The Stranger on the Train (23 page)

Her mother was with her now, beside her, her hair, the same color as Emma's, whipping in the wind.

I needed help, but I was too proud. I'm sorry, my darling child. I should have fought harder for you.

“It's all right, Mum. I know. I always knew.”

The wind was beginning to drop. The waves rolled, rather than smashed, into the cliffs.

She would fight for Ritchie. He would know her when he grew up. She didn't know how she'd get him back, but she would. She had a head start, didn't she? She knew he was alive, who he was with. That was much more than the parents of some missing children ever knew. She'd tried hardly anything yet. There was a way, and whatever it took, she would find it. She wouldn't give up until she did.

• • •

Quarter to midnight. No point waiting for a bus at this hour. Emma stepped off the soaking dune and walked along the road until she came to a village. One of the houses had a sign in the window saying: “Vacancy.”

The woman who answered the door took her time, looking Emma up and down in the porch light before grudgingly admitting that, yes, she did have a room. Emma supposed it was her wetness that was the problem. Or her lack of luggage, or the lateness of the hour. The woman led her through to a spotless kitchen with pine cupboards and a long table down the middle, set with a white cloth and cups and bowls for breakfast. She wrote Emma's details into a notebook with a marble-design cover. Then she took some keys and showed her to a bedroom off a hall behind the kitchen.

Emma sat for a while by the radiator in her room, letting the warmth loosen her limbs. She hadn't realized how cold the wind on the cliffs had been.

Funny, the way her mum had come to her so strongly up there. When she had died, Emma had just . . . kept going. She'd never done any of the things you were supposed to do when your closest family member died. Weep, smell her mum's perfume, visit her grave. The sort of things other people said they did. She didn't know why, really. The death had sat inside her like a stone. For a while, Oliver had taken the pressure off, but when he had let go, the stone had come back, heavier than before. Only this time, she'd hardly noticed it, because she'd had Ritchie to carry as well.

“Why does she keep calling?” she'd said to Joanne, when she'd found her mother's messages on the answering machine.

But she knew why now. It was because her mum had never given up either.

The wind rattled the glass, gentler with each gust. Her mum's presence was less strong here than it had been on the cliff. But from up there, you could see down to this house. And all the way to France too, if you looked over the sea.

Emma said: “If you can see him, tell him I'm coming. Tell him to hold on.”

Then she took off all her clothes and spread everything out on an armchair to dry. She fell into the single bed. She slept as soon as the duvet settled over her. She didn't dream at all.

When she woke, the room was very bright. She'd left the red gingham curtains open. A vase filled with dried flowers stood on the windowsill. She could see the branch of a tree, and part of a washing line with a man's blue shirt and some towels. Somewhere, someone was hammering something. A large-sounding dog barked deeply. Children's voices floated:

“You're a . . .”

“No
you're
a . . .”

Once Emma realized the voices weren't about to come right up to the window, she relaxed, letting her legs straighten out in the bed. Strange, how her body ached. Her muscles felt used and stretched, as if she'd been running a marathon or lifting heavy weights. She was hungry as well. A toast-and-butter smell wafted from the hall. What time was it? She lifted her head. She couldn't see a clock anywhere. What had she done with her bag? Her phone would have the time on it.

The bag was a couple of feet away under a chair. Still wrapped in her duvet, Emma leaned out of bed to tug it towards her. She felt around inside it, thrusting aside keys and pens with her fingers, until finally she located her mobile right at the bottom. She lay back in the bed, holding the phone up to see the screen.

Then she looked again and blinked.

Twenty-eight missed calls.

Emma frowned and sat up.

Even as she did so, the phone rang again.

“Hello?”

“Emma!”

It was Rafe.

“Emma.” He talked right over her as she tried to answer. “Where have you been? I've been trying all night. You just disappeared. I rang the police, I rang everyone. No one knew where you were.”

Emma was astonished. He'd been phoning her all night? From Peru or Bolivia or wherever it was?

