The Girl on the Train: A Novel

TUESDAY, JULY 23, 2013

MORNING

It takes me a while to realize what I’m feeling when I wake. There’s a rush of elation, tempered with something else: a nameless dread. I know we’re close to finding the truth. I just can’t help feeling that the truth is going to be terrible.

I sit up in bed and grab my laptop, turn it on and wait impatiently for it to boot up, then log on to the Internet. The whole process seems interminable. I can hear Cathy moving around the house, washing up her breakfast things, running upstairs to brush her teeth. She hovers for a few moments outside my door. I imagine her knuckles raised, ready to rap. She thinks better of it and runs back down the stairs.

The BBC news page comes up. The headline is about benefit cuts, the second story about yet another 1970s television star accused of sexual indiscretions. Nothing about Megan; nothing about Kamal. I’m disappointed. I know that the police have twenty-four hours to charge a suspect, and they’ve had that now. In some circumstances, they can hold someone for an extra twelve hours, though.

I know all this because I spent yesterday doing my research. After I was shown out of Scott’s house, I came back here, turned on the television and spent most of the day watching the news, reading articles online. Waiting.

By midday, the police had named their suspect. On the news, they talked about “evidence discovered at Dr. Abdic’s home and in his car,” but they didn’t say what. Blood, perhaps? Her phone, as yet undiscovered? Clothes, a bag, her toothbrush? They kept showing pictures of Kamal, close-ups of his dark, handsome face. The picture they use isn’t a mug shot, it’s a candid shot: he’s on holiday somewhere, not quite smiling, but almost. He looks too soft, too beautiful to be a killer, but appearances can be deceptive—they say Ted Bundy looked like Cary Grant.

I waited all day for more news, for the charges to be made public: kidnap, assault or worse. I waited to hear where she is, where he’s been keeping her. They showed pictures of Blenheim Road, the station, Scott’s front door. Commentators mused on the likely implications of the fact that neither Megan’s phone nor her bank cards had been used for more than a week.

Tom called more than once. I didn’t pick up. I know what he wants. He wants to ask why I was at Scott Hipwell’s house yesterday morning. Let him wonder. It has nothing to do with him. Not everything is about him. I imagine he’s calling at her behest, in any case. I don’t owe her any explanations.

I waited and waited, and still no charge; instead, we heard more about Kamal, the trusted mental health professional who listened to Megan’s secrets and troubles, who gained her trust and then abused it, who seduced her and then, who knows what?

I learned that he is a Muslim, a Bosnian, a survivor of the Balkans conflict, who came to Britain as a fifteen-year-old refugee. No stranger to violence, he lost his father and two older brothers at Srebrenica. He has a conviction for domestic violence. The more I heard about Kamal, the more I knew that I was right: I was right to speak to the police about him, I was right to contact Scott.

I get up and pull my dressing gown around me, hurry downstairs and flick on the TV. I have no intention of going anywhere today. If Cathy comes home unexpectedly, I can tell her I’m ill. I make myself a cup of coffee and sit down in front of the television, and I wait.

EVENING

I got bored around three o’clock. I got bored with hearing about benefits and seventies TV paedophiles, I got frustrated with hearing nothing about Megan, nothing about Kamal, so I went to the off-licence and bought two bottles of white wine.

I’m almost at the bottom of the first bottle when it happens. There’s something else on the news now, shaky camera footage taken from a half-built (or half-destroyed) building, explosions in the distance. Syria, or Egypt, maybe Sudan? I’ve got the sound down, I’m not really paying attention. Then I see it: the ticker running across the bottom of the screen tells me that the government is facing a challenge to legal aid cuts and that Fernando Torres will be out for up to four weeks with a hamstring strain and that the suspect in the Megan Hipwell disappearance has been released without charge.

I put my glass down and grab the remote, clicking the volume button up, up, up. This can’t be right. The war report continues, it goes on and on, my blood pressure rising with it, but eventually it ends and they go back to the studio and the newsreader says: “Kamal Abdic, the man arrested yesterday in connection with the disappearance of Megan Hipwell, has been released without charge. Abdic, who was Mrs. Hipwell’s therapist, was detained yesterday, but was released this morning because police say there is insufficient evidence to charge him.”

I don’t hear what she says after that. I just sit there, my eyes blurring over, a wash of noise in my ears, thinking, They had him. They had him and they let him go.

