Into the Water Read online

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2017 by Paula Hawkins Ltd.

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Extract taken from “The Numbers Game,” Dear Boy © Emily Berry and reprinted by permission of Faber & Faber.

  Excerpt from Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks, copyright © 2012 by Oliver Sacks. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

  Lyrics from “Down by the Water” by PJ Harvey reproduced by kind permission of Hot Head Music Ltd. All rights reserved.

  Ebook ISBN: 9780735211216

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Hawkins, Paula, author.

  Title: Into the water : a novel / Paula Hawkins.

  Description: New York : Riverhead Books, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017003237 | ISBN 9780735211209 (hardback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Psychological fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Suspense. | FICTION / Contemporary Women. | GSAFD: Suspense fiction.

  Classification: LCC PR6108.A963 I58 2017 | DDC 823/.92—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017003237

  p. cm.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  For all the troublemakers

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  THE DROWNING POOL | LIBBY

  PART ONE 2015 | JULES ABBOTT

  Monday, 10 August | JOSH WHITTAKER

  Tuesday, 11 August | JULES

  NICKIE SAGE

  JULES

  JULES

  LENA ABBOTT

  MARK HENDERSON

  LOUISE WHITTAKER

  THE DROWNING POOL (UNPUBLISHED) | DANIELLE ABBOTT

  ERIN MORGAN

  JULES

  LENA

  JULES

  August 1993 | JULES

  2015 | Wednesday, 12 August | PATRICK TOWNSEND

  Thursday, 13 August | ERIN

  JULES

  JULES

  THE DROWNING POOL | 1679 | LIBBY

  Monday, 17 August | NICKIE

  HELEN TOWNSEND

  JOSH

  LENA

  JULES

  August 1993 | JULES

  2015 | SEAN TOWNSEND

  THE DROWNING POOL | 1983 | LAUREN

  ERIN

  PART TWO Tuesday, 18 August | LOUISE

  SEAN

  Wednesday, 19 August | ERIN

  MARK

  ERIN

  ERIN

  LENA

  LENA

  THE DROWNING POOL | 2015 | KATIE

  JULES

  August 1993 | JULES

  2015 | HELEN

  SEAN

  Thursday, 20 August | LENA

  Friday, 21 August | ERIN

  THE DROWNING POOL | 1920 | ANNE WARD

  Sunday, 23 August | PATRICK

  NICKIE

  JULES

  JULES

  NICKIE

  JULES

  PART THREE Monday, 24 August | MARK

  JULES

  JULES

  MARK

  LENA

  ERIN

  JULES

  ERIN

  SEAN

  LENA

  JULES

  THE DROWNING POOL | 1983 | LAUREN, AGAIN

  SEAN

  LENA

  SEAN

  LENA

  SEAN

  JULES

  LENA

  JULES

  Tuesday, 25 August | ERIN

  HELEN

  JULES

  ERIN

  JULES

  PATRICK

  PART FOUR September | LENA

  JOSH

  LOUISE

  December | NICKIE

  ERIN

  HELEN

  January | JULES

  PATRICK

  SEAN

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  I was very young when I was cracked open.

  Some things you should let go of

  Others you shouldn’t

  Views differ as to which

  —Emily Berry, “The Numbers Game”

  We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust’s jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection.

  —Oliver Sacks, Hallucinations

  THE DROWNING POOL

  LIBBY

  “Again! Again!”

  The men bind her again. Different this time: left thumb to right toe, right thumb to left. The rope around her waist. This time, they carry her into the water.

  “Please,” she starts to beg, because she’s not sure that she can face it, the blackness and the cold. She wants to go back to a home that no longer exists, to a time when she and her aunt sat in front of the fire and told stories to each other. She wants to be in her bed in their cottage, she wants to be little again, to breathe in woodsmoke and rose and the sweet warmth of her aunt’s skin.

  “Please.”

  She sinks. By the time they drag her out the second time, her lips are the blue of a bruise, and her breath is gone for good.

  PART ONE

  2015

  JULES ABBOTT

  There was something you wanted to tell me, wasn’t there? What was it you were trying to say? I feel like I drifted out of this conversation a long time ago. I stopped concentrating, I was thinking about something else, getting on with things, I wasn’t listening, and I lost the thread of it. Well, you’ve got my attention now. Only I can’t help thinking I’ve missed out on some of the more salient points.

  When they came to tell me, I was angry. Relieved first, because when two police officers turn up on your doorstep just as you’re looking for your train ticket, about to run out of the door to work, you fear the worst. I feared for the people I care about—my friends, my ex, the people I work with. But it wasn’t about them, they said, it was about you. So I was relieved, just for a moment, and then they told me what had happened, what you’d done, they told me that you’d been in the water and then I was furious. Furious and afraid.

