500 Miles from You (Scottish Bookshop #3)(89)
He gave her a level glance. The train started to make noises, the engines huffing up.
He screwed up his eyes. “Is there . . . Someone I really need to see is on this train. Can you call her for me?”
The woman protectively hid her clipboard with her hand. “What if you’re a murderer?”
“Okay,” said Cormac desperately.
Doors were slamming up and down the train now, and a guard was raising a whistle to his lips.
“Can I . . . can I just run up and down the train to see if I can see her?”
“Am I going to let you, a murderer, run up and down the train and peer in everybody’s windows?”
“Pleeeease! This is someone . . . this is someone really important to me. Please. Please.”
The woman looked at him sadly. “I cannae,” said the woman. “Health and Safety. We’ve had a lot of training.”
“Me too,” said Cormac ruefully.
Peeep! blew the whistle.
LISSA STOOD UP and leaned her head against the window of the little cabin, peering out into the world of the sooty, fluorescent station beyond, smelling of fast food and filled with the shouts of cheery or drunken commuters. When had London started to feel so strange?
Funny, it was almost as if it were calling her name. But as she strained her ears to hear, there was another sharp blow on the whistle, and the train began, smoothly, to chug its way out of the great black dirty station.
Chapter 78
“That,” said the woman on the reception desk, covering her ears, “is quite the shout you’ve got there.”
And she lightly stepped onto the platform as Cormac, throat ragged, cried out, “LISSSAAA!!!!” one last time, to no avail. As the train took off, he tried to run alongside it, even as security hailed him, and he stopped, put his hands on his knees, utterly out of breath, utterly defeated.
EMPTY, EXHAUSTED, FEELING foolish, simply ridiculous, for having pinned so many hopes and dreams . . . Lissa sank down on the bed, feeling the soothing motion of the train beneath her. She glanced at her phone . . . no, no, no. Of course.
She had been so stupid. Well. This was modern life, she supposed. She sank back against the pillows. No way was she going to sleep. She was going to have to lie awake in a frenzy of embarrassment and recrimination all night, then have to get straight back to work the next day, which was the only reason she’d been bought a sleeper ticket in the first place.
She turned her face into the pillows. Well. Tomorrow was another day, she supposed. But somehow—and having her phone off definitely helped—the slightly jolting motion of the train, the fresh white linen, the sheer exhaustion, and, let us be honest, the several gins somehow worked their magic, and within moments, Lissa was utterly and completely asleep.
OUTSIDE IN THE streets of London it was dark, and the corner pubs were starting to take on a more aggressive turn; there was distant shouting and omnipresent sirens and a helicopter somewhere overhead, the faint, tense feeling that there were too many people, hot and drunk and angry, in too small a space. King’s Cross was absolutely heaving, its restaurants and piazzas overspilling with people.
It crossed his mind; it absolutely crossed his mind. That Larissa might still be in her fancy restaurant with her fancy mates. That he could at least sit and lick his wounds surrounded by sympathetic company.
But it was strange. Those girls didn’t appeal to him. Not at all. Not Larissa, not Yazzie. Nobody did. Nobody except the person who thought he’d dropped her. After all, who these days didn’t have their phone? Who would ever believe it? Only a very stupid person, and he knew she wasn’t that.
Cormac turned blindly south again. Retracing the steps he had run with so much hope in his heart was bitter and exhausting. A group of cabaret performers shouted at him as he accidentally trod on the tail of someone’s feather boa, and he recoiled and apologized. A drunk heckled him from the street, and instead of stopping, he passed on by, head down. Stop trying to care for everyone and just care for one person, he thought bitterly. Well, look how brilliantly that had turned out.
It seemed so far now, through endless paved roads, past endless taxis at endless junctions, their yellow lights glinting into the distance. He considered taking one, but there was no benefit to arriving home any earlier, was there? His phone battery was almost dead. By the time it charged she’d be over the border, cursing him forever. And “I was in prison” wasn’t exactly the excuse he’d been hoping to give.
He sighed, passing, finally, the police station for what he hoped would be the last time ever. The lads were still, to his utter amazement, at the pub next door and increasingly merry, and, he was astounded to see, the coppers were now drinking as well. A mass cheer greeted him as he stumbled past.
“Did you find her? The fuckbeast?” shouted Nobbo.
One glance from Cormac convinced him otherwise.
“Aww,” said the group in chorus.
“What’s this?” said the sarcastic copper, and to Cormac’s horrified amazement, they immediately started telling him the entire story, while someone fetched Cormac a pint, which he declined in favor of a very large glass of water. The absolute last thing he needed was to get maudlin.
As the story unrolled the copper screwed up his face. “He’s never even seen her?”
“Naw, mate!”
“That’s nuts!” He pulled out his phone. “What’s her name? She’s got to be on Instagram.”