What Remains (10 page)

‘I don’t think he’s referring to his time at the Met.’

She shrugged. ‘I don’t know, then.’

Because I had my time again, and I screwed it up the same as before
. My eyes moved to the previous clause:
when I lie awake in this place at night, it’s all I can think about
. What place? A homeless shelter? A hostel? Emergency housing? It was unlikely he’d have been referring to a place he might be renting. Nothing in what he’d written suggested that. Back
in January he was desperate, basically penniless, years away from being able to take money from his pension, his savings all but wiped out, whatever cash he’d had from the sale of his home in St Albans gone on child support, on university fees for the boys, on rent, on petrol, on booze. It seemed impossible he would have been back on his feet by the time he mailed the message to Gemma in August. This letter, these words, they were the endgame; they didn’t even sound like they were written by the same person I’d given up on at the end. There was an unexpected eloquence to them. No anger, just stark self-reflection; a glimpse of the ghosts that lay inside him, the ones Craw and I had continually tried to coax out.

‘What about this?’ I said to Gemma, placing a finger near the bottom of the note. ‘ “Still, at least here at the end, I can do something right.” What was he doing that was right – do you know?’

There was a sudden change in her expression, and she seemed to recover some of her poise. Wiping her eyes again, she took a sip from her tea, as if gathering her thoughts. ‘We’ve only talked once, David, you and I. But do you remember what we talked about that day at Leanne’s funeral?’

I eyed her. ‘We talked about Healy.’

She nodded. ‘On the day of my daughter’s funeral, we talked about her father. It feels like I spent the last ten years of my marriage talking about him. Not about the kids, about what they needed from us, the things we
should
have been worrying about as parents – but about him. Our entire lives were dictated by him. His anger, his stupidity, his selfishness.’

Her voice was still quiet, but her tone had solidified. I got
the sense she knew exactly what Healy had meant in that line near the bottom, and it might not paint her in the best light – so she was going to make damn sure I understood her reasons.

‘In the early days it was different,’ she continued. ‘We all meant the world to him. The kids … they were
everything
to him. I know that sounds like an obvious thing to say, but he was so good with them.
So
good.’ She paused, turning her cup, the china chiming gently against the surface of the table. ‘But he found their teenage years much harder. The minute they became capable of doing their own thing, of having their own opinions, of answering back, it was like he began to drift away from them. The older they got, the worse it got. He preferred it when they were small. I think in a lot of ways, despite everything, Colm just needed to feel like he was wanted. Like he belonged to something. When they were small, they needed him, they couldn’t survive without him. As they got older, he couldn’t cope with the way they changed. I think he became lonely.’

Off the back of that, I thought I could see where this was going, and what Healy was referring to at the end of the letter – but I kept quiet, watching her.

‘Things began to change in the year before Leanne was killed,’ she said. ‘As he became more distant from the kids, he started doing longer hours. He’d sink himself into his work – and then he got that case. The twins. He
really
changed after that. That case got to him so quickly, and he just became more and more insular. He hardly talked to me, he never talked to the kids. I asked him to discuss it with me, because I could see him bottling it up, and I knew from bitter experience that the more he bottled something up, the worse the meltdown would be. But he didn’t. He
became uncommunicative. He was like a stranger. It got so bad, I couldn’t think what to say to him. A man I’d spent twenty-six years with.’

I nodded. ‘He didn’t just send the letter to you, did he?’

She glanced at me, surprised that I’d been able to see where it was going. But it wasn’t so hard, and as her eyes lingered on me, tears welled in them again. I imagined these weren’t out of grief this time, but out of a sense of guilt, out of the responsibility she felt for what I held in my hands.

‘No,’ she said, pulling her fringe back from her face. ‘A year and a half ago, I went to see a solicitor about making things official.’

‘You mean getting a divorce?’

