That Isn't Your Wife

Chapter 1: The Woman Who Knew Hands

Lucy Paterson had learned to find people by their shoes long before she knew there was a name for what was wrong with her.

At half past six on a gray April morning, Glasgow Queen Street station was full of shoes. Polished brogues hurried toward the Edinburgh train. White trainers went past with their laces trailing. A pair of red patent heels clicked like a metronome across the concourse and disappeared down the stairs to the low-level platforms. Lucy stood at the far end of platform seven with her medical bag between her feet and watched them all go by. Shoes stayed the same from one minute to the next. Faces did not. Faces, for Lucy, had never stayed anything at all.

She could see them perfectly well. That was the part people never understood, on the rare occasions she had tried to explain. She could see a nose and a mouth and a pair of eyes, the color of someone's hair, a beard or the lack of one. What she could not do was hold them together. The moment she looked away, the face slipped out of her memory like water out of a cupped hand, and the next time she saw it, it belonged to a stranger. Her own reflection in a shop window could catch her off guard. When she was seven, her mother had stood at the school gate in a navy coat, and Lucy had walked confidently across the playground and taken the hand of a different woman in a different navy coat.

The neurologist who finally gave it a name, when she was twenty-two, called it prosopagnosia. Face blindness. He said it the way a mechanic might name a rattle in an engine. Then he told her there was no treatment, only strategies, and Lucy had laughed out loud, because she had been using strategies her whole life. Voices. Walks. Hands. Scars. Habits. The way a man cleared his throat before he lied. The way a woman jingled her keys when she was nervous. Lucy knew people the way a blind person might know a room: by everything except the one thing everybody else used.

She had never told anyone at work. Not once, in eleven years of nursing.

Beyond the end of the platform, the reason she was here sat waiting in the morning mist.

The Strathmore Sleeper was eight carriages long and painted the deep green of wet pine needles, lined in cream and gold. Brass lettering ran along the side of every coach. The windows were tall and polished, and behind them Lucy could see lamps with fringed shades, white tablecloths, and silver laid out for breakfast. A diesel locomotive in matching paint idled at the front, breathing a thin plume of exhaust into the cold air. A red carpet ran the length of the platform, and men in black jackets were setting out brass posts and velvet ropes for the press.

The coaches had been built in 1927 for a railway company that no longer existed. They had spent forty years rotting in a siding in Fife until a hotelier named Malcolm Aitken bought them for scrap and spent, according to the newspapers, six million pounds turning them back into something beautiful. Today they would carry thirty-two guests and fourteen staff on the inaugural four-night Highland circuit: north from Glasgow along Loch Lomond, up to Fort William and the coast at Mallaig, back across Rannoch Moor, and on through Perthshire to finish at Edinburgh Waverley.

And somewhere among the fourteen staff was the sole medic. Lucy.

Nobody else had wanted the job. She knew that because the advert had run three times. Four nights on call, no doctor aboard, no backup except a satellite phone and a rescue helicopter that might or might not be able to fly. The pay was decent for a holiday job and dreadful for a nurse with her experience. Any sensible emergency nurse would have looked at the advert and laughed.

Lucy was not, at the moment, a sensible emergency nurse. As far as most people who mattered were concerned, she was not any kind of nurse at all. She had resigned from Glasgow Royal Infirmary eighteen months ago and had spent the time since working in a garden center in Bearsden, watering geraniums and being called "hen" by retired men who wanted to know where the compost was kept. When the advert came up a third time, she applied before she could talk herself out of it. She sat in the interview with her hands folded in her lap so they wouldn't shake, and she talked.

She talked about trauma care and remote medicine and the night she had kept a man with a severed artery alive in the back of a taxi on the Gallowgate. She did not talk about why she had left the Royal. Malcolm Aitken did not ask. He had been too pleased that somebody wanted the job at all.

"You'll be the nurse."

The voice came from just behind her left shoulder. Lucy turned. A woman in a dark green uniform jacket stood there with a clipboard, and Lucy took her in quickly, the way she always did, filing away what mattered. A soft Highland voice with the vowels rounded at the edges. A heavy ring of keys on her belt that chimed whenever she moved. A red tartan lanyard. A faint smell of peppermint. Sensible black shoes with a crease worn across the left toe.

"Lucy Paterson," Lucy said, and held out her hand.

"Ailsa McLean. Train manager." The handshake was quick and dry. "Which means if it breaks, leaks, catches fire or complains, it comes to me. You're in the staff car, number seven. The medical compartment is at the far end, next to the baggage van. Come on and I'll show you before the circus starts."

