The Stranger on the Train (4 page)

The flashes were coming faster. She screamed his name all around her, again and again and again.

“Ritchie! Ritchie! Ritchie!”

Then she knelt in the road and shrieked, no words coming out, just sounds. Car horns blared. Through the flashing lights came voices:

“Look at her. She's not well.”

“Is it drugs?”

Emma's head was full of noise. There was too much color and movement. She couldn't cope; everything was coming too fast. She couldn't think. Too many things to think about. Too urgent. Too much. She fell forward onto her hands. The road rushed at her face.

“Are you all right?” a woman asked.

“Someone call an ambulance.”

They swirled, blurred, and were gone.

Chapter Three

The light was blue and dim. Gentle on her eyes. Outside the patterned curtain, a muffled symphony of voices and footsteps; inside, a little square of hush where she was. She was in a bed and her knees were sore and stiff. She'd had a terrible dream that Ritchie had died. No, she'd left him on a train. She couldn't remember. It was all right now anyway. She was awake. It was over.

At the end of the bed, a girl in a blue tunic was busy writing something into a folder. Emma watched her drowsily. She felt sleepy, comfortable and secure; a sensation of well-being such as she hadn't had for a long, long time. The girl turned a page, checked something, turned back and wrote again. She had a delicate way of moving her fingers. Soothing. Hypnotic. As a child, sleeping at her gran's house, Emma had woken one night to see her mum sitting at the dresser under the window, going through some old letters. The lamp was tilted low, the only light a yellow pool over the paper. Emma had lain there for a long time, cozy and safe, listening to the rustlings and watching her mother's fingers turn the pages.

After a while she murmured to the girl in blue: “Where am I?”

The girl glanced up quickly. “Oh. You're awake.”

She put the folder down and hurried over to Emma.

“You're in hospital, Emma. The Royal London Accident and Emergency department. Do you remember the ambulance bringing you in?”

Ambulance? Emma frowned. Something struck her then, and she pulled herself up in the bed. She stared around the quiet blue cubicle.

“Where's Ritchie?” she asked. “Where's my little boy?”

“Excuse me.” The nurse dipped under one side of the curtain and beckoned to someone outside. The curtains shadowed, bulked, pulled aside. A shaven-headed man came in. He wore a short-sleeved white shirt and bulky black vest. A radio jutted from his left shoulder.

Emma's heart sank.

“Ritchie.” She sat up further. “What's happened to Ritchie?”

The policeman didn't say anything. Emma began to sob wildly. “Ritchie,” she cried. “Ritchie, where are you?” It wasn't a dream, then. Ritchie was gone. But what was wrong with her? She felt so sluggish and strange. Why couldn't she remember what had happened?

“Find him,” she begged the policeman. “Please. You have to find him.”

“We're trying to,” the policeman assured her. “The problem is, there's been some confusion as to exactly what happened. You've been unconscious for the last two hours. I believe you've had some kind of”—he glanced at the nurse—“sedative?”

The nurse said defensively: “She was screaming when the ambulance brought her in. Trying to run back into the street. A danger to herself. We didn't know.”

It was as if they were talking about someone else. Emma had a vague memory of shouting things at a crowd of people, but it didn't seem real. She felt so dim and underwater now, it was hard to believe she'd been like what the nurse said. She struggled to wake herself, to free her brain from the rolls of cotton wool wrapped around it.

The policeman took out a notebook.

“Would it help,” he said, licking his finger, “if I repeated back to you what you told the paramedics at the scene? Clarify what we've managed to gather so far?”

“Please,” Emma begged him. “Please do.”

The policeman flipped through the notebook until he came to the right page.

“Your name,” he said, “is Emma Turner, and you are aged twenty-five?”

“Yes.”

“And Richard—Ritchie—your child, is one?”

“Yes. Last month.”

“Good. So. You met this woman . . . Antonia?”

“Yes.”

