The Perfect Couple

by Jackie Kabler

  I leaned across the table, and we exchanged awkward pecks on the cheek.

  ‘No hassle. Haven’t got long though, as I said. Big job on today and the boss is a right bastard.’

  I smiled and told him I wouldn’t keep him long. He looked tired, I thought; a short, muscular man with closely cropped dark hair slightly receding at the temples, he was normally clean-shaven but had a couple of days’ worth of patchy stubble on his chin, and his denim shirt was faded and creased, the large tattoo of a skull and crossbones on the right side of his neck creeping above the grubby collar.

  ‘So, you’re worried about Danny?’ He asked the question and then looked away, eyes flitting around the bar before returning to mine.

  ‘I’m worried sick, Quinn. I just know he’d never deliberately go off without telling me where he was, even if he was in terrible trouble. He just wouldn’t. And that’s why I’m so scared. The police think he’s dead, and I’m starting to think he might be too. But they think I had something to do with it – I mean you know I’ve been questioned, don’t you, you’ve seen the papers? And this hasn’t been made public yet, but Quinn they also think that whatever happened to him happened weeks ago … they found blood, you see, in our old apartment in London, lots of blood, and I have no idea what happened there, he seemed fine when he moved down to Bristol, but the police think he never made it to Bristol at all. They think I’m lying about everything, and I’m not, they’re looking in completely the wrong direction, and if they keep looking at me they’re never going to find him, because I don’t know where he is. The whole thing is just ludicrous, that they could even think I was capable of killing my husband, and maybe the others too, it’s just insane, but that’s why I need to try and find Danny, or find out what might have happened to him, not just for his sake but for mine too.’

  The words had spilled out of me in a torrent, and I stopped talking suddenly, aware that Quinn was sitting in silence, staring at me, an odd look on his face.

  ‘You don’t … you don’t think I had anything to do with it, please tell me you don’t?’ I said desperately. ‘I mean, you know how much I love him, right?’

  He said nothing for a moment, still looking at me with that odd expression, then his face cleared.

  ‘Course I don’t,’ he said. He picked up his pint and drank slowly, then put the glass down again and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.

  ‘But what do you want me to do? I’m as gutted about him going AWOL as you are, but I don’t know where he is, Gemma. I don’t know anything.’

  I took a deep breath.

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know if you can help, but you know him so well, and you’ve known him for so long, and I just thought … look, there’s been a lot of weird stuff that’s emerged since he vanished, and I just wanted to run it past you, see if you can shed any light on it. Can I do that? I actually made a list, because there’s so much.’

  I rummaged in my bag which was lying on the table in front of me and pulled out my notebook, flicking through the pages until I found the list. Quinn looked vaguely amused for a moment, then nodded.

  ‘Sure. Shoot.’

  And so I told him. I told him how careful Danny had been not to bump into any of our neighbours after he moved to Bristol, how he never answered the front door, how he always seemed to make sure he left in the dark and came home in the dark, and how I’d realized, too late, that he must have been lying low, in some sort of serious trouble. I told him that Danny had lied to me about starting his new job, and how I now thought he’d been hiding out in a local gym every day instead. How his bank account had remained untouched since the end of January, fuelling the police view that something had happened to him back then, and how none of his friends or family had heard a word from him since January either.

  ‘Have you, Quinn?’ I asked. ‘When did you last hear from him, can you remember?’

  He took a few moments to answer, eyes flitting around the bar again. Then he shrugged.

  ‘Dunno. It’s been a while though. Probably January, yeah.’

  He was looking down at his pint as he spoke, running a finger around the rim of the glass. I suddenly felt uneasy – is he telling me the truth? I wondered – but I ignored the feeling and carried on talking, telling him next about what the police had told me about Danny appearing on EHU, the same dating app as the two Bristol murder victims. I knew that, like the stuff about the blood in our old apartment, this information hadn’t been made public, so I wasn’t surprised when Quinn’s face twisted, his eyes widening.

  ‘Do you … do you know if he was seeing other women, Quinn? I’m struggling with it, but it might explain some of—’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said sharply. ‘And he probably wouldn’t have told me if he was. I don’t agree with that sort of messing around. You’re either with someone or you’re not. Danny was brought up Catholic, and adultery’s a sin. He’d know I’d hold no truck with that.’

