Not on the Ropers’, however. No tree glitters at their window, no twists of holly and ivy bedeck the door. As Clare rings the bell, holding it down for a full five seconds, a man strides past with a huge bouquet of flowers and I’m assaulted by olfactory memory: the scent of the flowers we brought the night we came for dinner, the night all of this was set in motion. The next thought comes in a furious surge: What if he’s in there, standing right next to her? This will all be over!
Before I can assess how this thought makes me feel, the door opens. Though I’ve half-prepared myself for the state Melia might be in, I can tell Clare is rocked by the sight of her. She’s swollen-faced, her hair limp and lips rough and chewed. Dressed in leggings and a fleece, she has nothing on her feet, making her a full head shorter than us. Luckily for her, all of this has the effect of stifling the barrage of insults Clare surely had ready and instead we are divided by a strange, downcast expectation.
‘Melia,’ I say into the void, ‘we’re so sorry—’
‘I don’t want to see you,’ she interrupts in a desperate, raw-throated voice. Though she raises a hand, she doesn’t quite close the door.
‘We understand you don’t want visitors right now . . .’ Clare has found her voice and it’s very different from the one I was anticipating: cool, underlaid with compassion, as if she recognizes an injured animal when she sees one. ‘But can we come in for a couple of minutes? We might be able to help you figure out what’s going on.’
Perhaps it’s a conditioned response to the voice of her professional superior, but Melia surrenders almost at once and without anyone uttering another word we are moving through the small unlit hallway, up the narrow staircase and directly into the living room, where we sit side by side on the yellow sofa.
There is a tree, a small potted one on the floor by the fireplace, a handful of baubles, a sparkly ‘M’ at the top. Who chose that ‘M’ for a star, Melia or Kit? There are only three or four cards on the mantelpiece, one I recognize as being from us. Clare always sends them through the post, even to those who live walking distance away. She likes imagining cards on the doormat, swept up and enjoyed over the first drink of the evening.
There is no offer of a drink on this occasion, though Melia looks as if she could do with something hot, her normally glowing skin tinged pale blue. It’s very cold and I remember her complaining of huge gas bills. They can’t have been cut off, can they?
Still unsure if Clare intends making accusations about the affair, I take the initiative, hardly knowing what I’m saying: ‘Melia, you probably know Kit and I had a row on the boat on Monday night, but that’s the last I saw of him, I swear. I’m sorry I didn’t pick up your calls, but I had no idea all of this was going on, and we were in Edinburgh until late last night, weren’t we, Clare?’
Melia just blinks at me, otherwise unresponsive to this gush of information.
‘Richard filled me in,’ Claire says, as if I have not spoken. ‘Are you being kept up to date? Should you even be on your own like this? It’s a hugely stressful thing to have to go through.’
‘I’m okay. I’ll be the first to hear if anything happens.’ Melia looks at her, her distress clearly unadulterated by any additional fear of her friend and colleague. Can’t she guess from Clare’s manner towards me that we’ve been discovered? Should I have texted to warn her we were coming? But even if I hadn’t had to scramble after Clare the way I did, I’d have needed to be aware of the police accessing my messages, reading meaning where there is none.
She turns her hollow gaze back to me. ‘I just want to know where he is. Or where his body is.’
‘His body?’ I give a mirthless laugh. ‘I think that’s a bit melodramatic, don’t you?’
‘Melodramatic? You just admitted you got into a fight with him! Just tell me what happened? After you got off the boat.’
‘There’s nothing to tell.’
‘Right.’ She fixes me with emotionless eyes that make what she says next sound all the more chilling: ‘I hate you, Jamie.’
Sensing a frisson of pleasure from Clare, I protest: ‘What? That’s ridiculous, I haven’t done anything!’
‘Look,’ Clare says, ‘we all know Jamie wouldn’t harm Kit. He’s not capable of it. That will be obvious to the police.’ I don’t care for her disdain, but she continues to adjourn any confrontation about the affair and, for that, I’m supremely grateful.
