by Jessica Moor
Whitworth walked over to the bridge wall and pressed its height into his body, leaning forward as far as he dared. It didn’t come up even to his hips. For Katie Straw, it would have been around waist-height.
He hinged forward, looking down into the water. It appeared harmless, even inviting, churned into a feather-soft foam which glazed the jagged edges of the dark rocks. You’d never know, just from looking at it, how cold it was. That its clarity concealed a chilly bite; that it could extinguish a human life in half a minute.
Drowning was an unpopular method of suicide, Whitworth knew that. It was too imprecise for most people. Too hard to commit to.
The pathologist had found a quantity of mud underneath Katie’s fingernails. His best guess was that she had clawed at the riverbank as she was dragged along by the current. But that didn’t necessarily mean she hadn’t wanted to die. Maybe the desperate grasping was just the reflex of a dying animal.
Whitworth got back into the car, and Brookes drove on.
* * *
• • •
As soon as they arrived back at the station, Melissa dashed towards them, awkwardly pulling down a skirt that was just that little bit too tight. Her face was red and her hair was already escaping from its ponytail.
‘Where’s the fire?’ Whitworth joked, but Melissa didn’t laugh.
‘This is what I’ve been able to gather on Katie Straw. Or rather, the victim. I don’t know . . . Obviously, we don’t know what her real name is.’
Whitworth took the papers she was thrusting at him. Scanning them, he saw that Melissa was right. It seemed that, to all intents and purposes, Katie Straw didn’t exist.
She had cropped up in Widringham two years ago, working in some caf and volunteering at a care home for the elderly for six months. After that she’d started her employment at Widringham Women’s Aid.
‘What about her house?’ Whitworth probed, frowning. ‘Passport? Birth certificate? Bank statements? Surely there must have been something?’
‘Nothing.’ Melissa shrugged. ‘It’s crazy.’
It is bloody crazy, Whitworth thought grimly. I can certainly foresee a crazy amount of faffing around with computer databases instead of working to find out what actually happened.
He dreaded the thought of talking to DI Khan about it before they had all their ducks in a row. But, he supposed, at least he had the joy of delegation to fall back on. Let Brookes deal with it. Young people found this sort of thing much easier, anyway.
He poured hot water over his instant-coffee granules and, without bothering to stir it, carried his mug over to Brookes’s desk.
‘There’s your open-and-shut suicide case,’ he said, dropping the pile of papers on to Brookes’s desk. Brookes grinned, eyeing Whitworth’s mug.
‘That for me? Sweet of you.’
‘Fat chance. Find this girl and I’ll consider making you a tea. Only consider, mind.’
‘What do you mean, find her?’
‘She’s got no . . .’ Whitworth found himself struggling to explain the extent of the absence. It wasn’t just that Katie Straw had no paperwork, no back story. It was that she seemed to have achieved something that was supposed to be so impossible in this day and age. True anonymity.
‘ . . . She’s got no . . . no footprint in the world.’
Brookes picked up the papers, scanning them, and whistled.
‘She’s not even on Facebook.’ He looked up at Whitworth. ‘Everyone’s on Facebook.’
Whitworth snorted. ‘We’ve got no legal record of her on any database in the country, but never mind that. She’s not on bloody Facebook.’
‘What can I say? The robots are taking over.’
‘Speaking of tech and all that,’ Whitworth continued abruptly, Val Redwood’s face jumping unbidden into his mind, ‘for God’s sake get one of the computer geeks to work out where all those nasty messages are coming from. I want that woman off my back.’
‘Aye aye, Cap’n,’ Brookes replied, saluting. He grinned over to where Melissa was hovering ten feet away. ‘We’ve got it covered between us, haven’t we?’
Melissa nodded eagerly and hurried back to her desk in a scramble of performative haste. For a few seconds, Whitworth noticed that Brookes’s eyes were lingering on her backside.
He could see why a young man would like Melissa. She was fleshy, in that way that irresistibly made you think of what it would be like to grasp at her, but not so attractive as to be unattainable. Still, Whitworth shot Brookes a stern look. At first Brookes didn’t seem to notice but, as he caught Whitworth’s eye, he corrected his expression to one of perfect professionalism. Whitworth breathed a bit easier. He could understand the impulse to look, but he also understood that there would be consequences if there was anything more than looking.
‘We’ll meet at the victim’s house tomorrow morning,’ Whitworth said, his tone bright and encouraging. He wanted to encourage the professional side of Brookes to stay at the fore, and apparently Brookes’s generation needed plenty of encouragement. ‘Hopefully, that’ll shed a bit of light.’
He patted the younger man on the shoulder.
‘Go on. You head home now. We could be in for a long few days.’
11.
It was a repeat. How could it be another fucking repeat? Why did no one here ever think to change the channel?
Nazia realized that she was tapping out the rhythm of the Morse theme song on the arm of the sofa. She forced herself to stop and lay her palm flat. In her mind, she was still tapping.
