by Flynn Berry
“We were friends,” says Joanna, drawing out the last word.
“Where were you?” I want to be able to picture the two of them. It makes me happy. Sometimes I worried that Rachel was lonely, that all she did was work.
“The Pelican.”
Joanna sighs. I imagine she feels as I do, which is leaden. A plane roars overhead, hidden in the seam of the clouds.
“Why did you go to the Pelican?”
After work, Rachel only ever went to the White Hart, near the hospital.
“Rachel came to meet me after her shift. I was already in Oxford,” she says.
“Why?”
“A coroner’s inquest.”
“When was this?”
“October.”
“That must have been difficult.”
“No, I’ve been at dozens of them. We do an inquest every time someone dies within forty-eight hours of entering hospital. The coroner talks to the witnesses and presents the cause of death, and then if we’re lucky we have the afternoon off.”
I ask about her affair, because I want to build out the image of the two of them in the Pelican. The affair is with her son’s swimming instructor. I make her tell me Rachel’s reaction. Joanna says there was a lot about it the two of them found hilarious at the time, and I see Rachel, hanging her dark head and laughing over the table.
• • •
Four old men are playing shuffleboard at the public courts when I return to Marlow. When it was too cold for me, Rachel played with the regulars. She didn’t know all their names and said they rarely talked, but when one of them went on holiday he brought her a small bottle of ouzo.
“Why did he get you ouzo?” I asked.
“Because he went to Greece,” she said.
I wonder if one of these men brought Rachel the ouzo. They appear to be in their eighties, so I rule them out of suspicion. It’s not fair, really. Who knows what they were like when they were younger.
I watch them push the burgundy disks down the court and wonder whether they knew her, and how well. I remember how embarrassed Lewis was for me on the common last week. Rachel never told me about visiting Andrew Healy in prison. She never told me she bought the dog for protection. She allowed me to pretend it was over.
31
I COME OUT OF the grocer’s on the high street with two carrier bags. Part of my arrangement with the manager now is that I have full use of the kitchen. There are flurries but it feels too cold for snow. I shift the straining bags to my other hand. At the door to the inn, I turn around and, as I expected, Keith is standing beside his van watching me.
I was behind him on the checkout line. It was quite a slow line, too. He seemed to grow more and more distraught, but he couldn’t exactly leave at the sight of me, at least not in front of other people. The thing is, Rachel and I look similar.
• • •
I resume my research, hunched over my laptop on the bed, working through a bag of licorice. I add more names to the list and sort through them, striking names if they were in prison on the date of either her assault or her murder, adding stars to indicate priority, and then, hours into the research, I find Paul Wheeler.
It took me so long because he was charged six years ago, and there’s been nothing about him in the news since. He attacked a young woman at seven in the morning in Bramley, a district in Leeds. As soon as I read the first sentence of the article, my skin starts to burn.
Seeing the photograph of him is like remembering a name you’ve forgotten, as though I knew it was him all along. He looks exactly as she described.
I lurch off the bed and drink water straight from the tap. I want to call Rachel so much that I pick up my phone and find her name, allowing myself a few seconds with the illusion that I might be able to tell her.
The assault matches what happened to Rachel. The victim was a stranger, the attack brutal and sudden. After another two hours of research, I have the name of the victim, the town where Paul lived, and the name of his solicitor. He was tried at York Crown Court and imprisoned at Wakefield. I call his solicitor and leave a message with my number, asking Paul to contact me. I say my name is Sarah Collier, from the Telegraph. A few hours later, my phone rings.
• • •
We arranged to meet at a café in Leeds. I am surprised that he is willing to talk to me, though he has nothing to lose. He has already served time for the assault in Bramley. If his case hadn’t yet gone to trial, or if he were still in prison awaiting parole, he would never agree to meet me.
His hair has been shaved. Before, in the arrest photographs, he wore it long. He hasn’t seen me yet and I step back into the entry. I can’t go near him when I’m like this, and I force myself to wait outside for another few minutes. He is on parole. I know the conditions of his parole and what will happen if he violates them.
He smiles when he sees me. It’s him. I’m certain of it. There is a glass jar of sugar on the table, and I want to break it in half on the edge of the chair and drive it into his face.
“Hello, Paul. Thank you for meeting me.” I imitate Sarah Collier. I speak in a brisk voice, as she does, and my movements are firm and decisive. After my coffee arrives, I tap my spoon once on the side of the cup and set it beside my saucer. “I’m working on a story for the Telegraph and it concerns you. I think there was a miscarriage of justice in your trial.”
It takes a great deal of effort to speak clearly and sound neutral. If I stop controlling my face for a second, it will break apart, and I will tell him how I plan to punish him.
He stares back at me, amused, and I think the disguise hasn’t convinced him, but he probably does this to all women—journalists, prosecutors, judges—a stripping-down, an assessment. Their reserve and competence don’t fool him. He knows what they’re like. He knows what they look and sound like when they’re scared.
