The Sleeper (18 page)

‘DC Alexander Zielowski? That’s like a cop’s name from the telly.’

He nodded, apparently mildly amused, but not very.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Though it will astonish you to discover that I’m not actually the hard-bitten New Yorker you might expect from my name.’

‘Can I get you a coffee?’ I said. He nodded.

‘Yes please.’ Jessica turned to me, taking charge. ‘That would be great. Thanks. So, we understand that Mrs Finch was travelling on the sleeper train last night, and that she has failed to come home. Could you tell me all about the circumstances, please, Mr Finch?’

She was much more businesslike, less casual, than I would have expected, considering that we were talking about an adult who had simply not shown up at her own house. Very soon I came to suspect from the urgency of their questions that the police knew something we did not. I fumbled with the coffee, put it on the gas ring, and went straight back over to them.

‘We had unsuccessful fertility treatment,’ Sam was saying, ‘and so we decided to look into adopting from abroad. Trouble was, we’d spent our savings. We needed some cash. Lara was offered a six-month contract working back in her old line of work in London. She’s in property development – a project director, working on a development at the back of Tate Modern. She’s brilliant. The money was literally three times what I earn at the shipyard, with some extra allowances towards travel and all that. So she went off to do it.’ He sounded as if he were not expecting to be believed. ‘She’s doing it for us, so that we can start the adoption process. That’s why.’ His voice cracked and he started to cry.

‘Now,’ said Jessica, sitting on the sofa beside him. DC Alexander took the single chair, and I hovered on my feet, close to the kitchen. ‘So here’s the thing. This is not going to be easy to hear, I’m afraid. When last night’s sleeper train arrived at Penzance this morning, the First Great Western staff discovered a body in one of the cabins.’

Sam gasped. I reached for the wall to steady myself. The coffee whooshed and bubbled like a steam train. The words ‘she’s dead’ filled my mind, repeating themselves on a loop.

‘A
man
’s body,’ DC Alex said quickly, raising his voice to be heard over the sound of the coffee. ‘Not your wife’s. I do apologise.’ He looked at Jessica. ‘We should have made that clear. Penzance station is closed until further notice, and the train is a crime scene. Every passenger is being questioned by our colleagues in Penzance, working for the MCIT.’ He looked at our blank faces. ‘Major Crime Investigation Team. In this context, obviously your report of Mrs Finch’s disappearance is being taken extremely seriously. We were asked to come because Penzance had no spare manpower, but they are quite likely to want to talk to you soon, if Mrs Finch does not turn up safe and well. If she does, they will, of course, want to speak to her urgently.’

I went to pour the coffee. The percolator only made enough for two cups, so I gave them to the police. Sam did not look as if he would be able to swallow anything; and I knew I could not.

‘Did this man die of natural causes?’ I managed to ask, as I carried the cups shakily to the officers. An elderly man having a heart attack on the train would be almost palatable, verging on the ordinary. I imagined him lying on a train bed, whatever such a thing was like, and clutching his chest, his face contorting into the last grimace it would ever make. In my mind he was very old, so old that everyone would immediately be able to say that he’d had a good life and at least he was active right up to the end: ‘He was amazing, wasn’t he? The sleeper train at his age!’

That man’s death would not have given rise to a crime scene, and I knew it.

‘Early indications,’ said Jessica blankly, ‘are that this is not the case. It is being treated as a suspicious death. Thanks, this coffee’s brilliant. Beyond that, we are waiting for more details. The body was discovered by staff shortly before arrival into Penzance; they go round the cabins ensuring everyone is awake. All the passengers were detained at the station, fingerprints taken, travel tickets seized and so on.’ I saw Sam sit up, transparently hoping that this explained Lara’s disappearance, but of course she continued: ‘As Mrs Finch would have left the train at Truro, she was unlikely to be among them. We checked, of course, when we got your call, and indeed, she was not on the train at that point.’

She was very calm, though her fingers fiddled ceaselessly with a piece of lined paper she had folded into a fan shape. When she sipped her coffee, the cup trembled slightly. I wondered how often Falmouth police had to deal with something like this. I was sure that most of their time must have been spent issuing fines for dog shit and policing the students’ exits from what nightclubs there were in the early weekend hours.

