The Stranger on the Train Read online

  A very handsome friend. He met her outside Brixton tube station, looking very tall, wearing a blue shirt and dark wine velvet trousers, and Emma knew she was lost. The pub was on a corner, a spacious brick building with outsized windows and a large green canopy. Under the patio heaters, the wooden benches on the pavement were packed with people chatting and laughing. Inside, the pub was even more crowded. Emma followed Oliver up a narrow set of stairs. At the top, a very pretty blond girl with a clipboard and a fluorescent wrist stamper flung her arms around Oliver and showed him and Emma to a table with a good view of the stage. The stools were low and very close together. Every time Oliver leaned to say something to Emma, the tips of his knees brushed against hers.

  The music was a mixture of blues and jazz, some upbeat and lively, some slow and sad. The singer, a tall black girl with long, braided, blond-dyed hair, was good enough that, at times, everyone fell absolutely silent to listen.

  Oliver talked about his girlfriend.

  “Sharmila and I have split up,” he told Emma over seafood chowder and Guinness. “She had to move to Edinburgh for work.”

  “I’m sorry,” Emma said. “You must miss her.”

  “I do, a bit,” Oliver said. “But she was always going to put her career first. I don’t blame her. If there’d been anything real between us, I might have gone to Edinburgh or she might have stayed here. But neither of us wanted to make the sacrifice.”

  By the time the gig was over, it was after one and the tubes had all stopped for the night. Oliver walked Emma home to her flat in Clapham. One minute they were walking through streets lined with littered doorways and steel-shuttered shops, the next, as was often the way in London, they found themselves turning down much posher roads, with tall, sprawling houses surrounded by trees. Clapham Common, lit partly by streetlights, partly by the glow from the houses around the edges, looked black and leafy and romantic. Emma probably wouldn’t have cut through the park at this hour on her own, but with Oliver she felt safe. Her corner of London had never looked particularly beautiful to her before, but it did that night.

  Especially when Oliver stopped her under a vast old horse chestnut tree to kiss her.

  This was it, then, this was the one. There was something so special about him. Emma had fallen under a spell. She’d read that in books, but thought it was just something people wrote. Now she knew what it meant. Everything about Oliver was magical: not quite human. His skin was so smooth and clean. He didn’t smell of sweat, even after a long day, like normal people, just of warmed cotton, as if he wasn’t really there.

  Emma heard all about Oliver’s childhood: about the car crash, the aunt who’d made it plain she’d never wanted a child. Oliver had an older sister living in Birmingham whom he rarely saw. This shocked Emma. How could a sister and brother lose touch like that? Her concern for Oliver made her forget her own unhappiness. She’d had her gran, at least, when she was young and her mum was . . . not herself. Oliver seemed to have had no one. She imagined him as the seven-year-old child he’d been, alone and frightened, and the thought of it almost broke her heart.

  Oliver was always full of ideas for outings and exhibitions and music festivals. Over the next few weeks, there were surfing trips to Cornwall, a weekend on Skye, the green river in Hampshire. He took her to a party in an underground tunnel in the Docklands where an unexploded bomb from the Second World War was embedded right there in the wall. Emma was thrilled. Although it did occur to her to wonder why, if it was common knowledge that a live bomb was sitting directly under London, the authorities hadn’t got around to doing something about it.

  Oliver could be moody at times, but Emma didn’t let that put her off. He worked hard, often spending weekends and nights at work, supervising the transfer of money to and from accounts all over the world. Emma stayed in with him when he was tired and wanted to slump in front of the TV. This lowness was a part of him that other people didn’t see.

  “You’re such a caring, genuine person,” he said to Emma during one of these down times. “Sharmila was colder, less giving. I’m a bit like that myself, I think.”

  “No you’re not,” Emma reassured him. Then she hesitated. Was this a good time to bring up something she’d been thinking for a while? “You know, you should try to see more of your sister.”

  “Sasha? What for? We saw each other last Christmas.”

