Evening
The police think I’m a rubbernecker. They think I’m a stalker, a nut-case, mentally unstable. I should never have gone to the police station. I’ve made my own situation worse and I don’t think I’ve helped Scott, which was the reason I went there in the first place. He needs my help, because it’s obvious the police will suspect that he’s done something to her, and I know it isn’t true, because I know him. I really feel that, crazy as it sounds. I’ve seen the way he is with her. He couldn’t hurt her.
OK, so helping Scott was not my sole reason for going to the police. There was the matter of the lie, which needed sorting out. The lie about me working for Huntingdon Whitely.
It took me ages to get up the courage to go into the station. I was on the verge of turning back and going home a dozen times, but eventually I went in. I asked the desk sergeant if I could speak to Detective Inspector Gaskill, and he showed me to a stuffy waiting room, where I sat for over an hour until someone came to get me. By that time I was sweating and trembling like a woman on her way to the scaffold. I was shown into another room, smaller and stuffier still, windowless and airless. I was left there alone for a further ten minutes before Gaskill and a woman, also in plain clothes, turned up. Gaskill greeted me politely; he didn’t seem surprised to see me. He introduced his companion as Detective Sergeant Riley. She is younger than I am, tall, slim, dark-haired, pretty in a sharp-featured, vulpine sort of way. She did not return my smile.
We all sat down and nobody said anything; they just looked at me expectantly.
‘I remembered the man,’ I said. ‘I told you there was a man at the station. I can describe him.’ Riley raised her eyebrows ever so slightly and shifted in her seat. ‘He was about medium height, medium build, reddish hair. I slipped on the steps and he caught my arm.’ Gaskill leaned forward, his elbows on the table, hands clasped together in front of his mouth. ‘He was wearing … I think he was wearing a blue shirt.’
This is not actually true. I do remember a man, and I’m pretty sure he had reddish hair, and I think that he smiled at me, or smirked at me, when I was on the train. I think that he got off at Witney, and I think he might have spoken to me. It’s possible I might have slipped on the steps. I have a memory of it, but I can’t tell whether the memory belongs to Saturday night, or to another time. There have been many slips, on many staircases. I have no idea what he was wearing.
The detectives were not impressed with my tale. Riley gave an almost imperceptible shake of her head. Gaskill unclasped his hands and spread them out, palms upwards, in front of him. ‘OK. Is that really what you came here to tell me, Ms Watson?’ he asked. There was no anger in his tone, he sounded almost encouraging. I wished that Riley would go away. I could talk to him; I could trust him.
‘I don’t work for Huntingdon Whitely any longer,’ I said.
‘Oh.’ He leaned back in his seat, looking more interested.
‘I left three months ago. My flatmate – well, she’s my landlady really – I haven’t told her. I’m trying to find another job. I didn’t want her to know because I thought she would worry about the rent. I have some money. I can pay my rent, but … Anyway, I lied to you yesterday about my job and I apologize for that.’
Riley leaned forward and gave me an insincere smile. ‘I see. You no longer work for Huntingdon Whitely. You don’t work for anyone, is that right? You’re unemployed?’ I nodded. ‘OK. So … you’re not signing on, nothing like that?’
‘No.’
‘And … your flatmate, she hasn’t noticed that you don’t go to work every day?’
‘I do. I mean, I don’t go to the office, but I go into London, the way I used to, at the same time and everything, so that she … So that she won’t know.’ Riley glanced at Gaskill; he kept his eyes on my face, the hint of a frown between his eyes. ‘It sounds odd, I know …’ I said and I tailed off then, because it doesn’t just sound odd, it sounds insane when you say it out loud.
‘Right. So, you pretend to go to work every day?’ Riley asked me, her brow knitted too, as though she were concerned about me. As though she thought I was completely deranged. I didn’t speak or nod or do anything, I kept silent. ‘Can I ask why you left your job, Ms Watson?’
There was no point in lying. If they hadn’t intended to check out my employment record before this conversation, they bloody well would now. ‘I was fired,’ I said.
‘You were dismissed,’ Riley said, a note of satisfaction in her voice. It was obviously the answer she’d anticipated. ‘Why was that?’
I gave a little sigh and appealed to Gaskill. ‘Is this really important? Does it matter why I left my job?’
