really did, someone who might be able to shed some light on his recent behaviour, someone who might even know the truth behind some of the secrets he had clearly been keeping. His mother? No, definitely not. His brother Liam? Danny was probably far closer to him than he was to his mother, but Liam would clearly not be capable of being a reliable source of information. And then it had come to me – Quinn. As his first cousin, son of his late dad’s brother Michael, and of a similar age to Danny, they’d known each other all their lives. Quinn had moved to London from Ireland around the same time as Danny had, and although their careers and lifestyles had been very different – Quinn worked on building sites and spent most of his spare time drinking in west London pubs – the two had remained close. Quinn had been on Danny’s stag night and had been the only one of his family to attend our small register office wedding. If anyone knew Danny, he did.
It had struck me, once or twice, especially after Danny’s family had finally heard about his disappearance, that it was slightly odd that Quinn hadn’t been in touch with me. Living in London, surely he would have seen the newspaper headlines? Then I’d realized that although he obviously had Danny’s old mobile number, and our old apartment landline, he wouldn’t have had a number for me. He could have got hold of it if he’d tried, through Danny’s mother, but maybe the family were keeping him up to date with developments, I’d thought, and let him slip from my mind. I probably should have called him myself, really, but I’d never been a hundred per cent sure what to make of Quinn. I knew, from Danny, that he’d regularly got himself into trouble with the police growing up, minor stuff like vandalism and pilfering from shops, although he’d apparently grown out of that in his late teens, training as a bricklayer, moving to the UK when work in Ireland proved hard to come by. He was currently single, as far as I knew, having split with a girl he’d been seeing for a while the previous summer, and although Danny had always described him as ‘great craic’ and ‘a real decent fella, deep down’, on the few occasions we’d met he’d seemed pleasant enough but always a little reserved, chatting mainly to Danny and seemingly reluctant to engage in any form of lengthy conversation with me.
‘He’s a bit intimidated, I think,’ Danny had said, as we’d walked to the tube hand in hand after an evening spent with Quinn at a pub near Victoria station a few months before we’d decided to leave London. ‘He left school with no qualifications, failed all his Leaving Cert exams. He doesn’t really hang out with brain boxes like you. He doesn’t know what to say.’
I’d squeezed his hand, laughing.
‘But you’re even more of a brain box than I am, and he chats away to you! How does that work then?’
‘Ahh, sure we’ve known each other since we were kids, it’s different. We’re family. He’s like a second brother to me. He likes you fine though, don’t be worrying about that.’
I hadn’t been worried, not really. You can’t get on brilliantly with everyone in life, I reasoned, and Quinn was just a very different sort of guy to the ones I was friendly with – a gruff, macho in an old-fashioned-sort-of-way bloke, who had four sugars in his tea and had looked slightly horrified at the sight of the pink rose buttonholes I’d organized for the male guests at our wedding. But he’d always been there for Danny, a link to his past, a solid, hardworking, loyal presence, and that was fine by me.
I had his number in my phone – I’d asked Danny for it before the wedding, wanting to make sure I had contact details for all of the guests, just in case of any last-minute changes – and, after a moment’s hesitation (What if he has seen all the press coverage, and thinks I’m responsible for Danny’s disappearance? What if he just puts the phone down on me?) I hit the call button.
‘Hello?’
‘Hi – Quinn? It’s Gemma. Danny’s Gemma.’
For a few seconds … three, four … there was silence on the line. But just as I’d opened my mouth to speak again, he said: