The Weatherman E-Book

Royston Reeves

• Herausgeber: No Exit Press
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 419

Beschreibung

'I'm going to tell you about the worst thing that ever happened to me.' Will's a nice guy. So when he takes a shortcut to the tube station after a few beers with his mates from work, he steps out of the way of the fellow who's staggering towards him. But he – deliberately – moves back into his path. They knock each other as they pass. Moments later one man is dead and another's life is changed forever. Or is it? There are no CCTV cameras. There was no one else in the out-of-the-way alley. Maybe the world doesn't have to end for Will after all. But there's always someone watching . . . and Will's life is about to implode.

Leseprobe

THE WEATHERMAN

Royston Reeves

For Carly- Your energy and encouragement makes me want to create things.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Nine

Chapter Fifty

Chapter Fifty-One

Chapter Fifty-Two

Chapter Fifty-Three

Chapter Fifty-Four

Chapter Fifty-Five

Chapter Fifty-Six

Chapter Fifty-Seven

Chapter Fifty-Eight

Chapter Fifty-Nine

Chapter Sixty

Chapter Sixty-One

Chapter Sixty-Two

Chapter Sixty-Three

Chapter Sixty-Four

Chapter Sixty-Five

Chapter Sixty-Six

Chapter Sixty-Seven

Chapter Sixty-Eight

Chapter Sixty-Nine

Chapter Seventy

Chapter Seventy-One

Chapter Seventy-Two

Chapter Seventy-Three

Chapter Seventy-Four

Chapter Seventy-Five

Chapter Seventy-Six

Chapter Seventy-Seven

Chapter Seventy-Eight

Chapter Seventy-Nine

Chapter Eighty

Chapter Eighty-One

Chapter Eighty-Two

Chapter Eighty-Three

Chapter Eighty-Four

Chapter Eighty-Five

Chapter Eighty-Six

Chapter Eighty-Seven

Chapter Eighty-Eight

Chapter Eighty-Nine

Chapter Ninety

Chapter Ninety-One

Chapter Ninety-Two

Chapter Ninety-Three

Chapter Ninety-Four

Chapter Ninety-Five

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

One

I’m going to tell you about the worst thing that ever happened to me.

But first I must give you some context that’s important: I am not a bad guy. I do my best to be nice to everybody, I never cheated on my girlfriend and I have three or four of those charity direct debits coming out of my bank account every month. I like children and I’m not a racist or any rubbish like that. I’m a normal person.

I get the depression. That much is true, but you wouldn’t know it. I keep that shit well smothered. Most of the time you wouldn’t know it anyway. I get three or maybe four horrible days in a month and I can deal with that, no need to go on about it.

It was October last year and I’d had a real shit day at work. I work in advertising, which was supposed to be fun and creative, but it’s mostly just sitting in awkward, boring meetings and coming up with reasons you can’t meet unrealistic deadlines and arguing with pedantic people about minutia that doesn’t matter.

The social side is ok. Most lunchtimes there’ll be three or four of the old boys from work going to The Three Kings across Clerkenwell Green for a couple of jars of Camden Hells or Birra Moretti. I tend to go, when I can. And after work on a Wednesday or Thursday there are usually a few people going somewhere for post work drinks. I normally go to those. I’ll say, ‘I’ll come for one’ and end up having four or five. It feels quite liberating to drink and chat shit late on week nights. Puts all the work stuff in its place.

This was October. My least favourite month probably (October or January). It’s like the month of announcement that the nice weather and long days are finishing; but it’s not close enough to Christmas yet to feel in any way good or fun or festive or whatever so everyone shuffles around with a long face. I bet part of it is also our brains triggering with some chemical that it remembers from the days of all that ‘Back to School’guff.

We used to go back after the big holiday in September, so October would’ve been the month when it’s dawning on everyone: ‘It’s so miserable and now I’ve actually got to do this all winter.’ I remember as soon as those ‘Back to School’ posters went up I’d feel a bit gloomy. They’d come out way too early. Sometimes they’d start appearing in Lakeside shopping centre in like, June and I remember thinking, ‘Come on guys, take it easy with this.’

Typically for that time of year, I was feeling down. I take Fluoxetine 40mg to help with that, but it only does so much. Prozac is very good but it’s not a magic formula. On Wednesday night I went to The Three Kings with four work colleagues. Some kids from the Social Media team and the Client Services Director who was always up for a pint. You could rely on him.

The Three Kings is an old-fashioned pub run by this passive aggressive Welsh guy called Pat. He’s ok but he has an inflated self-opinion. He once told off one of my mates for moving the speakers to charge his phone out of one of the plug sockets. He has this girl Rochelle there who works the taps. She’s cheerful and nice, you can easily lose half an hour chatting to her.

