Under the Harrow

22

ONCE I FOLLOWED a woman home from the tube. She got on at Monument, which in itself caught my attention. I wanted to know what she had been doing there, for some reason. She spent the trip reading, and only looked up once, at Cannon Street. When she stood at Victoria, I followed her off the train instead of staying until my stop. She left the station and walked toward the river and Pimlico. It was late May, the kind of warm spring evening when you delay going indoors. She stepped onto the road to get around the crowd of people standing outside a pub, holding sparkling glasses of lager and smoking, then turned on a small road of terraced yellow-brick houses with white piping on the roofs.

I never told anyone. It would be too hard to explain what I had wanted to know about her.

The woman in Pimlico noticed me, but she didn’t think anything of it. I could have followed her up to the house, and said I lived in the flat below hers, and she would have held the door open for me and laughed at the coincidence. This is different, of course. I want Keith to notice me following him. The important thing, though, that I learned is that I appear harmless. What this means is that I can stalk him and no one will notice but him. If I walk by his house twice in one day, if we eat dinner at the same pub. I’ve never threatened him, he has no evidence of harassment. All I have to do, I think, is be where he is.

• • •

Keith is hiding something. Still, he might not have killed her. He might have only stalked her. And he certainly didn’t assault her in Snaith fifteen years ago. I might be looking for three different men. The man who attacked her in Snaith, the man who watched her from the ridge, and the man who murdered her.

Rachel visited Bristol Prison in March, only a few months ago. She never stopped looking for the man who assaulted her. There is a chance that she found him, and he killed her. I know how she conducted her search from fifteen years ago, and whatever she found will still be available.

I leave the Hunters and go to the newsagent’s for supplies. When we were teenagers, we spent hours at a time looking for him in crime reports, reading about incidents near Snaith, chewing bags of Swedish fish. Biting them off between my teeth, clicking from one rape story to the next. The smell of them turns my stomach now.

Instead I buy bags of licorice and a bottle of mineral water. I sit with my laptop on my bed, the open bags of sweets scattered around me, and begin to search for the man who attacked her.

Grievous bodily harm, rape, murder. A rough circle with Snaith at its center, encompassing Leeds, York, and Hull, and the villages between them. As I start to read, the adrenaline takes hold. I remember this. Both of our mouths stained red, our backs hunched, legs folded under us.

Reporting has changed in fifteen years. There is more material now, more photographs. I move quickly through the stories, carried by something close to panic. It’s so familiar. I thought I had changed, but maybe the years in London were the aberration, and I was always going to return to this.

By the end of the day, there is sweat pooled under my arms, and I have a list of names. The first one is Lee Barton, and in two days he will appear at York Crown Court.

23

“IS THAT WHAT you’re wearing?”

“Yes.” Rachel wore shorts and a low-cut black tank top that showed her cleavage. We started for the bus stop. The heat wave still hadn’t broken since the night of the attack. The houses on our estate looked slumped, like melting iced cakes. They would all collapse, sooner or later, and the heat seemed to be speeding them on their way. Sweat dampened the straps of my rucksack. I had packed a spare jumper for Rachel, though on all our other visits she’d refused it.

I didn’t know whose job it would be to tell Rachel to dress decently. The court usher, the security guards. No one was up for it, apparently.

We had already visited the courthouse in York six times. Rachel believed she wasn’t the first person he had attacked and wouldn’t be the last. She thought he would be caught eventually, and we came to the court to look for him.

When asked, we said we watched trials because we planned to study law at Newcastle. “Me too!” said a boy our age once. Rachel stared at the floor and I turned to him. He wore a cheap, clean suit and a shiny tie. “At Durham, though.”

He beamed at me and said, “Have you heard any interesting cases yet?”

“No,” I said. “Not yet.”

The guards pretended not to stare at Rachel while we went through security, until her back was to them and she lifted her arms for the female officer to pat her down. When the woman asked her to turn around, Rachel smiled at the sight of the men motionless on the queue. In the sunlight, the cotton of her top turned sheer in the triangle between her breasts, showing the skin beneath it.

As we walked down the marble corridor, I pulled on a loose jumper and put my hair back. I knew why the defendants were here and what they had done.

Today’s defendant was accused of following a girl into the toilets at a pub and raping her. He said it was consensual and pled not guilty at his magistrate’s hearing.

It wasn’t him, Rachel knew as soon as she saw him, but neither of us considered leaving. The victim was a fifteen-year-old girl. The public gallery was empty except for us, and when the girl went onto the stand, she stared as though hoping to recognize us.

It was the second day of the trial. We didn’t know what had happened on the first day, so we didn’t know why she looked so desperate. The defense barrister started with a simple line of questioning about where she had been the day of the assault, and with whom. He was in his forties, with round wire glasses and a crisp accent. I was relieved for her sake that he wasn’t aggressive like some of the other barristers we had seen, or the detectives who’d visited Rachel in hospital.

The girl was shaking, I thought from being in the same room as the defendant, an older teenager who ignored everyone in the room except his barrister and the judge.

The barrister gave a name and asked the girl if she knew him. She said yes, they were friends.

“Did you send photographs of yourself to him?” he asked in a level voice.

The girl hunched. “Yes.”

“What was in the photographs?”

Rachel leaned forward. She wasn’t looking at the barrister. She was intent on the judge. He had to stop this. The judge calmly regarded the girl, and the barrister. His face was so pale it seemed to have a layer of dust or chalk.

“I’m in them.”

“What are you doing in the photographs?”

The jury appeared interested in this development. None of them frowned at the barrister. Their expressions showed only focus, an eagerness to take this new information into account.

She didn’t answer.

“Are you nude in them?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Why did you send the photographs?”

“I liked him.”

The barrister was quiet for a long moment, as though deflated by this revelation about her. Then he straightened. “How many boyfriends have you had?” he asked, and his voice sounded confident and refreshed.

This continued for another hour. A few of the jury members finally started to appear uneasy, but most of them seemed sunk in disapproval, their minds made up about her. The judge wasn’t surprised. That might have been what worried me most. He watched a middle-aged man ask a child how many times she’d had sex and if she masturbated often and if she took topless photographs, and never showed any discomfort. It must happen all the time.

The prosecutor showed photographs taken in hospital of bruises on the girl’s wrists and legs, but the jury’s faces didn’t turn sympathetic. The bruises didn’t mean it wasn’t consensual, the defense barrister argued. It might have been rough sex.

Rachel and I didn’t speak as we left the court. The defendant was declared not guilty. Later we tried to find the girl, but her name had been starred out of the court records because she was a minor.

That evening we rode home in silence. The sky was still light above the shadowy trees and utility lines. The air was balmy and soft. Cow parsley grew high along the road.

“I can’t do this on my own after you leave,” I told her. She was moving to Manchester in September for her nursing course.

“Why not?”

“I’ll be too busy. I have to study for my A levels.”

She didn’t look at me.

24

THE LIBRARY IS ONE of the painted-wood buildings on the high street in Marlow. I still have Rachel’s library card from the last time I borrowed it, and I need something to do at night at the Hunters. I pull out books at random. The Lover. Balthazar. King Lear.

Never, never, never, never, never. Kill, kill, kill, kill.

I can’t remember if that is the right quote. I keep pulling books but I can’t understand any of them, even the ones I have read before. The sentences don’t lock together. I climb the narrow stairs to the children’s collection and choose a book of German fairy tales with beautiful colored illustrations.

“You have two books overdue,” says the librarian at the checkout desk. He is young, with black hair and round glasses. He doesn’t live in Marlow, I’ve seen him waiting for the bus to Oxford with his bag on his lap.

“What are they?”

“The Nesbø and the Läckberg.” He waits. Her last books. “Do you want to renew them?”

“Yes,” I say, “thank you.”

• • •

After the library, I drive to Abingdon. A poster in the corridor at the police station promotes an early retirement scheme, and I look between it and the book of fairy tales.

“Why don’t you retire?” I ask Moretti.

“Ah,” he says, “you’ve noticed our voluntary redundancy program.” I wait. He takes off his glasses and wipes his eyelids. “It’s complicated.”

“You have a house in Whitstable.”

“I have a shack,” he says. I try to imagine him as a fisherman, in yellow waders, steering a boat through rocks.

“We didn’t find anyone at the hospital named Martin,” he says. “Are you sure that’s how she knew him?”

“She said he was a friend from the hospital. You didn’t find anyone at all? Isn’t it a common name?”

“No one in contact with Rachel, no staff or patients on her ward. What did she say exactly?”

“She said she had to hang up. She said she was going to meet a friend from the hospital named Martin.”

“When was this?”

“Sunday evening.”

“Where was she meeting him?”

“I don’t know.”

“Was she going to drive or walk to meet him?”

“She didn’t tell me.”

“You said before that they were going to have dinner. What made you think so?”

“Just the hour. Half six, something like that.”

“The thing is,” says Moretti, “we’ve looked at her phone and e-mail. There were no recent calls or messages to or from an unknown person, or anyone named Martin. It’s likely she made a verbal agreement to meet him.”

“Is that strange?”

“You know better than I do. How did Rachel normally arrange social engagements?”

“Text,” I say. “And then she was always late, so she always sent a message apologizing for being late. Is there anyone in town named Martin?”

“Yes, but he’s nine years old.” Moretti lifts the end of his tie and tucks it back into nothing. “Your father asked where you’re staying.”

“Did you tell him?”

“No.”

“He’s living in a hostel in Blackpool. Do you want their number?”

“No. Did you tell him Rachel owned a house?”

“Not directly, no.”

He might want to move in. He might be there already, using her things, replacing her specific atmosphere with his. One of the rehabs, years ago, asked me to store his belongings. Three bin bags, which when I returned to my flat I discovered were filled with wire clothes hangers and papers and one pair of stiff, wrinkled jeans. Everything he owned.

He mostly ignored us when we were growing up. He was drinking then, though he still found jobs on building sites and kept the house in fairly decent order. Soon after we left home he lost the house, and began to drink more, and stay with friends. I don’t know why it became more severe, if an event triggered it or if he was just worn down from years of managing.

We used to try to rescue him. The two of us, turning up at a house in Hull or a track in Leeds. As soon as she started working, Rachel regularly sent him money. Nothing we did helped, though, and, with shame, we stopped trying.

Moretti promises that he didn’t give him Rachel’s address, and we talk for another hour.

“Why did your last relationship end?” he asks.

“He was unfaithful.”

“When did the relationship end?”

“In May.”

It doesn’t strike me as strange of him to ask. It doesn’t even seem like police work. We talked about the news earlier, a political scandal in London, and I had the sense that he hadn’t spoken about it with anyone yet and wanted to process it. The scandal in Whitehall certainly had nothing to do with the case. I still miss Liam. Every day I don’t think of him is a triumph.

“Who was the other woman?”

“He didn’t know her name. He was in Manchester for work, they met at a bar. They didn’t continue to see each other.”

“How did you find out?”

“I found a pair of black lace knickers in his bag. They must have gotten mixed up with his clothes when he left the hotel. I knew they weren’t mine, they were a brand I’d never heard of before.” The lace was the expensive kind, so delicate it’s almost ragged, spidery.

25

I WAIT ON a bench in the corridor of the same courthouse in York. It hasn’t changed in fifteen years. Guards, solicitors, defendants, and witnesses move past me. No one asks why I am here. A transparent justice system, though the motto is in French and the judges are almost all Oxbridge. Dieu et mon droit. I only know what it means because I looked it up.