Lucy picked up her bag and followed the chime of the keys.

---

The staff car was plainer than the rest of the train but still handsome, all dark wood paneling and brass fittings. A narrow corridor ran down one side past a row of small doors. Ailsa pointed out a galley, a linen store, and a cramped office with a radio set on the desk and a board of brass hooks holding spare keys. Then she opened the door to Lucy's berth, which was the size of a large wardrobe and held a fold-down bed with a tartan blanket.

"Not the Ritz," Ailsa said. "But you'll be in the other place most of the time."

The other place was at the very end of the coach. A small brass plate on the door read MEDICAL. Inside was a compartment about eight feet square. A padded couch ran along one wall with restraint straps folded underneath it. There was an oxygen cylinder clamped in a bracket, a defibrillator in its yellow case, a sharps bin, a tiny sink, and a metal cabinet bolted to the wall with two locks. Opposite the corridor door was a second, narrower door with a small window of wired glass.

"That goes through to the baggage van," Ailsa said. "Fire regulations want a second way out. We keep it shut. There's nothing back there but luggage and the wine stores, and it's cold as charity. No heating in the van at all."

Lucy set her bag on the couch and unlocked the cabinet with the keys Ailsa handed her. Everything had been supplied by a private pharmacy in Paisley from a list Lucy had drawn up herself. Adrenaline. Antihistamines. Morphine, counted and signed for. Inhalers. Aspirin, glucose gel, a spray for angina. And a small white box of midazolam: ten glass ampoules of clear liquid nested in a cardboard tray. It was a powerful sedative, there for seizures that would not stop and for patients so agitated they were a danger to themselves.

She did not like looking at it. The last time she had drawn up midazolam, a man had died.

She counted it anyway. Ten. She counted the morphine. Then she did what she had planned to do from the start: she moved the midazolam box and two ampoules of morphine into the locked inner pouch of her medical bag. On a moving train with no doctor, a seizing patient could not wait while she ran back to a cabinet. The drugs would travel with her. So would the controlled drugs register, a stiff little black book with numbered pages that fit into the same pouch.

She wrote the date and the stock in her small, neat capitals and signed it. *L. Paterson.* She always made her L with a single straight stroke and a short foot, like a printed letter. A primary school teacher had once tried to make her loop it, and Lucy had refused. It was a small thing. She liked small things that stayed the same.

"Methodical," Ailsa said from the doorway.

"Habit."

"Good habit." The keys chimed. "Mr. Aitken's coming down. Brace yourself."

Lucy heard him before she saw him. Quick, heavy footsteps thudded along the corridor carpet, and a man's voice was saying into a phone, "No. No, I want the drone shot as we cross the viaduct, not before." Then a wave of sandalwood cologne arrived, strong enough to taste, and a man in a dark suit filled the doorway.

She remembered him from the interview by that cologne and by one other thing, which she watched for now. There it was. As he spoke, he tapped a heavy gold signet ring against the doorframe, three times, like a man knocking to be let in.

"Miss Paterson. Settling in?"

"Yes, thank you, Mr. Aitken."

"Good. Good." Tap, tap, tap. "I'll be frank, because I don't have time to be anything else. These are the most important four days of my life. I've got investors aboard. I've got the press aboard. I've got Serena Wells aboard, and Serena Wells has eleven million followers, and every one of them is going to see this train. I need everything to be perfect. What I need from you is very simple." He pointed at her, not unkindly. "Be invisible. Be there if somebody twists an ankle or swallows a fishbone, and the rest of the time, don't be noticed. Can you do that?"

Lucy almost smiled. She had spent her whole life not being noticed. It was the only way to stop people noticing what she could not do.

"I can do that," she said.

"Excellent." He had already turned away, phone back at his ear. "Ailsa, the champagne. Where is the champagne?"

The cologne followed him down the corridor. Ailsa tilted her head back in what Lucy guessed was an eye roll, and went after him.

Alone, Lucy locked the cabinet. Above the little sink hung a mirror in a brass frame. She looked into it and saw a woman of thirty-four with short brown hair and a pale, tired face. She knew it was her because there was nobody else in the room. If she had passed that woman on Sauchiehall Street, she would not have known her.

Thirty-two guests. Fourteen staff. Forty-six people she would have to learn in four days, by their voices and shoes and hands, without anyone guessing why she looked at them the way she did.

No one aboard knew. She meant to keep it that way.