The Keeper

by Jessica Moor

  ‘Nothing,’ Melissa reported on returning to the station, her mouth pressed into a thin line.

  ‘Well, then.’ Whitworth paused, arranging his features into what he hoped was a contemplative, worldly look. Brookes and Melissa were looking at him intently. It was an odd one, this case. He was so used to knowing roughly who’d done what and why. The small-town curse of everyone knowing everyone.

  He raised his eyebrows. ‘Any ideas?’

  ‘We’ve got to go back to the refuge,’ Brookes said. ‘If someone followed her to Amir’s, that’s where we need to start.’

  Whitworth sighed, then took out his phone. His personal phone. Just a cheap little thing, which Jennifer seemed to view as an endless source of embarrassment and laughter.

  His fingers knew the standard Morse code of apology so well he didn’t have to look at the screen.

  Won’t be home for dinner. Sorry. Love to Jen x

  He put the phone back in his pocket, not waiting for a reply.

  15.

  Then

  Love. Love for Jamie.

  First, it is carefully cultivated. A fragile stem that Katie doesn’t trust to survive on its own, that shrinks back every time he says something wooden or crass. Then, somehow, fed carefully by long mornings lying in bed, skin to skin, the love becomes a vast creeper that covers her entire being.

  She isn’t sure when that feeling took on a life of its own, when she stopped thinking how convenient it would be if she loved him back and just knew that she did. Loving someone is important – it gives her a sense that, no matter where she goes in the world, there is always an elastic band stretching her back towards a firm centre.

  That firmness itself was always attractive. Katie’s friends have always lovingly described each other as ‘flakey’ – it’s something of a joke in their group. But Katie had never wanted to be flakey. She finds that, when there is someone as solid and as dependable as Jamie around, part of her personality melts away.

  Jamie does odd jobs. Fixes hinges on doors that have hung at odd angles for ever. Tests the smoke alarms. Nails in stray bits of carpet. Large things become no more fixable than they ever were, but small things can change.

  The flakey friends seem to melt away a little, too. She can no longer bring herself to haggle endlessly about who has time to meet up when, all juggled around thankless new jobs and live-in boyfriends.

  ‘Don’t bother with them,’ Jamie advises her. ‘If people don’t bother replying to messages, then they don’t care about you. Why should you care about them?’

  ‘My friends care about me,’ she says, more because she feels she ought to be angry at his words than because she actually is.

  He just blinks.

  ‘I didn’t say your friends,’ he says. ‘I just said people.’

  ‘I’ll get back in touch with them soon. Properly. It’s just a lot right now.’

  ‘You don’t need to tell me that. What help have they been with any of the stuff you’re going through?’

  ‘I can talk to them,’ Katie says. It’s not true, but it’s supposed to be the bastion of female friendship, so she says it.

  ‘What good’s talking? What have any of them actually done?’

  ‘What can they actually do?’

  ‘You tell me,’ Jamie says with a shrug.

  * * *

  • • •

  If anyone were to ask her why she loves him (no one would, of course; that would be overstepping), she imagines her reply – that it’s because of his fundamental goodness. In a sense, it’s old-fashioned. She’s trained her brain so hard to think of things like moral relativism and the infinite complexity of things that there is something so honest, so simple, so beautiful, in the way he uses words like ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. Moral truths as hard and simple as darts on a board. He believes in things like honour and pride. Taking care of the people you love.

  Besides, her mum likes him, she says he’s a sweet boy, and she is glad that Katie is with someone she can rely on. In the past, Katie hasn’t taken much notice of her mum’s advice, but it feels prophetic now.

  Jamie does his part, becoming something of a son or husband for the house. He goes to the supermarket to get the food shopping and refuses to be paid back. He becomes a permanent fixture at the Sunday dinners that her mum still makes without fail, though the myopathy in her fingers is now so bad she struggles to chop the vegetables. She always asks Jamie to carve, even though he doesn’t know how and hacks off clumsy pieces of beef and flops them awkwardly on to the waiting plates. He cuts enormous, wedge-like slabs for Katie then winks at her mother.

  ‘She’s a growing girl,’ he says.

  Her dad used to say that.

  * * *

  • • •

  Katie’s dad is gone. That is his defining characteristic, to the point that she struggles to remember what it was like to love anything but the vacuum he left. Everything she was, she had become for him.

  He had been a professor of philosophy. An intellectual. He had taught her cleverness like a little parrot, instilling in her the basics of formal logic, then setting her a problem as if he were winding up a mechanical toy.

  ‘Tell me, Katie,’ he’d say. ‘If all ladies are too fussy, and your mummy’s a lady, what does that mean?’

  He loved the idea of his clever daughter, loved creating a special club between the two of them. Even back then, Katie’s mother was thin, pale, insubstantial. The kind of woman that would always be easy to leave out.

  Her parents had been sweethearts from the age of seventeen. When she was little, Katie liked to set photographs of the two of them together into a timeline, from when they were still mostly children. As her father grew, in size, in status, in blooming cheek and belly, her mother seemed to shrink. When they were young, it was noticeable that her mother was nearly two inches taller than him. At some unplottable point in the photographic history of their lives, that seemed to stop being the case.