The court usher calls, “Lee Barton,” and I find a seat in the public gallery. The only other person watching the trial is a middle-aged woman. A door opens and the jury files in, already wearing that expression, fixed, remote, as though to assure us they are worthy of the responsibility.

A bailiff enters escorting the defendant. I lean forward, with a catch in my throat. It could be the man who attacked her in Snaith. Brown eyes, narrow face. I can’t gauge his height from here. He runs his eyes over the crowd, passing over me. He and the other woman in the public gallery give each other a smile. His mother, I think.

The prosecutor and the defense are both women. Both appear to be in their forties, brisk and neat. They both speak quickly, though never too quickly for the jury to understand, and with a degree of urgency. I find that I like both of them, and I wonder where they go after their trials end for the day, if they return to their offices or meet their colleagues for a drink.

I’d rather watch them, but I force myself to study Lee. He is accused of beating a woman with a tire iron. Rachel might have read about it and paid him a visit. He was released on bail until the trial and was free on the day of her murder.

The defense barrister interviews a witness, an army corporal who trained Lee. The questions are about Lee’s temper, his character, and the work he did as a private and then a border guard. “What were the dates of his service?” asks the barrister.

“He served in the Yorkshire Regiment from 1996 to 1999 and as a border guard on Tortola, BVI, from 1998 to 2000.”

He was abroad when Rachel was attacked. I slump against the bench and rub my hand over my eyes.

During the recess, I find the woman from the public gallery smoking outside. I ask for a light and introduce myself. “I’m Caitlin, Alex’s girlfriend. He had work so he asked me to come and tell him what happened.”

It always surprises me how easily the old accent comes back, as though it’s been waiting, building up, growing stronger. She nods, distracted. I can’t tell if the name was a successful guess, but if her son doesn’t know an Alex, she’s too preoccupied to challenge me.

“I didn’t know Lee was sent to the Virgin Islands,” I say. She stares across the wet traffic circle. The columns loom above us. “Did he get home much?”

“No,” she says. “Only once, for Christmas.”

After she returns inside, I stub out my cigarette and pass between the stained columns into the drizzle. On top of the courthouse is a statue of a blindfolded woman holding a sword and a pair of scales. The blindfold makes her look like she is about to be executed.

26

WHEN I RETURN FROM York, the journalist is at the bar in the inn. I hurry past the open door, and there is a clatter behind me as Sarah climbs off her stool and follows me into the hall.

“Glass of wine?” she asks. I start up the stairs. “Nora, I was a court reporter at the Old Bailey for eight years. I’ve watched hundreds of police inquiries move to trial. I can help you.”

I come down the stairs and follow her into the bar.

“This is off the record,” she says. “Ask me anything you like.”

“What happens to the victims’ families?”

“If it’s a child, the parents divorce. Even if the child is grown. The families often go into debt. It can be difficult to hold a job, especially at first. If it’s a spouse, the surviving partner will often remarry, and if not, he has a high risk of an early death.” She looks at me and says, “Siblings generally recover. It’s not the same as losing a child.”

“If there’s a trial, will I be able to talk to him?”

“Sort of. You can make an impact statement, but the defendant doesn’t have to respond in any way. Once he is in prison, you can visit him, if he agrees to it.”

Sarah orders a glass of wine. She wears red lipstick and a loose cowl-neck sweater. In the leather satchel hanging on a hook by her legs is a scarf with a pattern of red Japanese gates, and a black notebook.

“Keith Denton was at her house that morning.”

“I know. I’ve been looking into him,” she says. “He doesn’t have a record. Everyone I’ve spoken to here adores him.”

I signal to the bartender and order a bourbon. She’s telling the truth. If she’d found any dark secrets of his, they would be published by now.

“When will the police stop looking?”

“The Thames Valley CID says they keep an inquiry open until they stop turning up new evidence. But that’s not true, since any information about her can be considered evidence. Really they stop when they have too many new inquiries.”

“How long will that be?” There’s so little crime here, I expect it could be months, a year.

“In this district, not long. Any day now.”

“What?” There were only four murders in the county last year, I remember from the article about Rachel.

“They investigate murder, manslaughter, rape, missing persons, serious assault, and child abuse. They have more cases than you might think.”

“Would they come back to it?”

“Yes, if there’s a similar incident in the area, or if someone confesses. Or someone on the review team might pick it up, but there are hundreds of other cases for them to consider.” We sit in silence, and she straightens the links on her bracelet. “Can I ask you something?” she says.

I nod, though she seems far away, and the bar seems far away. Any day now. Then I notice Sarah’s expression. She’s going to tell me who she thinks did it.

“Where’s the dog?” she asks.

“What?”

“A lot of people in town have mentioned seeing Rachel with a dog. Where is he?”

“He ran away.”

She nods and sips her wine. “When?”

“The day Rachel was killed. Whoever did it must have left the door open and the dog escaped.”

German shepherds do not run away. Sarah doesn’t say this, and she tries not to look triumphant, but she is getting closer to whatever it is she needs. I can’t tell you what it will be like, Moretti said, if this becomes a national story.

27

I TAKE MYSELF TO the Miller’s Arms for breakfast. I only pretended to Rachel that I liked the Duck and Cover better. I order the Parmesan galette and a coffee and argue with Rachel in my head. I don’t want a sausage bap and instant coffee, I tell her. You’re skint, she would say, that is what skint people eat.

“Social climber,” she said when I was eighteen and losing my Yorkshire accent, and I was, but I also needed a change. That summer, our dad lost the plot, and by the time I got to university I was furious, and I changed my voice the way I would have chewed off my leg to get out of a trap. Every time I heard my cool, even accent, I thought — I’ve left, I’m gone.

It wasn’t difficult. Most of the people I went to university with spoke in the almost placeless tones of Received Pronunciation. Rachel kept her accent even after she moved south, but she had a beautiful voice, burry and low.

I try not to think about my conversation with the journalist, but I regret all of what I said to her. If I weighed my actions further in the past, the regret might kill me.

I told Rachel I would be on an earlier train. After my job, I was supposed to catch the 1:50 train from Paddington. Instead I left London at 2:50. In that hour, I ate lunch at the Surprise. I had salmon in pastry and a white wine. The thought of the food and drink repulses me. At the time I thought it was decadent.

Last night, I should have said one of Rachel’s friends took the dog. I should have read her notebook when Sarah went to the toilet, and I should not have asked her about Keith Denton. Rachel would have done a better job of this. She would have been patient and cunning.

The owner brings me toast and marmalade, the galette, and a French press of coffee. I consider my table and the room. This is why I like the Miller’s Arms better. The galette is crisp and savory. There are bright pink stalks of rhubarb on the counter. Every summer, wild rhubarb striped pink and white grows on Boar Lane. I open the book of German fairy tales.

In “The Six Swans,” a girl’s brothers are turned into swans for six years. If she speaks or laughs, they will remain swans forever. She sews them shirts and doesn’t speak even when she is accused of murdering her children. On the last day of the sixth year, the swans fly to her. She throws the shirts on them and they turn back into men. There is an illustration of the sixth brother. The girl didn’t finish his sleeve in time, so he has a swan wing in place of one arm.

• • •

Martha calls, and I talk to her outside under the yellow awning. “What are you doing? What’s your routine?” she asks. Five days have passed since the funeral.

“I don’t have a routine.”

“But what do you do there every day? How do you spend the time?”

I consider the awning, which is translucent, glowing with sunlight. I don’t want to tell her about Keith yet. “I do research. She was still looking for the man who attacked her, and I’ve picked up where she left off.”

“Is it useful?”

“I can’t tell.”

“What do the police think about your staying?”

“They want me to stay in the area. We talk often.”

“On the phone?” she asks, and then, without waiting for a response, she says, “How many times have they interviewed you?”

“Three or four, at the station. We’ve spoken a few times on the phone, but that’s not an interview.”

“What do you talk about?”

“The inquiry.”

“You know that’s not normal, don’t you? You should have a family liaison officer.”

“I do have one.” She left me a message the day after it happened, which I never returned.

“The lead detectives don’t usually keep the family updated.”

“How do you know?”

“Everyone knows that. Have they interviewed you under caution?”

“No.”

“Nora, do you think they’re investing time in you because they like you? Either you’re a suspect, or they think you know something that you’re not telling them.”

“I’m not a suspect. They need information about her for the victim profile.” I look across the road at the black shutters on the inn. “And I want to see if anyone in town does anything strange. Having me here might make him nervous.”

“If he’s there,” she says, “which most likely he isn’t.”

“Why would you say that?”

“You can’t be sure that he knew her.”

“He killed her dog. Why would he kill her dog unless he wanted to punish her?”

“I don’t know,” she says, and I can tell that she’s crying and trying to pretend that she isn’t. “If he were insane. That sounds like someone not in his right mind.”

• • •

It’s only ten thirty when I get back to my room. There are so many things to do. I should clear out Rachel’s house. I should organize her mortgage and bills. I should write notes to the people who sent flowers and wreaths to her funeral. I should earn money. I should open a new line of credit before my card reaches its limit. I should talk to a therapist or someone from Victim Support. Martha sent me a list of groups for the families of murder victims. There is one in Oxford, I should find out when it meets.

Instead I decide to go for a walk on the aqueduct. As I put on my boots, I notice a pile of white powder beside the dresser. In it are two larger pieces, and I recognize the handle and part of the base from the pitcher that used to stand on the dresser. Sometime in the night, I must have smashed it. I don’t remember this at all. I don’t know what I used to break it. I used to sleepwalk, the year after Rachel left home, when I was still in Snaith with our dad. I wonder what other changes are happening that I don’t know about.

28

I FORCE MYSELF NOT to walk past Keith’s house. I already have twice today, before and after the aqueduct. His home isn’t what I expected. I thought he would live in a house like the one where we grew up, a little plaster box built after the war, but number eleven Bray Lane is wooden, with shingles. The shingles are shaped like scallops and painted pale green. It looks like a house you’d see in a port in Denmark or Sweden.

The difficult part is going slowly. If Keith ever accuses me of following him, I have to be sure it makes him seem like the crazy one, the fixated one. All of my movements must seem natural, as though only a guilty person would notice them.

I decide to go to the grocer’s in Marlow, where at least there is a chance of running into him. It’s also practical. I can’t afford restaurants or takeaways, and I assume I can talk the girl at the Hunters into letting me leave a few things in the restaurant fridge.

I haven’t done the shopping since it happened. I remember going to the Tesco in Kilburn a few weeks ago, with all the other people who had just come up from the tube, who were also hungry and had just finished work, also buying supplies for dinner and a reward for getting through the day.

A woman lays her hand on my arm. I look down from the boxes of pasta, which I was considering, wondering if the girl at the Hunters would also let me use their hob. The woman has long, smooth hair and wears a green hunting jacket. I recognize her from walks on the aqueduct. She has two massive Newfoundlands.

I try to remember her name. Something soft and rainy and Home Counties. Was it Tamsin? I asked Rachel about her. “She looks so fresh,” I said, “and outdoorsy.” Blooming was the word, which I didn’t intend to tell Rachel.

Rachel snorted. “Not outdoorsy,” she said, “rich.”

Rachel told me that she has three children and lives in the Georgian stone house that you can partly see from the aqueduct, behind a thick hedgerow.