Melia’s attention moves from Clare to me and back again. ‘Please just go,’ she whispers. ‘Both of you.’
‘We’re going. But just answer me one thing first, Melia.’ Clare shifts closer to her, her eye contact insistent. ‘Answer me honestly . . .’
‘What?’ Melia asks, and she gazes at Clare as if with a morbid fascination she cannot hope to break.
‘Do you really not know where Kit is?’
There’s a moment of acute shock. From the street, a car engine starts, a kick of dissent. What Clare just said may not have been intended as an insult, but it’s certainly received as one and enraged eyes meet mine before Melia turns on her: ‘I beg your pardon. Why would I be in a state like this if I wasn’t terrified something horrific has happened to him? Where is it you think I think he is? On a stag weekend in Vegas?’ Her tone is hostile, haughty, but she can’t sustain it for longer than a few seconds and suddenly her face collapses and she’s weeping into her hands.
Unable to watch her, I focus on Clare, terrified she’ll escalate the argument, but again she wrong-foots me with her response. She places a gentle hand on Melia’s shaking shoulder and her tone dips in apology: ‘Oh, Melia, there could be all sorts of reasons for his going to ground. I’m sure there’ll be news soon. Good news. I’ll leave you, I didn’t come here to upset you, but let me know as soon as you hear anything. Or if you can think of any way I can help.’
‘Me too,’ I say, sidelined by that insistent first-person singular, and we leave her with her face in her hands. I am bewildered by Clare’s behaviour. Is it purely reactive, the effect of Melia’s torment dwarfing her own? Or is it more strategic: she’s waiting for a bigger stage on which to expose us for who we are? To assemble witnesses to support her?
I think, for the first time, Will she take revenge?
‘Why didn’t you mention—’ I begin, but she interrupts.
‘That’s my business. I don’t answer to you anymore.’
‘You never did,’ I say, before I can stop myself.
She comes to an abrupt stop, one foot in front of me to force me to do the same. Ah, there’s to be an announcement. ‘I never did, you say? Right. Life won’t be so different, then, will it? In case it’s not clear, don’t think for a second I’m forgiving you. We are over.’
We start walking again. I imagine the bristling hostility as a force field around us: if a third party reached towards us, they’d burn their fingers. Heavy with guilt, I remind myself that the fact that I have to grovel is at least part of the reason why I strayed in the first place.
‘Clare, about my staying in the house a few days, I—’
She interrupts with a snort of contempt. ‘Stop begging, it’s pathetic. Yes, you can stay in the house. I’ll support you till you sort out this crap with the police. It’s obvious you’re not a murderer and the last thing I want is people thinking I’ve been living with one all these years.’
‘Thank you. I’m grateful.’ And I really am, in spite of all my resentment. In spite of everything.
‘But as soon as you’re in the clear, you need to go. And when you do, I don’t ever want to hear from you again.’
I suck my lower lip. ‘I understand.’ As we reach Prospect Square, I’m conscious of ravenous hunger. I haven’t eaten since early morning. Since then, only coffee and wine. ‘Will we . . . will we still eat together?’
She rears up with fresh anger. ‘Yes, Jamie, what shall I rustle up? Boeuf bourguignon all right? Or would you prefer the fish of the day?’
I keep my voice neutral. ‘I meant, I’m going to
cook – we’ve just had all that food delivered. Would you like me to make something for you too?’
‘No thanks. I’d rather starve.’
We’ve halted on our doorstep. As she fiddles with her key, she gives an unpleasant scrape of a laugh and I can tell she wants me to ask.
‘What?’ I oblige.
‘I’m just thinking that there’s one thing I agree with Melia on.’
‘What’s that?’
‘I hate you as well.’
And it hurts. Even in the maelstrom of the rest – the pounding of my head, the ghastly arrhythmic drum of my terrified heart – it hurts.
