The Perfect Couple

by Jackie Kabler

  ‘We’ll get to the bottom of it, Gem. I promise we will, OK?’ she’d said, squeezing my hands and planting a kiss on my forehead.

  After a solid eight hours’ sleep, she looked refreshed, her hair still damp from the shower, cheeks glowing, her curves wrapped in a black velvet dressing gown. I handed her the steaming mug of coffee and sat down opposite her, reaching for a coaster and putting my own mug of peppermint tea down on it. I’d had so much caffeine in recent days I was starting to feel jittery.

  ‘God, it’s good to see you, Eva Hawton,’ I said. ‘I’ve missed you.’

  ‘Missed you too, buddy. Can’t believe you’ve moved to the wilds of the West Country. Still, it’s a nice place to escape to at weekends. That’s if the frigging trains are working, of course,’ she said, and reached across the table to touch my hand.

  ‘How’ve you been? Bloody hell, for all this to happen when you’ve just moved here and don’t even know anyone yet, the timing is shit. Are you OK, really?’

  ‘I’m OK. Well, hanging on in there and all the better now for seeing you. And I’ve somehow managed to make a couple of friends already, actually. Clare and Tai. They’re nice, you’d like them.’

  ‘Oh, great! How did you meet them?’

  I told her the story; about meeting Clare and Winnie the Poodle while I was out with Albert, and about Clare inviting me to come to yoga with her. At my first session Tai, who’d been Clare’s friend for years, had been warned I was coming and had saved us both a place at the back of the room. It had been an interesting first meeting; the class had only been underway for about ten minutes, all of us easing into the downward facing dog pose, when there was a loud PFFFFT somewhere in front of us.

  ‘Oh God, somebody’s farted!’ hissed Clare, who was on my left.

  To my right Tai snorted.

  ‘Shhhh!’ Clare hissed again, but I glanced at her and she was grinning broadly. I turned my head to look at Tai, whose shoulders were shaking, lips pressed tightly together. I felt a bubble of laughter threatening to escape my own lips and took a deep breath. Nobody else in the room seemed to have heard the cause of our mirth, or if they had they were studiously ignoring it. Tai snorted again, and next to me Clare tried to stifle a giggle. Unable to help myself, I giggled too, and suddenly all three of us were tittering away like a group of naughty schoolgirls.

  ‘Will you PLEASE be quiet at the back?’

  The booming voice of the yoga teacher, a tall, powerfully built woman with a shock of auburn hair, brought us to our senses, but we’d started giggling again as soon as the class finished.

  ‘I knew right then that I’d get on with them,’ I said to Eva, and she rolled her eyes.

  ‘You always have had a juvenile sense of humour,’ she said. ‘But I love you for it. And I’m glad you’ve met some nice people. Sounds like you need them at the moment. Anyway … Danny. Let’s do this. Tell me everything.’

  And so I did. I told her about the last email I’d had from him on the Thursday night when I’d been away, and how I’d come home on Friday evening to find the house empty. How I’d called friends and former colleagues, asking if they’d heard from him, how I’d gone out searching for him, called the hospitals, emailed Danny repeatedly, and eventually gone to the police. And then I’d told her about the bombshells that had been dropped upon me – that Danny hadn’t been working at ACR Security at all, how he’d accepted the job and then apparently changed his mind, but had still been heading out every morning, coming home every evening, lying through his teeth to me. How he hadn’t been using his bank account, not for weeks, and yet still had money in his pocket whenever it was needed. How my neighbours had told the police that they’d thought I lived here alone. How his profile was currently on a dating app, and how I had no idea if he’d registered himself or if someone had put him on there as a joke. And, finally, my eyes prickling with tears, I told her about the two men whose profiles had been on the same dating app, the men who looked so similar to Danny, and who were now dead.

  Eva, who’d been listening intently, gasped at that.

  ‘Shit, Gemma. I’d heard about those murders, obviously, but I didn’t connect the …’

  She sank her head into her hands for a moment, rubbing her eyes. Then she straightened up and reached towards me again, patting my arm.

