Under the Harrow

52

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

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

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

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

“Stay.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

53

KEITH KNOWS ABOUT the fight, and he knows Fenno was trained. The simplest explanation for how he knows these things is that she told him. That they had an affair, or a friendship he thought was an affair. The strange thing is, when he came to see me, he acted like the affair proved his innocence. If anything it means the opposite.

The important thing now is that Keith thinks it’s over for him. He thinks he’s safe. He might think, like I did, that he’s protected from being charged again by a form of double jeopardy. It must be such a sense of relief, after nearly going to prison. He will live the rest of his days a free man. I imagine that on the aqueduct he wants to kneel and kiss the ground. In his house, in the pub, driving the roads. He must be making plans now, with all the years he has, plans to travel, to sleep rough.

If someone were to threaten all that, there is no telling what he would do. Or, really, there is. He is going to attack me, and it will look unprovoked to everyone except the two of us.

I want him back with the police. They know how to snare him by letting him mention some detail of the crime — how the dog was tied, where her body was found — that they never told him, or by interviewing him until his account begins to shift and break apart. Even though they didn’t manage it before, they need more time with him.

The best way to do this is for him to commit another crime. It shouldn’t take very long, someone with a temper like that.

I’ve never understood why the police don’t use bait more often. When someone started to kill women on a mountain in Wales, the police could have sent hikers down the trails. With teams following them, or with guns. They could be policewomen, not civilians. It wasn’t even a very large mountain, they could have baited every trail. Eight victims, over three months, and the murderer has never been found. Fucking stupid.

Grievous bodily harm. He’s ready for it, too. He needs to take it out on someone.

54

MORETTI GIVES A PRESS conference from a room inside Abingdon station. He asks for anyone who was near the warehouse in Eynsham on Thursday night to make contact with the police. He says that based on early evidence they believe more than one person was responsible for the murders, and he urges anyone with information, however minor, to come forward.

He’s done with Rachel. It’s over for him, unless another development draws him back.

A row of detectives sits beside him behind low, angled microphones. While he speaks, the officers stare at the press audience with blank, judging faces, as though waiting for an outburst. Based on the crowns on their epaulets, some of them are his superiors. I recognize the chief constable, seated near the middle of the row with his hands clasped on the table.

Moretti’s voice is measured and clear. The impression he gives is of someone who is serious and, more than anything, effective.

55

“CAN YOU COME TO the station?” asks Moretti the morning after the press conference. Rain falls on the yard behind the Hunters, and the foghorn bellows from the village hall. I remember what Keith said about the police suspecting me, but I don’t believe him. It was a bluff. I’m pleased the detectives haven’t closed the inquiry.

A constable collects me at a quarter past eight. This time Lewis is also in the interview room. For a moment I think this must mean there is news, but neither of them looks eager. They look exhausted.

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

“He was unfaithful.”

“How did you know?”

“I found a pair of knickers. I told you already.”

On the Sunday night of his return from Manchester, I reached into his bag and pulled out a fistful of black silk. I spread them flat on the bed to see the dimensions of the body that wore them. The legs and stomach that the lace edged. I imagined a woman lying on her back, topless, biting her finger and laughing.

Moretti shows me a photograph of a pair of black silk knickers, with the same faint blue label stitched to the hem.

“Like these?”

“Yes.”

“They have a shop on the Via Cavour in Rome. They don’t distribute abroad.” I’ve stopped breathing. Both detectives watch me. Moretti says, “When did you find out?”

“Find out what?”

“That Rachel slept with your boyfriend.”

“She didn’t. He was in Manchester that weekend.”

“No, Oxford. He stayed at the George on Prince Street. Rachel met him for dinner and she stayed with him at the hotel.”

The first kick lands. My body turns numb, as it did on that Sunday night. I’m very aware of my movements, of lifting my hand to straighten my shirt, of how much air I displace in the room, as though everything around me is freezing up. It’s not unpleasant. Lewis watches from across the table. He still hasn’t spoken.

“How many times?” I ask. My voice telescopes away from me.

“Once, according to Liam,” says Moretti.

I startle, as though I have been pushed from behind. “He’s admitted it?”

“Yes.”

I look at the photograph and remember placing them on our bed and smoothing the cool silk. Liam was in the shower and I left them like that for him to find.

“Thank you, Nora. That’s all we need for today.”

He hasn’t turned off the recorder. I wonder what else he thinks I might say.

56

“CAN YOU COME TO Oxford now?” I ask at the first pause in his condolences.

“I’m at work,” says Liam.

“I’m sure you can explain. The train’s only an hour, you can be back in London tonight.”

We arrange to meet at the covered market on the high street. There is a bistro on the second floor. It serves good, rustic French food, though I’m not hungry.

Moretti might be trying to find a motive for me. He may have ordered the knickers from the shop in Rome, not found a matching pair in Rachel’s dresser. I think I told him the brand name.

While I wait for Liam, I sort through all the times I saw them together. A few times the two of them went off on their own. But they were always on ordinary, reasonable two-person jobs. They once did the grocery shopping when we stayed in Marlow, or he drove her to collect her car from the repair garage.

It hurts too much to believe that these expeditions were planned, and eagerly awaited. When they returned, they never seemed tense or guilty.

Moretti never showed me any proof that Liam was in Oxford and not Manchester. He didn’t say how he knew that Rachel stayed at the hotel.

Liam arrives. I haven’t seen him in six months. He wears a soft black jumper and he smells the same, a cologne with cedar and musk that I realized was quite popular after we broke up. Who do you wear it for now? I think before I can stop myself.

“How are you?” he asks.

I shake my head, and then notice the magazine folded in his briefcase. He was able to read on the trip here, and I hate him for it. The server comes and I order a second Campari and soda. Liam orders a beer. He looks so well.

