The Girl on the Train Page 23

  Deep inside me, a rotten seed has been planted. When Tom tells me it’s OK, everything’s all right, she’s not going to bother us any longer, and then she does, I can’t help wondering whether he’s trying as hard as he can to get rid of her, or whether there’s some part of him, deep down, that likes the fact that she can’t let go.

  I go downstairs and scrabble around in the kitchen drawer for the card that Detective Riley left. I dial her number quickly, before I have time to change my mind.

  WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 14, 2013

  MORNING

  In bed, his hands on my hips, his breath hot against my neck, his skin slick with sweat against mine, he says, “We don’t do this enough anymore.”

  “I know.”

  “We need to make more time for ourselves.”

  “We do.”

  “I miss you,” he says. “I miss this. I want more of this.”

  I roll over and kiss him on the lips, my eyes tight shut, trying to suppress the guilt I feel for going to the police behind his back.

  “I think we should go somewhere,” he mumbles, “just the two of us. Get away for a bit.”

  And leave Evie with whom? I want to ask. Your parents, whom you don’t speak to? Or my mother, who is so frail, she can barely care for herself?

  I don’t say that, I don’t say anything, I just kiss him again, more deeply. His hand slips down to the back of my thigh and he grips it, hard.

  “What do you think? Where would you like to go? Mauritius? Bali?”

  I laugh.

  “I’m serious,” he says, pulling back from me, looking me in the eye. “We deserve it, Anna. You deserve it. It’s been a hard year, hasn’t it?”

  “But . . .”

  “But what?” He flashes his perfect smile at me. “We’ll figure something out with Evie, don’t worry.”

  “Tom, the money.”

  “We’ll be OK.”

  “But . . .” I don’t want to say this, but I have to. “We don’t have enough money to even consider moving house, but we do have enough money for a holiday in Mauritius or Bali?”

  He puffs out his cheeks, then exhales slowly, rolling away from me. I shouldn’t have said it. The baby monitor crackles into life: Evie’s waking up.

  “I’ll get her,” he says, and gets up and leaves the room.

  • • •

  At breakfast, Evie is doing her thing. It’s a game to her now, refusing food, shaking her head, chin up, lips firmly closed, her little fists pushing at the bowl in front of her. Tom’s patience wears thin quickly.

  “I don’t have time for this,” he says to me. “You’ll have to do it.” He gets to his feet, holding out the spoon for me to take, the expression on his face pained.

  I take a deep breath.

  It’s OK, he’s tired, he has a lot of work on, he’s pissed off because I didn’t enter into his holiday fantasy this morning.

  But it isn’t OK, because I’m tired, too, and I’d like to have a conversation about money and our situation here that doesn’t end with him just walking out of the room. Of course, I don’t say that. Instead, I break my promise to myself and I go ahead and mention Rachel.

  “She’s been hanging around again,” I say, “so whatever you said to her the other day didn’t do the trick.”

  He gives me a sharp look. “What do you mean, hanging around?”

  “She was here last night, standing in the street right opposite the house.”

  “Was she with someone?”

  “No. She was alone. Why d’you ask that?”

  “Fuck’s sake,” he says, and his face darkens the way it does when he’s really angry. “I told her to stay away. Why didn’t you say anything last night?”

  “I didn’t want to upset you,” I say softly, already regretting bringing this up. “I didn’t want to worry you.”

  “Jesus!” he says, and he dumps his coffee cup loudly in the sink. The noise gives Evie a fright, and she starts to cry. This doesn’t help. “I don’t know what to tell you, I honestly don’t. When I spoke to her, she was fine. She listened to what I was saying and promised not to come around here any longer. She looked fine. She looked healthy, actually, back to normal—”

  “She looked fine?” I ask him, and before he turns his back on me I can see in his face that he knows he’s been caught. “I thought you said you spoke to her on the phone?”

