The Other Passenger

by Louise Candlish

  But, as we pass London Bridge, these points of advantage are exposed for what they are: temporary, fraudulent, and, in the end, easily construed as evidence of guilt. The grotesque truth is that my carefully plotted timeline, my meticulously secured alibis, Melia’s and my rehearsed scripts: they’re all meaningless because Kit was never reported missing when I thought he’d been.

  When he thought he’d been, too, I’ve no doubt.

  The two imposters who interviewed me must have been paid and prepped by Melia. The £10,000 loan that Kelvin unearthed, that feels like the right sort of fee for an acting job like this: one big interview, a house call or two, phone conversations as and when he gets in touch – their target and their dupe. Expenses would have been minimal, the costumes the actors’ own and their only props a pair of fake IDs. A cheap disposable phone to field my calls must by now have been hurled into the river or crushed to pieces in the back of a bin lorry.

  This is as much as I can calculate of the ‘how’. The ‘why’ is clearer: she’s framed me for Kit’s murder. What did the officers say just now? His wife has just made the formal identification. There was no hint – and nor do I have any hope – that she is under suspicion, much less arrest.

  Clare’s words haunt me: Your little fling with her might have been strategic . . .

  How could you do this to me, Melia?

  The boat leaves the central zone and picks up speed. Still, the riverside paths and roads are free of flashing blue lights. Still, there’s no message over the PA for a member of the crew to make contact with his captain. But even if the police don’t know where I am, the fact remains that I have nowhere to go. I can’t go home. I have nowhere to hide, no one to protect me. My past with the woman I used to love can never be resurrected, my future with the woman I love now only ever existed as fantasy, as bait.

  Greenwich comes into view and my fellow passengers press towards the exit, eager to get sightseeing, even in the rain. Thanks to the screen their queue creates, we’ve docked before I see it: a police launch, skimming the water behind us, dispatched, presumably, from the river police station at Wapping.

  They know where I am!

  The sight reignites the flight instinct and I shoulder my way to the exit, ignoring the grumbles, mouthing apologies with the taste of bile in my mouth. The moment the rope is raised, I tear past the crew and hare up the jetty to the open concourse, where I scan the options in front of me, my left ankle deep in a rain puddle: the Cutty Sark, with no queue in evidence; the terracotta entrance to the foot tunnel; the Greenwich streets, with the park – and southeast London – beyond; the Thames path east-and westward, both directions obstructed in places, if I remember rightly. Behind me, heavy footsteps, urgent voices; ahead, a uniformed security guard attached to the Cutty Sark, not looking my way but with his radio to his ear.

  For fuck’s sake, Jamie, choose!

  Instinct leads me to the right and I slip into the doorway of the tunnel entrance, fed automatically to the left down a wide spiral stairwell. Round and round in a sickening corkscrew, my wet foot squelching loudly, my brain struggling to fathom what my body is doing. If I get to the other side of the river, I can run from there. Find somewhere to hide, think of a way to contact Clare.

  No, not Clare, they’ll be expecting that. Not my father or sister, either. Who, then? Who do I have left in the world? In my fixation with Melia, I’ve isolated myself. I’ve put all my faith in a false god.

  At the foot of the stairs, the narrow tiled pipe beckons, the squares of fluorescent light along the curved ceiling receding down the shallow slope. There’s a swarming sensation in my head before I’m even twenty feet in and I hear myself shriek as something whips past me, a man on a bike, riding one foot on the pedal, swooping into the dipped centre, before disappearing from view. Now there are voices behind me, disembodied, their echoes sinister, and before I dare look a knot of tourists overtakes me.

  I try to accelerate, but all I feel is an unbearably heavy wading motion, as if my coat is made of plates of iron. The world is suddenly odourless but for my own sweat, my rank breath. I reach to touch the tiles, to check the world is physical and not locked inside my mind.

  I call out to the group bunched in my path. ‘Please, can I get by? Please.’