•   •   •

Upstairs, later. I’ve had too much to drink, I can’t see the computer screen properly, everything doubles, trebles. I can read if I hold my hand over one eye. It gives me a headache. Cathy is home, she called out to me and I told her I was in bed, unwell. She knows that I’m drinking.

My belly is awash with alcohol. I feel sick. I can’t think straight. Shouldn’t have started drinking so early. Shouldn’t have started drinking at all. I phoned Scott’s number an hour ago, again a few minutes ago. Shouldn’t have done that, either. I just want to know, what lies has Kamal told them? What lies have they been fool enough to believe? The police have messed the whole thing up. Idiots. That Riley woman, her fault. I’m sure of it.

The newspapers haven’t helped. There was no domestic violence conviction, they’re saying now. That was a mistake. They’re making him look like the victim.

Don’t want to drink anymore. I know that I should pour the rest down the sink, because otherwise it’ll be there in the morning and I’ll get up and drink it straightaway, and once I’ve started I’ll want to go on. I should pour it down the sink, but I know I’m not going to. Something to look forward to in the morning.

It’s dark, and I can hear someone calling her name. A voice, low at first, but then louder. Angry, desperate, calling Megan’s name. It’s Scott—he’s unhappy with her. He calls her again and again. It’s a dream, I think. I keep trying to grasp at it, to hold on to it, but the harder I struggle, the fainter and the further away it gets.

WEDNESDAY, JULY 24, 2013

MORNING

I’m woken by a soft tapping at the door. Rain batters against the windows; it’s after eight but still seems dark outside. Cathy pushes the door gently open and peers into the room.

“Rachel? Are you all right?” She catches sight of the bottle next to my bed and her shoulders sag. “Oh, Rachel.” She comes across to my bed and picks up the bottle. I’m too embarrassed to say anything. “Are you not going into work?” she asks me. “Did you go yesterday?”

She doesn’t wait for me to answer, just turns to go, calling back as she does, “You’ll end up getting yourself sacked if you carry on like this.”

I should just say it now, she’s already angry with me. I should go after her and tell her: I was sacked months ago for turning up blind drunk after a three-hour lunch with a client during which I managed to be so rude and unprofessional that I cost the firm his business. When I close my eyes, I can still remember the tail end of that lunch, the look on the waitress’s face as she handed me my jacket, weaving into the office, people turning to look. Martin Miles taking me to one side. I think you should probably go home, Rachel.

There is a crack of thunder, a flash of light. I jolt upright. What was it I thought of last night? I check my little black book, but I haven’t written anything down since midday yesterday: notes about Kamal—age, ethnicity, conviction for domestic violence. I pick up a pen and cross out that last point.

Downstairs, I make myself a cup of coffee and turn on the TV. The police held a press conference last night, they’re showing clips from it on Sky News. Detective Inspector Gaskill’s up there, looking pale and gaunt and chastened. Hangdog. He never mentions Kamal’s name, just says that a suspect had been detained and questioned, but has been released without charge and that the investigation is ongoing. The cameras pan away from him to Scott, sitting hunched and uncomfortable, blinking in the light of the cameras, his face a twist of anguish. It hurts my heart to see him. He speaks softly, his eyes cast down. He says that he has not given up hope, that no matter what the police say, he still clings to the idea that Megan will come home.

The words come out hollow, they ring false, but without looking into his eyes, I can’t tell why. I can’t tell whether he doesn’t really believe she’s coming home because all the faith he once possessed has been ripped away by the events of the past few days, or because he really knows that she’s never coming home.

It comes to me, just then: the memory of calling his number yesterday. Once, twice? I run upstairs to get my phone and find it tangled up in the bedclothes. I have three missed calls: one from Tom and two from Scott. No messages. The call from Tom was last night, as was the first call from Scott, but later, just before midnight. The second call from him was this morning, just a few minutes ago.

My heart lifts a little. This is good news. Despite his mother’s actions, despite their clear implications (Thank you very much for your help, now get lost), Scott still wants to talk to me. He needs me. I’m momentarily flooded with affection for Cathy, filled with gratitude to her for pouring the rest of the wine away. I have to keep a clear head, for Scott. He needs me thinking straight.

I take a shower, get dressed and make another cup of coffee, and then I sit down in the living room, little black book at my side, and I call Scott.

