The Perfect Couple

by Jackie Kabler

  Devon was staring at her.

  ‘You seriously think Gemma O’Connor could have killed three men, boss?’

  She shrugged again.

  ‘I don’t know. The thought’s only just occurred to me, if I’m honest. But I’m clutching at straws here, in the absence of anything more solid. And what possible motive would she have for killing our two local victims?’

  She paused, and blew out some air, staring at the photograph of Gemma O’Connor, and thinking. Then she turned back to Devon.

  ‘Ridiculous, eh? I know. Far too many ifs and buts. But just do me one favour, Devon? Talk to her again and see where she was on the nights Mervin and Ryan were killed. And while you’re at it, check and see if there’ve been any similar, unsolved murders in London in the past year or so. Humour me, OK?’

  Devon nodded slowly.

  ‘Sure. You’re the boss.’

  Chapter 15

  Friday dawned bright and mild, the birds singing joyously outside my bedroom window, the clouds little white powder puffs in a baby blue sky. It was as if spring had suddenly decided to arrive in all its glory overnight, something which would normally fill me with delight after a long cold winter. Instead, I felt numb, low, my head and limbs aching. Albert, who usually slept downstairs, had somehow crept onto my bed during the night, his warm body stretched across my feet, tiny snores emanating from his glossy black nose. I’d stayed still for as long as I could, not wanting to wake him, trying to organize my thoughts, grateful that at least I’d somehow managed to sleep for a few hours, undisturbed by any more nightmares. Finally, my right foot beginning to cramp, I’d gently shaken my dog off it, and he’d yawned and stretched and licked my face, then suddenly leapt from the bed, running through the half-open door and back downstairs as if remembering he shouldn’t have been up there in the first place.

  When I’d finally arrived home from the police station late the previous night Eva had been anxiously waiting in the living room, but I’d brushed her questions aside, telling her I was too tired to speak, and that I’d fill her in on everything in the morning. When I finally crawled out of bed and made it, still in my pyjamas, hair a tousled mess, to the kitchen, she simply handed me a mug of tea and a newspaper.

  ‘Popped out while you were sleeping. He’s on the front page, Gem. Someone’s obviously been talking. There’s not much detail, nothing about all the weird stuff about his job or his bank account or anything like that, it just says he’s missing and remarks on his resemblance to the two murder victims. But still, it’s out there now. I’m so sorry.’

  FEAR IN BRISTOL AS A THIRD MAN VANISHES

  I read the headline, the knot which had begun to form in my stomach again the moment I’d woken up tightening painfully. Then I looked at the big photo of Danny, instantly recognizable as one taken at a friend’s wedding about eight months ago. Where had they got that one from? And ‘Fear in Bristol’? Fear? Terror was closer to what I was starting to feel now. Fear wasn’t a big enough word for this, not big enough for this all-consuming anguish, this confusion, the growing sense that everything around me was spinning faster and faster, completely out of control. Knowing I couldn’t hide what was happening for much longer, and that the press were bound to get hold of it, I’d finally called my parents on the way home last night, trying to play things down, telling them only that Danny had gone missing, trying to reassure them that I was certain he would be home soon and not to believe anything they might hear or read in the papers. They were distraught, of course, my dad offering to get on a train first thing in the morning, but I eventually persuaded him to stay put.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I lied. ‘My friend Eva’s here, and it’ll all blow over in a few days, don’t worry. I’m sure he’ll turn up. I’ll keep you posted, OK? I love you both. It’ll all be all right.’