‘Yes,’ she said, looking at me like she expected me to say something. When I didn’t, she continued: ‘Colm and I … there was nothing left. There was too much water under the bridge by then. After we separated, we hardly even spoke. His work became everything to him. That case he had – the twins, their mother – it ruined him. At the time …’ A snaking strand of hair fell forward again but she didn’t bother addressing it. ‘Just before the start of that case, I … I stupidly started seeing someone else, someone to fill the gap he’d left behind at home …’

She paused again, looking at me, as if waiting for me to pass judgement. But I knew this part of her history already: how she’d drifted into the arms of another man – and how Healy had responded when he’d found out.

‘And a month into that case, he discovered what was going on,’ she said, ‘and that was when he
really
lost control.’

He’d only ever mentioned that incident to me once, right
back when we’d first been drawn together. We’d been nursing drinks in a place near East India Dock Road, rain lashing against the window, and he’d asked me if I’d ever done anything I regretted. I hardly knew him back then, but he began to admit to what he’d done anyway, as if he needed it out in the open, even in front of a stranger.
If I’d found out she was seeing someone else any other time, I would have thrown some furniture around. Put my foot through a door. I know I’ve got a temper. It’s who I am. I’m too old to change. But I found out when I was up to my neck with photographs of those twin girls. So when she told me … I totally lost it.

He’d hit her.

He’d hit her so hard, he’d put her in a neck brace for eight weeks. It was an unforgivable act, with nothing to justify it and no way to ever take it back. But I’d seen the remorse in his face enough times to know he hated himself for it, every single day, even if he’d found it hard – until this final letter – to articulate an apology.

‘My solicitor sent him divorce papers,’ she said, looking out on the gathering darkness, where even the birdsong seemed to have faded. ‘But he refused to sign them. July through to October last year, I tried again and again, explaining to him why it was for the best. But then, towards the end of last year, it became harder and harder to get hold of him, and eventually – in November – my solicitor found out he wasn’t even renting a place any more. We couldn’t trace him. He wasn’t using his mobile phone. Every time I called him, it just went to voicemail.’

‘He was living in a homeless shelter.’

She studied me like she was waiting for the punchline.

‘What?’

‘He called me in January and asked for my help. I tried
to get him back on his feet, loaned him some cash, put him up in a place just off the motorway, and then a week later he phoned me up drunk and we haven’t spoken since.’ I ran a hand across my face, finding the story painful to recount now, given everything I’d just read. ‘So, when he said in the letter he was doing something right by you, he meant he’d finally signed the divorce papers and sent them with the letter?’

‘Yes,’ she said, faintly. ‘Yes, that’s right.’

It was obvious that, in the letter, Gemma glimpsed the re-emergence of the man she’d married, the man who had always been so good, and so close, to her and the kids. That was what was getting at her: doubt over whether she’d been too hard on him; guilt over her brief, failed affair with another man; anger that Healy would only reveal this side of him again when things had reached the end of the line, when it was too late for her to do anything about it.

When, perhaps, all that was left of him was a husk.

A memory. A ghost.

A body.

14

‘What date did you report him missing?’ I asked.

We were in the living room now, Gemma more determined. She’d been to the bathroom and cleaned herself up, wiped the mascara away and tied her hair up into a bun. I’d spent time alone trying to recover some fortitude of my own.

‘I went to the police on Friday 22 August,’ she said.

‘The day after you received the letter and the divorce papers from him?’

‘Yes.’

‘What was the name of the cop you spoke to?’

‘PC Miriam Davis.’

I wrote both things down and pushed on. ‘Okay, so you decided to report him missing based on what he’d written in the letter – nothing else?’

She shook her head. ‘I didn’t initially report him missing. I just wanted to tell someone about the letter, about what I thought it might mean.’ She paused, a grimace on her face, but she was definitely in control now, seeing the importance of these moments: I needed her clear-headed, honest, decisive. ‘PC Davis seemed reluctant to do anything about it to start with,’ she went on. ‘When I told her our history, I think she saw it as some kind of … I don’t know, domestic. Something that would blow over. I told her I hadn’t seen him for a year, hadn’t spoken to him
at all
since October 2013, and that the only contact we’d had
between then and now was the letter. But she said she couldn’t report him missing if all he was doing was choosing not to keep in touch with me.’

