by Tim Weaver
He looked up at me, cleared his throat.
‘You probably remember the T-shirt,’ he said.
I nodded. Boys on Tour – Dublin 07.
‘Anyway, we’re there and he started on it again, and I was pissed, and I just lost it. I said, “Stop fucking thanking me! I get it, okay? I wish you’d just have a pint of beer with the rest of us, or go and screw someone and get it out of your system.” Basically, I was an arsehole to him. I belittled him. I took that one small act of kindness – that one good thing that I’d done for someone – and I ruined it.’
Silence.
Seeing Healy, hearing him talk like this, had almost hypnotized me – but then, in the quiet of the house, I was suddenly back in the moment: East was tied up in the next room.
‘What are you planning to do to him?’ I said.
‘Tom worked for –’
‘Healy. What are you planning to do to East –’
‘Do you want to hear this or not?’ he said, and looked down at his feet, where his coat was gathered, as he shifted from left to right. His left leg was giving him problems. ‘After that, I didn’t speak to Tom for years. Not until a few months back. After I woke up from my coma …’ He faded out, looking across the room at me, one of his eyes moist. Just then something showed in his face: an awful, pained expression. ‘I was in a coma,’ he went on. ‘I’m not sure how much you know, but I was in a coma for seventy-four days, and when I woke up, my life …’
He shook his head, as if unable to articulate himself.
After a long pause, he said, ‘I called Tom up.’
‘Why?’
‘I wasn’t exactly sure at the time – not entirely. I just knew that – sooner or later – I was going to need him. I had to apologize to him, square things off.’
‘Why, Healy?’
He paused, rubbing his fingers together, his system clamouring for a cigarette – and suddenly I was back in the motel bar months ago, watching him doing exactly the same thing.
‘Even before they shut the Forensic Science Service,’ he went on, ‘the Met was outsourcing a lot of lab work to private companies. When I worked murders in Southwark, we used this company up in Harlow, and another one out west, in Staines. All the murders went to Harlow, everything else went through this company in Staines.’
Immediately I saw what was coming.
Healy nodded at me, seeing that I understood. ‘Tom ran the lab at Staines,’ he said. ‘When that body you found under Highdale came in, he made sure the police believed it was me.’
43
I stood there, stunned.
‘He wasn’t a scientist, just a desk jockey,’ Healy said, his voice even and clear, perhaps for the first time. This was something he’d put so much planning into, a sequence of events he knew so well. ‘But he was still the suit in charge there, and all requests went through him. He did it so he could log everything, make sure response times and work quality were up to scratch. As long as he did that, his company kept on getting that juicy government contract.’
‘Who did I find down there?’
‘Under Highdale?’
The woollen jumper he was wearing was slowly unravelling at the edges. His fingers started playing with some of the loose thread.
‘I read how you found the body,’ he said. ‘I saw it in the newspaper a few days later. I didn’t expect you to be the one who actually discovered it, but that book – that was for you. Specifically, you. I left it there because I hoped – if it all went to plan – the book, and the photos, my T-shirt, that old tin cup, would be passed to Gemma and eventually they’d find their way to you. I hoped you might read the book and start to ask questions about that pier. I didn’t give a shit if you spent a single second trying to find out the reasons why I might kill myself, but I cared about those girls. You said you would help me.’ He looked off into space, fingers falling away from the threads. ‘That family, it’s all that matters now.’
‘Who did the body belong to, Healy?’
His gaze returned to me. ‘His name was Stevie.’
‘Who was he?’
‘After I left hospital, I was …’
He stopped.
‘Things happened to me in there.’
‘Like what?’
He obviously saw something in my face that wasn’t there, his expression twisting up, a second of fire, a glimpse of the old Healy. ‘You don’t understand,’ he said. ‘I wheeled myself out of there five days after I came out of a coma. I was a fucking mess. I’d only stopped pissing into a tube the day before. I couldn’t walk, I could hardly form a sentence. I found this place, and I lay here, and I waited to die. I lay here with the smell of piss and shit, and I begged to be taken. Begged. You think you know what that’s like, Raker? Do you? Because it’s not like when you got stabbed. Being in that coma, it took my survival instinct away. It took everything away. I didn’t want to live.’
‘Okay.’ I held up a hand. ‘Okay.’
He stared at me, the fire receding.
I struggled to recall a single time I’d ever seen him let down his guard like this. I’d watched him fall apart before, but every time it happened – after Leanne died; after he was sacked from the only job he’d ever loved – I could still see the struggle he was going through, the effort of trying to rein in this side of himself. He used to see it as weakness.
But not now.
‘Just tell me who Stevie is,’ I said.
He stood there for a moment, unmoved. ‘I lay in this place,’ he said, so softly it was hard to hear him at first, ‘and days became weeks, weeks became months. I don’t know when Stevie arrived – maybe July, maybe August – but he came in here, and he lay there in that room downstairs, on the opposite side to me, and we hardly said a word to start with. I could see, though. I could see he was just like me.’
‘But you ended up at Highdale?’
‘I only moved to Highdale at the end, before Stevie …’ Died. He sniffed. ‘Highdale was in Southwark – so I knew that when the body was found, forensics would get sent to Tom’s lab.’
