Girl on the Train Read online

  garden?

  I did as Gaskill said, I bought a ham and cheese sandwich and a bottle of water from a corner shop and took it to Witney’s only park, a rather sorry little patch of land surrounded by 1930s houses and given over almost entirely to an asphalted playground. I sat on a bench at the edge of this space, watching mothers and childminders scolding their charges for eating sand out of the pit. I used to dream of this, a few years back. I dreamed of coming here—not to eat ham and cheese sandwiches in between police interviews, obviously. I dreamed of coming here with my own baby. I thought about the buggy I would buy, all the time I would spend in Trotters and at the Early Learning Centre sizing up adorable outfits and educational toys. I thought about how I would sit here, bouncing my own bundle of joy on my lap.

  It didn’t happen. No doctor has been able to explain to me why I can’t get pregnant. I’m young enough, fit enough, I wasn’t drinking heavily when we were trying. My husband’s sperm was active and plentiful. It just didn’t happen. I didn’t suffer the agony of miscarriage, I just didn’t get pregnant. We did one round of IVF, which was all we could afford. It was, as everyone had warned us it would be, unpleasant and unsuccessful. Nobody warned me it would break us. But it did. Or rather, it broke me, and then I broke us.

  The thing about being barren is that you’re not allowed to get away from it. Not when you’re in your thirties. My friends were having children, friends of friends were having children, pregnancy and birth and first birthday parties were everywhere. I was asked about it all the time. My mother, our friends, colleagues at work. When was it going to be my turn? At some point our childlessness became an acceptable topic of Sunday-lunch conversation, not just between Tom and me, but more generally. What we were trying, what we should be doing, do you really think you should be having a second glass of wine? I was still young, there was still plenty of time, but failure cloaked me like a mantle, it overwhelmed me, dragged me under, and I gave up hope. At the time, I resented the fact that it was always seen as my fault, that I was the one letting the side down. But as the speed with which he managed to impregnate Anna demonstrates, there was never any problem with Tom’s virility. I was wrong to suggest that we should share the blame; it was all down to me.

  Lara, my best friend since university, had two children in two years: a boy first and then a girl. I didn’t like them. I didn’t want to hear anything about them. I didn’t want to be near them. Lara stopped speaking to me after a while. There was a girl at work who told me—casually, as though she were talking about an appendectomy or a wisdom-tooth extraction—that she’d recently had an abortion, a medical one, and it was so much less traumatic than the surgical one she’d had when she was at university. I couldn’t speak to her after that, I could barely look at her. Things became awkward in the office; people noticed.

  Tom didn’t feel the way I did. It wasn’t his failure, for starters, and in any case, he didn’t need a child like I did. He wanted to be a dad, he really did—I’m sure he daydreamed about kicking a football around in the garden with his son, or carrying his daughter on his shoulders in the park. But he thought our lives could be great without children, too. “We’re happy,” he used to say to me. “Why can’t we just go on being happy?” He became frustrated with me. He never understood that it’s possible to miss what you’ve never had, to mourn for it.

  I felt isolated in my misery. I became lonely, so I drank a bit, and then a bit more, and then I became lonelier, because no one likes being around a drunk. I lost and I drank and I drank and I lost. I liked my job, but I didn’t have a glittering career, and even if I had, let’s be honest: women are still only really valued for two things—their looks and their role as mothers. I’m not beautiful, and I can’t have kids, so what does that make me? Worthless.

  I can’t blame all this for my drinking—I can’t blame my parents or my childhood, an abusive uncle or some terrible tragedy. It’s my fault. I was a drinker anyway—I’ve always liked to drink. But I did become sadder, and sadness gets boring after a while, for the sad person and for everyone around them. And then I went from being a drinker to being a drunk, and there’s nothing more boring than that.

