Flynn Berry - Under the Harrow

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.

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.

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.