What She Saw Last Night

by Mason Cross

Genres: Action & Adventure; Thrillers

Synopsis

Jenny Bowen is going home. Following an acrimonious split from her husband, she is quitting her job and moving back from London to the small town in the Scottish Highlands where she grew up. After tying up some last-minute loose ends, she rushes to Euston and boards the Caledonian Sleeper, headed north on a five-hundred mile, ten-hour journey through the night.

As Jenny is getting settled in her cabin, she hears a commotion outside in the corridor. She sees a pale little girl of about eight years old being bundled into a cabin down the carriage, with a stressed-looking woman who Jenny assumes to be her mother. A tall man glances at the pair as he passes them. Jenny thinks it's strange that he has no luggage. He gives her a look that makes her uneasy before opening the door of the cabin next to her.

When they reach their destination in the morning, Jenny discovers the woman dead in her cabin... but there's no sign of the little girl. The train company have no record of a child of that age being booked on the train, and CCTV shows the dead woman boarding alone.

Jenny starts to get settled in her new home. She tries to put the incident out of her head and tells herself that everyone else is right: she must have imagined the little girl, or it was a misunderstanding. But deep down, she knows that isn't the truth.

(p) Orion Publishing Group Ltd 2019

Release date: April 18, 2019

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 384

Sample

‘Cutting it fine, aren’t you?’

The ticket collector waiting at the bottom of the ramp down to platform 1 at Euston was a short, tanned woman with greying hair and at least three decades of don’t-mess-with-me experi­ence in her eyes. She glanced at the ticket in Jenny Bowen’s outstretched hand before waving her through. Jenny shot her a sarcastic smile in response and hurried past onto the platform, the wheels of her case bumping and rattling on the surface as she ran for the nearest door on the first carriage.

Old-fashioned swing doors, not sliding. The kind you have to manually open and close. One of the crew was walking briskly along the platform towards her, shutting the doors at the ends of each carriage. She made it just in time and pulled her case onto the train.

‘Thank fuck,’ she sighed, a combination of relief and exhaustion.

The guard slammed the door, giving her a pointed look as he did so. The last-minute detour to the storage unit had been a mistake that had almost cost her not only her transport, but her bed for the night as well.

She wiped the sheen of sweat from her forehead and took a moment to tuck the stray strands of her hair back into her ponytail. She let out a long breath and watched the platform outside begin to slide by; painfully slowly at first, and then gradually picking up speed. The squeal of the wheels echoed off the roof of the station and then quietened as they emerged into the open.

Looking down at the ticket again for the number of her berth, she realised she had a long walk to her carriage, at the front of the train. She grabbed the handle of her case and started along the corridor.

It was perhaps only two feet wide, most of the available room being taken up by the sleeping compartments on her left-hand side. Her case banged against the wall in the tight space as she walked. She passed through the join into an all-seated carriage, about half-full with passengers getting settled in, some eating hastily grabbed dinners from Burger King or Pret. Then it was the lounge car, which was occupied by a mixture of lone individuals and small groups. Some of them were on the couches, others seated at the tables sipping a civilised nightcap, or perhaps just attempting to knock themselves out for the journey. A line came to her from a half-forgotten song. All kinds of people, ridin’ the rails. All of them were here until morning, come what may.

Jenny had booked the sleeper on a whim. She had never travelled overnight before, always taking the regular Virgin West Coast service to Glasgow where her dad would pick her up and drive the rest of the way, or occasionally flying to Inverness. But she had always been curious to find out what the night train was really like.

It had a romantic allure: a night on the rails. Going to sleep in one place, waking up in a completely different one. Her life seemed to be changing at such an alarming rate that it seemed like a sensible idea to deliberately slow down, take the time to decompress.

Her idealised preconceptions, hazily assembled from mem­ories of old paperbacks and black-and-white Hollywood movies, had taken a hit after a conversation with Hannah from the finance department at Wedgwood & Hart, a law firm to which she provided freelance IT support. Hannah, a strikingly tall Californian with hair colour that seemed to change on a weekly basis, was the only person of her acquaintance with first-hand experience of the journey.

‘It’s like sleeping in a moving broom closet, honey. Don’t do it.’

