Under the Harrow

by Flynn Berry

  “She’d rather be alive.”

  The woman looks at me with disapproval, like I’ve cheated at a game. I move away from her and the taper candles.

  The priest has propped open the church doors, hopefully, in case the crowd might spill over. It must be very cold inside.

  I buy a paper cup of glügg. This is why people move to small towns, I think. To gossip and raise money for the bridge.

  Across the common, Keith Denton speaks with a small boy. From their interaction, I think the boy is his son and that he is a good father, loving and lighthearted. The boy runs to join the pack of children playing behind the stalls, and Keith puts his arm around a woman. He looks across the common, and when he faces in my direction, he pretends not to see me and turns so the woman under his arm rotates away.

  My stomach hollows. I keep watching but Keith doesn’t look over again. After a while, his wife kisses him on the cheek and slips out from under his arm to join two other women. She doesn’t know about me, he hasn’t confided in her. Keith stays to talk with the owner of the hardware shop, then he walks over to say something to his wife and leaves. I watch him walk down the high street until the bend in the road.

  I go in the opposite direction, onto Redgate. Keith was at her house that day. He doesn’t have an alibi. He offered to help me with the arrangements. He bought the tennis rackets for us to use. Rachel said she would never have an affair with a married man, which means that if she did, she wouldn’t tell me. I don’t think she would tell Helen either, since her husband slept with someone else when she was pregnant with Daisy, but I call her anyway.

  “Was Rachel seeing anyone recently?”

  “She saw Stephen sometimes.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. I walk past the yard with the apple tree. A dozen apples singed red by the cold still hang from the bare branches.

  “Did she ever talk about someone in town?” I ask.

  “No.”

  “What about someone who was married?”

  “No, she didn’t.”

  I stand at the end of Redgate, sour with disappointment, but then Helen says, “I’m glad you called.” I look across the road to the repair garage and wonder if this is it, if she has realized she knows what happened. She says, “Did you tell Daisy to go to Rachel’s house?”

  I wince. At the Miller’s Arms, after the funeral, I remember telling Daisy to choose something from the house.

  “Do you know what that place looked like? Nobody had cleaned it yet. She hasn’t slept in a week. She’s been doing research on sex crimes.”

  “Why does she think it was a sex crime?” I ask, and Helen shrieks. I turn the phone away and look at the line of poplars next to the repair garage.

  “If you talk to my daughter again, I’ll tell the police you’ve molested her.”

  I laugh. She hangs up and I stare at the phone, shaking.

  • • •

  “Why did you interview Keith Denton?”

  “The plumber?” says Moretti. “Why?”

  I wait.

  “He was the last known person to see her alive,” he says.

  “Did they have a relationship?”

  “Not one that I know about. Do you have something to tell me, Nora?”

  “No.”

  The police interviewed him three weeks ago, and Moretti told me then that they were testing his van and house for forensic evidence. I remember the fireman’s decal in the window and wonder where his wife took their children while the police searched the house.

  “What’s his wife’s name?”

  There is silence on the line. I knew he would be reluctant to tell me, but there’s no reason for him to refuse. It’s a small town, I’ll be able to find it.

  “Please, Rachel might have mentioned her.”

  “Natasha,” he says.

  • • •

  I am standing by the rill when Keith comes off the high street. We’re alone, though I can hear sounds from the holiday market. I finger the straight razor I’ve started to carry, the sort of blade that before I only ever saw when a clerk used it to scrape the sticker from a bottle of wine.

  “I’m keeping a log,” Keith says, “of every time you walk past my house and every time you follow me inside somewhere.”

  “That seems odd,” I say. “It makes sense we’d run into each other in a small town.”

  He has gained more weight. I would eat a lot too, if I were faced with a lifetime of prison food.

  “You’ll be caught,” he says.

  “For what?”

  “Stalking.”

  “No, I don’t think so.” I turn away from him, toward the rill, and consider it with my hands in my pockets. I use the toe of my boot to brush the snow on its surface, then turn back toward him. “Do you think your wife knows what you’ve done?”

  He slaps me. It lands hard and my skull rattles. My head starts to pound, but it won’t leave much of a mark. He checks that no one saw and strides back to the high street.

  • • •

  I soon find a Natasha Denton who works at a spa with locations in Bath and Oxford. When I call the North Oxford branch, the receptionist tells me that Natasha does work on Sundays, but her appointments for tomorrow are all booked, starting at nine in the morning.

  42

  “I NEED TO ASK you something.”

  I don’t know what to say next. I’ve never had to doorstop someone’s wife before. Thanks, Rachel.

  I’ve been waiting for her in the car park outside the spa for the past hour. She looks at me, puzzled, trying to work out if I am a client or someone with a habit. “Can we go somewhere?”

  Her face starts to morph. It sags and grows soft with fear. “No,” she says. “I’ve got to go to work.”

  “It’s about your husband.”

  It seems pointless to say. She already knows it is. Natasha sneers and steps back. She looks at me and I can see her thinking, No accounting for taste.