“I'm here,” she said. “I'm here, it's all right. I didn't do anything—”

Again he cut across her.

“I have a message for you,” he said.

“From who?” She was bewildered.

Rafe said: “From your son.”

Chapter Sixteen

Monday, October 2nd

Day Sixteen

The train from Brighton pulled into Victoria two and a half minutes early. Roused from her trance by the announcement from the driver, Emma glanced up for the first time in an hour. South London had slid past without her noticing any of it. Outside the window, a pigeon with a crisp in his beak fluttered in a panicky way, flapping his wings in circles before getting back on top of things and floating upwards to the grimy glass ceiling.

Rafe, wearing his bright blue jacket, was waiting for her on the concourse. She met him in a daze.

“I can't believe it,” she said. “Tell me I didn't imagine what you told me.”

“You didn't imagine it.”

He hustled her to the nearest café and sat her at a table by the window. Before he left for the counter, he took something wrapped in a plastic bag from his pocket and passed it into her hand.

Emma sat there, staring at the contents of the bag, turning it over and over between her fingers.

“I'm starving,” Rafe said, reappearing at the table with a tray-load of food. “My flight home was too early for breakfast.”

He sat across from Emma, slid a takeaway coffee cup towards her and began to rip the cellophane off a giant salad roll.

“Just give me a minute to get this down,” he said. “Then we'll decide our next move.”

Emma tried to let him eat in peace but it was impossible. A thousand questions battled to escape. So many gaps needing to be filled. What came next? What should she do now? But before she could work it out, there were way too many things she needed to know.

“How did you get their phone number?” she asked, starting with the first thing to come into her head.

“It was . . .” Rafe stopped, waving his hand. He chewed on a mouthful of food, swallowed, and continued: “It was with the address that my friend Mike sent me.”

“So that was where you were all along.” Emma marveled at it. “Not in Bolivia at all.”

“I never actually said where I was going,” Rafe pointed out. “All I said was that a job came up abroad that I couldn't refuse.”

“A garden that needed work,” Emma said slowly, “in a house that was suddenly for sale.”

“Precisely,” Rafe said. “Could have been made for me, eh?”

He took a mouthful of coffee.

“I didn't tell you where I was going,” he said, “because I didn't want to get your hopes up. I didn't really have any idea what I was going to do. For all I knew, it could have ended up being a total waste of time.”

“How did you get them to take you on?” Emma asked.

“I told David Hunt I was an ex-pat gardener who offered landscaping services for English-speaking owners, including for when they were trying to sell.”

“What if he'd asked where you'd got his number?”

“I was going to take a chance and say I knew the estate agent. Fortunately, he didn't ask.”

In fact, as he went on to explain, David Hunt hadn't seemed to be that interested in the state of his garden at all.

“It
could
do with some work,” he had agreed in a vague way, when Rafe had inquired whether his garden was up to saleable scratch.

“Couple of days' worth,” Rafe said firmly. “Mowing, weeding, hedge cutting, that kind of thing. You'll find your viewings will shoot up. Garden's the first thing they see.”

“You have a point,” David Hunt said. “As it happens, though, we have our own gardener.”

“Oh.”
Arse.

“Yes. I'm not sure why he doesn't seem to have been here for a while. He's normally very good. We've been away, so things seem to have been allowed to slide, but I think you're right. I think we do need to give him a call.”

“Right.” Rafe tried to think of some other way he could get himself invited to the house. Nothing sprang to mind. “Right. Well, can I leave you my contact details anyway? Just in case.”

“Of course,” David Hunt said. Rafe recited the number and David Hunt repeated it back to him, but there was no way of telling whether he'd written it down.

“I appreciate your calling,” he said.

“No problem.”

Click
. The line went dead.

But an hour later, David Hunt called back.

“You won't believe it,” he said. “Our usual chap is having an operation of some sort. He won't be able to work for six weeks. Now you've put the idea in my head, we probably could use you.”

“The gods were on our side,” Rafe said. He took another bite of salad roll.

“Didn't you have any kind of plan?” Emma asked. “Any idea at all what you were going to do?”

