Under the Harrow

1

A WOMAN IS MISSING in the East Riding. She vanished from Hedon, near where we grew up. When Rachel learns of the disappearance, she will think it’s him.

The hanging sign for the Surprise, a painting of a clipper ship on a green sea, creaks in the wind. The pub stands on a quiet road in Chelsea. After finishing the job on Phene Street, I came for lunch and a glass of white wine. I work as an assistant to a landscaper. Her specialty is in meadows. They look like they haven’t been landscaped at all.

On-screen, a reporter moves through the park where the woman was last seen. Police and dogs fan out across the hills behind the town. I could tell Rachel about her tonight, though it would ruin our visit. It might not have anything to do with what happened to her. The woman might not have even come to harm.

The builders at the house across the road have finished eating, the white paper bags balled at their feet, and are leaning back against the steps in the cold sunshine. I should have already left for the train to Oxford, but I wait at the bar in my coat and scarf while a detective from the station in Hull asks the public for any information about the disappearance.

When the broadcast moves to the storm in the north, I leave under the hanging sign and turn on the next corner toward Royal Hospital Road. I walk past the trimmed squares of Burton Court. Past the estate agent’s. Sunny homes in Chelsea and Kensington. I still live in a tower block in Kilburn. The stairwell forever smelling of fresh paint, seagulls diving at the balconies. I don’t have a garden, obviously. The cobbler’s children have no shoes, etc.

Black cabs drive down Sloane Street. Blurry orbs of light glow on the sides of buildings, reflected from the facing windows. The bookshop displays a pile of new translations of The Thousand and One Nights.

In one of the stories, a magician drank a potion made from an herb that kept him young. The problem was that the herb grew only at the top of a mountain, and so every year the magician tricked a youth into climbing the mountain. Throw down the herb, said the magician. Then I’ll come get you. The youth threw down the herb. I can’t remember the end. That may have been it. I’ve forgotten the ending for most of the stories, except the important one, that Scheherazade lives.

A few minutes on the tube, and then I am back out again, hiking up the stairs to Paddington station. I buy my ticket and a bottle of red wine at the Whistlestop.

On the platform, the train engines hum. I wish Rachel would move to London. “But then you wouldn’t get to come here,” she says, and I do love her house, an old farmhouse on a shallow hill, with two ancient elms on either side of it. The sound of the elms soughing in the wind fills the upstairs bedrooms. And she likes living there, living alone. Two years ago she almost got married. “Close brush,” she said.

On the train, I press my head against the seat and watch the winter fields pass by the window. My carriage is empty except for a few commuters who have left work early for the weekend. The sky is gray with a ribbon of purple at the horizon. It’s colder here, outside the city. You can see it on the faces of people waiting at the local stations. A thin stream of air whistles through a crack at the bottom of the pane. The train is a lighted capsule traveling through the charcoal landscape.

Two boys in hoods run alongside my carriage. Before I draw level with them, they jump a low wall and disappear down the berm. The train plunges through a tight hedge. In summer, it turns the light in the carriage green and flickering, like being underwater. Now, the hedge is bare enough that the light doesn’t change at all. I can see small birds in the gaps of the branches, framed by vines.

A few weeks ago Rachel mentioned that she plans to raise goats. She said the hawthorn tree at the bottom of her garden is perfect for them to climb on. She already has a dog, a large German shepherd. “How will Fenno feel about the goats?” I asked.

“Demented with happiness, probably,” she said.

I wonder if all goats climb trees, or only certain types. I didn’t believe her until she showed me pictures of a goat balanced at the edge of a fan of cedar, a group of them in a white mulberry. None of the pictures showed how the goats climbed the tree, though. “They use their hooves, Nora,” said Rachel, which doesn’t make any sense.

A woman comes down the aisle with a trolley and I buy a Twix bar for myself and an Aero for Rachel. Our father called us greedy little girls. “Too right,” said Rachel.

I watch the fields trundle by. Tonight I’ll tell her about my artist’s residency, to start two months from now in the middle of January. Twelve weeks in France, with lodging and a tiny bursary. I applied with a play that I wrote at university called The Robber Bridegroom. It’s embarrassing that I haven’t done anything better since then, but that no longer matters because in France I will write something new. Rachel will be pleased for me. She will pour us a celebratory drink. Later, over dinner, she will tell me stories from her week at work, and I won’t tell her about the missing woman in Yorkshire.

The train sounds its horn, a long, low call, as it passes through the chalk hills. I try to remember what Rachel said she would cook tonight. I see her moving around in her kitchen, shifting the massive slate bowl of chestnuts to the edge of the counter. Coq au vin and polenta, I think.

She likes to cook, partly because of her job. She says her patients talk all the time about food, now that they can’t eat what they want. They often ask what she makes, and she likes to give them a good answer.

Clay roofs and chimney pots rise above a high brick wall alongside me, and then it wraps around, enclosing the village. Past the wall is a field of dry shrubs and hedges with a few paths tunneling through it. At its edge, a man in a green hat tends a trash fire. Charred leaves rise on the drafts and spin into the white sky, floating over the field.

From my bag, I take out the folder of properties to let in Cornwall. Over the summer, Rachel and I rented a house in Polperro. Both of us have time off at Christmas and plan to book a house this weekend.

Polperro is built into the folds of a coastal ravine. Whitewashed houses with slate roofs nestle in the green rivulets. Between the two cliffs is a harbor and, past a seawall, an inner harbor, large enough for maybe a dozen small sailing boats, with houses and pubs built to the water’s edge on the quay. When the tide is out, the boats in the inner harbor rest on their hulls in the mud. On the western hook of the ravine are two square merchant’s houses — one a tweed-brown brick, the other white. Above them, umbrella pines stand outlined against the sky. Past the merchant’s houses, on the point, a fisherman’s croft is built into the rocks. The croft is made of rough granite, so on foggy days it blurs into the stones around it. The house we rented was on a headland ten minutes’ walk along the coast path from Polperro and included a private staircase with seventy-one steps built up the cliff from the beach.

I loved Cornwall with a mad, jealous ardor. I was twenty-nine and had only just discovered it, but it belonged to me. The list of things I loved about Cornwall was long but not complete.

It included our house, of course, and the town, the Lizard Peninsula, and the legend of King Arthur, whose seat was a few miles up the coast at Tintagel. The town of Mousehole, pronounced “mouzall.” Daphne du Maurier and Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again, and of course you did, anyone who left here would. The widow’s walks. The photographs in pubs of wrecks, and of townspeople in long brown skirts and jackets, dwarfed by the ruined hulls.

Every day the list had to be rewritten. I added the umbrella pines and the Crumplehorn Inn. Cornish pasties and Cornish ale. Swimming, both in open water and in the quiet, dripping caves. Every minute, really, even the ones when we were asleep.

“Everything’s better here,” I said.

And Rachel said, “Well.”

“What’s your favorite thing about Cornwall?” I asked, and she groaned. “Or I can tell you mine.”

But then she said, “Well, to start, there’s the ocean.”

If anything, she loved it more than I did, and she is even more excited than I am to go back. She hasn’t been herself lately. She seems frayed by her work, and always tired.

At the next station, the conductor warns the riders of possible delays tomorrow from the storm. Excellent, I think, so it is going to snow.

We pass through another town, where the cars now have their headlights switched on, pale yellow marbles in the weak afternoon light, and then the train curves around a poplar hedge and straightens as it pulls into Marlow.

Rachel isn’t at the station. This isn’t unusual. Her shifts at the hospital often run late. I leave the platform under a light so dull that the roofs of the town already seem to be dusted with snow. I walk away from the village toward her house, and soon I am on the open stretch of the road, a narrow tarmac ribbon between farms.

I wonder if she is walking to meet me with Fenno. The bottle of red wine thumps against my back. I picture Rachel’s kitchen. The bowl of chestnuts, the polenta bubbling on the hob. A car drives toward me, and I step onto the verge. It slows to a crawl as it approaches, and the woman behind the wheel nods at me before accelerating down the road.

I walk faster, my breath warming my chest, my cold fingers curled in my pockets. Heavy clouds mass overhead, and in the quiet the air takes on a tinnitus ring.

And then her house is in sight. I climb the hill, and the gravel crunches under my feet. Her car is parked in the drive, she must have just gotten home. I open her door.

I stumble back before I know what is wrong with the house, like something has flown at me.

The first thing I see is the dog. The dog is hanging by his lead from the top of the stairs. The rope creaks as the dog slowly rotates. I know this is bad, but it is also amazing. How did you do that, I wonder.

His lead is wrapped around a post on the banister. He must have tangled it and fallen, strangling himself. But there is blood on the floor and the walls.

I am hyperventilating, though everything around me is calm and still. It is urgent that I do something, but I don’t know what. I don’t call for Rachel.

I climb the stairs. There is a stripe of blood on the wall just below my shoulder, like someone sagged against it while climbing. When the stripe ends, there are red handprints on the step above it, and the next step, and then on the landing.

In the upstairs hallway, the stains turn messy. I don’t see any handprints. It looks as though someone crawled or was dragged. I stare at the stains and then, after some time, I look down the hall.

I can hear myself keening as I crawl toward her. The front of her shirt is black and wet, and I gently lift her onto my lap. I put my hand to her neck, trying to feel her pulse, then lower my ear to her face to hear her breathing. My cheek brushes her nose and chills sweep down my neck. I blow air into her mouth and pump on her chest, then stop. It might cause more damage.

I bend my forehead to Rachel’s and the hallway goes dark. My breath rolls on her skin and into her hair. The hall closes around us.

My phone never has service in her house. I’ll have to go outside to call an ambulance. I can’t leave her, but then I am stumbling down the stairs and through the door.

As soon as the call ends, I can’t remember what I said. There is no one in either direction, just her neighbors’ houses and the ridge behind them, and in the humming quiet I think I can hear the sea. The sky roils above me. I look up. Put my hands to my head. My ears ring as if someone is shouting very loudly.

I wait for Rachel to appear in the doorway. Her face confused and exhausted, her eyes fixing on mine. I am listening for the soft pad of her footsteps when I hear the sirens.

She has to come downstairs before the ambulance arrives. It will be finished when someone else sees her. I beg her to come down. The sirens grow louder, and my ears lift away from my jaw like I am grinning. I watch the door for her.

And then the ambulance is in view, racing down the road between the farms. It comes up her drive, gravel spraying from its tires, and when the doors open and the paramedics run to me, I can’t speak. The first paramedic enters the house and the second asks if I am wounded. I look down, and my shirt is stained with blood. When I don’t answer, he begins to examine me.

I pull away from him and run up the stairs behind the first paramedic. Rachel’s face is turned to the ceiling, her dark hair pooling on the floor, her arms at her sides. I can see her feet, in thick woolen socks. I want to crawl around the woman and squeeze them between my hands.

The paramedic points at a place on Rachel’s neck, then touches the same place on herself, under her jaw. I can’t hear her over the sounds I am making. She helps me down the steps. She opens the ambulance doors and settles me on its ledge and puts a foil wrapper around my shoulders. The wet on my shirt turns cold and plasters the fabric to my stomach. My teeth chatter. The paramedic switches on a fan so heat pours from the ambulance behind me, warming my back, escaping in vapors into the cold air.

Soon patrol cars arrive, the police in black uniforms gathering on the road and coming up the lawn. I stare at them, my eyes streaking from one face to the next. Static crackles from someone’s belt. I wait for one of them to smile and give the game away. A constable lowers a stake into the dirt and runs tape across the door, the ribbon bobbing up and down as it unspools behind him.

The edges of my vision go soft, then disappear entirely. I am so tired. I try to watch the police so I can tell Rachel what this was like.

The sky foams, like the spindrift of a huge unseen wave is bearing down on us. Who did this to you, I wonder, but that isn’t the important thing, the important thing is that you come back. At the house across the road, the open barn where they usually park is empty. An Oxford professor lives there. “The gentleman farmer,” Rachel calls him. Beyond the professor’s house, the ridge is an almost vertical cliff face, with steep paths cut into the stone. I stare at the ridge until it seems to come loose and start to drift closer.

