The Sleeper (23 page)

‘Is this the … well, you know. The actual same train?’

For some reason this had only just occurred to me. There was an outside chance that I could be sleeping in the very bed in which it happened.

‘Nah. It was on the other one, and anyway they’ve taken the carriage off, apparently. Forensics. Won’t be back in circulation for a while, I reckon.’

I doubted that was true. Would a train company really have a spare carriage lying around to substitute for the murder scene? Were they running shorter trains than before? I was grimly sure they would have cleaned it up and put it back into circulation.

When I took my first sip of gin and tonic, Lara’s train drink and the first alcoholic drink you choose when you are young and trying to be grown up, it fizzed on my tongue. The sweetness of the tonic water hit the top of my mouth, and even though the lemon was limp and had been cut up many hours or days ago, I smiled at the forgotten pleasure. I had not had one of these for years.

There was a man sitting opposite me drinking a can of bitter and reading a book that he was holding so low I could not see its cover. If I stared for long enough he would probably look up. I tried it. Eventually, of course, it worked. People cannot help looking at you in the end, if you don’t stop looking at them. They are not used to the attention; and this man certainly would not have been. He was grey-haired, with an enormous bald patch that was threatening to become his entire head, and he looked extraordinarily ordinary.

When he glanced up, his expression said: ‘What do you think you’re staring at, young lady?’

I directed an insincere grin his way. ‘Do you often do this journey? It’s my first time on this night train.’

‘Oh. Yes, I do. Not all the time, like some people.’ He gave the free copy of
The
Times
a pointed look, even though Lara was on an inside page, not the cover. ‘Just once or twice a month, when I have a meeting to get to.’

‘Do you? Did you ever see them?’

‘I don’t believe so. I’ve given it plenty of thought, as you’d expect, but I can’t drag out a single memory. I mean, life is full of middle-aged men. But I’m fairly sure the young lady would have stuck in one’s mind.’

‘Yes.’

He turned back to his book.

‘What are you reading?’

He did not reply, just lifted it so I could see the cover.

‘Harry Potter?’

He shrugged. ‘Why not?’

The gin kept me awake for a while as the train chugged and clattered through the night, leaving my quiet and comfortable life further behind with every clunk of wheels on rails. I lay in the narrow bed, the duvet pulled up to my chin, trying not to think of a man stabbed to death in a bed like this.

Then suddenly someone was knocking on the door, and before I could even feel alarmed or confused, a female voice said: ‘Breakfast!’ and I realised we were not moving any more.

When I opened the door and took the tray, she answered my questions before I had even managed to formulate them in my head.

‘Paddington. If you could get off before seven, that’s all we ask, my lovely. Here you go. You’re all right with the tray?’

‘Thank you.’

There was no sign of Ellen Johnson when I got off the train. She was not in the lounge next to the platform, and I imagined she had plunged straight into London when the train stopped there, long before I woke up. I had failed to find a phone number for her, and my email to her Facebook account had gone predictably unanswered. When I went back home, I would find her at Paddington. I would catch her as she got on the train.

I almost wanted a second, early morning gin. There was a reason why I had not been here for all these years.

I walked straight back out of the first-class lounge. It was a horrible place, atmosphere-free and built for transience. Lara had, I knew, spent hours there before and after her journeys, but I would not be stalking her on that front.

In the café up the stairs, on the station concourse, I ordered something substantial, and took out a notebook to make a plan.

The station was massive. It was enormous compared with Truro station, at least. They should, I thought, make that its official motto: ‘Bigger than Truro.’ It could, in fact, be a slogan for the whole city.

I was able to position myself at a table that allowed me to see the people walking around. Most of them came from trains, walked directly to the Tube and vanished underground. I was more interested in the ones who milled and meandered around, killing time. Some of them queued for bagels and doughnuts. A man picked his nose, trying to be surreptitious about it. A woman stumbled, nearly fell over, then walked on, looking down, trying to pretend it hadn’t happened.