I decided to make coffee for Sam and me, partly because he would probably need it – I certainly did – but mainly to give me an excuse to walk away. I listened to them taking Sam through Lara’s movements again, as methodically as they could make him do it. I could not believe that I had stumbled into this.

‘So you have no idea whether or not she got on the train?’ DC Alex asked. I clicked the gas on and watched the blue flames licking the side of the coffee pot once more. ‘Did she normally let you know when she was at Paddington station, or leaving work? Would you speak on a Friday night?’

Sam sounded defensive.

‘When she started the job, she’d call twice a day. Then, you know, she kind of settled into it and we didn’t need to be on the phone all the time. We always speak at some point during every day, though. No matter what. There are people she talks to on the train every week,’ he said quickly. ‘They’d know if she was there. There’s a woman who lives in Penzance. Ellen. Lara likes her a lot. And I think there was a man too, though she hasn’t mentioned him for a while. But she used to go for a drink with them on the train. Loads of people would know if she caught it or missed it. Those same people you’re talking to …’ His voice tailed off.

‘She checked out of her hotel as usual,’ I called over. ‘I rang the place where she stays, this morning. They said she left as normal.’

In fact, the man had said ‘they’ left as normal, but I was trying not to consider that as anything other than a harried hotel receptionist using the wrong word. I was certainly not going to be mentioning it to the police in front of Sam.

‘The moment you hear from her,’ said Alexander Zielowski as I poured the second lot of coffee into two stripy mugs, ‘please let us know. Instantly. This is absolutely crucial. Tell her to contact us as a matter of the utmost urgency. Meanwhile our colleagues will be asking the other passengers for any information that could help us trace her movements.’

There was something gentle about Alex Zielowski, and I liked the way you could tell that he had depths. If I was colouring him in, I would use a gentle pale blue, my favourite colour. I was intrigued about what might be going on under his surface. I never met new people, ever, and this morning, under the most unsettling of circumstances, I had met several.

I was colouring in the police (Jessica was orange, with some more vulnerable yellow around the edges) in an attempt to stop thinking about Lara. Someone was dead, and she was nowhere. I fought hard not to picture her twisted body lying in a track-side ditch, flung from the train by a shadowy figure because she had seen too much.

Now Jessica took over the questions, wondering, in a far blunter way than Alexander had, whether Sam and Lara had argued last weekend, whether she was the sort of person who would sulk, whether there was any reason he could think of for her to have stayed away. Did she, Jessica wondered, ever mislay her phone and purse? Did she have any ongoing medical problems? It went on and on. In the light of the man’s death, these looked like kind questions, questions that, if answered the right way, could bring Lara back with an apology for all the bother.

While she was mid-probe, and I was trying to busy myself clearing up the kitchen, Alexander took a phone call. As soon as I heard his tone, I stared at him and focused. He wandered towards me as he spoke, to take him away from Sam. Jessica was pretending to concentrate on Sam telling her that he and Lara never argued, ever, but I could see that she too was listening intently to her colleague.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I see. I’m with her husband now, in fact … Yes, of course.’

When he hung up, the silence solidified. It was the only thing in the room. When he broke it, he had adopted a formal tone, as if he were at a press conference, distancing himself from the words he had to say.

‘So,’ he said, ‘the passenger is confirmed as having been murdered. He has been identified as Guy Thomas, and several regular passengers and staff on the train have suggested that he was close to your wife, Mr Finch. Has she ever mentioned him?’

Sam closed his eyes.

‘Close to my wife?’ he said, trying out the phrase, testing its meaning. ‘She might have mentioned him once or twice. There was someone called Guy. But he definitely wasn’t close to her.’

After a flurry of phone calls and low-voiced consultations, Alexander left. Jessica stayed behind but announced that she would keep in the background. ‘Pretend I’m not here,’ she said, and stood by the window staring out at the view. She listed things we were not allowed to do, the main one of which was that Sam was not allowed anywhere near his computer.

He slumped on the sofa and leaned heavily on me. It was uncomfortable, but I bore it as long as I could. I wanted to put the news on and see what they were saying about dead Guy Thomas. I wanted to go online and find out everything.