  My parents lived in Cornwall, where I’d been born, neither of them in the best of health. My dad had been diagnosed with prostate cancer a year earlier, and although his treatment had gone well and was keeping the disease at bay, he had aged noticeably in recent months, his frail appearance a shock when I had last visited just before Christmas. My mother had always been a delicate woman (‘I suffer terribly with my nerves’ was her constant refrain), and not for the first time in my life I wished I had a sibling, a brother or sister who could share this load with me. At least Danny had Liam – if not someone he could share his troubles with, at least someone to distract his mother from what was going on. I couldn’t bring myself to ring Bridget though, and I hadn’t heard from her, even though I assumed the police would be calling her any time now, if they hadn’t already. Would she even care that Danny was missing? She didn’t seem to even like her son very much. The thought of speaking to her about Danny’s disappearance … I didn’t think I could, couldn’t face it, and I couldn’t read the article in the newspaper Eva had handed me either, and so I didn’t. Instead, I pushed the paper aside, and I started to talk, telling Eva everything the police had said to me. Told her about the pictures, the blood. Danny’s blood, in our old bedroom.

  ‘Blood that’s five weeks old? Five? But that doesn’t make any sense.’

  Eva was wide-eyed, gaping at me as I recounted the story.

  ‘I mean, you’d have noticed if he had any injuries that severe, wouldn’t you? Surely?’

  ‘Of course I would. He was absolutely fine when he arrived in Bristol. Shit, Eva, what’s going on? I feel like I’m stuck in one of those horrible dreams where everything’s back to front and upside down and nothing makes sense. And that’s not all. Apparently our landlord said we both moved out on the first of February, because the keys were left at his office that day with a note. That’s the day I moved down here, but Danny stayed on in London for a week to finish up his final project for Hanfield Solutions. Or at least, that’s what he said he was doing. He certainly didn’t stay in the apartment though, it seems now. So where the hell did he go?’

  Eva shook her head slowly, eyes even wider.

  ‘Whaaat?’

  ‘I know. And it gets worse. They accused me, Eva. They think I hurt Danny, attacked him, even killed him maybe. In our bedroom, back at the end of January. And they think I’m making it up about him moving down here. They don’t believe he was ever here, because the neighbours never saw him, and he hasn’t used his bank account, and he didn’t start his new job, and all the other stuff. But he was here, Eva. He was fucking here, until last week …’

  I stood up, feeling panic rising, my heartrate speeding up. Eva stood up too, reaching a hand out towards me.

  ‘Gemma … Gemma, calm down, come on. We can sort this, this is ridiculous. How can they think that? There’ll be loads of ways of proving it, there must be. I mean, it was three weeks, wasn’t it, that he was here? There must have been heaps of people who saw him and can vouch for the fact that he was fine. Sit down, come on.’

  Her tone was soothing, and I took a deep breath, trying to regain control. Slowly, I lowered myself onto my chair again, and nodded.

  ‘OK. But I need you to help me make sense of this. My brain is all … muddled. The stress … I can’t think properly. They’ve got no real evidence, not against me, not yet, otherwise they’d have arrested me, charged me. I’ve been released on bail, and they haven’t put any restrictions on me or anything, for now. But they’re coming here again later, to do forensic stuff or something, and I’m just so scared, Eva. What the hell is Danny playing at? Where is he? And all that blood? What’s that all about? I just can’t …’

  Hot tears were burning their way down my cold cheeks, and Eva grabbed my hands, rubbing them hard.

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t understand any of it any more than you do. And the blood thing is weird, bloody weird, no pun intended. But you know he was OK when he moved to Bristol, so don’t think about that for now. Go and get your diary. We need to go through every day, every single day, from the day Danny moved down here to the day he disappeared. Because he didn’t have an invisibility cloak, Gem. Th
is isn’t some sort of Harry Potter fantasy story, it’s the real world. And he was out of this house all day every day, pretending to go to work, and you must have had things delivered to the house, and done lots of stuff together over the past few weeks, right? Somebody will remember seeing him, there’ll be somebody who can prove to the police that Danny was here with you and alive and well until last week, OK? Come on. Game face on.’

  I managed a small smile. ‘Game face on’ – it was what we used to say to each other in our early newspaper days, when we were half dead from lack of sleep and the stress of deadlines, and had just had yet another assignment thrown at us.

  ‘Game face on. We can do this.’

  And so, I put my game face on. I even got dressed, brushed my hair, moisturized my skin, ate a bowl of cereal, fed Albert, promising him as I did so that I’d take him out for a nice long walk later. And then I brought my diary to the kitchen table, and we began, as the morning sun streamed in, dust motes dancing in the air around us.

