abroad, get a new identity, try to start my life again. It was too risky to bring Gemma or anyone else with me … if I got caught, they’d have killed us both. And yes, before you say it, I know what I’ve done was cruel, especially to Gemma. And to all of them, my family, my friends. But it would have made life so much easier, you know? Them thinking I was dead, and not just missing? It would have meant that after a while, nobody would have looked for me. Yes, I’d be alone. I’d never be able to see my friends and family again. I’d have missed Gemma so much, so bloody much. But at least I’d be free. And you know what … Gemma’s probably better off without me, anyway. I wasn’t a good husband, although I tried to be. I wasn’t always faithful to her. Anyway, that’s not important now.’
Devon and Mike glanced at each other again.
‘OK, we’ll come back to that,’ said Devon. ‘Tell us about your plan.’
‘Right, here we go,’ he said, straightening up in his chair. ‘We’d already decided to move away from London, to Bristol, and that turned out to be a godsend. I’d be somewhere new, somewhere nobody knew me, somewhere I could hide in plain sight, almost. Practice disappearing, before I did it for good. And I needed to buy a bit more time too, to get new ID documents and so on made up. It takes a while, if you want good ones. So I had this idea. I decided to try to make it look like I’d never been in Bristol at all, that something had happened to me in London before the move. And … well, this is the bit I’m most ashamed of … I knew that the easiest way to do it, by far the easiest way, was to implicate Gemma. To make it look like she’d done something to me, something terrible, before she left. Then, when the day came and she reported me missing, the police would look into it and find no trace of me in Bristol, and well … think that she, or maybe somebody else, but most likely she, had killed me weeks before. Jesus, it sounds sick now, doesn’t it? I didn’t think it would go as far as it did, you know, there was no real evidence against her after all, because she didn’t do anything wrong, but it all seems to have got a bit out of hand. I’m so, so sorry about that.’
He leaned back in his chair, rubbing both hands across his face.
It does sound pretty sick, Devon thought. And criminal, too, as Danny would soon find out when they arrested him. How could anyone do that to his own wife, a woman who loved him? He kept his mouth shut, but it was an effort. Beside him, Mike was silent too, but Devon could hear him breathing deeply.
He’s trying to control himself too. This bastard’s made fools of all of us, he thought.
‘I’m so sorry, about what I’ve done to her. I really am, and if I ever get the chance to see Gemma again I’ll tell her that too. But at the time …’ He picked up his mug, took another drink and grimaced. ‘Getting cold,’ he said.
‘Mike, will you put the kettle on, top up these drinks?’ Devon asked. ‘Carry on, Danny.’
‘Sure.’ Mike stood up, his face expressionless.
Danny smiled at him, gesturing towards the kettle on the worktop behind them, then turned back to Devon.
‘OK, so you want to know details, I assume? I started by opening a couple of foreign bank accounts, and slowly putting bits and pieces of cash into them. We never had a joint bank account, so that bit was easy; it was my money, and I just took little bits out here and there, no big withdrawals, nothing that would look odd if anyone ever checked. I had a couple of big bonuses I didn’t tell Gemma about too, and I asked for them as cheques, and stashed those away as well. I put most of it away for Gemma, so she’d have something to fall back on when I was gone, you know? I’d have found a way of letting her know where to find the money, eventually. And a bit for myself too, of course – I just wanted a bit of cash in the bank to start me off, but I didn’t need