It hadn’t deterred her. As a student, Jenny had once made the trip south to London on the overnight Megabus, not sleeping a wink as she tried to brace herself in a position that meant the large flatulent man sitting next to her would be less likely to topple over in his sleep and crush her. She shuddered at the memory. Compared to that, the sleeper would be the lap of luxury.

Reaching the end of the lounge car, she squeezed past an elderly couple standing in the aisle in a flutter of mutual apolo­gies, and crossed into carriage F.

Ahead, she saw her path was blocked by a woman who was using her back to prop open the door to her compartment. Room, rather. The man at the ticket office had corrected her. They called them rooms now, like in a hotel. She supposed that made them guests, rather than passengers.

The woman wasn’t large, actually the opposite, but the narrow space meant Jenny would have to wait for her to get out of the way before passing. She was very thin, perhaps in her early forties. Her skin was pale, and her washed-out blonde hair was hanging around her face. She wore jeans and scuffed white trainers and a faded blue long-sleeved t-shirt under a thin leather jacket. Not warm weather clothes, but perhaps she had been running, like Jenny, and had stuffed her overcoat in the case. She was the only person Jenny had seen on the train who looked more dishevelled than herself. She looked harassed, swearing under her breath as she tried to push down the pull-handle of her suitcase. It kept catching, the case overstuffed.

Jenny noticed something grey and crumpled lying on the floor between herself and the woman. She stepped forward, bent, and picked it up.

It was a stuffed toy; a grey rabbit. It hung limply in her hand. The stitching under one of the arms was coming away, and some of the stuffing protruded. She had seen similar rabbits in interior design magazines, propped up on bookshelves and positioned on pillows in idealised children’s bedrooms.

‘Excuse me, did you—’ The woman flinched at the sound of Jenny’s voice and looked up from fiddling with the handle of her case. There were dark shadows under her eyes. She looked like she hadn’t slept for a month. ‘Did you drop this?’ Jenny finished, holding the rabbit out.

The woman’s eyes were grey; as washed-out as her hair and her skin and her shirt. Up close, Jenny could see she was much younger than she had first thought, maybe just in her late twenties, but with eyes older than her years. She murmured a thank you, dropping her eyes from Jenny’s.

The woman finished pushing her case through into the room and followed it inside, reaching behind her to close the door hurriedly. As it swung shut, Jenny saw a young girl, no more than six or seven years old, with long, shiny brown hair. She wore a blue denim dress over a black long-sleeved t-shirt. She was holding out her hand for the stuffed rabbit. The little girl’s eyes – dark brown, almost black – met Jenny’s for a second before the door clicked shut.

Jenny looked back down the corridor and saw the way ahead was still blocked. A tall man, over six feet, had appeared without her hearing his approach. He was turning the handle of the room next to the woman’s. He wore a long, black raincoat. His light-coloured hair was shaved so close to his scalp that it was impossible to tell if it was blond or prematurely grey. She smiled politely. He seemed to study Jenny for a second before nodding acknowledgement and stepping inside.

She sighed and gripped the handle of her case again. All kinds of people ridin’ the rails, and apparently none of them felt any more sociable than she did. She passed another door, found room number 9 at last, and opened the door.

Hannah from Wedgewood & Hart had been wrong. Jenny had seen broom cupboards far more spacious than this.

The room was a tight rectangle, about six and a half feet across by five feet deep. There were two bunks to the left of the doorway with a small, three-runged ladder for accessing the top bunk. The man at the ticket counter had told her that lone passengers travelling standard class had to share with another passenger of the same sex when the train was full, but looking at the bookings he hadn’t thought that was likely. Unless her potential room-mate had been even later than she had been, it looked like he was correct. There was a small stainless-steel sink beneath the window, with a wooden flap that folded down to make a table. There was a free magazine on the bed and bottle of spring water. The cover of the magazine advertised the new, modern carriages coming next year: CHANGE IS COMING. She tossed it under the bed, thinking she had already had more than enough change for one year.

The window was open a couple of inches, the rattle of the tracks loud in the small space. Jenny had to tug hard to get it to close. Eventually it obliged with a squeak, and the track noise quietened as a long row of Edwardian terraces flashed by, their lighted windows affording fleeting glimpses into a dozen other lives.

She turned back to survey her accommodation. It would do. The last few weeks had taken a lot out of her. She didn’t foresee any problems in falling asleep, even on the bijou bunk. Turning to glance in the mirror, she saw that there was a door in the wall, leading through to the adjoining cabin. Gently, she tested the handle, and was relieved to find it was locked.

