I don’t mean to sneer. My point is just that we weren’t surgeons. Indeed, our utensils had IKEA stamped on them and I’d brought our only decent knife from home, the ones provided being too blunt for slicing the prosciutto we layered in our bestselling prosciutto and fig on sourdough. We handled hiccups like the contactless handset playing up or the Wi-Fi going down with aplomb, safe in the knowledge that none of it mattered and that at the end of our shift we would stroll away, free of all responsibility. Our only frictions involved battles over music and I seem to remember that Regan had prevailed with Billie Eilish when, mid-morning, Clare called.
‘How was the river commute?’
‘Amazing. A business-class experience. I feel like a new man.’
‘Oh, good. Just so long as you don’t feel like a new woman.’
‘Ha.’ Though my gaze was on Regan, consolidating two half-empty baskets of pastries into one full one, I thought unexpectedly of Melia on Saturday night, the way her legs emerged from her shorts on the sofa opposite, pale under sheer tights.
‘While I’m on the phone . . . I just had an email from Vicky Jenkinson.’
‘Vicky who?’
‘Your career coach.’ An edge of exasperation entered Clare’s voice. ‘She says you haven’t scheduled the sessions and she wanted to warn you that she books up over a month in advance.’
‘Okay, I’ll get on to it.’
‘Actually, I don’t mean to be controlling, but . . .’
In my experience, when people said they didn’t mean to be something, it was usually in the spirit of apology, not denial. ‘But?’
‘I’ve already put some dates in her diary for you, just provisionally. I hope that’s all right.’
‘Fine.’ It hardly mattered, since I already had my suspicions that the only career guaranteed to benefit from this transaction was Ms Jenkinson’s own.
As I hung up, I reached out a hand to stop a leaning tower of takeout cups from toppling to the floor.
*
On the trip home, everything slid by in reverse, as commutes have a habit of doing. I’d never seen my city before from the water at night and was charmed by the thousands of acid-blue bulbs along the South Bank and, inside the office buildings, the ceiling lights of open-plan floors, stark and beautiful as art installations.
Kit got on at Blackfriars, picking up a pair of Peronis from the bar before joining me with the air of someone whose day had only now properly begun. Having not done so in the morning, I was reading the emergency instructions and slid the laminated card back into the pocket in front as he thrust the beer at me.
‘You’re not reading the safety card,’ he mocked, taking his own from its pocket and reading aloud in a scoffing tone: ‘“Your crew are trained in emergency procedures . . .” I should bloody well hope so!’
‘It’s not funny,’ I said. ‘You obviously haven’t heard of the Marchioness disaster.’
He slurped his beer. ‘No. What was that?’
‘A collision. Back in eighty-nine. Happened the first year I lived here.’ And just like that, we resumed the morning’s dynamic. (Perhaps I could propose to my career coach that I become a tour guide? It would not, I suspected, fulfil Clare’s brief.) Having taken the edge off his post-work euphoria with my account of the worst loss of life on the Thames in living memory, I cast about for other historical pearls to impart. ‘Did you know the Thames Tunnel is somewhere below us now? It was the world’s first underwater tunnel. London’s the most tunnelled city in the world. Built on clay.’
‘I’ve been in the foot tunnel,’ Kit said, as we approached Greenwich, where the dome of the tunnel entrance glowed in welcome. Used by thousands of pedestrians daily on this bridgeless stretch, it linked Greenwich on the south with Millwall on the north. ‘What about you, Jay, would you be able to go in that?’ He must have been thinking about our morning conversation about claustrophobia. I’ll say that for Kit: unlike many of his generation, he asked questions, he was interested in other people.
‘I’d be able to go in anything, I just might not like it.’ I had been in the Greenwich Foot Tunnel once, in fact, back in the day. As twentysomethings, a pack of us had raced through the long, narrow pipe, too competitive to be unnerved by the discovery of its being twice the distance it looked from the riverbank. ‘If it wasn’t too crowded, I’d know I’d be okay. I could run.’
‘What would you be running from?’ Kit asked.
‘Nothing. I’d just want to get back outside, above ground.’
He considered this. ‘The way I see it, it’s safer down there than up here.’
I glanced at him. ‘Why would you not be safe up here?’
He smirked. ‘Visibility, mate, know what I mean?’
I didn’t, and as he turned to his phone and began chuckling at something on Twitter, I found my thoughts trapped in the tubular worlds far below us. Running near the foot tunnel, much deeper, was the DLR between Cutty Sark and Island Gardens stations. It was all too easy for me to imagine the crush of people below us right now, held in a black tunnel at a red light, some rush-hour incident ahead having caused all moving stock to halt. Was sweat beading under layers of winter clothing as commuters grew uncomfortably conscious of being sealed in, the engines eerily still? Were they starting to ask themselves – or one another – What’s going on? Why aren’t we moving? Was there someone down there whose mind, like mine, spun faster, towards terror, someone thinking, When will the oxygen run out?
‘You all right?’ Kit peered at me, more curious than concerned. He lowered his phone. ‘You look like you’re having an allergic reaction to that beer.’
‘I’m fine. Fancy another one?’
