What Remains (11 page)

Heading back inside, I grabbed my pad and started to construct a timeline of Healy’s movements over the last two years, starting with him leaving the Met.

JUNE
2012 – Fired from police.

JANUARY–MARCH
2013 – Starts and finishes short-term, two-month security job at building society in Kennington.

APRIL–DECEMBER
2013 – No other work, then homeless.

7
JANUARY
2014 – Calls me (from phone box), wants meeting
.

I stopped. The phone box had been close to the hostel he was staying in at the time. Going back through my notes, I found an entry I’d made on 8 January, during the meeting I’d had with Healy at the café:
Hostel on Goldhawk Road
. If he’d been staying there before 8 January, maybe he returned there after checking out of the motel in Kew. I located the number of the hostel and tried calling them.

It was a dead line.

Doing another web search, I soon found out why: the George Lyon Shelter on Goldhawk Road had closed four months ago, at the beginning of June, citing a lack of funds. I tried not to let the disappointment get to me, and returned to the timeline, adding in more dates, beginning with that January meeting.

8
JANUARY
2014 – Meet at Hammersmith café.

8–16 JANUARY – Stays at motel.

17/18 JANUARY – Checks out of motel on one of these days.

17/18 JANUARY–20 AUGUST – ???????

21 AUGUST – Sends letter and divorce papers to Gemma.

22 AUGUST–2 OCTOBER – ???????

I circled the final three entries.

He’d spent months unaccounted for since our argument on 16 January – but had he gone completely off grid? It was hard to do that. In fact, it was almost impossible.

Picking up my phone again, I dug around in the S’s for Spike, a Russian hacker living anonymously in London on
an expired student visa. I didn’t know his real name, and had never asked, but while Ewan Tasker was my man on the inside at the Met, Spike was my skeleton key for everything else. I’d made my peace long ago with the fact that what he did for me was illegal, and I cared even less about it now. The files from Task would be arriving in tomorrow’s post – the missing persons report, the triple murder. What I needed now was Healy’s life.

‘Laundromat,’ Spike said, when he answered.

‘Spike, it’s David Raker.’

‘David! How are you?’ His accent was a composite: the sternness of Eastern Europe, an American twang, a hint of south London.

I gave him as much as I knew about Healy: his employment history, his former address in St Albans, the address of the place he rented when he returned to the Met after suspension, all the mobile numbers I’d ever had for him and the registration of his car. When I was done, I said to Spike, ‘I need everything.’

‘Everything?’

‘Literally everything you can find on this guy from June 2012 on. That was the month he got the push from the Met. From then to today is what I need.’

‘It’s a big job,’ he said. ‘Might take me twenty-four hours, a little less, hopefully not too much more. Depends how much of a footprint your guy’s left.’

Now all I could do was wait.

15

A little while later, I called Annabel on Skype. After a couple of rings, she answered my call, dressed in a blue training top and sitting in the living room, the blinds pulled shut behind her. She looked like she’d just been exercising, her hair up in a ponytail, a sheen of sweat still visible at her hairline.

‘How are you doing, sweetheart?’

‘Good. A bit knackered.’

‘You been on the running machine?’

‘Six miles,’ she said, and then collapsed backwards on to the sofa. She came up smiling. ‘Plus, I chased around after six- and seven-year-olds this afternoon.’

Her career teaching dance and drama to kids didn’t pay much, but she loved it, and with Olivia in a good school, and the mortgage paid off on a beautiful house on the edges of Dartmoor, I understood the reasons she didn’t want to relocate closer to me. We began talking about her schedule for the rest of the week, her other classes and their plans for the weekend, and then, eventually, she asked about my day.

At the start, I’d made a promise never to lie to her about my work, but it was a promise I’d already failed to keep many times over. She knew about Healy, because we’d talked on and off about the cases I’d worked, including the ones I’d worked with him, but I didn’t want to get into a discussion about him – or the murder of a family. It would be too close to home for Annabel.

‘So when are you coming to visit us?’ she asked afterwards.

Before I could answer, Olivia leaped into shot, arms around her sister’s neck. She was a beautiful girl, her Asian heritage visible in the curves of her face and the dark sweep of her hair. ‘Hi David!’ she squealed, the speaker distorting.

‘Hey Liv. How are you?’

‘Good.’

‘Good,
thank you
,’ Annabel corrected.

‘Good, thank you,’ Olivia repeated, and then instantly became distracted by something on TV. After about twenty seconds of Annabel trying to get Olivia to tell me about what she’d done at school today, she disappeared out of shot.

‘The last of the great conversationalists,’ Annabel joked.

‘How’s she doing?’

‘Yeah, she’s good. We went to see the doctor yesterday for a check-up, and he said he was really pleased with everything and there were no signs of any setbacks. Her hip’s still giving her a bit of gyp, but he says it’ll come right.’

‘That’s great news.’

‘Yeah, I’m really pleased,’ Annabel replied, and then I caught her looking at me, eyes narrowing slightly, as if she’d picked up on something.

