and Devon turned to study the board for a moment, where a photograph of Gemma had been pinned next to that of her husband. Then he cleared his throat.
‘OK, so yes, Gemma O’Connor is now a person of interest. But there are a few things which don’t entirely add up. First, when we showed her the photographs of the bloodstained room, she seemed genuinely shocked. In fact, she looked like she was going to pass out for a bit, didn’t she guv?’
He looked at Helena and she shrugged and nodded.
‘If she did attack Danny in that room then, which has to be one of our major lines of enquiry now, she’s a very good actress. In addition to that, she knew we were going to search that apartment a few days ago and didn’t react at all when we told her that. If she knew what we were going to find when we got there, I’d expect at least some reaction from her, some attempt to stop us going until she could cover her tracks, maybe.’
‘Could just be the good actress thing again though. Or, if she has done something to her husband, maybe she’s in some sort of denial, post traumatic shock, something like that. She was certainly in a bit of a state last night, sweating, crying, the lot, wasn’t she?’ Helena said.
‘She was. And it could be PTSD, possibly, yes. I’ve started the ball rolling to access her medical records by the way. See if there’s any history of mental illness, violence, anything like that. She has no criminal record, but it would be interesting to see what else we can find out about her background.’
‘Good.’ Helena gave him a thumbs up sign. ‘OK, go on.’
‘As we already know, and we put this to Gemma last night, there’s no evidence of any email exchanges between her and Danny since the end of January, despite her claims to the contrary. However, there are a number of emails from Gemma’s account to Danny’s in the past week, in the days after she claims he went missing. A number of attempted Skype calls too, all of which have gone unanswered. She’s told us she tried numerous times to contact him after he went missing, in a desperate attempt to track him down. If she knew he’d died five weeks ago, would she be trying to email and Skype him like that?’
‘Could easily just be an attempt to throw us off the scent, make it look like she thought he was still alive. Just like all her calls to his mates, and to the hospitals and so on. Could all be part of her act.’
This came from DC Tara Lemming, sitting on the edge of a desk in the centre of the room. Devon nodded an acknowledgement.
‘That’s true. So let’s just look at the timeline for a moment, and assume for a moment that Gemma did seriously assault, or kill, her husband. It would have to have worked like this.’
He turned to the board, placing his finger at the left-hand end of a long red line, above which had been written various dates and comments.
‘A message was sent from Danny O’Connor’s email address to ACR Security on Thursday, the thirty-first of January, informing them that he would no longer be taking up his position with them in Bristol. Did Gemma actually send this message, and not Danny himself, because she was planning to kill him, or indeed had already killed him, and didn’t want alarm bells to ring when he failed to turn up at his new place of work?’
He ran his finger a little further along the line.
‘Sometime on Friday, the first of February, somebody dropped the Chiswick apartment keys off at the landlord’s office, with a note saying there’d been a change of plan and that the apartment had now been fully vacated. The landlord had already told the O’Connors that he was heading off on holiday for a few weeks and wouldn’t be able to check over the place until he got back. As it turned out, he didn’t actually get back to it until this week when we visited. So, if Gemma did kill Danny in the apartment, she most likely did that on the thirtieth or thirty-first of January. Knowing the landlord was away, she wouldn’t have been worried about being disturbed. But then – and this is the bit I’m struggling with – she’d have had to somehow move the body out of that apartment