‘Mr Buckby? Mr Buckby?’

My head is in my hands, fingers pressing eyes into the sockets, and all of a sudden they’re saying my name as if releasing me from a spell.

‘I strongly urge you to take a break,’ my solicitor says, and reminds the detective of my fainting fit in the tunnel, my disorientation on regaining consciousness. He doesn’t know what he’s saying.

But I do, and for the last time, I silence him. ‘No! I want to talk. Let’s get this over and done with.’

The detective is pleased. His body language opens, his tone relaxes. ‘That would be my preference, as well. I’d like to bring in a colleague, if I may.’

The photos are withdrawn, papers put back in order, recording equipment checked. The solicitor is messaging on his phone, cancelling plans. The deflation in his manner tells me he thinks he’s done all he can and is now a bystander, not a player. Well, I don’t want his law. I no longer care about my rights.

Soon there are two men facing me across the table. By coincidence – or illusion – they are of similar height and build to Merchison and Parry.

‘Let’s start at the beginning, shall we?’ the new arrival proposes. ‘Tell us everything you know about Mr Roper. How long have you known each other?’

I gape. These are the same questions I was asked on December the 23rd, the exact wording. I feel like I’m losing my mind, though in truth it’s been dislocated for me, by an angel who turned out to be a she-devil.

I clear my throat and a phrase grips me, more than a phrase, a sensation: fear of falling. Oh, Melia, maybe it would have been better if we’d fallen from the cable car that night. We’d have died on impact, rolled along the riverbed in our capsule, figures in a snow globe waiting to be shaken back to life.

‘Almost a year,’ I say. ‘We met last January.’

43

2 January 2020

You know what’s funny about all this? (And when I say ‘funny’, I mean sick, fucked-up; wildly, suicidally bad.) My second version is really not so different from the first. I was never actively lying to Parry and Merchison. I didn’t need to. It was really just a matter of deleted scenes.

Like that evening in late March, the bedroom with all the mirrors. That confessional exchange of frailties – and, yes, I know they are in fact vanities, but perhaps vanity is the most profound frailty of all? Mine, the shame of being virtually as impoverished as she was, hers the fear that she could never attract, or be attracted to, a partner with the means to free her from debt and help her reinvent herself and rise.

‘You know what I’ve just thought?’ she said. We were still in the bedroom, but dressed and about to leave. I was putting on my shoes, she was fixing her hair in one of the mirrors behind me.

‘What?’ I glanced up at her and saw that something maverick had been stirred in her. Her eyes glittered gold.

‘Kit’s got this life insurance policy. It’s part of his work benefits, all permanent employees his level get it. So apparently, if he dies, I’ll get a crazy amount of money.’

‘You’re the named beneficiary, are you?’

‘That’s it. Beneficiary.’ She said it like it was some erotic term.

It was immediately clear to me that I should treat this as jest and nothing but. ‘How do you plan to do away with him? No, don’t tell me. You can’t trust me not to squeal when the time comes.’

‘Really? That’s disappointing.’ A held beat as her gaze drifted from her own reflection to my face, and then she sighed. ‘You know I’m only having a laugh, don’t you?’

‘Of course. Besides, those policies only kick in after a certain length of service.’

‘Two years,’ she said.

I paused. Don’t ask. ‘How long has he worked there?’

‘Twenty months this week.’

I noted the precision and said nothing.

‘What about Clare?’ she asked. She had her back to me now and was fiddling with her bag, looking for keys.

‘What about her?’

‘Does she have a policy?’

‘I don’t think so. I’m not sure I’d be her beneficiary, anyway. She has a cousin she’s close to and he’s got three kids. She’s always said she’d leave everything to them.’

Those mirrors, that night, a great arrangement of them! I remember our gazes connecting suddenly in reflection and I was disorientated by the flicker of malevolence I thought I saw in her face. Only when laughter broke across it did I recognize her again.

‘Bummer,’ she said. ‘Kit it is, then.’

*

And like another evening, the one on which the plan surfaced. September, the first time she and I had met since the wedding, just after my holiday in France with Clare and Dad. A reunion so sweet, so ripe – and yet, by the time we parted, there was already that fine, dry dust that denotes the beginning of rot.

I remember being bewitched by her. That’s honestly the only word to describe it. The sight of her, the feel of her, the scent of her, it all filled me with a new recklessness, a daredevil pleasure indistinguishable from freedom.

I thought, Nothing in my life is important except this.

(Which is very different from Nothing in my life is as important as this.)

‘Tell me why you and Kit got married,’ I said. ‘It can’t have been on impulse, you have to give notice.’

‘I know. I did it because I’ve had an idea.’ Such a simple statement, and so stark, that use of the singular, as if Kit had no agency at all. If I could go back to that moment and suspend time, start living backwards, all the way back to birth, I would. ‘I’ve been thinking about it for a while, going over all the details, seeing if it could work. And I’m a hundred per cent certain it could.’

‘What idea?’ I said, because time was not suspended; it proceeded as it always did, a pace or two ahead, tugging me forward by a leash clipped to my collar.

‘How we can deal with Kit and claim the insurance money.’

I raised an eyebrow and smiled as if at an imaginative child. ‘When you say “deal with”, you don’t mean . . . ?’

She pressed her lips together in private judgement; when released, they puffed open like a flowerhead. ‘I do.’

My face was trapped in that smile. Inside, confusion roared. I felt as if I’d missed a link in the plot development, my understanding obscured by a fit of amnesia.

Her mouth moved a fraction closer to my ear. ‘That’s why I had to marry him. You get more. There’s a death in service thing, as well as the life insurance. Almost two million pounds.’

‘As much as that. Wow.’ Though I was still chuckling, I was aware of the tension in her body, the weight of expectation on me, and my heart quaked.

‘Help me, Jamie.’ Her gaze was persuasive, the kind born not of envy or revenge but of the pure, primal will to succeed. ‘You’ve got nothing, I’ve got nothing. This is a solution.’

‘It’s not a solution, it’s a crime.’ At last, I brought some condemnation to my tone. ‘Two crimes if you consider the fact that the payout could be treated as fraud or money laundering. If you got caught, you’d go to jail for, what, ten, fifteen years?’