stuff or something, and I’m just so scared, Eva. What the hell is Danny playing at? Where is
he? And all that blood? What’s that all about? I just can’t …’
Hot tears were burning their way down my cold cheeks, and Eva grabbed my hands,
rubbing them hard.
‘I don’t know. I don’t understand any of it any more than you do. And the blood thing is
weird, bloody weird, no pun intended. But you know he was OK when he moved to Bristol, so
don’t think about that for now. Go and get your diary. We need to go through every day, every
single day, from the day Danny moved down here to the day he disappeared. Because he didn’t
have an invisibility cloak, Gem. This isn’t some sort of Harry Potter fantasy story, it’s the real
world. And he was out of this house all day every day, pretending to go to work, and you must
have had things delivered to the house, and done lots of stuff together over the past few weeks,
right? Somebody will remember seeing him, there’ll be somebody who can prove to the police
that Danny was here with you and alive and well until last week, OK? Come on. Game face
on.’
I managed a small smile. ‘Game face on’ – it was what we used to say to each other in
our early newspaper days, when we were half dead from lack of sleep and the stress of
deadlines, and had just had yet another assignment thrown at us.
‘Game face on. We can do this.’
136
And so, I put my game face on. I even got dressed, brushed my hair, moisturized my skin,
ate a bowl of cereal, fed Albert, promising him as I did so that I’d take him out for a nice long
walk later. And then I brought my diary to the kitchen table, and we began, as the morning sun
streamed in, dust motes dancing in the air around us.
An hour later, I pushed the diary aside, feeling something close to despair.
‘There’s nothing. Nothing.’
Eva steepled her fingers together, eyes fixed on the diary.
‘OK, well as far as I see it at the moment – and leaving the mystery of the blood in the
bedroom aside for now, as that makes no sense whatsoever – there are really only two possible
scenarios here. One – and I know this is one you don’t want to think about, love, but I’m sorry,
we have to consider it as a possibility – one, he’s vanished because he’s gone off with someone
else, someone he met on that app. He might have stayed with her that week after you moved
down here. It doesn’t explain all his odd behaviour, I know, but still. The other one … well, I
now think it’s even more likely that we were on the right track with that vague theory we came
up with before. Because what this increasingly sounds like to me now is that he was being very,
very careful to make sure that nobody would see him here in Bristol. But he was clever about
it, really clever, so you wouldn’t notice. I don’t know why yet, but now I’m really starting to
think he was hiding, Gemma. He was hiding right here, and you didn’t even realize it,’ she said
slowly.
She tapped her notebook with her pen.
‘Let’s look at it all again with that in mind. For a start, when you lived in London he
always took his turn doing the weekend supermarket run. Or else you did it together, right?’
I nodded.
‘But since you moved here, he decided he’d stay in and clean the house on a Saturday
morning, and that you’d go out and do the shopping.’
137
‘Well, yes, but that was because I always moaned about having to do all the cleaning, and
he was just being nice …’
My voice tailed off.
‘OK, maybe. But seriously …’
‘You did every dog walk since you moved here. Every single one, on your own.’
‘Well, yes, but that’s just because of his working hours … well, I thought he was working.
I generally did most of it in London too, not all, but most; he used to come out with us at
weekends. I’m sure he would have started doing that again here soon.’
‘Every time you got food delivered, you went to the door to get it, not him,’ Eva
interrupted.
‘He said he’d get the plates out, pour the wine …’
‘Exactly. Making sure the delivery guy didn’t see him. Did he ever go to the door, to take
in a delivery? Of anything?’
I thought. I couldn’t remember, but he must have, surely?
‘I don’t know,’ I said quietly.
‘When you went out with your new friends, he never asked if he could come. Fair enough,
maybe, as you’d only known them a few weeks. But even when you went round to … Tai, is
that her name? … to Tai’s house for a drink after yoga, and Clare’s husband joined you too,
and you called Danny and asked him if he wanted to pop over for a quick one as well, and meet
them all, he said no. So they never met him, either.’
I’d told Eva about that night earlier. On the spur of the moment as we’d left the third yoga
class I’d been to, Tai had suggested that it might be nice if her husband, Peter, and Clare’s
husband, Alex, met Danny.
138
‘I’ve got some very nice sauv blanc chilling in the fridge; shall we have an impromptu
midweek drinkies?’ she said, with a cheeky grin. ‘Are they all free? We could just have a
couple, it would be nice.’
I’d called Danny, but he told me he’d had to bring some work home with him that needed
to be done for first thing in the morning.
‘Any other night … look, give them my apologies and tell them we’ll have them all over
here soon instead, OK?’ he’d said. And so I’d done just that, and gone for drinks at Tai’s
stunning penthouse apartment in the Cathedral Quarter on my own, admiring the
three-hundred-and-sixty-degree views of the city from the floor-to-ceiling windows and
wishing Danny was there to enjoy them, and the wine and the company, with me.