“Christ, no. One thing I knew, even if they did let me anywhere near the house, they sure as hell weren't going to let Ritchie out of their sight for one second. I didn't even know if he'd still be there at all.”

Emma looked again at the little bag in her hand. She smoothed the see-through plastic. No diamond could have been more precious.

“I thought you didn't believe me,” she said. “That he was mine.”

“I
wanted
to believe you.” Earnestly, Rafe leaned forward. “I knew
you
believed it. I just couldn't see how it fit with the DNA. I thought, maybe you could have been making yourself think it was him. You know, because of how much you were grieving. I know things have been a bit . . .” He trailed off.

“It's all right.” Emma rescued him.

“I'm sorry, ” he said. “I didn't mean to—”

“It's all right,” she repeated.

Another glance at the bag on her knee. Time for all that later.

• • •

And so, it wasn't until a long time afterwards that she heard from Rafe the thoughts that had seesawed through his head as he waited at the airport, his rucksack at his feet. The police had warned him off: “You hardly know this woman. Don't break the law on her behalf.” In his pocket, plane tickets for two countries.

Keep trying. Or just pass right on by. It wasn't too late to decide.

Why was he doing this? Getting himself so involved with this woman. In the beginning, he'd felt guilty, and sorry for Emma, who'd struck him as being frankly wretched and pitiful, but now he seemed to have ended up a lot deeper in the whole thing than he'd ever intended. How
could
that kid in France be Ritchie? Everything pointed against it. The DNA. Everything. You only needed half a brain to see how unlikely it was to be him.

And what the hell had he been thinking, asking Emma to come with him to South America like that? He'd expected her to tell him where to stick it, and she had. In his defense, he'd only been trying, in his big-mouthed, cack-handed way, to make her see that she was a good mother, whatever she said about herself.

Because the way she spoke about Ritchie! She knew every little detail about him. This was no feckless, negligent, abusive parent. And she wasn't stupid. Far from it. Surely her opinion should count for something?

That story she'd told him, about going to the GP and saying she was planning to kill Ritchie. Strong words, you could not deny it. But words were not deeds. Talking about killing him and actually doing it were not the same thing. And then the GP, peeling off like that and running to the police, saying she thought Emma hadn't been coping. Stupid woman. If that was what she'd thought, why hadn't she done her job at the time and tried to help? And didn't doctors have a Hippocratic oath forbidding them from revealing secrets told to them by patients in their surgeries? Or was that priests he was thinking of?

The police, anyway, were no doubt pleased enough to have what they saw as the answer all nicely laid out in front of them. You couldn't blame them. It was human nature. Take the easy path.

“DI Hill's a tosser,” Mike, his friend, had told him. “Puts the hours in, clocks in and clocks out, but that's it. I couldn't see him going the extra mile. Your friend's been unlucky. She doesn't seem to have many people on her side, does she?”

“No,” Rafe said. “She doesn't.”

“What's your interest in this, anyway?” Mike sounded curious.

Rafe paused.

“I think maybe the chickens,” he said.

It wasn't a lie. He'd always felt guilty about those chickens. He'd jacked in his training because of the unquestioning way the police had accepted the paperwork saying the chickens were being properly treated—European directive, number of square meters per bird, blah blah blah—and they'd hauled off the animal rights protesters and refused to investigate any further. And so the farm had stayed open, and it was another year before someone finally got in there with a camera and filmed the workers during their lunch hour, playing football with the chickens, hurling the frantically flapping creatures against the walls, kicking them mercilessly back and forth across the concrete floor.

He'd walked out to make a point. When the point was, if he'd stayed, maybe he could have done something to help.

Sod it. Maybe it wasn't Ritchie at all. But he wouldn't have peace of mind until he knew. It wasn't as if there was much else going on in his life at the moment. His main problem these days was finding ways to stay out of that flea-pit flat over the kebab shop that he shared with Neil, the poet. Poet and cannabis addict. He was finding the days very long. Things were only quiet because he was about to travel, he knew that. But what did you do while you were waiting? Go for a cycle. Do the Sudoku. Meet a mate for a pint. Somehow, when he was a kid, he'd thought he'd have been doing
more
with his life by now.

