Under the Harrow: (14 page)

L
EWIS WANTS TO MEET
at the Cherwell. I don’t ask if something has happened with the case. If it had, he wouldn’t wait until this afternoon to tell me. Still, on the walk through Oxford to the river, my pulse beats quickly and my legs are light, as though something is about to happen.

“It’s closed,” he says when I find him outside the pub, and without discussion we circle around the boathouse to the towpath. We walk toward Magdalen and one of the pubs along the river.

“You aren’t wearing a suit.”

“No,” he says. He wears narrow trousers, a white thermal shirt, and a hooded canvas jacket. The path narrows and he walks in front of me. I look at the hood draped between his shoulders, and it’s comforting, it reminds me of something but I don’t know what.

The river sweeps under a row of fat curved bridges. Underneath them, the sound of our footsteps clatters around us. We go into the first pub, but it’s crowded with students from a rugby tournament. On a shelf is a row of bottles of dandelion and burdock. I remember the tennis court, and the sunshine pouring over the town. That day, when Rachel left me at a table next to the inn and went to Keith’s house, I want to know what was in her head.

“Should we stop here?” asks Lewis.

“No, let’s keep walking.” Fog wraps the trees on the opposite bank. Water drips from Magdalen Bridge, making rings
on the surface. I watch one of the rings grow wider and bump Lewis’s shoulder.

We get coffees at a café with no other customers and one million chairs. Halfway across the room Lewis stops with his hands at his waist and says, “It’s a trap.” When we finally reach the table I suggested by the window, we look back at all the chairs and become hysterical. I learn that he completely loses it when he laughs.

“I listened to your music,” I say. “It was really good.”

The band name was Easy Tiger. It wasn’t really a band, though, it was just him, playing different instruments. The songs reminded me of Beach House and Blood Orange, and I feel bad for him because he recorded them ten years ago, he would have been right in there with them, if not ahead.

“Who did the vocals?”

“My sister.”

She had a lovely, haunting voice. Listening to the songs was difficult, since they filled me with so much longing. One of them was the exact sensation of driving on the Westway late at night.

We spend the rest of the day together, walking down the river and up again through the colleges, and end up at a trattoria on Fetter Lane. We share a split portion of pasta carbonara and one of linguine, and a liter of red wine. We are seated in the bow window facing the narrow cobbled lane.

It was dusk when we arrived, in the lull between seatings, and even though it’s now dark there isn’t any formality between us. Both of us were starving, and we don’t speak at all when the food first arrives.

“Are you leaving soon?” he asks.

“I can’t yet.”

Something ripples between us. I sit up in my seat and Lewis tips his head back. He lets the silence grow taut.

I almost ruined it. Days of effort and waiting. Keith is close now too, I can tell. The way he looks at me now is different even than it was a few days ago.

“I’m not ready to go back,” I say, finally.

“You don’t know it’s him.”

I look away from Lewis to the reflection on the window. Our waiter across the room, the bottle in his hand, the twisting red rope of wine falling from it.

“Tell me about the chief inspector.”

“She’s brilliant.”

We continue talking in this vein, and it’s nice, like we’re former colleagues. When we leave, the door to the trattoria blows shut and seals it behind us. Lewis asks if I want a ride home, but I want to say good-bye here and not in her town, so I tell him I have to meet a friend nearby. He hugs me. We stay like that, and I sag against him. He holds his hand against the back of my head. It’s a relief, like something wrinkled has been smoothed. Then it’s over, and he walks to his car by the river and I walk to St. Aldate’s and the bus.

I
RETURN TO MARLOW
at half past eight and by habit walk down Bray Lane. There are police cars in front of his house. My gait changes, like I have grown larger, bulkier. My shoulders rise behind my ears. The front door is open, and two uniformed officers are standing in the corridor. One of them steps forward to stop me from entering. He pins my arms and drags me down to the road. A second officer, younger than the first, follows, saying, “He can’t hear you, he isn’t in there.”

The older officer releases me at the edge of the property. I recognize both men, detective constables from Abingdon, and know how weary of me they are, how beside the point it is for them to answer my questions.

