Paula Hawkins - The Girl on the Train

“Please, Scott!” I call out. “Please . . .” I hate the sound of my voice, the wheedling note, the desperation. I look down at my blood-soaked T-shirt and I’m reminded that I am not without options. I pick up the photo frame and tip it over onto the carpet. I select the longest of the glass shards and slip it carefully into my back pocket.

I can hear footsteps coming up the stairs. I back myself up against the wall opposite the door. The key turns in the lock.

Scott has my handbag in one hand and tosses it at my feet. In the other hand he is holding a scrap of paper. “Well, if it isn’t Nancy Drew!” he says with a smile. He puts on a girly voice and reads aloud: “Megan has run off with her boyfriend, who from here on in, I shall refer to as B.” He snickers. “B has harmed her . . . Scott has harmed her . . .” He crumples up the paper and throws it at my feet. “Jesus Christ. You really are pathetic, aren’t you?” He looks around, taking in the puke on the floor, the blood on my T-shirt. “Fucking hell, what have you been doing? Trying to top yourself? Going to do my job for me?” He laughs again. “I should break your fucking neck, but you know what, you’re just not worth the hassle.” He stands to one side. “Get out of my house.”

I grab my bag and make for the door, but just as I do, he steps out in front of me with a boxer’s feint, and for a moment I think he’s going to stop me, put his hands on me again. There must be terror in my eyes because he starts to laugh, he roars with laughter. I can still hear him when I slam the front door behind me.

FRIDAY, AUGUST 16, 2013

MORNING

I’ve barely slept. I drank a bottle and a half of wine in an attempt to get off to sleep, to stop my hands shaking, to quieten my startle reflex, but it didn’t really work. Every time I started to drop off, I’d jolt awake. I felt sure I could feel him in the room with me. I turned the light on and sat there, listening to the sounds of the street outside, to people moving around in the building. It was only when it started to get light that I relaxed enough to sleep. I dreamed I was in the woods again. Tom was with me, but still I felt afraid.

I left Tom a note last night. After I left Scott’s, I ran down to number twenty-three and banged on the door. I was in such a panic, I didn’t even care whether Anna was there, whether she’d be pissed off with me for showing up. No one came to the door, so I scribbled a note on a scrap of paper and shoved it through the letter box. I don’t care if she sees it—I think a part of me actually wants her to see it. I kept the note vague—I told him we needed to talk about the other day. I didn’t mention Scott by name, because I didn’t want Tom to go round there and confront him—God knows what might happen.

I rang the police almost as soon as I got home. I had a couple of glasses of wine first, to calm me down. I asked to speak to Detective Inspector Gaskill, but they said he wasn’t available, so I ended up talking to Riley. It wasn’t what I wanted—I know Gaskill would have been kinder.

“He imprisoned me in his home,” I told her. “He threatened me.”

She asked how long I was “imprisoned” for. I could hear the air quotes over the line.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Half an hour, maybe.”

There was a long silence.

“And he threatened you. Can you tell me the exact nature of the threat?”

“He said he’d break my neck. He said . . . he said he ought to break my neck . . .”

“He ought to break your neck?”

“He said that he would if he could be bothered.”

Silence. Then, “Did he hit you? Did he injure you in any way?”

“Bruising. Just bruising.”

“He hit you?”

“No, he grabbed me.”

More silence.

Then: “Ms. Watson, why were you in Scott Hipwell’s house?”

“He asked me to go to see him. He said he needed to talk to me.”

She gave a long sigh. “You were warned to stay out of this. You’ve been lying to him, telling him you were a friend of his wife’s, you’ve been telling all sorts of stories and—let me finish—this is a person who, at best, is under a great deal of strain and is extremely distressed. At best. At worst, he might be dangerous.”

“He is dangerous, that’s what I’m telling you, for God’s sake.”

“This is not helpful—you going round there, lying to him, provoking him. We’re in the middle of a murder investigation here. You need to understand that. You could jeopardize our progress, you could—”

“What progress?” I snapped. “You haven’t made any bloody progress. He killed his wife, I’m telling you. There’s a picture, a photograph of the two of them—it’s smashed. He’s angry, he’s unstable—”

“Yes, we saw the photograph. The house has been searched. It’s hardly evidence of murder.”

“So you’re not going to arrest him?”

She gave a long sigh. “Come to the station tomorrow. Make a statement. We’ll take it from there. And Ms. Watson? Stay away from Scott Hipwell.”

Cathy came home and found me drinking. She wasn’t happy. What could I tell her? There was no way to explain it. I just said I was sorry and went upstairs to my room, like a teenager in a sulk. And then I lay awake, trying to sleep, waiting for Tom to call. He didn’t.

I wake early, check my phone (no calls), wash my hair and dress for my interview, hands trembling, stomach in knots. I’m leaving early because I have to stop off at the police station first, to give them my statement. Not that I’m expecting it to do any good. They never took me seriously and they certainly aren’t going to start now. I wonder what it would take for them to see me as anything other than a fantasist.

On the way to the station I can’t stop looking over my shoulder; the sudden scream of a police siren has me literally leaping into the air in fright. On the station platform I walk as close to the railings as I can, my fingers trailing against the iron fence, just in case I need to hold on tight. I realize it’s ridiculous, but I feel so horribly vulnerable now that I’ve seen what he is; now that there are no secrets between us.

AFTERNOON

The matter should be closed for me now. All this time, I’ve been thinking that there was something to remember, something I was missing. But there isn’t. I didn’t see anything important or do anything terrible. I just happened to be on the same street. I know this now, courtesy of the red-haired man. And yet there’s an itch at the back of my brain that I just can’t scratch.

Neither Gaskill nor Riley were at the police station; I gave my statement to a bored-looking uniformed officer. It will be filed and forgotten about, I assume, unless I turn up dead in a ditch somewhere. My interview was on the opposite side of town from where Scott lives, but I took a taxi from the police station. I’m not taking any chances. It went as well as it could: the job itself is utterly beneath me, but then I seem to have become beneath me over the past year or two. I need to reset the scale. The big drawback (other than the crappy pay and the lowliness of the job itself) will be having to come to Witney all the time, to walk these streets and risk running into Scott or Anna and her child.

Because bumping into people is all I seem to do in this neck of the woods. It’s one of the things I used to like about the place: the village-on-the-edge-of-London feel. You might not know everyone, but faces are familiar.

I’m almost at the station, just passing the Crown, when I feel a hand on my arm and I wheel around, slipping off the pavement and into the road.

“Hey, hey, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” It’s him again, the red-haired man, pint in one hand, the other raised in supplication. “You’re jumpy, aren’t you?” He grins. I must look really frightened, because the grin fades. “Are you all right? I didn’t mean to scare you.”