by Tim Weaver
‘They’ve hardly spoken in three years.’
‘So?’
‘So why would she assume he’s missing and not just in another spiral? Healy kept in touch with his boys, but he was hardly Dad of the Year. Sometimes he could go weeks between calls to them, especially recently.’
‘Yeah, but it’s not been weeks. It’s been nine months.’
‘It’s longer than usual, obviously, but it’s not unprecedented. Healy went over a year without speaking to me, and I’ve probably been as close to him as anyone since he and Gemma split up. So you can bet he’s been the same with her. You can bet he’s been the same with his boys too, especially if things have gone seriously south. He wouldn’t want them to see him like that. The way he was back in January …’ I paused, looked at her. ‘He was in a bad place, even after I’d bailed him out. Who knows how much worse it got afterwards?’
‘Maybe he failed to pay Gemma child support.’
‘His sons are both adults.’
‘Maybe he owes her money.’
Her eyes returned to me, and we could both see what had gone unspoken: the only reason she could think of for Gemma reporting him missing was Healy owing money. Yet I knew, unequivocally, that wouldn’t be the reason. Healy was many things – by the end he was destitute – but he wouldn’t run because of a debt.
I leaned back, watching cattle grazing in the distance, moving through the marshland like ships on a sea of grass. ‘So, are you asking me to find him?’
‘I’m not asking you anything,’ she said.
Except we both knew that wasn’t true.
He’d gone more than a year without picking up the phone to me until he’d called in January. When our paths had crossed before that, in the search for the man who’d killed his daughter, there’d been no contact from him for the following seven months. This was his MO, his pattern. If I was apathetic to him, or perhaps realistic about the way he was programmed, I’d have given Craw a prediction: days, weeks, months from now – when things got really desperate – Healy would finally ring me, because he’d run out of options. And yet, intuitively, there was something I couldn’t shake, a bad feeling.
Why would Gemma report him missing?
‘You want me to speak to her?’ I asked.
‘Gemma? I think that would be a good idea.’
‘You’re not even going to source his missing persons report for me?’
She shook her head. ‘I can’t. I’m sorry.’
I saw something in her face: frustration at not being able to help me, but a little relief too. This way, she didn’t disturb any ghosts from her past, but she got to find out first-hand what had happened to a man she’d once rated so highly.
‘So Gemma filed the report in Barnet,’ I said to her, ‘which probably means she’s not living in the house she shared with Healy in St Albans any more.’
Craw nodded once, reached into the pocket of her trousers and brought out a slip of paper. ‘This is the address listed on her driver’s licence.’
‘What happened to you not getting involved?’
‘Yeah, well, this is where it begins and ends. She’s using her maiden name again now: Doherty.’ She paused, eyeing me. It was clear she thought she saw something else in my expression. ‘This was a sixty-second PNC search.’
I didn’t say anything.
But she wasn’t done: ‘Searching the computer for Gemma’s street address isn’t going to raise any flags. Accessing a missing persons report on a disgraced cop that sold me down the river and almost burned an entire case to the ground – that’s completely different.’
‘Okay.’
‘I’m glad we’re clear, then.’
‘We’re clear,’ I said, opening up the piece of paper.
The address was Bells Hill, on the western fringes of Barnet.
‘You can use me as a sounding board if you want,’ Craw said quietly, and when I looked up, she was glancing left and right, as if someone might have heard her offering to help. When her eyes pinged back to me, there was a focus to her; resolute, unwilling to negotiate. ‘I’m happy to discuss things with you.’
‘But?’
She let out a long breath, one that spoke of so much painful history. ‘But I can’t be audited and logged looking for him in the database. I can’t get burned by Healy again.’
I didn’t particularly want to get burned by him either. But maybe, quietly, Craw was acknowledging what I’d always tried to hide from myself: that in the end, when I believed in a cause, getting burned wouldn’t ever be enough to stop me.
The streets shimmered with a mix of heat and exhaust fumes as I made my way back to the car. Summer should have been long gone by now; instead, every air-conditioning unit on every building was humming, doors were wide open, kids were covered in sunblock. On some of them it was smeared like war paint, yet to be rubbed in properly, and as that thought came to me, so did another: two other children, long gone, and their mother, all three of them slaughtered and cast aside; and the cop who had become their vessel. For most people at the Met, that family were memories from another time, words on a page in a file.
But not for Colm Healy.
I was still chewing on that when I finally reached the car. It was a creaking eighteen-year-old BMW, and as I pulled the driver’s door open, it wheezed like an old man and the heat of the interior crashed against me like a wave. I got in and fired it up, trying to clear my head, but Craw’s words were on a loop.
You may have been the last person to see him alive.
Grabbing my phone, I dialled the last number I had for Healy, a mobile I’d bought him from a supermarket back in January. It rang continually for twenty seconds and then hit the generic network voicemail message. ‘Healy, it’s Raker,’ I said, after the tone. ‘People are concerned about you. You need to call me back.’