We sat right next to the entrance around this small table because it was the only one free. We all drank pints and got merry, chatting about the dickhead clients and re-telling everything that had happened in the day to make ourselves feel righteous and immaculate. I had a bet on as well, so I kept checking my phone to see the scores.

At about half nine I decided to go home. The Three Kings tended not to have hand wash in the Gents. It would routinely run out and they wouldn’t replace it, so I’d have to wash my hands with just water when I had a piss, which made me feel a little bit dirty and eventually a bit cranky. I also don’t like going to sleep too much after eleven if I have work the next day, and it was an hour’s journey home.

My friend Clem left at the same time as me but went home in the other direction, so I was alone. I wasn’t in the mood to listen to music, so I put my headphones on and chose a podcast about this kid who’d disappeared in Vermont. I forget about some of the American states – some of them just never really get talked about enough.

I knew a short cut to the Tube station that took a few minutes off the walk. You had to walk down the side of a café and cut through a building site. It meant you didn’t have to walk all the way round the side of the station to get to the entrance.

Anyway, I’m walking down there listening this podcast and talking to my work mate Jack on WhatsApp. He’d lost the same bet as me. It was quite usual for us to back the same bet independently.

I guess we followed a lot of the same tipster accounts on Twitter and had gotten used to looking out for the same teams to do the same things.

I went down the side of the café, which was called Limon, and cut through the building site. It was unseasonably cold, so I was in a jumper and thin rain jacket, with gloves. I’d seen some people walking around with proper coats and scarves and hats on, like it was deepest winter (ridiculous).

I did have gloves on, yes, but I’ll sometimes wear gloves even with a T-shirt. My hands get loads colder than the rest of my body, at least 60 or 70 per cent colder. So I’ll normally start wearing gloves before I start wearing jumpers. I think, if it wasn’t for social convention, more people would do that actually.

There weren’t any people in the cut-through; it was really quiet. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to go through there – but loads of people did it on the way to the station at about five or six, after work. The owner of Limon doesn’t seem to care. Sometimes I see him out there watching everyone walk round the side of his café, frowning with his arms folded – but I’ve also seen him watching football in that same posture so that might just be how he likes to stand and watch things.

There were pallets of bricks and bags of sand everywhere and coffee cups that the builders had left. I don’t know what they were building in there but there were loads of these massive yellow pipes running across the ground. Probably sewage pipes for a building or something, I thought. My headphones died. Ran out of battery, for fuck’s sake. That’s the problem with wireless stuff. I took them off and put them in my bag. I hate doing train rides without my headphones. End up having to listen to my own thoughts when I’d much rather detach and forget about my day than analyse it.

When I finished cramming my big headphones into the tiny space I had left in my bag, I looked up and saw this figure moving slowly towards me through the darkness. It was a man. He was walking pretty normally but not in a straight line. I guessed he was drunk.

A lot of drunk bankers would make their way back through here to Old Street station. So they could get their trains back to Hertfordshire or Essex or wherever. They could be arrogant dicks when they appeared in our pub. They’d look down on me because I don’t dress up smart for work. But I don’t need to. That’s surely a good thing: the way I see it, if you don’t need to wear a suit you’re winning. But the bankers take it as a sign of weakness, like you’re less important.

As the guy got within about ten or fifteen metres, he suddenly noticed me. He stopped and stood still. Then he laughed out loud to himself and said something (for me to hear, I think). Except I couldn’t hear it, whatever he said. He spat on the floor.

Why do people do that?

Then he did something I didn’t understand. He crossed over the path, so he was walking directly towards me, front-on. I could tell by his silhouette he was looking at me. I couldn’t be arsed with any shit or anything, so I moved out across the path a little bit so there was enough space for both of us to pass without anyone having to move. As he got closer, under one of the few streetlights, I could see him a bit better. He was definitely a city boy of some kind, but he looked like shit.

Two

I have to quickly tell you about me and fighting. I give myself a five-point-five out of ten. Notuseless.

Between five out of ten (survival level) and six out of ten (will occasionally come out on top).

Between the ages of 0-17 I think I lost every fight I got into. My dad reckons he never threw a punch in his life and he thought of ‘knowing how to defend yourself’ as somehow thuggish and coarse. My mum always had my back; she couldn’t fight herself, but she had a fighting spirit at least and probably secretly wished I’d been a bit tougher.

Anyway, I used to get started on a fair bit by local groups of kids and I’d always end up getting beaten up. It wasn’t that I was weak, but the adrenaline would be overwhelming, and it’d sort of paralyse me a bit and make my arms and legs feel all limp and useless, like I was in a dream. I never ran away from anything. I’d just stand there and lose.

The main thing was, I’d never really get wound up enough. I was such a laid-back kid I didn’t ever feel angry enough to want to hurt anybody. I wasn’t bothered enough. But then when I was about sixteen or seventeen, I started getting angrier about getting started on. I don’t know why it suddenly happened, I think I’d just had enough of the whole thing, the whole liberty of it.

