by Tim Weaver
Looked up, listened.
No more sound, no sign of Grankin.
My brain fired a caution, warning me that I had no idea what lay at the top, but by then I was already moving, the steps bending beneath my weight. The further up I got, the worse the damage became, walls charred and burned, paint peeling and blistered, plasterboard and cavities exposed. The fire damage seemed to deaden any noise, and when I was almost at the apex of the stairs, I could see he’d lit another candle, this one burning in the furthest room to my left – what I guessed was a bedroom. There were three doors: the one with the light, the one in the middle – another bedroom – and one directly in front of me, a bathroom.
I stopped, listening again, eyes on the room with the light. Another creak, this time in tune with a sudden gust of wind, the house moaning and shifting before settling again. Then I became aware of something else: a new sound.
Whimpering.
Gripping the knife, I checked the bathroom was clear and stopped at the doorway to the first, unlit bedroom. In the dark, it was hard to get any real sense of the size of the room, and it was only recognizable as a bedroom because a metal bed frame stood against one of the walls, blackened by the fire.
It was empty.
Eyes on the second bedroom, I started to move again, knife out in front of me, being pulled towards something I wasn’t sure I wanted to see. Through the door jamb, half lit, I glimpsed a figure, obscured by shadows. He was crouching.
No, not crouching.
Doubled over.
As I edged around the door, I saw him clearly, one of his shirtsleeves torn, his trousers dotted with blood. He was tied to a chair at the back of the room.
Bound. Gagged.
Calvin East.
Suddenly, he seemed to sense he wasn’t alone and looked up – eyes wide, full of tears – and, through the gag, he started to plead for my help, shifting on the chair, his words indistinct and unrecognizable. I put a finger to my lips and used my other hand to tell him to calm down. It wasn’t Grankin I had heard up here.
It was East.
Which meant Grankin was somewhere else.
I turned just as he came up the stairs. Instinct kicked in, and I jabbed the knife in his direction – but something odd happened. He didn’t come for me. He just stood there, hood pulled tight, most of his face hidden among its shadows.
He was unarmed.
He stared at me, one of his eyes catching the remnants of the candlelight, glinting like a distant shore. And then he began to loosen the knot holding the hood in place, his movements slow and laboured, unable to muster the precision.
Eventually, it fell away.
His face was skeletal and colourless like a death mask; the curve of his eye sockets sunken and dark, as if they’d been sketched out with a stick of charcoal. His head was completely hairless – not a hint of growth anywhere – and his chin poked through his skin like a balled fist, jaw covered in a scattering of stubble. He coughed once, and again, the second time a thick, congealed sound like he was hacking up big globs of syrup.
‘No,’ I heard myself saying. ‘No way.’
He nodded – a movement that said so much.
You’re not seeing things.
I’m not a ghost.
I’m here. I’m alive.
It wasn’t Grankin I’d been following. It never had been.
It was Healy.
Alone
5 days, 11 hours, 13 minutes after
‘How are you feeling today?’
Healy looked across the room at Meredith Blaine. She was dressed more smartly than the day before. Blue skirt. White blouse. Heels. Her hair was up in a bun and she had a gold necklace with some sort of pendant on it, half disguised by her top button. He wondered whether she was due at a meeting later. Maybe she’d get asked questions about him; who he was. Or maybe she hadn’t dressed like this for work at all. Maybe she was heading out afterwards to meet someone.
A partner. A husband.
Her family.
The room was warm, stuffy, sun pouring through slatted blinds in a series of horizontal sheets. He shifted on the sofa. The drip was still attached to him, its metal stand rigid in the space beside him, like a guard standing to attention. The catheter had been removed, though, which he was relieved about. He had bigger problems than feeling embarrassed about pissing through a tube but it had got to him all the same. It made him feel feeble.
Blaine shuffled forward in her seat. Her photocopies of the book cover, of the photos he’d carried, weren’t out on the table today. They were probably in a file somewhere, hidden in her desk. She’d found out more about him in those few minutes than the medical staff on the ward had found out in four days. When Healy had looked at the family, he’d relived every moment he’d spent with them.
