‘Which was what?’
‘Sex,’ she said, as if the answer was obvious. ‘I was like a bloody schoolgirl; so wrapped up in it, I couldn’t see the difference.’
‘Did he ever talk about his sex life with Julia?’
‘A little.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He said he didn’t fancy her.’
For a man, Sam didn’t have much of a sex drive, Julia had said to me.
‘Did he say why he didn’t fancy her?’
‘No.’ She brushed more hair away from her eyes. ‘He obviously loved her. I could see that after a while; can certainly see it now. But he used to say – when it came to sex – she didn’t do it for him.’
‘In what way?’
‘In any way.’
I wrote that down. It seemed weird that he would feel like that about Julia – and yet still commit to getting married.
‘Do you think he cheated on her before he met you?’
‘No.’
‘How come?’
She looked out through the windows of the bar. ‘He was ballsy and confident in his work, single-minded, which was why I was attracted to him in the first place. But he wasn’t like that at all in bed. Not to start with, anyway. He seemed almost … inexperienced.’
‘How?’
A frown cut across her face, but it was more a look of discomfort than anything else. ‘Maybe “inexperienced” is the wrong word,’ she said, ‘because that suggests he didn’t know what he was doing. He definitely knew what he was doing. But there was always …’ She faded out, and then looked up. She wasn’t going to finish. I didn’t know if it was because she couldn’t articulate what she meant – or she was hiding something. There seemed to be a hint of a half-truth in her eyes, a flicker, a shadow, but not enough for me to build an accusation on.
‘There was always what?’ I pressed.
‘I think he was twisted up over what we were doing.’
‘He felt guilty about cheating on Julia?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is that why you think he cooled things off towards the end?’
She seemed surprised I knew about the change in their relationship, but the phone records showed the calls and texts between the two of them had started to die out from 2 September. The relationship had been burning itself out. ‘In the last two or three months, he’d tell me he was busy over lunch, or pretend he had a meeting, or had to work late,’ she said, not exactly answering the question, and I decided not to jump in but come back to it later. ‘He just changed.’
‘Changed how?’
‘Became different. Preoccupied.’
‘Did you ever talk about it?’
‘I never got the chance. He became very quiet, really highly strung and stressed out. It was never like that before. He was easy-going and fun.’
This was returning to the same place all conversations about Sam seemed to retreat to: he was a nice guy, he was easy-going, he didn’t have any reason to leave, but he changed in those last few months. The minor details were different, but everyone was saying the same thing. His finances, his affair, how he felt about Julia, everyone had a theory, but no one had an answer.
‘Nothing else sticks with you?’ I asked.
She glanced at me, down to her wine, then back up. A frown formed on her face. ‘There was this one time …’ She paused again, trying to recall the details; rubbed a hand across her forehead. ‘It was about two or three months after we started seeing each other. He came back to my place for a couple of hours and we …’ She looked at me. Had sex. I nodded for her to continue. ‘Anyway, he started to ask about my previous relationships.’
‘What did he ask?’
‘It was weird. He wanted to know the details. Like, all the details. He wanted to know how long I’d gone out with each of them, how many times I’d slept with them, what our sex life was like, that kind of thing.’ She paused, forefinger and thumb pinching the neck of her glass. ‘I only really thought about it after he disappeared, because it never struck me as odd at the time. We weren’t married, we were just having sex. Him wanting to know what I’d done, what I liked, it was all a part of it; part of the affair. The excitement. When it’s taboo, when it’s risky, when people see it as wrong, you’ll do anything. Try anything. Because it doesn’t matter any more. All the stuff you’ve always wanted to do, you just …’ She looked at me, shrugged. ‘You just do it.’
‘So why did it feel weird when he asked?’
‘It was just strange coming from him.’
‘You pegged him for a straight arrow?’
She nodded. ‘Definitely.’
I looped the conversation around to a point we’d left unfinished earlier. ‘How did you react when he started cooling things off?’
‘React?’
‘Did you just accept it?’
She shrugged. ‘I could see myself becoming a bunny boiler, the psycho bit on the side, but I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t bear the silence; going from all-in to all-out.’ She stopped; looked downcast. ‘So, no, I didn’t just accept it.’
‘What did you do?’
She glanced at me, a reluctance in her face. ‘I started following him.’
‘When was this?’
‘Things started to change in early September, and by the middle of October I wasn’t getting anything from him: no calls, no texts. I found that very hard.’
‘So you started following him at the end of October?’
‘End of October, beginning of November.’
‘How many times did you follow him?’
‘Only twice. The second time I started feeling ridiculous. I was angry with him – jealous and hurt, I suppose – but I got a dose of clarity halfway through the evening the second time and that was when I left.’
‘Where did he go?’
‘Both times, it was just down there, to the Hilton.’ She was pointing over my head, in the direction of South Quay. ‘He just sat there in the bar by himself.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Nothing. Just drinking. Like he was deep in thought.’
‘That was it?’
‘That was it.’
Deep in thought. But about what?
‘You never told Sam you followed him?’
‘No. He would have flipped.’
‘And done what?’
‘He wasn’t violent, if that’s you mean. We only ever had one fight in the time we were seeing each other. But he wouldn’t have taken kindly to me following him.’
‘What was the fight about?’
‘It was a Friday night,’ she said, remembering it instantly. ‘August, in the weeks before he started getting weird. He was in the shower and his phone went off. It was right there next to me on the bed, so – without even thinking, really – I glanced at the display to see who was calling. It was just an automatic reaction. I saw the name, it didn’t mean anything to me, so I just assumed it was a client of his. When he came back out, I told him his phone had gone off and he was fine about it. Really relaxed. Then he checked to see who’d called, and it all changed.’
‘Changed how?’
‘He went absolutely crazy. Started accusing me of snooping around in his phone, of going through his private things. It just came out of nowhere. I tried to tell him I hadn’t done anything, that I hadn’t looked at his messages, that I didn’t even know who the guy was who’d called him, but he wouldn’t believe me. I’d never seen him like that.’
‘Who was the caller?’
‘Some guy called Adrian.’
‘No surname?’
‘It just said Adrian.’
I noted it down. He definitely wasn’t on Julia’s list, which meant she didn’t know about him, and although I didn’t remember seeing an Adrian in the phone records, it didn’t mean he wasn’t there. Spike had got me eighteen months of calls and texts from Sam’s phone, and – in the first run-through – I’d concentrated on repeating numbers and the people who’d contacted Sam the most. Adrian was a reason to go back to it.