I try not to look up, I try to read the free newspaper I was handed on my way into the station, but the words blur in front of my eyes, nothing holds my interest. The train lurches and sways around the bend, slowing as it approaches a red signal. I can feel my fellow commuters shift in their seats, rustle their newspapers, tap at their computers. They're slow to answer, it jingles on and on around me. Someone's phone is ringing, an incongruously joyful and upbeat song. There's something comforting about the sight of strangers safe at home. Twice a day, I am offered a view into other lives, just for a moment. I see them as others do not even their owners probably don't see them from this perspective. My head leaning against the carriage window, I watch these houses roll past me like a tracking shot in a film. The train crawls along it judders past warehouses and water towers, bridges and sheds, past modest Victorian houses, their backs turned squarely to the track. The journey is supposed to take fifty-four minutes, but it rarely does: this section of the track is ancient, decrepit, beset with signalling problems and never-ending engineering works. Someone in the seat behind me gives a sigh of helpless irritation the 8:04 slow train from Ashbury to Euston can test the patience of the most seasoned commuter. The train jolts and scrapes and screeches back into motion, the little pile of clothes disappears from view and we trundle on towards London, moving at a brisk jogger's pace. I can't help it, I catch sight of these discarded scraps, a dirty T-shirt or a lonesome shoe, and all I can think of is the other shoe and the feet that fitted into them. My mother used to tell me that I had an overactive imagination Tom said that, too. It could have been left behind by the engineers who work this part of the track, they're here often enough. It's probably rubbish, part of a load dumped into the scrubby little wood up the bank. Light-blue clotha shirt, perhapsjumbled up with something dirty white. There is a pile of clothing on the side of the train tracks. I can see them now, black against the sun. I can hear the magpiesthey're laughing, mocking me, a raucous cackling. My head is thick with sounds, my mouth thick with blood. I'm stuck on three, I just can't get any further. One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl . . . She'll sleep peacefully there, no one to disturb her, no sounds but birdsong and the rumble of passing trains. I didn't want to draw attention to her resting place, but I couldn't leave her without remembrance. Not more than a little pile of stones, really.

She's buried beneath a silver birch tree, down towards the old train tracks, her grave marked with a cairn.

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins