Chapter 1
I’m leaving court when my phone rings. An old friend.
I almost don’t answer; I mean who calls people up these days?
There’s nothing that can’t be said by text, or in an app, and that way I can ignore it until I’ve worked up the required energy to engage in social contact.
If it’s important, there’s always email.
But dialling your mate’s number on purpose, making an unsolicited call for a live conversation, in the middle of the working day: what kind of maniac does that?
‘Ed,’ I say, ‘what’s all this? Have you butt-dialled me again?’
He laughs. We haven’t spoken for months but I’d recognise that laugh anywhere: a nasal squawk like an old gate opening on a rusty hinge; it was the soundtrack to half of my youth. ‘No, I meant to call you this time.’
‘What’s the matter then? You feeling needy? Want a cuddle?’
‘Shut up, it’s important. Do you have a couple of minutes?’
I do, as it happens. I have about five minutes before I descend into the communications blackspot that is the London Underground.
I’ve just finished work after spending the afternoon at Westminster Magistrates’, no doubt looking like a typical London clone in my black suit, phone pressed to my ear as I weave through the masses on Marylebone Road.
Ed takes a deep breath, so exaggerated I can hear it through the phone, then blurts out: ‘I’m getting married.’
‘You what?’ For a moment I’m sure I’ve misheard him under the growl and horn of the building rush-hour traffic.
‘I’m getting married. Next spring.’
‘Bloody hell.’ I sit down on a bench, breathing in the acrid fumes from a nearby exhaust. ‘But you’re only twenty-five. You’re not a footballer or a Mormon – aren’t you a bit young to be getting married?’
‘Nah, it’s fine. Kim’s been keen on the idea for a while, and I’m not going to find better, am I? You’ve seen her – I’m punching above my weight, and we both know it.’
‘I can’t argue with that.’
He laughs. ‘Exactly. So why wait?’
I’m silent for a few seconds. It all seems a bit rushed to me. But he sounds happy, excited – at least one of us is. And who the hell am I to lecture anyone on their life choices?
‘Congratulations,’ I say. ‘I’m happy for you. This is great news.’
‘Thanks, JP.’ Ed pauses for a moment. ‘There’s another thing.’
Something in his voice, a slight tremor, tells me he’s a bit anxious about what’s coming next. ‘Go on.’
‘I . . . I was wondering if you’d be best man. Well, there’d be two, you and Merl. What do you say?’
Oh no. Being a best man is a nightmare. ‘Of course. I’m honoured.’
My heart rate cranks up a few notches as Ed carries on, thanking me, and telling the story of how he proposed in view of the Eiffel Tower.
I’m only half listening; my mind has already raced off into the distance, way down the track and through some stomach-churning hairpins to the certain car crash that lies in wait.
Me, best man? That’s a misnomer if I ever heard one.
I’m the worst man, if anything. I shudder at the thought of martialling guests, cosying up to Kimberley’s family, doing the speech.
Oh God, the bloody speech. I’m not the man for this; Merl is the funny, confident one, he could easily do it by himself – why does Ed need me?
Ed is probably only asking me because he thinks he should, and there’s no way I can turn him down. I’m being killed with kindness.
An even more unsettling thought hits me, prompts me to cut him off mid-sentence. ‘Have you decided where you’re holding the wedding?’
I swallow a lump in my throat as I wait for his response.
‘Kim wants to get married in church, and I’m not going to argue, you know what she’s like. If it had been up to me, I’d happily do it down at the registry—’
‘Yeah, but where? Have you booked somewhere for the reception?’ Please don’t say St Hellion. Anywhere but there.
‘The Dolphin. We’re going to have a big marquee. A classy one, mind.’
I’m breathing quickly, but can’t get enough of the heavy, polluted air into my lungs. ‘In St Hellion?’
‘Yeah, of course. Where else would we do it?’
Shit.
Ed runs through the arrangements that have already been made, and I’m monosyllabic in response, staring across the street in a daze, the world around me slipping out of focus until all I see is the red smudge of a London bus drifting from right to left.
A knot of dread tightens in my stomach. It’s immediately obvious there’s no hope of changing his mind.
Everything is settled. The wedding will be held on the 24th of May, and I will be best man, which leaves my brain about eleven months to focus on it relentlessly, no matter what I’m doing, whether it be work, trying to sleep, running on a treadmill, waiting to be served at the Oxford Arms, being crammed on a Bakerloo Line train, heating a preassembled dinner, or any other of the repeating parts that make up the persistent cycle of a city existence.
I guess I knew this would happen, eventually. Something was always bound to come up that would force me to go back. Yet, even now, I can’t bear the idea of it, even after so much time has passed.
It’s been more than nine years since she died.
Nine years. For nearly a decade the episode has played over in my mind, like some awful soap opera stuck on repeat, plaguing my thoughts, fracturing my sleep.
What happened to her? Every rational thought I’ve had about it tells me we had nothing to do with it – it wasn’t our fault.
There had to be another explanation. The problem is, even now, I have no idea what that other explanation is. I can’t be one hundred per cent sure.
Of course, we didn’t really kill her. We couldn’t have. Could we?