the girl on the train 014, Tuesday, 16 July 2013

RACHEL
Tuesday, 16 July 2013
Morning
I’M ON THE 8.04, but I’m not going into London. I’m going to Witney instead.
I’m hoping that being there will jog my memory, that I’ll get to the station and
I’ll see everything clearly, I’ll know. I don’t hold out much hope, but there is
nothing else I can do. I can’t call Tom. I’m too ashamed, and in any case, he’s
made it clear. He wants nothing more to do with me.
Megan is still missing; she’s been gone more than sixty hours now and the
story is becoming national news. It was on the BBC website and MailOnline this
morning; there were a few snippets mentioning it on other sites, too.
I printed out both the BBC and Mail stories; I have them with me. From them
I have gleaned the following:
Megan and Scott argued on Saturday evening. A neighbour reported hearing
raised voices. Scott admitted that they argued, and said that he believed his wife
had gone to spend the night with a friend, Tara Epstein, who lives in Corly.
Megan never got to Tara’s house. Tara says the last time she saw Megan was
on Friday afternoon at their pilates class. (I knew Megan would do pilates.)
According to Ms Epstein, ‘She seemed fine, normal. She was in a good mood,
she was talking about doing something special for her thirtieth birthday next
month.’
Megan was seen by one witness walking towards Witney train station at
around seven fifteen on Saturday evening.
Megan has no family in the area. Both her parents are deceased.
Megan is unemployed. She used to run a small art gallery in Witney, but it
closed down in April last year. (I knew Megan would be arty.)
Scott is a self-employed IT consultant. (I can’t bloody believe Scott is an IT
consultant.)
Megan and Scott have been married for three years; they have been living in
the house on Blenheim Road since January 2012.
According to the Daily Mail, their house is worth £400,000.
Reading this, I know that things look bad for Scott. Not just because of the
argument, either; it’s just the way things are: when something bad happens to a
woman, the police look at the husband or the boyfriend first. However, in this
case, the police don’t have all the facts. They’re only looking at the husband,
presumably because they don’t know about the boyfriend.
It could be that I am the only person who knows that the boyfriend exists.
I scrabble around in my bag for a scrap of paper. On the back of a card slip for
two bottles of wine, I write down a list of most likely possible explanations for
the disappearance of Megan Hipwell:
1. She has run off with her boyfriend, who from here on in I will refer to as
B.
2. B has harmed her.
3. Scott has harmed her.
4. She has simply left her husband and gone to live elsewhere.
5. Someone other than B or Scott has harmed her.
I think the first possibility is most likely, and four is a strong contender, too,
because Megan is an independent, wilful woman, I’m sure of it. And if she were
having an affair, she might need to get away to clear her head, mightn’t she?
Five does not seem especially likely, since murder by a stranger isn’t all that
common.
The bump on my head is throbbing, and I can’t stop thinking about the
argument I saw, or imagined, or dreamed about, on Saturday night. As we pass
Megan and Scott’s house, I look up. I can hear the blood pulsing in my head. I
feel excited. I feel afraid. The windows of number fifteen, reflecting morning
sunshine, look like sightless eyes.
Evening
I’m just settling into my seat when my phone rings. It’s Cathy. I let it go to
voicemail.
She leaves a message: ‘Hi Rachel, just phoning to make sure you’re OK.’
She’s worried about me, because of the thing with the taxi. ‘I just wanted to say
that I’m sorry, you know, about the other day, what I said about moving out. I
shouldn’t have. I overreacted. You can stay as long as you want to.’ There’s a
long pause and then she says, ‘Give me a ring, OK? And come straight home,
Rach, don’t go to the pub.’
I don’t intend to. I wanted a drink at lunchtime; I was desperate for one after
what happened in Witney this morning. I didn’t have one though, because I had
to keep a clear head. It’s been a long time since I’ve had anything worth keeping
a clear head for.
It was so strange, this morning, my trip to Witney. I felt as though I hadn’t
been there in ages, although of course it’s only been a few days. It may as well
have been a completely different place, though, a different station in a different
town. I was a different person to the one who went there on Saturday night.
Today I was stiff and sober, hyper-aware 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 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
walk 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 which said that ‘a man in his thirties is helping police with
their enquiries’. 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, 17 July 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 sounds 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 plain-clothes one, very tall and slightly
stooped, shook my hand and introduced himself as Detective Inspector Gaskill.
