The Girl on the Train (30 page)

I grab my bag and make for the door, but just as I do, he steps out in front of me with a boxer’s feint, and for a moment I think he’s going to stop me, put his hands on me again. There must be terror in my eyes because he starts to laugh, he roars with laughter. I can still hear him when I slam the front door behind me.

I’ve barely slept. I drank a bottle and a half of wine in an attempt to get off to sleep, to stop my hands shaking, to quieten my startle reflex, but it didn’t really work. Every time I started to drop off, I’d jolt awake. I felt sure I could feel him in the room with me. I turned the light on and sat there, listening to the sounds of the street outside, to people moving around in the building. It was only when it started to get light that I relaxed enough to sleep. I dreamed I was in the woods again. Tom was with me but still I felt afraid.

I left Tom a note last night. After I left Scott’s, I ran down to number twenty-three and banged on the door. I was in such a panic I didn’t even care whether Anna was there, whether she’d be pissed off with me for showing up. No one came to the door, so I scribbled a note on a scrap of paper and shoved it through the letter box. I don’t care if she sees it – I think a part of me actually wants her to see it. I kept the note vague – I told him we needed to talk about the other day. I didn’t mention Scott by name, because I didn’t want Tom to go round there and confront him – God knows what might happen.

I rang the police almost as soon as I got home. I had a couple of glasses of wine first, to calm me down. I asked to speak to Detective Inspector Gaskill, but they said he wasn’t available, so I ended up talking to Riley. It wasn’t what I wanted – I know Gaskill would have been kinder.

‘He imprisoned me in his home,’ I told her. ‘He threatened me.’

She asked how long I was ‘imprisoned’ for. I could hear the air quotes over the line.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Half an hour, maybe.’

There was a long silence.

‘And he threatened you. Can you tell me the exact nature of the threat?’

‘He said he’d break my neck. He said … he said he ought to break my neck …’

‘He ought to break your neck?’

‘He said that he would if he could be bothered.’

Silence. Then, ‘Did he hit you? Did he injure you in any way?’

‘Bruising. Just bruising.’

‘He hit you?’

‘No, he grabbed me.’

More silence.

Then: ‘Ms Watson, why were you in Scott Hipwell’s house?’

‘He asked me to go to see him. He said he needed to talk to me.’

She gave a long sigh. ‘You were warned to stay out of this. You’ve been lying to him, telling him you were a friend of his wife’s, you’ve been telling all sorts of stories and – let me finish – this is a person who, at best, is under a great deal of strain and is extremely distressed. At best. At worst, he might be dangerous.’

‘He
is
dangerous, that’s what I’m telling you, for God’s sake.’

‘This is not helpful – you going round there, lying to him, provoking him. We’re in the middle of a murder investigation here. You need to understand that. You could jeopardize our progress, you could—’

‘What progress?’ I snapped. ‘You haven’t made any bloody progress. He killed his wife, I’m telling you. There’s a picture, a photograph of the two of them – it’s smashed. He’s angry, he’s unstable—’

‘Yes, we saw the photograph. The house has been searched. It’s hardly evidence of murder.’

‘So you’re not going to arrest him?’

She gave a long sigh. ‘Come to the station tomorrow. Make a statement. We’ll take it from there. And Ms Watson? Stay away from Scott Hipwell.’

Cathy came home and found me drinking. She wasn’t happy. What could I tell her? There was no way to explain it. I just said I was sorry and went upstairs to my room, like a teenager in a sulk. And then I lay awake, trying to sleep, waiting for Tom to call. He didn’t.

I wake early, check my phone (no calls), wash my hair and dress for my interview, hands trembling, stomach in knots. I’m leaving early because I have to stop off at the police station first, to give them my statement. Not that I’m expecting it to do any good. They never took me seriously and they certainly aren’t going to start now. I wonder what it would take for them to see me as anything other than a fantasist.

On the way to the station I can’t stop looking over my shoulder; the sudden scream of a police siren has me literally leaping into the air in fright. On the station platform I walk as close to the railings as I can, my fingers trailing against the iron fence, just in case I need to hold on tight. I realize it’s ridiculous, but I feel so horribly vulnerable now that I’ve seen what he is; now that there are no secrets between us.