‘How are you feeling today?’ Blaine asked again.
He shrugged.
He hadn’t wanted to be wheeled up here by the nurse, didn’t want to have to sit in a chair, be seen like this, be judged. But he’d had no choice. His legs were weak, machines he had to awaken again through physio, through repetition. He hated it; hated feeling like this. Even as he sat in the chair, immobile and useless, pain still gripped his body, his bones, his muscles. And the physical pain wasn’t even the worst bit. The worst bit was catching a glimpse of himself in the windows of the third floor, the creamy glass reflecting back the man he had become.
Old. A failure. A drunk.
Don’t hurt them. Don’t hurt my family.
A fantasist.
‘Can I call you something?’ Blaine said.
Healy looked at her.
‘If you won’t tell me your real name, maybe there’s something else I can call you.’ She opened her notebook on the desk. ‘I feel you should have a name.’
‘Why?’
‘It makes it hard to have a conversation otherwise.’
He drew his dressing gown tighter around him, a starched white robe, cleaned endlessly, worn so many times by patients the seams had started to inch apart. It smelled of washing powder and antiseptic.
‘So what can I call you?’ she said.
Malcolm.
He knew, even if he chose to say it aloud, he’d be unable to make the col sound properly. When he spoke, there was a soft, humiliating slur to his words. But why would he say it aloud? That wasn’t even his name.
It wasn’t anyone’s name.
Back in this failing body, he was just Healy again, his history scattered behind him, the debris of his marriage, his daughter’s death, his lost sons. Perhaps this was fate, him being like this. Perhaps this was the perfect vessel for who he was: a physical reflection of his life, of its impotence and failure.
But why did the traces of them have to linger? Why did he still have to feel the girls’ tiny hands inside his? Why could he still smell Gail’s perfume? Why did he still hear the conversations they’d all had inside that flat like they were being spoken now, here, in this moment? He knew, vivid as they were, they were only dreams, hallucinations, maybe some sort of madness. But what he’d felt for them all …
‘It was so real.’
Blaine shifted. ‘Pardon?’
He looked at her, struck into silence. Where had that come from? Why had he spoken? He was unshakeable, grounded, stony. That’s who he was, who he’d always been his whole life. Now he was talking without even realizing it. He was confused and he was ill. Maybe this was madness. Or maybe, somewhere deeper down, the coma had stripped him back, broken his defences, left him a shell.
Lonely.
Alone.
‘What was so real?’ she asked.
He dropped his head, hands in his lap, the palms open and facing up to the ceiling, as if he were praying. ‘Do people ever …’ He stopped. He hated the way he sounded now, the deformity in his words. ‘How many people like me are there?’
‘People who’ve been in comas?’
He nodded.
She brought her notebook from the desk
to her lap and removed the lid of her pen. ‘A great many. Circumstances vary, of course. Some people are in a coma for a few days, others can be comatose for years, although the length of time will not have a direct effect on the speed or success of any recovery.’ She paused, pen hovering above her notes, studying him. ‘Everyone’s different. Some patients recover very, very quickly and return to their lives largely unaltered. Some patients suffer severe physical and psychological difficulties and never recover.’
He cleared his throat. ‘What about dreams?’
‘In what regard?’
‘While in a coma.’
She’d been writing something down – but now stopped. Carefully, she placed the notebook and the pen back on to the desk, and said, ‘Did you dream?’
He didn’t look at her, staring off into the corner of the room, thinking of those moments at the end, in the flat, as the man in the raincoat had come to the door. The mask he wore. He was a composite, Healy could see that now. He was the blond man and the driver – everything Healy had memorized about the two suspects, right down to their choice of clothes. Two men, in the same body.
‘What did you dream about?’
He sat back, his bones creaking.
‘I dreamed I had a family again.’
‘ “Again”?’ Blaine said.