  I’m better now, about the children thing; I’ve got better since I’ve been on my own. I’ve had to. I’ve read books and articles, I’ve realized that I must come to terms with it. There are strategies, there is hope. If I straightened myself out and sobered up, there’s a possibility that I could adopt. And I’m not thirty-four yet—it isn’t over. I am better than I was a few years ago, when I used to abandon my trolley and leave the supermarket if the place was packed with mums and kids; I wouldn’t have been able to come to a park like this, to sit near the playground and watch chubby toddlers rolling down the slide. There were times, at my lowest, when the hunger was at its worst, when I thought I was going to lose my mind.

  Maybe I did, for a while. The day they asked me about at the police station, I might have been mad then. Something Tom once said tipped me over, sent me sliding. Something he wrote, rather: I read it on Facebook that morning. It wasn’t a shock—I knew she was having a baby, he’d told me, and I’d seen her, seen that pink blind in the nursery window. So I knew what was coming. But I thought of the baby as her baby. Until the day I saw the picture of him, holding his newborn girl, looking down at her and smiling, and beneath he’d written: So this is what all the fuss is about! Never knew love like this! Happiest day of my life! I thought about him writing that—knowing that I would see it, that I would read those words and they would kill me, and writing it anyway. He didn’t care. Parents don’t care about anything but their children. They are the centre of the universe; they are all that really counts. Nobody else is important, no one else’s suffering or joy matters, none of it is real.

  I was angry. I was distraught. Maybe I was vengeful. Maybe I thought I’d show them that my distress was real. I don’t know. I did a stupid thing.

  I went back to the police station after a couple of hours. I asked if I could speak to Gaskill alone, but he said that he wanted Riley to be present. I liked him a little less after that.

  “I didn’t break into their home,” I said. “I did go there, I wanted to speak to Tom. No one answered the doorbell . . .”

  “So how did you get in?” Riley asked me.

  “The door was open.”

  “The front door was open?”

  I sighed. “No, of course not. The sliding door at the back, the one leading into the garden.”

  “And how did you get into the back garden?”

  “I went over the fence, I knew the way in—”

  “So you climbed over the fence to gain access to your ex-husband’s house?”

  “Yes. We used to . . . There was always a spare key at the back. We had a place we hid it, in case one of us lost our keys or forgot them or something. But I wasn’t breaking in—I didn’t. I just wanted to talk to Tom. I thought maybe . . . the bell wasn’t working or something.”

  “This was the middle of the day, during the week, wasn’t it? Why did you think your husband would be at home? Had you called to find out?” Riley asked.

  “Jesus! Will you just let me speak?” I shouted, and she shook her head and gave me that smile again, as if she knew me, as if she could read me. “I went over the fence,” I said, trying to control the volume of my voice, “and knocked on the glass doors, which were partly open. There was no answer. I stuck my head inside and called Tom’s name. Again, no answer, but I could hear a baby crying. I went inside and saw that Anna—”

  “Mrs. Watson?”

  “Yes. Mrs. Watson was on the sofa, sleeping. The baby was in the carry-cot and was crying—screaming, actually, red in the face, she’d obviously been crying for a while.” As I said those words it struck me that I should have told them that I could hear the baby crying from the street and that’s why I went round to the back of the house. That would have made me sound less like a maniac.

  “So the baby’s screaming and her
mother’s right there, and she doesn’t wake?” Riley asks me.

  “Yes.” Her elbows are on the table, her hands in front of her mouth so I can’t read her expression fully, but I know she thinks I’m lying. “I picked her up to comfort her. That’s all. I picked her up to quieten her.”

  “That’s not all, though, is it, because when Anna woke up you weren’t there, were you? You were down by the fence, by the train tracks.”

  “She didn’t stop crying right away,” I said. “I was bouncing her up and down and she was still grizzling, so I walked outside with her.”

  “Down to the train tracks?”

  “Into the garden.”

  “Did you intend to harm the Watsons’ child?”

  I leaped to my feet then. Melodramatic, I know, but I wanted to make them see—make Gaskill see—what an outrageous suggestion that was. “I don’t have to listen to this! I came here to tell you about the man! I came here to help you! And now . . . what exactly are you accusing me of? What are you accusing me of?”

