Flynn Berry - Under the Harrow

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.

“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.

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.”

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.