Under the Harrow: (13 page)

M
ORETTI CALLS THE NEXT
morning to say that officers will be returning to her house to conduct another search of the property. He won’t tell me why exactly, but I assume for the murder weapon. They still haven’t found the knife.

“Are you sure Stephen was in Dorset that day?”

“Why? Did Rachel ever say she was frightened of him?”

“No.”

“Was he ever violent toward her?”

“No.”

“Stephen was at work until seven on the day of the murder. He placed calls from the restaurant, and he’s on the security film.”

“After her funeral, he said if she’d married him she would still be alive.”

“And you think he was confessing?”

“No. It just seems like a strange thing to say.”

I struggle not to tell him about the roses. The card was written in cursive, as though dictated, and the florist’s shop confirmed that he placed the order and a courier delivered them. But he still knows where I am, and to find me in Marlow, he had to know Rachel’s name. Mine doesn’t appear in any of the articles about her. I think he assumed I would be at the Hunters because it’s the only inn in town, though he may have learned some other way. Maybe he followed me.

I can’t ask Moretti for advice. Instead, I say, “Do you have brothers or sisters?”

“One brother.”

“Are you close?”

“No.” He probably makes the trip to Glasgow out of duty exactly once a year, and hates every moment of it. He must be able to use his work to get out of family occasions. I can so clearly see him taking a phone call, in a house in Dalmarnock or Royston, and saying, “Sorry, I’ve got to go.” His family must know better than to ask. It could be important.

“Have you ever been to the Whistlestop in Paddington station?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“Have you made any purchases?”

“I bought wine on my way to Rachel’s sometimes. Why?”

“Just a loose end,” he says.

R
ACHEL SAID THERE WAS
something wrong with the town. I still don’t know what she meant. I’ve hardly left its center, and today I walk north away from the lanes and the high street toward the tennis court, a strange empty box in the pines. The gate is padlocked, and cracks splinter across the court. There are still names from last season on the clipboard hanging from the fence. I walk closer. The paper has turned stiff and crinkled, and the black ink is now burnt umber. I run my finger down the page until I land on her handwriting, then stumble away from the fence.

We played tennis in August. Rachel wrote our names and we waited for the court to be free. We watched other people play, and the balls arcing back and forth over the net. The court is set in chalk, surrounded by scrub pines. I felt like we were at the beach. A turquoise sky arched above the court and the pines had squiggly tips, like cypresses.

I hurry away. The track curves so when I turn around again the court is hidden. No one has driven here recently. Weeds have sprouted from the road, and down its center they form a hedge of thistle, campion, bloody cranesbill.

Rachel borrowed the rackets, I remember. She went to get them while I waited by the Hunters. It was hot and the white canvas umbrellas were open alongside the inn.

“Where did you get those?” I asked.

“Keith,” she said. I didn’t ask who that was. My stomach turns, and I can’t believe I didn’t remember until now.

She went down the high street and came back with two rackets. I sat at one of the wooden tables outside the inn and waited for her.

He told me he barely knew her. By the time I reach the common, it’s raining. I can see one of the twins inside the hardware shop. I turn down Bray Lane and stop in front of the shingled house. I wonder if Rachel ever went inside it.

His van is in the drive, but the house is dark. There is a fireman’s decal in an upstairs window, in one of the children’s rooms. I wait, but I don’t want to talk to him in front of them or his wife.

I can’t remember what Rachel said about returning the rackets. I don’t remember her returning them that day, which would imply she was going to see him later. I have no idea. I remember what we ate that afternoon. Runny cheese and bread and swing-top bottles of dandelion and burdock.

This was the sort of thing she hated me for.

 • • • 

The Duck and Cover is full for the Arsenal and Chelsea match, and I push through the crowd until I find Keith. “Can I speak to you outside? It won’t take a minute.”

His eyes are glassy. He wants to tell me to fuck off, but people around us are listening, and he follows me outside. The painted-wood buildings creak in the wind, and the hanging sign of the pub rocks back and forth.

“She borrowed tennis rackets from you,” I say.

“Did she?” He wears the same long coat as before and a rolled orange hat.

“This past summer.”

“I never knew if she ended up using them. I left them out by the back door for her.”

“Why?”

“She said she wanted to play and I said she could borrow them anytime.”

“Where? Where were you when she said that?”

“Her house. She wanted an estimate on external piping.”

“What for?”

“An outdoor shower,” he says. “She said it was a birthday present for you.”

I laugh. The dark street seems to slip and keel.

“She needed rackets, and I told her we always have that sort of thing lying around.”

The rackets were new. I remember the smell of them and the tacky rectangle where a label had recently been scraped away.