‘I had a family once,’ he replied softly, eyes on the space between them. ‘I lost them. I let them drift away. I became consumed by my job, by what I thought needed to be done, and was important. And then I turned around one day and …’
‘What?’
‘They’d forgotten me.’
He wiped some saliva away from his lips. This was the most he’d spoken in almost three months. The effort of it throbbed in his throat.
‘So did you dream about having your family back?’
‘No.’
She frowned. ‘Then I’m not sure I follow.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said.
A brief moment of alarm in Blaine’s face, as if she could see this opening – this first real opportunity – slipping away from her. ‘A lot of coma patients talk about not experiencing anything while they’re unconscious,’ she said, keeping her voice steady. ‘They say, being in a coma was like blinking. I’ve read accounts of people being admitted on Christmas Day, and waking up two months later and asking their family what time the turkey’s being carved. But I’ve also read accounts of patients having dreams that felt utterly real. Sometimes these dreams featured the actual doctors and nurses attending to the patient: the patient is fully aware of who he is and who’s around him, but isn’t able to wake up and communicate.’
He said nothing.
‘Was that like your dream?’ she asked.
‘No.’
‘What happened in yours?’
He didn’t answer. He could still feel them on his skin, smell the shampoo in their hair. He could taste the meals Gail had cooked him, the joy and the ease every time he sat across the dinner table from them, every time he took the girls to the park, or tucked them into bed at night. He could see them when he blinked, lying there in their beds, with their comforters, under the mural he’d helped them paint.
Except he’d never painted a mural, and he’d never taken them to the park. He’d never had dinner with them. He’d never lived in that flat.
He was nothing to them.
Nothing to anyone.
‘I’m alone,’ he said.
That evening, two hours after he left Blaine’s office, he wheeled himself down to the hospital foyer, telling the nurses on the ward that he needed some air. He had no mobile, and no money, but he headed to a bank of phones against the far wall.
Underneath one of them was a phone book. He yanked it out, laid it on his lap and leafed through until he found R. It took him a couple of minutes to get to the number he wanted, but once he did, he picked up the handset, dialled 0800 Reverse, punched in the phone number from the book and spoke his name.
The line connected.
Eventually, someone picked up.
A message kicked in, asking the receiver if they were prepared to accept the call and the charges. Please, Healy thought. Please accept it. Please accept it.
A click.
‘Colm?’ Tom Ruddy said.
‘Tom,’ Healy replied. ‘Tom, thank you for accepting the call.’
He thought of their history, of how that history had leaked into his dream. Healy had been someone else during the coma – himself, but not himself – and Tom had been the only one to recognize it. In the dream, he’d told Tom he was a delivery driver, and Tom had looked at him oddly, as if to say, But you’re not.
You’re a cop.
Because that was how they’d known each other.
In the real world, that was how they’d met.
Back in 2004, Healy had saved Tom’s nine-year-old son from drowning in a lake at a Met charity event, and their relationship had changed for ever.
It had mutated into something different.
Tom – once one of Healy’s regular drinking buddies, a borderline alcoholic, a serial cheater – changed overnight. His son’s brush with death altered his DNA, made him re-evaluate himself: he sobered up, he became serious. Worse than that, every time he looked at Healy, he saw that day at the lake – he saw a different moment, when his son didn’t come back to shore alive – and Tom’s suffocating debt to Healy returned, silent, stifling. Healy hadn’t talked to Tom for years, not since before Healy was given the boot from the Met. In truth, he hadn’t foreseen a day when he would ever need to talk to Tom.
But he needed to talk to him today.
‘Tom,’ he said quietly. ‘I need your help.’
Part Four
* * *
42
I had a million questions.
But I didn’t even know where to start.
Healy shrugged off his coat – letting it drop to the floor, its bulk gathering around his feet like a punctured inflatable – and then looked beyond me, his face pale and unmoved, to where he’d been keeping Calvin East, bound and gagged.