“You should have told me,” he says as soon as he picks up, “what you are.” His tone is flat, cold. My stomach is a small, hard ball. He knows. “Detective Riley spoke to me after they let him go. He denied having an affair with her. And the witness who suggested that there was something going on was unreliable, she said. An alcoholic. Possibly mentally unstable. She didn’t tell me the witness’s name, but I take it she was talking about you?”

“But . . . no,” I say. “No. I’m not . . . I hadn’t been drinking when I saw them. It was eight thirty in the morning.” Like that means anything. “And they found evidence, it said so on the news. They found—”

“Insufficient evidence.”

The phone goes dead.

FRIDAY, JULY 26, 2013

MORNING

I am no longer travelling to my imaginary office. I have given up the pretence. I can barely be bothered to get out of bed. I think I last brushed my teeth on Wednesday. I am still feigning illness, although I’m pretty sure I’m fooling no one.

I can’t face getting up, getting dressed, getting onto the train, going into London, wandering the streets. It’s hard enough when the sun is shining, it’s impossible in this rain. Today is the third day of cold, driving, relentless downpour.

I’m having trouble sleeping, and it’s not just the drinking now, it’s the nightmares. I’m trapped somewhere, and I know that someone’s coming, and there’s a way out, I know there is, I know that I saw it before, only I can’t find my way back to it, and when he does get me, I can’t scream. I try—I suck the air into my lungs and I force it out—but there’s no sound, just a rasping, like a dying person fighting for air.

Sometimes, in my nightmares, I find myself in the underpass by Blenheim Road, the way back is blocked and I cannot go farther because there is something there, someone waiting, and I wake in pure terror.

They’re never going to find her. Every day, every hour that passes I become more certain. She will be one of those names, hers will be one of those stories: lost, missing, body never found. And Scott will not have justice, or peace. He will never have a body to grieve over; he will never know what happened to her. There will be no closure, no resolution. I lie awake thinking about it and I ache. There can be no greater agony, nothing can be more painful than the not knowing, which will never end.

I have written to him. I admitted my problem, then I lied again, saying that I had it under control, that I was seeking help. I told him that I am not mentally unstable. I no longer know whether that’s true or not. I told him that I was very clear about what I saw, and that I hadn’t been drinking when I saw it. That, at least, is true. He hasn’t replied. I didn’t expect him to. I am cut off from him, shut out. The things I want to say to him, I can never say. I can’t write them down, they don’t sound right. I want him to know how sorry I am that it wasn’t enough to point them in Kamal’s direction, to say, Look, there he is. I should have seen something. That Saturday night, I should have had my eyes open.

EVENING

I am soaked through, freezing cold, the ends of my fingers blanched and wrinkled, my head throbbing from a hangover that kicked in at about half past five. Which is about right, considering I started drinking before midday. I went out to get another bottle, but I was thwarted by the ATM, which gave me the much-anticipated riposte: There are insufficient funds in your account.

After that, I started walking. I walked aimlessly for over an hour, through the driving rain. The pedestrianized centre of Ashbury was mine alone. I decided, somewhere along that walk, that I have to do something. I have to make amends for being insufficient.

Now, sodden and almost sober, I’m going to call Tom. I don’t want to know what I did, what I said, that Saturday night, but I have to find out. It might jog something. For some reason, I am certain that there is something I’m missing, something vital. Perhaps this is just more self-deception, yet another attempt to prove to myself that I’m not worthless. But perhaps it’s real.

“I’ve been trying to get hold of you since Monday,” Tom says when he answers the phone. “I called your office,” he adds, and he lets that sink in.

I’m on the back foot already, embarrassed, ashamed. “I need to talk to you,” I say, “about Saturday night. That Saturday night.”

“What are you talking about? I need to talk to you about Monday, Rachel. What the hell were you doing at Scott Hipwell’s house?”

“That’s not important, Tom—”

“Yes it bloody is. What were you doing there? You do realize, don’t you, that he could be . . . I mean, we don’t know, do we? He could have done something to her. Couldn’t he? To his wife.”

“He hasn’t done anything to his wife,” I say confidently. “It isn’t him.”

“How the hell would you know? Rachel, what is going on?”

“I just . . . You have to believe me. That isn’t why I called you. I needed to talk to you about that Saturday. About the message you left me. You were so angry. You said I’d scared Anna.”

“Well, you had. She saw you stumbling down the street, you shouted abuse at her. She was really freaked out, after what happened last time. With Evie.”

