The Girl on the Train: A Novel

SUNDAY, AUGUST 4, 2013

MORNING

It’s different, the nightmare I wake from this morning. In it, I’ve done something wrong, but I don’t know what it is, all I know is that it cannot be put right. All I know is that Tom hates me now, he won’t talk to me any longer, and he has told everyone I know about the terrible thing I’ve done, and everyone has turned against me: old colleagues, my friends, even my mother. They look at me with disgust, contempt, and no one will listen to me, no one will let me tell them how sorry I am. I feel awful, desperately guilty, I just can’t think what it is that I’ve done. I wake and I know the dream must come from an old memory, some ancient transgression—it doesn’t matter which one now.

After I got off the train yesterday, I hung around outside Ashbury station for a full fifteen or twenty minutes. I watched to see if he’d got off the train with me—the red-haired man—but there was no sign of him. I kept thinking that I might have missed him, that he was there somewhere, just waiting for me to walk home so that he could follow me. I thought how desperately I would love to be able to run home and for Tom to be waiting for me. To have someone waiting for me.

I walked home via the off-licence.

The flat was empty when I got back, it had the feeling of a place just vacated, as though I’d just missed Cathy, but the note on the counter said she was going out for lunch with Damien in Henley and that she wouldn’t be back until Sunday night. I felt restless, afraid. I walked from room to room, picking things up, putting them down. Something felt off, but I realized eventually that it was just me.

Still, the silence ringing in my ears sounded like voices, so I poured myself a glass of wine, and then another, and then I phoned Scott. The phone went straight to voice mail: his message from another lifetime, the voice of a busy, confident man with a beautiful wife at home. After a few minutes, I phoned again. The phone was answered, but no one spoke.

“Hello?”

“Who is this?”

“It’s Rachel,” I said. “Rachel Watson.”

“Oh.” There was noise in the background, voices, a woman. His mother, perhaps.

“You . . . I missed your call,” I said.

“No . . . no. Did I call you? Oh. By mistake.” He sounded flustered. “No, just put it there,” he said, and it took me a moment to realize he wasn’t talking to me.

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

“Yes.” His tone was flat and even.

“So sorry.”

“Thank you.”

“Did you . . . did you need to talk to me?”

“No, I must have rung you by mistake,” he said, with more conviction this time.

“Oh.” I could tell he was keen to get off the phone. I knew I should leave him to his family, his grief. I knew that I should, but I didn’t. “Do you know Anna?” I asked him. “Anna Watson?”

“Who? You mean your ex’s missus?”

“Yes.”

“No. I mean not really. Megan . . . Megan did a bit of babysitting for her, last year. Why do you ask?”

I don’t know why I ask. I don’t know. “Can we meet?” I asked him. “I wanted to talk to you about something.”

“About what?” He sounded annoyed. “It’s really not a great time.”

Stung by his sarcasm, I was ready to hang up when he said, “I’ve got a house full of people here. Tomorrow? Come by the house tomorrow afternoon.”

EVENING

He’s cut himself shaving: there’s blood on his cheek and on his collar. His hair is damp and he smells of soap and aftershave. He nods at me and stands aside, gesturing for me to the enter the house, but he doesn’t say anything. The house is dark, stuffy, the blinds in the living room closed, the curtains drawn across the French doors leading to the garden. There are Tupperware containers on the kitchen counters.

“Everyone brings food,” Scott says. He gestures at me to sit down at the table, but he remains standing, his arms hanging limply at his sides. “You wanted to tell me something?” He is a man on autopilot, he doesn’t look me in the eye. He looks defeated.

“I wanted to ask you about Anna Watson, about whether . . . I don’t know. What was her relationship with Megan like? Did they like each other?”

He frowns, places his hands on the back of the chair in front of him. “No. I mean . . . they didn’t dislike each other. They didn’t really know each other very well. They didn’t have a relationship.” His shoulders seem to sag lower still; he’s weary. “Why are you asking me about this?”

I have to come clean. “I saw her. I think I saw her, outside the underpass by the station. I saw her that night . . . the night Megan went missing.”

