M.J. Ford - Keep Her Close

‘I’ll take you upstairs first,’ said the estate agent. ‘Save the best parts until the end!’

Jo waited in the entrance hall while the estate agent led the Daleys to the first floor. She heard various exclamations of surprise and delight as they inspected the bedrooms, the family bathroom, and as they came downstairs, both were smiling. They checked the living room, the study, and the under-stairs cupboard before going to the kitchen.

‘Oh wow!’ said the woman.

Jo drifted in behind them. From the slight tension in the estate agent’s face, Jo guessed he’d been fully briefed on the background to the marketing of The Rookery. The brutal murder of Detective Ben Coombs, not ten feet from where they all stood. The kidnapping of William Masters, her six-year-old nephew, from the upstairs bedroom by a psychopath. With a vague smile pasted across her features, Jo found her eyes drifting to the island, wondering if the cleaners had missed even the tiniest spot of blood. Dylan had plunged the broken bottle right through Ben’s carotid. The coroner said he’d probably lost consciousness in a matter of seconds. He’d have known that was it, thought Jo, and it brought the sudden threat of tears to her eyes, which she surreptitiously blinked away.

The Daleys, though, were oblivious. ‘The light in here is amazing!’ said the man, gazing up at the glass panes of the orangerie-style extension.

‘And those bi-folds open right onto the garden,’ said the woman. She touched her stomach as she said it, and Jo wondered if she was pregnant, imagining her children gambolling in and out of the kitchen in a scene of domestic bliss. Or maybe they already had kids. A house this size didn’t make sense for a couple.

Jo looked briefly out of the back herself. The branches of the trees at the bottom of the garden were bare, giving a view out towards the fields. Sally Carruthers’ barn, where she and her husband had kept Dylan Jones for three decades, had been levelled, leaving a bare patch of earth. She looked at her watch. An hour until her shift started.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I really must be going.’

‘That’s all right,’ said Mrs Daley. ‘I think we might do another circuit.’ She looked to her husband, who nodded happily.

‘Shall I draw up the paperwork now then?’ asked the agent, with a cocky smile. ‘Only kidding … take some time to think about it.’

‘Have you had many other viewings?’ asked the young man.

The briefest pause. ‘A few, yes. But I happen to know the vendors would entertain any offers, even if under the guide price.’

You bet they would , thought Jo. She wondered about the logic of not being completely honest with the potential buyers. These days, even though the survey wouldn’t explicitly say ‘Someone was murdered in the kitchen six months ago’, a perfunctory search of the address online would bring up a host of news stories laying out the gory details. She even considered telling them herself. Imagine if they moved in, then found out …

The estate agent was giving her a wary look as if he could read her discomfort. Offloading The Rookery would probably garner some serious kudos in the sales office. Three per cent well earned.

‘Nice to meet you both,’ she said.

The woman frowned. ‘Sorry, do I know you from somewhere?’ she asked.

Maybe the front pages of the Oxford Times and most of the national press? She’d been variously described as a ‘Hero Detective’, ‘Brave Policewoman’, and in one of the tabloids, ‘The Clown Killer’. Thames Valley Police had insisted on a photo shoot, much to Jo’s dismay. Another attempt to polish her up for public consumption. To ‘control the message’, as the media officer had said repeatedly.

Jo shook her head. ‘I don’t think so.’ She bid the Daleys goodbye, and breathed a sigh of relief to be back at the front door. She decided then and there that she’d never visit the house again.

‘You can keep my key,’ she called to the estate agent.

She drove away, taking the longer route to avoid Sally’s bungalow.

She wondered about dropping in to see her mother at the nursing home. It had been only a couple of days since her last visit, and that hadn’t gone brilliantly. Mrs Masters had made accusations that staff had helped themselves to some money she had squirrelled away at the back of a drawer. She had insisted that Jo find the culprit, which left her with the unenviable task of mediating between the staff and her mother. In the end a compromise had been reached. From then on, all of Jo’s mum’s petty cash would be documented, and stored in the home’s safe.

Jo took the bypass out towards Wheatley. The issue with the money was a minor awkwardness, because otherwise, reconnection with her mum had been an unexpected joy. In her lucid moments, they talked about Dad and happier times. Madeleine Masters had no idea of the ordeal her family had undergone that year. It wasn’t even a conscious decision not to tell her, more a tacit understanding that the news would unlikely penetrate the thick fog of dementia anyway. There’d been some worry that Will himself might bring it up – after all, he was only six, and could hardly be expected to maintain the family subterfuge – but so far he hadn’t. Unsurprisingly, he wasn’t keen to relive any of that night. Even with his trauma therapist, he was apparently silent on the subject, preferring to focus discussions on his latest passion: astronauts.

Jo reached the home – Evergreen Lodge – and pulled in along the tree-lined drive. She normally brought flowers or chocolates, but she didn’t think her mum would care. Most the sweets went in a cupboard, to be dished out to staff anyway, and the flowers always wilted in the overheated atmosphere of the residents’ rooms. At the door, she was about to press the buzzer when her phone rang. It was St Aldates station.

‘What’s up?’ she answered.

‘You busy?’ said DI Andy Carrick.

Jo looked through the reinforced glass panel. Mrs Deekins was sitting in her normal spot in the corridor, staring at the opposite wall. She could almost smell the place already. Overcooked food, disinfectant, sadness. Radiators cranked to max.

‘Not especially.’

‘Head over to Oriel College,’ said Carrick.

‘What is it?’ asked Jo.

‘Missing person,’ said Carrick. ‘Signs of a struggle. A student called …’ he paused, and Jo guessed he was checking his notes, ‘Malin Sigurdsson.’

‘You there already?’

‘Division meeting,’ sighed Carrick. ‘Pryce is on his way though.’

‘Course he is,’ said Jo with a smile. ‘I’ll be about fifteen minutes.’

She returned to the car, wondering what awaited at Oriel. Missing people were reported several times a week. Most showed up within forty-eight hours, and unless it was a minor, the police rarely got involved. But indications of violence escalated the case to another level.

She appreciated Carrick giving her the call. Despite being the toast of the town in the summer, she’d sensed the Detective Chief Inspector, Phil Stratton, keeping her at arm’s length for the last few months. There’d been a couple of murders, one a straightforward domestic, the second drug-related, but she’d been sidelined on both cases in favour of Dimitriou and the new kid taking over from the mother-to-be Heidi Tan, Detective Constable Jack Pryce. Sure, they were both competent investigators, but Jo knew she was being treated with kid gloves. Indeed, when she’d asked for a quiet word with Stratton, he’d said as much, though he’d used words like ‘operational sensitivity’ and ‘workplace welfare’. The simple fact was, no one higher up seemed to understand what was going on in Jo’s head. How had she been affected by what had happened? Was she a liability? Perhaps Dr Forster could give an answer in her report. What had she meant that she’d ‘support’ more sessions, anyway – that Jo was still fucked up in the head somehow?