The Stranger on the Train by Abbie Taylor Read Free Book Online Page A

would want to hurt him. I’m sure he’s being treated well.”
    Lindsay must have been a couple of years older than Emma, but looked younger. Her skin was plump and smooth. Her hair, as long and dark as Emma’s, was thick and shiny. She had a cheerful, worry-free face; a face that wore a half smile in repose. You would call her a girl, not a woman.
    She had come to meet Emma in the hospital after the police had finally agreed to start looking for Ritchie.
    â€œI’m going to be your family liaison officer while we’re looking for Ritchie,” Lindsay explained. “Think of me as the link between the police and you. Anytime you need to speak to someone, you can phone me, and I’ll call and visit you regularly until Ritchie is found, so you always know what’s happening.”
    It was Lindsay, along with a couple of other policemen, who accompanied Emma from the hospital back to her flat in Hammersmith. Emma’s keys and security swipe card were still in her bag somewhere in the East End, but the police had managed to get her an emergency replacement set from the housing association. Dazed, Emma stood under the lighted shelter at the tower-block entrance and swiped the new card through the security slot by the doors. Most of the windows in the block were dark. The new card worked. The heavy metal doors opened with their deep double click.
    In her flat on the fifth floor, the smell of cold toast and baby cereal hit her as soon as she opened the door. The breakfast things were still piled in the sink in the kitchen. There was Ritchie’s plastic bowl with the picture of Bob the Builder on the bottom, partly obscured by lumps of dried porridge. His toys were still lying about the flat where he’d left them. The red truck he’d just learned to push himself around on, recklessly aiming it straight at the furniture. His train that shrieked “All aboard!” when you pressed the funnel. A rusk lying in a shower of crumbs under the table, the edges scalloped with tiny teeth marks. His cuddly frog named Gribbit. Each item made Emma’s chest grow heavier and heavier, until the pain was almost unbearable.
    The police, after asking Emma’s permission to take a look around, began to search all over the flat. They searched everywhere: the narrow, yellow-painted bedroom, with Ritchie’s cot and Emma’s single bed; the bathroom with its olive-green bath and rubber shower hose on the taps and Ritchie’s yellow plastic bathtub under the sink. His spill-proof beaker lay upended behind the tub. She’d been looking for that for a week.
    The policemen rummaged through the cupboards and peered into the laundry basket. They got down on their hands and knees to examine the floors: the speckled lino in the kitchen, the green scratchy carpets in the bedroom and sitting room.
    â€œWhat are they looking for?” Emma kept asking. “Ritchie wasn’t kidnapped from here. Why aren’t they doing this at the café?”
    â€œIt’s routine,” Lindsay soothed.
    The policemen picked strands of Ritchie’s hair from his cot, and they took away his toothbrush. They took his blanket and some of his clothes.
    â€œFor scent,” Lindsay explained. “And DNA. To help us with the search.”
    â€œHave you any clothes similar to what he was wearing at the time?” one of the policemen asked.
    Emma was able to give them an exact replica of Ritchie’s trousers; they had come in a two-for-one pack at Primark. The man labeled the trousers and took them away. Emma described the fleece Ritchie had been wearing.
    â€œAny photos of him in it?”
    When she went to look, she was shocked at how few photographs she had of either of them. It had never occurred to her that she should have taken more. The last one she had of Ritchie struck her as a lonely little picture. Ritchie on his own, astride his truck against the empty yellow background of the