The Perfect Couple

by Jackie Kabler

  ‘We just need a break. One tiny little lead. Come on, universe, help me out here,’ she muttered, as she sat down at her desk and tapped her mouse. Her screen lit up, an email notification flashing in the corner. She clicked on it. It was, finally, the forensics report from the scene of the attempted murder of Declan Bailey in London, the attack which had happened, coincidentally it now seemed, so close to the pub where Gemma and Quinn had met up. Her heart skipped a beat as she started to scan the message. If they’d found DNA on the weapon the assailant had dropped … then she stopped scrolling, frowning.

  ‘What? WHAT?’

  ‘What’s up?’

  Devon, who was still only halfway across the room, having paused for a chat with Tara as he headed towards the door on his tea mission, turned and started walking back towards her.

  ‘SHIT! This can’t be right. It can’t be, it just doesn’t make any sense …’

  She was standing up now, but still peering at her computer screen, unable to comprehend what she was reading.

  ‘Boss – what? What is that?’

  Devon was by her side now, trying to see what she was looking at.

  ‘It’s the forensics report from the assault in London. They’ve found DNA. And look, Devon. Look.’

  He read it too, and gasped.

  ‘What? But that means …’

  Helena took a deep breath.

  ‘Exactly. It means we’ve got this wrong. We’ve got this all wrong.’

  Chapter 38

  ‘That is so kind of you, thank you. I really appreciate it.’

  I took the fragrant-smelling casserole dish from Jo and smiled. My next-door neighbour had just popped round to tell me she’d been keeping up with the news and had been greatly relieved to hear that I was free, and that Danny was alive.

  ‘I never met him, obviously, but you were so worried about him that time you came round, so I’m really happy it’s all worked out for you,’ she said. ‘We didn’t really know what to do, me and Jenny and Clive, while it was all going on, you know? All the press outside and everything. We talked about coming round to see if you were OK, but then we thought, well, we didn’t really know you, and … and, well, it was all so awkward. We probably should have though, sorry.’

  ‘Oh gosh, please don’t be sorry. I’m the one that’s sorry, so sorry, for all the commotion. I did see Clive a few times, and I could tell he felt really uncomfortable. I don’t blame him, or you. It was a horrible situation.’

  Jo smiled.

  ‘Well, good. Anyway, it’s over now, and I thought with all the shenanigans you probably haven’t had much time to cook. So here you go. It’s just a sausage stew but it generally goes down well when I’ve got friends round. Oh gosh – you’re not vegetarian, are you?’

  ‘I’m not. And it smells delicious. Honestly, this is so kind of you. And Albert clearly thinks so too. He doesn’t seem to want to stop eating at the moment.’

  I pointed at my dog, who was staring eagerly up at the dish, tail wagging wildly. Jo smiled.

  ‘He’s a sweetie. I’m sure there’s enough there for him to have some too.’

  I smiled back.

  ‘Oh, he’ll make sure of that. He has ways of making me do whatever he wants, trust me. But seriously, people are being so, so kind, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it. And again, I’m so sorry you’ve had to put up with the press outside all this time. They’ve gone now, for good hopefully.’

  Jo smiled again, her kind eyes wrinkling at the corners, and pushed an errant strand of hair back off her face. She was wearing it loose today, and it hung in a heavy grey curtain down her back.

  ‘No problem. And when you’re feeling up to it, come round for a drink. I’ll get Jenny and Clive round too. It would be nice to get to know you better.’

  ‘I’d love that, thank you. How do I heat this up?’

  ‘About half an hour at 170 should do it. Just make sure it’s piping hot. And now I must go, my friend Ally’s coming round in ten and I’ve got scones in the oven. Pop that in the fridge for now. I’ll let myself out. Take care, Gemma.’

  She patted me on the arm and headed out of the kitchen door and down the hallway. As I opened the fridge with my elbow and carefully manoeuvred the large dish onto the middle shelf, I heard her calling.