  I was thinking about what I was going to say to you when I got there, how I knew you’d done this to spite me, to upset me, to frighten me, to disrupt my life. To get my attention, to drag me back to where you
wanted me. And there you go, Nel, you’ve succeeded: here I am in the place I never wanted to come back to, to look after your daughter, to sort out your bloody mess.

  Monday, 10 August

  JOSH WHITTAKER

  Something woke me up. I got out of bed to go to the toilet and I noticed Mum and Dad’s door was open, and when I looked I could see that Mum wasn’t in bed. Dad was snoring as usual. The clock radio said it was 4:08. I thought she must be downstairs. She has trouble sleeping. They both do now, but he takes pills so strong you could stand right by the bed and yell into his ear and he wouldn’t wake up.

  I went downstairs really quietly because usually what happens is she turns on the TV and watches those really boring adverts about machines that help you lose weight or clean the floor or chop vegetables in lots of different ways and then she falls asleep. But the TV wasn’t on and she wasn’t on the sofa, so I knew she must have gone out.

  She’s done it a few times—that I know of, at least. I can’t keep track of where everyone is all the time. The first time, she told me she’d just gone out for a walk to clear her head, but there was another morning when I woke up and she was gone and when I looked out of the window I could see that her car wasn’t parked out front where it usually is.

  I think she probably goes to walk by the river or to visit Katie’s grave. I do that sometimes, though not in the middle of the night. I’d be scared to go in the dark, plus it would make me feel weird because it’s what Katie did herself: she got up in the middle of the night and went to the river and didn’t come back. I understand why Mum does it, though: it’s the closest she can get to Katie now, other than maybe sitting in Katie’s room, which is something else I know she does sometimes. Katie’s room is next to mine and I can hear Mum crying.

  I sat down on the sofa to wait for her, but I must have fallen asleep, because when I heard the door go, it was light outside, and when I looked at the clock on the mantelpiece, it was quarter past seven. I heard Mum close the door behind her and then run straight up the stairs.

  I followed her up. I stood outside the bedroom and watched through the crack in the door. She was on her knees next to the bed, over on Dad’s side, and she was red in the face, like she’d been running. She was breathing hard and saying, “Alec, wake up. Wake up,” and she was shaking him. “Nel Abbott is dead,” she said. “They found her in the water. She jumped.”

  I don’t remember saying anything but I must have made a noise because she looked up at me and scrambled to her feet.

  “Oh, Josh,” she said, coming towards me, “oh, Josh.” There were tears running down her face and she hugged me hard. When I pulled away from her she was still crying, but she was smiling, too. “Oh, darling,” she said.

  Dad sat up in bed. He was rubbing his eyes. It takes him ages to wake up properly.

  “I don’t understand. When . . . do you mean last night? How do you know?”

  “I went out to get milk,” she said. “Everyone was talking about it . . . in the shop. They found her this morning.” She sat down on the bed and started crying again. Dad gave her a hug, but he was watching me and he had an odd look on his face.

  “Where did you go?” I asked her. “Where have you been?”

  “To the shops, Josh. I just said.”

  You’re lying, I wanted to say. You’ve been gone hours, you didn’t just go to get milk. I wanted to say that, but I couldn’t, because my parents were sitting on the bed looking at each other, and they looked happy.

  Tuesday, 11 August

  JULES

  I remember. On the backseat of the camper van, pillows piled up in the centre to mark the border between your territory and mine, driving to Beckford for the summer, you fidgety and excited—you couldn’t wait to get there—me green with car sickness, trying not to throw up.

  It wasn’t just that I remembered, I felt it. I felt that same sickness this afternoon, hunched up over the steering wheel like an old woman, driving fast and badly, swinging into the middle of the road on the corners, hitting the brake too sharply, overcorrecting at the sight of oncoming cars. I had that thing, that feeling I get when I see a white van barrelling towards me along one of those narrow lanes and I think, I’m going to swerve, I’m going to do it, I’m going to swing right into its path, not because I want to but because I have to. As though at the last moment I’ll lose all free will. It’s like the feeling you get when you stand on the edge of a cliff or on the edge of the train platform, and you feel yourself impelled by some invisible hand. And what if? What if I just took a step forward? What if I just turned the wheel?

  (You and me not so different, after all.)

  What struck me is how well I remembered. Too well. Why is it that I can recall so perfectly the things that happened to me when I was eight years old, and yet trying to remember whether or not I spoke to my colleagues about rescheduling a client assessment for next week is impossible? The things I want to remember I can’t, and the things I try so hard to forget just keep coming. The nearer I got to Beckford, the more undeniable it became, the past shooting out at me like sparrows from the hedgerow, startling and inescapable.