I let my features slip, to show him my distaste, as an actual journalist might. We stare frankly at each other for a moment, then I signal to the waiter and order a danish. It’s a calculated gesture. I’m not too frightened to eat in front of him.
“Do you want anything?”
“No,” he says, and I study him. Did you hurt my sister? Did you kill her? I think of the woman in Bramley. Both of her shoulders were dislocated by the time he was done.
“Have you heard of Anna Cartwright?” I ask.
“No.”
“She was a forensic pathologist in the US. A few years ago, she was caught falsifying evidence. Her work was used in thousands of convictions, and all of them have to be retried now. I think something similar is happening in York.”
“Who?”
“I can’t say yet. But the person handled materials for your trial.”
“It’s too late now, isn’t it?” he says. “I already served five years.”
“You could clear your name. It must be difficult to find work.”
“No,” he says, “it hasn’t been.”
“The story will go ahead either way. If you want a chance to say what actually happened, all you have to do is talk to me.” The waiter sets down the danish and I start to eat, choking down the sweet cream and pastry. I hate danishes, but didn’t want to ruin a good food.
“How much will I be paid?”
“We don’t compensate interview subjects, but you might receive reparations if your conviction is overturned.” I pause, as though this next part will be difficult to hear. “He’s done very well, this man. He’s risen quickly in the Home Office.”
We talk for the next half hour. He grew up in Hull and attended the comprehensive on Fountain Road. He lived in Hull until he was charged, and I work out that he was there the summer of Rachel’s assault. He spent five years at Wakefield Prison. His brother bought him a flat and furnished it for him before his parole.
“Did your brother collect you on your release?”
�
��No. He lives in Germany.”
I falter for a moment. His brother thinks he’s guilty. He flew back to buy and furnish the flat, but not to meet him. I would guess he never visited Paul in prison either.
We discuss his treatment by the police. He has some complaints but was treated courteously overall. He mentions his probation officer by name. He tells me about being on parole and about his job.
As we finish the conversation, I mention the name of the commissioning editor at the Telegraph.
He smiles. “Do you live in London?” he asks.
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“Clapham,” I say, with a tight smile. He tilts his head. He knows I’m lying, but I think it pleases him that I don’t want him to know where I live. I stow my notebook in my bag. I’m about to pull the straps over my shoulder and stand when he says, “We’ve met before. Do you not remember?”
“No.”
“At the Cross Keys.”
“I’ve never been. Is that around here?”
“Yes. You must have been a teenager. We talked one night. You don’t remember our conversation?”
“No. I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.”
32
I LEAVE THE CAR in front of the café and walk to Albion Street. The district is familiar, though many of the shops have changed since I was last here, years ago. The name of the pub isn’t familiar, and I was telling the truth when I said I’d never been to it. A group of us often went out in Leeds when we were teenagers, but I remember the names of the bars and clubs, and the Cross Keys isn’t one of them. People go past me, pulling their collars up, the rain too fine for an umbrella. I turn into Red Lion Square.
The pub has an ordinary front—baskets of ivy, a chalkboard by the door—but as soon as I see it I know that the bar is on the left when you enter and there is a square stone patio for smoking. The toilets are down a flight of stairs behind red stall doors that are half the usual height.
The pub has a few patrons inside, stale air, a race on. I go down the steps, and at the bottom of the stairs I push open the door to the ladies’. I still hope to be wrong. The room smells of disinfectant and spilled liquor. The stall doors are red and half height.
I enter one of the stalls and pull the latch across. The glossy red paint shows my reflection, a dark smear. My heart is beating so strongly that when I look down it’s lifting the fabric of my shirt.
At the top of the steps the bartender and the other drinkers turn to look at me, and I realize I’m panting. It was like being where something terrible had happened, where someone had died or where bodies were buried. I don’t know what happened there.
I leave the square and realize the pub is a few blocks from the Mint. We often went into places like it to drink before we went to a club. No one noticed if we brought a plastic bottle of tequila and emptied it into a cup of ice. I think Rachel and I came together. Going out in Leeds was an endeavor and something we rarely did separately.
He may have confused me with Rachel. He may have spoken to Rachel before the attack, on one of the nights when she blacked out. Or he spoke to me, on one of the nights I blacked out.
• • •
Paul told me he works as a clerk at a computer repair shop. I call the manager and introduce myself as Ruth Foley, Paul’s parole officer, and ask to confirm his account of his movements. I ask if he worked on Friday 19 November, and the manager has me hold the line, then says, “Yes, he was here from ten until six.”
The manager promises that he couldn’t have left. He was behind a till and would have needed a replacement.
I call Moretti from the green on Merrion Street. “What will you do if you find the man who attacked her in Snaith?”
“We would consider him as a suspect in her murder.”
“What if he has an alibi? Would you investigate the assault itself?”
“No.”
“Why not? There’s no statute of limitations on it.”
“The victim can’t testify, and there were no witnesses. Even if we charged him, the Crown prosecutor would never bring it to court.”
