Chapter 11 #2
‘Better use cash,’ Harriet said. ‘It’s all coming back to me now. I read about it. Cards only work in the machines when there is good enough Wi-Fi.’
Looking forward to getting some proper food at Milan station when we would change trains for the last time, we stocked up with some snacks and perfectly decent coffee, investigated the loo, which was spotlessly clean and very acceptable, and then settled in our seats for the journey.
All the misgivings and worries of the previous evening seemed to have faded and I for one was excited about the trip ahead of us. We were luckily on the right side of the train so we would be able to see the wonderful views of the coast during our journey, and the weather outside was glorious too.
There were just a few minutes remaining until the train started off on the next leg of our escapade.
We played with the expanding table, peered into the little rubbish container at the end, found our travel adaptors and cables and put our phones on to charge.
We were seasoned travellers now. Yes, we had known some sticky moments and Harriet without a doubt had come off worst with her sore knee, but we had made it this far and scooped up a trophy too.
Perhaps we weren’t past it after all. I leaned forward and looked across Anna to see out of the window as the train silently started to move out of the station.
‘Hello again,’ said a voice, and just for a moment, I ignored it.
‘Seems like we really are following each other around.’
This time I turned my head to look and found myself looking up at that man. The same man I had seen on the Eurostar, the sleeper train and last night in the bar as we collected our award. He was standing about three seats in front of us and was putting his laptop bag up into the overhead locker.
‘This is ridiculous,’ I said.
He grinned and gave a funny little shrug as if in agreement.
The other two looked to see who I was talking to and Harriet gasped.
‘It’s the stalker,’ she hissed in a poor stage whisper. ‘The one with the socks, whose wife sent him out to get the cat food.’
‘Huh?’ Anna looked puzzled.
The newcomer raised his eyebrows. ‘As I don’t have a wife or a cat, I think that’s unlikely. I do have socks though.’
He went off to sit down in his seat and all I could see of him was the back of his grey hair between the headrests. The three of us had a whispered conference.
‘What the heck is Mr Grumpy doing here?’
‘That is him, isn’t it?’
‘Do we know him from somewhere? He seems to know us.’
‘No, Anna, we don’t actually know him. He’s the man from the Eurostar who sat next to me, and he’s the same man whose compartment I fell into on the sleeper train from Paris, and I thought I saw him last night too. In the bar, but I didn’t believe it.’
‘Then he’s definitely stalking you,’ Anna said. ‘I wonder why?’
I wrestled with the ridiculousness of the possibility.
‘Of course he’s not! Why on earth would a stranger follow us all this way? When we don’t even know him.’
‘He could be a private detective; someone Fred has put on to follow you?’ Harriet said.
‘But why? We have been divorced for years, why would he care what I’m doing now?’
‘Men can get funny like that,’ Anna said.
‘When I was at university I had a boyfriend once who trailed after me in his car all the way from Oxford to Witney. I was on a bike ride with some friends and he thought I was messing around with one of them. Which I wasn’t I might add. Not that time anyway.’
‘That’s no distance,’ I said. ‘It’s hardly the same as following me all the way from London to Nice, and now being on the same train to Milan, is it?’
Harriet leaned across the table and patted my hand reassuringly.
‘Don’t worry. I’ll call a gendarme the minute we get to the station, or perhaps there is one on this train in plain clothes? You know, like an air marshal on flights.’
We thought about this for a few minutes, and Anna raised herself up in her seat a bit so she could stare at the back of his head.
‘He’s got nice hair,’ she said at last.
‘Anna! For heaven’s sake. Who cares about his hair? He might be a dangerous criminal or – ooh, a hit man,’ Harriet gasped. ‘Perhaps I should ring the police now or something? Anyone know what the number is for Interpol?’
I was exasperated by this. ‘A hit man? That’s daft. Why would anyone do that?’
‘I was watching a series on Netflix only the other day where a woman didn’t know she was the heir to a fortune, and someone else – I think it was an estranged daughter or it might have been a niece – had found out and paid an assassin to knock her off,’ Anna said earnestly, ‘and she very nearly got away with it. Fortunately, there was a detective living in the house next door although it actually looked like a mansion, because all these people live in mansions, don’t they?
Heaven knows how they afford it. And his wife never wore the same clothes twice.
And he knew someone who knew the niece. And there was a dog too, I think it was a corgi. It barked at exactly the right moment.’
‘Right, I’m going to find out,’ I said.
I stood up and adjusted the neckline of my new green and white dress, which, annoyingly that morning, didn’t seem to fit properly over my new holiday bra. And then I took a deep breath and walked towards him.
‘Hello,’ I said, ‘what are you doing here?’
‘I might ask you the same thing,’ he said pleasantly enough. He held out a hand. ‘Jack Fisher. It feels like you have been following me all the way from St Pancras.’
I shook his hand automatically although I still had reservations about his motivation.
‘Lizzie Stevens. No, I haven’t, you’ve been following me.’
He had the nerve to laugh up at me, and to be fair he had a nice laugh, and a megawatt smile that made me wonder if he was wearing dentures. They looked very real from where I was standing. Or perhaps he was American; a lot of them seem to have good teeth.
‘I am travelling to Milan, obviously,’ he said, ‘where I will catch a train to Venice.’
‘So am I,’ I gasped, ‘how did you know?’
‘Know what? That you were going to Venice? I didn’t.’
‘That seems unlikely,’ I said, ‘all things considered.’
‘So perhaps you think I am a private detective, or a hit man chasing after you across Europe for some reason?’ Jack said with a chuckle.
‘Of course not, don’t be silly,’ I said, although of course that was exactly what we had just been talking about a few seconds ago.
A thought struck me. Did he have a listening device? Had he somehow bugged my backpack?
‘And obviously you are neither one of those things,’ he said.
I was mildly annoyed at this. Just because I didn’t look exotic and mysterious. I pulled myself upright, took a deep breath and one of the buttons on my new dress popped open. For heaven’s sake, I bet real spies didn’t have to put up with this sort of irritation.
I discreetly buttoned it back up again.
‘Why not? I might be. Why couldn’t I be a hit person? I might be wanted by Interpol in five countries.’
He laughed again. ‘You don’t look like a determined assassin, Lizzie.’
‘That might be a part of my cunning disguise,’ I said, wishing that I didn’t like the way he said my name.
Fred had always called me Liz, or Elizabeth if he was annoyed with me, which was quite often.
He on the other hand had insisted on always being called Frederick, never Fred, although in a weak moment during our divorce he confessed his irritation that his thirty-six-year-old lover called him Freddo.
I had laughed until I cried on hearing that, and then he had been even more annoyed.
Had it made him happy, I wondered. He had exchanged over thirty years of marriage and the respect of his son for a woman who was old enough to be his daughter and had eyebrows like caterpillars. Perhaps it had. Never mind, it wasn’t my business.
But thinking about it, Jack had made a good point. Why would anyone suspect a sixty-four-year-old woman in a new dress of anything? Particularly one who – I looked down as something brushed against my calf – had forgotten to cut the labels off before she put it on for the first time.
‘I might be an international spy, wanted all over Europe for all sorts of terrible crimes,’ I added. ‘I could be a cold-blooded assassin with loads of guns and explosives and things in my bag in secret compartments.’
He nodded. ‘I suppose you could. But I’m guessing you’re not. And to be honest I wouldn’t claim that too loudly. People get a bit edgy when they hear discussions about guns and explosives these days.’
‘But I might be, so there,’ I repeated firmly, trying not to laugh.
Realising I didn’t have a lot more to say and also that Anna and Harriet were peering over the top of the train seats to see what was going on, I turned and went to sit down again.