My lifetime fight record is probably something like four wins and ten losses. Maybe some draws. So, I can look after myself. I’m ok. But I won’t be winning any title belts.

Three

His suit was all crumpled up; it didn’t hang off him properly in a nice shape. His shirt had the top two or three buttons undone so his tie was hanging awkwardly, like it didn’t know what form to follow.

He had short, mousy hair that was receding a bit and although he wasn’t fat you could see evidence of a little beer belly gently pressing against his shirt.

His shirt was off-white with these thin, light-blue stripes on it. It looked like the kind of shirt that had been sitting there for years and he’d long since stopped liking it, but he kept wearing it because it was always there. It was the kind of shirt that made you think, That guy doesn’t live with someone who loves him.

Single men have a high tolerance for worn out things.

I looked down as he got closer. Not because I was scared or anything, but I just was not in the mood for any sort of interaction or drunk banter with this mumbling lone wolf. What’s the best that could come out of an interaction like that? Even his walk set off alarm bells. That awkward, leaning stagger.

When he was about to pass me, I could see his face. He had little shrunken eyes; maybe a bit Slavic-looking in his features. And he had this pointy nose like a little beak. Overall, a resting-bitch expression that looked sneery and hurtful.

Then out of nowhere, he took this sideways step, so he was walking straight in my direction again. Directly towards me, so I wouldn’t be able to get past without moving.

Just to be clear about this: I’d made the effort to move out of his way to make it more easy and pleasant for both of us, and he’s then deliberately moved to make it awkward again. Think how disrespectful that is. Seriously, stop and think about it. Someone going out of their way to cause a problem for you. And this guy didn’t know me at all, remember. So, why’s he targeting me? What is it about me that makes me a good person to pick on?

We were about to bump into each other, but I didn’t try to avert it. Fuck you, I’ve done my bit. I stiffened up my back and braced to bump into him. I was just looking ahead, trying to look calm and casual. I even checked my watch, as if I was oblivious to this little cold war that had broken out and was just going about my business.

Now I could see that the guy wasn’t any bigger than me. He was about my height, five-eight, and probably a fair bit slimmer and lighter than me overall. Adrenaline had started racing, but I wasn’t feeling anything except pissed off at this prick who thought he’d just hassle me for no reason. Why’s he chosen me?Do I give off a ‘weak and vulnerable’ vibe to this man? The thought sent a wave of anger through me.

As we crossed paths, he allowed his shoulder to swing into mine. We thudded together stiffly, and both carried on walking, neither of us giving the other the satisfaction of altering course in the slightest. I carried on walking without looking back. I heard him stop; the soles of his feet scraped the pavement as he turned to look at me. I just kept on walking.

Until he just calmly said, ‘Pussy.’

It wasn’t so much the word ‘pussy’ that annoyed me, but the way he’d said it. So much spite in his voice, overemphasising the ‘p’to make it spikier and more sincere. Still walking, I turned my head to look back at him and laughed. I couldn’t think of anything else to do, except pretend I found him pathetic. Idiot.

My blood was tingling. I kept walking but then my mind just flooded with feeling pissed off. My heart had begun racing: why does he think he can just treat me like that? I’ve worked fucking hard all day and I feel like shit and now I can’t even walk back to the Tube without someone taking a liberty with me, calling me names and shoving me around.

Eventually, I turned around. I was grinding my jaws together really hard. Pointy nose’s smirk dropped. He wanted me to know he was pissed off that I’d turned around. How dare I turn around, he’s thinking. He’s thinking, ‘You’re nobody. Don’t answer back, boy.’

As I approached him, I could feel my head nodding, for some reason. I got a few feet away from him and stopped. His face had dropped into a frown and he’d squared up his shoulders. I wanted to tell him he looked fucking dumb. His jaw was jutting forward now and the dim street light bounced off all the stubble around his chin, making it look burnt orange.

‘Did you say something to me?’ I said, in a low whisper. Deep as I could and just loud enough for him to hear. My voice box had shrivelled up a bit and I was physically shaking, I don’t mind admitting.

He grinned and shook his head. ‘No.’

I stared back for a minute and smiled a bit. ‘Didn’t think so.’

So, that’s it, I thought. I can live with that. I’ll just leave it at that. I’ve had the last word now.

But then another wave of this anger came over me. His grinning fucking face.

‘Pussy!’ I shouted and swung my fist at the side of his stupid fucking head. I had no idea why I shouted that. Just sort of matching what he said to me. Sort of saying this is for what you said, and so making it clear what I was doing him in for, so it was clear that I’m still the good guy in this thing. I’m the righteous one.

I got him right on the side of his face, on the top of the jawbone. Bang.

