The Passenger by Daniel Hurst (great book club books TXT) 📕

‘No, you can’t,’ Christine replies curtly, and she tries to close the door again.

But I’m getting seriously pissed off now, and this woman isn’t helping me, so I barge my way past her and head up the stairs.

‘Hey! What are you doing?’ Christine calls after me, but I ignore her and enter the door at the top of the stairs that takes me into her home, if you can even call it that. There’s a mattress on the floor, several open bin bags of clothes that the occupier hasn’t unpacked, and an empty pizza box lying on the grotty kitchen counter. But one thing concerns me amongst the mess, and it’s something that’s missing that was definitely here the last time I visited.

‘Where are his things?’ I ask Christine as she reaches the top of the stairs, looking like she is about to hit me.

‘What?’ she replies, but her anger quickly evaporates when she notices what I already have.

There is nothing here that belongs to James. It’s hard to tell amongst all the mess, but the more I look, the more I see.

James has cleaned his stuff out.

‘I don’t understand. His things were here this morning,’ Christine says, scratching her head.

‘He must have cleared out while you were asleep.’

‘The cheeky bastard,’ Christine mutters as she realises he has done a runner on her, but there’s no way she can be feeling as hard done by as I am right now.

‘Is there anything here that is his?’ I ask, hoping for a small glimmer of hope as I search the tiny flat, but Christine just shakes her head.

‘This is all mine,’ she replies, clearly upset about James’s sudden disappearance.

I bet she thought he was the only woman she was seeing too.

‘There has to be something here,’ I say, more out of desperation than of any real belief. I can’t believe my partner would have screwed me over like this. Without me and what I did on that train, he never would have got the code to that safe. I’ll kill him if I ever get my hands on him again. But first, I need to figure out how I might be able to do that.

‘There’s got to be something he left behind,’ I say, rummaging through the bin bags of clothes.

‘Hey, those are my things!’ Christine protests, and unfortunately, she is right.

I let out a cry of frustration and kick the nearest bin bag to me, expecting it to be full of yet more of the homeowner’s clothes. But instead, it’s a rubbish bag, and the top bursts open, spilling the contents out across the floor.

‘Hey!’ Christine cries again, and I’m just about to storm out when I see the piece of paper lying amongst the empty beer cans and microwave meal wrappers.

I scoop it up and open it out to see James’s handwriting scrawled across it. I recognise it from the crosswords he would do when we were in prison to pass the time. He’s written out a series of times, but I’m not sure what they relate to.

18:42

18:59

19:12

19:27

My eyes scan down the list, trying to figure out what they might be. But then I see the final entry and I know. These are train times. I know that because of the underlined words written beside the last entry.

21:12 – last Eurostar of the day.

41

AMANDA

I didn’t expect to be back on a train again so quickly considering how eventful my last journey was, but here I am. The countryside is whizzing by my window, and my elbows are leaning against the table as the carriage shakes all around me. But unlike the last time I was on a train, I actually have hope. That’s because I’m no longer the prey.

This time, I’m the hunter.

‘Why is it not updating?’ I ask my daughter sitting beside me as we stare at the laptop screen on the table in front of us.

‘He must be on the tube,’ she replies as she continues to refresh the page. ‘There’s no signal down there, so it won’t update until he’s out.’

‘Okay,’ I reply, trying to stay positive. That makes sense. The signal from the phone will come back as soon as he goes above ground again, and all we can do until then is remain patient. The problem is that isn’t an easy thing to do when there’s so much at stake.

But I console myself with the knowledge that we have been able to track Louise’s mobile phone this far, so there’s no reason to think that we won’t be able to for a little longer yet. Unless James throws it away, of course. Then we are screwed. But neither of us want to dwell on the negatives right now. We have to believe that we are going to be able to find James again using this technology, and when we do, I will be able to get back what he stole from my safe.

Ever since Louise told me there was a way to see where her mobile phone was, we have been keeping an eye on the red dot as it has moved around the south of England. When we first saw it, it was already heading north out of Brighton, and the speed of its movement suggested to me that James was on a train. After a frantic few minutes to get ready and prepare myself mentally, Louise and I took a taxi to the train station and purchased a couple of tickets to London to give chase. While we couldn’t be sure that London was his destination, we figured it was as good a guess as any considering the direction he was headed, so we decided to start making our own way north so the gap between us and that red dot didn’t grow any bigger.

It had been ten minutes since we saw that the red dot was at London Victoria Station, which gave us hope that James’s journey was coming to an end and we could catch him up.