Under the Harrow

by Flynn Berry

  • • •

  As soon as I cross the bridge over the river Tamar, I want to turn back. I want to keep drifting around Cornwall. It would be a happy life. I could visit Frenchman’s Creek in a thunderstorm. I could find the dark pink lighthouse. After a heavy rain, a falls will appear somewhere on the Lizard Peninsula. A sudden fan of silver water, spraying between the green headlands, twisting down the side of a black ravine.

  I could order the scallops at St. John’s. They were her second choice, and she had a hard time deciding.

  The bridge span rattles under the tires. Far below, chunks of ice and snow float on the water. Ahead of me is the Devon side. I want to stay in Cornwall, but Rachel was not arrested, she isn’t in prison, and I will never be able to feed her my memories.

  As I drive east, the calm of the past four days is replaced by dread. The prosecutors will announce their decision tomorrow. I keep thinking that I need to call someone to make sure that the charge isn’t lowered from murder to manslaughter. I keep doing the maths based on the different minimum sentence lengths, to find out how old he will be when he gets out, how old I will be.

  I drive toward Keith Denton’s house. I pretend that someone knows where I am. I pretend I have been trained and somewhere the people who trained me are standing in a great stone house, thin women in black suits with cigarettes and men smoking cigars and looking out the window at the rain, my spymasters, my superintendents.

  49

  THE SHINGLED HOUSE APPEARS empty. Natasha and the two boys are likely still in Margate, and Keith is at the station in Abingdon, unless they moved him to the nick in Oxford. The dog didn’t come to the door in Margate, I wonder if they kenneled her or if Natasha has already given her away to punish him.

  A stain spreads across the gravel below where he parked the van. I stand for a long time looking down at it, though I know I’m being ridiculous, it can’t be her blood. The stain must be fuel or motor oil. I crouch down and lift a handful of gravel, which has the sharp scent of petrol.

  When I am halfway up the drive, a man comes out of the house next door, and we stare at each other. He is about forty. He has a shaved head and wears an anorak. I recognize him from town, though I don’t know where. He shifts his weight, watching me. After a few moments, he continues down to the road. I let my breath out. I wonder if he would have stopped me if Keith were at home, or if I were carrying a hammer wrapped in plastic.

  Once the neighbor turns on Redgate, I continue to the front door. I open the letter box and sort through the past few days of post. Nothing personal has arrived for Keith, no envelopes with handwritten addresses. I decide to continue checking it while he is in custody, on the slight chance that something useful might arrive.

  There is not much to look at in his garden. A shed, a cherry tree, which in spring will froth with white or pink blossom. In one corner is a stack of boxes, and I pull the drawers open. An apiary, of all things. I consider the dry honeycombs and the white resin and imagine him showing up at Rachel’s house with a stupid grin and a chunk of fresh, dripping honeycomb wrapped in paper. “Just thought you might like it.” I open one of the drawers and spit in it.

  One of them left a recycling bin by the back door. The police must have gone through his rubbish weeks ago, and I wonder if they searched it again after arresting him. Bottles of white wine and cans of Strongbow. No Tennent’s Light Ale. No proof yet that he watched her from the ridge. I replace the bottles and cans gently, to avoid attracting the neighbors’ attention.

  They had an affair, or he fixated on her, or some combination of the two. He stalked her. He watched her from the ridge, and offered to do jobs at her house, and stole the photographs. He wasn’t in any of them, which would make them strange mementos of a relationship.

  I cup my hands around my eyes and look through a window. The kitchen clearly belongs to a family. If they did have an affair, Rachel would never have come here.

  There would be plenty of other meeting places. They would meet at isolated countryside inns or at hotels in London, even in Oxford. I imagine them setting off at different times down the aqueduct and, far from the village, after the hazel copse, stumbling off the path and pressing against a tree.

  I can imagine her in an affair but not with him. He doesn’t fit the role. I can’t imagine her doing anything risky or desperate for him, and she would hate him for betraying his wife.

  The more I think about it, the more I think she isn’t the type for any of it, not the subterfuge, not the narcotic obsession of an affair. Other people’s delusions disgusted her.

  Alice had an affair with one of our teachers, and I can’t imagine Rachel doing any of what she did, walking by his house, for example, and seeing that he was home with his family and telling him to meet her around the corner and fuck her in her car. The teacher was crazy about her. Alice put an end to it, and he said, “But we were going to go to the beach together.” I felt sorry for him, but Rachel didn’t. “Sad fuck,” she said. She didn’t understand why he insisted on lying to his wife instead of leaving.

  I think Rachel made Keith feel foolish. I think she made him feel foolish at a point when he couldn’t recover from it, he had hoped for too much. He proposed something to her and she laughed or told him off, and it was too late, she was already precious to him.