I heard his rows of teeth crack together on impact. He hadn’t been expecting it. I don’t know if it was the drink, or just arrogance, but he did not see that punch coming. He swung round with his arms out like a spinning top, one of those old-fashioned children’s toys.

As he completed a nearly 180-degree spin, he tilted forward and sort of lean-dived headfirst down at the pavement. Then he goes quiet and he lets out this noise. Like a little wail. Like a little girl. I’m still pumped up with adrenaline, so I strode over and stood over him. I’m violently shaking with adrenaline and rage. I feel strong.

‘Go on then. Say it again.’ The words bundled out of my mouth so quickly that a load of spit came out and the word ‘say’ came out with a bit of a lisp. I was so hyped I couldn’t even speak properly. It was raining. I hadn’t noticed until then, but it had been raining for the last few minutes. Big globs of rain like spatters of paint.

He didn’t move. Just stared up at me with an indignant face. Still smirking a tiny little bit. Just to be a rat about things. I muttered something, can’t remember what, before turning and leaving him, shaking my head at this ridiculous thing I’d been dragged into.

Four

I got to the end of the shortcut and looked back. I didn’t mean to. If I looked back, that would look like I’m scared that he’s coming after me. (Which I wasn’t). I knew he wasn’t behind me anyway. I’d have heard his weird scratchy footsteps coming, for a start.

He was still down there. I knew I didn’t knock him out, he was still making noises when I was standing next to him. He was clearly pissed. Maybe he’d passed out drunk? But he wasn’t that pissed. You could tell by the way he moved; he wasn’t anywhere near paralytic. He’d focussed his eyes on me too well, he wasn’t that drunk. Fuck him. I’m going home.

A few minutes later I’d decided to go back and check on him. I’d kept walking towards the train station and eventually started thinking I’d wake up and feel bad about this the next day. Once the adrenaline had worn off a bit, I felt like I should check he was actually ok.

I doubted my punch could have done that much damage. But his head did hit the pavement so maybe he’d been concussed. He had landed on a slightly raised bit of concrete that separated the pavement from a concrete verge. Not quite a kerb; a design thing I think, a pavement border or something. I hadn’t thought anything of it at the time. All of a sudden, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

I didn’t know why, but I started panicking a bit. My mouth felt all dry and I had these sort of pins and needles in my tongue. He’d hit that bit of raised pavement and made a really weird sound. A sickly noise, like a sudden, blunt cruck. Come to think of it, I’d never heard a sound like it. My pace quickened. My adrenaline was rising again, but this time in a different way. Before it made me all hot, this time it was making me all cold. As I neared the corner to get back into the shortcut, I noticed I’d started to run.

Five

He was still there. He hadn’t moved at all. Still lying propped onto his side, arms out in front, hands almost palm-to-palm, legs in a sort of running man motion on the ground. I got close to him and slowed down to a tentative walk.

‘D’you want an ambulance?’ The words sort of spilled out of my mouth before my head had fully approved the question. No response. I walked up a bit closer. Not too close, in case he was going to swing at me or something. I kept about a metre away.

‘Fucking call me a pussy for no reason.’ I said it slowly and quietly. I said it to try and level things out before he reacted. I wanted him to know it was one-all, he didn’t have a score to settle.

I walked around him (always maintaining my metre-berth) and looked at his face. He was staring in my direction, expressionless. Looking right through me.

‘Mate,’ I said. The authority draining out of me.

I felt like a kid, waiting for an adult to come and take charge of the situation. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I looked up and down the walkway. Absolute silence, absolute stillness.

Fuck the metre. I stepped up to his face, knelt down and put my gloved fingers out towards his face. Using my left hand to prop myself up, I reached over with the forefinger and middle finger of my right. I gently pressed my fingers into his cheekbone. He didn’t react.

I waved my hand in front of his eyes and whispered, ‘Hello?’

I didn’t know how to check for a pulse, so I pushed him over onto his back and as I did, I revealed a patch of blood that had been hidden under the side of his head, just below his temple. I reeled back and gasped. I couldn’t see where the blood was coming from but there was quite a lot of it. All gathered up and smeared across the side of his face. The stubble down the side of his face now looked jet black where it’d been darkened by blood and shadow.

Heart racing, I pulled my phone out of my pocket. Still looking at this guy, I tried a few times to unlock the screen before realising I had my gloves on and it wasn’t going to work. I reached for the wrist cuff of my glove to pull it off but stopped myself. Did I need to keep my gloves on? Holy shit.

I looked up and down the alley again. I could hear myself breathing really heavy and fast. Trying to gulp in more air, like I couldn’t get enough all of a sudden. I heard myself say something but I’m still not sure what I said. I couldn’t hear myself; it was like my ears had shrivelled up a bit.

I stood up and walked past him, glancing up and down the walkway the whole time, squinting in the dark to see if anyone was around. I looked out across the building site and up into the pale-yellow office block windows in the middle distance. No movement, anywhere.

