The Other Passenger

by Louise Candlish

  ‘Let’s leave that issue for now and return to the photograph, if we may. Is it possible that this could have been taken on the stretch of the river where Mr Roper’s body was found earlier today?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know which stretch that was,’ I say, teeth gritted.

  ‘I thought you said your partner told you? It might interest you to know that we’re checking all CCTV footage from cameras in St Mary’s on New Year’s Eve, including the roads between your house and the river.’

  I feign a shrug. There’ll be nothing on the main route, I’m confident of that much, but any amateur could find the alternative access path with a cursory google and my precautions strike me now as utterly woeful. Melia assured me it was clear of security cameras and because I had no reason to doubt her my own reconnaissance was far from exhaustive. Might there have been a distant camera I wasn’t aware of, somewhere beyond the gates of the St Mary’s Wharf construction site? A camera she alone knew to evade?

  A bulb flickers overhead – or maybe I’m imagining it. ‘This timestamp has been faked,’ I repeat, blinking.

  The detective’s gaze does not waver. ‘We’ve tested its authenticity and we’re satisfied it meets evidential requirements.’

  Otherwise, they might not have had enough to arrest me. And I don’t need my new friend Evan to take me aside and explain it is likely going to be enough to bring a charge all on its own.

  I have a memory of myself in Rosie’s Café, haranguing Melia. Have you heard from him? Is he still AWOL? Lines rehearsed to show concern for a missing person, but might they just as easily have been those of a man hunting another man with the intent of doing him harm? My face that afternoon was crazy-eyed. I’d looked deranged.

  Just as I know I do now.

  ‘It was Melia,’ I say, abruptly. ‘She took this photo. She’s set me up.’

  As my solicitor tries more strenuously than ever to intervene, to somehow negate this last catastrophic offering, I raise a hand, insist I know what I’m saying. The detective lowers his shoulders, adjusts his gaze. He was not expecting a confession so quickly, but then this is not my first interview, no matter what he prefers to think.

  ‘You mean, you were with Mr Roper at one forty-three on the morning of January the first?’

  ‘Yes. We were by the river in St Mary’s. Just along from the Hope and Anchor.’

  He taps the photo. ‘And this is him in the photograph with the person you’ve already identified as yourself?’

  ‘Yes.’ I take a breath and expel the truth: ‘But I didn’t stab him. I admit I’m guilty of not reporting a crime or whatever that’s called, but not murder. She did it.’ When he makes no immediate reply, I raise my voice: ‘Look at me, surely you’re trained to tell if someone’s telling the truth!’

  His mouth tightens, as if to warn me that more challenging individuals than me have sat in this spot and spat out their lies, their avowals and confessions. ‘To be clear, when you say “She did it”, you’re talking about . . . ?’

  ‘Melia, of course! I just said!’

  ‘Melia Roper, Christopher Roper’s wife?’

  That’s the moment when I see my future – hear it. The way he says her name, the incontrovertible rejection in his tone. That’s when I know beyond a shadow of a doubt she is not sitting somewhere else in this building being subjected to a parallel interrogation, but is at home being comforted and cared for. Elodie is going to turn out to be a special-needs teacher or a social worker and she will swear on the lives of our city’s vulnerable or her own babies that Melia was in the flat with her all night, a unit so compact she couldn’t have failed to notice her friend’s absence (unless she was drugged, of course). Clare, meanwhile, will freely explain we weren’t sharing a room; we weren’t even on the same storey of our big rich-person’s house. I could have been doing anything while she slept, a bottle of wine in her system.

  ‘Mr Buckby? Mr Buckby?’

  My head is in my hands, fingers pressing eyes into the sockets, and all of a sudden they’re saying my name as if releasing me from a spell.

  ‘I strongly urge you to take a break,’ my solicitor says, and reminds the detective of my fainting fit in the tunnel, my disorientation on regaining consciousness. He doesn’t know what he’s saying.

