The Perfect Couple. Jackie Kabler
didn’t seem to be listening.
‘Where is it, dammit! This bag … sorry. I wasn’t sure what you’d need, but I thought a photo …’
She raised her eyes to Helena, finally pulling an envelope from her bag and sliding a picture out of it.
‘I showed your colleague here when he came down earlier. I don’t know why I put it away again, I can never find anything in this stupid bag at the best of times. This is the first one I could find. I’m in it too as it’s a wedding photo, obviously, but I can get you a better one, one of him on his own, later, I have loads on my phone, I just need to look through them and find a good one, but I thought you might need a hard copy one and I just wanted to get the ball rolling, do something …’
Her words came out in a rush, tumbling over each other, and she stopped talking abruptly, eyes still glistening with tears. Devon reached out and took the photograph, placing it on the table between himself and Helena.
‘Thanks, Gemma. Guv, take a look.’
He looked meaningfully at Helena, and she glanced at the photo, then looked again, properly. Shit. SHIT. Now she understood. Her stomach lurched. There was Gemma, glowingly pretty in a simple white satin shift dress, hair piled high in an elaborate up-do, one hand clutching a bouquet of white lilies, the other gripping the hand of a smiling young man. Dark hair, curly. Thick dark eyebrows, dark brown eyes. A man who appeared, like his wife, to be in his early thirties. A man called Danny O’Connor. But a man who, at a quick glance, could quite easily have been Mervin Elliott. Or Ryan Jones. Or their brother, at least. The same build, the same colouring, the same look. Christ, what’s going on here? She took a deep breath, trying to stay calm. No point in jumping the gun, she thought. Danny O’Connor was, according to his wife, missing. Not dead. There was no body, no evidence he’d come to any harm. So, treat this as a standard missing person, then. For now, anyway. She pushed the photo aside and turned to Devon, nodding slowly.
‘Thanks for calling me down, Devon. OK, Gemma, let’s get some details. You said you last saw him on Thursday morning, the twenty-eighth? What time did you leave?’
Gemma took a deep breath.
‘About seven. We had breakfast together at six, got up extra-early to make it a special one, before we both went off to work … Danny cooked a fry-up. I had to go on a press trip, to a new spa hotel in the Cotswolds. I’m a journalist, a feature writer, freelance. I used to do hard news, but I prefer mostly lifestyle stuff nowadays. You know, fashion and beauty and travel, that sort of thing? I have a monthly column in Camille magazine but I do other bits and pieces too. It’s mostly from home but a few times a month I get a chance to get out for a bit, go away for a night, so I’d really been looking forward …’ Her voice tailed off, and the animated expression that had appeared briefly on her face as she talked about her work faded, the anguished look back in her eyes.
‘OK, great. So you said goodbye and headed off and then what? When did you next speak to Danny?’
Helena was scribbling in her notebook.
‘Well, I didn’t speak to him, not exactly. We only moved into our new place a few weeks ago, we just moved down here from London, and we haven’t got a landline phone, and there was a delay with Danny’s new company getting him a mobile, so he hasn’t got a phone at all at the moment. So we’ve been communicating by email for the past few weeks. Bit of a pain, but it works most of the time. He emailed me late on Thursday night, about eleven, just to say goodnight. Reminded me he’d be cooking dinner when I got home on Friday, that sort of thing. Just a normal email. I replied, told him I loved him, and that was it. I haven’t … haven’t heard from him since.’
The tears were back. She reached for a tissue, her hand shaking.
Helena nodded.
‘Right. So you came home on Friday night, that’s the first of March, and there was no sign of him? And you said as far as you know he hasn’t taken anything with him? Passport, clothes? Nothing he wouldn’t normally take on a work day? No note left or anything, I presume?’
Gemma shook her head.
‘No note. And yes, everything’s still there, passport, clothes, the lot. So he probably hasn’t skipped the country at least.’
She smiled weakly.
‘And you said you’ve called his office, his friends, family? And the hospitals too?’
Gemma nodded.
‘Yes, everyone I could think of. I couldn’t get hold of anyone at his office, it’s closed, and I don’t have numbers for all his friends, but I called all the ones I had. Nobody’s seen or heard from him. I didn’t call his family though. Most of them live in Ireland and his mum’s elderly and … well, I didn’t want to worry them, not yet.’
‘Yes, probably a good idea not to panic his family, for now at least.’
Helena gave the woman a brief smile.
‘I’ll get a list of the hospitals you’ve tried and Danny’s work address from you in a moment, Gemma, and we’ll need his date of birth, what he was wearing when you last saw him, your current address and where you recently moved from, some specifics like that, OK? But first just a few more general questions, if you can bear it? Did Danny’s behaviour change at all recently? I mean, did he seem worried about anything, distracted, anything like that? Was he having any problems – medical, financial, that sort of thing? Was he misusing drugs, or alcohol?’
Gemma was shaking her head and frowning.
‘No, nothing like that at all. We’ve been really happy – it was his idea initially to move here from London, and I can work from anywhere so I was fine with it too, delighted in fact, and he’s been really excited about his new job, and a better lifestyle. We’ve been busy non-stop since we moved in, of course, just getting the house sorted, but it’s really lovely. We’re renting for now, just until we decide exactly where we want to live, but it’s such a great place, big rooms and this beautiful courtyard, we both love it, and … well, no. None of those things. He was fit and healthy and happy, and I honestly can’t think of a single reason why … why …’ She stopped talking and swallowed hard.
Helena was still making notes.
‘Does he use social media? Facebook, Twitter, Instagram? Any of them?’
Gemma shook her head again.
‘No. Neither of us do really. He doesn’t at all, and I have an Instagram account for work purposes but I don’t post very often. Danny’s quite anti-social media actually. Says it’s damaging, that people end up comparing themselves to all these other people who seem to have these perfect glamourous lives, and it’s all rubbish really. I’m not so extreme – I think it can be quite useful, if you follow things you’re really interested in. And it’s kind of part of the job when you work in the media, it’s expected. But to answer your question, no, I’ve never known Danny to have a social media account.’
Devon, who’d been sitting quietly, cleared his throat.
‘How long have you been together, Gemma? You said you’ve only been married a year or so?’
She turned to look at him.
‘We haven’t been together long at all really. It all happened quite quickly. I hate the term “whirlwind romance”, but it was, kind of.’ She gave a little laugh, her cheeks flushing. ‘We met online, about eighteen months ago. We’d only been dating for four months when he proposed, and we got married three months later, in March last year. It’ll be our first wedding anniversary in a couple of weeks. So, as I said, all pretty quick really. But when you know, you know, I guess.’
‘I suppose so, yes.’ Devon smiled, then his face turned serious again.
‘So … well, I hate to ask this, but … is there any chance that he was seeing somebody else, having an affair? It’s just that sometimes when people go missing …’