  An hour later, I pushed the diary aside, feeling something close to despair.

  ‘There’s nothing. Nothing.’

  Eva steepled her fingers together, eyes fixed on the diary.

  ‘OK, well as far as I see it at the moment – and leaving the mystery of the blood in the bedroom aside for now, as that makes no sense whatsoever – there are really only two possible scenarios here. One – and I know this is one you don’t want to think about, love, but I’m sorry, we have to consider it as a possibility – one, he’s vanished because he’s gone off with someone else, someone he met on that app. He might have stayed with her that week after you moved down here. It doesn’t explain all his odd behaviour, I know, but still. The other one … well, I now think it’s even more likely that we were on the right track with that vague theory we came up with before. Because what this increasingly sounds like to me now is that he was being very, very careful to make sure that nobody would see him here in Bristol. But he was clever about it, really clever, so you wouldn’t notice. I don’t know why yet, but now I’m really starting to think he was hiding, Gemma. He was hiding right here, and you didn’t even realize it,’ she said slowly.

  She tapped her notebook with her pen.

  ‘Let’s look at it all again with that in mind. For a start, when you lived in London he always took his turn doing the weekend supermarket run. Or else you did it together, right?’

  I nodded.

  ‘But since you moved here, he decided he’d stay in and clean the house on a Saturday morning, and that you’d go out and do the shopping.’

  ‘Well, yes, but that was because I always moaned about having to do all the cleaning, and he was just being nice …’

  My voice tailed off.

  ‘OK, maybe. But seriously …’

  ‘You did every dog walk since you moved here. Every single one, on your own.’

  ‘Well, yes, but that’s just because of his working hours … well, I thought he was working. I generally did most of it in London too, not all, but most; he used to come out with us at weekends. I’m sure he would have started doing that again here soon.’

  ‘Every time you got food delivered, you went to the door to get it, not him,’ Eva interrupted.

  ‘He said he’d get the plates out, pour the wine …’

  ‘Exactly. Making sure the delivery guy didn’t see him. Did he ever go to the door, to take in a delivery? Of anything?’

  I thought. I couldn’t remember, but he must have, surely?

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said quietly.

  ‘When you went out with your new friends, he never asked if he could come. Fair enough, maybe, as you’d only known them a few weeks. But even when you went round to … Tai, is that her name? … to Tai’s house for a drink after yoga, and Clare’s husband joined you too, and you called Danny and asked him if he wanted to pop over for a quick one as well, and meet them all, he said no. So they never met him, either.’

  I’d told Eva about that night earlier. On the spur of the moment as we’d left the third yoga class I’d been to, Tai had suggested that it might be nice if her husband, Peter, and Clare’s husband, Alex, met Danny.

  ‘I’ve got some very nice sauv blanc chilling in the fridge; shall we have an impromptu midweek drinkies?’ she said, with a cheeky grin. ‘Are they all free? We could just have a couple, it would be nice.’

  I’d called Danny, but he told me he’d had to bring some work home with him that needed to be done for first thing in the morning.

  ‘Any other night … look, give them my apologies and tell them we’ll have them all over here soon instead, OK?’ he’d said. And so I’d done just that, and gone for drinks at Tai’s stunning penthouse apartment in the Cathedral Quarter on my own, admiring the three-hundred-and-sixty-degree views of the city from the floor-to-ceiling windows and wishing Danny was there to enjoy them, and the wine and the company, with me.

  Eva was still talking.

  ‘And you stayed in, every weekend. I mean, I know he was only living here for three weekends, but still. Didn’t it strike you as weird that he never wanted to go out? Not once? To explore your new city?’

  I was staring at the diary myself now and starting to feel very stupid. What Eva was saying was starting to make more and more sense. How had I not realized it, any of it, at the time?

