Sadie shoots him a glance, terrified, antagonistic. Peering up through the tangled strands of her hair, she looks like a wild animal. But Rachel nods and gets to her feet, letting her arm slip away from her sister’s shoulder.
* * *
• • •
THE ROOM IS SMALL AND CUBOID; walls washed with watery khaki-colored paint, a tiny window set into the door. There is a smell in the air that she can’t quite place; some kind of disinfectant or bleach perhaps. Outside, Rachel can hear footsteps and the occasional rise and swell of voices, echoing along the corridor. The policewoman who curtly introduced herself as Sergeant Karen James pulls the little curtain along the door and switches on a lamp in the corner of the room.
“If you’re ready, Miss Castelle, we’ll start now,” she says, coming back to sit on the other side of the desk. She is middle aged. Graying hair curling neatly around an oval face. Small black-rimmed glasses. Her stare is neutral, impassive. Next to her is the young man with the strawberry blond hair. He’s even younger than she thought, little more than a teenager; she can see the scars of acne on his left cheek. He looks across at her as he switches on the tape recorder. She sees the little red light winking and stares at it a second too long, so that when she looks away, it’s still there, a tiny bright red pinprick suspended in the air.
The woman reels off a practiced spiel that Rachel has heard on television, and which instantly slips from her mind. “So,” she continues, “perhaps you can tell us, in your own words, what happened at Camden Road station tonight?”
In the minutes that they left her here alone, Rachel has considered and discarded the possibility of using stony silence as her response. It might be the wisest thing, but she can’t imagine being able to pull it off. The surreal horror of what she has witnessed is swirling in her head and already the words are knocking at the back of her throat, hammering to be let out. And she’s also considered lying outright, saying that she and her sister were simply waiting on the platform alongside the woman in the raspberry-colored jacket, perhaps even saying that they saw her jump. But she’s quickly realized that this would be stupid. For one thing, she has no idea if the station platform is equipped with CCTV. For another, she has no way of knowing what Sadie might be saying in her own interview room across the corridor. It’s clear that the only real option is to tell the truth, as far as she can.
“I was with my sister, Sadie,” she says. “She wanted to speak to the woman who—” She hesitates. To say “the woman who died” feels odd somehow, presumptuous, although clearly there’s no room for doubt. “To the woman on the platform. I wasn’t part of the conversation, but I could see that they began to argue.”
“And do you know what this argument was about?” Karen interrupts.
“I imagine it was about her husband,” Rachel says carefully. “The woman’s husband, I mean, not my sister’s. Sadie has been—involved with him. She wanted to speak to his wife, to make her aware of the situation between them.”
“Were you acquainted with the woman in question yourself?” Karen asks. “Can you tell me her name?”
Rachel shakes her head. “Her name’s Melanie, but I’ve never spoken to her,” she says. “I know of her through her husband. Kaspar Kashani.” And as she speaks she sees a quick look pass between the two people opposite her, the briefest flicker of triumph or confirmation.
“Let’s go back to what you saw,” the policewoman says mildly. “They were arguing, you say, and then . . .”
“Then it became—physical,” Rachel says. “They were lashing out at one another, trying to hurt each other, I would say. I’m sure that neither of them saw the train until it was too late, or realized that they were so close to the edge of the platform. It all happened very fast. One moment they were fighting, and the next moment the woman had fallen onto the track.”
Karen leans forward, her eyes shrewd and hard through her glasses. “Fallen,” she repeats. “She fell? She lost her balance? Or was she pushed?”
The directness of it startles her; the way it cuts unpleasantly to the heart. She casts her mind back, tries to think. She sees the two figures in front of her, just yards away; sees her sister’s arm rising up. She is not sure, not sure at all. But she notices the policewoman’s expression shift minutely, betraying a flash of world-weary cynicism. Of course, she realizes, this woman expects her to protect her sister. It’s the natural thing to do. Blood is thicker than water. What woman would do otherwise?