  “I think he had an affair with my sister.”

  “Who?”

  “Rachel Lawrence.”

  Relief slips over her face, and she lowers her eyes. “No, you’re wrong. He already talked to the police.”

  “I’m asking you. If there’s anything you noticed, if he has ever acted strange, about going somewhere or meeting someone.”

  “He hasn’t.”

  “Then when you saw me—just now—why did you think I’d been having it off with him?”

  “I didn’t,” she says and laughs. “I thought you were going to rob me.”

  I don’t believe her, but, then, I also can’t remember the last time I showered, or put anything on the dark, shiny smudges under my eyes.

  “My sister killed herself on her twentieth birthday,” she says. “If I could help you, I would, I promise.”

  “Does he have a middle name?”

  “Yes,” she says and clears her throat. She looks nervous. “Thomas.”

  • • •

  Martha answers from her dressing room at the Royal Court.

  “What happens when you have an affair?” I ask.

  “You get fit,” she says. “You spend money on different things. You start to spend time in other parts of the city.”

  Martha has complained to me before that half of the plays running in London at any given time revolve around an affair. She has played an adulterer or mistress in a dozen productions. She last acted in Betrayal, in which the lovers buy a flat in Kilburn. I can’t imagine Rachel doing that. It seems outdated, buying a flat for adultery, like owning a gas ring, and financially impossible. Normal people couldn’t do that anymore, you couldn’t shift enough money to buy an entire flat.

  “Is there anything else?”

  “Something to do with your phone. You might get
a second one, or start spending more time on it,” she says. “How are you?”

  “Fine. I have a routine now,” I say, though that’s not quite right, it’s less of a routine than a reason.

  “Come home,” says Martha. “I made a copy of my keys for you.”

  “I can’t.”

  “She isn’t watching, Nora. You can’t make it up to her.”

  “What about presents? Isn’t that something people do in an affair?”

  • • •

  I’m meeting a friend named Martin, said Rachel, on the Sunday before she died.

  It’s not Keith’s middle name but it could still be what she called him. Moretti said there were no unknown numbers on her phone and no trace of her arranging to meet someone on Sunday. If it was Keith, they might have bumped into each other in town and arranged to meet Sunday evening. They wouldn’t need to call or send messages.

  • • •

  For the next two days it rains. The gargoyles on the bank scream into the wet. Paul Wheeler hasn’t made contact again. The police won’t investigate him for the assault fifteen years ago. I have to think of a way to prevent him from doing it to someone else. Immobilize him, somehow. I have time. His brother bought him a flat in Leeds, he has a job, he has parole requirements. I doubt he will leave.

  Every so often I walk down Bray Lane, but nothing seems out of order in their house. I wait for Natasha to call me. She must be curious. She must want to know the reasons for my suspicion.

  43

  LEWIS WANTS TO MEET at the Cherwell. I don’t ask if something has happened with the case. If it had, he wouldn’t wait until this afternoon to tell me. Still, on the walk through Oxford to the river, my pulse beats quickly and my legs are light, as though something is about to happen.

  “It’s closed,” he says when I find him outside the pub, and without discussion we circle around the boathouse to the towpath. We walk toward Magdalen and one of the pubs along the river.

  “You aren’t wearing a suit.”

  “No,” he says. He wears narrow trousers, a white thermal shirt, and a hooded canvas jacket. The path narrows and he walks in front of me. I look at the hood draped between his shoulders, and it’s comforting, it reminds me of something but I don’t know what.

  The river sweeps under a row of fat curved bridges. Underneath them, the sound of our footsteps clatters around us. We go into the first pub, but it’s crowded with students from a rugby tournament. On a shelf is a row of bottles of dandelion and burdock. I remember the tennis court, and the sunshine pouring over the town. That day, when Rachel left me at a table next to the inn and went to Keith’s house, I want to know what was in her head.

  “Should we stop here?” asks Lewis.

  “No, let’s keep walking.” Fog wraps the trees on the opposite bank. Water drips from Magdalen Bridge, making rings on the surface. I watch one of the rings grow wider and bump Lewis’s shoulder.

  We get coffees at a café with no other customers and one million chairs. Halfway across the room Lewis stops with his hands at his waist and says, “It’s a trap.” When we finally reach the table I suggested by the window, we look back at all the chairs and become hysterical. I learn that he completely loses it when he laughs.

  “I listened to your music,” I say. “It was really good.”

  The band name was Easy Tiger. It wasn’t really a band, though, it was just him, playing different instruments. The songs reminded me of Beach House and Blood Orange, and I feel bad for him because he recorded them ten years ago, he would have been right in there with them, if not ahead.

  “Who did the vocals?”

  “My sister.”

  She had a lovely, haunting voice. Listening to the songs was difficult, since they filled me with so much longing. One of them was the exact sensation of driving on the Westway late at night.

  We spend the rest of the day together, walking down the river and up again through the colleges, and end up at a trattoria on Fetter Lane. We share a split portion of pasta carbonara and one of linguine, and a liter of red wine. We are seated in the bow window facing the narrow cobbled lane.

