever girl. Graduated with a First from the University of Exeter, or so her employer seemed to think. No one had tracked down a degree certificate yet. She had worked in Widringham’s shelter for battered women. A professional do-gooder.
Spending all day soaking in other people’s relationship problems, then going home to Noah. Whitworth wondered if she’d died of middle-class disappointment.
* * *
• • •
Whitworth let himself out of the mortuary room and walked down the hall to the car park. Brookes was standing by their unmarked car, peering at his phone. He had transferred to them from Manchester, and Whitworth occasionally got the impression that Brookes wasn’t impressed with the calibre of crimes they dealt with in Widringham.
‘Noah get off okay?’
‘Called him a minicab.
Cabby didn’t look too keen to take him.’
‘We’ll get him in for a chat tomorrow, once he’s over his hangover,’ Whitworth said. He didn’t need to elaborate on why. It was standard procedure to grill the boyfriend when a woman died. ‘Any luck with the victim’s employer?’
Tasks like getting in touch with Katie’s boss made Whitworth glad he could pull rank. He had never personally had to deal with Valerie Redwood, the woman in charge of the women’s shelter where Katie worked, but she was known in the station for having all the cooperative spirit of a wet sack of concrete.
‘Melissa told her we were coming,’ Brookes said.
‘Got the address okay, did she?’
Brookes looked blank for a second, so Whitworth clarified.
‘They keep the locations of these places need-to-know. You know.’
‘Of course. Yeah. Melissa got it for me.’
‘Smart of you to get one of the girls in the station to ring her up,’ Whitworth commented. ‘She’s not too fond of’ – he swung heavily into the passenger seat and shut the door with a thud – ‘you know. Menfolk.’
He gave a little grunt of laughter. Brookes didn’t.
‘’S’probably just her job,’ he said.
Whitworth felt embarrassed. It was the same kind of embarrassment as when Jennifer told him that his jokes were past their sell-by date.
‘Well. You’re probably right. Still, no harm in a joke. She’s not got much of a sense of humour, by all accounts. You’ll need to watch yourself.’
* * *
• • •
As Brookes wound the police car around the slumped shoulders of the hills surrounding Widringham, Whitworth found himself yawning.
He was meant to be relaxed, restored, loved-up, after whisking Maureen off to the Yorkshire Dales for the weekend.
Twenty-five years of marriage.