She raises her chin and does as they expect. “She fell,” she says clearly.
The other woman watches her for a few moments, and she meets her gaze head-on. “OK,” she says levelly.
Silence stretches between them, thick and viscous. The young policeman’s head is bent over a notebook as he scribbles earnestly away. Outside Rachel can hear the sounds of some faint altercation; a shout rising and falling on the air, the rhythms of dissent and protest. She realizes that her hands are clenched in her lap, her fingernails digging painfully into her skin.
There is something rising up inside her, a powerful anger. She is furious with Sadie. For causing her to be here in this room, for following and confronting Kas’s wife, for every thoughtless word she has spoken and every thoughtless action she has performed over the past few years—from the tiny throwaway slights to the crippling restraints and brunt of responsibility she has imposed on Rachel’s own life.
It comes at her in a rush. At twenty-two, she already feels like a mother. The mother of a wayward, defiant teenage girl who won’t listen to reason and who cares about nothing but herself, and for whom love is a one-way street. She loves Sadie, but there is nothing nourishing or rewarding about this love; it simply makes her miserable. And the longer she sits in this arid, soulless room, the more she begins to realize that it doesn’t really matter whether she is here or not, because even when she walks free she will still be trapped.
“Is there anything else you want to tell us?” Karen asks. She’s looking at Rachel with sharp, inquisitive eyes, as if she can read her mind and doesn’t much like what she sees.
Rachel bites the inside of her cheek, tasting a little well of blood. “No,” she says. Her relationship with her sister is not this woman’s concern. The thought rockets wildly through her mind that if she altered her story, then things might go very differently. She pushed her! I saw her, she meant to do it! But it’s a passing fancy, melodramatic and pointless. She won’t lie, or throw out wild accusations; can no more imagine doing so than she can imagine her life being her own, free of this ever-present millstone around her neck.
“Let’s go over it again, then,” Karen says. And they do go over it again—over and over, the same questions and the same brutal rehashing in ever more granular detail, until she wants to cry with frustration. Her head feels scraped out, entirely excavated. The young man looks equally exhausted, slumped in his chair. She wonders if this is just another day at the office for him, how quickly he has been desensitized to trauma and tragedy. But Karen doesn’t seem tired at all. If anything it appears that the conversation is energizing her—her bearing ever straighter and keener, the full focus of her attention turned on Rachel.
When she finally asks a different question it catches Rachel off guard. “So, tell me what you know about Kaspar Kashani,” she says. Her tone is almost casual, but not quite.
Rachel blinks, unsure of where the question is leading. “I don’t know him well,” she says. “I mean, I’ve been in the same room as him a few times. At the club.”
“But your sister has been involved with him, you said,” Karen presses. “You must have spent some time together?”
Rachel half laughs. “It wasn’t that sort of relationship. And besides . . .” She hesitates, not wanting to say anything that might turn these people against her. But surely if Kas is known to them already, it can only be in a negative context. “I don’t like him,” she says baldly. “He
’s an unpleasant, intimidating man.”
Karen regards her thoughtfully. “What basis do you have for saying that?” she asks. And when she considers it, Rachel realizes that she has very little basis for it at all, or that she didn’t, until the brief, snatched conversation with Sadie on the station platform. Her dislike for him has been instinctive, unarguably so. But now it has become something else. It’s justified. Validated.
Leaning forward with sudden forced intimacy, Karen speaks again, and this time it really is as if she has read her mind. “Are you aware that Mr. Kashani is currently on bail?” she asks. “That he’s been questioned in connection with murder, and that it’s quite likely he’ll be charged?”
Rachel doesn’t reply at first, and in the pause that stretches between them she’s acutely aware of the way the atmosphere has changed in the room. The young man is suddenly alert, sitting up in his seat, and the woman is watching her with all the avid concentration of a collector spying a rare specimen, keen for it not to get away. “I didn’t know that, no,” she says. She thinks of the haunted look on her sister’s face, her hushed, broken words.