She wanted to ask Jenny to go for a walk, but she had a feeling Jenny wouldn’t want to go outside. She looked like the stripped outline of a tree in winter. It didn’t seem fair to subject her to the February wind. Nazia wanted to be considerate. So she went by herself, shoving her woollen beanie on to her cropped head. Her ears were always cold these days.
There were two men standing in the hallway. At first, Nazia just nodded vaguely at them, but then she stopped dead.
It was weird how quickly she’d become unused to the sight of men. The older one made a show of friendly smiling as she pressed her back against the wall of the entryway to allow them past.
The guy looked like a fucking Fisher Price man, all made up of spheres – a shining bald head, a nose that finished in a round pink bulb, weirdly fleshy lips. Red-nosed, blur-featured. Hammy.
The other guy was shorter, darker, slimmer. His eyes were very wide, in a way that made him seem too young to be in a position of authority, but his features were drawn more sharply than the first’s.
She didn’t bother returning the show of friendliness. She wasn’t scared. She just didn’t want to have to act friendly towards them.
As she stepped outside the front door she noticed a strange car across the road. It probably belonged to those two cops, she told herself.
She headed down the street. It was a walk she often took. She found that her feet were pounding out the rhythm of the Morse theme song, which was dancing tauntingly around in her head.
A few houses down from the refuge she passed a man. Older. He didn’t look like anyone in particular, but still Nazia’s heart thudded. Angie’s old man, maybe? Come to finish her off? She shook off the thought. No need to become paranoid. She’d end up like Jenny if she wasn’t careful.
But then again, maybe it was better to end up like Jenny than like Katie.
* * *
• • •
The last time Nazia’s feet had carried her this way – towards the bridge – had been just the previous week. On Thursday. The last day she’d seen Katie. They’d had one of their weekly group sessions, which Val insisted on and which Nazia hated.
Nazia looked to her side, imagining last week’s self walking beside her, her face reddened with irritation. She’d like to feel some of that irritation now. Anything was better than the numbness that ha
d gripped her since the news of Katie’s death.
Katie had always been very into what Val called ‘peer support’. In practice, that meant sitting around the kitchen table while Katie wrote words like ‘power’ and ‘control’ in Sharpie on big pieces of paper then looked around at them hopefully.
Those sessions always made Nazia feel like she had wandered into the wrong classroom by mistake. When Sonia had talked about how no one had believed her when she said her husband was hitting her, Nazia’s stomach had knotted – it could have been guilt or annoyance, she wasn’t sure. What was for sure was that, if Nazia had gone to the police, then no one would have doubted the origin of her bruises. No one would have told her that she must have done something to provoke it. Nobody would think she was capable of provoking anything.
‘Who says anything about shared experiences?’ Nazia had asked on that final day, after a particularly awkward silence. ‘Who says I’ve even got anything in common with . . .’
She hadn’t finished the thought out loud, but her eyes had been on Lynne.
‘We’ve all got different experiences, of course,’ Katie had said. ‘It’s about finding those common threads that exist between all of them.’
Nazia had been shredding a plain Hobnob into the lap of her stiff new jeans. ‘You’re looking for a link that isn’t there,’ she said.
‘It’s about patterns of behaviour,’ Katie continued, as if it were an answer. ‘So, say that instead of a domestic partner it was your father, for example –’
‘It wasn’t,’ Nazia interrupted. ‘My dad’s lovely. A sweetheart. You’d be lucky to have a dad like him.’
She hadn’t been sure if that was really the truth, or if she were trying to compile a version of her life that was fit for human consumption.
‘Okay. Sorry,’ Katie continued. ‘I didn’t mean to imply anything. I’m not talking about any of us in particular. Let’s just say a figure of power.’
Nazia snorted again.
‘Sabbir’s my little brother. He doesn’t have any power.’
It felt true.
When the two of them were small, Sabbir had followed her around devotedly, mirroring her every move. There had always been a blunt-instrument quality to him; he was totally incapable of delicacy or precision. His hugs were rough and warm.
He always came out with the stupidest things, and really seemed to mean them. That was true for the gym phase, the God phase, the Jordan Peterson phase.
‘It doesn’t sound like you understand him all that well,’ Sonia said coolly.
‘Why’s it my fucking job to understand him?’
‘Well –’
Sonia might have been about to say something insightful, but Nazia wasn’t in the mood to listen, so she interrupted out of principle.
‘He beat the shit out of me and now I’m the one who’s got to put the effort into understanding him?’
‘We’re all people,’ Sonia responded. ‘We all do things for a reason. And if you don’t understand the reason, then how do you expect to be able to do anything about it?’
‘Why? So you can give him an excuse? Like Angie’s old man used to do with the booze?’
Nazia jerked her head towards Angie, who was sitting with her head bowed, as if in prayer.
‘You said he was really into religion, though.’
‘He was into religion. He’s not religious. They’re not the same thing.’
Nazia could feel her cheeks burning. She knew her voice was defensive, and she wished she knew just who it was that she was trying to defend. Why should she have to defend anyone?
‘This is pointless,’ she muttered. Then she stood up and walked out, scattering the plate of biscuits in her wake. No one said anything.
She had stormed out of the house, her chest full of fury. Fuck Sonia. Fuck confrontation. Fuck Angie. Fuck Lynne. Fuck them all.
