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.