Under the Harrow: (8 page)

A
T NOON,
I take the train to London to close my flat. Soon after I leave, a man with the cleaners calls to say they have arrived at the house. While my sister’s blood is cleaned from her walls and floor, I watch the view from the train window. Between the snow and the low white clouds are villages of houses with stained yellow roofs, fields, Roman roads.

He said they would sand the floor and then revarnish it. Part of me is relieved—there won’t be a trace left of what he did to her—but it also seems strange. Shouldn’t we leave it as it is. Or burn the place down.

The thing lodged under my ribs begins to ache. A car with smoke fuming behind it drives alongside the train. Rachel crawls up the stairs. The dog rotates from the ceiling, and blood drips from his paws.

There is a thump and then a suck of air as another train rockets by us. Sounds seem to dwindle into the vacuum between the two trains, and then it has passed and I look out at a stone house with lancet windows.

Keith Denton said that he was resting in his van at the pond during her murder.

The watcher on the ridge drank Tennent’s Light Ale and smoked Dunhills.

Rachel decided to leave Oxfordshire.

Stephen is angry she refused him.

I need to know why it happened, so I can stop it from
happening. When I opened the door, her house began to shine, and Rachel in my mind began to shine. The way when soldiers go berserk, they recall the battle slowing down, and themselves entranced by it.

I should have made the trip back to London seven days ago, last Sunday night. On Saturday we would have driven into Broadwell for breakfast—lingonberry crêpes, dark coffee—and wandered through the museum. At home, she would have a glass of wine, and I would build a fire or take a bath. On Sunday we would take the dog on the aqueduct, and read, cook lunch, discuss the goats she planned to raise, then I’d head back to London and she’d go to work since she was on the night shift.

I am furious at what has been taken away from us. It is too large to consider all at once, so I focus on smaller things. I want lingonberry crêpes very badly, for example.

The train passes through a village, its steeple sliding by. I look out at the snow, the yellow-gray houses and evergreen trees, the hanging sign of the Mermaid. At the edge of the village is a church with a small graveyard. While the graveyard hovers in front of my window, I count twelve tombstones in the snow, and then the scene begins to drift from view, shaking with the train’s movement, and is gone.

I close my eyes, sickened with guilt, horrified at how much better it is to be alive than dead. I swallow, listening to the sound it makes in the back of my throat. If I had been any faster she would be alive.

Land streams by the window. Sheep arranged on the stony flank of a hill, the troubling clouds surging behind it. A firehouse with a man doing exercises in its yard. He pulls himself above a bar, lowers himself, vanishes.

Beside me Rachel is sleeping. If I lean forward, I will see her faint reflection on the window. Her chest rising and falling. The snow, the power lines, and the fences running through her body. Her dark hair pulled over one shoulder, her arms crossed above her stomach. She is wearing a camel-colored sweater. I can see its fibers on the windowpane.

We approach Heathrow. A huge jet glides in to land, its windows a series of yellow drops in the faded light. This used to be the part of the trip when I started to get excited about coming home.

Lately, though, coming back to London has filled me with a sense of doom. I thought about Liam less when I was away. In London, I followed the same routines and visited the same places as when we were together, so it was easy to think that everything was like before, except a little worse.

After Ealing Broadway, the landscape turns modern and industrial. People bundled into winter coats cross the bridges over the tracks. Moretti calls as the train plunges under the Westway flyover. “We have some news,” he says. “We located your father.”

My skull aches. I thought he was going to say they made an arrest.

“Do you want a number for him?” he asks.

“No. Did you get results back from the materials on the ridge?”

“They couldn’t retrieve any DNA evidence.”

I dig the heel of my hand into my eye. “None? How is that possible?”

“It’s rained quite a lot in the last few weeks.”

 • • • 

The train docks in Paddington. I step onto the platform, breathing in the sharp winter air and the familiar ashy, Victorian smell of the station. Patches of snow melt on the glass roof between the iron rafters, and light comes through the glass yellow.

The investigation will not be swift, I realize. The police don’t know who watched Rachel. They don’t know if Keith is lying. They don’t know who attacked her fifteen years ago.

London appears menacing and sinister. No one knows where I am, and anything could happen. I think uneasily of the canals and the basin. I always thought of myself as safer in London than anywhere else in the world. Each potential
assailant was balanced by a potential defender. But horrible things still happen here, and now they might rise up and envelop me.

 • • • 

It begins to rain as I come up from the tube station in Maida Vale, and I shake open my umbrella, surprised to find it still at the bottom of my bag, where I put it when I left my flat nine days ago. I look at the concrete under the edge of my umbrella, then tilt its brim back so I can see down the road. For a moment as the brim rises, I am in the old London, mysterious and cinematic, the finials of umbrellas moving up and down around me, the rain dashing on the road.

