The Stranger on the Train Read online

  “Muh,” he said.

  She almost turned back to take him. Her weight went to one foot, then the other. But her face and hands were all bloody, and if the toilets were anything like the rest of the café, she could imagine only too well what condition they’d be in. She didn’t want to take Ritchie in there if she could help it. There was something funny about Antonia—something about her superior attitude that Emma didn’t like—but she’d done a good job minding Ritchie on her own already, those few minutes when she’d taken him off the train. Ritchie would be okay with her. Just for a few seconds more.

  Emma smiled at him.

  “I won’t be a minute,” she said.

  Then she opened the door and went in.

  As soon as she smelled the air, she was glad she’d left Ritchie outside. The toilet was just one room, with a tiny sink covered with gray cracks and no window. A ventilation fan in the wall above the sink was clogged on the inside with lumps of blackish material. This really was a horrible place. Emma would be just as glad to get Ritchie out of here as soon as possible, even if it meant him having to wait till much later to get anything to eat. She looked at herself in the mirror over the sink. The glass was rippled and bendy; her face looked wider than normal, but it was enough for her to see the swollen area on her lip, oozing from the tip. Blood streaked her cheek and chin. She looked a right mess.

  On the cistern at the back of the toilet was an industrial-sized roll of toilet paper. Emma reached for it, avoiding looking into the toilet bowl. She unrolled some of the sheets and tore them off. They were probably filthy but she didn’t care. She wet the tissue under the tiny trickle from the tap and scrubbed at her face. There. That was the worst of it sorted. She threw the tissue into a bin under the sink and tore off a second piece. This she held to her lip, pressing it on the cut for a few seconds to stop the bleeding. But when she took the tissue away, it stuck to the cut and pulled the scab off, making the bleeding start all over again. Emma sighed with impatience. It took two more pieces of tissue before the cut finally stayed sealed. A final quick scrub at her chin, and a rinse of her fingers, and she was done. She didn’t bother looking for anything to dry her hands with.

  When she came out of the toilet, she was too busy at first breathing in the fresher air to fully take in what she was seeing. She was looking down the passage towards the front of the restaurant; she had a good view of most of the tables from here. She could see the window with its flaking red lettering: “Mr. Bap’s” spelled back to front. But just inside that, where she would have expected to see Ritchie with his flushed, sleepy face, and Antonia with her flicky blond hair, there was a gap. Ritchie’s pushchair was gone. The table by the window was empty.

  Emma didn’t start to worry straightaway. They were here somewhere. She just wasn’t seeing them. She came out into the main part of the café and looked around. The tabletops were sticky and yellow in the fluorescent light. The bearded old man sat with his eyes closed. The man behind the counter was still nowhere to be seen.

  Uncertain, Emma stood in the middle of the room. What was happening here? What was going on that she didn’t understand? Then she got it. They’d gone outside! Antonia’s husband had arrived. They’d got Ritchie ready and put him back in his buggy. They were all out there, waiting for her in the street.

  She went to the door and yanked it open. She looked up the street and then down. Cars and buses on the main road. Some shops still open, their lights glistening on the pavement. Music thumping from one of them, an unfamiliar Eastern beat. Groups of bearded men, some wearing round, colored hats. No sign of a woman in a furry jacket pushing a buggy.

  A few feet along, the street turned onto another side road. Emma went to it and looked down. Railings along the pavement, three buses in a row. Blocks of flats, a pub.

  No woman with a buggy.

  Trying hard not to panic, Emma hurried back to the café. This was ridiculous. They must be here! Antonia must have taken Ritchie to some other table, some section of the restaurant Emma hadn’t noticed before. She really should have told her first, though. This was definitely the last straw. When she found Ritchie now, she really was just going to take him and go.

  But even as she quickly examined every wall of the restaurant, and all around the counter, she knew what she’d known when she’d first walked into the place: that it was just one square room, with the window and door to the street at the front. There were no stairs, and no corner. No tables she hadn’t seen. No other section to the café at all.

  Emma hurtled down the passage to the toilet. She flung open the door, just in case there was a second toilet in there and she’d missed it. But there was just the one stinking room.

  Hands shaking, she ran to the front of the counter.

  “Excuse me,” she called, her voice high-pitched. “Exc­use me.”

  The colored plastic strips moved. The man with the stubbly beard poked his head through.

  “Did you see them?” Emma asked.

  “Who?”

  “My son.” Emma looked past him, through the colored strips. “Are they in there? Did they go into your kitchen?”

  The man began to lift his hands in incomprehension. Emma opened the flap on the counter. She ran to the doorway and shoved her way through the strips. Behind them was a steel kitchen, cluttered with pots and piles of plates and smelling of rotting food. No Ritchie. No Antonia.

  “What are you doing?” The man was behind her.

  Emma turned on him.

  “There was a woman.” She struggled to stay calm. “By the window, with my son. Did she take him? Where did they go?”

  “I didn’t—”

  “Did she leave him on his own?” Emma was shouting now. “Did she take him, or did someone else? You must have seen something, are you blind?”

  The man backed away, looking alarmed.

