Flynn Berry: Under the Harrow

By the time I reach Marlow, the Emerald Gate has opened. I order scallion pancakes, chow fun, and dumplings. I eat greedily, tearing the pancakes with my hands, scooping mouthfuls of food. While I eat, I don’t think of anything but how it tastes.

After the bowls are scraped clean, I lean back in my chair and look out the window and wonder what I am supposed to do next.

At the station last night I started to make plans. I didn’t mean to, but couldn’t help it. Plans to travel. To sleep rough.

I RETURN TO the Hunters to pack my things. Tonight I will stay with Martha in London, and the thought makes me heavy with relief.

Before I stow my laptop, I open it on the bed. The screen brightens. I haven’t checked his name in over a week, since before Cornwall.

• • •

Paul Wheeler violated his parole. Over the weekend he assaulted a woman in Holbeck, South Leeds. Milly Athill. The name sounds familiar, but I can’t place it. He followed her into her home. The charge against him will be much more severe this time. He committed the crime while he was on probation, and it’s a repeat offense. It was a sustained attack on one victim. The prosecutor will likely be able to prove psychological damage to the victim.

Her brother was upstairs, by chance, and he and Milly were able to overpower Paul.

The maximum sentence for grievous bodily harm is life imprisonment, and the solicitor interviewed for the article expects him to receive that or close to it.

Is that enough? I ask Rachel. Is it over?

• • •

I speak to Lewis. Moretti had a trace on my car, apparently, the day I went to his house. He’s in Brighton now, and he tells me about his flat. You can see the channel from every room, he says, even the bathroom. He says that after a constable told him I’d been released, he ate chips and vinegar on the beach to celebrate. He asks if I want to come visit and I say yes, soon.

I look down at the article again. “Would anyone know you’ve been suspended yet? If, for example, you called a prison and asked to speak to an inmate.”

• • •

I walk through Marlow while waiting for his call. Down Meeting House Lane, down Redgate. Past the church, past the firehouse, past the tennis court. I’m on the common, facing the village hall, when Lewis calls.

“I spoke to Paul Wheeler,” he says, and his voice is careful and measured. “He says Rachel was his girlfriend.”

My eyes skitter away, and it looks like the clock is falling out of the village hall.

“It sounds like they only went out a few times, when she was a teenager. He said he hated his name, he always told girls he was called Clive. She wouldn’t have been able to find him. He didn’t admit to the assault, but he said they had an argument, and soon after he moved to Newcastle for work.”

“Is he making it up?”

“He said he gave her a mask. Does that sound familiar?”

The white carnival mask, with a curved beak. She hung it on the wall in her room.

“She probably thought the police would consider the crime more seriously if it were a stranger.”

“But why wouldn’t she tell me?”

“It happens,” he says. “Victims often don’t tell their families when they knew the person who beat or raped them.”

After the call ends, I sit on a bench under the yews and turn my face up to the thrashing branches. The wind roars, growing louder and louder.

I remember what happened at the Cross Keys now. The red half-height doors of the toilets. I didn’t go in with a man, I went in with Rachel. I had barely seen her all night. And she said, “I’ve been talking to someone. I think I’ve met someone.”

• • •

I know what Lewis meant. If she told me she knew him, she wouldn’t be able to forgive me if, for even a second, I suggested it was somehow her fault.

But I don’t understand why she thought I would have.

• • •

After some time, I leave the common and return to my room to finish packing. Milly Athill. Before closing the laptop, I search through the other articles about Paul Wheeler and finally find the name in one of the first reports after the crime that sent him to prison. Before the assault, the victim was at a pub with her best friend, Milly.

Her brother was upstairs at the time. He’s a rugby player who lives in Dublin, but he happened to be at her house. What a coincidence.

I always wondered why the police don’t use bait more often. Apparently so did they.

• • •

“Are you checking out?” the manager asks hopefully.

“Yes.”

She charges me for the night I spent in jail.

“I THOUGHT YOU WOULD move,” I say. Louise, on her own in front of the service station, looks at me as though I’m mad.

“No,” she says. “No, I haven’t moved.”

She could be in Camden. The gas ring. The tratt. Louise frowns. I should say something else, but I can’t, and I start to fill the car with petrol for the drive to London.

Her decision to stay seems pathological. Louise watches me and parts her mouth just enough to let out a flat stream of smoke. A familiarity opens between us, because of our resemblance, maybe, and I think she knows what I meant, and that it would be all right for me to tell her who I am. I am about to start but find I can’t. The only way I can think to begin is — my sister was murdered. My sister was murdered.

“Do you want one?” asks Louise. She wears the same outfit as always, a navy shirt, black skirt, and apron, but with a duffle coat wrapped over it. On the ledge beside her are a pack of cigarettes and a glass of mint tea steaming into the cold air.

I replace the pump and join her. As she offers me the pack, I notice the dark red marks on her hand, from when she was burned with a cigarette or stabbed with a screwdriver.

“Yes,” I say, “cheers.” I bend toward the lighter, straighten, exhale. I move around her so I am also leaning against the restaurant window. There is a jet in the distance, and it sounds like a wall breaking apart.

Louise stares at a van parked on the grass on the far side of the Bristol Road.

“Why would I move?” she asks.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “It’s none of my business.” She shifts toward me, rolling onto her shoulder against the glass, and waits. “It must be difficult for you to go past that every day.”

“Past what?”

“Where Callum died.”

“He didn’t die in the accident,” she says. “He woke up after the surgery. He died the next night.”

“From what?”

“Complications.”

The sensation is like missing a stair. Of course, I think, before the thought has even formed into words.

“There was a collision here,” said Rachel. She pointed out the window. “A man and a woman.”

“Did they survive?”

“One did.”

“Which one?”

“The woman.”

Sunlight warms the top of my head, then vanishes, like a hand pressing down and lifting. Why? I should have asked. Why did only one survive?

Callum must have been the subject of the coroner’s inquest in October. Rachel never told me the death was under review. After the inquest, she invented a reason for driving past the accident site. She wanted to show it to me. I wonder if she was disappointed that I didn’t suspect anything, or if it was a relief.

“None of her injuries came from the crash,” she said. “It’s a good thing he didn’t make it. He would have killed her.”

I turn to Louise, but it feels like a countermotion, and something else is rotating beneath me. She gathers her cigarettes and lighter, her glass, and nods at me before going inside. Through the window, I watch her hang up her duffle coat and tie the strings on her apron. Waves of heat sweep over me. Rachel wanted revenge, and she must have grown tired of waiting to find the man who attacked her. Louise moves in and out of the glare, and I watch her while I call Joanna.