He told me the PC’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 exhusband?
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 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 Ms Hipwell, the missing woman, left her
home. Mrs Anna Watson told us that she saw you in the street, near Ms
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 closeup 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 nut-case,
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 me 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, reddish 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 signing on, 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 come 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 everything. 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 garden?
I did as Gaskill said, I bought a ham-and-cheese sandwich and a bottle of
water from a corner shop and took it to Witney’s only park, a rather sorry little
patch of land surrounded by 1930s houses and given over almost entirely to an
asphalted playground. I sat on a bench at the edge of this space, watching
mothers and childminders scolding their charges for eating sand out of the pit. I
used to dream of this, a few years back. I dreamed of coming here – not to eat
ham-and-cheese sandwiches in between police interviews, obviously – I
dreamed of coming here with my own baby. I thought about the buggy I would
buy, all the time I would spend in Trotters and at the Early Learning Centre
sizing up adorable outfits and educational toys. I thought about how I would sit
here, bouncing my own bundle of joy on my lap.
It didn’t happen. No doctor has been able to explain to me why I can’t get
pregnant. I’m young enough, fit enough, I wasn’t drinking heavily when we
were trying. My husband’s sperm was active and plentiful. It just didn’t happen.
I didn’t suffer the agony of miscarriage, I just didn’t get pregnant. We did one
round of IVF, which was all we could afford. It was, as everyone had warned us
it would be, unpleasant and unsuccessful. Nobody warned me it would break us.
But it did. Or rather, it broke me, and then I broke us.
The thing about being barren is that you’re not allowed to get away from it.
Not when you’re in your thirties. My friends were having children, friends of
friends were having children, pregnancy and birth and first birthday parties were
everywhere. I was asked about it, all the time. My mother, our friends,
colleagues at work. When was it going to be my turn? At some point our
childlessness became an acceptable topic of Sunday-lunch conversation, not just
between Tom and me, but more generally. What we were trying, what we should
be doing, do you really think you should be having a second glass of wine? I was
still young, there was still plenty of time, but failure cloaked me like a mantle, it
overwhelmed me, dragged me under and I gave up hope. At the time, I resented
the fact that it was always seen as my fault, that I was the one letting the side
down. But as the speed with which he managed to impregnate Anna
demonstrates, there was never any problem with Tom’s virility. I was wrong to
suggest that we should share the blame; it was all down to me.
Lara, my best friend since university, had two children in two years: a boy
first and then a girl. I didn’t like them. I didn’t want to hear anything about them.
I didn’t want to be near them. Lara stopped speaking to me after a while. There
was a girl at work who told me – casually, as though she were talking about an
appendectomy or a wisdom-tooth extraction – that she’d recently had an
abortion, a medical one, and it was so much less traumatic than the surgical one
she’d had when she was at university. I couldn’t speak to her after that, I could
barely look at her. Things became awkward in the office; people noticed.
Tom didn’t feel the way I did. It wasn’t his failure, for starters, and in any
case, he didn’t need a child like I did. He wanted to be a dad, he really did – I’m
sure he daydreamed about kicking a football around in the garden with his son,
or carrying his daughter on his shoulders in the park. But he thought our lives
could be great without children, too. We’re happy, he used to say to me, why
can’t we just go on being happy? He became frustrated with me. He never
understood that it’s possible to miss what you’ve never had, to mourn for it.
I felt isolated in my misery. I became lonely, so I drank a bit, and then a bit
more, and then I became lonelier, because no one likes being around a drunk. I
lost and I drank and I drank and I lost. I liked my job, but I didn’t have a
glittering career, and even if I had, let’s be honest: women are still only really
valued for two things – their looks and their role as mothers. I’m not beautiful,
and I can’t have kids, so what does that make me? Worthless.
I can’t blame all this for my drinking – I can’t blame my parents or my
childhood, an abusive uncle or some terrible tragedy. It’s my fault. I was a
drinker anyway – I’ve always liked to drink. But I did become sadder, and
sadness gets boring after a while, for the sad person and for everyone around
them. And then I went from being a drinker to being a drunk, and there’s nothing
more boring than that.
