Under the Harrow

by Flynn Berry

  Keeping the same distance between them, she made it about half a block.

  The man turned around and came toward her. He walked strangely, high on the balls of his feet, with short strides. She started to shout at him. While she shouted, he came closer in quick, jerking steps.

  It was meant to frighten him away. She had been told that, we had all been told that. Make a scene, draw attention, make it difficult on him, and he will leave you alone.

  It didn’t make any difference. As soon as he was near enough, his hand closed around her throat, and he pulled her to the ground by her neck. He kneeled beside her, with his leg blocking his groin. With one hand pinning her neck, he punched her in the stomach and chest and face. She hit and scratched him. When he bent close enough, she tried to drive her fist into his windpipe, but he turned and the blow landed under his jaw. He grabbed her hand in the air and snapped her arm, then trapped it under his knee. He bounced her head against the pavement and her scalp turned wet.

  He continued to beat her in the stomach and face. Then he stood on the balls of his feet and looked down at her. She cradled her wet head.

  She tried to lie still but her body jerked and convulsed. When the seizing stopped, she crawled to her knees, then to her feet, and the ground wheeled. She backed away, because if she turned around he would return from behind the houses, with his short bobbing steps, and pull her to the ground again.

  She shuffled across the road. Her left arm was broken and she held it against her chest. As she retreated, her eyes skipped along the gaps between the houses. She heard herself breathing, rapid inhalations pumping her chest.

  10

  WHAT HAPPENED IN Rachel’s house on Friday didn’t fit with anything outside of it. The professor’s house across the road. The neighbor riding her horse. The elm trees, the car in the drive.

  It doesn’t make any sense. There were people in the village, dozens of them, a mile from where she was killed. When I arrived, the town was quiet, like the snow had already started. I saw a woman leaving the library with a stack of books. A man looking at cakes in the bakery window. One of the village employees lifting a sheaf of papers from the seat beside him and climbing from his van. People maneuvering their cars through the narrow streets, listening to the forecast. It was like something set down on Rachel’s house, upending it, while the rest of the town was left untouched.

  It doesn’t make any sense, except that it has happened before. The rest of a town undisturbed while something is loosed on her.

  11

  “WAS RACHEL EVER ON medication for a mental illness?” asks Moretti. It’s midmorning on Tuesday, and on the other side of the door, the incident room is crowded. Moretti appears relaxed, and I hope that means they’re making progress.

  “No.”

  “Have you ever been?”

  “Yes.”

  “What for?”

  “Depression. I started on a course of Wellbutrin in June.”

  It all caught up to me, the end of my relationship, every other loss. When I saw myself in a mirror, I looked hunted. I was tired all the time, and often had a rising sense of panic in innocuous places—a cake shop, a museum, the rose garden in Regent’s Park.

  “Are you still taking it?”

  “No. I stopped in October.”

  “On the advice of your psychologist?”

  “She said it was my decision.” I was better after Cornwall. I had changed since my first visit to the psychologist’s office.

  “Why was Rachel unmarried?” he asks.

  “She valued other things. Why are you not married?”

  “I’m divorced,” he says, as though it answers the question. “It sounds like Rachel could be unpleasant.”

  “I liked that about her.”

  He smiles, and I have the sense that he agrees with me, and understands her. She matters to him now in a way that’s different than with anyone else.

  12

  “I’M SORRY. I’m so sorry I didn’t go with you.”

  “Don’t apologize,” she said. She lowered her face and pried her rope bracelet from under the hospital wristband. The pale gold straw was now stiff and rust colored, and she began to work it off with her teeth.

  When I first saw her, I started to cry and Rachel tilted her head at me. This was a second shock. Her eyes were so swollen I had thought they were closed and that she was asleep. Her appearance frightened me, like the bashed-up girl was the scary thing instead of what had happened to her.

  Her face was swollen and garish. Her mouth was twice its normal size, as though she had drawn around it with lipstick, and both of her eyes were almost hidden under black bulges. Someone had combed her hair, and the comb left raked lines in her scalp. A greasy ointment covered the stitches on her brow and cheek. One arm was folded across her body in a sling.

  We were at the hospital in Selby, seven miles from Snaith. “How did you get here?”

  “Banged on a door. They wouldn’t drive me. They were scared I’d die on the way to hospital and they’d be held responsible. I had to talk to the 999 operator myself, and they wanted me to wait for the ambulance outside.”

  A couple, the same age as our dad, and, she said, with the same habits. “Which house?” I asked, because I was going to torch it when I got home. She couldn’t remember the number.

  “Has the hospital told Dad?”

  “No. I said he was camping.”

  Two tall men came into the room. Both ignored the visitors’ chairs and stood at the end of her bed. Rachel turned her battered head at them, and they asked me to leave. They didn’t try to shut the door. If they had, I would have screamed the place down.

  She told the officers what she had told me, and she added that the man had black hair to his jaw and a narrow face, with a pronounced plate of bone under his forehead. He wore a canvas jacket that was too large for him. One of the detectives stopped her. “Where had you been?”

