45
Some months later
Dear Kit . . .
I never said that when you were alive, did I? I never used that phrase, that endearment. All those ‘mate’s and ‘wanker’s and ‘twat’s. Lads together, across the generations.
But now I say it all the time. In the hours upon hours I’ve been gifted in which to reconstruct the events that led me here, to revise everything I thought I knew about my crime and punishment, it’s you I’m addressing. Not Melia or Clare or my legal team; not the guard I like best who used to be a barista at Pret and with whom, in another version of events, I might have worked alongside making flat whites. And certainly not God.
No, in my head, it’s always you. Maybe it’s because you know how it feels to be screwed by her (in both senses of the word). Maybe it’s because there’s no one else left for me to appeal to.
Or maybe I just miss you.
It’s not terrible here. I’m warm, well-fed, safe enough. The young inmates frying their brains on spice have no interest in a Gen X nonentity like me and in any case it’s not like on TV, where the entire prison population is let loose at once to mill around yards and gyms and canteens, the alphas choosing their allies and enemies, the betas hiding deep in the herd. No, it’s lockdown most of the day, all of the night.
You’d think it was a claustrophobe’s worst nightmare, wouldn’t you? But it turns out that being sealed into a confined space, for the most part prone on a metal bunk, doesn’t present the same threat to the nervous system as a crush of seven commuters per square metre in a rush-hour train. In this carriage, there’s just me and Nabil. And it’s not like we’re underground, either, we’re on the first floor of the house block they’ve nicknamed the Premier Inn – albeit one with welded steel doors that only unlock from the outside.
And, get this, it’s the nearest prison to home – or what used to be home. About a twenty-minute drive from St Mary’s. Not too far from the river, in fact, though you can’t see the water from here. You can see the sky, though – even when I lie on my bed, I can see a little corner of it – and it’s always grey, Kit. It’s always grey, even when it’s blue.
There’s philosophy for you, my friend. There’s retribution.
*
Yes, yes, of course I should have paid more attention to the psychological flaws of the thing. Beginning with this: why would a hot twenty-nine-year-old begin an affair with an unprepossessing geezer knocking on the door of fifty? Or, if we accept that she launched it in the belief that he was wealthy, the co-owner of a grand house with its expensive glimpse of the Thames, then why would she continue once he’d come clean and disabused her of this notion?
Two possible reasons. One, she’d fallen in love with him – people say that all the time, don’t they, romantic sorts? ‘By the time I found out, it was too late, I was already head over heels . . .’ Because of his winning sense of humour, perhaps (Oh! Clare said you were funny). Two, she’d begun to intuit a different kind of usefulness to his presence in her bed, his heedless devotion. That little idea she had, maybe it took root earlier than she let on. Clearly this was a woman who could think on her feet – and her back.
And then there are the logistical questions I did think to ask, but not loudly enough, not using the correct channels. If once, just once, I’d gone to the police station – any police station – in person and asked for Parry or Merchison, or even if I’d phoned one of them through the station switchboard and not on the number they gave me; if I hadn’t shut down Clare’s attempt to locate them online quite so efficiently.
They don’t seem to list the detectives . . .
Making me think they couldn’t issue a public appeal because they were investigating some big drugs ring, that was a masterstroke on Melia’s part. She’s got a real eye for authentic detail, hasn’t she? She should write crime drama for the telly.
Oh, there were countless misconstruals on my part. Like when Elodie said, ‘Don’t you think she needs some privacy at a time like this?’ – meaning not while Melia despaired of her husband’s disappearance, but while he undertook some homespun cold-turkey programme a couple of streets away! Just one further question from me might have brought our cross purposes to light.
It’s clear now that Melia counted on my compliance, my cowardice, my lack of imagination. I followed her breadcrumb trail like a middle-aged Hansel, into the lair of a wide-eyed, open-legged witch.