She glances down at my basket, and I feel a stricture loosen, a sort of sigh. This is exactly what I need. She will invite me over for dinner. Maybe, eventually, she will suggest I stay with them instead of at the Hunters. I could make myself useful. Watch the children, walk the dogs. Take care of the garden, obviously. My worry over my credit debt will fade. I remember looking through the hedgerow toward her house a few weeks ago and seeing trees full of yellow apples.

“I hope they find him soon,” she says. “I’m sick of being scared at night in my own house. Do you think it’s someone from her Hull days?”

“Rachel never lived in Hull.”

She looks at me like I am lying. “Where was it again?”

I recognize her tone. It is the voice my clients in London use when something in their garden has died or been knocked over in a storm, and they ask me to remind them of how much they paid for it.

“We grew up in Snaith.”

“That’s near Hull, isn’t it?”

I tip a box of wagon wheels into my basket. “Why are you scared at night?” I ask.

“Because—”

“She died at four in the afternoon,” I say. “You stupid bitch.”

I step around her and carry my shopping to the till. None of you protected her, I think as I walk away from her down the aisle. It was probably one of you and the rest of you didn’t see it and you let it happen.

• • •

The door to the kitchen is locked, and the girl isn’t at the front desk or in her room in the attic. I search on top of all the doorways for a key. I need to put the groceries in the fridge, and then I want to cook dinner.

The carrier bags strain at my arms and I am hungry and dizzy. Finally I open the back door and set the milk and eggs and cheese on one of the flagstones. The air isn’t too cold now, but it will drop to freezing in the night.

I wonder if I will still be able to use the milk after it thaws. I’m too embarrassed to return the groceries, but I don’t have any money and they cost ten pounds. I stare at them and it is too much for me, these absurd worries on top of the pain, and I start to howl with my jacket bunched in my mouth.

• • •

Instead of cooking pasta in the large, dim kitchen at the Hunters and possibly beginning to feel a sliver of normalcy, I drank whisky in bed and tried to fall asleep early.

Now the Emerald Gate and the chip shop are closed, and I am thinking of what I could have eaten if I were not so stupid. Wonton soup. Moo shu pancakes with plum sauce. Scallion dumplings.

I am so tired. Right now, if the detectives called and said, “We believe this to be hopeless. We’ve stopped looking,” I think I would be relieved.

29

IN THE MORNING, I drive to the café attached to a petrol station on the Bristol Road, a few miles outside Marlow. It looks like any other service station, but the food is delicious. I once asked Rachel why and she said, “Anders,” and pointed with her fork at a man in chef’s whites and a toque. I have nothing to eat at the Hunters. The milk did freeze overnight and shattered the bottle. I haven’t cleaned it up yet.

Wet countryside rolls away on either side of the Bristol Road. This is where the accident Rachel told me about happened, with Callum and his girlfriend, Louise. She worked at the café, he had probably driven out to collect her.

I pass a small white cross and, soon after, pull off the road. The service station sells Esso fuel, and its icon, a red globe, towers above the empty countryside. I wonder if Louise still works here. Rachel said she looked like me.

I laugh when I see Louise. We do resemble each other. I feel a loose, happy surge of familiarity and have to stop myself from wheeling toward her. She has brown hair to her shoulders and high, wide cheekbones. She even moves like me, quick and fidgety, and she also walks with her feet slightly turned out.

As I find a table, Louise goes outside for a cigarette. She smokes with one arm crossed over her stomach and the other elbow balanced on her wrist. She looks about twenty-five. She scratches her mouth with her thumb while the smoke ladders above her.

When she sees me, I think Louise notices the resemblance too. Her eyes crinkle and her mouth slopes to the side, as though she is stopping herself from pointing it out. She wears a navy shirt and a black canvas skirt with an apron over it. “What would you like?” she asks.

“Coffee and the ebelskiver, please.”

She smiles and takes the menu from me. When she sets the cup and saucer down a few minutes later, I look at her wrists and forearms in the strong light through the window. There are dark red marks on her arms, like cigarette burns, though I read once the same mark can be made with a screwdriver. Her chest and neck appear to have been lacerated or burned, leaving pale, crimped scars. One of her ears folds down. Some of the fingers on her right hand are knobby and stiff, as though they were broken once.

She doesn’t have to cover the scars anymore. Everyone will assume they’re from the crash.

“He beat her,” said Rachel. “When they came in after the collision they were both in bad shape, but none of her injuries came from the accident. They were too old. They came from him.”

• • •

That night, there are a few men inside the Duck and Cover. They must be doing a lock-in, it should have closed hours ago. The men inside the pub are laughing over the bar. One of them puts his face in his hands. Next to him, Keith shakes his head and raises a bottle to his mouth.

I settle on the bench in front of the town solicitor’s, across from the pub, and unwrap the plastic from a pack of cigarettes. I cup my hands around the match while I light one. Then I take out my phone and hunch over it, smoking. I force myself not to look up for a long time, and when I do Keith is staring at me through the window.

His face is blank, his mouth sagging. I don’t hold his gaze. I dial the number of my bank and hold the phone to my ear, still bowed over, still holding the lit cigarette. When I glance up again, the man next to Keith is looking at me too. He shrugs and turns back to the bar.

After another few minutes, I grind the cigarette under my boot and walk toward the common. The yews sound like there are waves seething through them, and I wait under them in case he will follow me. Above the yews, the clock strikes in the village hall, and I walk down Salt Mill Lane toward the memorial for Callum. All the candles are lit. The shrine is beautiful and shadowy, the candles pulling deep pools of scarlet from the flowers. Candlelight flickers on my face. I read the cards again, but I don’t find one from Louise.

When I return to the Hunters, the bar is unlocked, and I pull a club chair to the window facing the station.

I spent ten days here in June. The town was different then. It was like going to the beach, even though it’s farther inland than London. I walked around barefoot. I bicycled on Meeting House Lane. I made a blueberry slump. Rachel worked most of the time, but when she got home from the hospital she poured us both a glass of white wine and we carried them through the field behind her house and onto the aqueduct.

I remember her laughing at something, trying not to slop the wine from her glass as she threw a stick for Fenno. Greenfinches flew between the trees. The dog raised his paw in silhouette, like a dog from the unicorn tapestries, with the embroidered woods behind him. I remember thinking that this isn’t the newest moment in history but the oldest, that time isn’t thinning but thickening.

It is so easy to think about her. Each memory links to another one, and time doesn’t seem to pass at all. I sit for hours remembering, until the first commuters, unbearably sad, begin to arrive, waiting in the darkness on the platform for the early train to London.

30

I DRIVE TO the hospital to meet Joanna Cole. She and Rachel worked most of their shifts together, and Joanna may know whom she meant when Rachel said she was meeting a friend from the hospital.

The John Radcliffe is a short drive from Marlow, on the edge of Oxford. A teaching hospital, with the best surgeons and equipment. When I came to meet her once, Rachel dropped a vial in a plastic bag. She wrote something on a clipboard with a word near the top highlighted in pink.

“What’s the color mean?”

“Nothing. Obfuscation.”

“Really?”

“No.”

I watch the door to Accident and Emergency and wait for Rachel to come out, a winter coat wrapped over her scrubs, frowning, with dark circles under her eyes and her hair scraped back from her face. She liked to sit on a certain bench, facing away from the hospital. “I spend enough time inside it,” she said.

I wish I could tell her something I learned from the Thames Valley Police website, which is a rule that you have to report treasure. She would love that, like people were always finding treasure, like they would be stupid enough to report it if they did.

I try to imagine what Rachel would want to talk about if she were here. Lately she had been preoccupied with swimming. The logic seemed to be that she was so tired sleep wouldn’t even help anymore, only swimming.

I can hardly bear to sit still. It’s not like something that happened days ago, it’s always about to happen, he’s always coming up the hill.

The doors to A&E open and Joanna spots me and waves. She wears a white doctor’s coat over a black suit. We’ve met only a few times, but Rachel often spoke about her. Joanna crosses her legs and leans against the bench. The red Casualty sign glows above the entrance.

“Have they arrested anyone yet?” she asks.

“No.”

“I keep thinking about what I’d do to him if I found him,” says Joanna. “It wouldn’t be quick.”

She’s from Manchester, and her accent is familiar and reassuring, not quite like Rachel’s but at least northern. She is over forty and Rachel once said she looked at Joanna to see what she would be like in ten years. “But she’s a doctor, not a nurse,” I said, and Rachel gave me a long stare.

“Is there anyone on staff named Martin?”

Joanna frowns. “Not in our unit, no.”

“A patient?”

“No one comes to mind. Why?”

“She mentioned the name for the first time recently. She said she was going to meet him.”

“I’ll let you know if I think of anything,” she says.

“How had she seemed lately?”

“She was herself.” Joanna stares at the hospital. “It’s terrible without her. Everyone else in there is a tosser or a moron.”

“What about Helen?”

“Tosser.”

In ten years Rachel would have been a senior nurse practitioner. I wonder if she would have stayed in Oxford or left for another hospital.

“We got pissed a few weeks ago. I told Rachel about the affair I’m having and she told me about getting beat up when she was seventeen.”

“She never told anyone that. I don’t think she ever told Stephen.”

“We were friends,” says Joanna, drawing out the last word.

“Where were you?” I want to be able to picture the two of them. It makes me happy. Sometimes I worried that Rachel was lonely, that all she did was work.

“The Pelican.”

Joanna sighs. I imagine she feels as I do, which is leaden. A plane roars overhead, hidden in the seam of the clouds.

“Why did you go to the Pelican?”

After work, Rachel only ever went to the White Hart, near the hospital.

“Rachel came to meet me after her shift. I was already in Oxford,” she says.

“Why?”

“A coroner’s inquest.”

“When was this?”

“October.”

“That must have been difficult.”

“No, I’ve been at dozens of them. We do an inquest every time someone dies within forty-eight hours of entering hospital. The coroner talks to the witnesses and presents the cause of death, and then if we’re lucky we have the afternoon off.”

I ask about her affair, because I want to build out the image of the two of them in the Pelican. The affair is with her son’s swimming instructor. I make her tell me Rachel’s reaction. Joanna says there was a lot about it the two of them found hilarious at the time, and I see Rachel, hanging her dark head and laughing over the table.

• • •

Four old men are playing shuffleboard at the public courts when I return to Marlow. When it was too cold for me, Rachel played with the regulars. She didn’t know all their names and said they rarely talked, but when one of them went on holiday he brought her a small bottle of ouzo.

“Why did he get you ouzo?” I asked.

“Because he went to Greece,” she said.

I wonder if one of these men brought Rachel the ouzo. They appear to be in their eighties, so I rule them out of suspicion. It’s not fair, really. Who knows what they were like when they were younger.

I watch them push the burgundy disks down the court and wonder whether they knew her, and how well. I remember how embarrassed Lewis was for me on the common last week. Rachel never told me about visiting Andrew Healy in prison. She never told me she bought the dog for protection. She allowed me to pretend it was over.

31

I COME OUT OF the grocer’s on the high street with two carrier bags. Part of my arrangement with the manager now is that I have full use of the kitchen. There are flurries but it feels too cold for snow. I shift the straining bags to my other hand. At the door to the inn, I turn around and, as I expected, Keith is standing beside his van watching me.

I was behind him on the checkout line. It was quite a slow line, too. He seemed to grow more and more distraught, but he couldn’t exactly leave at the sight of me, at least not in front of other people. The thing is, Rachel and I look similar.