He shakes his head a little, trying to comprehend what I’m telling him. “Sorry? You saw her. You were . . . Where were you?”

“I was here. I was on my way to see . . . to see Tom, my ex-husband, but I—”

He squeezes his eyes shut, rubs his forehead. “Hang on a minute—you were here—and you saw Anna Watson? And? I know Anna was here. She lives a few doors away. She told the police that she went to the station around seven but that she didn’t recall seeing Megan.” His hands grip the chair, I can tell he is losing patience. “What exactly are you saying?”

“I’d been drinking,” I say, my face reddening with a familiar shame. “I don’t remember exactly, but I’ve just got this feeling—”

Scott holds his hand up. “Enough. I don’t want to hear this. You’ve got some problem with your ex, your ex’s new wife, that’s obvious. It’s got nothing to do with me, nothing to do with Megan, has it? Jesus, aren’t you ashamed? Do you have any idea of what I’m going through here? Do you know that the police had me in for questioning this morning?” He’s pushing down so hard on the chair, I fear it’s going to break, I’m steeling myself for the crack. “And you come here with this bullshit. I’m sorry your life is a total fucking disaster, but believe me, it’s a picnic compared to mine. So if you don’t mind . . .” He jerks his head in the direction of the front door.

I get to my feet. I feel foolish, ridiculous. And I am ashamed. “I wanted to help. I wanted—”

“You can’t, all right? You can’t help me. No one can help me. My wife is dead, and the police think I killed her.” His voice is rising, spots of colour appear on his cheeks. “They think I killed her.”

“But . . . Kamal Abdic . . .”

The chair crashes against the kitchen wall with such force that one of the legs splinters away. I jump back in fright, but Scott has barely moved. His hands are back at his sides, balled into fists. I can see the veins under his skin.

“Kamal Abdic,” he says, teeth gritted, “is no longer a suspect.” His tone is even, but he is struggling to restrain himself. I can feel the anger vibrating off him. I want to get to the front door, but he is in my way, blocking my path, blocking out what little light there was in the room.

“Do you know what he’s been saying?” he asks, turning away from me to pick up the chair. Of course I don’t, I think, but I realize once again that he’s not really talking to me. “Kamal’s got all sorts of stories. Kamal says that Megan was unhappy, that I was a jealous, controlling husband, a—what was the word?—an emotional abuser.” He spits the words out in disgust. “Kamal says Megan was afraid of me.”

“But he’s—”

“He isn’t the only one. That friend of hers, Tara—she says that Megan asked her to cover for her sometimes, that Megan wanted her to lie to me about where she was, what she was doing.”

He places the chair back at the table and it falls over. I take a step towards the hallway, and he looks at me then. “I am a guilty man,” he says, his face a twist of anguish. “I am as good as convicted.”

He kicks the broken chair aside and sits down on one of the three remaining good ones. I hover, unsure. Stick or twist? He starts to talk again, his voice so soft I can barely hear him. “Her phone was in her pocket,” he says. I take a step closer to him. “There was a message on it from me. The last thing I ever said to her, the last words she ever read, were Go to hell you lying bitch.”

His chin on his chest, his shoulders start to shake. I am close enough to touch him. I raise my hand and, trembling, put my fingers lightly on the back of his neck. He doesn’t shrug me away.

“I’m sorry,” I say, and I mean it, because although I’m shocked to hear the words, to imagine that he could speak to her like that, I know what it is to love someone and to say the most terrible things to them, in anger or anguish. “A text message,” I say. “It’s not enough. If that’s all they have . . .”

“It’s not, though, is it?” He straightens up then, shrugging my hand away from him. I walk back around the table and sit down opposite him. He doesn’t look up at me. “I have a motive. I didn’t behave . . . I didn’t react the right way when she walked out. I didn’t panic soon enough. I didn’t call her soon enough.” He gives a bitter laugh. “And there is a pattern of abusive behaviour, according to Kamal Abdic.” It’s then that he looks up at me, that he sees me, that a light comes on. Hope. “You . . . you can talk to the police. You can tell them that it’s a lie, that he’s lying. You can at least give another side of the story, tell them that I loved her, that we were happy.”

