their highest priority, alongside that of establishing the whereabouts of missing man Danny O’Connor, who vanished from his home in Bristol two weeks ago.
‘Gemma? Howah ya?’
I jumped as a man suddenly sat down in the chair opposite me, pint in hand.
‘Quinn! Sorry, I was miles away. How are you? Thanks so much for coming.’
I leaned across the table, and we exchanged awkward pecks on the cheek.
‘No hassle. Haven’t got long though, as I said. Big job on today and the boss is a right bastard.’
I smiled and told him I wouldn’t keep him long. He looked tired, I thought; a short, muscular man with closely cropped dark hair slightly receding at the temples, he was normally clean-shaven but had a couple of days’ worth of patchy stubble on his chin, and his denim shirt was faded and creased, the large tattoo of a skull and crossbones on the right side of his neck creeping above the grubby collar.
‘So, you’re worried about Danny?’ He asked the question and then looked away, eyes flitting around the bar before returning to mine.
‘I’m worried sick, Quinn. I just know he’d never deliberately go off without telling me where he was, even if he was in terrible trouble. He just wouldn’t. And that’s why I’m so scared. The police think he’s dead, and I’m starting to think he might be too. But they think I had something to do with it – I mean you know I’ve been questioned, don’t you, you’ve seen the papers? And this hasn’t been made public yet, but Quinn they also think that whatever happened to him happened weeks ago … they found blood, you see, in our old apartment in London, lots of blood, and I have no idea what happened there, he seemed fine when he moved down to Bristol, but the police think he never made it to Bristol at all. They think I’m lying about everything, and I’m not, they’re looking in completely the wrong direction, and if they keep looking at me they’re never going to find him, because I don’t know where he is. The whole thing is just ludicrous, that they could even think I was capable of killing my husband, and maybe the others too, it’s just insane, but that’s why I need to try and find Danny, or find out what might have happened to him, not just for his sake but for mine too.’
The words had spilled out of me in a torrent, and I stopped talking suddenly, aware that Quinn was sitting in silence, staring at me, an odd look on his face.
‘You don’t … you don’t think I had anything to do with it, please tell me you don’t?’ I said desperately. ‘I mean, you know how much I love him, right?’
He said nothing for a moment, still looking at me with that odd expression, then his face cleared.
‘Course I don’t,’ he said. He picked up his pint and drank slowly, then put the glass down again and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.
‘But what do you want me to do? I’m as gutted about him going AWOL as you are, but I don’t know where he is, Gemma. I don’t know anything.’
I took a deep breath.
‘I don’t know. I don’t know if you can help, but you know him so well, and you’ve known him for so long, and I just thought … look, there’s been a lot of weird stuff that’s emerged since he vanished, and I just wanted to run it past you, see if you can shed any light on it. Can I do that? I actually made a list, because there’s so much.’
I rummaged in my bag which was lying on the table in front of me and pulled out my notebook, flicking through the pages until I found the list. Quinn looked vaguely amused for a moment, then nodded.
‘Sure. Shoot.’
And so I told him. I told him how careful Danny had been not to bump into any of our neighbours after he moved to Bristol, how he never answered the front door, how he always seemed to make sure he left in the dark and came home in the dark, and how I’d realized, too late, that he must have been lying low, in some sort of serious trouble. I told him that Danny had lied to me about starting his new job, and how I now thought he’d been hiding out in a local gym every day instead.