  They had been the two cleverest children in their class at grammar school, always competing for the best marks. She had done slightly better in her A levels than him and had applied to Cambridge because he had and she wanted them to be together.

  She got in; he didn’t.

  He went to University College London, stayed on and on, eventually became a professor. Katie wondered whether that had been because of his sheer staying power, or just because he had selected a subject for his PhD that no one else had wanted to study.

  They had never married. He thought it was too conventional. She didn’t push him, she told Katie, because he wasn’t the kind of man who responded to being pushed.

  Katie remembered overhearing him saying at a party that he could not possibly marry her mother because the only thing they knew about the self was that it was in a constant state of flux. That the very atoms which constituted his being would mostly be replaced in twenty years – then how could he say he was the same person? How could he commit himself to something like marriage, when the self was so ephemeral?

  She remembered, after that, him laying a proprietorial hand on her mother’s bottom when he thought no one was looking.

  In a way that she could never put into words, she had been frightened of her father. At the same time, she had despised her mother for being frightened of him, too. The fright was somehow permanently glued together in her mind with that image of his hand on her mother’s bottom – she had been wearing a dark red dress. She never wore high heels, because he didn’t like the height difference between them accentuated. She saw the fear in the lines of her mother’s body in that moment. The faintest jump, then the determined stillness.

  Her father was right about the self being ephemeral, at least. The atoms that constituted his being exploded apart in a car crash. He had been drink-driving. That was an illogical thing to do – but then, he’d never been a consistent pers
on.

  He burned. First in the charred wreckage of the car, and then what remained was burned again in the crematorium.

  Katie had scattered his ashes in the Lake District. Her father had taken them on family holidays there, telling her about the Romantic poets as her little feet scuttled after him, tripping over themselves to keep up. She thought he probably would have been pleased with his final resting place – although, when second-guessing his wishes, she found that there were great blanks for her to fill in.

  She had never been angry with her father. The idea of being angry seemed remote and inaccessible; it lay beyond the threshold of what she was allowed to feel. The person who manned the gate, who exacted tolls from whatever passed through it, that was her father. She wasn’t angry with him, because she didn’t have his say-so. He had monopolized anger in their home. He never shouted, not exactly. He had seethed, raged, stormed, but never shouted, which made it difficult to lay before him the case that he was the one that infused all the air with such a sense of anger.

  I never shout, he would always say, as if it were relevant.

  He would have hated Jamie.

  Jamie doesn’t believe in things like philosophy. With the work he does every day, Katie can respect that. Things work, therefore they are.

  Her mother isn’t the kind of person whose existence was laid out in theoretical terms. Her mother lives in a reality that ignores intellectual protestations.

  Katie thinks about the atoms and cells multiplying themselves inside her mother’s body, the creation of Katie herself. Later, the gestation of womb cancer, a cruel echo of what had been before.

  16.

  Now

  Charlie and Angie Woods had been married a great many years. Forty-nine.

  Two children, no grandchildren. Not yet. But you hope, don’t you?

  Five pints a night, Charlie, if he could. Two, if Angie had anything to do with it.

  One mortgage, paid off three years ago. A business between them, sold off to leave them comfortable. A comic double act all their lives, as far as the rest of the village was concerned, the Jack and Vera Duckworth, bickering away happily, running their village post office.

  Charlie beat Angie.

  Three days after their wedding, Angie had turned up outside her mam’s back door with a black eye. Her mam had let her in and given her a mug of tea and words that were kind but not too kind.

  It had been a cloudy Sunday, one of those pallid days when it’s hard to hold on to the memory of things.

  Mam had put arnica cream on the bruises and sent her home to her husband. The trick was to never let the bruises fully heal, to never remember what life was like without them. Then it didn’t seem like too much to bear.

  When Angie was a little girl, if she had an apple with a bruise on it, her mam had always told her to put her thumb over the bruise and eat around it. If you thought about it that way, it was Charlie, not Angie herself, who wore the bruises, and Angie who put her thumb over them and loved the pieces of the man in between.

  * * *

  • • •

  They had house meetings in the refuge. Every two weeks. Angie never knew what to do with herself, always wondered whether she was expected to speak or if she could stay quiet. She felt herself babbling too much these days – she didn’t know how to stop.

  It had been such a strange feeling when Angie had arrived at the refuge. The way that she could speak freely. She didn’t say very much – the other women probably thought she was as dull as ditchwater – but she could say what she liked.

  Cup of tea, lovie?

  Oh, isn’t she just a gorgeous little girl?

  So much energy, those boys of yours. It’s just fabulous. Wish I could have some of it for myself.

  Angie didn’t pretend to herself that she had anything new to say. But that wasn’t the point.

  She was no longer a secret-keeper. She no longer had to examine every little thing she said, checking it for defects, in case some of the truth sneaked through. In case the riverbanks overflowed and the world found out what Charlie was – what Angie was. How terribly she had failed.

