Flynn Berry - Under the Harrow

• • •

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.

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.