  Startled faces turn, there’s even a faint recoiling, confirming the otherness of me. Then someone makes way and I finally pick up speed, rushing and rushing, opening a gap between us. I’m almost at the mid-point of the tunnel, deep under the water right now. The concave walls enclose me, the dot at the end out of reach. I register the aching rumble of a train somewhere in the earth nearby. I think, Why the hell am I here? I’d have been better hiding in a building, the toilets of a bar. Now my destination is narrowed to the exit on the other side. Narrowing and narrowing into a cone . . .

  ‘Grab him, he’s falling!’

  The last words before my hearing fails, my vision blurs. I feel the brakes in my body, the loss of power, and everything turns to black.

  *

  When I come to, the first thing I see is a man’s face bright with concern. He is taking my vital signs and his fingers are gentle. He is in a hi-vis jacket, but I do not think he is police.

  ‘Why did the train stop?’ I say, which surprises me as much as it does him.

  ‘You’re not on a train. You’re in the Greenwich Foot Tunnel. You fainted and someone pressed the emergency button.’

  ‘The emergency lever. I pulled it. I needed the train to stop. I have to get out.’

  ‘Stay nice and still while we wait for the medics. They’ll have a stretcher with them, so you don’t need to move. It will only be a few minutes.’

  I focus on details. The glaze on the tiles, cracked, each rectangle its own parched riverbed. A stalactite on the ceiling – calcium has formed in the gaps. I know these things. How far above is the water? I know this fact, too, I do.

  ‘Stay right where you are,’ the voice commands, and I see the stalactite drawing closer as I rise to my feet.

  ‘No, no. I can walk.’

  ‘You really need to stay still in case—’

  I battle through the onlookers, staggering on. They don’t know if I am a threat or a form of entertainment. There are silhouettes in the circle ahead. I can hear the man in the neon vest coming up behind me and calling, ‘Sir, please come back!’

  Uniformed police are coming towards me now. They are bowling pins, toy soldiers. A fearful, accented voice asks: ‘What has this man done?’

  Another, local, bolder: ‘Keep out of his way, he might have a knife.’

  Undeterred, someone walks right by my side, phone held brazenly in my face.

  Three police officers surround me. One speaks into his radio, another addresses me directly:

  ‘Was that really necessary, Mr Buckby?’

  I know the voice and my heart leaps: Merchison!

  But no, not him, of course not. He is neither officer nor friend, but Melia’s puppet. Like Parry, he speaks only her words.

  There are hands restraining me now, because I can no longer be trusted not to bolt, and as I emerge above ground, daylight snapping and crackling around my face, the police arrest me on suspicion of murder.

  42

  2 January 2020

  This time we go to a police station. Of course we do. Why would detectives from the Metropolitan Police interview someone in the middle of winter at a terrace table outside the Royal Festival Hall? We drive west down roads rinsed clean by the rain, passing Londoners reborn with optimism as they raise their faces to the emerging sun – that used to be me! – until we reach a featureless mid-rise building in Woolwich that I’ve never had occasion to notice before.

  Before I met Melia.

  There’s a booking-in process that takes an age and gives me time to recover from my absconsion, my confusion in the tunnel. To clarify my situation to myself, understand my rights. ‘Have you arrested anyone else, as well?’ I ask the custody officer, but am told to worry a
bout myself and leave police work to the professionals.

  Eventually, I’m introduced to the duty solicitor and taken to a room far removed from the large interrogation chambers you see on TV, where officers get buzzed in and out and chief inspectors watch through a one-way mirror as suspects pace like caged tigers. This is small and oppressive and could be a unit at a job centre or a parking office: we sit on rough-textured plastic seats at a smeared table, on which there is digital equipment of some sort. A wall-mounted camera in the corner with an all-seeing eye. There’s no offer of coffee, but I am permitted a plastic beaker of water.

  The solicitor sits by my side. Evan, a good Welsh name, even if his accent is pure home counties. I try to bring to mind our pre-interview conference – he was briefing himself as we spoke and there was some grumble about disclosure. He is about my age and wears his world-weariness in extra kilos around his waist. Once or twice he yawns and I smell cigarettes on his breath, which makes me think of Kit and me on the stoop, looking out over Prospect Square.

  How the hell do you get to live in a place like this?

