by Flynn Berry
I try not to think about my conversation with the journalist, but I regret all of what I said to her. If I weighed my actions further in the past, the regret might kill me.
I told Rachel I would be on an earlier train. After my job, I was supposed to catch the 1:50 train from Paddington. Instead I left London at 2:50. In that hour, I ate lunch at the Surprise. I had salmon in pastry and a white wine. The thought of the food and drink repulses me. At the time I thought it was decadent.
Last night, I should have said one of Rachel’s friends took the dog. I should have read her notebook when Sarah went to the toilet, and I should not have asked her about Keith Denton. Rachel would have done a better job of this. She would have been patient and cunning.
The owner brings me toast and marmalade, the galette, and a French press of coffee. I consider my table and the room. This is why I like the Miller’s Arms better. The galette is crisp and savory. There are bright pink stalks of rhubarb on the counter. Every summer, wild rhubarb striped pink and white grows on Boar Lane. I open the book of German fairy tales.
In “The Six Swans,” a girl’s brothers are turned into swans for six years. If she speaks or laughs, they will remain swans forever. She sews them shirts and doesn’t speak even when she is accused of murdering her children. On the last day of the sixth year, the swans fly to her. She throws the shirts on them and they turn back into men. There is an illustration of the sixth brother. The girl didn’t finish his sleeve in time, so he has a swan wing in place of one arm.
• • •
Martha calls, and I talk to her outside under the yellow awning. “What are you doing? What’s your routine?” she asks. Five days have passed since the funeral.
“I don’t have a routine.”
“But what do you do there every day? How do you spend the time?”
I consider the awning, which is translucent, glowing with sunlight. I don’t want to tell her about Keith yet. “I do research. She was still looking for the man who attacked her, and I’ve picked up where she left off.”
“Is it useful?”
“I can’t tell.”
“What do the police think about your staying?”
“They want me to stay in the area. We talk often.”
“On the phone?” she asks, and then, without waiting for a response, she says, “How many times have they interviewed you?”
“Three or four, at the station. We’ve spoken a few times on the phone, but that’s not an interview.”
“What do you talk about?”
“The inquiry.”
“You know that’s not normal, don’t you? You should have a family liaison officer.”
“I do have one.” She left me a message the day after it happened, which I never returned.
“The lead detectives don’t usually keep the family updated.”
“How do you know?”
“Everyone knows that. Have they interviewed you under caution?”
“No.”
“Nora, do you think they’re investing time in you because they like you? Either you’re a suspect, or they think you know something that you’re not telling them.”
“I’m not a suspect. They need information about her for the victim profile.” I look across the road at the black shutters on the inn. “And I want to see if anyone in town does anything strange. Having me here might make him nervous.”
“If he’s there,” she says, “which most likely he isn’t.”
“Why would you say that?”
“You can’t be sure that he knew her.”
“He killed her dog. Why would he kill her dog unless he wanted to punish her?”
“I don’t know,” she says, and I can tell that she’s crying and trying to pretend that she isn’t. “If he were insane. That sounds like someone not in his right mind.”
• • •
It’s only ten thirty when I get back to my room. There are so many things to do. I should clear out Rachel’s house. I should organize her mortgage and bills. I should write notes to the people who sent flowers and wreaths to her funeral. I should earn money. I should open a new line of credit before my card reaches its limit. I should talk to a therapist or someone from Victim Support. Martha sent me a list of groups for the families of murder victims. There is one in Oxford, I should find out when it meets.
Instead I decide to go for a walk on the aqueduct. As I put on my boots, I notice a pile of white powder beside the dresser. In it are two larger pieces, and I recognize the handle and part of the base from the pitcher that used to stand on the dresser. Sometime in the night, I must have smashed it. I don’t remember this at all. I don’t know what I used to break it. I used to sleepwalk, the year after Rachel left home, when I was still in Snaith with our dad. I wonder what other changes are happening that I don’t know about.
28
I FORCE MYSELF NOT to walk past Keith’s house. I already have twice today, before and after the aqueduct. His home isn’t what I expected. I thought he would live in a house like the one where we grew up, a little plaster box built after the war, but number eleven Bray Lane is wooden, with shingles. The shingles are shaped like scallops and painted pale green. It looks like a house you’d see in a port in Denmark or Sweden.
The difficult part is going slowly. If Keith ever accuses me of following him, I have to be sure it makes him seem like the crazy one, the fixated one. All of my movements must seem natural, as though only a guilty person would notice them.
I decide to go to the grocer’s in Marlow, where at least there is a chance of running into him. It’s also practical. I can’t afford restaurants or takeaways, and I assume I can talk the girl at the Hunters into letting me leave a few things in the restaurant fridge.
I haven’t done the shopping since it happened. I remember going to the Tesco in Kilburn a few weeks ago, with all the other people who had just come up from the tube, who were also hungry and had just finished work, also buying supplies for dinner and a reward for getting through the day.
