‘They’re both blonde, slim, petite, pale-skinned …’
‘So I attacked Megan Hipwell thinking she was Anna? That’s the most stupid thing I’ve ever heard,’ I said. But that lump on my head was throbbing again and everything from Saturday night was still deepest black.
‘Did you know that Anna Watson knows Megan Hipwell?’ Gaskill asked me, and I felt my jaw drop.
‘I … what? No. No, they don’t know each other.’
Riley smiled for a moment, then straightened her face. ‘Yes they do. Megan did some childminding for the Watsons …’ she glanced down at her notes, ‘back in August and September last year.’ I don’t know what to say. I can’t imagine it: Megan in my home, with her, with her baby.
‘The cut on your lip, is that from when you got knocked down the other day?’ Gaskill asked me.
‘Yes. I bit it when I fell, I think.’
‘Where was it, this accident?’
‘It was in London, Theobalds Road. Near Holborn.’
‘And what were you doing there?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Why were you in central London?’
I shrugged. ‘I already told you,’ I said coldly. ‘My flatmate doesn’t know that I’ve lost my job. So I go into London, as usual, and I go to libraries, to job hunt, to work on my CV.’
Riley shook her head, in disbelief perhaps, or wonder. How does anyone get to that point?
I pushed my chair back, readying myself to leave. I’d had enough of being talked down to, being made to look like a fool, like a mad woman. Time to play the trump card. ‘I don’t really know why we’re talking about this,’ I said. ‘I would have thought that you would have better things to do, like investigating Megan Hipwell’s disappearance, for example. I take it you’ve spoken to her lover?’ Neither of them said anything, they just stared at me. They weren’t expecting that. They didn’t know about him. ‘Perhaps you didn’t know. Megan Hipwell was having an affair,’ I said, and I started to walk to the door. Gaskill stopped me; he moved quietly and surprisingly quickly, and before I could put my hand on the door handle he was standing in front of me.
‘I thought you didn’t know Megan Hipwell?’ he asked me.
‘I don’t,’ I said, trying to get past him.
‘Sit down,’ he said, blocking my path.
I told them then about what I’d seen from the train, about how I often saw Megan sitting out on her terrace, sunbathing in the evenings or having coffee in the mornings. I told them about how last week I saw her with someone who clearly wasn’t her husband, how I’d seen them kissing on the lawn.
‘When was this?’ Gaskill snapped. He seemed annoyed with me, perhaps because I should have told them this straight away, instead of wasting all day talking about myself.
‘Friday. It was Friday morning.’
‘So the day before she went missing, you saw her with another man?’ Riley asked me, with a sigh of exasperation. She closed the file in front of her. Gaskill leaned back in his seat, studying my face. She clearly thought I was making it up; he wasn’t so sure.
‘Can you describe him?’ Gaskill asked.
‘Tall, dark—’
‘Handsome?’ Riley interrupted.
I puffed my cheeks out. ‘Taller than Scott Hipwell. I know, because I’ve seen them together – Jess and – sorry, Megan and Scott Hipwell – and this man was different. Slighter, thinner, darker skinned. Possibly an Asian man,’ I said.
‘You could determine his ethnic group from the train?’ Riley said. ‘Impressive. Who is Jess, by the way?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘You mentioned Jess a moment ago.’
I could feel my face flushing again. I shook my head, ‘No, I didn’t,’ I said.
Gaskill got to his feet and held out his hand for me to shake. ‘I think that’s enough.’ I shook his hand, ignored Riley and turned to go. ‘Don’t go anywhere near Blenheim Road, Ms Watson,’ Gaskill said. ‘Don’t contact your ex-husband unless it’s important, and don’t go anywhere near Anna Watson or her child.’
On the train on the way home, as I dissect all the ways that today went wrong, I’m surprised by the fact that I don’t feel as awful as I might do. Thinking about it, I know why that is: I didn’t have a drink last night, and I have no desire to have one now. I am interested, for the first time in ages, in something other than my own misery. I have purpose. Or at least, I have a distraction.
Thursday, 18 July 2013
Morning
I bought three newspapers before getting on to the train this morning: Megan has been missing for four days and five nights and the story is getting plenty of coverage. The Daily Mail, predictably, has managed to find pictures of Megan in her bikini, but they’ve also done the most detailed profile I’ve seen of her so far.
Born Megan Mills in Rochester in 1983, she moved with her parents to King’s Lynn in Norfolk when she was ten. She was a bright child, very outgoing, a talented artist and singer. A quote from a school friend says she was ‘a good laugh, very pretty and quite wild’. Her wildness seems to have been exacerbated by the death of her brother, Ben, to whom she was very close. He was killed in a motorcycle accident when he was nineteen and she fifteen. She ran away from home three days after his funeral. She was arrested twice – once for theft and once for soliciting. Her relationship with her parents, the Mail informs me, broke down completely. Both her parents died a few years ago, without ever being reconciled with their daughter. (Reading this, I feel desperately sad for Megan. I realize that perhaps, after all, she isn’t so different from me. She’s isolated and lonely too.)
When she was sixteen, she moved in with a boyfriend who had a house near the village of Holkham in north Norfolk. The school friend says, ‘He was an older guy, a musician or something. He was into drugs. We didn’t see Megan much after they got together.’ The boyfriend’s name is not given, so presumably they haven’t found him. He might not even exist. The school friend might be making this stuff up just to get her name into the papers.
They skip forward several years after that: suddenly Megan is twenty-four, living in London, working as a waitress in a north London restaurant. There she meets Scott Hipwell, an independent IT contractor who is friendly with the restaurant manager, and the two of them hit it off. After an ‘intense courtship’, Megan and Scott marry, when she is twenty-six and he is thirty.