EVENING

The train is full of rain-soaked people, steam rising off their clothes and condensing on the windows. The fug of body odour, perfume and laundry soap hangs oppressively above bowed, damp heads. The clouds that menaced this morning did so all day, growing heavier and blacker until they burst, monsoon-like, this evening, just as office workers stepped outside and the rush hour began in earnest, leaving the roads gridlocked and tube station entrances choked with people opening and closing umbrellas.

I don’t have an umbrella and am soaked through; I feel as though someone has thrown a bucket of water over me. My cotton trousers cling to my thighs and my faded blue shirt has become embarrassingly transparent. I ran all the way from the library to the tube station with my handbag clutched against my chest to hide what I could. For some reason I found this funny—there is something ridiculous about being caught in the rain—and I was laughing so hard by the time I got to the top of Gray’s Inn Road, I could barely breathe. I can’t remember the last time I laughed like that.

I’m not laughing now. As soon as I got myself a seat, I checked the latest on Megan’s case on my phone, and it’s the news I’ve been dreading. “A thirty-four-year-old man is being questioned under caution at Witney police station regarding the disappearance of Megan Hipwell, missing from her home since Saturday evening.” That’s Scott, I’m sure of it. I can only hope that he read my email before they picked him up, because questioning under caution is serious—it means they think he did it. Although, of course, it is yet to be defined. It may not have happened at all. Megan might be fine. Every now and again it does strike me that she’s alive and well and sitting on a hotel balcony with a view of the sea, her feet up on the railings, a cold drink at her elbow.

The thought of her there both thrills and disappoints me, and then I feel sick for feeling disappointed. I don’t wish her ill, no matter how angry I was with her for cheating on Scott, for shattering my illusions about my perfect couple. No, it’s because I feel like I’m part of this mystery, I’m connected. I am no longer just a girl on the train, going back and forth without point or purpose. I want Megan to turn up safe and sound. I do. Just not quite yet.

I sent Scott an email this morning. His address was easy to find—I Googled him and found www.shipwellconsulting.co.uk, the site where he advertises “a range of consultancy, cloud- and web-based services for business and nonprofit organizations.” I knew it was him, because his business address is also his home address.

I sent a short message to the contact address given on the site:

Dear Scott,

My name is Rachel Watson. You don’t know me. I would like to talk to you about your wife. I do not have any information on her whereabouts, I don’t know what has happened to her. But I believe I have information that could help you.

You may not want to talk to me, I would understand that, but if you do, email me on this address.

Yours sincerely,

Rachel

I don’t know if he would have contacted me anyway—I doubt that I would, if I were in his shoes. Like the police, he’d probably just think I’m a nutter, some weirdo who’s read about the case in the newspaper. Now I’ll never know—if he’s been arrested, he may never get a chance to see the message. If he’s been arrested, the only people who see it may be the police, which won’t be good news for me. But I had to try.

And now I feel desperate, thwarted. I can’t see through the mob of people in the carriage across to their side of the tracks—my side—and even if I could, with the rain still pouring down I wouldn’t be able to see beyond the railway fence. I wonder whether evidence is being washed away, whether right at this moment vital clues are disappearing forever: smears of blood, footprints, DNA-loaded cigarette butts. I want a drink so badly, I can almost taste the wine on my tongue. I can imagine exactly what it will feel like for the alcohol to hit my bloodstream and make my head rush.

I want a drink and I don’t want one, because if I don’t have a drink today then it’ll be three days, and I can’t remember the last time I stayed off for three days in a row. There’s a taste of something else in my mouth, too, an old stubbornness. There was a time when I had willpower, when I could run 10k before breakfast and subsist for weeks on thirteen hundred calories a day. It was one of the things Tom loved about me, he said: my stubbornness, my strength. I remember an argument, right at the end, when things were about as bad as they could be; he lost his temper with me. “What happened to you, Rachel?” he asked me. “When did you become so weak?”

I don’t know. I don’t know where that strength went, I don’t remember losing it. I think that over time it got chipped away, bit by bit, by life, by the living of it.

The train comes to an abrupt halt, brakes screeching alarmingly, at the signal on the London side of Witney. The carriage is filled with murmured apologies as standing passengers stumble, bumping into one another, stepping on one another’s feet. I look up and find myself looking right into the eyes of the man from Saturday night—the ginger one, the one who helped me up. He’s staring right at me, his startlingly blue eyes locked on mine, and I get such a fright, I drop my phone. I retrieve it from the floor and look up again, tentatively this time, not directly at him. I scan the carriage, I wipe the steamy window with my elbow and stare out, and then eventually I look back over at him and he smiles at me, his head cocked a little to one side.

I can feel my face burning. I don’t know how to react to his smile, because I don’t know what it means. Is it Oh, hello, I remember you from the other night, or is it Ah, it’s that pissed girl who fell down the stairs and talked shit at me the other night, or is it something else? I don’t know, but thinking about it now, I believe I have a snatch of sound track to go with the picture of me slipping on the steps: him saying, “You all right, love?” I turn away and look out of the window again. I can feel his eyes on me; I just want to hide, to disappear. The train judders off, and in seconds we’re pulling into Witney station and people start jostling one another for position, folding newspapers and packing away tablets and e-readers as they prepare to disembark. I look up again and am flooded with relief—he’s turned away from me, he’s getting off the train.

It strikes me then that I’m being an idiot. I should get up and follow him, talk to him. He can tell me what happened, or what didn’t happen; he might be able to fill in some of the blanks at least. I get to my feet. I hesitate—I know it’s already too late, the doors are about to close, I’m in the middle of the carriage, I won’t be able to push my way through the crowd in time. The doors beep and close. Still standing, I turn and look out of the window as the train pulls away. He’s standing on the edge of the platform in the rain, the man from Saturday night, watching me as I go past.

The closer I get to home, the more irritated with myself I feel. I’m almost tempted to change trains at Northcote, go back to Witney and look for him. A ridiculous idea, obviously, and stupidly risky given that Gaskill warned me to stay away from the area only yesterday. But I’m feeling dispirited about ever recalling what happened on Saturday. A few hours of (admittedly hardly exhaustive) Internet research this afternoon confirmed what I suspected: hypnosis is not generally useful in retrieving hours lost to blackout because, as my previous reading suggested, we do not make memories during blackout. There is nothing to remember. It is, will always be, a black hole in my timeline.