  “Well, you could see her at other times too,” Emma said. “You should phone her. Spend some time together.”

  Emma often fantasized about meeting Oliver’s sister. She would look a bit like Oliver, she thought, maybe with a sparkier personality. She and Emma would hit it off straightaway. It was coming up to Christmas now. Emma and Sasha would go shopping together for Oliver’s present, and Sasha would have them all to her house for dinner on Christmas Day.

  Oliver was looking baffled. “Well, she doesn’t phone me. How often do you see your sister?”

  “I haven’t got one,” Emma said.

  “Oh.” Oliver stared at the television. “I’m sorry. You did say.”

  “I wish I did have a sister,” Emma said. “At the end of the day, your family is who you can rely on the most.”

  Oliver yawned.

  “Well,” he said. “Sasha’s ten years older than me. Married with three children. She’s nice enough, but a bit, you know, bourgeois. Never done anything with her life. I wouldn’t know what to say to her.”

  “Maybe I could call her?” Emma suggested. “It might be easier that way. You know, woman-to-woman. We could organize dinner.”

  “It’s all right, Emma.” Oliver was polite. “The thing is, you don’t really know my family.”

  When he phoned her the next time, he had some news for her. He hoped she hadn’t got the wrong idea but he didn’t want things to go too far between them. Sharmila was moving back to London, and they were going to give things another go.

  Emma would have been shocked except that she was already too shocked to get any worse. She had just realized that her period was nearly three weeks late.

  Chapter Seven

  Friday, September 22nd

  Day Six

  What . . . ?

  Emma woke, clawing at something under her face. A cushion, rough and scratchy, dug hard into her cheek. She was lying on her side on the couch, her body jerking in time with her heart. She’d been dreaming. She had a vague awareness of a picture, a scene of some kind, dissolving into dots and flitting from her brain.

  What was it that had wakened her so suddenly like that?

  She held herself still and listened, but the flat was quiet. The only sound was the buzzing of the fridge from the kitchen. Emma raised herself on her elbow and gazed blearily around. Her mouth was dry. How long had she been asleep? The room had been bright when she’d decided to lie down for a while. Now there was just a gray gleam, high on the walls. The carpet was dotted with ground-in crumbs. A mug lay on its side under a chair.

  The flat was cold and empty. Nobody here but her. The police had packed up and left some time ago. They weren’t looking for Ritchie any more.

  • • •

  They hadn’t said that straight out, of course.

  “What Dr. Stanford said won’t affect the investigation in the slightest,” Lindsay had tried to claim. “There’s no evidence you’ve done anything wrong.”

  But it was five days now since he’d disappeared. Five days, and nothing! Not one single lead. The police might be going through the motions, but if their hearts weren’t in it, Ritchie would not be found. Lindsay was being patronizing, with her fake concern, and her insolent, cheerful face that said she put Emma and Ritchie out of her head the second she went home every evening to her boyfriend. Emma could see right through the act. Next thing they’d be arresting her for having done something to Ritchie. She didn’t trust Lindsay anymore. She didn’t trust anyone.

  “I
’d like some privacy,” Emma had said coldly to Lindsay. “If you’ve all finished searching my flat, I’d like you to leave.”

  “Emma, I don’t think—”

  “I said I want you to leave. You can’t stay if I don’t want you to. I have a right to spend some time in peace in my own home.”

  But when Lindsay had gone, the silence swelled, humming and crushing inwards at her ears. Emma curled up on the couch and put a cushion over her head. She lay there, shivering, trying to think. She had to get her head together. She couldn’t just stay here; she had to do something. If the police wouldn’t help her, she’d have to find someone else who would. But who? Who in the world was there, who cared about Ritchie as much as she did?

  Nobody, was the answer to that question. Nobody at all.

  • • •

  She’d had phone calls, of course, once people had heard. The newspapers had finally got around to publishing the picture of Ritchie on his red truck, although never on the front page. Whenever the journalists mentioned the kidnapping, they always used the word “alleged.” As in: “The alleged abduction,” or: “The mother of the child alleges that . . .”