I looked down at him again. He actually looked peaceful in the middle of all this. I turned and set off towards the station again. I kept my phone out, so if anyone saw me walking away from him, I could say I had found him there and was trying to get help. And then, when I’m back home and far away I’ll ring up 999 and say, ‘Oh, it’s probably nothing but I saw this drunk guy lying on the ground sleeping when I walked past.’

But I’d already decided that I wasn’t going to stay there. It’s not like I could help by staying.

And the bottom line was, I’d punched this guy – I’d punched him and he’d fallen and bashed his head because he was drunk. But if I hadn’t punched him, he probably wouldn’t have fallen over. (But he might have).

My DNA and little threads of my clothes would be all over him. I watched enough crime documentaries to know that, once they found out I was there at the same time as him, it wouldn’t take long for them to close the net on me. Bits of wool off my gloves or teeny bits of cotton off my jacket. A bit of my hair or an eyelash or some skin cells, or something like that.

I’d heard a few fables before about big-faced lads in Ben Sherman shirts in the 90s who accidentally killed people with ‘lucky punches’ in street fights. The most tragic cases were the ones where it’d just been a nice guy and one single punch, and the guy ended up in prison for ten years and his whole life ruined.

I staggered up to a bin and puked.

Six

The train ride home seemed like it took about three hours. In fact, it was probably more like half an hour, because I got a direct one. I kept a fast walking pace, without ever breaking into a run. I was like one of those Olympic racewalkers, swirling my hips for momentum.

I wanted to run but I didn’t. I kept thinking about all the cameras on me that would probably later be used as records of my behaviour after the incident. It felt like the whole world had suddenly turned to look at me. If they started tightening the net on me, that kind of detail would become important. So I walked as casually as I could, with my hands in my jacket pockets. I kept shaking my head, like a dog trying to straighten out its fur.

I got home and closed the front door. Straight to the kitchen for a long glass of water. As I reached for the cupboard with my gloved hand, I stopped myself. I carefully took my gloves off, delicately placing them into a Morrisons bag. I decided I was going to take that down to the bins.

I washed my hands. I took the rest of my clothes off and put them in that carrier bag. Then I went for a long, hot shower. When I came out, I put the boots I’d been wearing into a bin liner. Then I crushed that into the Morrisons bag, too.

I necked the last quarter of a bottle of wine that was in the fridge and smoked a joint in my bedroom. It was a blunt and I smoked the whole thing in probably ten minutes, without coughing. I took two Night Nurse and lay on my bed staring at the ceiling. My heart was still racing, but I felt like I was starting to think a bit clearer. A bit more logically.

An hour later I was asleep.

Seven

I had forgotten to set an alarm and slept right through until nearly 11 a.m. I woke up, grabbed my phone to look at the time, and sat bolt upright. Shit. Night Nurse will do that, if you take it with alcohol and don’t set an alarm. Two missed calls. A bunch of email notifications running all the way down the screen.

I quickly bashed up an email calling in sick and sent it to my boss. Then I immediately sent a follow-up email to her explaining that the first email had been stuck in my email Outbox since I tried to send it at 7 a.m. Having done that, I felt a bit calmer. Breathing space.

I went through the late-night messages and glanced over the emails that’d come through. Nothing. As I breathed in the relief, I absent-mindedly switched over to the BBC app to see what all the final scores were. No idea why I thought the football scores were important in that moment. It was almost a reflex action to fire up that app in the morning.

Then I saw something that made my stomach drop. And I realised nothing would ever be the same again.

Eight

Everything is as simple as you make it. If you concentrate, you can simplify most situations down to something manageable. That’s why people talk about breathing exercises and all that. It does help. No task is too complicated if you really break it down into things you can manage. You just need to learn the techniques.

I’d just killed a person, though. I’m not sure how you even go about breaking that down.

It was the BBC’s second most viewed story in London.

Breathe.

Even from the small picture attached to the story I could see it was something big. Two police vans and a car parked outside the alley. I got a weird flutter of excitement when I saw an ambulance. Maybe he’s not dead after all. But the headline says a ‘fatal incident’.

Breathe.

Maybe there was a different incident? This could all be a big coincidence? For fuck’s sake.

A spontaneous hot flush had me power-walking to the bathroom. I splashed my face with cold water over the sink. I glanced up at myself in the mirror and couldn’t believe how old I looked. I thought for a minute about how trivial my usual problems were. This time on Monday I’d been stressed about a pitch presentation for a craft beer brand. Craft beer doesn’t matter, in the grand scheme of things.

I could hear my phone buzzing on the bedside table in the next room. I ran to answer it. Maybe I wanted some feedback from the world to distract me from my thoughts. It was one of the girls in my team, Anna, giving me a heads up that my boss wasn’t happy about my vanishing act. She must not’ve seen my frantically crafted email yet.