‘How did Stevie die?’
Healy didn’t respond, a distant look in his face.
‘Healy?’
‘After we’d been together for a while, he asked me to end it.’
‘To kill him?’
‘He said he was too scared to do it himself.’ Healy paused, eyes downcast. ‘I tried to talk him out of it, over and over again, but he begged me. We sat here together in this house, and he begged me. He was done. Finished. All he wanted was for someone to physically put the pills in his mouth. That’s all he wanted. He said he couldn’t do it himself, and when I finally started considering it, thinking about it, when I finally said yes, I realized – after it was done – he could help me.’
I shook my head. ‘Are you listening to yourself?’
‘I know what I did.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I know what I did,’ he repeated.
‘You killed him, and you used him.’
‘I helped him.’
‘You fed him those pills.’
‘So? So what? You think giving someone a way out like that is only okay if they’re physically ill? He was gone behind the eyes. It was over. You don’t have a clue what that feels like. You think I would have done it if he hadn’t been there, on bended knee, crying, begging me, every fucking day for months?’
‘What about his family?’
‘What about them?’
‘Didn’t they deserve the chance to –’
‘Deserve? You don’t get it, do you? He had no one left. He was completely and utterly alone. The only difference between me and him, the only reason I didn’t sit there and neck a bottle of pills myself, was because I still had something I needed to do. But deserve? What does that even mean? Deserve means nothing. Deserve is just fantasy. No one gets what they deserve. You think the Clarks deserved what they got? You think Stevie deserved to be in this rat-filled shithole at the en
d of his life, asking me to finish him off? You think I did?’
He gestured to himself, to the body he carried with him, empty, brittle, and it was hard not to feel sorry for him. His breath seemed to catch in his throat as he calmed down.
‘I phoned Tom for a second time and told him I was calling in my debt. Tom said no, straight off the bat. I expected him to. I told him he owed me, that he’d spent years telling me he owed me, but he just kept saying no. “This isn’t what I meant. This is illegal. This is ridiculous and insulting.” So I threatened him. I told him I would call up his wife and tell her about all the women he’d screwed behind her back. I had five, six, seven years of women to draw on. I knew some of them. I could give her names, details, dates. I told him I would ruin his professional life too. I’d make anonymous calls to the authorities and claim impropriety at the lab. Mismanagement. Evidence tampering. He’d never get another government contract again by the time I was finished. He’d be unemployable. I told him he was going to do this thing for me or, with one call, I would tear his life apart.’ He stopped, a flash of guilt. ‘When he said yes, Stevie and I moved to Highdale.’
‘How the hell are you coming back from this?’
‘Coming back?’
‘Here. Life. You’re supposed to be dead.’
He looked at me for a long time, and something he’d said moments before returned to the surface. The only difference between me and him, the only reason I didn’t sit there and neck a bottle of pills myself, was because I still had something I needed to do. I saw it then: once this was done, he wasn’t coming back.
‘What about your boys?’ I said.
‘Stevie told me this story –’
‘Healy, what about your boys?’
‘He told me this story,’ he said, pausing for a moment, eyes fixed on me. ‘He told me this story about how, years ago, he got caught stealing nappies, boxes of Calpol, wet wipes, dummies, all from a pharmacist up in Dalston. He said this PC called Blake arrested him. Blake was in his twenties with no family of his own. He had no idea how much Calpol kids got through, or how many times you changed a nappy a day, so he never bothered asking Stevie about his kids, or his reasons for stealing all that stuff. Blake just waited at the pharmacy, caught Stevie in the act and slapped the cuffs on him. He took Stevie back to the station, questioned him, but saw the case for what it was: a few hundred quid’s worth of stolen goods. Something that size, it’s wasted time and energy, for everyone. So Blake called the chemist and managed to persuade her not to press charges.’
For the first time, I could hear rain on the roof, a chant from somewhere beyond the walls.
‘About a year later, Stevie goes back to another chemist and does the same: grabs a shitload of Calpol and wet wipes and nappies, and makes a run for it. Blake hears about it from one of the boys in his station, picks up the case and goes down to the pharmacy. He checks the in-store tape and sees it’s Stevie again. The only thing that had changed in the time since the first arrest was that Blake had started a family of his own. He had a young son now, which meant he knew all about Calpol, the cost of nappies, all that other shite. So he drives to Stevie’s home, arrests him, takes him back to the station, and he says, “Why the hell did you steal so much, Stevie? Why not take those things in smaller amounts? You steal a bottle of Calpol here, a few nappies there, no one’s going to notice. It’s less conspicuous. You do it like that and your kids aren’t going to be talking to you from the other side of some prison Plexiglas.” Stevie said that Blake didn’t seem to care that he was stealing. He was just worried for Stevie’s kids – and that was when Stevie told him the truth.’
Healy turned to me, a sickly yellow tint pooling in the stretched contours of his face. ‘His wife, his baby boy, they were killed in a house fire a decade back. The two of them had been dead for years.’ He came forward, shrugged. ‘Blake is shocked, obviously, and he says, “So, why the hell are you even stealing this stuff?” and Stevie looks at him and says, “Because when my wife and boy died, my whole life was taken from me – and, sometimes, even though I know it’s wrong, it hurts so much, I don’t want other people to be able to live theirs.” ’
In that moment, something else became clear.