“I’ll be honest with you, Rachel,” the policewoman says, and now her voice is dripping with inclusive chumminess. “This is a separate conversation, really. We’ve been trying to pin Kashani down for some time. Various charges coming to nothing, you know? He’s got a lot of people around him who make it pretty hard to get to him. But it’s different this time. As I say, we’re very close to charging him. And there’s a fair bit of evidence, enough for a professional to look at and convict him.” She pauses, as if for effect, and when she continues she leans forward, her eyes intently boring into Rachel’s. “The problem is, juries aren’t made up of professionals. They’re just ordinary men and women, people who tend to follow their guts and think with their hearts. You see?”
Rachel frowns, lost. She tries to piece together what the woman is saying. “They might get it wrong?” she says tentatively.
The policewoman smiles, without much warmth. “Yes, they might. And then we’ll be back in the same place we were, waiting for him to slip up and using our time and resources trying to get him arrested. You see, Rachel, what I’m saying is that a lot of people don’t care too much about evidence. They care about people. They’ll see Kashani looking all handsome in his nice suit, and they’ll listen to a load of his mates waxing lyrical about what a great guy he is, and there’s a good chance they’ll fall for it. So someone like you . . .” She pauses again, and now Rachel does understand. “Someone like you,” the woman says, “if you did know anything and were prepared to speak out against him, could be invaluable to us.” She waits with eyebrows raised encouragingly, clearly expecting an answer.
Rachel tries to think, tries to understand what she might be committing to. It is all happening too fast, and she is very tired. It is past three in the morning, and there’s a relentless ache spreading through her body, right up to the sharp nerves of her temples. She can’t quite make sense of this, doesn’t know if these people are for her or against her.
When Karen speaks again her voice is softer, and Rachel realizes that she has misinterpreted her silence. “I can understand that you might be afraid to speak about this,” she says. For the first time, Rachel catches a flash of something human, almost warm. “As you say, Mr. Kashani is an intimidating man. But there are measures that can be put in place. Police protection. In extreme circumstances, if it was felt that you were in serious danger, your case could be approved by the witness protection program. Do you know what that means?”
Still she doesn’t speak, but this time it’s shock that silences her. It’s as if someone has reached inside her head, grasped hold of her brain, and altered everything—a decisive, one-hundred-and-eighty-degree rotation that makes it all seem bright and clear. All this time, she’s been secretly, shamefully wishing that her sister would disappear from her life. She has never even thought about the possibility that she, Rachel, could disappear from Sadie’s.
She thinks about this life and its building blocks. A decent but uninspiring job; a distant family she barely sees; friends who do little more than scratch her surface; an apartment that belongs to somebody else. She’s sat curled up in front of the television countless times, thinking that without Sadie’s corrosive presence her life would be fine, but in reality there’s very little of substance to hang on to. She has heard of witness protection—has read anonymized interviews with women who say that they are traumatized by their ordeal, still pining for the life they left behind. She tries to think about whether she would feel that way.
She nods uncertainly. “I think so. I’d like to know more.”
“Well, that can be arranged.” Karen straightens up, clearly sensing a breakthrough. “So, is there anything you’d like to talk to us about?”
Slowly, Rachel nods again. Her head swims lightly with tiredness, but she can feel a little pulse of excitement beating through her veins. And she knows that she hasn’t really properly considered this, weighed the pros and cons and the possible implications and reverberations, but it feels right. It feels like fate.
* * *
• • •
IT’S ALMOST HALF PAST FOUR in the morning when she finally gets back to the apartment, and by the time she lurches through the door she’s dead on her feet, so desperate to sleep that she can’t think about what has just passed. She flings herself down on her bed and it’s instant—a swift vertiginous loss of consciousness that overtakes her and blacks everything else out.