Eva was still talking.
‘And you stayed in, every weekend. I mean, I know he was only living here for three
weekends, but still. Didn’t it strike you as weird that he never wanted to go out? Not once? To
explore your new city?’
I was staring at the diary myself now and starting to feel very stupid. What Eva was saying
was starting to make more and more sense. How had I not realized it, any of it, at the time?
‘It just … it just didn’t occur to me. He was working long days … well, I thought he was
working long days during the week, and I had loads on too. So when the weekends came we
just wanted to get this place sorted, get the walls painted and put up shelves and stuff. We were
planning to go out soon; we’d even made a list of all the restaurants and bars we wanted to go
to. We just hadn’t got around to it yet …’
I stopped talking. Shit. Eva waved her hands in a ‘see what I mean?’ sort of gesture.
‘And he cut all communications too, didn’t he? He deliberately didn’t have a phone. He
didn’t call or email a single friend or family member since he moved here, if what the police
have told you is true. Maybe he thought whoever he was scared of could track him via his
139
mobile. Or via his job, which is why he didn’t start it. Look at all the evidence, Gemma. He
was hiding. It’s obvious. He was hiding. From everyone, except you,’ she said.
‘Yes, OK, OK.’<
br />
I rubbed my eyes, my brain racing. It made sense, finally. Something about this big fat
mess made sense.
‘But the blood … what about the blood, Eva?’
She shrugged.
‘I don’t know. I can’t explain that. And honestly, I don’t know if he’s dead or alive right
now, nobody does. But what we do know is that you didn’t kill him, and we also know that,
despite what the police think, nothing terrible can have happened to him five weeks ago in
London either, because he was here with you, alive and well, for the past few weeks. Somehow,
we need to prove that. So if we forget the blood thing for now, assume it’s some sort of
forensics cock-up or something, the rest of this theory makes sense, right? That he’d maybe
got himself in some sort of trouble, and was laying low?’
I nodded slowly.
‘Maybe. I mean, I never thought of it before but now … except for the fact that he did go
out, Eva, every day, for hours, Monday to Friday. Yes, he left in the dark and came home in
the dark, but there were hours of daylight in-between. He must have been somewhere. And
wherever that was, people must have seen him. So maybe he was hiding from someone. But he
couldn’t hide from everyone, not in a busy city like this. So how do I find out where he went
every day, and what he was doing? Because that must be the key to all this. How on earth do I
find out?’
Eva grimaced.
‘Well that, my dear, is the million-dollar question.’
She paused, and shifted on her seat, suddenly looking uncomfortable.
140
‘Look, we can’t totally discount the other theory though. He did have a profile on a dating
site after all. Maybe both theories work, maybe he was in some sort of trouble and he’s run off
with someone else to get away from it. It’s just that, well …’
She took a deep breath, looking even more uneasy now, and I stared at her, my chest
tightening.
‘What? What is it? Eva, if you know something, you have to tell me!’
‘OK, OK. Look, I didn’t want to tell you this, I really didn’t. You seemed so happy, and
I just didn’t see the point, it was nothing really …’
‘Shit, Eva, TELL ME!’
‘OK. I’m telling you. It’s … well …’ She paused and blew out some air, then covered her
face with her hands. ‘Danny made a pass at me once,’ she mumbled through her fingers.
‘Danny … he what?’
I suddenly felt light-headed. What? Seriously. WHAT? Had she really just said that
Danny, my husband Danny, had made a pass at her, my best friend? Eva dropped her hands
from her face again, looking anguished.
‘I’m so sorry. So, so sorry. I should have told you about it ages ago, but I just didn’t see
the point. I mean nothing happened, nothing whatsoever, OK? I would never have done that to
you, even if I did fancy Danny, which I didn’t. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with him, he’s
very attractive, but he just isn’t my type …’
Her voice tailed off, her face flushed. I stared at her.
‘Well, go on. When, how? What happened?’
She ran a hand across her eyes, then leaned forwards in her seat.
‘OK. It was at that crazy space restaurant opening in Soho, do you remember? Back in
September. The one where robots served the pre-dinner nibbles?’
141
I did remember. I’d actually been given four tickets for the opening night of Space Soho
at pretty short notice, and only Eva and Danny had been free to come with me; it had been on
a Tuesday night, as far as I could recall. The restaurant, with glow in the dark menus, a slowly
rotating dining area and small white robots moving jerkily between tables holding aloft trays
of finger food, was owned by the brother of one of my Camille magazine colleagues, and
although it was all as tacky and cheesy as hell, it had been a really fun night. But, I thought,
casting my mind back, the three of us had been together all evening, hadn’t we? When would
Danny have …?