No one goes into the house. They are all waiting for someone. The constable who ran the tape stands in front, guarding the entrance. In the paddock next door to the professor’s house, a woman rides a horse. Her cottage stands behind the paddock, near the foot of the ridge. The horse and rider gallop in a great circle under the darkening sky.

As the woman leans forward into the wind, I wonder if she can see us. The house, the ambulance, the uniformed police standing on the lawn.

A door slams at the bottom of the driveway and a man and woman step onto the gravel. Everyone watches the pair advance up the hill. They both wear tan coats, their hands in their pockets, their coattails blowing behind them. Their gaze is trained on the house, then the woman looks in my direction and our eyes catch. I am buffeted by wind, cold air. The woman lifts the tape and enters the house. I close my eyes. I hear footsteps approaching on the gravel. The man kneels down next to me. He waits.

Color sweeps over my eyelids. It will settle soon to black, and then I will hear the elm trees soughing overhead. If I go down the stairs, I’ll see our dishes in the sink and on the hob. The scrapings of polenta dried to the bottom of the pot. The chestnut skins on the counter, dropped where we pulled them off, burning our fingers.

If I go to her room, I’ll see the shadows of the southern-planted elm flickering on the boards. The dog asleep, sprawled below the bed, near enough that Rachel can drop her arm over the edge of the mattress and pet him. And Rachel, asleep.

I open my eyes.

2

THE MAN KNEELING NEXT to me says hello. He is holding his tie against his stomach. Behind him, the wind flattens the grass on the hill.

“Hello, Nora,” he says, and I wonder if we have met before. I don’t remember telling anyone my name. He must know Rachel. He has a large, square face and hooded eyes, and I try to place him at an event in town, bonfire night or the fire brigade fund-raiser. “DI Moretti. I’m from the station in Abingdon.”

It is a blow. He has never met her, her town doesn’t have murder detectives. To file any serious complaint you probably have to go to Oxford or Abingdon. As we walk down the drive, two women in white forensic suits pass us on their way to the house.

As we drive away I can’t breathe. I look out the window at the line of plane trees flashing past. I would have thought it would feel like a dream but it doesn’t. The man driving next to me is real, the landscape outside the window is real, and the wet sticking my shirt to my stomach, and the thoughts coiling through my head.

I want the shock to buy me a little more time, but the grief is already here, it came down like a guillotine when the woman put her finger to Rachel’s neck. I keep thinking how I am never going to see my sister again, how I was about to see her. As we drive through Marlow, I realize that I am talking to myself in my head. No one else is there. Usually when I have the uncanny sensation of watching myself think, I shape my thoughts into things to tell Rachel.

I shrink against the seat. Cars rush past us on the motorway. I wonder if the detective is always such a slow driver, or only when he has someone else in the car. I realize I haven’t been watching the road signs to check where he is taking me. Part of me hopes he will take me to a dark, wet field, far from the lights of the town. It would be symmetrical. One sister murdered and then the other, in the space of a few hours.

He did it. Then circled around the house and came up the drive, and convinced me to leave with him while everyone else was distracted. It isn’t hard to persuade myself. The fear is already here, pressing under the surface. I take a pen from my bag and grip it under my thigh.

I wait for him to ease onto one of the turnings, for an abandoned factory, or an empty orchard. Dead space surrounds the motorway, he has a lot of options. I ready myself to stab the pen into his eye, and then run back to her house. Rachel will be sitting in her living room. She will look up, frowning. “Did it work?”

But the sign for Abingdon appears, and the detective turns off the motorway, slowing to a stop at the end of the slip road. His face is slack, his eyes trained up through the windscreen at the signal.

“Who did it?” I ask.

He doesn’t look at me. The indicator ticks in the quiet car. “We don’t know yet.”

The signal changes and he pulls the car into gear. The light box sign of the Thames Valley Police revolves on a post at the entrance to the building.

In an open-plan room upstairs, a fair man with a dark suit hanging from his shoulders stands in front of a whiteboard. When he hears us enter, he shifts away from the board, where he has just taped up a picture of Rachel.

I groan. It is the picture from the hospital website, her oval face framed by dark hair. Her face is so familiar it is like looking at myself. She is paler and has stronger bones in her face. I can disappear in a room, she can’t. Both of us have high cheekbones, but hers turn out like knobs. She smiles in the photograph with her mouth closed, her lips pressed a little to the side.

In the interview room, Moretti sits down across from me, unhooking the button of his suit jacket with one hand.

“Are you tired?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“It’s the shock.”

I nod. It’s strange to be so tired, and also so scared, as if my body is asleep but receiving electric jolts.

“Can I get you anything?” he asks. I don’t know what he means, and when I don’t answer he brings me a tea that I don’t drink. He hands me a navy sweatshirt and tracksuit bottoms. “If you’d like to change.”

“No, thank you.”

He talks for a few minutes about nothing. He has a cabin at Whitstable. It is beautiful, he says, at low tide. He makes me nervous, even while talking about the sea.

He asks me to tell him what I saw when I first entered the house. I can hear my tongue lift from the bottom of my mouth with a click before every answer. He rubs at the back of his neck, the weight of his hand pushing his head down.

“Do you live with her?”

“No, I live in London.”

“Is it common for you to be there on a Friday afternoon?”

“Yes. I often come up to visit.”

“When was the last time you spoke to your sister?”

“Last night, around ten.”

The sky has darkened, so I can see the pale citrine squares of office lights across the road.

“And how did she sound?”

“Like herself.”

Above his shoulder, one of the yellow tiles clicks off. I wonder if he thinks I did it. It doesn’t seem likely, though, and my fear of it is distant, another depth charge but one that barely reaches me. For a moment, I wish I were being framed. Then, what I felt now would be something else — worry, outrage, righteousness — other than this. Which is nothing, like waking in a field with no memory of how you got there.

“How long will this last?” I ask.

“What?”

“The shock.”

“It depends. Maybe a few days.”

In an office across the street, a cleaning woman lifts the cord of a vacuum and shifts chairs out of her path.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I know you must want to go home. Have you noticed anything weighing on Rachel recently?”

“No. Her work, a little.”

“Is there anyone you can think of who might want to harm Rachel?”

“No.”

“If she felt threatened, would she tell you?”

“Yes.”

None of this is like her. I can just as easily see the other outcome. I can see Rachel, drenched in blood, sitting in this chair and patiently explaining to the inspector how she killed the man who attacked her.

“Did it take a long time?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” he says, and I bow my head against the ringing. The woman who came up the drive with him opens the door. She has a soft, pouchy face and curling hair pulled back into a knot. “Alistair,” she says. “A word.”

When he returns, Moretti says, “Did Rachel have a boyfriend?”

“No.”

He asks me to write down the names of the men she dated in the last year or so. I print each letter neatly, starting with the most recent and going back sixteen years, to her first boyfriend in Snaith, where we grew up. When I finish the list, I sit with my hands curled on the table in front of me, and Moretti stands near the door with his heavy square head bent to the paper. I watch to see if he recognizes any of the names from other cases, but his expression doesn’t change.

“The first name,” I say. “Stephen Bailey. They almost got married two years ago. She still saw him sometimes. He lives in West Bay, Dorset.”

“Was he ever violent toward her?”

“No.”

Moretti nods. Stephen will still be the first person to eliminate. The detective leaves the room, and when he returns his hands are empty. I think of the pub this afternoon, and the missing woman in Yorkshire.

“There’s something else,” I say. “Rachel was attacked when she was seventeen.”

“Attacked?”

“Yes. The charge would have been grievous bodily harm.”

“Did she know the assailant?”

“No.”

“Was anyone arrested?”

“No. The police didn’t believe her.” They would allow that she had been assaulted, but not in the way she described. They suspected that she had tried to rob or solicit someone and been violently rebuffed. They were the last of the old wave of policemen, preoccupied with the amount she’d had to drink, and that she didn’t cry. “It was in Snaith, Yorkshire. I don’t know if they still have a record of it. It was fifteen years ago.”

Moretti thanks me. “We need you to stay in the area. Do you have anywhere to sleep tonight?” he asks.

“Rachel’s house.”

“You can’t stay there. Is there someone who can come pick you up?”

I am so tired. I don’t want to try to explain this to anybody, or to wait in the station for one of my friends to arrive from London. When the interview ends, a constable drives me to the only inn in Marlow.

I hope we crash. A lorry holding metal poles drives in front of us on the Abingdon Road, and I imagine the nylon ribbon snapping, the metal poles falling out, dancing on the road, one of them pinioning me to the seat.

The Marlow high street is curved like a sickle, with the common at one end and the train station at the other. The Hunters is at the bottom of the sickle, next to the train station. It is a square, cream stone building with black shutters. When the constable drops me at the inn, there are a few people waiting on the train platform, and they all turn to look at the police car.

At the Hunters, I lock the door and put on the chain. I run my hand along the papered wall, then press my ear to it and hold my breath. I want to hear a woman’s voice. A mother talking to her daughter, maybe, as they get ready for bed. No sounds come through the wall. Everyone’s probably sleeping, I tell myself.

I turn off the lights and crawl under the blanket. I know what’s happening is real, but I do keep expecting her to call.

3

WE ARE SUPPOSED TO drive to Broadwell today for lingonberry crêpes and the museum, I think when I wake, angry that our plans have been postponed.

Halfway between the bed and the bathroom, my knees crumple. I collapse, but it’s like being yanked upright. The dog rotates from the ceiling. Rachel lies curled against the wall. There are red handprints on the stairs. There are three clean posts on the banister and a dirty one with the dog’s lead tied around it.

• • •

I don’t know how long I stayed like that. At some point I decide to wash myself. I can’t shower, because I think I can smell her house in my hair. Instead I strip and run a damp flannel over my body, watching its fabric turn pink and brown.

I dress, put my clothes from yesterday into a plastic bag, and carry them to the skip behind the inn. This feels strange, like I am disposing of evidence, but the police didn’t ask me to keep them. They should have advised me more carefully. I walk past a painting of a fox hunt in the hall, with some of the red riders hidden behind the trees.

As I climb the stairs, Moretti calls to say he has a few more questions for me. “I’m doing a press statement in an hour. My statement won’t include anything about the dog.”

“Why not?”

“People fixate on that sort of thing. I can’t prepare you,” he says, “for what it will be like if this becomes a national story. We can’t tell you not to talk to the press, but I can say it won’t help the case. They will get in the way, and then when they get bored they will look for what makes Rachel interesting.”

“What makes her interesting?”

“The worst things about her.”

A constable will collect me from the Hunters at five. I decide to wait in my room. I have six hours on my own until he arrives, and I wonder if I will make it until then.

• • •

A few hours later, there is a knock at the door. “I’ve had some complaints from the other guests,” says the manager of the inn. Behind her, the lamps are switched on in the hall. She wears a scarf of Black Watch tartan, and I want to tell her that I used to live in Scotland. My sister came to visit me there.

“The noise is disturbing them.”

“I’m sorry.” I have to lean on the door frame. I haven’t had anything to eat or drink today. Food is going to be a problem.

“Let me know if there’s anything you need,” she says. “I’m so sorry. It’s been such a difficult time. First Callum and now your sister.”

“Callum?”

“The young man from town, killed in an accident on the Bristol Road. He was only twenty-seven.”

I remember now. Rachel was one of his nurses. I consider sharing with the woman what Rachel told me about him, but decide against it.

• • •

At five, a constable collects me and we drive to Abingdon. In the interview room, Moretti says, “We haven’t been able to find your father. Are you in touch with him?”

“No.”

“Was Rachel in touch with him?”

“No.”

The heating pipes click in the ceiling above us. Outside the night is heavy with clouds. It is already snowing in Lancashire and Cumbria. The detective hasn’t asked about our mother. He must already know that she died a long time ago, soon after I was born.

“When did you last speak to your father?”

“Three years ago.”

“Does he have a history of violence?”

“No,” I say, though I’m not sure that’s entirely true. “He’s also frail. Rachel was much stronger than him. Do you have to tell him about her?”

“Yes.”

