Keep Her Close

‘Superb, gritty and realistic.’

Mel Sherratt, million-copy bestseller

‘Well written and sizzling with tension. A cracking debut.’

James Nally, author of Games With the Dead

‘A fabulous, page-turning thriller.’

Jacqui Rose, author of Toxic

‘I absolutely loved this well written, riveting debut mystery and would have happily given it far more than five stars. I really hope this is the first book in a new series and look forward to reading more books by this author in the future.’

Goodreads reviewer

‘Hold My Hand is an absolutely brilliant debut novel from a very talented author. It has an elaborate plot which is both convincing and exciting, with twists and turns, an unbelievably scary and thrilling conclusion … in fact, everything I want from a crime thriller.’

NetGalley reviewer

‘A unique plot and storyline – I enjoyed the book immensely. It really makes you think.’

Goodreads reviewer

‘Spectacularly assured.’

Amazon reviewer

‘Excellent, and incredibly compelling. I didn’t want to put it down!’Amazon reviewer

‘A belter of a crime novel!’

Amazon reviewer

‘Very atmospheric, with acute observations, and full of twists and turns. Great characterisation.’

Amazon reviewer

Keep Her Close

M.J. FORD

Copyright

Published by AVON

A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

Copyright © M.J. Ford 2019

Cover design © Charlotte Abrams-Simpson 2019

Cover [photograph/illustration] © Millennium Images

M.J. Ford asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008293772

Ebook Edition © March 2019 ISBN: 9780008293789

Version: 2019-02-13

Dedication

For Mum and Dad.

Table of Contents

Cover

Praise for M.J. Ford

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Epilogue

About the Author

Keep Reading …

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

Chapter 1

WEDNESDAY

Dr Forster kept a box of tissues on the table, and for the last five weeks Detective Jo Masters had managed not to reach for a single one. It had become a point of principle during their sessions, a way of telling herself she was above all this. So she’d remained stubbornly dry-eyed through all five sixty-minute meetings, even though they’d touched on plenty of painful subjects, personal and professional – her relationships with her parents, her brother, her colleagues, her aspirations, and her fears. And Ben, of course. Lots of Ben. The psychologist was surgical at times, probing with questions that slipped almost unfelt, like a scalpel blade into the deepest recesses of her past, exposing places, incidents, and people she hadn’t thought about for years.

People like Frank Tyndle. It was just another anecdote, an incident early in her relationship with Ben – and she’d managed to deflect the conversation the first time he’d come up. She wasn’t sure why Dr Forster was returning to it now, so near the end of their allotted time together. It was almost like she knew there was a weakness there, something to be excised.

‘I thought we’d covered Tyndle already,’ said Jo, nonchalantly.

‘Not really,’ said Dr Forster. She checked back through the pad of notes on her lap. ‘You mentioned him, in our first session, when we were discussing your miscarriage. You said something about karma, but we ran out of time. Do you believe in karma?’

The counsellor looked up, her expression quizzical. Jo was ninety per cent sure Dr Forster’s brown frizzy hair was a wig, maybe as a result of cancer treatment. What was certain was that she’d drawn her eyebrows on a fraction too high, making her look perpetually curious.

‘It’s just something people say, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t know,’ replied Dr Forster. ‘Is it?’

Jo sneaked a look at the minimalist clock-face on the wall. Twelve-forty. They had twenty minutes left, and so far Dr Forster had shown herself to be assiduous with her time-keeping.

‘Tyndle was a nasty piece of work,’ she began. A wrong’un from the start, as her friend Harry Ferman would have said. ‘He ran the largest drug gang in Kent, and he was untouchable. The investigating team had bugs on all his known locations, but he was careful. Mostly. Had a temper, though. We got a break when one of his lieutenants, a guy called Jon Ruffell, nicknamed Rusty, tried to take over and failed. Tyndle went ballistic, and the listening device picked up that he was going to shoot the kneecaps off Rusty’s sister. We knew he had access to firearms, so it was credible.’

‘Go on,’ said Forster.

Jo took a sip of water. ‘The problem was the investigating team didn’t have an address for Jon Ruffell’s sister. The tribunal later said that was a failure of intelligence, but that’s easy with hindsight. Ben and I were just back-up, so the plan was for us to follow Tyndle and direct the firearms to come to us. We knew it was going to be a close call.’ Christ, she’d been scared. She’d thought Ben was too, but he hadn’t shown it and would never admit it. He could be like that in an argument too. Just switch off. ‘Our orders from the co-ordinating officer were clear. We were observing and tracking only. Now there was a gun in the equation, anything more was deemed an unnecessary risk. Ben knew it too. He didn’t believe in heroes.’