And so did you, Kit, so did you. Talk about divide and rule! What if you and I had compared notes, even just a single time? What if I’d heeded your warning, that night on the steps at Prospect Square? Don’t do it, will you? You don’t need to fall for her drama . . . You’d be alive and I’d be free.
But you know what they say are the two most heartbreaking words in the English language?
What if.
Or, if they don’t, they really should.
*
I have to tell you, I think they overdid it, her detectives. Actor friends of hers, I’m guessing, because to the unsuspecting eye they were really very good. Naturalistic, composed, fluent. You probably know them, perhaps from drama school or from some get-together for struggling actors.
You knew nothing about their gig, of course. Like me, you thought you’d been reported missing to the police, not to two imposters. You thought the last-ditch loan for ten grand was for your new passport, your day-to-day needs in hiding while Melia set about getting me convicted, not pay dirt for a pair of out-of-work actors.
But, as I say, I think they got carried away; they kept adding their own lines. I can’t believe Melia briefed them about the claustrophobia – they must have googled my name and found the news reports. I was pretty unnerved at times, even knowing I’d done nothing, that there was no body for them to find – not yet. What if I’d been rattled enough to pull out? That would have been the last thing she wanted.
Or maybe she just knew she’d be able talk me back around, no matter how I reacted. The washed-up middle-aged man who’d fallen for her so predictably. (A blowjob on a cable car, did she tell you about that?) Her greatest challenge was probably hiding her contempt.
I’m really attracted to you, Jamie . . . Sometimes, often, I wonder where the three of us – the four of us – would be if she’d never said that. Those words that were not so much fateful as fatal.
*
As for the other passenger, the mystery witness, she didn’t exist. How twisted is that? There I was, agonizing over her identity, her potential to subvert our careful planning and sabotage my defence – even resurrecting my guilt about that woman on the Tube, who had probably cast me from her mind the moment she hit ‘Send’ on her last vindictive email – when all along the men pretending to be detectives simply made her up! For a while, I thought Melia must have written her into the script to keep me on my toes, but then I remembered her reaction when I brought it up (What other passenger?), that rare moment of disbalance, and I knew they’d been improvising.
No, that little sadistic touch was theirs, not hers.
They had a fine old time of it, Merchison and Parry.
46
Soon after
So, listen, Kit: I might be able to visit your grave myself – and sooner than I thought. I think I might have new grounds to appeal.
I know!
I’ve sent a message to my brief and hope to get him in for a meeting as soon as his schedule allows.
Let me tell you, visitors are like hens’ teeth here – if someone your age even knows what that means – or at least they are in my case. Dad and Debs visited at first, but when Dad passed away following a stroke, three months after my conviction, my sister as good as told me I was responsible for his death and said she couldn’t bring herself to see me again – not until ‘time heals’, anyway. I wasn’t permitted temporary release for his funeral because I’m Cat A, but Debs at least wrote to tell me it had gone as well as could be hoped and attached a graveside photo deemed by my overlords safe for me to view. Clare
was there, of course, looking older, thinner, but that might have been the black clothing, an unforgiving colour for the middle-aged.
And so, unbelievably, was Melia. She wanted to pay her respects, apparently, after Clare had paid hers at a ‘moving’ memorial service for you. Women together, burying their men. ‘If anyone knows how we all feel, it’s her,’ Debs wrote. ‘She’s still grieving too.’
Seriously, Kit, is there no one who sees through this woman, besides you and me?
Oh, and Clare told Debs they played ‘She’s Not There’ by the Zombies at your service, the song we were listening to on the steps of Prospect Square that time. I didn’t know it had become a favourite. If they’d had any idea I was the one who introduced you to it, they wouldn’t have allowed it. It’s too late to say you’re sorry, remember?
Anyway, in recent months, I’ve had only one visitor. That’s right, out of all the Visitor Orders I’ve sent out, only one has been used. No, not by Clare, regrettably, but that was always going to be a long shot; not Steve or Gretchen, either, or any of my older friends, the ones I virtually ignored in that last year of liberty – they all think I’m a murderer and presumably couldn’t delete me from their contacts, their memories, fast enough.