• • •

I resume my research, hunched over my laptop on the bed, working through a bag of licorice. I add more names to the list and sort through them, striking names if they were in prison on the date of either her assault or her murder, adding stars to indicate priority, and then, hours into the research, I find Paul Wheeler.

It took me so long because he was charged six years ago, and there’s been nothing about him in the news since. He attacked a young woman at seven in the morning in Bramley, a district in Leeds. As soon as I read the first sentence of the article, my skin starts to burn.

Seeing the photograph of him is like remembering a name you’ve forgotten, as though I knew it was him all along. He looks exactly as she described.

I lurch off the bed and drink water straight from the tap. I want to call Rachel so much that I pick up my phone and find her name, allowing myself a few seconds with the illusion that I might be able to tell her.

The assault matches what happened to Rachel. The victim was a stranger, the attack brutal and sudden. After another two hours of research, I have the name of the victim, the town where Paul lived, and the name of his solicitor. He was tried at York Crown Court and imprisoned at Wakefield. I call his solicitor and leave a message with my number, asking Paul to contact me. I say my name is Sarah Collier, from the Telegraph. A few hours later, my phone rings.

• • •

We arranged to meet at a café in Leeds. I am surprised that he is willing to talk to me, though he has nothing to lose. He has already served time for the assault in Bramley. If his case hadn’t yet gone to trial, or if he were still in prison awaiting parole, he would never agree to meet me.

His hair has been shaved. Before, in the arrest photographs, he wore it long. He hasn’t seen me yet and I step back into the entry. I can’t go near him when I’m like this, and I force myself to wait outside for another few minutes. He is on parole. I know the conditions of his parole and what will happen if he violates them.

He smiles when he sees me. It’s him. I’m certain of it. There is a glass jar of sugar on the table, and I want to break it in half on the edge of the chair and drive it into his face.

“Hello, Paul. Thank you for meeting me.” I imitate Sarah Collier. I speak in a brisk voice, as she does, and my movements are firm and decisive. After my coffee arrives, I tap my spoon once on the side of the cup and set it beside my saucer. “I’m working on a story for the Telegraph and it concerns you. I think there was a miscarriage of justice in your trial.”

It takes a great deal of effort to speak clearly and sound neutral. If I stop controlling my face for a second, it will break apart, and I will tell him how I plan to punish him.

He stares back at me, amused, and I think the disguise hasn’t convinced him, but he probably does this to all women — journalists, prosecutors, judges — a stripping-down, an assessment. Their reserve and competence don’t fool him. He knows what they’re like. He knows what they look and sound like when they’re scared.

I let my features slip, to show him my distaste, as an actual journalist might. We stare frankly at each other for a moment, then I signal to the waiter and order a danish. It’s a calculated gesture. I’m not too frightened to eat in front of him.

“Do you want anything?”

“No,” he says, and I study him. Did you hurt my sister? Did you kill her? I think of the woman in Bramley. Both of her shoulders were dislocated by the time he was done.

“Have you heard of Anna Cartwright?” I ask.

“No.”

“She was a forensic pathologist in the US. A few years ago, she was caught falsifying evidence. Her work was used in thousands of convictions, and all of them have to be retried now. I think something similar is happening in York.”

“Who?”

“I can’t say yet. But the person handled materials for your trial.”

“It’s too late now, isn’t it?” he says. “I already served five years.”

“You could clear your name. It must be difficult to find work.”

“No,” he says, “it hasn’t been.”

“The story will go ahead either way. If you want a chance to say what actually happened, all you have to do is talk to me.” The waiter sets down the danish and I start to eat, choking down the sweet cream and pastry. I hate danishes, but didn’t want to ruin a good food.

“How much will I be paid?”

“We don’t compensate interview subjects, but you might receive reparations if your conviction is overturned.” I pause, as though this next part will be difficult to hear. “He’s done very well, this man. He’s risen quickly in the Home Office.”

We talk for the next half hour. He grew up in Hull and attended the comprehensive on Fountain Road. He lived in Hull until he was charged, and I work out that he was there the summer of Rachel’s assault. He spent five years at Wakefield Prison. His brother bought him a flat and furnished it for him before his parole.

“Did your brother collect you on your release?”

“No. He lives in Germany.”

I falter for a moment. His brother thinks he’s guilty. He flew back to buy and furnish the flat, but not to meet him. I would guess he never visited Paul in prison either.

We discuss his treatment by the police. He has some complaints but was treated courteously overall. He mentions his probation officer by name. He tells me about being on parole and about his job.

As we finish the conversation, I mention the name of the commissioning editor at the Telegraph.

He smiles. “Do you live in London?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“Clapham,” I say, with a tight smile. He tilts his head. He knows I’m lying, but I think it pleases him that I don’t want him to know where I live. I stow my notebook in my bag. I’m about to pull the straps over my shoulder and stand when he says, “We’ve met before. Do you not remember?”

“No.”

“At the Cross Keys.”

“I’ve never been. Is that around here?”

“Yes. You must have been a teenager. We talked one night. You don’t remember our conversation?”

“No. I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.”

32

I LEAVE THE CAR in front of the café and walk to Albion Street. The district is familiar, though many of the shops have changed since I was last here, years ago. The name of the pub isn’t familiar, and I was telling the truth when I said I’d never been to it. A group of us often went out in Leeds when we were teenagers, but I remember the names of the bars and clubs, and the Cross Keys isn’t one of them. People go past me, pulling their collars up, the rain too fine for an umbrella. I turn into Red Lion Square.

The pub has an ordinary front — baskets of ivy, a chalkboard by the door — but as soon as I see it I know that the bar is on the left when you enter and there is a square stone patio for smoking. The toilets are down a flight of stairs behind red stall doors that are half the usual height.

The pub has a few patrons inside, stale air, a race on. I go down the steps, and at the bottom of the stairs I push open the door to the ladies’. I still hope to be wrong. The room smells of disinfectant and spilled liquor. The stall doors are red and half height.

I enter one of the stalls and pull the latch across. The glossy red paint shows my reflection, a dark smear. My heart is beating so strongly that when I look down it’s lifting the fabric of my shirt.

At the top of the steps the bartender and the other drinkers turn to look at me, and I realize I’m panting. It was like being where something terrible had happened, where someone had died or where bodies were buried. I don’t know what happened there.

I leave the square and realize the pub is a few blocks from the Mint. We often went into places like it to drink before we went to a club. No one noticed if we brought a plastic bottle of tequila and emptied it into a cup of ice. I think Rachel and I came together. Going out in Leeds was an endeavor and something we rarely did separately.

He may have confused me with Rachel. He may have spoken to Rachel before the attack, on one of the nights when she blacked out. Or he spoke to me, on one of the nights I blacked out.

• • •

Paul told me he works as a clerk at a computer repair shop. I call the manager and introduce myself as Ruth Foley, Paul’s parole officer, and ask to confirm his account of his movements. I ask if he worked on Friday 19 November, and the manager has me hold the line, then says, “Yes, he was here from ten until six.”

The manager promises that he couldn’t have left. He was behind a till and would have needed a replacement.

I call Moretti from the green on Merrion Street. “What will you do if you find the man who attacked her in Snaith?”

“We would consider him as a suspect in her murder.”

“What if he has an alibi? Would you investigate the assault itself?”

“No.”

“Why not? There’s no statute of limitations on it.”

“The victim can’t testify, and there were no witnesses. Even if we charged him, the Crown prosecutor would never bring it to court.”

• • •

On the drive home, I think about the red half-height doors. They were designed, I think, to keep you from doing things you shouldn’t. I have a memory of laughing about this. I think I went into one of the stalls with a man.

33

WHEN I RETURN TO Marlow, I go to the library. On the landing, there is a drawing of the meeting house, a white lodge on a great lawn. It had a portico with columns and segments of shade, and benches facing the village. I wonder if anyone died when it burned down.

“Why didn’t they rebuild it?” I asked Rachel.

“They all left. They moved to America.”

I climb the stairs to the children’s collection. I choose a book of Italian fairy tales with a green cover and carry it home. As I come up the stairs, I stub my toe on the chair on the landing. Pain bursts up my calf, and I drop the book. I lift the chair and thrash it against the wall. Across the landing the heavy gold mirror rattles. Dust rises from the plaster. My face is wet and my mouth gapes open as I grunt with the effort.

• • •

When I leave my room again, the book of Italian fairy tales has been smoothed and left in front of my door. On the landing, I kneel and brush the plaster dust into my hand. The exterior walls of the Hunters are made of stone. There is a chance no one will notice the dents in the plaster. Someone has already cleared away the broken chair.

That night, in my room, I try to read the Italian stories, but even they are beyond me. For a long time I sit with the book on my lap and my head tilted back in pain. When I finally stand to go to bed, I notice the illustration that has been open on my lap.

There are two rows of pleached hornbeams on a lawn that leads to a forest. A woman in a hooded robe walks purposefully toward the woods, between the hornbeams. A greyhound trots ahead of her.

My head droops toward the painting. It bewilders me, after today. I can’t believe such things exist, both the painting and the things in it. The greyhound and the hooded robe. I want to know where the woman is going, and I want to be in her place with an urgency that surprises me, and that I would have thought I had outgrown.

My hands are still white with plaster dust. There are still black spots on the wall from the bottle of wine that exploded the night before her funeral.

34

RACHEL AND I VISITED the Tate last year. I like Tate Modern better. At its bar you can drink a white wine or a mineral water and look down at the cloudy river and St. Paul’s and the people on the bridges. I didn’t try to explain this to Rachel. She would fixate on the mineral water, which I rarely bought and always with a sense of disappointment in myself.

The mineral water fits, I wanted to tell her. It fits there.

We looked at medieval Flemish paintings. One of them was a triptych of a pilgrimage, and the path curved far back into the picture field. Looking at it is supposed to be like going on a pilgrimage yourself, said the placard, which I thought was overstating the matter. But it was mesmerizing, and I did find that I really wanted to be there, not here. Walking past, apparently, all manner of things. A hydra in the courtyard of an inn. Dogs chasing a leaping stag. A tavern on stilts in a pond.

Rachel came over and I leaned against her and said, “Wouldn’t that be nice?”

“Mm.”

I followed her into the next room, where there was an oil painting of Judith and Holofernes. Holofernes was the general of an invading army. Judith seduced him and maneuvered her way into his tent. She slaked him with wine and cut off his head.

“Then what happened?” I asked, but the placard didn’t say and Rachel was already in the next room.

35

THE NEXT DAY, there are cars parked in double rows along the common, and all the shops on the high street are closed. The Duck and Cover is closed, and the Miller’s Arms. The only open office belongs to the town solicitor, who tells me that today is Callum Hold’s funeral.

I don’t have anything else to do, so I find a bench on the common. From here, there is no sign of the two hundred people inside the church. Its wooden doors are closed. Every so often a twist of smoke rises from its chimney. The garden beside it, with thin stone tablets under the cedar elm, is quiet. The church looks cold and empty, the stained glass black and glossy as oil.

Above me the yews creak in the wind. The town didn’t shut down for Rachel. Or maybe the shops did close. I wouldn’t have noticed. The day is bleak, and I stuff my hands in my pockets and pull my scarf over my mouth.

I think about the Cross Keys and the red half-height doors in the toilets. I still can’t remember what happened there. Every time I think of it, my stomach drops, as it does when I remember something shameful.

With a sound like a gate being lowered, the church doors open. The family appears to be the first to come out. They’re down from Stoke, said the town solicitor. There isn’t a coffin.

