of courage to speak first in a situation like this. You had to give him credit for that. Minimal credit, admittedly. “You’re here for my wife.”
“Yup.”
“I never meant it to end up like this.”
“They never do.”
He looked down at the table. This wasn’t going to be a happy conversation for either of us.
“Go grab a drink,” I told him. “I’ll still be here when you get back.”
He went and grabbed a drink, again making the wise choice not to try and do a runner. “I don’t know where to begin,” he said when he returned.
“Okay, let’s start with the basics. First of all, just to make sure we’re on the same page here, when you say my wife you mean Galatea, not some other woman you’ve got stashed in a semi-detached in Slough?”
He nodded.
“And is your marriage legal?”
That one rattled him. But he probably knew I’d spoken to her. He shook his head.
“Because you got her fake papers, or because you never intended to marry her to begin with?”
“The first one. Legally she didn’t seem to exist, so I had a friend fix it. In the eyes of the law, our marriage might have been a fraud. In my eyes it wasn’t.”
I didn’t know if that made it better or worse. “And is there another woman?”
He didn’t respond to that one, which was basically confirmation on its own.
“How long?”
“A year?”
“And how long were you married?”
“Two years. Two and a half. Engaged for a while before that—the papers took time to sort out.”
This was getting to be a variant on the oldest story in the world. Well, I suppose technically the oldest story in the world was the one that went “then a big rock came out of the sky and all the dinosaurs were gone” but this was still on the list. “Okay,” I said. “Let me run a scenario by you, and you can steer me right if I miss anything or say anything you think is off base.”
He gave me an expectant look.
“You meet this girl, she’s beautiful and mysterious and did I mention beautiful. Also she’s, like, extremely accommodating sexually. How am I doing so far?”
“I’d rather you didn’t speculate about my sex life.”
“That wasn’t a no. Point is she makes you feel things you’ve never felt before—she’s basically your dream woman. The kind of woman you thought only existed on television. Pretty soon you decide you’re in love or what passes for it, and to your amazement she feels the same. It’s like your birthday and Christmas all at once.”
Silence. I’d probably been a bit unfair, but unfair wasn’t the same as inaccurate.
“A few months later you ask her to marry you and she says yes. You start to realise that some of the things that made this girl so fresh and exciting might actually be problems, maybe even dangerous problems. She doesn’t seem to have parents or a family or really any past at all. You probably come up with some theories, maybe she was a mail order bride who got lost in the post, maybe she’s in witness protection and they couldn’t be bothered with a cover story, maybe she’s an angel sent from heaven to suck your dick and do your laundry.”
“That’s rather harsh.”
It was, wasn’t it? I didn’t know this guy, I had no idea what his relationship with Galatea had been like. And if I was being honest with myself I was partly projecting. I’d had the advantage of being given at least some of Elise’s backstory by the Multitude—the sentient rat consciousness that was London’s best informed, probably most altruistic, and definitely absolute creepiest information broker—and I’d still had to work hard not to think of her as a cross between a washing machine and a RealDoll. I knew there were times when I’d taken her for granted.
Like that time I let her face down Sebastian Douglas for me and then let her die.
“Are you okay?” asked Ed Brown. I wasn’t sure if he was concerned that I’d gone off into a misery trance, or if he just wanted to get this fucking over with. I wouldn’t have blamed him either way.
“Sorry, drifted off. Been drinking for two hours. Anyway, you’re beginning to have suspicions but at this stage in the game they still add to the excitement of it all. You like the idea that maybe she has a shady past and maybe you’re saving her from it. You talk to whoever you need to talk to and get