‘Did she?’ He doesn’t seem to notice, there’s a note of wistfulness in his voice. ‘That’s so good to hear.’ He pauses, and I can hear his breathing, quick and shallow, on the other end of the line. ‘We had … we had a terrible argument,’ he says. ‘The night she left. I hate the idea that she was angry with me when …’ he tails off.
‘I’m sure she wasn’t angry with you for long,’ I say. ‘Couples fight. Couples fight all the time.’
‘But this was bad, it was terrible, and I can’t … I feel like I can’t tell anyone, because if I did they would look at me like I was guilty.’
There’s a different quality to his voice now: haunted, saturated with guilt.
‘I don’t remember how it started,’ he says, and immediately I don’t believe him, but then I think about all the arguments I’ve forgotten, and I bite my tongue. ‘It got very heated. I was very … I was unkind to her. I was a bastard. A complete bastard. She was upset. She went upstairs and put some things in a bag. I don’t know what exactly, but I noticed later that her toothbrush was gone, so I knew she wasn’t planning on coming home. I assumed … I thought she must have gone to Tara’s for the night. That happened once before. Just one time. It wasn’t like this happened all the time.
‘I didn’t even go after her,’ he says, and it hits me yet again that he’s not really talking to me, he’s confessing. He’s on one side of the confessional and I’m on the other, faceless, unseen. ‘I just let her go.’
‘That was on Saturday night?’
‘Yes. That was the last time I saw her.’
There was a witness who saw her – or saw ‘a woman fitting her description’ – walking towards Witney station at around quarter past seven, I know that from the newspaper reports. That was the final sighting. No one remembered seeing her on the platform, or on the train. There is no CCTV at Witney, and she wasn’t picked up on the CCTV at Corly, although the reports said that this didn’t prove she wasn’t there, because there are ‘significant blindspots’ at that station.
‘What time was it when you tried to contact her?’ I ask him. Another long silence.
‘I … I went to the pub. The Rose, you know, just around the corner, on Kingly Road? I needed to cool down, to get things straight in my head. I had a couple of pints, then I went back home. That was just before ten. I think I was hoping that she’d have had time to calm down and that she’d be back. But she wasn’t.’
‘So it was around ten o’clock when you tried to call her?’
‘No.’ His voice is little more than a whisper now. ‘I didn’t. I drank a couple more beers at home, I watched some TV. Then I went to bed.’
I think about all the arguments I had with Tom, all the terrible things I said after I’d had too much, all the storming out into the street, shouting at him, telling him I never wanted to see him again. He always rang me, he always talked me down, coaxed me home.
‘I just imagined she’d be sitting in Tara’s kitchen, you know, talking about what a shit I am. So I left it.’
He left it. It sounds callous and uncaring, and I’m not surprised he hasn’t told this story to anyone else. I am surprised that he’s telling anyone at all. This is not the Scott I imagined, the Scott I knew, the one who stood behind Megan on the terrace, his big hands on her bony shoulders, ready to protect her from anything.
I’m ready to hang up the phone, but Scott keeps talking. ‘I woke up early. There were no messages on my phone. I didn’t panic – I assumed she was with Tara and that she was still angry with me. I rang her then and got her voicemail, but I still didn’t panic. I thought she was probably still asleep, or just ignoring me. I couldn’t find Tara’s number, but I had her address – it was on a business card on Megan’s desk. So I got up and I drove round there.’
I wonder, if he wasn’t worried, why he felt he needed to go round to Tara’s house, but I don’t interrupt. I let him talk.
‘I got to Tara’s place a little after nine. It took her a while to come to the door, but when she did, she looked really surprised to see me. It was obvious that I was the last person she expected to see on her doorstep at that time of the morning, and that’s when I knew … That’s when I knew that Megan wasn’t there. And I started to think … I started …’ The words catch and I feel wretched for doubting him.
‘She told me the last time she’d seen Megan was at their pilates class on Friday night. That’s when I started to panic.’
After I hang up the phone, I think about how, if you didn’t know him, if you hadn’t seen how he was with her, as I have, a lot of what he’d said would not ring quite true.
Monday, 22 July 2013
Morning
I feel quite befuddled. I slept soundly but dreamily and this morning I am struggling to wake up properly. The hot weather has returned and the carriage is stifling today, despite being only half full. I was late getting up this morning and didn’t have time to pick up a newspaper or to check the news on the internet before I left the house, so I am trying to get the BBC site on my phone, but for some reason it is taking forever to load. At Northcote a man with an iPad gets on and takes the seat next to me. He has no problems at all getting the news up, he goes straight to the Daily Telegraph site and there it is, in big, bold letters, the third story: MAN ARRESTED IN CONNECTION WITH MEGAN HIPWELL DISAPPEARANCE.
I get such a fright that I forget myself and lean right over to get a better look. He looks up at me, affronted, almost startled.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I know her. The missing woman. I know her.’
‘Oh, how awful,’ he says. He’s a middle-aged man, well spoken and well dressed. ‘Would you like to read the story?’
‘Please. I can’t get anything to come up on my phone.’
He smiles kindly and hands me the tablet. I touch the headline and the story comes up.
A man in his thirties has been arrested in connection with the disappearance of Megan Hipwell, twenty-nine, the Witney woman who has been missing since Saturday 13 July. Police were not able to confirm whether the man arrested is Megan Hipwell’s husband, Scott Hipwell, who was questioned under caution on Friday. In a statement this morning a police spokesman said: ‘We can confirm that we have arrested a man in connection with Megan’s disappearance. He has not yet been charged with an offence. The search for Megan continues, and we are searching an address which we believe may be a crime scene.