Under the Harrow Read online

  Soon patrol cars arrive, the police in black uniforms gathering on the road and coming up the lawn. I stare at them, my eyes streaking from one face to the next. Static crackles from someone’s belt. I wait for one of them to smile and give the game away. A constable lowers a stake into the dirt and runs tape across the door, the ribbon bobbing up and down as it unspools behind him.

  The edges of my vision go soft, then disappear entirely. I am so tired. I try to watch the police so I can tell Rachel what this was like.

  The sky foams, like the spindrift of a huge unseen wave is bearing down on us. Who did this to you, I wonder, but that isn’t the important thing, the important thing is that you come back. At the house across the road, the open barn where they usually park is empty. An Oxford professor lives there. “The gentleman farmer,” Rachel calls him. Beyond the professor’s house, the ridge is an almost vertical cliff face, with steep paths cut into the stone. I stare at the ridge until it seems to come loose and start to drift closer.

  No one goes into the house. They are all waiting for someone. The constable who ran the tape stands in front, guarding the entrance. In the paddock next door to the professor’s house, a woman rides a horse. Her cottage stands behind the paddock, near the foot of the ridge. The horse and rider gallop in a great circle under the darkening sky.

  As the woman leans forward into the wind, I wonder if she can see us. The house, the ambulance, the uniformed police standing on the lawn.

  A door slams at the bottom of the driveway and a man and woman step onto the gravel. Everyone watches the pair advance up the hill. They both wear tan coats, their hands in their pockets, their coattails blowing behind them. Their gaze is trained on the house, then the woman looks in my direction and our eyes catch. I am buffeted by wind, cold air. The woman lifts the tape and enters the house. I close my eyes. I hear footsteps approaching on the gravel. The man kneels down next to me. He waits.

  Color sweeps over my eyelids. It will settle soon to black, and then I will hear the elm trees soughing overhead. If I go down the stairs, I’ll see our dishes in the sink and on the hob. The scrapings of polenta dried to the bottom of the pot. The chestnut skins on the counter, dropped where we pulled them off, burning our fingers.

  If I go to her room, I’ll see the shadows of the southern-planted elm flickering on the boards. The dog asleep, sprawled below the bed, near enough that Rachel can drop her arm over the edge of the mattress and pet him. And Rachel, asleep.

  I open my eyes.

  2

  THE MAN KNEELING NEXT to me says hello. He is holding his tie against his stomach. Behind him, the wind flattens the grass on the hill.

  “Hello, Nora,” he says, and I wonder if we have met before. I don’t remember telling anyone my name. He must know Rachel. He has a large, square face and hooded eyes, and I try to place him at an event in town, bonfire night or the fire brigade fund-raiser. “DI Moretti. I’m from the station in Abingdon.”

  It is a blow. He has never met her, her town doesn’t have murder detectives. To file any serious complaint you probably have to go to Oxford or Abingdon. As we walk down the drive, two women in white forensic suits pass us on their way to the house.

  As we drive away I can’t breathe. I look out the window at the line of plane trees flashing past. I would have thought it would feel like a dream but it doesn’t. The man driving next to me is real, the landscape outside the window is real, and the wet sticking my shirt to my stomach, and the thoughts coiling through my head.

  I want the shock to buy me a little more time, but the grief is already here, it came down like a guillotine when the woman put her finger to Rachel’s neck. I keep thinking how I am never going to see my sister again, how I was about to see her. As we drive through Marlow, I realize that I am talking to myself in my head. No one else is there. Usually when I have the uncanny sensation of watching myself think, I shape my thoughts into things to tell Rachel.

  I shrink against the seat. Cars rush past us on the motorway. I wonder if the detective is always such a slow driver, or only when he has someone else in the car. I realize I haven’t been watching the road signs to check where he is taking me. Part of me hopes he will take me to a dark, wet field, far from the lights of the town. It would be symmetrical. One sister murdered and then the other, in the space of a few hours.

  He did it. Then circled around the house and came up the drive, and convinced me to leave with him while everyone else was distracted. It isn’t hard to persuade myself. The fear is already here, pressing under the surface. I take a pen from my bag and grip it under my thigh.

  I wait for him to ease onto one of the turnings, for an abandoned factory, or an empty orchard. Dead space surrounds the motorway, he has a lot of options. I ready myself to stab the pen into his eye, and then run back to her house. Rachel will be sitting in her living room. She will look up, frowning. “Did it work?”

  But the sign for Abingdon appears, and the detective turns off the motorway, slowing to a stop at the end of the slip road. His face is slack, his eyes trained up through the windscreen at the signal.

  “Who did it?” I ask.

  He doesn’t look at me. The indicator ticks in the quiet car. “We don’t know yet.”

  The signal changes and he pulls the car into gear. The light box sign of the Thames Valley Police revolves on a post at the entrance to the building.

  In an open-plan room upstairs, a fair man with a dark suit hanging from his shoulders stands in front of a whiteboard. When he hears us enter, he shifts away from the board, where he has just taped up a picture of Rachel.

