by Jessica Moor
So she doesn’t really mind that Jamie insists.
Before they leave for the pub he spends what feels like hours deciding where they are going to park. Katie figures it’s a manifestation of his nerves. She’s a little nervous herself, actually.
‘We could get the bus, you know. Then you could have a drink.’
‘I don’t need to have a drink.’
‘Right.’
He isn’t really a big drinker. That’s on the roster of things she likes about him. She’d never had sex sober before she met him.
‘We don’t need to rush to get there,’ she tells him. He’s driving on the edges of the speed limit. They’re in his car – a small but determined turquoise Vauxhall Corsa he seems to see as an extension of his own body. It jerks at every traffic light and seems to be trailing the car ahead a little too closely. But Jamie’s a good driver, and Katie has never even had a lesson, so it isn’t really for her to say.
When Jamie sees the cost of the car park he swears under his breath. Katie can’t help but smile at him. It’s just a teasing smile, but he frowns.
‘What’re you laughing about?’
‘Nothing.’
He holds her hand firmly on the walk between the car park and the pub, grasping it in a way that feels both more and less than affectionate. She leads him towards an empty table in the beer garden and sits down, moving over on the bench so that he can sit beside her. But he remains standing.
‘Four glasses, right?’
She blinks. ‘Right.’
He returns from inside a few minutes later, with a pint of Coke in one hand and the tangled stems of four wine glasses in the other, a bottle of white clutched to his side in a cooler. Katie glances at it. It isn’t their usual house white.
‘You didn’t have to get the expensive one,’ she says.
‘I wanted to make a good impression.’ He smiles and pulls her close, his kiss warming her forehead. She lingers for a moment, crushed into him. Then she sits up, wraps her scarf again around her neck and nestles into it, scanning the entrance to the beer garden. Jamie cuddles her to him, feeling her shiver.
‘Why’re we sitting outside? You’re cold.’
‘Some of the girls smoke.’
‘So?’
‘We always sit outside. Even in the winter.’
* * *
• • •
They have been waiting for the best part of half an hour. The wine bottle still sits unopened in the cooler, the glaze of condensation gradually dissipating from its surface. Jamie stares determinedly at the dancing surface of his Coke without taking a sip. Katie glances at her phone occasionally as the messages begin to trickle in on the WhatsApp group.
Be there in fifteen minutes.
Sorry, bus problems, see you in twenty!
OMG haha so sorry I just woke up from a snooze but will be there ASAP KATIE I CAN’T WAIT TO MEET THE NEW BOY
‘They’ll all be here soon,’ Katie says.
‘How soon?’
‘Five minutes.’
When they do arrive, one by one – Ellie, Lucy, Lara – the noise in the beer garden seems to amplify tenfold. There’s the usual exaggerated kissing, the eager compliments, the tight hugs that hark back to their schooldays, when they were each others’ main source of physical contact.
‘Jamie got a round in,’ Katie says, gesturing towards the wine bottle in the middle of the table. Lara turns around to where Jamie is sitting. He stands up and she sweeps forward to kiss him on either cheek. Katie sees a slight frown crossing his face.
‘That’s so lovely of you,’ she says. ‘I’m actually in more of a red mood right now, so I’m just going to pop in to the bar. But we’ll definitely drink yours later. Thank you.’
Though Lara is nominally straight, she always seems to have more girls on the back burner than Katie has ever had boys. She’s currently shooting the occasional winning smile at Jamie as she recounts her current knotty involvement with both halves of a married couple. Nothing’s happened. Not yet. Katie knows it’s a matter of time. Lara’s boyfriend doesn’t know.
‘So the thing that I’m trying to figure out for myself is – is it still cheating, even if it’s with a girl?’
The others suck on their cigarettes and look contemplative, but Jamie jumps in immediately.
‘Yes.’
There’s something in the quality of his yes that seems to cut through the smooth, blurry mood. Katie begins to shiver and Lara glances over at her.
‘You cold, babe?’
Jamie’s head snaps round to look at Katie, and within a few seconds his jacket is off and wrapped around her shoulders. It has something of that swaggering-teenage-boy smell, with the too-strong deodorant. But it’s warm from his body.
‘Yes,’ he says again, pulling the zip of his hooded sweatshirt to under his chin. ‘Yes, of course it’s still cheating.’
‘Why?’ Lara’s face is lit up with a half-smile, her eyes film noir. ‘Why, though?’
Jamie shrugs. ‘Why not?’
He seems to retreat from Lara’s gaze and instead turns to look at Katie. ‘I can’t explain it,’ he says. There’s something slightly panicked in his face, something appealing that makes Katie feel like she needs to defend him.
‘I can’t explain why I think it, it’s just what I think. I think it’s just as bad. If anything, as a guy, I think it’s probably worse.’
He angles slightly back towards Lara, but without really meeting her eyes. ‘You know, you’ve got your morals, I’ve got mine, that’s cool. But I reckon that if you actually asked your boyfriend how he felt, he’d probably say the same thing.’
