Under the Harrow: by Flynn Berry Read Free Book Online

suspect?”
    “No.”
    From his shop, Giles has an unobstructed view of the train station. He is also the town gossip, according to Rachel. His shop has longer hours than any other business on the high street, and he knows everyone in town. People confide in him. He asks after illnesses, pregnancies, divorces. I remember, absurdly, that he knows about my breakup with Liam. He got it out of me in the two minutes I spent buying a newspaper and bottle of mineral water at his shop in May.
    I consider his view, of the hooked lights on the platform and the station house, then follow Lewis up the high street. We find a bench on the common. The priest is in the church graveyard in his black robe. A cedar elm rises above him, sheltering him under its green tier.
    “Do Anglican priests hear confession?” I ask.
    “No, not formally. Not like Catholic ones. But it wouldn’t be any good if they did, they never tell us anything.”
    The priest climbs the church steps. For a moment, he seems to be looking at us, then he grasps the iron rings inside the two doors and pulls them shut.
    “Does he have to close the doors like that?” says Lewis. “Can’t he do one, then the other?”
    I stare at the stained glass window above the doors. Across the common, wind rushes through the yews, a vast, maritime sound. The wind grows stronger, and it’s like I am on the strand in Edinburgh, near my university.
    “A man named Andrew Healy assaulted a teenage girl in Whitley two years ago,” says Lewis. “It’s six miles from Snaith. Rachel wrote him a letter asking to visit him in prison. He agreed, and she visited him in March.”
    “Was it him?”
    “No. Healy was serving a drugs sentence the summer of Rachel’s assault.”
    “Could he have left?”
    “It’s a class-A prison. The day of her assault he was on canteen duty. They would have recorded it if he somehow stepped out.”
    “Did Rachel know that?”
    “Healy says he told her it couldn’t have been him. Rachel spoke to his solicitor, who confirmed the dates of his sentence.”
    “Where did she visit him?”
    “A prison outside Bristol.” Lewis looks embarrassed for me. She didn’t ask me to come and wait in the car. She didn’t even tell me she’d written him. “Did Rachel ever talk about looking for her attacker?”
    “She said she stopped. She said she wanted to forget it ever happened.”
    Of course that was what she told me. For years I had urged her to stop looking, and at a certain point it must have been easier to lie than to argue.
    “When was this?” asks Lewis.
    “Five years ago. Is he a suspect?”
    “No. Healy’s still in prison.”
     • • • 
    At the Hunters I find the route from her house to the prison. I imagine Rachel in the visitors’ room as the prisoners start to file in. I don’t know what she planned to say. What abuse she would turn on him.
    She wouldn’t ask him why he did it. I asked her once andshe laughed in my face. “He doesn’t get to have a reason,” she said. She didn’t want to meet him to better understand what had happened. She wanted to punish him.
    She told me once how she would go about it. She would correspond with other men in the prison and win them over. During her visit, she would mention their names and say what they were willing to do for her.
    I don’t know how far she would have taken it. If she would actually convince another prisoner to assault him. I doubt it, but the desired effect would be the same.
    It wasn’t him. Andrew Healy. They must look alike, though, enough for her to call his solicitor to confirm his story. She might have still threatened him. It wasn’t her but he still attacked someone. I can see her walking back to the car, her arms tight around herself, her face hatched open with rage.
    She would have stopped in Bristol for a drink. I can see the place too; it would be familiar, a chain she had visited in London or Bath. The Slug and Lettuce, or something like it. She would still