The Perfect Couple

by Jackie Kabler

  I reached for my iPad again, pulling up a map of Bristol, then zooming in on our street. Then I slowly zoomed out again until I had an area of about one square mile of the house on my screen. Something told me that if Danny was trying to keep a low profile, had essentially been hiding in plain sight, he wouldn’t have wanted to travel too far. Were there any gyms that close to the house? I typed ‘gym near’ into the search box and added our postcode. Yes! Two pins appeared on the map, one just a couple of streets away, one about half a mile to the south. I clicked on the first one, then clicked again to open its website.

  Fit4U Gym – a small, friendly independent gym in Clifton, Bristol.

  I scrolled through the photographs; a compact but well-equipped gym, a steam room, a spin class, a small café. Would Danny have felt comfortable there? Or was it too small? I wasn’t sure, so I clicked onto the second pin.

  GYMCITY. A big city gym at small town prices.

  This one looked huge – a spa with hydrotherapy pool, personal trainers, an Olympics standard weights room. Shit. If Danny had to choose one of these, which would he go for? I wasn’t sure. I’d have to try both of them.

  ***

  Assuming dogs weren’t allowed in gyms, I left Albert behind, muttering apologies as I slipped out of the front door, and headed for the big one first, bracing myself for the barrage of questions from the reporters as I left the house, only to find that they’d suddenly disappeared. Called to a press conference, maybe, I thought, then realized I didn’t care. As long as they weren’t bothering me, they could go where they liked. In the reception area of GymCity, a harassed-looking man with a shaven head and a dark, bushy beard glanced at the photographs of Danny I was holding and shrugged.

  ‘Don’t recognize him. That doesn’t mean he hasn’t been here though. We get hundreds of people coming in every day and I’m only part-time. There are eight of us on this desk, we work shifts … hang on.’

  The phone on his desk was ringing and he picked it up.

  ‘GymCity. Can you hold please?’

  He looked back at me.

  ‘Look, I’m really busy, sorry. If you want to leave a photo and your number, I’ll stick them on the desk here with a note, see if any of the others remember him. We’ll call you.’

  I thanked him and left, a now-familiar feeling of hopelessness creeping over me. This was a waste of time. My legs felt heavy as I trudged slowly to Fit4U, wondering why I was bothering.

  There was somebody already chatting to the man on the desk when I walked in, so I wandered around the small lobby, reading the posters advertising ‘cardioblast’ and ‘bodypump’ classes, studio cycling and body balance sessions.

  ‘Hi, can I help?’

  I turned to see the receptionist smiling at me.

  ‘Yes, sorry. I was just wondering … well, the thing is, my husband has gone missing. And I was just wondering if you might have seen him in here, any time over the past few weeks? It’s been tricky, trying to track his recent movements, and well, I brought a photo, just in case. You probably won’t have seen him, I know how busy these places always are, but I was just hoping that maybe if you could take a look at this picture …’

  I was gabbling, already feeling embarrassed for wasting his time. The young man, who had cropped dark hair and was wearing a very tight, white T-shirt, looked at me quizzically.

  ‘Missing? Sorry to hear that. Sure, let me see.’

  I pushed the photograph across the desk.

  ‘His name is Danny. Danny O’Connor. He’s thirty-three, six foot one. Do you recognize him at all?’

  The man – he wore a name badge which said ‘Gerry’ – was staring at the picture, his eyes scrunched into narrow slits.

  ‘Well … I’m not sure actually. At first glance I’d have said no …’, he picked up the photo, angling it towards the light, ‘but … well, he does look a bit like someone who’s been coming in. His name isn’t Danny though. Hang on. Paul? PAUL!’

  A head poked out from behind a half-open door to the rear of the reception desk.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Come here a minute, will you? Does this look like Patrick to you?’

  ‘The Patrick you had the hots for?’

  Paul emerged fully from behind the door, grinning. He was short and muscular, biceps bulging.

  ‘Shut up!’ Gerry had turned pink. ‘Just look. Could that be him?’

  Paul glanced at me then at the photograph. He frowned.

