01 The Night Train by Sharon Bolton

Author:Sharon Bolton [Bolton, Sharon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orion
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

3.

‘Here’s to the Scamper of Tiny Paws.’

For nearly two decades Will Jennings had been telling everyone he met that he worked for a merchant bank in the city. Because he could name the bank, and knew everything about it, including how it was performing every day on the world’s stock markets, and because he always wore expensive suits, shirts and shoes, few doubted his word.

And it was true. He did work for Goldman Sachs on Newgate Street. In the IT department. He ran the help desk, and earned the modest salary of £35,000 a year without bonuses. The house that he owned near the river in Pimlico he’d inherited from his mother, who’d lived in it for sixty years.

He spent all his spare cash on a five series BMW that he hardly ever used because he was nervous of London traffic, and on the women he met through dating websites.

Sooner or later, though, they always saw through him. They saw the tired, 1970s kitchen in the Pimlico house, the avocado bathroom suite with mould that he could never scrape off the grouting, and they realised he wasn’t the bonus-fuelled meal ticket they’d been looking for.

It was shame, because when Will Jennings stopped trying to impress, when he concentrated instead upon talking about books that he loved, and how the constantly moving, ever-changing river made him feel, and how his life had improved immeasurably the day he’d brought home a young beagle puppy from the dog’s charity, then he turned into the sort of guy that most sensible women realized they’d spent a very long time looking for.

He just hadn’t discovered this yet.

‘My parents met on Hampstead Heath.’ He and Marion were sitting on a bench at the top of Parliament Hill, waiting for the sun to go down and the moon to rise, watching the two dogs race around like dervishes. On his phone he’d bookmarked the Wikipedia entry for Meadowsweet, the herb that Marion’s dog needed before she could receive the attentions of his, and he and Marion had already picked out their harvesting site. They just had to wait for the moon to be up. And, quite possibly, for the dogs to calm down. He’d never seen them like this before.

Meadowsweet. Frothy, creamy flowers, erect reddish stalks, grows in moist woodland. There was something ridiculously suggestive about the description and several times he’d opened his mouth to say exactly that. Opened it, and closed it again, because did you really say words like erect and moist to a librarian?

Meadowsweet, he’d discovered, had an odd smell, the sort that hit the back of the nose and stayed there. He must have brushed through it at some point, because he could still smell it.

‘They both lived nearby.’ He checked that she was listening. Not that he needed to; Marion always listened. ‘So every week after Sunday dinner, they’d put on their best clothes, meet their mates and hang around the park.’

A few yards further down the hill, Snoopy and Mona had found something of interest in the long grass; or maybe exhausted themselves.

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