They will have a hard time finding him. He stopped collecting benefits after becoming suspicious of the government. Rachel had a postcard from him a few months ago saying he was in Blackpool, which I decide not to tell the detective.

“Have you spoken to Stephen yet?” I ask.

“He was at his restaurant all day.”

The news comes as a relief, and I feel disloyal for suspecting him. He adored her.

Moretti says, “What type of vehicle does your father drive?”

“He doesn’t drive anymore,” I say, and start to explain. He’s an alcoholic, though the word has always sounded too polished to describe him. Moretti must already know some of this. He has a record. Disorderly behavior, trespassing, burglary.

A constable knocks on the door, and Moretti excuses himself. I look into the incident room. One of the detectives is eating chips from a packet of foil and paper, and the air smells of vinegar.

I wish Fenno were with me, sitting on his haunches beside my chair. I want to rest my hand on his soft head. I gave him a bath on my last visit, cupping my hand over his eyes while rinsing the soap from his fur. When I wrapped him in a towel he leaned against me, and we stayed like that for a long time, the warm damp soaking through my shirt.

When Moretti returns, he says, “What we need from you now is an account of anything unusual in Rachel’s routine. It could be as small as a change in her route to work. Any new friends, a new activity.”

“I don’t know. She talked about joining a gym in Oxford so she could swim in the winter, but she hadn’t yet.”

“Anything else? Any changes at the hospital?”

“No.”

“Did she enjoy her work?”

“Yes, mostly.” She had a difficult time early in her career, when she was studying to become a nurse practitioner while already working as a registered nurse. She told me that she would bicycle home hoping someone would hit her so she could lie down. “She said it was demanding, but it satisfied her.”

Moretti studies me, and I wonder if I am trying his patience. Soon our interview will end, and I will have to leave. I can’t imagine what I will do next.

“Do you want something to drink?” he asks, and I nod. While he fixes us tea, I try to think of something to tell him, but I can’t remember any changes in her habits. I read the brochure from Victim Support. “Life can fall apart after a murder,” it says. “Simple things like paying bills and answering the phone can become difficult.”

I want to ask Moretti what he does in Whitstable, and how often he goes there. I expect to tell Rachel about all of this, and it is something she will want to know. We drink our tea in silence.

“On Sunday Rachel said she was off to meet someone named Martin.”

Moretti turns to me. “And where did they go?”

“She didn’t say. It was the evening, so dinner somewhere, I think. I asked if it was a date and she said no. She said he was a friend from the hospital.”

“His surname?”

“She didn’t tell me.”

Moretti says, “When did Rachel decide to move?”

“She wasn’t moving.”

“She visited an estate agent two weeks ago.”

“Where was she going?”

“St. Ives.” The north coast of Cornwall. I have a pulse of excitement. I love St. Ives. I’ll get to visit her there. “Rachel planned to move, and she didn’t sleep at her house this week. We think it’s likely she was being threatened.”

“Where was she staying?”

“With Helen Thompson.”

Moretti stands and I follow him from the room, too baffled to protest. He says, “Sergeant Lewis is on his way to Marlow. He’s offered to drop you at the hotel.”

A tall black man with a South London accent meets me in the corridor. In the lift on the way down, he says, “I’m sorry about your sister.”

When the doors open, I follow him outside to his car. Rain begins to drum the windscreen as we work our way through the traffic.

“Where do people go afterward?” I ask.

“They go home,” he says. The wipers sluice water from the glass.

“How long have you been a policeman?”

“Eight years,” he says, leaning forward at a crossing to check the oncoming traffic. “I give myself two more.”

4

RACHEL BOUGHT HER HOUSE in Marlow five years ago. Her town is perfect. There are painted-wood buildings on the high street. There is the common. There are the yews on the long end of the common. There is the yellow clock in the village hall. There are the two pubs. There is the church and the church graveyard. There is the rill. There is the petrol station.

The Duck and Cover is the tradesmen’s pub. It used to be called something different, the Duck and Clover, until someone painted out one of the letters. The Miller’s Arms is the commuters’ pub. It serves Pimm’s and shows sports only during the World Cup and Wimbledon. Rachel thought there was going to be an explosive showdown between the two sides eventually. She hoped for one. She sided firmly with the Duck and Cover. She said, “We don’t want it to turn into Chipping Norton.” She said, “It’s important that the people who work here can afford to live here.”

With the exception of the Miller’s Arms, the town hasn’t changed much, or not yet. There are no clothing or housewares shops on the high street. The village has a spring fête, and a pasta dinner to raise money for the firehouse.

“Why weren’t there as many commuters before?” I asked her.

“The trains got faster.”

There is another, larger town with the same name near London, with a famous pub, but Rachel never corrected people when they confused the two, or when they told her they had been to the Hand and Flowers.

Rachel said there was something wrong with the town. I can’t remember exactly when this happened. It was recent, sometime after we got back from Cornwall. I didn’t let her finish. We were eating breakfast at her house. I had just woken up, and I didn’t want to hear it. I knew from her tone of voice that what she was about to tell me was horrible. I knew I had to stop her. I had a raspberry croissant and an espresso and I had her town.

There is the wine shop. There is the building society. There is the gold rooster on top of the Hunters. There is the library. There are the twins who work for the town. There is the yellow awning of the Miller’s Arms. There are the poplars in front of the repair garage.

I thought the twins were one person until I saw them both at once washing a bin lorry. They both wore mirrored sunglasses and they both kept their hair long and they both had rottweilers.

“Do they have identical dogs?” I asked.

“No, there’s just one dog,” said Rachel.

• • •

The Hunters isn’t doing very well. There are twelve rooms and only two other guests. It’s November, but according to Rachel no one stayed there in the summer either. She said it only stayed open because of the bar below the rooms. This is good news for me, since I am not planning to leave.

When I return from the police station, I steal a carving knife from the kitchen. I put it under my bed, so if I drop my arm over the edge I can reach it. Then I sink down on the bed, wondering what she wanted to tell me, and let the darkness swarm my face.

5

THE FIRST PASSENGERS ARE already waiting in the darkness on the train platform when I go out to buy the papers at the newsagent’s shop across the road the next morning and carry them back to the empty front room at the inn. The room has green wallpaper with gold lilies of the valley. It’s where the riders used to eat breakfast before a hunt.

Rachel isn’t in the Telegraph. She isn’t in the Independent, the Sun, the Guardian, or the Daily Mail. If none of the national papers reported it, maybe it didn’t happen.

But she is on the cover of the Oxford Mail. The reporter must have had a copy of the postmortem. She died from arterial bleeding, I learn. The time of death was between three and four in the afternoon. She was stabbed eleven times in the stomach, chest, and neck. She had defensive wounds on her hands and arms.

I am at the table reading the article and then I am on all fours on the carpet. The pattern in the wallpaper starts to move. My mouth gapes.

When the worst of the pain recedes, I am washed against the corner of the room. I put the newspapers in the empty fireplace. I want to burn them, but I don’t have any matches.

• • •

I call the landscaper. I tell her there has been a death in the family and that I don’t know when I will come back to London. The phrasing pleases me, like it wasn’t Rachel who died, but someone else in the family, an aunt, our dad. She tells me to take all the time I need, but she doesn’t offer paid bereavement leave. I don’t really blame her. It isn’t that sort of job.

I call my best friend, Martha. She wants to come stay with me but I say I need to be alone at the moment.

“When are you coming home?” she asks.

“I don’t know. The detective asked me to stay in the area.”

“Why?”

“They need information about her, I think.”

I ask Martha to tell our other friends, and I give her the numbers for Rachel’s as well. Alice lives in Guatemala. I don’t have her number, and I hope Martha can’t find it either. It comforts me that to her Rachel is alive and well, like that makes it partially true.

• • •

After the calls, I walk to her house. It is a Sunday afternoon in late November, and a few people drive past me, going about their errands. I can’t believe that I plan to survive her, to go on into life without her. The road to her house, a stripe of black tarmac, stretches in front of me.

The newspaper article didn’t mention the dog. The police must be pleased. I still see him, hanging from the top of the stairs. A large German shepherd. I’m surprised the banister post could hold his weight.

In the early dusk, uniformed figures move in the long grass at the edge of Rachel’s lawn. I leave the road in front of her neighbor’s property and walk around the horse paddock. Behind it, a path climbs the ridge.

I walk slowly, stopping sometimes to use my hand for balance on the rocks, until I am across the valley from Rachel’s house. All the lights are on, and figures move in the upstairs windows. I count eighteen people searching in the grass, under the roiling sky. The blue tape is still stretched across the door and a man in uniform stands beside it.

Snow starts to fall. A gust of white smoke billows up over the cliff edge. Someone is in the professor’s house below the ridge. I lean over until I can see its roof and chimneys. Twists of steam rise, melting into the snow. The professor is walking up the drive, throwing handfuls of yellow sand and salt. At the edge of his property he looks across the road to Rachel’s house. His shoulders slump, and the empty paper bag hangs at his side.

He stands there, waiting, I think, for someone to come down the hill so he can ask if there is any news. They will have interviewed him already. I imagine there are tears in his eyes. He liked Rachel. And I think he must have been scared last night, maybe unable to sleep.

I look up, my chest raw and aching. The snow stops, hovers, swirls in fast horizontal gyres. I walk toward the spine of the ridge, away from the cliff edge, through a band of low, twisting trees. They are barely taller than my head, stunted by the wind. A branch jabs out from one with a piece of stiff yellow fabric hanging over it. I step onto a flat rock, and when I come down its other side, I land in a mess of beer cans and cigarette ends. The back of my neck prickles and heat rushes over my skin. I look up slowly and there, framed in a gap between the trees, is Rachel’s house.

The branches form a portrait oval around it. In the dusk I can see people moving through the rooms of her house. As night falls, the pictures in the windows will grow sharper and clearer. She didn’t have any curtains, except for one in the bathroom. I can see its white gauze, but even that reaches only to the sash. You would be able to see the top of her head when she stood at the sink to brush her teeth, when she came out of the shower.

Someone drank Tennent’s Light Ale and smoked Dunhills and watched her. I search the ridge behind me. I pick up a sharp rock and turn in a circle, so the litter and dry leaves crackle under my boots. I wait for a man to appear. I’m not frightened, I want to see who did this to her. As the minutes pass, the chance that someone else is here sags, then collapses.

Through the gap in the branches, I watch the snow fall on her house. The ridge is so quiet I think I can hear the snow as it lands on the frozen ground. An absolute bleakness takes hold of me. The men searching the grounds move deeper into the woods. I notice the snow melting on the cigarette ends, so they soften and expand.

I call Lewis, whose car is parked at the bottom of her lawn. I watch him duck under the tape and come out of the house. He stands on the drive in a dark overcoat. In the silence, I watch him take the phone from his pocket and check the screen.

“Hello, Nora.”

“I found something.”

“Where are you?”

I scramble out onto the path, in front of the thorn trees, and start to wave. “Here.”

He rotates his head, then sees me. He stops. His face is a distant blur, his tie twisting in the wind, his trousers bagging above his shoes.

By the time I hear him on the path, I am frozen. As he steps into the gap in the trees, I know from his expression that I look absurd.

Lewis stares at me, his face slackened and sad, through the portrait oval of the branches. Two more years, he said in the car, but I can see he wishes it were none. The thorn branches arch above him.

He ducks under them and kneels to look at the ground. I wonder if he expects to find nothing, that I have been guarding nothing. As he stands, he turns and sees the house, framed by the gap in the trees, in a perfect oval, as though someone cut back the branches. His shoulders drop.

“Someone was watching her,” I say.

“Nora,” says Lewis, “why did you come here?” He stands a head taller than me, and he addresses the question into the space above me.

“I wanted to see the house.”

He nods, staring over the cliff. “Did you think someone was watching Rachel?”

“No.”

We look at the valley, and the stands of trees forming dark pools in the white snow. In daylight, a man would be invisible up here, and at night he could move closer. I imagine him circling the house, putting his hands on the windows.

A man in a forensic suit — the thin fabric stretched over his shoes and pulled taut over his head — comes up the path. Lewis asks him to bag the material, and we start down the ridge. Ahead of me Lewis leaves a trail of footprints on the snow. Off the far side of the ridge, the forest below is a series of crosshatches.

