“Um, yes, it’s in the dining room under the window,” I said.
“Great, I’ll email you some stuff and you can print it. I think it’ll give you some clues.”
“Clues?”
“Yes, clues. Should I send it to the same email you gave me when I was working on the kitchen?”
“Ah, yes, that’d be fine. Um …” I looked at my fireplace, which was where Simon seemed to have put most of the paper that formed a timeline of Riz’s last few days.
“Right, shall we get started?” He clapped his hands together and came to stand beside me, radiating warmth and a pleasant musky scent that spoke of man, and sweat, and more … man. God, I wanted to jump his bones.
I inwardly groaned. What. Was. Wrong. With. Me? Why, why, did I let my dick control my life? Just once could I get through a social interaction with a semi-attractive man without becoming a slave to what was between my legs?
“Okay, um.” I pinched the bridge of my nose again. This was going to be harder than I thought. How could I let him down gently? “Er, why don’t we go through Riz’s last movements? I got the feeling there was a lot they weren’t telling us at the press conference,” I said and then berated myself for letting that slip. Don’t feed his fantasy.
Simon got some papers together and stuck his tongue out as he concentrated. I sat on the sofa and leaned forward to try and give an air of interest and enthusiasm.
“Right, okay, so you know what the cops said in the conference?” He began taping up a long sheet of A4 he’d Blu-Tacked together over the mirror on my mantlepiece. “More or less accurate, bar a few things.”
“Such as?”
“That the number he was calling obsessively wasn’t registered. It was a burner phone.”
I cocked my head. “So, they …”
“Have no idea? Yes. Which leads me to believe it was something bad. I thought originally it was some political intrigue.” He played with the hem of his T-shirt, lifting it slightly and giving me a glimpse of that lovely bodyunderneath. “I confronted him about it on Saturday night. We’d argued before we came to Honningtons.”
I perked up. “Did you tell the police?”
He nodded. “Yes, I was honest about it. I told them I … I didn’t think he was completely above board on the campaign. I had …” He looked around the room at basically any direction but me. “I wondered if he had something to do with Guy’s photos being leaked.”
I cocked my head. “How would he know about that? Were he and Guy acquainted?”
“No.” Simon shook his head. “Riz had heard of him, but they’d never met before the campaign. He had a lot of questions when we” – he averted his gaze – “got back together. All of a sudden, he was quite intrigued by him, but I put it down to rubbernecking over Arabella’s death.”
And yet you proposed to him. What taste.
“Okay, so you thought he was up to no good …” A suspicion formed in my mind for a second, but I tried to push it down. It was a terrible idea to bring up. Simon was pacing my living room, all but tearing his hair out with his family worried he was about to hurt himself. I couldn’t.
But he was looking at me now. “What? Have you had an idea?”
Jesus, I’m not fucking Sherlock Holmes.“It’s nothing.”And you’ll kick off if I say it.
“No, say it. No thought too stupid or small.” He offered a slight smile.
Noticing the knees of my jeans were beginning to fray, I played with the material for several seconds and mouthed at the air, trying to think of an excuse to keep my gob shut. But Simon’s big blue eyes were imploring me.
“Have you considered the possibility that maybe he was with someone else, another man?” I asked in a high-pitched voice. “I only say because of the phone calls, allthe secrets …” My voice trailed off as I took in the expression on Simon’s face.
“Of course I had,” he said. “It was my first thought. He begins acting weird and taking phone calls at all hours. And not from Marina like he claimed they were from at the beginning. Because I could tell he was getting the calls from a private number, and then that changed to being under Marina’s name. Except he had Marina in his phone already as Marina with a capital ‘M’. Then her name changed to being spelt with a lowercase letter. I don’t think he’d picked up he’d done it, or he’d done it to keep the people separate in his head so he knew who was actually calling and was hoping I wouldn’t notice.”
“Did you confront him about your suspicions?”
“The cheating? Yes, that was the day I proposed.”
A factoid to pocket for later. “And about the names?”
“Yes, when we came back from Honningtons. That’s why he left. We had a blazing row. Marina almost had to referee. I told him I wasn’t going to let him treat me like a fool. I didn’t know what was happening, but I wasn’t going to be a part of it.”
