Flynn Berry - Under the Harrow

“Moretti thinks I asked someone to assault her in Snaith.”

“I know.”

“I helped her look for him.”

“The idea is that once she had been punished, you enjoyed the role. There are benefits to being close to a victim. It’s like Munchausen by proxy.”

“I didn’t benefit from it. Am I officially a suspect?”

“Yes.” He starts to peel the label from his beer. “She slept with your boyfriend.”

“I don’t see how that’s my fault.”

“That’s not exactly the point.”

“What else? What else do they find strange about me?”

“They think Rachel had been using the oven. A fireman noticed that the pot on one of the burners was still warm. It’s unlikely an intruder would turn off a burner before leaving the scene, but you might, out of habit. Or so the house wouldn’t burn down, since she left it to you.”

“I can’t remember,” I say. “I don’t think I went into the kitchen. What about the knife? What would I have done with the knife?”

“One theory,” he says, “is that you didn’t dispose of the knife at the scene. You tucked it into your waistband. At the police station, we know you went into the toilets alone. You wrapped the knife in paper, threw it in the bin, and that night it was loaded with the rest of the rubbish and brought to the landfill.”

“That’s absurd. Wouldn’t Moretti have noticed?”

“It was a short blade.” He puts his head back and rubs his face.

“Do you think I’m going to be charged?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“We found a partial footprint. A men’s Lonsdale, with blood on it.”

The footprint doesn’t eliminate me, he says, since I may have had an accomplice. My body turns leaden. The new information washes over me and I’m too tired to speak. Lewis notices and moves into the kitchen, leaving me to sink in privacy. Sometime later, he returns and hands me a bowl of ramen. We eat while listening to the record.

“Can you forgive her?” he asks.

“Yes,” I say. “I think so.”

When we finish our ramen, he rinses the bowls. It starts to rain, and I consider asking him if I can stay.

He lends me an umbrella. At the bottom of the stairs, as I lean on the point of the umbrella, he pulls me toward him and kisses me.

Only for a second, and then I am outside, my heart racing, the struts of the umbrella snapping open above me.

I THINK I UNDERSTAND now why people don’t leave when a war comes, why even residents with the means to leave stayed in a city like Sarajevo as danger drew closer. A mixture of disbelief and bargaining. If I stay, the war won’t come.

I could drive to the airport and leave her car in short-stay parking. At an airline desk, I could buy a ticket to a country without an extradition treaty with England.

The police might have placed a travel alert on my passport, but that isn’t what stops me. He stabbed Rachel eleven times. If I leave now, the police will consider it an admission of guilt, and he will never be caught.

I SEND MYSELF UP and down the aqueduct. At some point Keith will decide to go for a walk, or he will follow me. I carry pepper spray and the straight razor. The difficult part will be knowing when to stop him. He has to do enough damage for the police to take it seriously, but neither of us is going to die. The detectives must know that he is the violent one, not me, and not to trust anything he has told them.

Along the path, the brambles are shaped into hollow globes, and sparrows fly through them. I walk south toward Oyster Pond.

I have to forgive her or else sacrifice our last six months together. In a way, I don’t entirely blame her. If she wanted to switch, to see what it was like to be the other of us, the one who stayed safely at the party that night, at dinner with my boyfriend. Or she just drank too much and stopped caring. Bitch, I think, and the venom does nothing to how much I miss her.

From part of the aqueduct, you can see the back of her house. The white wooden siding, the chimney, the two sheltering elms. Steam rises from the chimney, like someone is at home, but only because we left the boiler on so the pipes don’t burst.

I wait for her to come outside. Or for Fenno to lunge into view at one of the windows. It hasn’t gotten any easier to believe she’s gone. At Oyster Pond, I test the pepper spray to make sure it isn’t frozen. I do this on every other walk. If he doesn’t come for me soon, it will be all used up.

TWO CONSTABLES ARE WAITING for me in front of the Hunters. They’ve seen me before I notice them, they’ve been watching me come down the road. I know the area better than they do. I know places to hide around the aqueduct. The woods are the most dense by Oyster Pond, that’s where I have to go, and I’m plotting this out, waiting for the right moment, but their eyes are fixed on me and I continue toward them. Full of rage, the length of the high street. They’re wasting time. If they had waited a little longer, Keith would have come after me.

They step forward, reading me my rights while opening the door of the patrol car. They don’t use handcuffs. During the drive to Abingdon, I focus on the landscape through the window to stop my throat from closing. They didn’t give me time to change, and I still have pepper spray and the straight razor in my pocket.

The light box sign of the Thames Valley Police appears. Much of it is the same as at other interviews. The room is identical, except one wall is a mirror, behind which other officers can watch us. I’m given a blue tracksuit to change into, and then left to wait in the interview room.

Moretti comes in and says, “Hello, Nora.”

They were rehearsals, I realize now, all the interviews before this one. Moretti was practicing for this. He knows me now, and my weaknesses.

“We found some notes in your room. Is this your handwriting?”

“Yes.”

He starts to read. “‘Harm compounding factors. Psychological damage to victim. Sustained attack on same victim. Use of weapon or weapon equivalent. Significant degree of premeditation.’” He leans back in his chair. “Why do you have the sentencing guidelines for grievous bodily harm?”

“Rachel thought the man who attacked her in Snaith might be caught for doing it again. I thought knowing the prison sentence for a similar crime would help me find him.”

“Or,” he says, “you wanted to know what your punishment might be.”

“No.”

“Where did you scatter her ashes?” he asks.

“Cornwall.”

“Did anyone go with you?”

“No.”

“None of Rachel’s friends or family?”

“No.”

“Why not? Did you ask them?”

“I wanted to be alone.”

He smooths his suit jacket. “Did you ever bring anything onto the ridge? A picnic?”

“No.”

“A witness saw you on the ridge carrying a plastic bag from Whistlestop.”

“That’s not possible.”

“There is a Whistlestop in Paddington station. You told me you’ve made purchases from it. And that particular branch sells Tennent’s Light Ale and Dunhills.”

“Is the witness Keith? He made it up. Either they were his or you showed him photographs.”

Moretti looks at the mirror, as though he wants to be sure someone has heard what I’ve just said. I wonder if I’ve already made a mistake. He remains silent for a moment. The witness must be Keith, or he would contradict me.

“You assembled the scene on the ridge,” he says. “You wanted us to think Rachel had a stalker. Two days after her murder, you started to worry we might not find it, so you reported it yourself.”

“No.”

“Why were you on the ridge?”