  She had carried the load for so long it had become part of her. Most days now, she was stretching herself out, exploring the ache it had left. There were only so many times you could spring up and offer to make a round of tea when everything strayed a little too close to the truth.

  The meetings hadn’t been so bad with Katie. With Katie, it had been chocolate biscuits and cups of tea, the door to the playroom open to keep an eye on the children. Katie had been quiet in the way that she dealt with things, but deal with them she did. Val tended to dissolve under a swelling volume of words about nothing in particular, vague promises that something would be done and a near-fanatical attention to taking minutes.

  But last night had been different. At first, they had all been silent, stealing only the briefest of looks at one another before snatching their gaze away to restore it to their cups of tea, to the plate of plain digestives, to the empty seat where Katie had always sat, on the chair that wobbled. She had always insisted it was fine.

  Val didn’t sit like that. Angie wouldn’t have said that Val was fat, but she always seemed to be crammed into whatever space she was occupying.

  Once the police officers had left, she had droned on at some length about how she wouldn’t let them anywhere near the refuge again, about how there was a duty of care that she took very seriously. About how they were all safe there.

  It was astonishing how exactly her repetition of the word ‘safe’ coincided with the terror growing in the room.

  ‘I know you must all have a lot of questions,’ Val said. Angie studied her cup of tea.

  ‘Will there be a funeral?’ she asked. A nod to decency, at least.

  ‘I can only presume so,’ Val said. ‘But that’s . . . that’s really not up to me. I’ll keep you informed as things . . . as it all develops. It might not be for a while.’

  ‘Why not?’ Sonia spoke this time.

  ‘It’s . . . well . . . if they were to decide to treat the death as suspicious. You know. Can I make anyone another tea?’

  ‘When you say suspicious . . .’ Sonia persisted, ‘do you think they are treating it like that? You know. Suspiciously.’

  ‘It’s really difficult for me to . . .’

  ‘Suspicious as in murder?’

  Angie hadn’t meant to speak, but the air had built up too much inside her. In her mind’s eye, a tall, indistinct figure, half beast and half man, unfolded itself from a dark corner and began to stalk the streets of Widringham.

  She looked down so that no one would see her cheeks reddening.

  ‘There are . . . well, shades of suspicion. It could very well have been a suicide. We know Katie was depressed.’

  ‘Not depressed enough to chuck herself off a bridge.’

  Nazia never normally spoke up in house meetings. Nazia never normally did anything that might imply she actually belonged there.

  ‘You never know how depressed people are. What’s going on for them.’ Lynne’s cheeks had been flushed as she spoke.

  Angie hadn’t been looking to find anything wrong with Katie the last time they’d spoken. That was one of the worst things about being a victim. It made it impossible to see anyone else.

  * * *

  • • •

  Angie opened the door less than a foot and awkwardly distorted her shoulders to squeeze through the narrow gap. The only thing that she wasn’t trying to make smaller about herself was her smile, which she turned on Peony.

  ‘Hello, my sweetheart.’

  Lynne bunched herself up on the sofa, even though Angie was hardly an expansive woman herself. Surely there was room for both of them.

  ‘Mind if I join you?’ Angie said. She felt shy saying it – Lynne was the kind of woman who’d always
made her feel a little nervous, but Angie was starting to realize that she could overcome that. In fact, she could overcome all sorts.

  ‘Not at all,’ Lynne said, her cashmere-clad body sliding along the sofa with a luxurious whisper.

  Angie’s phone gave a loud ping. She took out her glasses and frowned at it, holding it in her hand as carefully as you would a baby bird.

  ‘Now, is there a way for me to make that bloody sound go away?’

  ‘There’s usually a button . . .’ Lynne said. ‘On the side?’

  Angie prodded for a few seconds, then grimaced.

  ‘There you go. I think I’ve turned it off by accident.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Probably for the best.’

  She sat down on the sofa. ‘They can be so bloody persistent, men. If you told me my Charlie had learned to text just so he could bother me . . .’ She looked up at Lynne quickly. Her voice sounded so silly. Tinkling. ‘Sorry, pet,’ she said. ‘Don’t you worry about me.’

  ‘Frank was persistent,’ Lynne said. She sounded like she was trying to do a tone of sisterliness. ‘He’s a very . . . He knows what he wants.’

  Lynne’s little Peony was sitting on a turquoise plastic seesaw, rocking violently back and forth.

  ‘Not like me,’ Lynne said.

  Angie didn’t say anything. The seesaw thudded rhythmically on the floor of the playroom.

  ‘Do you ever think about going back?’

  The police had asked Angie, again and again, why she had never left him. She had left him, she tried to explain, left him dozens of times, but it was only ever for an afternoon or so. She would drive round and round their town, where it always seemed to be drizzling but never properly rained. She would walk through the botanical gardens, clutching an old nylon shopping bag with spare pairs of knickers and the unwashed pillowcases from her children’s beds. Then she would pull herself together and go home to make the kids’ tea.