“Did you sleep with my sister?”

Everything around us goes quiet.

“Yes.”

I swipe his bottle and it shatters against the wall. The liquid foams and spills along the floor. The two servers, both young women, stop at the far end of the room and stare. I doubt they heard our conversation, but they can imagine it. Both of their faces are creased with sympathy. I push back my chair and hurry down the stairs. Behind me I can hear Liam apologizing, a zip on his case opening as he searches for notes to leave on the table.

He catches me up in the alley beside the covered market. “It wasn’t planned. We ran into each other on the street and decided to eat together later. I don’t even remember it,” he says. “Neither of us did. It was a mistake.”

“How much did you drink?”

“Two bottles of wine.”

“Each?” I ask, scrupulous, desperate. If it happened after four bottles of wine, I might be able to forgive them.

“No, together.”

We hear footsteps at the far end of the alley and stop speaking. A young woman comes down the cobbles, teetering between us. She has a net bag with vegetables and a bouquet of tulips, and I almost grab her arm and say, Listen to this, listen to what he’s done. She lowers her head demurely as she passes us. Lovers’ quarrel. I wish we were having a row, I wish we were in an alley in London, that there was no reason for us to be in Oxford.

“But you planned it. You told me you were going to Manchester.”

“No. I said I was going to a conference. We didn’t talk about where until afterward. When I came back, I said I’d been in Manchester.”

“Did she ask you to say that?”

“No.”

I’m having trouble breathing. I was so sure he would deny it. No, I would tell the detective. You’re wrong. It never happened.

And if he denied it I would never have to think about Rachel kissing him, about Rachel undressing for him, about the two of them falling asleep together, or about the first time that I saw her afterward and she didn’t tell me. I told her we broke up and she said, “Do you want to come up here for a few days?”

“Did you fancy her the whole time?” I ask.

“No.”

“Was she angry with me?”

“No,” he says. “No, of course not. She hated herself for it.”

I am crying freely now, stoppering my nose with the back of my hand. He looks down at the cobblestones. We don’t speak, and then I say, “Are you seeing someone?”

He rubs his hand over his mouth.

“What’s her name?”

“Charlotte.”

I can picture her. Cheerful and good-natured, shining light brown hair. Going to work and meeting her friends, meeting Liam, afterward. If she were here, if she came toward us now, I would hit her. I would want to claw her to pieces.

She’s waiting for him in London. Tonight or tomorrow night he’ll go to see her. It will be a relief, after this, to be near someone serene and warm. She’ll say, “Do you want to tell me what happened?”

Liam still hasn’t realized my position. He hasn’t considered the danger he’s put me in.

“I found her.”

“Oh, God. I’m so sorry.”

“They think I killed her because of this.”

His throat is flushed red, and it spreads down his chest. “No, that’s not possible. I’ll tell them you didn’t know.”

I step forward and his arms close around me. His chest lifts and sinks against mine. I remember the room at the top of the Oxo Tower. Elderflower gin and tonics. I’d thought, I didn’t know things could be like this.

He’s seeing someone. It can’t compare to our first months. Golden brown, lays me down. Even the hotel with Rachel can’t compare.

Warmth spreads through his body into mine. He’s kissing the top of my head and if I turn my face he will kiss my mouth. He tightens his arms around me. I rest my head between his shoulder and his warm throat and try to ignore the disquiet. It will never be how it was before. This will harm you more, in the end.

“I have to go,” I say and my voice sounds calm, like I’ve just remembered an appointment.

“Will you be all right?” he asks, and I realize that he expects me to say yes.

My voice stays composed as I say good-bye. At the end of the alley, I turn into the crowds on the high street. The loneliness has me by the throat, and I hear Rachel tell me, You’re fine, all you have to do now is get home, all you have to do is get home.

57

“BEFORE LEAVING LONDON, you went to a pub on Christchurch Terrace in Chelsea,” says Moretti. As soon as I left Liam, he called me back to the station. I told him again that I hadn’t known about them, but I can’t offer any proof. “How much did you have to drink?”

“One glass of wine.” I can see the table in front of me, as if I could go back. The salmon in pastry, the white wine, the cutlery.

“What about the night of Rachel’s attack in Snaith? How much did you have to drink then?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Half a liter of vodka?” he asks. I tilt my head. “We spoke to Alice. She said the three of you drank quite a lot that night. Does that sound accurate?”

“Yes.”

“Were you angry with Rachel?”

“No.”

“You threw a bottle at her face,” he says. Keith must have told him. I wonder if he also told them about Liam, if Rachel confessed to him. “Who was Will Cooke?”

Fuck, I think, fuck. “A friend of ours. He went to school with us.”

“Was he your friend or Rachel’s?”

“Both.”

“Was he your boyfriend?”

“For a few months.”

“Was he ever Rachel’s boyfriend?”

“No.”

“That isn’t what Alice told us.”

“They had sex a few times.”

“Was your fight at the party about Will Cooke?”

“No, that wasn’t a problem. Did Alice tell you she also slept with Will? We were teenagers, it meant nothing.”

When we met, I liked Moretti because I like Italy. How stupid, but it disarmed me. A Scottish accent and Italian appearance. I had an image of him. Drinking an espresso and reading the paper. He has heavy eyelids and I thought that meant he was tortured by his cases and the things he learned in his work. He told me his grandparents owned a bergamot grove in Calabria.

I didn’t try to resist. I was so happy that he and Lewis were nothing like the detectives in Snaith. I don’t know why he became a policeman. I don’t know what he has done in his career, and I don’t know if he believes me.

“When did you stop taking Wellbutrin?”

“October.”