‘I’ll come in,’ I said. ‘I’m feeling a lot better now; had some stomach problems.’ Good old stomach problems. I suddenly felt desperate to go into work, and normality. Nothing unusual or out of turn.

I threw my wardrobe open and chewed my nails as I scanned up and down the rail. I kept glancing back at my phone – God knows who I was expecting to call. I eventually put on a grey shirt, with a pair of black jeans that were hanging over the end of my bed. I spent ten minutes looking for my black boots before remembering I’d had to ‘bag’ them, which sent a horrible chill down me.

The fuck have I got myself into.

An hour later I arrived in Farringdon. London was grey and rank. Walking around London alone can get you down, if the weather’s wrong. It’s a different city in the summer. Although the rain had finished coming down, the roads were stained a deep black by the damp and puddles ran up and down the edges of the street.

Farringdon was prickling with people out for lunch. Being a Thursday lunchtime, the pubs were half-full. I walked faster than everyone else. Charging left and right on the pavement to carve a path for myself between the slow walkers.

As I turned the corner onto the main road next to the station, I couldn’t bear to look up ahead. When I eventually glanced up, beyond Express Dry Clean, towards the shortcut exit from the night before, I couldn’t see anything unusual. It looked pretty normal, which gave me a gentle, momentary endorphin rush. Had it all been a misunderstanding? Had I got it wrong?

As I passed the opening to the alley, I casually glanced down it. I couldn’t see far in, but I didn’t notice any activity except for a single traffic cone about three metres down. The cranes were moving though. The building work was going on. That was surely a good sign? I was scanning the faces around me, trying to get a feel for the vibe. The whole time I was acting cool but under the surface I was taking everything in, glancing around at the position of all the cameras, scanning facial expressions, straining to try and listen to what people might be saying to each other.

There were quite a few cameras around. I counted at least seven but, in my efforts to appear relaxed I guessed I’d probably missed a few. There was a big pole at the crossing with three cameras on it, all facing different directions. One of them directly faced Limon café which flanked the entrance to the alley. I winced. Couldn’t help myself. I rounded the corner at the end of the road and finally located the circus.

A police cordon; the alley blocked off with yellow tape and a sign requesting information. I didn’t read any of it. I could feel the nausea rising, and I needed to keep my cool. I pushed on to work.

Nine

Work was not what I’d expected. But then again, I’m not sure what I’d expected. Everyone was in a pretty upbeat mood. I don’t know why but I expected some state of semi-mourning. Nobody mentioned the activity going on down in Farringdon. But then, why should they? It had nothing to do with us. Meanwhile, something weird was happening to me. I noticed I was going out of my way to be extra nice to people. Super accommodating. I guess it was a like a weird side effect, trying to re-establish what a nice guy I really was. Trying to prove to myself that I was different from that whole situation last night.

But as the afternoon wore on, I ran out of focus. I sat in meetings daydreaming, with my laptop open Googling things like ‘Farringdon’, keeping it vague. Just a man finding out about ‘Farringdon’. Twitter was quiet but there was a fair amount of local coverage from news corps. His name was Richard King. He was an insurance broker and, by all accounts, a decent, hardworking person who was well liked. (Yeah, right. When do they ever say anything else about someone who’s just died?)

Someone asked me a question and I felt my head physically jolt upwards. I’m in a meeting. Someone’s asking me something about an email to procurement.

‘Yeah, I’ll chase them.’ I pretended to note something in my book. A couple of people nodded, and the conversation moved on. Nobody looked at me strangely or anything.

Richard King was from Colchester in Essex. He was a sociable man with a long-term girlfriend. He loved his mum, loved his mates and followed Blackburn Rovers. His dad was from Blackburn.

For the first time I began wondering if I should turn myself in. Is that the best thing to do right now? The best thing, for me? I could explain in detail that it was a complete mistake with no intent and that I’d only realised today he’d actually been properly hurt. They wouldn’t do you for that. Not prison.

My whole body went cold at that thought. That thought was the manifestation of all the terror that had started bubbling in my gut. Me, in prison. I don’t even like being away from my home for a single evening. I couldn’t stand the thought of my life changing like that.

I yanked my phone out under the table and started Googling similar cases. After ploughing through a few articles, I stopped. I’m leaving a fucking trail of breadcrumbs. They can access all this, the police. It’s all circumstantial evidence. They can get all your internet activities if they want. I quickly erased the History off my phone and work laptop.

Ten

When I got home, I took that bag of clothes from the night before, drove to the park near my flat and dumped them all in the charity bin, in the car park by the entrance. Somehow that felt safer and less traceable than putting it in a local bin. You put something in a charity bin, it gets cleaned and recycled back into humanity. It stops being ‘an item of mine that’s been discarded’ and becomes just ‘an item belonging to someone else’.

