dinner for me. So maybe he was at work, after all, and the office switchboard had just been left in weekend mode. But why hadn’t he answered my email, or contacted me to let me know where he was? Surely, however busy he was, he’d have had time to do that? He’d know how worried I’d be.
Breathing deeply, trying to keep on top of the anxiety which was threatening to overwhelm me, I tapped out another email.
Danny, where are you? I’m seriously worried now. I’ve tried your office but it’s just going to voicemail. PLEASE let me know you’re OK? Gxx
I pressed send and checked the time. Midday, on Saturday. I hadn’t heard from him since the goodnight email he’d sent me at about eleven on Thursday night, the one I’d read in my hotel room. Just over thirty-six hours. It just wasn’t right, wasn’t normal, not for us. Should I call the police? But what if he really was just frantically busy at work, trying to fix some sort of online disaster for a major client, totally losing track of time? Imagine his mortification if the police suddenly turned up at his office, the sniggers of his new work mates, the mutterings about neurotic wives. No, I couldn’t call the police; it was too soon. I was being silly. He’d reply to this latest email any minute now, and everything would be fine, I told myself. By this evening we’ll be snuggled on the sofa drinking wine and laughing at me and my stupid over-reaction.
I’d gone out briefly to collect Albert from the nearby kennels – I’d dropped him off on Wednesday night before I left on Thursday morning – Danny’s long and unpredictable working hours not compatible with dog care – desperately hoping that by the time we arrived home, my husband would be back, wearily brewing coffee in the kitchen or sprawled, exhausted, on the sofa after a long night in the office. But he wasn’t, and so at lunchtime, and uncharacteristically for me, because doing it too often made me feel fearful and anxious, I turned on the BBC Radio Bristol news. I’d worked in newsrooms for years before going freelance, covering so many stories that had shocked and sickened me, and although I’d become harder and tougher as time had gone on, more able to handle the horror of reporting on yet another stabbing, yet another senseless murder, there had come a point when the life I’d led back then had all become too much for me, and I’d simply walked out and left it all behind. I’d stopped watching the news completely for months after I quit, stopped reading the papers, finding solace in my ignorance about the true state of the world, switching to lifestyle journalism when I returned to work, leaving crime and politics behind me. But now my husband had vanished, and so I turned the radio on, feeling shaky as I listened for stories about accidents, car crashes, unidentified bodies.
There weren’t any, but in the afternoon, and feeling a little foolish, I slipped Albert’s lead on and went out to walk Danny’s route to and from work, some vague idea in my head that maybe he’d been knocked off his bike by a car and had been tossed, unconscious, into a hedge or alleyway. Ridiculous, even I knew that, in a big city where he’d surely have been spotted within minutes, but I did it anyway. I’d realized before we set out that I didn’t even know his exact route to work, or even if he took the same route every day – as a cyclist, there were so many options, so many shortcuts you could take. So I studied a map, picked what looked like the two most likely routes, the most logical roads to take to travel between our house in Monville Road and Danny’s office in Royal York Crescent, and did both, one one way, the other on the return. His office was clearly closed when I got there, but I rang the doorbell anyway, and peered in through the windows at unlit rooms empty of people, before turning round and heading home again, my sense of desperation growing. I found nothing on either route, of course. No bike, no helmet, no Danny.
I spent the rest of the afternoon pacing around the house, staring out of the windows, yelling pointlessly at my absent spouse and intermittently bursting into tears. Finally, I checked the time – almost six