Keep You Close by Lucie Whitehouse
Prologue
Before she opens the door – before she even sets foot on the drive – she is on her guard. She knows he’s there, he’d told her he would be, and yet the house is dark. If he’d left for any reason, he would have texted – Gone to buy wine. Back in ten – but when she checks her phone, there’s no message.
The moon slips between a gap in the clouds, sending a momentary gleam across the house’s blind eyes. It is still early, not even seven, but with the emptiness of the street, the absence of any human-made sound, it feels like the small hours. The only movement comes from the wind shivering the leaves on the evergreens, rattling the thin branches of the willow that bows its head on the drive.
She glances over her shoulder then crunches across the gravel and up the steps to the front door. The carriage lamp is off so she locates her keys in her bag by touch.
A strange pressure on the door makes it harder than usual to open, as if someone is pushing against it from the other side. When she turns to close it behind her, a gust of wind seems to come from within the house and slams it shut. In the silence, the sound is violent.
She is not imagining it: the wind is coming from inside the house. There must be a window open but where? Not at the front, she would have noticed. But why would he open a window at all? It’s below freezing outside.
Something’s happened. As soon as she thinks it, she knows she’s right.
‘Hello?’
She puts on the light and the hallway materialises around her. The draught, she realises, is coming down the stairs. She stands at the bottom and calls up but again there’s no answer. The sitting-room door is open and she slaps the light on, goes quickly to the fireplace and picks up the poker.
When she reaches the landing, fear forms a fist in her stomach. The cold air is coming from the very top floor. The studio. She climbs the final set of stairs with her pulse thrumming in her temples.
In the glow of the moon she sees the chaos of sketches strewn across the worktable and the floor. When she sees the open skylight, the stepladder underneath, the poker drops to the floor with a heavy clang. She is almost sick with fear but a break-in, even an intruder, is not what frightens her now.
As she starts to climb the ladder, her hands are shaking.
He is waiting for her at the top, perspective making him a colossus, his feet planted wide. The wind snatches at the sheet of paper in his hands but she doesn’t need to see it to know what it is. She has lost him forever; that is clear – his face is closed. Hard. Vengeful.
The paper buckles and cracks, wind-whipped. There is nothing she wouldn’t do, literally nothing, for it to be torn from his hands and erased from his memory. To go back even one day.
Behind him is the roof-edge. She can feel its power, the force field it exerts, the weird push-and-pull. It’s so raw, unprotected – a four-storey fall, death almost guaranteed. He sees her looking and steps to one side.
‘Do it,’ he says.
One
The parcel of fish and chips was warm under Rowan’s arm as she agitated the key in the lock. ‘Come on.’ She pulled the key out then jammed it in again just as the automatic light timed out and plunged the hallway into darkness. At the same moment, she heard the first shrill note of her ringtone.
‘Christ’s sake.’ Leaving the key in the lock, she pulled the phone from her pocket. Its screen was a bright rectangle in the dark. A London number but she didn’t recognise it. ‘Yes?’ Impatience made her brusque.
‘Rowan?’
She hadn’t heard it in years – a decade – but she knew the voice immediately. The sound of it was otherworldly, seeming to reach through time as well as space, light from a distant star. Her heart gave a beat like a punch in the sternum. It was a moment before she could speak.
‘Jacqueline?’
‘Yes. Yes, it is. Oh, I’m so glad I’ve got you – thank God. I didn’t know if you’d still be on this number – you weren’t on her phone. I’ve found an old address book but most of the stuff in here’s useless – everyone’s moved and changed number or . . .’
‘I haven’t.’ Rowan’s stomach clenched and, despite the cold, there was suddenly sweat on her forehead. Something had happened to Marianne. ‘How are you? How—’
A low keening sound came wheezing down the line, a single corrosive note. It went on and on, only for five or six seconds in reality, but to Rowan it felt like forever. She knew that sound, how time stretched around it, became irrelevant, a joke. The aching, hollowed-out kind of loss that could never be made better.