No, it was my old mucker Regan. Oh, of course, you never met her, did you? I think you’d have found her a bit guileless for your tastes, but she and I always got on fine. Innocent times at the Comfort Zone, eh.
We sat in the visits hall on spongy blue seats, divided by a low table. The mood in the room was upbeat, with many of the men receiving visits from their wives or girlfriends, and supervised mostly by volunteers. She let me hug her and I smelled the outside world on her clothing, on her hair. The plastic coating of the hi-vis bib I was required to wear crackled between us.
‘This is so great!’ I beamed at her, stirred with sentiments I hadn’t felt in months.
‘Yes.’ Through the masterwork that was her makeup job, she looked uncertain and I tried to put her at her ease.
‘How’s the café?’
‘Oh, I left ages ago. I’m assistant manager in a branch of H&M in Victoria Station now.’
‘Where are you living these days?’
Her lengthy complaint about a studio in Hounslow partitioned to accommodate her and a friend, who was newly and lustfully coupled with a man prone to psychotic episodes, would have elicited more sympathy had I not been flat-sharing myself in a twelve-by-eight-foot cell. I wondered if the aromas compared. Everywhere you go here, including the visits hall, the bodily smells of fifteen hundred overheated, underemployed males are discernible through the disinfectant.
‘You got here okay?’
‘Fine, though there were these really scary dudes waiting at the gate. They offered me drugs, can you believe it?’
I gestured dismissively. ‘I’d be more surprised if you said there weren’t dealers at the gate. There are over fifty different gangs in this place, they all have mates meeting them when they get out and those mates aren’t likely to be astronauts.’
‘Oh, right.’
I saw I’d offended her; my social skills were not what they used to be. You forget that outside decent people go on living by the same discretionary codes they always did, the same regard for the feelings of others. ‘Thank you for coming today, Regan. I didn’t think you would. And for standing up for me in court. That meant a lot.’
‘I didn’t . . . I mean, you were so . . .’ She faltered, swallowing nervously. Her fingers tugged at the ends of her hair.
‘I was so what? You can say anything, Regan. I’m just happy to be making eye contact here.’ With a woman, a human being who once knew me as good, even honourable.
‘You were so real,’ she managed, at last.
‘What do you mean, “real”?’
‘At work, when you heard he’d been stabbed. When the police came. You were so believable, when all along . . .’
My smile faded. ‘Why did you come today?’
‘What?’
‘If you think I stuck a knife in my own friend, why would you want to see me?’
Her brow creased as she pressed back in her seat, defensive now. ‘I’ve always wanted to see inside a prison. I’ve never had the opportunity before.’
Good God, she was serious. I’d forgotten her fascination with street crime. As if to demonstrate her thirst for knowledge, she did a theatrical one-eighty, eyes on stalks as she checked out the other cons in the hall. She wanted to ask what he’d done to get put in here, and that one, too, the one on the far side with the older male visitor drinking orange squash. Who was the scariest, the most dangerous? Were any of them kiddy fiddlers or gangsters or celebrities? She probably thought she’d be allowed to bring her mobile in, Instagram a few pictures of the lags’ shower facilities. Maybe she expected there to be a gift shop on the way out where she could buy a mug or Christmas cards designed by the inmates’ kids. The latest John Grisham novel.
‘Glad to be of service, Regan,’ I said.
When she left, I knew I’d never see her again. Either that or she’d try to start a romantic relationship with me. Finally, the secret to being visible as a middle-aged man: wear the neon bib that identifies you as the offender in the room. A little crackle of plastic to get the juices flowing.
*
Sorry, I digress. The mind lacks discipline. I was talking about a visit to your grave. New grounds for appeal.
So what’s happened is this: a mate of Nabil’s rigged up our computer so it picks up cable TV and there we were, watching a BBC police drama called Hackney Beat, when I saw a familiar face on-screen.