  ‘I’m so sorry, and I totally get why you’re so upset. This is crazy.’

  She took a deep breath.

  ‘OK, there’s a lot to take in here. So I’m going to try to look at this objectively, OK? Pretend I don’t know Danny, or you. Just look at the facts, as if it’s a news story. And for now, we’re going to assume that those murders are just a coincidence, and that Danny’s still alive. Is that all right?’

  I nodded, wiped my eyes with the backs of my hands, then picked up my mug and took a gulp. The tea had gone cold, and I grimaced as I swallowed.

  ‘Of course. The police have already done a quick search of the house to see if they could find anything that might help – they didn’t. And they’re going to Chiswick today for a look around our old place, although I can’t imagine they’ll find anything of any use there either. So if you can think of anything, Eva, anything at all … because honestly, I’m stumped here. I just can’t think of anything that would explain any of this.’

  ‘Well, I’ll certainly give it a try.’

  She’d put a notebook and pen on the table when she’d sat down, and she reached for them.

  ‘OK, let’s brainstorm. First, the job thing. Why would somebody do that, lie to their wife about something like that? Have you come up with anything so far?’

  ‘A few things, but they’re all a bit mad.’

  ‘Shoot.’

  ‘OK. Well …’

  I told her about the crazy theories I’d come up with – Danny had some sort of top-secret job he couldn’t tell me about; he was secretly ill and having daily treatment somewhere in Bristol; he had another wife and family nearby and was spending his days with them, returning to me at night. She wrote them all down, an increasingly sceptical expression on her face.

  ‘Hmmm,’ she said. ‘Top-secret job, unlikely. Although very, very vaguely possible I suppose, given his line of work. Ill? Did he look or seem ill?’

  I shook my head. ‘No. He’s looked great recently, actually. Really fit. I don’t really think he’s ill. I was just desperately coming up with theories, you know?’

  ‘OK. And another wife? And kids? Seriously?’

  The wide-eyed, disbelieving look on her face almost made me laugh.

  ‘No, I don’t really think that either. But what else, Eva? I can’t think of any other reasons he’d lie about where he was going every day.’

  Eva was nodding slowly, looking at her notes. She stared at the page for a few seconds, then looked back at me.

  ‘Well, I can think of one more possibility. Look what we have here. A man who doesn’t start the new job he was supposed to start, but still disappears every morning and comes home every evening. A man who isn’t using his bank account. A man whose new neighbours have never seen him. And now, a man who’s disappeared without trace, overnight. Sounds like a man who’s laying low, to me. A man who’s in trouble. A man who’s trying to keep a very, very low profile. A man who’s scared of somebody or something. A man with a secret. A man who doesn’t want to be traced, so he lies about where he’s working, goes and hides away somewhere every day instead, even hides where his money is being kept? Moves house, and makes sure even his new neighbours don’t know he lives here?’

  I stared at her. Bizarre as it sounded, what she was saying made some sort of sense.

  ‘OK, but … but who, Eva? What? Who would he be scared of, who would he be hiding from? I mean, I’ve never had the slightest inkling that he’s in any sort of trouble. He seemed totally normal at home, surely he wouldn’t be so relaxed if something like that was going on? At the same time, well, it’s a good theory – better than any of mine, that’s for sure.’

>   I stopped talking, thinking. Thinking again about the times over the past year or so that Danny would seem stressed and distracted, would say he needed to be on his own for a while, would head off for a few hours and come home looking better, behaving like himself again. It had happened more frequently after his dad had died, but I’d put that down to grief, to him trying to handle his loss, even if he didn’t want to admit that his father’s death had hit him harder than he’d expected it to. But maybe I’d got that all wrong. I’d wondered over the past few days if he might, after all, been having an affair. But maybe it wasn’t that at all. Maybe he had been worried about something, something else. Maybe he had been in some sort of trouble. Could Eva be right?

  ‘Eva. The EHU app thing. How would that fit in?’

  Eva sat back in her chair, her smooth brow crinkling.

