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.’
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.’
‘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.
‘I’ve got some very nice sauv blanc chilling in the fridge; shall we have an impromptu