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?
MEGAN
• • •
THURSDAY, JUNE 13, 2013
MORNING
I can’t sleep in this heat. Invisible bugs crawl over my skin, I have a rash on my chest, I can’t get comfortable. And Scott seems to radiate warmth; lying next to him is like lying next to a fire. I can’t get far enough away from him and find myself clinging to the edge of the bed, sheets thrown back. It’s intolerable. I thought about going to lie down on the futon in the spare room, but he hates to wake and find me gone, it always leads to a row about something. Alternative uses for the spare room, usually, or who I was thinking about while I was lying there alone. Sometimes I want to scream at him, Just let me go. Let me go. Let me breathe. So I can’t sleep, and I’m angry. I feel as though we’re having a fight already, even though the fight’s only in my imagination.
And in my head, thoughts go round and round and round.
I feel like I’m suffocating.
When did this house become so bloody small? When did my life become so boring? Is this really what I wanted? I can’t remember. All I know is that a few months ago I was feeling better, and now I can’t think and I can’t sleep and I can’t draw and the urge to run is becoming overwhelming. At night when I lie awake I can hear it, quiet but unrelenting, undeniable: a whisper in my head, Slip away. When I close my eyes, my head is filled with images of past and future lives, the things I dreamed I wanted, the things I had and threw away. I can’t get comfortable, because every way I turn I run into dead ends: the closed gallery, the houses on this road, the stifling attentions of the tedious Pilates women, the track at the end of the garden with its trains, always taking someone else to somewhere else, reminding me over and over and over, a dozen times a day, that I’m staying put.
I feel as though I’m going mad.
And yet just a few months ago, I was feeling better, I was getting better. I was fine. I was sleeping. I didn’t live in fear of the nightmares. I could breathe. Yes, I still wanted to run away. Sometimes. But not every day.
Talking to Kamal helped me, there’s no denying that. I liked it. I liked him. He made me happier. And now all that feels so unfinished—I never got to the crux of it. That’s my fault, of course, because I behaved stupidly, like a child, because I didn’t like feeling rejected. I need to learn to lose a little better. I’m embarrassed now, ashamed. My face goes hot at the thought of it. I don’t want that to be his final impression of me. I want him to see me again, to see me better. And I do feel that if I went to him, he would help. He’s like that.
I need to get to the end of the story. I need to tell someone, just once. Say the words out loud. If it doesn’t come out of me, it’ll eat me up. The hole inside me, the one they left, it’ll just get bigger and bigger until it consumes me.
I’m going to have to swallow my pride and my shame and go to him. He’s going to have to listen. I’ll make him.
EVENING
Scott thinks I’m at the cinema with Tara. I’ve been outside Kamal’s flat for fifteen minutes, psyching myself up to knock on the door. I’m so afraid of the way he’s going to look at me, after last time. I have to show him that I’m sorry, so I’ve dressed the part: plain and simple, jeans and T-shirt, hardly any makeup. This is not about seduction, he has to see that.
I can feel my heart starting to race as I step up to his front door and press the bell. No one comes. The lights are on, but no one comes. Perhaps he has seen me outside, lurking; perhaps he’s upstairs, just hoping that if he ignores me I’ll go away. I won’t. He doesn’t know how determined I can be. Once I’ve made my mind up, I’m a force to be reckoned with.
I ring again, and then a third time, and finally I hear footsteps on the stairs and the door opens. He’s wearing tracksuit bottoms and a white T-shirt. He’s barefoot, wet-haired, his face flushed.
“Megan.” Surprised, but not angry, which is a good start. “Are you all right? Is everything all right?”
“I’m sorry,” I say, and he steps back to let me in. I feel a rush of