Girl on the Train Read online

  have been a completely different place, though, a different station in a different town. I was a different person than the one who went there on Saturday night. Today I was stiff and sober, hyperaware of the noise and the light and fear of discovery.

  I was trespassing. That’s what it felt like this morning, because it’s their territory now, it’s Tom and Anna’s and Scott and Megan’s. I’m the outsider, I don’t belong there, and yet everything is so familiar to me. Down the concrete steps at the station, right past the newspaper kiosk into Roseberry Avenue, half a block to the end of the T-junction, to the right the archway leading to a dank pedestrian underpass beneath the track, and to the left Blenheim Road, narrow and tree-lined, flanked with its handsome Victorian terraces. It feels like coming home—not just to any home, but a childhood home, a place left behind a lifetime ago; it’s the familiarity of walking up stairs and knowing exactly which one is going to creak.

  The familiarity isn’t just in my head, it’s in my bones; it’s muscle memory. This morning, as I walked past the blackened tunnel mouth, the entrance to the underpass, my pace quickened. I didn’t have to think about it because I always walked a little faster on that section. Every night, coming home, especially in winter, I used to pick up the pace, glancing quickly to the right, just to make sure. There was never anyone there—not on any of those nights and not today—and yet I stopped dead as I looked into the darkness this morning, because I could suddenly see myself. I could see myself a few metres in, slumped against the wall, my head in my hands, and both head and hands smeared with blood.

  My heart thudding in my chest, I stood there, morning commuters stepping around me as they continued on their way to the station, one or two turning to look at me as they passed, as I stood stock-still. I didn’t know—don’t know—if it was real. Why would I have gone into the underpass? What reason would I have had to go down there, where it’s dark and damp and stinks of piss?

  I turned around and headed back to the station. I didn’t want to be there any longer; I didn’t want to go to Scott and Megan’s front door. I wanted to get away from there. Something bad happened there, I know it did.

  I paid for my ticket and walked quickly up the station steps to the other side of the platform, and as I did it came to me again in a flash: not the underpass this time, but the steps; stumbling on the steps and a man taking my arm, helping me up. The man from the train, with the reddish hair. I could see him, a vague picture but no dialogue. I could remember laughing—at myself, or at something he said. He was nice to me, I’m sure of it. Almost sure. Something bad happened, but I don’t think it had anything to do with him.

  I got on the train and went into London. I went to the library and sat at a computer terminal, looking for stories about Megan. There was a short piece on the Telegraph website that said that “a man in his thirties is helping police with their inquiries.” Scott, presumably. I can’t believe he would have hurt her. I know that he wouldn’t. I’ve seen them together; I know what they’re like together. They gave a Crimestoppers number, too, which you can ring if you have information. I’m going to call it on the way home, from a pay phone. I’m going to tell them about B, about what I saw.

  My phone rings just as we’re getting into Ashbury. It’s Cathy again. Poor girl, she really is worried about me.

  “Rach? Are you on the train? Are you on your way home?” She sounds anxious.

  “Yes, I’m on my way,” I tell her. “I’ll be fifteen minutes.”

  “The police are here, Rachel,” she says, and my entire body goes cold. “They want to talk to you.”

  WEDNESDAY, JULY 17, 2013

  MORNING

  Megan is still missing, and I have lied—repeatedly—to the police.

  I was in a panic by the time I got back to the flat last night. I tried to convince myself that they’d come to see me about my accident with the taxi, but that didn’t make sense. I’d spoken to police at the scene—it was clearly my fault. It had to be something to do with Saturday night. I must have done something. I must have committed some terrible act and blacked it out.

  I know it sounds unlikely. What could I have done? Gone to Blenheim Road, attacked Megan Hipwell, disposed of her body somewhere and then forgotten all about it? It sounds ridiculous. It is ridiculous. But I know something happened on Saturday. I knew it when I looked into that dark tunnel under the railway line, my blood turning to ice water in my veins.

  Blackouts happen, and it isn’t just a matter of being a bit hazy about getting home from the club or forgetting what it was that was so funny when you were chatting in the pub. It’s different. Total black; hours lost, never to be retrieved.