“And you were talking to her in the café, and then you went to the bathroom and when you came out, she and the child were gone?”

“Yes. Yes.” The cotton wool lifted. She was there, in the café, and Ritchie was holding his arms out to her, smiling and saying: “Muh.” It was so real she almost cried out, lifting her hand to touch him.

“Now, if I could just clarify.” The policeman tapped his notebook. “Because this is where things become a little confusing.”

He cleared his throat and looked at Emma. “Whose child was it that the woman took?”

Emma gaped at him in astonishment. “Mine.”

“You're quite sure about that? You're sure the child didn't belong to the other woman?”

“Of course I'm sure.” Bewildered, Emma looked at the nurse for help. Why was he saying this? “There were witnesses. Ask them.”

“We already have, Ms. Turner. This is where their version differs from yours. The general impression from the witnesses we spoke to in Mr. . . . er . . . Bap's seems to have been that this lady and the child came into the café together, and that
you
approached
them
.”

“No.” Emma struggled to sit up in the bed. “That's wrong. We'd met each other already. In the tube station.”

“Yes, that is correct. You had previously approached this lady and her child at Whitechapel station. A staff member witnessed that, a guard at the barrier—”

“What?”

“You went to the guard and reported to him that you had lost your bag. When you spoke to him, you were on your own, no child, no buggy . . .”

“No!”

“. . . You then left him and approached a woman at the entrance to the station who was with her child. You seemed to be asking her for money, and she gave you . . . Please, Ms. Turner. I'm just summing up what's been said. She gave you some money, then she left you and went into the café. Some minutes later, you were seen to approach her again. At this point, there was some kind of argument. You went to the bathroom, and the lady left with her child.”

He looked up.

“Is that what happened?”

“No!” Emma cried. “It is
not
what happened. Ritchie is
my
child.”

“All right, Ms. Turner. Try to stay calm. I'm here to hear your side of the story.”

Emma's breathing was harsh and rapid. She couldn't control it; it was like she was having an asthma attack. Her mouth was filled with saliva. She couldn't swallow. The spit was dripping out of her, onto the pillow. The nurse put a bowl in front of her.

“Breathe slowly,” she advised, rubbing Emma's shoulder.

Emma spat into the bowl, smelling bile and plastic. She forced herself to breathe properly. Everything was coming back to her now, the cotton-wool veil over her mind split by great, jagged tears.

“
Listen,
” she said, desperate to tell them before it all disappeared again. “
This
is what happened.”

The story tumbled out. She started with Ritchie scrambling onto the train before the doors closed, his wide little face aglow with triumph. By the time she got to where she was sprawled in the road, with all the faces, and the horns blaring at her, she was crying. The policeman nodded, writing everything down. He was quiet when she'd finished, tapping his notebook with the top of his pen.

“He
is
my child.” Emma's voice shook. “He
is
.”

“Yet, according to your story,” the policeman said, “you went to the bathroom and left him with a woman you'd never met before.”

The nurse squeezed Emma's hand.

The policeman said: “You said that the child got trapped on a train when the doors closed. Did anyone else see this happening?”

“No.” Then Emma remembered. “Yes. A man. He pulled me back from the tunnel.”

“Did this man give you his name?”

“No.”

The policeman didn't say anything.

“Why would I lie about something like this?”

“I'm not saying you're lying, Ms. Turner. But why didn't you report this to anyone? Press the alarm to call for help? Mention it to the guard you spoke to? He says you only reported a lost handbag.”

“I have a child!” Emma shouted. “Why would I be here telling you he's been kidnapped instead of looking after him?”

She was kneeling up on the bed by this time, thrusting her face towards the policeman. He didn't react. He calmly held his notebook and focused on a point between Emma's eyes.

“Is there any way,” he said, “that you can verify that you have a child?”

“What do you mean?”

“Who do you live with? Who else knows Ritchie?”

“I don't live with anyone.”