  Gaskill remained impassive, unimpressed. He motioned at me to sit down again. “Ms. Watson, the other . . . er, Mrs. Watson—Anna—mentioned you to us during the course of our enquiries about Megan Hipwell. She said that you had behaved erratically, in an unstable manner, in the past. She mentioned this incident with the child. She said that you have harassed both her and her husband, that you continue to call the house repeatedly.” He looked down at his notes for a moment. “Almost nightly, in fact. That you refuse to accept that your marriage is over—”

  “That is simply not true!” I insisted, and it wasn’t—yes, I called Tom from time to time, but not every night, it was a total exaggeration. But I was getting the feeling that Gaskill wasn’t on my side after all, and I was starting to feel tearful again.

  “Why haven’t you changed your name?” Riley asked me.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You still use your husband’s name. Why is that? If a man left me for another woman, I think I’d want to get rid of that name. I certainly wouldn’t want to share my name with my replacement . . .”

  “Well, maybe I’m not that petty.” I am that petty. I hate that she’s Anna Watson.

  “Right. And the ring—the one on a chain around your neck. Is that your wedding band?”

  “No,” I lied. “It’s a . . . it was my grandmother’s.”

  “Is that right? OK. Well, I have to say that to me, your behaviour suggests that—as Mrs. Watson has implied—you are unwilling to move on, that you refuse to accept that your ex has a new family.”

  “I don’t see—”

  “What this has to do with Megan Hipwell?” Riley finished my sentence. “Well. The night Megan went missing, we have reports that you—an unstable woman who had been drinking heavily—were seen on the street where she lives. Bearing in mind that there are some physical similarities between Megan and Mrs. Watson—”

  “They don’t look anything like each other!” I was outraged at the suggestion. Jess is nothing like Anna. Megan is nothing like Anna.

  “They’re both blond, slim, petite, pale-skinned . . .”

  “So I attacked Megan Hipwell thinking she was Anna? That’s the most stupid thing I’ve ever heard,” I said. But that lump on my head was throbbing again, and everything from Saturday night was still deepest black.

  “Did you know that Anna Watson knows Megan Hipwell?” Gaskill asked me, and I felt my jaw drop.

  “I . . . what? No. No, they don’t know each other.”

  Riley smiled for a moment, then straightened her face. “Yes they do. Megan did some childminding for the Watsons . . .” She glanced down at her notes. “Back in August and September last year.”

  I don’t know what to say. I can’t imagine it: Megan in my home, with her, with her baby.

  “The cut on your lip, is that from when you got knocked down the other day?” Gaskill asked me.

  “Yes. I bit it when I fell, I think.”

  “Where was it, this accident?”

  “It was in London, Theobalds Road. Near Holborn.”

  “And what were you doing there?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Why were you in central London?”

  I shrugged. “I already told you,” I said coldly. “My flatmate doesn’t know that I’ve lost my job. So I go into London, as usual, and I go to libraries, to job hunt, to work on my CV.”

  Riley shook her head, in disbelief perhaps, or wonder. How does anyone get to that point?

  I pushed my chair back, readying myself to leave. I’d had enough of being talked down to, being made to look like a fool, like a madwoman. Time to play the trump card. “I don’t really know why we’re talking about this,” I said. “I would have thought that you would have better things to do, like investigating Megan Hipwell’s disappearance, for example. I take it you’ve spoken to her lover?” Neither of them said anything, they just stared at me. They weren’t expecting that. They didn’t know about him. “Perhaps you didn’t know. Megan Hipwell was having an affair,” I said, and I started to walk to the door. Gaskill stopped me; he moved quietly and surprisingly quickly, and before I could put my hand on the door handle he was standing in front of me.

  “I thought you didn’t know Megan Hipwell,” he said.

  “I don’t,” I said, trying to get past him.

  “Sit down,” he said, blocking my path.

  I told them then about what I’d seen from the train, about how I often saw Megan sitting out on her terrace, sunbathing in the evenings or having coffee in the mornings. I told them about how last week I saw her with someone who clearly wasn’t her husband, how I’d seen them kissing on the lawn.

