17

27 December 2019

My phone buzzes and, ignoring the detectives’ scrutiny, I read Clare’s reply to my earlier text:

Yes, Melia told Richard about K. So strange!

I hope he’s OK.

I judge from her use of ‘strange’, as opposed to tragic or horrific, that she is sceptical about Kit’s being in any real danger.

‘Not him, is it?’ Merchison says.

‘No.’ It strikes me that I haven’t tried Kit’s phone myself since that text on Monday. ‘His phone is off, is it? You haven’t found it abandoned somewhere? Come on, you can tell me that, surely?’

‘No. It may be on his person, but it’s out of service,’ Parry says.

‘That’s definitely unusual.’

They don’t dignify this with the response it warrants – Gee, thank you for confirming we’ve done the right thing to launch an investigation! – and I feel foolish.

‘Were you aware of anyone in his life who might have a grievance against him?’ Merchison asks. ‘What about his colleagues?’

I think. When you and your fellow commuters all work in different industries, you discuss your work very little. Gripes about bad bosses notwithstanding, who wants to start the day sharing their dread of the meetings and deadlines ahead? ‘No,’ I say. ‘Sorry. He’s pretty popular. I imagine his colleagues like him a lot.’

‘What about family?’

‘Hasn’t Melia filled you in on that? She’s fallen out with hers. His are mostly dead.’

‘“Mostly” dead?’

‘His mum died young, when he was ten or eleven. Not suicide, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

There’s a short, frozen moment when I realize that in trying to deny a theory I’ve only gone and proposed it. I strongly doubt Melia has introduced the notion. ‘His mum died of cancer and his dad sold their house and spent the proceeds on the horses. Kit hasn’t had much to do with him since, from what I can gather. He was pretty much raised by his grandmother.’ It occurs to me that this summarizes quite neatly Kit and his bitter aspirations. ‘But I’m sure Melia’s told you all about it,’ I add.

‘So there’s no one he argued with recently, even over something small?’

‘No, I met some of his friends at the wedding and they all seemed nice enough. Some were from his drama school days, a couple from work.’

My answers are intentionally bland: my aim is to neutralize my interrogators, regain some of the power I lost with that blurted error about suicide.

‘You and your partner were witnesses at the wedding, I gather,’ Merchison says. ‘That must have been a bit awkward.’

‘Melia told you that?’

‘Must have made you feel a bit, what’s the word they use?’ He pauses. ‘Conflicted.’

‘I was happy for them.’ I have a sudden unprompted image of Melia spinning herself in that length of diaphanous fabric in the first of our borrowed bedrooms. Come back, Melia, I say in a sing-song voice, the yearning only half-mocking. You’re like Cleopatra.

God, have we been too caught up in self-mythology? Have we cared too much about what our feelings mean?

Merchison is watching me, reading me. ‘Come on, Jamie, you’re only human. You must have felt a bit envious seeing him marry the woman you were . . .’ He pauses for the right word, but this time it feels as if he’s withholding it as a taunt. ‘In love with,’ he supplies, at last, and I’m unsettled to see that he’s grinning at me. For the first time I see his teeth, perfectly straightened, as they always are in the mouths of men younger than me (if you want to see the famed British dental neglect you have to go to the forty-plus age group).

I sigh. ‘Look, I’m not in therapy here. What’s your point in relation to the investigation?’

‘Our point is it all seems to lead back to you,’ Parry says. ‘You’re the one who was there on Monday night. You’re the one with the history of emotional outbursts. You’re the one Kit trusted to be a witness at his wedding, even though you were in fact betraying him in the worst possible way.’

It sounds bad when he lists it all like that. You could say indefensible.

‘He’s right, you know,’ Merchison says. And he looks almost saddened, as if he’s tried to defend me, he really has, but he simply cannot find a way through to a truth that might serve me better.

‘You’re his only known enemy, Jamie.’

18

August 2019

The wedding, on a Saturday in late summer, struck me as an act of insanity the moment I heard about it, still buried by pillows in our bedroom, black-out blinds drawn.

‘Jamie! You need to get up!’ Clare was in the doorway, waiting for me to raise my head before crossing to the windows to snap open the blinds and flood the room with daylight.

I shielded my eyes with my arm. Kids shrieked in the square out front and dogs barked in reply. ‘Why?’

‘Seriously, get up now.’ Her voice was alive with emergency. ‘You’re not going to believe this: Kit and Melia are getting married!’

She was right, I didn’t believe it. I sat up, seized by a forceful jabbing in my chest, my heart protesting the news before my brain could formulate a spoken response. ‘That is news. I doubt it will actually happen, though.’ I gave a grudging little laugh before sinking against the headboard. ‘You know what they’re like.’

Clare was at the wardrobe, moving the hangers along the rail with a horrible metallic scraping that shredded my nerves. ‘No, you don’t get it, it’s happening now. Today at twelve o’clock! They want us to be their witnesses. We need to get ready, it’s already past ten.’

Immobilized and gaping, I found it all too easy to put myself at the centre of this development: Kit must have found out about Melia and me and proposed in order to reclaim her, lock her in. But no, who invites their new wife’s lover to be a witness? That was perverse, even for Kit. More to the point, how the hell were they going to pay for a wedding? It could only create deeper debt, tighter knots. I remembered my advice to her, much too recent for her to have forgotten: Don’t marry Kit . . . You’ll only be liable for his debts, as well as your own.

Clare tossed me her phone. ‘Look at Melia’s text. Can we meet them at the register office at eleven thirty. I said yes.’

It was unnerving seeing my lover’s name on my partner’s phone screen, the long string of messages between them, evidence of firm ongoing friendship. My relations with Kit had conveniently been camouflaged by the group, our last night out alone an all-nighter in June at a club on the peninsula that had taken me a week to recover from and seen me dispatched to the spare room for days afterwards for ‘breathing alcohol through your pores’. Please say you can do it? Melia had pleaded. Exciting! She’d added an emoji of a veiled, blushing bride.

I swung my legs to the floor. ‘Kit didn’t breathe a word on the boat last night.’ There’d been the usual onboard beers and he’d asked what everyone was up to the next day, but there’d been no secret smile that I remembered, no conspiratorial wink. ‘Don’t you have to give notice when you get married?’