“There must be someone who knows you both. Family members? Friends?”

Emma thought wildly.

“Even a health visitor or GP?”

“My GP. Dr. Stanford. In Hammersmith. She knows Ritchie.”

“We'll contact her immediately. Do you have an address?”

“It's Walker Square. The health center. But what about Ritchie? What are you doing about him?”

“As soon as we've spoken to Dr. Stanford, we'll be able to proceed from there. We'll go as quickly as we can.”

“But—”

“I'll be back as soon as I can, Ms. Turner.” The policeman was halfway through the curtains. “As soon as I've confirmed these details you've given.”

He pushed his way out and left.

“Look for him!” Emma shouted after him. “Find my child. You have to believe me.” She slammed against the pillows, weeping with frustration. The cotton wool was back again. She forced it away. She had to stay awake. She had to make them look for Ritchie. Oh God, how long had he been gone? Every minute he was moving further away from her. She sat up again, her heart racing with terror. Where was he? What did that woman want with him? What if Emma never saw him again? The thought made her want to throw up. This was a nightmare. It wasn't real. Any minute now, she would wake up and find herself back in her flat, with Ritchie in the cot by her bed. Only, a too-large part of her knew that she wouldn't. She had an enormous sense of failure. She had failed Ritchie. She'd always known it was going to happen, and now, at long last, it had.

A man in a pink shirt was beside her bed, saying something. His mouth opened and closed. Emma stared at him in confusion. His voice swam at her brain.

“Are you listening, Emma?” he was saying.

“I've told you,” she said in despair. “I've told you everything I know. Why aren't you out looking for him?”

“Bear with me, Emma. Just a few more questions. Is Ritchie your only child?”

“Yes. Yes, he is.”

“How is it that you are so isolated? A young woman like you. No family, no one to call. Where is Ritchie's father?”

“We're not in touch.”

“What about your family? Your parents?”

“They're dead.”

“I'm sorry.” He was writing this down. “Were you close to them?”

“No . . . yes . . . my mum.” Tears in her eyes. Viciously, she rubbed them away.

“Have you any history of psychiatric illness?”

“Sorry?”

“Depression, for example. Are you attending a doctor for treatment?”

“Why are you asking me this?” She stared at him. “Are you a psychiatrist?”

“I'm Dr. Canning, from the psych—”

“Do you think I have a mental illness? Is that it? You think I'm imagining all this?”

“Of course not.”

“Right.” Christ, she'd had enough of this. She pushed at the sheets to untwist them from her legs and began to climb off the trolley. “I'm leaving.”

“Emma. Please.” The pink-shirted man sat back, his hands in the air. “You're very upset. Let's think about this. How are you going to get home?”

“Where are my shoes?”

“If you leave against medical advice, you'll have to sign—”

“Fine. Whatever you want. My child's been kidnapped and no one's doing a fucking thing about it. I'll have to go and find him myself.”

She muttered to herself as she stooped to find her trainers. Fucking doctors. Fucking police. Fucking everyone. She felt weird. Dizzy. She couldn't feel her feet. The one thing she knew was that she had to get out of there and find Ritchie. In this city, the only person you could depend on was yourself.

The curtains swished back again. It was the shaven-headed policeman.

“We've spoken to Dr. Stanford,” he announced.

Emma stared up at him, gripping the bars of the trolley. Harsh white light surrounded him from behind. She couldn't see his face.

The policeman said: “Dr. Stanford confirms that you do have a son whom she knows very well and has seen many times. On the basis of that, we'll be starting a full investigation into the disappearance of your child.”

Chapter Four

Emma's first memory of Ritchie. Yeah, you didn't forget that kind of thing. He was purple, wrapped in a crocheted blanket, lying like a mollusk across her bed. She felt it was someone else's baby the midwife had just put there for a minute.

“Aren't you breast-feeding?” the brisk, navy-uniformed midwife asked, busy rolling up a blood pressure cuff beside the bed.