“Have you had any withdrawal symptoms?”

“No.”

“Has it been difficult to resume daily life without the medication?”

“No.”

“How many weeks passed between when you stopped the medication and Rachel’s death?”

“Five. I don’t understand why that’s relevant. It’s not an antipsychotic.”

“What would it mean if it were an antipsychotic?”

“Then going off it might make me violent or unstable.”

“And that would mean?”

“That I should be a suspect.”

He smiles again. Then he stands and opens the door for me to go. He’s not arresting me. I wonder which pieces are still missing, or if it’s only the knife.

I stop in the doorway, close to him. “Rachel had defensive wounds. If I did it, I would have had scratches or bruises.”

“Did you?” he asks.

I laugh. “You saw me. You know I didn’t.”

He shrugs, and the hair stands on the back of my neck.

58

I DRIVE TO Prince Street. A reconstruction. I can see where they ate dinner. I can ride in one of the lifts, where they probably kissed for the first time, and walk down one of the corridors. Maybe they didn’t make it to the room. Both of them liked sex in public, I know.

The George Hotel has a gold roof cantilevered above the pavement from metal poles. The carpeted space underneath the roof is bathed in light, and the people under it look vivid and somehow frenetic. The women balancing on spiked heels, the men gesturing with lit phones. Rachel came here in early May, I know now. I imagine her ducking under the canopy, the gold light blazing on her dark head and bare shoulders.

I push open the revolving doors and cross a lobby with the restaurant and bar at its far end. I imagine Liam climbing down from his stool and opening his arms.

I stop, swaying on my feet.

• • •

During our argument, I worked out that on the night Liam cheated on me I was at a party in Fulham. Before the party Martha and I went for tapas, peppers in oil and grilled bread and olives. The party was on the roof of a mansion block. There were friends from St. Andrews and I wore a white crocheted dress and felt lucky and contented. On the walk to the party, I sent Liam a message, and he wrote a similar one back. Before my sister arrived, maybe, or while she was in the toilets. He said he missed me.

I wonder if they longed for each other afterward, and if separately or together they tried to plan a way it could happen again. Liam said neither of them remembered it. I hope that’s true. If she didn’t remember it then she couldn’t have ever been thinking about it when we were together.

• • •

She made both of us foolish. We were better than this. We had other concerns. We had bigger fish to fry.

• • •

Prince Street ends at the river. I climb down the hill to the towpath and call Martha. “It was Rachel. He cheated on me with Rachel.”

“Oh, no,” she says, and her voice is gratifyingly horrified. I start to explain that his work trip was to Oxford, not Manchester, but she interrupts me. “My parents want to help. They know a defense barrister in Oxford.”

“That’s kind of them. If it comes to that—”

“You need advice now.”

“Maybe.” The story comes out in a rush, and I realize that since learning the news I have been aching to tell someone. I’ve been framing and reframing it in my mind, and recasting the events of the last six months based around it.

I start to tell Martha about meeting Liam at the covered market, but she stops me before I’ve finished and says, “Nora, don’t talk to anyone about this. I wish you hadn’t told me that.”

“Why?”

“Because now if I’m ever sworn to oath, and someone asks if you were angry with Rachel I have to say yes.” She sighs. “You would have split up anyway. Please try not to think too much of it. You have other problems now.”

59

LEWIS ONCE TOLD ME he lives in Jericho, not far from here. He gives me the address, and a few minutes later I’m on the step of a brick terraced house and he is opening the door and saying, “Come in.”

I follow him up the stairs to his flat. The living room is clean and lit by lamps. He has a green couch, bookshelves, and a low table holding a record player. From across the room, I can see the record turning, wobbling a little. A racing bicycle leans against one wall, under a poster from a heist film, three people running, their legs akimbo, in exaggerated vanishing point perspective. Lewis disappears into the kitchen and returns with two bottles of beer.

“Do you think I did it?”

“No.”

My shoulders drop, and I can look at him properly now. He wears a red-checked flannel shirt. His expression is worried and intent.

“Moretti thinks I asked someone to assault her in Snaith.”

“I know.”

“I helped her look for him.”

“The idea is that once she had been punished, you enjoyed the role. There are benefits to being close to a victim. It’s like Munchausen by proxy.”

“I didn’t benefit from it. Am I officially a suspect?”

“Yes.” He starts to peel the label from his beer. “She slept with your boyfriend.”

“I don’t see how that’s my fault.”

“That’s not exactly the point.”

“What else? What else do they find strange about me?”

“They think Rachel had been using the oven. A fireman noticed that the pot on one of the burners was still warm. It’s unlikely an intruder would turn off a burner before leaving the scene, but you might, out of habit. Or so the house wouldn’t burn down, since she left it to you.”

“I can’t remember,” I say. “I don’t think I went into the kitchen. What about the knife? What would I have done with the knife?”

“One theory,” he says, “is that you didn’t dispose of the knife at the scene. You tucked it into your waistband. At the police station, we know you went into the toilets alone. You wrapped the knife in paper, threw it in the bin, and that night it was loaded with the rest of the rubbish and brought to the landfill.”

“That’s absurd. Wouldn’t Moretti have noticed?”

“It was a short blade.” He puts his head back and rubs his face.

“Do you think I’m going to be charged?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“We found a partial footprint. A men’s Lonsdale, with blood on it.”

The footprint doesn’t eliminate me, he says, since I may have had an accomplice. My body turns leaden. The new information washes over me and I’m too tired to speak. Lewis notices and moves into the kitchen, leaving me to sink in privacy. Sometime later, he returns and hands me a bowl of ramen. We eat while listening to the record.

“Can you forgive her?” he asks.

“Yes,” I say. “I think so.”