It came back to her in spikes of adrenalin that made her skin tingle. From the moment they’d been in pursuit, she’d been thinking about the end game. What would they do if the firearms didn’t get there in time? If Tyndle reached Joanne Ruffell’s address first? How could they stop him?

‘Tyndle must’ve made us for police, even in plain clothes, because suddenly he detoured. Pulled a U-turn through traffic, and sped off the other way. We followed. I was all for calling it off, discontinuing pursuit, but Ben had that look in his eyes. He said Tyndle was armed and that now he knew he was busted, he was too dangerous to leave on the street.’

‘And did you agree?’ Dr Forster’s interruption made Jo focus on her.

‘Ben was my superior.’

‘That isn’t what I asked,’ said Dr Forster. Jo had noticed the counsellor liked to have her questions answered. She could be steely like that.

‘I tossed it up the chain,’ said Jo. ‘And it came back in the affirmative. We were to stay in pursuit, blues on, in the hope Tyndle would think again. They just didn’t want that gun on the streets, in Tyndle’s hands, under any circumstances. They’d found the sister’s address, but the armed response was re-routing to us. Parameters hadn’t changed. We weren’t to engage directly with Tyndle.’

Jo wondered if the doctor actually had access to the hearing papers and this was some sort of test. It was all in there, in the transcripts and statements. They only told half the story though. Such operational tactics looked fine on paper, but on the ground it could get … complicated. There were split-second decisions to be made.

‘I remember we were doing close to ninety on an urban A-road, cutting through traffic. I trusted Ben behind the wheel. That was part of the training. And he was good. Then the lights went red ahead. The junction wasn’t busy. And Tyndle wasn’t braking. I shouted for Ben to stop. I think I did. But I can’t blame him for not listening. If I’d outranked him, maybe he would have. He was single-minded. Tyndle was armed, and we couldn’t let an armed suspect escape.’ She paused, her mouth dry, and drained the rest of the water from her glass. The next bit was the hardest part to relive, and she’d never spelled it out to anyone before. ‘The ambulance was suddenly there, right in front of us. It apparently had its sirens on, but I didn’t hear it. There was no way Tyndle could’ve swerved. His bonnet caught the rear end of the ambulance, spun it round and up onto two wheels. Then it went over. Metal ripping. Sparks everywhere. Like something out of an action film, but a lot more real. Horrible, really. It slid up a bank, hit a tree.’

She remembered Ben pulling over, looking at her, and asking if she was okay. She’d thought that was odd, because she was fine.

‘Training took over. I called an ambulance – another one. We got out of the car. I saw Tyndle in the road. No seatbelt, it seemed, so he’d gone straight through the windscreen. Ben told me to leave him. To prioritise. While he went to secure the firearm, I made my way to the ambulance. The paramedic was climbing out through the driver’s window.’ He’d been bleeding, and obviously dazed, dragging a leg with the foot kinked up at the wrong angle, enough to make her retch. ‘The poor guy just said, “In the back”. I left Ben with him and circled to the rear doors. I couldn’t hear anything inside. The mechanism must’ve got stuck in the collision, because I couldn’t get the fucking thing open. In the end, a guy came out from the pub across the junction. He brought a fireman’s axe – Christ knows where he got it – and together we managed to use the head to lever the doors.’

She tried to drink again, but there was nothing in the glass.

‘Would you like some more water?’ asked Dr Forster.

Jo shook her head. She wished she’d never started the story, but she knew she couldn’t leave it hanging. In her mind, the images were fresh.

‘The other paramedic must’ve been travelling with the patient,’ she continued quietly. ‘He was on the floor, unconscious. The patient – a woman – she was pressed against the wall, still strapped into the stretcher which had gone over.’ Jo remembered her face. The utter disbelief. ‘She was talking … well, mumbling really. She was in a night-dress, hitched up around her waist. I … I got inside, trying to work out what to do. Who to help first. There was so much blood. My shoes were slipping in it. I mean, fucking pints of it. More than you’d think a person could lose, you know? I went to her, and then I realised what it was she was saying, over and over again, gripping her stomach. She was saying “My baby … my baby … my baby”, like her brain was stuck on some kind of short circuit.’

Jo fell silent, so lost in the memories of almost ten years before that she didn’t even realise Dr Forster had stood up to offer her a tissue. Jo took it, and wiped her eyes.

‘She miscarried the foetus?’ asked the counsellor, sitting back once more.