  He came home afterward, I think. He showered and washed his clothes. It would seem safer to do here than anywhere else. He must have left traces everywhere, in the pipes, in the floorboards. The police didn’t look hard enough for evidence. It is there somewhere, in the pipes, and they should have torn the house apart to get to it.

  Before I leave the property, I return to the shed for the secateurs and trim the cherry tree until there is not much of it left.

  • • •

  I go to the Duck and Cover, but there isn’t any news. The bartender tells me that as far as anyone knows Keith has not been released. Snow begins to fall on the town, and we both turn to watch it. It falls heavily, not like in Cornwall. The half-timbered houses across the road look, for a moment, ancient, and the people on the pavement have the defined features and heavy gazes of people in old paintings. Their eyes are dark and serious as they look up and across the road toward us, to see what the snow has already done, what it will go on to do.

  50

  AT THE LIBRARY the next morning I take down a contemporary French novel about a woman who murders her doctor. It is the sort of thing I’ve been avoiding. She stabs him. But I read it anyway, standing in the library, then sitting. Somehow, it’s like an antidote.

  The narrator lives next to the Gare de l’Est. She commits the crime on the rue de la Clef. She returns the knife to her old flat in the sixième. The story is brisk and clean in a way that seems particularly French. I hope she gets away with it.

  I worry the librarian, the boy with the round glasses, will not let me borrow it. He will look at it and say, You shouldn’t be reading this.

  This does not happen. I carry the novel home and finish it in my room. Near the end, I realize I have been picturing the narrator as Rachel.

  • • •

  I am reading certain parts of the book again—the part at the Gare du Nord, the part at the coliseum—when Lewis calls and asks me to come downstairs. This was not what I planned to be doing when he called with the prosecutor’s decision. I planned to be outdoors, for one thing. Instead I am reading about a woman disposing of evidence in the Seine.

  A cold weight settles in my stomach. I dress in clean clothes and braid my hair, as though it will help to look respectable and compliant.

  I walk down the carpeted stairs and past the painting of the red riders. My heart thumps against my ribs. Lewis waits for me on the road, leaning against an unmarked car. His face is blank and I wait for it to shift. I hug my jumper to my chest against the wind.

  “Nora,” he says, and I know from his voice. “CPS isn’t going to pr
osecute Keith Denton.”

  “But he was there. He stole photographs of her. He doesn’t have an alibi.”

  “It’s not enough. We have no forensic evidence against him.”

  Lewis opens the car door for me. Through the windscreen, I watch him walk around to the driver’s side, a tall, handsome man in a long coat, and wonder if he is savoring these few seconds alone before he has to rejoin me.

  He doesn’t turn on the engine. There is nowhere to go. I don’t have to speak to a prosecutor or attend his appearance before a magistrate, though I don’t know if those are things I would have done if this had gone the way it should have.

  “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know. He was released early this morning from St. Aldate’s.”

  I resist the urge to turn around in my seat. “Did you check the drains at his house?”

  “Yes, when we first interviewed him.”

  “What are you going to do?” I ask.

  “If we don’t find any new evidence, the inquiry will lose priority.”

  “Has that already started?”

  “Yes. Our resources are limited at the moment,” he says, which means there has been another murder near Abingdon.

  “Is it related?”

  “No. Two men were killed at a warehouse in Eynsham. It appears to be a hate crime.”

  Moretti will solve the case quickly, I think. A sop to his conscience.

  “Can you charge him again? Or does he have immunity now?”

  “We can, with compelling new evidence,” he says. “But it doesn’t happen often.”

  Keith was released hours ago. I might have bumped into him on leaving the library, when I thought he was in custody. The thought makes me laugh. Lewis runs his hand over his eyes.

  “Do you think he did it?” I ask.

  “I don’t know.”

  I want him to say yes, even though it will only add to my fury. Was it laziness, on the part of the prosecutors? Did they not want to increase their caseload? Or was it money, are there too few courts and judges in this country? When I say this aloud, Lewis says, “Or it’s a moral decision not to make an innocent man endure a trial.”

  “What’s your instinct about him?”

  “Based on what?” His voice sounds tense and strangled. I wonder if he was in Eynsham last night, and what he saw.

  “If you were forced to decide—”

  “Nora, I don’t know.” His head rests on his hand. “You shouldn’t speak to him. He’s trying to get an order of protection against you.”

  • • •

  It will never be solved now. Not formally, anyway, not with a conviction. There won’t be a trial. The detectives in Abingdon are in the first forty-eight hours of a new case. Lewis will leave soon, and Moretti will take the early retirement scheme. Both of them will be gone before the new year is out, I think. Not because of Rachel. I don’t think any of the officers will be haunted by her. I wish they would be, then there might be a chance of one of them solving it. The strange thing is this probably isn’t the worst case any of them has seen, or the saddest. They will carry other people with them into the future. Children, probably.

  Keith Denton is free. I imagine him coming home and setting the house to rights after its two sudden departures. I wonder if he made a list of the things he would do as a free man. Pint of bitter, walk in the hills.

