What the Water Kept

Twenty-five years ago, seventeen-year-old Cerys Morgan disappeared. The official record says she was found. She wasn't.

When maintenance work lowers the Cwm Mieri reservoir to an extraordinary level, Detective Inspector Rhys Meredith is called to its exposed bed. Near the remains of a drowned chapel lies an iron-bound oak chest, blackened by years beneath the water and weighted with stone.

Inside are the preserved remains of a young woman.

What begins as a painstaking recovery leads back to the disappearance of Cerys Morgan, who left choir practice one November evening in 2001 and never came home. The story that settled around her disappearance was that she had left for London. But when Meredith begins examining what actually survives in the records, that story starts to come apart.

Cerys was officially recorded as traced even though she had never been found. A crucial page is missing from a police occurrence book. Evidence survives in unexpected places. And as investigators follow the trail through old files, forensic evidence and records connected to Cerys's life, they confront a more difficult question than what people remember happening:

What can actually be proved?

Set against the cold, submerged landscape of rural Wales, What the Water Kept is a meticulously observed literary crime novel about evidence, institutional memory, silence, buried violence and the difference between a story repeated for years and a fact that can withstand scrutiny.

A haunting, deeply controlled mystery about a missing girl, a compromised record and the long journey towards truth.