'The text messages that exposed a creep lurking at the heart of our social circle.'

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It wasn't one big explosion, but a series of small depth charges.

Someone in our wider circle of friends is a creep. One woman became five women, became an open secret that some had known, individually, for years. He's not my best friend, but I've known him a while and I liked him. Past tense.

He's the kind of creep that slips into a woman's messages the day he meets her. He doesn't talk about his wife or children, just fixes them with a look that says he's been stopped in his tracks by their beauty/wit/other and insists they exchange numbers.

Then he sends out little tests and waits to see who'll bite.

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If they're not interested, he eventually moves on. If it's had the desired effect and they're left blushing and disarmed, he gets to work. Like he's metaphorically licking two fingers and running them over his eyebrows. The same day he'll compose late-night missives, over-familiar inquiries and intimate disclosures, testing the boundaries. Maybe he tells himself he's just making friends.

He's been doing it for years when the rest of us (and his wife) aren't looking. A pattern of ardent approaches and soulful looks, the attention from this ever-fluid harem feeding his deep need to be admired.

Once the first woman had spoken up, the others tentatively began to follow. They'd never said before, but now I came to mention it, yes they did have a story that they'd heard and logged and never done anything with.

Until six months ago, I'd been living in a reality where he was the fun, enigmatic one. Most people seem to like him, describe him as a good guy, as someone who always seems to be saying the right sort of thing on social media. The women he'd targeted lived in another version of reality where he'd insinuated himself into their inner lives like Buzz Lightyear on Spanish mode, late at night, one eyebrow raised, just our little secret.

His friends and colleagues wouldn't recognise that guy. Because they've never met him. I don't know if he translated any of these emotional relationships into affairs. But if it was my partner, privately harvesting adoration from women while I slept, I'd be devastated.

The stories were all similar and always described this swift move to intimacy shortly after a first meeting. Not with wandering party hands in dark corners, but with words, an emotional safe-cracker setting to work.

Here's a sample of what I was told.

"A few years ago, a friend asked me if he was OK as he'd approached her for (she assumed) a date. And I was like 'ummm, he's married' and she was very shocked."

Where's the harm, some of you might be asking. He merely suggested they get together, just the two of them, but it's not like he'd used the word 'date'. She might've been mistaken, crossed her wires.

Then there was the woman to whom he'd played the 'woebegone boy', sensing she'd instinctively reach out to help.

Image: Getty.

"Are you awake? I'm sad," he texted her one night at gone 1am. "I'd only met him the week before," she said. "Go and tell your wife that you're sad, I thought." She didn't say that to him though. Yes, he was being inappropriate at worst but she didn't want to upset him because he sounded depressed. He never tried to kiss her or even held onto a hug for too long, but talking to him sometimes sounded like conversing with the snake from The Jungle Book.

In their chats, he would describe how his wife's menopause was hard for him and then segue into innuendo which wrong-footed and confused her. Is this flirting? she'd think before dismissing it. It's not as if he'd ever made a move.

But imagine being that wife.

Another friend and her husband told me how he'd corner her at parties, quite aggressively she felt, and intimidate her just to watch her reaction. She says she shakes when she sees him come into a room now. She also received (and ignored) the late night messages until he eventually gave up.

And what are they supposed to do with this information? Demand he is banned from polite society for 'being weird' with a woman? When the behaviour is hard to name, it's doubly hard to call out. No laws broken. He's just harvesting a little of what he fancies and probably tells himself the women are enjoying it too. Because some of them probably are.

Being deeply unpleasant to women isn't against the law, but it will, gradually, as the women begin to talk to one another, make you less likely to be invited to social gatherings.

"He's a fucking creep," said another more recent friend when she was sure it was safe to speak freely, her nose wrinkling. She'd worked with him and given him her number for that purpose only. She didn't even make it home before the messages started. She was polite but firm for the length of time they needed to work together. She didn't mention the messages to anyone at the office.

I think I didn't know for so long because I'm not the person these women would have told. They probably assumed I wouldn't have been receptive because I was friends with him. They probably thought it wasn't safe. But I've written so much about this kind of man that now I think they know I'll listen.

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Maybe he doesn't try it with every woman he meets, but certainly a lot of them if these anecdotes are anything to go by. Another friend I spoke to this week has known him longer than I have. He said he wasn't surprised.

"Someone completely unconnected to you told me he was a creep last year," he said, the three dots doing the caterpillar as he continued to type. "I can't remember who it was now, but it's definitely not something I haven't heard before." This is what surprises me most - how many people aren't surprised when I bring it up.

And I am bringing it up. Because as someone who wrote a whole book about stealth creeps and their methods, I'm amazed he was hiding in plain sight all this time and my radar didn't even twitch. I thought he was perhaps a bit closed off sometimes, carefully guarding what we all knew about him, but nothing that set alarm bells ringing.

But the stories are too many and too similar for me to dismiss them. I know those women aren't lying.

So, my friend is a creep and here we are.

What would you do? Because I think, if you're really honest, the answer to that is "nothing". You wouldn't do anything, because it's much easier to see it as none of your business and to go on with your day.

I don't want a friend who behaves like that, so I've changed tenses: from like to liked.

That feels like enough. For now.

Feature Image: Getty.