We scramble down the rock and emerge behind the paddock. I follow Lewis to the road, my legs growing heavy as we trudge through the snow.

“Are you hungry?” he asks.

• • •

The Emerald Gate has plastic tables and photographs of the dishes backlit above the till. A young man in chef’s whites lifts a metal basket from a fryer and shakes it before letting it submerge again, and the smell of oil makes my mouth water. My last full meal was two days ago, at the pub in London.

I watch the pearls of jasmine open in my tea, groggy and fascinated. My fists push my cheeks up to my eyes. Lewis slides his knees under the table, looking too large for his chair. I rub my thumb over my cheek, which was scratched by the thorn trees.

Our food arrives on the counter. Lewis ordered moo shu pancakes, and I’m having the same, since I couldn’t face making a decision. The rhythm of it calms me, spooning the mixture onto a thin flour pancake, folding it into a triangle, dipping it into the plum sauce. We assemble and eat in silence as the snow drifts under the streetlamps.

“Nora,” he says, “why did you go to the ridge?”

“I told you, I wanted to see the house.”

Behind the counter, the cook ladles wonton soup into a plastic container, and the salty smell of the broth drifts over to us.

“Did Rachel ever say anything to make you think to look there?”

“No.” I fold the edges of the pancake. Lewis has stopped eating and is watching me.

“When did she get her dog?” he asks.

“Five years ago, when she moved to Marlow. She was twenty-seven.” I dip the pancake into plum sauce.

“Did anything else important happen that year?”

“No.”

“But she got a German shepherd.”

“Lots of people do,” I say.

“We found papers in her house. The dog was bred and trained by a security firm in Bristol.”

I stop with a spoon halfway to my plate. “What?”

“They sell dogs for protection.”

I remember Rachel on the lawn, calling commands while Fenno raced around her. She said she had to train him so he wouldn’t be bored. “She told me she adopted him.”

“Maybe she was scared,” says Lewis, “because of what happened in Snaith.”

By the time he finished, she couldn’t walk. Every one of her fingernails was split from fighting him.

“Do you think it was him?” I ask.

“I don’t know.”

“Why would he wait fifteen years?”

“Maybe he was looking for her.”

6

WE WENT TO a party the night she was attacked. It was the first week in July and I had a job at the town pool as assistant junior lifeguard, which meant that if three people were drowning at opposite ends of the pool I could rescue the smallest one.

The morning of the party was “a scorcher,” according to Radio Humberside. “Be careful out there,” the announcer said, which I thought was stretching it. The toast popped up, the electric kettle whistled. I wedged open the sliding door with my foot and ate my breakfast with my back against the glass.

My feet were stretched on the patio stones, and our dad was at work on a building site in Sunderland, the driveway empty of his AMC Gremlin, the world’s smallest and ugliest car. Rachel said we were “latchkey children,” though technically we weren’t since the door was never locked. When I said that, she said, “Stop being stupid.”

Rachel was still asleep when I left for the pool. The blind in her room was snagged in one corner and light glowed on her pale arm and dark hair. I closed her door and clattered down the stairs. My dad once asked if I walked down the stairs that way on purpose, to make the maximum possible noise. The screen door slammed behind me and I turned onto the hot, empty street. Half of the houses had been repossessed, and I ambled along the center of the road, brushing the hair back from my face.

After my shift at the pool, I went to Alice’s. Rachel met me at the door and I watched her figure take shape beyond the screen.

“How was work, Nora?” asked Alice.

“No drownings.”

We left for the party at nine. Rachel walked in front, and Alice and I followed with our arms linked. My sister wore denim shorts and a loose navy shirt. She had sandals that tied at the ankle and a rope bracelet around her wrist, her hair loose down her back. We had poured vodka into a Coke can and walked sipping from it, and all the alcohol floated to the top so by the time we reached the house we were drunk.

When we arrived at the party, everyone began hugging everyone else, including some of the people who had already been there together when we arrived. Rafe pulled me under his arm into the kitchen and I drank another vodka Coke, then another.

I lost Rachel. We played Nevers but no one could remember the rules, and then Rachel came in from the kitchen and squeezed beside me on the sofa. I tipped my head against her shoulder and smelled that she had just smoked a cigarette. I lifted her hair and held it across my nose, breathing through it like a screen.

It gets fuzzy after that.

I remember emptying an ice tray into a cup, then knocking it to the floor, and being on my knees, one hand scrabbling under the fridge.

More people coming.

Another vodka Coke.

Rachel in the kitchen, her hair tied up in a high knot, drinking a glass of water and talking with Rafe. Her knobby cheekbones, her pink lips.

I was swampy with tiredness, and knocking into things. I climbed the stairs, which was interesting because I couldn’t see below my knees.

I closed my eyes. And then someone was leaning over me in the earliest light of morning, when it’s uncanny, almost neon. I was in a single bed, sleeping on my side next to Alice.

“Nora, I’m going to walk home. Do you want to come with me or stay?” Rachel’s hand on my arm.

“Stay.” And I nestled against Alice’s shoulder and fell back asleep.

The thing was — that morning — I hadn’t even turned over to look at her. I imagined it afterward, over and over. Pushing back on my shoulder, twisting around to see her. Her face would be pale in the neon blue light from outside, her hair swinging forward in two long sheets.

“Never mind. I’ll come with you.”

7

THE NEXT MORNING, I head down Cale Street to the aqueduct. The path is thirteen miles long, and my plan is to walk for long enough to clear my head. Last night, at the Emerald Gate, I asked Lewis, “Are you going to look for him?”

“Yes,” he said. He might already be in Snaith. I can’t imagine how the search will work now, after fifteen years. It was difficult enough in the weeks immediately after the attack.

I duck under a gap in the hedge and emerge onto the aqueduct, at the part of the trail where people bring their dogs after work and at the weekend. My heart skips. Three weeks ago Rachel and I came here with Fenno. We took turns throwing the tennis ball for him, wiping our hands on our jeans. When a Portuguese water dog arrived off Cale Street, Rachel folded in half laughing at Fenno’s reaction.

As he bowled over to greet the other dog, Rachel wiped tears from her eyes, her mouth pulled down into a crescent. “He’s literally quivering with happiness,” I said. “I know,” she said, “I know.”

Rachel chose the dog for protection. She bought him five years ago, soon after she moved here. Lewis thinks she felt unsafe living alone in the countryside, more exposed than in London. Maybe she thought he would find her.

I walk down the aqueduct away from town. The fuel that’s always in my stomach now catches and I am sheeted in flames. I can’t hear anything, which I don’t notice until I am far past the village and realize my shoes must have been making that sound on the path since I started walking.

I stalk between the farms, the flames rippling over me. The rage doesn’t go away. After two or three miles I stop and weep into my hands. I drop to my knees. Even with my legs pressed to the frozen ground, I still burn, the fire bristling off my spine.

On my way back, I come through a copse of hazels and around a bend, and there is a figure on the path in front of me.

As I draw closer, I see that it is a man in a long coat. He has a Staffordshire bull terrier on a lead, which is strange. Most people let their dogs run on the aqueduct. When we are close, the dog trots over to greet me, tugging him nearer. The man smiles. He is bald, with a strong chin and a flattened nose, like a boxer.

He says, “This is Brandy.” I hold my hand out for the dog to sniff. She presses her wet nose to it and pain sluices through me. I scratch behind her ears, and her eyes crease and her tail swings back and forth. Even though it’s cold, she has been sweating. I can see her pink skin through the damp raked lines of her coat.

The stranger isn’t wearing gloves, and his hand on the lead is red and chapped. The slight swell of his stomach presses against his coat.

“Sweet girl,” I say to the dog. Her eyes fasten on mine with the attention specific to bull terriers, and I wonder if he attacked me if she would lunge for me or him.

A crow calls from the field, and when he turns toward it, I flip the dog’s tag over. Denton. They live on Bray Lane, near the common. I can’t tell if he caught me reading it.

“Does she run away?” I ask, and point at the lead.

“No,” he says. “A friend of mine let his Staffie off lead and his neighbor shot her.”

The dog sniffs my wrist, her eyes wide and a little crossed. “They used to be nanny dogs,” I say.

“I know. My friend told that to the police. Nothing happened to the shooter. He wasn’t even cautioned.”

I recognize the grain reaper in the field next to us and realize how far we still are from town. A mile, at least.

“Are you Nora?” he asks. We’ve never met before. He has gray stubble and a few deep lines across his forehead.

“Yes.”

“We used to see Rachel out here,” he says. “I can’t believe it.”

The dog snaps to attention. I turn to look behind me, but the path is empty.

“I saw her just that morning,” he says.

My mouth goes dry. His coat sleeve has a small rip at its hem, did my sister do that?

“Where?”

“At her house. The bath sprang a leak. It had been going for a few days before she noticed. There’s a crack halfway across the ceiling.”

I straighten. We are alone, between drab, stippled fields. I watch his red hand twist the lead. “And she called you?”

“I’m a plumber. If you need help with the house or anything, let me know,” he says. His coat is zipped to his chin, leaving only his hands and head exposed. I check for scratches or bruises, but if he has any they are hidden. “My mum died last year. There’s a lot to sort out, I’m happy to help.”

He walks away. I start toward Marlow, and once he is out of sight, I run.

• • •

My phone doesn’t have service until Cale Street.

“Have you interviewed someone named Denton yet?”

“Yes,” says Moretti, “Keith Denton.” I didn’t think he would tell me. I thought police interviews were confidential, and for a moment I wonder whom he has told about speaking with me.

“He was at Rachel’s house on Friday.”

“I know. One of her neighbors saw his van. We interviewed him at the station on Saturday.”

“Why did you let him go?”

“We don’t have grounds to arrest him. Our technicians are still performing tests on the van. He’s not to leave the area.”

“Did you check him for injuries?” Rachel had defensive wounds, and the dog was trained by a security firm. He would have tried to protect her.

“We haven’t found any evidence to incriminate him. According to him, Rachel was alive and well when he left her house.”

“Where was he between three and four?”

“Resting.”

“Where?”

“In his van at the pond. He was up the night before on a job in Kidlington.”

“Did anyone see him?”

“We’re confirming his movements with witnesses and CCTV.”

He must have something to gain from telling me this. It must be a technique. I wonder if he thinks the information will trigger some memory for me. That Rachel met lovers at the pond, maybe, or that the location has some meaning.

“Was he the person watching her from the ridge?”

“Nora, I don’t know yet. We’ll know more when the results return from the lab.”

• • •

The high street appears almost preternaturally beautiful and civilized, and I am shaky with relief to not be alone with him anymore.

The yellow awning of the Miller’s Arms thumps in the wind. Soft clouds marble the windows of the library. There are a dozen people on the street, and one of them, a woman with dark hair and kaleidoscopic blue eyes, stops in front of me. “Nora. I’m so sorry about your sister.”

“Are you from the hospital?” I ask.

She shakes her head. “Do you want to get a cup of tea?”

She smiles and squeezes my arm, and I have the sense that people here will look out for me. We go to the Miller’s Arms. She sets the tea in front of me and gives me an encouraging smile. The relief of being with another person, in the warmth of company, sinks me into my chair.

I might have just met her murderer. This knowledge roars in my ears. A few minutes, somewhere safe.

I’ve only been to the Miller’s Arms once before. My drink was pale and frothy and it had a violet floating on its surface. This delighted me. “Bloody hell,” said Rachel. Her fish pie arrived with one speckled blue-and-red crab claw pointing from its crust, which mollified her a little. “Does it make up for the violet?” I asked. “No, definitely not.”

“I’m sorry,” I say now. “I don’t remember your name.”

She sets her cup down and the clink of it on the saucer is so domestic, so incongruous.

“Sarah Collier. I work at the Telegraph.”

I notice, with a whip of vertigo, the other people in the room looking at us. I stand and walk out.

Sarah catches me up outside. She left her coat indoors and stands, shivering, in a cream-colored jumper, her hands tucked under her arms. “I’m not going to ask you any questions. I’m just here, if you need to talk.”