Callum died in September. The solicitor told me the family waited to have the funeral until his best friend returned from a tour in Afghanistan. I can’t tell who he is. The best man, in a way. There are a lot of men around Callum’s age, and they all look gutted.

More and more people exit the church. They spill onto the common, near where I sit. I unwind my red scarf and stuff it in my pocket since it marks me out too much. I listen to the voices, which are low and somber. Some of the men and women are still crying freely. People form groups near the open doors of the church, on its lawn, in the middle of the road along the common. I don’t see Louise. I wouldn’t go either, if I were her.

The reception is in Brightwell. Someone has rented the manor lodge. I know the building, which is long and low, with three turrets. When they host weddings, they fly white pennants from the turrets. I wonder if there will be flags today, and what color they will be.

When I go out again later the shops and pubs are still closed, their owners out in Brightwell. I imagine the young men I saw outside the church standing on the lawn in front of the lodge and smoking.

36

KEITH HAS GAINED WEIGHT. He looks like a different man from the one who approached me on the aqueduct.

We are drawing closer. Today, he did leave a checkout line when I stood behind him. He put a full basket of food down and fled. People noticed, and after he had gone a number of them stared at me, as though they wanted to ask me what had just happened and what it meant.

• • •

Early in the evening, I run into Lewis on Meeting House Lane. “Want to go for a walk?” he says. “I could use a break.”

I nod, though it’s not really a break for him, anytime he talks to me he is working. I wonder what he thinks he might still discover. His legs are longer than mine, but he walks slowly, like we’re only out for a stroll.

“Where are you from?” I ask.

“Brixton.”

“I like Brixton.”

“All of you like Brixton,” he says.

“Fuck off,” I say, but he’s smiling, and I remember that he knows about how we grew up. I can’t tell him about Paul Wheeler, not until I’ve decided what to do. I wish I could stop seeing his face.

“Where in Brixton?”

“Loughborough.”

“I can see Loughborough from my flat.”

“How did you know what it was?”

“I wanted to know what I was looking at.”

We walk past the rill, which is frozen now. You could walk on it instead of on the planks laid across it.

“Why did you become a policeman?”

“For a day job,” he says. “I was a musician. You have a lot of time on your own as a constable. A lot of time walking. I spent it composing songs.”

“Were you in Brixton?”

“No, Barnes, where nothing ever happened,” he says.

“What’s your first name?”

“Winston.”

“If I look you up, will I find any of your music?”

“No,” he says, “definitely not.”

I wonder what confidences he expects in exchange for this, but I don’t have any. I wish I did. We both know he shouldn’t have told me that, he should have said he wanted to help people.

“Do you miss London?” I ask.

“Yes. Do you?”

“I don’t know.” We start down the high street. “I was jealous of Rachel for living here. I hate London sometimes.”

“Centuries of people,” says Lewis, his low voice cresting up and down, “have hated London.”

The town is quiet. A few people are running errands. Coming calmly out of shops, unlocking their cars or walking down the pavements. Behind us is the rosy light in the church tower.

“Do you?” I ask.

“No,” he says. We walk past the bakery, and the queue inside it for bread and cakes. “I hate this.” We walk past the wine shop and the building society. “No grit. No culture. It’s boring.”

We reach the train station and return to the common on the north side of the road.

“It’s placid.”

“Exactly,” he says.

We walk past the chip shop. I stare in its window and then down the road, astonished. “It’s like Snaith,” I say. “It’s like the town where we grew up.”

“We always repeat our mistakes,” says Lewis.

“I never realized before. It’s like Snaith but farther south.”

“And with money,” says Lewis, and I nod. The only difference is that time has been kind to this town and not to Snaith.

“Why did she move here?” I ask.

Lewis doesn’t answer. He already has, in a way. “What do you hate about London?” he asks.

“The noise.”

“The noise is the best part,” he says.

We walk past the Miller’s Arms. In this light its awning is the color of paper.

“Not in Kilburn.”

“You can wear headphones. Do you know what you can’t do anything about? The rain,” he says, so the word turns long and threatening.

• • •

After Lewis returns to the station, I walk through the village again. I miss Snaith. The Vikings and the bakery. The Norman church, especially in winter, with snow falling over it and the poplars in its yard.

I can’t believe I never noticed before. I walk around the common but I see the common in Snaith. The towns are like twins.

I walk past the Chinese restaurant where Lewis and I ate two weeks ago. There was one in Snaith too, though it was called, embarrassingly, Oriental Chop Suey, and this one is the Emerald Gate.

I don’t know anyone else who moved to a small town. Rachel said she wanted to be close to the hospital, but Oxford would have been closer. It’s as if she never left our village. I stand on the station platform and see the station in Snaith. I don’t know if they have updated the trains on the Leeds line. When we lived there the seats were made of blue carpet and you could open the windows.

37

I BICYCLE DOWN the Bristol Road, past the white cross marking the site of Callum’s accident, toward the service station. Ahead of me, the red Esso globe rises above the flat countryside.

Louise is still working at the café. She wears the same clothes as last time, a navy shirt and black canvas skirt under an apron. “Hello again,” she says. “Is that your bike?”

“Sort of.” I don’t think anyone will miss it. I found it in the shed behind the inn. Its gears are rusted and both its tires needed air.

“Do you want to bring it around back so it doesn’t get wet?”

The rain has stopped but the clouds are low and ragged. Louise leads me outside and I wheel the bike around the building to a covered parking bay. You can’t see the white cross from here, which is probably good. Rachel showed it to me a few weeks ago. We were on our way to Didcot, and she pointed and said, “That’s where Callum’s car spun off.” I remember thinking it was strange, since there weren’t any turns or obstacles. It was a straightaway. He must have thought he saw something in the road, a fox maybe.

The lorry bay smells of stone. I lower the kickstand and follow Louise around the building. Cars rumble down the Bristol Road. “Thanks,” I say.

“Not a problem,” she says.

“He beat her,” said Rachel.

Louise swings open the door and holds it for me. I pass so close I can smell that she wears scent with some vetiver in it.

“How did you know her injuries came from him?”

“She told me,” said Rachel.

Louise finds a breakfast menu and follows me to a table.

“Do you live around here?”

“Kidlington,” she says. I wait for her to add more. I expect she is moving soon. I watch her cross the restaurant and picture a room with a friend in Camden. For some reason my image is about forty years out of date. They have a gas ring and a record player, and they go to the trattoria on the corner for a liter of red wine and bucatini.

You should move to Camden, I want to tell her. You should move to Camden in about 1973.

I wish we could talk. I want to ask her about Callum, and the accident. I can’t see a way to do this without bringing Rachel into it, though I wouldn’t mind that. I’d like to know what their encounter was like. But it would also mean revealing a violation of patient rights. Rachel should never have told me about Louise’s injuries, or how she got them.

• • •

I finish the ebelskiver, a sort of pancake filled with jam, and pay the bill.

“Do you want to wait it out?” asks Louise. Heavy rain falls on the countryside, and we both watch as the wind blows an opaque curve of water across the road.

“It’s not far. I’m staying at the Hunters in Marlow.”

“Still,” she says, but she doesn’t ask what I am doing in Marlow. I don’t think she knows I’m Rachel’s sister.

I want to tell her about the moment between opening the door of the house and understanding what had happened, when what I felt was wonder. It was an incredible feeling, golden and drugged. I would like to know if she experienced that, when the car first jerked, maybe. I wouldn’t mind living my whole life in that gap, when I knew the rules had somehow been upturned, but not how.

I pedal down the Bristol Road. I don’t think I will see Louise again. I want to ask her why she hasn’t quit already. She must find it difficult to drive past the accident site twice a day. Maybe she forces herself, as a reminder of something.

• • •

In Marlow, people have started hanging wreaths on their doors. Square and round wreaths of bay leaves and holly.

There are trees for sale at the repair garage. Last year Rachel took the tree down on Twelfth Night. “You don’t want to anger the Holly Man,” she said.

• • •

A bouquet of white roses has been propped in front of my door. I bend down and carry them into my room, and the soft, creamy petals fill the air with scent. I’ve never been given white roses before, or bought them for myself, and in the dim room they look rare and precious. I fill a glass with water for them. Someone sending condolences. Martha’s family, maybe. The card is from a florist’s shop in Oxford.

It says, Nice to meet you again. Paul.

• • •

I sit on my heels in bed holding the carving knife. My body is stiff with fear. The manager sleeps in a set of rooms on the floor below mine, and I don’t know if sounds can reach her from here. It’s only the pipes, the building settling. It’s nothing, I imagine Rachel saying to herself on Friday, there’s no one there.

38

MORETTI CALLS THE NEXT morning to say that officers will be returning to her house to conduct another search of the property. He won’t tell me why exactly, but I assume for the murder weapon. They still haven’t found the knife.

“Are you sure Stephen was in Dorset that day?”

“Why? Did Rachel ever say she was frightened of him?”

“No.”

“Was he ever violent toward her?”

“No.”

“Stephen was at work until seven on the day of the murder. He placed calls from the restaurant, and he’s on the security film.”

“After her funeral, he said if she’d married him she would still be alive.”

“And you think he was confessing?”

“No. It just seems like a strange thing to say.”

I struggle not to tell him about the roses. The card was written in cursive, as though dictated, and the florist’s shop confirmed that he placed the order and a courier delivered them. But he still knows where I am, and to find me in Marlow, he had to know Rachel’s name. Mine doesn’t appear in any of the articles about her. I think he assumed I would be at the Hunters because it’s the only inn in town, though he may have learned some other way. Maybe he followed me.

I can’t ask Moretti for advice. Instead, I say, “Do you have brothers or sisters?”

“One brother.”

“Are you close?”

“No.” He probably makes the trip to Glasgow out of duty exactly once a year, and hates every moment of it. He must be able to use his work to get out of family occasions. I can so clearly see him taking a phone call, in a house in Dalmarnock or Royston, and saying, “Sorry, I’ve got to go.” His family must know better than to ask. It could be important.

“Have you ever been to the Whistlestop in Paddington station?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“Have you made any purchases?”

“I bought wine on my way to Rachel’s sometimes. Why?”

“Just a loose end,” he says.

39

RACHEL SAID THERE WAS something wrong with the town. I still don’t know what she meant. I’ve hardly left its center, and today I walk north away from the lanes and the high street toward the tennis court, a strange empty box in the pines. The gate is padlocked, and cracks splinter across the court. There are still names from last season on the clipboard hanging from the fence. I walk closer. The paper has turned stiff and crinkled, and the black ink is now burnt umber. I run my finger down the page until I land on her handwriting, then stumble away from the fence.

We played tennis in August. Rachel wrote our names and we waited for the court to be free. We watched other people play, and the balls arcing back and forth over the net. The court is set in chalk, surrounded by scrub pines. I felt like we were at the beach. A turquoise sky arched above the court and the pines had squiggly tips, like cypresses.

I hurry away. The track curves so when I turn around again the court is hidden. No one has driven here recently. Weeds have sprouted from the road, and down its center they form a hedge of thistle, campion, bloody cranesbill.

Rachel borrowed the rackets, I remember. She went to get them while I waited by the Hunters. It was hot and the white canvas umbrellas were open alongside the inn.

“Where did you get those?” I asked.

“Keith,” she said. I didn’t ask who that was. My stomach turns, and I can’t believe I didn’t remember until now.

