by Flynn Berry
Her brother was upstairs, by chance, and he and Milly were able to overpower Paul.
The maximum sentence for grievous bodily harm is life imprisonment, and the solicitor interviewed for the article expects him to receive that or close to it.
Is that enough? I ask Rachel. Is it over?
• • •
I speak to Lewis. Moretti had a trace on my car, apparently, the day I went to his house. He’s in Brighton now, and he tells me about his flat. You can see the channel from every room, he says, even the bathroom. He says that after a constable told him I’d been released, he ate chips and vinegar on the beach to celebrate. He asks if I want to come visit and I say yes, soon.
I look down at the article again. “Would anyone know you’ve been suspended yet? If, for example, you called a prison and asked to speak to an inmate.”
• • •
I walk through Marlow while waiting for his call. Down Meeting House Lane, down Redgate. Past the church, past the firehouse, past the tennis court. I’m on the common, facing the village hall, when Lewis calls.
“I spoke to Paul Wheeler,” he says, and his voice is careful and measured. “He says Rachel was his girlfriend.”
My eyes skitter away, and it looks like the clock is falling out of the village hall.
“It sounds like they only went out a few times, when she was a teenager. He said he hated his name, he always told girls he was called Clive. She wouldn’t have been able to find him. He didn’t admit to the assault, but he said they had an argument, and soon after he moved to Newcastle for work.”
“Is he making it up?”
“He said he gave her a mask. Does that sound familiar?”
The white carnival mask, with a curved beak. She hung it on the wall in her room.
“She probably thought the police would consider the crime more seriously if it were a stranger.”
“But why wouldn’t she tell me?”
“It happens,” he says. “Victims often don’t tell their families when they knew the person who beat or raped them.”
After the call ends, I sit on a bench under the yews and turn my face up to the thrashing branches. The wind roars, growing louder and louder.
I remember what happened at the Cross Keys now. The red half-height doors of the toilets. I didn’t go in with a man, I went in with Rachel. I had barely seen her all night. And she said, “I’ve been talking to someone. I think I’ve met someone.”
• • •
I know what Lewis meant. If she told me she knew him, she wouldn’t be able to forgive me if, for even a second, I suggested it was somehow her fault.
But I don’t understand why she thought I would have.
• • •
After some time, I leave the common and return to my room to finish packing. Milly Athill. Before closing the laptop, I search through the other articles about Paul Wheeler and finally find the name in one of the first reports after the crime that sent him to prison. Before the assault, the victim was at a pub with her best friend, Milly.
Her brother was upstairs at the time. He’s a rugby player who lives in Dublin, but he happened to be at her house. What a coincidence.
I always wondered why the police don’t use bait more often. Apparently so did they.
• • •
“Are you checking out?” the manager asks hopefully.
“Yes.”
She charges me for the night I spent in jail.
67
“I THOUGHT YOU WOULD move,” I say. Louise, on her own in front of the service station, looks at me as though I’m mad.
“No,” she says. “No, I haven’t moved.”
She could be in Camden. The gas ring. The tratt. Louise frowns. I should say something else, but I can’t, and I start to fill the car with petrol for the drive to London.
Her decision to stay seems pathological. Louise watches me and parts her mouth just enough to let out a flat stream of smoke. A familiarity opens between us, because of our resemblance, maybe, and I think she knows what I meant, and that it would be all right for me to tell her who I am. I am about to start but find I can’t. The only way I can think to begin is—my sister was murdered. My sister was murdered.
“Do you want one?” asks Louise. She wears the same outfit as always, a navy shirt, black skirt, and apron, but with a duffle coat wrapped over it. On the ledge beside her are a pack of cigarettes and a glass of mint tea steaming into the cold air.
I replace the pump and join her. As she offers me the pack, I notice the dark red marks on her hand, from when she was burned with a cigarette or stabbed with a screwdriver.
“Yes,” I say, “cheers.” I bend toward the lighter, straighten, exhale. I move around her so I am also leaning against the restaurant window. There is a jet in the distance, and it sounds like a wall breaking apart.
Louise stares at a van parked on the grass on the far side of the Bristol Road.
“Why would I move?” she asks.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “It’s none of my business.” She shifts toward me, rolling onto her shoulder against the glass, and waits. “It must be difficult for you to go past that every day.”
“Past what?”
“Where Callum died.”
“He didn’t die in the accident,” she says. “He woke up after the surgery. He died the next night.”
“From what?”
“Complications.”
The sensation is like missing a stair. Of course, I think, before the thought has even formed into words.
“There was a collision here,” said Rachel. She pointed out the window. “A man and a woman.”
“Did they survive?”
“One did.”
“Which one?”
“The woman.”
Sunlight warms the top of my head, then vanishes, like a hand pressing down and lifting. Why? I should have asked. Why did only one survive?
