Flynn Berry - Under the Harrow

“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.

“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.

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.