The matter should be closed for me now. All this time, I’ve been thinking that there was something to remember, something I was missing. But there isn’t. I didn’t see anything important or do anything terrible. I just happened to be on the same street. I know this now, courtesy of the red-haired man. And yet there’s an itch at the back of my brain that I just can’t scratch.

Neither Gaskill nor Riley was at the police station; I gave my statement to a bored-looking uniformed officer. It will be filed and forgotten about, I assume, unless I turn up dead in a ditch somewhere. My interview was on the opposite side of town to where Scott lives, but I took a taxi from the police station. I’m not taking any chances. It went as well as it could: the job itself is utterly beneath me, but then
I
seem to have become beneath me over the past year or two. I need to reset the scale. The big drawback (other than the crappy pay and the lowliness of the job itself) will be having to come to Witney all the time, to walk these streets and risk running into Scott or Anna and her child.

Because bumping into people is all I seem to do in this neck of the woods. It’s one of the things I used to like about the place: the village-on-the-edge-of-London feel. You might not know everyone, but faces are familiar.

I’m almost at the station, just passing the Crown when I feel a hand on my arm and I wheel around, slipping off the pavement and into the road.

‘Hey, hey, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’ It’s him again, the red-haired man, pint in one hand, the other raised in supplication. ‘You’re jumpy, aren’t you?’ he grins. I must look really frightened, because the grin fades. ‘Are you all right? I didn’t mean to scare you.’

He’s knocked off early, he says, and invites me to have a drink with him. I say no, and then I change my mind.

‘I owe you an apology,’ I say, when he – Andy, as it turns out – brings me my gin and tonic, ‘for the way I behaved on the train. Last time, I mean. I was having a bad day.’

‘S’all right,’ Andy says. His smile is slow and lazy, I don’t think this is his first pint. We’re sitting opposite each other in the beer garden at the back of the pub; it feels safer here than on the street side. Perhaps it’s the safe feeling that emboldens me. I take my chance.

‘I wanted to ask you about what happened,’ I say. ‘The night that I met you. The night that Meg— The night that woman disappeared.’

‘Oh. Right. Why? What d’you mean?’

I take a deep breath. I can feel my face reddening. No matter how many times you have to admit this, it’s always embarrassing, it always makes you cringe. ‘I was very drunk and I don’t remember. There are some things I need to sort out. I just want to know if you saw anything, if you saw me talking to anyone else, anything like that …’ I’m staring down at the table, I can’t meet his eye.

He nudges my foot with his. ‘It’s all right, you didn’t do anything bad.’ I look up and he’s smiling. ‘I was pissed, too. We had a bit of a chat on the train, I can’t remember what about. Then we both got off here, at Witney, and you were a bit unsteady on your feet. You slipped on the steps. You remember? I helped you up and you were all embarrassed, blushing like you are now.’ He laughs. ‘We walked out together, and I asked you if you wanted to go to the pub. But you said you had to go and meet your husband.’

‘That’s it?’

‘No. Do you really not remember? It was a while later – I don’t know, half an hour, maybe? I’d been to the Crown, but a mate rang and said he was drinking in a bar over on the other side of the railway track, so I was heading down to the underpass. You’d fallen over. You were in a bit of a mess then. You’d cut yourself. I was a bit worried, I said I’d see you home if you wanted, but you wouldn’t hear of it. You were … well, you were very upset. I think there’d been a row with your bloke. He was heading off down the street, and I said I’d go after him if you wanted me to, but you said not to. He drove off somewhere after that. He was … er … he was with someone.’

‘A woman?’

He nods, ducks his head a bit. ‘Yeah, they got into a car together. I assumed that was what the argument was about.’

‘And then?’

‘Then you walked off. You seemed a little … confused or something, and you walked off. You kept saying you didn’t need any help. As I said, I was a bit wasted myself, so I just left it. I went down through the underpass and met my mate in the pub. That was it.’

Climbing the stairs to the apartment, I feel sure that I can see shadows above me, hear footsteps ahead. Someone waiting on the landing above. There’s no one there, of course, and the flat is empty, too: it feels untouched, it smells empty, but that doesn’t stop me checking every room – under my bed and under Cathy’s, in the wardrobes and the closet in the kitchen that couldn’t conceal a child.

Finally, after about three tours of the flat, I can stop. I go upstairs and sit on the bed and think about the conversation I had with Andy, the fact that it tallies with what I remember. There is no great revelation: Tom and I argued in the street, I slipped and hurt myself, he stormed off and got into his car with Anna. Later he came back looking for me, but I’d already gone. I got into a taxi, I assume, or back on to the train.