  ‘Mmm, good point. That doesn’t really fit with the rest of it, I suppose. A man who’s trying to keep a low profile isn’t very likely to put himself on a dating app.’ She sighed. ‘Damn. Thought I’d cracked it there for a minute. OK, let’s just look at that separately for a minute. As you said earlier, somebody could easily have stuck him on there for a silly joke, although I’m not sure who would think that was funny. Still, you know how childish men can be, especially after a few drinks maybe. And yes, it’s kind of freaky, very freaky in fact, that two other men who used the same app have been murdered. But that could just be a horrible coincidence. Billions of people use those apps. So, leaving that aside for a moment, well …’ she paused, her eyes fixing on mine, ‘well, I hate to ask this again, I really do, and I know you told me when he first went missing that there was absolutely no way he was seeing anyone else, but things have changed a bit now, so I’m going to ask you again. Could he have been seeing other women, Gem? I mean, how were things between you, really? How’s your sex life been?’

  I looked back at her, squirming slightly inwardly. How had our sex life been? It had started off fine, even great. And recently … well, we probably had sex less frequently than we had back in the early days, there was no doubt about that. But that was normal, wasn’t it?

  ‘Our sex life … it’s fine. I mean, we’ve been together a while now, we’re not tearing each other’s clothes off every ten minutes. But it’s OK, we’re still doing it. Now and again. I mean, not so much recently, with the move and all the work we’ve been doing trying to sort this place out. But … oh, I just don’t know anymore, Eva. The police asked me this too. I’ve wracked my brains, I really have, trying to think of anything that should have made me suspicious. And other than him heading off on his bike every now and again, wanting some alone time … I mean, he could have been seeing someone. But I’ve never seen any real evidence …’

  My voice tailed off. I wasn’t being entirely truthful, was I? Because there had been one occasion, just one. It had been the previous summer, just a few months after we got married, when I – and, as my plus one, Danny – had been invited to a party thrown by the fashion editor of Camille magazine to mark her fortieth birthday. It had been during the heatwave, several weeks during July and August that year when the temperature in London had soared into the mid-thirties and stayed there, and even though the party hadn’t started until seven, the sun was still beating down, the ice cubes that clinked in our glasses melting within minutes, sweat beading on our brows. From the glass-roofed kitchen, guests drifted slowly into the shady garden at the back of the chic terraced house in Notting Hill, chatting and laughing, languid in the heat. I’d been networking, of course, as usual – so many editors to chat to, from all of the big magazines! – but I never worried about Danny at parties, knowing he was happy to wander from group to group without me, sipping his drink, joining in easily with the varied conversations, letting me do my thing and waiting for me to re-join him. That night though, as I glanced around, looking for him, checking he was OK, I noticed that he seemed to be deep in conversation with a pretty, blue-eyed woman with dead straight, almost waist-length blonde hair. I vaguely recognized her from another event – a fashion stylist called Sylvie, I seemed to remember – and when I looked for Danny a second time twenty minutes later and he hadn’t moved, head bent towards her, her hand on his arm, the sound of his laughter floating through the humid air – a shiver of apprehension ran through me. What were they talking about, and why was he spending so much time with just her? When I looked again just a few minutes after that the spot where they’d been standing, next to a slender silver birch tree, was empty. I’d excused myself from the conversation I’d been having with a group of art directors and weaved my way around the garden, between the women in their floaty, brightly coloured cocktail dresses, the men with shirt sleeves rolled to the elbow, ties discarded. The music had been turned up as the light had faded, the air muggy and heavy with perfume, the bodies I brushed against hot and sticky. Unable to see Danny anywhere, I’d made my way back into the kitchen, where catering staff were laying out canapés on big platters, but he wasn’t there either, nor was he in the hallway where a small queue had formed for the downstairs loo, two gently swaying women in matching slinky jumpsuits leaning against each other for support as they waited. Uneasy about searching the house any further, I’d returned to the garden, accepting a glass of champagne from a waiter with a tray as I stepped outside, anxiety building. And then, suddenly, there he was, hands slipping round my waist from behind, lips soft on my neck.

  ‘Danny! Where did you go? I was worried!’