“He isn’t here,” says the younger one. “You’re screaming for nothing.” I shove him. He turns away and I shove him from behind so he stumbles. The older one clasps my arms at my waist until his partner has entered the house.

The yew trees at the end of Bray Lane shudder up and down with every step. I lick my lips. My breathing is loud in my ears and I walk unsteadily, like my feet are far from me, until I am in the hall at the Hunters. At the bottom of the stairs, my knees give out.

 • • • 

“We’re in a very sensitive time,” says Moretti. “We still have many hours of interviewing ahead of us. We had grounds to make an arrest, but I can’t give you any further information yet.”

“If you don’t tell me why you arrested him, I’ll give an
interview to the papers. I have the number for a journalist at the
Telegraph
.”

“We’ve already alerted the media that we arrested a suspect. They’ll have learned who by now, and we’re going to ask anyone with information about the murder to come forward.”

“Why would he do it?”

“As soon as we pass the case to the Crown Prosecution Service, a solicitor will present the evidence against the suspect to you.”

“When?”

“The earliest will be about a week from now. It depends on our interviews, and the continuing inquiry.”

 • • • 

One more train will leave for London before they stop running for the night. The high street is deserted but the lights are still on at the newsagent’s shop. I choose a bottle of mineral water for the sake of having something to carry up to the till.

“Why are the police at the Denton house?” I ask.

“His wife called them,” says Giles. His voice is rough and he seems to have a hard time forming the words. “She found pictures of Rachel.”

“Where is she?”

“She’s gone to stay with her mum.”

“Where?”

“Margate.”

T
O REACH MARGATE, I
have to take the train to London, then the tube across the city, then a second train from King’s Cross. I don’t trust myself to drive. There are five stops to King’s Cross. I know each one and before each one I plan to get out. It’s over, really. The police have arrested someone. I’m done. I’m free now to, for example, leave at Edgware Road and ride the bus down to Fulham Broadway. Or switch trains and go to the cinema at Notting Hill Gate. Or leave at Chancery Lane and buy a carafe of red wine at the cellar under Furnival Street.

She isn’t watching. It makes no difference to her if I pour fuel on his house and set it on fire. It doesn’t matter. I could celebrate that the police arrested a suspect by going to the top of the Barbican and jumping. I could celebrate that the police arrested a suspect by going to the Battersea Dogs and Cats Home and adopting a dog. Neither will change what he did to her four weeks ago.

As far as I know. Maybe the moment I land on the road below the Barbican we will go back in time. Maybe when I start the adoption paperwork Rachel will come into the office, rubbing her hands on her jeans, and slide onto the seat next to mine and say, “Have they done all his jabs yet?”

Keith Denton is in custody, but the trial might not occur, or the jury might not convict him. Even if it does he might get a reduced sentence, he’ll likely get out while I’m still alive. Especially if the prosecutor can’t prove that he planned it. I don’t know if the knife belonged to Rachel or if he brought it to her house. What he did to the dog, though, that must be
taken into consideration, and every time he comes up for parole the review board will see photographs of it.

 • • • 

By the time the train arrives in Margate, I am drawn and exhausted. The station is on the edge of the city, and I shoulder my bag and walk along the main road to an old-fashioned seaside hotel. I climb three flights of a velvet staircase, gripping a key, which will lead me to a bed. With the window cracked open, I can smell the sea.

I’ve never been here before. Paul can’t know where I am now, I realize. I pull the heavy curtain around my back to block the reflection of the room, and a view of Margate opens past the window. Pastel houses with tar roofs, blurry sodium lights, the sea in the distance. Strange that this city exists, that it would have existed tonight even if I hadn’t come.

Her murderer is in custody. He is in a cell, and before I fall asleep I imagine saying to Rachel, It’s time, and leading her down a hallway, and turning a key, and letting her inside with him. She’s dressed simply and she isn’t carrying a weapon, but she doesn’t need one. She will be able to tear him apart with her bare hands.

 • • • 

Natasha’s mother came to stay with them for a few weeks after the birth of their second son, and during her visit she and Giles chatted sometimes, he told me. Her name is Diane Eaves. Giles didn’t have her address, but it’s listed.

