Under the Harrow: Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.

5
    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 meto 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