  Tom bought me a book about it. Not very romantic, but he was tired of listening to me tell him how sorry I was in the morning when I didn’t even know what I was sorry for. I think he wanted me to see the damage I was doing, the kind of things I might be capable of. It was written by a doctor, but I’ve no idea whether it was accurate: the author claimed that blacking out wasn’t simply a matter of forgetting what had happened, but having no memories to forget in the first place. His theory was that you get into a state where your brain no longer makes short-term memories. And while you’re there, in deepest black, you don’t behave as you usually would, because you’re simply reacting to the very last thing that you think happened, because—since you aren’t making memories—you might not actually know what the last thing that happened really was. He had anecdotes, too, cautionary tales for the blacked-out drinker: There was a guy in New Jersey who got drunk at a fourth of July party. Afterwards, he got into his car, drove several miles in the wrong direction on the motorway and ploughed into a van carrying seven people. The van burst into flames and six people died. The drunk guy was fine. They always are. He had no memory of getting into his car.

  There was another man, in New York this time, who left a bar, drove to the house he’d grown up in, stabbed its occupants to death, took off all his clothes, got back into his car, drove home and went to bed. He got up the next morning feeling terrible, wondering where his clothes were and how he’d got home, but it wasn’t until the police came to get him that he discovered he had brutally slain two people for no apparent reason whatsoever.

  So it sound ridiculous, but it’s not impossible, and by the time I got home last night I had convinced myself that I was in some way involved in Megan’s disappearance.

  The police officers were sitting on the sofa in the living room, a fortysomething man in plain clothes and a younger one in uniform with acne on his neck. Cathy was standing next to the window, wringing her hands. She looked terrified. The policemen got up. The plainclothes one, very tall and slightly stooped, shook my hand and introduced himself as Detective Inspector Gaskill. He told me the other officer’s name as well, but I don’t remember it. I wasn’t concentrating. I was barely breathing.

  “What’s this about?” I barked at them. “Has something happened? Is it my mother? Is it Tom?”

  “Everyone’s all right, Ms. Watson, we just need to talk to you about what you did on Saturday evening,” Gaskill said. It’s the sort of thing they say on television; it didn’t seem real. They want to know what I did on Saturday evening. What the fuck did I do on Saturday evening?

  “I need to sit down,” I said, and the detective motioned for me to take his place on the sofa, next to Neck Acne. Cathy was shifting from one foot to another, chewing on her lower lip. She looked frantic.

  “Are you all right, Ms. Watson?” Gaskill asked me. He motioned to the cut above my eye.

  “I was knocked down by a taxi,” I said. “Yesterday afternoon, in London. I went to the hospital. You can check.”

  “OK,” he said, with a slight shake of his head. “So. Saturday evening?”

  “I went to Witney,” I said, trying to keep the waver out of my voice.

  “To do what?”

  Neck Acne had a notebook out, pencil raised.

  “I wanted to see my husband,” I said
.

  “Oh, Rachel,” Cathy said.

  The detective ignored her. “Your husband?” he said. “You mean your ex-husband? Tom Watson?” Yes, I still bear his name. It was just more convenient. I didn’t have to change my credit cards, email address, get a new passport, things like that.

  “That’s right. I wanted to see him, but then I decided that it wasn’t a good idea, so I came home.”

  “What time was this?” Gaskill’s voice was even, his face completely blank. His lips barely moved when he spoke. I could hear the scratch of Neck Acne’s pencil on paper, I could hear the blood pounding in my ears.

  “It was . . . um . . . I think it was around six thirty. I mean, I think I got the train at around six o’clock.”

  “And you came home . . . ?”

  “Maybe seven thirty?” I glanced up and caught Cathy’s eye and I could see from the look on her face that she knew I was lying. “Maybe a bit later than that. Maybe it was closer to eight. Yes, actually, I remember now—I think I got home just after eight.” I could feel the colour rising to my cheeks; if this man didn’t know I was lying then, he didn’t deserve to be on the police force.