  He takes a deep breath, sighs heavily, then turns back to me, his face a blank. “Yeah, well, that’s what I told you, darling, because I knew you’d get upset if I saw her. So I hold my hands up—I lied. Anything for an easy life.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  He smiles at me, shaking his head as he steps towards me, his hands still raised in supplication. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. She wanted to chat in person and I thought it might be best. I’m sorry, OK? We just talked. We met in a crappy coffee shop in Ashbury and talked for twenty minutes—half an hour, tops. OK?”

  He puts his arms around me and pulls me towards his chest. I try to resist him, but he’s stronger than me, and anyway he smells great and I don’t want a fight. I want us to be on the same side. “I’m sorry,” he mumbles again, into my hair.

  “It’s all right,” I say.

  I let him get away with it, because I’m dealing with this now. I spoke to Detective Riley yesterday evening, and I knew the moment we started talking that I’d done the right thing by calling her, because when I told her that I’d seen Rachel leaving Scott Hipwell’s house “on several occasions” (a slight exaggeration), she seemed very interested. She wanted to know dates and times (I could furnish her with two; I was vague about the other incidents), if they’d had a relationship prior to Megan Hipwell’s disappearance, whether I thought they were in a sexual relationship now. I have to say the thought hadn’t really crossed my mind—I can’t imagine him going from Megan to Rachel. In any case, his wife’s barely cold in the ground.

  I went over the stuff about Evie as well—the attempted abduction—just in case she’d forgotten.

  “She’s very unstable,” I said. “You might think I’m overreacting, but I can’t take any risks where my family is concerned.”

  “Not at all,” she said. “Thank you very much for contacting me. If you see anything else that you consider suspicious, let me know.”

  I’ve no idea what they’ll do about her—perhaps just warn her off? It’ll help, in any case, if we do start looking into things like restraining orders. Hopefully, for Tom’s sake, it won’t come to that.

  After Tom leaves for work, I take Evie to the park, we play on the swings and the little wooden rocking horses, and when I put her back into her buggy she falls asleep almost immediately, which is my cue to go shopping. We cut through the back streets towards the big Sainsbury’s. It’s a bit of a roundabout way of getting there, but it’s quiet, with very little traffic, and in any case we get to pass number thirty-four Cranham Road.

  It gives me a little frisson even now, walking past that house—butterflies suddenly swarm in my stomach, and a smile comes to my lips and colour to my cheeks. I remember hurrying up the front steps, hoping none of the neighbours would see me letting myself in, getting myself ready in the bathroom, putting on perfume, the kind of underwear you put on just to be taken off. Then I’d get a text message and he’d be at the door, and we’d have an hour or two in the bedroom upstairs.

  He’d tell Rachel he was with a client, or meeting friends for a beer. “Aren’t you worried she’ll check up on you?” I’d ask him, and he’d shake his head, dismissing the idea. “I’m a good liar,” he told me once with a grin. Once, he said, “Even if she did check, the thing with Rachel is, she won’t remember what happened tomorrow anyway.” That’s when I started to realize just how bad things were for him.

  It wipes the smile off my face, though, thinking about those conversat
ions. Thinking about Tom laughing conspiratorially while he traced his fingers lower over my belly, smiling up at me, saying, “I’m a good liar.” He is a good liar, a natural. I’ve seen him doing it: convincing check-in staff that we were honeymooners, for example, or talking his way out of extra hours at work by claiming a family emergency. Everyone does it, of course they do, only when Tom does it, you believe him.

  I think about breakfast this morning—but the point is that I caught him in the lie, and he admitted it straightaway. I don’t have anything to worry about. He isn’t seeing Rachel behind my back! The idea is ridiculous. She might have been attractive once—she was quite striking when he met her, I’ve seen pictures: all huge dark eyes and generous curves—but now she’s just run to fat. And in any case, he would never go back to her, not after everything she did to him, to us—all the harassment, all those late-night phone calls, hang-ups, text messages.

