‘I-I.’ I swiped at my damp forehead again. My heart was pounding, as if I’d just sprinted up a long, steep staircase. What was I supposed to say, when everything they’d just said was wrong, was ridiculous? Of course Danny had stayed on in London. Of course he hadn’t been hurt. How did I get them to understand that? I took a deep breath.
Just tell them. Tell them calmly, and firmly.
‘Look, I’m sorry, but none of this is making any sense to me,’ I said at last, trying hard to make my mouth cooperate, to enunciate each word clearly. ‘Danny stayed on in London, at our apartment, for a week after I left, like I told you. And when he arrived in Bristol, he was fine. He wasn’t hurt, or cut, or anything. I’d have noticed – we shared a bed, for goodness’ sake. I don’t what else to say. This is wrong, all of it. None of it is true. Somebody’s made a huge mistake, or is lying to you. That’s the only explanation.’
DCI Dickens stared at me in silence for a few moments, then sighed.
‘Right. Well, let’s look at what else we have here, shall we?’
She tapped a finger on her notepad.
‘None of your Clifton neighbours have ever laid eyes on Danny – they say they believe you moved into the house alone. He accepted a new job in Bristol, and then mysteriously pulled out of it. We’ve now checked his main email account, the one you gave us details of when you first reported him missing, and he sent the email to ACR Security to tell them of his change of plan on the thirty-first of January. No further activity on that account since that date. His bank account also hasn’t been touched since the end of January.’
She turned a page.
‘We’ve also checked your email account, Gemma. You say you last heard from Danny via email on the night of Thursday, the twenty-eighth of February, when you were away on your press trip. There’s no sign of that email, or indeed, as I just said, any other emails between you and Danny after, again, the end of January. I know you mentioned to my colleagues that you were having some trouble with your phone, that some photographs and emails had gone missing, but … well, as well as no recent emails, you also don’t seem to have any photographs of your husband since the move, just photos from your time in London. And nobody we’ve spoken to so far – his friends, his former colleagues – have heard anything from him, also since the end of January. We’re planning to speak to his family today, but I strongly suspect that it will be the same story there.’
She paused, regarding me coolly.
‘Do you see a bit of a pattern developing here, Gemma?’
I swallowed. ‘Yes, but there are explanations for all that. I mean, the job thing, I still haven’t got to the bottom of that. Or the bank account. But he doesn’t have a phone at the moment, so that’s why he hasn’t been in touch with people much. And my phone’s just playing up, not saving stuff, I’m sure I’ll track those photos and emails down …’
DCI Dickens was holding up a slender hand. She wore a wedding ring, I noticed for the first time, a narrow gold band.
‘In addition, Danny seems to have vanished but taken absolutely nothing with him. His passport, clothes, everything is still there, correct?’
I nodded.
‘Yes. That’s why I’m so worried, so scared …’
‘Well, we’re worried too, Gemma. Very, very worried.’
DCI Dickens leaned towards me across the table, and I smelled a faint scent, a soft floral perfume.
‘We’re very worried indeed,’ she said. ‘Because, looking at all of the evidence, it does very much seem now that Danny has actually been off the scene for quite a few weeks. Since the end of January in fact. Since just before you packed your bags and moved to Bristol, Gemma. Did you discover his profile on that dating app, is that what happened? Because it can’t have been very nice, discovering that your husband was on the hunt for other women to have sex with. Not nice at all, is it, Devon?’
She leaned back in her seat again, turning to look at her colleague. He nodded slowly.
‘Not nice at all, boss. Nobody would blame you for losing your temper, Gemma, after discovering something like that. Is that what happened? Did you and Danny get into a fight, and it went too far?’
The humming in my head faded to a low buzz, and then stopped. Suddenly, with growing horror, I understood. I understood perfectly. They thought … they thought that Danny’s disappearance was down to me. Me. They thought I’d … what? Seriously injured him – killed him – in our London apartment, and then calmly moved to Bristol on my own? And then what? That I’d waited a few weeks, and then reported him missing, when all the time I knew exactly what had happened to him, because it had been me that had done it. That was what they thought, wasn’t it? It was … it was insane.
