The Stranger on the Train (8 page)

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 to 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?

BZZZT. BZZZT.

The intercom! Emma almost tripped over the leg of a chair. At the same time, a wave of dizziness rolled over her. She must have got up off the couch too quickly. She ignored it, hurrying to press the button. Whoever it was might be something to do with Ritchie. Even as she thought it, she braced herself for disappointment. It was probably just another journalist. She'd stopped letting them up to the flat ever since a sneery-faced woman in a red skirt suit had asked her if she could prove that Oliver was Ritchie's father, while behind her, her colleague used Gribbit's foot to clean his camera lens.

The other person it could have been was Mrs. Alcarez, the Filipino nurse who lived next door. Emma hardly knew the woman but she was constantly accosting the police in the lifts, asking them if they'd found Ritchie yet.

But the voice on the intercom was none of these.

“Emma Turner?” a man's voice said.

“Yes?”

“I'm sorry to bother you. This is Rafe Townsend.”

Rafe Townsend. Rafe Townsend! The man who'd been on her balcony. Emma was too astonished to respond. She'd been thinking about him only a couple of minutes ago.

“I brought your bags back to your flat,” Rafe was explaining. “Last Monday.”

Emma said: “I know who you are.”

Before she knew what she was doing, she'd pressed the switch on the intercom to let him in. Then she clicked her tongue against her teeth. What had she done that for? What the hell was this Rafe person doing, calling over here again?

When, a minute or two later, she heard his knock on the door of the flat, she was tempted to ignore it. She was still dizzy from getting up off the couch. Then she sighed and went to open the door. In the hallway stood the tallish dark-haired man she recognized from the last time. He had the same beaten-up rucksack slung on his shoulder. His face was flushed, from exercise or the cold, and his hair stuck up in little spikes of drying sweat.