“I’m not talking to the press.”

“Did Alistair tell you to say that?” she asks. “You don’t need to listen to everything he says.”

I don’t want Sarah to know where I’m staying, so I walk toward the common. When I look back, the door to the Miller’s Arms is swinging shut behind her. I pass the common and turn down Salt Mill Lane. At the side of the road is a memorial, and my first thought is that it is for Rachel. My hand goes to my mouth. There are candles and piles of pale cut flowers. Then I notice the football jersey pinned to the fence, and a card with the name Callum across it.

The small semidetached house behind the fence looks vacant. Rachel told me he died in September, his family won’t have sold it yet. I wait until the lane is empty, then kneel to read some of the cards. The messages show people gripped by his death, and anguished by it. A lot of them describe him as a hero. Either no one knew what he was like, or they knew and didn’t care.

8

I AM CROSSING the high street when I see Lewis in the newsagent’s shop, speaking with the old man who owns it. I wait for him to come out.

“Is he a suspect?”

“No.”

From his shop, Giles has an unobstructed view of the train station. He is also the town gossip, according to Rachel. His shop has longer hours than any other business on the high street, and he knows everyone in town. People confide in him. He asks after illnesses, pregnancies, divorces. I remember, absurdly, that he knows about my breakup with Liam. He got it out of me in the two minutes I spent buying a newspaper and bottle of mineral water at his shop in May.

I consider his view, of the hooked lights on the platform and the station house, then follow Lewis up the high street. We find a bench on the common. The priest is in the church graveyard in his black robe. A cedar elm rises above him, sheltering him under its green tier.

“Do Anglican priests hear confession?” I ask.

“No, not formally. Not like Catholic ones. But it wouldn’t be any good if they did, they never tell us anything.”

The priest climbs the church steps. For a moment, he seems to be looking at us, then he grasps the iron rings inside the two doors and pulls them shut.

“Does he have to close the doors like that?” says Lewis. “Can’t he do one, then the other?”

I stare at the stained glass window above the doors. Across the common, wind rushes through the yews, a vast, maritime sound. The wind grows stronger, and it’s like I am on the strand in Edinburgh, near my university.

“A man named Andrew Healy assaulted a teenage girl in Whitley two years ago,” says Lewis. “It’s six miles from Snaith. Rachel wrote him a letter asking to visit him in prison. He agreed, and she visited him in March.”

“Was it him?”

“No. Healy was serving a drugs sentence the summer of Rachel’s assault.”

“Could he have left?”

“It’s a class-A prison. The day of her assault he was on canteen duty. They would have recorded it if he somehow stepped out.”

“Did Rachel know that?”

“Healy says he told her it couldn’t have been him. Rachel spoke to his solicitor, who confirmed the dates of his sentence.”

“Where did she visit him?”

“A prison outside Bristol.” Lewis looks embarrassed for me. She didn’t ask me to come and wait in the car. She didn’t even tell me she’d written him. “Did Rachel ever talk about looking for her attacker?”

“She said she stopped. She said she wanted to forget it ever happened.”

Of course that was what she told me. For years I had urged her to stop looking, and at a certain point it must have been easier to lie than to argue.

“When was this?” asks Lewis.

“Five years ago. Is he a suspect?”

“No. Healy’s still in prison.”

• • •

At the Hunters I find the route from her house to the prison. I imagine Rachel in the visitors’ room as the prisoners start to file in. I don’t know what she planned to say. What abuse she would turn on him.

She wouldn’t ask him why he did it. I asked her once and she laughed in my face. “He doesn’t get to have a reason,” she said. She didn’t want to meet him to better understand what had happened. She wanted to punish him.

She told me once how she would go about it. She would correspond with other men in the prison and win them over. During her visit, she would mention their names and say what they were willing to do for her.

I don’t know how far she would have taken it. If she would actually convince another prisoner to assault him. I doubt it, but the desired effect would be the same.

It wasn’t him. Andrew Healy. They must look alike, though, enough for her to call his solicitor to confirm his story. She might have still threatened him. It wasn’t her but he still attacked someone. I can see her walking back to the car, her arms tight around herself, her face hatched open with rage.

She would have stopped in Bristol for a drink. I can see the place too; it would be familiar, a chain she had visited in London or Bath. The Slug and Lettuce, or something like it. She would still have all her plans twisting through her head, and she would drink too much to drive home. I am so certain about this that I start to call every midrange hotel in central Bristol.

“Hello, this is Rachel Lawrence. I want to book the same room as I had on my last visit. Could you check what that is?”

As soon as the clerk says they have no record of a Rachel Lawrence, I hang up and dial the next number, until one says, “Room twelve.”

I ask the rate. “That seems like more than last time. Is it a weekend rate?”

“The rate on eight March was also ninety-five pounds.”

I have a glow of pride. I’ve always known her better than anyone else.

9

“NORA,” SAID RACHEL, “do you want to come with me or stay?”

“Stay.” And I fell back asleep. Rachel tripped down the stairs. She said good-bye to Rafe and the others who were still awake, then turned the knob so the screen door wheezed open into the summer air. The sun hadn’t risen yet but the pavements were warm, had stayed warm through the night.

Rachel told me this story only once, on the assumption that I would remember every part of it, and she never had to tell it to me again.

She walked with her sandals in her hand. Later, she found out the time of the sunrise that day and decided she must have left Rafe’s shortly before five. The sky was an uncanny, electric blue. Soon after leaving, she stepped on a sharp pebble and tied her sandals back on. She seemed to think this part was important. She described it precisely. I don’t know if this was because she thought she would have been able to run otherwise.

She said she had a surge of happiness. Instead of going home, she thought about going to the river to watch the sun rise. She said she felt sorry for the people asleep in their houses, that her life was better and more vibrant than theirs.

She crossed onto our council estate, a spiral of identical white boxes, half of them empty.

A man appeared, walking very quickly between two of the houses toward her and the road. She saw him from the corner of her eye as she passed the strip of lawn. When she turned around, the man wasn’t on the road behind her, and she assumed he had gone inside.

Then he appeared two houses ahead of her. He must have doubled back and crossed on the lawns. This second appearance unnerved her. She couldn’t decide if it would be better to continue on toward home or run back to town.

The man continued down the lawn and stepped onto the road. He didn’t look at Rachel, who was now frozen a few meters behind him.

He started to walk away from her, in the same direction as she had been going. When there were about five meters between them, she took a step forward. She liked that he was in front of her. It made her feel more safe. She decided not to run, she decided it would be better if she could see where he was.

For the rest of the walk home, she would be in earshot of other people’s houses. If anything were to happen someone would hear and come outside. If she ran away, he might catch her in the stretch of fields between the estate and town, with no one around them.

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 brother. 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.

I knew we wouldn’t find him, and on the return trip we were both frustrated and miserable. She spent the walk home from the train hoping we’d see him, and I spent it begging that we wouldn’t.

The police did not help. Rachel went to the station and spoke to a detective constable who spent the entire interview asking her for information about the flow of drugs into Snaith. Aside from his face, the only thing Rachel had to go on was that she thought she heard his voice. His accent sounded like ours, she said. He was local.

We assumed he was poor, because we were, and he was in our town. We went to the places our father would go. The tracks. The pubs. Where would a violent man go, where would a monster go. It was hard to know what someone who liked hurting women would also like.

15

THE BODY OF the missing woman I heard about on the day of Rachel’s death was found this morning in the River Humber. Nicole Shepherd. Divers were in the river examining the posts of the bridge at Hessle, which is overdue for repairs, and they found her body in a sleeping bag weighted with breeze blocks. Whoever it was threw her from the center of the bridge, but the river isn’t very deep by Hessle, only thirty feet, and the current isn’t strong.

My stomach twists while I read the rest of the article, hunched in my coat at one of the tables outside the inn, holding the paper down with my forearms against the wind. Of course she came to harm. I wonder if they can figure out who owned the sleeping bag.

The bell over the newsagent’s door peals and I look up. I wait for a moment, and then I lift my hand to wave.

Keith unties his dog’s lead and crosses the road toward me. His shadow spills over the table and I look up at him, shading my eyes with my hand. He wears the same coat as on the aqueduct, but open, with a work shirt underneath. He is solid and tall but soft at the middle.

“Hello,” I say. I fold the newspaper and stow it on the bench beside me.

“Are they treating you well?” he asks, pointing at the inn.

“Yes.”

He nods. The silence stretches and I slip my hand inside the paper for comfort. The sound of a sledgehammer comes from behind the inn, and Keith says, “They’ve been repairing that road for weeks.”

The dog rests her front paws on my lap, and I scratch behind her ears. She presses her head against my chest. Keith says, “Nice to see you again. If there’s anything we can do.” He steps back, pulling on the dog’s lead so she drops from the bench and out of my reach.

“Actually,” I say, and he stops. “I’ve just had a phone call. The police are done with Rachel’s car. It’s at a place in Didcot, and there aren’t any buses to it.”

He stares at me as though he doesn’t understand. I wait, and then he says, “Not a problem. I can take you now if you like.”

In my room, I pack the carving knife, wrapped in a leather glove, and a can of pepper spray. On my way out the door, I tell the manager that Keith Denton is giving me a lift to Didcot. She smiles and says, “How nice of him.”

Keith arrives in a black Renault. “Not the van,” I say as I climb in.

“Only for jobs. It uses too much fuel.”

I grip the can of pepper spray in my pocket. Both of his hands hold the wheel. I expected to be scared but instead I’m filled with anticipation, and a rising sense of power. He’s nervous.

We drive through Marlow. The door next to me is unlocked, and I roll the window down. The day is bright, and he doesn’t comment on the cold draft. He asks if we have any family in the area, and I say no. He switches on the radio. I direct him onto the motorway. As he pulls onto the slip road, I say, “It must be especially difficult for you.”

“Why?”

“You saw her right before it happened.”

His hands roll forward on the wheel, then back. If you did it, I think, I will destroy you. He leans from his seat, checking the next lane with exaggerated care before merging.

He doesn’t speak for a long time, and then he says, “He might have already been there, waiting for me to leave. I should have noticed.”

“This is the exit,” I say. We drive past a parade of shops, a shipping depot, a storage facility. He drives slowly, checking the numbers on the side of the road. There isn’t any foot traffic and for the first time since we left I’m frightened.

“Here.”

He pulls into the lot, where a guard sits in a booth at the entrance. Keith passes my license through the window to him, and we wait in silence as he searches for my record. Keith appears restless, and I wonder if he came here to collect his van after it was tested for her blood.

The guard returns my license and the gate swings open. Keith starts driving down the first row. I scan the cars, and then he stops. I look past him at Rachel’s car, an old Jeep. He turns to me with his mouth compressed in a tight smile, waiting for me to go.

“Thank you. Are you hungry?” I ask. “Can I take you someplace?”

We agree to meet at the Duck and Cover. After he leaves, I lock her car around me. The interior smells familiar, warm and dusty. I open the glove box and take out a small gold tube of lipstick. The color, when I open it, is a vivid dark red.

She had so much left to do. It isn’t that she had something grand in mind, at least not that I know of. It is worse than that, she has been taken away from everything, she lost everything. She likes red lipstick, and will never again stand in the aisle at a chemist’s, testing the shades on the back of her hand. She likes films, and will miss all the ones coming out at the holidays that she planned to see. She likes pan con tomate, and will never again come home from work and mash tomatoes and garlic and olive oil, and rub it onto grilled bread, and eat it standing in her kitchen.

• • •

At the Duck and Cover, Keith orders a whisky. The disappointment makes me slump. They carry Tennent’s, the same green cans of lager as the ones on the ridge.

“Miss?”

“A Tennent’s, please.” I point at the can. Keith doesn’t react. The bartender sets down our drinks and leans against the bar with his back to us, arms folded, watching greyhounds pelt down a track.

“Do you usually drink whisky in the daytime?” I ask.

“No,” says Keith, watching the dogs.

“What’s your usual?” I say it loudly, hoping the bartender will correct him if he lies.

“I don’t have one.”