  I couldn’t hide my surprise at his answer.

  ‘Well, yes … I mean, I agree with you, but most people don’t think like that nowadays, do they? But, well … look, he was definitely using that EHU dating app. Whether he actually went through with any actual dating, I don’t know.’

  I suddenly felt a tiny bit better. Surely if Danny had been seeing other people, he’d have shared that with Quinn, his closest confidant? OK, so he’d flirted with that woman at that party, and made a pass at Eva, but maybe that was as far as it had gone …

  ‘He saved my life, you know.’ He said the unexpected words loudly, almost angrily, his face suddenly flushing, and at the closest inhabited table an elderly man with a small dog stretched out on the floor by his feet turned and frowned.

  ‘He … what?’

  Quinn looked down at the table, one bitten fingernail scratching at a spot of dried paint on the antique wood. Then he looked at me again.

  ‘He saved my life. It was when we were kids, messing around in the lake at home. It was summer, hot, and we were in and out of the water all day long. I was showing off, holding my breath underwater, and I went too deep, got my foot stuck in something, dunno what, and suddenly I was drowning, panicking …’ He paused, an anguished look in his eyes, as if he was back there again, reliving the horror. ‘I thought I was a goner, you know? Thought it was all over. And then, just when everything was going black, and my lungs were bursting, and I thought that was it, I was going to die, there was Danny, like some sort of miracle. There he was, divin’ down and pulling my foot free, and draggin’ me back up to the surface, and I was alive and … well, that was it. That’s the story. He saved my life. I’d have died that day, if it wasn’t for him.’

  His tone had softened, and I stared at him, a lump in my throat, strangely moved.

  ‘I … I didn’t know. He never told me,’ I said.

  He shrugged.

  ‘So, you know, I owe him. I’d defend the man to me grave. But if he was messing around on ya, Gemma, that’s bad. I’d batter him for that.’

  I didn’t know what to say. He was a strange man, I thought.

  ‘Thanks … thanks, Quinn. Look, another thing. Bridget … you don’t think she could possibly know where he is, do you? Every time I’ve spoken to her, well … as I said to you on the phone, she doesn’t seem that bothered. By Danny being missing, I mean. Is there any chance that’s because she knows he’s alive and well somewhere?’

  Another odd expression crossed his face, his eyes widening, then he stood up abruptly.

  ‘No, I don’t think that. No way. Look, I need to go now. Sorry I can’t help you. I don’t know where he is. I’ll let you know if I hear from him.’

  He nodded at me, then turned and walked quickly away.

  ‘But Quinn …’

  He was already gone, the pub door swinging shut behind him. Shit, I thought. SHIT. Did he really not know anything? Why had he left as soon as I’d mentioned Bridget? And what had he said about what he’d do if Danny had been ‘messin
g around’? I’d batter him for that? A chill ran down my back, as if someone was running a cold hand slowly along my spine. There’d been something else too, something which was only now dawning on me as I remembered the garbled explanation I’d given him when he’d first sat down. When I’d mentioned Danny using a dating app, Quinn had looked visibly shocked. But earlier, when I’d told him one of the other things that the press didn’t know, one of the other things that had been kept out of the public domain, the thing about the blood in the Chiswick apartment, he hadn’t reacted at all. No reaction, no questions. It had almost been as if he already knew all about it.

  Chapter 26

  ‘His name is Quinn O’Connor. Says he’s Danny O’Connor’s first cousin and he wants to come in and talk to us about Danny’s disappearance. He’s getting on a train from London now, says he’ll be in Bristol by midday.’

  ‘And he didn’t want to just tell us whatever it is he wants to tell us on the phone?’ Helena looked up at DC Mike Slater, who’d just appeared at her desk to tell her the news.

  ‘Nope. Says he has some photos to show us and he’d rather talk in person. Sounded quite anxious.’

  Helena frowned. ‘We spoke to him, right, when we were contacting Danny’s friends and family after he vanished? He said he hadn’t heard from him?’