  ‘Could be,’ he said, but he sounded unsure. ‘I mean, he definitely has the look of him. But Patrick has a beard and specs and he always wears that beanie, so I’ve never seen his hair. Could be though. Why?’

  ‘He’s this lady’s husband.’

  He gestured towards me.

  ‘He’s gone missing, and she wants to know if he’s been in here recently.’

  ‘Husband!’ Paul laughed, then looked apologetically at me.

  ‘Oh, sorry. I’m not laughing about him being missing, that’s shitty. Just laughing at Gerry here. He has the right hots for him.’

  ‘Shut up!’ hissed Gerry.

  Paul hooted and headed into the back room again.

  ‘Hope you find him,’ he called over his shoulder.

  Gerry rolled his eyes.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, and tapped the photo of Danny with a manicured finger. ‘I do quite fancy him, if I’m honest. He is hot. Sorry.’

  I smiled and waved a hand dismissively. I needed to get this back on track.

  ‘So – you do think you might have seen him? In here? I’m confused.’

  Gerry looked back down at the picture, nodded slowly and then looked up again.

  ‘I think so. There’s a guy who started coming in about a month ago. Didn’t join as an annual member, just paid for a weekly pass and kept renewing it. His name … well, he said his name was Patrick, not Danny. Patrick Donnelly. He’s Irish?’

  I nodded. ‘Danny’s Irish, yes.’

  ‘He said he was a freelance writer who’d just moved to Bristol and he was waiting for new office space, said it was being renovated or something. Asked if it was OK to use the gym in the morning and then hang out and do some work in the café in the afternoon. We were cool with that – as long as people pay for the pass they can use the facilities as long as they like, we’re open eighteen hours a day. And he was nice, no trouble, just got on with it. He started coming in Monday to Friday, just in the daytime. Stayed all day. Worked out for a couple of hours then had lunch and got his laptop out and sat in a corner of the café for the rest of the day. Did that for a few weeks. Then he just stopped coming. I presumed his new office was ready. Gutted.’

  He smiled sheepishly. My heartbeat had been quickening as I listened. Could this Patrick be Danny? The timescale fitted. The Monday to Friday fitted. It fitted.

  ‘Did he seem OK? I mean, did he look like he was injured at all, when he was in the gym?’

  Gerry frowned.

  ‘Not that I noticed. Looked fine to me.’

  ‘But … you said he had a beard? Danny didn’t have a beard. And glasses?’

  Gerry nodded.

  ‘Yes. And he always wore a little black beanie, even when he was working out.’ He paused. ‘Not that I was spying on him lifting weights or anything. But, you know, we’re always running about, in and out of the gym, and you notice,’ he added hurriedly, his face flushing again.

  I nodded distractedly, my mind racing. If Danny had been trying to keep a low profile, it might have made sense for him to try to disguise his appearance a bit when he was outside the house. Would it be outside the realms of possibility for him to have stuck on a hat, a pair of glasses? A false beard seemed faintly ludicrous, but maybe, if he was that desperate to avoid being recognized …

  ‘You know, the more I look at this the more I think it is him,’ Gerry was saying. ‘His body shape, and those eyes – you can’t disguise eyes, even in glasses. I’m pretty sure that’s Patrick. Are you saying he was wearing a stick-on bear
d though? Why?’

  ‘I don’t really know,’ I said honestly. ‘Do you know how he got here every day? Did he walk, or drive?’

  ‘Cycled,’ Gerry said immediately. ‘Always came in carrying a bike helmet.’

  My heart was racing again. It was Danny, it had to be. But how could I prove it?

  ‘Look, you said he paid for a weekly pass. Did he use a credit card, a bank card, anything like that? I can’t really explain, but I need some sort of proof that he was here, that he’d been coming here for the past few weeks. Do you have anything like that?’

  Gerry was frowning, shaking his head.

  ‘As far as I can recall he always paid cash,’ he said. ‘I always work Mondays and that’s when we renew the weekly passes, and I remember him pulling out a wad of notes each time. I remember thinking he must be loaded, to carry that much cash. Made him even sexier. Oh shit, sorry.’

  He slapped himself on the forehead, and I smiled.