“Did she . . . did she do something?”

“Do something?”

“To me?”

“What?”

“I had a cut, Tom. On my head. I was bleeding.”

“Are you accusing Anna of hurting you?” He’s yelling now, he’s furious. “Seriously, Rachel. That is enough! I have persuaded Anna—on more than one occasion—not to go to the police about you, but if you carry on like this—harassing us, making up stories—”

“I’m not accusing her of anything, Tom. I’m just trying to figure things out. I don’t—”

“You don’t remember! Of course not. Rachel doesn’t remember.” He sighs wearily. “Look. Anna saw you—you were drunk and abusive. She came home to tell me, she was upset, so I went out to look for you. You were in the street. I think you might have fallen. You were very upset. You’d cut your hand.”

“I hadn’t—”

“Well, you had blood on your hand, then. I don’t know how it got there. I told you I’d take you home, but you wouldn’t listen. You were out of control, you were making no sense. You walked off and I went to get the car, but when I came back, you’d gone. I drove up past the station but I couldn’t see you. I drove around a bit more—Anna was very worried that you were hanging around somewhere, that you’d come back, that you’d try to get into the house. I was worried you’d fall, or get yourself into trouble . . . I drove all the way to Ashbury. I rang the bell, but you weren’t at home. I called you a couple of times. I left a message. And yes, I was angry. I was really pissed off by that point.”

“I’m sorry, Tom,” I say. “I’m really sorry.”

“I know,” he says. “You’re always sorry.”

“You said that I shouted at Anna,” I say, cringing at the thought of it. “What did I say to her?”

“I don’t know,” he snaps. “Would you like me to go and get her? Perhaps you’d like to have a chat with her about it?”

“Tom . . .”

“Well, honestly—what does it matter now?”

“Did you see Megan Hipwell that night?”

“No.” He sounds concerned now. “Why? Did you? You didn’t do something, did you?”

“No, of course I didn’t.”

He’s silent for a moment. “Well, why are you asking about this then? Rachel, if you know something . . .”

“I don’t know anything,” I say. “I didn’t see anything.”

“Why were you at the Hipwells’ house on Monday? Please tell me so that I can put Anna’s mind at ease. She’s worried.”

“I had something to tell him. Something I thought might be useful.”

“You didn’t see her, but you had something useful to tell him?”

I hesitate for a moment. I’m not sure how much I should tell him, whether I should keep this just for Scott. “It’s about Megan,” I say. “She was having an affair.”

“Wait—did you know her?”

“Just a little,” I say.

“How?”

“From her gallery.”

“Oh,” he says. “So who’s the guy?”

“Her therapist,” I tell him. “Kamal Abdic. I saw them together.”

“Really? The guy they arrested? I thought they’d let him go.”

“They have. And it’s my fault, because I’m an unreliable witness.”

Tom laughs. It’s soft, friendly, he isn’t mocking me. “Rachel, come on. You did the right thing, coming forward. I’m sure it’s not just about you.” In the background, I can hear the prattle of the child, and Tom says something away from the phone, something I can’t hear. “I should go,” he says. I can imagine him putting down the phone, picking up his little girl, giving her a kiss, embracing his wife. The dagger in my heart twists, round and round and round.

MONDAY, JULY 29, 2013

MORNING

It’s 8:07 and I’m on the train. Back to the imaginary office. Cathy was with Damien all weekend, and when I saw her last night, I didn’t give her a chance to berate me. I started apologizing for my behaviour straightaway, said I’d been feeling really down, but that I was pulling myself together, turning over a new leaf. She accepted, or pretended to accept, my apologies. She gave me a hug. Niceness writ large.

Megan has dropped out of the news almost completely. There was a comment piece in the Sunday Times about police incompetence that referred briefly to the case, an unnamed source at the Crown Prosecution Service citing it as “one of a number of cases in which the police have made a hasty arrest on the basis of flimsy or flawed evidence.”

We’re coming to the signal. I feel the familiar rattle and jolt, the train slows and I look up, because I have to, because I cannot bear not to, but there is never anything to see any longer. The doors are closed and the curtains drawn. There is nothing to see but rain, sheets of it, and muddy water pooling at the bottom of the garden.