I’m better now, about the children thing; I’ve got better since I’ve been on my
own. I’ve had to. I’ve read books and articles, I’ve realized that I must come to
terms with it. There are strategies, there is hope. If I straightened myself out and
sobered up, there’s a possibility that I could adopt. And I’m not thirty-four yet –
it isn’t over. I am better than I was a few years ago, when I used to abandon my
trolley and leave the supermarket if the place was packed with mums and kids; I
wouldn’t have been able to come to a park like this, to sit near the playground
and watch chubby toddlers rolling down the slide. There were times, at my
lowest, when the hunger was at its worst, when I thought I was going to lose my
mind.
Maybe I did, for a while. The day they asked me about it at the police station,
I might have been mad then. Something Tom once said tipped me over, sent me
sliding. Something he wrote, rather: I read it on Facebook that morning. It
wasn’t a shock – I knew she was having a baby, he’d told me, and I’d seen her,
seen that pink blind in the nursery window. So I knew what was coming. But I
thought of the baby as her baby. Until the day I saw the picture of him, holding
his newborn girl, looking down at her and smiling, and beneath he’d written: ‘So
this is what all the fuss is about! Never knew love like this! Happiest day of my
life!’ I thought about him writing that – knowing that I would see it, that I would
read those words and they would kill me, and writing it anyway. He didn’t care.
Parents don’t care about anything but their children. They are the centre of the
universe; they are all that really counts. Nobody else is important, no one else’s
suffering or joy matters, none of it is real.
I was angry. I was distraught. Maybe I was vengeful. Maybe I thought I’d
show them that my distress was real. I don’t know. I did a stupid thing.
I went back to the police station after a couple of hours. I asked if I could
speak to Gaskill alone, but he said that he wanted Riley to be present. I liked him
a little less after that.
‘I didn’t break into their home,’ I said. ‘I did go there, I wanted to speak to
Tom. No one answered the doorbell …’
‘So how did you get in?’ Riley asked me.
‘The door was open.’
‘The front door was open?’
I sighed. ‘No, of course not. The sliding door at the back, the one leading into
the garden.’
‘And how did you get into the back garden?’
‘I went over the fence, I knew the way in …’
‘So you climbed over the fence to gain access to your exhusband’s house?’
‘Yes. We used to … There was always a spare key at the back. We had a place
we hid it, in case one of us lost our keys or forgot them or something. But I
wasn’t breaking in – I didn’t. I just wanted to talk to Tom. I thought maybe …
the bell wasn’t working or something.’
‘This was the middle of the day, during the week, wasn’t it? Why did you
think your ex-husband would be at home? Had you called to find out?’ Riley
asked.
‘Jesus! Will you just let me speak?’ I shouted, and she shook her head and
gave me that smile again, as if she knew me, as if she could read me. ‘I went
over the fence,’ I said, trying to control the volume of my voice, ‘and knocked
on the glass doors, which were partly open. There was no answer. I stuck my
head inside and called Tom’s name. Again, no answer, but I could hear a baby
crying. I went inside and saw that Anna—’
‘Mrs Watson?’
‘Yes. Mrs Watson was on the sofa, sleeping. The baby was in the carrycot and
was crying – screaming, actually, red in the face – she’d obviously been crying
for a while.’ As I said those words it struck me that I should have told them that I
could hear the baby crying from the street and that’s why I went round to the
back of the house. That would have made me sound less like a maniac.
‘So the baby’s screaming and her mother’s right there, and she doesn’t wake?’
Riley asks me.
‘Yes.’ Her elbows are on the table, her hands in front of her mouth so I can’t
read her expression fully, but I know she thinks I’m lying. ‘I picked her up to
comfort her. That’s all. I picked her up to quieten her.’
‘That’s not all, though, is it, because when Anna woke up you weren’t there,
were you? You were down by the fence, by the train tracks.’
‘She didn’t stop crying right away,’ I said. ‘I was bouncing her up and down
and she was still grizzling, so I walked outside with her.’
‘Down to the train tracks?’
‘Into the garden.’
‘Did you intend to harm the Watsons’ child?’
I leaped to my feet then. Melodramatic, I know, but I wanted to make them
see – make Gaskill see – what an outrageous suggestion that was. ‘I don’t have
to listen to this! I came here to tell you about the man! I came here to help you!
