Think again, Kit.
38
1 January 2020
I take a pace forward and place myself in their path. I haven’t rehearsed my first words and when they come they are dismayingly prosaic and utterly right: ‘Well, well, who do we have here?’
They both stop dead, just a few feet in front of me. Kit is a step closer, close enough for me to witness the shock flooding his pale features. He’s let himself go in his eight days of lying low, excursions limited to late-night walks in the dark with Melia along the deserted river path. He’s needed the human contact, needed his Melia maintenance. I haven’t asked her if she’s slept with him, but it seems unlikely that she would have undressed in some squalid hostel. A kiss, perhaps, with this bearded, semi-vagrant Kit.
It’s good he looks so rough. That will help.
He has recognized me, of course, and is instantly combative, an animal sensing a trap. ‘What the fuck are you doing down here, you prick?’ His voice has the hoarseness of disuse. He turns to Melia, anger and panic exploding from him: ‘Can you believe this? This is a fucking disaster, Me!’
‘Kit, wait—’ she begins, but he speaks over her, spinning back to me, his mouth twisted with contempt.
‘Why are you lying in wait like some fucking psycho? What do you want?’
‘I’m not lying in wait, don’t flatter yourself.’ My tone is lethally cold. ‘I’ve just been to the New Year’s party at the Hope and Anchor. Getting some air before I head home. Back to my lovely Georgian townhouse.’
Though the line about the party is rehearsed, the taunting detail about the house is unexpectedly real, a last opportunity to lord it over him. I watch him grapple with the claim that this meeting is coincidental. He wants to believe it. He has little choice but to believe it.
‘Kit.’ Melia tries again, but he ignores her and edges closer to me, so close I can smell the confinement on him, humid and sour.
‘Don’t you tell a soul you’ve seen me, all right? I need your word on that, Jamie.’
‘Or else?’
‘Or else I’ll kill you.’ His eyes flick to the river. He would do it, as well. He would tip me over the wall and watch me drown. I picture my own face on the surface, stealing a final breath before the water turns it black, and suddenly, before anything, above all else, I crave a confession.
‘I know what you’re doing,’ I say, straying from the script. ‘You’re in hiding, you can only come out at night like the vampire you are. You’re setting me up.’ My voice breaks with sudden, rogue emotion: the lowest, bleakest sense of lost friendship, of betrayal. I’m breathing heavily, starting to forget Melia is there. ‘You really would see me rot in jail, wouldn’t you? Just for a payout.’
‘What the fuck?’ He denies it, of course. ‘You’re losing your mind, Jamie. Must be dementia at your age, eh? Just go home, yeah. Forget this happened. No one would believe you, anyway – I hear the police are all over you already.’
I brace, feel the strength gathering in my shoulders. ‘I’m not going anywhere. Not until I hear it from your lips, that you’ve set me up.’
He continues to protest, at the same time shoving me, so I slam against the river wall, adrenaline stifling the worst of the pain. Our body heat is magnetic, we’re clinging as if we’re down a well together, nothing to clutch but each other. This is not brawling, as it was on the boat, but mutual primitive terror. ‘Say it,’ I growl. ‘Say it.’
A figure moves in my peripheral vision with a dancer’s grace, a steel blade raised that will slice through clothing like butter. The angle of entry has been studied on websites that supply such information, googled on borrowed devices.
There is an instant of acute horror when Melia looks beyond him to me and I think, She’s going for me, not him, but it’s delirium, of course, the final, most fantastical projection of my paranoia.
She loves me.
She chose me.
Now Kit utters a succession of noises unconnected to rational language. I couldn’t have asked for a more perfect expression on his face as he collapses against me: surprise dawning, but not allowed fully to rise. A beautiful sunrise blotted by a flock of swallows – or maybe a toxic ash cloud.
I step back and let go of him, and he’s falling to the ground with a heavy thwack. He’s remembering language and saying my name, begging for help, crying for his mum. But all too soon his airways are filling with blood and he can no longer voice his terror. There’s a scraping noise from one of his hands, before defter fingers than his remove something from his grip – a phone. Then, with a clean arc, it flies over the wall into the water.