On a whim, I get off the train at Witney. Tom couldn’t help me, but perhaps the other man could—the red-haired man. I wait for the disembarking passengers to disappear down the steps and then I sit on the only covered bench on the platform. I might get lucky. I might see him getting onto the train. I could follow him, I could talk to him. It’s the only thing I have left, my last roll of the dice. If this doesn’t work, I have to let it go. I just have to let it go.

Half an hour goes by. Every time I hear footsteps on the steps, my heart rate goes up. Every time I hear the clacking of high heels, I am seized with trepidation. If Anna sees me here, I could be in trouble. Tom warned me. He’s persuaded her not to get the police involved, but if I carry on . . .

Quarter past nine. Unless he starts work very late, I’ve missed him. It’s raining harder now, and I can’t face another aimless day in London. The only money I have is a tenner I borrowed from Cathy, and I need to make that last until I’ve summoned up the courage to ask my mother for a loan. I walk down the steps, intending to cross underneath to the opposite platform and go back to Ashbury, when suddenly I spot Scott hurrying out of the newsagent opposite the station entrance, his coat pulled up around his face.

I run after him and catch him at the corner, right opposite the underpass. I grab his arm and he wheels round, startled.

“Please,” I say, “can I talk to you?”

“Jesus Christ,” he snarls at me. “What the fuck do you want?”

I back away from him, holding my hands up. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m sorry. I just wanted to apologize, to explain . . .”

The downpour has become a deluge. We are the only people on the street, both of us soaked to the skin. Scott starts to laugh. He throws his hands up in the air and roars with laughter. “Come to the house,” he says. “We’re going to drown out here.”

Scott goes upstairs to fetch me a towel while the kettle boils. The house is less tidy than it was a week ago, the disinfectant smell displaced by something earthier. A pile of newspapers sits in the corner of the living room; there are dirty mugs on the coffee table and the mantelpiece.

Scott appears at my side, proffering the towel. “It’s a tip, I know. My mother was driving me insane, cleaning, tidying up after me all the time. We had a bit of a row. She hasn’t been round for a few days.” His mobile phone starts to ring, he glances at it, puts it back into his pocket. “Speak of the devil. She never bloody stops.”

I follow him into the kitchen.

“I’m so sorry about what happened,” I say.

He shrugs. “I know. And it’s not your fault anyway. I mean, it might’ve helped if you weren’t . . .”

“If I wasn’t a drunk?”

His back is turned, he’s pouring the coffee.

“Well, yes. But they didn’t actually have enough to charge him with anything anyway.” He hands me the mug and we sit down at the table. I notice that one of the photograph frames on the sideboard has been turned facedown. Scott is still talking. “They found things—hair, skin cells—in his house, but he doesn’t deny that she went there. Well, he did deny it at first, then he admitted that she had been there.”

“Why did he lie?”

“Exactly. He admitted that she’d been to the house twice, just to talk. He won’t say what about—there’s the whole confidentiality thing. The hair and the skin cells were found downstairs. Nothing up in the bedroom. He swears blind they weren’t having an affair. But he’s a liar, so . . .” He passes his hand over his eyes. His face looks as though it is sinking into itself, his shoulders sag. He looks shrunken. “There was a trace of blood on his car.”

“Oh my God.”

“Yeah. Matches her blood type. They don’t know if they can get any DNA because it’s such a small sample. It could be nothing, that’s what they keep saying. How could it be nothing, that her blood’s on his car?” He shakes his head. “You were right. The more I hear about this guy, the more I’m sure.” He looks at me, right at me, for the first time since we got here. “He was fucking her, and she wanted to end it, so he . . . he did something. That’s it. I’m sure of it.”

He’s lost all hope, and I don’t blame him. It’s been more than two weeks and she hasn’t turned on her phone, hasn’t used a credit card, hasn’t withdrawn money from an ATM. No one has seen her. She is gone.

“He told the police that she might have run away,” Scott says.

“Dr. Abdic did?”

Scott nods. “He told the police that she was unhappy with me and she might have run off.”

“He’s trying to shift suspicion, get them to think that you did something.”

“I know that. But they seem to buy everything that bastard says. That Riley woman, I can tell when she talks about him. She likes him. The poor, downtrodden refugee.” He hangs his head, wretched. “Maybe he’s right. We did have that awful fight. But I can’t believe . . . She wasn’t unhappy with me. She wasn’t. She wasn’t.” When he says it the third time, I wonder whether he’s trying to convince himself. “But if she was having an affair, she must have been unhappy, mustn’t she?”