  “A friend’s house.”

  “And what were you doing out so early?”

  “I wanted to go home.”

  “Had you been drinking?”

  “Yes.”

  “How many drinks did you have?”

  I begged her to lie. “Four,” she said, and in the hallway I dropped my head to the wall and sighed. It was a lie. It was probably the number she thought reasonable. They were cops, surely they drank, surely they understood that four drinks over many hours wouldn’t impair your judgment.

  “Anything else?” asked the same officer. The second one was silent. I don’t think I heard his voice once.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Any drugs?”

  “No.”

  “Did you argue with anyone at the party?”

  “No.”

  “How clear is your memory of the night?”

  “It’s clear.”

  “Did you recognize this man?”

  “No.”

  “Any chance you saw him before, even in passing?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have a boyfriend?”

  “He wasn’t my boyfriend. I’d never seen him before.”

  “It would be helpful if you could answer the question.”

  “No.”

  “Can you tell us who was at the party?”

  They asked her to go through it a few more times, and then to sign a statement. They said they would be in touch if they identified a suspect, but of course they never did.

  13

  RACHEL WENT TO Bristol Prison. She would have dressed for the occasion, I think, to prove he didn’t damage her. It would be much worse for him than her, in the end. Dark fabric, sharp boots, lipstick. She would dress like her own solicitor.

  On the drive to Bristol, the hour and a half on the M4 in March, I imagine she was taut and icy with fury, and triumphant.


  “I found you. I always knew I’d find you.”

  I wonder if she had a few searing minutes of thinking it was finally over before Healy explained he’d been in prison that summer. It’s difficult for me to think about. The drive to Bristol is better.

  • • •

  “We’ll try to finish this as quickly as possible,” says Lewis after he joins us in the interview room. “It’s unusual for someone like Rachel to be the victim of two random assaults.”

  “What do you mean, someone like her?”

  “Not a sex worker,” says Moretti.

  “She also lived in areas with a low incidence of violent crime,” says Lewis. “She had no involvement in gangs or drugs.”

  I don’t correct him. He means the trade, not snorting lines at a club in Shoreditch. Which I miss, suddenly. I used to wear a pair of ankle boots with a sharp heel, leather leggings, a black cotton shirt that I bought for one million pounds at AllSaints on the King’s Road.

  I let my head tip back. Rachel liked a club behind Hoxton Square the best. “Let’s go take a few dances,” she said, and unlatched the toilet stall, and out we went, tripping up the stairs to the main floor.

  Across the table, the detectives wait. Rachel rubbed her finger above her sharp white teeth. She rolled a note against her leg.

  Moretti unbuttons his suit jacket and leans forward. “Grievous bodily harm,” he says in his Scottish accent, “is very similar to murder. It becomes murder if the victim dies. Your sister was the victim of two nearly identical crimes.” He stumbles on the last four words, intentionally, I think, to stress how difficult this is to believe. “We’d like to ask you some more questions about the first incident. Can you describe her assailant?”

  “He was older than her, around twenty-five, six foot, dark hair, pale, a narrow face with a high, strong forehead. Do you think it was him?”

  “He may have been angry that she got away,” says Lewis.

  “She didn’t get away. She could barely walk when he finished.”

  “Did he rape her?”

  “No.”

  “Why did the attack stop?” asks Lewis.

  “She didn’t know. He may have thought someone saw them, or he just decided he was done. She said he lurched off her and walked away.”

  Short bouncing steps. I could imitate him for them, like Rachel did for me, but there isn’t any point.

  “He walked funny,” I say. “On his toes.”

  Moretti writes this down. The fluorescent lights hum above us. She isn’t coming back. Lewis notices me rubbing my head and stands to switch off the lights. The electric whine disappears, and the room dims. Rain patterns the window as the worst of my headache drains away.

  Moretti opens a folder and says, “For the purpose of the tape, I am now showing Miss Lawrence three photographs. Do you recognize any of these men?”

  “Yes.” Both detectives tense. I tap the middle photograph.

  “How?” asks Moretti.

  “He killed a girl in Leeds.”

  “Did you ever discuss this man with Rachel?”

  “Yes. I showed him to Rachel and she said it wasn’t him.”

  “When?”

  “A long time ago. Rachel might have been eighteen or nineteen. I know he was caught right away. He had blood on him and he took the girl’s bracelet.”

  “Why did you show his picture to Rachel?”

  “I thought she would want to know.”

  “But you were surprised that she visited Andrew Healy,” says Moretti.

  “I was surprised that she visited him in March of this year. She said she wanted to forget about it, and I thought she had.”

  We were on a trip to Rome, visiting a lemon grove outside the city. “You were right,” she said. She scratched her fingernail across the skin of a lemon and sniffed it. “It’s time to stop.” That night we feasted on pasta and wine. A celebration. I thought it was finished.

  “Five years ago, she told me she would stop looking.”

  “What form did looking take?” asks Moretti.