She went down the high street and came back with two rackets. I sat at one of the wooden tables outside the inn and waited for her.

He told me he barely knew her. By the time I reach the common, it’s raining. I can see one of the twins inside the hardware shop. I turn down Bray Lane and stop in front of the shingled house. I wonder if Rachel ever went inside it.

His van is in the drive, but the house is dark. There is a fireman’s decal in an upstairs window, in one of the children’s rooms. I wait, but I don’t want to talk to him in front of them or his wife.

I can’t remember what Rachel said about returning the rackets. I don’t remember her returning them that day, which would imply she was going to see him later. I have no idea. I remember what we ate that afternoon. Runny cheese and bread and swing-top bottles of dandelion and burdock.

This was the sort of thing she hated me for.

• • •

The Duck and Cover is full for the Arsenal and Chelsea match, and I push through the crowd until I find Keith. “Can I speak to you outside? It won’t take a minute.”

His eyes are glassy. He wants to tell me to fuck off, but people around us are listening, and he follows me outside. The painted-wood buildings creak in the wind, and the hanging sign of the pub rocks back and forth.

“She borrowed tennis rackets from you,” I say.

“Did she?” He wears the same long coat as before and a rolled orange hat.

“This past summer.”

“I never knew if she ended up using them. I left them out by the back door for her.”

“Why?”

“She said she wanted to play and I said she could borrow them anytime.”

“Where? Where were you when she said that?”

“Her house. She wanted an estimate on external piping.”

“What for?”

“An outdoor shower,” he says. “She said it was a birthday present for you.”

I laugh. The dark street seems to slip and keel.

“She needed rackets, and I told her we always have that sort of thing lying around.”

The rackets were new. I remember the smell of them and the tacky rectangle where a label had recently been scraped away.

40

I PULLED LAST NIGHT. There was a man alone at the bar at the Mitre in Oxford, and I chose him. As a precaution, I told myself, to distract me from doing something stupid. We drank gin and tonics and talked at the bar, and I remembered how to turn the lights on, how to dispense the right amount of warmth and cruelty. On the bar were silver bowls filled with ice and bottles of cava with horned yellow labels. He was handsome, and the encounter was surreal, and jolly, as they can be sometimes, as though we had a snow day when everyone else had work. He was in town from London for a wedding, the first of his friends to arrive. They had rented a house for the weekend near Somerville College. We fucked on the stairs and in the bedroom. Because I’d had enough to drink and because the sex went on for long enough, I was able to lose where I was.

In the morning, he said, “Do you want to come to the wedding tomorrow night?”

I laughed, and he said, “No, I’m serious.”

“I have work,” I said.

41

AT THE HOLIDAY MARKET on the common, the residents of Marlow tread muddy paths in the snow. Above the yews, the sky is gray. The stalls are all open, their Dutch doors flung wide. I move down the row. Soap and candles, mostly. A banner on the village hall announces the holiday fund-raiser.

“What are they raising money for?” I ask a woman selling cups of pear cider.

“The bridge.”

“What’s wrong with the bridge?”

“It’s falling down.”

People can’t possibly use as many soaps and candles as they buy, yet here they are, buying soaps and candles. At least there are food stalls. The first one sells pies. The second sells preserves and clary wine from a farm in Cirencester.

The next stall sells taper candles made by nuns in France, and I imagine a nun dipping the wick into a cauldron of hot wax. How do the monastic orders decide what to make or train? Saint-Émilion, Chartreuse, Saint Bernards. At the monastery in Valais, the dogs are trained to perform rescues in pairs. I am thinking of the Saint Bernards, and trying to do this without also thinking of Fenno, when a woman pats my arm.

“Rachel was truly a beauty,” she says, and then she looks at me to see how I will take it. I sigh. I was jealous of her, but not for the reason everyone assumes. The woman is still watching me with that look, curious and a little mean, familiar to every sister of an exceptionally appealing woman. I can’t think what to say. The yew branches lift and stream in the wind.

“She’d rather be alive.”

The woman looks at me with disapproval, like I’ve cheated at a game. I move away from her and the taper candles.

The priest has propped open the church doors, hopefully, in case the crowd might spill over. It must be very cold inside.

I buy a paper cup of glügg. This is why people move to small towns, I think. To gossip and raise money for the bridge.

Across the common, Keith Denton speaks with a small boy. From their interaction, I think the boy is his son and that he is a good father, loving and lighthearted. The boy runs to join the pack of children playing behind the stalls, and Keith puts his arm around a woman. He looks across the common, and when he faces in my direction, he pretends not to see me and turns so the woman under his arm rotates away.

My stomach hollows. I keep watching but Keith doesn’t look over again. After a while, his wife kisses him on the cheek and slips out from under his arm to join two other women. She doesn’t know about me, he hasn’t confided in her. Keith stays to talk with the owner of the hardware shop, then he walks over to say something to his wife and leaves. I watch him walk down the high street until the bend in the road.

I go in the opposite direction, onto Redgate. Keith was at her house that day. He doesn’t have an alibi. He offered to help me with the arrangements. He bought the tennis rackets for us to use. Rachel said she would never have an affair with a married man, which means that if she did, she wouldn’t tell me. I don’t think she would tell Helen either, since her husband slept with someone else when she was pregnant with Daisy, but I call her anyway.

“Was Rachel seeing anyone recently?”

“She saw Stephen sometimes.”

“Anyone else?”

“I don’t know,” she says. I walk past the yard with the apple tree. A dozen apples singed red by the cold still hang from the bare branches.

“Did she ever talk about someone in town?” I ask.

“No.”

“What about someone who was married?”

“No, she didn’t.”

I stand at the end of Redgate, sour with disappointment, but then Helen says, “I’m glad you called.” I look across the road to the repair garage and wonder if this is it, if she has realized she knows what happened. She says, “Did you tell Daisy to go to Rachel’s house?”

I wince. At the Miller’s Arms, after the funeral, I remember telling Daisy to choose something from the house.

“Do you know what that place looked like? Nobody had cleaned it yet. She hasn’t slept in a week. She’s been doing research on sex crimes.”

“Why does she think it was a sex crime?” I ask, and Helen shrieks. I turn the phone away and look at the line of poplars next to the repair garage.

“If you talk to my daughter again, I’ll tell the police you’ve molested her.”

I laugh. She hangs up and I stare at the phone, shaking.

• • •

“Why did you interview Keith Denton?”

“The plumber?” says Moretti. “Why?”

I wait.

“He was the last known person to see her alive,” he says.

“Did they have a relationship?”

“Not one that I know about. Do you have something to tell me, Nora?”

“No.”

The police interviewed him three weeks ago, and Moretti told me then that they were testing his van and house for forensic evidence. I remember the fireman’s decal in the window and wonder where his wife took their children while the police searched the house.

“What’s his wife’s name?”

There is silence on the line. I knew he would be reluctant to tell me, but there’s no reason for him to refuse. It’s a small town, I’ll be able to find it.

“Please, Rachel might have mentioned her.”

“Natasha,” he says.

• • •

I am standing by the rill when Keith comes off the high street. We’re alone, though I can hear sounds from the holiday market. I finger the straight razor I’ve started to carry, the sort of blade that before I only ever saw when a clerk used it to scrape the sticker from a bottle of wine.

“I’m keeping a log,” Keith says, “of every time you walk past my house and every time you follow me inside somewhere.”

“That seems odd,” I say. “It makes sense we’d run into each other in a small town.”

He has gained more weight. I would eat a lot too, if I were faced with a lifetime of prison food.

“You’ll be caught,” he says.

“For what?”

“Stalking.”

“No, I don’t think so.” I turn away from him, toward the rill, and consider it with my hands in my pockets. I use the toe of my boot to brush the snow on its surface, then turn back toward him. “Do you think your wife knows what you’ve done?”

He slaps me. It lands hard and my skull rattles. My head starts to pound, but it won’t leave much of a mark. He checks that no one saw and strides back to the high street.

• • •

I soon find a Natasha Denton who works at a spa with locations in Bath and Oxford. When I call the North Oxford branch, the receptionist tells me that Natasha does work on Sundays, but her appointments for tomorrow are all booked, starting at nine in the morning.

42

“I NEED TO ASK you something.”

I don’t know what to say next. I’ve never had to doorstop someone’s wife before. Thanks, Rachel.

I’ve been waiting for her in the car park outside the spa for the past hour. She looks at me, puzzled, trying to work out if I am a client or someone with a habit. “Can we go somewhere?”

Her face starts to morph. It sags and grows soft with fear. “No,” she says. “I’ve got to go to work.”

“It’s about your husband.”

It seems pointless to say. She already knows it is. Natasha sneers and steps back. She looks at me and I can see her thinking, No accounting for taste.

“I think he had an affair with my sister.”

“Who?”

“Rachel Lawrence.”

Relief slips over her face, and she lowers her eyes. “No, you’re wrong. He already talked to the police.”

“I’m asking you. If there’s anything you noticed, if he has ever acted strange, about going somewhere or meeting someone.”

“He hasn’t.”

“Then when you saw me — just now — why did you think I’d been having it off with him?”

“I didn’t,” she says and laughs. “I thought you were going to rob me.”

I don’t believe her, but, then, I also can’t remember the last time I showered, or put anything on the dark, shiny smudges under my eyes.

“My sister killed herself on her twentieth birthday,” she says. “If I could help you, I would, I promise.”

“Does he have a middle name?”

“Yes,” she says and clears her throat. She looks nervous. “Thomas.”

• • •

Martha answers from her dressing room at the Royal Court.

“What happens when you have an affair?” I ask.

“You get fit,” she says. “You spend money on different things. You start to spend time in other parts of the city.”

Martha has complained to me before that half of the plays running in London at any given time revolve around an affair. She has played an adulterer or mistress in a dozen productions. She last acted in Betrayal, in which the lovers buy a flat in Kilburn. I can’t imagine Rachel doing that. It seems outdated, buying a flat for adultery, like owning a gas ring, and financially impossible. Normal people couldn’t do that anymore, you couldn’t shift enough money to buy an entire flat.

“Is there anything else?”

“Something to do with your phone. You might get a second one, or start spending more time on it,” she says. “How are you?”

“Fine. I have a routine now,” I say, though that’s not quite right, it’s less of a routine than a reason.

“Come home,” says Martha. “I made a copy of my keys for you.”

“I can’t.”

“She isn’t watching, Nora. You can’t make it up to her.”

“What about presents? Isn’t that something people do in an affair?”

• • •

I’m meeting a friend named Martin, said Rachel, on the Sunday before she died.

It’s not Keith’s middle name but it could still be what she called him. Moretti said there were no unknown numbers on her phone and no trace of her arranging to meet someone on Sunday. If it was Keith, they might have bumped into each other in town and arranged to meet Sunday evening. They wouldn’t need to call or send messages.

• • •

For the next two days it rains. The gargoyles on the bank scream into the wet. Paul Wheeler hasn’t made contact again. The police won’t investigate him for the assault fifteen years ago. I have to think of a way to prevent him from doing it to someone else. Immobilize him, somehow. I have time. His brother bought him a flat in Leeds, he has a job, he has parole requirements. I doubt he will leave.

Every so often I walk down Bray Lane, but nothing seems out of order in their house. I wait for Natasha to call me. She must be curious. She must want to know the reasons for my suspicion.