“No.”

“Oh? You do know it's best for his immune system?”

“My mother didn't breast-feed me.” Emma lifted her chin. “And I did all right.”

The vicious pain of the labor was behind her, but her body felt ripped and bruised, from her belly button right down to her knees. She felt weak, heavy, flattened into the pillows. Blood dripped from a transfusion bag above her wrist. The baby meowed, then bawled, gumming his knuckles. He lay on her bed, dirty, hungry and helpless, and the responsibility overwhelmed her.

The midwife pursed her lips.

“In that case, you'd best give him his bottle. We don't want his glucose levels to drop.”

“Will the social worker come before I leave?” Emma asked, more timidly now that she had won her small battle. “The maternity grant—”

“Oh, she'll be here.” The midwife clattered her equipment back into its basket. “Don't you worry.”

She left the room, rattling the blood pressure stand ahead of her.

Unfriendly cow, Emma thought.

Left to herself, she propped the yowling baby in her arms, holding him a little away from her in case she hurt him. She took the bottle from the nightstand and looked from it to the child. What now? Did she just put the bottle to his lips? How would he know what to do?

While she was wondering, the teat happened to touch the baby's mouth. Instantly, he lifted his face and hoovered it in. He sucked so hard that Emma grabbed the bottle in alarm, afraid the thing would disappear down his throat. After a few seconds, however, she relaxed. The bottle wasn't going anywhere; the baby seemed to know what he was doing. She just had to balance the bottle with her hand and let him get on with it.

She watched him cautiously as he drank, surprised by how alert he was. She'd thought they couldn't see anything for the first few days, but here he was, pear-drop eyes wide open, gazing steadily up at her. He had a strange little face, wide and squashy, like a toy football. His wrinkly neck stuck out of the top of his Babygro. The room was quiet, the only sounds the steady
suck-suck
on the bottle and a murmured conversation from a radio turned low. The baby's expression was one of grave understanding.

“I do apologize,” he seemed to say. “I need to drink this, but I'll do it as fast as I can and let you get back to yourself.” A slow blink: “I'm on your side, you know.”

Very slightly, the anxiety clawing at Emma's insides began to ease.

On the radio, the DJ announced: “And now we have a classic from Keane.”

The opening bars of “Somewhere Only We Know” filled the room. Emma's throat hardened. She let her head drop back against the pillow. She was in Hampshire with Oliver, and the song had played in the car on the way down. They were walking along the river. “Wait till you see this place,” he had said. “It's like an enchanted forest. Not many people know about it.”

They passed under old stone bridges, one after another, into green, misty light. Heavy branches dappled the water. They walked for a couple of miles and saw no one but the midges. Oliver pushed his dirty-blond hair back from his forehead. In the silence, his mouth came down on hers.

Emma's arms were tired. She relaxed them, and the baby settled in against her body. She lowered her head, still feeling the ache in her throat, and the baby's wispy hair brushed against her lips.

She couldn't call him Oliver. Not after what had happened. But she could call him . . . what were the names of the band members in Keane? Was one of them called Richard? She had always liked that name.

“Would you like to be called Richard?” she asked the child.

He didn't answer. His eyelids had begun to droop; his mouth was slack around the teat of the bottle.“All right, then. That's what we'll do.”

One less thing to worry about. The sun slanted from the window across the bed. Emma felt tired, peaceful, as if she might sleep too.

Monday, September 18th

Day Two

“The first twenty-four hours are crucial,” Lindsay, the family liaison officer, said. “We need to gather information as quickly as possible. Some of the questions we ask might seem intrusive or personal, but it's all part of the procedure, so please try not to take offense.”

It was five hours since Ritchie had been taken. Lindsay was so tall and shiny and efficient. Beside her, Emma felt very small and cold and thin. Mostly she was numb, but every so often a sheet of panic would open in her head, whiting out her mind. Where was Ritchie? What was happening to him? She got bouts of shivering every hour or so, where all her muscles, especially those in her neck, were so shuddery and tense that they were painful.