When we finish our ramen, he rinses the bowls. It starts to rain, and I consider asking him if I can stay.

He lends me an umbrella. At the bottom of the stairs, as I lean on the point of the umbrella, he pulls me toward him and kisses me.

Only for a second, and then I am outside, my heart racing, the struts of the umbrella snapping open above me.

60

I THINK I UNDERSTAND now why people don’t leave when a war comes, why even residents with the means to leave stayed in a city like Sarajevo as danger drew closer. A mixture of disbelief and bargaining. If I stay, the war won’t come.

I could drive to the airport and leave her car in short-stay parking. At an airline desk, I could buy a ticket to a country without an extradition treaty with England.

The police might have placed a travel alert on my passport, but that isn’t what stops me. He stabbed Rachel eleven times. If I leave now, the police will consider it an admission of guilt, and he will never be caught.

61

I SEND MYSELF UP and down the aqueduct. At some point Keith will decide to go for a walk, or he will follow me. I carry pepper spray and the straight razor. The difficult part will be knowing when to stop him. He has to do enough damage for the police to take it seriously, but neither of us is going to die. The detectives must know that he is the violent one, not me, and not to trust anything he has told them.

Along the path, the brambles are shaped into hollow globes, and sparrows fly through them. I walk south toward Oyster Pond.

I have to forgive her or else sacrifice our last six months together. In a way, I don’t entirely blame her. If she wanted to switch, to see what it was like to be the other of us, the one who stayed safely at the party that night, at dinner with my boyfriend. Or she just drank too much and stopped caring. Bitch, I think, and the venom does nothing to how much I miss her.

From part of the aqueduct, you can see the back of her house. The white wooden siding, the chimney, the two sheltering elms. Steam rises from the chimney, like someone is at home, but only because we left the boiler on so the pipes don’t burst.

I wait for her to come outside. Or for Fenno to lunge into view at one of the windows. It hasn’t gotten any easier to believe she’s gone. At Oyster Pond, I test the pepper spray to make sure it isn’t frozen. I do this on every other walk. If he doesn’t come for me soon, it will be all used up.

62

TWO CONSTABLES ARE WAITING for me in front of the Hunters. They’ve seen me before I notice them, they’ve been watching me come down the road. I know the area better than they do. I know places to hide around the aqueduct. The woods are the most dense by Oyster Pond, that’s where I have to go, and I’m plotting this out, waiting for the right moment, but their eyes are fixed on me and I continue toward them. Full of rage, the length of the high street. They’re wasting time. If they had waited a little longer, Keith would have come after me.

They step forward, reading me my rights while opening the door of the patrol car. They don’t use handcuffs. During the drive to Abingdon, I focus on the landscape through the window to stop my throat from closing. They didn’t give me time to change, and I still have pepper spray and the straight razor in my pocket.

The light box sign of the Thames Valley Police appears. Much of it is the same as at other interviews. The room is identical, except one wall is a mirror, behind which other officers can watch us. I’m given a blue tracksuit to change into, and then left to wait in the interview room.

Moretti comes in and says, “Hello, Nora.”

They were rehearsals, I realize now, all the interviews before this one. Moretti was practicing for this. He knows me now, and my weaknesses.

“We found some notes in your room. Is this your handwriting?”

“Yes.”

He starts to read. “‘Harm compounding factors. Psychological damage to victim. Sustained attack on same victim. Use of weapon or weapon equivalent. Significant degree of premeditation.’” He leans back in his chair. “Why do you have the sentencing guidelines for grievous bodily harm?”

“Rachel thought the man who attacked her in Snaith might be caught for doing it again. I thought knowing the prison sentence for a similar crime would help me find him.”

“Or,” he says, “you wanted to know what your punishment might be.”

“No.”

“Where did you scatter her ashes?” he asks.

“Cornwall.”

“Did anyone go with you?”

“No.”

“None of Rachel’s friends or family?”

“No.”

“Why not? Did you ask them?”

“I wanted to be alone.”

He smooths his suit jacket. “Did you ever bring anything onto the ridge? A picnic?”

“No.”

“A witness saw you on the ridge carrying a plastic bag from Whistlestop.”

“That’s not possible.”

“There is a Whistlestop in Paddington station. You told me you’ve made purchases from it. And that particular branch sells Tennent’s Light Ale and Dunhills.”

“Is the witness Keith? He made it up. Either they were his or you showed him photographs.”

Moretti looks at the mirror, as though he wants to be sure someone has heard what I’ve just said. I wonder if I’ve already made a mistake. He remains silent for a moment. The witness must be Keith, or he would contradict me.

“You assembled the scene on the ridge,” he says. “You wanted us to think Rachel had a stalker. Two days after her murder, you started to worry we might not find it, so you reported it yourself.”

“No.”

“Why were you on the ridge?”

“I wanted to see her house.”

He leaves the room. For a long time I sit with my hands on my lap. They’re watching me somewhere, on a video monitor, a small, still figure staring ahead. It must be meant to make me nervous, but it’s a relief to be alone. They have thirty-six hours to charge me.

His boss, DCI Bristowe, will have to approve. He might be in her office now. I imagine she has been watching us, and I wish she would interview me herself. We’ve never spoken, she can’t be convinced of my guilt. I imagine her in a suit, a coffee on her desk, rubbing her shoulders, wondering if she can go home. It will look bad for her, and her department, to charge two suspects that CPS declines to prosecute.

• • •

There isn’t a clock in the interview room. Moretti wears a watch but its face is hidden under his sleeve. I don’t know how much time passes. I look at the mirror to try to see shapes behind it. I listen for sounds in the building, and when I don’t hear any I become frightened that we are the only ones in it.

“Is Lewis here?”

“No. DS Lewis has been suspended.”