  And there was worse. Lindsay had warned Emma not to take anything she read too much to heart, but still, it was a shock to open the pages and see the horrible things that people she and Ritchie had never even met had written about them.

  “The single mother is reported to have had difficulties coping . . .”

  “After a fling with the child’s father, whom she has not seen since . . .”

  “Turner, 25, claims to have left her small child in the care of a complete stranger in a chip shop while she . . .”

  Emma couldn’t read any more.

  Emma’s old supervisor from the call center phoned, as did a couple of her ex coworkers. So did Claire Burns, who was now living in Brighton. They all said how sorry they were, and how they hoped that Ritchie would be found soon. But none of them knew Ritchie. None of them had even met him.

  Mrs. Cornes, shocked and quavery, rang from Bath, sounding twenty years older and frailer than the last time Emma had spoken to her. She kept saying: “Poor Robbie. Poor little Robbie.” She offered to come to London, but Emma knew she’d be better staying where she was. She managed to put her off by saying that Joanne was staying in the flat with her.

  But Joanne wasn’t. Joanne had made one phone call: “Sorry to hear about Ritchie. Call me if you need anything.” She hadn’t phoned a second time, though. Hadn’t called around. Clearly, ridiculous as it was, she hadn’t forgiven Emma for the comments she’d made about Barry the last time they had spoken.

  Karen, Emma’s oldest friend from Bath, called, and that meant a lot. Karen had traveled to Australia with Emma and Joanne after they’d all finished their finals. The three of them had shared a tatty, sunny house off the seafront at Bondi Beach. Emma missed Karen very much. She’d been a good friend—in light of things, a much better friend than Joanne had ever been. In uni, it had been Karen and Emma against the world, best mates since they’d been eleven years old in school. Joanne, new from Middlesbrough and not knowing a soul, had been put in the room next to Karen’s in their halls of residence. Emma and Karen had found her there one evening, crying her eyes out, saying she was lonely and hated Bristol and was going to drop out of her course and go home. Softhearted Karen had insisted she join them for a pizza to rethink her decision. Once Joanne had recovered, she’d turned out to be a good laugh, always up for a night out, and they’d all ended up staying friends.

  But while three of them, Karen, Joanne and Emma, had gone together to Sydney for a year of sun and fun, only two of them had come home again. Karen had stayed behind to move with Conor, her new Australian boyfriend, to Melbourne. She was settled there forever now. She and Conor had just got engaged. Karen accidentally let this information slip during her phone call to Emma, and then became tearful and couldn’t stop apologizing. In the end, Emma couldn’t wait to get off the phone.

  The worst phone call of all was the one from Oliver. The police had tracked him down in Malaysia. It seemed he was living there now. It was the first time he and Emma had spoken since before Ritchie had been born, apart from the single e-mail Oliver had sent from Thailand when Ritchie was about six months old. In the e-mail, Oliver had said he felt guilty about the way things had turned out and hoped they were doing okay. At the end of it, he’d written: “You gave me no say or choice in this.” He had never met his son.

  “How awful for you,” he said now on the phone, sounding genuinely distressed. “Really awful. You must be going through hell.”

  “It might be nothing compared to what Ritchie’s going through,” Emma reminded him.

  “Don’t say that. He’s my son too.”

  Emma cried quietly into her sleeve. How much hearing something like that from Oliver would have meant to her at any time during the past thirteen months.

  “The police interviewed me,” Oliver said. “They were able to do it over the phone. They said it’s unlikely for now that I’ll need to come to England.”

  Emma said nothing.

  “That’s not to say I won’t come if you want me to,” Oliver said. He paused. “I saw all those things they wrote in the papers. About whether you were looking after him properly. But of course that doesn’t mean anything. I know more than to believe half of what these people say. If you want me to come, then I will. I’d have to arrange things, obviously, but under the circumstances . . .”

