Emily Barr - The Sleeper

‘I’m actually a friend of Lara Finch’s,’ I told him. He looked at me with narrowed eyes.

‘Are you?’ he asked. ‘Really a friend, or someone pretending?’

‘Really. I live near her in Cornwall.’ I could see that I needed to parade some credentials, so I went on: ‘I was with her husband when she was first missing. That’s not something I ever want to see anyone go through again.’

He poured in the tonic without looking at me. ‘Oh. I’m sorry. I hope I didn’t …’

I waited to hear what he hoped he didn’t do, but he was not planning on finishing the sentence.

‘Not at all,’ I assured him. ‘I’m heading up to London to see her family, actually.’

‘Are you? Fuck. Well, for what it’s worth, we were all amazed when we heard. She always seemed a lovely woman, always so friendly, always with a nice thank you and a please, and the two of them couldn’t keep their hands off each other. I reckon it was a lovers’ tiff. I think he was maybe threatening her, and she was defending herself and it went too far. Maybe he had the knife and she grabbed it off him.’

I took the drink. ‘Could be. I hadn’t thought of that. So their friend, Ellen Johnson? Does she still use the train?’

‘Oh, she does indeed,’ he said, taking the five-pound note I was holding out. ‘She’s on this train now all right, but she sticks to her sleeping compartment at the moment. Hasn’t been out here since it happened. Can’t blame her. Doesn’t want everyone looking at her. She’ll be back out and about in a week or two, I reckon. Nice woman.’

‘Is this the … well, you know. The actual same train?’

For some reason this had only just occurred to me. There was an outside chance that I could be sleeping in the very bed in which it happened.

‘Nah. It was on the other one, and anyway they’ve taken the carriage off, apparently. Forensics. Won’t be back in circulation for a while, I reckon.’

I doubted that was true. Would a train company really have a spare carriage lying around to substitute for the murder scene? Were they running shorter trains than before? I was grimly sure they would have cleaned it up and put it back into circulation.

When I took my first sip of gin and tonic, Lara’s train drink and the first alcoholic drink you choose when you are young and trying to be grown up, it fizzed on my tongue. The sweetness of the tonic water hit the top of my mouth, and even though the lemon was limp and had been cut up many hours or days ago, I smiled at the forgotten pleasure. I had not had one of these for years.

There was a man sitting opposite me drinking a can of bitter and reading a book that he was holding so low I could not see its cover. If I stared for long enough he would probably look up. I tried it. Eventually, of course, it worked. People cannot help looking at you in the end, if you don’t stop looking at them. They are not used to the attention; and this man certainly would not have been. He was grey-haired, with an enormous bald patch that was threatening to become his entire head, and he looked extraordinarily ordinary.

When he glanced up, his expression said: ‘What do you think you’re staring at, young lady?’

I directed an insincere grin his way. ‘Do you often do this journey? It’s my first time on this night train.’

‘Oh. Yes, I do. Not all the time, like some people.’ He gave the free copy of The Times a pointed look, even though Lara was on an inside page, not the cover. ‘Just once or twice a month, when I have a meeting to get to.’

‘Do you? Did you ever see them?’

‘I don’t believe so. I’ve given it plenty of thought, as you’d expect, but I can’t drag out a single memory. I mean, life is full of middle-aged men. But I’m fairly sure the young lady would have stuck in one’s mind.’

‘Yes.’

He turned back to his book.

‘What are you reading?’

He did not reply, just lifted it so I could see the cover.

‘Harry Potter?’

He shrugged. ‘Why not?’

The gin kept me awake for a while as the train chugged and clattered through the night, leaving my quiet and comfortable life further behind with every clunk of wheels on rails. I lay in the narrow bed, the duvet pulled up to my chin, trying not to think of a man stabbed to death in a bed like this.

Then suddenly someone was knocking on the door, and before I could even feel alarmed or confused, a female voice said: ‘Breakfast!’ and I realised we were not moving any more.

When I opened the door and took the tray, she answered my questions before I had even managed to formulate them in my head.

‘Paddington. If you could get off before seven, that’s all we ask, my lovely. Here you go. You’re all right with the tray?’

‘Thank you.’

There was no sign of Ellen Johnson when I got off the train. She was not in the lounge next to the platform, and I imagined she had plunged straight into London when the train stopped there, long before I woke up. I had failed to find a phone number for her, and my email to her Facebook account had gone predictably unanswered. When I went back home, I would find her at Paddington. I would catch her as she got on the train.

I almost wanted a second, early morning gin. There was a reason why I had not been here for all these years.

I walked straight back out of the first-class lounge. It was a horrible place, atmosphere-free and built for transience. Lara had, I knew, spent hours there before and after her journeys, but I would not be stalking her on that front.

In the café up the stairs, on the station concourse, I ordered something substantial, and took out a notebook to make a plan.

The station was massive. It was enormous compared with Truro station, at least. They should, I thought, make that its official motto: ‘Bigger than Truro.’ It could, in fact, be a slogan for the whole city.

I was able to position myself at a table that allowed me to see the people walking around. Most of them came from trains, walked directly to the Tube and vanished underground. I was more interested in the ones who milled and meandered around, killing time. Some of them queued for bagels and doughnuts. A man picked his nose, trying to be surreptitious about it. A woman stumbled, nearly fell over, then walked on, looking down, trying to pretend it hadn’t happened.

The waitress brought me a plate of eggs and beans, defrosted hash browns and cooked tomatoes, and this was soon joined by a vast bucket full of milky coffee with froth on the top. I was not hungry, but I balanced some beans on the fork anyway.

My heart was pounding and I made an effort to calm myself down. I was here because Lara had vanished and had quite possibly taken my passport with her. This sounded stupid, but I knew it had been in that filing cabinet. I knew that I had never taken it out. I was certain that Laurie hadn’t either, because he would have been shifty, and I would have known. She had been in the room, alone, when I went to answer a phone call that never was. I partly thought I was being ridiculous, but I was increasingly uneasy, too. I was going to apply for a new passport first, and then I would try to discover whether I had taken a flight anywhere lately.

Despite the fact that her face was all over the news, she could easily disguise herself and slip into a different life in the city. She would just need to change her hair, and no one would recognise her. London was big enough for that: even though everyone had been looking for her for ten days, she could be hiding here.

I tried hard to focus. When I had applied for my passport, I was going to find her sister, because Olivia Wilberforce was an intriguing character, and Sam hated her with a disconcerting vehemence. She was pregnant, I knew that much, and this had upset Lara. They had not been on speaking terms for a while, according to Sam, and I remembered Lara, on our trip to St Mawes and when she came over for mince pies, muttering unhappily about her sister.