  ‘Work called. Went out the front to take the call, couldn’t hear myself think back here with all the music and chat. Managed to sort it out on the phone though, so nothing to worry about. Right – where’s the beer?’ he’d said, with a grin.

  Suddenly weak with relief, I’d let it go. He was allowed to chat to other women, after all – I’d been chatting to plenty of men that night, hadn’t I? – and I trusted him, trusted him implicitly. I hadn’t seen Sylvie again that night and I’d forgotten all about it. But as I repeated the story to Eva, I wondered. Had I been too trusting? Was Danny all I thought he was, or had he been making a fool of me all along? How long had he been on that dating website, if his profile on it wasn’t a joke by one of his stupid mates …

  ‘Well, I wasn’t at that party, so I just don’t know, Gem,’ Eva was saying. ‘But, well …’ she hesitated, then shook her head. ‘Oh nothing. Look, it’s probably just …’

  ‘No go on. What were you going to say?’

  She shook her head again.

  ‘Nothing. We don’t know anything at this stage, Gemma, that’s all. Maybe he has gone off with some other woman, but maybe it’s something else entirely. There’s no point in working yourself up and jumping to conclusions until we know, OK?’

  I sighed.

  ‘I know. I’m trying, I really am. But I just can’t understand it. Cheesy as it sounds, I thought we were the perfect couple, you know? Well, clearly not; he’s been lying to me for weeks, and now he’s vanished. He could be dead, Eva. Dead like those other two men. Or he could have just upped and left me. Or he could have been abducted by bloody aliens for all I know. I have no idea what’s happened to him, none at all.’

  Eva closed her notebook, pushed it to one side and put her pen down.

  ‘I think aliens are unlikely. But, you know what, I don’t think I have any proper idea either,’ she said. ‘This is going to take more thinking time, a lot more thinking time. So we’re going to go out now, get some fresh air, walk Albert, go to the supermarket. Get you some supplies in. And then we’re going to put our heads together, and we’re going to work this out, OK? The two of us, together. Because whether he’s alive or dead now, he’s definitely been hiding something, your Danny. That much is pretty clear. We just need to figure out what it was.’

  Chapter 12

  DS Devon Clarke was staring at the glazed doughnut on the plate in front of him. Normally, he’d have wolfed it down in a matter of seconds, but today, weirdly, it held no appeal whatsoever. It was the room t
hat had stolen his appetite; since the moment he’d walked into that nightmarish, blood-soaked bedroom in Chiswick some twenty-four hours previously, he had barely eaten, or indeed slept, missing Jasmine more than ever, needing her arms around him, the comfort of her body next to his. He’d seen crime scenes like that before, of course he had, many, many times, some with the bodies, mangled and macabre, still in situ. So why had this one stuck in his mind, haunted his dreams, taken away his desire for doughnuts, for goodness’ sake? Was it the unexpectedness of it, maybe? After all, they hadn’t been expecting to find much at all in Danny O’Connor’s former home, so to open a door and see … and see that …

  He shuddered and glanced at the clock in the corner of his computer screen. Just after two. The forensic report should be arriving any minute.

  ‘No sign of it yet?’

  Helena suddenly appeared at his elbow, peering over his shoulder.

  ‘Are you reading my mind? I was just thinking about it. No, not here yet. They’re fast-tracking it for us though, so it should be here soon. Want that doughnut?’

  He pointed at the plate, and Helena wrinkled her nose.

  ‘Thanks, but I’ll pass. Charlotte would kill me. She wants me healthy, if we’re going to have a baby …’

  She stopped talking abruptly, and Devon raised a quizzical eyebrow.

  ‘Is that definitely on the cards then? I know you mentioned it before, but that was ages ago and you haven’t said anything since.’

  Helena shrugged. There was an empty chair at the next desk and she reached for it, pulled it across and sat down next to him.

  ‘Nah, nothing definite,’ she said, glancing around the room and keeping her voice low. A couple of dozen officers were milling around, some chatting, some on the phones, a small cluster of them standing around the incident board, pointing at the new pictures that had been pinned there and clearly discussing them animatedly.