And now … what exactly are you accusing me of? What are you accusing me
of?’ Gaskill remained impassive, unimpressed. He motioned at me to sit down
again. ‘Ms Watson, the other … er, Mrs Watson – Anna – mentioned you to us
during the course of our enquiries about Megan Hipwell. She said that you had
behaved erratically, in an unstable manner, in the past. She mentioned this
incident with the child. She said that you have harassed both her and her
husband, that you continue to call the house repeatedly.’ He looked down at his
notes for a moment. ‘Almost nightly, in fact. That you refuse to accept that your
marriage is over …’
‘That is simply not true!’ I insisted, and it wasn’t – yes, I called Tom from
time to time, but not every night, it was a total exaggeration. But I was getting
the feeling that Gaskill wasn’t on my side after all, and I was starting to feel
tearful again.
‘Why haven’t you changed your name?’ Riley asked me.
‘Excuse me?’
‘You still use your ex-husband’s name. Why is that? If a man left me for
another woman, I think I’d want to get rid of that name. I certainly wouldn’t
want to share my name with my replacement …’
‘Well, maybe I’m not that petty.’ I am that petty. I hate that she’s Anna
Watson.
‘Right. And the ring – the one on a chain around your neck. Is that your
wedding band?’
‘No,’ I lied. ‘It’s a … it was my grandmother’s.’
‘Is that right? OK. Well, I have to say that, to me, your behaviour suggests that
– as Mrs Watson has implied – you are unwilling to move on, that you refuse to
accept that your ex has a new family.’
‘I don’t see—’
‘What this has to do with Megan Hipwell?’ Riley finished my sentence. ‘Well.
The night Megan went missing, we have reports that you – an unstable woman
who had been drinking heavily – were seen on the street where she lives.
Bearing in mind that there are some physical similarities between Megan and
Mrs Watson—’
‘They don’t look anything like each other!’ I was outraged at the suggestion.
Jess is nothing like Anna. Megan is nothing like Anna.
‘They’re both blonde, slim, petite, pale-skinned …’
‘So I attacked Megan Hipwell thinking she was Anna? That’s the most stupid
thing I’ve ever heard,’ I said. But that lump on my head was throbbing again and
everything from Saturday night was still deepest black.
‘Did you know that Anna Watson knows Megan Hipwell?’ Gaskill asked me,
and I felt my jaw drop.
‘I … what? No. No, they don’t know each other.’
Riley smiled for a moment, then straightened her face. ‘Yes they do. Megan
did some childminding for the Watsons …’ she glanced down at her notes, ‘back
in August and September last year.’ I don’t know what to say. I can’t imagine it:
Megan in my home, with her, with her baby.
‘The cut on your lip, is that from when you got knocked down the other day?’
Gaskill asked me.
‘Yes. I bit it when I fell, I think.’
‘Where was it, this accident?’
‘It was in London, Theobalds Road. Near Holborn.’
‘And what were you doing there?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Why were you in central London?’
I shrugged. ‘I already told you,’ I said coldly. ‘My flatmate doesn’t know that
I’ve lost my job. So I go into London, as usual, and I go to libraries, to job hunt,
to work on my CV.’
Riley shook her head, in disbelief perhaps, or wonder. How does anyone get to
that point?
I pushed my chair back, readying myself to leave. I’d had enough of being
talked down to, being made to look like a fool, like a mad woman. Time to play
the trump card. ‘I don’t really know why we’re talking about this,’ I said. ‘I
would have thought that you would have better things to do, like investigating
Megan Hipwell’s disappearance, for example. I take it you’ve spoken to her
lover?’ Neither of them said anything, they just stared at me. They weren’t
expecting that. They didn’t know about him. ‘Perhaps you didn’t know. Megan
Hipwell was having an affair,’ I said, and I started to walk to the door. Gaskill
stopped me; he moved quietly and surprisingly quickly, and before I could put
my hand on the door handle he was standing in front of me.
‘I thought you didn’t know Megan Hipwell?’ he asked me.
‘I don’t,’ I said, trying to get past him.
‘Sit down,’ he said, blocking my path.
