The guy at the next table suddenly adjusts his seat and the scraping of chair legs on marble seems to travel through my legs and into my pelvis. Perhaps experiencing the same discomfort, Merchison straightens and places his palms on his thighs. Freed of his fiddling, the pages of his book drop apart and I see, under the heading ‘C. ROPER’ and a reference number of some sort, another name in capitals. ‘SARAH MILLER’, it looks like.

‘Who’s Sarah Miller?’ I blurt, before I can stop myself.

Looking down, he sees his mistake and angles the pad so the notes are no longer visible to me. By his side, Parry frowns, but says nothing.

‘She’s a witness in a different investigation. Not relevant here.’

He brings just the right edge of dismissal to convince most people, but I feel I understand him well enough by now to sense danger.

If Sarah Miller is part of this investigation, then it’s not hard to guess who she might be. She’s the loose cannon whose projectile is coming my way. The other passenger.

And I’ve seen her name before, I’m certain of it.

‘Can I suggest a theory?’ I say. Because suddenly, chillingly, I know it is not enough that every word I’ve uttered is the truth. These days, the truth comes in inverted commas, as owned and defined by the listener as by the speaker. Unless these two detectives believe my story, it might just as well be fiction.

Merchison rotates a shoulder, grimaces at the evident discomfort of it, and urges me on: ‘Sure, let’s hear it.’

‘I think Kit’s disappearance might be to do with drugs.’

They go rigid, soldiers on parade, and I know my timing is perfect. After all my objections and denials, my self-indulgent account of infidelity, I’m suddenly the one offering something, something I hope they’ll think about when they’re driving back to the station. Something they’ll tell their supervisor when they’re reporting on their progress and awaiting a steer.

‘I’ve maybe played it down, but he’s got a serious cocaine habit, probably other drugs as well, and it must be costing him. I’ve been with him a few times when he’s left to meet his dealer.’

‘Where?’ Parry says. Merchison starts to take notes.

‘They have a regular spot on the river path, a blackspot where there aren’t any cameras.’

‘Where is this blackspot?’

‘Near the Hope and Anchor. You sometimes see homeless people there, or dodgy types, it’s not the nicest stretch. Anyway, my point is he might have owed money, got into some sort of dispute. For all I know, he could have been dealing himself.’

I stop speaking and assess their reactions. They’re not smacking their heads and exclaiming, ‘Of course!’, but they’re not scorning me either. They’re mulling the basics, checking the logic.

‘This has just occurred to you, has it?’ Parry says, his tone dubious.

‘Not “just”, but . . .’ I hang my head a little. ‘I thought it might be relevant.’

‘You’ve taken drugs together, have you?’

I’d forgotten he wasn’t here when I described the dinner party at the Ropers’ flat. ‘Well, once or twice, but I’m too old for that game.’

Both sets of eyes flare, but no comment is made. Merchison’s pen is already dismayingly still.

‘Anything else you’d like to share now your memory’s cranking to life?’ Parry asks.

‘There is something, actually. He asked me if I could lend him some money. Back in October, I think it was.’

‘How much?’ He looks as if he could thump me for waiting this long to share the most incendiary details.

‘Five thousand pounds. He said it was for rent arrears, but now I feel certain it was a drug debt.’

‘Did you lend it to him?’

‘No, I don’t have that kind of money to spare. Look, I know it probably isn’t that much in terms of his overall debts, but . . .’ I falter.

‘But even if you had had it, you still wouldn’t have given it to him?’ Merchison guesses.

I meet his eye. ‘You guys are in a better position to know this than I am, but what I was actually going to say was that people have been killed for less, haven’t they?’

In the first instance of harmony between the three of us, there is a collective intake of breath.

22

October 2019

Admittedly, it was a bit late in the day that I began worrying about Kit’s lifestyle choices, when the drug use I’d assumed to be recreational and self-contained started to feel as if it were defining him. As if it might bring everything crashing down. After the excitement of the wedding had faded, the backslapping and good wishes, he was visibly untethered, the very opposite of the new dynamic Clare had predicted. At least once a week, he failed to turn up for the river bus, which meant he must have been getting into work late, if at all.

I wasn’t the only one to miss him. I’d clock Steve’s disappointment when he approached our seats on Boleyn and saw it was just me – followed by Gretchen’s, when she saw it was just Steve and me. It occurred to me that the low-level flirtation she and Kit had engaged in might have become less tenable now he was married and that he might in fact be avoiding her. The notion that he might be avoiding me only struck later, when we connected one morning on the later boat – I’d missed the 7.20 by seconds – and I caught the reflex of irritation in his eyes when he saw me sitting there.

‘You all right?’ I asked. His complexion was terrible, greying and blemished, his eyes glassy.

‘Yeah, fine.’

‘How’s work?’ It had been a while since he’d talked of leaving his firm of dinosaurs (and, of course, the Cold Fish) to jump on some tech start-up or other cliché.

He didn’t bother answering, but turned to look out of the window. The river was pale under a flagstone-grey sky; any minute now, the rain would come down. As we sat in strange, tense silence, I imagined myself saying, ‘Have I done something to offend you?’ and the justifiably violent twist of his response: ‘You fucking know you have!’

But I wasn’t a lunatic. My job was to thwart any airing of my own injurious part in his affairs and carry on acting as if his off-colour mood was nothing to do with me at all. Instead, I tried a different angle. ‘Is there anything I can do to help?’

He jerked to attention. ‘You know what? There is, actually.’

My pulse quickened as I caught the torment in his eyes. ‘Tell me.’

‘I need a loan, mate. Quick.’

‘How much?’

‘Three or four grand. Five would be great.’ His voice wavered with a desperate hope that I knew it cost him to show. ‘I could get it back to you when I get my end-of-year bonus.’

‘Five grand?’ I was stunned. (And if I knew anything about his performance at work, he wasn’t getting any bonus.) ‘I haven’t got that sort of money, Kit. You know I work in a café.’

He dismissed this, of course. ‘Yeah, but you could get it from Clare.’

‘It’s not as easy as that. What’s it for, anyway?’

‘Just cash-flow problems. We owe a couple of months’ rent.’