That day she followed the sound of the water, just as she was doing now.
‘So when’s the wedding, then, Naz?’
Fuck Sabbir.
Nazia kicked her trainer into the February mulch that slicked the pavement.
He’d come home from . . . somewhere. The gym or the mosque or the ice-cream parlour, wherever it was that he went to show his better self. Teeth bared like a smile, but not a smile. Maybe if she had pretended to be scared of him, it would all have been fine.
But he was her little brother.
Her mother was convinced that Sabbir was in a gang. The government was probably convinced he was a would-be jihadi. But the only thing that Nazia was convinced of was that Sabbir had never really committed to anything. Not to the protein shakes, not to learning Arabic, not to studying hard at school so he could become a surgeon, like he said he wanted.
Sabbir had never followed through on anything. That didn’t stop her from looking around the streets of Widringham now, convinced that he was following her.
But there was no one on the road except for some middle-aged man sitting in a car, frowning at his iPhone. Lost, probably. Why else would anyone ever come here?
‘So when’s the wedding, then, Naz?’
‘Could ask you the same question,’ she had shot back. ‘Been hearing all sorts of rumours about you and some Polish girl at school. Oh my God! Does this mean you’re going to have a Catholic wedding?’
Maybe that had been cruel. Sabbir’s face dropped.
‘Turned you down, did she?’ Nazia stepped forward to scratch at his patchy beard, like she was rubbing a dog under his chin. ‘You know, you’re not fooling anyone with this.’
That was when he grabbed her.
Even now, a hundred miles away, walking down a road in a town no one had ever heard of, Nazia felt herself being thrown off balance by the force of his movement.
The fractured scream could have been her mother, or it could have been Nazia herself. She could hear it now, blending with the whine of the strong north wind.
Sabbir looked her straight in the eye.
‘I’m not fooling anyone?’
Even then she hadn’t thought he’d hurt her. Even now, she still didn’t, though walking this fast made parts of her body ache from the injuries, which still weren’t fully healed. Because though the two of them had drifted apart over the years, there were still parts of Sabbir that Nazia understood far better than she understood herself. Because long before she had ever understood herself as I, she and Sabbir had been Us.
She didn’t believe it then; she didn’t believe it now. But it had happened.
She had never felt unsafe in her body before. Never felt commanded, crushed by pain. Force and flesh and fist over and over against soft stomach, bone giving way.
Bone doesn’t break with a sudden snap. It splinters, slowly.
Then it was over and there was only a distant tugging.
She couldn’t move.
That was the part she would never be able to understand. She couldn’t move. It was impossible to believe now, when her feet were skimming so quickly over the paving stones she could kid herself she could fly.
He had sawn off her plait with a kitchen knife.
‘There,’ he said, holding it in his hand like a piece of roadkill. ‘Maybe that’ll teach you a lesson, you fucking dyke.’
* * *
• • •
So here she was. Leaning on the stone wall of the bridge, watching chunks of ice break away and be carried down the valley by the swift current.
And Katie, too, less than a week ago, before the police, before Nazia spent the night staring at the ceiling and wondering what it would be like to drown. Katie, catching up, standing next to her on the bridge, the packet of Hobnobs in her hand. Her face had been pink with the cold.
‘Sorry about that,’ Nazia said, even though she wasn’t.
Katie shrugged. ‘I think it was probably helpf
ul for you. Setting some boundaries.’
Yeah. Boundaries. As if they were any compensation for what was missing. As if that made it okay that those other women looked at her face and wrote her story for her.
‘You don’t understand,’ Nazia said. She hadn’t meant to say it out loud – it sounded so lame, so childish.
‘No. I probably don’t. We’re doing our best, but we’re not perfect. I get that.’
‘There should be places for people like me. Where we don’t have to explain ourselves.’
‘There are. Culturally specific services for South Asian women. Indian, Pakistani – you know.’
Maybe Nazia imagined the little jerk of Katie’s head towards her at the word ‘Pakistani’. But maybe she didn’t.
‘I’m not Pakistani,’ she said coolly. ‘My family are Bengali. From Bangladesh.’
‘Right. Sorry.’
‘So . . . “culturally specific”? Separate but equal, you mean?’
‘The idea’s that it’s easier to recover from trauma when you’re not having to explain your background to everyone.’
Nazia’s chest clenched. On the one hand, she hated the idea of being filed under ‘different’ like that. On the other, she didn’t think she could bear to hear Val referring to ‘your community’ one more time, or getting confused about who in her family had beaten the shit out of her, and what barbaric cultural disease had made them do it. Forced marriage, so-called ‘honour violence’ – it was all the same to Val.
‘Or rather, there were,’ Katie said. ‘They’re closing. No funding.’
‘That’s fucking bullshit.’
‘I know. I’m really sorry.’
Nazia didn’t quite see why Katie was the one who had to apologize for everything, but she’d take what she could get. For a while the two women just stared out at the river in front of them, and neither of them spoke.
‘It isn’t what you think it is,’ Nazia said after a pause.
‘What isn’t?’