Emma sits back, triumph sparking. “Then it exists. Proof exists.”
“Proof of what?”
“Abuse. Coercion. Something ugly.” She looks around the café — the prams, the laptops, the plants performing sanity — and lowers her voice. “If there’s footage of James hurting Pete — if we could get it — policehaveto take it seriously. It wouldn’t fix everything, but it would get a door open. Keep them apart. Long enough to make Pete breathe and talk.”
“Surely James would delete anything incriminating?”
“Maybe, but also why put it up in the first place? Clearly, he has some voyeuristic fetish for being filmed. Maybe he saves them to watch them back while he rubs baby oil over his misters.”
This is not an image I was hoping for today, so I just nod.
While I’m not sure this is exactly the route I wanted to go down to help Pete, the tired, irrational, overly emotional side of me that feels he could double as Ethan Hunt to save the day is switched on.
Could I find some video evidence of James that could be used to convince Pete to leave?
“How would we get it?” I ask, hearing how treacherous my voice sounds and deciding not to fix it.
Emma’s smile is sharp. “Well. This is where we leverage your… excellent rapport.”
“I knew you were going to say leverage,” I sigh.
“I mean it kindly,” she insists. “You’re… nice.”
“That’s my fatal flaw.”
“One of them,” she says cheerfully. “Tom, listen. Pete trusts you. He invited you back, didn’t he?”
“Sort of. I may have… shown up,” I mumble. “I’m aware of the hypocrisy.”
She pats my hand. “We’ve all stalked someone for good reasons. You should see my search history.”
For a brief moment we breathe—two ridiculous people in a Bristol coffee shop discussing how to ethically obtain illegal evidence.
“I can’t go through him,” I say. “If Pete’s terrified, he won’t risk it. And if James catches a whiff…”
“Then we don’t go through Pete,” Emma says. “We go around him. You said the footage is stored somewhere in the house?”
“Almost certainly,” I say. “There’s an office. Mac on the desk.”
Emma’s attention scatters to the window—two men walk past in matching coats—then zips back. “Do you think you could get to it?”
“DoIthink I can commit a crime with panache? No. Do I think I can bumble a crime with high anxiety and snacks? Possibly.”
“Snacks are crucial,” she deadpans. “I once tried breaking into my ex’s place with nothing but Pringles and optimism. It didn’t work.”
We sip; I overthink. My internal monologue starts a chorus: You cannot do this / You absolutely will do this / Please stop doing this. I imagine myself on the six o’clock news as “local man with excellent posture arrested beside ornamental shrub.”
“This is a really terrible idea,” I say, surprising myself with a sensible sentence.
“It is,” she says simply. “But I’ve been in this for two years. Two years of terrible ideas. And I’m prepared to try them over and over again until I find the truth.”
“You know,” I say, “you’re very weirdly inspirational.”
“Yes,” she says. “It’s my brand. My other brand is unpaid parking fines and men who ghost me. But inspirational sounds better.”
We go quiet long enough to notice the café’s playlist has slid into melancholy acoustic covers of songs that don’t deserve it.
This really is a terrible idea.