The greyhounds disappear into mist. The race ends, and a photograph shows the distance between the front two dogs’ noses and the finish line. Their noses are very long, like horses’.

“Anything to eat?” asks the bartender.

“I’m not hungry,” says Keith.

“No, me neither.”

The bartender takes a pack of Benson and Hedges from a shelf and goes onto the back patio, leaving the door cracked open. If I shout, he will come back inside. I don’t know which of the two men would be stronger. I swallow a long draft of beer and wish it were whisky.

“You were eager to help,” I say.

Keith doesn’t straighten or look at me, but something in him tenses and flexes.

“Rachel was lovely. She was a lovely woman.”

“Did you fancy her?”

“I’m married.” I shrug. He says, “No, it’s not like that.”

“What was it like?”

“With Tash? It’s good. It’s normal.”

“No, with Rachel.”

He sets down his whisky and I think he’s going to hit me. “I barely knew her.”

Nothing happens, but I am sure he wanted to strike me. “I didn’t tell you when to stop,” I say, and he watches me. “How did you know which car was hers?”

“I’d just done a job at her house.”

“Rachel told me you were obsessed with her.”

He puts a note on the bar and leaves. I can’t tell if it was the right thing to say. She never mentioned him.

16

MORETTI CALLS. “We’re done with the house. Let me give you the number of a cleaning agency.”

“You don’t handle that?”

“No.”

“Do you pay for it?”

“No.”

“We don’t have to clean it. If it will compromise evidence—”

“We have what we need,” he says, and I take down the number. The agency is called Combe Cleaners. You wouldn’t know their specialty unless you asked. “You’ll want to have the cleaners in before you go back,” he says. “We can arrange for people to be at the house when you arrive, light a fire, make sure the boiler is on. Some families like to have a priest bless the house. Should I arrange anything like that?”

“What people?”

“Friends of yours and Rachel’s.”

“Oh.” I thought he meant strangers, or guards, which I would have preferred. “No, thank you.”

• • •

I decide not to wait for the cleaners.

A few yellow leaves hang from the elms on either side of Rachel’s house. Some noise flushes the birds from the trees and they wheel into the sky. The air smells of water and mud and hay and the smokiness that courses over the countryside in November. Across the road, Rachel’s neighbor rides in her paddock on the same dappled horse as on the day Rachel was killed.

Smoke rises from the chimney at the professor’s house. Two cars are parked in its open barn. Wind flattens the thorn trees on top of the ridge and bends the column of smoke until it is almost horizontal.

When I open the door, I think someone else is inside. I have a sense of the pressure changing, a floorboard lowering. I wait on the step, listening, but I don’t hear another creak, or a door close.

I can’t do this. The blood staining the floors and the walls has turned black. My ears start to ring. But she might have left something inside about Keith, or someone following her, or her friend from the hospital.

I raise the thermostat, and there is a roar as the boiler comes on in the basement. My whole body twitches at the sound. I look at the banister. The dog’s lead didn’t cause any damage, and in the row of four turned wooden posts the one he hanged from doesn’t look different from the others, except for a few stains. I think, nonsensically, of the houses on Priory Walk in Chelsea, the identical white decoys on either side.

I check the ceiling, and it does have a long crack across it. Keith was telling the truth about that much. The radiators start to hiss as I cross the living room. Anything important will probably be in the files under her desk, but I decide to start downstairs. I move through the rooms, looking for anything out of order, anything the police might have missed.

All the surfaces are covered with a thin layer of black carbon. I run my finger through it and sniff, but it doesn’t smell like anything. The police also left ice in the sink in the kitchen, though other than that the room is unchanged. The pot on the hob. The slate bowl of chestnuts.

Her ax is propped against the back door. The sight of it prompts a burst of hope, as though she has a chance now.

I imagine coming in with a fire lit, and the living room filled with people, and someone cooking dinner in the kitchen, and the lamps burning against the dreck. It wouldn’t have made it easier. I imagine a priest walking through the rooms, reading a psalm, but the only lines that come to mind are from a poem. And I have asked to be / Where no storms come.

Through the front window, I look across the valley until I think I find the hole cut in the trees. He might have come in the house on one of the days he watched her. She left a key under the mat, he could have let himself in when she was at work or asleep. I try not to think of it. I can’t decide if I would feel safer with the front door locked or unlocked.

I switch on a lamp and the kitchen glows faintly, with the drizzle at the windows. The round wooden table near the entryway, the rag rug, the oven across the room. A thick bunch of parsley stands in a glass of water by the sink. On the shelf above it is a package of pasta striped pink and green, shaped like tricorner hats. Rachel had an alert on tickets to Rome, and I imagine the travel deals still filing into her in-box, unread messages ticking in one by one.

I open the cupboards, which smell, as they always have, faintly of incense, and stare at the boxes of tea, bags of lentils, flour, the jars of sherbet lemons and wine gums and licorice ropes. A few weeks ago, we came back from the cinema and she walked to the counter, where the jar of licorice stood empty.

“Was this you?” she asked.

“Oh, sorry,” I said. She hadn’t even taken off her coat, she walked straight to the counter and pointed at the jar with her gloved hand. I can’t remember if she sounded scared, or just annoyed at me for finishing it. It was a strange way to phrase it, I realize now. Who else could it have been?

As I leave the kitchen, I stumble. My hearing tunnels, then disappears, and my vision breaks into spots like pixels. I lean my forehead on the counter until I can hear the wind gusting around the house again, and the slush of a car driving by, and myself sighing.

I am going up the stairs, and then for a long time I am staring at her handprint on the steps. I can see the notches in her fingers and the three deep lines across her palm.

I hold on to the banister, then tip forward onto the step. I crawl up the stairs and the corridor stretches dim and empty in front of me. Past the open doors, the other rooms are bathed in pale light. I press myself flat to the floor where I last saw her. I don’t think I’ll be able to get up again. I think of her socked feet.

• • •

Her bedroom still smells like her. Across the valley, the red light on the radio tower has a foggy halo. The radiators hiss steam into the room.

Her desk has two filing cabinets underneath it, and I start to sort through the papers. Someone may have written to her. She was clever. If she knew she was being stalked, she would keep a record of it.

Stacks of bureaucratic papers, from the hospital, from the bank, from the purchase of her home. Old letters, recipes, lists of projects around the house. It takes a long time to go through all of it, and I find nothing, no mention of Keith, or someone named Martin, no suspicious notes or letters.

In the bathroom there is a jar of olive oil and sea salt. My heart lurches. It seems an impossible thing for her to have done. Who has the time? Though it doesn’t take any, of course, pouring a thick cup of olive oil and stirring in the salt. The jar is the same brown as the bottle of hydrogen peroxide next to it, which she used on cuts and to dry the water in her ears after swimming.

She was moving to Cornwall, five hours away. I wonder if that would have been far enough. It felt safe, though. All those small villages. The walls of trees. Smugglers hid there for centuries. St. Ives is large, too, she could blend in.

At the Chinese restaurant, I asked Lewis why it would take the man who attacked her in Snaith so long to find her. “He might not have known her name,” he said.

I wonder if Rachel thought she was about to lurch out of the house, call for help, survive. If as she died, she was thinking, On the count of three—

There are two full suitcases in the boot of her car. She had started to pack for Cornwall.

17

I WAS ON the cliff path in Polperro. There were beach roses. I was hauling groceries to our house. Bottles of tonic, cherries, potatoes, spinach, crisps, lemons, and a dozen channel scallops. The shop in town sold ice and firewood. All the grocer’s shops in Cornwall sold ice and firewood.

The bottles of tonic knocked against my knees. Below the cliff, a fishing boat motored through a cloud of seagulls. It looked talismanic, with the birds whirling around it, but, then, so did a lot of things here, like the pointed white caps on the dock pilings, and the anchor ropes disappearing under water.

We ate dinner together every night in Cornwall and had an endless number of things to say. She was my favorite person to talk with, because what caught her attention caught mine too. Rachel cooked and I did the shopping, which I didn’t mind. I liked seeing all the boats straining in the same direction in the harbor and the traps stacked on the quay.

I was starving. We both were, all the time. “Sea air,” said Rachel. I went to the grocer’s nearly every day to replenish our stocks. I wanted salt and vinegar crisps, which tasted like seawater, and Rachel wanted pots of toffee. “What has toffee got to do with the ocean?” I asked, and she said, “It’s delicious.”

I carried the groceries down the path. The beach roses were pink and the Kilburn high street was hundreds of miles away. Later, after I unpacked the groceries, the sun sank through bars of gray cloud, lighting a red path on the water. “The sun road,” said Rachel.

18

ON MY WAY BACK from her house, the priest stops me and introduces himself. He is only in his thirties and reminds me of the boys I went to school with at St. Andrews. Who knows how he ended up here. He should be banking.

He asks about arrangements for the funeral. “They won’t let me bury her,” I say. We stand by the rill, a thin, decorative stream that runs down Boar Lane between the houses and the road. He tells me we can still hold a funeral and offers to perform the service.

“She wasn’t religious. She thought all religions are cults and some, like yours, are just better at distracting people from the fact that they’re cults.”

“I can lead a secular service,” he says. His willingness to please unnerves me. It isn’t what I expect from a priest. “Has it come to that, then?” I ask, and he toes a pebble into the rill. We both watch it sink. He says, “I want to help, and I think a funeral is necessary. To honor her. We have room for one hundred people. Do you want to come inside and see?”

Dust, wood, winter sunlight, black-mullioned windows, the smell of candles like the wax my flatmate in Edinburgh melted down to make encaustic for paintings. An Anglican church. We never had to go when we were children, so it only reminds me of weddings, and Anne Boleyn.

“This would be fine,” I say.

• • •

As we sit in the front pew of the empty church, planning the service, he says, “I did know her.”

“Did you?”

“She sometimes dropped Fenno with me.”

I realize he must not have much to do, that he must be lonely. I picture him chattering to Fenno while they walk and think my heart will break.

We place phone calls. Before calling Helen, I go into the garden and pace along the church wall. Rachel was her best friend and her daughter’s godmother.

Helen has always made me nervous. She moved from Melbourne to Oxford when her daughter, Daisy, was an infant, and raised her on her own while training and then working as a nurse. The thought of Helen maintaining a household, heating infant formula after a shift, dropping her daughter at nursery and picking her up, always made me feel useless. I don’t think I would be able to manage either one, let alone both, and Helen seems to agree.

When she answers, her voice sounds stiff. We discuss the police inquiry, and she agrees to do the eulogy. After a pause, I say, “How did Rachel seem last week?”

“Fine, a little withdrawn. She said work was trying.”

“Why was she staying with you?”

“Her boiler was broken,” she says. “She had no heat.”

Rachel lied to her. I would have noticed if the house were cold on Friday.

“Did she tell you she was moving?” I ask.

“No. To where?”

“Cornwall. She would have been there by now.”

“No, that’s not possible. She didn’t give notice.”

“Who do you think did it?” I ask.

“I don’t know.” She pauses. “It might not have had anything to do with Rachel. It might have been the location.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s secluded. Close to a major motorway. Where was she moving in Cornwall?”

“St. Ives.”

“I thought she liked the Lizard.”

“We’ve been there. She wouldn’t go to a place she’d been if she wanted to get away from someone. Has she ever mentioned a man named Keith Denton to you?”

“No.”

“Are you certain?”

“Yes. Do you really think that’s why she wanted to move? Cornwall isn’t very far, it’s only five hours.”

“It feels farther,” I say. “And it’s not so easy to find someone. If she changed her name.”

“I doubt she thought she was in danger. She would have reported it.”

“Someone was watching her from the ridge by her house.”

I can tell Helen doesn’t believe me. When I return inside, the priest says, “Did you have any music in mind?”

“Gymnopédie number one.”

He says he will locate a piano player.

“Do people tell you their secrets?” I ask.

“Sometimes.”

“If one of your parishioners told you they had done something wrong, what would you do?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “It would depend on the severity of the transgression.”

• • •

My friends start to arrive at the Hunters on the day before the funeral. This alarms me. I thought they would all stay in Oxford.

