Under the Harrow: by Flynn Berry Page A

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.

23
    “ I S THAT WHAT you’re wearing?”
    “Yes.” Rachel wore shorts and a low-cut black tank top that showed her cleavage. We started for the bus stop. The heat wave still hadn’t broken since the night of the attack. The houses on our estate looked slumped, like melting iced cakes. They would all collapse, sooner or later, and the heat seemed to be speeding them on their way. Sweat dampened the straps of my rucksack. I had packed a spare jumper for Rachel, though on all our other visits she’d refused it.
    I didn’t know whose job it would be to tell Rachel to dress decently. The court usher, the security guards. No one was up for it, apparently.
    We had already visited the courthouse in York six times. Rachel believed she wasn’t the first person he had attacked and wouldn’t be the last. She thought he would be caught eventually, and we came to the court to look for him.
    When asked, we said we watched trials because we planned to study law at Newcastle. “Me too!” said a boy our age once. Rachel stared at the floor and I turned to him. He wore a cheap, clean suit and a shiny tie. “At Durham, though.”
    He beamed at me and said, “Have you heard any interesting cases yet?”
    “No,” I said. “Not yet.”
    The guards pretended not to stare at Rachel while we went through security, until her back was to them and she lifted her arms for the female officer