‘Wouldn’t you ring me, though? When he hasn’t come home on the Tuesday morning? You’d know he’d been out with me the night before.’
‘I’ll ring you,’ she agreed. ‘I’ll try a few times, but let it go to voicemail. We don’t want the police thinking we’ve been speaking.’ Colluding. Conspiring.
‘You’d try Clare, as well, wouldn’t you? That would be the natural thing, if you couldn’t get hold of me.’ She’d be more likely to pick up, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world if she did. ‘She’s sure to say he’s off partying somewhere, he’s done it often enough before.’
‘By the time you come back, the police will have taken a statement from me and will want to speak to you,’ Melia said. ‘My guess is they’ll phone you at work on the Friday. And, Jamie?’
‘Yes?’
‘When you talk to them, they’ll be clever. The best way to stop yourself saying stuff is to not think it.’
‘I’ll remember that,’ I said.
*
As for the crime itself, time and place were quickly agreed: New Year’s Eve, the blackspot east of the Hope & Anchor. Melia would arrange to meet Kit for one of their long nocturnal walks (they would each have an old-style pay-as-you-go phone for their untraceable messaging), and I’d be waiting, concealed by the night, ready to distract him for a minute or two while she prepared her attack.
Initially, Melia thought we should dispose of the body in the river, wait for it to be washed up, but I’d read extensively on the dangers of the tidal Thames. ‘The undertow can keep bodies down there for days, even weeks. What if it screws up our alibis? Or the body comes back so decomposed you can’t see any wound? We don’t want it declared a suicide.’
Suicide meant no money, hence my vociferous denials to Clare and Gretchen that Kit had ever had any such intentions.
As for the knife wound, ‘Leave it to me, I’ll research how to do it properly,’ Melia said, as if talking about growing tomatoes or reupholstering an armchair. ‘The last thing we need is him living to tell the tale.’
‘I can’t believe you think you’re capable of this,’ I remarked, in another apartment with high windows and floors as smooth as glass. The dusk had come a little earlier then, the light lower.
‘It’s not like I’ll enjoy it,’ she said. ‘It’s just got to be done.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ I said. They’d been together for years, been in debt for as long. ‘What changed? What did he do to make you hate him?’
She shook her head. ‘He’s going to destroy himself anyway, look at the way he lives. This way, we get something out of it. A future, you and me.’
‘Until you decide to do the same thing to me,’ I said. It was meant as a wisecrack, but she answered with the utmost sincerity.
‘No, we’re different, Jamie. We’re special.’
*
Clare was an unexpected obstacle.
It goes without saying that ideally she wouldn’t have found out about the affair; that was a variable of which I lost control, thanks to having been unsettled by my ‘interrogation’ that morning. Had she not done the decent thing and let me move into the spare room, I would have had to beg for a reconciliation, a last chance.
She rocked the boat a second time by storming off to her parents, when I needed her to be at home for New Year’s Eve to alibi me. She came through for me again, but not before I’d had to line up Dad to understudy her, an alternative that would have been far from ideal.
Then, a third time, when she guessed the plan. The fake plan. She had a better nose for a bluff than I did.
When I remember New Year’s Eve at home with her, my pulse slows a fraction. I picture her in her pyjamas standing in front of me on the landing, making her suggestion: Do you think it’s completely impossible . . . ?
The suggestion that I now understand was my last chance in every conceivable way.
Dear God, I should have fallen to my knees to take it, weeping with gratitude.
*
And so the police hear out my true confession – hours of it; by the end, I’ve almost lost my voice – but thanks to my having established myself as a fantasist regarding a certain non-existent detective double act, they make no bones about considering my account the improvised alternative reality of an unhinged mind.
‘So you told these other “investigators” that Mr Roper disappeared because he owed money to drug dealers, but now you’re saying it was an insurance fraud gone wrong and he was killed by his wife?’
‘A faked insurance fraud.’
‘We can’t keep up with your imagination, Mr Buckby.’
‘It’s not imagination,’ I cry. ‘It’s the truth!’ There’s a kicking sensation inside my head and my eyelids crunch as I blink. ‘Melia persuaded him I’d be convicted for his murder without there being a body.’
As the three of them regard me with opposing emotions of pity and pitilessness, the bright-eyed detective says, ‘Well, the fact that there is a body would appear to contradict that.’
*
Even so, I persist with my truth during the months of remand that follow. I persist with it even in the face of Melia’s reported denials, of the ever more convincing case being assembled by the prosecution. My defence team is sympathetic, but pragmatic, repeatedly explaining to me that it is not what I have done or not done that matters, but what they can prove I’ve done or not done.
For instance: when my phone search history is examined and the words ‘How to inflict fatal knife wound’ found in a private browsing mode that I wasn’t even aware existed, I can claim the search was made when I gave Melia my passcode so she could download her favourite songs for me, but I can’t prove it. (Our first meeting after the wedding, too, before I’d even agreed to her plan. She was already setting me up!)
For instance: when it’s discovered that a knife is missing from the Comfort Zone – the very one I loaned in the first place – I can claim Melia took it during that single, helpful visit of hers, but I can’t prove it.
