by Tom Weaver
After the search of the Dead Tracks was completed, a smaller forensic team went over the burial site Crane had discovered to recover what was left of the thirteen women Milton Sykes had murdered. They found twelve. The thirteenth grave had animal bones in it, but no human remains. Even before an anthropologist had got close to the bodies, I knew what their conclusions would be. Sykes knew the woods better than anyone: the tiny ravines, the trails, the clearings, the hiding places. He'd lived on its edges all his life. Crane had lucked out by finding the twelve Indian women, but inside those fifty acres, tied to the roots of the place, Jenny Truman would remain hidden. And as long as she lay hidden, maybe there would always be a feel to its paths. A sense that something was trying to get away, to claw its way out of the ground and finally find peace.
The investigation into Russian organized crime continued after Crane was sentenced, and police visited him frequently in prison in the months after, trying to build a case. No one outside the task force knew how much Crane was willing to play ball, or how much he even really knew, but I heard from a couple of people that the prison service had rolled out an unofficial protection detail on the advice of the police - to prevent Crane being got at on the inside - and that they were closer to Akim Gobulev than they'd ever been.
Maybe that was true. But I hoped, most days, the police remembered the sacrifice they'd made to get there. Six dead women, including Leanne. Three more — Megan, Sona and Jill — lucky to be alive. Susan Markham. And then Crane's own wife and child.
Eventually, I went to visit Jill at home. She still had heavy bandaging around the top of her forehead where surgeons had sewn her skin back on to her scalp. But otherwise she looked good. Minimal bruising. little visible damage. She made some coffee while I stood at the kitchen door listening to her description of the night the man she thought was Aron Crane had come for her.
As we talked, she played with the St Michael pendant at her neck, occasionally glancing at the photographs of her husband looking down at us from the mantelpiece. I saw a lot of myself in her at that moment; having to remind herself over and over that the one person she could rely on, the one person she could trust most in this world, was gone for good. And as I left her house and walked to my car, I realized - after what Crane had done to her - it might be a long time before she gained enough distance to trust again.
Megan was discharged at the same time as Jill. She'd suffered bumps and bruises but the baby was fine. James and Caroline Carver picked her up at the hospital, crying among a scrum of photographers as they walked her back to the car. Soon Megan was crying too. She told them she was sorry for the secrets she'd kept, and sorry for ever believing Daniel Markham. When they got home, the tears stopped for a while as the Carvers told her everything that had happened while she'd been gone. And then they took their pregnant daughter back upstairs to her bedroom and the Carvers—James, Caroline and Megan—spent ten minutes on the edge of her bed, holding each other, while Leigh played on the floor beside them.
Megan gave birth to a baby girl a week early. They called her Faith. She wouldn't ever know her father, and - given everything he had done — maybe that was for the best. But, one day, Megan might tell her of the things she'd had to endure to bring her daughter into the world — and how it was worth every moment of the doubt and fear she'd experienced along the way.
The Healy family finally buried Leanne on 3 November. It was a big Catholic ceremony in a huge church near their home in St Albans. The Irish side of the family flew over from Cork, packing the aisles at the front, and Leanne's friends filled out the middle. I sat at the back next to Phillips, Chief Superintendent Bartholomew and a couple of other members of the task force who had helped Healy, in those first few weeks after her disappearance, to try and find Leanne.
Until the shoot-out at the woods, Healy wouldn't have wanted Phillips there, and Phillips wouldn't have come. But in the bullet Phillips had taken in the leg, and in the wounds Healy had taken in his chest, they had some common ground. As well as that, Phillips had agreed to stand as a character witness for Healy at his review hearing. It was a selfish gesture in many ways, there as a way to prevent Healy from talking publicly about everything the task force had kept suppressed. But Phillips was highly rated and it would look good for Healy to have him there. At the wake afterwards, they talked uncomfortably for a while — Phillips signed off on sick for a month; Healy indefinitely suspended pending a review by the Directorate of Professional Standards — and then Phillips hobbled away on crutches and headed back down to London.
Most of the others who'd been there with us that night weren't so lucky. Jamie Hart had spent his first three days rigged up to life support after a bullet perforated his lung and lodged in his throat. Forty-eight hours later, his wife decided to turn the machine off. Three uniformed officers had also been killed, and the paramedic died on arrival at Whitechapel. The SFO who had provided the cover for me had taken a bullet, but survived, and so had one of the dog handlers. Aron Crane might not have fired the guns, but he was responsible for a bloodbath.