Two hours later she opens her eyes again, still fully clothed, with the sickly, clinging aftermath of a headache. She’s still tired, but her mind is whirring, replaying the night’s events in Technicolor. She drags herself to her feet and goes to the kitchen, fills the kettle on autopilot, and stands waiting for it to boil. Dawn is starting to creep through the dark clouds outside the window, casting a faint sheen of gray light on the room. Her hands look pale and otherworldly. She watches them grasp a mug and hunt through the cupboard for a teabag, as if they are separate entities. When she has finally made the tea she carries it carefully through to the living room and drinks it standing in front of the window, looking down onto the street. She realizes she’s shaking, unsure if it’s the cold or some kind of delayed shock.
There’s an image flashing statically in her head, again and again. The twisting of a high-heeled shoe on the platform, the skid and slide of a body falling like a stone, and then a microsecond’s worth of horror, the blood and the swift obliteration of everything that held that body together. Even in her mind’s relentless reenactment of the scene, she can barely process it. A morbid part of her wants to slow it down, so that she can better understand it. She didn’t know this woman. To feel sadness seems disingenuous somehow; to feel sympathy too easy and pat. She doesn’t know how she is supposed to feel.
She has been standing there for long enough for the streaks of light between the clouds to widen and spread and for the streetlights to switch off, when a movement at the end of the road catches her eye. A young woman is approaching the apartment. She can’t see her face yet, but there’s something in the way the woman walks, a kind of recklessness and looseness in her stride. Sadie is home.
SADIE
JANUARY 2000
She has no money left in her pockets and her card has been declined again so she walks all the way home from the police station and it takes hours—she walks through the dark, through the sunrise, and into one of the coldest mornings she can remember. The ground is thinly covered with frost, sliding beneath her shoes with treacherous softness.
She’s used to people looking at her. As early as four or five, she felt spotlit, marked out from the crowd. Women would gaze at her in the street, their features softening into delight and admiration. Such a lovely girl. She knew even then that she had been given a gift. That it made her somehow special. And then later, when she was twelve or th
irteen and she changed almost overnight—her cheekbones sharpening and slanting, her body snapping into provocative new curves—she was still under observation, but in a different way. Women on the street would look at her once, quickly, then away, tugging at their hair or clothes. It was their husbands who focused on her now, but there was nothing soft or sweet in their gaze. She understood that they wanted something from her that she was not allowed to give. A couple of years later, she started giving it anyway.
She’s still being watched, as she walks the streets of London, but she’s no longer sure why. It doesn’t seem to be just about her looks anymore. It isn’t lust she sees in the eyes of the passersby who slip through her vision like scurrying ants, but something else—something closer to fear. People glance at her, then catch themselves and move quickly away, training their attention intently elsewhere. It’s as if they know what she’s done.
One foot in front of the other, for miles on end, and with every footstep she’s turning it over in her head, replaying those few minutes on the platform. She remembers the way her arm shot out toward Melanie—the decisive, sharp action of it, almost as if it were outside her control. Almost, but not quite. She pushed her. She pushed her toward the tracks. She pushed her toward the tracks and she fell. She pushed her toward the tracks and she fell to her death. Every thought nudges a little further toward the reality of what has happened, but it feels less and less real. It feels theoretical, conceptual. Like she’s done nothing at all.
She thinks about the police, too, the way they questioned her. The swing in their attitude that she can’t quite understand—that she thinks she might be able to make sense of, if she was just a bit less drunk and had had a bit more sleep. They started off solicitous, gentle. This must have been a horrifying experience for you. Tissues, a steaming cup of tea. Grave, acquiescent nods when she told them that it had been an accident, just a silly little argument that got out of control—and even now, that doesn’t feel so far from the truth. And then, at a certain point, the tone had changed. So, tell us more about your relationship with this woman’s husband. Keen, inquisitive eyes raking her face. How much do you know about his activities outside of work? The sergeant leaning forward in the darkening room, pushing the tape recorder imperceptibly closer. And then the last words she’d wanted to hear. Do the names George Hart and Felix Santos mean anything to you?
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