The Girl on the Train (23 page)

‘Please,’ he said, indicating for me to follow him into his office, and I did, feeling sick, dizzy all the way. I was walking in her footsteps. She did all this. She sat opposite him in the chair he told me to sit in, he probably folded his hands just below his chin the way he did this afternoon, he probably nodded at her in the same way, saying, ‘OK, what would you like to talk to me about today?’

Everything about him was warm: his hand, when I shook it; his eyes; the tone of his voice. I searched his face for clues, for signs of the vicious brute who smashed Megan’s head open, for a glimpse of the traumatized refugee who had lost his family. I couldn’t see any. And for a while, I forgot myself. I forgot to be afraid of him. I was sitting there and I wasn’t panicking any longer. I swallowed hard and tried to remember what I had to say, and I said it. I told him that for four years I’d had problems with alcohol, that my drinking had cost me my marriage and my job, it was costing me my health, obviously, and I feared it might cost me my sanity, too.

‘I don’t remember things,’ I said. ‘I black out and I can’t remember where I’ve been or what I’ve done. Sometimes I wonder if I’ve done or said terrible things, and I can’t remember. And if … if someone tells me something I’ve done, it doesn’t even feel like me. It doesn’t feel like it was me who was doing that thing. And it’s so hard to feel responsible for something you don’t remember. So I never feel bad enough. I feel bad, but the thing that I’ve done – it’s removed from me. It’s like it doesn’t belong to me.’

All this came out, all this truth, I just spilled it in front of him in the first few minutes of being in his presence. I was so ready to say it, I’d been waiting to say it to someone. But it shouldn’t have been him. He listened, his clear amber eyes on mine, his hands folded, motionless. He didn’t look around the room or make notes. He listened. And eventually he nodded slightly and said, ‘You want to take responsibility for what you have done, and you find it difficult to do that, to feel fully accountable if you cannot remember it?’

‘Yes, that’s it, that’s exactly it.’

‘So, how do we take responsibility? You can apologize – and even if you cannot remember committing your transgression, that doesn’t mean that your apology, and the sentiment behind your apology, is not sincere.’

‘But I want to
feel
it. I want to feel … worse.’

It’s an odd thing to say, but I think this all the time. I don’t feel bad enough. I know what I’m responsible for, I know all the terrible things I’ve done, even if I don’t remember the details – but I feel distanced from those actions. I feel them at one remove.

‘You think that you should feel worse than you do? That you don’t feel bad enough for your mistakes?’

‘Yes.’

Kamal shook his head. ‘Rachel, you have told me that you lost your marriage, you lost your job – do you not think this is punishment enough?’

I shook my head.

He leaned back a little in his chair. ‘I think perhaps you are being rather hard on yourself.’

‘I’m not.’

‘All right. OK. Can we go back a bit? To when the problem started. You said it was … four years ago? Can you tell me about that time?’

I resisted. I wasn’t completely lulled by the warmth of his voice, by the softness of his eyes. I wasn’t completely hopeless. I wasn’t going to start telling him the whole truth. I wasn’t going to tell him how I longed for a baby. I told him that my marriage broke down, that I was depressed, and that I’d always been a drinker, but that things just got out of hand.

‘Your marriage broke down, so … you left your husband, or he left you, or … you left each other?’

‘He had an affair,’ I said. ‘He met another woman and fell in love with her.’ He nodded, waiting for me to go on. ‘It wasn’t his fault, though. It was my fault.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Well, the drinking started before …’

‘So your husband’s affair was not the trigger?’

‘No, I’d already started, my drinking drove him away, it was why he stopped …’

Kamal waited, he didn’t prompt me to go on, he just let me sit there, waiting for me to say the words out loud.

‘Why he stopped loving me,’ I said.

I hate myself for crying in front of him. I don’t understand why I couldn’t keep my guard up. I shouldn’t have talked about real things, I should have gone in there with some totally made-up problems, some imaginary persona. I should have been better prepared.

I hate myself for looking at him and believing, for a moment, that he felt for me. Because he looked at me as though he did, not as though he pitied me, but as though he understood me, as though I was someone he wanted to help.

