The Keeper

by Jessica Moor

  ‘Some kind of fish?’

  ‘I got scared,’ Katie says.

  ‘What of?’

  ‘That he’d . . . that he’d find me . . . that he’d trace my phone call.’

  Shellie laughs. ‘I doubt he’s got that kind of equipment lying around.’ She rolls up her sleeve slightly and fishes the phone out of the jug between her thumb and forefinger, then lays it out on a piece of coarse blue tissue like a little drowned corpse.

  ‘Well, it’s one way to stop him calling you.’ She giggles. ‘Bit expensive, though. Wouldn’t do it as a long-term solution.’

  Katie is still staring at the phone. She reaches out her index finger and touches it lightly.

  ‘I don’t know his number,’ she says.

  Shellie gives a little shrug, holding eye contact the whole time.

  ‘Couldn’t call him if you wanted to, then.’

  * * *

  • • •

  Katie chooses Manchester. It’s just a place on a list of names, read out to her by Shellie in the same modulated, warm tone she uses for everything. Chester. Sheffield. Brighton. Bristol. Manchester.

  Anywhere out of what they call her ‘danger zone’.

  They buy her a bus ticket. Whoever ‘they’ is – whatever organization it is that Shellie works for.

  ‘We would do a train for you, but they’re so bloody expensive these days, eh?’

  Shellie doesn’t seem to let anything interfere with her professional brightness.

  Katie wonders whether, when Shellie gets home, she lets her face drop and allows the sadness and hopelessness that gets pushed back in the crush of the day seep out of every pore. She wonders whether she can let herself sit in it, or whether she can sluice it off in the shower or burn it away with the sting of swallowed alcohol.

  But Shellie just smiles again, and her face stays blank.

  ‘Right. So when you get to the bus station in Manchester someone will meet you and take you to the refuge. That all right?’

  It might as well be all right. Katie’s going to need a new working definition of what all right looks like.

  So she nods.

  * * *

  • • •

  All the time she’s on the bus she stares out of the window. The vast bulk of the coach feels fatal, as if the vehicle might take a turn too sharply and rock over on to its side. When they go under bridges she looks up and is almost surprised when they don’t collapse. When it starts to rain, she waits for the bus to skid and overturn.

  It’s late at night by the time she gets to the bus station. She stands there by herself as the rest of the passengers drain away. After a few minutes the only people left in the terminal are Katie and another young woman, lounging on her suitcase with her headphones in, her eyes half closed.

  ‘Katie?’

  A woman in her late thirties or early forties, her hijab tucked untidily over a bulky jumper and ill-fitting trousers, is smiling broadly at her. Katie nods.

  ‘Great. So lovely to see you’ve made it here safely. The car’s just round the corner.’

  Katie wasn’t expecting the Manchester accent to sound quite so foreign to her ears. Each vowel delineates a hundred miles’ distance between herself and Jamie, between herself and home. She follows the woman, who introduces herself as Yara, to a tinny-looking Ford Escort and gets in.

  ‘Good journey?’ Yara asks as she reverses out of the car park. Katie just nods.

  They drive for twenty minutes or so, out of the city and into a suburb with lots of tree-lined roads and red-brick Victorian houses.

  ‘Nice area,’ Katie says.

  ‘Lots of students live round here, so some of the houses are a bit run-down. However’ – Yara indicates and turns the car left with a decisive jerk of the wheel – ‘some of the streets are a bit better kept up than others.’

  They pull up to a large Victorian house, no different to the rest of the street, aside from a few small CCTV cameras outside and a slightly higher chain-link fence around the back garden.

  ‘It’s not what I expected,’ Katie says. She has imagined a hostel, a halfway house, with a drab manned reception area and beige walls, maybe with bars on the windows and a dreary canteen. Yara laughs.

  ‘Well, we don’t want to be anywhere dodgy, do we?’ She lowers her voice to a whisper, though there is no one around. ‘Not with the nasty pieces of work our women are getting away from.’

  Up a gravel drive past a neat row of wheelie bins to a very solid-looking front door. Yara keys a code into a metal keypad and a buzz ushers them both inside.

  ‘I know it’s a bit warm.’ Yara inserts a finger between the fabric of her hijab and her chin and puffs her cheeks out dramatically, fanning herself. ‘The women are always turning the heat right up,’ she says.

  She leads Katie through a cramped hallway and up a flight of stairs, which turns tightly up two storeys before coming out on to a narrow landing. She takes a bunch of keys out of her pocket to unlock a white door with a number 6 on it and steps inside to switch on the light. She pivots slightly to let Katie into the room then stands in the centre of the floor, smiling. It’s a kind smile, a boundaried smile.

  ‘I’ll let you get settled,’ she says. ‘I’ll be down in the kitchen. Ground floor, on the left. I’ll do us both a cup of tea.’

  She smiles.

  ‘Might even be able to find some chocolate biscuits. We’ve usually got some on the go here.’

  She steps back from the threshold, and the smile leaves her face to make room for another look; her messy, jolly features rearrange themselves into a steel-clad promise: ‘You’re safe here, Katie.’