Callum must have been the subject of the coroner’s inquest in October. Rachel never told me the death was under review. After the inquest, she invented a reason for driving past the accident site. She wanted to show it to me. I wonder if she was disappointed that I didn’t suspect anything, or if it was a relief.
“None of her injuries came from the crash,” she said. “It’s a good thing he didn’t make it. He would have killed her.”
I turn to Louise, but it feels like a countermotion, and something else is rotating beneath me. She gathers her cigarettes and lighter, her glass, and nods at me before going inside. Through the window, I watch her hang up her duffle coat and tie the strings on her apron. Waves of heat sweep over me. Rachel wanted revenge, and she must have grown tired of waiting to find the man who attacked her. Louise moves in and out of the glare, and I watch her while I call Joanna.
“Was Rachel at the coroner’s inquest in October?” I ask.
“No,” she says.
A line of rippling birds flies low over the trees.
“Was she one of his nurses?”
“Yes.”
I close my eyes and wrap my hand over my forehead.
“I don’t remember all the particulars,” says Joanna. “Can I call you back when I have it in front of me?”
“Have what in front of you?”
“The transcript from the inquest.”
“Is that a public document?”
“Yes.”
“I’m on my way to the hospital now, will you make a copy for me?”
“All right. I’m going to be in rounds, but I’ll leave it at the nurses’ station for you.”
“Can you tell me anything you remember?”
“It was a good result. The cause of death wasn’t negligence.”
The sounds around me sharpen and separate. “Who was the patient?”
“Callum Hol
d.”
“How did he die?”
“The latch on his intravenous drip broke. He overdosed.”
“Does he have any family?”
“Yes, he had a brother.”
“What was his name?”
“Martin Hold.”
• • •
The inquest transcript begins with a précis from the coroner. The patient was brought to the John Radcliffe after a road accident on 22 September. The consultant surgeon recommended reconstructive work to repair internal bleeding. The surgery was successful. On the morning following the surgery, the patient was awake and in stable condition. Shortly after six that night he was pronounced dead.
The cause of death was not complications from surgery, as originally suspected. He died from an overdose of fentanyl, a medical heroin. The drip was meant to give him a painkiller at regular intervals. When its latch broke, the fluid flooded his veins.
An expert witness testified on faulty medical equipment. He believed the hospital staff did nothing wrong. Despite all precautions, equipment sometimes fails. Faulty equipment is the cause of one-fourth of all deaths in hospital.
Never, never, never, never. Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill.
• • •
Martin Hold. She told me his first name so I would remember it. So I would recognize it if anything happened to her.
If nothing did happen, if she made it to St. Ives, I doubt she would have ever confessed. But maybe it would have weighed on her too much, and one day she would have called me and said, “I’ve got something to tell you.”
• • •
I find the important part halfway through the transcript, hunched on the bench across from Casualty. Martin visited his brother in hospital. He was alert at the time, and they had a long conversation.
I cover my face with my hands. Rachel must have asked Callum about Louise’s injuries, or threatened him, and he told his brother.
• • •
In A&E Louise is wheeled past Rachel and into a room. Rachel starts to examine her. She presents like someone who has been in a road accident, but the strange thing is some of her wounds appear to have started to heal, and some of them already have bandages.
• • •
Rachel limps in and out of pubs and betting shops in Hull. Where would a violent man go, where would a monster go.
• • •
She had a way, sometimes. When she wanted to. I can hear her voice, burry and low, and she says, “When I was seventeen a man beat me up.” She waits. She says, “Do you want to tell me what happened to you?”
• • •
Even if the detectives read the inquest transcript, Martin doesn’t stand out. He doesn’t accuse her and he doesn’t sound aggrieved. Or he does, but not with her. He says there should be consequences for the manufacturer, so other families don’t go through what he has gone through. The coroner advises him to seek the advice of a solicitor for damages.
The transcript is a public document, like a trial record, but surely some of it would have been redacted if the coroner’s office were giving it to a member of the public instead of back to the hospital. Like Callum’s medical records, and all the contact information for his next of kin.
• • •
“I need your help,” I say. The service station café is empty and Louise looks at me, with a dishcloth in one hand. “My name’s Nora Lawrence.”
“I know who you are,” she says. This whole time, I thought I was the one watching her.
“Did you tell Rachel how you got your injuries?”
“Yes.”
She regards me with her small, calm face.
“Rachel broke the latch on his drip.”
Louise closes her eyes. “I know,” she says.
• • •
First we drive to Cirencester and Martha’s family’s estate. A long gravel drive, a row of poplars. Louise waits in the car. Martha’s mum answers the door, and when she sees me her hand covers her mouth.
“Hello, Lily. Is Martha here?”
“No, darling, she isn’t.”
“Oh, I must be supposed to meet her in town. Do you mind if I use the loo before I go?”