  I groan. It is the picture from the hospital website, her oval face framed by dark hair. Her face is so familiar it is like looking at myself. She is paler and has stronger bones in her face. I can disappear in a room, she can’t. Both of us have high cheekbones, but hers turn out like knobs. She smiles in the photograph with her mouth closed, her lips pressed a little to the side.

  In the interview room, Moretti sits down across from me, unhooking the button of his suit jacket with one hand.

  “Are you tired?” he asks.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s the shock.”

  I nod. It’s strange to be so tired, and also so scared, as if my body is asleep but receiving electric jolts.

  “Can I get you anything?” he asks. I don’t know what he means, and when I don’t answer he brings me a tea that I don’t drink. He hands me a navy sweatshirt and tracksuit bottoms. “If you’d like to change.”

  “No, thank you.”

  He talks for a few minutes about nothing. He has a cabin at Whitstable. It is beautiful, he says, at low tide. He makes me nervous, even while talking about the sea.

  He asks me to tell him what I saw when I first entered the house. I can hear my tongue lift from the bottom of my mouth with a click before every answer. He rubs at the back of his neck, the weight of his hand pushing his head down.

  “Do you live with her?”

  “No, I live in London.”

  “Is it common for you to be there on a Friday afternoon?”

  “Yes. I often come up to visit.”

  “When was the last time you spoke to your sister?”

  “Last night, around ten.”

  The sky has darkened, so I can see the pale citrine squares of office lights across the road.

  “And how did she sound?”

  “Like herself.”

  Above his shoulder, one of the yellow tiles clicks off. I wonder if he thinks I did it. It doesn’t seem likely, though, and my fear of it is distant, another depth charge but one that barely reaches me. For a moment, I wish I were being framed. Then, what I felt now would be something else—worry, outrage, righteousness—other than this. Which is nothing, like waking in a field with no memory of how you got there.

  “How long will this last?” I ask.

&
nbsp; “What?”

  “The shock.”

  “It depends. Maybe a few days.”

  In an office across the street, a cleaning woman lifts the cord of a vacuum and shifts chairs out of her path.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “I know you must want to go home. Have you noticed anything weighing on Rachel recently?”

  “No. Her work, a little.”

  “Is there anyone you can think of who might want to harm Rachel?”

  “No.”

  “If she felt threatened, would she tell you?”

  “Yes.”

  None of this is like her. I can just as easily see the other outcome. I can see Rachel, drenched in blood, sitting in this chair and patiently explaining to the inspector how she killed the man who attacked her.

  “Did it take a long time?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” he says, and I bow my head against the ringing. The woman who came up the drive with him opens the door. She has a soft, pouchy face and curling hair pulled back into a knot. “Alistair,” she says. “A word.”

  When he returns, Moretti says, “Did Rachel have a boyfriend?”

  “No.”

  He asks me to write down the names of the men she dated in the last year or so. I print each letter neatly, starting with the most recent and going back sixteen years, to her first boyfriend in Snaith, where we grew up. When I finish the list, I sit with my hands curled on the table in front of me, and Moretti stands near the door with his heavy square head bent to the paper. I watch to see if he recognizes any of the names from other cases, but his expression doesn’t change.

  “The first name,” I say. “Stephen Bailey. They almost got married two years ago. She still saw him sometimes. He lives in West Bay, Dorset.”

  “Was he ever violent toward her?”

  “No.”

  Moretti nods. Stephen will still be the first person to eliminate. The detective leaves the room, and when he returns his hands are empty. I think of the pub this afternoon, and the missing woman in Yorkshire.

  “There’s something else,” I say. “Rachel was attacked when she was seventeen.”

  “Attacked?”

  “Yes. The charge would have been grievous bodily harm.”

  “Did she know the assailant?”

  “No.”

  “Was anyone arrested?”

  “No. The police didn’t believe her.” They would allow that she had been assaulted, but not in the way she described. They suspected that she had tried to rob or solicit someone and been violently rebuffed. They were the last of the old wave of policemen, preoccupied with the amount she’d had to drink, and that she didn’t cry. “It was in Snaith, Yorkshire. I don’t know if they still have a record of it. It was fifteen years ago.”

  Moretti thanks me. “We need you to stay in the area. Do you have anywhere to sleep tonight?” he asks.

  “Rachel’s house.”

  “You can’t stay there. Is there someone who can come pick you up?”

  I am so tired. I don’t want to try to explain this to anybody, or to wait in the station for one of my friends to arrive from London. When the interview ends, a constable drives me to the only inn in Marlow.

  I hope we crash. A lorry holding metal poles drives in front of us on the Abingdon Road, and I imagine the nylon ribbon snapping, the metal poles falling out, dancing on the road, one of them pinioning me to the seat.

  The Marlow high street is curved like a sickle, with the common at one end and the train station at the other. The Hunters is at the bottom of the sickle, next to the train station. It is a square, cream stone building with black shutters. When the constable drops me at the inn, there are a few people waiting on the train platform, and they all turn to look at the police car.