I can feel panic rising in my chest. He thinks I can help him. He is pinning his hopes on me and all I have for him is a lie, a bloody lie.

“They won’t believe me,” I say weakly. “They don’t believe me. I’m an unreliable witness.”

The silence between us swells and fills the room; a fly buzzes angrily against the French doors. Scott picks at the dried blood on his cheek, I can hear his nails scraping against his skin. I push my chair back, the legs scraping on the tiles, and he looks up.

“You were here,” he says, as though the piece of information I gave him fifteen minutes ago is only now sinking in. “You were in Witney the night Megan went missing?”

I can barely hear him above the blood thudding in my ears. I nod.

“Why didn’t you tell the police that?” he asks. I can see the muscle tic in his jaw.

“I did. I did tell them that. But I didn’t have . . . I didn’t see anything. I don’t remember anything.”

He gets to his feet, walks over to the French doors and pulls back the curtain. The sunshine is momentarily blinding. Scott stands with his back to me, his arms folded.

“You were drunk,” he says matter-of-factly. “But you must remember something. You must—that’s why you keep coming back here, isn’t it?” He turns around to face me. “That’s it, isn’t it? Why you keep contacting me. You know something.” He’s saying this as though it’s fact: not a question, not an accusation, not a theory. “Did you see his car?” he asks. “Think. Blue Vauxhall Corsa. Did you see it?” I shake my head and he throws his arms up in frustration. “Don’t just dismiss it. Really think. What did you see? You saw Anna Watson, but that doesn’t mean anything. You saw—come on! Who did you see?”

Blinking into the sunlight, I try desperately to piece together what I saw, but nothing comes. Nothing real, nothing helpful. Nothing I could say out loud. I was in an argument. Or perhaps I witnessed an argument. I stumbled on the station steps, a man with red hair helped me up—I think that he was kind to me, although now he makes me feel afraid. I know that I had a cut on my head, another on my lip, bruises on my arms. I think I remember being in the underpass. It was dark. I was frightened, confused. I heard voices. I heard someone call Megan’s name. No, that was a dream. That wasn’t real. I remember blood. Blood on my head, blood on my hands. I remember Anna. I don’t remember Tom. I don’t remember Kamal or Scott or Megan.

He is watching me, waiting for me to say something, to offer him some crumb of comfort, but I have none.

“That night,” he says, “that’s the key time.” He sits back down at the table, closer to me now, his back to the window. There is a sheen of sweat on his forehead and his upper lip, and he shivers as though with fever. “That’s when it happened. They think that’s when it happened. They can’t be sure . . .” He tails off. “They can’t be sure. Because of the condition . . . of the body.” He takes a deep breath. “But they think it was that night. Or soon after.” He’s back on autopilot, speaking to the room, not to me. I listen in silence as he tells the room that the cause of death was head trauma, her skull was fractured in several places. No sexual assault, or at least none that they could confirm, because of her condition. Her condition, which was ruined.

When he comes back to himself, back to me, there is fear in his eyes, desperation.

“If you remember anything,” he says, “you have to help me. Please, try to remember, Rachel.” The sound of my name on his lips makes my stomach flip, and I feel wretched.

On the train, on the way home, I think about what he said, and I wonder if it’s true. Is the reason that I can’t let go of this trapped inside my head? Is there some knowledge I’m desperate to impart? I know that I feel something for him, something I can’t name and shouldn’t feel. But is it more than that? If there’s something in my head, then maybe someone can help me get it out. Someone like a psychiatrist. A therapist. Someone like Kamal Abdic.

TUESDAY, AUGUST 6, 2013

MORNING

I’ve barely slept. All night, I lay awake thinking about it, turning it over and over in my mind. Is this stupid, reckless, pointless? Is it dangerous? I don’t know what I’m doing. I made an appointment yesterday morning to see Dr. Kamal Abdic. I rang his surgery and spoke to a receptionist, asked for him by name. I might have been imagining it, but I thought she sounded surprised. She said he could see me today at four thirty. So soon? My heart battering my ribs, my mouth dry, I said that would be fine. The session costs £75. That £300 from my mother is not going to last very long.