  But I do, and for the last time, I silence him. ‘No! I want to talk. Let’s get this over and done with.’

  The detective is pleased. His body language opens, his tone relaxes. ‘That would be my preference, as well. I’d like to bring in a colleague, if I may.’

  The photos are withdrawn, papers put back in order, recording equipment checked. The solicitor is messaging on his phone, cancelling plans. The deflation in his manner tells me he thinks he’s done all he can and is now a bystander, not a player. Well, I don’t want his law. I no longer care about my rights.

  Soon there are two men facing me across the table. By coincidence – or illusion – they are of similar height and build to Merchison and Parry.

  ‘Let’s start at the beginning, shall we?’ the new arrival proposes. ‘Tell us everything you know about Mr Roper. How long have you known each other?’

  I gape. These are the same questions I was asked on December the 23rd, the exact wording. I feel like I’m losing my mind, though in truth it’s been dislocated for me, by an angel who turned out to be a she-devil.

  I clear my throat and a phrase grips me, more than a phrase, a sensation: fear of falling. Oh, Melia, maybe it would have been better if we’d fallen from the cable car that night. We’d have died on impact, rolled along the riverbed in our capsule, figures in a snow globe waiting to be shaken back to life.

  ‘Almost a year,’ I say. ‘We met last January.’

  43

  2 January 2020

  You know what’s funny about all this? (And when I say ‘funny’, I mean sick, fucked-up; wildly, suicidally bad.) My second version is really not so different from the first. I was never actively lying to Parry and Merchison. I didn’t need to. It was really just a matter of deleted scenes.

  Like that evening in late March, the bedroom with all the mirrors. That confessional exchange of frailties – and, yes, I know they are in fact vanities, but perhaps vanity is the most profound frailty of all? Mine, the shame of being virtually as impoverished as she was, hers the fear that she could never attract, or be attracted to, a partner with the means to free her from debt and help her reinvent herself and rise.

  ‘You know what I’ve just thought?’ she said. We were still in the bedroom, but dressed and about to leave. I was putting on my shoes, she was fixing her hair in one of the mirrors behind me.

  ‘What?’ I glanced up at her and saw that something maverick had been stirred in her. Her eyes glittered gold.

  ‘Kit’s got this life insurance policy. It’s part of his work benefits, all permanent employees his level get it. So apparently, if he dies, I’ll get a crazy amount of money.’

  ‘You’re the named beneficiary, are you?’

  ‘That’s it. Beneficiary.’ She said it like it was some erotic term.

  It was immediately clear to me that I should treat this as jest and nothing but. ‘How do you plan to do away with him? No, don’t tell me. You can’t trust me not to squeal when the time comes.’

  ‘Really? That’s disappointing.’ A held beat as her gaze drifted from her own reflection to my face, and then she sighed. ‘You know I’m only having a laugh, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course. Besides, those policies only kick in after a certain length of service.’

  ‘Two years,’ she said.

  I paused. Don’t ask. ‘How long has he worked there?’

  ‘Twenty months this week.’

  I noted the precision and said nothing.

  ‘What about Clare?’ she asked. She had her back to me now and was fiddling with her bag, looking for keys.

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘Does she have a policy?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I’m not s
ure I’d be her beneficiary, anyway. She has a cousin she’s close to and he’s got three kids. She’s always said she’d leave everything to them.’

  Those mirrors, that night, a great arrangement of them! I remember our gazes connecting suddenly in reflection and I was disorientated by the flicker of malevolence I thought I saw in her face. Only when laughter broke across it did I recognize her again.

  ‘Bummer,’ she said. ‘Kit it is, then.’

  *

  And like another evening, the one on which the plan surfaced. September, the first time she and I had met since the wedding, just after my holiday in France with Clare and Dad. A reunion so sweet, so ripe – and yet, by the time we parted, there was already that fine, dry dust that denotes the beginning of rot.