43

LEWIS WANTS TO MEET at the Cherwell. I don’t ask if something has happened with the case. If it had, he wouldn’t wait until this afternoon to tell me. Still, on the walk through Oxford to the river, my pulse beats quickly and my legs are light, as though something is about to happen.

“It’s closed,” he says when I find him outside the pub, and without discussion we circle around the boathouse to the towpath. We walk toward Magdalen and one of the pubs along the river.

“You aren’t wearing a suit.”

“No,” he says. He wears narrow trousers, a white thermal shirt, and a hooded canvas jacket. The path narrows and he walks in front of me. I look at the hood draped between his shoulders, and it’s comforting, it reminds me of something but I don’t know what.

The river sweeps under a row of fat curved bridges. Underneath them, the sound of our footsteps clatters around us. We go into the first pub, but it’s crowded with students from a rugby tournament. On a shelf is a row of bottles of dandelion and burdock. I remember the tennis court, and the sunshine pouring over the town. That day, when Rachel left me at a table next to the inn and went to Keith’s house, I want to know what was in her head.

“Should we stop here?” asks Lewis.

“No, let’s keep walking.” Fog wraps the trees on the opposite bank. Water drips from Magdalen Bridge, making rings on the surface. I watch one of the rings grow wider and bump Lewis’s shoulder.

We get coffees at a café with no other customers and one million chairs. Halfway across the room Lewis stops with his hands at his waist and says, “It’s a trap.” When we finally reach the table I suggested by the window, we look back at all the chairs and become hysterical. I learn that he completely loses it when he laughs.

“I listened to your music,” I say. “It was really good.”

The band name was Easy Tiger. It wasn’t really a band, though, it was just him, playing different instruments. The songs reminded me of Beach House and Blood Orange, and I feel bad for him because he recorded them ten years ago, he would have been right in there with them, if not ahead.

“Who did the vocals?”

“My sister.”

She had a lovely, haunting voice. Listening to the songs was difficult, since they filled me with so much longing. One of them was the exact sensation of driving on the Westway late at night.

We spend the rest of the day together, walking down the river and up again through the colleges, and end up at a trattoria on Fetter Lane. We share a split portion of pasta carbonara and one of linguine, and a liter of red wine. We are seated in the bow window facing the narrow cobbled lane.

It was dusk when we arrived, in the lull between seatings, and even though it’s now dark there isn’t any formality between us. Both of us were starving, and we don’t speak at all when the food first arrives.

“Are you leaving soon?” he asks.

“I can’t yet.”

Something ripples between us. I sit up in my seat and Lewis tips his head back. He lets the silence grow taut.

I almost ruined it. Days of effort and waiting. Keith is close now too, I can tell. The way he looks at me now is different even than it was a few days ago.

“I’m not ready to go back,” I say, finally.

“You don’t know it’s him.”

I look away from Lewis to the reflection on the window. Our waiter across the room, the bottle in his hand, the twisting red rope of wine falling from it.

“Tell me about the chief inspector.”

“She’s brilliant.”

We continue talking in this vein, and it’s nice, like we’re former colleagues. When we leave, the door to the trattoria blows shut and seals it behind us. Lewis asks if I want a ride home, but I want to say good-bye here and not in her town, so I tell him I have to meet a friend nearby. He hugs me. We stay like that, and I sag against him. He holds his hand against the back of my head. It’s a relief, like something wrinkled has been smoothed. Then it’s over, and he walks to his car by the river and I walk to St. Aldate’s and the bus.

44

I RETURN TO MARLOW at half past eight and by habit walk down Bray Lane. There are police cars in front of his house. My gait changes, like I have grown larger, bulkier. My shoulders rise behind my ears. The front door is open, and two uniformed officers are standing in the corridor. One of them steps forward to stop me from entering. He pins my arms and drags me down to the road. A second officer, younger than the first, follows, saying, “He can’t hear you, he isn’t in there.”

The older officer releases me at the edge of the property. I recognize both men, detective constables from Abingdon, and know how weary of me they are, how beside the point it is for them to answer my questions.

“He isn’t here,” says the younger one. “You’re screaming for nothing.” I shove him. He turns away and I shove him from behind so he stumbles. The older one clasps my arms at my waist until his partner has entered the house.

The yew trees at the end of Bray Lane shudder up and down with every step. I lick my lips. My breathing is loud in my ears and I walk unsteadily, like my feet are far from me, until I am in the hall at the Hunters. At the bottom of the stairs, my knees give out.

• • •

“We’re in a very sensitive time,” says Moretti. “We still have many hours of interviewing ahead of us. We had grounds to make an arrest, but I can’t give you any further information yet.”

“If you don’t tell me why you arrested him, I’ll give an interview to the papers. I have the number for a journalist at the Telegraph.”

“We’ve already alerted the media that we arrested a suspect. They’ll have learned who by now, and we’re going to ask anyone with information about the murder to come forward.”

“Why would he do it?”

“As soon as we pass the case to the Crown Prosecution Service, a solicitor will present the evidence against the suspect to you.”

“When?”

“The earliest will be about a week from now. It depends on our interviews, and the continuing inquiry.”

• • •

One more train will leave for London before they stop running for the night. The high street is deserted but the lights are still on at the newsagent’s shop. I choose a bottle of mineral water for the sake of having something to carry up to the till.

“Why are the police at the Denton house?” I ask.

“His wife called them,” says Giles. His voice is rough and he seems to have a hard time forming the words. “She found pictures of Rachel.”

“Where is she?”

“She’s gone to stay with her mum.”

“Where?”

“Margate.”

45

TO REACH MARGATE, I have to take the train to London, then the tube across the city, then a second train from King’s Cross. I don’t trust myself to drive. There are five stops to King’s Cross. I know each one and before each one I plan to get out. It’s over, really. The police have arrested someone. I’m done. I’m free now to, for example, leave at Edgware Road and ride the bus down to Fulham Broadway. Or switch trains and go to the cinema at Notting Hill Gate. Or leave at Chancery Lane and buy a carafe of red wine at the cellar under Furnival Street.

She isn’t watching. It makes no difference to her if I pour fuel on his house and set it on fire. It doesn’t matter. I could celebrate that the police arrested a suspect by going to the top of the Barbican and jumping. I could celebrate that the police arrested a suspect by going to the Battersea Dogs and Cats Home and adopting a dog. Neither will change what he did to her four weeks ago.

As far as I know. Maybe the moment I land on the road below the Barbican we will go back in time. Maybe when I start the adoption paperwork Rachel will come into the office, rubbing her hands on her jeans, and slide onto the seat next to mine and say, “Have they done all his jabs yet?”

Keith Denton is in custody, but the trial might not occur, or the jury might not convict him. Even if it does he might get a reduced sentence, he’ll likely get out while I’m still alive. Especially if the prosecutor can’t prove that he planned it. I don’t know if the knife belonged to Rachel or if he brought it to her house. What he did to the dog, though, that must be taken into consideration, and every time he comes up for parole the review board will see photographs of it.

• • •

By the time the train arrives in Margate, I am drawn and exhausted. The station is on the edge of the city, and I shoulder my bag and walk along the main road to an old-fashioned seaside hotel. I climb three flights of a velvet staircase, gripping a key, which will lead me to a bed. With the window cracked open, I can smell the sea.

I’ve never been here before. Paul can’t know where I am now, I realize. I pull the heavy curtain around my back to block the reflection of the room, and a view of Margate opens past the window. Pastel houses with tar roofs, blurry sodium lights, the sea in the distance. Strange that this city exists, that it would have existed tonight even if I hadn’t come.

Her murderer is in custody. He is in a cell, and before I fall asleep I imagine saying to Rachel, It’s time, and leading her down a hallway, and turning a key, and letting her inside with him. She’s dressed simply and she isn’t carrying a weapon, but she doesn’t need one. She will be able to tear him apart with her bare hands.

• • •

Natasha’s mother came to stay with them for a few weeks after the birth of their second son, and during her visit she and Giles chatted sometimes, he told me. Her name is Diane Eaves. Giles didn’t have her address, but it’s listed.

As soon as I wake, I find the bus route to her house on the city’s outskirts. Before the next one leaves, I walk toward the coast. The town smells of tar and salt, and a thin fog blows in from the sea. Ramshackle terraced houses and fishermen’s pubs line the roads. Nearly everyone I see is a teenager or in their twenties or thirties, and it reminds me of the part of Edinburgh near the art school. Tequila, doner kebabs, a dance studio.

I reach the water, flat and dreary, the Margate sands sweeping an exhausting, defeating distance to the break line. The beach huts are very nice. Each one painted a different color, possibly by one of the art students I walked past. A thick bank of fog pours in from the water.

Will they let Keith sleep? Did they interview him overnight? I imagine that now, Moretti, who always looks tired, won’t look tired. After sixteen hours with a suspect in custody, he will carry himself as though he could continue on indefinitely.

I find a place on the harbor wall. I don’t want to go talk to his wife, and I won’t be able to look at her. She repulses me. After what he did, she shared a house with him.

At the end of the pier, a cannon points toward the fog, as though at any moment a ship might appear. I can’t remember who invaded this stretch of coastline. Along with the cannon, I watch the swirling fog, listen for the splash of waves against a hull, wait for a bowsprit.

Whatever happens now, I can still punish him. I can drive his dog into the woods and set her loose. I can collect his sons from primary school. Hello, I’m a friend of your mum’s, do you want to stop for ninety-nines on the way home? Keith would never know if they were alive or not, or where they had gone.

• • •

I board a bus bound south toward Ramsgate. As I walk down the aisle, the bus stirs, and the shops and houses of Margate begin to scroll by backward to either side.

Natasha Denton’s mum lives in a subdivision near the main road. The houses are small boxes of white plaster with low clay roofs. Ragged brown palm trees blow in the gardens. Television aerials bob up and down.

Natasha opens the door and at once I feel deluded, appearing on her doorstep so far from where she lives. She stares at a point on one of the roofs behind me. “I’ll get my coat. I don’t want her to listen,” she says, nodding into the house.

She doesn’t speak until we round the corner. “After you came to see me, I went through his phone. I almost told him, I wanted to apologize. I didn’t have to search the house, the police already had weeks ago. They turned the place upside down.

“The boys liked to play with a loose tile in our bathroom when they were younger. When you slide it off, there’s a little cave behind it. The police couldn’t have known. I almost convinced myself not to check, and I waited all afternoon before looking. There were photographs of her.

“I brought the pictures to my friend’s house before I asked him about them. Wasn’t that clever? I thought he might try to burn them. He started to cry and said they had an affair but he didn’t hurt her and he didn’t know who did. He said he loved her. He asked if I was going to call the police and I said no because of the boys and then he went to work and I called the police.”

“Did you suspect him before?”

“No. You look so much like her. When I saw you just now, I thought you were her. I thought you had come to punish me.”

“She wouldn’t punish you.”

“Oh, I think she would,” she says. “She’d be furious.”

“Was Keith in any of the pictures?”

“No. I asked if he stole them and he said no. He got quite angry that I suggested it. We were in the kitchen and I remember looking at the knives and thinking he wouldn’t stab me. He couldn’t be bothered, with me.”

“Has he ever been violent in the past?”

“No, but he has a temper.”

I planned to tell her that he hit me, but it doesn’t seem necessary. She’s already disgusted by him. “Was there anything else?”

“After we heard about the murder, he asked me the last time I saw Rachel. It was just passing on the aqueduct, but he wanted to know everything about it. What she was wearing, what she said, where she was going. I thought he was in shock.”

