Do we?
*
Senseless, I know, because Clare won’t be home for hours yet, but it’s with a terrible foreboding that I enter Prospect Square and approach number 15. By the time I’ve put my key in the lock, I’m fully expecting it not to fit, for the locks to have been changed, or at the very least for me to find bin liners of my clothes heaped in the hallway. Smashed photograph frames, my passport savaged, toothbrush snapped in two.
But all is as it should be. My clothes are alongside Clare’s in the wardrobe in the master bedroom and the kitschy photo of us at a tea ceremony in Kyoto remains on the mantelpiece. My passport and toothbrush are intact.
I make a coffee and sit on the sofa with the iPad to search online for news of Kit’s disappearance – information might have circulated in spite of the police’s preference to keep investigations below the radar – but there is nothing. I check the name ‘Sarah Miller’ and find three hundred million listings. There are thousands on LinkedIn, almost two hundred of those in the UK. Am I really going to track down every one and demand to know if she took the river bus to St Mary’s on Monday night? And if I do by some miracle identify the right individual, will she co-operate? Like me, she’ll have been asked not to talk about the investigation and she might report my approach to Parry and Merchison, make me look more suspicious, not less.
I check on Kit again. Still nothing.
I know I ought to be careful of my online activity from now on. If the police do suspect me of foul play and are monitoring it, it might look like unusual levels of interest.
On the other hand, wouldn’t any friend be searching constantly for updates? Wouldn’t any friend be on the streets scouring in person, out of their mind with worry? Making notes of remembered details that might prove useful, scraps of conversation that contain clues.
If the police even believe I was a friend in the first place. I text Kit’s phone for the first time since Monday night:
Where the hell are you? Everyone’s worried sick!
But the message fails to send.
29
27 December 2019
Clare comes home at five thirty – early for her, she must have cancelled her evening viewings – and hurries straight over to hug me. There is licorice on her breath from the little Italian sweets she eats when she craves a cigarette, the only sign that she is anywhere near as agitated as I am.
‘I know we just talked about cooling things with Kit, but I didn’t mean for him to literally vanish!’
‘I know.’ I remember my suggestion about adjusting my hours in the New Year and changing to a different boat from him, but right now, the idea that my working life will proceed along controlled lines feels like a fantasy. ‘Have you seen Melia?’
‘No, she wasn’t in. She rang Richard this morning. Played it down from what I can gather, said it’s not the first time he’s gone AWOL, but obviously I knew from you it’s more serious than she’s letting on. I mean, to report him missing! She must know this isn’t just his usual drinking session – I mean, who with? Everyone will’ve been with their families over Christmas, won’t they? Like us.’
Like us. The words cause a lurch of remorse.
Clare shrugs off her coat, drapes it over the back of the sofa. ‘Poor thing, I hope she hasn’t been dealing with this on her own. Richard’s told her to take a few days’ compassionate leave. She won’t be able to think straight until she finds Kit. Where the hell is he, d’you think?’
I exhale noisily through my mouth. ‘I have no idea. Did the police call you?’
‘Yes, just now.’
Well, they can’t have told her of the affair or she wouldn’t be talking to me like this. The thought is less relaxing than I’d hoped. There’s something dangerous simmering within me. ‘They’ll be ringing everyone he knows, Melia must’ve given them a list. What did they ask you?’
‘Just when I saw him last, which was weeks ago, so no use to them. Also, what time you got home on Monday night.’
Which presumably was of use to them.
‘What did you say?’
‘Eleven forty. I looked at my phone when you woke me up, so it was easy to remember. They said you were the last to see him. Is that true?’
I shrug. ‘As far as they seem to know, yes, but I don’t see how I can have been. If he didn’t go home, he must have gone to meet someone, or to a bar.’
Clare pulls a face. ‘Maybe he carried on drinking somewhere and went to sleep under a bush or something, in which case he could have caught hypothermia. I assume they’ve tried all the hospitals?’
