At his desk near the window, DC Slater raised his head.
She gestured at him. ‘Can you come over here for a minute?’
She turned back to her DS.
‘And Devon, can you give Mike a copy of that new photo of Danny O’Connor, the one Gemma sent across earlier? It’s just an idea, but …’ she looked at the eager face of Mike Slater, who had joined them, ‘Mike, DS Clarke is going to give you a photograph. It’s of a man called Danny O’Connor, who seems to have gone missing in slightly strange circumstances. He’s very, very similar in physical appearance to our two murder victims which is just making us slightly nervous, and he’s not single, he’s fairly recently married, but it’s just a thought, something I’d like to rule out … could you just humour me and have a look to see if he’s on that EHU site too? I mean, I’m sure he won’t be, but can you access it to search it, without paying to join?’
Mike nodded.
‘Yes, the general public can’t, but they gave me a code so I could look at Mervin’s and Ryan’s profiles, and it gives me access to the search facility. I’ll give it a go.’
They didn’t have to wait long. Ten minutes later there was an elated yell from across the room. Helena and Devon stood simultaneously, and in seconds were peering over Mike’s shoulder, Helena aware her heart had started beating uncomfortably quickly.
‘Well … what have you found?’ she asked. On Mike’s screen was a search page, where he’d clearly been filling in details of Danny’s physical appearance, hair colour and so on.
‘OK, well I searched for his name and nothing that matched him came up, although that’s not unusual, lots of people use nicknames and so on, on sites like this. So I put in all the basic info from his missing person report instead. And when I hit search …’
He clicked on the red search button at the bottom of the screen. Immediately the screen changed, a dozen or so photographs of dark-haired young men flashing up. Helena scanned them, looking for a familiar face, and then gasped.
‘There! Middle of the second row. Is that …?’
Devon leaned closer to the screen, hand on Mike’s shoulder. Mike was grinning widely.
‘That’s him. That’s bloody him. Holy cow,’ Devon said slowly.
‘I think it is too. He’s on there under a different name, calling himself Sean, look. Not much personal info in the profile, but it does say he works in IT. I’m pretty sure it’s him too, from comparing the two photos. What do you think, boss?’
Mike looked up at Helena. Her eyes were glued to the image on the screen, her brain trying to process what she was seeing and what it could possibly mean. It had only been a stab in the dark, a wild hunch. She hadn’t expected to actually be right. She cleared her throat.
‘I think, Mike, that you’re bang on. I have no idea what’s going on here, or why on earth an apparently happily married man has a profile on a trendy dating site, but that’s definitely Danny O’Connor.’
Chapter 7
I was slumped on the sofa, shivering violently despite the warmth of the room. What was going on? My head throbbed, and I felt disorientated, dizzy, as if I’d had too much to drink, although not a drop or morsel had passed my lips since the police had left that morning. The thought of food made me feel ill. How could I prepare a meal, sit down and eat it like a normal person, when everything I thought of as normal seemed to be crumbling around me? Danny hadn’t been going to work, hadn’t even started his new job. How was that even possible? For three weeks, he’d been leaving the house in the morning, dressed for the office, heading off on his bike and returning long after dark in the evening. He’d seemed to be enjoying his new role enormously, seemed so happy, so … so Danny. Nothing different about him whatsoever. And now I’d been informed that all of it, all of it, had been a lie. Why? Why would he make something like that up, pretend to be going to work when he wasn’t? And if he wasn’t working at ACR Security, where I thought he was, where he said he was, then where the hell had he been spending his