wrong, just fucking wrong,’ I’d shouted, making Eva jump, her freshly poured coffee slopping over the edge of her mug and onto the table.
As I slouched on the sofa waiting for her to pack her bags, eyes closed, exhaustion taking hold, the images the police had shown me of the blood-soaked bedroom in Chiswick floated into my mind yet again, making my stomach churn. If that really was Danny’s blood, blood from many weeks ago, as they claimed, there had to be an explanation. But what? How could it have happened, how? Come on, Gemma, think. Think.
I stood up, and started pacing the room, my mind racing.
OK, so let’s forget about the other murders for now, the other dead men. Let’s just concentrate on Danny and assume that he’s in some sort of trouble, big trouble. What if the person he’s in trouble with came to see him the day I moved out of the apartment? And then got violent with him, really violent, hence all the blood? Danny didn’t join me until a week later, so maybe his injuries had time to heal? But there was so much blood, and no serious injury could heal in just a week …
I stopped pacing, suddenly feeling a little dizzy, and reached out a hand to lean on the mantelpiece to steady myself.
Think, Gemma, think.
Had I actually seen Danny naked, totally naked, since he moved down to Bristol to join me? We hadn’t had sex in the three weeks he’d been here, I knew that. It hadn’t bothered me at the time, not really – we’d both been tired, busy, and we’d had dry spells in the bedroom before when things were a bit crazy. But had I seen him with his clothes off? Could he have had injuries after all, ones I hadn’t seen because he’d kept them covered up?
I started walking again, up and down, up and down, my temples starting to throb. The central heating hadn’t been working properly in the house for the first ten days or so, so we’d been bundled up in jumpers, sleeping in tracksuit bottoms and T-shirts. Even when the letting agent had finally arranged for someone to repair the boiler, the bedroom was still chilly enough to stop us going to bed naked. I’d definitely seen Danny with his top off, I could remember that, but … I stopped dead, staring at myself in the mirror over the fireplace. He could have been hiding an injury, or even more than one, if it was below the waist. His legs, his lower belly … he could have been. My stomach lurched. Was I completely on the wrong track here? There had been so much blood in those photographs, and Danny hadn’t seemed to be in any pain, had never flinched noticeably when I’d touched him, had been walking and riding his bike normally. But didn’t injuries on some parts of the body bleed a lot, even when they weren’t very serious? Head injuries tended to, I thought I vaguely remembered someone saying once, but did the same apply to cuts on other parts of the body?
Feeling decidedly wobbly now, I staggered back to the sofa. So, continue this line of thought. How would the timing have worked? I left Chiswick early on the morning of Friday, the first of February, and the keys were dropped off at the landlord’s office later that day. So this attacker, whoever he was, must have come round to see Danny not long after I left, that morning in fact. Something went wrong, and he attacked him. Danny somehow survived, fought him off, but he was scared. Maybe the guy threatened to come back and finish him off? So instead of staying on in the apartment for a week as planned he moved out that day, went to stay with someone else, went to hospital even, or possibly stayed in a hotel or bed and breakfast? And then, a week later, he moved down here to join me, and didn’t tell me a thing about it. He didn’t want me to know about the trouble he was in, so he simply kept quiet about all of it.
I took a deep breath. Did this work, as a theory? Almost. It didn’t explain everything – why Danny had pulled out of his new job on the thirty-first of January, for example. That would have been the day before any of it had happened. But even so … I knew I was