I
PULLED LAST NIGHT.
There was a man alone at the bar at the Mitre in Oxford, and I chose him. As a precaution, I told myself, to distract me from doing something stupid. We drank gin and tonics and talked at the bar, and I remembered how to turn the lights on, how to dispense the right amount of warmth and cruelty. On the bar were silver bowls filled with ice and bottles of cava with horned yellow labels. He was handsome, and the encounter was surreal, and jolly, as they can be sometimes, as though we had a snow day when everyone else had work. He was in town from London for a wedding, the first of his friends to arrive. They had rented a house for the weekend near Somerville College. We fucked on the stairs and in the bedroom. Because I’d had enough to drink and because the sex went on for long enough, I was able to lose where I was.

In the morning, he said, “Do you want to come to the wedding tomorrow night?”

I laughed, and he said, “No, I’m serious.”

“I have work,” I said.

A
T THE HOLIDAY MARKET
on the common, the residents of Marlow tread muddy paths in the snow. Above the yews, the sky is gray. The stalls are all open, their Dutch doors flung wide. I move down the row. Soap and candles, mostly. A banner on the village hall announces the holiday fund-raiser.

“What are they raising money for?” I ask a woman selling cups of pear cider.

“The bridge.”

“What’s wrong with the bridge?”

“It’s falling down.”

People can’t possibly use as many soaps and candles as they buy, yet here they are, buying soaps and candles. At least there are food stalls. The first one sells pies. The second sells preserves and clary wine from a farm in Cirencester.

The next stall sells taper candles made by nuns in France, and I imagine a nun dipping the wick into a cauldron of hot wax. How do the monastic orders decide what to make or train? Saint-Émilion, Chartreuse, Saint Bernards. At the monastery in Valais, the dogs are trained to perform rescues in pairs. I am thinking of the Saint Bernards, and trying to do this without also thinking of Fenno, when a woman pats my arm.

“Rachel was truly a beauty,” she says, and then she looks at me to see how I will take it. I sigh. I was jealous of her, but not for the reason everyone assumes. The woman is still watching me with that look, curious and a little mean, familiar to every
sister of an exceptionally appealing woman. I can’t think what to say. The yew branches lift and stream in the wind.

“She’d rather be alive.”

The woman looks at me with disapproval, like I’ve cheated at a game. I move away from her and the taper candles.

The priest has propped open the church doors, hopefully, in case the crowd might spill over. It must be very cold inside.

I buy a paper cup of glügg. This is why people move to small towns, I think. To gossip and raise money for the bridge.

Across the common, Keith Denton speaks with a small boy. From their interaction, I think the boy is his son and that he is a good father, loving and lighthearted. The boy runs to join the pack of children playing behind the stalls, and Keith puts his arm around a woman. He looks across the common, and when he faces in my direction, he pretends not to see me and turns so the woman under his arm rotates away.

My stomach hollows. I keep watching but Keith doesn’t look over again. After a while, his wife kisses him on the cheek and slips out from under his arm to join two other women. She doesn’t know about me, he hasn’t confided in her. Keith stays to talk with the owner of the hardware shop, then he walks over to say something to his wife and leaves. I watch him walk down the high street until the bend in the road.

I go in the opposite direction, onto Redgate. Keith was at her house that day. He doesn’t have an alibi. He offered to help me with the arrangements. He bought the tennis rackets for us to use. Rachel said she would never have an affair with a married man, which means that if she did, she wouldn’t tell me. I don’t think she would tell Helen either, since her husband slept with someone else when she was pregnant with Daisy, but I call her anyway.

“Was Rachel seeing anyone recently?”

“She saw Stephen sometimes.”

“Anyone else?”

“I don’t know,” she says. I walk past the yard with the apple tree. A dozen apples singed red by the cold still hang from the bare branches.

“Did she ever talk about someone in town?” I ask.

“No.”

“What about someone who was married?”

“No, she didn’t.”

I stand at the end of Redgate, sour with disappointment, but then Helen says, “I’m glad you called.” I look across the road to the repair garage and wonder if this is it, if she has realized she knows what happened. She says, “Did you tell Daisy to go to Rachel’s house?”

I wince. At the Miller’s Arms, after the funeral, I remember telling Daisy to choose something from the house.

“Do you know what that place looked like? Nobody had cleaned it yet. She hasn’t slept in a week. She’s been doing research on sex crimes.”

“Why does she think it was a sex crime?” I ask, and Helen shrieks. I turn the phone away and look at the line of poplars next to the repair garage.

“If you talk to my daughter again, I’ll tell the police you’ve molested her.”

I laugh. She hangs up and I stare at the phone, shaking.

 • • • 

“Why did you interview Keith Denton?”

“The plumber?” says Moretti. “Why?”

I wait.

“He was the last known person to see her alive,” he says.

“Did they have a relationship?”

“Not one that I know about. Do you have something to tell me, Nora?”

“No.”