“Why?”

“Professional misconduct.”

• • •

They don’t let me sleep for very long. It seems like only a few minutes pass between when I enter the cell and when I am back in the room with Moretti. He drinks a tea and doesn’t offer me one.

“Tell me about your relationship with Paul Wheeler.”

I try to hide my surprise, but I’m sure Moretti caught it, a twitch. “We met for the first time a few weeks ago. I think he attacked Rachel in Snaith.”

“He sent you roses.”

“He was harassing me. He sent the flowers to scare me.”

“Have you given Paul Wheeler any gifts? Have you lent or given him money?”

“No.”

“What are the terms of your agreement?”

“We don’t have an agreement.”

Moretti stands and stretches. There are wrinkles on the back of his suit jacket. “Nothing you did with Lewis was illegal,” he says, “but a jury will want to know why you slept with a case detective so soon after the murder.”

• • •

Later, he pulls a sheet of paper toward him and lowers his head to read. “‘I’m unhappy. I don’t feel like myself. I’m scared this won’t go away.’” He continues, and I lean forward, my hands twisting on my lap. He’s reading my psychologist’s notes. I thought they were sealed.

Moretti finishes reading and we sit with the paper on the table between us. “When you found out that Rachel caused so much unhappiness, you must have been very angry with her.”

“I didn’t know about Liam until you told me.”

He looks again at the mirror. Moretti still hasn’t mentioned the weapon. If the murderer used a knife from her house, my fingerprints might be on it. I’ve cooked using those knives.

63

A DUTY SOLICITOR COMES to see me. She introduces herself as Amrita Ghosh. “Have I been charged?” I ask.

“No,” she says. “I’m here to explain what might happen next.”

Her voice is candid and direct, and she meets my eyes. I can’t tell if she thinks I’m guilty. I suppose she might not have an opinion. She is here to share general information, not offer me advice. She might not have reviewed the case in any detail.

She starts with what I already know. After my arrest, the police have thirty-six hours before they must either charge or release me. If I am released, the police will likely continue to consider me as a suspect and to build the case against me, unless new evidence eliminates me.

The solicitor doesn’t do anything to confuse me. She never asks how I am coping. She makes it clear that she is a neutral party. If I am charged, I will remain in custody while an Oxfordshire prosecutor decides if the evidence against me is strong enough to move to trial. If it is, I will appear before a magistrate to enter a plea. If I plead guilty, negotiations will begin between my defense counsel and the prosecutor. If I plead not guilty, the magistrate will either set bail or remand me into custody until the trial.

“It is my duty to tell you that there is a sentence reduction for a guilty plea. The prosecutor might also adjust the charge from murder to manslaughter. It depends on the details of the offense.”

“What’s the average length of time in prison after a guilty manslaughter plea?”

“Three years.”

“What’s the average if you plead not guilty to murder and are convicted?”

“Twenty years.”

She holds my eyes. I don’t think she believes I’m innocent.

• • •

The difference between being released at thirty-three or forty-nine.

I won’t do well in cross-examination. At York Crown Court some defendants remained composed and patient. Others became emotional, to the jury’s distaste. The juries appeared to prefer when defendants kept calm, and I won’t be able to.

The visit from the duty solicitor was not about due process, it was the first application of pressure. They could have waited until I was charged, but they want to be sure I have time before the magistrate’s hearing to consider it. Three or twenty years.

64

“ARE YOU TIRED?” he asks.

“Yes.”

He smiles at me. For a moment I think he will let me go. The silence stretches between us.

“Your fingerprints are on the banister post.”

I watch his expression closely. “Which one?”

“The one you tied the dog’s lead around.”

“I must have touched it on a different visit.”

“They’re close to the ground. To reach there, you would have had to kneel on the floor.” He straightens his tie. “One of the prints is in the dog’s blood.”

“Show me a photograph of it.”

He leaves the room. My breathing turns loud and ragged. I can’t remember if detectives are allowed to lie during an interview. It’s such a huge point of law, I can’t believe I don’t know it. He might be allowed to say anything.

The minutes stretch on. I try to stare through the black mirror, and my reflection is appalled and ashen. He wants to retire. How important is it to him to leave after a success? I never considered it before.

I didn’t touch the banister post that day, but I did touch the dog. I put my hand against his side while he was hanging. I knew he was dead, but I still wanted to comfort him.

I must have left fingerprints somewhere else in the house. All he would have to do is change the label on where the print was found. The house has been industrially cleaned now. I won’t be able to prove him wrong.

65

MORETTI DOESN’T RETURN, and a constable leads me to the cell.

He’s fitting me up. When I asked about the defensive injuries, he shrugged. He might decide to remember a scratch or a bruise on me.

I don’t sleep. Instead I pretend to be a juror, listening to the evidence and the witnesses. I don’t know if it will be clear that the police are crooked, or if something about me will make it easy for them to believe.

• • •

A constable unlocks the door and says, “Follow me, please.”

Sunlight falls over us as we walk down the corridor. It must be Thursday morning. I can’t tell from her face if in a few minutes she will charge or release me.

An officer hands me my clothes and bag. Moretti isn’t in the room. I wonder if he’s watching on a monitor somewhere else in the building. I’m not being charged. He must have lied about the prints on the banister.

I hurry away from the police station. The morning is cool and damp, the sun behind a scrim of gray cloud. Giddiness bursts up my legs and into my chest. I dig my nails into the sides of my arms, sailing down the road.

By the time I reach Marlow, the Emerald Gate has opened. I order scallion pancakes, chow fun, and dumplings. I eat greedily, tearing the pancakes with my hands, scooping mouthfuls of food. While I eat, I don’t think of anything but how it tastes.

