God knows how much the flight must have cost her the Saturday before Hogmanay. What a wonderful cushion money is.

Without saying goodbye, she closes the door in my face.

Upstairs, there’s further ignominy to contend with. My remaining clothes and toiletries from the master suite have been moved into the spare and dumped in a huge heap on the bed. A roll of bin liners has appeared on the dressing table, the message that I should get packing loud and clear. Decide what I’m going to donate and what I’m going to keep for my next life.

I tip the clothes onto the floor and go back to bed.

*

For once, I wish I worked weekends. Delaying re-waking – and therefore decision-making – until the afternoon, I leave the house and walk down to the pier, the commuter who won’t take a day off. Okay, it’s more than force of habit, I admit I’m hoping Melia might be walking on the river path, fleeing the cabin fever of her waiting game to get some air. But the riverside is deserted, the water a sullen grey, and she is nowhere in sight.

With the powerful need to do something constructive, I retrace my steps from Monday night, from jetty to Prospect Square, checking for the security cameras in which I’ve so emphatically put my faith. As well as the one mounted on the front wall of Mariners, there is at least one traffic camera, as well as a private surveillance camera above the door of a large house on the western corner of Prospect Square.

Reaching number 15, I pass the gate and return to the river by the second, lesser-known route accessed from the eastern side of the square, which leads down Pepys Road, a dead-end used mostly by construction vehicles heading for the new apartment complex going up, St Mary’s Wharf (‘Riverside Forever Homes’, for fuck’s sake). The road ends about twenty metres from the water, at which point the river path is reachable only on foot and via an insalubrious alleyway yet to be improved by the developers. I don’t see a single camera between my own door and the stretch of river path leading to the Hope & Anchor, including the blackspot I mentioned to the detectives. No drug dealers today, only a couple of homeless guys who’ve managed to furnish themselves with fags and booze and who call out festive greetings to me from the bushes.

It’s as I pass the door of the pub that I think I hear it: Kit’s laughter, the distinctive discharge of it, somewhere within. I pivot with a dancer’s precision and go inside. Other than the main room overlooking the water, where I’ve drunk frequently with Kit, the rooms are of the poky, low-ceilinged style I dislike, the stairwells unpleasantly confined, but I sweep systematically from corner to corner. There is no sign of him. The two lavatories are vacant.

I must look forlorn because the barman tries to help out. ‘Who’re you looking for?’

I don’t recognize him as regular staff and so I find a picture of Kit on my phone and show it to him. ‘A friend of mine, a short bloke, about thirty?’

‘Oh, I know Kit,’ he says.

Of course he does.

‘Haven’t seen him for a few days, mind you—’ As if only now registering the enquiry – or my face – properly, he presses his lips tightly together, which I take to be a subconscious sign that the police have been in and asked him not to mention it to anyone.

‘Thanks anyway.’ Since I’m here, I down a double G&T that I really shouldn’t be spending money on when I have free booze at home. I take a seat in the main window and send Kit another message: Where are you? But the text, like the one sent yesterday, brings only a ‘message failed’ notification. I look out at the Thames, consider its unknowable depths. Is that where Kit’s phone is? Down there, on the riverbed? I saw an exhibition once of phones found in the Thames, from the earliest brick models to the latest iPhones. Each one had an owner with a story about its loss. Maybe in the case of one or two sad souls, the story died with the owner.

Feeling a flare of fury, I push my empty glass from me and stride out. This won’t work, being haunted by the bastard everywhere I go.

*

Other than a voicemail left for my father in which I neglect to mention that I’m now a single man soon to be of no fixed abode, my communications over the rest of the day are spartan, characterized mostly by unanswered texts. There’s one to Clare to ask how long she’ll be away. I imagine her with her family, telling an appalled audience of my betrayal, an excellent whisky at their disposal. Will they express shock and dismay or will they say, Well, we’ve always thought there was something shiftless about him?

When she fails to reply, I make a more specific appeal to Dad:

What are you doing on NYE? Would you like to come to London?

He won’t answer either, at least not promptly. He treats his mobile like a live grenade. I’ll need to call his landline to repeat the invitation. Even so, I check my texts constantly. What power these things have, as if words lit on a screen are more significant than those produced by the human voice. I remember presenting the detectives with that text to Kit, like I was a magician, a mesmerist.

I had to show him I wasn’t intimidated.

I had to get the last word.

With hours to fill and a taste for G&Ts freely indulged, I replay my police interview, teasing the details from a short-term memory that retains a fraction of the information it would have done twenty years ago. I know why I was singled out, of course – if I were drawing up the list I would have put my name top, too – but why in person and not over the phone? Why two detectives, not one? Someone had convinced them that I warranted intercepting in that fashion and to my knowledge there were only two people they interviewed before me: Melia and this other passenger, possibly named Sarah Miller.

I can’t shake the thought of the hater from the Tube. I know I shut down the email account she used to harass me, and I’m certain she never signed her name, anyway, but there was an email address for her that I retrieved from my bank of bad memories when talking to the detectives. Weren’t there three letters, initials, perhaps? STM or SBM? Could they stand for Sarah Miller?

What goes around comes around . . . That’s what she’d said.

Or maybe Sarah Miller really is part of another investigation. Think. Maybe there’s a more obvious candidate, someone who’s been party to the tensions between Kit and me and who may even have rivalrous feelings towards me. And I know he was on the boat that night because I bought him a drink! Adrenaline courses through me as I find Steve’s number on the water rats’ WhatsApp group and tap out an individual message:

This is Jamie. Have you been telling the police lies about me?

His reply comes within ten minutes:

What lies?

I just want to know. Be honest with me PLEASE!

You been on the sherry, mate? I’ve told the police nothing. Take it no news on Kit?

In the time it takes for the adrenaline to drain, I have understood that my theory is preposterous. My phone rings – Steve – but I decline the call.

I feel suddenly completely alone.

I search for something to watch on TV that will hold my attention, dismissing episode after episode of dramas that any other week of my life I’d have found perfectly gripping. Finally, I settle on the old movie Plein Soleil, the French version of The Talented Mr Ripley, with Alain Delon and Maurice Ronet. Clare and I saw it years ago at the NFT and had disagreed about the ending: the body is thrown overboard and gets tangled up in the boat’s propeller, only to be discovered when the yacht is inspected by a new buyer. While Clare was outraged that they’d changed the book’s denouement, I hadn’t read the book and pronounced the twist perfect.