Under the Harrow: (16 page)

A
T THE LIBRARY
the next morning I take down a contemporary French novel about a woman who murders her doctor. It is the sort of thing I’ve been avoiding. She stabs him. But I read it anyway, standing in the library, then sitting. Somehow, it’s like an antidote.

The narrator lives next to the Gare de l’Est. She commits the crime on the rue de la Clef. She returns the knife to her old flat in the sixième. The story is brisk and clean in a way that seems particularly French. I hope she gets away with it.

I worry the librarian, the boy with the round glasses, will not let me borrow it. He will look at it and say, You shouldn’t be reading this.

This does not happen. I carry the novel home and finish it in my room. Near the end, I realize I have been picturing the narrator as Rachel.

 • • • 

I am reading certain parts of the book again—the part at the Gare du Nord, the part at the coliseum—when Lewis calls and asks me to come downstairs. This was not what I planned to be doing when he called with the prosecutor’s decision. I planned to be outdoors, for one thing. Instead I am reading about a woman disposing of evidence in the Seine.

A cold weight settles in my stomach. I dress in clean clothes and braid my hair, as though it will help to look respectable and compliant.

I walk down the carpeted stairs and past the painting of the red riders. My heart thumps against my ribs. Lewis waits for me on the road, leaning against an unmarked car. His face is blank and I wait for it to shift. I hug my jumper to my chest against the wind.

“Nora,” he says, and I know from his voice. “CPS isn’t going to prosecute Keith Denton.”

“But he was there. He stole photographs of her. He doesn’t have an alibi.”

“It’s not enough. We have no forensic evidence against him.”

Lewis opens the car door for me. Through the windscreen, I watch him walk around to the driver’s side, a tall, handsome man in a long coat, and wonder if he is savoring these few seconds alone before he has to rejoin me.

He doesn’t turn on the engine. There is nowhere to go. I don’t have to speak to a prosecutor or attend his appearance before a magistrate, though I don’t know if those are things I would have done if this had gone the way it should have.

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know. He was released early this morning from St. Aldate’s.”

I resist the urge to turn around in my seat. “Did you check the drains at his house?”

“Yes, when we first interviewed him.”

“What are you going to do?” I ask.

“If we don’t find any new evidence, the inquiry will lose priority.”

“Has that already started?”

“Yes. Our resources are limited at the moment,” he says, which means there has been another murder near Abingdon.

“Is it related?”

“No. Two men were killed at a warehouse in Eynsham. It appears to be a hate crime.”

Moretti will solve the case quickly, I think. A sop to his conscience.

“Can you charge him again? Or does he have immunity now?”

“We can, with compelling new evidence,” he says. “But it doesn’t happen often.”

Keith was released hours ago. I might have bumped into him on leaving the library, when I thought he was in custody. The thought makes me laugh. Lewis runs his hand over his eyes.

“Do you think he did it?” I ask.

“I don’t know.”

I want him to say yes, even though it will only add to my fury. Was it laziness, on the part of the prosecutors? Did they not want to increase their caseload? Or was it money, are there too few courts and judges in this country? When I say this aloud, Lewis says, “Or it’s a moral decision not to make an innocent man endure a trial.”

“What’s your instinct about him?”

“Based on what?” His voice sounds tense and strangled. I wonder if he was in Eynsham last night, and what he saw.

“If you were forced to decide—”

“Nora, I don’t know.” His head rests on his hand. “You shouldn’t speak to him. He’s trying to get an order of protection against you.”

 • • • 

It will never be solved now. Not formally, anyway, not with a conviction. There won’t be a trial. The detectives in Abingdon are in the first forty-eight hours of a new case. Lewis will leave soon, and Moretti will take the early retirement scheme. Both of them will be gone before the new year is out, I think. Not because of Rachel. I don’t think any of the officers will be haunted by her. I wish they would be, then there might be a chance of one of them solving it. The strange thing is this probably isn’t the worst case any of them has seen, or the saddest. They will carry other people with them into the future. Children, probably.

Keith Denton is free. I imagine him coming home and setting the house to rights after its two sudden departures. I wonder if he made a list of the things he would do as a free man. Pint of bitter, walk in the hills.

The exonerated man. His friends and the town will rally around him. They will want to hear all about his narrow escape.
Everyone knows the system is cracked. At least some of the thousands of people in prison for murder are innocent, and he almost became one of them. The town will be happy to believe he is innocent. Better a stranger than someone who has been inside their own homes.