  He thought I had it all and didn’t deserve it, when in fact I was busy preparing for exactly what I deserved: nothing.

  A detective comes in. A real one. I don’t absorb his name, but he is so totally unlike Merchison and Parry I could weep at my stupidity. It’s not just his appearance – unremarkable, mid-priced suit, complexion that speaks of long-term dietary compromise – but also his sour odour of institution, of overwork. He is in his early forties and has rounded, boyish features, with a bright, obliging manner that feels hackneyed, as if he’s signalling to me that he is not to be surprised, I am no one he hasn’t sat face to face with a thousand times before.

  He says he is recording our interview and activates the equipment, checking that I can clearly see what he is doing. The time and place are stated, as well as the names of all present. When asked to give my address, I have a profound sense that I will never set foot in Prospect Square again. I am the outcast now, the dispossessed.

  ‘Okay, Mr Buckby.’ He insists on eye contact before beginning. ‘Perhaps you’d like to start by telling me why you took it upon yourself to take off the way you did this afternoon when our officers spoke to you at your place of work?’

  ‘Because I thought . . .’ My voice is a mumble and I clear my throat, raise the volume to a more confident level. ‘I thought I must have been framed for Kit’s murder and I got scared. I’m sorry. It was a crazy thing to do, I didn’t mean to waste your time and budget.’

  He gives me a sarcastic Well, that’s all right then kind of look and I understand that what little benefit of the doubt I might have been entitled to, I’ve squandered. He is entirely disinclined to believe a word I say.

  ‘What made you think he’d been murdered? You hadn’t been told that by our officers, had you?’

  ‘No, but my partner had phoned earlier and said she thought it was a stabbing.’

  ‘Did she now? Her job is what?’

  ‘She’s in property. What I mean is, she was in the area and she overheard someone say it was a stabbing. She didn’t see the body with her own eyes.’

  The body. I can’t connect with what I’ve done, what Melia has done. It’s evening by now and the river bus commuters will be arriving home. Are the police still there, rainwater dripping from the tent, cordons in place?

  ‘Right. Well, what I’m interested in, if we’re going to get anywhere tonight, is what you’ve seen with your own eyes. Okay?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where were you on Tuesday night of this week?’

  ‘At home.’ I repeat the answers I gave the uniformed officers in the café. Again, Clare is invoked. If I’ve established anything in the time between arrest and now, it’s that this is Melia’s word against mine, whether she is questioned as a suspect or as the victim’s family or both. I have Clare to alibi me and she has Elodie. Surely someone as successful and respectable as Clare will be more convincing than Elodie? I try to remember her profession, if I was ever told it. Most of the Ropers’ friends are ‘creative’, so if there’s any justice in the world, Elodie will be flitting between casual jobs, constantly demonstrating her unreliability. An uneasy voice corrects mine: Melia will not have picked her at random. I shudder.

  Bright eyes grip mine once more, demand my focus. ‘Let’s look at the period between midnight and six in the morning on Wednesday, Mr Buckby.’

  That must be the time of death. ‘I was in bed. I sent some New Year’s messages to my family, then I listened to a radio drama. I slept from about one to eight-thirty in the morning.’

  ‘What radio drama was it?’

  ‘Just an old Jeeves and Wooster thing.’

  ‘In a lighthearted mood, were you?’

  ‘Not really, it was just good to fall asleep to.’

  ‘Because you were keyed up about something?’

  ‘No, not at all. But I could hear fireworks going off, a bit of party noise from the square outside. I just wanted to relax. I’m sure you could check my phone, or search history or whatever.’

  ‘I’m sure we could. What was the Jeeves and Wooster story? Fill me in.’

  His style is relentless: this is no game of cat and mouse, but the lightening of an unmanageable workload with optimum efficiency. I’m of no fascination to him, only an arrogant chancer who believes his life is worth more than other people’s and who has been wicked enough to act on that belief.

  I wouldn’t have a hope even if I did disagree with him.

  ‘I can’t remember,’ I say, truthfully.

  ‘Try. Give me some idea of the story.’

  I strain for a likely detail. ‘I think it was the one where he helps his friend break off his engagement.’