  ‘It’s fine, honestly. OK, so no credit card receipt …’

  I looked around, eyes searching for cameras. Yes! Two of them, one angled towards the gym’s front door, the other pointing at the desk we were standing at.

  ‘But you have CCTV, right?’

  I pointed at the closest camera, and Gerry nodded.

  ‘Just here in reception though. We’re a small, friendly place. Nobody wants to be watched when they’re working out or getting changed, so there aren’t any in the gym or exercise areas.’

  ‘The café?’ I asked.

  Gerry shook his head.

  ‘Never felt the need. We’re well-staffed so if there’s ever any trouble or anyone gets injured on one of the machines or collapses or anything, there’s always someone around to deal with it. We only have cameras here, where we take the money, just in case, you know?’

  ‘OK. But if Dann … er this Patrick guy, was coming in here every day he’d be captured by these cameras here, right?’

  ‘Sure. We don’t keep the footage for long though. Gets wiped after two weeks if we don’t need it. Want me to look?’

  ‘Yes! Yes please.’ I thought quickly. Today was Monday, the eleventh of March. Two weeks would take us back to Monday, the twenty-fifth of February.

  ‘Can you look at the week of the twenty-fifth of last month?’

  ‘Sure,’ he said again. ‘I can get it up on this screen here. You’ll have to come round for a minute.’

  I made my way behind the reception desk and watched as he tapped various keys, suddenly feeling excited.

  ‘OK, so he usually came in quite early, around seven,’ Gerry was muttering. ‘So if I start it here …’ He moved the mouse a couple of times, then stood back. ‘There. That’s Patrick. I’ve zoomed in and frozen the image.’

  I leaned forwards. On the screen a man was standing at the front of the reception desk I was now behind. He was wearing, as Gerry had described earlier, a dark beanie hat and small round glasses, the outline of his jaw obscured by a fluffy beard. His jacket was dark, anonymous. But Danny had a black jacket, simple like this one. His shoulders were broad, like this man’s. If only I could see his face more clearly. I leaned even closer, squinting, but the picture just wasn’t clear enough. Was it him? I didn’t know. I just couldn’t tell.

  ‘I don’t know if it’s him,’ I said. ‘Can you let it play for a minute? Maybe if I see a bit more …’

  Gerry had already hit ‘play’. The man on screen was moving now, pulling something from his pocket – cash? – and as he lifted his arm again I saw a flash on his wrist.

  A watch.

  I stared at it, then gasped.

  ‘Can you zoom in? On his wrist, there?’

  I jabbed at the screen, and Gerry obliged. The picture froze, and I stared. Stared at the now surprisingly clear image of a square-faced, steel-cased watch with a bright red seconds hand. A sleek, elegant, very distinctive watch. The watch I’d bought Danny as a gift on our wedding day. The watch that had cost me the equivalent of a month’s salary but which I knew had been worth every penny when I’d seen the delight on his face when he opened the box and slipped it onto his wrist. That was Danny’s watch. That was Danny.

  Chapter 20

  ‘I bloody hate Mondays. I’ve always bloody hated Mondays, but today has been The. Shittiest. In. A. Long. Time.’

  Helena punctuated the words by throwing a small rubber ball hard at the wall. She caught it for the sixth time then flung it onto her desk, where it landed with a plop in the handle-less mug which doubled as a pen holder.

  ‘Nice shot.’ Devon sounded impressed.

  Helena grunted and flung herself petulantly into her chair.

  ‘That’s meant to be a stress ball. Charlotte gave it to me. I’m going to tell her to demand her money back, because it doesn’t bloody work.’

  Devon laughed. ‘I feel sorry for your poor wife. Agreed though, it hasn’t been the best of Mondays.’

  He walked a few steps closer and leaned against the edge of her desk.

  ‘It was grim, wasn’t it?’ he said.

  She nodded, closing her eyes briefly. It really had been. After the on-call press officer had been forced to deal with numerous and increasingly demanding calls from journalists over the weekend about the so-called ‘Bristol serial killer’, Detective Chief Superintendent Anna Miller had been on the phone to Helena at seven that morning, ordering her to call a press conference.