  “I didn’t see nobody,” he said. “I don’t know where they go.”

  Emma pushed past him, back to the shop. The old man by the wall was peering up at her. His eyes had a bluish film on the front.

  “Did you see them?” Emma begged.

  The man just gripped his cup. He was more elderly than she’d thought, shaky and vague. She couldn’t tell if he even understood what she was saying.

  “Call the police!” she shouted to the man at the counter. “Someone’s taken my child.”

  The two men stared at her.

  “Call the police!” Emma screamed at them, and ran out into the street.

  There was still no sign. She couldn’t even run—she didn’t know which way to go. The street blurred; she was dizzy and sick.

  “Ritchie,” she called. “Ritchie.”

  Her throat was clicky with fright. She looked up and down again, standing on tiptoe. People everywhere, in coats and scarves and hats, but no one with a baby. Ritchie seemed to have completely vanished. Emma wanted to vomit. She tried to cross the road to the island in the middle, to get a better view of the street on both sides of the café, but there were railings everywhere, blocking her way.

  “Ritchie!” she yelled. And then: “Oh God. Please. Somebody help me. My baby’s been kidnapped.”

  A man in a baseball cap and jacket was striding towards her on the path.

  “Please.” Emma tried to stop him. “Please. I need help.”

  The man veered past her and kept going.

  “Someone. Please.” Emma was breathless with terror. She had to force herself to stay standing. Her legs were like water. She couldn’t think straight. What should she do? Someone had to help her; she couldn’t, she couldn’t think about anything.

  A large middle-aged lady, laden with plastic shopping bags, slowed down to have a look.

  “What’s going on here?” the lady asked.

  Emma almost threw herself at her.

  “Please. Oh, please. Someone’s taken
my baby.”

  “Who’s taken your baby?”

  “The woman, she . . . Did you see them? A woman and a little boy? Did you pass them on your way up here?”

  “I don’t . . .” The woman hesitated. Around her, more people were stopping. People were talking, mostly in foreign languages, she couldn’t understand what they were saying. One or two English phrases came through:

  “Who’s taken a baby?”

  “That thin girl with the torn coat.”

  “Is that blood on her face?”

  “My child has been kidnapped.” Emma couldn’t believe it. Why were they all just standing there? She grabbed the ­middle-aged woman by the front of her jumper.

  “Call the police!” she yelled at her. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  The woman recoiled, her mouth a rectangle: What have I got myself into? Someone else said in a sharp voice to Emma: “Hey, hey, no need for that.”

  Emma let go of the woman. She sprinted down the street in the opposite direction from which the woman had come, trusting her that if she’d seen Ritchie on her way up she’d have said. Her breath sounded thin and whistly. Only a tiny amount of air was coming in each time. Oh God, don’t black out. Oh, please, let her not black out now, there wasn’t time, she had to find him before he got too far away. She was trying to look everywhere at once, at the lighted windows, the darker corners and side roads, straining to see Ritchie’s tufty little head and blue fleece in all the colors and the gloom. Had Antonia’s husband come? Had the two of them bundled Ritchie off together? Did Antonia even have a husband? Or a child? Or was she just some nutter who . . . Oh Jesus.

  Ice.

  Maybe Ritchie wasn’t with Antonia at all. Maybe Antonia had got bored, and walked out of the café and left him, and someone else, some person Emma couldn’t even begin to imagine, had seen him there on his own and come in and taken him.

  The street disappeared. The road came and went in flashes, like the strobes at a nightclub. Then she was pushing past people, shoving them violently out of her way. She was flying down the street, spinning down side roads at random, then sprinting back up them again. She didn’t know which way she was going, whether she was searching the same places over again or different ones, they all looked the same, the same people and roads and buildings. Had she missed him, gone right past him? Was she flying around in circles, not making any progress at all, while all the time he was getting further and further away?

  The flashes were coming faster. She screamed his name all around her, again and again and again.

  “Ritchie! Ritchie! Ritchie!”

  Then she knelt in the road and shrieked, no words coming out, just sounds. Car horns blared. Through the flashing lights came voices:

  “Look at her. She’s not well.”

  “Is it drugs?”

  Emma’s head was full of noise. There was too much color and movement. She couldn’t cope; everything was coming too fast. She couldn’t think. Too many things to think about. Too urgent. Too much. She fell forward onto her hands. The road rushed at her face.

  “Are you all right?” a woman asked.

  “Someone call an ambulance.”

  They swirled, blurred, and were gone.

  Chapter Three

  The light was blue and dim. Gentle on her eyes. Outside the patterned curtain, a muffled symphony of voices and footsteps; inside, a little square of hush where she was. She was in a bed and her knees were sore and stiff. She’d had a terrible dream that Ritchie had died. No, she’d left him on a train. She couldn’t remember. It was all right now anyway. She was awake. It was over.