And, when my team requests access to the security footage at the Royal Festival Hall and it’s discovered that at no time are Merchison’s and Parry’s faces captured with any clarity, but only mine, I can claim they’d studied the angles in advance, but I can’t prove it.
Oh, and when a hoodie is found in the bushes of Prospect Square with my both my hairs and traces of Kit’s blood attached to it, I can claim Melia kept it back that night and tossed it over the railings, but I can’t prove it.
I could go on.
I’m urged to consider a manslaughter plea, but I do what they do in movies and I refuse to compromise. I make my ‘not guilty’ plea to all who will listen, including judge and jury.
But in the end, it will come down to who they believe: her or me.
Well, I think we can all guess which way that’s going to go.
44
Some months later
I won’t dwell on the trial. Just as she has been a highly credible witness with the police, so Melia is with the court. Attending in the company of a victim liaison officer, she is dressed in slim black trousers and white blouse, the prim and servile uniform of a waitress. Her hair is demurely styled, soft on her shoulders, her brave eyes shining with grief, and I’m guessing she intends the silver heart pendant at her throat to be taken for a love token from her dear, departed husband.
I study the jurors’ faces when she gives her evidence and I see they want to, variously, mother her, befriend her, comfort her, fight for her, or fuck her. She’s got ‘it’: something for everyone. They should have invited agents and casting directors to judge her performance alongside the legal professionals and sworn good citizens.
Don’t get me wrong, my barrister is excellent and challenges her on her inconsistencies, but she is consistently earnest and agreeable – even apologetic that her messages might have been mixed or misunderstood.
Her fingers reach frequently for that silver love heart.
The way she tells it, the fake
d disappearance and insurance fraud scheme simply didn’t exist. Kit would never have been stupid enough to agree to a plan like that, even if she’d been stupid enough to suggest it. Yes, it is true that on 27 December she told her boss and a couple of Kit’s friends that Kit had gone AWOL over Christmas and she was sick with worry, but she wouldn’t have dreamt of notifying the police, not when she knew how much he liked to party. He’d stayed out all night several times in the months preceding his death, on one occasion with the defendant himself, whose partner had told Melia personally how angry she’d been.
Richard backs her story up: she’d told him Kit had gone missing but made no mention of having reported his disappearance to the police; rather, she expected him to return at any time. The idea that the police were involved had entered office channels via Clare – and Clare’s information had come directly from me.
Yes, she’d tried to get hold of the defendant a few times during this anxious period, and his partner, who was also her friend and colleague, but neither of us picked up her calls. And yes, it was true that on the occasion of our visit to her flat on Tiding Street, Clare and I had spoken about liaising with the police, but Melia had not fully comprehended such references and had thought the exchange hypothetical.
Then, sure enough, Kit reappeared on the Saturday after Christmas with his tail between his legs, and in the chaos of the holiday season she hadn’t thought to let people know. She ‘kind of feared’ others guessed they had a volatile relationship and felt a bit embarrassed about her earlier ‘overreaction’. According to her, Kit then began some sort of amateur rehab programme in the flat, supervised by Nurse Melia. Attempts by the defendant to contact her by text message were rebuffed because she wanted to concentrate on her husband’s health and in any case regretted her extramarital fling. Of course there wasn’t any lovers’ code, she wasn’t a teenager! Do not contact me meant ‘Do not contact me’. A distressing incident in a local café on Sunday the 29th reinforced her belief that her relationship with the defendant had been a disastrous error of judgement – and Kit’s friendship with him, too (his alcohol abuse had got far worse since they’d begun commuting to work together).
And so the lie turns the truth into a madman’s conspiracy theory, with a string of plausible witnesses to support it, such as the bartender at the Hope & Anchor, who recounts my visit on 28 December in search of Kit: I’d struck him as ‘unstable’ and ‘paranoid’, it transpires. He had wondered about my scratched face and injured hand.
It was a burn! (It really was a burn.)
And such as Elodie, who for good measure had heard Melia phone Kit from the café on the afternoon of the 29th to check on him. She confirms the ‘harassment’ on my part: ‘He was desperate to find Kit. I would characterize him as not in control of himself. To be honest, he scared me.’
Can Elodie tell the court her profession? Yes, she is a carer in a nursing home for elderly ex-servicemen and women.
Of course she is.
No, Melia is terribly sorry, but she can’t name anyone else who saw Kit during those fraught few days of withdrawal, but he was obviously alive, wasn’t he, since it is an undisputed fact that he died in the early hours of January the 1st. On the night in question, newly sober and inexplicably nocturnal, he had ventured out alone ‘to get some air’. It was the last time she saw him until undertaking the grim task of identifying his body on Friday the 2nd.
Faithful Elodie had been nowhere near Tiding Street, of course – Melia has no explanation for why the defendant would insist this to be the case or allege that she should want to drug her friend – but it was true that Melia did phone her at 02.30, when Kit failed to return from his walk. Elodie, coming to the end of her night’s partying, advised waiting till morning and they prayed jointly that poor Kit had not bumped into some bad influence from his old life and been tempted into a late-night bar (a glance in my direction as the words ‘bad influence’ are uttered).
