Under the Harrow: (6 page)

T
HE BODY OF
the missing woman I heard about on the day of Rachel’s death was found this morning in the River Humber. Nicole Shepherd. Divers were in the river examining the posts of the bridge at Hessle, which is overdue for repairs, and they found her body in a sleeping bag weighted with breeze blocks. Whoever it was threw her from the center of the bridge, but the river isn’t very deep by Hessle, only thirty feet, and the current isn’t strong.

My stomach twists while I read the rest of the article, hunched in my coat at one of the tables outside the inn, holding the paper down with my forearms against the wind. Of course she came to harm. I wonder if they can figure out who owned the sleeping bag.

The bell over the newsagent’s door peals and I look up. I wait for a moment, and then I lift my hand to wave.

Keith unties his dog’s lead and crosses the road toward me. His shadow spills over the table and I look up at him, shading my eyes with my hand. He wears the same coat as on the aqueduct, but open, with a work shirt underneath. He is solid and tall but soft at the middle.

“Hello,” I say. I fold the newspaper and stow it on the bench beside me.

“Are they treating you well?” he asks, pointing at the inn.

“Yes.”

He nods. The silence stretches and I slip my hand inside the paper for comfort. The sound of a sledgehammer comes
from behind the inn, and Keith says, “They’ve been repairing that road for weeks.”

The dog rests her front paws on my lap, and I scratch behind her ears. She presses her head against my chest. Keith says, “Nice to see you again. If there’s anything we can do.” He steps back, pulling on the dog’s lead so she drops from the bench and out of my reach.

“Actually,” I say, and he stops. “I’ve just had a phone call. The police are done with Rachel’s car. It’s at a place in Didcot, and there aren’t any buses to it.”

He stares at me as though he doesn’t understand. I wait, and then he says, “Not a problem. I can take you now if you like.”

In my room, I pack the carving knife, wrapped in a leather glove, and a can of pepper spray. On my way out the door, I tell the manager that Keith Denton is giving me a lift to Didcot. She smiles and says, “How nice of him.”

Keith arrives in a black Renault. “Not the van,” I say as I climb in.

“Only for jobs. It uses too much fuel.”

I grip the can of pepper spray in my pocket. Both of his hands hold the wheel. I expected to be scared but instead I’m filled with anticipation, and a rising sense of power. He’s nervous.

We drive through Marlow. The door next to me is unlocked, and I roll the window down. The day is bright, and he doesn’t comment on the cold draft. He asks if we have any family in the area, and I say no. He switches on the radio. I direct him onto the motorway. As he pulls onto the slip road, I say, “It must be especially difficult for you.”

“Why?”

“You saw her right before it happened.”

His hands roll forward on the wheel, then back. If you did it, I think, I will destroy you. He leans from his seat, checking the next lane with exaggerated care before merging.

He doesn’t speak for a long time, and then he says, “He might have already been there, waiting for me to leave. I should have noticed.”

“This is the exit,” I say. We drive past a parade of shops, a shipping depot, a storage facility. He drives slowly, checking the numbers on the side of the road. There isn’t any foot traffic and for the first time since we left I’m frightened.

“Here.”

He pulls into the lot, where a guard sits in a booth at the entrance. Keith passes my license through the window to him, and we wait in silence as he searches for my record. Keith appears restless, and I wonder if he came here to collect his van after it was tested for her blood.

The guard returns my license and the gate swings open. Keith starts driving down the first row. I scan the cars, and then he stops. I look past him at Rachel’s car, an old Jeep. He turns to me with his mouth compressed in a tight smile, waiting for me to go.

“Thank you. Are you hungry?” I ask. “Can I take you someplace?”

We agree to meet at the Duck and Cover. After he leaves, I lock her car around me. The interior smells familiar, warm and dusty. I open the glove box and take out a small gold tube of lipstick. The color, when I open it, is a vivid dark red.

