_OceanofPDF.com_The_Girl_on_the_Train_-_Paula_Hawkins

Spain four years ago. So that rules him out. It never sounded to me like a
likely motive in any case—if someone wanted to punish her for what
she’d done back then, they’d have done it years ago.
So who does that leave? It leaves the usual suspects: the husband, the
lover. Scott, Kamal. Or some random man who snatched her from the
street—a serial killer just starting out? Will she be the first of a series, a
Wilma McCann, a Pauline Reade? And who said, after all, that the killer
had to be a man? She was a small woman, Megan Hipwell. Tiny,
birdlike. It wouldn’t take much force to take her down.
AFTERNOON
The first thing I notice when he opens the door is the smell. Sweat and
beer, rank and sour, and under that something else, something worse.
Something rotting. He’s wearing tracksuit bottoms and a stained grey T-
shirt, his hair is greasy, his skin slick, as though with fever.
“Are you all right?” I ask him, and he grins at me. He’s been drinking.
“I’m fine, come in, come in.” I don’t want to, but I do.
The curtains on the street side of the house are closed, and the living
room is cast in a reddish hue that seems to suit the heat and the smell.
Scott wanders into the kitchen, opens the fridge and takes a beer out.
“Come and sit down,” he says. “Have a drink.” The grin on his face is
fixed, joyless, grim. There’s something unkind about the set of his face.
The contempt that I saw on Saturday morning, after we slept together,
it’s still there.
“I can’t stay long,” I tell him. “I have a job interview tomorrow, I
need to prepare.”
“Really?” He raises his eyebrows. He sits down and kicks a chair out
towards me. “Sit down and have a drink,” he says, an order, not an
invitation. I sit down opposite him and he pushes the beer bottle towards
me. I pick it up and take a sip. Outside, I can hear shrieking—children
playing in a back garden somewhere—and beyond that, the faint and
familiar rumble of the train.
“They got the DNA results yesterday,” Scott says to me. “Detective
Riley came to see me last night.” He waits for me to say something, but
I’m frightened of saying the wrong thing, so I stay silent. “It’s not mine.
It wasn’t mine. The funny thing is, it wasn’t Kamal’s, either.” He laughs.
“So she had someone else on the go. Can you believe it?” He’s smiling
that horrible smile. “You didn’t know anything about that, did you?
About another bloke? She didn’t confide in you about another man, did