Under the Harrow: (3 page)

R
ACHEL BOUGHT HER HOUSE
in Marlow five years ago. Her town is perfect. There are painted-wood buildings on the high street. There is the common. There are the yews on the long end of the common. There is the yellow clock in the village hall. There are the two pubs. There is the church and the church graveyard. There is the rill. There is the petrol station.

The Duck and Cover is the tradesmen’s pub. It used to be called something different, the Duck and Clover, until someone painted out one of the letters. The Miller’s Arms is the commuters’ pub. It serves Pimm’s and shows sports only during the World Cup and Wimbledon. Rachel thought there was going to be an explosive showdown between the two sides eventually. She hoped for one. She sided firmly with the Duck and Cover. She said, “We don’t want it to turn into Chipping Norton.” She said, “It’s important that the people who work here can afford to live here.”

With the exception of the Miller’s Arms, the town hasn’t changed much, or not yet. There are no clothing or housewares shops on the high street. The village has a spring fête, and a pasta dinner to raise money for the firehouse.

“Why weren’t there as many commuters before?” I asked her.

“The trains got faster.”

There is another, larger town with the same name near London, with a famous pub, but Rachel never corrected people when they confused the two, or when they told her they had been to the Hand and Flowers.

Rachel said there was something wrong with the town. I can’t remember exactly when this happened. It was recent, sometime after we got back from Cornwall. I didn’t let her finish. We were eating breakfast at her house. I had just woken up, and I didn’t want to hear it. I knew from her tone of voice that what she was about to tell me was horrible. I knew I had to stop her. I had a raspberry croissant and an espresso and I had her town.

There is the wine shop. There is the building society. There is the gold rooster on top of the Hunters. There is the library. There are the twins who work for the town. There is the yellow awning of the Miller’s Arms. There are the poplars in front of the repair garage.

I thought the twins were one person until I saw them both at once washing a bin lorry. They both wore mirrored sunglasses and they both kept their hair long and they both had rottweilers.

“Do they have identical dogs?” I asked.

“No, there’s just one dog,” said Rachel.

 • • • 

The Hunters isn’t doing very well. There are twelve rooms and only two other guests. It’s November, but according to Rachel no one stayed there in the summer either. She said it only stayed open because of the bar below the rooms. This is good news for me, since I am not planning to leave.

When I return from the police station, I steal a carving knife from the kitchen. I put it under my bed, so if I drop my arm over the edge I can reach it. Then I sink down on the bed, wondering what she wanted to tell me, and let the darkness swarm my face.

T
HE FIRST PASSENGERS ARE
already waiting in the darkness on the train platform when I go out to buy the papers at the newsagent’s shop across the road the next morning and carry them back to the empty front room at the inn. The room has green wallpaper with gold lilies of the valley. It’s where the riders used to eat breakfast before a hunt.

Rachel isn’t in the
Telegraph
. She isn’t in the
Independent
, the
Sun
, the
Guardian
, or the
Daily Mail
. If none of the national papers reported it, maybe it didn’t happen.

But she is on the cover of the
Oxford Mail
. The reporter must have had a copy of the postmortem. She died from arterial bleeding, I learn. The time of death was between three and four in the afternoon. She was stabbed eleven times in the stomach, chest, and neck. She had defensive wounds on her hands and arms.

I am at the table reading the article and then I am on all fours on the carpet. The pattern in the wallpaper starts to move. My mouth gapes.

When the worst of the pain recedes, I am washed against the corner of the room. I put the newspapers in the empty fireplace. I want to burn them, but I don’t have any matches.

 • • • 

I call the landscaper. I tell her there has been a death in the family and that I don’t know when I will come back to London. The phrasing pleases me, like it wasn’t Rachel who died, but someone else in the family, an aunt, our dad. She tells me
to take all the time I need, but she doesn’t offer paid bereavement leave. I don’t really blame her. It isn’t that sort of job.

I call my best friend, Martha. She wants to come stay with me but I say I need to be alone at the moment.

“When are you coming home?” she asks.

“I don’t know. The detective asked me to stay in the area.”

“Why?”

“They need information about her, I think.”

I ask Martha to tell our other friends, and I give her the numbers for Rachel’s as well. Alice lives in Guatemala. I don’t have her number, and I hope Martha can’t find it either. It comforts me that to her Rachel is alive and well, like that makes it partially true.

 • • • 

After the calls, I walk to her house. It is a Sunday afternoon in late November, and a few people drive past me, going about their errands. I can’t believe that I plan to survive her, to go on into life without her. The road to her house, a stripe of black tarmac, stretches in front of me.

The newspaper article didn’t mention the dog. The police must be pleased. I still see him, hanging from the top of the stairs. A large German shepherd. I’m surprised the banister post could hold his weight.