I sit on the landing, out of sight, and listen to them bumping into each other. Despite the circumstances, there is something giddy about the encounters, like it’s a reunion or a wedding.

“I didn’t know you were coming,” I hear them say, again and again.

I recognize the voices downstairs, but without any sense of possession. I can’t claim any of them and, hunched on the steps, I’m surprised I ever could.

Then Martha is coming up the stairs at a run. Before I can say anything, she is on the landing and her arms close around me.

• • •

On the night before her funeral, I can’t sleep. The dread grows worse with every hour and warps the next day into something I won’t survive without rest. I don’t have sleeping pills or tranquilizers, but I do have the bottle of red wine I brought from London for Rachel. There isn’t a corkscrew in the room. I go downstairs, but the heavy wooden doors to the bar are locked. Upstairs, I stare at the bottle of red wine. I use a knife to cut the foil and then consider the cork.

There is a screwdriver on top of the bathroom cabinet. Someone must have forgotten it after a repair.

I dig the screwdriver into the cork, pushing it down the neck of the bottle. There is a crash as the cork breaks the seal and wine erupts. Red liquid gushes onto my stomach and drips down my chest.

I sit with the screwdriver in my hand. The wine tracks down my arms along my veins. The wet plasters my shirt to my stomach. There are red spatters on the walls, and already the room smells rancid. I stay where I am, under the stained walls, as the ringing starts in my ears, and grip the screwdriver.

19

BEFORE THE FUNERAL STARTS, I scan the church and kill each person in exchange for her. They stand three deep behind the benches and along the walls. I recognize some of them from the library, the pubs, the aqueduct. I notice Lewis and Moretti and the woman, the DCI who walked up the hill with Moretti that day. They sit apart, which at first I think is a tactical police maneuver, but is probably only because they arrived separately and the church filled quickly.

Our dad has not turned up. As far as I know, the police have not found him yet, but this is the funeral of his eldest daughter. He might learn of it somehow. He might limp up the aisle and settle in next to me and start to offer theories. The church doors are shut now, and I wonder if anyone would mind if I locked them.

There are too many people I don’t recognize, which I hadn’t expected. I thought I would be able to note any strangers. Whoever did it might come today.

I find Keith Denton in the crowd. Lewis has him in view, across the aisle, and I’m glad since I can’t watch him myself. A dark-haired woman sits in the rear bench, and I turn to Martha. “There’s a journalist here,” I say, pointing to her.

Martha clips down the aisle until she reaches the last row. After some discussion, the journalist stands, squeezes past the others on her bench, and leaves through the main doors of the church. Before she does, she gives me a wry smile, like we are in on a joke together. She doesn’t show any embarrassment, even as the church turns to stare at her, and I envy her. She seems free.

Stephen has arrived, I realize with a sort of terror. He comes up and kisses me on the cheek. He smells of whisky, and from this morning, not last night.

People shift aside to allow him to rest against the wall. He looks exhausted, and I wonder if he also keeps needing to sit down.

They almost got married. Close brush, she said. He still wanted to. They slept together a few times a year, and he thought she would change her mind and move to Dorset with him. She might have done, eventually. She did love him.

I glance at him. His position or balance is wrong, like he might slide off the wall. Moretti said he was at his restaurant, but I wonder if he has proof.

The air in the church is restive and tortured, the result of two hundred people trying not to make a sound. I wish they would all talk. Outside, through the side door, is the garden. There’s still snow in the shade of the church, and under the cedar elms, and the air this morning is clear and scouring.

The priest climbs to the lectern. His sermon and the eulogy are wrong. They’re laughable. I look at Stephen and know he agrees. I wish I had done it myself, though even now I’m crying too hard to speak.

The piano player sets up her music, and I watch, already disappointed. She’s too young, for one thing.

The song starts and it’s like a rope is cut. Something washes over the crowd, settling it. The song isn’t sad, which is why listening to it agonizes me, and Stephen, I can tell. The point is that she loved it, and she can’t hear it.

• • •

Neither of the town’s pubs is big enough for us, so the group splits. Without discussion, the out-of-towners go to the Miller’s Arms, and the locals to the Duck and Cover. There are a few exceptions. Stephen goes to the Duck and Cover. He walks alone from the church to the pub and looks set on destroying himself. None of the detectives come to the reception. They climb into separate cars and drive back toward Abingdon.

At the Miller’s Arms, I carry my glass of whisky around the room from group to group. People watch me. Most of the guests apologize for my loss, and then leave me to steer the conversation somewhere else, which I can’t. My wet eyes give the room facets and panels that it doesn’t have. I notice with surprise that everything that has always been difficult about parties is still difficult. I go to the toilet eight times and for a cigarette three times.

I am surprised that Liam didn’t come, but of course Martha wouldn’t have invited him. Why would she, we aren’t together anymore. I think of the song he always played in the beginning. Never a frown with golden brown.

Daisy, Rachel’s goddaughter, finds me smoking under the awning. She wears a coat over a thin black matelot top and black jeans. She hugs me and says, “I miss her,” and I nod, my chin pushing into her shoulder.

They had an arrangement. If anything happened to Helen, Rachel would take in Daisy. Part of me expected it to happen. When Daisy was younger, I thought that if Rachel had to adopt her, I would move in to help, and the thought of that sort of responsibility excited me.

“Rachel would want you to have something of hers,” I say.

“What?”

“I’ve no idea. Why don’t you go to her house and pick something?”

We go back into the pub. No one wants to talk about what happened, or how I found her. They seem to think it morbid to describe the sequence of events, that I should want to talk about Rachel’s life, which I do, desperately. But I want to talk about this too, with someone who isn’t a policeman. I wish I could tell Rachel, she would want to know every part of it.

I go to the toilet again. As I walk back to the bar, I notice that the crowd has thinned. I let my head fall. Martha steers me outside. We don’t speak, and I lean against her as we make our way down the high street.

In my room, I wipe the makeup from my eyes and lips and throw the stained pads in the bin. Martha climbs into bed. She sets a pillow down the middle, like she did on trips at university, and says, “It’s for your own protection. I’ll break your face if you try to steal my blankets.”

• • •

The dog rotates from the ceiling. I can hear him whining. The fall didn’t break his neck and the lead is strangling him. I stand on the bed and reach my arms up. If I can hold him an inch higher he will be able to breathe. I can’t get to him, and then he isn’t there anymore, and Martha is saying my name.

20

IN THE MORNING, Martha and I sit in our coats at one of the tables next to the inn. She smokes and we watch the trains go by, hard and glinting and mineral in the winter light.

“The lead detective wants to open a fish restaurant in Whitstable,” I say.

“What about the other one?”

“He’s clever. They’re both clever, but I don’t know if they’re good at their jobs.”

In the spring, the Hunters puts up white canvas umbrellas. It was one of the things I always looked for as the train pulled into the station, the four stiff canvas umbrellas, to know I had arrived. Now our table is bare, and I move my coffee cup over the hole at its center.

“Do you want help raising publicity?” she asks.

“No,” I say sharply. Martha ashes her cigarette and waits. “The famous ones never get solved.”

“Is that true?”

Silence falls as we think about famous victims. I fold my hands in my lap. Clouds drift overhead.

Martha wears a linen scarf and suede boots. To her embarrassment, her family has an estate in Cirencester, with a wine cellar and a gun cabinet. In one of my favorite photographs of her, Martha stands on a hill covered in heather with a rifle broken over her arm.

“Do you want a private investigator?” she asks. “I found one in Oxford with good references.”

“No, not yet. I don’t want to get in the detectives’ way. But I do need to ask you a favor. Can you help me rent out my flat?”

“Are you still not coming back?”

“The police want me to stay in the area.”

“For how long?”

“They didn’t say.” It made sense to me, I hadn’t considered leaving. “Rachel said there was something wrong with the town, only a few weeks ago. And she put her house for sale and rented a place in St. Ives. I think she wanted to escape from someone.”

“Not necessarily someone from Marlow.” At the station, there is a ping and an automated announcement about the London train. We both turn our heads to listen. Martha has to be back in the city soon for a meeting. “How can you afford this?”

“Credit.” The gold rooster on top of the inn gleams in the light. My card has a cap of eight thousand pounds. I should open a new one for when I reach the limit.

“Come stay with me,” says Martha. I shake my head. “Then I’ll come stay here.”

“You can’t.”

“I wouldn’t mind leaving for a while.”

“Liar.”

Martha is acting in a Caryl Churchill play at the Royal Court Upstairs. I saw it at the start of the run early this month. The production is a two-hander and her best role yet.

“No, it’s for the best. If I don’t live alone now, I’ll never be able to again.”

Martha leans down to zip her luggage. “Is there something you’re not telling me?” she asks.

“No.”

She studies the inn, the cream stone and black shutters, and the row of modest houses behind it. In this light, it’s difficult to tell if anyone’s at home.

“Do you think you know who did it?”

“No.”

We sit in silence. Martha smokes, blowing the column to the side. I can tell she doesn’t believe me. A train goes by and reflected light bubbles over the wall of the Hunters. “What do you want me to do about the flat?” she asks.

• • •

After Martha boards her train, I watch it pull from the station, fighting the idea that I am being abandoned. She appears to be the last of the guests to leave. I thought they would stay longer, and knowing that they didn’t is like watching it grow dark in the afternoon.

I have to drop Rachel’s keys at the cleaning agency. Afterward, I will take the train to London and clean out my flat. There is nothing else for me to do today, but I still feel breathless and sick, like I’ve forgotten something important.

Stephen is shoving a bag into the boot of his car in front of the chip shop. There is a moment when we might pretend not to see each other, but neither of us is able to look away in time. As I walk toward him, I stare up the high street to the yellow awning of the Miller’s Arms, as though that is my true destination, and I will only be stopping for a moment.

“Are you going home?”

He nods. Stephen lives on the Jurassic Coast, two and a half hours away. They both did the drive so many times. And now it’s over. This route they knew so well no longer exists.

And all the landmarks are gone too, the ways she gauged the distance — the spires of towns on the Salisbury Plain, the service station where she always stopped for coffee, the sign for his town, the shapes of his neighbors’ houses. Then she was there, opening the car, her feet creaking on the gravel, and pulling her overnight bag over her shoulder, and heading for his door, with exhilaration in the beginning, and a sense of doom around the end of their engagement, and lately, in the past two years, some sensation I could never pin down.

“How’s the restaurant?”

Stephen owns a Mexican restaurant in West Bay. Even in the off-season, La Fondita does tremendous business.

“I don’t know. Fine. Tom is going to look after it for a while,” he says.

He’s so handsome. That was part of the problem. Rachel thought he was too lucky. Not anymore. After this, he would be perfect for her. A high, mangled sound leaves my throat.

“I thought your dad would come.”

“No.” I don’t tell him our dad wasn’t invited. Stephen never understood about our father. But, then, it isn’t an easy thing to understand.

Neither of us knows what to say. I think how strange it is, after how much time we’ve spent together. A few years ago, the three of us visited Lyme Regis, where the woman who found the dinosaurs lived. I remember being very sad when we went to the dinosaur museum. One of my plays had just been rejected by a competition. I wondered if the woman who discovered the dinosaurs ever found her life as absurd as I found mine.

“She didn’t find dinosaurs, Nora, she found fossils,” said Rachel. And that was the problem, wasn’t it.

Afterward, we sat in front of a pub the color of pistachio ice cream. I got shit-faced on beer, as did Rachel, companionably, and at some point I laughed so hard I fell off the bench. On the drive down the coast, I watched how the cliffs were eaten away into folds, how the grass grew right to their edge, the felt tip of the coast a green curving line. Watching them, my thoughts expanded to a grand scale, consoling me. In the front seat Rachel, also drunk, also watching the pale cliffs and thinking her own noble, magnificent thoughts, held Stephen’s hand.

“I miss Rachel.” My voice cracks open on her name, like I am yawning.

Stephen looks down the high street, and I am ashamed of saying it. It didn’t need to be said. I remember seeing them asleep on his couch. His lips pursed, chin doubled, kissing the top of her head.

“Will you tell me anything the police tell you? I keep calling the station but they won’t give me anything.”

“Of course.”