Gaskill didn’t say anything, he was consulting some notes that Riley had pushed in front of him, but he did give the slightest shake of his head. Riley changed tack.
‘Ms Watson, I wanted to ask you about Saturday night.’ I glanced at Gaskill – we’ve already had this conversation – but he wasn’t looking at me. ‘All right,’ I said. I kept raising my hand to my scalp, worrying at my injury. I couldn’t stop myself.
‘Tell me why you went to Blenheim Road on Saturday night. Why did you want to speak to your ex-husband?’
‘I don’t really think that’s any of your business,’ I said, and then, quickly, before she had time to say anything else, ‘Would it be possible to have a glass of water?’
Gaskill got to his feet and left the room, which wasn’t really the outcome I was hoping for. Riley didn’t say a word; she just kept looking at me, the trace of a smile still on her lips. I couldn’t hold her gaze, I looked at the table, I let my eyes wander around the room. I knew this was a tactic: she was remaining silent so that I would become so uncomfortable that I had to say something, even if I didn’t really want to. ‘I had some things I needed to discuss with him,’ I said. ‘Private matters.’ I sounded pompous and ridiculous.
Riley sighed. I bit my lip, determined not to speak until Gaskill came back into the room. The moment he returned, placing a glass of cloudy water in front of me, Riley spoke.
‘Private matters?’ she prompted.
‘That’s right.’
Riley and Gaskill exchanged a look, I wasn’t sure if it was irritation or amusement. I could taste the sweat on my upper lip. I took a sip of water; it tasted stale. Gaskill shuffled the papers in front of him and then pushed them aside, as though he was done with them, or as though whatever was in them didn’t interest him all that much.
‘Ms Watson, your … er … your ex-husband’s current wife, Mrs Anna Watson, has raised concerns about you. She told us that you have been bothering her, bothering her husband, that you have come to the house uninvited, that on one occasion …’ Gaskill glanced back at his notes, but Riley interrupted.
‘On one occasion you broke into Mr and Mrs Watson’s home and took their child, their newborn baby.’
A black hole opened up in the centre of the room and swallowed me. ‘That is not true!’ I said. ‘I didn’t take … It didn’t happen like that, that’s wrong. I didn’t … I didn’t take her.’
I got very upset then, I started to shake and cry, I said I wanted to leave. Riley pushed her chair back and got to her feet, shrugged at Gaskill and left the room. Gaskill handed me a Kleenex.
‘You can leave any time you like, Ms Watson. You came here to talk to us.’ He smiled at me then, an apologetic sort of smile. I liked him in that moment, I wanted to take his hand and squeeze it, but I didn’t, because that would have been weird. ‘I think you have more to tell me,’ he said, and I liked him even more for saying tell me rather than tell us.
‘Perhaps,’ he said, getting to his feet and ushering me towards the door, ‘you would like to take a break, stretch your legs, get yourself something to eat. Then when you’re ready, come back, and you can tell me everything.’
I was planning to just forget the whole thing and go home. I was walking back towards the train station, ready to turn my back on everything. Then I thought about the train journey, about going backwards and forwards on that line, past the house – Megan and Scott’s house – every day. What if they never found her? I was going to wonder forever – and I understand that this is not very likely, but even so – whether my saying something might have helped her. What if Scott was accused of harming her just because they never knew about B? What if she was at B’s house right now, tied up in the basement, hurt and bleeding, or buried in the garden?
I did as Gaskill said, I bought a ham-and-cheese sandwich and a bottle of water from a corner shop and took it to Witney’s only park, a rather sorry little patch of land surrounded by 1930s houses and given over almost entirely to an asphalted playground. I sat on a bench at the edge of this space, watching mothers and childminders scolding their charges for eating sand out of the pit. I used to dream of this, a few years back. I dreamed of coming here – not to eat ham-and-cheese sandwiches in between police interviews, obviously – I dreamed of coming here with my own baby. I thought about the buggy I would buy, all the time I would spend in Trotters and at the Early Learning Centre sizing up adorable outfits and educational toys. I thought about how I would sit here, bouncing my own bundle of joy on my lap.