In the early dusk, uniformed figures move in the long grass at the edge of Rachel’s lawn. I leave the road in front of her neighbor’s property and walk around the horse paddock. Behind it, a path climbs the ridge.

I walk slowly, stopping sometimes to use my hand for balance on the rocks, until I am across the valley from Rachel’s house. All the lights are on, and figures move in the upstairs windows. I count eighteen people searching in the grass, under the roiling sky. The blue tape is still stretched across the door and a man in uniform stands beside it.

Snow starts to fall. A gust of white smoke billows up over the cliff edge. Someone is in the professor’s house below the ridge. I lean over until I can see its roof and chimneys. Twists of steam
rise, melting into the snow. The professor is walking up the drive, throwing handfuls of yellow sand and salt. At the edge of his property he looks across the road to Rachel’s house. His shoulders slump, and the empty paper bag hangs at his side.

He stands there, waiting, I think, for someone to come down the hill so he can ask if there is any news. They will have interviewed him already. I imagine there are tears in his eyes. He liked Rachel. And I think he must have been scared last night, maybe unable to sleep.

I look up, my chest raw and aching. The snow stops, hovers, swirls in fast horizontal gyres. I walk toward the spine of the ridge, away from the cliff edge, through a band of low, twisting trees. They are barely taller than my head, stunted by the wind. A branch jabs out from one with a piece of stiff yellow fabric hanging over it. I step onto a flat rock, and when I come down its other side, I land in a mess of beer cans and cigarette ends. The back of my neck prickles and heat rushes over my skin. I look up slowly and there, framed in a gap between the trees, is Rachel’s house.

The branches form a portrait oval around it. In the dusk I can see people moving through the rooms of her house. As night falls, the pictures in the windows will grow sharper and clearer. She didn’t have any curtains, except for one in the bathroom. I can see its white gauze, but even that reaches only to the sash. You would be able to see the top of her head when she stood at the sink to brush her teeth, when she came out of the shower.

Someone drank Tennent’s Light Ale and smoked Dunhills and watched her. I search the ridge behind me. I pick up a sharp rock and turn in a circle, so the litter and dry leaves crackle under my boots. I wait for a man to appear. I’m not frightened, I want to see who did this to her. As the minutes pass, the chance that someone else is here sags, then collapses.

Through the gap in the branches, I watch the snow fall on her house. The ridge is so quiet I think I can hear the snow as it lands on the frozen ground. An absolute bleakness takes hold of me. The men searching the grounds move deeper into
the woods. I notice the snow melting on the cigarette ends, so they soften and expand.

I call Lewis, whose car is parked at the bottom of her lawn. I watch him duck under the tape and come out of the house. He stands on the drive in a dark overcoat. In the silence, I watch him take the phone from his pocket and check the screen.

“Hello, Nora.”

“I found something.”

“Where are you?”

I scramble out onto the path, in front of the thorn trees, and start to wave. “Here.”

He rotates his head, then sees me. He stops. His face is a distant blur, his tie twisting in the wind, his trousers bagging above his shoes.

By the time I hear him on the path, I am frozen. As he steps into the gap in the trees, I know from his expression that I look absurd.

Lewis stares at me, his face slackened and sad, through the portrait oval of the branches. Two more years, he said in the car, but I can see he wishes it were none. The thorn branches arch above him.

He ducks under them and kneels to look at the ground. I wonder if he expects to find nothing, that I have been guarding nothing. As he stands, he turns and sees the house, framed by the gap in the trees, in a perfect oval, as though someone cut back the branches. His shoulders drop.

“Someone was watching her,” I say.

“Nora,” says Lewis, “why did you come here?” He stands a head taller than me, and he addresses the question into the space above me.

“I wanted to see the house.”

He nods, staring over the cliff. “Did you think someone was watching Rachel?”

“No.”

We look at the valley, and the stands of trees forming dark pools in the white snow. In daylight, a man would be invisible
up here, and at night he could move closer. I imagine him circling the house, putting his hands on the windows.

A man in a forensic suit—the thin fabric stretched over his shoes and pulled taut over his head—comes up the path. Lewis asks him to bag the material, and we start down the ridge. Ahead of me Lewis leaves a trail of footprints on the snow. Off the far side of the ridge, the forest below is a series of crosshatches.

We scramble down the rock and emerge behind the paddock. I follow Lewis to the road, my legs growing heavy as we trudge through the snow.

“Are you hungry?” he asks.

 • • • 

The Emerald Gate has plastic tables and photographs of the dishes backlit above the till. A young man in chef’s whites lifts a metal basket from a fryer and shakes it before letting it submerge again, and the smell of oil makes my mouth water. My last full meal was two days ago, at the pub in London.

I watch the pearls of jasmine open in my tea, groggy and fascinated. My fists push my cheeks up to my eyes. Lewis slides his knees under the table, looking too large for his chair. I rub my thumb over my cheek, which was scratched by the thorn trees.