Tempted as I was to keep Googling the status of the police inquiries, I managed to stay off the internet all night. I made a quiet resolution to myself that from that moment on, I would behave like a normal person who didn’t know anything about that whole business, or about Richard King.

I kept convincing myself that it wasn’t my fault any of this had happened. From the few cases I’d seen, it was possible to get eight or ten or even fifteen years in prison for what I’d done; a rush of blood in a heated moment. There has in fact, been lots of precedent. It’s been in the news a lot over the last few years.

The one-punch death, the alarmist tabloids have branded it. A pandemic that needs stamping out, like religious extremism or inner-city stabbings. The latest moral panic for suburban people to get twisted up in knots about. A little dose of fear to make us feel alive. A folk devil for us all to hide from. That man cannot be me.

After pacing my kitchen, thinking, for what must have been hours, I resolved that I needed to swallow all this up and draw a firm line underneath it. I’d take a day or two to feel regretful and sorry, and then forget the name Richard King and continue with my life completely as normal. It was the only way not to let this take over my life, forever. Because I didn’t ask for any of this. I hadn’t seen Richard King before, and I didn’t know anything about him, twenty-four hours before. I didn’t ask for him to come crashing into my life.

So, you can leave me out of it.

Eleven

I went in to work early the next morning. I woke up automatically at 4.30 a.m. and couldn’t get back to sleep again; my mind was whirring. I kept reiterating it to myself: the only way to let sanity take grip of things again was to draw a line under this and take a permanent zero tolerance to thinking about it.

I thought, I’ll push back on any worry or anxiety about this stuff, as soon as it begins to emerge, and that eventually it would be a speck on the landscape. Just distant, in the rear-view mirror.

Today’s job was to put it firmly in the past. Archive it away in a part of my brain that I don’t access often, and keep busy with work. But I had one last thing I needed to do first. I needed to check something.

On my way in to work, I went through the shortcut, which was open to the public again. Three or four metres from where the thing had happened, there were five or six bunches of flowers propped against the wall, and a Blackburn football shirt which well-wishers had written on in marker pen. I didn’t stop to look at them or register any interest in them.

Outside Limon there was a police road sign appealing for information. Asking the public what happened has got to be really hit and miss, if nothing’s been reported already. Nobody is walking around paying attention to what’s going on, really. We’re all too busy. That thought gave me a momentary rush of positivity.

Most importantly, there were no security cameras down there. None at all. That’s what I’d really gone snooping down there to investigate. I’d been vigilant the whole way through. There was no way anything could have been caught on camera. A little bit of good news. There wasn’t even a line of sight to anything except the windows at the tops of tall buildings nearby. The alley was pretty well shielded by surrounding buildings and the void of the construction site.

The office was pretty empty, I had expected to be one of the first in but when I placed my fob over the sensor the front door joltedopen. The deadbolt wasn’t on, meaning somebody had got in before me. Normally the first thing I’d do upon entering the office would be to fill my water bottle at the dispenser in reception. Not today. I bustled straight through and made my way to my desk. It was in a corner beneath a big hanging sign saying Planning.

I could hear murmuring coming from the boardroom. I craned my neck to peep over the strip of frosted glass as I walked past. Couldn’t see anyone. But as I walked further away, beneath the frosted area I could see four pairs of feet around the boardroom table.

I collapsed into my chair and flipped my laptop screen open. I punched the power button with my forefinger and threw my phone and wallet onto the desk. As I reached to pull half a stale croissant out of the open packet in my top drawer, some shuffling footsteps from the kitchen caught my attention. I saw my colleague Em emerge with a tray of coffees and glasses of water. I nodded and called out through a mouth full of croissant.

‘Morning.’

Em widened her eyes at me and nodded towards the boardroom. She placed the tray down on her desk and reached into her handbag for a packet of tissues. Grinning nervously, she mouthed something at me as she picked the tray back up and whisked it towards the boardroom door.

‘What?’ I mouthed back.

She didn’t reply, instead backing into the boardroom door.

Must be a client meeting.

After a few minutes, curiosity got the better of me. I could see an agricultural looking pair of shoes in there, with thick plastic soles. They weren’t the shoes of your regular, polished Marketing Wanker. I got up and strolled round the side of the boardroom to the printer area. Pretending to look for a printout, I stood on tiptoes and peered into the boardroom. There were two police officers in there.

Jesus.

Twelve

One of them glanced up and locked eyes with me. Instinctively, I ducked down. She’d seen me. Now what?

I went back to my desk, inexplicably clutching a wad of blank paper from the machine. My mouth had gone dry. As I tentatively sat down, the boardroom door swung open. My boss leaned around the corner and gestured me in with a wave.