None other than DC Ian Parry.
He was playing a suspect, actually. Evidently, there’s a thin line between hero and villain in casting (as in life). They’d made him look unkempt, a school-of-hard-knocks type, but you could tell he was a professional actor, a man with good teeth and a honed physique who wants to be a star, not a civilian. The credits rolled just slowly enough for me to get his name: Simon Whiting.
‘I don’t fucking believe it,’ I said, under my breath. My nervous system didn’t know what to do with the development, not at first, lashing adrenaline about and making me think of the ambulances that come sometimes when an inmate has overdosed.
‘Bullshit, innit,’ Nabil said. He thought I was expressing dissatisfaction with the clichéd ending to the storyline – criminal in cuffs, cops in the pub, pints raised in celebration – and I played along; I had no intention of sharing this frankly dynamite piece of news. You’d think we’d spend hours talking, wouldn’t you? Honing our histories from our bunkbeds, dreaming up our futures, keeping each other hopeful, but it’s not like that. We have to shit in each other’s presence, but we couldn’t give a shit about each other.
*
Meetings with briefs take place in a special room, out of earshot of staff for confidentiality reasons. Mine doesn’t want to be here, I can tell by the way he opens his laptop to create a screen between us, and by the way he struggles to transform a dead-eyed stare into a friendly, co-operative one the moment he realizes I’ve noticed. It’s an odd thing, seeing yourself held in such low esteem in someone else’s eyes. Not because I’m an inmate – he has scrupulous respect for prisoners’ rights – but because he thinks I’m a fantasist.
‘So you have some new information, Jamie?’ he says, typing. I imagine the line: Latest hare-brained theory . . .
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I know who Ian Parry is.’
‘Ian Parry?’
I remind him of the account I’ve given over and over of the false police interview. Even when it was discredited in court and subsequently minimized by my defence team, I’ve never wavered, never betrayed a shred of doubt. ‘If you google Simon Whiting and Melia Quinn, I bet you’ll find a link straightaway. They know each other. I’m pretty sure they were in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof together years ago.’
His fingers pause on the keyboard. ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.’ Not a question, merely a polite repe
tition.
‘Then once you find him, he’ll be able to tell you who Merchison is.’
It came to me last night, Kit: Simon Whiting and the actor playing Merchison must have been in the photo on your mantelpiece. In fact, wasn’t it you who said one of the cast was called Si? That’s why Melia removed it from sight. Once I’d met them, she couldn’t have me turning up at the flat unannounced and recognizing them in the picture. Clare noticed it was gone, but for once her theory – which I disregarded, anyway – was wrong.
My solicitor checks something in his notes on-screen before saying, in a measured tone, ‘Mrs Roper was last employed as a lettings agent, I believe.’
‘Yes, she was, but I’m talking about before that. She went to drama school and then she was an actor for a couple of years.’ I lean in a little, try to galvanize him with my positive energy. ‘This could lead to the kind of new evidence that means we can appeal, right? Come on, if Simon Whiting confesses to this masquerade, we must have a chance?’
He nods, respectfully vexed, before reminding me that the police case is closed and there is next to no chance of securing additional manpower at this stage. ‘But I can see if someone in my office is available to follow this up. I can’t promise anything, but if we do manage to make contact with Mr Whiting, and if he does disclose anything new and helpful—’
‘He will,’ I interrupt.
‘Then I’ll be in touch. But you need to know it’s unlikely we would get permission to appeal even if his account did match yours. I don’t have to remind you that the alternative would have been a conspiracy to murder conviction, which in itself carries a heavy sentence.’
‘I know that,’ I cry, ‘but I’d plead guilty to that, wouldn’t I, because it’s true! Don’t you see it’s the principle? I’d rather be in here for the crime I did commit.’
I’d rather know she wasn’t out there, living her best life – at the expense of mine.
And yours, of course, Kit. Especially yours.
The Other Passenger Page 28