Ever since I made the appointment, I haven’t been able to think of anything else. I’m afraid, but I’m excited, too. I can’t deny that there’s a part of me that finds the idea of meeting Kamal thrilling. Because all this started with him: a glimpse of him and my life changed course, veered off the tracks. The moment I saw him kiss Megan, everything changed.

And I need to see him. I need to do something, because the police are only interested in Scott. They had him in for questioning again yesterday. They won’t confirm it, of course, but there’s footage on the Internet: Scott, walking into the police station, his mother at his side. His tie was too tight, he looked strangled.

Everyone speculates. The newspapers say that the police are being more circumspect, that they cannot afford to make another hasty arrest. There is talk of a botched investigation, suggestions that a change in personnel may be required. On the Internet, the talk about Scott is horrible, the theories wild, disgusting. There are screen grabs of him giving his first tearful appeal for Megan’s return, and next to them are pictures of killers who had also appeared on television, sobbing, seemingly distraught at the fate of their loved ones. It’s horrific, inhuman. I can only pray that he never looks at this stuff. It would break his heart.

So, stupid and reckless I may be, but I am going to see Kamal Abdic, because unlike all the speculators, I have seen Scott. I’ve been close enough to touch him, I know what he is, and he isn’t a murderer.

EVENING

My legs are still trembling as I climb the steps to Corly station. I’ve been shaking like this for hours, it must be the adrenaline, my heart just won’t slow down. The train is packed—no chance of a seat here, it’s not like getting on at Euston, so I have to stand, midway through a carriage. It’s like a sweatbox. I’m trying to breathe slowly, my eyes cast down to my feet. I’m just trying to get a handle on what I’m feeling.

Exultation, fear, confusion and guilt. Mostly guilt.

It wasn’t what I expected.

By the time I got to the practice, I’d worked myself up into a state of complete and utter terror: I was convinced that he was going to look at me and somehow know that I knew, that he was going to view me as a threat. I was afraid that I would say the wrong thing, that somehow I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from saying Megan’s name. Then I walked into a doctor’s waiting room, boring and bland, and spoke to a middle-aged receptionist, who took my details without really looking at me. I sat down and picked up a copy of Vogue and flicked through it with trembling fingers, trying to focus my mind on the task ahead while at the same time attempting to look unremarkably bored, just like any other patient.

There were two others in there: a twentysomething man reading something on his phone and an older woman who stared glumly at her feet, not once looking up, even when her name was called by the receptionist. She just got up and shuffled off, she knew where she was going. I waited there for five minutes, ten. I could feel my breathing getting shallow. The waiting room was warm and airless, and I felt as though I couldn’t get enough oxygen into my lungs. I worried that I might faint.

Then a door flew open and a man came out, and before I’d even had time to see him properly, I knew that it was him. I knew the way I knew that he wasn’t Scott the first time I saw him, when he was nothing but a shadow moving towards her—just an impression of tallness, of loose, languid movement. He held out his hand to me.

“Ms. Watson?”

I raised my eyes to meet his and felt a jolt of electricity all the way down my spine. I put my hand into his. It was warm and dry and huge, enveloping the whole of mine.

“Please,” he said, indicating for me to follow him into his office, and I did, feeling sick, dizzy all the way. I was walking in her footsteps. She did all this. She sat opposite him in the chair he told me to sit in, he probably folded his hands just below his chin the way he did this afternoon, he probably nodded at her in the same way, saying, “OK, what would you like to talk to me about today?”

Everything about him was warm: his hand, when I shook it; his eyes; the tone of his voice. I searched his face for clues, for signs of the vicious brute who smashed Megan’s head open, for a glimpse of the traumatized refugee who had lost his family. I couldn’t see any. And for a while, I forgot myself. I forgot to be afraid of him. I was sitting there and I wasn’t panicking any longer. I swallowed hard and tried to remember what I had to say, and I said it. I told him that for four years I’d had problems with alcohol, that my drinking had cost me my marriage and my job, it was costing me my health, obviously, and I feared it might cost me my sanity, too.