Next, I logged into the email account I’d set up for him at the motel. He’d had another one before that, which I didn’t have the username or password for, but he’d stopped using it as things began unravelling in his personal life. The new account had been an attempt to motivate him, to focus him on the process of applying for jobs. It was cheap psychology, and we both knew it, but it meant I now had access to it. Except there was nothing to find: the inbox had been in stasis since January, and the last Sent messages and deleted emails were for job applications before 16 January. After our argument, he’d washed his hands of it all.
Phoning Directory Enquiries, I got the landline number for Gemma’s new address in Barnet and asked to be connected. It rang for thirty seconds until an answerphone kicked in. I listened to her voice, her Irish accent subdued after living in London for so long. The last time I’d spoken to her was at the funeral of their daughter, Leanne, in November 2011, so I wasn’t sure if she’d remember me or not. Given that, it was going to be better to meet her in person: to look her in the face and reassure her; to discover her reasons for reporting him missing. That was key. When we’d met in January, Healy had still been wearing his wedding ring. Three years on from their split, I doubted Gemma would be doing the same. Yet something had compelled her to go to the police.
Something had drawn her back to him.
‘Gemma,’ I said, after the tone had chimed, ‘it’s David Raker. I’m not sure if you remember me, but I’ve just heard about Colm, and I’d really like the opportunity to talk to you. Maybe I might be able to help in some way.’
I left her my number and hung up.
11
Stuck in traffic on the way home, I hunted down the details of Healy’s sons Ciaran and Liam.
The eldest, Ciaran, was straightforward to find: he worked in Enfield, at a small insurance firm, his photo included on their website. Liam was even easier: he was a second-year Art History student at the University of Essex, and seemed to have catalogued his student life in pictures on an unprotected Facebook page.
I punched Ciaran’s work number into my phone, my thumb hovering over the Call button. But then
I backed out again. Talking to him at work about his missing father wasn’t the right approach, plus I hadn’t even had the opportunity to speak to Gemma yet. What if she didn’t want me getting involved in the search for Healy? What if she had someone else looking for him?
The idea gave me pause. Could I just step back without finding out the truth about him? Could I accept not knowing? Could I let Gail, April and Abigail Clark continue to rot on a hard drive at the Met, without knowing everything about their case? Returning to my phone’s address book, I realized I’d already made my mind up.
I couldn’t.
The person I was looking for was Ewan Tasker. He was a semi-retired ex-police officer who’d worked for the National Criminal Intelligence Service, its successor SOCA, and was now an advisor to its current incarnation, the National Crime Agency. Back when I was a journalist, our relationship had begun as a marriage of convenience – he’d fed me stories he wanted out in the open, I’d broken them first – but, over time, we’d become good friends. He’d been the one who had got me a copy of the Clark family murder file back in January, but that was gone now, left on a reception desk for a man I thought I probably wouldn’t see again.
‘Raker,’ he said when he picked up.
‘How you doing, Task?’
He paused briefly, and the sound of background conversation faded. He’d moved somewhere private. ‘Yeah, all good, old friend. So what can I do for you?’
‘A couple of quick things, neither of which should be too difficult. The first is a missing persons report. It was opened back in August at Barnet. The name of the person who filed it is a Gemma Doherty – G for Gemma, no c in Doherty.’
‘Got it. Who’s missing?’
‘His name’s Colm Healy. C-O-L-M.’
A brief pause. ‘Healy. Wasn’t he a pal of yours?’
‘Something like that.’
‘He was on the Snatcher task force, right?’
‘There’s nothing wrong with your memory, old man.’
‘I heard that was his last gig.’
‘Yeah, he got fired from the task force. It’s a long story.’
‘One for another time maybe,’ Task said, but didn’t probe any further. That was what I liked about him. ‘Okay. No problem. What’s the second thing?’
‘I don’t know if you remember, but back in January you sent me a file for a triple murder down in New Cross. This would have been July 2010. A mother and her two daughters. No arrest was ever made. The family name was Clark.’
‘Vaguely.’
‘It doesn’t matter. I need another copy of it.’
‘Okay. Is that Clark without an e?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Okay, I’m on it.’
‘I appreciate that. Thanks, Task.’
As I sat there, I thought of Healy, picturing him coming back to the motel in the days after our argument and being given the murder file at reception. I’d already called them to see if they still had a record of his stay, which they didn’t. But when I brought up the subject of the case file, and whether it had been passed on to him as I’d requested, the woman I spoke to said that rang a bell with her, and that she was certain that it had. It also helped to spark off a memory of when Healy might have officially checked out. ‘I’m sure it was shortly afer I gave him that file,’ she said. ‘Maybe one or two days.’
If he’d continued to carry the casework with him over the past nine months, there was simply no way he’d have allowed it to gather dust. He was going to work it again. For Healy, the murder of April and Abigail Clark, the death of their mother, was a broken levee – so maybe the file would be the most effective lead in finding him, because it was all that mattered to him. Everything that washed through afterwards started in a single moment: the moment that killer got away with it. Every cop had a case that had stalled on them, leads that had fizzled out, suspects they couldn’t put at the scene. Healy had those things too – and all that followed.
