by Flynn Berry
I lost Rachel. We played Nevers but no one could remember the rules, and then Rachel came in from the kitchen and squeezed beside me on the sofa. I tipped my head against her shoulder and smelled that she had just smoked a cigarette. I lifted her hair and held it across my nose, breathing through it like a screen.
It gets fuzzy after that.
I remember emptying an ice tray into a cup, then knocking it to the floor, and being on my knees, one hand scrabbling under the fridge.
More people coming.
Another vodka Coke.
Rachel in the kitchen, her hair tied up in a high knot, drinking a glass of water and talking with Rafe. Her knobby cheekbones, her pink lips.
I was swampy with tiredness, and knocking into things. I climbed the stairs, which was interesting because I couldn’t see below my knees.
I closed my eyes. And then someone was leaning over me in the earliest light of morning, when it’s uncanny, almost neon. I was in a single bed, sleeping on my side next to Alice.
“Nora, I’m going to walk home. Do you want to come with me or stay?” Rachel’s hand on my arm.
“Stay.” And I nestled against Alice’s shoulder and fell back asleep.
The thing was—that morning—I hadn’t even turned over to look at her. I imagined it afterward, over and over. Pushing back on my shoulder, twisting around to see her. Her face would be pale in the neon blue light from outside, her hair swinging forward in two long sheets.
“Never mind. I’ll come with you.”
7
THE NEXT MORNING, I head down Cale Street to the aqueduct. The path is thirteen miles long, and my plan is to walk for long enough to clear my head. Last night, at the Emerald Gate, I asked Lewis, “Are you going to look for him?”
“Yes,” he said. He might already be in Snaith. I can’t imagine how the search will work now, after fifteen years. It was difficult enough in the weeks immediately after the attack.
I duck under a gap in the hedge and emerge onto the aqueduct, at the part of the trail where people bring their dogs after work and at the weekend. My heart skips. Three weeks ago Rachel and I came here with Fenno. We took turns throwing the tennis ball for him, wiping our hands on our jeans. When a Portuguese water dog arrived off Cale Street, Rachel folded in half laughing at Fenno’s reaction.
As he bowled over to greet the other dog, Rachel wiped tears from her eyes, her mouth pulled down into a crescent. “He’s literally quivering with happiness,” I said. “I know,” she said, “I know.”
Rachel chose the dog for protection. She bought him five years ago, soon after she moved here. Lewis thinks she felt unsafe living alone in the countryside, more exposed than in London. Maybe she thought he would find her.
I walk down the aqueduct away from town. The fuel that’s always in my stomach now catches and I am sheeted in flames. I can’t hear anything, which I don’t notice until I am far past the village and realize my shoes must have been making that sound on the path since I started walking.
I stalk between the farms, the flames rippling over me. The rage doesn’t go away. After two or three miles I stop and weep into my hands. I drop to my knees. Even with my legs pressed to the frozen ground, I still burn, the fire bristling off my spine.
On my way back, I come through a copse of hazels and around a bend, and there is a figure on the path in front of me.
As I draw closer, I see that it is a man in a long coat. He has a Staffordshire bull terrier on a lead, which is strange. Most people let their dogs run on the aqueduct. When we are close, the dog trots over to greet me, tugging him nearer. The man smiles. He is bald, with a strong chin and a flattened nose, like a boxer.
He says, “This is Brandy.” I hold my hand out for the dog to sniff. She presses her wet nose to it and pain sluices through me. I scratch behind her ears, and her eyes crease and her tail swings back and forth. Even though it’s cold, she has been sweating. I can see her pink skin through the damp raked lines of her coat.
The stranger isn’t wearing gloves, and his hand on the lead is red and chapped. The slight swell of his stomach presses against his coat.
“Sweet girl,” I say to the dog. Her eyes fasten on mine with the attention specific to bull terriers, and I wonder if he attacked me if she would lunge for me or him.
A crow calls from the field, and when he turns toward it, I flip the dog’s tag over. Denton. They live on Bray Lane, near the common. I can’t tell if he caught me reading it.
“Does she run away?” I ask, and point at the lead.
“No,” he says. “A friend of mine let his Staffie off lead and his neighbor shot her.”
The dog sniffs my wrist, her eyes wide and a little crossed. “They used to be nanny dogs,” I say.
“I know. My friend told that to the police. Nothing happened to the shooter. He wasn’t even cautioned.”
I recognize the grain reaper in the field next to us and realize how far we still are from town. A mile, at least.
“Are you Nora?” he asks. We’ve never met before. He has gray stubble and a few deep lines across his forehead.
“Yes.”
“We used to see Rachel out here,” he says. “I can’t believe it.”
The dog snaps to attention. I turn to look behind me, but the path is empty.
“I saw her just that morning,” he says.
My mouth goes dry. His coat sleeve has a small rip at its hem, did my sister do that?
“Where?”
“At her house. The bath sprang a leak. It had been going for a few days before she noticed. There’s a crack halfway across the ceiling.”