‘So what changed?’

‘I told her it was a suicide note.’ She paused, disturbed again by those last two words. ‘I told her that none of us – not me, not even Ciaran or Liam, who he always tried to stay in contact with – had heard from him, and if she chose not to look into it, his death was going to be on her. She seemed so young, skittish – like she hadn’t been in the job very long – so I suppose I took advantage of that, and I made a bit of a scene.’ Gemma stopped again, this time for longer. ‘It was worth it. By the time I was finished, Colm had been officially registered missing.’

‘What happened after that?’

‘PC Davis asked if she could come to the house to get a DNA sample from Colm’s toothbrush, but I told her, “I haven’t lived with him for three years. There
is
no toothbrush. I don’t own a single thing that belongs to him.” So she said she’d organize something through the employment records they had on file for Colm.’

I frowned. ‘Meaning what?’

‘I guess, meaning they’d get a DNA sample that way.’

She was clearly being palmed off by Davis: police officers didn’t give DNA samples as part of the job, and scrapings couldn’t be taken from the workstation Healy had used because, by the time Gemma reported him missing, he’d been out of the force for two years. His desk was occupied by someone else, if anyone at the Met even remembered which desk he’d once sat at. Things got even more complicated when you factored in his status as homeless. In fact, the only thing he’d kept through all of it
was his car, a rusting red Vauxhall, which wasn’t taxed or insured until I’d paid for both of those things in January. But perhaps he’d finally got rid of that too in the months leading up to August. Davis could have found out through the Police National Computer. The fact that Healy hadn’t been located suggested that it was no longer registered to him – or, more cynically, she remained so unconvinced about Healy actually being missing, she hadn’t bothered looking in the first place.

‘Has PC Davis been in touch since?’ I asked.

‘Once,’ Gemma replied, pushing her glasses back to the bridge of her nose. ‘A month ago, the first week of September, she called to say that she’d passed all of Colm’s information on to the Missing Persons Bureau.’

She studied me, to see if that meant anything.

The MPB worked with police, trying to attach the names of missing people to unidentified bodies. They wouldn’t have a DNA sample for Healy, but they’d have his physical description, and could access his medical and dental records. If any match had been found on the system, it would have been found quickly – and Gemma would have received a call. Yet, a month on, the phone hadn’t rung.

Dead or alive, Healy was still out there somewhere.

I looked at Gemma again, trying to decide where to go next. Normally at this stage, the families were giving me detailed descriptions of their loved ones, their last movements, state of mind, routines, hang-ups, addictions, reasons for leaving. Here, I had none of that. I had the kindness of a woman who could easily have abandoned her ex-husband, especially after everything he’d done to her – but one who’d gone even longer than me without seeing him. Apart from what she’d read in the letter, she
had no real idea who Healy was any more: she didn’t know how he thought now, or where he’d been in the three years since they split.

She didn’t have his recent history.

I didn’t have much of it either. I had year-long gaps in my knowledge, where I had no idea what he was doing or where he’d been. A lot of the time, he’d remained a mystery to me, even when – briefly – we’d been living under the same roof. But I had eight days in January, and soon I’d have the Clark family murder file.

That gave me something.

I walked Gemma to her car and told her I’d keep her up to date with what I managed to find out. She spoke again about money, but I told her not to worry. I was less concerned about being paid, and more concerned about the anxiety that was starting to pick at me. Could he really be dead?

And, if he was, how much blame lay at my door?

The things he’d said to me were like a residual ache, even if their impact had dulled over time, but the choices I’d made – to walk away from him, to leave him to fend for himself – seemed, at best, impetuous now, at worst misjudged and irresponsible. I should have had the capacity to look past the words and see the man underneath. I should have had enough control not to just abandon him.