hand, fingers digging painfully into my flesh. I gulped in some air, trying to stay calm. I just needed to get him out, make him go …
‘Sssssh. I trusted you, Gemma. I wouldn’t have told you if I hadn’t. I trusted you, and you’ve let me down. So, to use a cliché …’ he said, and then paused, his grip on my waist tightening.
I swallowed hard, and the air in the room suddenly seemed thick, heavy, my breathing laboured. SHIT. Shit, shit, shit. I had misjudged this, hadn’t I? Totally misjudged him, completely misjudged how unhinged he was. Could he … no, he couldn’t, could he? He wouldn’t. Not me … so think, Gemma, think …
‘Danny, please, I’m sorry, I’ll …’
He wasn’t listening, and there was a darkness to his gaze now, a malevolence. My breath caught in my throat.
‘Danny … please …’
He shook his head, eyes fixed on mine.
‘As I was saying, to use a cliché, I’ve told you my story, and now I’m going to have to kill you.’
And slowly, very slowly, he moved his hand from my face, and slid it inside his jacket pocket. And he pulled out a knife.
Chapter 44
Helena felt sick, her stomach churning. They had buggered this up so badly, and the thought was almost unbearable. What a bloody screw-up, she thought. And yet, the discovery of Danny O’Connor’s DNA on the hammer used to half kill Declan Bailey in that London alleyway had suddenly made everything fall into place. She’d been so focused on Gemma O’Connor, so certain that the woman was lying to them, and the circumstantial evidence had all fitted so neatly too; the two murders in London, not far from where she’d lived, the two in Bristol, happening shortly after she moved in, even the Declan Bailey attack, happening as it did on the day she happened to be visiting London, and just up the road from where she’d been having her meeting in Victoria. Even the blood in the bedroom of her old apartment, convincing them that she’d attacked and probably killed her husband there too. It had all fitted. Except, of course, that it hadn’t, had it? Because Danny O’Connor had faked that bedroom attack. And if it was Danny who had carried out the Victoria attack, as they now believed he had, then it stood to reason that he’d also carried out the others. She wasn’t a hundred per cent certain of that, right now, but she was ninety per cent of the way there. Why exactly he had felt the need to murder men who looked like him she still hadn’t worked out, but there was clearly a lot the man had been hiding from everyone, his wife included, and she was sure that once they found him, they’d get the truth out of him. If they found him of course. Because they’d lost him, hadn’t they? The man was, very likely, a highly dangerous serial killer, and they’d had him, quite literally within their grasp. And now they’d bloody lost him. And that was something they needed to put right, and fast.
‘Five minutes, boss.’
‘Thanks, Devon. He won’t be there, but we have to rule it out just in case.’
She was in the passenger seat, Devon at the wheel, as they drove through the already dark streets of Bristol, heading for the O’Connors’ Clifton house. The hunt for Danny had only been going on for a matter of hours, but already she was beginning to despair. They’d managed to keep it from the press so far, but she knew that if they didn’t find him soon, maybe by the morning, she’d have to release it, make an appeal to the public for help in finding him. It was that, as well as everything else, that was making her feel sick; the wrath of her superiors, the scathing newspaper stories that would surely appear in the next few days. She could see the headlines already.
BUNGLING POLICE LET SERIAL KILLER GO FREE
IS THIS THE GREATEST COP COCK-UP OF ALL TIME?
FEAR ON THE STREETS OF BRITAIN AS SERIAL KILLER ESCAPES POLICE
So far, the media blackout had been successful, but it had been the only thing that had. She’d done everything she could in the past few hours, but it all felt like too little, too late. In London, officers had searched Quinn O’Connor’s flat, just in case, and were visiting his known hangouts, local bars and snooker halls, trying to find someone who might know where either of