I
SIT AT ONE
of the wooden tables next to the Hunters and listen to the news on my headphones. A few words stream by that I don’t catch, and I try to work out what the reporter might have said. I’m so absorbed it takes me a few seconds to realize what is in front of me. Keith coming around the corner of the building.

I tug my headphones off and he slumps onto the bench across from me. A tinny voice leaks from the headphones but I don’t switch the radio off, as though the person on the other line will be listening if anything happens to me. His hands are in his pockets, and I can’t tell if he has a weapon. At the moment we are out of view of anyone on the high street.

“You killed her,” I say, and my voice doesn’t sound like me, it sounds like her.

He shakes his head, either to warn me to stop talking or to correct me. “Do you want to know what I can’t figure out?” he says, staring at the join in the wood. “They never thought about you.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You were in the house with Rachel. The police arrive, you’re waiting outside, covered in her blood, and they don’t arrest you.”

“I found her.”

“If you found her you would want to get away from the house. You’d run to the neighbors or down the road. You wouldn’t wait around, in case whoever did it was still inside. Unless it was you.”

“I wasn’t thinking clearly at that point,” I say. Keith’s body is oddly slack, like he can’t hold himself up properly.

“One of the firemen told me he was watching you, and he said you didn’t cry. And there’s the dog. I can’t get my head around it. What you’re saying is an intruder, someone breaking into the house, killed a trained German shepherd. I don’t know how you could do that without serious injuries, but whoever it was didn’t lose any blood.”

“How do you know that?”

“I’m guessing. They didn’t ask for my blood. I think you slit the dog’s throat while he was sleeping.”

“The police eliminated me.” I remember Moretti asking if it was normal for me to be at the house at that time. He considered me as a suspect.

“How?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t have a weapon.”

“Did Rachel have any knives in her kitchen? You either washed it or hid it afterward.” He lifts his head. “They’re coming for you now. They know what you did, and they know why you did it.”

“I’d never hurt her.”

“Would you throw a bottle at her face?”

“How do you know about that?”

He snorts. “How the fuck do you think? What is it about me that makes it so hard for you to believe?”

I shake my head, and he says, “You broke her nose.”

I don’t argue. It was hard to tell if her nose was broken because of me or what happened to her a few hours later.

“You stole pictures of her.”

“No. Rachel gave them to me. She loved me.”

He laughs at my expression.

“She always said you were a little
bitch.”

W
E GOT IN
a fight at the party. After we played Nevers, before I climbed the stairs, with everything below my knees a fuzzy darkness. Rachel teased me and I snapped at her and then we were through the back door and screaming at each other on the lawn. Rafe said he was going to call it in to the police as a domestic. He said it as a joke, but then Rachel said something to him about me and I took the beer bottle from his hand and threw it at her. It hit her in the face and she inhaled sharply and bent over.

My stomach soured, but then she looked up and laughed with the blood coursing down her face. Clearly the victor. I’d proved her right. She was still laughing when I retreated inside.

The boys kept us apart for the rest of the night. They made huddles around us and joked with us like we were boxers. They acted impressed but mostly they thought we were both mental, a nightmare, like Ali Ross, who at the last party did all the windows in her boyfriend’s car.

Rachel leaned over me, early in the morning. “Nora, do you want to come with me or stay?”

“Stay.”

We fought at most of the parties that summer, if one of us drank enough, which we always did, and if we weren’t too distracted by trying to pull someone. We fought carelessly, the way our friends fought with their mothers, and mostly over nothing.

Every walk home followed the same idiot logic. First silent bitterness, then recrimination, an echo of before but with less
slurring. By the time we reached the old center of town one of us said, I don’t want to talk about this anymore. We walked in angry silence past the Norman church and the bakery with our sandals slapping the pavement. Maddening, how our strides joined up even when we didn’t want them to. We looked in opposite directions, a gloomy Janus head.

The fourth stage usually started near the end of the high street. One of us made a remark, often about the party, and a stupid thing someone else had done or said at it. This stage involved more recrimination, but also a few very faint apologies, like, I didn’t think you’d take it that way.

We would start to get bored. The neon sky and the strangeness of the town at that hour would slowly colonize our attention. By the time we crossed onto the estate, the fight would be over.

I can still see Rachel at seventeen, a line of blood curving over her mouth, laughing at me.

I thought if she went on her own she might think about what she had said about me, and that she would be sorry. It drives me to distraction now, that I can’t remember what she said to upset me so much.