A woman pushes a pram toward us, and after she passes, Natasha says, “We’ll have to change our names. I don’t want the boys growing up with this.”

“That’s probably wise.”

I’m not sure of the way out of the subdivision, so she leads me back to the main road, as though through a maze. I wait for the bus into Margate. Natasha told me she was going to move, maybe abroad, for her sons. I wonder if any part of her finds this thrilling. She didn’t give the impression of having been particularly happy and now she can start over, find a different life that suits her better. The normal obligations don’t weigh on her anymore. I imagine her in the weeks before this thinking, Is this it? Is this how things will always be? And now the answer is no.

46

I TAKE THE TRAIN back to London the next morning. What at night was rounded and storybook (shape of barn, shape of tree) is now sodden, thin, and colorless. The fields are pale, the house paint faded against the bleached sky. After we pass Faversham, I call Lewis. “His wife thinks he did it,” I say.

“Yes, she does. It looks like we’re going to charge him, Nora.”

I wonder if the police have told my dad about the arrest. I hope they won’t be able to find him again. I don’t think I will be able to bear helping him in and out of the courtroom, watching him shuffle to his seat. I have a surge of anger then. Where’s my family? I think. Where’s my family?

The detectives and a solicitor from the Crown Prosecution Service will assemble the case against Keith Denton. Lewis says the case will move to trial only if the prosecution has an excellent chance of winning.

The next few days will be spent examining any weaknesses in the evidence, he says, and searching out possible defenses. The police will review the circumstances around the crime, the details that are not relevant to the trial but will help win the confidence of the jury. When they finish, the prosecutor will decide if the case will go to trial.

I decide to wait for the news in Marlow, and the prospect turns me restless. In a room in Abingdon someone is going to sit down with a file and decide what happens next. I can’t go talk to this person. I can’t plead with her.

At the Hunters, I find the names of the dozen prosecutors in Oxford who might have been assigned to her case, and consider approaching them. Their stakes are different from ours. I wonder how many cases Oxford CPS brings to trial every year. What would losing one mean? A bad day, a drink after work, at worst, a professional review.

None of their addresses are listed. They must not want certain people to know where they live. But I could follow them home from the CPS office or Abingdon police station. I imagine the thud of a car door, their polished shoes tapping on the walk, and following them through the open gate, saying, Excuse me.

They wouldn’t listen, and my desperation might only make things worse. I can’t do anything for her. I remember her weight in my arms. The hours drag by. They have seven days to decide. Lewis is going to call me with the decision, and I try not to see portents everywhere.

• • •

Lewis calls me in the evening.

“Have they made a decision?”

“No, it’s something else,” he says. “The chief inspector has agreed to release her body. You can call the coroner to make arrangements.”

47

THE DRIVE TAKES six hours, and by the time I reach Polperro it is dark. I park on a steep, narrow road behind the Crumplehorn Inn and collect the box of ashes from the footwell. I wish we had done this differently, with a coffin and pallbearers. I shouldn’t be able to lift the box on my own, but I can, and then I am carrying it down the cobbled streets to the Green Man, a lime-washed inn by the harbor where I will spend the night.

At dawn tomorrow I will scatter the ashes in the cove below the house we rented. I chose Cornwall because it is where she intended to go, five weeks ago. She had already rented a flat on the other side of the county. I have the address in St. Ives, but I think seeing it might tip me over some last, final barricade, and I don’t know what things would be like afterward.

I can’t manage to think of them as her ashes. Instead the box is something she has entrusted to my care, and I am scared something will happen to me before I can complete the errand. On the M5 I thought I would crash and now, as I turn the corner and the Green Man comes into view, I am sure it will burn down with us inside. It wouldn’t be the worst thing. Her ashes would still end up in the ocean, floating with the cinders in long fingers of smoke over the sea.

• • •

Before dawn, I carry the box along the flagged stones of the quay. In the inner harbor, the tide is in, and sailing boats rock on the silvery water, their rigging clinking against the masts. The slate roofs seem to glow in the darkness. The sky is just beginning to lighten at the horizon as I circle around the inner harbor, and I can see the black outline of the two umbrella pines.

I climb the coast path along the edge of the headland. At its highest point I turn to look back at Polperro. More lights have come on, and smoke curls from the chimneys. I look at the fisherman’s croft, nearly invisible against the rocks, and at the two square merchant’s houses. One white, the other tweed-brown, though in this light the white one is blue, and the tweed one black.

The sand of the path crunches beneath my boots. Wind rustles the low sage pines on the headland. The coast doesn’t look very different from in summer, since so much of it is evergreen. I listen to the boom of the waves at the base of the cliff.

After a half mile, the coast path curves around a familiar white oak. Its branches creak with a sound like a door opening.

Another, shorter stretch and then a house comes into view, set down from the path by the edge of the cliff. Our house! I worried it wouldn’t be here anymore.

The house is empty. The man who owns it spends most of the year in London. There are still colored buoys hanging from a tree at the edge of the property. There is the outdoor shower, its spigot foxed with mold, its crooked door on the latch. And the clothesline, a wire strung between two whitewashed poles. In this light the wire is invisible, the pegs floating in midair against the sea. I remember pegging up my swimsuit, with wet hair, wearing a blue dress sprigged with white flowers.

The sense of recognition propels me forward until I stand on the back porch, facing the sea, and then it begins to fracture, so while I am surveying the house, I am also worrying about the prosecutor’s decision, and I am pleading for Rachel’s life, and I am thinking about how we planned to come back here. We wanted to come back for years and years, until we were both old.

The staircase vanishes down the cliff to the sea, and I imagine that Rachel is climbing the steps. Forty years on. The sea below her, the rivulets in the cliff. A formidable old woman, with her hair wet from an early swim. She puts her hand on the railing and leans back to check if she can see her sister, her children, her grandchildren, if any of them has come to the edge of the lawn to wait for her.

I cross the damp lawn and carry the box down the seventy-one steps to the beach. I remove my shoes and socks. I wait until the sun comes over the eastern headland, then twist the lid from the box and walk to the edge of the surf. The icy water stings my skin and soaks through my jeans. I throw handfuls of ash into the water. There is little wind and the things that I worried might happen do not. Most of the ash sinks below the water and the particles that float on the surface are soon roiled by the next wave. Sunlight floods the cove and the waves and the few offshore clouds with color. It takes me a while to recognize that what I feel is disappointment. I had hoped so much for a signal from her.

When I finish, I kneel to rinse my hands and the box in the water. I hold my hands in the clear cold water for longer than necessary, until long after the last of the ash is rinsed away.

• • •

On the porch, I use a glove to wipe the sand and water from my blue feet. I pull on woolen socks and roll my sodden jeans down over them. My teeth chatter. My mind is blank. She’s gone.

I zip my coat to my chin and rock back and forth. I am so cold that I go around the house to the outdoor shower. How good it would feel to take off my wet socks and jeans and stand under a jet of steaming water. I twist the tap but nothing happens. The water must be shut off to keep the pipes from freezing.

I return to the porch, which has the most sun. The day will grow warmer as it rises. Behind me are the rooms where she slept for three weeks, the rooms where she cooked, the rooms where she read. During our trip, Rachel was reading Clarice Lispector and I was alternating between John Fowles and the soggy detective novels in the cabinet under the stairs. Every morning one of us walked to the bakery for almond croissants and I ate mine here with my book. I broke the horn of the croissant and licked out the marzipan. Ahead of me, trenches of ocean rose and fell for miles.

At night I watched the stars from the hammock and was scared by the size of the universe as I hadn’t been since I was little. Rachel climbed in next to me, tucking my socked feet under her arm, pulling a blanket over her chest, and the two of us stared out.

It was good to be so scared. The ocean was very large, as was the universe. Which contained the ocean. And the oceans on other planets, and other planets. The fear made the domestic rituals better. The almond croissant, the detective novel, the outdoor shower. Here I am, I thought, taking an outdoor shower in the universe.

While we were here, I wanted to stay forever, but I was also already thinking of leaving. Always biding and always going, always at the exact same time.

“What’s your favorite thing about Cornwall?” I asked her, but it wasn’t what I meant, I meant what’s your favorite thing about being alive.

48

IN POLPERRO, birds wheel over the masts of boats in the inner harbor. On the decks, a few men smoke as they ready their boats for the day, and I listen to their voices and the rigging clinking. I decide to stay in Cornwall for the next four days. There is no reason to return to Oxford until the prosecutor’s decision, and their deadline is five days from now.

• • •

For the next four days, I acted as though I were still scattering her ashes, and should visit only the places here she loved best. This meant a lot of driving.

I visited the rivers Fowey, Fal, and Helford. I ate at St. John’s in Fowey at sunset, as the windows across the estuary in Polruan became shimmering brass squares. I ordered what she would have ordered, which was rainbow trout. The drink was more difficult, and from her three favorites I chose a white Bordeaux.

I visited Frenchman’s Creek. I visited the fishing town of Cadgwith. I tried to find the falls she had talked about on the Lizard Peninsula, but couldn’t. It may have dried up. No one I asked had heard of a dark pink lighthouse either. She may have told me the wrong color, or I remembered it wrong. I visited Porthgwidden and found the stall where she bought buttered crumpets.

I visited Redruth. I visited Lostwithiel and Padstow. I rode the ferry across the bay. This was a pattern I could follow for the rest of my life. I could retrace her steps. I could visit the hostel where she stayed in Greece and try to track down the man she met there. She lost his number when she was on the train north, which she always said was a blessing in disguise, but maybe it wasn’t.

One by one I could replace my tastes with hers. I don’t like mussels, for example, but I ordered them in a restaurant she liked in Cadgwith and finished the bowl. I could sleep with the men she would have slept with. I could become a nurse, even. It’s not like I already have a career.

And maybe that’s what I would do, if she were in prison. If what happened that day was that she killed someone instead of the other way around. I would do what she wanted me to and then tell her about it in detail. We often confused memories. It was easy if you talked for long enough.

• • •

On my last night, I visited Mousehole, and on the drive back it began to snow. It almost never snows in Cornwall, and I held my breath, hoping it wouldn’t stop. I drove over hills, across the peninsula.

At the edge of a town I hadn’t seen before was an old-fashioned Esso station, the two narrow pumps, the glowing lozenges atop them. Snow drifted over the empty filling station. The road was wet and black along its center and white at its edges, where the snow hadn’t been touched. The gothic spires of a church tower were almost invisible against the night sky. The glowing sign for a garage stood beside the filling station, and other signs — RAC Repairer, Community House — hung from wrought-iron hooks on the edges of the buildings. An old car sat with its headlights, two orbs mounted on the round wells of its tires, switched on.

• • •

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

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

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

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

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

49

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• • •

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

50

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

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

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

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

• • •

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Where is he?”

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

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

“Yes, when we first interviewed him.”

“What are you going to do?” I ask.

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

“Has that already started?”

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

“Is it related?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Do you think he did it?” I ask.

“I don’t know.”

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

“What’s your instinct about him?”

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

“If you were forced to decide—”

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

• • •

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

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

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

51

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

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

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

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

“I don’t know what you mean.”

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

“I found her.”

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

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

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

“How do you know that?”

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

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

“How?”

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

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

“I’d never hurt her.”

“Would you throw a bottle at her face?”

“How do you know about that?”

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

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

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

“You stole pictures of her.”

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

He laughs at my expression.

“She always said you were a little bitch.”