  “When was this?” Gaskill snapped. He seemed annoyed with me, perhaps because I should have told them this straightaway, instead of wasting all day talking about myself.

  “Friday. It was Friday morning.”

  “So the day before she went missing, you saw her with another man?” Riley asked me with a sigh of exasperation. She closed the file in front of her. Gaskill leaned back in his seat, studying my face. She clearly thought I was making it up; he wasn’t so sure.

  “Can you describe him?” Gaskill asked.

  “Tall, dark—”

  “Handsome?” Riley interrupted.

  I puffed my cheeks out. “Taller than Scott Hipwell. I know, because I’ve seen them together—Jess and—sorry, Megan and Scott Hipwell—and this man was different. Slighter, thinner, darker-skinned. Possibly an Asian man,” I said.

  “You could determine his ethnic group from the train?” Riley said. “Impressive. Who is Jess, by the way?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You mentioned Jess a moment ago.”

  I could feel my face flushing again. I shook my head, “No, I didn’t,” I said.

  Gaskill got to his feet and held out his hand for me to shake. “I think that’s enough.” I shook his hand, ignored Riley and turned to go. “Don’t go anywhere near Blenheim Road, Ms. Watson,” Gaskill said. “Don’t contact your ex-husband unless it’s important, and don’t go anywhere near Anna Watson or her child.”

  On the train on the way home, as I dissect all the ways that today went wrong, I’m surprised by the fact that I don’t feel as awful as I might do. Thinking about it, I know why that is: I didn’t have a drink last night, and I have no desire to have one now. I am interested, for the first time in ages, in something other than my own misery. I have purpose. Or at least, I have a distraction.

  THURSDAY, JULY 18, 2013

  MORNING

  I bought three newspapers before getting onto the train this morning: Megan has been missing for four days and five nights, and the story is getting plenty of coverage. The Daily Mail, predictably, has managed to find pictures of Megan in her bikini, but they’ve also done the most detailed profile I’ve seen of her so far.

  Born Megan Mills in Rochester in 1983, she moved with her parents to King’s Lynn in Norfolk when she was ten. She was a
bright child, very outgoing, a talented artist and singer. A quote from a school friend says she was “a good laugh, very pretty and quite wild.” Her wildness seems to have been exacerbated by the death of her brother, Ben, to whom she was very close. He was killed in a motorcycle accident when he was nineteen and she fifteen. She ran away from home three days after his funeral. She was arrested twice—once for theft and once for soliciting. Her relationship with her parents, the Mail informs me, broke down completely. Both her parents died a few years ago, without ever being reconciled with their daughter. (Reading this, I feel desperately sad for Megan. I realize that perhaps, after all, she isn’t so different from me. She’s isolated and lonely, too.)

  When she was sixteen, she moved in with a boyfriend who had a house near the village of Holkham in north Norfolk. The school friend says, “He was an older guy, a musician or something. He was into drugs. We didn’t see Megan much after they got together.” The boyfriend’s name is not given, so presumably they haven’t found him. He might not even exist. The school friend might be making this stuff up just to get her name into the papers.

  They skip forward several years after that: suddenly Megan is twenty-four, living in London, working as a waitress in a North London restaurant. There she meets Scott Hipwell, an independent IT contractor who is friendly with the restaurant manager, and the two of them hit it off. After an “intense courtship,” Megan and Scott marry, when she is twenty-six and he is thirty.

  There are a few other quotes, including one from Tara Epstein, the friend with whom Megan was supposed to stay on the night she disappeared. She says that Megan is “a lovely, carefree girl” and that she seemed “very happy.” “Scott would not have hurt her,” Tara says. “He loves her very much.” There isn’t a thing Tara says that isn’t a cliché. The quote that interests me is from one of the artists who exhibited his work in the gallery Megan used to manage, one Rajesh Gujral, who says that Megan is “a wonderful woman, sharp, funny and beautiful, an intensely private person with a warm heart.” Sounds to me like Rajesh has got a crush. The only other quote comes from a man called David Clark, “a former colleague” of Scott’s, who says, “Megs and Scott are a great couple. They’re very happy together, very much in love.”