It didn’t happen. No doctor has been able to explain to me why I can’t get pregnant. I’m young enough, fit enough, I wasn’t drinking heavily when we were trying. My husband’s sperm was active and plentiful. It just didn’t happen. I didn’t suffer the agony of miscarriage, I just didn’t get pregnant. We did one round of IVF, which was all we could afford. It was, as everyone had warned us it would be, unpleasant and unsuccessful. Nobody warned me it would break us. But it did. Or rather, it broke me, and then I broke us.
The thing about being barren is that you’re not allowed to get away from it. Not when you’re in your thirties. My friends were having children, friends of friends were having children, pregnancy and birth and first birthday parties were everywhere. I was asked about it, all the time. My mother, our friends, colleagues at work. When was it going to be my turn? At some point our childlessness became an acceptable topic of Sunday-lunch conversation, not just between Tom and me, but more generally. What we were trying, what we should be doing, do you really think you should be having a second glass of wine? I was still young, there was still plenty of time, but failure cloaked me like a mantle, it overwhelmed me, dragged me under and I gave up hope. At the time, I resented the fact that it was always seen as my fault, that I was the one letting the side down. But as the speed with which he managed to impregnate Anna demonstrates, there was never any problem with Tom’s virility. I was wrong to suggest that we should share the blame; it was all down to me.
Lara, my best friend since university, had two children in two years: a boy first and then a girl. I didn’t like them. I didn’t want to hear anything about them. I didn’t want to be near them. Lara stopped speaking to me after a while. There was a girl at work who told me – casually, as though she were talking about an appendectomy or a wisdom-tooth extraction – that she’d recently had an abortion, a medical one, and it was so much less traumatic than the surgical one she’d had when she was at university. I couldn’t speak to her after that, I could barely look at her. Things became awkward in the office; people noticed.
Tom didn’t feel the way I did. It wasn’t his failure, for starters, and in any case, he didn’t need a child like I did. He wanted to be a dad, he really did – I’m sure he daydreamed about kicking a football around in the garden with his son, or carrying his daughter on his shoulders in the park. But he thought our lives could be great without children, too. We’re happy, he used to say to me, why can’t we just go on being happy? He became frustrated with me. He never understood that it’s possible to miss what you’ve never had, to mourn for it.
I felt isolated in my misery. I became lonely, so I drank a bit, and then a bit more, and then I became lonelier, because no one likes being around a drunk. I lost and I drank and I drank and I lost. I liked my job, but I didn’t have a glittering career, and even if I had, let’s be honest: women are still only really valued for two things – their looks and their role as mothers. I’m not beautiful, and I can’t have kids, so what does that make me? Worthless.
I can’t blame all this for my drinking – I can’t blame my parents or my childhood, an abusive uncle or some terrible tragedy. It’s my fault. I was a drinker anyway – I’ve always liked to drink. But I did become sadder, and sadness gets boring after a while, for the sad person and for everyone around them. And then I went from being a drinker to being a drunk, and there’s nothing more boring than that.
I’m better now, about the children thing; I’ve got better since I’ve been on my own. I’ve had to. I’ve read books and articles, I’ve realized that I must come to terms with it. There are strategies, there is hope. If I straightened myself out and sobered up, there’s a possibility that I could adopt. And I’m not thirty-four yet – it isn’t over. I am better than I was a few years ago, when I used to abandon my trolley and leave the supermarket if the place was packed with mums and kids; I wouldn’t have been able to come to a park like this, to sit near the playground and watch chubby toddlers rolling down the slide. There were times, at my lowest, when the hunger was at its worst, when I thought I was going to lose my mind.
Maybe I did, for a while. The day they asked me about it at the police station, I might have been mad then. Something Tom once said tipped me over, sent me sliding. Something he wrote, rather: I read it on Facebook that morning. It wasn’t a shock – I knew she was having a baby, he’d told me, and I’d seen her, seen that pink blind in the nursery window. So I knew what was coming. But I thought of the baby as her baby. Until the day I saw the picture of him, holding his newborn girl, looking down at her and smiling, and beneath he’d written: ‘So this is what all the fuss is about! Never knew love like this! Happiest day of my life!’ I thought about him writing that – knowing that I would see it, that I would read those words and they would kill me, and writing it anyway. He didn’t care. Parents don’t care about anything but their children. They are the centre of the universe; they are all that really counts. Nobody else is important, no one else’s suffering or joy matters, none of it is real.
I was angry. I was distraught. Maybe I was vengeful. Maybe I thought I’d show them that my distress was real. I don’t know. I did a stupid thing.