I told them then about what I’d seen from the train, about how I often saw
Megan sitting out on her terrace, sunbathing in the evenings or having coffee in
the mornings. I told them about how last week I saw her with someone who
clearly wasn’t her husband, how I’d seen them kissing on the lawn.
‘When was this?’ Gaskill snapped. He seemed annoyed with me, perhaps
because I should have told them this straight away, instead of wasting all day
talking about myself.
‘Friday. It was Friday morning.’
‘So the day before she went missing, you saw her with another man?’ Riley
asked me, with a sigh of exasperation. She closed the file in front of her. Gaskill
leaned back in his seat, studying my face. She clearly thought I was making it
up; he wasn’t so sure.
‘Can you describe him?’ Gaskill asked.
‘Tall, dark—’
‘Handsome?’ Riley interrupted.
I puffed my cheeks out. ‘Taller than Scott Hipwell. I know, because I’ve seen
them together – Jess and – sorry, Megan and Scott Hipwell – and this man was
different. Slighter, thinner, darker skinned. Possibly an Asian man,’ I said.
‘You could determine his ethnic group from the train?’ Riley said.
‘Impressive. Who is Jess, by the way?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘You mentioned Jess a moment ago.’
I could feel my face flushing again. I shook my head, ‘No, I didn’t,’ I said.
Gaskill got to his feet and held out his hand for me to shake. ‘I think that’s
enough.’ I shook his hand, ignored Riley and turned to go. ‘Don’t go anywhere
near Blenheim Road, Ms Watson,’ Gaskill said. ‘Don’t contact your ex-husband
unless it’s important, and don’t go anywhere near Anna Watson or her child.’
On the train on the way home, as I dissect all the ways that today went wrong,
I’m surprised by the fact that I don’t feel as awful as I might do. Thinking about
it, I know why that is: I didn’t have a drink last night, and I have no desire to
have one now. I am interested, for the first time in ages, in something other than
my own misery. I have purpose. Or at least, I have a distraction.
Thursday, 18 July 2013
Morning
I bought three newspapers before getting on to the train this morning: Megan has
been missing for four days and five nights and the story is getting plenty of
coverage. The Daily Mail, predictably, has managed to find pictures of Megan in
her bikini, but they’ve also done the most detailed profile I’ve seen of her so far.
Born Megan Mills in Rochester in 1983, she moved with her parents to King’s
Lynn in Norfolk when she was ten. She was a bright child, very outgoing, a
talented artist and singer. A quote from a school friend says she was ‘a good
laugh, very pretty and quite wild’. Her wildness seems to have been exacerbated
by the death of her brother, Ben, to whom she was very close. He was killed in a
motorcycle accident when he was nineteen and she fifteen. She ran away from
home three days after his funeral. She was arrested twice – once for theft and
once for soliciting. Her relationship with her parents, the Mail informs me, broke
down completely. Both her parents died a few years ago, without ever being
reconciled with their daughter. (Reading this, I feel desperately sad for Megan. I
realize that perhaps, after all, she isn’t so different from me. She’s isolated and
lonely too.)
When she was sixteen, she moved in with a boyfriend who had a house near
the village of Holkham in north Norfolk. The school friend says, ‘He was an
older guy, a musician or something. He was into drugs. We didn’t see Megan
much after they got together.’ The boyfriend’s name is not given, so presumably
they haven’t found him. He might not even exist. The school friend might be
making this stuff up just to get her name into the papers.
They skip forward several years after that: suddenly Megan is twenty-four,
living in London, working as a waitress in a north London restaurant. There she
meets Scott Hipwell, an independent IT contractor who is friendly with the
restaurant manager, and the two of them hit it off. After an ‘intense courtship’,
Megan and Scott marry, when she is twenty-six and he is thirty.
There are a few other quotes, including one from Tara Epstein, the friend with
whom Megan was supposed to stay on the night she disappeared. She says that
Megan is ‘a lovely, carefree girl’ and that she seemed ‘very happy’. ‘Scott would
not have hurt her,’ Tara says. ‘He loves her very much.’ There isn’t a thing Tara
says that isn’t a cliché. The quote that interests me is from one of the artists who
exhibited their work in the gallery Megan used to manage, one Rajesh Gujral,
who says that Megan is ‘a wonderful woman, sharp, funny and beautiful, an
intensely private person with a warm heart’. Sounds to me like Rajesh has got a
crush. The only other quote comes from a man called David Clark, ‘a former
colleague’ of Scott’s, who says, ‘Megs and Scott are a great couple. They’re very
happy together, very much in love.’