  There are some news pieces about the investigation, too, but the statements from the police amount to less than nothing: they have spoken to “a number of witnesses,” they are “pursuing several lines of enquiry.” The only interesting comment comes from Detective Inspector Gaskill, who confirms that two men are helping the police with their enquiries. I’m pretty sure that means they’re both suspects. One will be Scott. Could the other be B? Could B be Rajesh?

  I’ve been so engrossed in the newspapers that I haven’t been paying my usual attention to the journey; it seems as though I’ve only just sat down when the train grinds to its customary halt opposite the red signal. There are people in Scott’s garden—there are two uniformed police just outside the back door. My head swims. Have they found something? Have they found her? Is there a body buried in the garden or shoved under the floorboards? I can’t stop thinking of the clothes on the side of the railway line, which is stupid, because I saw those there before Megan went missing. And in any case, if harm has been done to her, it wasn’t by Scott, it can’t have been. He’s madly in love with her, everyone says so. The light is bad today, the weather’s turned, the sky leaden, threatening. I can’t see into the house, I can’t see what’s going on. I feel quite desperate. I cannot stand being on the outside—for better or worse, I am a part of this now. I need to know what’s going on.

  At least I have a plan. First, I need to find out if there’s any way that I can be made to remember what happened on Saturday night. When I get to the library, I plan to do some research and find out whether hypnotherapy could make me remember, whether it is in fact possible to recover that lost time. Second—and I believe this is important, because I don’t think the police believed me when I told them about Megan’s lover—I need to get in touch with Scott Hipwell. I need to tell him. He deserves to know.

  EVENING

  The train is full of rain-soaked people, steam rising off their clothes and condensing on the windows. The fug of body odour, perfume and laundry soap hangs oppressively above bowed, damp heads. The clouds that menaced this morning did so all day, growing heavier and blacker until they burst, monsoon-like, this evening, just as office workers stepped outside and the rush hour began in earnest, leaving the roads gridlocked and tube station entrances choked with people opening and closing umbrellas.

  I don’t have an umbrella and am soaked through; I feel as though someone has thrown a bucket of water over me. My cotton trousers cling to my thighs and my faded blue shirt has become embarrassingly transparent. I ran all the way from the library to the tube station with my handbag clutched against my chest to hide what I could. For some reason I found this funny—there is something ridiculous about being caught in the rain—and I was laughing so hard by the time I got to the top of Gray’s Inn Road, I could barely breathe. I can’t remember the last time I laughed like that.

  I’m not laughing now. As soon as I got myself a seat, I checked the latest on Megan’s case on my phone, and it’s the news I’ve been dreading. “A thirty-four-year-old man is being questioned under caution at Witney police station regarding the disappearance of Megan Hipwell, missing from her home since Saturday evening.” That’s Scott, I’m sure of it. I can only hope that he read my email before they picked him up, because questioning under caution is serious—it means they think he did it. Although, of course, it is yet to be defined. It may not have happened at all. Megan might be fine. Every now and again it does strike me that she’s alive and well and sitting on a hotel balcony with a view of the sea, her feet up on the railings, a cold drink at her elbow.

  The thought of her there both thrills and disappoints me, and then I feel sick for feeling disappointed. I don’t wish her ill, no matter how angry I was with her for cheating on Scott, for shattering my illusions about my perfect couple. No, it’s because I feel like I’m part of this mystery, I’m connected. I am no longer just a girl on the train, going back and forth without point or purpose. I want Megan to turn up safe and sound. I do. Just not quite yet.

  I sent Scott an email this morning. His address was easy to find—I Googled him and found www.shipwellconsulting.co.uk, the site where he advertises “a range of consultancy, cloud- and web-based services for business and nonprofit organizations.” I knew it was him, because his business address is also his home address.

  I sent a short message to the contact address given on the site:

  Dear Scott,