‘I went to his house to try and find a laptop or computer,’ he said, speaking to me like our last conversation had been an hour ago, as if ten months hadn’t passed since I’d hung up on him. As if he wasn’t supposed to be dead. ‘He brought his phone with him, so I’ve got his numbers. I can see who calls him. But he doesn’t email from it. He doesn’t use the Internet on it. Who doesn’t use email and the Internet on their phone these days? So he’s wiping it clean. He’s hiding something.’ He tore his eyes away from East and they settled on me. ‘But if he’s got a laptop, it must be at work.’
As I watched him, everything seemed to shift into focus, like a light passing across shadows. It’s really him. It’s really him standing here.
He’s alive.
‘I just …’ I stopped. ‘Healy, I just … ’
I was struck again by the change in him. It was hard to reconcile the man I knew with the one who was looking at me now. I’d only known him as heavy, a man whose shirts strained at the waist, whose face bulged and hung, who had to use gel to keep his thick red hair back from his face. Now his jumper hung off him like a smock, his neck scrawny and taut, muscles and cartilage showing through skin as slight as tracing paper. As he leaned forward, hands on his knees, I saw blobs of light form on his hairless head; a shrunken cap that didn’t fit properly.
‘I didn’t know if you would understand,’ he said.
‘Understand what? That you’re still alive?’
‘No, not that.’
‘Then what?’
He came forward, off the last step of the staircase.
But he said nothing.
‘What don’t I understand, Healy? Have you got any idea what you’ve put your family through over the past month? They buried you yesterday. If it hadn’t been for Gemma –’
‘They’re better off without me.’
His voice was soft, crackling like fat in a pa
n. He had phlegm caught in his throat, and when he tried to cough it out, his body spasmed in pain. I felt so much in seeing him again – so many emotions – but whatever anger I had, at the way he’d deceived me, fooled his family, whatever his reasons and however he’d done it, I couldn’t bring myself to tear into him. A part of me was just elated at seeing him here, alive, in front of me. But it was more than that. I couldn’t go for him like this, not this version of him. He was ill, and his sickness cloaked him like a shroud.
‘How is this even possible?’ I said.
He looked at me for a long time, a blank look in his eyes, then he said softly, ‘There’s this guy I know. Tom Ruddy.’
He didn’t make a move to continue.
‘Healy?’
‘His brother was a cop I used to work with. This guy used to drink like a fish, but Tom was like the next level up from that. We’d go out on the lash, and he’d have us under the table. When we were flat out on the floor, he’d be across the other side of the pub, still stone-cold sober, with his hand up some woman’s blouse. I don’t remember us letting anyone outside the Met into our little drinking group, ever – but Tom was different. He fitted in with the rest of us.’
‘So?’ I said, unable to see the relevance. ‘So what?’
‘You asked me how this is possible.’
‘And you’re telling me some story about –’
‘We were at this family charity day the Met organized at Hampstead Heath back in 2004,’ he said, cutting me off, ‘and Tom’s kid wandered into one of the bathing ponds. I was hammered, and had gone off into the trees to take a piss. As I was coming back, I saw him out there, thrashing around. I don’t know how the hell he got that far from the group, but Tom’s wife wasn’t there, and Tom was too busy necking his tenth beer to notice his boy wasn’t playing with the other kids. So I went in after him. I swam out there, I grabbed him, and I brought him back in.
‘He was fine.’ He paused for a moment, taking a long, rasping breath. ‘But Tom changed. I mean, proper, Road to Damascus change. Gave up booze, stopped banging around with anything in a skirt, concentrated on his work, spent every waking moment with his family. That was fine. It bothered some of the lads, but not me. What bothered me was that he became so fucking clingy. He’d always bring up what I’d done – always, every time – just telling me how grateful he was. Every conversation we had was about that day, about how he owed me so much, that he’d always be in my debt. “I owe you, I owe you, I owe you.” This went on for three years, until we all went to Dublin for his brother’s stag do in 2007.’