There are some news pieces about the investigation, too, but the statements
from the police amount to less than nothing: they have spoken to ‘a number of
witnesses’, they are ‘pursuing several lines of enquiry’. The only interesting
comment comes from Detective Inspector Gaskill, who confirms that two men
are helping the police with their enquiries. I’m pretty sure that means they’re
both suspects. One will be Scott. Could the other be B? Could B be Rajesh?
I’ve been so engrossed in the newspapers that I haven’t been paying my usual
attention to the journey; it seems as though I’ve only just sat down when the
train grinds to its customary halt opposite the red signal. There are people in
Scott’s garden – there are two uniformed police just outside the back door. My
head swims. Have they found something? Have they found her? Is there a body
buried in the garden or shoved under the floorboards? I can’t stop thinking of the
clothes on the side of the railway line, which is stupid, because I saw those there
before Megan went missing. And in any case, if harm has been done to her, it
wasn’t by Scott, it can’t have been. He’s madly in love with her, everyone says
so. The light is bad today, the weather’s turned, the sky leaden, threatening. I
can’t see into the house, I can’t see what’s going on. I feel quite desperate. I
cannot stand being on the outside – for better or worse, I am a part of this now. I
need to know what’s going on.
At least I have a plan. First, I need to find out if there’s any way that I can be
made to remember what happened on Saturday night. When I get to the library, I
plan to do some research and find out whether hypnotherapy could make me
remember; whether it is in fact possible to recover that lost time. Second – and I
reckon this is important, because I don’t think the police believed me when I told
them about Megan’s lover – I need to get in touch with Scott Hipwell. I need to
tell him. He deserves to know.
Evening
The train is full of rain-soaked people, steam rising off their clothes and
condensing on the windows. The fug of body odour, perfume and laundry soap
hangs oppressively above bowed, damp heads. The clouds that menaced this
morning did so all day, growing heavier and blacker until they burst, monsoonlike,
this evening, just as office workers stepped outside and the rush hour began
in earnest, leaving the roads gridlocked and tube station entrances choked with
people opening and closing umbrellas.
I don’t have an umbrella and am soaked through; I feel as though someone has
thrown a bucket of water over me. My cotton trousers cling to my thighs and my
faded blue shirt has become embarrassingly transparent. I ran all the way from
the library to the tube station with my handbag clutched against my chest to hide
what I could. For some reason I found this funny – there is something ridiculous
about being caught in the rain – and I was laughing so hard by the time I got to
the top of Gray’s Inn Road I could barely breathe. I can’t remember the last time
I laughed like that.
I’m not laughing now. As soon as I got myself a seat, I checked the latest on
Megan’s case on my phone, and it’s the news I’ve been dreading. ‘A thirty-fiveyear-
old man is being questioned under caution at Witney police station
regarding the disappearance of Megan Hipwell, missing from her home since
Saturday evening.’ That’s Scott, I’m sure of it. I can only hope that he read my
email before they picked him up, because questioning under caution is serious –
it means they think he did it. Although, of course, it is yet to be defined. It may
not have happened at all. Megan might be fine. Every now and again it does
strike me that she’s alive and well and sitting on a hotel balcony with a view of
the sea, her feet up on the railings, a cold drink at her elbow.
The thought of her there both thrills and disappoints me, and then I feel sick
for feeling disappointed. I don’t wish her ill, no matter how angry I was with her
for cheating on Scott, for shattering my illusions about my perfect couple. No,
it’s because I feel like I’m part of this mystery, I’m connected. I am no longer
just a girl on the train, going back and forth without point or purpose. I want
Megan to turn up safe and sound. I do. Just not quite yet.
I sent Scott an email this morning. His address was easy to find – I googled
him and found www.shipwellconsulting.co.uk, the site where he advertises ‘a
range of consultancy, cloud and web-based services for business and non-profit
organizations’. I knew it was him, because his business address is also his home
address.
I sent a short message to the contact given on the site:
Dear Scott,
My name is Rachel Watson. You don’t know me. I would like to talk to you about your wife. I do not
have any information on her whereabouts, I don’t know what has happened to her. But I believe I
have information that could help you.