‘No,’ I said. ‘No.’
They both sat in silence, watching me, waiting. Waiting for what? A confession? I felt a sudden surge of anger. How could they think me capable of something like that?
‘NO.’ I practically shouted the word this time, banging both fists on the table. ‘That’s not true. None of it is true. Danny’s been here, in Bristol, living with me for the past few weeks. He was fine, everything was fine. Or I thought it was fine, until last week when I came home and he was gone. I know it looks bad, none of what you’ve told me makes sense and I don’t understand any of it either. But I’m telling you the truth …’
I paused for a moment, my voice suddenly thick with tears, my chest contracting, my breath coming in shallow gasps.
Then I said: ‘You have to believe me. Nothing can have happened to Danny in that room, not five weeks ago or whenever you said it did. Because he’s been here, with me. He’s been here with me …’
I stopped, unable to continue speaking, the tears pouring down my cheeks, my whole body starting to shudder. This couldn’t be real, could it? Could the police really think I’d hurt, I’d killed, Danny? It was like some sort of sick nightmare. And now DCI Dickens was leaning towards me across the table again, her voice low and hard.
‘He’s been here, with you? Here with you, since early February? OK. Prove it, Gemma.’
Chapter 14
The Friday morning papers bore the headlines Helena had been dreading.
BRISTOL SERIAL KILLER – IS THIS A THIRD VICTIM?
FEAR IN BRISTOL AS A THIRD MAN VANISHES
‘SHIT,’ she said. ‘And where did they get that photo of Danny O’Connor? It’s not one we’ve seen before, is it?’
Devon, who’d been adding some notes to the incident board, put his marker pen down and turned to face her.
‘Nope. It looks as if it was taken at a party or a night out, so my guess is one of his mates got in touch with the press about him being missing, as we feared, and the journos have put two and two together and made … well, made their serial killer theory stand up even more.’
‘Probably. It’s so frigging frustrating. Just fuelling the fire when we don’t even know if any of these cases are connected yet. Or if Danny’s even bloody dead, although that does seem highly likely now. I wish we could find his body. Where the hell is it?’
She groaned and ran her hands over her hair. It was getting long, she thought distractedly, little curls beginning to snake over her ears. She needed to make an appointment at the salon, but who knew when she’d have the time to do that. She’d look like bloody Rapunzel before this case was solved at this rate. And her back was still killing her too. Another appointment she needed to make. She looked around the room. It was only just 8 a.m., and not everyone was at their desks yet, but she decided she couldn’t wait any longer. This enquiry needed to be stepped up, urgently.
‘Can everyone gather round please? Guys?’
When all the officers had shuffled themselves forward, some still in outdoor coats, others clutching coffee mugs, all with tense, weary expressions, she began.
‘OK, so as you all probably know we released Gemma O’Connor on bail late last night. Yes, there’s a lot of circumstantial evidence, and the quantity of blood in that
Chiswick bedroom is extremely worrying. But at this point we have no body, and no proof that Gemma has done anything to harm her husband. There are a lot of things that don’t add up in her story though, so we’ll be keeping a very close eye on her and I’m ready to haul her in again if we find even the slightest …’
She took a breath.
‘However, what I do want to do now is stop thinking of Danny O’Connor as just a missing person. This is now significantly more likely to turn into another murder enquiry, which I want to run alongside our current two cases. The Met will probably want to get involved with the London end at some point, but for the moment I’m hoping we’ll be able to keep it ourselves as it does seem to tie in somewhat with what we have here.’
She turned to point at the board behind her, where the gruesome photographs of the Chiswick bedroom sat next to the image of Danny.