‘So then, Rachel, the drinking started
before
the breakdown of your marriage. Do you think you can point to an underlying cause? I mean, not everyone can. For some people, there is just a general slide into a depressive or an addicted state. Was there something specific for you? A bereavement, some other loss?’

I shook my head, shrugged. I wasn’t going to tell him that. I will not tell him that.

He waited for a few moments and then glanced quickly at the clock on his desk.

‘We will pick up next time, perhaps?’ he said, and then he smiled and I went cold.

Everything about him is warm – his hands, his eyes, his voice – everything but the smile. You can see the killer in him when he shows his teeth. My stomach a hard ball, my pulse sky-rocketing again, I left his office without shaking his outstretched hand. I couldn’t stand to touch him.

I understand, I do. I can see what Megan saw in him, and it’s not just that he’s arrestingly handsome. He’s also calm and reassuring, he exudes a patient kindness. Someone innocent or trusting or simply troubled might not see through all that, might not see that under all that calm he’s a wolf. I understand that. For almost an hour, I was drawn in. I let myself open up to him. I forgot who he was. I betrayed Scott, and I betrayed Megan, and I feel guilty about that.

But most of all, I feel guilty because I want to go back.

I had it again, the dream where I’ve done something wrong, where everyone takes against me, sides with Tom. Where I can’t explain, or even apologize, because I don’t know what the thing is. In the space between dreaming and wakefulness, I think of a real argument, long ago – four years ago – after our first and only round of IVF failed, when I wanted to try again. Tom told me we didn’t have the money, and I didn’t question that. I knew we didn’t – we’d taken on a big mortgage, he had some debts left over from a bad business deal his father had coaxed him into pursuing – I just had to deal with it. I just had to hope that one day we would have the money, and in the meantime I had to bite back the tears that came, hot and fast, every time I saw a stranger with a bump, every time I heard someone else’s happy news.

It was a couple of months after we’d found out that the IVF had failed that he told me about the trip. Vegas, for four nights, to watch the big fight and let off some steam. Just him and a couple of his mates from the old days, people I had never met. It cost a fortune, I know, because I saw the booking receipt for the flight and the room in his email inbox. I’ve no idea what the boxing tickets cost, but I can’t imagine they were cheap. It wasn’t enough to pay for a round of IVF, but it would have been a start. We had a horrible fight about it. I don’t remember the details because I’d been drinking all afternoon, working myself up to confront him about it, so when I did it was in the worst possible way. I remember his coldness the next day, his refusal to speak about it. I remember him telling me, in flat disappointed tones, what I’d done and said, how I’d smashed our framed wedding photograph, how I’d screamed at him for being so selfish, how I’d called him a useless husband, a failure. I remember how much I hated myself that day.

I was wrong, of course I was, to say those things to him, but what comes to me now is that I wasn’t unreasonable to be angry. I had every right to be angry, didn’t I? We were trying to have a baby – shouldn’t we have been prepared to make sacrifices? I would have cut off a limb if it meant I could have had a child. Couldn’t he have foregone a weekend in Vegas?

I lie in bed for a bit, thinking about that, and then I get up and decide to go for a walk, because if I don’t do something I’m going to want to go round to the corner shop. I haven’t had a drink since Sunday and I can feel the fight going on within me, the longing for a little buzz, the urge to get out of my head, smashing up against the vague feeling that something has been accomplished and that it would be a shame to throw it away now.

Ashbury isn’t really a good place to walk, it’s just shops and suburbs, there isn’t even a decent park. I head off through the middle of town, which isn’t so bad when there’s no one else around. The trick is to fool yourself into thinking that you’re headed somewhere: just pick a spot and set off towards it. I chose the church at the top of Pleasance Road, which is about two miles from Cathy’s flat. I’ve been to an AA meeting there. I didn’t go to the local one because I didn’t want to bump into anyone I might see on the street, in the supermarket, on the train.