The waitress brought me a plate of eggs and beans, defrosted hash browns and cooked tomatoes, and this was soon joined by a vast bucket full of milky coffee with froth on the top. I was not hungry, but I balanced some beans on the fork anyway.

My heart was pounding and I made an effort to calm myself down. I was here because Lara had vanished and had quite possibly taken my passport with her. This sounded stupid, but I knew it had been in that filing cabinet. I knew that I had never taken it out. I was certain that Laurie hadn’t either, because he would have been shifty, and I would have known. She had been in the room, alone, when I went to answer a phone call that never was. I partly thought I was being ridiculous, but I was increasingly uneasy, too. I was going to apply for a new passport first, and then I would try to discover whether I had taken a flight anywhere lately.

Despite the fact that her face was all over the news, she could easily disguise herself and slip into a different life in the city. She would just need to change her hair, and no one would recognise her. London was big enough for that: even though everyone had been looking for her for ten days, she could be hiding here.

I tried hard to focus. When I had applied for my passport, I was going to find her sister, because Olivia Wilberforce was an intriguing character, and Sam hated her with a disconcerting vehemence. She was pregnant, I knew that much, and this had upset Lara. They had not been on speaking terms for a while, according to Sam, and I remembered Lara, on our trip to St Mawes and when she came over for mince pies, muttering unhappily about her sister.

I knew where Olivia lived, so finding her was going to be easy. I was not going to run into anyone from my previous life in London. That would be so unlikely as to be impossible. Like winning the lottery.

I had absent-mindedly eaten half my breakfast. Now I knocked back the coffee and went up to the counter to pay the bill. Olivia lived in Covent Garden, Sam had told me that, in Mercer Street, just off Long Acre. She had a job in PR, which presumably involved normal office hours, and I knew she was back at work, in spite of everything, because I had seen her in the paper. I would stake out her street at approximately the right time of day, and sooner or later she would come home. That was my scientific plan, at least. It involved my going nowhere near Putney, or Notting Hill.

By the time I was loitering near Olivia’s flat, I was almost feeling comfortable. It was the anonymity that did it. It would be difficult not to be at ease in a city in which nothing you did, or wore, could cause anything more than a raised eyebrow.

I had not been to this city for five years, yet I was instantly back at home. I lived, now, in a world in which you generally said hello to people when you passed them out walking, in which you knew not just your neighbours, but the names and temperaments of their dogs. Here, I could have been anyone, could have done anything. Nobody had looked at me in my short skirt and biker boots, and no one was looking at me, now, in my brand-new skinny black trousers and a bright blue top that I had secretly bought because it was the kind of thing I felt Lara would have worn. I was going to get a serious haircut next, and lose the blond ends that had entertained me for a while. Then, if I could overcome my distaste for that sort of thing, I would go to a department store and get somebody to do my make-up so it suited me, and then I would buy everything they had used. Meanwhile, though, I had put on the tiny amount of make-up that I still possessed (black mascara, some clumsily applied eyeliner, and a dark pink lipstick that I felt certain made me look like a vampire with bad table manners). I was trying to be the most ordinary Londoner I could possibly be.

Going to the passport office had been a good way to start. It was all forms and queues and officialdom. There was nothing to do but follow the rules, tick the boxes, hand over the evidence and the money.

I felt sick with guilt, but I pushed that from my mind. All I could think about was the task at hand. The rest of it I would deal with later. I needed to phone Alex and talk to him about my lost passport, but I knew that making contact with him would be treacherous.

I paced outside a vintage clothes shop for a while, and then went in and lost myself in the racks of old dresses and wonderful shoes. I wandered across the road and into a courtyard that certainly hadn’t been there last time I was in Covent Garden: it was new and moneyed, containing a Jamie Oliver restaurant, a shop that only sold expensive ballet pumps, an upmarket-yet-funky florist. However, being away from Olivia’s street made me nervous in case I missed her.