  The detective turned around, grabbed one of the chairs pushed under the table in the corner and pulled it towards him in a swift, almost violent movement. He placed it directly opposite me, a couple of feet away. He sat down, his hands on his knees, head cocked to one side. “OK,” he said. “So you left at around six, meaning you’d be in Witney by six thirty. And you were back here around eight, which means you must have left Witney at around seven thirty. Does that sound about right?”

  “Yes, that seems right,” I said, that wobble back in my voice, betraying me. In a second or two he was going to ask me what I’d been doing for an hour, and I had no answer to give him.

  “And you didn’t actually go to see your ex-husband. So what did you do during that hour in Witney?”

  “I walked around for a bit.”

  He waited, to see if I was going to elaborate. I thought about telling him I went to a pub, but that would be stupid—that’s verifiable. He’d ask me which pub, he’d ask me whether I’d spoken to anyone. As I was thinking about what I should tell him, I realized that I hadn’t actually thought to ask him to explain why he wanted to know where I was on Saturday evening, and that that in itself must have seemed odd. That must have made me look guilty of something.

  “Did you speak to anyone?” he asked me, reading my mind. “Go into any shops, bars . . . ?”

  “I spoke to a man in the station!” I blurted this out loudly, triumphantly almost, as though it meant something. “Why do you need to know this? What is going on?”

  Detective Inspector Gaskill leaned back in the chair. “You may have heard that a woman from Witney—a woman who lives on Blenheim Road, just a few doors along from your ex-husband—is missing. We have been going door-to-door, asking people if they remember seeing her that night, or if they remember seeing or hearing anything unusual. And during the course of our enquiries, your name came up.” He fell silent for a bit, letting this sink in. “You were seen on Blenheim Road that evening, around the time that Mrs. Hipwell, the missing woman, left her home. Mrs. Anna Watson told us that she saw you in the street, near Mrs. Hipwell’s home, not very far from her own property. She said that you were acting strangely, and that she was worried. So worried, in fact, that she considered calling the police.”

  My heart was fluttering like a trapped bird. I couldn’t speak, because all I could see at that moment was myself, slouched in the underpass, blood on my hands. Blood on my hands. Mine, surely? It had to be mine. I looked up at Gaskill, saw his eyes on mine and knew that I had to say something quickly to stop him reading my mind. “I didn’t do anything.” I said. “I didn’t. I just . . . I just wanted to see my husband . . .”

  “Your ex-husband,” Gaskill corrected me again. He pulled a photograph out of his jacket pocket and showed it to me. It was a picture of Megan. “Did you see this woman on Saturday night?” he asked. I stared at it for a long time. It felt so surreal having her presented to me like that, the perfect blonde I’d watched, whose life I’d constructed and deconstructed in my head. It was a close-up head shot, a professional job. Her features were a little heavier than I’d imagined, not quite so fine as those of the Jess in my head. “Ms. Watson? Did you see her?”

  I didn’t know if I’d seen her. I honestly didn’t know. I still don’t.

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “You don’t think so? So you might have seen her?”

  “I . . . I’m not sure.”

  “Had you been drinking on Saturday evening?” he asked. “Before you went to Witney, had you been drinking?”

  The heat came rushing back to my face. “Yes,” I said.

  “Mrs. Watson—Anna Watson—said that she thought you were drunk when she saw you outside her home. Were you drunk?”

  “No,” I said, keeping my eyes firmly on the detective so that I didn’t catch Cathy’s eye. “I’d had a couple of drinks in the afternoon, but I wasn’t drunk.”

  Gaskill sighed. He seemed disappointed in me. He glanced over at Neck Acne, then back at me. Slowly, deliberately, he got to his feet and pushed the chair back to its position under the table. “If you remember anything about Saturday night, anything that might be helpful to us, would you please call me?” he said, handing me a business card.

  As Gaskill nodded sombrely at Cathy, preparing to leave, I slumped back into the sofa. I could feel my heart rate starting to slow, and then it raced again as I heard him ask me, “You work in public relations, is that correct? Huntingdon Whitely?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “Huntingdon Whitely.”