31
28 December 2019
I wake up on Saturday wretched and unrefreshed in one of the spare bedrooms (one of the spares: I know how that sounds). Though I can use the second bathroom (second bathroom: ditto), I have to enter the marital bedroom for fresh clothes and when I do Clare assaults me on sight. And I mean assault: first, she’s slapping my face with open palms, then she’s beating my chest and shoulders with closed fists, the whole time repeating her sentiment of last night: ‘I hate you!’
‘Stop!’ I try to seize her arms but she goes on lashing out, striking a particularly unwelcome blow to the tender area of bruising left by Kit’s skull. Eventually, she crumples away, sinks onto the bench seat at the end of the bed, breathing hard.
‘How can you have fallen for such a bloodsucker, Jamie? How?’ She groans. ‘Stupid question. It’s not your blood she’s sucking. Sex. Always sex.’
Rubbing my wounds, I don’t point out that she was the one who introduced us. She would only – quite reasonably – tell me to shut the fuck up. ‘Come on, Clare, something bigger is going on than some meaningless affair – otherwise you wouldn’t have felt sorry for her last night. You didn’t behave like this with her.’ I run fingers over my stinging left cheekbone, feel the raised lines where her fingernails have broken the skin. There are going to be scratch marks.
‘Of course I felt sorry for her,’ Clare cries. ‘She thinks her husband’s dead and I’m a decent human being! And why does it have to be a showdown between women? You’re the one I’m confronting here.’
‘I know, but if you could not do it physically.’ As I gather the clothes I need, I notice there’s a packed overnight bag by the wardrobe. Downstairs, as I drink my morning coffee, I hear snatches of phone conversation – ‘Just one night, maybe two’ – and try to make sense of the thuds and slams that succeed it. When she comes down, the bag bumping at her side, I ask where she’s going.
‘If you’re going back up to Edinburgh, won’t all the trains be booked up for New Year’s? You won’t get a seat, it’ll be awful standing the whole way. Stay here, please. It’s your house.’
‘I know that,’ she snaps. ‘Are you offering to leave instead?’
I make no reply.
‘That’s right, you have rights. I’m flying, for your information, so there’s no need to concern yourself with my comfort.’
God knows how much the flight must have cost her the Saturday before Hogmanay. What a wonderful cushion money is.
Without saying goodbye, she closes the door in my face.
Upstairs, there’s further ignominy to contend with. My remaining clothes and toiletries from the master suite have been moved into the spare and dumped in a huge heap on the bed. A roll of bin liners has appeared on the dressing table, the message that I should get packing loud and clear. Decide what I’m going to donate and what I’m going to keep for my next life.
I tip the clothes onto the floor and go back to bed.
*
For once, I wish I worked weekends. Delaying re-waking – and therefore decision-making – until the afternoon, I leave the house and walk down to the pier, the commuter who won’t take a day off. Okay, it’s more than force of habit, I admit I’m hoping Melia might be walking on the river path, fleeing the cabin fever of her waiting game to get some air. But the riverside is deserted, the water a sullen grey, and she is nowhere in sight.
With the powerful need to do something constructive, I retrace my steps from Monday night, from jetty to Prospect Square, checking for the security cameras in which I’ve so emphatically put my faith. As well as the one mounted on the front wall of Mariners, there is at least one traffic camera, as well as a private surveillance camera above the door of a large house on the western corner of Prospect Square.
Reaching number 15, I pass the gate and return to the river by the second, lesser-known route accessed from the eastern side of the square, which leads down Pepys Road, a dead-end used mostly by construction vehicles heading for the new apartment complex going up, St Mary’s Wharf (‘Riverside Forever Homes’, for fuck’s sake). The road ends about twenty metres from the water, at which point the river path is reachable only on foot and via an insalubrious alleyway yet to be improved by the developers. I don’t see a single camera between my own door and the stretch of river path leading to the Hope & Anchor, including the blackspot I mentioned to the detectives. No drug dealers today, only a couple of homeless guys who’ve managed to furnish themselves with fags and booze and who call out festive greetings to me from the bushes.