Her mum goes into the kitchen, to call Martha, I imagine. I slip into the hall. The cabinet is downstairs, and unlocked. I remember that Martha shrugged. No small children in the house.
I call good-bye to Lily on my way out. On the doorstep, she grasps both my shoulders and kisses me. I return to the car and settle my bag between my seat and the door. Louise looks at it, but doesn’t ask.
• • •
Sixty Rutland Street, Stoke-on-Trent.
I call the second of the two telephone numbers and ask for Martin.
“No, he’s not here,” says a young man. “He isn’t here until four.”
“Thanks. Can you remind me of your address?”
“Five thirty Waterloo.”
It is a paint shop, also in Stoke, around the corner from his home.
• • •
We drive north on the M5. Louise tests the recorder on her phone, and we listen to our voices from a few moments ago. Her voice sounds high and youthful, and mine sounds clear and taut. “So it works, then,” she says.
• • •
Past Bishop’s Cleeve. Past Redditch. It’s unfamiliar countryside. I think that’s a good thing. I think the strangeness of this might paralyze me if I were on a familiar route.
The road to Stoke is broad and nearly empty, but I drive like I am traveling across central London in the rain. I study each road sign as though I’ve just missed an exit, and my heart pounds when a driver merges well ahead of me.
“He said if I left he was going to kill me,” says Louise. “I didn’t ask Rachel to do it, but I told her about him.”
They grew up in Stoke, I learned from Callum’s obituary. They had a sister, Kirsty, but the obituary didn’t say what happened to her. Were they bad then? Can you learn to do what they did to Rachel and Louise? If their dad beat them I wish he had finished the job.
Past Birmingham. Past Stafford. The nervousness fades and is replaced with a low and solid dread. Neither of us speaks.
• • •
Louise will talk to him first and record the conversation. The recording won’t be admissible in court, but her account of what he tells her will be. And the police can listen to it, and the jury can be made aware that a tape exists. We park on Waterloo Road a block from the paint shop.
“Are you sure?” I ask her again.
“He likes me,” she says. “We never talked about what Callum did. He has no reason to be suspicious.”
“You didn’t go to the funeral,” I say, remembering.
“My best friend went. She told Martin I was still too distraught to leave the house.” I shake my head and she says, “I know. Quite clever,” and climbs out of the car.
• • •
I put my hood up. Martin lives in a terrace of brick houses. Most of the houses in the terrace are empty. Some have estate agent signs and others do not. The terrace backs onto an alley, and I walk up it, past the low sheds and garages. Strange Victorian buttresses separate each property. One of the bins has been tipped over, and as I step around the stream of rubbish, I hope it is his, I hope the kids here hate him. I count the lots until number sixty. It doesn’t look any different from the others. Stained brick, buttresses, shed.
Not far from here is a corner shop. I could buy kitchen roll, a jug of fuel, and matches. This is so clear I may have already done it. I imagine the weight of the jug rocking in my hand as the fuel glugs out. It splashes on my feet. It darkens the brick. I imagine the smell of petrol. I imagine carefully wiping the fuel from my hands before lighting the kitchen roll.
I consider the house. I consider the house burning, but I would only be doing him a favor, destroying
evidence.
I keep thinking of the officers swarming the woods behind her house. They had seemed so certain of the direction, that they’d find something. Then and all the nights since, like a clock steadily ticking, he has been here.
• • •
Louise meets me in the alley behind his house. “It was him,” she says. Her teeth chatter. “He told me he took care of it.”
She dials the police station in Abingdon, which we decided would act on the information more quickly than the one in Stoke. “My name’s Louise Rosten. A friend of mine just confessed to the murder of Rachel Lawrence.”
The desk officer transfers her to a detective whose voice I don’t recognize. Louise tells him about the confession and says she’s scared he’s going to hurt her now. She describes what he did to the dog. It still hasn’t come out in the press, only the police and the emergency workers who came to her house that day could know about it, and the person who did it. The detective asks her to hold the line. Her teeth don’t stop chattering.
When he returns, the detective says he has spoken to the station in Stoke, which will send patrol cars to the shop to arrest him. In the meantime, he asks Louise to wait somewhere safe.
• • •
I went cliff jumping once in Dorset, so I recognize this, that I am paralyzed with fear. Even with the handful of other shops, the block is quieter than I expected. The shop walls are made of plaster that was scraped into crescents before it dried. There is no side or rear exit. The building stands near the middle of the block. The lights are on, weakly, and I think I can see the shape of a person through the window display.
Louise will be gone by now. We agreed she would take a train back to Oxford. The detective will call her in for a full statement.
The police will be here soon. The Stoke police station is two miles away, but there might be a patrol car closer by. I command myself to move, which is as useless as when I told myself to jump off a fifty-foot cliff into Mirror Lake, which I did eventually, out of some combination of weariness and fatalism, like I had already done it and died, and I move toward the door. I take my hood down.