He closes the boot and comes around to the driver’s door. I try to ignore how uneasy he makes me now. The police must have confirmed his story. If he was at work all day, dozens of people saw him. He isn’t a suspect. But the police aren’t telling him anything.

Stephen takes out his keys and stands looking down at them.

“Was she seeing someone?” he asks.

“No.”

“She seemed different the last time I saw her. I wanted to visit in October, and she said she had to work.”

“She probably did.”

There is a pause, and Stephen’s expression shifts. “Did you tell her not to marry me?”

“What, two years ago?”

“Yes, and since.”

“Do you think she would have listened to me one way or the other?”

“So you did.”

“No.” I wonder if he can tell I’m lying. Rachel was restless. I said that if she was restless already, marrying him was probably not the best idea. But she had already decided by then. “I told her she would be fine either way.”

“She isn’t fine. If we’d married she would still be alive.”

“You’re right. I wish she had moved to Dorset.”

And, a few years later, divorced you. By now she would be starting over somewhere, in a new flat, happily on her own again. Unless neither of us is right, and someone has been following her, and would have found her no matter where she went.

21

AT NOON, I take the train to London to close my flat. Soon after I leave, a man with the cleaners calls to say they have arrived at the house. While my sister’s blood is cleaned from her walls and floor, I watch the view from the train window. Between the snow and the low white clouds are villages of houses with stained yellow roofs, fields, Roman roads.

He said they would sand the floor and then revarnish it. Part of me is relieved — there won’t be a trace left of what he did to her — but it also seems strange. Shouldn’t we leave it as it is. Or burn the place down.

The thing lodged under my ribs begins to ache. A car with smoke fuming behind it drives alongside the train. Rachel crawls up the stairs. The dog rotates from the ceiling, and blood drips from his paws.

There is a thump and then a suck of air as another train rockets by us. Sounds seem to dwindle into the vacuum between the two trains, and then it has passed and I look out at a stone house with lancet windows.

Keith Denton said that he was resting in his van at the pond during her murder.

The watcher on the ridge drank Tennent’s Light Ale and smoked Dunhills.

Rachel decided to leave Oxfordshire.

Stephen is angry she refused him.

I need to know why it happened, so I can stop it from happening. When I opened the door, her house began to shine, and Rachel in my mind began to shine. The way when soldiers go berserk, they recall the battle slowing down, and themselves entranced by it.

I should have made the trip back to London seven days ago, last Sunday night. On Saturday we would have driven into Broadwell for breakfast — lingonberry crêpes, dark coffee — and wandered through the museum. At home, she would have a glass of wine, and I would build a fire or take a bath. On Sunday we would take the dog on the aqueduct, and read, cook lunch, discuss the goats she planned to raise, then I’d head back to London and she’d go to work since she was on the night shift.

I am furious at what has been taken away from us. It is too large to consider all at once, so I focus on smaller things. I want lingonberry crêpes very badly, for example.

The train passes through a village, its steeple sliding by. I look out at the snow, the yellow-gray houses and evergreen trees, the hanging sign of the Mermaid. At the edge of the village is a church with a small graveyard. While the graveyard hovers in front of my window, I count twelve tombstones in the snow, and then the scene begins to drift from view, shaking with the train’s movement, and is gone.

I close my eyes, sickened with guilt, horrified at how much better it is to be alive than dead. I swallow, listening to the sound it makes in the back of my throat. If I had been any faster she would be alive.

Land streams by the window. Sheep arranged on the stony flank of a hill, the troubling clouds surging behind it. A firehouse with a man doing exercises in its yard. He pulls himself above a bar, lowers himself, vanishes.

Beside me Rachel is sleeping. If I lean forward, I will see her faint reflection on the window. Her chest rising and falling. The snow, the power lines, and the fences running through her body. Her dark hair pulled over one shoulder, her arms crossed above her stomach. She is wearing a camel-colored sweater. I can see its fibers on the windowpane.

We approach Heathrow. A huge jet glides in to land, its windows a series of yellow drops in the faded light. This used to be the part of the trip when I started to get excited about coming home.

Lately, though, coming back to London has filled me with a sense of doom. I thought about Liam less when I was away. In London, I followed the same routines and visited the same places as when we were together, so it was easy to think that everything was like before, except a little worse.

After Ealing Broadway, the landscape turns modern and industrial. People bundled into winter coats cross the bridges over the tracks. Moretti calls as the train plunges under the Westway flyover. “We have some news,” he says. “We located your father.”

My skull aches. I thought he was going to say they made an arrest.

“Do you want a number for him?” he asks.

“No. Did you get results back from the materials on the ridge?”

“They couldn’t retrieve any DNA evidence.”

I dig the heel of my hand into my eye. “None? How is that possible?”

“It’s rained quite a lot in the last few weeks.”

• • •

The train docks in Paddington. I step onto the platform, breathing in the sharp winter air and the familiar ashy, Victorian smell of the station. Patches of snow melt on the glass roof between the iron rafters, and light comes through the glass yellow.

The investigation will not be swift, I realize. The police don’t know who watched Rachel. They don’t know if Keith is lying. They don’t know who attacked her fifteen years ago.

London appears menacing and sinister. No one knows where I am, and anything could happen. I think uneasily of the canals and the basin. I always thought of myself as safer in London than anywhere else in the world. Each potential assailant was balanced by a potential defender. But horrible things still happen here, and now they might rise up and envelop me.

• • •

It begins to rain as I come up from the tube station in Maida Vale, and I shake open my umbrella, surprised to find it still at the bottom of my bag, where I put it when I left my flat nine days ago. I look at the concrete under the edge of my umbrella, then tilt its brim back so I can see down the road. For a moment as the brim rises, I am in the old London, mysterious and cinematic, the finials of umbrellas moving up and down around me, the rain dashing on the road.

The air is cool and fresh and tarry. My legs are already damp and my jeans cling to my skin. I turn to look in the window of a pie shop. Four and twenty blackbirds. Rachel had an enamel blackbird. I remember her sinking its pin into a pie crust. In Cornwall we saw pies with fish heads cooked in honor of the sailor Tom Bawcock. I wonder when Rachel and I will go back to Polperro, and then it strikes me again.

Rain drums on my umbrella. I wait to cross Greville Road under a sign for vodka that was a sign for cider when I left. I try to see what else has changed, which is impossible. Once the road crosses into Kilburn it is shingled with posters, hoardings, flyers. London’s visual tax on the poor. I pass the first of the four Carphone Warehouses on my walk home from the tube.

Inside my flat, I remove my coat, fold my umbrella. The flat seems uncanny. There is a coffee mug in the sink, rinsed but not washed, from before I went to work on Friday morning.

I walk to the window at the end of the living room and watch vapor spinning from the roofs. On clear days I can see south as far as Brixton, and east to the City. At dusk, the towers start to shimmer and haze, and by nightfall I can see a million windows.

Now, the falling rain blurs away the view somewhere around Bayswater. The white cornice roofs of houses fade under the mist, then disappear. We could have people there, said Moretti. Light a fire, make sure the boiler is on.

Rain spatters on the window. I start to move through the flat, but I can’t believe I’m here. I don’t know how to survive the hours until I can sleep.

I used to love coming home, fixing coffee or tea, shucking off my shoes and tights, rubbing at the red welts they left on my stomach and the ribbed lines from my socks. Now my movements are stiff as I change into a pair of leggings and a long-sleeved shirt from a race in Wandsworth that I didn’t run.

I was only gone for nine days. Most of the food in my fridge is still good. I take the rubbish to the chute in the corridor. In the shower I am transfixed by the smell of my shampoo, which after nine days away seems to belong to the distant past. The steam pools the scent of rosemary and juniper around me. I’ll have to buy a new kind.

When I come out of the shower, the rain has stopped and I dress and step onto the balcony, the wind in my face and whistling off the side of the building, the seagulls screaming and diving. Blood rises up my legs and the vertigo makes my head light. The fog has cleared and past the roofs of Bayswater I can see Hyde Park, which from here is a dark green stripe with silvery sheets of mist.

The air smells of paraffin. I study the skyline. The dark shape of the Lots Road power station. The Oxo Tower on the South Bank. I went to dinner there once. The restaurant at its top, the sound of the bartender pouring ice in a glass carrying across the room. Elderflower gin and tonics, I’d just met Liam and thought, I didn’t know things could be like this.

My legs shake. I am scared of heights but less than I am of other things. Last spring, I entered a lift with a stranger, and after we rose past the first few floors a surge of fear crashed over me, and I was sure that he wanted to hurt me. The man stared at the join in the doors. His arms hung at his sides and his fingers curled and uncurled.

I think both of us could have recovered from the shock of her assault, if we hadn’t spent months afterward learning about hundreds of other assaults and rapes and murders as part of our search for him. I wanted both of us to forget what we had learned. For the past five years, I’ve pretended that we did forget, and ignored any signs otherwise. That she got a German shepherd. That I never ride alone in a cab.

I don’t know if I was right about the stranger in the lift. We stopped on the eighth floor and another man came inside, so he couldn’t do anything even if he’d wanted to. When I told Rachel about it, arriving at her house to find her chopping coriander, a glowing blue sky over Oxfordshire, she said, “You have an overactive imagination.”

“Or I picked up on something,” I said, splashing white wine into a glass, remembering the man’s dangling arms, his curling fingers. I must have sounded like I wanted to be right, and she frowned at me.

Rachel knew I blamed myself for what happened to her in Snaith, and that I wanted things to be even. Whatever that meant. I wished I hadn’t told her. She pushed the pile of coriander against the knife blade and continued chopping.

The smell of paraffin still hangs in the air. One of the balconies below mine must be open to the flat and I can hear their music. Four on the floor. Patterns ripple across the muddy sky. I wonder if he is out there somewhere, celebrating. Rage lights through me and then, in a sea change, all my fury turns to Rachel.

I picture her leaning against the balcony with the skyline behind her. Her black jumper falls off her shoulder, showing the yellow strap of her bra. She starts to smile, her cheekbones lifting, eyes shining. If Keith watched her from the ridge, she probably encouraged him. She probably liked the attention.

The wind flattens my shirt to my chest. I cross my arms and start to go through our old fights. After the sodden misery of the past nine days, it is a joy to be spiteful, like I am swigging battery acid.

I build my case against her, based on every time she was thoughtless or nasty, like the time she called me lazy. “I’m just as ambitious as you are,” I said.

“For what?” she asked. “Toward what?”

She laughed, and I said, “Well, what about you? Do you think anyone will remember you when you’re dead? You’re a nurse, no one thinks about you twice after they leave hospital.”

“They do, and I don’t care,” said Rachel, with the air of a tennis player who serves a beautiful shot and throws her racket down in the same gesture.

The temper on her. She is the only woman I know to have been hit by a male bouncer. On another night, I watched her pick up two bottles of beer, hold them over the bar, and drop them on the bartender’s feet.

At a party a few years ago on the island in Hackney Wick, I turned to her and said, “This is the best party I’ve ever been to.” I resumed dancing and wondering if this was what Burning Man was like, and Rachel punched a man in the head and had us kicked out.

Alice said we needed to make her run laps before she could go out. We were at the dog park in Willesden and she pointed and said, “That’s what the bitch needs.” We knew the source of her fury, but it didn’t always make us sympathetic.

The thought of the party on the island in Hackney Wick fills me with bitterness. I wrench open my closet and throw my bag inside. Her flannel dressing gown is on the floor. I carry the gown to the sofa and hold it on my lap. I run the fabric through my fingers. It still holds her smell, and I sink back, exhausted.

• • •

I can’t wait here during the inquiry. If it was a random attack, the police will never find him. Unless he confesses. Unless a woman in the countryside outside Oxford calls and says, I doubt it’s anything, but my husband came home late, and I noticed there was blood on his jacket and in his car. Do you think you should come have a look?

• • •

I clean my flat for the potential subletter. I lock the door and take a bus to Earl’s Court to drop my key in Martha’s postbox. The lights in her house are out, which is good. I don’t want her to see me and try to convince me to stay. By eleven I am at Paddington again, waiting for the train that will take me back.