Page 4 of Wanting Daisy Dead

Dan Levine, Housemate

When I get in from work she’s in the kitchen with the kids – doesn’t even look at me. Obviously pissed off because I was supposed to pick them up from the childminder’s an hour ago.

‘Sorry, I was held up at work,’ I say, but she ignores me, and continues to chop up two apples for the kids. ‘It’s not the end of the world.’ I walk towards her, both arms open, and she whizzes round, the knife in her hand. ‘Whoa, watch that,’ I warn, smiling.

‘Not the end of your world, perhaps, but it’s the end of mine!’ she hisses. ‘I had to cancel a really important pitch this afternoon.’ She can’t look at me, and goes back to chopping.

‘I’m sorry! Something came up – a few million pounds, to be precise,’ I mutter as an afterthought. ‘Look, I had to be there. If the stock market crashes and I’m at the school gate, I won’t have a job !’

‘But I’ve worked so fucking hard on that client—’

‘Don’t swear ... The kids ...’ I widen my eyes in Violet’s direction, as our eight-year-old gasps theatrically at ‘Mummy’s swear’.

‘Here, take these for you and Elspeth,’ she says to Violet, handing her the chopped-up apple. ‘You can watch TV.’

This is a source of great delight, as the girls scramble to get out of the kitchen to the sitting room. Like most things in our lives, Georgie has made watching TV into forbidden fruit, and in much the same way as I now hide my guilty pleasures from my wife, our daughters will learn to do the same.

As they leave, I turn to her. I’m too tired to argue, I just want to flop on the sofa and fall asleep. But her anger is palpable – it throbs in her veins, pulses through the air, creating this thick layer of tension between us. She scares me when she’s like this.

‘Couldn’t you move your pitch meeting to another day, or get a sitter .

..?’ I suggest gently, but before I’ve even finished the sentence, I hold my breath.

I can feel the blast of heat. My wife is breathing fire, which is soon followed by the familiar yelling and swearing, punctuated by crashing pots and pans.

No wonder she keeps losing staff – I certainly couldn’t work with her.

She needs help, but now isn’t the time for that conversation.

I wander into the sitting room to let her cool down, and even the kids seem to be giving me the silent treatment.

Kids pick up on stuff like this, though fortunately they’re still young enough to be bribed by chocolate, so I produce the Cadbury stash I bought from the petrol station on the way home.

‘Do you want to poison your kids with sugar?’ She’s standing in the doorway, glaring at me.

‘Has Daddy poisoned us?’ Elspeth, the little one, lisps through no front teeth, her eyes wide in child horror.

‘No, darling,’ I say, before adding in a murmur, ‘Not half as much as Mummy has.’

‘Dan!’ Her voice is raised. ‘It’s not okay to wreck my business then turn up late with bloody chocolate bars like Father Christmas.’

Accustomed to Mummy snapping at Daddy, our girls don’t flinch at this, but I catch the look between them, presumably at ‘Mummy’s second swear’.

Georgie stomps from the sitting room, and the girls eat their chocolate in silence, mesmerised by the blue Australian dog on the screen.

I go back into the kitchen, and my darling wife is holding another sharp knife.

This time, she’s chopping manically at a carrot.

I’m sure she’s wishing it was one of my fingers – or worse.

I know she’s seen her invite to the Daisy thing – it’s lying on the kitchen counter.

She hasn’t mentioned it at all.

She says she can’t trust me, but I’m not sure I trust her. She’s been texting more than usual, and in the past couple of weeks her phone has rung and she’s picked up and left the room. The other night I walked into the living room and she took her phone outside. I mean, what the hell?

‘Who was that?’ I asked casually when she returned from the arctic temperatures of the back garden on a winter’s night.

‘Just a work thing.’

‘You seem to be taking a lot of work calls outside and upstairs recently. I didn’t realise one had to sign the Official Secrets Act to discuss a finger buffet with a client these days.’

‘Don’t be so stupid,’ she hissed, and stomped upstairs to bed.

Something’s going on with her, and I know that’s hypocritical coming from me, but I don’t like how it makes me feel.

This morning I tried to check her phone but she’s obviously changed the PIN, and on the way to work I realised I hadn’t put it back where she’d left it.

She’d go mad if she knew, even though she’s constantly trying to get into my phone.

But that’s the least of my problems right now: the invite is swirling around my head constantly.

Who could possibly know that I wanted Daisy dead?

I’m really worried about what these freaks have on me.

I need to mention the invite to Georgie, but daren’t give anything away.

I’ll have to box clever on this one. Jesus, she’s so contrary that if she thinks I want to go, she’ll make it her mission to stop me, either by refusing to go herself or by kicking off if I try to go alone.

But I have to go, because if I don’t that podcast will tell everyone everything , and that would be curtains for me.

Whoever posted mine and Georgie’s invites through the door did so last night.

It was late, I’d been for drinks after work, and I opened the door to see two envelopes lying there.

Neither of them had a postmark, or a stamp, and one was addressed to Georgie and one to me.

This worried me, because why wasn’t it one letter to both of us?

So, I double-locked the doors and checked outside through the windows to see if anyone was standing in the garden.

It wouldn’t have been the first time we’d had a nocturnal visitor in the garden, but Georgie doesn’t know about that.