I sit on my bed looking out of the window and wonder why I don’t feel better. Perhaps it’s simply because I still don’t have any answers. Perhaps it’s because although what I remember tallies with what other people remember, something still feels off. Then it strikes me: Anna. It’s not just that Tom never mentioned going anywhere in the car with her, it’s the fact that when I saw her, walking away, getting into the car, she wasn’t carrying the baby. Where was Evie while all this was going on?

I need to speak to Tom, to get things straight in my head, because the more I go over it, the less sense it makes, and I can’t stop going over it. I’m worried, in any case, because it’s two days since I left him that note and he hasn’t got back to me. He didn’t answer his phone last night, he’s not been answering it all day. Something’s not right, and I can’t shake the feeling that it has to do with Anna.

I know that he’ll want to talk to me, too, after he hears about what happened with Scott. I know that he’ll want to help. I can’t stop thinking about the way he was that day in the car, about how things felt between us. So I pick up the phone and dial his number, butterflies in my stomach, just the way it always used to be, the anticipation of hearing his voice as acute now as it was years ago.

‘Yeah?’

‘Tom, it’s me.’

‘Yes.’

Anna must be there with him, he doesn’t want to say my name. I wait for a moment, to give him time to move to another room, to get away from her. I hear him sigh. ‘What is it?’

‘Um, I wanted to talk to you … As I said in my note, I—’

‘What?’ He sounds irritated.

‘I left you a note a couple of days ago. I thought we should talk …’

‘I didn’t get a note.’ Another heavier sigh. ‘Fuck’s sake. That’s why she’s pissed off with me.’ Anna must have taken it, she didn’t give it him. ‘What do you need?’

I want to hang up, dial again, start over. Tell him how good it was to see him on Monday, when we went to the lake.

‘I just wanted to ask you something.’

‘What?’ he snaps. He sounds really annoyed.

‘Is everything OK?’

‘What do you want, Rachel?’ It’s gone, all the tenderness that was there a week ago. I curse myself for leaving that note, I’ve obviously got him into trouble at home.

‘I wanted to ask you about that night – the night Megan Hipwell went missing.’

‘Oh, Jesus. We’ve talked about this – you can’t have forgotten already.’

‘I just—’

‘You were drunk,’ he says, his voice loud, harsh. ‘I told you to go home. You wouldn’t listen. You wandered off. I drove around looking for you, but I couldn’t find you.’

‘Where was Anna?’

‘She was at home.’

‘With the baby?’

‘With Evie, yes.’

‘She wasn’t in the car with you?’

‘No.’

‘But—’

‘Oh for God’s sake. She was supposed to be going out, I was going to babysit. Then you came along, so she came and cancelled her plans. And I wasted yet more hours of my life running around after you.’

I wish I hadn’t called. To have my hopes raised and dashed again, it’s like cold steel twisting in my gut.

‘OK,’ I say. ‘It’s just, I remember it differently … Tom, when you saw me, was I hurt? Was I … Did I have a cut on my head?’

Another heavy sigh. ‘I’m surprised you remember anything at all, Rachel. You were blind drunk. Filthy, stinking drunk. Staggering all over the place.’ My throat starts to close up, hearing him say these words. I’ve heard him say these sorts of things before, in the bad old days, the very worst days, when he was tired of me, sick of me, disgusted by me. Wearily, he goes on. ‘You’d fallen over in the street, you were crying, you were a total mess. Why is this important?’ I can’t find the words right away, I take too long to answer. He goes on: ‘Look, I have to go. Don’t call any more, please. We’ve been through this. How many times do I have to ask you? Don’t call, don’t leave notes, don’t come here. It upsets Anna. All right?’

The phone goes dead.

I’ve been downstairs in the living room all night, with the television on for company, fear ebbing and flowing. Strength ebbing and flowing. It feels a bit like I’ve gone back in time, the wound he made years ago ripped open again, new and fresh. It’s silly, I know. I was an idiot to think that I had a chance with him again, just on the basis of one conversation, a few moments which I took for tenderness and which were probably nothing more than sentimentality and guilt. Still, it hurts. And I’ve just got to let myself feel the pain, because if I don’t, if I keep numbing it, it’ll never really go away.