‘I guess so, they didn’t say.’ It strikes me that in my extended chat with the two detectives I gathered very little information for myself.
‘Well, he didn’t reach home, that’s established,’ Clare says. ‘Melia went to bed early, apparently, and when she got up and realized he hadn’t come home, she assumed he must have stayed out with you. Then she discovered his phone was dead and started getting worried. She couldn’t get hold of you, or me – it must have been a complete nightmare for her.’
She sets about turning on the lamps I have left unlit, restoring us to normality. The Christmas tree lights, in the window at the front, are on a timer and so have been twinkling for some time and I feel an ache of regret for all the future Christmases that I won’t be enjoying here. Because everything’s changed now. She leaves the room and a minute later, I hear the fridge door open and close, the musical clink of glassware on worktop.
Then she’s back, with two oversized glasses of white wine that must contain half a bottle each. I told myself on the way home that I wouldn’t drink this evening – with the police interested enough to intercept me on my way to work, I need to keep my wits about me, remember every word I say and to whom. But the pull is too powerful and I take the glass, swallow gratefully.
‘God knows what Melia’s feeling right now.’ Clare arranges herself next to me on the sofa, her face close enough for me to feel the heat of her breath. I have a sudden and terrifying premonition of discovery, of conflict, seeing with hallucinatory clarity her wine flying the short distance from glass to my face. I can feel the cold sting of it in my eyes.
She sinks back, takes a sip. ‘Should we go round there, do you think?’
I look just past her candid, caring gaze. ‘I don’t know. She might be with the police, one of those family liaison types.’
‘I doubt it. I mean, would they have the manpower for that? Half our industry was off work today, so it must be the same for the police, all the public services – they can’t possibly be laying on the full works. Let’s go round after we’ve finished these. We can’t just leave her to suffer, can we? It’s been, what, four days? She must be assuming the worst by now. I know I would be with a boyfriend like that.’
I take a deep draught of wine and then speak very carefully: ‘I think you should go on your own, Clare.’
She frowns. ‘Why?’
‘Because the police asked me not to go near her.’ There’s a cold prickle at the back of my neck as I realize I haven’t phrased this skilfully enough. The sense of premonition deepens and I recognize it for what it is: the slippery, bucking, lunatic impulse to confess.
‘Why?’ she asks a second time.
‘I suppose because I argued with Kit on Monday, so they think I might be involved in his disappearance in some way. And I ignored her calls – maybe that looks bad.’
‘I didn’t know you ignored her calls. Why didn’t you pick up?’
‘Because it was Christmas and I didn’t think they were anything important.’ I can hardly use the excuse I gave the detectives: the awkwardness of taking calls from your lover while a guest in your partner’s parents’ home. ‘What could we have done from Edinburgh, anyway? Melia’s got other friends, hasn’t she? They would have helped her.’
Clare stares at me, her head tilting fractionally. ‘Did something happen on Monday you haven’t told me about? After you got to St Mary’s?’
I shrink slightly from her scrutiny. ‘No. I didn’t see him again, I swear. They’ve already looked at the security film on the boat, they know I got off first. And even if he was walking behind me the whole way, once they check the other cameras they’ll see I came straight here.’
‘So they literally met you off the boat this morning? That must have been a shock?’
‘Yes.’ I keep my voice steady. ‘It was pretty early.’
She shakes her head. ‘I don’t understand why they’re so interested in you. What motive could you possibly have to harm him?’
I shrug.
‘What did you argue about? You still haven’t said.’
My continued silence serves only to steer her towards her next, most damning query: ‘Why aren’t you really allowed to see Melia?’ And I watch helplessly as her mind files through the possibilities, her head quite still.
She’ll throw me out, I think. Where am I going to go? My heart rate accelerates even before she says it, an animal reacting to its predator’s pheromones:
‘Oh my God, I know what you argued about. I know why the police wanted to talk to you.’