  ‘Gemma? Another visitor for you! I’ve let him in, bye for now!’

  A visitor? Clive maybe? I grabbed the towel that hung on a hook next to the sink and wiped my hands. Then I turned as I heard footsteps entering the room. A man was standing there, a tall man with a beard and glasses, his hair covered by a black beanie hat. Albert turned too, paused for a second, then yelped and launched himself at the visitor, yapping frantically, leaping in the air with joy, tail a frenetic blur.

  ‘What … who …?’ I stammered. I stared at the man.

  It couldn’t be. Could it?

  ‘Hello, Gemma,’ the man said, and I gasped.

  Danny. It was Danny. He’d come home.

  Chapter 39

  In the incident room, the air was thick with nervous tension, the low hum of excited conversation fading to a whisper and then to silence as Helena strode to the front of the room and raised a hand.

  ‘OK, listen up. We now have a suspect, as you all know. The forensic evidence is very clear – the person who was interrupted during the attack on Declan Bailey and ran off, dropping the hammer being used as a weapon, left DNA behind, as we hoped. And that DNA was a match for a profile on the National DNA Database. It’s a shock, yes, but our priority now is to find the suspect as soon as possible and see if we can tie that attack to our two unsolved murders here, and quite possibly to the two London killings as well. It looks very likely, given the similarities between the cases, that this perpetrator is indeed the one we’ve all been looking for, and that the press have been right with their speculation all along too.’

  She took a deep breath.

  ‘What I’m saying is that we’re now officially on the hunt for a serial killer. And now we have a face and name too. Just not the face or name any of us were expecting, is it?’

  Chapter 40

  Danny and I sat at the kitchen table, Albert stretched out underneath it, just like old times. Except it wasn’t like old times at all, because my husband had just finished telling me exactly how he’d managed to disappear so completely. Eva and I had been right about that, after all. He had been hiding in plain sight in Bristol, he had planned it all. He hadn’t told me why, not yet – he said he’d come to that later. But he’d told me how. How he’d planned it all for ages, worked out exactly how to do it, and how to do it perfectly, and how Quinn, who knew everything after all, had helped him. Helped him stage his own death. The blood. Cleaning our house with bleach to make it look like he’d barely been there. Making sure I didn’t see that he was using a strange, foreign bank card when he paid for things, using the cash he’d stashed away as often as he could. Squirreling money away for his future. Finding out the locations of all the CCTV cameras in Bristol and choosing our new house because it was in a location where he knew there were none. Deleting all my recent photos of him and emails from him from my phone. Pulling out of his new job in Bristol, and instead spending his days at the gym, hiding away. I’d been right about that too, but the plan, all of it, the whole incredible, organized plan which had worked so well, so brilliantly, stunned me. He’d known, too, that the police would suspect me of attacking him. He’d hoped they’d suspect me. He’d even confessed, almost as an afterthought, that he’d been repeatedly unfaithful throughout our marriage, ‘addicted’ to sex with other women, sneaking off for regular hook-ups with people he’d met online, when I thought he was working late or off on one of his solitary bike rides. With each new revelation came an apology, an expression of regret at what he had put me through, but I barely heard his remorseful words, the scale of his deception hitting me with such force that I felt as if I was being physically attacked, my chest so tight I was struggling to catch my breath,
waves of nausea washing over me. If it hadn’t been my life, if I’d read about it in a newspaper, I would have thought someone had made it up. But it was my life, and I felt yet again as if somebody had just thrown a bomb into it and blown it into a million pieces.

  ‘So go on, Danny. Why, for God’s sake? You’ve told me how you did it, now tell me why. Why did you have to run, to pretend you were dead? What can have been so bad, that you had to do that? That you had to frame me, for your murder? Me, your wife?’