I’ll be frank, I haven’t been the most faithful of husbands, and there have been some slightly tricky moments as a result.

And, seeing those envelopes on the mat, I thought they were from the woman I was seeing last summer, finally bringing the wrath she’d been threatening.

I assumed the letter to me was an X-rated tirade of abuse, and there was a strong possibility that Georgie’s might contain photographs of me and the woman in flagrante.

It was a bad move even starting that affair – it had car crash written all over it – but what can I tell you?

She was beautiful, with a great body. I had no idea she was a psycho.

To my horror, Georgie found out about my summer psycho when she spotted a message on my phone. It took months to convince her not to divorce me, and if this correspondence was from her, it could trigger Georgie into retaining a divorce lawyer all over again.

Anyway, I was standing in the hallway with these two envelopes, and as Georgie and the kids were in bed I locked myself in the downstairs toilet so I could read them.

I opened my envelope first, but instead of the abusive letter I’d been expecting from my fling, another woman was suddenly staring out at me – Daisy.

That angelic face, innocent and beautiful, peeling away time like it was yesterday.

She was smiling, the sun was shining, and the future held such hope and optimism.

Daisy’s photo was so mesmerising, I didn’t register at first that this was an invitation.

I just drank her in, remembering the good times, the great sex.

But even so, it was unsettling, and even the memory of her long legs, her full breasts and those come-to-bed eyes couldn’t hold back the darkness.

Everything I’d kept hidden for the past twenty years was now flooding back up my oesophagus, like a memory reflux.

The silver lining to this dark trip down memory lane is that Georgie’s envelope was obviously an invite too, and not a series of scandalous photographs sent by my summer fling, so I left hers on the mat.

She could find it herself in the morning, after I’d gone to work.

I didn’t want a conversation about it, I always find it very difficult, and I know she does too.

Georgie and I rarely talk about Daisy – we can’t. There were things I didn’t tell her then, and I know how distressing that was for her, but how could I confide in her without incriminating myself?

Georgie and Daisy had been friends – not best friends, but they liked each other – but then, after what happened between us, that changed.

Georgie grew to hate Daisy. ‘I wish she’d go away, far away,’ she’d mumble through her tears.

‘I can’t bear to live in the same house as her anymore – I wish she was dead! ’

Georgie didn’t mean it literally; she says terrible things when she’s angry and upset. It was one of the reasons I tried to keep them apart, because I was seriously worried that Georgie might lose it with Daisy.

I still think about her every night, still dream about her, and when she’s drunk Georgie always asks me if I loved Daisy. I did. But I always say no.

In the week between Daisy going missing and her body being found, I was suspect numero uno.

The press and public seemed to love the weird posh kid because I never said no to a photo or an interview.

I was so naive, so stupid. I thought they genuinely liked me and wanted to hear what I said, but all they wanted was to poke fun at me and make me look guilty.

And when they asked me questions about Daisy, I replied honestly.

I didn’t realise those comments, and my smiling photos, would be turned into something quite sinister.

‘I Miss Her,’ Says Lovesick Housemate Dan .

I can’t deny I said I missed her, but ‘lovesick’?

It made me sound weak and pervy. But then, about a year after Daisy’s murder, the court case finally took place and, despite everyone assuming David Montgomery was guilty, the press still kept me in the spotlight.

I was photographed, quoted, and there was a documentary about Daisy that focused on her housemates, especially me.

I thought that I was famous and that being on the telly would impress the girls.

But Twitter had just started up, and when someone in my tutorial group gleefully pointed out that ‘Dan the Pervert’ was trending, I was mortified.

I admit that when I was younger I was probably too keen with the opposite sex, but in my defence I attended an all-boys school until university.

Women had always been a mystery to me, and suddenly I was sharing a living space with these wonderful, enigmatic creatures who wandered around the place in flimsy clothes with their firm young flesh out for all to see.

Who could blame a boy of eighteen with hormones raging for taking lascivious pleasure in rescuing girls from errant spiders camping out in their rooms?

One hint of a scream, and I was the first at their bedroom door with my glass to catch whatever creepy-crawly was causing such distress.

I could only imagine the delights waiting on the other side of that door: a terrified, half-dressed girl, crying in fear, begging me to save her.

‘The other girls think you hang around outside bedroom doors trying to get a glimpse of them in their nightclothes,’ Georgie told me after we started sleeping together.

‘God, that couldn’t be further from the truth,’ I replied, feigning outrage.

‘I know, but they’re a bit paranoid. There are rumours about a bloke hanging around, stealing girls’ underwear and peering into the windows at night. It’s made them all a bit jumpy.’

‘That’s all it is, just a rumour. No one’s stealing pants and peering through windows,’ I assured her.

‘I know, and I don’t care anyway because now I’ve got you to protect me,’ she said, all cutesy. Yes, she was like that once – vulnerable and girlish – but it was just a ploy to reel me in. Once I’d fallen for the kitten, I was stuck with the Rottweiler.

‘Yeah, I’ll protect you,’ I said, stroking her head as we lay in her little single bed.

After Georgie told me that, I weaned myself off the underwear stealing and the voyeurism. I also got rid of the jar of spiders I kept to release in their rooms. But even now I can still get aroused when I think of Daisy terrified and screaming, begging me to save her.