Quarter past nine. Unless he starts work very late, I’ve missed him. It’s raining harder now, and I can’t face another aimless day in London. The only money I have is a tenner I borrowed from Cathy, and I need to make that last until I’ve summoned up the courage to ask my mother for a loan. I walk down the steps, intending to cross underneath to the opposite platform and go back to Ashbury, when suddenly I spot Scott hurrying out of the newsagent opposite the station entrance, his coat pulled up around his face.

I run after him and catch him at the corner, right opposite the underpass. I grab his arm and he wheels round, startled.

“Please,” I say, “can I talk to you?”

“Jesus Christ,” he snarls at me. “What the fuck do you want?”

I back away from him, holding my hands up. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m sorry. I just wanted to apologize, to explain . . .”

The downpour has become a deluge. We are the only people on the street, both of us soaked to the skin. Scott starts to laugh. He throws his hands up in the air and roars with laughter. “Come to the house,” he says. “We’re going to drown out here.”

Scott goes upstairs to fetch me a towel while the kettle boils. The house is less tidy than it was a week ago, the disinfectant smell displaced by something earthier. A pile of newspapers sits in the corner of the living room; there are dirty mugs on the coffee table and the mantelpiece.

Scott appears at my side, proffering the towel. “It’s a tip, I know. My mother was driving me insane, cleaning, tidying up after me all the time. We had a bit of a row. She hasn’t been round for a few days.” His mobile phone starts to ring, he glances at it, puts it back into his pocket. “Speak of the devil. She never bloody stops.”

I follow him into the kitchen.

“I’m so sorry about what happened,” I say.

He shrugs. “I know. And it’s not your fault anyway. I mean, it might’ve helped if you weren’t . . .”

“If I wasn’t a drunk?”

His back is turned, he’s pouring the coffee.

“Well, yes. But they didn’t actually have enough to charge him with anything anyway.” He hands me the mug and we sit down at the table. I notice that one of the photograph frames on the sideboard has been turned facedown. Scott is still talking. “They found things—hair, skin cells—in his house, but he doesn’t deny that she went there. Well, he did deny it at first, then he admitted that she had been there.”

“Why did he lie?”

“Exactly. He admitted that she’d been to the house twice, just to talk. He won’t say what about—there’s the whole confidentiality thing. The hair and the skin cells were found downstairs. Nothing up in the bedroom. He swears blind they weren’t having an affair. But he’s a liar, so . . .” He passes his hand over his eyes. His face looks as though it is sinking into itself, his shoulders sag. He looks shrunken. “There was a trace of blood on his car.”

“Oh my God.”

“Yeah. Matches her blood type. They don’t know if they can get any DNA because it’s such a small sample. It could be nothing, that’s what they keep saying. How could it be nothing, that her blood’s on his car?” He shakes his head. “You were right. The more I hear about this guy, the more I’m sure.” He looks at me, right at me, for the first time since we got here. “He was fucking her, and she wanted to end it, so he . . . he did something. That’s it. I’m sure of it.”

He’s lost all hope, and I don’t blame him. It’s been more than two weeks and she hasn’t turned on her phone, hasn’t used a credit card, hasn’t withdrawn money from an ATM. No one has seen her. She is gone.

“He told the police that she might have run away,” Scott says.

“Dr. Abdic did?”

Scott nods. “He told the police that she was unhappy with me and she might have run off.”

“He’s trying to shift suspicion, get them to think that you did something.”

“I know that. But they seem to buy everything that bastard says. That Riley woman, I can tell when she talks about him. She likes him. The poor, downtrodden refugee.” He hangs his head, wretched. “Maybe he’s right. We did have that awful fight. But I can’t believe . . . She wasn’t unhappy with me. She wasn’t. She wasn’t.” When he says it the third time, I wonder whether he’s trying to convince himself. “But if she was having an affair, she must have been unhappy, mustn’t she?”

“Not necessarily,” I say. “Perhaps it was one of those—what do they call it?—transference things. That’s the word they use, isn’t it? When a patient develops feelings—or thinks they develop feelings—for a therapist. Only the therapist is supposed to resist them, to point out that the feelings aren’t real.”

His eyes are on my face, but I feel as though he isn’t really listening to what I’m saying.

“What happened?” he asks. “With you. You left your husband. Was there someone else?”

I shake my head. “Other way round. Anna happened.”

“Sorry.” He pauses.

I know what he’s going to ask, so before he can, I say, “It started before. While we were still married. The drinking. That’s what you wanted to know, isn’t it?”

He nods again.

“We were trying for a baby,” I say, and my voice catches. Still, after all this time, every time I talk about it the tears come to my eyes. “Sorry.”

“It’s all right.” He gets to his feet, goes over to the sink and pours me a glass of water. He puts it on the table in front of me.

I clear my throat, try to be as matter-of-fact as possible. “We were trying for a baby and it didn’t happen. I became very depressed, and I started to drink. I was extremely difficult to live with, and Tom sought solace elsewhere. And she was all too happy to provide it.”

“I’m really sorry, that’s awful. I know . . . I wanted to have a child. Megan kept saying she wasn’t ready yet.” Now it’s his turn to wipe the tears away. “It’s one of the things . . . we argued about it sometimes.”

“Was that what you were arguing about the day she left?”

He sighs, pushing his chair back and getting to his feet. “No,” he says, turning away from me. “It was something else.”

EVENING

Cathy is waiting for me when I get home. She’s standing in the kitchen, aggressively drinking a glass of water.

“Good day at the office?” she asks, pursing her lips. She knows.

“Cathy . . .”

“Damien had a meeting near Euston today. On his way out, he bumped into Martin Miles. They know each other a little, remember, from Damien’s days at Laing Fund Management. Martin used to do the PR for them.”

“Cathy . . .”

She held her hand up, took another gulp of water. “You haven’t worked there in months! In months! Do you know how idiotic I feel? What an idiot Damien felt? Please, please tell me that you have another job that you just haven’t told me about. Please tell me that you haven’t been pretending to go to work. That you haven’t been lying to me—day in, day out—all this time.”

“I didn’t know how to tell you . . .”

“You didn’t know how to tell me? How about: ‘Cathy, I got fired because I was drunk at work’? How about that?” I flinch and her face softens. “I’m sorry, but honestly, Rachel.” She really is too nice. “What have you been doing? Where do you go? What do you do all day?”

“I walk. Go to the library. Sometimes—”

“You go to the pub?”

“Sometimes. But—”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” She approaches me, placing her hands on my shoulders. “You should have told me.”

“I was ashamed,” I say, and I start to cry. It’s awful, cringeworthy, but I start to weep. I sob and sob, and poor Cathy holds me, strokes my hair, tells me I’ll be all right, that everything will be all right. I feel wretched. I hate myself almost more than I ever have.

Later, sitting on the sofa with Cathy, drinking tea, she tells me how it’s going to be. I’m going to stop drinking, I’m going to get my CV in order, I’m going to contact Martin Miles and beg for a reference. I’m going to stop wasting money going backwards and forwards to London on pointless train journeys.