I swallowed hard and got up; my heart beginning to pound in my chest. I needed to get ahead of the sweat beads that would inevitably start emerging from my forehead in there, so I went to the bathroom first. I let the tap run for a good thirty seconds to let it go really cold, before scooping a few handfuls straight onto my red-hot face. I scooped a final handful of water into my dry mouth and grabbed some hand towels.

Breathe.

Would the police find it weird if I wore sunglasses to this meeting? I had an overwhelming urge to hide behind some sunglasses. I pushed the boardroom door open and there they were. My boss Julia, the Finance Director Brian and two police officers, one male, one female.

‘Hello,’I croaked, ‘what’s going on?’

For a few horrible moments they all just stared at me in silence.

‘This is Will,’ announced Julia, pulling out a chair next to her. The female police officer looked up at me, blankly. The male one, wearing an expensive looking pair of silver-framed glasses, gestured with his palm towards the chair Julia had pulled out.

‘Hello, Will. My name is Detective Inspector Matt Probert, this is Police Sergeant Sara Kane.’

I nodded at Kane and forced a smile at Probert.

‘So, what’s going on?’ I blurted with feigned intrigue. In my effort to pretend I was finding the drama exciting and a bit fun I half-shouted it. Probert opened a pocketbook in front of him and took out a photograph, sliding it towards me.

‘You may have heard about an incident on Wednesday night, up near the train station? We’re trying to get a picture of the events going on around there at that time.’ I blinked at the inspector, emotionless as possible. My mouth and throat felt like they’d been densely packed with cotton wool.

‘Sorry… which incident?’

The police officers looked at each other and Kane answered. She had a hard, fucking face, oh my goodness. Those oddly angled, sarcastic eyes that let you know someone’s going to be hard work. She was attractive, no doubt about it. Probably early or mid-thirties I thought.

She had lovely fresh-looking skin and shoulder length dark blond hair that curled a little at the bottom. Her mouth was perfectly formed, with a straight top lip framing a beautiful row of straight, white teeth.

‘There was a fatal incident in the alleyway leading up to the train station on Wednesday night between 21:15 and 21:50,’ she said. Her studious, brown eyes went right through me. She had a tone like an old schoolmaster, impatient and superior.

‘Oh yeah! I saw the sign up next to—’

‘Next to Limon café,’ she interrupted. She must have known I was going to pretend to claw for the name of the café. Somehow I thought pretending I couldn’t remember the name of the place might detach me further from the inquiry. She seemed to be ahead of that, however.

Probert nodded towards Brian. ‘You guys were in the pub across the green that night? Your colleague here mentioned you were there. Do you mind if we have a chat?’

‘Oh… yeah, ok! Not sure how much help I can be though.’ I smiled awkwardly and glanced around the table for water or something. Both Probert and Kane had glasses of water sitting in front of them, untouched. I imagined just grabbing one and taking a long sip from it. I could pretend I thought it was a spare glass. I could hear my own mouth clacking open and closed and I assumed everybody else could, too.

‘Anything you can remember about that evening could be helpful,’ Probert continued. He pulled a biro from the chest pocket of his jacket. ‘Do you know what time you left?’

I puffed my cheeks out and raised my eyes to the ceiling. ‘Ahh, half ten-ish?’ My mind was whirring. Why hadn’t I worked up a narrative yet? What was my narrative?

Probert glanced at Brian. Brian squinted at me slightly before looking up at the ceiling thoughtfully. He wasn’t going to correct me, but his expression seemed to ask, ‘Are you sure about that?’

I resolved to get in there first. ‘No, wait, hang on, it must have been earlier than that. The football was still going, so it must’ve been earlier. It must’ve been closer to half nine, quarter to ten.’

Probert nodded; Kane wrote something down.

‘Yeah, because I left before you didn’t I,’ I said, nodding towards Brian as if I’d just remembered.

‘Yeah, I think we left the pub at half ten,’ replied Brian.

‘Which route did you take home?’ asked Kane. ‘Do you pass through Farringdon?’

Probert intervened. ‘Sorry to interrupt whatever you were doing, by the way. Won’t take long, we’re just trying to piece things together and get a picture of everything that night. The landlord at The Three Kings said you lot were in around that time, so we just need to know if anyone saw anything out of the ordinary, and if you’re able to point us in the direction of anyone else who was in the pub… any details you can think of might help us build a better picture.’

My whole mood suddenly lightened. He was apologising to me for this inconvenience.He’s inconveniencing a law-abiding citizen (me) so he’s apologising. I felt liberated. I was just another law-abiding citizen, helping out with anything I know.Nothing to see here.

‘Out of the ordinary…’

I rubbed the sides of my head and pretended to rack my brain.

Kane stuck her oar back in. ‘What would really help is if you could just retrace the walk for us. Did you go through Farringdon?’

I’m a law-abiding citizen.

‘Yes, I did.’ I replied. ‘I go through there on my way home.’