  I’m standing in the tinned goods aisle, Evie still mercifully sleeping in the buggy, and I start thinking about those phone calls, and about the time—or was it times?—when I woke up and the bathroom light was on. I could hear his voice, low and gentle, behind the closed door. He was calming her down, I know he was. He told me that sometimes she’d be so angry, she’d threaten to come round to the house, go to his work, throw herself in front of a train. He might be a very good liar, but I know when he’s telling the truth. He doesn’t fool me.

  EVENING

  Only, thinking about it, he did fool me, didn’t he? When he told me that he’d spoken to Rachel on the phone, that she sounded fine, better, happy almost, I didn’t doubt him for a moment. And when he came home on Monday night and I asked him about his day and he talked to me about a really tiresome meeting that morning, I listened sympathetically, not once suspecting that there was no meeting, that all the while he was in a coffee shop in Ashbury with his ex-wife.

  This is what I’m thinking about while I’m unloading the dishwasher, with great care and precision, because Evie is napping and the clatter of cutlery against crockery might wake her up. He does fool me. I know he’s not always 100 percent honest about everything. I think about that story about his parents—how he invited them to the wedding but they refused to come because they were so angry with him for leaving Rachel. I always thought that was odd, because on the two occasions when I’ve spoken to his mum she sounded so pleased to be talking to me. She was kind, interested in me, in Evie.

  “I do hope we’ll be able to see her soon,” she said, but when I told Tom about it he dismissed it.

  “She’s trying to get me to invite them round,” he said, “just so she can refuse. Power games.” She didn’t sound like a woman playing power games to me, but I didn’t press the point. The workings of other people’s families are always so impenetrable. He’ll have his reasons for keeping them at arm’s length, I know he will, and they’ll be centred on protecting me and Evie.

  So why am I wondering now whether that was true? It’s this house, this situation, all the things that have been going on here—they’re making me doubt myself, doubt us. If I’m not careful they’ll end up making me crazy, and I’ll end up like her. Like Rachel.

  I’m just sitting here, waiting to take the sheets out of the tumble dryer. I think about turning on the television and seeing if there’s an episode of Friends on that I haven’t watched three hundred times, I think about doing my yoga stretches, and I think about the novel on my bedside table, which I’ve read twelve pages of in the past two weeks. I think about Tom’s laptop, which is on the coffee table in the living room.

  And then I do the things I never thought I would. I grab the bottle of red that we opened last night with dinner and I pour myself a glass. Then I fetch his laptop, power it up and start trying to guess the password.

  I’m doing the things she did: drinking alone and snooping on him. The things she did and he hated. But recently—as recently as this morning—things have shifted. If he’s going to lie, then I’m going to check up on him. That’s a fair deal, isn’t it? I feel I’m owed a bit of fairness. So I try to crack the password. I try names in different combinations: mine and his, his and Evie’s, mine and Evie’s, all three of us together, forwards and backwards. Our birthdays, in various combinations. Anniversaries: the first time we saw each other, the first time we had sex. Number thirty-four, for Cranham Road; number twenty-three, this house. I try to think outside the box—most men use football teams as passwords, I think, but Tom isn’t into football; he quite likes cricket, so I try Boycott and Botham and Ashes. I don’t know names of any of the recent ones. I drain my glass and pour another half. I’m actually rather enjoying myself, trying to solve the puzzle. I think of bands he likes, films he enjoys, actresses he fancies. I type password; I type 1234.

  There’s an awful screeching outside as the London train stops at the signal, like nails on a chalkboard. I clench my teeth and take another long swig of wine, and as I do, I notice the time—Jesus, it’s almost seven and Evie’s still sleeping and he’ll be home in a minute, and I’m literally thinking that he’ll be home in a minute when I hear the rattle of the key in the door and my heart stops.

  I snap the laptop shut and jump to my feet, knocking my chair over with a clatter. Evie wakes and starts to cry. I put the computer back on the table before he gets into the room, but he knows something’s up and he just stares at me and says, “What’s going on?” I tell him, “Nothing, nothing, I knocked over a chair by mistake.” He picks Evie up out of her pram to give her a cuddle, and I catch sight of myself in the hallway mirror, my face pale and my lips stained dark red with wine.