  ‘Yep. I checked, he says he still hasn’t. But he was pretty keen to talk to us today. He wouldn’t tell me anything else, boss, sorry.’

  ‘OK, fine. Let me know when he arrives. Devon’s off today so you can come and see him with me.’

  ‘Sure.’ Mike wandered off, and Helena broke off another piece from the Twix she’d been eating and popped it in her mouth. She tried her hardest to keep away from chocolate but she’d been so despondent earlier about the events of the past few days that she’d succumbed on her way in to work that morning, stopping at the local corner shop to stock up. Charlotte wouldn’t allow chocolate in the house, one of the very few things Helena found annoying about her wife.

  ‘You’re so bloody saintly when it comes to food. It’s beyond irritating. A bit of sugar won’t kill us. Dark chocolate’s actually good for you. For your heart or something, same as red wine,’ she’d snapped a few days previously, when she’d reached for a packet of dark chocolate digestives in the supermarket and Charlotte had practically slapped them out of her hand.

  ‘Well fine, we’ll get a bar of organic seventy per cent cacao then. But you won’t eat it, will you?’ Charlotte had snapped back, so loudly that an elderly woman who’d just stopped next to them and was perusing the shortbread section actually jumped.

  Charlotte lowered her voice.

  ‘You just want to eat that shitty cheap chocolate crap which is full of fat and sugar. Fine, go ahead. But don’t blame me when all your teeth fall out and your arteries are all clogged up.’

  The old woman backed slowly away from the biscuit shelf and hurried away down the aisle, and Helena glared at her wife.

  ‘Well, I pity our kids,’ she hissed. ‘Great fun they’ll have at Easter, when all the other kids are stuffing down the chocolate eggs. What are you going to give them instead? Brussels sprouts dipped in bloody couscous?’

  She’d instantly regretted the remark, but the damage had been done, and the shopping trip had been completed in stony silence. They’d made up since, but the row had left Helena feeling guilty and low. Work was tough enough at the moment without strife at home too. Now, she suddenly felt a little cheerier.

  ‘Just when you think all your leads have dried up, along comes another one. Maybe,’ she said out loud to nobody.

  ***

  When Quinn O’Connor arrived in reception at twelve thirty he was shown into a side room and given a cup of tea. When Helena and Mike entered the room three minutes later, they saw a pale-faced, stocky man in a tight black T-shirt, a large skull tattoo visible on his neck. A black jacket lay balled up on the floor next to his chair. He stood up quickly as the two police officers approached him and offered a hand.

  ‘Thanks for seeing me, appreciated,’ he said. He sounded Irish, but Helena wasn’t familiar enough with the country’s regional accents to know what part of the country his came from.

  ‘I thought I needed to see ya as soon as possible, so I took the day off work,’ he continued. ‘My cousin Danny … well, I thought I might have some information that might help.’

  ‘Great.’ Helena sat down on the chair opposite him, and Mike slid into the seat beside her. ‘So, what have you got for us, Mr O’Connor?’

  He cleared his throat.

  ‘Well, yesterday Gemma came to see me.’

  ‘Gemma O’Connor? She came to London?’ Helena was immediately interested.

  The man nodded. ‘Yes. She said she was worried about Danny and how the cops … sorry, you, the police …’ He coloured slightly but carried on. ‘How you seemed to think she might have done somethin’ to him. To Danny. And she wanted my help, to persuade you that she’d never do anythin’ like that.’

  He paused and licked his lips.

  ‘Go on.’ Helena smiled encouragingly, realizing that he was nervous.

  ‘The thing is, she says she’d never hurt him, she said it again to me yesterday, but she has a history, you see. Of hurting him. And he never went to the police about it, well you wouldn’t would you, as a man, it’s embarrassing, telling anyone a woman’s been beating you, but he told me. But that’s why you probably don’t know about this, because he never got her charged, so I thought I’d better tell you … I have pictures, look.’

  He bent down to lift his jacket from the floor and fumbled in the inside pocket, pulling out an envelope.

  ‘Hang on, do you mean domestic violence? Gemma O’Connor was violent towards her husband?’ said Helena. She could hear the excitement in her own voice.

