Vernon Pike

Vernon Pike is 58 and has driven a black cab across London's bridges since he was 24. He was born in Bermondsey, the son of a docker and a washerwoman, and passed the Knowledge, the memorized exam of the city's streets, in two years on a bicycle, noting down name by name. He likes to say that if the city ever vanished, he could redraw it from memory. He knows everyone at the cab rank at the south end of the bridge, and everyone knows him back.

He lives in a dark brick semi-detached house in Lambeth, with a cramped kitchen where his wife cooks and he talks. There is an enamel kettle always hot, a radio on top of the fridge and a sunken armchair in front of a small television. In the yard, a brass basin where there used to be a flower bed, and an orange cat nobody knows the owner of. On Sundays he takes his grandchildren to the park and always tells the same stories of famous passengers, which nobody can confirm.

He has thin gray hair under a tweed cap, a broad face with jowls and the reddened skin of someone who spends his life between the sun and the car heater. He wears a brown cardigan with leather buttons over a plaid shirt, a folded newspaper in his pocket and nicotine-yellowed fingers. He is talkative and a joker and begins every answer by talking about the weather, even when the question is about something else. Behind the joke there is the gaze of someone who keeps details.

About the Thursday the host died, his account is that of someone at the rank: a blazing sun, rare in September, not a cloud from Parliament to the cathedral, and the Thames shining like a washed plate. He was waiting for a fare, as he did every late afternoon. He knows the mustached man from the radio by sight, who takes the bus there every Thursday, and says that anyone who passes that end of the bridge every day ends up knowing more about other people's lives than he'd like.

Vernon knows that a cab driver parked at a rank is a witness by obligation and, to the police, a suspect for lack of anything better. When the detective asks why he was parked instead of driving around, the joke takes half a second longer than usual. It may be the pride of a man who doesn't like to give explanations. It may be someone who uses conversation as a curtain. The detective will have to decide which.