You may not want to talk to me, I would understand that, but if you do, email me on this address.
Yours sincerely,
Rachel
I don’t know if he would have contacted me anyway – I doubt that I would, if
I were in his shoes. Like the police, he’d probably just think I was a nutter, some
weirdo who’s read about the case in the newspaper. Now I’ll never know – if
he’s been arrested, he may never get a chance to see the message. If he’s been
arrested, the only people who see it may be the police, which won’t be good
news for me. But I had to try.
And now I feel desperate, thwarted. I can’t see through the mob of people in
the carriage across to their side of the tracks – my side – and even if I could,
with the rain still pouring down I wouldn’t be able to see beyond the railway
fence. I wonder whether evidence is being washed away, whether right at this
moment vital clues are disappearing for ever: smears of blood, footprints, DNAloaded
cigarette butts. I want a drink so badly I can almost taste the wine on my
tongue. I can imagine exactly what it will feel like for the alcohol to hit my
bloodstream and make my head rush.
I want a drink and I don’t want one, because if I don’t have a drink today then
it’ll be three days, and I can’t remember the last time I stayed off for three days
in a row. There’s a taste of something else in my mouth, too, an old
stubbornness. There was a time when I had willpower, when I could run 10k
before breakfast and subsist for weeks on 1,300 calories a day. It was one of the
things Tom loved about me, he said: my stubbornness, my strength. I remember
an argument, right at the end, when things were about as bad as they could be; he
lost his temper with me. ‘What happened to you, Rachel?’ he asked me. ‘When
did you become so weak?’
I don’t know. I don’t know where that strength went, I don’t remember losing
it. I think that over time it got chipped away, bit by bit, by life, by the living of it.
The train comes to an abrupt halt, brakes screeching alarmingly, at the signal
on the London side of Witney. The carriage is filled with murmured apologies as
standing passengers stumble, bumping into each other, stepping on each other’s
feet. I look up and find myself looking right into the eyes of the man from
Saturday night – the ginger one, the one who helped me up. He’s staring right at
me, his startlingly blue eyes locked on mine, and I get such a fright I drop my
phone. I retrieve it from the floor and look up again, tentatively this time, not
directly at him. I scan the carriage, I wipe the steamy window with my elbow
and stare out, and then eventually I look back over at him and he smiles at me,
his head cocked a little to one side.
I can feel my face burning. I don’t know how to react to his smile, because I
don’t know what it means. Is it Oh, hello, I remember you from the other night,
or is it Ah, it’s that pissed girl who fell down the stairs and talked shit at me the
other night, or is it something else? I don’t know, but thinking about it now, I
believe I have a snatch of soundtrack to go with the picture of me slipping on the
steps: him saying, ‘You all right, love?’ I turn away and look out of the window
again. I can feel his eyes on me; I just want to hide, to disappear. The train
judders off and in seconds we’re pulling into Witney station and people start
jostling each other for position, folding newspapers and packing away Kindles
and iPads as they prepare to disembark. I look up again and am flooded with
relief – he’s turned away from me, he’s getting off the train.
It strikes me then that I’m being an idiot. I should get up and follow him, talk
to him. He can tell me what happened, or what didn’t happen; he might be able
to fill in some of the blanks at least. I get to my feet. I hesitate – I know it’s
already too late, the doors are about to close, I’m in the middle of the carriage, I
won’t be able to push my way through the crowd in time. The doors beep and
close. Still standing, I turn and look out of the window as the train pulls away.
He’s standing on the edge of the platform in the rain, the man from Saturday
night, watching me as I go past.
The closer I get to home the more irritated with myself I feel. I’m almost
tempted to change trains at Northcote, go back to Witney and look for him. A
ridiculous idea, obviously, and stupidly risky given that Gaskill warned me to
stay away from the area only yesterday. But I’m feeling dispirited about ever
recalling what happened on Saturday. A few hours of (admittedly hardly
exhaustive) internet research this afternoon confirmed what I suspected:
hypnosis is not generally useful in retrieving hours lost to blackout because, as
my previous reading suggested, we do not make memories during blackout.
There is nothing to remember. It is, will always be, a black hole in my timeline.