After the bowls are scraped clean, I lean back in my chair and look out the window and wonder what I am supposed to do next.

At the station last night I started to make plans. I didn’t mean to, but couldn’t help it. Plans to travel. To sleep rough.

66

I RETURN TO the Hunters to pack my things. Tonight I will stay with Martha in London, and the thought makes me heavy with relief.

Before I stow my laptop, I open it on the bed. The screen brightens. I haven’t checked his name in over a week, since before Cornwall.

• • •

Paul Wheeler violated his parole. Over the weekend he assaulted a woman in Holbeck, South Leeds. Milly Athill. The name sounds familiar, but I can’t place it. He followed her into her home. The charge against him will be much more severe this time. He committed the crime while he was on probation, and it’s a repeat offense. It was a sustained attack on one victim. The prosecutor will likely be able to prove psychological damage to the victim.

Her brother was upstairs, by chance, and he and Milly were able to overpower Paul.

The maximum sentence for grievous bodily harm is life imprisonment, and the solicitor interviewed for the article expects him to receive that or close to it.

Is that enough? I ask Rachel. Is it over?

• • •

I speak to Lewis. Moretti had a trace on my car, apparently, the day I went to his house. He’s in Brighton now, and he tells me about his flat. You can see the channel from every room, he says, even the bathroom. He says that after a constable told him I’d been released, he ate chips and vinegar on the beach to celebrate. He asks if I want to come visit and I say yes, soon.

I look down at the article again. “Would anyone know you’ve been suspended yet? If, for example, you called a prison and asked to speak to an inmate.”

• • •

I walk through Marlow while waiting for his call. Down Meeting House Lane, down Redgate. Past the church, past the firehouse, past the tennis court. I’m on the common, facing the village hall, when Lewis calls.

“I spoke to Paul Wheeler,” he says, and his voice is careful and measured. “He says Rachel was his girlfriend.”

My eyes skitter away, and it looks like the clock is falling out of the village hall.

“It sounds like they only went out a few times, when she was a teenager. He said he hated his name, he always told girls he was called Clive. She wouldn’t have been able to find him. He didn’t admit to the assault, but he said they had an argument, and soon after he moved to Newcastle for work.”

“Is he making it up?”

“He said he gave her a mask. Does that sound familiar?”

The white carnival mask, with a curved beak. She hung it on the wall in her room.

“She probably thought the police would consider the crime more seriously if it were a stranger.”

“But why wouldn’t she tell me?”

“It happens,” he says. “Victims often don’t tell their families when they knew the person who beat or raped them.”

After the call ends, I sit on a bench under the yews and turn my face up to the thrashing branches. The wind roars, growing louder and louder.

I remember what happened at the Cross Keys now. The red half-height doors of the toilets. I didn’t go in with a man, I went in with Rachel. I had barely seen her all night. And she said, “I’ve been talking to someone. I think I’ve met someone.”

• • •

I know what Lewis meant. If she told me she knew him, she wouldn’t be able to forgive me if, for even a second, I suggested it was somehow her fault.

But I don’t understand why she thought I would have.

• • •

After some time, I leave the common and return to my room to finish packing. Milly Athill. Before closing the laptop, I search through the other articles about Paul Wheeler and finally find the name in one of the first reports after the crime that sent him to prison. Before the assault, the victim was at a pub with her best friend, Milly.

Her brother was upstairs at the time. He’s a rugby player who lives in Dublin, but he happened to be at her house. What a coincidence.

I always wondered why the police don’t use bait more often. Apparently so did they.

• • •

“Are you checking out?” the manager asks hopefully.

“Yes.”

She charges me for the night I spent in jail.

67

“I THOUGHT YOU WOULD move,” I say. Louise, on her own in front of the service station, looks at me as though I’m mad.

“No,” she says. “No, I haven’t moved.”

She could be in Camden. The gas ring. The tratt. Louise frowns. I should say something else, but I can’t, and I start to fill the car with petrol for the drive to London.

Her decision to stay seems pathological. Louise watches me and parts her mouth just enough to let out a flat stream of smoke. A familiarity opens between us, because of our resemblance, maybe, and I think she knows what I meant, and that it would be all right for me to tell her who I am. I am about to start but find I can’t. The only way I can think to begin is — my sister was murdered. My sister was murdered.

“Do you want one?” asks Louise. She wears the same outfit as always, a navy shirt, black skirt, and apron, but with a duffle coat wrapped over it. On the ledge beside her are a pack of cigarettes and a glass of mint tea steaming into the cold air.

I replace the pump and join her. As she offers me the pack, I notice the dark red marks on her hand, from when she was burned with a cigarette or stabbed with a screwdriver.

“Yes,” I say, “cheers.” I bend toward the lighter, straighten, exhale. I move around her so I am also leaning against the restaurant window. There is a jet in the distance, and it sounds like a wall breaking apart.

Louise stares at a van parked on the grass on the far side of the Bristol Road.

“Why would I move?” she asks.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “It’s none of my business.” She shifts toward me, rolling onto her shoulder against the glass, and waits. “It must be difficult for you to go past that every day.”

“Past what?”

“Where Callum died.”

“He didn’t die in the accident,” she says. “He woke up after the surgery. He died the next night.”

“From what?”

“Complications.”

The sensation is like missing a stair. Of course, I think, before the thought has even formed into words.

“There was a collision here,” said Rachel. She pointed out the window. “A man and a woman.”

“Did they survive?”

“One did.”

“Which one?”

“The woman.”

Sunlight warms the top of my head, then vanishes, like a hand pressing down and lifting. Why? I should have asked. Why did only one survive?