  The exonerated man. His friends and the town will rally around him. They will want to hear all about his narrow escape. Everyone knows the system is cracked. At least some of the thousands of people in prison for murder are innocent, and he almost became one of them. The town will be happy to believe he is innocent. Better a stranger than someone who has been inside their own homes.

  51

  I SIT AT ONE of the wooden tables next to the Hunters and listen to the news on my headphones. A few words stream by that I don’t catch, and I try to work out what the reporter might have said. I’m so absorbed it takes me a few seconds to realize what is in front of me. Keith coming around the corner of the building.

  I tug my headphones off and he slumps onto the bench across from me. A tinny voice leaks from the headphones but I don’t switch the radio off, as though the person on the other line will be listening if anything happens to me. His hands are in his pockets, and I can’t tell if he has a weapon. At the moment we are out of view of anyone on the high street.

  “You killed her,” I say, and my voice doesn’t sound like me, it sounds like her.

  He shakes his head, either to warn me to stop talking or to correct me. “Do you want to know what I can’t figure out?” he says, staring at the join in the wood. “They never thought about you.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “You were in the house with Rachel. The police arrive, you’re waiting outside, covered in her blood, and they don’t arrest you.”

  “I found her.”

  “If you found her you would want to get away from the house. You’d run to the neighbors or down the road. You wouldn’t wait around, in case whoever did it was still inside. Unless it was you.”

  “I wasn’t thinking clearly at that point,” I say. Keith’s body is oddly slack, like he can’t hold himself up properly.

  “One of the firemen told me he was watching you, and he said you didn’t cry. And there’s the dog. I can’t get my head around it. What you’re saying is an intruder, someone breaking into the house, killed a trained German shepherd. I don’t know how you could do that without serious injuries, but whoever it was didn’t lose any blood.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I’m guessing. They didn’t ask for my blood. I think you slit the dog’s throat while he was sleeping.”

  “The police eliminated me.” I remember Moretti asking if it was normal for me to be at the house at that time. He considered me as a suspect.

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t have a weapon.”

  “Did Rachel have any knives in her kitchen? You either washed it or hid it afterward.” He lifts his head. “They’re coming for you now. They know what you did, and they know why you did it.”

  “I’d never hurt her.”

  “Would you throw a bottle at her face?”

  “How do you know about that?”

  He snorts. “How the fuck do you think? What is it about me that makes it so hard for you to believe?”

  I shake my head, and he says, “You broke her nose.”

  I don’t argue. It was hard to tell if her nose was broken because of me or what happened to her a few hours later.

  “You stole pictures of her.”

  “No. Rachel gave them to me. She loved me.”

  He laughs at my expression.

  “She always said you were a little bitch.”

  PART THREE

  FOXES

  52

  WE GOT IN a fight at the party. After we played Nevers, before I climbed the stairs, with everything below my knees a fuzzy darkness. Rachel teased me and I snapped at her and then we were through the back door and screaming at each other on the lawn. Rafe said he was going to call it in to the police as a domestic. He said it as a joke, but then Rachel said something to him about me and I took the beer bottle from his hand and threw it at her. It hit her in the face and she inhaled sharply and bent over.

  My stomach soured, but then she looked up and laughed with the blood coursing down her face. Clearly the victor. I’d proved her right. She was still laughing when I retreated inside.

  The boys kept us apart for the rest of the night. They made huddles around us and joked with us like we were boxers. They acted impressed but mostly they thought we were both mental, a nightmare, like Ali Ross, who at the last party did all the windows in her boyfriend’s car.

  Rachel leaned over me, early in the morning. “
Nora, do you want to come with me or stay?”

  “Stay.”

  We fought at most of the parties that summer, if one of us drank enough, which we always did, and if we weren’t too distracted by trying to pull someone. We fought carelessly, the way our friends fought with their mothers, and mostly over nothing.

  Every walk home followed the same idiot logic. First silent bitterness, then recrimination, an echo of before but with less slurring. By the time we reached the old center of town one of us said, I don’t want to talk about this anymore. We walked in angry silence past the Norman church and the bakery with our sandals slapping the pavement. Maddening, how our strides joined up even when we didn’t want them to. We looked in opposite directions, a gloomy Janus head.

  The fourth stage usually started near the end of the high street. One of us made a remark, often about the party, and a stupid thing someone else had done or said at it. This stage involved more recrimination, but also a few very faint apologies, like, I didn’t think you’d take it that way.

  We would start to get bored. The neon sky and the strangeness of the town at that hour would slowly colonize our attention. By the time we crossed onto the estate, the fight would be over.

  I can still see Rachel at seventeen, a line of blood curving over her mouth, laughing at me.

  I thought if she went on her own she might think about what she had said about me, and that she would be sorry. It drives me to distraction now, that I can’t remember what she said to upset me so much.