  He is going to check, and he is going to know I lied. I can’t let him find out for himself, I have to tell him.

  So that’s what I’m going to do this morning. I’m going to go round to the police station to come clean. I’m going to tell him everything: that I lost my job months ago, that I was very drunk on Saturday night and I have no idea what time I came home. I’m going to say what I should have said last night: that he’s looking in the wrong direction. I’m going to tell him that I believe Megan Hipwell was having an affair.

  EVENING

  The police think I’m a rubbernecker. They think I’m a stalker, a nutcase, mentally unstable. I should never have gone to the police station. I’ve made my own situation worse and I don’t think I’ve helped Scott, which was the reason I went there in the first place. He needs my help, because it’s obvious the police will suspect that he’s done something to her, and I know it isn’t true, because I know him. I really feel that, crazy as it sounds. I’ve seen the way he is with her. He couldn’t hurt her.

  OK, so helping Scott was not my sole reason for going to the police. There was the matter of the lie, which needed sorting out. The lie about my working for Huntingdon Whitely.

  It took me ages to get up the courage to go into the station. I was on the verge of turning back and going home a dozen times, but eventually I went in. I asked the desk sergeant if I could speak to Detective Inspector Gaskill, and he showed me to a stuffy waiting room, where I sat for over an hour until someone came to get me. By that time I was sweating and trembling like a woman on her way to the scaffold. I was shown into another room, smaller and stuffier still, windowless and airless. I was left there alone for a further ten minutes before Gaskill and a woman, also in plain clothes, turned up. Gaskill greeted me politely; he didn’t seem surprised to see me. He introduced his companion as Detective Sergeant Riley. She is younger than I am, tall, slim, dark-haired, pretty in a sharp-featured, vulpine sort of way. She did not return my smile.

  We all sat down and nobody said anything; they just looked at me expectantly.

  “I remembered the man,” I said. “I told you there was a man at the station. I can describe him.” Riley raised her eyebrows ever so slightly and shifted in her seat. “He was about medium height, medium build, reddi
sh hair. I slipped on the steps and he caught my arm.” Gaskill leaned forward, his elbows on the table, hands clasped together in front of his mouth. “He was wearing . . . I think he was wearing a blue shirt.”

  This is not actually true. I do remember a man, and I’m pretty sure he had reddish hair, and I think that he smiled at me, or smirked at me, when I was on the train. I think that he got off at Witney, and I think he might have spoken to me. It’s possible I might have slipped on the steps. I have a memory of it, but I can’t tell whether the memory belongs to Saturday night or to another time. There have been many slips, on many staircases. I have no idea what he was wearing.

  The detectives were not impressed with my tale. Riley gave an almost imperceptible shake of her head. Gaskill unclasped his hands and spread them out, palms upwards, in front of him. “OK. Is that really what you came here to tell me, Ms. Watson?” he asked. There was no anger in his tone, he sounded almost encouraging. I wished that Riley would go away. I could talk to him; I could trust him.

  “I don’t work for Huntingdon Whitely any longer,” I said.

  “Oh.” He leaned back in his seat, looking more interested.

  “I left three months ago. My flatmate—well, she’s my landlady, really—I haven’t told her. I’m trying to find another job. I didn’t want her to know because I thought she would worry about the rent. I have some money. I can pay my rent, but . . . Anyway, I lied to you yesterday about my job and I apologize for that.”

  Riley leaned forward and gave me an insincere smile. “I see. You no longer work for Huntingdon Whitely. You don’t work for anyone, is that right? You’re unemployed?” I nodded. “OK. So . . . you’re not registered to collect unemployment benefits, nothing like that?”

  “No.”

  “And . . . your flatmate, she hasn’t noticed that you don’t go to work every day?”

  “I do. I mean, I don’t go to the office, but I go into London, the way I used to, at the same time and everything, so that she . . . so that she won’t know.” Riley glanced at Gaskill; he kept his eyes on my face, the hint of a frown between his eyes. “It sounds odd, I know . . .” I said, and I tailed off then, because it doesn’t just sound odd, it sounds insane when you say it out loud.