The air is cool and fresh and tarry. My legs are already damp and my jeans cling to my skin. I turn to look in the window of a pie shop. Four and twenty blackbirds. Rachel had an enamel blackbird. I remember her sinking its pin into a pie crust. In Cornwall we saw pies with fish heads cooked in honor of the sailor Tom Bawcock. I wonder when Rachel and I will go back to Polperro, and then it strikes me again.

Rain drums on my umbrella. I wait to cross Greville Road under a sign for vodka that was a sign for cider when I left. I try to see what else has changed, which is impossible. Once the road crosses into Kilburn it is shingled with posters, hoardings, flyers. London’s visual tax on the poor. I pass the first of the four Carphone Warehouses on my walk home from the tube.

Inside my flat, I remove my coat, fold my umbrella. The flat seems uncanny. There is a coffee mug in the sink, rinsed but not washed, from before I went to work on Friday morning.

I walk to the window at the end of the living room and watch vapor spinning from the roofs. On clear days I can see south as far as Brixton, and east to the City. At dusk, the towers start to shimmer and haze, and by nightfall I can see a million windows.

Now, the falling rain blurs away the view somewhere around Bayswater. The white cornice roofs of houses fade under the
mist, then disappear. We could have people there, said Moretti. Light a fire, make sure the boiler is on.

Rain spatters on the window. I start to move through the flat, but I can’t believe I’m here. I don’t know how to survive the hours until I can sleep.

I used to love coming home, fixing coffee or tea, shucking off my shoes and tights, rubbing at the red welts they left on my stomach and the ribbed lines from my socks. Now my movements are stiff as I change into a pair of leggings and a long-sleeved shirt from a race in Wandsworth that I didn’t run.

I was only gone for nine days. Most of the food in my fridge is still good. I take the rubbish to the chute in the corridor. In the shower I am transfixed by the smell of my shampoo, which after nine days away seems to belong to the distant past. The steam pools the scent of rosemary and juniper around me. I’ll have to buy a new kind.

When I come out of the shower, the rain has stopped and I dress and step onto the balcony, the wind in my face and whistling off the side of the building, the seagulls screaming and diving. Blood rises up my legs and the vertigo makes my head light. The fog has cleared and past the roofs of Bayswater I can see Hyde Park, which from here is a dark green stripe with silvery sheets of mist.

The air smells of paraffin. I study the skyline. The dark shape of the Lots Road power station. The Oxo Tower on the South Bank. I went to dinner there once. The restaurant at its top, the sound of the bartender pouring ice in a glass carrying across the room. Elderflower gin and tonics, I’d just met Liam and thought, I didn’t know things could be like this.

My legs shake. I am scared of heights but less than I am of other things. Last spring, I entered a lift with a stranger, and after we rose past the first few floors a surge of fear crashed over me, and I was sure that he wanted to hurt me. The man stared at the join in the doors. His arms hung at his sides and his fingers curled and uncurled.

I think both of us could have recovered from the shock of her assault, if we hadn’t spent months afterward learning about hundreds of other assaults and rapes and murders as part of our search for him. I wanted both of us to forget what we had learned. For the past five years, I’ve pretended that we did forget, and ignored any signs otherwise. That she got a German shepherd. That I never ride alone in a cab.

I don’t know if I was right about the stranger in the lift. We stopped on the eighth floor and another man came inside, so he couldn’t do anything even if he’d wanted to. When I told Rachel about it, arriving at her house to find her chopping coriander, a glowing blue sky over Oxfordshire, she said, “You have an overactive imagination.”

“Or I picked up on something,” I said, splashing white wine into a glass, remembering the man’s dangling arms, his curling fingers. I must have sounded like I wanted to be right, and she frowned at me.

Rachel knew I blamed myself for what happened to her in Snaith, and that I wanted things to be even. Whatever that meant. I wished I hadn’t told her. She pushed the pile of coriander against the knife blade and continued chopping.

The smell of paraffin still hangs in the air. One of the balconies below mine must be open to the flat and I can hear their music. Four on the floor. Patterns ripple across the muddy sky. I wonder if he is out there somewhere, celebrating. Rage lights through me and then, in a sea change, all my fury turns to Rachel.

I picture her leaning against the balcony with the skyline behind her. Her black jumper falls off her shoulder, showing the yellow strap of her bra. She starts to smile, her cheekbones lifting, eyes shining. If Keith watched her from the ridge, she probably encouraged him. She probably liked the attention.