It’s as I pass the door of the pub that I think I hear it: Kit’s laughter, the distinctive discharge of it, somewhere within. I pivot with a dancer’s precision and go inside. Other than the main room overlooking the water, where I’ve drunk frequently with Kit, the rooms are of the poky, low-ceilinged style I dislike, the stairwells unpleasantly confined, but I sweep systematically from corner to corner. There is no sign of him. The two lavatories are vacant.
I must look forlorn because the barman tries to help out. ‘Who’re you looking for?’
I don’t recognize him as regular staff and so I find a picture of Kit on my phone and show it to him. ‘A friend of mine, a short bloke, about thirty?’
‘Oh, I know Kit,’ he says.
Of course he does.
‘Haven’t seen him for a few days, mind you—’ As if only now registering the enquiry – or my face – properly, he presses his lips tightly together, which I take to be a subconscious sign that the police have been in and asked him not to mention it to anyone.
‘Thanks anyway.’ Since I’m here, I down a double G&T that I really shouldn’t be spending money on when I have free booze at home. I take a seat in the main window and send Kit another message: Where are you? But the text, like the one sent yesterday, brings only a ‘message failed’ notification. I look out at the Thames, consider its unknowable depths. Is that where Kit’s phone is? Down there, on the riverbed? I saw an exhibition once of phones found in the Thames, from the earliest brick models to the latest iPhones. Each one had an owner with a story about its loss. Maybe in the case of one or two sad souls, the story died with the owner.
Feeling a flare of fury, I push my empty glass from me and stride out. This won’t work, being haunted by the bastard everywhere I go.
*
Other than a voicemail left for my father in which I neglect to mention that I’m now a single man soon to be of no fixed abode, my communications over the rest of the day are spartan, characterized mostly by unanswered texts. There’s one to Clare to ask how long she’ll be away. I imagine her with her family, telling an appalled audience of my betrayal, an excellent whisky at their disposal. Will they express shock and dismay or will they say, Well, we’ve always thought there was something shiftless about him?
When she fails to reply, I make a more specific appeal to Dad:
What are you doing on NYE? Would you like to come to London?
He won’t answer either, at least not promptly. He treats his mobile like a live grenade. I’ll need to call his landline to repeat the invitation. Even so, I check my texts constantly. What power these things have, as if words lit on a screen are more significant than those produced by the human voice. I remember presenting the detectives with that text to Kit, like I was a magician, a mesmerist.
I had to show him I w
asn’t intimidated.
I had to get the last word.
With hours to fill and a taste for G&Ts freely indulged, I replay my police interview, teasing the details from a short-term memory that retains a fraction of the information it would have done twenty years ago. I know why I was singled out, of course – if I were drawing up the list I would have put my name top, too – but why in person and not over the phone? Why two detectives, not one? Someone had convinced them that I warranted intercepting in that fashion and to my knowledge there were only two people they interviewed before me: Melia and this other passenger, possibly named Sarah Miller.
I can’t shake the thought of the hater from the Tube. I know I shut down the email account she used to harass me, and I’m certain she never signed her name, anyway, but there was an email address for her that I retrieved from my bank of bad memories when talking to the detectives. Weren’t there three letters, initials, perhaps? STM or SBM? Could they stand for Sarah Miller?
What goes around comes around . . . That’s what she’d said.
Or maybe Sarah Miller really is part of another investigation. Think. Maybe there’s a more obvious candidate, someone who’s been party to the tensions between Kit and me and who may even have rivalrous feelings towards me. And I know he was on the boat that night because I bought him a drink! Adrenaline courses through me as I find Steve’s number on the water rats’ WhatsApp group and tap out an individual message:
This is Jamie. Have you been telling the police lies about me?
His reply comes within ten minutes:
What lies?
I just want to know. Be honest with me PLEASE!
You been on the sherry, mate? I’ve told the police nothing. Take it no news on Kit?
In the time it takes for the adrenaline to drain, I have understood that my theory is preposterous. My phone rings – Steve – but I decline the call.
The Other Passenger Page 18