At the bottom of the road there was an appealing-looking pub, a print shop, and, often, passers-by on their way to Pineapple Studios in the next street. Some of them were indisputable ballerinas. They held themselves gorgeously, heads poised upon swan-like necks. Others were much cooler than that: they were the kind of people who appeared in the background of music videos, casually performing the kind of moves I would not even be able to come close to naming.

I stamped my feet and walked back along the street, looking up, occasionally, into a sky that was leaden with clouds. It was freezing and I was bored.

I headed to the other end of the road, to see what was happening there. People were strolling along Long Acre. That was what was happening there. I walked to the middle. Nothing was happening there, either. Every time anyone came into the street, I would give them a good look, but for a long time none of them was Olivia Wilberforce; right up until, suddenly, one of them was.

She was walking and tapping on an iPhone at the same time, but although her head was bent and I could barely see her face, I knew it was her. She was visibly but not massively pregnant. My pulse quickened as she walked towards me. She had black hair, cut in a chic and geometric style, short at the back and longer at the front, with a fringe that would have looked ridiculously short on most people, but which worked for her. Her jeans were so tight they were probably leggings, and over them she wore a military-style coat that somehow looked wonderful.

I tugged at the velvet jacket I still had on over my new clothes. It was threadbare and stupid, clearly an item from a charity shop hundreds of miles from London.

‘Hello,’ I said, as she walked past me. She stopped and gave me a look of the most phenomenal disdain.

‘No thanks.’ She walked on. Her features were spookily even. She looked like a china doll, or a sexy assassin from a film. Somehow, in Olivia Wilberforce, those two looks were able to coexist. The bulge of her fertile stomach made her more unsettling still.

‘I’m not from the press.’ She kept walking, and I turned and trotted after her. ‘I’m a friend of Lara’s.’

That made her stop, but only for as long as it took her to say, ‘Sure you are.’

‘Well I am. I live outside Falmouth. I was with Sam straight after she went missing. I stayed with him until the police took him for an interview. I called his brother.’

She narrowed her eyes. ‘What are his family like?’

‘His brother was horrible and aggressive. I was surprised, actually. Sam’s so … Well, he’s so unaggressive, so gentle, that I hadn’t expected that at all. His mum looked like a sweet old lady, but she was incredibly tough.’

She looked into my face for a moment, then suddenly relaxed. Her whole demeanour changed, though she was still guarded.

‘Well, that’s true enough. They were vile at the wedding. It was dysfunction city. What’s your name?’

‘Iris. Iris Roebuck. Lara and I met on a ferry to St Mawes one day and we got chatting, and after that we were friends.’

Olivia laughed a sudden and odd laugh that stopped as abruptly as it had started.

‘If you wanted to speak to me, couldn’t you have called? You know, you don’t get to just show up and stop me in the street. The world may be fucked, but it doesn’t mean no one needs manners any more.’

I liked that. It was what I would have said, in her place.

‘Sorry, Olivia. You’re completely right. Truly. I am sorry. I just – well, I happened to be in London. And I was thinking of Lara, obviously. I’m sure she didn’t kill Guy. I know it looks as if she did, but …’ She looked at me, not helping me out at all. ‘Well. I knew that when she first came here she was living with you, and I knew where you lived, and …’

I was not used to this. No one made me beg for anything.

‘I can go away again. I mean, the last thing I want is to upset you or disturb you.’

She was looking into my face. Her blue eyes were piercing.

‘The thing is, Iris,’ she said, ‘she never mentioned you. You apparently know all about me. But I know nothing about you. And everyone knows all about my family, because the papers have been obsessed with us. I’m not exactly hard to research at the moment. Any old nutter can stop me in the street. Believe me, you’re not the first.’

‘Oh.’ I struggled for credentials. ‘Would she have mentioned me to you, though? She wouldn’t, would she?’

‘Well, not to me. No. She wouldn’t have done to
me
. I’m sure she never mentioned you to Mum and Dad either, though. We were talking about her friends. You know. The world implodes and you go over every detail. We thought she didn’t have any close friends in Cornwall.’

I shrugged.

‘Ask Sam, if you like.’

‘He did say there was someone with him that day. It could have been you.’