Callum must have been the subject of the coroner’s inquest in October. Rachel never told me the death was under review. After the inquest, she invented a reason for driving past the accident site. She wanted to show it to me. I wonder if she was disappointed that I didn’t suspect anything, or if it was a relief.

“None of her injuries came from the crash,” she said. “It’s a good thing he didn’t make it. He would have killed her.”

I turn to Louise, but it feels like a countermotion, and something else is rotating beneath me. She gathers her cigarettes and lighter, her glass, and nods at me before going inside. Through the window, I watch her hang up her duffle coat and tie the strings on her apron. Waves of heat sweep over me. Rachel wanted revenge, and she must have grown tired of waiting to find the man who attacked her. Louise moves in and out of the glare, and I watch her while I call Joanna.

“Was Rachel at the coroner’s inquest in October?” I ask.

“No,” she says.

A line of rippling birds flies low over the trees.

“Was she one of his nurses?”

“Yes.”

I close my eyes and wrap my hand over my forehead.

“I don’t remember all the particulars,” says Joanna. “Can I call you back when I have it in front of me?”

“Have what in front of you?”

“The transcript from the inquest.”

“Is that a public document?”

“Yes.”

“I’m on my way to the hospital now, will you make a copy for me?”

“All right. I’m going to be in rounds, but I’ll leave it at the nurses’ station for you.”

“Can you tell me anything you remember?”

“It was a good result. The cause of death wasn’t negligence.”

The sounds around me sharpen and separate. “Who was the patient?”

“Callum Hold.”

“How did he die?”

“The latch on his intravenous drip broke. He overdosed.”

“Does he have any family?”

“Yes, he had a brother.”

“What was his name?”

“Martin Hold.”

• • •

The inquest transcript begins with a précis from the coroner. The patient was brought to the John Radcliffe after a road accident on 22 September. The consultant surgeon recommended reconstructive work to repair internal bleeding. The surgery was successful. On the morning following the surgery, the patient was awake and in stable condition. Shortly after six that night he was pronounced dead.

The cause of death was not complications from surgery, as originally suspected. He died from an overdose of fentanyl, a medical heroin. The drip was meant to give him a painkiller at regular intervals. When its latch broke, the fluid flooded his veins.

An expert witness testified on faulty medical equipment. He believed the hospital staff did nothing wrong. Despite all precautions, equipment sometimes fails. Faulty equipment is the cause of one-fourth of all deaths in hospital.

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

• • •

Martin Hold. She told me his first name so I would remember it. So I would recognize it if anything happened to her.

If nothing did happen, if she made it to St. Ives, I doubt she would have ever confessed. But maybe it would have weighed on her too much, and one day she would have called me and said, “I’ve got something to tell you.”

• • •

I find the important part halfway through the transcript, hunched on the bench across from Casualty. Martin visited his brother in hospital. He was alert at the time, and they had a long conversation.

I cover my face with my hands. Rachel must have asked Callum about Louise’s injuries, or threatened him, and he told his brother.

• • •

In A&E Louise is wheeled past Rachel and into a room. Rachel starts to examine her. She presents like someone who has been in a road accident, but the strange thing is some of her wounds appear to have started to heal, and some of them already have bandages.

• • •

Rachel limps in and out of pubs and betting shops in Hull. Where would a violent man go, where would a monster go.

• • •

She had a way, sometimes. When she wanted to. I can hear her voice, burry and low, and she says, “When I was seventeen a man beat me up.” She waits. She says, “Do you want to tell me what happened to you?”

• • •

Even if the detectives read the inquest transcript, Martin doesn’t stand out. He doesn’t accuse her and he doesn’t sound aggrieved. Or he does, but not with her. He says there should be consequences for the manufacturer, so other families don’t go through what he has gone through. The coroner advises him to seek the advice of a solicitor for damages.

The transcript is a public document, like a trial record, but surely some of it would have been redacted if the coroner’s office were giving it to a member of the public instead of back to the hospital. Like Callum’s medical records, and all the contact information for his next of kin.

• • •

“I need your help,” I say. The service station café is empty and Louise looks at me, with a dishcloth in one hand. “My name’s Nora Lawrence.”

“I know who you are,” she says. This whole time, I thought I was the one watching her.

“Did you tell Rachel how you got your injuries?”

“Yes.”

She regards me with her small, calm face.

“Rachel broke the latch on his drip.”

Louise closes her eyes. “I know,” she says.

• • •

First we drive to Cirencester and Martha’s family’s estate. A long gravel drive, a row of poplars. Louise waits in the car. Martha’s mum answers the door, and when she sees me her hand covers her mouth.

“Hello, Lily. Is Martha here?”

“No, darling, she isn’t.”

“Oh, I must be supposed to meet her in town. Do you mind if I use the loo before I go?”

Her mum goes into the kitchen, to call Martha, I imagine. I slip into the hall. The cabinet is downstairs, and unlocked. I remember that Martha shrugged. No small children in the house.

I call good-bye to Lily on my way out. On the doorstep, she grasps both my shoulders and kisses me. I return to the car and settle my bag between my seat and the door. Louise looks at it, but doesn’t ask.

• • •

Sixty Rutland Street, Stoke-on-Trent.

I call the second of the two telephone numbers and ask for Martin.

“No, he’s not here,” says a young man. “He isn’t here until four.”

“Thanks. Can you remind me of your address?”

“Five thirty Waterloo.”

It is a paint shop, also in Stoke, around the corner from his home.

• • •

We drive north on the M5. Louise tests the recorder on her phone, and we listen to our voices from a few moments ago. Her voice sounds high and youthful, and mine sounds clear and taut. “So it works, then,” she says.

• • •

Past Bishop’s Cleeve. Past Redditch. It’s unfamiliar countryside. I think that’s a good thing. I think the strangeness of this might paralyze me if I were on a familiar route.