  Katie is looking round the room, at the sloping ceiling, which has been painted neatly, if not too recently, at the single pillow and the polyester bedsheets, at the small pile of packaged items on the bed. Tampons. Body lotion. Mascara. Razors.

  She looks back at Yara and nods.

  48.

  Now

  ‘Sarge.’

  Whitworth turned to see Brookes hurrying after him, a piece of paper in his hand. He was grinning. ‘Mystery solved.’

  Whitworth raised an eyebrow. That was the kind of thing you said in a film, not in a police station. ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s Katie Straw. Or rather, Katie Bradley.’ Brookes thrust a photocopy of a birth certificate into Whitworth’s hand, then stepped back and folded his arms as if he’d just put the finishing touches on a sculpture.

  ‘Nothing fishy about it, as it turns out. Her parents were Eleanor Straw and Martin Bradley. Bradley left the family when Katie was fifteen, then died in a car accident a few years later. Drink-driving. Little to no contact with Katie. Eleanor Straw died of cervical cancer a couple of years ago. Looks like Katie was hacked off with her dad and decided to start using her mum’s name after she died. To keep it going or whatever. It wasn’t hard to find her.’

  ‘Did she change it by deed poll? Why didn’t we find a record of it?’

  Brookes shook his head. ‘Nope, just started using it. No record. Nice of her to make our job so much harder for us.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘Some feminist thing, I guess. Anyway’ – he grinned – ‘it gave us a bit of fun for a while, eh? Made it look like we had a proper mystery on our hands.’

  ‘No mystery, then.’ Whitworth’s voice was dull and soft. He felt blunted. ‘Just admin.’

  ‘Just good old-fashioned detective work.’

  Whitworth was still studying the birth certificate as if it held some deeper answer than name. Age. Date. Parentage. Place of birth. As if it gave him some real measure of this girl.

  49.

  Then

  She chooses Widringham because of the postcards. And the jigsaw puzzles. And the fudge boxes. Yara suggests it – the cost of living is cheap. After six months in the refuge, just the idea of independent living
seems to call out to her.

  She has searched for Jamie’s opposite and found it here, in this town laced with bleak, watery light and surrounded by heathery hills. The sky is big – big enough to keep at bay that permanent sense of claustrophobia.

  Sometimes Katie feels too exposed, but she accepts that this is the way it may always be.

  She maps Jamie everywhere. Large as a colossus, small as a heartbeat. She sees him in the body of every blameless man caught in the corner of her eye. She learns to greet these ghosts, and they learn to disappear when she waves at them.

  It grows gradually. Not so much a feeling of safety as an exquisite sense of space around her eyes.

  She learns to name the demon. To understand that, just as cities can fall without a shot being fired, a woman can relinquish herself, piece by piece.

  There are still days when it doesn’t make sense to her, when blaming herself becomes the easier option. Something in her DNA must have malfunctioned to make her stay with a man like Jamie.

  Working at the refuge sometimes feels like catching a whiff of some half-forgotten smell. All those women, crammed together. It’s like being back at her all-girls school. Not bitchy, which was always the complaint that came pre-levelled against large groups of females. It’s something heavier than that – the weight of requirement to always be the best, the kindest, sweetest and least troublesome person in the room. Surrounded by women who have lived the last few years (and, in Angie’s case, decades) under siege in their own skin, the effect is amplified yet remains unmistakeably the same.

  In her bones, Katie longs for the women to explode, to hurt the world instead of relentlessly and insistently continuing to hurt themselves. They move like mice around each other, continually apologizing for a stream of imaginary offences.

  Even though she knows that words are no good to any of them, she still wants to hear their stories. Perhaps that’s nothing more than a ghoulish greed she isn’t decent enough to shake off.

  She always thought Jamie was bigger than life. Bigger than her life, anyway. But she is starting to wonder if, after all, he might have been smaller. If everything he had said and done, everything he had made her feel, had been nothing more than the inability to see beyond himself, to understand that he didn’t have to act the way a man was ‘meant’ to act. He certainly didn’t understand anything about women.

  Maybe it was true, but it was too simple to be a good story.

  Nobody has a good answer. Not Katie herself, not Yara, nor later Val, and certainly not the psychologists and sociologists whose works she googles endlessly in the months after she comes to Widringham.

  She finds herself smacking up endlessly against the crash barriers of language. She can only guess at what lies beyond, and whether it would make her feel any better to articulate herself. It’s an article of faith that it would but, really, she isn’t sure.

  Her story with Jamie was written in sensations rather than words, so maybe words will never be of any use to her.

  It’s that search, that mapping of her own psyche, which has led her to Widringham Women’s Aid. She applies for the job shaking, and shakes all the way through the interview. Val is pleased by this – she takes it as a sign of dedication.

  There are a dozen daily moments of terror. It seemed so easy at the time to change her name but little threadlike roots reach towards her from her old life to remind her of a person called Katie Bradley. A person who inherited her mother’s money. A person with a P45 and a national insurance number. A person waiting at the other end of a background check. That person calls her back every day.

  She hasn’t caught up. Not yet.