When the sun started falling in the sky, I left the wake and walked back across Verulamium Park to my car. As I started the engine, I looked up and saw Gemma Healy coming across the grass towards my BMW. She was in her late forties, but wore it pretty well: dark hair, a petite frame, tiny creases funnelling out from green eyes, and a strength and assurance in her movements that suggested she'd known pain and handled it better than her husband. For a moment, I thought she was heading to the church. But then she continued towards me and waited while I buzzed the window down.
'Hello,' she said softly. She also had an Irish accent, stronger than her husband's. 'We've never met before, but I know who you are.'
I smiled. 'I'm not sure if that's a good or a bad thing.'
'It's good,' she replied, and managed a smile. 'I just wanted to thank you for what you've done. Away from my husband.' She paused, corrected herself. 'Ex husband.'
'I don't understand.'
'He needed you. He needed someone strong to rein in his excesses. I don't know what you found in that place, and I don't want to know. But I was married to Colm for long enough to know that, in order for you to get him there, in order to contain him, you would have had to have been strong enough to face down his arrogance, his anger and his resentment. And as I can tell you from personal experience, that takes some doing.'
I nodded, not entirely sure how to respond.
'So thank you,' she added quietly.
She went to walk away, and, as she did, I killed the engine. She looked back at me, brow furrowed, eyes moving back and forth across my face.
'Has he ever told you why he did it?'
She knew what I meant. Subconsciously she reached to the spot on her face that he must have struck, and brushed it with a couple of fingers. Then she shook her head.
'It wasn't the affair,' I said, and watched colour briefly fill her cheeks. 'It was the fact that he thought everyone had turned their backs on him.'
'He still shouldn't have done it.'
'I totally agree.'
'And I can't forgive him.'
I let her know that I understood that too. 'I know why you walked away from him. I even know why you did what you did. But the isolation you felt before you made that decision, that's what he felt in those last few months. That's what he felt when we were looking for your daughter. You hated him. Leanne hated him. He had a case that completely consumed him. But he bottled it up and he pushed it down, and something had to give. I'm not saying it's right, I'm just saying that, if you felt he'd turned his back on you, then I think he might have felt the same.'
She studied me, but didn't say anything.
'I'm sorry,' I said. 'This is none of my business.'
'No,' she said, and held up a hand in front of her. 'It's fine. I just… the Colm you're telling me about isn't the Colm I've come to know over the past year.'
I told her that I understood, and started up the car.
I looked at her, her eyes glistening in the half-light of the evening. Healy had asked me the same question two days before, and I wondered why they would both think I had the answer. Perhaps I still carried a sadness around with me, a stain in the fabric of my skin. Or perhaps they saw faint signs of hope, of recovery. A man who had been through the darkness and was standing in the light at the other end.
You say goodbye to them eventually,' I replied, the sun disappearing beyond a copse of trees behind us. 'But, the truth is… you never let them go.'
* * *
Chapter Seventy-seven
The sound of the shower woke me at six-thirty. As I slowly stirred, I lay on my back and looked up at the ceiling, steam crawling out through the partially open bathroom door. The bed was empty and the bedroom was cold. I pulled the duvet up and rolled over, studying the photograph of Derryn on my side table. I knew every inch of her face so well: the shape of her eyes, the way her mouth turned up when she smiled, the pattern of her freckles, the curve of her body. Next to the frame was a black coffee, steam rising from inside the mug.
The shower stopped.
I sat up, sipped on the coffee and watched through the gap in the door. The noise of the shower door opening. An arm reaching to the rail for a towel. One side of a body, water droplets running down the skin, tracing the waist and the hips.
Outside, rain spat against the window.
I glanced at the picture of Derryn again and then went to the window. The first pinpricks of day pierced a smear of cloud beyond the houses opposite. I pulled on a pair of boxers and watched one of my neighbours filling his car full of junk. When he was done, his wife came down the drive to him, kissed him, and watched him pull out and disappear along the road.
'Morning.'
I turned. Liz was standing looking at me, a towel around her, her hair darkened by water and sitting against one of her shoulders like a thick tail.
'Morning,' I said, smiling, and held up the coffee. 'Thanks.'
'You're welcome.' She moved around to my side of the bed, then perched herself on the edge. I sat down next to her. 'How are you feeling?' she asked.
I looked at her. She blinked, a little water breaking free from her hairline and running down her cheek.
'I feel good. You?'
She nodded. 'Sorry it's so early.'
'Are you in court today?'
'No,' she said, her eyes moving across my face. 'I'm driving up to Warwick to see Katie again. She's meeting with an investment bank about a graduate programme next week. I'll give her the old mum-to-daughter pep talk and then we'll probably head into Birmingham and go shopping'
'You excited about seeing her again?'
'Very.'