‘Clare—’ I leave her name hanging. There’s no script for this; it’s a testament of my cowardice that in all the months of my affair I have never rehearsed this showdown. Now that it’s happening, I know instinctively I should deny, deny, deny, but sheer stupefaction gets the better of me and I say nothing at all. I’m no longer thinking.
A flush spreads over her face and she blinks as if to refresh her vision. ‘Something’s been going on between you and Melia. You and Melia.’ She repeats her name in an altered tone, disgust thickening her voice like mucus. As I finally begin my denials, she breaks in, right in my face, her breath coming rapidly: ‘How long? And don’t insult me by lying. No more lies.’
‘Since the spring,’ I say, at last.
‘What does that mean? May?’
‘March,’ I admit.
That’s a second shock, I can tell. She’s wondering how she could have been unaware of what must have been an attraction from the get-go. She’s probably thinking, Well, of course he would fancy her, but what would she see in him? Or maybe I’m doing her a disservice. Another one. Oh, shit, why the hell aren’t I denying it? Denying it and counterpunching with injured pride?
‘Where did you meet? Not here?’ Not in my house. Even in this moment of profound crisis, the inference goads me.
‘No, at a friend of hers’ place.’
‘How often? Once a month?’ Her words come in gulps. ‘Once a week?’
‘About that, I suppose.’
‘So you’ve had sex, let’s see . . .’ She tots up the weeks, nine months’ worth. ‘Thirty-five, forty times. More, probably. Or is it waning a bit now? Hang on a minute, they got married in August . . .’ As the next dirt-encrusted penny drops, she begins to tremble. ‘You continued after that? That’s the lowest of the low, Jamie. Even if you couldn’t give a shit about me, what about Kit? You were one of their witnesses.’
I stay silent. Anything I say will be ammunition smashed back at me.
‘Did he find out? Is that what you were rowing about? You need to tell me, Jamie, this is bloody serious, it could be seen as a motive for murder!’
‘I know that!’ I find my voice. ‘He didn’t find out, no, but he was slagging her off and threatening me and I got angry. I was worried he would go back and, I don’t know, hurt her or something. You know what they’re like.’
There’s an uncomfortable sense to this last statement, an implication that I acted to intercept him, but fortunately Clare doesn’t pick up on it. ‘Evidently I haven’t got a clue what any of you are like.’
I breathe deeply, slowly, knowing I must get this right, that this is now crisis control of the highest order: ‘Clare, I’m sorry you had to find out this way, I really am. I know there’s no way back from it, but I honestly don’t think Kit’s going missing has got anything to do with me. Or her. I told the police I think this might be drugs-related.’
But I’m a fool to think I can wrench control of this dialogue: Kit’s whereabouts are disregarded while she processes my betrayal. She’s on her feet now, hands shaking so the wine threatens to spill. Her face twists with fury. ‘All this time she’s been acting like I’m her mentor. Women helping women. Woman screwing women, more like!’
‘Don’t fire her, Clare.’
She looks for somewhere to put down her glass, stumbling slightly, fighting tears. ‘I couldn’t even if I wanted to. It’s not illegal to seduce a colleague’s partner of ten years, just fucking rude.’ Her neck is streaked with high colour, hair dishevelled from her pulling at it; she looks both wild and destroyed. ‘I can’t believe this is happening. I want you to leave. Get out.’
I experience a whoosh of horror. And not only horror but also, farcically, given how much I’ve risked and how long I’ve been risking it, surprise. Surprise that she’s exercising the power that’s been hiding in plain sight all these years, even when a well-paid career of mine afforded me the illusion of equality: this is her castle and I’ve been allowed to be king of it only on a grace-and-favour basis. If it were the other way around and she had been unfaithful to me, I would still be the one who had to beg for the stay of execution.
I keep my voice level. ‘Come on, that’s not fair. This is my home, my home of ten years, I must have some rights. Let me stay until I sort something out. I’ll move to the spare room, I’ll keep out of your way.’
‘I know you will, you won’t be here. I can’t speak to you anymore, I can’t look at you.’ She retreats and I hear her in the loo under the stairs, fan turning, water splashing.