She flinched at the sound of a sharp knock, then realised it had come from the other door. When she opened it, she saw one of the train staff was outside. Or ‘hosts’ as his nametag had it. He was dressed as smartly as the others she had seen: a deliberately old-fashioned style of jacket over a dark green waistcoat, matching tie and white shirt. The slight arti­ficiality of the uniform reminded her a little of the train guards at Disneyland in Paris.

‘Evening ma’am. Name?’

Jenny smiled at the formality. He pronounced it like charm, not like jam. Which was the royal way again? She was hopelessly behind on The Crown.

‘Bowen,’ she said.

The host looked down at the tablet device in his hand and tapped a stylus on the screen a couple of times. He told her they’d be arriving at Fort William at nine-fifty-seven tomorrow morning. She declined to book breakfast. Years of staying in hotels for work had taught her there was no hospitality-­industry breakfast that could beat an extra twenty minutes in bed.

After closing the door again and checking it was locked, she changed into her pyjamas and brushed her teeth at the sink. She found the USB socket for phone charging, oddly positioned at head height, over the sink, and plugged her phone in. She switched the room light off and climbed up into the top bunk. It had been a long day.

Typical. Now she was lying down, she didn’t feel tired at all. Instead her mind kept turning, working away at the upheavals of the autumn. Eric’s infidelity: suspected for months, years if she was honest, finally confirmed by the text message the idiot had accidentally sent to her rather than his girlfriend. And then, when she was just about coping with the fallout of that and moving out of the flat, her dad’s fatal stroke, completely unexpected, and more wrenching than she could have predicted.

She switched on the night light beside the bed and climbed down to dig out the book she had been reading. The new Dennis Lehane paperback. One of her favourite authors, but she was finding it next to impossible to focus on anything right now. She turned a few pages before realising she hadn’t taken any of it in. She gave up, closed the book and switched the light off again.

She kept thinking of the funeral. The brutal finality of the polished oak coffin. Very high-end, the funeral director had assured her, as though closing a sale on a new BMW. It felt like the end of more than one life. A matter of months before, she had been confident that she was on track; that she was where she needed to be in life. Now she was single, between homes, and an orphan at the age of thirty-five.

The mattress was more comfortable than she had expected. After a few minutes, she realised that the gentle rocking of the carriage, the hum of the wheels on the track, the sound of the air rushing past outside, was all having an effect. She didn’t fight it. Slipped slowly, gratefully into sleep.

Dim early morning light, and a stillness that felt strange.

It took her a few seconds to orientate herself. As always, the bad memories came to her before anything else. Eric’s ­brutally intimate text message. Her father’s coffin. And then she remembered where she was, and where she was going. Only that wasn’t entirely correct. She had no real idea of exactly where she was. The train wasn’t moving. A scheduled stop? She knew the train had to make different connections during the night, stretching the journey out over the five hundred miles, splitting the carriages for different legs. She fumbled for her phone and checked the time. They weren’t due into Fort William for ages. The sky was only just beginning to lighten, and she remembered the dawn arrived almost an hour later this far north.

Her mouth was parched, and she needed to use the bathroom, so she climbed down from the bunk and took a swig from the complimentary bottle of water, grimacing at the tinny room-temperature taste. She considered digging in her case for her slippers, decided she couldn’t be bothered. The train was half-empty going by what she had seen, with any luck the toilet wouldn’t be disgusting. She opened the door and blinked in the harsh fluorescent light of the passageway. She focused on the sign above the windows directing her to the toilets and turned.

And froze.

The door to the room two down from hers was ajar.

It was wedged open by the limp hand and wrist of a woman.

‘Here.’

Jenny looked up at the plastic cup of water that was being held in front of her face. The voice was calm, but the hand holding it was trembling slightly. She shook her head.

‘Come on, have a drink.’

She looked up at the face of the guard. Host. He reminded her a little of an older version of Eric. Blue eyes, scruffy hair. His accent was pure Lancaster, though. She shrugged and accepted the cup, sipping. At least it was cold, unlike the bottle of water in her room. Christ, that had been ten minutes ago, it seemed like ten years. Talk about waking up in a different place.