‘Does the sun set in the west?’ But noticing how speedily we’d progressed – there were no signal failures on the water – he proposed we drop in at the Hope & Anchor instead, the nearest pub to St Mary’s Pier, situated on the river path leading east.
What with my nervous system having previously mistaken the Northern Line for the trenches of the Western Front, I had never before strolled into a pub at rush hour for anything other than a solo pulse-lowering double vodka and it was a thrill to submit to this commuter’s rite – or right, as Kit would have seen it. In spite of having lived in the area only half a year and been to the pub a fraction as frequently as I had, he was on first-name terms with the bar staff.
‘Nice spot in the summer,’ I told him as we took seats in the deep bay overhanging the water. ‘Did you know this is an old smugglers’ haunt?’
He lowered his pint. ‘What did they smuggle? Drugs?’
‘More likely wool. Because of high taxes. If you look in daylight, there’re gallows hanging over the water.’
‘Harsh.’ As the alcohol deepened his complexion, Kit turned mischievous. ‘So, Jamie, you ever done anything illegal?’
‘Like what?’
‘Y’know, the usual.’
‘I don’t know what your usual is, but I imagine the answer is yes. Hang on, you’re not recruiting me into some bomb-making cell, are you?’
‘Absolutely not.’ And he smashed our glasses together so hard I thought they might crack, letting out that machine-gun laughter that caused faces to turn towards us and soften at the sight of such bonhomie. ‘Clare seems up for a laugh, as well.’
‘Well, that was her New Year’s resolution. Trying new things. New people.’
‘Trying new people? I see.’ His eyebrows waggled. ‘Why aren’t you two married? I thought it was better for rich people to get married for inheritance tax reasons?’
‘We’re not the marrying kind.’ I didn’t point out that Clare was the rich one, not me, and it was obvious enough why: I wanted him to admire me. Envy me. To believe I had something he didn’t besides an archive of historical facts.
‘You don’t know how lucky you are, mate, being able to do whatever you like without worrying about bills. If that was me working in a café, I wouldn’t be able to pay my rent. I’d just be some loser.’
>
It was the same word he’d used to describe his father that morning. His face took on an expression I would come to know as peculiar to him: part co-conspirator, part tormentor. An oddly destabilizing kind of look. As he got to his feet to get another round in, I made a mental note never to make an enemy of Kit Roper.
5
27 December 2019
Under a luminous white sky, the river flickers silver, as if rebranded for the holiday. A riverboat appears from the east, sleek and low: Seymour. Henry’s third wife, queen for just a year. I can make out figures already queuing in the aisle to disembark at Westminster, eager to start a new shift making money for other people – or perhaps spending it on behalf of some government department. Stretching my throat, I raise my eyes and stare directly at the sun, dangerously pale behind dense cloud. I’m having one of those acute out-of-body rushes: This is really happening. This is really me with two detectives from the Met! I feel a sudden knifing of fear. Am I handling this okay? If I don’t act the right way, will I be arrested and put in a cell with a gangster or a paedophile?
‘All right, Jamie?’
I blink away the glare and pass a hand over my eyes. ‘I’m fine.’
Worrying perhaps that I’m losing concentration when we’ve scarcely begun, Merchison tasks Parry with fetching coffee, and as soon as we’re alone the atmosphere alters perceptibly. He’s like the teacher dismissing the bully to release me from my own face-saving survival instincts.
Now you can feel safe enough to tell the truth.
‘What rank are you?’ I ask him. ‘An inspector or something?’
But he’s a constable, like Parry, it turns out. This can’t be that important an investigation then, I think, heartened. ‘Look, whatever you seem to have decided about Kit and me, we’re not joined at the hip. Most weeks, I only see him on the boat.’
He rotates his pen, a miniature baton between his fingers. ‘So you’re not close friends, as Mrs Roper thinks?’
‘It depends how you define close.’ I wish I had a transcript of Melia’s interview. Knew what she’s revealed, what she’s chosen to draw a veil over. ‘We’ve socialized a bit at weekends as couples. Drinks, dinner, you know. And we sometimes have a drink on the boat after work.’
‘You carried on drinking on the boat on Monday, did you? Before this bust-up between you?’
‘We had one or two more for the road, yes.’
He taps the pen nib on his open pad, leaving little marks on the page. ‘Mr Callister and Ms Miles were with you, you said?’
‘Yes, though they both get off before us. Gretchen lives in Surrey Quays, and then Steve is on the Greenwich peninsula.’
Don’t think about the peninsula.
The apartments, the bedrooms, the secrets.
I feel myself flush. ‘After that there’s only one more stop before St Mary’s. We were the last on board.’
‘Among the last,’ Merchison corrects me, mildly. ‘As we said, there’s another witness we’ve spoken to already. I wouldn’t mind seeing if your account matches theirs.’
I don’t like his assumption that this unnamed stranger’s story is the benchmark against which others must be judged. Nor do I like my own incomplete recollection: I don’t remember noticing a single other person, other than the crew, after Steve got off the boat. I do know it was only then that the scene turned ugly; before that I had been high-spirited, even raucous. A memory breaks from earlier in the evening, when we were still at the bar: Christmas, I declaimed with drunken exaggeration, season of goodwill to all men – or so all men hope . . .