Lara’s current boyfriend – she always has one – is a floppy PhD student who always seems far more interested in discussing the semiotics of sex than in actually having it. He says he thinks the distinction between the intellect and the libido is arbitrary. Lara has said in the past that he watches a lot of porn.
‘He’s not so big on monogamy,’ Lara says, gesturing the idea away with a flick of her cigarette. ‘You know. In theoretical terms.’
‘Okay.’ Jamie shrugs. ‘I guess it’s cool, then.’
Lara keeps looking at him for a second, as if she’s expecting him to say something more. Her forehead creases into a picturesque frown. But then she shrugs and stubs her cigarette out, turning her head to look at Katie.
‘Come to the bar with me, lovely?’
Katie glances at the bottle of wine in the cooler and realizes that it’s empty, though she has only had one glass herself. She doesn’t like to drink too much around Jamie. The others have poured themselves half a glass here, a drop there, and now Jamie’s offering is gone.
Katie drains the last mouthful of her own and makes to stand up, but Jamie cuts her off.
‘I think it’s probably time for us to shoot off, actually,’ he says.
He reaches over and takes Katie’s hand, scratching the back of it lightly with his short fingernails.
‘Oh.’ Katie leaves her grip slack. ‘Maybe we could just stay for one more?’
Jamie glances around them, as if slightly embarrassed, and then leans forward, saying at only a slightly quieter volume, ‘We need to get back to your mum, Katie.’
‘Mum’s okay,’ Katie starts to say, but the sympathetic looks have already started and Ellie has risen to her feet to squeeze her in a tight hug. Lara stands up, too, and walks around the bench, her heels asserting themselves against the concrete in a sharp tock tock tock. She hugs Katie, enveloping her in a cloud of Chanel No. 5.
‘So lovely to meet you,’ she says over Katie’s shoulder to Jamie.
Then she kisses Katie once on each cheek and then, very lightly, on the tip of her nose, her breath leaving a wine-scented trail.
‘Oh, you are just looking gorgeous. Glowing. It’s so good to see
you.’
Katie’s used to Lara. She knows that her friend is just in the habit of seduction and that whenever there are no strangers around to catch in her tractor beam she’ll always let it fall on her friends.
Jamie has stood up sharply, and there’s something different about him. He’s become a wall of silence. He accepts the array of hugs and kisses and the two of them walk away from the beer garden and through the passage, back on to the main pedestrianized street. Katie pushes the cuff of his jacket on to her wrist and makes to take his hand, but it’s rigid and does not return her grasp.
She says nothing.
It’s only once they’re back in his car that she allows herself a little sigh. She isn’t sure whether she meant him to hear it or not, but by the way his head snaps around she feels she must have sounded a klaxon.
‘What?’ he says.
‘Nothing.’
‘I don’t know what you’re blaming me for,’ he says as he swings the car out of the multistorey and on to the main street. There isn’t much by way of traffic and he starts to pick up speed, though you couldn’t exactly call it speeding.
‘I’m not blaming you. Blaming you for what?’
‘That.’ He drags his eyes backwards towards the town centre via the rear-view mirror. ‘All that talk about . . . what she gets up to.’
‘What about it?’
‘It made me uncomfortable.’
‘But that’s just Lara,’ Katie says. ‘She takes a bit of getting used to.’
‘Don’t really want to get used to that. She’s a slut.’
The word stings, but Katie lets it sink in for a moment. She waits too long before replying quietly, ‘Don’t say that about her.’
‘Why not? I’m not calling her a bad person. But you can’t deny that her behaviour’s really slutty. You can’t blame me for calling it how I see it.’
‘Maybe that says more about you than it does about her,’ Katie mutters.
For half a second she thinks about telling him to stop the car, that she can get out and walk home. She doesn’t know what implications that would even have, but it feels like the right thing to do right now.
But then she’s thrown forward, her seat belt cutting into her bare neck and shoulders.
Jamie has slammed the brakes on and stopped dead in the middle of the road. He’s looking at her with statue eyes.
She stays very still. There’s a fear in her. A fear that is as old as she is, familiar as breathing, that fills her ears in the silence the engine has left.
‘What was that?’ he says. His tone is perfectly mild. His hands are clenched on the steering wheel. In the harshness of the light from the street lamp Katie can hardly see anything but those white knuckles.
‘Get out of the middle of the road, Jamie,’ she says softly.
‘What was that?’ he says again. Nothing of him moves. Even his voice seems disembodied.
‘Nothing. Sorry.’
The sorry is automatic. Almost like a tic. The structure of him seems to ease at the sound. The fear slackens. There’s a rush of something like euphoria. She’s a child again, even though now she’s in the front seat.
‘We’ll say no more about it, then,’ he says. They drive on.
10.
Now
Brookes drove the two of them back to the station.
He wasn’t the chatty type and, if Whitworth were honest, that was probably one of the main reasons he’d warmed to the boy. Melissa always seemed to be dissecting things out loud, and Whitworth found that irritating. He needed chunks of quiet in his day so that he could switch off his conscious mind and let the facts of the case stew together.