The road to Stoke is broad and nearly empty, but I drive like I am traveling across central London in the rain. I study each road sign as though I’ve just missed an exit, and my heart pounds when a driver merges well ahead of me.

“He said if I left he was going to kill me,” says Louise. “I didn’t ask Rachel to do it, but I told her about him.”

They grew up in Stoke, I learned from Callum’s obituary. They had a sister, Kirsty, but the obituary didn’t say what happened to her. Were they bad then? Can you learn to do what they did to Rachel and Louise? If their dad beat them I wish he had finished the job.

Past Birmingham. Past Stafford. The nervousness fades and is replaced with a low and solid dread. Neither of us speaks.

• • •

Louise will talk to him first and record the conversation. The recording won’t be admissible in court, but her account of what he tells her will be. And the police can listen to it, and the jury can be made aware that a tape exists. We park on Waterloo Road a block from the paint shop.

“Are you sure?” I ask her again.

“He likes me,” she says. “We never talked about what Callum did. He has no reason to be suspicious.”

“You didn’t go to the funeral,” I say, remembering.

“My best friend went. She told Martin I was still too distraught to leave the house.” I shake my head and she says, “I know. Quite clever,” and climbs out of the car.

• • •

I put my hood up. Martin lives in a terrace of brick houses. Most of the houses in the terrace are empty. Some have estate agent signs and others do not. The terrace backs onto an alley, and I walk up it, past the low sheds and garages. Strange Victorian buttresses separate each property. One of the bins has been tipped over, and as I step around the stream of rubbish, I hope it is his, I hope the kids here hate him. I count the lots until number sixty. It doesn’t look any different from the others. Stained brick, buttresses, shed.

Not far from here is a corner shop. I could buy kitchen roll, a jug of fuel, and matches. This is so clear I may have already done it. I imagine the weight of the jug rocking in my hand as the fuel glugs out. It splashes on my feet. It darkens the brick. I imagine the smell of petrol. I imagine carefully wiping the fuel from my hands before lighting the kitchen roll.

I consider the house. I consider the house burning, but I would only be doing him a favor, destroying evidence.

I keep thinking of the officers swarming the woods behind her house. They had seemed so certain of the direction, that they’d find something. Then and all the nights since, like a clock steadily ticking, he has been here.

• • •

Louise meets me in the alley behind his house. “It was him,” she says. Her teeth chatter. “He told me he took care of it.”

She dials the police station in Abingdon, which we decided would act on the information more quickly than the one in Stoke. “My name’s Louise Rosten. A friend of mine just confessed to the murder of Rachel Lawrence.”

The desk officer transfers her to a detective whose voice I don’t recognize. Louise tells him about the confession and says she’s scared he’s going to hurt her now. She describes what he did to the dog. It still hasn’t come out in the press, only the police and the emergency workers who came to her house that day could know about it, and the person who did it. The detective asks her to hold the line. Her teeth don’t stop chattering.

When he returns, the detective says he has spoken to the station in Stoke, which will send patrol cars to the shop to arrest him. In the meantime, he asks Louise to wait somewhere safe.

• • •

I went cliff jumping once in Dorset, so I recognize this, that I am paralyzed with fear. Even with the handful of other shops, the block is quieter than I expected. The shop walls are made of plaster that was scraped into crescents before it dried. There is no side or rear exit. The building stands near the middle of the block. The lights are on, weakly, and I think I can see the shape of a person through the window display.

Louise will be gone by now. We agreed she would take a train back to Oxford. The detective will call her in for a full statement.

The police will be here soon. The Stoke police station is two miles away, but there might be a patrol car closer by. I command myself to move, which is as useless as when I told myself to jump off a fifty-foot cliff into Mirror Lake, which I did eventually, out of some combination of weariness and fatalism, like I had already done it and died, and I move toward the door. I take my hood down.

Martin Hold is behind the counter, and at first his face is blank and open. Then something slides over it. He recognizes me. It is as obvious as the moment when the friend you are meeting first sees you.

He is younger than I expected. Not far past thirty. He wears a gray sweater with holes at the hem. He has red in his hair. There is a deep wrinkle across his forehead. He has a short beard, and his hair is grown out. He looks like anyone, but just underneath it is the adolescent, when his skin was worse and his hairline shaved back. He is so familiar, like one of the boys we grew up with.

I don’t remember starting to cry but my face is wet.

“Hello,” I say, in the voice I used to have. I can tell that my face is contorting.

He stares at me without saying anything. I lift the pistol from my bag and point it at him.

“Roll your sleeves up.”

His eyes are wide. He lowers his head and slowly pushes up one sleeve.

Both of his arms are covered in red marks. One of the scars forms a neat half circle around his forearm. The dog’s jaw. My body is shuddering now. I want him dead. It’s what Rachel would want me to do, I know that now.

“Did it take a long time?” I ask.

He continues to watch me, and I don’t think he will answer.

“No,” he says.

I lower the gun and walk outside. The road is quiet under a gray sky. I can hear the sirens. At first I think I am imagining them, a disruption somewhere in the distance, but the sound grows steadily louder, and I start to move away from it.

• • •

Both of us went cliff jumping in Dorset. The water was so clear that after Rachel jumped I could see her on the other side, plunging down through the center of what looked like a cascading, clear swell.

68

MARTHA IS WAITING FOR me at a pub in Battersea. It’s warm enough now that people sit outside cafés on the King’s Road.

I turn down an alley. A man appears at the far end, walking toward me, and I consider turning back. As we pass, he nods at me, and then I am out the other side, and rushing across the bright road.

• • •

I know I’m going to be all right. And I know I will never stop missing her.

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?

And she said, Well.

She said, To start—