“Not necessarily,” I say. “Perhaps it was one of those—what do they call it?—transference things. That’s the word they use, isn’t it? When a patient develops feelings—or thinks they develop feelings—for a therapist. Only the therapist is supposed to resist them, to point out that the feelings aren’t real.”

His eyes are on my face, but I feel as though he isn’t really listening to what I’m saying.

“What happened?” he asks. “With you. You left your husband. Was there someone else?”

I shake my head. “Other way round. Anna happened.”

“Sorry.” He pauses.

I know what he’s going to ask, so before he can, I say, “It started before. While we were still married. The drinking. That’s what you wanted to know, isn’t it?”

He nods again.

“We were trying for a baby,” I say, and my voice catches. Still, after all this time, every time I talk about it the tears come to my eyes. “Sorry.”

“It’s all right.” He gets to his feet, goes over to the sink and pours me a glass of water. He puts it on the table in front of me.

I clear my throat, try to be as matter-of-fact as possible. “We were trying for a baby and it didn’t happen. I became very depressed, and I started to drink. I was extremely difficult to live with, and Tom sought solace elsewhere. And she was all too happy to provide it.”

“I’m really sorry, that’s awful. I know . . . I wanted to have a child. Megan kept saying she wasn’t ready yet.” Now it’s his turn to wipe the tears away. “It’s one of the things . . . we argued about it sometimes.”

“Was that what you were arguing about the day she left?”

He sighs, pushing his chair back and getting to his feet. “No,” he says, turning away from me. “It was something else.”

EVENING

Cathy is waiting for me when I get home. She’s standing in the kitchen, aggressively drinking a glass of water.

“Good day at the office?” she asks, pursing her lips. She knows.

“Cathy . . .”

“Damien had a meeting near Euston today. On his way out, he bumped into Martin Miles. They know each other a little, remember, from Damien’s days at Laing Fund Management. Martin used to do the PR for them.”

“Cathy . . .”

She held her hand up, took another gulp of water. “You haven’t worked there in months! In months! Do you know how idiotic I feel? What an idiot Damien felt? Please, please tell me that you have another job that you just haven’t told me about. Please tell me that you haven’t been pretending to go to work. That you haven’t been lying to me—day in, day out—all this time.”

“I didn’t know how to tell you . . .”

“You didn’t know how to tell me? How about: ‘Cathy, I got fired because I was drunk at work’? How about that?” I flinch and her face softens. “I’m sorry, but honestly, Rachel.” She really is too nice. “What have you been doing? Where do you go? What do you do all day?”

“I walk. Go to the library. Sometimes—”

“You go to the pub?”

“Sometimes. But—”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” She approaches me, placing her hands on my shoulders. “You should have told me.”

“I was ashamed,” I say, and I start to cry. It’s awful, cringeworthy, but I start to weep. I sob and sob, and poor Cathy holds me, strokes my hair, tells me I’ll be all right, that everything will be all right. I feel wretched. I hate myself almost more than I ever have.

Later, sitting on the sofa with Cathy, drinking tea, she tells me how it’s going to be. I’m going to stop drinking, I’m going to get my CV in order, I’m going to contact Martin Miles and beg for a reference. I’m going to stop wasting money going backwards and forwards to London on pointless train journeys.

“Honestly, Rachel, I don’t understand how you could have kept this up for so long.”

I shrug. “In the morning, I take the 8:04, and in the evening, I come back on the 5:56. That’s my train. It’s the one I take. That’s the way it is.”

THURSDAY, AUGUST 1, 2013

MORNING

There’s something covering my face, I can’t breathe, I’m suffocating. When I surface into wakefulness, I’m gasping for air and my chest hurts. I sit up, eyes wide, and see something moving in the corner of the room, a dense centre of blackness that keeps growing, and I almost cry out—and then I’m properly awake and there’s nothing there, but I am sitting up in bed and my cheeks are wet with tears.

It’s almost dawn, the light outside is just beginning to tinge grey, and the rain of the last several days is still battering against the window. I won’t go back to sleep, not with my heart hammering in my chest so much it hurts.

I think, though I can’t be sure, that there’s some wine downstairs. I don’t remember finishing the second bottle. It’ll be warm, because I can’t leave it in the fridge; if I do, Cathy pours it away. She so badly wants me to get better, but so far, things are not going according to her plan. There’s a little cupboard in the hallway where the gas meter is. If there was any wine left, I’ll have stashed it in there.

