_OceanofPDF.com_The_Girl_on_the_Train_-_Paula_Hawkins

The matter should be closed for me now. All this time, I’ve been
thinking that there was something to remember, something I was
missing. But there isn’t. I didn’t see anything important or do anything
terrible. I just happened to be on the same street. I know this now,
courtesy of the red-haired man. And yet there’s an itch at the back of my
brain that I just can’t scratch.
Neither Gaskill nor Riley were at the police station; I gave my
statement to a bored-looking uniformed officer. It will be filed and
forgotten about, I assume, unless I turn up dead in a ditch somewhere.
My interview was on the opposite side of town from where Scott lives,
but I took a taxi from the police station. I’m not taking any chances. It
went as well as it could: the job itself is utterly beneath me, but then I
seem to have become beneath me over the past year or two. I need to
reset the scale. The big drawback (other than the crappy pay and the
lowliness of the job itself) will be having to come to Witney all the time,
to walk these streets and risk running into Scott or Anna and her child.
Because bumping into people is all I seem to do in this neck of the
woods. It’s one of the things I used to like about the place: the villageon-the-edge-of-London
feel. You might not know everyone, but faces are
familiar.
I’m almost at the station, just passing the Crown, when I feel a hand
on my arm and I wheel around, slipping off the pavement and into the
road.
“Hey, hey, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” It’s him again, the red-haired man,
pint in one hand, the other raised in supplication. “You’re jumpy, aren’t
you?” He grins. I must look really frightened, because the grin fades.
“Are you all right? I didn’t mean to scare you.”
He’s knocked off early, he says, and invites me to have a drink with
him. I say no, and then I change my mind.
“I owe you an apology,” I say, when he—Andy, as it turns out—
brings me my gin and tonic, “for the way I behaved on the train. Last
time, I mean. I was having a bad day.”
“S’all right,” Andy says. His smile is slow and lazy, I don’t think this
is his first pint. We’re sitting opposite each other in the beer garden at the
back of the pub; it feels safer here than on the street side. Perhaps it’s the
safe feeling that emboldens me. I take my chance.
“I wanted to ask you about what happened,” I say. “The night that I
met you. The night that Meg—The night that woman disappeared.”
“Oh. Right. Why? What d’you mean?”