You Still Have the Key

Chapter One: The Water Goes Down

The reservoir gives her back on a Tuesday, and I hear about it the way I hear about everything in Colthorpe now — sideways, through a wall.

I'm in the packing shed at Marl Hill with a wire brush and a bucket of rust remover, doing a job nobody asked me to do, because the alternative is sitting in the kitchen while my aunt pretends to read the parish newsletter. The radio on the shelf is tuned to the local station and mostly plays adverts for carpet warehouses. Then the news comes on, and the man reading it says the words *human remains* and *Whinmoor* in the same breath, and my hands go still on the brush.

A dog walker. Of course it's a dog walker. It's always a dog walker or a man with a metal detector. The water in Whinmoor has dropped eight feet in nine weeks of no rain, and the mud at the north end has cracked into grey plates like something baked and left too long, and a spaniel came back to its owner with a bone in its mouth.

A femur, the radio says. Adult. Female, probably. Police have sealed the area.

I put the brush down. I sit on an upturned crate in the dark of the shed, and I listen to the flies knocking against the one unbroken pane, and I find that I'm not surprised at all. That's the thing I'll have to be careful about, in the days coming. Everybody else will be surprised. I'll have to remember to be surprised too.

Outside, the afternoon is white with heat. Marl Hill Nurseries goes on for four acres behind the house, and it is all dying in slow motion: eleven glasshouses, six of them with their roofs half gone, the panes lying in the beds beneath like something spilled. The staging inside is blackened where the frost got into the timber and the damp got in after. Bindweed has come up through the floor of glasshouse four and is eating it from the inside, patiently, the way I imagine a story eats a family.

And at the far end, past the water tanks, the boiler house. Brick. Flat roof. One door, one shuttered window, one chimney that hasn't smoked in three years. The police took the padlocks off with bolt croppers two summers ago and nobody has ever put anything back on. The door just stands there, slightly ajar, the way a mouth stands open on someone asleep.

My aunt Denise bought all of it back in the spring after the trial, out of stubbornness and something worse than stubbornness. She paid eleven thousand pounds for four acres that nobody in the county would touch. She has never planted a thing here. She just owns it, the way you'd hold your hand over a burn.

I walk up to the house with the radio still going behind me.

Denise is at the kitchen table with the newsletter and a mug of tea gone cold and the phone face-down in front of her, which means it has already rung. Her hair is in the clip she wears for church. She's fifty-one and looks a hard sixty from the neck up and a brisk forty from the back, which is the kind of unfair thing you notice about people you live with.

"You've heard," she says.

"The radio."

"It'll be nothing to do with us." She says it fast, before I can say anything. "It'll be some walker from years back. People drown in that reservoir. There was a lad in the eighties."

"Right."

"There was." Her chin goes up. "They pulled him out at the spillway."

I get a glass of water and drink it at the sink with my back to her, because if I look at her I will say something true, and true things are not currency in this house. Denise has spent two years building a structure out of the word *alleged*. She writes to my father every fortnight on lined A4 with a biro, and she addresses the envelopes in a schoolgirl hand, and she puts stamps on them with the little curl of the tongue that our whole family does, him included, me included.

*Alleged.* Twelve life sentences' worth of alleged.

My cousin Jessica comes down the stairs two at a time with her headphones round her neck and her face already on. She's eighteen, three months older than me, and she has the kind of certainty you can only have if nothing has ever actually happened to you, which is a strange thing to say about a girl whose uncle is Stephen Sykes.

"They've found a body in the res," she says, breathless. "Zoe. A *body*."

"A bone," I say.

"Bones come from bodies." She's got her phone in her hand and she's not looking at either of us; she's looking at the screen, at the numbers going up on it. Jessica makes a podcast. It has a name I refuse to say out loud and eleven thousand subscribers and it is, essentially, us. Our kitchen. Our surname. She interviews retired detectives and a criminologist from Preston who has never met any of us, and at the end of every episode she says, in a voice that has been practised in the bathroom mirror, that she is telling this story because she was born inside it.

"Don't," Denise says.

"Don't what?"

"Don't make it into one of your programmes."

"It's journalism, Mum."

"It's your uncle."

Jessica's mouth goes thin. "That's exactly the problem with this family," she says, and takes an apple, and goes back up the stairs, and the bedroom door shuts with a careful, professional softness, because she doesn't slam doors any more; she records in that room.

Harry comes in from the yard at half four with grass on his knees and a football under one arm, eleven years old and sunburnt across the nose, and he says, "Zoe, will you go in goal," as if the radio doesn't exist, and for twenty minutes it doesn't. I stand between two water butts in the top yard and let him put fourteen past me. He celebrates each one with his shirt over his head. He is the only person in Lancashire who looks at me without doing a small calculation first.

When the light starts to go orange, I send him in for his tea and I walk down to the bottom of the nursery on my own.

I tell myself I'm checking the fence. There's a fence to check — kids come over it from the estate, and last month somebody spray-painted a word on the end wall of glasshouse one that Denise scrubbed off at six in the morning so the neighbours wouldn't see it. But my feet don't go to the fence.

The boiler house door is warm. South-facing brick holds the heat like a dog holds a grudge. I stand there with my hand flat on it and I don't go in — I haven't been in since the night the police came, and I am not sure what I'd do in there, whether I'd be sixteen or nine or nothing at all.

Under my shirt, on a bootlace, is a small brass key.

It used to open the padlock on the inner gate — the mesh gate they built inside the doorway, so the wooden door could be open in summer and there would still be a barrier, still a grid, still a way to pass a tray through without unlocking anything. It doesn't open anything now. The police croppered both padlocks off and took them away in bags with numbers on. The key is a key to a lock that doesn't exist.

I could have handed it in any time in the last two years. Every day I don't is a day I choose.

The swallows come out over the top field and turn and turn. Somewhere over the hill, at the north end of Whinmoor, there will be a white tent by now, and lights on stands, and people in blue suits on their knees in cracked silt, lifting out of the mud a woman whose name I already know, whose name I have known for five years, whose photograph was in the paper for a fortnight and then in a smaller and smaller box each year on the anniversary.

Alison Mills. Forty-one. Taught the Thursday evening class in the community hall behind Hollins Garden Centre and parked her blue Fiesta at the back of the car park, under the sycamore, because the spaces by the door filled up.

They'll say she has come back.

They'll say it like she got up and walked.

The town will hold its breath and then let it out all at once, and there'll be flowers tied to the reservoir gate, and Colthorpe will do what Colthorpe does, which is to decide very quickly who everybody is and never revisit it.

Colthorpe decided who I was two summers ago. Brave. A hero. The girl who walked into the police station on a Sunday morning in August with her father's jaw and her mother's nothing, and said, *There's a woman in the boiler house at Marl Hill*, and led them there herself, and stood in the yard while they cut the locks.

The photographs ran everywhere. The shaking woman in the foil blanket. The girl beside her.

I know the story is wrong. I have known since I was nine.

I go back up to the house and I eat shepherd's pie at the table with my aunt and my cousins, and the news is on with the sound down, and the reservoir on the screen is the colour of milky tea, and Denise says grace under her breath the way she does now, and Jessica films the television.