So. He was going to France. He would see this child again with his own eyes. And if it turned out not to be Ritchie, he'd have done what he could to help and he could move on.

South America. Tents under a canopy. The desert on horseback. The Iguaçu waterfall. Polyfilla for the gaps in himself. He would walk in the mountains and rainforests, contemplating life; and when he got bored of that he'd go to the cities and sink into his choice of depravity. Marinate his mind. The trip of a lifetime.

• • •

He arrived at St.-Bourdain in the afternoon. He drove through the tall iron gates, and up the hill around the trees, and when he saw the Hunts' house he whistled. He'd been here before, but at the time he hadn't paid too much attention to the place. This time . . . well, there was no denying it, this was one serious heap of bricks. Three storeys, the same bleached stone as the gate pillars. Windows everywhere, framed with pale blue shutters, the glass black in the light. The rust-red roof pinkened in the sun.

He parked the car in front of the house and turned off the engine. Silence descended like a thick, green blanket; the sort of silence that only money could buy: voice-free, machine-free, broken only by the
zzeeoo
of some passing insect. Rafe hoped it wasn't a sign he'd got here too late. He got out of the car. The three stone steps to the wooden front door were dotted with orange trees in square wooden pots. Beside the door, under some creeper, was a push-button doorbell. He pressed it, and heard a fairly ordinary
ding-dong
die away inside the house. The green silence again. He stood on the step, looking around. The only car he could see was his own. At the front of the house, a willow tree shaded a flagstoned courtyard and a white wrought-iron table and chairs. The only items missing were a jug of lemonade and a chick holding a frilly umbrella.

Still no answer to the doorbell. Where had the Hunts gone? Shopping? A day out? Taken the kid and moved to Australia? Then footsteps echoed inside the house, and the wooden door was opened by a tall, slim woman, dressed for the heat in white trousers and a pale green shirt. She held the door and stared.

“Hello.” Rafe put on his most jovial, gardener-type smile. “I'm Rafe Townsend. I spoke to Mr. Hunt the other day, about doing some work in your garden.”

“My husband did mention it,” the woman said. “I'm Mrs. Hunt.”

Mrs. Hunt—or Philippa, as he knew her name was—looked good for her age, which was probably early forties. Very preserved. Plucked eyebrows, the lot. She also looked much more suspicious than her husband had sounded.

“I'm very sorry,” she said, “but I must tell you that we would normally require references before employing someone like this. We've been very busy recently, and unfortunately my husband completely forgot until this morning to inform me about this arrangement.”

O-kay. If he was in a circus, this was the part right now where he'd be out on the tightrope. Right out in the middle. Rafe kept his smile.

“I understand,” he said. “You can't be too careful these days.” He let his gaze fall to a clump of nettles growing through the stones on the bottom step. “Of course, if you need a reference, I'd be only too happy to provide one.”

Mrs. Hunt's gaze dropped, with his, to the nettles. Then towards the gate, where the wooden estate agent's sign faced the road. Her expression went blank for a moment.

She looked back at Rafe.

“Where are you living?” she asked.

“I'm based in Domme,” Rafe lied, having picked the name at random from the map. It was a village far enough away that she'd be unlikely to know anyone there, or want to know what street he lived on. He hoped.

“Domme,” Mrs. Hunt mused. “Isn't that where they have that marvelous market on the hill?”

“That's the one,” Rafe agreed. “Great vegetables. I stock up there every Saturday.”

“Really?” Mrs. Hunt looked surprised. “I thought that market only opened on a Thursday.”

“No, it . . . changed.”

“Oh. How very interesting.”

Mrs. Hunt looked closely at Rafe's clothes. He was wearing his heavy brown boots. They were still clumped and stained with mud from his last gardening job.

“If I were to employ you,” she said, “I would need that reference.”