“Do you think he's alive?” she whispered.

“I'm sure he is,” Lindsay said. She put her arm around Emma's shoulders. “A lovely little boy like him? No one would want to hurt him. I'm sure he's being treated well.”

Lindsay must have been a couple of years older than Emma, but looked younger. Her skin was plump and smooth. Her hair, as long and dark as Emma's, was thick and shiny. She had a cheerful, worry-free face; a face that wore a half smile in repose. You would call her a girl, not a woman.

She had come to meet Emma in the hospital after the police had finally agreed to start looking for Ritchie.

“I'm going to be your family liaison officer while we're looking for Ritchie,” Lindsay explained. “Think of me as the link between the police and you. Anytime you need to speak to someone, you can phone me, and I'll call and visit you regularly until Ritchie is found, so you always know what's happening.”

It was Lindsay, along with a couple of other policemen, who accompanied Emma from the hospital back to her flat in Hammersmith. Emma's keys and security swipe card were still in her bag somewhere in the East End, but the police had managed to get her an emergency replacement set from the housing association. Dazed, Emma stood under the lighted shelter at the tower-block entrance and swiped the new card through the security slot by the doors. Most of the windows in the block were dark. The new card worked. The heavy metal doors opened with their deep double click.

In her flat on the fifth floor, the smell of cold toast and baby cereal hit her as soon as she opened the door. The breakfast things were still piled in the sink in the kitchen. There was Ritchie's plastic bowl with the picture of Bob the Builder on the bottom, partly obscured by lumps of dried porridge. His toys were still lying about the flat where he'd left them. The red truck he'd just learned to push himself around on, recklessly aiming it straight at the furniture. His train that shrieked “All aboard!” when you pressed the funnel. A rusk lying in a shower of crumbs under the table, the edges scalloped with tiny teeth marks. His cuddly frog named Gribbit. Each item made Emma's chest grow heavier and heavier, until the pain was almost unbearable.

The police, after asking Emma's permission to take a look around, began to search all over the flat. They searched everywhere: the narrow, yellow-painted bedroom, with Ritchie's cot and Emma's single bed; the bathroom with its olive-green bath and rubber shower hose on the taps and Ritchie's yellow plastic bathtub under the sink. His spill-proof beaker lay upended behind the tub. She'd been looking for that for a week.

The policemen rummaged through the cupboards and peered into the laundry basket. They got down on their hands and knees to examine the floors: the speckled lino in the kitchen, the green scratchy carpets in the bedroom and sitting room.

“What are they looking for?” Emma kept asking. “Ritchie wasn't kidnapped from here. Why aren't they doing this at the café?”

“It's routine,” Lindsay soothed.

The policemen picked strands of Ritchie's hair from his cot, and they took away his toothbrush. They took his blanket and some of his clothes.

“For scent,” Lindsay explained. “And DNA. To help us with the search.”

“Have you any clothes similar to what he was wearing at the time?” one of the policemen asked.

Emma was able to give them an exact replica of Ritchie's trousers; they had come in a two-for-one pack at Primark. The man labeled the trousers and took them away. Emma described the fleece Ritchie had been wearing.

“Any photos of him in it?”

When she went to look, she was shocked at how few photographs she had of either of them. It had never occurred to her that she should have taken more. The last one she had of Ritchie struck her as a lonely little picture. Ritchie on his own, astride his truck against the empty yellow background of the wall, smiling shyly into the camera. Oliver's languid, drowsy-eyed smile. It had been taken on his birthday. August. He wore denim shorts and a blue T-shirt with “Surfer Dude” printed across the front.

The man had to pull it before he got it from her hand.

“Have you got a copy of this?” he asked.

“No.”