  ‘Sounds like an episode of Friends.’ There’s a pause, a moment of amusement shared with Evan rather than me, a split-second of security I’d be a fool to put my faith in. ‘Thank you, Jamie, that sounds very complete. A nice, civilized early night. The problem is, we’ve got this.’

  It is a photograph, in black and white. As I peer at it, tilting my head to rid the surface of the glare, discussion ensues between the two of them about disclosure. Evidently, the item should have been submitted to us before the interview. Evan suggests a break, a private conference, but I wave away the idea. ‘It doesn’t matter whether I saw it before or not, because I can’t tell what it is.’

  This is true. There is little discernible variation in the dark tones of the image. But then I see the timestamp in the corner – 01/01/20 01.43 – and I brace in my seat. The atmosphere in the room heightens and quickens and contracts. Everything slams into everything else.

  My interrogator resumes: ‘This is an image sent anonymously through our witness appeal channels. It’s been taken without a flash, so you’re right, you can’t see anything much, but if you look at this enhanced version our techies have sorted out for us . . .’

  A second picture is placed alongside the first. Now I can make out two figures against a low wall, their torsos crushed together. They might be lovers if you cared to interpret it that way, but I know they are fighting. Fighting over a woman, fighting for their lives, though neither knows it yet.

  Only one face is visible to the camera.

  ‘Can you identify either of these figures, Mr Buckby?’

  Again, Evan attempts to interrupt the questioning and, again, I dismiss him. I touch my own face in the photo with a tentative finger. ‘This looks like me, but if it is then the time must be faked. Like I say, I was at home then. Clare will confirm that.’

  The detective ignores this, making a comment for the purposes of the recording that I have identified myself in the evidence. ‘And the other person?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘You don’t remember who you were with?’

  ‘The date’s faked, so if I don’t know when it was taken, then I don’t know who I was with.’ I cling to my line: everything is faked now, it’s an estab
lished problem for seekers of the truth.

  But the police are seekers of convictions, which is not necessarily the same thing.

  ‘Do you recognize the location, Mr Buckby?’

  ‘No idea,’ I repeat. The blackspot is out of range of all cameras and we were alone, which means Melia must have taken this photo, careful not to use flash, as the detective points out. I would have noticed that and so would Kit.

  Witch. Double-crosser. Right in front of our eyes – except our eyes were on each other.

  I pick up my water beaker, but it’s empty. I chew at the rim, as if that will yield liquid. ‘Could I have some more water, please?’

  Evan slides his cup towards me and I pour the remaining liquid down my throat. I say thank you but do not meet his eye.

  ‘We believe the second figure is your friend, Mr Roper,’ the detective says.

  ‘It could be,’ I agree, ‘just not any time recently. As I keep explaining, I haven’t seen him since Monday the twenty-third of December. I thought he’d been reported missing and I wasn’t the only one to think that. For God’s sake, Merchison and Parry detained me for half the morning on that basis!’

  ‘Ah, yes, the famous Merchison and Parry.’ An audible lungful of breath, followed by a theatrical sigh, tells me what he thinks of the allusion. ‘You were interviewed under caution, were you?’

  ‘No. It was only an informal chat.’

  He chuckles. ‘An informal chat that took up half the morning. Right.’

  ‘Yes, right. Someone needs to investigate them. If they’re not in the Met, then they should be charged with impersonating a police officer. That’s an offence, isn’t it?’ I’ve said this several times to police staff since being arrested, but it’s clear that all, including this one, the one who counts, think I’m making my inquisitors up, that they’re phantoms, delusions. Names plucked from some magazine ad or a label on a box that caught my eye in the café as I spoke to the uniformed officers: Merchison & Parry, purveyors of traditional gingerbread. My face floods as I remember Sarah Miller, soprano. Merchison must have seen her name on a poster or a flyer in the RFH, then doodled it in his pad, making himself look like a real detective, noticing things. What else was in that pad? A shopping list? Ideas for anniversary gifts for his wife? Does he even have a wife? A spike of fury pierces the deadweight of self-pity in me and I feel my face flame.