  I remember being bewitched by her. That’s honestly the only word to describe it. The sight of her, the feel of her, the scent of her, it all filled me with a new recklessness, a daredevil pleasure indistinguishable from freedom.

  I thought, Nothing in my life is important except this.

  (Which is very different from Nothing in my life is as important as this.)

  ‘Tell me why you and Kit got married,’ I said. ‘It can’t have been on impulse, you have to give notice.’

  ‘I know. I did it because I’ve had an idea.’ Such a simple statement, and so stark, that use of the singular, as if Kit had no agency at all. If I could go back to that moment and suspend time, start living backwards, all the way back to birth, I would. ‘I’ve been thinking about it for a while, going over all the details, seeing if it could work. And I’m a hundred per cent certain it could.’

  ‘What idea?’ I said, because time was not suspended; it proceeded as it always did, a pace or two ahead, tugging me forward by a leash clipped to my collar.

  ‘How we can deal with Kit and claim the insurance money.’

  I raised an eyebrow and smiled as if at an imaginative child. ‘When you say “deal with”, you don’t mean . . . ?’

  She pressed her lips together in private judgement; when released, they puffed open like a flowerhead. ‘I do.’

  My face was trapped in that smile. Inside, confusion roared. I felt as if I’d missed a link in the plot development, my understanding obscured by a fit of amnesia.

  Her mouth moved a fraction closer to my ear. ‘That’s why I had to marry him. You get more. There’s a death in service thing, as well as the life insurance. Almost two million pounds.’

  ‘As much as that. Wow.’ Though I was still chuckling, I was aware of the tension in her body, the weight of expectation on me, and my heart quaked.

  ‘Help me, Jamie.’ Her gaze was persuasive, the kind born not of envy or revenge but of the pure, primal will to succeed. ‘You’ve got nothing, I’ve got nothing. This is a solution.’

  ‘It’s not a solution, it’s a crime.’ At last, I brought some condemnation to my tone. ‘Two crimes if you consider the fact that the payout could be treated as fraud or money laundering. If you got caught, you’d go to jail for, what, ten, fifteen years?’

  ‘We wouldn’t get caught.’

  The transition from singular to plural was seamless and deadly.

  I fixed her with my gravest frown. ‘Melia, come on.’

  ‘I knew that’s what you’d say,’ she said, with simple acceptance. She rolled from me, releasing me from her body heat. ‘It’s fine, it would be weird if you didn’t.’

  ‘Well, to be fair, the last time you had an idea, we went on a cable car ride.’

  A giggle slipped from her then, as if she couldn’t resist my humour even when absorbed in the grimmest of thoughts. It was – excruciating to admit now – flattering.

  ‘Just let me tell you how it would work,’ she said. ‘Think of it as a fantasy, the plot of a movie.’

  I know it sounds insane that I even listened. I know I should have walked away. I should have protected Kit.

  I should have protected myself.

  The fact was I loved her. I was demented with the pleasure of being reunited with her, of the prospect of being a part of her future. Like I say, I was bewitched. Spellbound. And, for what it’s worth, she wasn’t wrong in her evaluation of my lot. Clare and I weren’t married and common law rights were a myth. In the event of a split, even if some lawyer agreed to negotiate for me I couldn’t afford to pay them. My job paid a pittance and at any time I could have nowhere to live. I’d be bed hopping like Regan; scavenging like the foxes in the square.

  It was not straightaway, no, but at some point after that liaison the erroneous but alluring theory began to form in my mind that owning nothing was the same as having nothing to lose.

  And it wasn’t as if I would be the one to kill him. My alibi would be impregnable – as impregnable as a prison cell.

  The real question was, would I be able to consider a future with a killer?

  Evidently, I could.

  *

  And evidently Kit could consider a future with a new identity in a country far from his own, while an innocent man – me! – was jailed for a crime he didn’t commit. That no one committed.

