jumped, a jarring sound rousing me from an uneasy sleep. The luminous digits on the alarm clock on my bedside table told me it was 4.25 a.m., and I whimpered. I hadn’t fallen asleep until gone two. I groped behind the clock for my phone, wondering who on earth was trying to get hold of me at this hour. My alarm clock – a white, chunky, old-fashioned thing with big yellow numbers on its display – had always been a great source of amusement for Danny.
‘Who uses an alarm clock nowadays, you mad woman? Use your phone like everyone else does!’ he’d say, but I always ignored him. I liked my clock; I liked being able to see at a glance what time it was when I opened my eyes, without having to fumble for my phone. Finally, I found it, and squinted at the screen. My body stiffened, and a surge of adrenaline rushed through me, making me jerk upright in bed.
‘No! Not again, please!’
I stared at the screen. It was another text message, sender’s number withheld.
Tell them what you did. If you don’t, you’ll be next.
There was a sudden movement at the door and for a moment I stopped breathing.
‘Gemma? What’s wrong? I just got up to go to the loo and I heard you shouting.’
Eva. I exhaled, my body sagging with relief.
‘Sorry. It’s another text, look.’
She crossed the room and sat down on the bed next to me, reaching for my phone.
‘Shit, Gem. This is getting out of control. You need to go back to the police and make them take this seriously. They haven’t even bothered to put anyone outside, have they? If anything happens to you …’
I shivered, and she grabbed my hand.
‘Oh bugger, I’m sorry, I’m no help, am I, scaremongering like this. But I’m worried, Gem. Come on, let’s go and make a hot chocolate or something. We’re not going to sleep now. Where’s your dressing gown?’
‘On … on the back of the … the door.’
My teeth were chattering, even though the room was warm, and I had a sudden urge to hide, to crawl under the bed or into the wardrobe, to stay there until all this was over. But when would it be over? This nightmare was never-ending, a dark stain spreading through my life, slowly obliterating all that had ever been good and right and happy.
I’ve lost everything, haven’t I? I thought suddenly. All of it was gone, all of it. My sense of security, my feeling of being loved, belonging. My self-esteem. My marriage. My life. So what did it matter what happened to me now? I’d lost everything worth living for. The police might as well arrest me, lock me up. I was beyond caring. I was done.
As if in a trance, I let Eva slip my robe around my shoulders and lead me to the kitchen. But as my body slowly warmed up, and I watched my friend as she bustled around, spooning chocolate into mugs and heating milk, I felt a tiny ping somewhere deep inside my brain, and one word began to run through my head over and over again. Quinn. Quinn.
Eva and I had talked for hours when we’d got back from the police station, trying to make sense of it all, and we’d both come to the same conclusion. If it was Quinn who had given the police those photos of Danny – and it must have been, who else? – and if it was Quinn who’d told them I’d been physically abusing my husband, then he was doing it for one reason only. Quinn was trying to frame me. He wanted to make it look as if I was the one who had hurt Danny. To lay a false trail, because in reality it was he who was responsible.
I’d batter him for that …
The more I thought about it, the more I thought it had to have been Quinn who attacked Danny in our Chiswick bedroom. I still didn’t really understand the reason behind it – him finding out that Danny was cheating on me just didn’t seem cause enough for such extreme violence. But the fact that he didn’t react in any way when I mentioned the blood, as if that wasn’t news to him, as if he already knew all about it … could Quinn and Danny have fallen out over something else, something much bigger? Danny had, apparently, saved Quinn’s life many years ago, and maybe that explained why