She had so much left to do. It isn’t that she had something grand in mind, at least not that I know of. It is worse than that, she has been taken away from everything, she lost everything. She likes red lipstick, and will never again stand in the aisle at a chemist’s, testing the shades on the back of her hand. She likes films, and will miss all the ones coming out at the holidays that she planned to see. She likes pan con tomate, and will never again come home from work and mash tomatoes and garlic and olive oil, and rub it onto grilled bread, and eat it standing in her kitchen.

 • • • 

At the Duck and Cover, Keith orders a whisky. The disappointment makes me slump. They carry Tennent’s, the same green cans of lager as the ones on the ridge.

“Miss?”

“A Tennent’s, please.” I point at the can. Keith doesn’t react.
The bartender sets down our drinks and leans against the bar with his back to us, arms folded, watching greyhounds pelt down a track.

“Do you usually drink whisky in the daytime?” I ask.

“No,” says Keith, watching the dogs.

“What’s your usual?” I say it loudly, hoping the bartender will correct him if he lies.

“I don’t have one.”

The greyhounds disappear into mist. The race ends, and a photograph shows the distance between the front two dogs’ noses and the finish line. Their noses are very long, like horses’.

“Anything to eat?” asks the bartender.

“I’m not hungry,” says Keith.

“No, me neither.”

The bartender takes a pack of Benson and Hedges from a shelf and goes onto the back patio, leaving the door cracked open. If I shout, he will come back inside. I don’t know which of the two men would be stronger. I swallow a long draft of beer and wish it were whisky.

“You were eager to help,” I say.

Keith doesn’t straighten or look at me, but something in him tenses and flexes.

“Rachel was lovely. She was a lovely woman.”

“Did you fancy her?”

“I’m married.” I shrug. He says, “No, it’s not like that.”

“What was it like?”

“With Tash? It’s good. It’s normal.”

“No, with Rachel.”

He sets down his whisky and I think he’s going to hit me. “I barely knew her.”

Nothing happens, but I am sure he wanted to strike me. “I didn’t tell you when to stop,” I say, and he watches me. “How did you know which car was hers?”

“I’d just done a job at her house.”

“Rachel told me you were obsessed with her.”

He puts a note on the bar and leaves. I can’t tell if it was the right thing to say. She never mentioned him.

M
ORETTI CALLS. “
We’re done with the house. Let me give you the number of a cleaning agency.”

“You don’t handle that?”

“No.”

“Do you pay for it?”

“No.”

“We don’t have to clean it. If it will compromise evidence—”

“We have what we need,” he says, and I take down the number. The agency is called Combe Cleaners. You wouldn’t know their specialty unless you asked. “You’ll want to have the cleaners in before you go back,” he says. “We can arrange for people to be at the house when you arrive, light a fire, make sure the boiler is on. Some families like to have a priest bless the house. Should I arrange anything like that?”

“What people?”

“Friends of yours and Rachel’s.”

“Oh.” I thought he meant strangers, or guards, which I would have preferred. “No, thank you.”

 • • • 

I decide not to wait for the cleaners.

A few yellow leaves hang from the elms on either side of Rachel’s house. Some noise flushes the birds from the trees and they wheel into the sky. The air smells of water and mud and hay and the smokiness that courses over the countryside in November. Across the road, Rachel’s neighbor rides in her paddock on the same dappled horse as on the day Rachel was killed.

Smoke rises from the chimney at the professor’s house. Two cars are parked in its open barn. Wind flattens the thorn trees on top of the ridge and bends the column of smoke until it is almost horizontal.

When I open the door, I think someone else is inside. I have a sense of the pressure changing, a floorboard lowering. I wait on the step, listening, but I don’t hear another creak, or a door close.

I can’t do this. The blood staining the floors and the walls has turned black. My ears start to ring. But she might have left something inside about Keith, or someone following her, or her friend from the hospital.

I raise the thermostat, and there is a roar as the boiler comes on in the basement. My whole body twitches at the sound. I look at the banister. The dog’s lead didn’t cause any damage, and in the row of four turned wooden posts the one he hanged from doesn’t look different from the others, except for a few stains. I think, nonsensically, of the houses on Priory Walk in Chelsea, the identical white decoys on either side.

