The Stranger on the Train by Abbie Taylor Page A

and none of them knew him at all. He was just another job to them. She felt like a goldfish, frantically swimming around and around in a bowl, trapped and banging off the sides, while these calm, trained people looked at her from the outside and took notes.
    The only private place was her room. She took Gribbit the frog from Ritchie’s cot and crawled into bed, holding him in her arms. She wrapped them both in her duvet and lay there, exhausted, yet unable to slow down her thoughts.
    What are they doing to my child? That was one of the worst things, nasty, ugly, lodged like a roll of barbed wire in her stomach. Lindsay had said she was sure he was being treated well, but then, she had to say that, didn’t she? The truth was, none of them knew who’d taken him or what was happening to him. She pictured Ritchie drugged, breathing in a loud, obstructed way, his eyes rolled back, waiting in a van or a shed somewhere for . . . what? Or shivering in a corner, eating things off the ground and crying because no one had changed him and he was dirty and sore. She pictured him with tears rolling down his cheeks, emitting little high-pitched hiccups of distress, wondering what he’d done for her to leave him like this. To ease the horror of it, she concentrated on trying to send a hug to him. She focused on him; the bed swam away and there was just Ritchie, sitting by himself in a cot in a darkened room. He looked up, puzzled, the tears still on his cheeks. Emma felt a fierce tenderness and joy. Her arms went around his fat little body and he gave a glad cry and snuggled into her. She soothed him, weak with thankfulness; felt the way he trembled as he clung to her, wanting her to bring him home. The sensation was powerful enough to wake her, jerking her back to the bed. It wasn’t Ritchie she held, it was Gribbit, his wide, stitched-open eyes blank with misery. Emma wept with the pain of it. She wasn’t with Ritchie, she was here and he was God knew where, all alone. Crying for her. What were they doing to him? What was some sick, twisted pervert standing over him doing to him?
    Emma writhed in agony. She couldn’t take much more of this. Why? Why had she taken her child for coffee with Antonia? A complete stranger! She’d been so naive, so desperate for someone to talk to. Why had she gone to the bathroom and left her small child—her baby—with a woman she’d never seen before? What sort of mother was she? Why had she let Ritchie get trapped on the train? Why hadn’t she been watching him properly? Again and again she saw him there, standing in the doors. Over and over she replayed it in her mind: that strange tug on the harness, the sense that something was not quite right. But her bag was an inch out of reach, so that she spent that extra fraction of a second groping for it before she turned around.
    She could never have that moment back. It had come and gone, and when it mattered most, she had chosen a bag of vests and trousers over her son.
    â€¢ • •
    If Emma slept at all, she didn’t remember it. The hours dragged as she lay in the bleak silence, that barbed-wire coil in her stomach. At six in the morning, she abandoned the farce of trying to sleep and got up again. The phone hadn’t rung once. She picked it up to check there was a dial tone. There was. Lindsay had left a note written in thick, black marker on a Post-it, stuck to the receiver: “Here’s my number again, just to make sure. I’ll be back tomorrow. Or sooner if there’s any news.”
    Emma was still wearing her jeans and jumper from the night before. She left her bedroom, trying not to look at the cot under the window. She made herself a cup of tea and sat without drinking it at the round table in the sitting room. The curtains to the balcony were open. Through the glass doors, she saw the black tower block opposite, a gray halo in the sky just softening its edges. The