  ‘It just … it just didn’t occur to me. He was working long days … well, I thought he was working long days during the week, and I had loads on too. So when the weekends came we just wanted to get this place sorted, get the walls painted and put up shelves and stuff. We were planning to go out soon; we’d even made a list of all the restaurants and bars we wanted to go to. We just hadn’t got around to it yet …’

  I stopped talking. Shit. Eva waved her hands in a ‘see what I mean?’ sort of gesture.

  ‘And he cut all communications too, didn’t he? He deliberately didn’t have a phone. He didn’t call or email a single friend or family member since he moved here, if what the police have told you is true. Maybe he thought whoever he was scared of could track him via his mobile. Or via his job, which is why he didn’t start it. Look at all the evidence, Gemma. He was hiding. It’s obvious. He was hiding. From everyone, except you,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, OK, OK.’

  I rubbed my eyes, my brain racing. It made sense, finally. Something about this big fat mess made sense.

  ‘But the blood … what about the blood, Eva?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘I don’t know. I can’t explain that. And honestly, I don’t know if he’s dead or alive right now, nobody does. But what we do know is that you didn’t kill him, and we also know that, despite what the police think, nothing terrible can have happened to him five weeks ago in London either, because he was here with you, alive and well, for the past few weeks. Somehow, we need to prove that. So if we forget the blood thing for now, assume it’s some sort of forensics cock-up or something, the rest of this theory makes sense, right? That he’d maybe got himself in some sort of trouble, and was laying low?’

  I nodded slowly.

  ‘Maybe. I mean, I never thought of it before but now … except for the fact that he did go out, Eva, every day, for hours, Monday to Friday. Yes, he left in the dark and came home in the dark, but there were hours of daylight in-between. He must have been somewhere. And wherever that was, people must have seen him. So maybe he was hiding from someone. But he couldn’t hide from everyone, not in a busy city like this. So how do I find out where he went every day, and what he was doing? Because that must be the key to all this. How on earth do I find out?’

  Eva grimaced.

  ‘Well that, my dear, is the million-dollar question.’

  She paused, and shifted on her seat, suddenly looking uncomfortable.

  ‘Look, we can’t totally discount the other theory though. He did have a profile on a dating site after all. Maybe both theories work, maybe he was in some sort of trouble and he’s run off with someone else to get
away from it. It’s just that, well …’

  She took a deep breath, looking even more uneasy now, and I stared at her, my chest tightening.

  ‘What? What is it? Eva, if you know something, you have to tell me!’

  ‘OK, OK. Look, I didn’t want to tell you this, I really didn’t. You seemed so happy, and I just didn’t see the point, it was nothing really …’

  ‘Shit, Eva, TELL ME!’

  ‘OK. I’m telling you. It’s … well …’ She paused and blew out some air, then covered her face with her hands. ‘Danny made a pass at me once,’ she mumbled through her fingers.

  ‘Danny … he what?’

  I suddenly felt light-headed. What? Seriously. WHAT? Had she really just said that Danny, my husband Danny, had made a pass at her, my best friend? Eva dropped her hands from her face again, looking anguished.

  ‘I’m so sorry. So, so sorry. I should have told you about it ages ago, but I just didn’t see the point. I mean nothing happened, nothing whatsoever, OK? I would never have done that to you, even if I did fancy Danny, which I didn’t. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with him, he’s very attractive, but he just isn’t my type …’

  Her voice tailed off, her face flushed. I stared at her.

  ‘Well, go on. When, how? What happened?’

  She ran a hand across her eyes, then leaned forwards in her seat.

  ‘OK. It was at that crazy space restaurant opening in Soho, do you remember? Back in September. The one where robots served the pre-dinner nibbles?’

  I did remember. I’d actually been given four tickets for the opening night of Space Soho at pretty short notice, and only Eva and Danny had been free to come with me; it had been on a Tuesday night, as far as I could recall. The restaurant, with glow in the dark menus, a slowly rotating dining area and small white robots moving jerkily between tables holding aloft trays of finger food, was owned by the brother of one of my Camille magazine colleagues, and although it was all as tacky and cheesy as hell, it had been a really fun night. But, I thought, casting my mind back, the three of us had been together all evening, hadn’t we? When would Danny have …?