Healy wasn’t just ill.
He was mourning.
‘My daughter was murdered,’ he said, voice cracking, ‘both my boys despise me, my wife is repulsed by me … and yet, for seventy-four days, I had a family again. Those girls were mine, Gail was mine, that life was mine. I breathed the same air as them. I could smell the shampoo in their hair. I could taste Gail on my lips. I was in that flat, tucking them in at night. When they told me they loved me …’ His words tailed off as tears filled his eyes. ‘I could feel it … I could feel it.’
He’d dreamed of them all.
Suddenly, I remembered a line from the letter he’d written to Gemma:
I had my time again, and I screwed it up the same as before.
He’d been talking about Gail, April and Abigail.
I went towards him, unsure of exactly what I was going to do, but then he stepped away, one hand up in front of me, one desperately wiping tears away.
‘Healy …’
‘Stevie had nothing left,’ he said, his words broken and smudged. ‘But I have. I’ve got one last thing I need to do.’ Another pause, long and drawn out. ‘I’m dead. The police won’t come looking for me. How can they? I don’t exist. I’m a ghost. I’m nothing. I’m just a name on a piece of granite. So here’s what I’m going to do: anyone who was there that night, anyone who had anything to do with what happened to that family, I’m going to find them …’
‘Healy –’
‘I’m going to find them, and I’m going to kill them.’ He gathered himself, wiping tears from his cheek with his sleeve. ‘And we’re going to start with that prick in there.’
44
Healy headed in the direction of the room behind me, the one he was keeping East in, but as he got level with me, I grabbed his arm, preventing him from going any further. I could feel his bones beneath my fingers, the paucity of him.
‘Wait a second.’
He frowned, looking down at my grip. ‘Get your hands –’
‘Calm down,’ I said quietly. ‘Don’t you think it would be better if we compared notes before you go charging in there? I can tell you what I know; you can tell me what you know. If you want to get East to talk, it’s going to go a hell of a lot smoother if we don’t look like a couple of strangers.’
He swallowed, turning the idea over.
Tentatively, I let go of his arm, but he didn’t move. Eventually, he nodded – as much of an acknowledgement as I was going to get – and gestured for us to go into the second bedroom. As I followed him in, I felt floorboards bend like springs beneath my feet and worried, briefly, about the whole structure giving way – but Healy moved with such confidence, as if he were tapped into the heartbeat of this place, that I just carried on in his wake.
‘These places have been boarded up for years,’ he said. ‘I remember one of the murder teams finding a body in here a few months after the original fire gutted it. Some homeless guy. One of his eyes had been removed with a knife. Because of that, the drifters don’t like it – bad juju, I guess – which is why I knew it would be empty.’ He looked around the room, most of it slathered in shadow. ‘I never asked Stevie where he was from. We never talked about stuff like that. But it wasn’t from around here. If he was from around here, he would have been like all the others – scared of this place. Some of them, they act like it’s haunted.’
He moved across to where the bed frame stood, and leaned against it. Perched there – stooped, small – he looked like an ancient, withered bird, a man half the size of the one I’d known, weightless and shrunken.
‘Sometimes I think there really are ghosts in here,’ he said.
He removed a penlight from his pocket, switched it on and directed it to my right, into the space next to my shoulder, w
here two cracked wall panels were hidden by the dark. Across them was a series of drawings: a succession of grey masks, in every available space, some overlapping, some more developed, some in pencil, some in pen. Every single one was a variation on the same design: a regular party mask – coloured in grey chalk – with two eyeholes, pinprick-sized nose holes, but no space at the mouth. In the most detailed ones, the grey mask was cracked on the left-hand side.
‘Did you draw these?’ I asked.
He nodded.
‘Why?’
His eyes lingered on the wall. ‘In January, after our phone call …’ He faded out again, a hint of regret at that last conversation we’d had. ‘After I left the motel in Kew, I went to the hostel on the Old Kent Road. That was where I was at night – but during the day I’d be down in New Cross, at Searle House. I told the people at the hostel that I was out, trying to find work, but all I was doing was driving down there and sitting outside that building day in, day out. I did that for a couple of weeks. That became my routine. That was how I first saw him.’
‘Saw who?’
He signalled to the room next door. ‘East.’
Stopping, he patted a space on his chest where a breast pocket might have been, where he might once have kept cigarettes, but there was no pocket and no cigarettes. It was habit, muscle memory, an echo of a former life.
‘The first time I saw him was 1 February,’ he continued quietly. ‘You know what’s significant about that date? It’s Gail’s birthday. He came all the way up to the children’s play park and stood there for ages, just looking up towards the seventeenth floor. Twenty minutes, maybe more. Then he placed these three cardboard crosses in the earth next to the play park.’ He ran a hand across his head, tiny bristles of hair making a crackle against the dryness of his palm. ‘Three days later, he was back again, standing in exactly the same place as before.’