K
EITH KNOWS ABOUT
the fight, and he knows Fenno was trained. The simplest explanation for how he knows these things is that she told him. That they had an affair, or a friendship he thought was an affair. The strange thing is, when he came to see me, he acted like the affair proved his innocence. If anything it means the opposite.

The important thing now is that Keith thinks it’s over for him. He thinks he’s safe. He might think, like I did, that he’s protected from being charged again by a form of double jeopardy. It must be such a sense of relief, after nearly going to prison. He will live the rest of his days a free man. I imagine that on the aqueduct he wants to kneel and kiss the ground. In his house, in the pub, driving the roads. He must be making plans now, with all the years he has, plans to travel, to sleep rough.

If someone were to threaten all that, there is no telling what he would do. Or, really, there is. He is going to attack me, and it will look unprovoked to everyone except the two of us.

I want him back with the police. They know how to snare him by letting him mention some detail of the crime—how the dog was tied, where her body was found—that they never told him, or by interviewing him until his account begins to shift and break apart. Even though they didn’t manage it before, they need more time with him.

The best way to do this is for him to commit another crime. It shouldn’t take very long, someone with a temper like that.

I’ve never understood why the police don’t use bait more
often. When someone started to kill women on a mountain in Wales, the police could have sent hikers down the trails. With teams following them, or with guns. They could be policewomen, not civilians. It wasn’t even a very large mountain, they could have baited every trail. Eight victims, over three months, and the murderer has never been found. Fucking stupid.

Grievous bodily harm. He’s ready for it, too. He needs to take it out on someone.

M
ORETTI GIVES A PRESS
conference from a room inside Abingdon station. He asks for anyone who was near the warehouse in Eynsham on Thursday night to make contact with the police. He says that based on early evidence they believe more than one person was responsible for the murders, and he urges anyone with information, however minor, to come forward.

He’s done with Rachel. It’s over for him, unless another development draws him back.

A row of detectives sits beside him behind low, angled microphones. While he speaks, the officers stare at the press audience with blank, judging faces, as though waiting for an outburst. Based on the crowns on their epaulets, some of them are his superiors. I recognize the chief constable, seated near the middle of the row with his hands clasped on the table.

Moretti’s voice is measured and clear. The impression he gives is of someone who is serious and, more than anything, effective.

“
C
AN YOU COME TO
the station?” asks Moretti the morning after the press conference. Rain falls on the yard behind the Hunters, and the foghorn bellows from the village hall. I remember what Keith said about the police suspecting me, but I don’t believe him. It was a bluff. I’m pleased the detectives haven’t closed the inquiry.

A constable collects me at a quarter past eight. This time Lewis is also in the interview room. For a moment I think this must mean there is news, but neither of them looks eager. They look exhausted.

“Why did your last relationship end?” asks Moretti.

“He was unfaithful.”

“How did you know?”

“I found a pair of knickers. I told you already.”

On the Sunday night of his return from Manchester, I reached into his bag and pulled out a fistful of black silk. I spread them flat on the bed to see the dimensions of the body that wore them. The legs and stomach that the lace edged. I imagined a woman lying on her back, topless, biting her finger and laughing.

Moretti shows me a photograph of a pair of black silk knickers, with the same faint blue label stitched to the hem.

“Like these?”

“Yes.”

“They have a shop on the Via Cavour in Rome. They don’t distribute abroad.” I’ve stopped breathing. Both detectives watch me. Moretti says, “When did you find out?”

“Find out what?”

“That Rachel slept with your boyfriend.”

“She didn’t. He was in Manchester that weekend.”

“No, Oxford. He stayed at the George on Prince Street. Rachel met him for dinner and she stayed with him at the hotel.”

The first kick lands. My body turns numb, as it did on that Sunday night. I’m very aware of my movements, of lifting my hand to straighten my shirt, of how much air I displace in the room, as though everything around me is freezing up. It’s not unpleasant. Lewis watches from across the table. He still hasn’t spoken.

“How many times?” I ask. My voice telescopes away from me.

“Once, according to Liam,” says Moretti.

I startle, as though I have been pushed from behind. “He’s admitted it?”

“Yes.”

I look at the photograph and remember placing them on our bed and smoothing the cool silk. Liam was in the shower and I left them like that for him to find.

“Thank you, Nora. That’s all we need for today.”

He hasn’t turned off the recorder. I wonder what else he thinks I might say.