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.
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