  My voice was shaking. If, over the past few horrible weeks, I’d ever dared to allow myself to imagine this day, the day when Danny would be home, safe and well, I’d never imagined it like this. Never imagined that the man I loved so much could treat me like this, use me, deliberately put me in such a terrible situation. I’d been suspected of being a serial killer, for fuck’s sake, and it was all down to him. I stared at him, waiting for him to explain, to tell me why, my heart thudding dully in my chest, and I realized with sudden, awful clarity what I had suspected for a while; that I had never known this man at all. This man who I had vowed to spend my life with, for better or for worse. This man who had made the same vows to me. It had been a lie, every single tiny bit of it, and although I had wondered about that in the dark days of the past few weeks, now it was real, and I was reeling. In fact, no, not reeling – reeling was too small a word for what I was feeling. Reeling sounded kind of fun, a gentle, dizzying spin across a dancefloor, maybe. What I was actually feeling was as if my world was spinning wildly, completely out of control, at sickening, breakneck speed, and with no return to normality ever possible. How did you recover from something like this? How would that ever be possible?

  ‘I do love you, you know.’

  I jumped. He’d started talking again, my husband, looking at me with those beautiful, chocolate brown eyes, and I tried to drag my attention back to him, away from my own anguish, away from the edge of the abyss I was sinking into, the dark, deep place I knew I would plunge into fully as soon as he left, the place I doubted I would ever be able to return from.

  ‘What?’ I laughed, a short, hoarse laugh, and he flinched a little. He’d taken his disguise off, removing the hat and glasses, peeling the beard from his chin. It sat on the table between us like a small, sleeping animal.

  ‘I do. I know you won’t believe that, not now. But I do. All I wanted was a normal life, a family. You, me and a couple of kids, living somewhere lovely like here in Bristol. It just didn’t work out like that.’

  I snorted.

  ‘Love? You don’t know the meaning of the word love, Danny. Nobody who loves someone would treat them the way you’ve treated me. And you still haven’t told me why. WHY, DANNY?’

  I shouted the last two words, banging my fists on the table, and he flinched again.

  ‘I’m sorry, so sorry, that you’ve had to go through all this. I’ll never be able to tell you how sorry I am. But I thought it was the only way, you know? To properly disappear. You’ll understand, when I tell you. Just give me a minute, please. This isn’t easy for me.’

  I shook my head slowly, my anger and misery dissipating for a moment as sheer disbelief took over.

  ‘Seriously? Easy for you? You think it’s been easy for me? You tried to frame me, Danny. For MURDER. Do you realize how sick that is? Just because, for whatever reason, you wanted to go and start a new life abroad? What the fuck is wrong with you? WHY, DANNY? WHY ANY OF THIS, FOR FUCK’S SAKE?’

  I was screaming by then, on my feet, leaning across the table, almost spitting at him. Albert was on his feet too, looking uneasily from me to Danny, tail between his legs. Danny shrank back in his chair, and I stayed there, looking at him for a moment, then groaned and turned away. I walked across the kitchen to the window and stared blankly out of it. I didn’t know what else to say, what else to do. He was probably going to tell me he’d fallen in love with someone else, and I suddenly realized I didn’t even care anymore. I just needed him to go. Out in the hallway, I heard my mobile phone begin to ring. I ignored it.

  ‘Leave, Danny,’ I said softly, without turning around. ‘Go away. Start your new life. We’re done here.’

  Chapter 41

  ‘Gemma O’Connor’s not answering, guv.’

  DC Frankie Stevens waved his desk phone handset at Helena, and she nodded.

  ‘OK, I’ll try her again in a bit. In the meantime, I need to get on the road. Devon, you’re with me, OK?’

  ‘Sure,’ he said grimly. ‘No place else I’d rather be right now.’

  She flashed him a tight smile. ‘We’re going to get him you know. We are. If it’s the last thing I ever do in this bloody job.’

  And it might be, she thought. It might be the last thing I ever do in the job. We’ve messed this up, I’ve messed this up. I got this so, so wrong. Wasted so much time looking at it in completely the wrong way, looking at the wrong person. And now I have to put it right. Somehow. I have to.

