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For a moment I blinked, unable to work out what he was saying. Then I looked down and realized. My bump. The priority seats were for the elderly, disabled, and… pregnant.
I felt a flush of shame wash up my chest and reach my cheeks—even though part of me was laughing at myself. I was a fugitive, on the run from the police, wanted for murder, and it was the fake bump I had chosen to feel guilty about?
“I’m fine,” I said, hoping that the blush wasn’t too painfully obvious. “Honestly. I’ll walk down.”
“Nah, you’re all good, love,” the boy said. He had that weird mix of swagger and self-consciousness that seemed unique to males in their late teens. He ducked his head, picked up his bag, and began heading down the aisle, leaving the empty seat to me. “I don’t like sitting near the bogs anyhow,” he said as the carriage door slid shut behind him, which made me laugh.
It was two minutes until the train left, and as I slid into the vacant seat, my bag on my lap, I couldn’t help peering out of the window, back up the platform. I was listening for pounding feet, shouts of Police! Stop the train!
But none came. The minutes ticked down until at last we reached 12:40—the time the train was supposed to leave. Nothing happened. I swallowed, aware that my neck and jaw were aching with tension. Why? Why weren’t we going?
Then the train speaker crackled, and I felt a lurch in my stomach, a rush of nerves so strong I thought I might vomit. Was the train canceled? Were they holding us here for a “routine inspection”?
But then, after what felt like a pause of a thousand years, the conductor’s voice came on.
“This is the twelve forty train for Ashford International, calling at Waterloo East, London Bridge…”
The familiar litany of stations droned on, and beneath the conductor’s voice I could hear the beep beep beep warning as the train doors slid closed, and the engines began to fire.
“… Headcorn, and Pluckley, arriving Ashford International at fourteen hundred hours. We apologize for the late departure of this train, which was due to staff shortages, and we hope to make up time on the journey. Our next stop is—”
The train was picking up speed. We were moving away from the platform. And then we were out, into the bright crisp air of a sunny winter afternoon.
I let my head fall back against the seat, feeling myself exhale as if someone had pressed a release button.
I had done it. I was out of London.
* * *
“YOU CAN STOP HERE,” I said to the taxi driver. He pulled in where I’d indicated and looked around the deserted car park doubtfully. In summer it was probably a sweet place, with a kiosk selling ice creams and plastic buckets and spades. On a cold February afternoon it was little short of desolate.
“You sure?”
I nodded. Taking a taxi had been a gamble—it was exactly these kinds of questions that I had wanted to avoid—but the alternative, walking five miles from Rye station along country lanes in the gathering dark, hadn’t exactly appealed either.
“Yes, I’m sure. I’m meeting a friend.”
The driver shrugged. “Eight pounds twenty pence.”
I leaned over, counting out the change from the train ticket pound coin by pound coin and adding a tip so small I felt instantly guilty—but my supply of cash was dwindling painfully fast, and I didn’t know when I would be able to get more. The driver didn’t seem to bear any resentment, though, and got out cheerfully, in spite of the wind whipping across the tarmac, to unlatch the boot and remove my rucksack.
“There you go, love. Good luck with it.”
He nodded at my bump, and I felt instantly even more guilty.
I waited until he got back in the car and completed a gear-grinding three-point turn to rejoin the main road, and then I turned and began to walk along the beach to where I very much hoped Noemie’s cottage must be.
It was very cold. The wind had picked up the sand and was blowing it at knee height along the flat beach, so hard that even through my jeans I could feel the stinging particles hitting my skin like tiny needles.
My feet were sinking into the soft dunes, and my eyes were watering with a mixture of wind, sand, and sea spray—and for a moment I deeply regretted not getting the taxi to drop me at the cottage itself. But the risk was too great.
The burner phone had said it was only half a mile from the car park to the cottage, but as the dunes wore on, it began to feel much, much further, and I started to wonder whether I had made a mistake. My legs felt jelly-like with the effort of striding through the shifting sand; the rucksack on my back felt like it contained bricks, not clothes, tools, and a sleeping bag; and the wound in my side throbbed like a motherfucker.
I shook my head, blinking salt spray out of my eyes. What was the matter with me? This wasn’t me. I was strong, capable, physically fit. Gabe might be the one in our relationship who got the lids off jars and heaved the washing machine out of its cupboard when the hose blocked, but I was the one who had the stamina and the endurance. Last month I had done a hill-running half marathon in aid of Cancer Research. And now I couldn’t walk along a beach?
But the truth was, of course, Gabe wasn’t that person anymore. Because he was dead. Any stuck lids in my future, any problems at all, in fact, I would be dealing with alone.
The unfairness of it hit me again, like a punch in the gut, and I found myself sinking down in the dunes and putting my face in my hands. Maybe I should simply give up, give in, lie down here on this beach and let the waves come in and take me out to sea. Because what did it matter? Who was I kidding to think I could do this alone, any of it? Least of all track down whoever had done this to Gabe. I might be able to scale walls and pick locks, but figuring out who had killed my husband? That was a job for the police. And they already had their suspect: me.