Everything had been a blur since the moment she had opened the door to the other room. Trying to rouse the woman, checking for a pulse, before turning and running; almost colliding with the staff member coming in the opposite direction at the entrance to the next carriage. She had led him back to the room.

Every time she closed her eyes she saw the face of the dead woman. She had fallen, or collapsed, with her back on the floor, her arm stretching out and propping the door open. Had she tried to get out, tried to summon help, when she realised she had taken too much?

Jenny hadn’t seen many dead bodies in her time, only her grandmother, but she knew the woman was gone before she felt for a pulse. She tried not to look at the belt around the arm, the spent needle lying by the woman’s right hand. The track marks. Her skin hadn’t been all the way cold yet.

‘Police are on their way,’ the host said, adding a strained smile as an afterthought. Jenny supposed it was a comforting thought for him. Right now, he was in charge of the situation, like it or not. The sooner he could hand it over to someone else, the better. ‘I’m Colin, by the way.’

Instinctively, her eyes moved to his nametag for confirm­ation. ‘Jenny,’ she said automatically.

She was thirstier than she had thought. She drained the water and held the empty cup in both hands. They were in a small room at the end of the adjoining carriage. It was about the same size as the sleeping rooms, but it just had a single seat instead of a bed, and a microwave and some stainless steel cupboards on the opposite wall. The door was open, so she could hear hushed voices and movement outside as the other hosts asked passengers to stay behind their own doors.

The sky was getting lighter. Through the window, she could see a stretch of open ground before a thick forest, a shroud of mist lingering above the ground, mountains on the horizon.

She started to speak and had to clear her throat first.

‘Where are we?’

‘About five miles south of Rannoch,’ Colin answered immedi­ately. On more confident territory now.

‘Why are we stopped?’ Jenny asked. ‘I mean, we were stopped before I … before …’

‘Scheduled,’ he replied. ‘We always stop here for a few minutes.’ He consulted his watch. ‘Longer today, now. The passengers will be starting to wonder.’ He shook his head. ‘What a waste, eh?’

Jenny nodded.

‘What makes someone do that? Put that … rubbish in their arm?’ He looked somewhere between bewildered and angry.

‘I don’t know. A lot of things, I suppose. People do it,’ she said, thinking about the desperate look in the woman’s eyes last night.

He shook his head again. ‘Silly girl.’

Girl. The word sparked a memory. The woman hadn’t been alone last night. Jenny felt an almost physical jolt at the realisation that the little girl with the brown hair and the stuffed rabbit had lost her mother. But she hadn’t been in the room with the body. Had she gone to get help?

‘Is the little girl all right?’ Jenny asked, the shock starting to settle into a dull ache in her stomach. ‘I mean, someone else is with her, right?’

Colin’s brow creased, and he studied Jenny’s face, as though translating a foreign tongue.

‘What?’

‘The girl. The little girl who was travelling with her?’

Her question hung in the air for a long moment. Before he spoke the three words, Jenny knew exactly what he was going to say.

‘What little girl?’

‘Watch the potholes.’ Detective Inspector Gregory Porter spoke absentmindedly as he finished tapping out an email on his phone.

Sergeant Mike Fletcher glanced over at his superior. He didn’t know why he was bothering with that out here. It would only sit in his outbox for the next couple of hours.

‘In case you hadn’t noticed, boss, this road is about eighty per cent potholes.’

The road had seemed to narrow by half when they had covered a mile of it; the untamed hedges on either side encroaching onto the rutted surface. It was so narrow it would have been difficult for two cars to pass one another. Luckily no one else had any reason to be using it at this time of the morning.

‘It’s not too far from the bridge,’ Mike said, glancing at the open road atlas on the dashboard, finding the spot where the railway line intersected with the road they were on.

‘It better bloody not be,’ Porter said. ‘These are new boots.’

Mike saw it in the distance, a stone hump-backed bridge rising abruptly from the road. There was a wide spot just before the rise to allow one car to wait while another passed. Mike pulled into the space at the side of the road and got out. The air was bitingly cold outside after the heated interior. He had noticed that ever since Afghanistan, the cold just seemed to get to him more. The sky was dark and overcast, but there was a dull glow on the crests of the mountains to the east, like someone had switched on a low-wattage bulb behind them.