  All that lushness, that unbelievable green, the bright acid yellow of the gorse on the hill, it burned into my brain and brought with it a newsreel of memories: Dad carrying me, squealing and squirming with delight, into the water when I was four or five years old; you jumping from the rocks into the river, climbing higher and higher each time. Picnics on the sandy bank by the pool, the taste of sunscreen on my tongue; catching fat brown fish in the sluggish, muddy water downstream from the Mill. You coming home with blood streaming down your leg after you misjudged one of those jumps, biting down on a tea towel while Dad cleaned the cut because you weren’t going to cry. Not in front of me. Mum, wearing a light-blue sundress, barefoot in the kitchen making porridge for breakfast, the soles of her feet a dark rusty brown. Dad sitting on the riverbank, sketching. Later, when we were older, you in denim shorts with a bikini top under your T-shirt, sneaking out late to meet a boy. Not just any boy, the boy. Mum, thinner and frailer, sleeping in the armchair in the living room; Dad disappearing on long walks with the vicar’s plump, pale, sun-hatted wife. I remember a game of football. Hot sun on the water, all eyes on me; blinking back tears, blood on my thigh, laughter ringing in my ears. I can still hear it. And underneath it all, the sound of rushing water.

  I was so deep into that water that I didn’t realize I’d arrived. I was there, in the heart of the town; it came on me suddenly as though I’d closed my eyes and been spirited to the place, and before I knew it I was driving slowly through narrow lanes lined with SUVs, a blur of rose stone at the edge of my vision, towards the church, towards the old bridge, careful now. I kept my eyes on the tarmac in front of me and tried not to look at the trees, at the river. Tried not to see, but couldn’t help it.

  I pulled over to the side of the road and turned off the engine. I looked up. There were the trees and the stone steps, green with moss and treacherous after the rain. My entire body goosefleshed. I remembered this: freezing rain beating the tarmac, flashing blue lights vying with lightning to illuminate the river and the sky, clouds of breath in front of panicked faces, and a little boy, ghost-white and shaking, led up the steps to the road by a policewoman. She was clutching his hand and her eyes were wide and wild, her head twisting this way and that as she called out to someone. I can still feel what I felt that night, the terror and the fascination. I can still hear your words in my head: What would it be like? Can you imagine? To watch your mother die?

  I looked away. I started the car and pulled back onto the road, drove over the bridge where the lane twists around. I watched for the turning—the first on the left? No, not that one, the second one. There it was, that old brown hulk of stone, the Mill House. A prickle over my skin, cold and damp, my heart beating dangerously fast, I steered the car through the open gate and into the driveway.

 
There was a man standing there, looking at his phone. A policeman in uniform. He stepped smartly towards the car and I wound down the window.

  “I’m Jules,” I said. “Jules Abbott? I’m . . . her sister.”

  “Oh.” He looked embarrassed. “Yes. Right. Of course. Look”—he glanced back at the house—“there’s no one here at the moment. The girl . . . your niece . . . she’s out. I’m not exactly sure where . . .” He pulled the radio from his belt.

  I opened the door and stepped out. “All right if I go into the house?” I asked. I was looking up at the open window, what used to be your old room. I could see you there still, sitting on the windowsill, feet dangling out. Dizzying.

  The policeman looked uncertain. He turned away from me and said something quietly into his radio before turning back. “Yes, it’s all right. You can go in.”

  I was blind walking up the steps, but I heard the water and I smelled the earth, the earth in the shadow of the house, underneath the trees, in the places untouched by sunlight, the acrid stink of rotting leaves, and the smell transported me back in time.

  I pushed the front door open, half expecting to hear my mother’s voice calling out from the kitchen. Without thinking, I knew that I’d have to shift the door with my hip, at the point where it sticks against the floor. I stepped into the hallway and closed the door behind me, my eyes struggling to focus in the gloom; I shivered at the sudden cold.

  In the kitchen, an oak table was pushed up under the window. The same one? It looked similar, but it couldn’t be; the place had changed hands too many times between then and now. I could find out for sure if I crawled underneath to search for the marks you and I left there, but just the thought of that made my pulse quicken.

  I remember the way it got the sun in the morning, and how if you sat on the left-hand side, facing the Aga, you got a view of the old bridge, perfectly framed. So beautiful, everyone remarked upon the view, but they didn’t really see. They never opened the window and leaned out, they never looked down at the wheel, rotting where it stood, they never looked past the sunlight playing on the water’s surface, they never saw what the water really was, greenish-black and filled with living things and dying things.