An arrow of steel follows.
We wait, and, as his final breaths are drawn at our feet, we stare down at him. Bless him, I think, unexpectedly. There was no guarantee I’d be found guilty – or even charged – and without a body there’d have been those seven years to endure before he could be declared dead and the insurance payment made. That’s trust for you. That’s love. Of course, his clear preference was for plan A, the swifter, more ruthless solution. All he’d have needed then was his new passport and he’d have been off somewhere hot and cheap while he waited for Melia to join him.
Sorry, Kit, there’s no passport. A murder conviction without any evidence of human remains? Come on, that happens once in a blue moon. Of course insurance companies want a body.
And that’s what they’re going to get.
‘Let’s get this finished,’ Melia says, and together we drag him behind the shrubbery on the far side of the path. There is blood by the wall, but that can’t be removed and in any case may prove a useful guide for the early-morning runners and dogwalkers who will stride past in a matter of hours, hungover and resolved to cleaning up their act. New Year, New Me. One of them will find him, led by a dog’s inquisitive nose, if not their own eyes.
When the police tell Melia where Kit’s body has been found, she will confess she knows the spot. She knows it because he has told her he meets his dealer here. She doesn’t know the dealer’s name, no, but she’ll remind them of his debts – debts that any financial investigator can confirm. She’s feared that since his disappearance he’s fallen into semi-vagrancy, like some of the other addicts she’s seen; she’s searched and searched – even going out in the dead of night – but never been able to find him. She’s been so worried, what with knife crime being on the rise, practically an epidemic.
‘Are you all right?’ I ask her.
‘Yes, I think so. You?’
‘Can’t stop shaking.’
I feel her grip on my arm, firm and steadying. ‘Keep going.’
In the breath of the sleeping river, we change out of our clothes and shoes and into fresh ones carried by Melia in her pack. The old go in the pack and are tossed into the water. At home, I’ll undress and put everything in the washing machine, just in case some fibre from him, some spot of blood, has attached itself. Melia will do the same.
We’ve been through the scenario, the psychology, scores of times, we both know the script by heart, but I still confirm my next line before we part. ‘As soon as I hear he’s been found, I’ll send you a text message of condolence. Clare and I will send you a card.’
‘Thank you.’ There’s grace in those two words, a sense of something still spared for her former lover. ‘I’ll invite you to the funeral. You and Clare.’
‘We’ll come.’
‘I love you,’ she says, as gentle engine sounds rise from the water; scraps of human voices. I repeat the words back to her in a whisper.
‘It’s just us now.’
I repeat this too, though it is not quite true. There’s still a way to go in this plot of ours, still other players to handle – not least Clare, who, as she keeps proving in new and dangerous ways, is no fool. But the hardest part is done. Melia will have her dead body, get her payout, and all that will remain will be to decide where to meet, where to locate our future together, where to spend her money.
I take one last lo
ok at Kit, a form now, not a man. The departed. I have a grotesquely clear memory of him sitting next to me on the boat that first morning, grinning and preening, saying, I plan to stay alive.
Well, death is what happens when you’re making plans, if you’ll allow the misquote.
39
1 January 2020
A word of advice to would-be killers: when you’re waiting for a body to be discovered, don’t look too expectant. Don’t pick up your phone before it rings. Don’t watch the window or spring to the door at the faintest scuff of a footstep on the pavement outside.
‘Waiting for a delivery?’ Clare asks.
‘No.’
‘You’re so jumpy this morning. You look terrible, actually.’ When she makes these remarks now, it’s without any implicit offer of comfort; in fact, she’s borderline pleased. I wonder what she’d say if she knew how close I was to vomiting – because I’ve helped kill a man. My upper body is aching from last night’s scrap, that shove against the wall. I can feel a huge bruise blooming on my lower back.
‘I didn’t sleep that well,’ I say, testing.
‘Really. I was out like a light.’ She can’t know that her callousness is the very answer I’m praying for.