When I get to the church, I turn around and walk back, striding purposefully towards home, a woman with things to do, somewhere to go. Normal. I watch the people I pass – the two men running, backpacks on, training for the marathon, the young woman in a black skirt and white trainers, heels in her bag, on her way to work – and I wonder what they’re hiding. Are they moving to stop drinking, running to stand still? Are they thinking about the killer they met yesterday, the one they’re planning to see again?

I’m not normal.

I’m almost home when I see it. I’ve been lost in thought, thinking about what these sessions with Kamal are actually supposed to achieve: am I really planning to rifle through his desk drawers if he happens to leave the room? To try and trap him into saying something revealing, to lead him into dangerous territory? Chances are he’s a lot cleverer than I am; chances are he’ll see me coming. After all, he knows his name has been in the papers – he must be alert to the possibility of people trying to get stories on him, or information from him.

This is what I’m thinking about, head down, eyes on the pavement, as I pass the little Londis shop on the right and try not to look at it because it raises possibilities, but out of the corner of my eye I see her name. I look up and it’s there, in huge letters on the front of a tabloid newspaper: W
AS
M
EGAN A
C
HILD
K
ILLER
?

I
WAS WITH THE
NCT girls at Starbucks when it happened. We were sitting in our usual spot by the window, the kids were spreading Lego all over the floor, Beth was trying (yet again) to persuade me to join her book club, and then Diane showed up. She had this look on her face, the self-importance of someone who is about to deliver a piece of particularly juicy gossip. She could barely contain herself as she struggled to get her double buggy through the door.

‘Anna,’ she said, her face grave, ‘have you seen this?’ and she held up a newspaper with the headline W
AS
M
EGAN A
C
HILD
K
ILLER
? I was speechless. I just stared at it and, ridiculously, burst into tears. Evie was horrified. She
howled
. It was awful.

I went to the loos to clean myself (and Evie) up, and when I got back they were all speaking in hushed tones. Diane glanced slyly up at me and asked, ‘Are you all right, sweetie?’ She was enjoying it, I could tell.

I had to leave then, I couldn’t stay. They were all being terribly concerned, saying how awful it must be for me, but I could see it on their faces: thinly disguised disapproval. How could you entrust your child to that monster? You must be the worst mother in the world.

I tried to call Tom on the way home, but his phone just went straight to voicemail. I left him a message to ring me back as soon as possible – I tried to keep my voice light and even, but I was trembling, and my legs felt shaky, unsteady.

I didn’t buy the paper, but I couldn’t resist reading the story online. It all sounds rather vague. ‘Sources close to the Hipwell investigation’ claim an allegation has been made that Megan ‘may have been involved in the unlawful killing of her own child’ ten years ago. The ‘sources’ also speculate that this could be a motive for her murder. The detective in charge of the whole investigation – Gaskill, the one who came to speak to us after she went missing – made no comment.

Tom rang me back – he was in between meetings, he couldn’t come home. He tried to placate me, he made all the right noises, he told me it was probably a load of rubbish anyway. ‘You know you can’t believe half the stuff they print in the newspapers.’ I didn’t make too much of a fuss, because he was the one who suggested she come and help out with Evie in the first place. He must be feeling horrible.

And he’s right. It may not even be true. But who would come up with a story like that? Why would you make up a thing like that? And I can’t help thinking, I
knew
. I always knew there was something off about that woman. At first I just thought she was a bit immature, but it was more than that, she was sort of
absent
. Self-involved. I’m not going to lie. I’m glad she’s gone. Good riddance.

I’m upstairs, in the bedroom. Tom’s watching TV with Evie. We’re not talking. It’s my fault. He walked in the door and I just went for him.

I was building up to it all day. I couldn’t help it, couldn’t hide from it, she was everywhere I looked. Here, in my house, holding my child, feeding her, changing her, playing with her while I was taking a nap. I kept thinking of all the times I left Evie alone with her and it made me sick.

And then the paranoia came, that feeling I’ve had almost all the time I’ve lived in this house, of being watched. At first, I used to put it down to the trains. All those faceless bodies staring out of the windows, staring right across at us, it gave me the creeps. It was one of the many reasons why I didn’t want to move in here in the first place, but Tom wouldn’t leave. He said we’d lose money on the sale.