The car eased out of the posh part of town and through the terraced streets where Whitworth had grown up and raised his family.
Whitworth fancied himself a bit of a local historian; he admitted it. His knowledge had been sharpened by his time as a beat copper, when directing tourists had turned into chats about topography and architecture. People had those sorts of conversations with policemen back then.
He knew every single inch of this little town. Yet there were some days – days like this – when it could still leave him at a loss. Like when a girl turned up dead and she seemed not to truly exist.
Soon it would be his sixtieth birthday, which would mark the end of thirty years of service in the police force. Then – no more crime, no more suicides, no more of the murky areas in between. Instead, he would spend his days doing walking tours for tourists. Just for tips. For the pleasure of it.
Now that the rain had passed over, the day was cold and bright. Police work felt like such a waste. Whitworth had long ago stopped believing that there was any point in trying to exorcize evil and exact justice. Better to just get on with your own life, taking the good with the bad.
And there was bad in this town, of course. Drugs, and crime, and ruined lives. But they were mostly confined to a group of seventies concrete blocks on the other side of the valley and so lay out of sight and mind. They didn’t detract from the charming impression that a first glance of the place always invoked in visitors. They came by train, on the graceful set of grey arches which had been built by the Victorians in a more hopeful time.
The river, which cut its way through Widringham at a bold angle, was bisected by a medieval-era bridge on three low, humped arches. That view – the view of the place where Katie Straw had gone to her death – was the mainstay of the postcards and the shortbread tins. It was Widringham keeping up appearances and, for the most part, it worked. The town was starting to get glowing write-ups in the magazine supplements of Sunday papers. Some preening bloke who Whitworth distantly remembered from his schooldays had become a celebrity chef and had returned to the town to open up a boutique hotel.
That was supposed to mean, everyone knew, that they were on the rise. But on days like this it was difficult to believe that anywhere really changed.
* * *
• • •
The first time Whitworth had been sent to a domestic-violence case, he had been new on the job and a bit of an idealist.
The woman, who had called the police herself, had been tiny, maybe four foot eleven. Irish, like Whitworth’s mother. One of those who’d started out in Liverpool and washed up in Widringham with a bloke who’d seemed like a good bet at the time but had proven otherwise.
She’d been torn to shreds, that little scrap of a woman, with her braying voice. Her flowered dress had been spattered with blood.
Moved to fury, Whitworth had punched the husband square in the face. He had been a bigger man in those days and, generally speaking, the police had been able to get away with a little bit more. The husband splayed on the floor. Whitworth stood over him. Really angry. Fit to kill.
But then he’d felt a faint, ineffective pummelling in the region of his kidneys. He turned to find the little wife, her face made ugly by the stretch of swelling, in an ecstasy of rage.
‘How feckin’ dare you? Don’t you lay a bloody finger on my husband!’
How feckin’ dare you?
It was then that Whitworth had learned never to guess at what was going on in other people’s relationships. That the words ‘my husband’ held some kind of unaccountable magic. That you couldn’t just blunder into people’s lives and assume you had the measure of them.
He had seen that same man sobbing on his knees, his arms around his wife’s waist, while she patted him on the head distractedly, as if she were soothing a small child.
How did women like Val Redwood account for that?
A couple of years ago they’d had domestic-violence training at the station. Whitworth had managed to beg off most of it, citing his heavy workload, but he’d still had to sit through a tedious, ancient video. A couple of drama students affecting the working-class accents of some unspecified region. Men chucking plates about. Wo
men weeping and cowering.
Whitworth couldn’t think of a single woman in his life who would ever cower like that. Some women allowed themselves to be dominated, maybe. But some didn’t. And those that didn’t . . . oh, they could wear you down.
Or maybe that was just what marriage was.
‘Hold on a sec . . .’ Whitworth raised his hand to get Brookes’s attention. ‘Pull over here, would you?’
The car was about to cross the bridge. That bridge.
The forensics team had already swept the area, but they hadn’t found anything of interest. A few fibres that appeared to match the victim’s trousers, but there were plenty of people in Widringham who wore Primark jeans. The bridge probably had hundreds – even thousands – of fibres and skin cells in the crevices of its grey-black stone. Yes, Katie might have stood there recently. But so what?
Whitworth got out of the car and stood, listening to the white noise of the water.
According to the pathologist’s report, the freshly thawed river had been just two degrees Celsius at night. It always had a vicious quality at that time of year, barging its way down the valley.
Of course, you could never assume, but Whitworth thought it was safe to rule out the possibility that Katie – if that really was her name – had just fancied a late-night swim.
Could she have fallen in?
Sure, if she had been completely reckless, and had no sense of balance to boot. But he couldn’t imagine that this girl – this sad, reserved girl, whose own boyfriend seemed to have barely known her – had been dancing along the top of a bridge late on a February night.
Her body had been carried along by the current for well over a mile. Out of town. It had probably taken her no more than thirty seconds to actually die once she had entered the icy water. She would likely have been paralysed by the shock of the cold, that shock giving way to euphoria, and the euphoria to nothing at all, then carried along by the early-spring rush.