I remembered the photographs of them I'd seen at Liz's. Katie looked a lot like her mum. She was also beautiful, except with even longer, darker hair.
'I'm sorry.'
I looked at Liz. 'For what?'
'For just having to leave like this.'
'You're not just leaving,' I said. You're leaving to see your daughter. That's the best kind of excuse.' I took another sip of coffee. 'And in any case, this is a mean cup of coffee to depart on.'
She leaned into me and kissed me. When she moved away again, her eyes were fixed on mine. She looked like she was expecting me to flinch.
'I don't regret what we did,' I said.
'Are you sure?'
More water ran down her face. She placed a hand on my leg, studying me, looking for signs of uncertainty.
'Derryn was a part of my life for fifteen years,' I said, placing my hand on hers. 'She was the first woman I loved, the only thing that ever really mattered to me during the time we were together. If you're asking me if there'll be moments to begin with when I'm a little unsure of myself, or feel like things are maybe moving too fast, then yes, there will be moments like that. But if you're asking me if I regret what we did, if I regret spending the night with you, then no. I don't. You've waited for me, and supported me, and comforted me. You've been there for me. I don't regret what I've done.'
Her eyes shimmered a little.
I touched a hand to her face, where a trail of water had worked its way down past her ear, to her neck. 'Like I told you yesterday, you don't have to compete with her.'
'Okay,' she said softly.
'I will always love Derryn,' I said. 'A part of me will always love her, whatever happens.'
She nodded.
'But…'I paused and looked into her eyes. 'I'm tired of feeling lonely. I'm tired of being scared of letting go. I'm tired of looking at her in pictures and feeling guilt choking me up when I think about moving on. I feel guilt, and yet Derryn never laid any guilt at my door. She would never have expected me to spend my life trying to cling on to every memory I have of her. That wasn't who she was. If she could see the way I'd been for almost two years, sitting alone in this house, feeling terrified about moving on… she would never have forgiven me. She would have wanted me to take the next step.'
I ran a hand through Liz's hair and then leaned in and kissed her.
'So, that's exactly what I'm going to do…'
Later, as I watched Liz's car disappear into the rain, I thought about what she'd said to me. You're trying to plug holes in the world because you know what it's like to lose someone, andyou think it's your job to stop anyone else suffering the same way.
She'd been right.
She saw it in me, even before I saw it in myself. She understood that the reason I let Derryn talk me into taking on that first case was because I could see what was happening to her, could see the end coming, and I didn't want anyone else to suffer like I had. The loss. The helplessness. The inevitability. I wanted to help families turn their lives around, to punch through the darkness to the light on the other side.
And then, finally, bring the people that mattered to them back from the dead.
* * *
Author's Note
Anyone even remotely familiar with London geography will know that I've taken some liberties in The Dead Tracks. I hope the residents of east London will forgive me for making their home the hunting ground for a notorious Victorian serial killer and a crazed plastic surgeon. Plainly, the woods, and the factories that surround it, don't actually exist.
* * *
Acknowledgements
Sometimes you have to admit when you've lucked out, and I feel very blessed to have landed Stefanie Bierwerth as my editor; her kindness, support, guidance and razor- sharp editorial powers have consistently refocused the book as it journeyed between drafts. My agent Camilla Wray also has an incredible eye for a story and was instrumental in shaping the book from the first moment it landed on her desk. Handily, she's become a black belt in settling my nerves too — important for the (many) times when doubts start creeping in. Without these two wonderful women there wouldn't be a book.
A special thank you to the brilliant team at Penguin (including, but not limited to, Tom, Jessica, Jennifer, Andrew, Shona and Caroline) who do an incredible job of getting Raker out there into people's hands, and who work so tirelessly on my behalf. Also, to the ladies of Darley Anderson, who have supported and promoted my writing right from day one.
Mike Hedges was enthusiastic and gracious, filling me in on his years as one of the country's top policemen, and offered ideas and details which I've since twisted and adapted for the purposes of the book. Any errors are entirely of my own making. Bruce Bennett also provided some intriguing insights in the early stages of the novel, while plastic surgeon Rob Warr will probably be horrified with how I've portrayed his profession — although I did warn him that things might go a bit rogue. I hope he forgives me.
My family in the UK and South Africa have been amazing, going above and beyond the call of duty in their support o
f the books. Thank you to everyone. I must give a special mention to my mum and dad, though. This book is dedicated to you both for a reason.
Finally, the two Weaver ladies: Erin, who wakes me up at six in the morning after I've been writing until one; and Sharlé, who lets me lie in, and never complains when Raker and I disappear for months on end. Without you both, I'd be lost.