With or without Clare commenting on my jitters, this is torture. The day is a bank holiday, of course, with no work, no public services. I can’t go out for fear of being unaccounted for within the window of Kit’s time of death and when, in the afternoon, Clare straps on her Fitbit and announces she’s going for a walk, I use the Wi-Fi to establish my presence at home. I permit myself a check of the local news, but there is no report of a stabbing by the river. Maybe there aren’t so many dogs on riverside walks, after all. Maybe they’re being kept on a short lead to stop them from nosing the vomit and broken glass left by last night’s revellers.
Sitting there, in the ground-floor window so as to be easily observed from the street, I become obsessed with the certainty that Clare will be the one to find him – of all people, her! I imagine her crouching next to the body, crying softly as her fingers fumble for her phone, her heart swelling with sympathy for Melia, the one person she should be condemning to hell. Is he even still intact? Might foxes have mutilated him – or time itself, every hour of death removing more of what was recognizable in life? Will the odours of his decomposition be evident yet or will they be suppressed by the low temperature?
Obviously, I can’t google ‘rigor mortis’ or anything else to do with dead bodies.
But, mercifully, Clare isn’t the one to find him. She returns with a spring in her step and pours herself a posh pressé. She’s doing Dry January, of course. I’m doing it too, but only because I’ll keep my story straighter if I’m sober. We speak very little. She is regretting, perhaps, her drunken half-suggestion of reconciliation last night, affronted that I didn’t jump on it as I should have.
There are dead bodies and then there are rejected live bodies.
Remarkably, by the time we go to bed, Kit remains undiscovered. ‘If I don’t see you in the morning, phone me after you’ve spoken to the police,’ she says, and there is a horrified second or two before I realize she’s talking about Merchison and my promise to pass on her theory about the Ropers’ fraud, the notes from Kelvin to support it.
‘No problem,’ I say.
2 January 2020
Having assumed I’d be absent from work the next day, dealing with traumatic developments in St Mary’s, I’m disorientated to find myself back behind the counter of the Comfort Zone following a routine passage on Aragon, which has replaced Boleyn as the carrier of the 7.20 a.m. tranche of westbound commuters. It was full of new faces, drudges who’d made the change, eyes tracking the riverscape just as mine did on my maiden voyage.
‘Your scratch has almost healed,’ Regan tells me.
‘It wasn’t anything serious.’
She has details to share from a New Year’s Eve house party where a man had had to be prevented from defenestration.
‘He’s only thirty,’ she says, unaware of the ghastly parallel.
‘That’s no age to die,’ I agree.
‘He’s really depressed, apparently. Had his hours cut at work, couldn’t pay his bills. I really worry about that, as well.’
‘If there’s any danger of that happening to you, I’ll give you my hours,’ I tell her, earnestly.
‘You’re so lovely, Jamie,’ she says, and makes us both an oat flat white. A pain aux raisins gets knocked to the floor and she gives it a wipe and begins eating it, unwinding the pastry until she’s left with the stodgy, raisin-studded heart.
All the conversations I eavesdrop on this morning are about finances, personal (too much spent over the holidays and not enough earned) or work-minded (deals, subsidies, compensation, revenue). For once people have cash for tips. ‘We need to position the pot more prominently,’ I tell Regan, and I remember my promise to Melia that day she helped out that I’d share my tips with her.
We are different people now. Killers.
A whimper escapes me, but Regan doesn’t appear to hear. All morning, she plays music that sounds as if it was recorded underwater and it starts to torment me, makes me want to tear off my skin in strips. And still no news! I agonize over whether to phone Merchison. If I don’t, Clare will want to know why, but if I do and he’s speaking from the crime scene, will he wonder at the coincidence of the call?
My only phone call is from Gretchen.
‘How was Marrakech?’ I ask.
‘Good. I’ve just got home from Gatwick this minute.’ But she doesn’t sound good, she sounds as overwrought as I feel. ‘Can I come and meet you in your break? I need you to update me on Kit.’
‘Okay,’ I say.
