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.

*

In those early weeks, Kit rarely mentioned Melia. Every evening, while I texted Clare my ETA and negotiated the shopping and cooking chores ahead, he made no contact with his girlfriend; I’d even seen him decline her calls, flashing Steve or me the sitcom grimace of the long-suffering male evading his shrew. Meanwhile, Clare would pass on complaints from the other direction, though in such a way that it was impossible to tell if the criticism was Melia’s or her own. ‘You saw how stunning she is, but he pays her no attention. What an idiot.’