Flynn Berry - Under the Harrow

She wouldn’t ask him why he did it. I asked her once and she laughed in my face. “He doesn’t get to have a reason,” she said. She didn’t want to meet him to better understand what had happened. She wanted to punish him.

She told me once how she would go about it. She would correspond with other men in the prison and win them over. During her visit, she would mention their names and say what they were willing to do for her.

I don’t know how far she would have taken it. If she would actually convince another prisoner to assault him. I doubt it, but the desired effect would be the same.

It wasn’t him. Andrew Healy. They must look alike, though, enough for her to call his solicitor to confirm his story. She might have still threatened him. It wasn’t her but he still attacked someone. I can see her walking back to the car, her arms tight around herself, her face hatched open with rage.

She would have stopped in Bristol for a drink. I can see the place too; it would be familiar, a chain she had visited in London or Bath. The Slug and Lettuce, or something like it. She would still have all her plans twisting through her head, and she would drink too much to drive home. I am so certain about this that I start to call every midrange hotel in central Bristol.

“Hello, this is Rachel Lawrence. I want to book the same room as I had on my last visit. Could you check what that is?”

As soon as the clerk says they have no record of a Rachel Lawrence, I hang up and dial the next number, until one says, “Room twelve.”

I ask the rate. “That seems like more than last time. Is it a weekend rate?”

“The rate on eight March was also ninety-five pounds.”

I have a glow of pride. I’ve always known her better than anyone else.

“NORA,” SAID RACHEL, “do you want to come with me or stay?”

“Stay.” And I fell back asleep. Rachel tripped down the stairs. She said good-bye to Rafe and the others who were still awake, then turned the knob so the screen door wheezed open into the summer air. The sun hadn’t risen yet but the pavements were warm, had stayed warm through the night.

Rachel told me this story only once, on the assumption that I would remember every part of it, and she never had to tell it to me again.

She walked with her sandals in her hand. Later, she found out the time of the sunrise that day and decided she must have left Rafe’s shortly before five. The sky was an uncanny, electric blue. Soon after leaving, she stepped on a sharp pebble and tied her sandals back on. She seemed to think this part was important. She described it precisely. I don’t know if this was because she thought she would have been able to run otherwise.

She said she had a surge of happiness. Instead of going home, she thought about going to the river to watch the sun rise. She said she felt sorry for the people asleep in their houses, that her life was better and more vibrant than theirs.

She crossed onto our council estate, a spiral of identical white boxes, half of them empty.

A man appeared, walking very quickly between two of the houses toward her and the road. She saw him from the corner of her eye as she passed the strip of lawn. When she turned around, the man wasn’t on the road behind her, and she assumed he had gone inside.

Then he appeared two houses ahead of her. He must have doubled back and crossed on the lawns. This second appearance unnerved her. She couldn’t decide if it would be better to continue on toward home or run back to town.

The man continued down the lawn and stepped onto the road. He didn’t look at Rachel, who was now frozen a few meters behind him.

He started to walk away from her, in the same direction as she had been going. When there were about five meters between them, she took a step forward. She liked that he was in front of her. It made her feel more safe. She decided not to run, she decided it would be better if she could see where he was.

For the rest of the walk home, she would be in earshot of other people’s houses. If anything were to happen someone would hear and come outside. If she ran away, he might catch her in the stretch of fields between the estate and town, with no one around them.

Keeping the same distance between them, she made it about half a block.

The man turned around and came toward her. He walked strangely, high on the balls of his feet, with short strides. She started to shout at him. While she shouted, he came closer in quick, jerking steps.

It was meant to frighten him away. She had been told that, we had all been told that. Make a scene, draw attention, make it difficult on him, and he will leave you alone.

It didn’t make any difference. As soon as he was near enough, his hand closed around her throat, and he pulled her to the ground by her neck. He kneeled beside her, with his leg blocking his groin. With one hand pinning her neck, he punched her in the stomach and chest and face. She hit and scratched him. When he bent close enough, she tried to drive her fist into his windpipe, but he turned and the blow landed under his jaw. He grabbed her hand in the air and snapped her arm, then trapped it under his knee. He bounced her head against the pavement and her scalp turned wet.

He continued to beat her in the stomach and face. Then he stood on the balls of his feet and looked down at her. She cradled her wet head.

She tried to lie still but her body jerked and convulsed. When the seizing stopped, she crawled to her knees, then to her feet, and the ground wheeled. She backed away, because if she turned around he would return from behind the houses, with his short bobbing steps, and pull her to the ground again.

She shuffled across the road. Her left arm was broken and she held it against her chest. As she retreated, her eyes skipped along the gaps between the houses. She heard herself breathing, rapid inhalations pumping her chest.

WHAT HAPPENED IN Rachel’s house on Friday didn’t fit with anything outside of it. The professor’s house across the road. The neighbor riding her horse. The elm trees, the car in the drive.

It doesn’t make any sense. There were people in the village, dozens of them, a mile from where she was killed. When I arrived, the town was quiet, like the snow had already started. I saw a woman leaving the library with a stack of books. A man looking at cakes in the bakery window. One of the village employees lifting a sheaf of papers from the seat beside him and climbing from his van. People maneuvering their cars through the narrow streets, listening to the forecast. It was like something set down on Rachel’s house, upending it, while the rest of the town was left untouched.

It doesn’t make any sense, except that it has happened before. The rest of a town undisturbed while something is loosed on her.

“WAS RACHEL EVER ON medication for a mental illness?” asks Moretti. It’s midmorning on Tuesday, and on the other side of the door, the incident room is crowded. Moretti appears relaxed, and I hope that means they’re making progress.

“No.”

“Have you ever been?”

“Yes.”

“What for?”

“Depression. I started on a course of Wellbutrin in June.”

It all caught up to me, the end of my relationship, every other loss. When I saw myself in a mirror, I looked hunted. I was tired all the time, and often had a rising sense of panic in innocuous places — a cake shop, a museum, the rose garden in Regent’s Park.

“Are you still taking it?”

“No. I stopped in October.”

“On the advice of your psychologist?”

“She said it was my decision.” I was better after Cornwall. I had changed since my first visit to the psychologist’s office.