  Emma wiped her nose with her sleeve.

  She said: “You don’t need to come.”

  “Are you sure? Because if there’s anything—”

  “You don’t need to come.”

  She put the phone down. Strange—all those feelings she’d once had for him. There’d been a time when she’d have done absolutely anything for him. Anything at all. She felt nothing for him now. He was wasting her time, taking up the line, when someone more important might be trying to get through with news of Ritchie.

  • • •

  All of those people who’d called. And not one of them had really known Ritchie, or cared about him, or could be of any use to him now. How had this happened? How had she let him down so badly? How had she got them both into this friendless, loveless position?

  Emma shifted, twisting her face into the seat.

  So easy, so very easy, to let go of the people you’d once thought were so important. And so very, very hard to replace them.

  She lay on, breathing into the cushion. It was still too early in the evening for the central heating to come back on. She was wearing a T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms. Her arms were starting to go numb. Her fleece was draped over her legs; she didn’t have the energy to pull it up. The sun went in behind a cloud. The room, never bright anyway, dimmed further as the sky darkened. A shadow closed over the couch.

  Emma knew before she heard the voice that she’d been expecting it.

  You’ve failed, the voice said.

  A deep, dry voice; neither male nor female. Each word was clearly pronounced. It came from the corner, from somewhere behind the television.

  Emma had heard that voice before.

  You lost him, the voice said. You’ve failed.

  “I know,” Emma wept. “I know.”

  It hurt, it hurt so much; and she had to do something, but she was so exhausted, so heavy, like something was pressing on her, stopping her from getting up. A chill in her hands and feet, spreading up her limbs. Ice in her heart. She closed her eyes. Please, she thought. Please.

  And then, for several merciful hours, she didn’t think anything else.

  • • •

  And now.

  What was it that had woken her? It was important, she had a definite feeling it was. Something about the flat? No. Something she’d been dreaming? That triggered a faint niggle. What had it been? Something t
o do with . . .

  Antonia.

  Jesus!

  Emma shoved the cushion away and sat up.

  Antonia! She remembered now. The thing that had flashed into her mind on the balcony the day that man—Rafe?—had brought over her bag. Something then had made her think of Antonia, and now, finally, it had clicked in her head and she knew what it was.

  Clear as day, she saw Antonia again in the café with Ritchie. Saw her lips move as she murmured into her mobile phone.

  “Bird rack,” she’d thought Antonia was saying.

  But she hadn’t been saying “Bird rack” at all.

  She’d been saying: “Bergerac.”

  Emma’s heart hammered. Now she knew why she’d thought of Antonia that day. “Bergerac” was the name of a detective program her mum used to watch on TV when Emma was a child. On the balcony, Emma had been saying something to that man—Rafe somebody—about hiring a private detective. And that was the exact moment Antonia had come slithering into her mind.

  Bergerac! The way Antonia had pronounced the g—the way a French person would say it. Even though Emma hadn’t been able to hear most of what she was saying, she’d caught that “g.” Recognized the accent without even knowing it at the time. Her subconscious, at least, had picked it up. And had responded by showing her that picture of her mum, watching telly all those years ago in front of the fire.

  Emma got up off the couch. She wrapped her fleece around herself and began to walk up and down the room. Okay. Okay. Think about this. Suppose “Bergerac” was what Antonia had said. What could she have meant by it? She’d hardly been sitting there discussing 1980s cop dramas on the phone, in a grimy chip shop in Whitechapel, with a strange toddler by her side. Emma concentrated, trying to recall the expression on Antonia’s face. What she’d been saying was important. The more Emma thought about it now, the more she was certain. Antonia had jumped a mile when Emma had come up behind her with the tray. She hadn’t wanted Emma to hear what she was saying. If she’d been plotting something, did that mean it definitely was Antonia who had taken Ritchie? Or was Emma remembering things now that had never happened at all?