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two years and seventeen days missing
chapter 48
alex
Jack leans across the table to refill my wine glass and then tops up his own. I have to be up early tomorrow for a Zoom call with a client in Istanbul and this will be my third glass of a very heady Italian red, but I don’t stop him.
‘To answer your question, Alex, no, I don’t think you’re being paranoid,’ he says. ‘But I do think you’re tired and under an incredible amount of stress.’
‘Subtext: I’m being paranoid.’
‘Maybe. But in your place, who wouldn’t be?’
His fingers brush mine on the tablecloth. Jack wants to get into my knickers a little bit. I’m not foolish enough to take it personally. He’s one of those men who simply loves women; wanting to get in their knickers is his default setting.
I move my hand. ‘To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, to have one friend with a dark secret may be regarded as a misfortune,’ I say. ‘To have three looks like I need new friends.’
‘Hardly dark secrets,’ Jack says, taking his cue from me and leaning back in his chair, putting a little distance between us. ‘Pale grey, at most. Newsflash: your platonic male friend is carrying a very unchaste torch for you. Who’d have thought? And Catherine Lord turned out to have gone to the same college as you, and met the same football coach. Asconspiracy theories go, it’s not exactly up there with the grassy knoll.’
‘Ah, but you’re forgetting about Ian Dutton.’
‘Yeah, OK. I’ll give you Dutton. That was pretty weird.’
‘I’m planning a TED talk later in the week:Poor Judgement or Why We Pick Men Who Elope With Other Women. It’ll be followed by a Q&A onSociopaths: the Science of Not Sleeping With.’
He grins wolfishly. ‘You just haven’t slept with the right ones.’
If Jack didn’t combine his supreme sexual confidence with a nice line in self-deprecation, he’d be insufferable. As it is, he’s hard to resist.
I’ve occasionally taken a man into my bed over the last two years, when the loneliness has been unbearable. The encounters have been physically satisfying, but emotionally uninvolved: it’s safer that way.
Jack, on the other hand, is far too risky a proposition. He’s attractive on multiple levels and I have no time for a relationship, even if it was on offer. My focus has to be on finding Lottie and I can’t afford distractions, however urbane and charming.
‘Everyone has secrets, Alex,’ Jack says, suddenly serious. ‘Dutton’s was more operatic than most, but we all have baggage. You could do a deep dive into the background of everyone at that wedding and you’d find something fishy on all of them: affairs, embezzlement, tax fraud—’
‘Christ,’ I say. ‘What sort of friends do you have?’
‘Politicians,’ Jack says dryly.
‘What about you?’ I ask. The wine has gone to my head: my tone is more arch than I intend. ‘What dark secrets do you have, Jack?’
‘I’m married,’ Jack says.
I laugh. Jack Murtaugh is famously single, a permanent star in the most-eligible-bachelor firmament of the gossip pages.
Jack doesn’t laugh with me.
‘Her name’s Amira,’ he says. ‘We met in Libya about nine years ago. She needed to get out of the country in a hurry, so I brought her to the UK. Totally fake marriage. I haven’t seen her in at least six years.’
A shadow passes across his face.
‘You’re not kidding,’ I say. ‘How d’you keep that quiet?’
‘I told you, I have friends in low places.’ He swirls the wine in his glass, but doesn’t raise it to his lips. ‘She lost her entire family in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. I couldn’t just leave her there.’
The marriage may be fraudulent, but Jack clearly feels something for his fake wife or he wouldn’t have risked his career to help her. I’m curious how they met, but I suspect, even if I asked, he wouldn’t tell me.
The waiter clears our plates away. ‘I don’t know how you’ve kept this out of the papers,’ I say. ‘Does the party know?’