  At the end of the bed, a girl in a blue tunic was busy writing something into a folder. Emma watched her drowsily. She felt sleepy, comfortable and secure; a sensation of well-being such as she hadn’t had for a long, long time. The girl turned a page, checked something, turned back and wrote again. She had a delicate way of moving her fingers. Soothing. Hypnotic. As a child, sleeping at her gran’s house, Emma had woken one night to see her mum sitting at the dresser under the window, going through some old letters. The lamp was tilted low, the only light a yellow pool over the paper. Emma had lain there for a long time, cozy and safe, listening to the rustlings and watching her mother’s fingers turn the pages.

  After a while she murmured to the girl in blue: “Where am I?”

  The girl glanced up quickly. “Oh. You’re awake.”

  She put the folder down and hurried over to Emma.

  “You’re in hospital, Emma. The Royal London Accident and Emergency department. Do you remember the ambulance bringing you in?”

  Ambulance? Emma frowned. Something struck her then, and she pulled herself up in the bed. She stared around the quiet blue cubicle.

  “Where’s Ritchie?” she asked. “Where’s my little boy?”

  “Excuse me.” The nurse dipped under one side of the curtain and beckoned to someone outside. The curtains shadowed, bulked, pulled aside. A shaven-headed man came in. He wore a short-sleeved white shirt and bulky black vest. A radio jutted from his left shoulder.

  Emma’s heart sank.

  “Ritchie.” She sat up further. “What’s happened to Ritchie?”

  The policeman didn’t say anything. Emma began to sob wildly. “Ritchie,” she cried. “Ritchie, where are you?” It wasn’t a dream, then. Ritchie was gone. But what was wrong with her? She felt so sluggish and strange. Why couldn’t she remember what had happened?

  “Find him,” she begged the policeman. “Please. You have to find him.”

  “We’re trying to,” the policeman assured her. “The problem is, there’s been some confusion as to exactly what happened. You’ve been unconscious for the last two hours. I believe you’ve had some kind of”—he glanced at the nurse—“sedative?”

  The nurse said defensively: “She was screaming when the ambulance brought her in. Trying to run back into the street. A danger to herself. We didn’t know.”

  It was as if they were talking about someone else. Emma had a vague memory of shouting things at a crowd of people, but it didn’t seem real. She felt so dim and underwater now, it was hard to believe she’d been like what the nurse said. She struggled to wake herself, to free her brain from the rolls of cotton wool wrapped around it.

  The policeman took out a notebook.

  “Would it help,” he said, licking his finger, “if I repeated back to you what you told the paramedics at the scene? Clarify what we’ve managed to gather so far?”

  “Please,” Emma begged him. “Please do.”

  The policeman flipped through the notebook until he came to the right page.

  “Your name,” he said, “is Emma Turner, and you are aged twenty-five?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Richard—Ritchie—your child, is one?”

  “Yes. Last month.”

  “Good. So. You met this woman . . . Antonia?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you were talking to her in the café, and then you went to the bathroom and when you came out, she and the child were gone?”

  “Yes. Yes.” The cotton wool lifted. She was there, in the café, and Ritchie was holding his arms out to her, smiling and saying: “Muh.” It was so real she almost cried out, lifting her hand to touch him.

  “Now, if I could just clarify.” The policeman tapped his notebook. “Because this is where things become a little confusing.”

  He cleared his throat and looked at Emma. “Whose child was it that the woman took?”

  Emma gaped at him in astonishment. “Mine.”

  “You’re quite sure about that? You’re sure the child didn’t belong to the other woman?”

  “Of course I’m sure.” Bewildered, Emma looked at the nurse for help. Why was he saying this? “There were witnesses. Ask them.”

  “We already have, Ms.
Turner. This is where their version differs from yours. The general impression from the witnesses we spoke to in Mr. . . . er . . . Bap’s seems to have been that this lady and the child came into the café together, and that you approached them.”

  “No.” Emma struggled to sit up in the bed. “That’s wrong. We’d met each other already. In the tube station.”

  “Yes, that is correct. You had previously approached this lady and her child at Whitechapel station. A staff member witnessed that, a guard at the barrier—”

  “What?”

  “You went to the guard and reported to him that you had lost your bag. When you spoke to him, you were on your own, no child, no buggy . . .”

  “No!”

  “. . . You then left him and approached a woman at the entrance to the station who was with her child. You seemed to be asking her for money, and she gave you . . . Please, Ms. Turner. I’m just summing up what’s been said. She gave you some money, then she left you and went into the café. Some minutes later, you were seen to approach her again. At this point, there was some kind of argument. You went to the bathroom, and the lady left with her child.”

  He looked up.

  “Is that what happened?”

  “No!” Emma cried. “It is not what happened. Ritchie is my child.”

  “All right, Ms. Turner. Try to stay calm. I’m here to hear your side of the story.”

  Emma’s breathing was harsh and rapid. She couldn’t control it; it was like she was having an asthma attack. Her mouth was filled with saliva. She couldn’t swallow. The spit was dripping out of her, onto the pillow. The nurse put a bowl in front of her.

  “Breathe slowly,” she advised, rubbing Emma’s shoulder.

  Emma spat into the bowl, smelling bile and plastic. She forced herself to breathe properly. Everything was coming back to her now, the cotton-wool veil over her mind split by great, jagged tears.