  She doesn’t ask herself whether she feels less alive now, because she doesn’t want to know the answer.

  She missed her mother’s death.

  She got the news on the day she moved out of the refuge, two years ago now. According to the nurses, there wasn’t much to miss; her mother spent her final six months in a morphine haze. She didn’t dare go to the funeral. Typical of her parents is the way she has to say goodbye to them. Her father, scattering himself, asserting his presence. Her mother buried, melding with and decaying into the earth. Permanent yet absent.

  Being in Widringham helps. People look you in the eye; you don’t know if it’s out of hostility or curiosity, but you always know it’s out of something.

  It had been so easy to go unseen in London.

  There are days when she reminds herself again and again of the note she left him, until her whole consciousness seems limited to the edges of those sentences.

  I’m sorry. I’ve been unhappy for a long time, and I can’t do it any more.

  Goodbye.

  Katie.

  It wasn’t quite true. She knew that, even lying in the hospital after the operation, in the half-light of drugged sleep. She could have kept doing it. She could have disappeared, said yes, assimilated herself into Jamie’s name.

  But she didn’t want to.

  50.

  Now

  Katie’s body still lay on the slab in the morgue, with a label around her big toe like a lot in an auction house.

  Whitworth looked into Katie’s face. He imagined her standing before him, tears rolling down those marble cheeks like a Madonna. Or maybe she hadn’t been the crying type. He hadn’t known her, after all.

  Why am I dead?

  He had no idea what her voice had been like in life, but he imagined it sounding a little like Jenny’s. Both Jennys.

  ‘Because you killed yourself, my darling,’ he said aloud.

  They could release her body now. To who? Noah?

  Katie Straw deserved better, but there were no legal grounds for giving better to her. What was Whitworth to do – organize the funeral himself?

  The death certificate was completed for Katie Bradley, with the cause of death listed as suicide by drowning. One of the few bits of documentation the poor girl had.

  Bad luck. Case closed.

  They hadn’t managed to get hold of Jenny, but that didn’t matter much any more. She was like a rat, disappearing into the bowels of the city to live in the damp and shame. She didn’t know any different; maybe it was better for her in the end. She’d turn up, most likely dead from an overdose.

  Though nobody would dare to say it, there was some sense in the idea that people like Jenny were better off dead. You wouldn’t make a dog suffer through the kind of life she had. Besides, you had to draw a line somewhere, you had to make people take responsibility for themselves somewhere along the line. Else there was nothing.

  Peony Ward had been taken in by her mother’s mother. She was back in nursery, and her grandmother was insisting that she wouldn’t remember what she’d seen. Her grandmother was clear that the kid didn’t need any therapy. What she needed, the old woman insisted, was to be treated like a normal little girl.

  She drew pictures sometimes, with the red crayon.

  The case had received some attention in the Echo, though it wasn’t quite big enough and the victim wasn’t quite young enough or pretty enough for national news. Lynne Ward’s sweet face gazing out. Husband kills wife. Dog bites man.

  The way they reported it was that Lynne had been preventing her husband from seeing his daughter, which had driven him into a rage. When she had returned, Frank Ward had been unable to control himself. That was why he had stabbed her so many times.

  The only thing Frank Ward had insisted on, over and over, was that he hadn’t been the one hanging around the refuge.

  He said he had no idea who it was. If he’d known where Lynne was, he said, he’d have talked to her. Pleaded with her.

  Maybe he was saying that because it fitted better with his story, Whitworth thought.

  You had to look at the facts. A man, hanging around a refuge.

  A woman, turning up dead.

  Or m
aybe, just maybe, it was a goddamn coincidence. Maybe the man was just a man. You couldn’t place suspicion on every man walking down the street.

  Frank Ward had pleaded guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility and received a six-year sentence. Temporary loss of control caused by years of stress. High-powered job. The strain of looking after a mentally ill woman all those years. Fear for his daughter.

  He had cried in court. The judge had taken his remorse into account with the sentencing.

  Six years. He’d be out in three with good behaviour.

  51.

  Here’s the job.

  Let me show you how I do it.

  It’s okay. Don’t be shy. I’ve seen it all. People like some fucked-up stuff, but I know how to handle them.

  Tell me what it is you want. Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone. I don’t care if it was because your daddy touched you or because you hate women and you want to see me on my knees or because it’s the time of day or the direction of the wind.

  I don’t care what it is.

  Honest.

  Okay. Here we go.

  Where are we?

  Bridge. Pretty here, in the daytime, but fucking cold tonight, and I know cold.

  They can’t see me. You shouldn’t be surprised. Lots of people can’t.

  I can see the two of them, here on the bridge. Him and her. Any him and her.

  Let’s watch them, you and me. Just let it happen. Don’t think about it too much, okay? They don’t know you’re looking.

  Tears running down her face, in that pretty way men like.

  It’s so fucking ugly.

  They’re saying things, but there’s nothing to hear over the noise of the river, so the words don’t matter. He’s the only one who has them now and he can change them and he can forget them and then it’ll be like there were never any words at all and it won’t matter that I didn’t hear them.