The police interviewed him three weeks ago, and Moretti told me then that they were testing his van and house for forensic evidence. I remember the fireman’s decal in the window and wonder where his wife took their children while the police searched the house.

“What’s his wife’s name?”

There is silence on the line. I knew he would be reluctant to tell me, but there’s no reason for him to refuse. It’s a small town, I’ll be able to find it.

“Please, Rachel might have mentioned her.”

“Natasha,” he says.

 • • • 

I am standing by the rill when Keith comes off the high street. We’re alone, though I can hear sounds from the holiday market. I finger the straight razor I’ve started to carry, the sort of blade that before I only ever saw when a clerk used it to scrape the sticker from a bottle of wine.

“I’m keeping a log,” Keith says, “of every time you walk past my house and every time you follow me inside somewhere.”

“That seems odd,” I say. “It makes sense we’d run into each other in a small town.”

He has gained more weight. I would eat a lot too, if I were faced with a lifetime of prison food.

“You’ll be caught,” he says.

“For what?”

“Stalking.”

“No, I don’t think so.” I turn away from him, toward the rill, and consider it with my hands in my pockets. I use the toe of my boot to brush the snow on its surface, then turn back toward him. “Do you think your wife knows what you’ve done?”

He slaps me. It lands hard and my skull rattles. My head starts to pound, but it won’t leave much of a mark. He checks that no one saw and strides back to the high street.

 • • • 

I soon find a Natasha Denton who works at a spa with locations in Bath and Oxford. When I call the North Oxford branch, the receptionist tells me that Natasha does work on Sundays, but her appointments for tomorrow are all booked, starting at nine in the morning.

“
I
NEED TO ASK
you something.”

I don’t know what to say next. I’ve never had to doorstop someone’s wife before. Thanks, Rachel.

I’ve been waiting for her in the car park outside the spa for the past hour. She looks at me, puzzled, trying to work out if I am a client or someone with a habit. “Can we go somewhere?”

Her face starts to morph. It sags and grows soft with fear. “No,” she says. “I’ve got to go to work.”

“It’s about your husband.”

It seems pointless to say. She already knows it is. Natasha sneers and steps back. She looks at me and I can see her thinking, No accounting for taste.

“I think he had an affair with my sister.”

“Who?”

“Rachel Lawrence.”

Relief slips over her face, and she lowers her eyes. “No, you’re wrong. He already talked to the police.”

“I’m asking you. If there’s anything you noticed, if he has ever acted strange, about going somewhere or meeting someone.”

“He hasn’t.”

“Then when you saw me—just now—why did you think I’d been having it off with him?”

“I didn’t,” she says and laughs. “I thought you were going to rob me.”

I don’t believe her, but, then, I also can’t remember the last
time I showered, or put anything on the dark, shiny smudges under my eyes.

“My sister killed herself on her twentieth birthday,” she says. “If I could help you, I would, I promise.”

“Does he have a middle name?”

“Yes,” she says and clears her throat. She looks nervous. “Thomas.”

 • • • 

Martha answers from her dressing room at the Royal Court.

“What happens when you have an affair?” I ask.

“You get fit,” she says. “You spend money on different things. You start to spend time in other parts of the city.”

Martha has complained to me before that half of the plays running in London at any given time revolve around an affair. She has played an adulterer or mistress in a dozen productions. She last acted in
Betrayal
, in which the lovers buy a flat in Kilburn. I can’t imagine Rachel doing that. It seems outdated, buying a flat for adultery, like owning a gas ring, and financially impossible. Normal people couldn’t do that anymore, you couldn’t shift enough money to buy an entire flat.

“Is there anything else?”

“Something to do with your phone. You might get a second one, or start spending more time on it,” she says. “How are you?”

“Fine. I have a routine now,” I say, though that’s not quite right, it’s less of a routine than a reason.

“Come home,” says Martha. “I made a copy of my keys for you.”

“I can’t.”

“She isn’t watching, Nora. You can’t make it up to her.”

“What about presents? Isn’t that something people do in an affair?”

 • • • 

I’m meeting a friend named Martin, said Rachel, on the Sunday before she died.

It’s not Keith’s middle name but it could still be what she called him. Moretti said there were no unknown numbers on her phone and no trace of her arranging to meet someone on
Sunday. If it was Keith, they might have bumped into each other in town and arranged to meet Sunday evening. They wouldn’t need to call or send messages.

 • • • 

For the next two days it rains. The gargoyles on the bank scream into the wet. Paul Wheeler hasn’t made contact again. The police won’t investigate him for the assault fifteen years ago. I have to think of a way to prevent him from doing it to someone else. Immobilize him, somehow. I have time. His brother bought him a flat in Leeds, he has a job, he has parole requirements. I doubt he will leave.

Every so often I walk down Bray Lane, but nothing seems out of order in their house. I wait for Natasha to call me. She must be curious. She must want to know the reasons for my suspicion.