I went back to the police station after a couple of hours. I asked if I could speak to Gaskill alone, but he said that he wanted Riley to be present. I liked him a little less after that.
‘I didn’t break into their home,’ I said. ‘I did go there, I wanted to speak to Tom. No one answered the doorbell …’
‘So how did you get in?’ Riley asked me.
‘The door was open.’
‘The front door was open?’
I sighed. ‘No, of course not. The sliding door at the back, the one leading into the garden.’
‘And how did you get into the back garden?’
‘I went over the fence, I knew the way in …’
‘So you climbed over the fence to gain access to your exhusband’s house?’
‘Yes. We used to … There was always a spare key at the back. We had a place we hid it, in case one of us lost our keys or forgot them or something. But I wasn’t breaking in – I didn’t. I just wanted to talk to Tom. I thought maybe … the bell wasn’t working or something.’
‘This was the middle of the day, during the week, wasn’t it? Why did you think your ex-husband would be at home? Had you called to find out?’ Riley asked.
‘Jesus! Will you just let me speak?’ I shouted, and she shook her head and gave me that smile again, as if she knew me, as if she could read me. ‘I went over the fence,’ I said, trying to control the volume of my voice, ‘and knocked on the glass doors, which were partly open. There was no answer. I stuck my head inside and called Tom’s name. Again, no answer, but I could hear a baby crying. I went inside and saw that Anna—’
‘Mrs Watson?’
‘Yes. Mrs Watson was on the sofa, sleeping. The baby was in the carrycot and was crying – screaming, actually, red in the face – she’d obviously been crying for a while.’ As I said those words it struck me that I should have told them that I could hear the baby crying from the street and that’s why I went round to the back of the house. That would have made me sound less like a maniac.
‘So the baby’s screaming and her mother’s right there, and she doesn’t wake?’ Riley asks me.
‘Yes.’ Her elbows are on the table, her hands in front of her mouth so I can’t read her expression fully, but I know she thinks I’m lying. ‘I picked her up to comfort her. That’s all. I picked her up to quieten her.’
‘That’s not all, though, is it, because when Anna woke up you weren’t there, were you? You were down by the fence, by the train tracks.’
‘She didn’t stop crying right away,’ I said. ‘I was bouncing her up and down and she was still grizzling, so I walked outside with her.’
‘Down to the train tracks?’
‘Into the garden.’
‘Did you intend to harm the Watsons’ child?’
I leaped to my feet then. Melodramatic, I know, but I wanted to make them see – make Gaskill see – what an outrageous suggestion that was. ‘I don’t have to listen to this! I came here to tell you about the man! I came here to help you! And now … what exactly are you accusing me of? What are you accusing me of?’
Gaskill remained impassive, unimpressed. He motioned at me to sit down again. ‘Ms Watson, the other … er, Mrs Watson – Anna – mentioned you to us during the course of our enquiries about Megan Hipwell. She said that you had behaved erratically, in an unstable manner, in the past. She mentioned this incident with the child. She said that you have harassed both her and her husband, that you continue to call the house repeatedly.’ He looked down at his notes for a moment. ‘Almost nightly, in fact. That you refuse to accept that your marriage is over …’
‘That is simply not true!’ I insisted, and it wasn’t – yes, I called Tom from time to time, but not every night, it was a total exaggeration. But I was getting the feeling that Gaskill wasn’t on my side after all, and I was starting to feel tearful again.
‘Why haven’t you changed your name?’ Riley asked me.
‘Excuse me?’
‘You still use your ex-husband’s name. Why is that? If a man left me for another woman, I think I’d want to get rid of that name. I certainly wouldn’t want to share my name with my replacement …’
‘Well, maybe I’m not that petty.’ I am that petty. I hate that she’s Anna Watson.
‘Right. And the ring – the one on a chain around your neck. Is that your wedding band?’
‘No,’ I lied. ‘It’s a … it was my grandmother’s.’
‘Is that right? OK. Well, I have to say that, to me, your behaviour suggests that – as Mrs Watson has implied – you are unwilling to move on, that you refuse to accept that your ex has a new family.’
