‘Oh Gemma, I can’t even imagine what you’re going through,’ she said. ‘We are so sorry, honestly.’
‘I just wish you’d met him, before he went missing,’ I said quietly. ‘You’d have liked him. Hopefully, one day …’
‘Definitely one day,’ said Clare, who was on my right. ‘Positive thinking, right?’
We all fell silent for a few moments, then Eva said: ‘It’s such a shame that you didn’t meet him. We’ve sort of been struggling to find people who did, you know, since he moved here with Gemma? It might have been useful to see if anyone had picked up anything that Gemma might not have noticed, about how he was behaving and stuff before he went missing.’
Clare nodded.
‘Well, we tried!’ she said, with a little laugh. ‘We invited him to join us for drinks but he couldn’t make it, could he, Gemma? So the mysterious Danny remained a mystery.’
‘Seemingly so,’ said Eva. She glanced at me as she spoke, and I thought I saw a strange expression cross her face. A shiver ran through me. Surely Eva wasn’t starting to doubt me now, too? Surely she wasn’t beginning to think I was making it up about Danny being here with me in Bristol, like the police did?
Tai and Clare left soon after, hugging me hard in the hallway and grimacing as they prepared to face the camera flashes once again. When it was just me and Eva again, I turned to her and asked her straight.
‘Eva – you do believe me, don’t you, that Danny was here? It’s just that when Clare talked about having never met him, you looked … I don’t know, you looked a bit strange.’
Was I imagining it, or was there a moment of hesitation before her reply came?
‘Gemma, of course I believe you! Don’t be ridiculous. All this is making you paranoid. I’ve got your back, OK? Always had, always will.’
She’d wrapped her arms around me then, and I’d taken a deep breath, burying my face in her shoulder. Of course Eva would never doubt me, of course she believed me. She was right, I was getting paranoid. But if only my new friends had met my husband. It would have meant four people, four people who could tell the police they’d seen him here in Bristol a couple of weeks ago. Four people who could confirm that he couldn’t possibly have been badly injured in Chiswick back at the end of January, because he was fine. How could the police think I’d hurt him, how? It made no sense, any of it.
We’d done some googling on the London murders earlier, using the dates the police had mentioned to me, and had found various news articles, although at the time it appeared the two deaths hadn’t been linked. I could see why they were trying to connect them in retrospect though, and why they were being looked at in connection with the Bristol murders too; the photographs attached to the news stories had given me shivers. Men with dark hair, dark eyes. Men who looked alike. Men who looked like Danny.
Eva gave me a small smile.
‘My friend, the serial killer,’ she said. ‘Now that would be a story.’
I couldn’t help smiling back.
‘Oh, shut up. Seriously though, what am I going to do, Eva? I feel like I’m in some sort of nightmare. And do you really have to leave today? It’s going to be so awful being here on my own.’
‘I know. I’m so sorry, I really am, I hate to leave you like this, but you’re not totally on your own, are you, and I’ve stayed too long already. I’m needed back in the newsroom, just for a few days. I’ll try and come back on Friday night though, OK? Stay for the weekend. And I need to go and get dressed, now. The train leaves at one.’
‘Go on. I’m OK.’
She leant over and dropped a kiss on my cheek, then leapt from the sofa and ran from the room. I leaned back on the cushions, trying to ignore the low hum of chatter from just metres away outside the front gate. We’d closed the lounge curtains so they couldn’t snap any photos through the window, and I’d made sure the back gate was locked so they couldn’t sneak into the courtyard, but even so, their continued presence was hugely unsettling. Karma, I thought yet again. The number of times I’d been part of a press pack, staking out the home of a