A woman lays her hand on my arm. I look down from the boxes of pasta, which I was considering, wondering if the girl at the Hunters would also let me use their hob. The woman has long, smooth hair and wears a green hunting jacket. I recognize her from walks on the aqueduct. She has two massive Newfoundlands.
I try to remember her name. Something soft and rainy and Home Counties. Was it Tamsin? I asked Rachel about her. “She looks so fresh,” I said, “and outdoorsy.” Blooming was the word, which I didn’t intend to tell Rachel.
Rachel snorted. “Not outdoorsy,” she said, “rich.”
Rachel told me that she has three children and lives in the Georgian stone house that you can partly see from the aqueduct, behind a thick hedgerow.
She glances down at my basket, and I feel a stricture loosen, a sort of sigh. This is exactly what I need. She will invite me over for dinner. Maybe, eventually, she will suggest I stay with them instead of at the Hunters. I could make myself useful. Watch the children, walk the dogs. Take care of the garden, obviously. My worry over my credit debt will fade. I remember looking through the hedgerow toward her house a few weeks ago and seeing trees full of yellow apples.
“I hope they find him soon,” she says. “I’m sick of being scared at night in my own house. Do you think it’s someone from her Hull days?”
“Rachel never lived in Hull.”
She looks at me like I am lying. “Where was it again?”
I recognize her tone. It is the voice my clients in London use when something in their garden has died or been knocked over in a storm, and they ask me to remind them of how much they paid for it.
“We grew up in Snaith.”
“That’s near Hull, isn’t it?”
I tip a box of wagon wheels into my basket. “Why are you scared at night?” I ask.
“Because—”
“She died at four in the afternoon,” I say. “You stupid bitch.”
I step around her and carry my shopping to the till. None of you protected her, I think as I walk away from her down the aisle. It was probably one of you and the rest of you didn’t see it and you let it happen.
• • •
The door to the kitchen is locked, and the girl isn’t at the front desk or in her room in the attic. I search on top of all the doorways for a key. I need to put the groceries in the fridge, and then I want to cook dinner.
The carrier bags strain at my arms and I am hungry and dizzy. Finally I open the back door and set the milk and eggs and cheese on one of the flagstones. The air isn’t too cold now, but it will drop to freezing in the night.
I wonder if I will still be able to use the milk after it thaws. I’m too embarrassed to return the groceries, but I don’t have any money and they cost ten pounds. I stare at them and it is too much for me, these absurd worries on top of the pain, and I start to howl with my jacket bunched in my mouth.
• • •
Instead of cooking pasta in the large, dim kitchen at the Hunters and possibly beginning to feel a sliver of normalcy, I drank whisky in bed and tried to fall asleep early.
Now the Emerald Gate and the chip shop are closed, and I am thinking of what I could have eaten if I were not so stupid. Wonton soup. Moo shu pancakes with plum sauce. Scallion dumplings.
I am so tired. Right now, if the detectives called and said, “We believe this to be hopeless. We’ve stopped looking,” I think I would be relieved.
29
IN THE MORNING, I drive to the café attached to a petrol station on the Bristol Road, a few miles outside Marlow. It looks like any other service station, but the food is delicious. I once asked Rachel why and she said, “Anders,” and pointed with her fork at a man in chef’s whites and a toque. I have nothing to eat at the Hunters. The milk did freeze overnight and shattered the bottle. I haven’t cleaned it up yet.
Wet countryside rolls away on either side of the Bristol Road. This is where the accident Rachel told me about happened, with Callum and his girlfriend, Louise. She worked at the café, he had probably driven out to collect her.
I pass a small white cross and, soon after, pull off the road. The service station sells Esso fuel, and its icon, a red globe, towers above the empty countryside. I wonder if Louise still works here. Rachel said she looked like me.
I laugh when I see Louise. We do resemble each other. I feel a loose, happy surge of familiarity and have to stop myself from wheeling toward her. She has brown hair to her shoulders and high, wide cheekbones. She even moves like me, quick and fidgety, and she also walks with her feet slightly turned out.
As I find a table, Louise goes outside for a cigarette. She smokes with one arm crossed over her stomach and the other elbow balanced on her wrist. She looks about twenty-five. She scratches her mouth with her thumb while the smoke ladders above her.
When she sees me, I think Louise notices the resemblance too. Her eyes crinkle and her mouth slopes to the side, as though she is stopping herself from pointing it out. She wears a navy shirt and a black canvas skirt with an apron over it. “What would you like?” she asks.
“Coffee and the ebelskiver, please.”
She smiles and takes the menu from me. When she sets the cup and saucer down a few minutes later, I look at her wrists and forearms in the strong light through the window. There are dark red marks on her arms, like cigarette burns, though I read once the same mark can be made with a screwdriver. Her chest and neck appear to have been lacerated or burned, leaving pale, crimped scars. One of her ears folds down. Some of the fingers on her right hand are knobby and stiff, as though they were broken once.
She doesn’t have to cover the scars anymore. Everyone will assume they’re from the crash.