Oh, God. These days, you have to judge your audience before you make those sorts of jokes. You have to be careful no one’s filming you on their phone. Is that what’s happened here? Did this other passenger find something we said so offensive they filmed us?
No, that’s crazy. Come on.
‘This passenger you’ve been talking to, is it a man or a woman?’
There’s an involuntary flicker in Merchison’s gaze when I say woman and I pounce. ‘Who is she? What’s her name?’
The pen is motionless in his grip. ‘You know I can’t tell you that.’
I don’t know that at all. On TV, detectives constantly taunt interviewees with testimony from witnesses freely named and I argue as much now.
‘That’s telly, Jamie,’ he says, with a little show of kindness. ‘This is real.’
‘At least tell me what she’s said about Kit and me. Why did you speak to her before anyone else?’ Before me, apparently established as the last person to see him alive. It makes no sense – unless . . .
Unless she went to them. The next day, she contacted the police to report our altercation as suspicious. That has to be it. I saw these two guys fighting and I just wanted to check nothing bad has happened . . .
‘We’ll come back to that,’ Merchison says. ‘Let’s talk about these other two mates of yours first. Steve and Gretchen. Where do they fit in?’
There’s a nasty twisting sensation in my gut as the drum-roll in my chest accelerates, steals my breath.
I think, I don’t like this.
6
February 2019
One of the joys of commuting without the risk of losing my mind was being able to indulge my curiosity in the people around me, to enjoy the incongruities in the way they presented themselves to the world. There was the man in polished handmade brogues and silk socks of cornflower blue, but with the neglected hair of a vagrant; the younger guy in a cheap suit, with a vinyl backpack from which he unpacked a bento box of perfectly sliced tropical fruit; and the woman who wore tan leather gloves with green piping and whose poker-straight black hair had turned-up ends tinted pink. You grew to match morning faces with evening ones, like a game of pairs: in the morning, animated with purpose or at least nervous tension, by the evening collapsed with exhaustion or relief.
Kit – surprise, surprise – was no mute observer. He would throw out comments, seizing on the slightest reciprocation to get a bit of banter going. I soon learned that he was drawn to a mood of hard living: with Steve, who boarded at North Greenwich one morning, there was something about the way he pitched himself into his seat across the aisle from us that appealed, as if he’d been on his feet all night and only now been offered rest.
‘The peninsula’s a decent place to live, is it?’ Kit asked. ‘Are you in one of those new towers?’
Needing no second invitation, the newcomer launched into a long complaint about having worked from home the previous week and been bedevilled by noisy construction work. ‘Apparently the whole complex’ll be finished in twenty years, so that’s all right then.’
‘So you’ll cash up and retire rich. You’re getting no sympathy from me,’ Kit said.
‘Yeah, maybe, but will I still have my hearing? Will I still have my soul?’
Smirking at each other, they exchanged names and slipped their phones into their pockets to signal their intention to engage for the duration. Sitting in the window seat and obscured by Kit’s turned shoulder, I peeked sideways at Steve. He was in his late thirties, broad-shouldered, fleshy, and very shortsighted – when he removed his glasses to wipe the lenses, it was a surprise to see how large his eyes were and how rich a grey-green colour. His voice was nasal. Unlike Kit, whose diction was well-projected, he spoke as if through a grate.
‘What d’you do?’ Kit asked him, after ten minutes of ambitious – some might say fabulous – talk about a friend of a friend’s electric scooter start-up he hoped to get in on once his debts were cleared.
‘I work at Finer Consulting. Internal comms.’
‘Isn’t that your game, Jamie?’
‘Was.’ Leaning forward, I began to explain that I’d left my job following a health scare, but it was obvious Steve thought that whatever story I was peddling I’d have been sidelined soon enough anyway because of my age. (He was almost certainly right: in media, fifty is the new seventy.)
‘Jamie lives in one of those massive
houses on Prospect Square in St Mary’s,’ Kit told him, ‘so he must have done something right.’
I couldn’t tell if this was meant in defence of me or accusation, but Steve said he didn’t know St Mary’s at all and the subject was dropped in favour of hangover war stories.
The next morning, when Steve took the same neighbouring seat, Kit gave him a heads-up on the evening service we caught, which prompted a move to the two pairs of seats facing each other next to the bar and a round of Peronis for three. Discovering they both smoked, they slipped out onto the deck for a cigarette. When they came back, buoyant, like they’d discovered fresh air, I had a ridiculous feeling of being put out, as if my friend had been stolen from under my nose in the school yard.
‘Get us,’ Kit said.
‘This is the fucking life,’ Steve agreed.
He’d come up with a name for us, Kit reported: the water rats.
‘Isn’t there a pub called that?’ I said.
‘There is? Even better.’
They stopped just short of high-fiving each other, before screwing up their faces and making nibbling noises like rodents. I supposed that at least, what with his getting off two stops before us, Steve wouldn’t join us at the Hope & Anchor, which had by now, inevitably, become a daily staging post in the Jamie-and-Kit river commute.
The Other Passenger Page 4