  ‘If you can’t make any arrests, if you really don’t have enough evidence, knock this serial killer nonsense on the head,’ she demanded in her broad Tyneside accent. ‘Tell them there’s no proven link even between the Bristol cases, never mind the London ones. But give them something. Anything. We’re being accused of doing nothing and getting nowhere, Dickens, and I won’t have it. Sort it out.’

  And so, with the greatest reluctance, Helena had called a press conference for midday. She hated press conferences with a passion; not normally a shy person, she always wanted to curl up under a rock when forced to endure the glare of television lights, the flash of cameras and the volley of questions being fired from the press pack. It wasn’t that she wanted to be obstructive; she totally understood the need for the public to be kept informed, especially with rumours of serial killers floating around.

  ‘They’re just so … so relentless,’ she said, opening her eyes again and looking up at Devon. ‘And if they don’t get what they want, they just make stuff up half the time. Or speculate and exaggerate at least, and dress that up as fact. It drives me mad.’

  ‘I know.’ He sighed. ‘They’re totally fixated on this serial killer thing now though, aren’t they? No talking them out of it, no matter what we say. And their fascination with Gemma O’Connor seems to have grown too. Plenty of questions about her and whether we think she’s involved.’

  Helena’s eyes widened. ‘Well, I can’t blame them for that. They know she’s the only one we’ve called in for questioning so far. And I still think she might have done it, Devon. Killed Danny, at least. Even if I did insist rather firmly this morning that she’s only ever been questioned with regards to background information about her missing husband. I don’t want them focussing on her too much, not right now. I know they’ve been hanging around outside her house, and we can’t stop them doing that, but I don’t want to give them anything more than we have to on her for now. She’ll clam up, and at the moment she’s still talking to us. Talking bollocks, but still talking. And I still think one of these days she’ll talk too much, let something slip.’

  Devon shrugged. ‘Maybe. I still can’t make up my mind on that one.’

  PRRRR.

  There was a low purr from the breast pocket of his shirt. He slid his mobile phone out of it, looked at the screen and gave a short laugh.

  ‘Talk of the devil,’ he said, and answered the call.

  ‘Mrs O’Connor? How can I help you?’ he asked.

  Helena sat up straight, suddenly feeling a little less gloomy. Gemma O’Connor, calling Devon di
rect? What did she want then? To confess, maybe, finally? She leaned a little closer to Devon, but he was giving little away.

  ‘Really? OK. OK. Well, I suppose it won’t hurt to take a look. Sure. OK. I’ll try to get someone down there tomorrow morning. Around 10 o’clock? OK. Someone will meet you there unless you hear otherwise. Great. Bye.’

  He ended the call then grabbed a pen and a pad from Helena’s desk and scribbled down an address.

  ‘Well?’ she said impatiently. ‘What was all that about?’

  He put the pen down and ripped the page from the notepad.

  ‘Not sure, really. She says she’s seen some CCTV footage from a gym in Clifton and she thinks it’s Danny. Apparently she decided to try and find out where he’d been spending his days while he was apparently here in Bristol …’

  ‘Pah!’ Helena couldn’t help herself.

  ‘Yes, yes, I know you don’t believe he ever made it this far. But she’s still insisting, so … anyway, she says she had a brainwave that he might have been hanging out in a gym because he was always into his fitness and so on, so she checked out a couple nearby, and at one of them the staff said there was a bloke who came in every weekday for a few weeks. He said his name was Patrick, not Danny, but she asked to see CCTV and she says this guy’s wearing some sort of disguise so she can’t be totally sure, but what she is sure about is that he’s wearing her husband’s watch, which has convinced her that it’s hi—’

  ‘A disguise?’ Helena snorted. ‘And you’re sending someone down there? Are you sure? It sounds like a load of old—’

  ‘Boss! BOSS!’

  DC Tara Lemming was running across the room towards them, her black ponytail bouncing. She skidded to a halt, slightly out of breath, her eyes bright.

  ‘You’re not going to believe this,’ she said.

  ‘What now?’ said Helena. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘I’m fine. And you will be too, when you hear what’s just happened.’