“I don’t remember things,” I said. “I black out and I can’t remember where I’ve been or what I’ve done. Sometimes I wonder if I’ve done or said terrible things, and I can’t remember. And if . . . if someone tells me something I’ve done, it doesn’t even feel like me. It doesn’t feel like it was me who was doing that thing. And it’s so hard to feel responsible for something you don’t remember. So I never feel bad enough. I feel bad, but the thing that I’ve done—it’s removed from me. It’s like it doesn’t belong to me.”

All this came out, all this truth, I just spilled it in front of him in the first few minutes of being in his presence. I was so ready to say it, I’d been waiting to say it to someone. But it shouldn’t have been him. He listened, his clear amber eyes on mine, his hands folded, motionless. He didn’t look around the room or make notes. He listened. And eventually he nodded slightly and said, “You want to take responsibility for what you have done, and you find it difficult to do that, to feel fully accountable if you cannot remember it?”

“Yes, that’s it, that’s exactly it.”

“So, how do we take responsibility? You can apologize—and even if you cannot remember committing your transgression, that doesn’t mean that your apology, and the sentiment behind your apology, is not sincere.”

“But I want to feel it. I want to feel . . . worse.”

It’s an odd thing to say, but I think this all the time. I don’t feel bad enough. I know what I’m responsible for, I know all the terrible things I’ve done, even if I don’t remember the details—but I feel distanced from those actions. I feel them at one remove.

“You think that you should feel worse than you do? That you don’t feel bad enough for your mistakes?”

“Yes.”

Kamal shook his head. “Rachel, you have told me that you lost your marriage, you lost your job—do you not think this is punishment enough?”

I shook my head.

He leaned back a little in his chair. “I think perhaps you are being rather hard on yourself.”

“I’m not.”

“All right. OK. Can we go back a bit? To when the problem started. You said it was . . . four years ago? Can you tell me about that time?”

I resisted. I wasn’t completely lulled by the warmth of his voice, by the softness of his eyes. I wasn’t completely hopeless. I wasn’t going to start telling him the whole truth. I wasn’t going to tell him how I longed for a baby. I told him that my marriage broke down, that I was depressed, and that I’d always been a drinker, but that things just got out of hand.

“Your marriage broke down, so . . . you left your husband, or he left you, or . . . you left each other?”

“He had an affair,” I said. “He met another woman and fell in love with her.” He nodded, waiting for me to go on. “It wasn’t his fault, though. It was my fault.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Well, the drinking started before . . .”

“So your husband’s affair was not the trigger?”

“No, I’d already started, my drinking drove him away, it was why he stopped . . .”

Kamal waited, he didn’t prompt me to go on, he just let me sit there, waiting for me to say the words out loud.

“Why he stopped loving me,” I said.

I hate myself for crying in front of him. I don’t understand why I couldn’t keep my guard up. I shouldn’t have talked about real things, I should have gone in there with some totally made-up problems, some imaginary persona. I should have been better prepared.

I hate myself for looking at him and believing, for a moment, that he felt for me. Because he looked at me as though he did, not as though he pitied me, but as though he understood me, as though I was someone he wanted to help.

“So then, Rachel, the drinking started before the breakdown of your marriage. Do you think you can point to an underlying cause? I mean, not everyone can. For some people, there is just a general slide into a depressive or an addicted state. Was there something specific for you? A bereavement, some other loss?”

I shook my head, shrugged. I wasn’t going to tell him that. I will not tell him that.

He waited for a few moments and then glanced quickly at the clock on his desk.

“We will pick up next time, perhaps?” he said, and then he smiled and I went cold.

Everything about him is warm—his hands, his eyes, his voice—everything but the smile. You can see the killer in him when he shows his teeth. My stomach a hard ball, my pulse skyrocketing again, I left his office without shaking his outstretched hand. I couldn’t stand to touch him.

I understand, I do. I can see what Megan saw in him, and it’s not just that he’s arrestingly handsome. He’s also calm and reassuring, he exudes a patient kindness. Someone innocent or trusting or simply troubled might not see through all that, might not see that under all that calm he’s a wolf. I understand that. For almost an hour, I was drawn in. I let myself open up to him. I forgot who he was. I betrayed Scott, and I betrayed Megan, and I feel guilty about that.