  RACHEL

  • • •

  THURSDAY, AUGUST 15, 2013

  MORNING

  Cathy has got me a job interview. A friend of hers has set up her own public relations firm and she needs an assistant. It’s basically a glorified secretarial job and it pays next to nothing, but I don’t care. This woman is prepared to see me without references—Cathy’s told her some story about my having a breakdown but being fully recovered now. The interview’s tomorrow afternoon at this woman’s home—she runs her business from one of those office sheds in the back garden—which just happens to be in Witney. So I was supposed to be spending the day polishing up my CV and my interviewing skills. I was—only Scott phoned me.

  “I was hoping we could talk,” he said.

  “We don’t need . . . I mean, you don’t need to say anything. It was . . . We both know it was a mistake.”

  “I know,” he said, and he sounded so sad, not like the angry Scott of my nightmares, more the broken one that sat on my bed and told me about his dead child. “But I really want to talk to you.”

  “Of course,” I said. “Of course we can talk.”

  “In person?”

  “Oh,” I said. The last thing I wanted was to have to go back to that house. “I’m sorry, I can’t today.”

  “Please, Rachel? It’s important.” He sounded desperate and, despite myself, I felt bad for him. I was trying to think of an excuse when he said it again. “Please?” So I said yes, and I regretted it the second the word came out of my mouth.

  There’s a story about Megan’s child—her first dead child—in the newspapers. Well, it’s about the child’s father, actually. They tracked him down. His name’s Craig McKenzie, and he died of a heroin overdose in Spain four years ago. So that rules him out. It never sounded to me like a likely motive in any case—if someone wanted to punish her for what she’d done back then, they’d have done it years ago.

  So who does that leave? It leaves the usual suspects: the husband, the lover. Scott, Kamal. Or some random man who snatched her from the street—a serial killer just starting out? Will she be the first of a series, a Wilma McCann, a Pauline Reade? And who said, after all, that the killer had to be a man? She was a small woman, Megan Hipwell. Tiny, birdlike. It wouldn’t take much force to take her down.

  AFTER
NOON

  The first thing I notice when he opens the door is the smell. Sweat and beer, rank and sour, and under that something else, something worse. Something rotting. He’s wearing tracksuit bottoms and a stained grey T-shirt, his hair is greasy, his skin slick, as though with fever.

  “Are you all right?” I ask him, and he grins at me. He’s been drinking.

  “I’m fine, come in, come in.” I don’t want to, but I do.

  The curtains on the street side of the house are closed, and the living room is cast in a reddish hue that seems to suit the heat and the smell.

  Scott wanders into the kitchen, opens the fridge and takes a beer out.

  “Come and sit down,” he says. “Have a drink.” The grin on his face is fixed, joyless, grim. There’s something unkind about the set of his face. The contempt that I saw on Saturday morning, after we slept together, it’s still there.

  “I can’t stay long,” I tell him. “I have a job interview tomorrow, I need to prepare.”

  “Really?” He raises his eyebrows. He sits down and kicks a chair out towards me. “Sit down and have a drink,” he says, an order, not an invitation. I sit down opposite him and he pushes the beer bottle towards me. I pick it up and take a sip. Outside, I can hear shrieking—children playing in a back garden somewhere—and beyond that, the faint and familiar rumble of the train.

  “They got the DNA results yesterday,” Scott says to me. “Detective Riley came to see me last night.” He waits for me to say something, but I’m frightened of saying the wrong thing, so I stay silent. “It’s not mine. It wasn’t mine. The funny thing is, it wasn’t Kamal’s, either.” He laughs. “So she had someone else on the go. Can you believe it?” He’s smiling that horrible smile. “You didn’t know anything about that, did you? About another bloke? She didn’t confide in you about another man, did she?” The smile is slipping from his face and I’m getting a bad feeling about this, a very bad feeling. I get to my feet and take a step towards the door, but he’s there in front of me, his hands gripping my arms, and he pushes me back into the chair.