  It was dusk when we arrived, in the lull between seatings, and even though it’s now dark there isn’t any formality between us. Both of us were starving, and we don’t speak at all when the food first arrives.

  “Are you leaving soon?” he asks.

  “I can’t yet.”

  Something ripples between us. I sit up in my seat and Lewis tips his head back. He lets the silence grow taut.

  I almost ruined it. Days of effort and waiting. Keith is close now too, I can tell. The way he looks at me now is different even than it was a few days ago.

  “I’m not ready to go back,” I say, finally.

  “You don’t know it’s him.”

  I look away from Lewis to the reflection on the window. Our waiter across the room, the bottle in his hand, the twisting red rope of wine falling from it.

  “Tell me about the chief inspector.”

  “She’s brilliant.”

  We continue talking in this vein, and it’s nice, like we’re former colleagues. When we leave, the door to the trattoria blows shut and seals it behind us. Lewis asks if I want a ride home, but I want to say good-bye here and not in her town, so I tell him I have to meet a friend nearby. He hugs me. We stay like that, and I sag against him. He holds his hand against the back of my head. It’s a relief, like something wrinkled has been smoothed. Then it’s over, and he walks to his car by the river and I walk to St. Aldate’s and the bus.

  44

  I RETURN TO MARLOW at half past eight and by habit walk down Bray Lane. There are police cars in front of his house. My gait changes, like I have grown larger, bulkier. My shoulders rise behind my ears. The front door is open, and two uniformed officers are standing in the corridor. One of them steps forward to stop me from entering. He pins my arms and drags me down to the road. A second officer, younger than the first, follows, saying, “He can’t hear you, he isn’t in there.”

  The older officer releases me at the edge of the property. I recognize both men, detective constables from Abingdon, and know how weary of me they are, how beside the point it is for them to answer my questions.

  “He isn’t here,” says the younger one. “You’re screaming for nothing.” I shove him. He turns away and I shove him from behind so he stumbles. The older one clasps my arms at my waist until his partner has entered the house.

  The yew trees at the end of Bray Lane shudder up and down with every step. I lick my lips. My breathing is loud in my ears and I walk unsteadily, like my feet are far from me, until I am in the hall at the Hunters. At the bottom of the stairs, my knees give out.

  • • •

  “We’re in a very sensitive time,” says Moretti. “We still have many hours of interviewing ahead of us. We had grounds to make an arrest, but I can’t give you any further information yet.”

  “If you don’t tell me why you arrested him, I’ll give an interview to the papers. I have the number for a journalist at the Telegraph.”

  “We’ve already alerted the media that we arrested a suspect. They’ll have learned who by now, and we’re going to ask anyone with information about the murder to come forward.”

  “Why would he do it?”

  “As soon as we pass the case to the Crown Prosecution Service, a solicitor will present the evidence against the suspect to you.”

  “When?”

  “The earliest will be about a week from now. It depends on our interviews, and the continuing inquiry.”

  • • •

  One more train will leave for London before they stop running for the night. The high street is deserted but the lights are still on at the newsagent’s shop. I choose a bottle of mineral water for the sake of having something to carry up to the till.

  “Why are the p
olice at the Denton house?” I ask.

  “His wife called them,” says Giles. His voice is rough and he seems to have a hard time forming the words. “She found pictures of Rachel.”

  “Where is she?”

  “She’s gone to stay with her mum.”

  “Where?”

  “Margate.”

  45

  TO REACH MARGATE, I have to take the train to London, then the tube across the city, then a second train from King’s Cross. I don’t trust myself to drive. There are five stops to King’s Cross. I know each one and before each one I plan to get out. It’s over, really. The police have arrested someone. I’m done. I’m free now to, for example, leave at Edgware Road and ride the bus down to Fulham Broadway. Or switch trains and go to the cinema at Notting Hill Gate. Or leave at Chancery Lane and buy a carafe of red wine at the cellar under Furnival Street.

  She isn’t watching. It makes no difference to her if I pour fuel on his house and set it on fire. It doesn’t matter. I could celebrate that the police arrested a suspect by going to the top of the Barbican and jumping. I could celebrate that the police arrested a suspect by going to the Battersea Dogs and Cats Home and adopting a dog. Neither will change what he did to her four weeks ago.

  As far as I know. Maybe the moment I land on the road below the Barbican we will go back in time. Maybe when I start the adoption paperwork Rachel will come into the office, rubbing her hands on her jeans, and slide onto the seat next to mine and say, “Have they done all his jabs yet?”

  Keith Denton is in custody, but the trial might not occur, or the jury might not convict him. Even if it does he might get a reduced sentence, he’ll likely get out while I’m still alive. Especially if the prosecutor can’t prove that he planned it. I don’t know if the knife belonged to Rachel or if he brought it to her house. What he did to the dog, though, that must be taken into consideration, and every time he comes up for parole the review board will see photographs of it.