This is bad, I think. Trembling, I finish my wine, rehearse my next pleas: Please, can you just let me stay another week, till the New Year . . .
The doorbell rings – our online grocery order – and bag after bag is passed across the threshold. The delivery guy tells me he’s worked non-stop over the holidays and I fish in my pockets for a tip.
‘Much obliged.’ If he hears the sound of a woman weeping a few feet away, he makes no remark. Maybe it’s not the only evidence of domestic dysfunction he’s witnessed this shift (isn’t it the case that more divorces are initiated after Christmas than at other time of year?).
When he’s gone, I knock on the loo door and call out, ‘Please, Clare, can we talk about this?’
‘Go away,’ she responds, the words muffled by the door between us and by her tears. ‘Go away.’
And I think, with disgraceful relief, that ‘Go away’ is at least a notch of an improvement on ‘Get out’.
30
27 December 2019
I’m startled awake by the sound of a door thumping shut, a vibration in my body, and I think for a moment I’m on the riverboat, absorbing the sickly bounce of the tide as heating pumps through the cabin, smothering me. (I dream of the river often now.) But then I feel the brief dip in temperature as the outside air reaches my skin and the living-room furniture takes shape.
Having unpacked the shopping while Clare was still holed up in the loo, I’d succumbed to the nervous exhaustion of the day and drifted off on the sofa. For how long? An hour, at least.
I stagger up, grab my jacket and tear out into the cold. From the doorstep, I catch a fragment of scarlet puffa jacket near the railings on the western side of the square; the faint crack of Clare’s boot heels on pavement. She’s heading towards the high street.
‘Clare? Clare!’ I sprint to catch her up. ‘Where are you going? Not to Melia’s?’
She doesn’t slacken her pace as she addresses me sideways. ‘Right first time.’
‘But why?’
‘Why?’ She gives an open-mouthed cackle of laughter, her breath a succession of puffs in front of her face ‘Because I’ve got a couple of questions for the slut, that’s why.’
The same insult Kit used. They’re all calling her that and she doesn’t deserve it. But I have to pick my battles. Defending
her to Kit was one thing, but defending her to Clare is more than my life’s worth.
‘I’ll come with you.’ I’m breathing heavily after the dash, recoiling from the bite of the chill on my face. The threatened storm hasn’t yet broken, but the wind is low and strong, picking up leaves and runaway litter. A putrid odour reaches my nose.
‘I thought you said you weren’t allowed?’ Clare snaps. ‘Can’t keep away, can you?’
‘Listen, I know you don’t want to hear it, but I’m convinced all of this is to do with drugs. I think maybe Kit owed his dealers money and they took him down.’
‘“Took him down”? Are you for real?’ Her tone is full of the contempt she normally reserves for politicians on TV and clients who turn out to be time wasters.
‘I am for real, yes! There’s all this knife crime now, it’s in the papers every day. People are killing each other over trivial things, like just looking at someone the wrong way. We like to think that this stuff is only ever gang-related, but it could happen to anyone.’
‘Far more likely he’s topped himself because he can’t bear being with her a moment longer.’
‘You don’t mean that, Clare.’
Her snarl begins in profile and ends face-on, just as we reach the high street and draw up at the kerb. ‘Don’t tell me what I mean.’ And she marches into the road with only the briefest regard for an oncoming single-decker bus, which blares its horn and brakes. Delayed by this and a pair of cyclists, I scurry after her towards the Lamb, the only pub on this stretch. On the pavement outside, smokers notice our fierce, unhappy faces, out of kilter with the prevailing Friday-night spirit. Will someone report us, I wonder: a wild-looking man stalking a well-dressed woman? A second account of his suspicious behaviour in four days? At the thought, I hang back; only when we reach Tiding Street do I draw level again. The street is a far more alluring prospect than on previous occasions, the residents of Victorian cottages clearly recognizing that this is their time of year: there are beautifully decked trees in almost every window and wreaths adorning most of the doors.
The Other Passenger Page 17