• • •
On the drive home, I think about the red half-height doors. They were designed, I think, to keep you from doing things you shouldn’t. I have a memory of laughing about this. I think I went into one of the stalls with a man.
33
WHEN I RETURN TO Marlow, I go to the library. On the landing, there is a drawing of the meeting house, a white lodge on a great lawn. It had a portico with columns and segments of shade, and benches facing the village. I wonder if anyone died when it burned down.
“Why didn’t they rebuild it?” I asked Rachel.
“They all left. They moved to America.”
I climb the stairs to the children’s collection. I choose a book of Italian fairy tales with a green cover and carry it home. As I come up the stairs, I stub my toe on the chair on the landing. Pain bursts up my calf, and I drop the book. I lift the chair and thrash it against the wall. Across the landing the heavy gold mirror rattles. Dust rises from the plaster. My face is wet and my mouth gapes open as I grunt with the effort.
• • •
When I leave my room again, the book of Italian fairy tales has been smoothed and left in front of my door. On the landing, I kneel and brush the plaster dust into my hand. The exterior walls of the Hunters are made of stone. There is a chance no one will notice the dents in the plaster. Someone has already cleared away the broken chair.
That night, in my room, I try to read the Italian stories, but even they are beyond me. For a long time I sit with the book on my lap and my head tilted back in pain. When I finally stand to go to bed, I notice the illustration that has been open on my lap.
There are two rows of pleached hornbeams on a lawn that leads to a forest. A woman in a hooded robe walks purposefully toward the woods, between the hornbeams. A greyhound trots ahead of her.
My head droops toward the painting. It bewilders me, after today. I can’t believe such things exist, both the painting and the things in it. The greyhound and the hooded robe. I want to know where the woman is going, and I want to be in her place with an urgency that surprises me, and that I would have thought I had outgrown.
My hands are still white with plaster dust. There are still black spots on the wall from the bottle of wine that exploded the night before her funeral.
34
RACHEL AND I VISITED the Tate last year. I like Tate Modern better. At its bar you can drink a white wine or a mineral water and look down at the cloudy river and St. Paul’s and the people on the bridges. I didn’t try to explain this to Rachel. She would fixate on the mineral water, which I rarely bought and always with a sense of disappointment in myself.
The mineral water fits, I wanted to tell her. It fits there.
We looked at medieval Flemish paintings. One of them was a triptych of a pilgrimage, and the path curved far back into the picture field. Looking at it is supposed to be like going on a pilgrimage yourself, said the placard, which I thought was overstating the matter. But it was mesmerizing, and I did find that I really wanted to be there, not here. Walking past, apparently, all manner of things. A hydra in the courtyard of an inn. Dogs chasing a leaping stag. A tavern on stilts in a pond.
Rachel came over and I leaned against her and said, “Wouldn’t that be nice?”
“Mm.”
I followed her into the next room, where there was an oil painting of Judith and Holofernes. Holofernes was the general of an invading army. Judith seduced him and maneuvered her way into his tent. She slaked him with wine and cut off his head.
“Then what happened?” I asked, but the placard didn’t say and Rachel was already in the next room.
35
THE NEXT DAY, there are cars parked in double rows along the common, and all the shops on the high street are closed. Th
e Duck and Cover is closed, and the Miller’s Arms. The only open office belongs to the town solicitor, who tells me that today is Callum Hold’s funeral.
I don’t have anything else to do, so I find a bench on the common. From here, there is no sign of the two hundred people inside the church. Its wooden doors are closed. Every so often a twist of smoke rises from its chimney. The garden beside it, with thin stone tablets under the cedar elm, is quiet. The church looks cold and empty, the stained glass black and glossy as oil.
Above me the yews creak in the wind. The town didn’t shut down for Rachel. Or maybe the shops did close. I wouldn’t have noticed. The day is bleak, and I stuff my hands in my pockets and pull my scarf over my mouth.
I think about the Cross Keys and the red half-height doors in the toilets. I still can’t remember what happened there. Every time I think of it, my stomach drops, as it does when I remember something shameful.
With a sound like a gate being lowered, the church doors open. The family appears to be the first to come out. They’re down from Stoke, said the town solicitor. There isn’t a coffin.
Callum died in September. The solicitor told me the family waited to have the funeral until his best friend returned from a tour in Afghanistan. I can’t tell who he is. The best man, in a way. There are a lot of men around Callum’s age, and they all look gutted.
More and more people exit the church. They spill onto the common, near where I sit. I unwind my red scarf and stuff it in my pocket since it marks me out too much. I listen to the voices, which are low and somber. Some of the men and women are still crying freely. People form groups near the open doors of the church, on its lawn, in the middle of the road along the common. I don’t see Louise. I wouldn’t go either, if I were her.
The reception is in Brightwell. Someone has rented the manor lodge. I know the building, which is long and low, with three turrets. When they host weddings, they fly white pennants from the turrets. I wonder if there will be flags today, and what color they will be.