In any other person, Jo would have deemed the tone insensitive, but she’d grown accustomed to the psychologist’s sometimes blunt questioning and exact use of language. Indeed, when everyone else around Jo spoke in euphemisms and platitudes about her last case – your ordeal, the incident, that night – it was actually refreshing to have a dose of the psychiatrist’s candour. She’d have made a good detective, Jo thought. No bullshit.

‘Yes,’ she said, screwing up the tissue. ‘They rushed her to hospital and tried to deliver by emergency C-section, but nothing could be done.’

Dr Forster leant forward slightly. ‘That must have been very upsetting.’

Jo glanced at the clock again. Officially there were seven minutes remaining of their designated hour together.

‘Of course,’ she said. For a long time, she’d blamed herself. Nightmares, insomnia, anxiety. It had been Ben who helped her heal.

‘And what happened to Frank Tyndle?’

‘He got eighteen years for the drugs and firearms offences.’

‘And for the death of the foetus in utero?’

Jo shook her head. She hadn’t been in court – by then she’d been moved on to Hertfordshire, for the start of her investigative training on the road to becoming a detective. ‘The woman had been on the way to hospital because of breach complications anyway. Hence the dash with the blues on. The prosecution couldn’t prove the baby would have survived in normal circumstances, so they couldn’t pin the death on Tyndle.’

‘What did Ben think of that?’

He’d been spitting feathers, she remembered, and it had kindled a long and almost personal hatred of defence barristers.

‘With eighteen years, there was a chance Tyndle could be out in half the time,’ said Jo. ‘Not that he was in much of a state to enjoy life. Going through the windscreen took most of his face off. Severe lacerations to the bone.’

Dr Forster cocked her head, completely unfazed. You wouldn’t be if you’d seen him …

‘Karma, perhaps?’ said the counsellor.

‘Ben thought so,’ muttered Jo. ‘Said he deserved everything he got.’

Neither of them spoke for at least thirty seconds. Jo looked at the screwed-up tissue in her hands. So much for holding it together …

Dr Forster put aside her writing pad, and placed her hands on her knees, looking at Jo like she was a rare specimen.

‘Do you blame yourself for what happened to Ben later?’ she asked.

With four minutes until the session ended, the question took Jo by surprise, telescoping time from the earliest days of her relationship with Ben to the final, terrible day when he was killed. It wasn’t like she hadn’t asked herself the same thing, or a version of it, a thousand times though. What if they hadn’t argued that night? What if she hadn’t left him alone and headed upstairs? What if she’d made the connections and arrested a suspect more quickly? Any number of minor actions on her part and he would still be alive.

‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘I blame Dylan Jones.’

With the words came the memories: Ben, collapsed on her brother’s kitchen floor, eyes still open but pupils dilated; the jagged edge of a broken wine bottle buried in his neck.

‘What about Dylan, then?’ asked the psychologist. ‘Did he deserve his fate?’

What sort of a question was that? Dylan was abducted as a shy little boy and turned into a monster through neglect. He’d committed terrible, terrible acts, but they all came as a consequence of his mistreatment. There was no karma there. No justice at all, cosmic, legal, or otherwise.

‘I think he was better off dead, after everything that had happened to him,’ said Jo.

‘A mercy killing?’ said Dr Forster. This time the surprise on her face looked real as well as painted on.

‘Maybe,’ said Jo, meeting her eye. In the end, there’d been no choice. Dylan had tried to kill Jo. It had been him or her.

One minute to go until she could leave. Dr Forster saw her glance at the clock.

‘It must be hard in your job,’ the psychologist said.

It was not a question but a comment, and such a vague one that Jo wondered if she was supposed to respond. What did it even mean, anyway? Being a woman in a predominantly man’s world?

‘Lots of jobs are hard. Isn’t yours?’

Dr Forster gave a rare smile. ‘It has challenges. Challenging patients. But you must see the worst in human nature. Awful things.’

‘That’s why we do it,’ said Jo. ‘To make awful things better. To deliver justice.’

‘And when you can’t – how does that make you feel?’

‘Part of the role,’ said Jo. ‘You move on. Do better next time.’

‘Sounds simple.’ The tone wasn’t exactly sarcastic, but there was a degree of challenge there that Jo didn’t entirely like.

The clock chimed.

‘I guess that’s it, then,’ said Jo, standing up.

Chapter 2

As Jo took her winter coat from the stand in the vestibule, Dr Forster emerged from the consulting room. She really was a tiny woman, little more than five feet tall, and away from her chair she looked quite fragile.