“He beat her,” said Rachel. “When they came in after the collision they were both in bad shape, but none of her injuries came from the accident. They were too old. They came from him.”
• • •
That night, there are a few men inside the Duck and Cover. They must be doing a lock-in, it should have closed hours ago. The men inside the pub are laughing over the bar. One of them puts his face in his hands. Next to him, Keith shakes his head and raises a bottle to his mouth.
I settle on the bench in front of the town solicitor’s, across from the pub, and unwrap the plastic from a pack of cigarettes. I cup my hands around the match while I light one. Then I take out my phone and hunch over it, smoking. I force myself not to look up for a long time, and when I do Keith is staring at me through the window.
His face is blank, his mouth sagging. I don’t hold his gaze. I dial the number of my bank and hold the phone to my ear, still bowed over, still holding the lit cigarette. When I glance up again, the man next to Keith is looking at me too. He shrugs and turns back to the bar.
After another few minutes, I grind the cigarette under my boot and walk toward the common. The yews sound like there are waves seething through them, and I wait under them in case he will follow me. Above the yews, the clock strikes in the village hall, and I walk down Salt Mill Lane toward the memorial for Callum. All the candles are lit. The shrine is beautiful and shadowy, the candles pulling deep pools of scarlet from the flowers. Candlelight flickers on my face. I read the cards again, but I don’t find one from Louise.
When I return to the Hunters, the bar is unlocked, and I pull a club chair to the window facing the station.
I spent ten days here in June. The town was different then. It was like going to the beach, even though it’s farther inland than London. I walked around barefoot. I bicycled on Meeting House Lane. I made a blueberry slump. Rachel worked most of the time, but when she got home from the hospital she poured us both a glass of white wine and we carried them through the field behind her house and onto the aqueduct.
I remember her laughing at something, trying not to slop the wine from her glass as she threw a stick for Fenno. Greenfinches flew between the trees. The dog raised his paw in silhouette, like a dog from the unicorn tapestries, with the embroidered woods behind him. I remember thinking that this isn’t the newest moment in history but the oldest, that time isn’t thinning but thickening.
It is so easy to think about her. Each memory links to another one, and time doesn’t seem to pass at all. I sit for hours remembering, until the first commuters, unbearably sad, begin to arrive, waiting in the darkness on the platform for the early train to London.
30
I DRIVE TO the hospital to meet Joanna Cole. She and Rachel worked most of their shifts together, and Joanna may know whom she meant when Rachel said she was meeting a friend from the hospital.
The John Radcliffe is a short drive from Marlow, on the edge of Oxford. A teaching hospital, with the best surgeons and equipment. When I came to meet her once, Rachel dropped a vial in a plastic bag. She wrote something on a clipboard with a word near the top highlighted in pink.
“What’s the color mean?”
“Nothing. Obfuscation.”
“Really?”
“No.”
I watch the door to Accident and Emergency and wait for Rachel to come out, a winter coat wrapped over her scrubs, frowning, with dark circles under her eyes and her hair scraped back from her face. She liked to sit on a certain bench, facing away from the hospital. “I spend enough time inside it,” she said.
I wish I could tell her something I learned from the Thames Valley Police website, which is a rule that you have to report treasure. She would love that, like people were always finding treasure, like they would be stupid enough to report it if they did.
I try to imagine what Rachel would want to talk about if she were here. Lately she had been preoccupied with swimming. The logic seemed to be that she was so tired sleep wouldn’t even help anymore, only swimming.
I
can hardly bear to sit still. It’s not like something that happened days ago, it’s always about to happen, he’s always coming up the hill.
The doors to A&E open and Joanna spots me and waves. She wears a white doctor’s coat over a black suit. We’ve met only a few times, but Rachel often spoke about her. Joanna crosses her legs and leans against the bench. The red Casualty sign glows above the entrance.
“Have they arrested anyone yet?” she asks.
“No.”
“I keep thinking about what I’d do to him if I found him,” says Joanna. “It wouldn’t be quick.”
She’s from Manchester, and her accent is familiar and reassuring, not quite like Rachel’s but at least northern. She is over forty and Rachel once said she looked at Joanna to see what she would be like in ten years. “But she’s a doctor, not a nurse,” I said, and Rachel gave me a long stare.
“Is there anyone on staff named Martin?”
Joanna frowns. “Not in our unit, no.”
“A patient?”
“No one comes to mind. Why?”
“She mentioned the name for the first time recently. She said she was going to meet him.”
“I’ll let you know if I think of anything,” she says.
“How had she seemed lately?”
“She was herself.” Joanna stares at the hospital. “It’s terrible without her. Everyone else in there is a tosser or a moron.”
“What about Helen?”
“Tosser.”
In ten years Rachel would have been a senior nurse practitioner. I wonder if she would have stayed in Oxford or left for another hospital.
“We got pissed a few weeks ago. I told Rachel about the affair I’m having and she told me about getting beat up when she was seventeen.”
“She never told anyone that. I don’t think she ever told Stephen.”
