‘I love you,’ she says, as gentle engine sounds rise from the water; scraps of human voices. I repeat the words back to her in a whisper.

‘It’s just us now.’

I repeat this too, though it is not quite true. There’s still a way to go in this plot of ours, still other players to handle – not least Clare, who, as she keeps proving in new and dangerous ways, is no fool. But the hardest part is done. Melia will have her dead body, get her payout, and all that will remain will be to decide where to meet, where to locate our future together, where to spend her money.

I take one last look at Kit, a form now, not a man. The departed. I have a grotesquely clear memory of him sitting next to me on the boat that first morning, grinning and preening, saying, I plan to stay alive.

Well, death is what happens when you’re making plans, if you’ll allow the misquote.

39

1 January 2020

A word of advice to would-be killers: when you’re waiting for a body to be discovered, don’t look too expectant. Don’t pick up your phone before it rings. Don’t watch the window or spring to the door at the faintest scuff of a footstep on the pavement outside.

‘Waiting for a delivery?’ Clare asks.

‘No.’

‘You’re so jumpy this morning. You look terrible, actually.’ When she makes these remarks now, it’s without any implicit offer of comfort; in fact, she’s borderline pleased. I wonder what she’d say if she knew how close I was to vomiting – because I’ve helped kill a man. My upper body is aching from last night’s scrap, that shove against the wall. I can feel a huge bruise blooming on my lower back.

‘I didn’t sleep that well,’ I say, testing.

‘Really. I was out like a light.’ She can’t know that her callousness is the very answer I’m praying for.

With or without Clare commenting on my jitters, this is torture. The day is a bank holiday, of course, with no work, no public services. I can’t go out for fear of being unaccounted for within the window of Kit’s time of death and when, in the afternoon, Clare straps on her Fitbit and announces she’s going for a walk, I use the Wi-Fi to establish my presence at home. I permit myself a check of the local news, but there is no report of a stabbing by the river. Maybe there aren’t so many dogs on riverside walks, after all. Maybe they’re being kept on a short lead to stop them from nosing the vomit and broken glass left by last night’s revellers.

Sitting there, in the ground-floor window so as to be easily observed from the street, I become obsessed with the certainty that Clare will be the one to find him – of all people, her! I imagine her crouching next to the body, crying softly as her fingers fumble for her phone, her heart swelling with sympathy for Melia, the one person she should be condemning to hell. Is he even still intact? Might foxes have mutilated him – or time itself, every hour of death removing more of what was recognizable in life? Will the odours of his decomposition be evident yet or will they be suppressed by the low temperature?

Obviously, I can’t google ‘rigor mortis’ or anything else to do with dead bodies.

But, mercifully, Clare isn’t the one to find him. She returns with a spring in her step and pours herself a posh pressé. She’s doing Dry January, of course. I’m doing it too, but only because I’ll keep my story straighter if I’m sober. We speak very little. She is regretting, perhaps, her drunken half-suggestion of reconciliation last night, affronted that I didn’t jump on it as I should have.

There are dead bodies and then there are rejected live bodies.

Remarkably, by the time we go to bed, Kit remains undiscovered. ‘If I don’t see you in the morning, phone me after you’ve spoken to the police,’ she says, and there is a horrified second or two before I realize she’s talking about Merchison and my promise to pass on her theory about the Ropers’ fraud, the notes from Kelvin to support it.

‘No problem,’ I say.

2 January 2020

Having assumed I’d be absent from work the next day, dealing with traumatic developments in St Mary’s, I’m disorientated to find myself back behind the counter of the Comfort Zone following a routine passage on Aragon, which has replaced Boleyn as the carrier of the 7.20 a.m. tranche of westbound commuters. It was full of new faces, drudges who’d made the change, eyes tracking the riverscape just as mine did on my maiden voyage.

‘Your scratch has almost healed,’ Regan tells me.

‘It wasn’t anything serious.’

She has details to share from a New Year’s Eve house party where a man had had to be prevented from defenestration.

‘He’s only thirty,’ she says, unaware of the ghastly parallel.

‘That’s no age to die,’ I agree.

‘He’s really depressed, apparently. Had his hours cut at work, couldn’t pay his bills. I really worry about that, as well.’

‘If there’s any danger of that happening to you, I’ll give you my hours,’ I tell her, earnestly.

‘You’re so lovely, Jamie,’ she says, and makes us both an oat flat white. A pain aux raisins gets knocked to the floor and she gives it a wipe and begins eating it, unwinding the pastry until she’s left with the stodgy, raisin-studded heart.

All the conversations I eavesdrop on this morning are about finances, personal (too much spent over the holidays and not enough earned) or work-minded (deals, subsidies, compensation, revenue). For once people have cash for tips. ‘We need to position the pot more prominently,’ I tell Regan, and I remember my promise to Melia that day she helped out that I’d share my tips with her.

We are different people now. Killers.

A whimper escapes me, but Regan doesn’t appear to hear. All morning, she plays music that sounds as if it was recorded underwater and it starts to torment me, makes me want to tear off my skin in strips. And still no news! I agonize over whether to phone Merchison. If I don’t, Clare will want to know why, but if I do and he’s speaking from the crime scene, will he wonder at the coincidence of the call?

My only phone call is from Gretchen.

‘How was Marrakech?’ I ask.

‘Good. I’ve just got home from Gatwick this minute.’ But she doesn’t sound good, she sounds as overwrought as I feel. ‘Can I come and meet you in your break? I need you to update me on Kit.’

‘Okay,’ I say.

Well, the latest update is we stabbed him to death . . .

Stop this. No matter how confident I am that I would never give this inner commentary voice, merely to think it puts it in danger of being extracted from me in extremis or perhaps volunteered in sleep. No, instead, such knowledge must be completely suppressed.

We are not different. We are not killers.

I meet her at the pier after the lunchtime rush. She suggests the café at the Royal Festival Hall, but, fearing some post-traumatic attack if returned to the scene of my interrogation, I lie about building works and steer her instead to the bar at the NFT.

We collect our drinks and sit on uncomfortable wooden benches alongside young people wearing huge earphones and thumbing apps on their phones. Young brains multitasking. Gretchen has no tan from her Moroccan sojourn, only smears of pink on her cheekbones and nose. There’s a chain around her neck with a pendant made of what looks like a tarnished Berber coin.