Our food arrives on the counter. Lewis ordered moo shu pancakes, and I’m having the same, since I couldn’t face making a decision. The rhythm of it calms me, spooning the mixture onto a thin flour pancake, folding it into a triangle, dipping it into the plum sauce. We assemble and eat in silence as the snow drifts under the streetlamps.

“Nora,” he says, “why did you go to the ridge?”

“I told you, I wanted to see the house.”

Behind the counter, the cook ladles wonton soup into a plastic container, and the salty smell of the broth drifts over to us.

“Did Rachel ever say anything to make you think to look there?”

“No.” I fold the edges of the pancake. Lewis has stopped eating and is watching me.

“When did she get her dog?” he asks.

“Five years ago, when she moved to Marlow. She was twenty-seven.” I dip the pancake into plum sauce.

“Did anything else important happen that year?”

“No.”

“But she got a German shepherd.”

“Lots of people do,” I say.

“We found papers in her house. The dog was bred and trained by a security firm in Bristol.”

I stop with a spoon halfway to my plate. “What?”

“They sell dogs for protection.”

I remember Rachel on the lawn, calling commands while Fenno raced around her. She said she had to train him so he wouldn’t be bored. “She told me she adopted him.”

“Maybe she was scared,” says Lewis, “because of what happened in Snaith.”

By the time he finished, she couldn’t walk. Every one of her fingernails was split from fighting him.

“Do you think it was him?” I ask.

“I don’t know.”

“Why would he wait fifteen years?”

“Maybe he was looking for her.”

W
E WENT TO
a party the night she was attacked. It was the first week in July and I had a job at the town pool as assistant junior lifeguard, which meant that if three people were drowning at opposite ends of the pool I could rescue the smallest one.

The morning of the party was “a scorcher,” according to Radio Humberside. “Be careful out there,” the announcer said, which I thought was stretching it. The toast popped up, the electric kettle whistled. I wedged open the sliding door with my foot and ate my breakfast with my back against the glass.

My feet were stretched on the patio stones, and our dad was at work on a building site in Sunderland, the driveway empty of his AMC Gremlin, the world’s smallest and ugliest car. Rachel said we were “latchkey children,” though technically we weren’t since the door was never locked. When I said that, she said, “Stop being stupid.”

Rachel was still asleep when I left for the pool. The blind in her room was snagged in one corner and light glowed on her pale arm and dark hair. I closed her door and clattered down the stairs. My dad once asked if I walked down the stairs that way on purpose, to make the maximum possible noise. The screen door slammed behind me and I turned onto the hot, empty street. Half of the houses had been repossessed, and I ambled along the center of the road, brushing the hair back from my face.

After my shift at the pool, I went to Alice’s. Rachel met me at the door and I watched her figure take shape beyond the screen.

“How was work, Nora?” asked Alice.

“No drownings.”

We left for the party at nine. Rachel walked in front, and Alice and I followed with our arms linked. My sister wore denim shorts and a loose navy shirt. She had sandals that tied at the ankle and a rope bracelet around her wrist, her hair loose down her back. We had poured vodka into a Coke can and walked sipping from it, and all the alcohol floated to the top so by the time we reached the house we were drunk.

When we arrived at the party, everyone began hugging everyone else, including some of the people who had already been there together when we arrived. Rafe pulled me under his arm into the kitchen and I drank another vodka Coke, then another.

I lost Rachel. We played Nevers but no one could remember the rules, and then Rachel came in from the kitchen and squeezed beside me on the sofa. I tipped my head against her shoulder and smelled that she had just smoked a cigarette. I lifted her hair and held it across my nose, breathing through it like a screen.

It gets fuzzy after that.

I remember emptying an ice tray into a cup, then knocking it to the floor, and being on my knees, one hand scrabbling under the fridge.

More people coming.

Another vodka Coke.

Rachel in the kitchen, her hair tied up in a high knot, drinking a glass of water and talking with Rafe. Her knobby cheekbones, her pink lips.

I was swampy with tiredness, and knocking into things. I climbed the stairs, which was interesting because I couldn’t see below my knees.

I closed my eyes. And then someone was leaning over me in the earliest light of morning, when it’s uncanny, almost neon. I was in a single bed, sleeping on my side next to Alice.

“Nora, I’m going to walk home. Do you want to come with me or stay?” Rachel’s hand on my arm.

“Stay.” And I nestled against Alice’s shoulder and fell back asleep.

The thing was—that morning—I hadn’t even turned over to look at her. I imagined it afterward, over and over. Pushing back on my shoulder, twisting around to see her. Her face would be pale in the neon blue light from outside, her hair swinging forward in two long sheets.

“Never mind. I’ll come with you.”