The wind flattens my shirt to my chest. I cross my arms and start to go through our old fights. After the sodden misery of the past nine days, it is a joy to be spiteful, like I am swigging battery acid.

I build my case against her, based on every time she was thoughtless or nasty, like the time she called me lazy. “I’m just as ambitious as you are,” I said.

“For what?” she asked. “Toward what?”

She laughed, and I said, “Well, what about you? Do you think anyone will remember you when you’re dead? You’re a nurse, no one thinks about you twice after they leave hospital.”

“They do, and I don’t care,” said Rachel, with the air of a tennis player who serves a beautiful shot and throws her racket down in the same gesture.

The temper on her. She is the only woman I know to have been hit by a male bouncer. On another night, I watched her pick up two bottles of beer, hold them over the bar, and drop them on the bartender’s feet.

At a party a few years ago on the island in Hackney Wick, I turned to her and said, “This is the best party I’ve ever been to.” I resumed dancing and wondering if this was what Burning Man was like, and Rachel punched a man in the head and had us kicked out.

Alice said we needed to make her run laps before she could go out. We were at the dog park in Willesden and she pointed and said, “That’s what the bitch needs.” We knew the source of her fury, but it didn’t always make us sympathetic.

The thought of the party on the island in Hackney Wick fills me with bitterness. I wrench open my closet and throw my bag inside. Her flannel dressing gown is on the floor. I carry the gown to the sofa and hold it on my lap. I run the fabric through my fingers. It still holds her smell, and I sink back, exhausted.

 • • • 

I can’t wait here during the inquiry. If it was a random attack, the police will never find him. Unless he confesses. Unless a woman in the countryside outside Oxford calls and says, I doubt it’s anything, but my husband came home late, and I noticed there was blood on his jacket and in his car. Do you think you should come have a look?

 • • • 

I clean my flat for the potential subletter. I lock the door and take a bus to Earl’s Court to drop my key in Martha’s postbox. The lights in her house are out, which is good. I don’t want her to see me and try to convince me to stay. By eleven I am at Paddington again, waiting for the train that will take me
back.

O
NCE I FOLLOWED
a woman home from the tube. She got on at Monument, which in itself caught my attention. I wanted to know what she had been doing there, for some reason. She spent the trip reading, and only looked up once, at Cannon Street. When she stood at Victoria, I followed her off the train instead of staying until my stop. She left the station and walked toward the river and Pimlico. It was late May, the kind of warm spring evening when you delay going indoors. She stepped onto the road to get around the crowd of people standing outside a pub, holding sparkling glasses of lager and smoking, then turned on a small road of terraced yellow-brick houses with white piping on the roofs.

I never told anyone. It would be too hard to explain what I had wanted to know about her.

The woman in Pimlico noticed me, but she didn’t think anything of it. I could have followed her up to the house, and said I lived in the flat below hers, and she would have held the door open for me and laughed at the coincidence. This is different, of course. I want Keith to notice me following him. The important thing, though, that I learned is that I appear harmless. What this means is that I can stalk him and no one will notice but him. If I walk by his house twice in one day, if we eat dinner at the same pub. I’ve never threatened him, he has no evidence of harassment. All I have to do, I think, is be where he is.

 • • • 

Keith is hiding something. Still, he might not have killed her. He might have only stalked her. And he certainly didn’t assault her in Snaith fifteen years ago. I might be looking for three different men. The man who attacked her in Snaith, the man who watched her from the ridge, and the man who murdered her.

Rachel visited Bristol Prison in March, only a few months ago. She never stopped looking for the man who assaulted her. There is a chance that she found him, and he killed her. I know how she conducted her search from fifteen years ago, and whatever she found will still be available.

I leave the Hunters and go to the newsagent’s for supplies. When we were teenagers, we spent hours at a time looking for him in crime reports, reading about incidents near Snaith, chewing bags of Swedish fish. Biting them off between my teeth, clicking from one rape story to the next. The smell of them turns my stomach now.

Instead I buy bags of licorice and a bottle of mineral water. I sit with my laptop on my bed, the open bags of sweets scattered around me, and begin to search for the man who attacked her.

Grievous bodily harm, rape, murder. A rough circle with Snaith at its center, encompassing Leeds, York, and Hull, and the villages between them. As I start to read, the adrenaline takes hold. I remember this. Both of our mouths stained red, our backs hunched, legs folded under us.

Reporting has changed in fifteen years. There is more material now, more photographs. I move quickly through the stories, carried by something close to panic. It’s so familiar. I thought I had changed, but maybe the years in London were the aberration, and I was always going to return to this.

By the end of the day, there is sweat pooled under my arms, and I have a list of names. The first one is Lee Barton, and in two days he will appear at York Crown Court.