Kit must have told Melia about that. Every single detail she’s thought through, every single witness has been manipulated.

Except . . . not Regan, surely? The two have never met, so there can be no question of manipulation.

Regan agrees that I spoke repeatedly of a friend who’d gone missing. ‘We talked about it a lot after he found out about it from the police. He was so upset. Kit was a really good friend of his.’ Yes, it was definitely Friday 27 December when the defendant was questioned. She is one hundred per cent sure and her colleague Simona can confirm it.

Finally, an account that echoes mine from a witness who has no reason to perjure herself!

But did she see the detectives with her own eyes? Did she have anyone’s word but mine that the disappearance was fact and not fiction? Was she shown any media reports or missing persons appeals regarding Christopher Roper?

‘No, but—’

Was it possible her colleague could have made up the drama in order to excuse unauthorized absences or other negligent behaviour?

‘It’s possible,’ Regan says, with reluctance.

It’s all downhill from there. Was she aware of a knife going missing at any time during the final weeks of the year?

‘Only the one that belonged to Jamie and I guessed he must have taken it back home at some point.’

‘This was the twelve-centimetre utility knife by the brand Global, originally bought by Clare Armstrong?’

‘Yes, it was really sharp. I assumed he needed it back for Christmas.’

For ‘Christmas’, read killing, suggests the prosecution.

Was she aware of the defendant making any special arrangements for transporting a professional chef’s knife home, given that the law prohibits the carrying of articles with blades exceeding 7.62 centimetres in any public place?

Regan nervously pushes up her sleeves then, exposing her spider tattoo to the jury. ‘No.’

The prosecution barrister allows a generous pause for the jurors to picture the defendant travelling home on public transport with a lethal blade in his bag; the massacre that might have been. How, at any time, I might have stabbed a customer for no other reason than he chose a chocolate croissant over a plain.

Management has since provided a replacement knife, Regan offers, as if that might help me.

‘Were you aware of a friend visiting Mr Buckby on November the twenty-sixth?’

‘I don’t think so. He didn’t really have friends visiting.’

‘This would be someone who helped him out behind the counter.’

‘No one helped,’ Regan corrects them. ‘You’re not allowed in the service area unless you’re staff. I’m the manager and I would know.’

Of course she would.

I won’t go on except to say that the jury need only a couple of hours to agree their verdict. By then, everyone present knows what I’ve been warned from day one: that for murder convictions in the UK, there is a mandatory minimum sentence of fifteen years.

45

Some months later

Dear Kit . . .

I never said that when you were alive, did I? I never used that phrase, that endearment. All those ‘mate’s and ‘wanker’s and ‘twat’s. Lads together, across the generations.

But now I say it all the time. In the hours upon hours I’ve been gifted in which to reconstruct the events that led me here, to revise everything I thought I knew about my crime and punishment, it’s you I’m addressing. Not Melia or Clare or my legal team; not the guard I like best who used to be a barista at Pret and with whom, in another version of events, I might have worked alongside making flat whites. And certainly not God.

No, in my head, it’s always you. Maybe it’s because you know how it feels to be screwed by her (in both senses of the word). Maybe it’s because there’s no one else left for me to appeal to.

Or maybe I just miss you.

It’s not terrible here. I’m warm, well-fed, safe enough. The young inmates frying their brains on spice have no interest in a Gen X nonentity like me and in any case it’s not like on TV, where the entire prison population is let loose at once to mill around yards and gyms and canteens, the alphas choosing their allies and enemies, the betas hiding deep in the herd. No, it’s lockdown most of the day, all of the night.

You’d think it was a claustrophobe’s worst nightmare, wouldn’t you? But it turns out that being sealed into a confined space, for the most part prone on a metal bunk, doesn’t present the same threat to the nervous system as a crush of seven commuters per square metre in a rush-hour train. In this carriage, there’s just me and Nabil. And it’s not like we’re underground, either, we’re on the first floor of the house block they’ve nicknamed the Premier Inn – albeit one with welded steel doors that only unlock from the outside.

And, get this, it’s the nearest prison to home – or what used to be home. About a twenty-minute drive from St Mary’s. Not too far from the river, in fact, though you can’t see the water from here. You can see the sky, though – even when I lie on my bed, I can see a little corner of it – and it’s always grey, Kit. It’s always grey, even when it’s blue.

There’s philosophy for you, my friend. There’s retribution.

*

Yes, yes, of course I should have paid more attention to the psychological flaws of the thing. Beginning with this: why would a hot twenty-nine-year-old begin an affair with an unprepossessing geezer knocking on the door of fifty? Or, if we accept that she launched it in the belief that he was wealthy, the co-owner of a grand house with its expensive glimpse of the Thames, then why would she continue once he’d come clean and disabused her of this notion?

Two possible reasons. One, she’d fallen in love with him – people say that all the time, don’t they, romantic sorts? ‘By the time I found out, it was too late, I was already head over heels . . .’ Because of his winning sense of humour, perhaps (Oh! Clare said you were funny). Two, she’d begun to intuit a different kind of usefulness to his presence in her bed, his heedless devotion. That little idea she had, maybe it took root earlier than she let on. Clearly this was a woman who could think on her feet – and her back.

And then there are the logistical questions I did think to ask, but not loudly enough, not using the correct channels. If once, just once, I’d gone to the police station – any police station – in person and asked for Parry or Merchison, or even if I’d phoned one of them through the station switchboard and not on the number they gave me; if I hadn’t shut down Clare’s attempt to locate them online quite so efficiently.

They don’t seem to list the detectives . . .

Making me think they couldn’t issue a public appeal because they were investigating some big drugs ring, that was a masterstroke on Melia’s part. She’s got a real eye for authentic detail, hasn’t she? She should write crime drama for the telly.

Oh, there were countless misconstruals on my part. Like when Elodie said, ‘Don’t you think she needs some privacy at a time like this?’ – meaning not while Melia despaired of her husband’s disappearance, but while he undertook some homespun cold-turkey programme a couple of streets away! Just one further question from me might have brought our cross purposes to light.