‘All the evidence we do have points to Danny either being very seriously injured or killed in that room approximately five weeks ago, which is a bit of a time gap but still doesn’t rule out it being linked to our other two cases. It looks to be a very different type of killing though – all that blood – but we need to keep an open mind on that. And, of course, we have the added complication of his wife claiming he was alive and well and living with her until a week ago. She also claims that she’s going to prove that to us, despite the fact that nobody else seems to have laid eyes on him in weeks, et cetera et cetera.’
She waved a hand at the board, and to the list of the things they’d discovered about Danny’s recent past.
‘We await that proof with interest,’ she continued. ‘But in the meantime, Danny O’Connor is still missing. Whether that disappearance has anything to do with his wife, is connected to our other two killings or is down to something else entirely, we don’t know yet. But there’s something not right about his wife’s story, that’s for sure.’
Devon, who’d been leaning against the wall to her right, stepped forward, a questioning look on his face. Helena nodded.
‘Go ahead, Devon.’
‘I just wanted to point out a few things that came out of our questioning of Gemma O’Connor,’ he said. ‘For the benefit of those who weren’t there.’
‘Of course.’
She moved aside, taking his place against the side wall, and Devon turned to study the board for a moment, where a photograph of Gemma had been pinned next to that of her husband. Then he cleared his throat.
‘OK, so yes, Gemma O’Connor is now a person of interest. But there are a few things which don’t entirely add up. First, when we showed her the photographs of the bloodstained room, she seemed genuinely shocked. In fact, she looked like she was going to pass out for a bit, didn’t she guv?’
He looked at Helena and she shrugged and nodded.
‘If she did attack Danny in that room then, which has to be one of our major lines of enquiry now, she’s a very good actress. In addition to that, she knew we were going to search that apartment a few days ago and didn’t react at all when we told her that. If she knew what we were going to find when we got there, I’d expect at least some reaction from her, some attempt to stop us going until she could cover her tracks, maybe.’
‘Could just be the good actress thing again though. Or, if she has done something to her husband, maybe she’s in some sort of denial, post traumatic shock, something like that. She was certainly in a bit of a state last night, sweating, crying, the lot, wasn’t she?’ Helena said.
‘She was. And it could be PTSD, possibly, yes. I’ve started the ball rolling to access her medical records by the way. See if there’s any history of mental illness, violence, anything like that. She has no criminal record, but it would be interesting to see what else we can find out about her background.’
‘Good.’ Helena gave him a thumbs up sign. ‘OK, go on.’
‘As we already know, and we put this to Gemma last night, there’s no evidence of any email exchanges between her and Danny since the end of January, despite her claims to the contrary. However, there are a number of emails from Gemma’s account to Danny’s in the past week, in the days after she claims he went missing. A number of attempted Skype calls too, all of which have gone unanswered. She’s told us she tried numerous times to contact him after he went missing, in a desperate attempt to track him down. If she knew he’d died five weeks ago, would she be trying to email and Skype him like that?’
‘Could easily just be an attempt to throw us off the scent, make it look like she thought he was still alive. Just like all her calls to his mates, and to the hospitals and so on. Could all be part of her act.’
This came from DC Tara Lemming, sitting on the edge of a desk in the centre of the room. Devon nodded an acknowledgement.
‘That’s true. So let’s just look at the timeline for a moment, and assume for a moment that Gemma did seriously assault, or kill, her husband. It would have to have worked like this.’
He turned to the board, placing his finger at the left-hand end of a long red line, above which had been written various dates and comments.
‘A message was sent from Danny O’Connor’s email address to ACR Security on Thursday, the thirty-first of January, informing them that he would no longer be taking up his position with them in Bristol. Did Gemma actually send this message, and not Danny himself, because she was planning to kill him, or indeed had already killed him, and didn’t want alarm bells to ring when he failed to turn up at his new place of work?’
He ran his finger a little further along the line.