I straighten. We are alone, between drab, stippled fields. I watch his red hand twist the lead. “And she called you?”
“I’m a plumber. If you need help with the house or anything, let me know,” he says. His coat is zipped to his chin, leaving only his hands and head exposed. I check for scratches or bruises, but if he has any they are hidden. “My mum died last year. There’s a lot to sort out, I’m happy to help.”
He walks away. I start toward Marlow, and once he is out of sight, I run.
• • •
My phone doesn’t have service until Cale Street.
“Have you interviewed someone named Denton yet?”
“Yes,” says Moretti, “Keith Denton.” I didn’t think he would tell me. I thought police interviews were confidential, and for a moment I wonder whom he has told about speaking with me.
“He was at Rachel’s house on Friday.”
“I know. One of her neighbors saw his van. We interviewed him at the station on Saturday.”
“Why did you let him go?”
“We don’t have grounds to arrest him. Our technicians are still performing tests on the van. He’s not to leave the area.”
“Did you check him for injuries?” Rachel had defensive wounds, and the dog was trained by a security firm. He would have tried to protect her.
“We haven’t found any evidence to incriminate him. According to him, Rachel was alive and well when he left her house.”
“Where was he between three and four?”
“Resting.”
“Where?”
“In his van at the pond. He was up the night before on a job in Kidlington.”
“Did anyone see him?”
“We’re confirming his movements with witnesses and CCTV.”
He must have something to gain from telling me this. It must be a technique. I wonder if he thinks the information will trigger some memory for me. That Rachel met lovers at the pond, maybe, or that the location has some meaning.
“Was he the person watching her from the ridge?”
“Nora, I don’t know yet. We’ll know more when the results return from the lab.”
• • •
The high street appears al
most preternaturally beautiful and civilized, and I am shaky with relief to not be alone with him anymore.
The yellow awning of the Miller’s Arms thumps in the wind. Soft clouds marble the windows of the library. There are a dozen people on the street, and one of them, a woman with dark hair and kaleidoscopic blue eyes, stops in front of me. “Nora. I’m so sorry about your sister.”
“Are you from the hospital?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “Do you want to get a cup of tea?”
She smiles and squeezes my arm, and I have the sense that people here will look out for me. We go to the Miller’s Arms. She sets the tea in front of me and gives me an encouraging smile. The relief of being with another person, in the warmth of company, sinks me into my chair.
I might have just met her murderer. This knowledge roars in my ears. A few minutes, somewhere safe.
I’ve only been to the Miller’s Arms once before. My drink was pale and frothy and it had a violet floating on its surface. This delighted me. “Bloody hell,” said Rachel. Her fish pie arrived with one speckled blue-and-red crab claw pointing from its crust, which mollified her a little. “Does it make up for the violet?” I asked. “No, definitely not.”
“I’m sorry,” I say now. “I don’t remember your name.”
She sets her cup down and the clink of it on the saucer is so domestic, so incongruous.
“Sarah Collier. I work at the Telegraph.”
I notice, with a whip of vertigo, the other people in the room looking at us. I stand and walk out.
Sarah catches me up outside. She left her coat indoors and stands, shivering, in a cream-colored jumper, her hands tucked under her arms. “I’m not going to ask you any questions. I’m just here, if you need to talk.”
“I’m not talking to the press.”
“Did Alistair tell you to say that?” she asks. “You don’t need to listen to everything he says.”
I don’t want Sarah to know where I’m staying, so I walk toward the common. When I look back, the door to the Miller’s Arms is swinging shut behind her. I pass the common and turn down Salt Mill Lane. At the side of the road is a memorial, and my first thought is that it is for Rachel. My hand goes to my mouth. There are candles and piles of pale cut flowers. Then I notice the football jersey pinned to the fence, and a card with the name Callum across it.
The small semidetached house behind the fence looks vacant. Rachel told me he died in September, his family won’t have sold it yet. I wait until the lane is empty, then kneel to read some of the cards. The messages show people gripped by his death, and anguished by it. A lot of them describe him as a hero. Either no one knew what he was like, or they knew and didn’t care.
8
I AM CROSSING the high street when I see Lewis in the newsagent’s shop, speaking with the old man who owns it. I wait for him to come out.
“Is he a suspect?”
“No.”
From his shop, Giles has an unobstructed view of the train station. He is also the town gossip, according to Rachel. His shop has longer hours than any other business on the high street, and he knows everyone in town. People confide in him. He asks after illnesses, pregnancies, divorces. I remember, absurdly, that he knows about my breakup with Liam. He got it out of me in the two minutes I spent buying a newspaper and bottle of mineral water at his shop in May.
I consider his view, of the hooked lights on the platform and the station house, then follow Lewis up the high street. We find a bench on the common. The priest is in the church graveyard in his black robe. A cedar elm rises above him, sheltering him under its green tier.
“Do Anglican priests hear confession?” I ask.
“No, not formally. Not like Catholic ones. But it wouldn’t be any good if they did, they never tell us anything.”
