She’d put a notebook and pen on the table when she’d sat down, and she reached for them.
‘OK, let’s brainstorm. First, the job thing. Why would somebody do that, lie to their wife about something like that? Have you come up with anything so far?’
‘A few things, but they’re all a bit mad.’
‘Shoot.’
‘OK. Well …’
I told her about the crazy theories I’d come up with – Danny had some sort of top-secret job he couldn’t tell me about; he was secretly ill and having daily treatment somewhere in Bristol; he had another wife and family nearby and was spending his days with them, returning to me at night. She wrote them all down, an increasingly sceptical expression on her face.
‘Hmmm,’ she said. ‘Top-secret job, unlikely. Although very, very vaguely possible I suppose, given his line of work. Ill? Did he look or seem ill?’
I shook my head. ‘No. He’s looked great recently, actually. Really fit. I don’t really think he’s ill. I was just desperately coming up with theories, you know?’
‘OK. And another wife? And kids? Seriously?’
The wide-eyed, disbelieving look on her face almost made me laugh.
‘No, I don’t really think that either. But what else, Eva? I can’t think of any other reasons he’d lie about where he was going every day.’
Eva was nodding slowly, looking at her notes. She stared at the page for a few seconds, then looked back at me.
‘Well, I can think of one more possibility. Look what we have here. A man who doesn’t start the new job he was supposed to start, but still disappears every morning and comes home every evening. A man who isn’t using his bank account. A man whose new neighbours have never seen him. And now, a man who’s disappeared without trace, overnight. Sounds like a man who’s laying low, to me. A man who’s in trouble. A man who’s trying to keep a very, very low profile. A man who’s scared of somebody or something. A man with a secret. A man who doesn’t want to be traced, so he lies about where he’s working, goes and hides away somewhere every day instead, even hides where his money is being kept? Moves house, and makes sure even his new neighbours don’t know he lives here?’
I stared at her. Bizarre as it sounded, what she was saying made some sort of sense.
‘OK, but … but who, Eva? What? Who would he be scared of, who would he be hiding from? I mean, I’ve never had the slightest inkling that he’s in any sort of trouble. He seemed totally normal at home, surely he wouldn’t be so relaxed if something like that was going on? At the same time, well, it’s a good theory – better than any of mine, that’s for sure.’
I stopped talking, thinking. Thinking again about the times over the past year or so that Danny would seem stressed and distracted, would say he needed to be on his own for a while, would head off for a few hours and come home looking better, behaving like himself again. It had happened more frequently after his dad had died, but I’d put that down to grief, to him trying to handle his loss, even if he didn’t want to admit that his father’s death had hit him harder than he’d expected it to. But maybe I’d got that all wrong. I’d wondered over the past few days if he might, after all, been having an affair. But maybe it wasn’t that at all. Maybe he had been worried about something, something else. Maybe he had been in some sort of trouble. Could Eva be right?
‘Eva. The EHU app thing. How would that fit in?’
Eva sat back in her chair, her smooth brow crinkling.
‘Mmm, good point. That doesn’t really fit with the rest of it, I suppose. A man who’s trying to keep a low profile isn’t very likely to put himself on a dating app.’ She sighed. ‘Damn. Thought I’d cracked it there for a minute. OK, let’s just look at that separately for a minute. As you said earlier, somebody could easily have stuck him on there for a silly joke, although I’m not sure who would think that was funny. Still, you know how childish men can be, especially after a few drinks maybe. And yes, it’s kind of freaky, very freaky in fact, that two other men who used the same app have been murdered. But that could just be a