Emily Barr - The Sleeper

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I see. I’m with her husband now, in fact … Yes, of course.’

When he hung up, the silence solidified. It was the only thing in the room. When he broke it, he had adopted a formal tone, as if he were at a press conference, distancing himself from the words he had to say.

‘So,’ he said, ‘the passenger is confirmed as having been murdered. He has been identified as Guy Thomas, and several regular passengers and staff on the train have suggested that he was close to your wife, Mr Finch. Has she ever mentioned him?’

Sam closed his eyes.

‘Close to my wife?’ he said, trying out the phrase, testing its meaning. ‘She might have mentioned him once or twice. There was someone called Guy. But he definitely wasn’t close to her.’

After a flurry of phone calls and low-voiced consultations, Alexander left. Jessica stayed behind but announced that she would keep in the background. ‘Pretend I’m not here,’ she said, and stood by the window staring out at the view. She listed things we were not allowed to do, the main one of which was that Sam was not allowed anywhere near his computer.

He slumped on the sofa and leaned heavily on me. It was uncomfortable, but I bore it as long as I could. I wanted to put the news on and see what they were saying about dead Guy Thomas. I wanted to go online and find out everything.

‘Sam,’ I said, in the end. Mainly I wanted to be in front of my wood burner with my cats, telling all of this to Laurie. He no more knew where I was than Sam knew where Lara was. ‘You need someone else with you, not me and Jessica. I’ll call somebody. It’s insane that no one but the two of us and the police, and maybe that hotel receptionist, I suppose, knows that Lara’s missing. I’m sure it’ll be on the news in a second, and then everyone’s going to want to talk to you. You don’t want your family, her family, to find it out that way. Give me numbers and I’ll ring people. Who’s your best friend in Falmouth?’

He looked at me, completely blank. His face was crumpled. I wanted, suddenly, to shout at him to pull himself together. This was not a moment for falling apart. Not yet.

‘Stay here, Iris. You’re Lara’s friend. Stay with me. Please. Don’t leave.’

‘Sam. Do you have parents? Siblings?’ I did not like to assume anything. ‘There must be somebody.’

He put his head in his hands and groaned. It was a weird, animalistic noise.

‘Oh fucking hell. Look, I know you have to call my mum. She’ll kill me if she sees it on the news. She and Lara never really … But Iris. Will you hold off at least until they know whether she was on the train or not? Will you do that? I still think she might just rock up. I don’t care what she’s done. As long as she’s safe.’

‘I’m happy to stay as long as you want.’ I wasn’t, but I could hardly say so. ‘But you’ll feel better if it’s not a stranger here making your coffee and answering your door. Really you will. I won’t contact your mum yet if you don’t want me to, but let me just get you a friend.’

Jessica wandered into the kitchen. ‘Mind if I put the kettle on?’ she asked. Sam said nothing.

‘Go ahead,’ I told her. ‘Sam. Who shall I call?’

He was not having it. ‘Please, Iris. Please. I have friends at work, I suppose, but not the sort you’re talking about. Any of my colleagues, if they got a call from you asking them to come and babysit me, would be … taken aback, I suppose. They’d assume I had real friends for this sort of emergency. Lara and I. We’ve always been so close. There’s never been any need for anyone else. We have each other.’

And she’d had, in one way or another, Guy Thomas. The words hung in the air, unsayable.

Sam’s elbow knocked his phone off the arm of the sofa, and he leaned down and snatched it up from the floor, his face suddenly alive with the hope that a message might have arrived without his hearing it in the nanosecond for which it was away from him.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Iris. What the hell is going on? What was she doing? Where is she? She can’t just … not be here.’

I sat next to him and touched his arm.

‘We’ll find out,’ I told him. I had no desire at all to be grumpy with him any more. His situation was terrible, and it was going to get worse. ‘At some point, we will. And I know what you mean about not needing anyone else. Not many people would get that, but I really, really do. If I were you I wouldn’t have anyone to call either. I know how much you’ve missed her. It’s funny, you know: the two of you gave the impression of being one of those couples with hundreds of friends. I thought you’d be going to people’s houses for dinner every weekend. You know. Stuff like that.’ I realised I had used the past tense instead of the present, and hoped he hadn’t noticed.

‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘We just want to be with each other. That’s all we do.’

‘I’m the same.’ I glanced up at Jessica. She was fiddling with her phone next to a noisy kettle, and seemed not to be listening to us. ‘Me and my boyfriend, Laurie. We’re like that.’

‘Who wants loads of “friends” texting all the time and trying to get you to do things you don’t want to do?’

‘Not me. I like having my music as loud as I like. And doing things the way I want to do them. And having Laurie to talk to, just Laurie. We’ve lived like that for years.’

I thought of my old life, when I had lived and worked in London. In those days I’d had lots of friends. I had been missing that, lately. I never thought it would happen. It was a hankering for something else that had led me to Sam’s door that morning.

He looked at me with a sad little smile.

‘You do understand,’ he said. ‘So imagine if your boyfriend vanished. And someone was dead. And it was all horrific and nonsensical, exactly like a nightmare but actually real. And if they told you that your boyfriend was “close” to the dead person. How you would feel.’

I refused to entertain that scenario. ‘If Lara had been here as usual today,’ I said instead, patting Sam’s hand in what I wanted to be an affectionate and reassuring way. He immediately grabbed my hand and held it so tightly that it hurt. ‘And I’d turned up on the doorstep, just dropping in to say hello, you’d have been pissed off, wouldn’t you?’

He laughed, but without smiling. ‘I would. But when she comes back, you can drop in whenever you like. In fact, please, please do. You get to be our friend. No one else. Just you.’

‘Thank you.’

I joined him in the strenuous mental effort he was making to pretend that everything was going to be all right. It was becoming harder. A man was dead and she was missing. That implied so strongly that she was dead too that I had to turn away from the thought. It dazzled me, so bright, so obvious that I had to look in the opposite direction. I had to pretend she was about to arrive home, flustered, with a complicated story, but safe. The policewoman in the kitchen would smile and set off for her next engagement.

I paced around the house. As the upstairs was almost entirely open-plan, there was not much to discover, and I did not like to ask permission to go and poke around.

‘Your bedroom’s downstairs, then?’ I asked.

‘Yep.’ He looked at me and produced an unexpected laugh. ‘Go ahead. Have a look round the house if you like. Nothing to hide. I can see you want to. Lara would too.’

It could end up being a crime scene, but since she had not been home, and that was the whole point, I felt it was safe to give myself a little tour. She had, after all, done the same at my house.

I looked at Jessica Staines. She shrugged. ‘OK, but don’t touch anything.’