Paula Hawkins - The Girl on the Train

He gives me a sharp look. “What do you mean, hanging around?”

“She was here last night, standing in the street right opposite the house.”

“Was she with someone?”

“No. She was alone. Why d’you ask that?”

“Fuck’s sake,” he says, and his face darkens the way it does when he’s really angry. “I told her to stay away. Why didn’t you say anything last night?”

“I didn’t want to upset you,” I say softly, already regretting bringing this up. “I didn’t want to worry you.”

“Jesus!” he says, and he dumps his coffee cup loudly in the sink. The noise gives Evie a fright, and she starts to cry. This doesn’t help. “I don’t know what to tell you, I honestly don’t. When I spoke to her, she was fine. She listened to what I was saying and promised not to come around here any longer. She looked fine. She looked healthy, actually, back to normal—”

“She looked fine?” I ask him, and before he turns his back on me I can see in his face that he knows he’s been caught. “I thought you said you spoke to her on the phone?”

He takes a deep breath, sighs heavily, then turns back to me, his face a blank. “Yeah, well, that’s what I told you, darling, because I knew you’d get upset if I saw her. So I hold my hands up—I lied. Anything for an easy life.”

“Are you kidding me?”

He smiles at me, shaking his head as he steps towards me, his hands still raised in supplication. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. She wanted to chat in person and I thought it might be best. I’m sorry, OK? We just talked. We met in a crappy coffee shop in Ashbury and talked for twenty minutes—half an hour, tops. OK?”

He puts his arms around me and pulls me towards his chest. I try to resist him, but he’s stronger than me, and anyway he smells great and I don’t want a fight. I want us to be on the same side. “I’m sorry,” he mumbles again, into my hair.

“It’s all right,” I say.

I let him get away with it, because I’m dealing with this now. I spoke to Detective Riley yesterday evening, and I knew the moment we started talking that I’d done the right thing by calling her, because when I told her that I’d seen Rachel leaving Scott Hipwell’s house “on several occasions” (a slight exaggeration), she seemed very interested. She wanted to know dates and times (I could furnish her with two; I was vague about the other incidents), if they’d had a relationship prior to Megan Hipwell’s disappearance, whether I thought they were in a sexual relationship now. I have to say the thought hadn’t really crossed my mind—I can’t imagine him going from Megan to Rachel. In any case, his wife’s barely cold in the ground.

I went over the stuff about Evie as well—the attempted abduction—just in case she’d forgotten.

“She’s very unstable,” I said. “You might think I’m overreacting, but I can’t take any risks where my family is concerned.”

“Not at all,” she said. “Thank you very much for contacting me. If you see anything else that you consider suspicious, let me know.”

I’ve no idea what they’ll do about her—perhaps just warn her off? It’ll help, in any case, if we do start looking into things like restraining orders. Hopefully, for Tom’s sake, it won’t come to that.

After Tom leaves for work, I take Evie to the park, we play on the swings and the little wooden rocking horses, and when I put her back into her buggy she falls asleep almost immediately, which is my cue to go shopping. We cut through the back streets towards the big Sainsbury’s. It’s a bit of a roundabout way of getting there, but it’s quiet, with very little traffic, and in any case we get to pass number thirty-four Cranham Road.

It gives me a little frisson even now, walking past that house—butterflies suddenly swarm in my stomach, and a smile comes to my lips and colour to my cheeks. I remember hurrying up the front steps, hoping none of the neighbours would see me letting myself in, getting myself ready in the bathroom, putting on perfume, the kind of underwear you put on just to be taken off. Then I’d get a text message and he’d be at the door, and we’d have an hour or two in the bedroom upstairs.

He’d tell Rachel he was with a client, or meeting friends for a beer. “Aren’t you worried she’ll check up on you?” I’d ask him, and he’d shake his head, dismissing the idea. “I’m a good liar,” he told me once with a grin. Once, he said, “Even if she did check, the thing with Rachel is, she won’t remember what happened tomorrow anyway.” That’s when I started to realize just how bad things were for him.

It wipes the smile off my face, though, thinking about those conversations. Thinking about Tom laughing conspiratorially while he traced his fingers lower over my belly, smiling up at me, saying, “I’m a good liar.” He is a good liar, a natural. I’ve seen him doing it: convincing check-in staff that we were honeymooners, for example, or talking his way out of extra hours at work by claiming a family emergency. Everyone does it, of course they do, only when Tom does it, you believe him.

I think about breakfast this morning—but the point is that I caught him in the lie, and he admitted it straightaway. I don’t have anything to worry about. He isn’t seeing Rachel behind my back! The idea is ridiculous. She might have been attractive once—she was quite striking when he met her, I’ve seen pictures: all huge dark eyes and generous curves—but now she’s just run to fat. And in any case, he would never go back to her, not after everything she did to him, to us—all the harassment, all those late-night phone calls, hang-ups, text messages.

I’m standing in the tinned goods aisle, Evie still mercifully sleeping in the buggy, and I start thinking about those phone calls, and about the time—or was it times?—when I woke up and the bathroom light was on. I could hear his voice, low and gentle, behind the closed door. He was calming her down, I know he was. He told me that sometimes she’d be so angry, she’d threaten to come round to the house, go to his work, throw herself in front of a train. He might be a very good liar, but I know when he’s telling the truth. He doesn’t fool me.

EVENING

Only, thinking about it, he did fool me, didn’t he? When he told me that he’d spoken to Rachel on the phone, that she sounded fine, better, happy almost, I didn’t doubt him for a moment. And when he came home on Monday night and I asked him about his day and he talked to me about a really tiresome meeting that morning, I listened sympathetically, not once suspecting that there was no meeting, that all the while he was in a coffee shop in Ashbury with his ex-wife.

This is what I’m thinking about while I’m unloading the dishwasher, with great care and precision, because Evie is napping and the clatter of cutlery against crockery might wake her up. He does fool me. I know he’s not always 100 percent honest about everything. I think about that story about his parents—how he invited them to the wedding but they refused to come because they were so angry with him for leaving Rachel. I always thought that was odd, because on the two occasions when I’ve spoken to his mum she sounded so pleased to be talking to me. She was kind, interested in me, in Evie.

“I do hope we’ll be able to see her soon,” she said, but when I told Tom about it he dismissed it.

“She’s trying to get me to invite them round,” he said, “just so she can refuse. Power games.” She didn’t sound like a woman playing power games to me, but I didn’t press the point. The workings of other people’s families are always so impenetrable. He’ll have his reasons for keeping them at arm’s length, I know he will, and they’ll be centred on protecting me and Evie.