Well, the latest update is we stabbed him to death . . .
Stop this. No matter how confident I am that I would never give this inner commentary voice, merely to think it puts it in danger of being extracted from me in extremis or perhaps volunteered in sleep. No, instead, such knowledge must be completely suppressed.
We are not different. We are not killers.
I meet her at the pier after the lunchtime rush. She suggests the café at the Royal Festival Hall, but, fearing some post-traumatic attack if returned to the scene of my interrogation, I lie about building works and steer her instead to the bar at the NFT.
We collect our drinks and sit on uncomfortable wooden benches alongside young people wearing huge earphones and thumbing apps on their phones. Young brains multitasking. Gretchen has no tan from her Moroccan sojourn, only smears of pink on her cheekbones and nose. There’s a chain around her neck with a pendant made of what looks like a tarnished Berber coin.
‘Did you have a good time?’ I ask.
‘Not really. I shouldn’t have gone. I couldn’t stop thinking about Kit.’
‘I know.’ I breathe deeply, feel the painful expansion of my chest. ‘It’s been awful not knowing what’s going on.’
‘So there’s really no word from him? Complete silence since our night out?’
‘As far as I know, yes.’
‘It feels like ages ago! It must be ten days now.’ She fixes me with the intense gaze of a mesmerist. ‘You know, don’t you?’
‘Know what?’ Feeling a tremor in my left cheek, I massage the spot with my knuckles. They’re a little grazed, I notice, from recent exertions.
‘That we were kind of seeing each other. Behind his girlfriend’s back.’
‘Ah.’ It’s hard by now to know if complications help or hinder. If subplots mask the main narrative or serve to shine a light on it. ‘I didn’t know, no. I mean, I wondered, but I didn’t think it was any of my business.’
‘That’s decent of you,’ Gretchen says, and it’s the second time today I’ve been told what a good guy I am. As she regards her untouched Diet Coke, her mouth stretches into a glum line. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I knew it meant nothing to him. We stopped when he got married, obviously. Not that that did him any good. He was so
adrift, wasn’t he? He wanted us to think he was so strong, but we kept forgetting he was an actor.’
Her past tense is emphatic. I’ve read that its use is a red flag to the police; the innocent are less likely to do it. ‘I’m not sure I know what you mean, Gretch.’
‘Really? You don’t think . . . ?’ She continues to gaze at me, tears pooling. ‘You don’t think he’s taken his own life?’
I don’t tell her that Clare made the same suggestion before launching her insurance fraud investigation. She reminded me of Kit’s rant about suicides at the train station the first time he and Melia came to dinner: I’d fuck off and do it privately, he’d said. Was this what he had done? Clare asked me.
I was quite forceful in my disagreement then and I repeat it now. ‘No, Kit would never kill himself.’
If he did, his insurance policy would be void.
Gretchen flushes. ‘But when he saw the cleaner on the building that time, he assumed it was a suicide, didn’t he? Steve told me that’s what he said, you know, the morning he was in that weird mood? Maybe that was a cry for help that we totally ignored?’
‘No,’ I say again. I keep my voice low and steady, banish my knowledge that she needs only hold on a few hours and she’ll know he’s dead, thought to have been knifed by some druggie. ‘I’m one hundred per cent sure he wouldn’t do that. I’ve told the police the same. He wasn’t suicidal. He was a total hedonist. Still is, hopefully!’
Tears of relief drop onto the table and I put my arm around her shoulder as our young neighbours regard us blank-eyed. I hope this brings an end to our discussion, but evidently Gretchen has more to say, more to confess.
‘The thing is, Jamie, there’re texts I sent him that make me look like some kind of stalker. I’m terrified the police will see them and think they pushed him over the edge, you know? Have they got his mobile phone? Can they see texts even if they don’t have the phone?’
‘If they get the records from the phone company, they might. I showed them mine from that Monday night voluntarily.’ I sip my water. ‘But if yours are from before he got married, they won’t be of any interest to the police. That was back in August, months before he went missing. They won’t look back that far.’
The Other Passenger Page 23