  At the Hunters, I lock the door and put on the chain. I run my hand along the papered wall, then press my ear to it and hold my breath. I want to hear a woman’s voice. A mother talking to her daughter, maybe, as they get ready for bed. No sounds come through the wall. Everyone’s probably sleeping, I tell myself.

  I turn off the lights and crawl under the blanket. I know what’s happening is real, but I do keep expecting her to call.

  3

  WE ARE SUPPOSED TO drive to Broadwell today for lingonberry crêpes and the museum, I think when I wake, angry that our plans have been postponed.

  Halfway between the bed and the bathroom, my knees crumple. I collapse, but it’s like being yanked upright. The dog rotates from the ceiling. Rachel lies curled against the wall. There are red handprints on the stairs. There are three clean posts on the banister and a dirty one with the dog’s lead tied around it.

  • • •

  I don’t know how long I stayed like that. At some point I decide to wash myself. I can’t shower, because I think I can smell her house in my hair. Instead I strip and run a damp flannel over my body, watching its fabric turn pink and brown.

  I dress, put my clothes from yesterday into a plastic bag, and carry them to the skip behind the inn. This feels strange, like I am disposing of evidence, but the police didn’t ask me to keep them. They should have advised me more carefully. I walk past a painting of a fox hunt in the hall, with some of the red riders hidden behind the trees.

  As I climb the stairs, Moretti calls to say he has a few more questions for me. “I’m doing a press statement in an hour. My statement won’t include anything about the dog.”

  “Why not?”

  “People fixate on that sort of thing. I can’t prepare you,” he says, “for what it will be like if this becomes a national story. We can’t tell you not to talk to the press, but I can say it won’t help the case. They will get in the way, and then when they get bored they will look for what makes Rachel interesting.”

  “What makes her interesting?”

  “The worst things about her.”

  A constable will collect me from the Hunters at five. I decide to wait in my room. I have six hours on my own until he arrives, and I wonder if I will make it until then.

  • • •

  A few hours later, there is a knock at the door. “I’ve had some complaints from the other guests,” says the manager of the inn. Behind her, the lamps are switched on in the hall. She wears a scarf of Black Watch tartan, and I want to tell her that I used to live in Scotland. My sister came to visit me there.

  “The noise is disturbing them.”

  “I’m sorry.” I have to lean on the door frame. I haven’t had anything to eat or drink today. Food is going to be a problem.

  “Let me know if there’s anything you need,” she says. “I’m so sorry. It’s been such a difficult time. First Callum and now your sister.”

  “Callum?”

  “The young man from town, killed in an accident on the Bristol Road. He was only twenty-seven.”

  I remember now. Rachel was one of his nurses. I consider sharing with the woman what Rachel told me about him, but decide against it.

  • • •

  At five, a constable collects me and we drive to Abingdon. In the interview room, Moretti says, “We haven’t been able to find your father. Are you in touch with him?”

  “No.”

  “Was Rachel in touch with him?”

  “No.”

  The heating pipes click in the ceiling above us. Outside the night is heavy with clouds. It is already snowing in Lancashire and Cumbria. The detective hasn’t asked about our mother. He must already know that she died a long time ago, soon after I was born.

  “When did you last speak to your father?”

  “Three years ago.”

  “Does he have a history of violence?”

  “No,” I say, though I’m not sure that’s entirely true. “He’s also frail. Rachel was much stronger than him. Do you have to tell him about her?”

  “Yes.”r />
  They will have a hard time finding him. He stopped collecting benefits after becoming suspicious of the government. Rachel had a postcard from him a few months ago saying he was in Blackpool, which I decide not to tell the detective.

  “Have you spoken to Stephen yet?” I ask.

  “He was at his restaurant all day.”

  The news comes as a relief, and I feel disloyal for suspecting him. He adored her.

  Moretti says, “What type of vehicle does your father drive?”

  “He doesn’t drive anymore,” I say, and start to explain. He’s an alcoholic, though the word has always sounded too polished to describe him. Moretti must already know some of this. He has a record. Disorderly behavior, trespassing, burglary.

  A constable knocks on the door, and Moretti excuses himself. I look into the incident room. One of the detectives is eating chips from a packet of foil and paper, and the air smells of vinegar.

  I wish Fenno were with me, sitting on his haunches beside my chair. I want to rest my hand on his soft head. I gave him a bath on my last visit, cupping my hand over his eyes while rinsing the soap from his fur. When I wrapped him in a towel he leaned against me, and we stayed like that for a long time, the warm damp soaking through my shirt.

  When Moretti returns, he says, “What we need from you now is an account of anything unusual in Rachel’s routine. It could be as small as a change in her route to work. Any new friends, a new activity.”

  “I don’t know. She talked about joining a gym in Oxford so she could swim in the winter, but she hadn’t yet.”

  “Anything else? Any changes at the hospital?”

  “No.”