I check the ceiling, and it does have a long crack across it. Keith was telling the truth about that much. The radiators start to hiss as I cross the living room. Anything important will probably be in the files under her desk, but I decide to start downstairs. I move through the rooms, looking for anything out of order, anything the police might have missed.

All the surfaces are covered with a thin layer of black carbon. I run my finger through it and sniff, but it doesn’t smell like anything. The police also left ice in the sink in the kitchen, though other than that the room is unchanged. The pot on the hob. The slate bowl of chestnuts.

Her ax is propped against the back door. The sight of it prompts a burst of hope, as though she has a chance now.

I imagine coming in with a fire lit, and the living room filled with people, and someone cooking dinner in the kitchen, and the lamps burning against the dreck. It wouldn’t have made it easier. I imagine a priest walking through the rooms, reading a psalm, but the only lines that come to mind are from a poem.
And I have asked to be / Where no storms come.

Through the front window, I look across the valley until I think I find the hole cut in the trees. He might have come in the house on one of the days he watched her. She left a key under the mat, he could have let himself in when she was at work or asleep. I try not to think of it. I can’t decide if I would feel safer with the front door locked or unlocked.

I switch on a lamp and the kitchen glows faintly, with the drizzle at the windows. The round wooden table near the entryway, the rag rug, the oven across the room. A thick bunch of parsley stands in a glass of water by the sink. On the shelf above it is a package of pasta striped pink and green, shaped like tricorner hats. Rachel had an alert on tickets to Rome, and I imagine the travel deals still filing into her in-box, unread messages ticking in one by one.

I open the cupboards, which smell, as they always have, faintly of incense, and stare at the boxes of tea, bags of lentils, flour, the jars of sherbet lemons and wine gums and licorice ropes. A few weeks ago, we came back from the cinema and she walked to the counter, where the jar of licorice stood empty.

“Was this you?” she asked.

“Oh, sorry,” I said. She hadn’t even taken off her coat, she walked straight to the counter and pointed at the jar with her gloved hand. I can’t remember if she sounded scared, or just annoyed at me for finishing it. It was a strange way to phrase it, I realize now. Who else could it have been?

As I leave the kitchen, I stumble. My hearing tunnels, then disappears, and my vision breaks into spots like pixels. I lean my forehead on the counter until I can hear the wind gusting around the house again, and the slush of a car driving by, and myself sighing.

I am going up the stairs, and then for a long time I am staring at her handprint on the steps. I can see the notches in her fingers and the three deep lines across her palm.

I hold on to the banister, then tip forward onto the step. I crawl up the stairs and the corridor stretches dim and empty in front of me. Past the open doors, the other rooms are bathed in pale light. I press myself flat to the floor where I last saw
her. I don’t think I’ll be able to get up again. I think of her socked feet.

 • • • 

Her bedroom still smells like her. Across the valley, the red light on the radio tower has a foggy halo. The radiators hiss steam into the room.

Her desk has two filing cabinets underneath it, and I start to sort through the papers. Someone may have written to her. She was clever. If she knew she was being stalked, she would keep a record of it.

Stacks of bureaucratic papers, from the hospital, from the bank, from the purchase of her home. Old letters, recipes, lists of projects around the house. It takes a long time to go through all of it, and I find nothing, no mention of Keith, or someone named Martin, no suspicious notes or letters.

In the bathroom there is a jar of olive oil and sea salt. My heart lurches. It seems an impossible thing for her to have done. Who has the time? Though it doesn’t take any, of course, pouring a thick cup of olive oil and stirring in the salt. The jar is the same brown as the bottle of hydrogen peroxide next to it, which she used on cuts and to dry the water in her ears after swimming.

She was moving to Cornwall, five hours away. I wonder if that would have been far enough. It felt safe, though. All those small villages. The walls of trees. Smugglers hid there for centuries. St. Ives is large, too, she could blend in.

At the Chinese restaurant, I asked Lewis why it would take the man who attacked her in Snaith so long to find her. “He might not have known her name,” he said.

I wonder if Rachel thought she was about to lurch out of the house, call for help, survive. If as she died, she was thinking, On the count of three—

There are two full suitcases in the boot of her car. She had started to pack for Cornwall.