‘I don’t see—’
‘What this has to do with Megan Hipwell?’ Riley finished my sentence. ‘Well. The night Megan went missing, we have reports that you – an unstable woman who had been drinking heavily – were seen on the street where she lives. Bearing in mind that there are some physical similarities between Megan and Mrs Watson—’
‘They don’t look anything like each other!’ I was outraged at the suggestion. Jess is nothing like Anna. Megan is nothing like Anna.
‘They’re both blonde, slim, petite, pale-skinned …’
‘So I attacked Megan Hipwell thinking she was Anna? That’s the most stupid thing I’ve ever heard,’ I said. But that lump on my head was throbbing again and everything from Saturday night was still deepest black.
‘Did you know that Anna Watson knows Megan Hipwell?’ Gaskill asked me, and I felt my jaw drop.
‘I … what? No. No, they don’t know each other.’
Riley smiled for a moment, then straightened her face. ‘Yes they do. Megan did some childminding for the Watsons …’ she glanced down at her notes, ‘back in August and September last year.’ I don’t know what to say. I can’t imagine it: Megan in my home, with her, with her baby.
‘The cut on your lip, is that from when you got knocked down the other day?’ Gaskill asked me.
‘Yes. I bit it when I fell, I think.’
‘Where was it, this accident?’
‘It was in London, Theobalds Road. Near Holborn.’
‘And what were you doing there?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Why were you in central London?’
I shrugged. ‘I already told you,’ I said coldly. ‘My flatmate doesn’t know that I’ve lost my job. So I go into London, as usual, and I go to libraries, to job hunt, to work on my CV.’
Riley shook her head, in disbelief perhaps, or wonder. How does anyone get to that point?
I pushed my chair back, readying myself to leave. I’d had enough of being talked down to, being made to look like a fool, like a mad woman. Time to play the trump card. ‘I don’t really know why we’re talking about this,’ I said. ‘I would have thought that you would have better things to do, like investigating Megan Hipwell’s disappearance, for example. I take it you’ve spoken to her lover?’ Neither of them said anything, they just stared at me. They weren’t expecting that. They didn’t know about him. ‘Perhaps you didn’t know. Megan Hipwell was having an affair,’ I said, and I started to walk to the door. Gaskill stopped me; he moved quietly and surprisingly quickly, and before I could put my hand on the door handle he was standing in front of me.
‘I thought you didn’t know Megan Hipwell?’ he asked me.
‘I don’t,’ I said, trying to get past him.
‘Sit down,’ he said, blocking my path.
I told them then about what I’d seen from the train, about how I often saw Megan sitting out on her terrace, sunbathing in the evenings or having coffee in the mornings. I told them about how last week I saw her with someone who clearly wasn’t her husband, how I’d seen them kissing on the lawn.
‘When was this?’ Gaskill snapped. He seemed annoyed with me, perhaps because I should have told them this straight away, instead of wasting all day talking about myself.
‘Friday. It was Friday morning.’
‘So the day before she went missing, you saw her with another man?’ Riley asked me, with a sigh of exasperation. She closed the file in front of her. Gaskill leaned back in his seat, studying my face. She clearly thought I was making it up; he wasn’t so sure.
‘Can you describe him?’ Gaskill asked.
‘Tall, dark—’
‘Handsome?’ Riley interrupted.
I puffed my cheeks out. ‘Taller than Scott Hipwell. I know, because I’ve seen them together – Jess and – sorry, Megan and Scott Hipwell – and this man was different. Slighter, thinner, darker skinned. Possibly an Asian man,’ I said.
‘You could determine his ethnic group from the train?’ Riley said. ‘Impressive. Who is Jess, by the way?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘You mentioned Jess a moment ago.’
I could feel my face flushing again. I shook my head, ‘No, I didn’t,’ I said.
Gaskill got to his feet and held out his hand for me to shake. ‘I think that’s enough.’ I shook his hand, ignored Riley and turned to go. ‘Don’t go anywhere near Blenheim Road, Ms Watson,’ Gaskill said. ‘Don’t contact your ex-husband unless it’s important, and don’t go anywhere near Anna Watson or her child.’
On the train on the way home, as I dissect all the ways that today went wrong, I’m surprised by the fact that I don’t feel as awful as I might do. Thinking about it, I know why that is: I didn’t have a drink last night, and I have no desire to have one now. I am interested, for the first time in ages, in something other than my own misery. I have purpose. Or at least, I have a distraction.