Mike popped the boot and grabbed an overcoat, a torch, and a preliminary evidence pack, just in case the CSE was held up. He had been looking forward to an uneventful last hour of his shift, followed by the big breakfast at Curly’s, a hot shower and bed. Those modest expectations had been dashed by the call from Bryden back at the station. Fatality aboard a train, with a location.

Mike was grateful for one thing. The location told him this likely wasn’t a suicide on the tracks. A good few miles from the nearest station, probably at least as far from the nearest dwelling. Mike was fairly new to this posting, but he had already attended a couple of code 233s. He still had no idea what would drive somebody to jump in front of a train, but experience told him they didn’t generally walk miles out of their way to do it.

It was out of the ordinary, though. Very early in the day for any kind of incident. There just weren’t that many passenger trains heading north at this time in the morning. Thinking about it, he realised it had to be the sleeper. The overnight from London, due into Fort William around ten. Heart attack, probably. Some poor bastard popping his clogs in his sleep.

He and Porter had been assisting a driver who had broken down on a level crossing when the call came in. Looking at the time, he had briefly considered asking if there was anybody closer. Anybody not at the end of his shift. But he knew the answer; if Bryden had called them, it was because they were nearest. That was procedure. Nearest officer attends an incident, regardless of rank. That was because the clock was already ticking, and every second counted.

As Porter was getting out, his radio crackled. He sat back in the seat and gestured for Mike to go on ahead.

Mike walked to the crest of the bridge and looked north along the tracks towards Rannoch, then south. There it was. Perhaps a quarter of a mile distant, mostly obscured by trees and the curve in the track, was the front of the train, stopped on the rails. He strapped on the backpack, picked his way down the embankment and stepped onto the tracks.

When he had got within a hundred yards of the train, the door of the driver’s cab opened and a guard got out wearing an orange hi-vis anorak, waving a hand at Mike. He was tall and broad, with a full head of grey hair.

‘Morning.’

‘I’ve had better,’ Mike said. ‘Sergeant Mike Fletcher.’

He didn’t offer his hand, but took the guard’s when he did.

‘Bill Morley.’ He was in his fifties, Glasgow accent.

Mike glanced at his watch and noted the time. He turned back the way he had come and saw no sign of Porter. He pushed the button on his radio and called the time in to Bryden. Bryden acknowledged and told him the crime scene examiner was on their way.

‘Clock’s ticking,’ the guard remarked, echoing Mike’s exact thoughts a few minutes before. He knew the drill, then. ‘After you.’

Mike nodded as he stepped up into the carriage. Accident, suicide, assault, heart attack; it was all the same to the clock. They had a ninety-minute window to process the scene and get the train moving again. A hold-up in one part of the system could have knock-on effects everywhere else, which meant somebody somewhere would lose money. Things came to a respectful pause for the dead, but only for a strictly defined time limit. Mike knew it wasn’t exactly an ideal structure in which to carry out a police investigation, but from what he’d seen so far, it seemed to work. Maybe the clock focused minds, meant no one involved could forget it was game time. And at least it was a Saturday morning: fewer pissed-off commuters to worry about.

‘Deceased is in F, another two down,’ Morley said, in a tone that was professionally respectful, but not shocked or upset. The guy looked like a lifer, no doubt he saw worse a few times a year.

Mike had never been aboard a sleeper train, and though it shouldn’t have surprised him, he found the narrow corridor running alongside the sleeping compartments a little tight. It accommodated his frame, but it made him want to walk sideways.

‘Any idea what happened?’ Mike said without looking back.

‘Looks like an overdose.’

‘Pills? Heroin?’

‘Needle, so …’

Mike nodded and slowed as they entered carriage F and he saw another guard, this one younger and female, standing outside one of the doors.

‘Do you have a name?’ he said.

‘Oh, for the deceased? Yes, I suppose you’ll need that,’ Morley said, his footsteps stopping. Mike stopped and glanced back at him. Morley had produced a small tablet-size device about the size of a Kindle. He tapped the screen a few times.

‘Sara Lee,’ he said. ‘Don’t know if it’s Sah-ra or Say-ra, there’s no H.’

‘Sara Lee like the cakes?’

It took Morley a second to get the reference and he shrugged. ‘I suppose.’

Mike frowned. It didn’t necessarily mean it was a fake name, but trains weren’t like aeroplanes. You could pay cash and be whoever you wanted to be on the b. . .