‘Sometime on Friday, the first of February, somebody dropped the Chiswick apartment keys off at the landlord’s office, with a note saying there’d been a change of plan and that the apartment had now been fully vacated. The landlord had already told the O’Connors that he was heading off on holiday for a few weeks and wouldn’t be able to check over the place until he got back. As it turned out, he didn’t actually get back to it until this week when we visited. So, if Gemma did kill Danny in the apartment, she most likely did that on the thirtieth or thirty-first of January. Knowing the landlord was away, she wouldn’t have been worried about being disturbed. But then – and this is the bit I’m struggling with – she’d have had to somehow move the body out of that apartment and hide it somewhere where it still hasn’t been found. And then she’d have had to calmly move to Bristol without even bothering to clean up after herself. Doesn’t quite add up, does it? Unless she’s totally psychotic, and hiding it very, very well. Which she could be, I suppose.’
‘Or maybe she had an accomplice, someone who helped her move the body? But yes, leaving that mess behind is a bit odd, to be fair.’
Helena had moved back across to join him as he was speaking.
‘Anyway, to extend that theory, she moves house, bringing all his stuff with her too, to make it look as if he’ll soon be moving in with her. Then she claims he joined her here a week later, and has been living with her ever since, until he vanished a week ago,’ she said. ‘That bothers me too. Why wait so long? Why not just wait until the day he was due to move to Bristol to join her, for instance, and then report him missing when he allegedly didn’t show, if that’s the route you want to go down? I’d love to be able to pin Danny’s disappearance on her, it would make our lives a lot easier. But I agree, there are definitely some things that don’t really add up.’
There was silence in the room. Then Devon spoke again.
‘We swabbed her yesterday, of course, and overnight the lab compared her DNA to that found in the Chiswick apartment. They say the only DNA found in the bedroom was hers and Danny’s, as you’d expect. But that doesn’t rule out somebody else being there, of course, if they were careful.’
‘Indeed. Hard to imagine whoever carried out that attack getting away without being covered in blood though, even if they did manage not to leave anything of themselves behind. We’re getting the forensic team into her house in Bristol today, by the way. We’ve already searched it, but now we’v
e found what we’ve found in Chiswick, we need to tear her new place apart. If Gemma was responsible, there may well still be traces of blood on some of her clothing and so on, even if she’s tried to wash it off in the meantime.’
‘If it was me, I’d have dumped the clothes though,’ DC Mike Slater said from the back of the room.
‘I would too, Mike,’ Helena said. ‘But we also need forensics in there to check out Gemma’s claim that Danny has been living there for the past few weeks. They’ll know if he hasn’t.’
‘Good point,’ said Devon. ‘On that note, Frankie spoke to the letting agent, Pritchards, last night while we were interviewing Gemma – thanks Frankie.’
From his perch next to Tara, DC Stevens nodded.
‘They couldn’t tell us much of any use though. They said that Danny did come to Bristol with Gemma when they initially viewed the house, and that the two of them were here again in mid-January to pay the deposit, sign the rental agreement and pick up the keys. They brought a van with a few bits of furniture with them that time and stayed in the house overnight before returning to London the following day. But the agents haven’t been round to the house since Gemma moved in on February the first, so couldn’t say whether Danny has been there again or not.’
‘OK.’
Devon sighed.
‘Well, those enquiries continue,’ Helena said. ‘But let’s not forget that we have two other murders which still remain unsolved too. And interestingly …’ She moved closer to the board, studying Devon’s red timeline, then looked up at the photographs of Mervin Elliott and Ryan Jones. ‘Interestingly, both of our killings happened after Gemma O’Connor moved to Bristol. What do we think about that, then?’
A murmur ran round the room. She turned away from the board and shrugged.
‘Oh, highly unlikely, I know. Look, I know we don’t have a third body, not yet. And the first two murders were very similar – clean killings, with some sort of heavy weapon. The crime scene in Chiswick is totally different, as I said earlier. Speaks of a much more frenzied, passionate attack. But … could that be the difference between killing a relative stranger, and killing your own husband? I’m just saying. We can’t rule anything out.’
The Perfect Couple Page 13