All his broken promises.
All his lies.
All his failures.
Everything You Love
74 days, 12 hours, 33 minutes before
They came across the grass in front of the flats, the dog running on ahead, the girls either side of him, hands in his, telling him about a vegetable patch they’d planted at school. He listened to them without interrupting, loving the excitement in their voices, the way they made everything sound so new, as if they were the first people in the world to have ever planted a potato. Sometimes, when he was alone with them like this, he became quite emotional, glimpsing a point in time – perhaps only two or three years away – when the girls would no longer take to him so quickly and innocently, when the purity of childhood became the fickleness and cynicism of the teenage years. In the months after he’d met Gail, he’d been surprised at how fast the girls had accepted him as part of the family, and he didn’t want that to change. The idea of being alone again scared him. He loved this sense of belonging.
He loved being a part of their lives.
Putting an arm around each of their shoulders and bringing them into him, he said to them, ‘You two will never understand how special you are to me.’
They didn’t say anything in return, but that was okay: sometimes kids forgot to say those things, or didn’t realize their importance, never imagining the weight similar words could carry when they came from a child. Instead they wrestled free of his bear hug, first April, then Abigail, and tore off across the grass, in the vague direction of the dog and the looming shadow of Searle House.
He broke out into a run himself and chased them across the grass, then – once they were all inside – up the stairwell. The dog ran on ahead, the girls half a flight further back, screaming with delight as his best evil laugh echoed off the walls. ‘I’m coming for you!’ he joked, and they moved even faster, both of them trying to be first, one sister attempting to get in front of the other. Twelve floors up, they started to flag, so as he finally caught up with them, he told them to pause and catch their breath, and they walked the rest of the way together. After a while, the girls started singing a song they’d learned in choir.
When they reached the flat, he let them both in, and the smell immediately hit them. ‘Fajitas!’ April squealed with delight, shedding her coat, leaving it on the hallway floor and running through to the kitchen where her mother was cooking dinner. Abigail shrugged hers off too, equally excited, but in a quieter, steadier way: the girls were identical twins, born within minutes of one another according to Gail, but he’d already noticed there were differences between the two of them; small, barely perceptible differences, but differences he’d begun to know so well.
Once Abigail had hung her coat on the end of a peg, she looked back at him. ‘Do you think Mum remembered the sour cream, Mal?’
‘I’m sure she did, honey.’
He hung up his own coat, took the dog off its leash and let it escape through to the living room. Then he followed Abigail into their tiny box kitchen, where Gail was frying some pieces of chicken. April was sitting on the window ledge to her right, back pressed against the glass, the London skyline ashen and hazy in the distance behind her. He leaned in and kissed Gail on the cheek.
‘The girls told me they don’t want fajitas tonight, Mummy,’ he said, winking. ‘They’d much rather have a big plate of vegetables.’
‘We didn’t say that!’ April shouted.
He broke out into a laugh. ‘Oh, I must have misheard you.’
‘Did you remember the sour cream?’ Abigail asked.
‘Of course I did,’ Gail replied, pointing to the fridge. ‘You only reminded me about seven thousand times, Abs.’ One hand swishing the chicken around the pan, Gail reached out to Abigail with the other and pulled her in. ‘Why don’t you and your sister go and watch TV for ten minutes? Mal will set the table and call you when it’s ready – and then we can all tuck in.’
After the girls were gone, he took April’s place at the window a
nd he and Gail started talking about their days. Gail worked three mornings a week at a library just down the road from them and was studying for an Open University degree in the evenings. He worked five days a week as a delivery driver but always finished early on a Friday, so he’d come home and take the girls out with the dog, and Gail would cook something special. Fridays were treat night in their flat, and this week the girls had chosen fajitas.
‘I’m going to get changed,’ he said.
‘Be quick. I’m almost done here.’
He kissed her on the cheek again, then headed across the hallway to their bedroom. Like every other room in the flat, it was small and slightly shabby, but they’d been good enough to accept him here, and he was used to this place now: living on top of one another, the smell of damp in the kitchen, the lack of natural light in the rooms. It was all they could afford for now, and until either he or Gail landed better jobs, or maybe won the lottery, he knew they’d make the best of it.
As he was taking off his trousers, his mobile started buzzing in the pocket. He pulled it out, dumped his trousers on the bed and looked at the display. An unknown number. Pressing Answer, he wedged the phone between his ear and shoulder, and began looking through the wardrobe for his tracksuit trousers.
‘Hello?’
Silence on the line.
‘Hello?’ he said again.
‘What are you doing?’
He stopped, pausing in front of the open wardrobe.
‘Uh, who is this, please?’
‘What are you doing?’ the voice said for a second time: same flat tone, exactly the same pronunciation, like a recording on a loop. There was a slight buzz on the line; an echo, as if the call had come a great distance. ‘What are you doing with that family?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘What are you doing with that family?’
A coolness slithered down his spine. ‘Who is this?’
‘This must be stopped.’
‘What? Who is this?’