  According to Melia, he was disgracefully easy to get on board with her fraud scheme – sorry, her fake fraud (how ironic is that?). He was all too willing to abandon his job, his friends, his debts, for the unearned wealth and life of leisure he considered his right.

  Even if Melia hadn’t warned me, I could have pinpointed the day he’d bought into her plan. He changed towards me, maybe because he knew she’d have to sleep with me for it to work, and yet he couldn’t fall out with me, at least not for long. He needed me in his life, his rival and enemy, to be available for an argument on the night he was to disappear. Without me, there’d be no murder theory, only a senseless disappearance, which meant no money for years.

  I got used to the rhythm of it. He’d say something abrasive (‘You’re a fucking dinosaur, Jamie’) and then he’d regroup to suggest something sociable (‘No hard feelings, mate. Time for a quick one at Mariners?’). Of course, he didn’t know that I was wrangling an almost identical dilemma: I couldn’t stand the sight of him, but I needed him in range. It both fortified and desensitized me to understand that we thought each other equally worthless and therefore equally worth sacrificing.

  ‘I can’t believe he’s willing to live with a false identity for the rest of his life,’ I told Melia.

  ‘What’s the alternative? Live like paupers for ever? And I’d have to, as well, don’t forget. The idea is we’d have each other and that’s all that counts.’ She pulled a nauseatingly romantic expression, before letting it fade to dispassion. It was an interesting thing, her alteration, her hardening of resolve. A mutation, fast-moving and deadly, and yet quite undetectable on the surface.

  ‘You wouldn’t be able to stay in Europe, if you were really doing it. It would have to be South America or somewhere without an extradition agreement with the UK, virtually off grid.’

  ‘If,’ she echoed, adding, hard candy in her voice, ‘Maybe I’ll let him choose the destination. It’s the least I can do.’

  *

  Kit being Kit, he struggled at times to stick to his script. It was the failed actor in him as much as the unreliable libertine. With a fortune tantalizingly in reach and nervous tension escalating, he consumed more booze and drugs than ever, risking his job exactly when it was vital he keep it. Melia managed him, talked him up, talked him down. It was a tribute to her that he was able to complete the course, even if the finish line he staggered towards was marked with a blade, not a ribbon.

  She’s a total slut . . . Just you wait, Jamie! I fucking mean it! It made my blood run cold that he would almost give himself away like that. Not only in his words, but also in his eyes, projecting like a silent movie just for me: months of hating me for having her. Months of longing to tell me it wasn’t real, that she was using me.

  Well, he was right about that.

  *

  Yes, it was a long game, a bluff of moving parts. Every step was
debated and dissected, our logistical queries checked on public computer terminals or colleagues’ borrowed laptops. ‘I’m thinking just before Christmas for getting him into hiding,’ Melia said. ‘There’s a lot of crime over that period, a lot of noise. When I report him missing, the police will be stretched to capacity.’

  ‘You mean, you don’t want them to investigate too well?’

  ‘Exactly. It needs to all be official, but the last thing we want is for them to actually find him.’ Holed up in his grotty B&B in Thamesmead, with long-stay rooms for cash and a helpful leniency regarding ID. It was a temporary option, as far as Kit understood it, but in reality his final home.

  With my train to Edinburgh booked for Tuesday morning, drinks with the water rats would be scheduled for the Monday night. Kit was primed to initiate a row in the stretch between North Greenwich and St Mary’s, making sure the cameras caught it nice and clear. Once off the boat, he’d turn onto the river path towards the Hope & Anchor, careful to obscure his face when in range of the pub’s exterior camera, and then on to Pepys Road, where he’d be removed to his hideout by an unlicensed minicab arranged by Melia, complete with generous tip to buy the driver’s silence.

  ‘Don’t get too provoked, Jamie. Don’t actually lure him off and kill him.’

  We shared a laugh at that.

  ‘When exactly will you phone the police?’

  ‘I’ll give it a day or two. That’s what I’d do if I really didn’t know where he was.’