Flynn Berry - Under the Harrow

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

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

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

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

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

• • •

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

• • •

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

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.

“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.