  ‘Yeah. Look.’

  Quinn opened the envelope and removed two photos from it, sliding them across the table. Helena and Mike leaned forwards simultaneously. The pictures were of a man they both instantly recognized as Danny O’Connor, standing shirtless against a white wall. In one shot he was facing the camera, in the other facing away. In both pictures, a large area of livid bruising could be seen across the right side of his torso, stretching from just under his arm to below his ribs.

  ‘Ouch. Looks painful,’ said Mike. ‘What happened?’

  ‘That was just a couple of months before they were planning to leave London,’ Quinn said. ‘He said she started kicking him in the ribs for absolutely no reason when he was lying in bed one night. Well, they’d had some sort of minor row a few hours earlier, but he didn’t think it was a big deal, like. She obviously thought differently. The next time I saw him he asked me to take photos, just so he had the evidence, like, if he ever decided to use it. But he always said he could handle it, and he didn’t want to go to the cops … sorry, to you guys. Embarrassing, like I said.’

  ‘And this would happen how often?’ asked Helena, eyes still on the photographs. ‘Are there any other pictures?’

  Quinn shook his head.

  ‘Happened every now and again. But those are the only pictures to prove it, as far as I know.’

  ‘OK.’ Helena looked at Mike, who raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us about this before, Mr O’Connor?’ he said.

  Quinn hesitated. ‘Well, as I said, it made Danny sound a bit soft. If he’d just gone off on a jolly, and he was going to come back, I didn’t want to go back on my promise to him to keep my mouth shut about it. But it’s been a while now, and maybe he’s not coming back, and after yesterday, well, I just thought …’

  Helena nodded.

  ‘I understand, but there’s no shame in it, Mr O’Connor. Domestic violence is domestic violence, no matter who the victim is. But thank you very much for bringing this to our attention.’

  She paused.

  ‘Can I just ask you one more thing? In your opinion, would Gemma O’Connor be capable of more than punching or kicking her hus
band? Do you think she’d have the capacity to hurt him badly? To actually inflict fatal injuries?’

  Quinn sat up very straight in his chair and looked her straight in the eye.

  ‘Do you mean kill him?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Well then yes, I do. I think she’d be very capable of that.’

  Chapter 27

  I spent Friday at home, cleaning the house, making up the spare bedroom for Eva’s return, baking some bread for Saturday morning’s breakfast, sweeping the front porch. As I’d emptied the dustpan into the bin by the front gate, Clive had emerged from next door, shouting a ‘bye, Jenny’, over his shoulder, then stopping abruptly halfway down the path as he spotted me.

  ‘Err … hi, Clive,’ I said awkwardly.

  He opened his mouth, then shut it again, his face reddening. Then he grunted something unintelligible and turned away, stumbling and almost tripping over an uneven flagstone in his apparent rush to make it down his path and into his car, revving the engine loudly and speeding off down the street.

  Shit. I’m the neighbour from hell, aren’t I? They just don’t want to know me, and why would they? I’ve turned their nice quiet street into a circus over the past couple of weeks.

  And so I went back inside and carried on cleaning and baking and tidying. I needed to keep busy, because if I stopped, even for a minute, the thoughts came crowding in, thoughts which even I was no longer sure were logical or rational. Thoughts about Quinn, the man who was Danny’s only relative in the UK, and one of his closest friends. The man who I, after our meeting the previous day, had increasingly begun to think might know more than he was admitting about Danny’s disappearance.

  I kept replaying our conversation in my head.

  They think that whatever happened to him happened weeks ago … they found blood, you see, in our old apartment in London, lots of blood …

  The blood in our Chiswick apartment, and the fact that it had been identified as Danny’s blood, was something the police had never told the press about, something that had never appeared in the newspapers. I didn’t think Bridget knew about it either; she’d certainly never mentioned it to me during our phone calls. So why had Quinn not reacted to that, in any way, when I’d told him about it? Why hadn’t he asked me to elaborate, to explain? Instead, he’d just watched me as I spoke, with that slightly odd expression on his face which I still couldn’t quite work out. And then there had been the surprise and distaste on his face when I’d asked him if he thought Danny might be cheating on me. What had he said?