‘Detective Masters,’ she said, ‘the Welfare Unit mandated six hours as a minimum, but I’d be keen for you to continue. I feel there’s quite a lot more for us to talk about.’

Jo wasn’t sure that she agreed. Really, she felt she’d spent plenty of time in the past.

‘But it’s my choice?’

‘Thames Valley Police will ask me for a recommendation, but ultimately it is your decision,’ She paused. ‘But … Jo, don’t play down what you went through. And don’t underestimate the impact it could have on you psychologically.’

Jo started to put on her coat, trying to hold back the mental images from the previous case assailing her. Ben’s dead body, his throat slashed. Her nephew William’s terrified screams as he was snatched from his bed. The pale, distorted form of Dylan Jones as he tried to strangle her.

‘I won’t,’ she said. ‘This has been really helpful, but I just want to get back to work properly.’

‘I understand that,’ said Dr Forster. ‘How are you faring with the anxiety medication?’

‘I stopped taking it,’ Jo said. There was no reason to lie.

‘Fair enough,’ said Forster. ‘Are you doing anything nice for your birthday?’

Jo glanced up sharply. It wasn’t for a few days, but she was sure she’d never mentioned it. ‘How did you know?’

‘On your file,’ said Dr Forster. ‘I’ve an eye for detail.’

‘The answer is not much,’ said Jo. ‘Thirty-nine is hardly a big one, is it?’

‘After the year you’ve had, that’s a questionable assertion,’ said Dr Forster. ‘Goodbye, Detective Masters. Look after yourself.’

* * *

The grand Georgian house where Dr Forster had her practice rooms was in the leafiest part of north Oxford, between the Woodstock and Banbury roads. It didn’t take much detective work to establish that the sleek Mercedes coupé parked outside belonged to her, as the number plate read F0RST3R. That level of narcissism seemed rather out of character for the diminutive psychologist, and Jo assumed therefore it had been an ill-conceived gift, perhaps from a partner.

As she wrapped her scarf around her neck against a freezing wind, Jo felt the vibration near her hip. She reached a gloved hand into her purse for her phone. The text was from her brother.

Would you mind heading to the house? Estate agent has lost key! Viewing at 1.30. P x

It was twenty to already.

No probs, she texted back. How’s the beach?

Her brother had decided the family needed some time away, and Jo got that. For all the shit she’d been through that year, her nephew Will had suffered worse, and his school hadn’t put up a great fight about the absence. Not that ten days of winter sun would go far to erase the mental scars of being taken from his bed by Dylan Jones, a man raised in isolation and depravity, who looked like something from a horror movie.

Her phone pinged as a picture message came through. It was a selfie of Paul, tanned and healthy, seated at some poolside bar with what looked like a strawberry daiquiri, ornately garnished with a pineapple slice and a Jamaican flag.

Not jealous, she replied, pocketing her phone and pulling on her gloves.

And really, she wasn’t. Much. Though the thought of the sun on her face was appealing. It was quite some time since she’d had a proper break. In fact, the last prolonged period of annual leave had been Padua with Ben, about fifteen months ago. A top-floor apartment overlooking some piazza or other, a warm Mediterranean breeze tickling the blinds, the muffled chatter of the restaurant customers below. Afterwards, they’d calculated it was during the holiday that she’d conceived. Ben had even suggested that Padua would be an acceptable name if it turned out to be a girl.

‘Enough, Josephine,’ she muttered to herself.

She drove back out of Oxford towards Horton, the village where she’d grown up and where Paul, until recently, had occupied the family home with his wife and two children. Maybe she needed to talk to Lucas about going away. They’d been together almost six months, so a holiday wasn’t moving too fast. Somewhere hot preferably. Sandy. Cocktails (virgin for teetotal Lucas, obviously). Somewhere free from the bloody footprints of the dead. Lucas preferred winter sports, but surely he could be coaxed onto a windsurfing board. The estate agents selling her brother’s house – The Rookery – were under strict instructions to drive potential viewers in from the other end of the crescent. It seemed a rather pointless subterfuge to Jo – they’d find out soon enough what had happened nearby at Sally Carruthers’ ‘House of Horrors’, as the papers had called it.

Jo pulled up outside to find the estate agent and a couple already waiting. She climbed out of her car and apologised, then scrambled for the key to let them in.

‘It’s a beautiful house,’ said the young woman.

‘Oh – it’s not mine,’ said Jo quickly, as they walked inside. ‘My brother’s on holiday.’ She let the estate agent past as well, then turned to go. ‘I’ll leave you to it?’