‘We have to keep an open mind about this entire investigation, until hard evidence takes us in a particular direction. Anyone else?’
She glanced around the room, at a sea of blank faces.
‘OK. Carry on, Devon.’
‘Sure.’
Devon turned back to the board and pointed at the photograph of Danny O’Connor, which had been pinned to the far right-hand side.
‘So – Danny O’Connor. Sounded like a straightforward misper at first, despite his strong physical resemblance to our two murder victims. But now that we’ve discovered he also had a profile on EHU, despite apparently being happily and fairly recently married, we’re looking into his disappearance a little more closely ourselves, instead of handing it over to Missing Persons.’
He picked up a piece of paper from the desk in front of him.
‘Obviously, we have no evidence he’s come to any harm, not at the moment. He does seem to have pretty much vanished into thin air though, and our efforts to trace him so far have drawn a blank. He doesn’t have a mobile phone currently, according to his wife, so that stops us being able to find him via that, and there are definitely a few oddities here. With regard to the EHU app, Gemma was pretty horrified when we told her about it yesterday. She flatly denied any possibility that he could have been, as she put it, “shagging around”. She suggested that somebody, one of his mates, might have put his profile on the site as some sort of joke. And she’s right, that could be what happened. We don’t really have any way of knowing how it got on there – did Danny register himself, or did someone else do it for some sort of stupid wind up? We need to talk to his friends, ask them if they know anything about it, and try to find out if Danny has been up to anything his wife might not know about. Mike, can you take care of that too? Be discreet though, don’t mention the app. We don’t want anything about that discovery getting out at the moment. Just ask them if they think there’s any possibility he might have been playing around. And also check out the email address he used on his profile on the site, see what we can get from that?’
From the back of the room, DC Slater gave him the thumbs up sign.
‘No problem.’
‘Great, thanks. We’ll continue to leave his family in Ireland out of it for now, don’t want to panic them unnecessarily. We’ll obviously need to speak to them at some point fairly soon though if he doesn’t turn up. OK, a couple of other strange things. The fake job – where did Danny go every weekday between Monday, the eleventh of February when he said he was starting his new job, and Thursday, the twenty-eighth of February, which was the last day his wife saw him? He didn’t drive, so wherever he went he was using his bike. Gemma O’Connor says she has absolutely no idea. But the guy couldn’t make himself invisible. Somebody, somewhere must know where he was spending all those hours every day.’
He pointed to two new photos on the board, under the image of Danny.
‘We took these yesterday afternoon when we visited Gemma. They live in a very nice house in Clifton, and this is the back courtyard, where O’Connor kept his bike. And this is the alleyway that runs behind the row of houses, so he would have gone out through that back gate and cycled along there every day to access the main road. Our problem is that there aren’t any CCTV cameras in the immediate vicinity, so we’re trying to pick him up on private cameras, those used by homes and businesses in the area. Not knowing which direction he was going is problematic of course, because we’re going to have to cast the net wide, which will take time.’
Helena spoke again.
‘And again, where he was going every day might well be irrelevant to our enquiry. It could be anything, and if he was just having an affair or whatever, taking some time out from work, having some sort of breakdown, well, all very sad but none of our business. Tough thing to say, but it’s really only if he’s dead too that he’s any concern of ours, otherwise we can hand him back to Missing Persons. But with the dating app connection, we do need to pursue it for now, see if it can