“Sorry.” His voice was kind. He looked like a father himself; shaggy and rumpled, as if people had been climbing on him. “We do need to take it. Put your name and address on it. We'll do our best to get it back to you.”

“What should
I
do?” Emma asked Lindsay. “I feel like I should be doing something. Looking for him. Not just sitting here.”

“You need to stay by the phone,” Lindsay said. “If anyone tries to ring. You know, for a ransom or something.”

“A ransom.” She had to be joking.

“You never know,” Lindsay said.

“But they don't know where I live. They don't have my number.”

Lindsay repeated: “You just never know.”

She made some hot, sweet tea and tried to persuade Emma to drink it.

“I can't.” Emma held the tea in her mouth for a moment, then spat it into the sink. “It won't go down.”

“You should have something, Emma. Something with sugar in it. You're as white as a sheet. You'll be no good to Ritchie if you fall sick.”

But she was shivering too much, and her throat just wouldn't swallow.

“Isn't there anyone we can phone?” Lindsay asked. “A friend, or a neighbor, even? Someone who'd come and stay with you tonight?”

“I don't need anyone with me.” Emma shook her head. “The only thing I need now is for you to find Ritchie.”

A large man with dark hair and a moustache loomed in front of the couch.

“Detective Inspector Ian Hill,” he said, holding out his hand. “Senior investigating officer, in charge of the case.”

Detective Inspector Hill looked exactly as Emma had always imagined a proper police detective should look: tall, with huge, bulky shoulders and a belted, tan-colored coat. She grabbed his hand between both of hers, holding it in a tight grip, as if to stop him from getting away.

“Promise me,” she implored him. “Promise me you'll find him. Promise me you'll get him back.”

Detective Hill scratched at his moustache and said: “We'll do our best, Ms. Turner.” He tugged, very slightly, at the hand Emma held.

“In the meantime,” he said, “if I could just ask you a few questions.”

It was all so mundane. So ordinary. They might have been discussing the theft of a bicycle. The calmness of it disorientated Emma, so that she sat there at first and answered all of Detective Hill's questions in a quiet and rational way. Then Detective Hill said: “Now can you tell us about the moment you noticed your son was missing?” That was when the reality of it hit her all over again. She thought: “This is
me
, this is happening to
me
.
My
son is missing!
” Her throat closed. Her lungs swelled; her chest wasn't big enough to hold them. This was not happening. She could not be here. She fought not to get up and thrash her way out of the room. They had to stop the interview while Lindsay sat her back in her chair and made her put her head between her knees.

• • •

Detective Inspector Hill wanted to know everything about Ritchie. He asked for Emma's permission to view Ritchie's medical records from the GP.

“Are you sure you'd never seen the woman at the tube station before?” he asked. “Did anyone strange call to your flat recently? Approach you or Ritchie in the street? Follow you when you were out and about?”

Emma had recovered enough to answer all of these quite definitely. No one had followed her. No one had called to the flat. She had never seen Antonia before.

“Does Ritchie's father have any contact with him?” Detective Hill asked.

“No.”

“Is that by his choice or yours?”

“His.”

“Would he have tried to take him, do you think?”

“No.” Emma shook her head. If only she could think it
was
Oliver. At least then she'd know Ritchie was all right. “I know he wouldn't. He's not the type.”

Detective Hill gave her a cold look, a look that said:
I'll be the judge, thank you, of who is the type.
For some reason, it was as if he'd decided he didn't like Emma very much. He wrote something into his notebook and said:

“We'll need to talk to him anyway.”

Once, Emma would have been ashamed at the thought of Oliver knowing she'd been incompetent enough to lose her child.
Their
child. She didn't care now. In less than twenty-four hours, all thoughts of Oliver had been wiped from her mind as completely as if he'd never existed. She gave Detective Hill his sister's phone number in Birmingham. Oliver wasn't close to his family, but presumably Sasha would at least have some idea of where he was.