‘It was towards the end of the evening, when you were invited into the kitchen to talk to
the head chef, remember?’ Eva said, anticipating my question.
I nodded. Yes, I remembered that too. But I’d only been gone for ten minutes, fifteen
tops… ‘So what happened?’ I said.
She sighed.
‘We were all really drunk, weren’t we? All those cocktails at the beginning, and then the
champagne, and the espresso martinis, and … anyway, you went off, and we just chit-chatted
for a few minutes, and then I think I said something about it getting late and needing to get
home, because I had work early the next morning, and he just … he just said something like,
“I wish I could take you home”.’
She stopped talking for a moment, looking at me with a wary expression, but I nodded at
her. I was beginning to feel sick.
‘Carry on. It’s OK.’
‘Right. Well, I just laughed it off at first, you know? I said, well, that’s kind of you, but
I’ll be fine, I can get a cab right outside. And then he … well, he slipped his hand under the
table and started stroking my knee, Gemma. And he told me that wasn’t what he meant. He
142
told me I was gorgeous, and that what he actually wanted to do was take me home and … take
me to bed.’
She stopped again, her face flushing an even darker shade of red. I swallowed hard.
‘And … what did you say? What happened next?’
‘Well, obviously, I told him to bugger off. I didn’t want to make a scene, especially as I
knew you’d be back any minute, but I asked him to get his hand off my leg and told him I was
going to ignore what he’d said, just this once, because you were my best friend and I knew he
loved you and he was only saying what he said because he was drunk. When you came back a
few minutes later it was all over, and he was acting normally again, laughing and joking like
nothing had happened. I felt dreadful the next day, and not just because of the hangover, which
was a stinker. I just didn’t know what to do, didn’t know whether to tell you or not. But then
the next time I saw him, a few weeks later, when we all went to the pub, he took me aside as
soon as he got a chance and he apologized, told me he didn’t even really remember what had
happened but he knew he’d been inappropriate, and he seemed really genuine, Gemma, really,
really sorry and really embarrassed about it. So I thought about it a bit more, and I decided to
just let it go. I mean, we all do and say stupid things when we’ve had too much to drink, don’t
we? And nothing happened, after all. It would just have upset you, and caused a big row, and
for what? It never happened again, either. So … well, that’s it really. I just thought that now,
with all this going on …’
I nodded. This was horrible, horrible, but it wasn’t her fault. Would I have told her, if the
situation had been reversed? Probably not, if I thought it was a one-off. Why potentially wreck
somebody’s relationship over a drunken, unwanted advance? No, I’d probably have done
exactly the same in her shoes. It didn’t stop it hurting, though. It was shit, SHIT.
How could you have done that, Danny? Eva’s my friend.
143
‘It’s OK, honestly,’ I said. �
�I’m glad you told me. I just don’t know what to make of it,
though, Eva. I don’t know what to make of any of it, and I can’t even think straight anymore,
I feel sick all the time and I think my brain is turning to mush—’
BRRRRR.
The doorbell rang, making us both jump. The police, to do whatever forensic stuff they
needed to do in the house. They filed in past me, four of them, led by DC Frankie Stevens, the
other three clutching cases of equipment, as Eva watched silently from the kitchen doorway.
‘You’re welcome to stay around while we work, but it will take a couple of hours. You
might prefer to go out, maybe have a coffee or something. It’s a nice day out there,’ DC Stevens
said, and the unexpected kindness in his voice almost made me burst into tears. The previous
day had been so horrible, the way DCI Dickens and DS Clarke had looked at me … maybe
they didn’t all think I was some sort of lying, husband-attacking witch then? We took his
advice, and went out, Eva and I, Albert trotting along beside us, walking towards Clifton
Village under a sky so bright we wished we’d thought to bring sunglasses. On a cobbled side
street, we found a little coffee shop that sold almond croissants and pains au chocolat, and we
ate at a tiny outside table, Albert stretched out at our feet, the sun warm on our faces, any
awkwardness that hung between us after Eva’s revelation quietly dissipating.
‘Let’s talk about other things. About anything. Just not about Danny, just for a little
while,’ I begged, and so we did, Eva regaling me with tales of newspaper life, stories that made
me smile, even laugh out loud once, before I remembered again, and the hollow feeling that
had been building in my chest for days now threatened to engulf me, smother me.
Where are you Danny? What are you doing to me? Come home, Danny. Please, please
come home.
After coffee, we wandered around for a while, peering into quirky little homeware shops
and flicking through the rails in trendy, independent boutiques. But our hearts weren’t in it,
144
and by mid-afternoon we were heading back to the house. As we turned into Monville Road, I
stopped abruptly.
‘What’s going on? Shit, Eva, are they for me?’
Halfway up the street we could see a little cluster of people, a large white van parked a
The Perfect Couple (ARC) Page 16