  “We read the newspapers.” We read about every rape, assault, and murder in Yorkshire, including ones from the recent past. It did my head in. I won’t take cabs alone because of one story. “And in the beginning we also went into Leeds and Hull.”

  “Why?”

  “He might have come on the train.”

  “Did you think that or did Rachel?”

  “She did, I think.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “No. Who are the other two men?”

  “Actors,” says Lewis. “It’s a photographic lineup.”

  “Why did you think it was that man?” I ask.

  “He left Whitemoor Prison three weeks before Rachel’s death,” says Lewis. “The way he killed the young woman in Leeds is similar to the first attack on Rachel, and at the time of Rachel’s assault, he was living in Hensall, near Snaith.”

  “No,” I say. “He didn’t attack her then.”

  They continue to interview me about the assault. They ask about the people we knew, even after I tell them that Rachel could see his face during the attack and was certain she didn’t recognize him. Andrew Healy must look similar to him, though she would have accounted for the possible changes in fifteen years, how his face might thin or thicken, and age. They take notes. I think of the sort of police officers who hold press conferences during a major inquiry, and wonder if any of them would have solved this already.

  14

  OUR DAD WAS not camping, but staying with a friend in Sunderland who had helped him get a job on a building site. When I finally spoke with him on Rachel’s third day in hospital, I told him she had broken her ankle. “Can you call Selby Hospital and say she’s fine to leave with her sister? Here’s the number.”

  This shouldn’t have worked, but it was a crowded NHS hospital and they probably needed her bed.

  On Rachel’s last day in hospital, Alice borrowed her mum’s car and we drove to pick her up. On the return trip, Rachel was quiet, and I wondered if despite what she’d said she was scared to come home.

  Alice and I had spent the morning preparing. We rented six films. We bought two pints of wonton soup and chow fun. We drove to the Italian café in Whitley for a quart of hazelnut ice cream. I bought a bottle of cleaning fluid—not the sort of thing in supply at our house—and scoured the bathtub. I had the idea that Rachel, who had never done so before, might want to take a bath. And, in a stroke of genius, we borrowed a friend’s dog, a cream-colored Labrador retriever puppy.

  Rachel didn’t even ask whose it was. It was the wrong kind of dog, I realized later. Not a Doberman pinscher, for example. We could have tried to borrow one of those, there were plenty in Snaith and on the farms around it. When she saw the dog, she must have realized how little the two of us understood.

  Rachel moved slowly up the stairs and into bed. The blind was still snagged up in one corner, and golden afternoon light glowed on her arm. She scrabbled her hand for the duvet and pulled it to her chin. I lay beside her but faced the room, the heaps of clothes, the stacks of books, the empty bottles of Jamaican beer, packs of cigarettes, and scorched lighters. Her mirror leaned on the floor, and next to it were a radio and a few gold tubes of lipstick.

  The room was messy but still somehow spare. She didn’t curate it for anyone else, and unlike me she didn’t display mementos. No matchboxes unless she needed matches. The only wall decoration was a carnival mask with a nose curved like a beak that she had found on a road in Leeds, abandoned, probably, after a party.

  I wondered what she made of it now. She hadn’t seemed to look at the room at all on her way to bed. We lay with our heads turned in opposite directions on the pillow and listened to the dog whining downstairs.

  Soon after leaving hospital, Rachel bought a blackjack from Rafe’s older b
rother. God knows where he got it. It was a small metal rod, like a police baton but smaller. “If it’s what the police use instead of a gun, it has to be one step down from a gun, doesn’t it?” she asked.

  That first night, Alice made us hazelnut milk shakes, which we drank while watching an animated film about foxes. Rachel said she wasn’t hungry because of the pain medicine. She twitched often. None of us looked at one another, or at the door, or the window. We kept our eyes on the small screen as night fell.

  • • •

  The next day, she said, “I’m going to Hull. Do you want to come?”

  “Why?”

  “I need to do some shopping.”

  Rachel had never, to my mind, needed to do any shopping. For one thing, she didn’t have any money.

  We rarely went to Hull. We went to Leeds more often, to the Warehouse, the Garage, the Mint Club. During the day, we bought kebabs and merguez rolls and watched the university students in the main square.

  It was not, I thought, what Rachel should be doing at the moment. She should be resting. She had not taken a bath yet.

  I followed her around Hull, into betting shops, into pubs. People stared at us. She still had her stitches in, and her face was bruised and swollen. When the train conductor asked what had happened, I waited for her to lie and say a road accident. Instead she said, “I was beat up. He is about six feet tall, has black hair to his chin, and was wearing a canvas jacket. He has a long narrow face and you can see the bones in his forehead.” She ran her finger up the edge of her forehead to demonstrate and then wrote something on the back of her ticket receipt and gave it to the conductor. “This is my number, if you see him.”

  We spent the entire day in Hull, and the next, and then we went to Leeds. These trips were excruciating. Rachel still couldn’t walk without pain. Watching her limp in and out of shops and pubs filled me with a pity that made it difficult to breathe.