As soon as I wake, I find the bus route to her house on the city’s outskirts. Before the next one leaves, I walk toward the coast. The town smells of tar and salt, and a thin fog blows in from the sea. Ramshackle terraced houses and fishermen’s pubs line the roads. Nearly everyone I see is a teenager or in their twenties or thirties, and it reminds me of the part of Edinburgh near the art school. Tequila, doner kebabs, a dance studio.

I reach the water, flat and dreary, the Margate sands sweeping an exhausting, defeating distance to the break line. The beach huts are very nice. Each one painted a different
color, possibly by one of the art students I walked past. A thick bank of fog pours in from the water.

Will they let Keith sleep? Did they interview him overnight? I imagine that now, Moretti, who always looks tired, won’t look tired. After sixteen hours with a suspect in custody, he will carry himself as though he could continue on indefinitely.

I find a place on the harbor wall. I don’t want to go talk to his wife, and I won’t be able to look at her. She repulses me. After what he did, she shared a house with him.

At the end of the pier, a cannon points toward the fog, as though at any moment a ship might appear. I can’t remember who invaded this stretch of coastline. Along with the cannon, I watch the swirling fog, listen for the splash of waves against a hull, wait for a bowsprit.

Whatever happens now, I can still punish him. I can drive his dog into the woods and set her loose. I can collect his sons from primary school. Hello, I’m a friend of your mum’s, do you want to stop for ninety-nines on the way home? Keith would never know if they were alive or not, or where they had gone.

 • • • 

I board a bus bound south toward Ramsgate. As I walk down the aisle, the bus stirs, and the shops and houses of Margate begin to scroll by backward to either side.

Natasha Denton’s mum lives in a subdivision near the main road. The houses are small boxes of white plaster with low clay roofs. Ragged brown palm trees blow in the gardens. Television aerials bob up and down.

Natasha opens the door and at once I feel deluded, appearing on her doorstep so far from where she lives. She stares at a point on one of the roofs behind me. “I’ll get my coat. I don’t want her to listen,” she says, nodding into the house.

She doesn’t speak until we round the corner. “After you came to see me, I went through his phone. I almost told him, I wanted to apologize. I didn’t have to search the house, the police already had weeks ago. They turned the place upside down.

“The boys liked to play with a loose tile in our bathroom
when they were younger. When you slide it off, there’s a little cave behind it. The police couldn’t have known. I almost convinced myself not to check, and I waited all afternoon before looking. There were photographs of her.

“I brought the pictures to my friend’s house before I asked him about them. Wasn’t that clever? I thought he might try to burn them. He started to cry and said they had an affair but he didn’t hurt her and he didn’t know who did. He said he loved her. He asked if I was going to call the police and I said no because of the boys and then he went to work and I called the police.”

“Did you suspect him before?”

“No. You look so much like her. When I saw you just now, I thought you were her. I thought you had come to punish me.”

“She wouldn’t punish you.”

“Oh, I think she would,” she says. “She’d be furious.”

“Was Keith in any of the pictures?”

“No. I asked if he stole them and he said no. He got quite angry that I suggested it. We were in the kitchen and I remember looking at the knives and thinking he wouldn’t stab me. He couldn’t be bothered, with me.”

“Has he ever been violent in the past?”

“No, but he has a temper.”

I planned to tell her that he hit me, but it doesn’t seem necessary. She’s already disgusted by him. “Was there anything else?”

“After we heard about the murder, he asked me the last time I saw Rachel. It was just passing on the aqueduct, but he wanted to know everything about it. What she was wearing, what she said, where she was going. I thought he was in shock.”

A woman pushes a pram toward us, and after she passes, Natasha says, “We’ll have to change our names. I don’t want the boys growing up with this.”

“That’s probably wise.”

I’m not sure of the way out of the subdivision, so she leads me back to the main road, as though through a maze. I wait for the bus into Margate. Natasha told me she was going to move, maybe abroad, for her sons. I wonder if any part of her finds this thrilling. She didn’t give the impression of having
been particularly happy and now she can start over, find a different life that suits her better. The normal obligations don’t weigh on her anymore. I imagine her in the weeks before this thinking, Is this it? Is this how things will always be? And now the answer is no.