  She took a deep breath and straightened her shoulders, then turned to the board, where a big red ring had been drawn around one of the photos that had been pinned up there for the past two and half weeks.

  ‘So let’s go and do it,’ she said. ‘Let’s go and find our serial killer. Let’s find Danny O’Connor.’

  Chapter 42

  ‘Go, Danny. Get out of here. I can’t even look at you.’

  I still had my back to him, trying to fight back the tears.

  ‘Not yet. I need to tell you everything, I need to get it off my chest. But first, Gemma, I need you to promise me something. I know you owe me nothing, not after this. Not after what I’ve done to you, what I’ve put you through. But please, Gemma, if you ever loved me, promise me one last thing? Promise me that when I tell you what I’m about to tell you, that you’ll keep it to yourself? That you won’t tell anyone, anyone at all? Please, Gemma, can you promise me that? And then I’ll tell you, and I’ll go. You’ll never have to see me again.’

  Seriously? He’s seriously asking me for a favour, after what he’s done? For a moment anger swelled inside me, then just as quickly subsided. Suddenly I felt tired, so very, very tired. I didn’t know if I could actually take anymore; what he’d already told me had been more than enough, way, way more. But fine, whatever. What does it matter, now?

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake. I’m assuming you’ve met someone else, Danny, and do you know what? I don’t care. I really, seriously, don’t give a flying shit. But go on, if you must. I’ll keep your tawdry little secret. Let’s just get it over with,’ I said, wearily. I turned to look at him, my stomach twisting with misery.

  ‘Promise? Is that a promise, Gemma?’

  ‘Bloody hell. Yes, it’s a promise,’ I spat the words at him.

  ‘OK. OK. Thank you. Well, here we go.’

  He clenched and unclenched his fists once, twice, three times, staring down at his hands. Then he looked back at me.

  ‘I lied to the police, Gemma. I made up a cock and bull story to explain why I needed to disappear. I told them my life was in danger, and yours too, because I’d got myself in trouble with a dodgy client, and they believed every word. But that wasn’t true, and I want to tell you what really happened. And it’s not that I’ve met someone else I want to be with, by the way. I wish I had, I wish that’s all it was. It’s … well, it’s something different. Something … something awful, Gemma.’

  He stopped talking, took a deep breath.

  ‘OK, here we go. So, when I was a kid, my dad … well, he was a bastard. And I mean a real, nasty bastard. He drank, heavily, and when he was drunk he’d come home and beat up my mum. Beat her up badly, you know, hospital bad. For no reason, other than he liked to be the big man, to keep her at his beck and call. He hit me too, any excuse. He’d batter me black and blue, for things like dropping toast crumbs on the floor at breakfast or bringing mud in from outside on my shoes. There was rarely a day when one of us didn’t get punched or slapped. Rarely a day, for years and years.’

  For a mom
ent, puzzled, I didn’t reply, the unexpectedness of this change in direction taking me by surprise, and trying to reconcile this description of Donal with the frail pensioner in the armchair I’d met on the one occasion I’d visited the family home. I mean, I hadn’t liked the man at all. He’d seemed cold, hard, deeply unpleasant. But violent, really?

  My scepticism must have shown on my face, because Danny said: ‘Oh, he wasn’t like that in his final years, obviously. Too old, too ill, thank God. But back then … he was an animal, Gemma. You can’t even imagine.’

  Maybe I can, though, I thought. Yes, Donal had been frail when I’d met him. But he had still been very much in control of that household, I remembered suddenly. Bridget still scurrying around, doing his bidding. Still scared of him, even then? Was that why she was how she was? If what Danny was saying was true, it must have been dreadful, for all of them, to live like that. Still not understanding why he was telling me, what his childhood had to do with any of this mess, I said quietly: ‘I’m sorry. That’s awful,’ because it was.