I creep out onto the landing and tiptoe down the stairs in the half-light. I flip the little cupboard open and lift out the bottle: it’s disappointingly light, not much more than a glassful in there. But better than nothing. I pour it into a mug (just in case Cathy comes down—I can pretend it’s tea) and put the bottle in the bin (making sure to conceal it under a milk carton and a crisp packet). In the living room, I flick on the TV, mute it straightaway and sit down on the sofa.

I’m flicking through channels—it’s all children’s TV and infomercials until with a flash of recognition I’m looking at Corly Wood, which is just down the road from here: you can see it from the train. Corly Wood in pouring rain, the fields between the tree line and train tracks submerged underwater.

I don’t know why it takes me so long to realize what’s going on. For ten seconds, fifteen, twenty, I’m looking at cars and blue-and-white tape and a white tent in the background, and my breath is coming shorter and shorter until I’m holding it and not breathing at all.

It’s her. She’s been in the wood all along, just along the railway track from here. I’ve been past those fields every day, morning and evening, travelling by, oblivious.

In the wood. I imagine a grave dug beneath scrubby bushes, hastily covered up. I imagine worse things, impossible things—her body hanging from a rope, somewhere deep in the forest where nobody goes.

It might not even be her. It might be something else.

I know it isn’t something else.

There’s a reporter on screen now, dark hair slick against his skull. I turn up the volume and listen to him tell me what I already know, what I can feel—that it wasn’t me who couldn’t breathe, it was Megan.

“That’s right,” he’s saying, talking to someone in the studio, his hand pressed to his ear. “The police have now confirmed that the body of a young woman has been found submerged in floodwater in a field at the bottom of Corly Wood, which is less than five miles from the home of Megan Hipwell. Mrs. Hipwell, as you know, went missing in early July—the thirteenth of July, in fact—and has not been seen since. Police are saying that the body, which was discovered by dog walkers out early this morning, has yet to be formally identified; however, they do believe that this is Megan that they’ve found. Mrs. Hipwell’s husband has been informed.”

He stops speaking for a while. The news anchor is asking him a question, but I can’t hear it because the blood is roaring in my ears. I bring the mug up to my lips and drink every last drop.

The reporter is talking again. “Yes, Kay, that’s right. It would appear that the body was buried here in the woods, possibly for some time, and that it has been uncovered by the heavy rains that we’ve had recently.”

It’s worse, so much worse than I imagined. I can see her now, her ruined face in the mud, pale arms exposed, reaching up, rising up as though she were clawing her way out of the grave. I taste hot liquid, bile and bitter wine, in my mouth, and I run upstairs to be sick.

EVENING

I stayed in bed most of the day. I tried to get things straight in my head. I tried to piece together, from the memories and the flashbacks and the dreams, what happened on Saturday night. In an attempt to make sense of it, to see it clearly, I wrote it all down. The scratching of my pen on paper felt like someone whispering to me; it put me on edge, I kept feeling as though there was someone else in the flat, just on the other side of the door, and I couldn’t stop imagining her.

I was almost too afraid to open the bedroom door, but when I did, there was no one there, of course. I went downstairs and turned on the television again. The same pictures were still there: the woods in the rain, police cars driving along a muddy track, that horrible white tent, all of it a grey blur, and then suddenly Megan, smiling at the camera, still beautiful, untouched. Then it’s Scott, head down, fending off photographers as he tries to get through his own front door, Riley at his side. Then it’s Kamal’s office. No sign of him, though.

I didn’t want to hear the sound track, but I had to turn the volume up, anything to stop the silence ringing in my ears. The police say that the woman, still not formally identified, has been dead for some time, possibly several weeks. They say the cause of death has yet to be established. They say that there is no evidence of a sexual motive for the killing.

That strikes me as a stupid thing to say. I know what they mean—they mean they don’t think she was raped, which is a blessing, of course, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a sexual motive. It seems to me that Kamal wanted her and he couldn’t have her, that she must have tried to end it and he couldn’t stand it. That’s a sexual motive, isn’t it?

I can’t bear to watch the news any longer, so I go back upstairs and crawl under my duvet. I empty out my handbag, looking through my notes scribbled on bits of paper, all the scraps of information I’ve gleaned, the memories shifting like shadows, and I wonder, Why am I doing this? What purpose does it serve?