‘Sam,’ I said, in the end. Mainly I wanted to be in front of my wood burner with my cats, telling all of this to Laurie. He no more knew where I was than Sam knew where Lara was. ‘You need someone else with you, not me and Jessica. I’ll call somebody. It’s insane that no one but the two of us and the police, and maybe that hotel receptionist, I suppose, knows that Lara’s missing. I’m sure it’ll be on the news in a second, and then everyone’s going to want to talk to you. You don’t want your family, her family, to find it out that way. Give me numbers and I’ll ring people. Who’s your best friend in Falmouth?’

He looked at me, completely blank. His face was crumpled. I wanted, suddenly, to shout at him to pull himself together. This was not a moment for falling apart. Not yet.

‘Stay here, Iris. You’re Lara’s friend. Stay with me. Please. Don’t leave.’

‘Sam. Do you have parents? Siblings?’ I did not like to assume anything. ‘There must be somebody.’

He put his head in his hands and groaned. It was a weird, animalistic noise.

‘Oh fucking hell. Look, I know you have to call my mum. She’ll kill me if she sees it on the news. She and Lara never really … But Iris. Will you hold off at least until they know whether she was on the train or not? Will you do that? I still think she might just rock up. I don’t care what she’s done. As long as she’s safe.’

‘I’m happy to stay as long as you want.’ I wasn’t, but I could hardly say so. ‘But you’ll feel better if it’s not a stranger here making your coffee and answering your door. Really you will. I won’t contact your mum yet if you don’t want me to, but let me just get you a friend.’

Jessica wandered into the kitchen. ‘Mind if I put the kettle on?’ she asked. Sam said nothing.

‘Go ahead,’ I told her. ‘Sam. Who shall I call?’

He was not having it. ‘Please, Iris. Please. I have friends at work, I suppose, but not the sort you’re talking about. Any of my colleagues, if they got a call from you asking them to come and babysit me, would be … taken aback, I suppose. They’d assume I had real friends for this sort of emergency. Lara and I. We’ve always been so close. There’s never been any need for anyone else. We have each other.’

And she’d had, in one way or another, Guy Thomas. The words hung in the air, unsayable.

Sam’s elbow knocked his phone off the arm of the sofa, and he leaned down and snatched it up from the floor, his face suddenly alive with the hope that a message might have arrived without his hearing it in the nanosecond for which it was away from him.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Iris. What the hell is going on? What was she doing? Where is she? She can’t just … not be here.’

I sat next to him and touched his arm.

‘We’ll find out,’ I told him. I had no desire at all to be grumpy with him any more. His situation was terrible, and it was going to get worse. ‘At some point, we will. And I know what you mean about not needing anyone else. Not many people would get that, but I really, really do. If I were you I wouldn’t have anyone to call either. I know how much you’ve missed her. It’s funny, you know: the two of you gave the impression of being one of those couples with hundreds of friends. I thought you’d be going to people’s houses for dinner every weekend. You know. Stuff like that.’ I realised I had used the past tense instead of the present, and hoped he hadn’t noticed.

‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘We just want to be with each other. That’s all we do.’

‘I’m the same.’ I glanced up at Jessica. She was fiddling with her phone next to a noisy kettle, and seemed not to be listening to us. ‘Me and my boyfriend, Laurie. We’re like that.’

‘Who wants loads of “friends” texting all the time and trying to get you to do things you don’t want to do?’

‘Not me. I like having my music as loud as I like. And doing things the way I want to do them. And having Laurie to talk to, just Laurie. We’ve lived like that for years.’

I thought of my old life, when I had lived and worked in London. In those days I’d had lots of friends. I had been missing that, lately. I never thought it would happen. It was a hankering for something else that had led me to Sam’s door that morning.

He looked at me with a sad little smile.

‘You do understand,’ he said. ‘So imagine if your boyfriend vanished. And someone was dead. And it was all horrific and nonsensical, exactly like a nightmare but actually real. And if they told you that your boyfriend was “close” to the dead person. How you would feel.’

I refused to entertain that scenario. ‘If Lara had been here as usual today,’ I said instead, patting Sam’s hand in what I wanted to be an affectionate and reassuring way. He immediately grabbed my hand and held it so tightly that it hurt. ‘And I’d turned up on the doorstep, just dropping in to say hello, you’d have been pissed off, wouldn’t you?’