  “Right. So, you pretend to go to work every day?” Riley asked me, her brow knitted, too, as though she were concerned about me. As though she thought I was completely deranged. I didn’t speak or nod or do anything, I kept silent. “Can I ask why you left your job, Ms. Watson?”

  There was no point in lying. If they hadn’t intended to check out my employment record before this conversation, they bloody well would now. “I was fired,” I said.

  “You were dismissed,” Riley said, a note of satisfaction in her voice. It was obviously the answer she’d anticipated. “Why was that?”

  I gave a little sigh and appealed to Gaskill. “Is this really important? Does it matter why I left my job?”

  Gaskill didn’t say anything, he was consulting some notes that Riley had pushed in front of him, but he did give the slightest shake of his head. Riley changed tack.

  “Ms. Watson, I wanted to ask you about Saturday night.”

  I glanced at Gaskill—we’ve already had this conversation—but he wasn’t looking at me. “All right,” I said. I kept raising my hand to my scalp, worrying at my injury. I couldn’t stop myself.

  “Tell me why you went to Blenheim Road on Saturday night. Why did you want to speak to your ex-husband?”

  “I don’t really think that’s any of your business,” I said, and then, quickly, before she had time to say anything else, “Would it be possible to have a glass of water?”

  Gaskill got to his feet and left the room, which wasn’t really the outcome I was hoping for. Riley didn’t say a word; she just kept looking at me, the trace of a smile still on her lips. I couldn’t hold her gaze, I looked at the table, I let my eyes wander around the room. I knew this was a tactic: she was remaining silent so that I would become so uncomfortable that I had to say something, even if I didn’t really want to. “I had some things I needed to discuss with him,” I said. “Private matters.” I sounded pompous and ridiculous.

  Riley sighed. I bit my lip, determined not to speak until Gaskill came back into the room. The moment he returned, placing a glass of cloudy water in front of me, Riley spoke.

  “Private matters?” she prompted.

  “That’s right.”

  Riley and Gaskill exchanged a look, I wasn’t sure if it was irritation or amusement. I could taste the sweat on my upper lip. I took a sip of water; it tasted stale. Gaskill shuffled the papers in front of him and then pushed them aside, as though he was done with them, or as though whatever was in them didn’t interest him all that much.

  “Ms. Watson, your . . . er . . . your ex-husband’s current wife, Mrs. Anna Watson, has raised concerns about you. She told us that you have been bothering her, bothering her husband, that you have gone to the house uninvited, that on one occasion . . .” Gaskill glanced back at his notes, but Riley interrupted.

  “On one occasion you broke into Mr. and Mrs. Watson’s home and took their child, their newborn baby.”

  A black hole opened up in the centre of the room and swallowed me. “That is not true!” I said. “I didn’t take . . . It didn’t happen like that, that’s wrong. I didn’t . . . I didn’t take her.”

  I got very upset then, I started to shake and cry, I said I wanted to leave. Riley pushed her chair back and got to her feet, shrugged at Gaskill and left the room. Gaskill handed me a Kleenex.

  “You can leave any time you like, Ms. Watson. You came here to talk to us.” He smiled at me then, an apologetic sort of smile. I liked him in that moment, I wanted to take his hand and squeeze it, but I didn’t, because that would have been weird. “I think you have more to tell me,” he said, and I liked him even more for saying “tell me” rather than “tell us.”

  “Perhaps,” he said, getting to his feet and ushering me towards the door, “you would like to take a break, stretch your legs, get yourself something to eat. Then when you’re ready, come back, and you can tell me everything.”

  I was planning to just forget the whole thing and go home. I was walking back towards the train station, ready to turn my back on the whole thing. Then I thought about the train journey, about going backwards and forwards on that line, past the house—Megan and Scott’s house—every day. What if they never found her? I was going to wonder forever—and I understand that this is not very likely, but even so—whether my saying something might have helped her. What if Scott was accused of harming her just because they never knew about B? What if she was at B’s house right now, tied up in the basement, hurt and bleeding, or buried in the