But most of all, I feel guilty because I want to go back.

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 7, 2013

MORNING

I had it again, the dream where I’ve done something wrong, where everyone is against me, sides with Tom. Where I can’t explain, or even apologize, because I don’t know what the thing is. In the space between dreaming and wakefulness, I think of a real argument, long ago—four years ago—after our first and only round of IVF failed, when I wanted to try again. Tom told me we didn’t have the money, and I didn’t question that. I knew we didn’t—we’d taken on a big mortgage, he had some debts left over from a bad business deal his father had coaxed him into pursuing—I just had to deal with it. I just had to hope that one day we would have the money, and in the meantime I had to bite back the tears that came, hot and fast, every time I saw a stranger with a bump, every time I heard someone else’s happy news.

It was a couple of months after we’d found out that the IVF had failed that he told me about the trip. Vegas, for four nights, to watch the big fight and let off some steam. Just him and a couple of his mates from the old days, people I had never met. It cost a fortune, I know, because I saw the booking receipt for the flight and the room in his email inbox. I’ve no idea what the boxing tickets cost, but I can’t imagine they were cheap. It wasn’t enough to pay for a round of IVF, but it would have been a start. We had a horrible fight about it. I don’t remember the details because I’d been drinking all afternoon, working myself up to confront him about it, so when I did it was in the worst possible way. I remember his coldness the next day, his refusal to speak about it. I remember him telling me, in flat disappointed tones, what I’d done and said, how I’d smashed our framed wedding photograph, how I’d screamed at him for being so selfish, how I’d called him a useless husband, a failure. I remember how much I hated myself that day.

I was wrong, of course I was, to say those things to him, but what comes to me now is that I wasn’t unreasonable to be angry. I had every right to be angry, didn’t I? We were trying to have a baby—shouldn’t we have been prepared to make sacrifices? I would have cut off a limb if it meant I could have had a child. Couldn’t he have forgone a weekend in Vegas?

I lie in bed for a bit, thinking about that, and then I get up and decide to go for a walk, because if I don’t do something I’m going to want to go round to the corner shop. I haven’t had a drink since Sunday and I can feel the fight going on within me, the longing for a little buzz, the urge to get out of my head, smashing up against the vague feeling that something has been accomplished and that it would be a shame to throw it away now.

Ashbury isn’t really a good place to walk, it’s just shops and suburbs, there isn’t even a decent park. I head off through the middle of town, which isn’t so bad when there’s no one else around. The trick is to fool yourself into thinking that you’re headed somewhere: just pick a spot and set off towards it. I chose the church at the top of Pleasance Road, which is about two miles from Cathy’s flat. I’ve been to an AA meeting there. I didn’t go to the local one because I didn’t want to bump into anyone I might see on the street, in the supermarket, on the train.

When I get to the church, I turn around and walk back, striding purposefully towards home, a woman with things to do, somewhere to go. Normal. I watch the people I pass—the two men running, backpacks on, training for the marathon, the young woman in a black skirt and white trainers, heels in her bag, on her way to work—and I wonder what they’re hiding. Are they moving to stop drinking, running to stand still? Are they thinking about the killer they met yesterday, the one they’re planning to see again?

I’m not normal.

I’m almost home when I see it. I’ve been lost in thought, thinking about what these sessions with Kamal are actually supposed to achieve: am I really planning to rifle through his desk drawers if he happens to leave the room? To try to trap him into saying something revealing, to lead him into dangerous territory? Chances are he’s a lot cleverer than I am; chances are he’ll see me coming. After all, he knows his name has been in the papers—he must be alert to the possibility of people trying to get stories on him or information from him.

This is what I’m thinking about, head down, eyes on the pavement, as I pass the little Londis shop on the right and try not to look at it because it raises possibilities, but out of the corner of my eye I see her name. I look up and it’s there, in huge letters on the front of a tabloid newspaper: WAS MEGAN A CHILD KILLER?