The priest climbs the church steps. For a moment, he seems to be looking at us, then he grasps the iron rings inside the two doors and pulls them shut.
“Does he have to close the doors like that?” says Lewis. “Can’t he do one, then the other?”
I stare at the stained glass window above the doors. Across the common, wind rushes through the yews, a vast, maritime sound. The wind grows stronger, and it’s like I am on the strand in Edinburgh, near my university.
“A man named Andrew Healy assaulted a teenage girl in Whitley two years ago,” says Lewis. “It’s six miles from Snaith. Rachel wrote him a letter asking to visit him in prison. He agreed, and she visited him in March.”
“Was it him?”
“No. Healy was serving a drugs sentence the summer of Rachel’s assault.”
“Could he have left?”
“It’s a class-A prison. The day of her assault he was on canteen duty. They would have recorded it if he somehow stepped out.”
“Did Rachel know that?”
“Healy says he told her it couldn’t have been him. Rachel spoke to his solicitor, who confirmed the dates of his sentence.”
“Where did she visit him?”
“A prison outside Bristol.” Lewis looks embarrassed for me. She didn’t ask me to come and wait in the car. She didn’t even tell me she’d written him. “Did Rachel ever talk about looking for her attacker?”
“She said she stopped. She said she wanted to forget it ever happened.”
Of course that was what she told me. For years I had urged her to stop looking, and at a certain point it must have been easier to lie than to argue.
“When was this?” asks Lewis.
“Five years ago. Is he a suspect?”
“No. Healy’s still in prison.”
• • •
At the Hunters I find the route from her house to the prison. I imagine Rachel in the visitors’ room as the prisoners start to file in. I don’t know what she planned to say. What abuse she would turn on him.
She wouldn’t ask him why he did it. I asked her once and she laughed in my face. “He doesn’t get to have a reason,” she said. She didn’t want to meet him to better understand what had happened. She wanted to punish him.
She told me once how she would go about it. She would correspond with other men in the prison and win them over. During her visit, she would mention their names and say what they were willing to do for her.
I don’t know how far she would have taken it. If she would actually convince another prisoner to assault him. I doubt it, but the desired effect would be the same.
It wasn’t him. Andrew Healy. They must look alike, though, enough for her to call his solicitor to confirm his story. She might have still threatened him. It wasn’t her but he still attacked someone. I can see her walking back to the car, her arms tight around herself, her face hatched open with rage.
She would have stopped in Bristol for a drink. I can see the place too; it would be familiar, a chain she had visited in London or Bath. The Slug and Lettuce, or something like it. She would still have all her plans twisting through her head, and she would drink too much to drive home. I am so certain about this that I start to call every midrange hotel in central Bristol.
“Hello, this is Rachel Lawrence. I want to book the same room as I had on my last visit. Could you check what that is?”
As soon as the clerk says they have no record of a Rachel Lawrence, I hang up and dial the next number, until one says, “Room twelve.”
I ask the rate. “That seems like more than last time. Is it a weekend rate?”
“The rate on eight March was also ninety-five pounds.”
I have a glow of pride. I’ve always known her better than anyone else.
9
“NORA,” SAID RACHEL, “do you want to come with me or stay?”
“Stay.” And I fell back asleep. Rachel tripped down the stairs. She said good-bye to Rafe and the others who were still awake, then turned the knob so the screen door wheezed open into the summer air. The
sun hadn’t risen yet but the pavements were warm, had stayed warm through the night.
Rachel told me this story only once, on the assumption that I would remember every part of it, and she never had to tell it to me again.
She walked with her sandals in her hand. Later, she found out the time of the sunrise that day and decided she must have left Rafe’s shortly before five. The sky was an uncanny, electric blue. Soon after leaving, she stepped on a sharp pebble and tied her sandals back on. She seemed to think this part was important. She described it precisely. I don’t know if this was because she thought she would have been able to run otherwise.
She said she had a surge of happiness. Instead of going home, she thought about going to the river to watch the sun rise. She said she felt sorry for the people asleep in their houses, that her life was better and more vibrant than theirs.
She crossed onto our council estate, a spiral of identical white boxes, half of them empty.
A man appeared, walking very quickly between two of the houses toward her and the road. She saw him from the corner of her eye as she passed the strip of lawn. When she turned around, the man wasn’t on the road behind her, and she assumed he had gone inside.
Then he appeared two houses ahead of her. He must have doubled back and crossed on the lawns. This second appearance unnerved her. She couldn’t decide if it would be better to continue on toward home or run back to town.
The man continued down the lawn and stepped onto the road. He didn’t look at Rachel, who was now frozen a few meters behind him.
He started to walk away from her, in the same direction as she had been going. When there were about five meters between them, she took a step forward. She liked that he was in front of her. It made her feel more safe. She decided not to run, she decided it would be better if she could see where he was.
For the rest of the walk home, she would be in earshot of other people’s houses. If anything were to happen someone would hear and come outside. If she ran away, he might catch her in the stretch of fields between the estate and town, with no one around them.