As for the photograph of Kit and me, she knows nothing of it, whatever the defendant maliciously claims.
Who, then, captured this crucial evidence? This is put to a member of the investigation team and the court is told that the image was anonymously submitted by email. A subsequent police appeal for the mystery photographer to come forward has led to several claims, including a man in and out of local homeless shelters and known to the police as a rough sleeper.
‘Do rough sleepers have mobile phones?’ my barrister asks.
‘Everyone does,’ says the officer.
‘Mobile phones equipped with data to send material by email?’
‘Incredibly, it’s not out of the question.’
Is there not then a case for charging this man with failure to report a crime?
Without firm identification, no charge can be brought. In any case, at the time the photograph was taken, no crime had been committed. It may even have been snapped accidentally and only recognized as potentially significant following the news of Kit’s death. (He’s a good citizen, this homeless guy. Someone give him a medal.)
All of which leads nicely into a reiteration of the time of death: any time between immediately after the image was captured and three hours later.
*
Clare witnessed my duping, of course, but now she suggests I sought to dupe her. She accepts Melia’s explanation of Kit’s return, understanding on reflection that with Melia off work and the two women estranged over my betrayal, her only information about Kit’s disappearance came from me.
No, she did not personally witness the arrival of any police officer at her home on the morning of Monday 30 December.
Merchison must have waited for her to leave the house before coming straight to the door, ID in hand, to tick me off and secure my continuing faith in his investigation.
One of the worst moments of my life is when, challenged with my claim that she personally took a call from one of the detectives, Clare says it might in fact have been from me, disguising my voice. ‘I can’t say for sure it was him, but I can’t say for sure it wasn’t.’
Ask Gretchen and Steve, I want to scream, they had calls from the police, too!
But, when it is their turn, they say they were in fact phoned by Melia, not the police. It was a fatal assumption on my part. She concedes she didn’t think to text them to inform them that Kit had turned up and they both accept her explanation that she believed Kit had been in touch directly. They were his friends, after all, not hers.
Steve bears witness to my erratic behaviour in the days following Kit’s ‘disappearance’ – a hostile text accusing him of lying to the police; garbled theories about drugs deals and a trip to Marrakech. (So much for not snitching on a friend – but then standing in a witness box is different from propping up a bar, and he was always closer to Kit than to me.)
Gretchen, for her part, admits to her affair with him, but somehow it only serves to redress the balance in terms of Melia’s own infidelity.
Even that airhead Yoyo from the bar on the 23rd is invited to add her two pennies’ worth about me: ‘I found him very menacing.’
‘Towards Mr Roper?’
‘Yes, he said, “Fuck you, Kit”. It was like he hated him.’
Kit must have told Melia about that. Every single detail she’s thought through, every single witness has been manipulated.
Except . . . not Regan, surely? The two have never met, so there can be no question of manipulation.
Regan agrees that I spoke repeatedly of a friend who’d gone missing. ‘We talked about it a lot after he found out about it from the police. He was so upset. Kit was a really good friend of his.’ Yes, it was definitely Friday 27 December when the defendant was questioned. She is one hundred per cent sure and her colleague Simona can confirm it.
Finally, an account that echoes mine from a witness who has no reason to perjure herself!
But did she see the detectives with her own eyes? Did she have anyone’s word but mine that the disappearance was fact and not fiction?
Was she shown any media reports or missing persons appeals regarding Christopher Roper?
‘No, but—’
Was it possible her colleague could have made up the drama in order to excuse unauthorized absences or other negligent behaviour?
‘It’s possible,’ Regan says, with reluctance.
It’s all downhill from there. Was she aware of a knife going missing at any time during the final weeks of the year?
‘Only the one that belonged to Jamie and I guessed he must have taken it back home at some point.’
‘This was the twelve-centimetre utility knife by the brand Global, originally bought by Clare Armstrong?’
‘Yes, it was really sharp. I assumed he needed it back for Christmas.’
For ‘Christmas’, read killing, suggests the prosecution.
Was she aware of the defendant making any special arrangements for transporting a professional chef’s knife home, given that the law prohibits the carrying of articles with blades exceeding 7.62 centimetres in any public place?
Regan nervously pushes up her sleeves then, exposing her spider tattoo to the jury. ‘No.’
The prosecution barrister allows a generous pause for the jurors to picture the defendant travelling home on public transport with a lethal blade in his bag; the massacre that might have been. How, at any time, I might have stabbed a customer for no other reason than he chose a chocolate croissant over a plain.
Management has since provided a replacement knife, Regan offers, as if that might help me.
‘Were you aware of a friend visiting Mr Buckby on November the twenty-sixth?’
‘I don’t think so. He didn’t really have friends visiting.’
‘This would be someone who helped him out behind the counter.’
‘No one helped,’ Regan corrects them. ‘You’re not allowed in the service area unless you’re staff. I’m the manager and I would know.’
Of course she would.
I won’t go on except to say that the jury need only a couple of hours to agree their verdict. By then, everyone present knows what I’ve been warned from day one: that for murder convictions in the UK, there is a mandatory minimum sentence of fifteen years.
The Other Passenger Page 27