I smile but she doesn’t reciprocate. ‘I really hope you’re not right about all of this, Clare.’

‘So do I. But in a way, if I’m not, then it’s more than likely he’s already dead, which is hardly a great alternative, is it? Better that we prevent his crime and save your skin. None of this is worth losing a life over.’

As her attention returns to the screen, a chill passes through me, exactly like you read about in stories of the paranormal. Something deeper than bodily; a recognition in my soul of the wickedness I’ve allowed to take residence.

Astonishing, really, that it’s taken this long for it to happen.

*

2020 has a sci-fi ring to it, I feel, like it might be the year of alien landings or the one when the gamma rays get us. We don’t bother waiting for the countdown to midnight: we’ve each experienced almost fifty of these before, after all. Instead, just after eleven thirty, I tell Clare I’m heading to bed. To my surprise, she follows closely after, intercepting me on the first-floor landing, outside the door of the spare bedroom.

I wait politely for her to say whatever she wants to say. Something to emphasize the mistakes I’ve made: I hope you know what you’ve thrown away. Yep, if I had to put money on it, that’s what she’ll say.

‘Do you think it’s completely impossible . . . ?’ she begins.

I feel my brow pucker. ‘Impossible to what?’

‘To rewind.’

‘Rewind what?’

‘Life. Just a few months. Pretend none of this happened.’

Both the sentiment and her expression are oddly childlike for her, reflecting a rare rawness of emotion, a leap of faith she seldom allows herself to make. Reflecting also, perhaps, the whole bottle of Chablis she’s drunk. I choose my words with care: ‘If I had a superpower that’s the one I’d choose.’

She takes her time absorbing this piece of diplomacy. ‘Do I even want to myself, that’s the question.’

And yet she doesn’t make a question of it, and that’s what saves me, that missing question mark. I hover in my doorway and watch as she goes up the stairs to the master bedroom on the second floor, the room where we slept together for ten years. She closes the door behind her, spends a few minutes in the en suite, and then her lights are off. I can hear the faint drone of her radio: she likes to fall asleep to audiobooks, used to listen through earphones so as not to disturb me, but now she can play her stories out loud.

In my bedroom, as fireworks crack and whistle in the distance, I check a few news sites online, text family and friends: Happy New Year from us! Establish that I am here, at home, with Clare. Then I select a radio drama from the iPlayer, one with a running time of almost two hours, and hit ‘Play’. I turn the volume down and slip the phone under my pillow so I can’t make the mistake of taking it with me.

At 1.20 a.m., I pull on trainers and a hoodie, both items too big for me and purchased with cash. I creep downstairs in the dark and leave the house.

There’s not a soul on the street, though I can see party lights in several houses where gatherings continue into the night, well-dressed silhouettes at the windows, wineglasses raised. Drunk people make poor witnesses, I remind myself – I was one of them myself on 23 December. I’m as confident as I can be that no one is watching as I move, soft-footed, towards the eastern exit of the square. Melia is right: my little visit from Merchison yesterday was the end of it. I’ve considered Kit gone since I was notified by the same officer on the 27th and, come tomorrow, I’ll be exonerated on those very grounds. Meanwhile, word will reach police ears of my clashes with Melia, designed to emphasize that we are foes, as far from coconspirators as you could imagine. It will all be on record, incontrovertible, both our alibis for the night of the killing as airtight as each other’s.

As for any thoughts I’ve had of this other passenger having some historic grievance against me, following me, waiting for me to trip up, Melia was right about that, as well. Paranoia, nothing more.

I take a left onto Pepys Road and head down to the river. As expected, I pass no one, only a skinny fox scavenging for food. A year from now, when the St Mary’s Wharf flats are completed and their buyers installed, it would be a different story. There’s a smell of sulphur in the air, of spent fireworks, stirring memories of childhood bonfire nights, Debs by my side, both of us in scarves knitted by our mother. Never, not for a nightmarish second, would my mother have imagined her son capable of doing tonight what he’s about to do.

I reach the river path. There’s no lighting on this stretch and no passing vessels, so I hear the water before my eyes adjust sufficiently to see it, the slap and squelch of high tide. When I draw to a halt, I realize I’m shaking badly. Maybe because I know that where I’m standing is a blackspot and I’m entirely alone and unguarded, hunter become hunted. The bar manager at the Hope & Anchor first drew it to my attention after my bike was nicked from where I’d locked it to the nearest bench. Their camera range didn’t extend that far, he explained. It’s I who told Kit and Melia about the spot, unaware, then, of their future uses for it.

My night vision is sharpening; I’m about twenty feet from the bench. Whatever celebrations were hosted by the Hope & Anchor are over, all its windows dark. There’s a sudden gust of high spirits from a party boat on the far bank and I’m reminded of when I told Kit about the Marchioness disaster. I feel a lurch of grief for the victims that terrible night, for all the dead who fall from memory with the passing of their own generation.

The innocent deserve better.

Without my phone, I can’t check the time, but it must be close to our agreed rendezvous of 1.30 a.m. Minutes tick by and I start to think they’re not coming. I’m shocked by the depth of my disappointment, by the phrase that rears in my mind: I’m ready. I’m ready to leave my home, my life. I’m ready to bundle every last possession into a sack and sink it in the Thames. To start my life again with the woman I love.

And then, quite suddenly, there they are, approaching from the same direction I came from myself.

Kit and Melia. Husband and wife.

Victim and killer.

On Melia’s back, a small, stuffed backpack. In Kit’s hands, nothing but a cigarette, which, as I watch, he tosses suddenly to the ground, too cool to extinguish it, like he thinks he’s James Dean.

It’s three, perhaps four, weeks since I last saw them together and, watching their advancing forms, I’m reminded of our first meeting, of their reflective, twinlike qualities. If Melia and I fit, they match, each an impression of the other. And it feels, for an instant, unimaginable that they should be parted, as they have been these last days, Kit holed up in the kind of cheap and nasty hostel that he of all people would consider far beneath him. Accommodation arranged with every effort to avoid detection. False name, false address. False dawn.

Because Clare’s deductions are spot on, in case that’s not yet clear. What she thinks Kit and Melia are doing is exactly what he thinks: a disappearance to lead to an insurance claim, a fall guy to expedite its payment from seven years to one. The perfect fraud.

Think again, Kit.

38

1 January 2020

I take a pace forward and place myself in their path. I haven’t rehearsed my first words and when they come they are dismayingly prosaic and utterly right: ‘Well, well, who do we have here?’