‘I’ll be down the weekend after this one,’ I said, trying to head her off, but there was no response this time, and I realized it was too late.

‘You look troubled,’ she said with a half-smile, trying to make her concern seem less intense.

‘No, I’m good.’

‘Are you sure?’

I glanced at the bottom right of the window, to where my face looked out. Did I look weary? Distressed? Emotional? Or had I just become that easy to read?

‘All good,’ I lied.

‘Okay,’ she said, ‘if you’re sure. Is it still all right if you put us both up at the end of October? Liv’s got half-term and I thought we could show her London.’

‘I can’t wait.’

‘Thanks,’ she said, and then there was a minor hesitation, as if she wanted to add to what she’d said – but she didn’t and I didn’t raise it.

Yet I knew what it was.

My concerns in getting to know Annabel were few. Sometimes, quietly, she reminded me of lost years, and of lost people; of Derryn’s cancer and how it had stopped me from ever sharing the joy of building a family with my wife.

Sometimes I worried that my work would eventually drive an irreparable wedge between us, just like it had done with my neighbour Liz, and I became fearful – in the quiet of early morning, in the moments when I was on my own – that knowing Annabel might force me to give up on my search for the missing. My connection to the lost, and to their families, had been my constant, a map that had led me through the shadows, as I’d buried my wife, mourned her loss and struggled to come out the other side.

I didn’t want to lose that.

But mostly it was something much smaller and more personal: it was the fact that, even after almost two years, she still didn’t call me anything. I didn’t expect her to call me Dad because, for most of her life, someone else had been that person to her. But she didn’t even call me David.
We were caught somewhere in between the memories of her surrogate family and the reality of who I was to her now.

I was her father.

Just one without a name.

I went to bed straight after, exhausted, worn down, and lay on top of the duvet, looking out at the shadows in the corners of the room. Moonlight escaped in through the open window, casting a pale glow across the ceiling, the air in the room hot and still, the world beyond the house as quiet as a tomb. I sweated so much, the bed became damp, but it wasn’t the unseasonable heat that was doing it, it was what was filling my head: Healy, where he might be, the words he’d written in the letter, that last conversation we’d had.

I didn’t sleep all night.

Things only got worse from there.

16

At 6 a.m., I got up and went for a run, beginning in darkness and ending in bright sunlight, and then sat at the counter in the kitchen as my neighbours went off to work together. At eight, I re-watched the video of Healy at the press conference, and at nine, the postman finally came up my drive, holding a brown A4 envelope.

The murder file.

The missing persons report.

I took them through to the decking at the back, along with my third coffee of the morning. There was no note from Tasker inside, no hint as to who’d sent me the printouts, but that was pretty standard. Normally he’d send a separate email to ensure I’d received what I’d asked for, keeping his language ambiguous.

I’d check for that later.

I started with the missing persons report, an official police photograph of Healy on the first page. He was in uniform, the insignia of an inspector on his shoulder, making the photo at least five years old. He looked marginally younger, but not much: a little more hair, more colour in his cheeks. He was carrying plenty of bulk, and there were traces of a shaving rash above his shirt collar. I recalled he’d had a similar rash, in a similar place, one night at the motel bar.

I knew most of his personal details already, so skipped
past those, on to the next page where the report had been filed with PC Miriam Davis at Barnet.

Gemma’s statement began with a brief history of their marriage. She was pretty kind to Healy to start with: they got married in 1986, when they were both in their early twenties, and had bought a house in St Albans – ‘a total wreck, but Colm worked so hard on it for us’ – and then Ciaran was born two years later. Eighteen months after that, Leanne came along, and then two years later, Liam. But as the statement went on, the tone of it slowly began to change, and the turbulent later days of their marriage cast a pall across Gemma’s descriptions of Healy.

Her account of how he had changed, especially in the days and weeks after he found April and Abigail, echoed much of what she’d told me the night before, and after they separated in 2011, she said they could go months without speaking to each other face-to-face, communicating only via email and text.

PC DAVIS
: Why was that?

GEMMA
: I couldn’t bear to look at him.

PC DAVIS
: Why?

GEMMA
: I think, after Leanne died, something got lost between us. I had nothing to say any more. But it wasn’t just that. He’d ruined our marriage way before then. That case with the twins, that completely messed him up. I mean, I understood why it got to him. They were eight years old. Them, their mother, it was all so senseless. But Colm worked cases like that every day of his life, and they’d never got to him like that before.

PC DAVIS
: So why did this one?

GEMMA
: I think they reminded him of our kids at that age. And I think they reminded him of a time in his life when he understood them – and they understood him back.

Finally, in July 2013, after giving it some prolonged thought, she said she decided it was time to officially file for divorce, and went and saw her solicitor.

Gemma told Davis that the papers were mailed to a shared house Healy was renting a room in, on the Isle of Dogs, on 23 July 2013, and she followed up with a call a couple of days later, trying to tell him why it was for the best. Over the next three months, she repeatedly tried, again and again, to get him to sign them – ‘I was basically sending him texts, begging him to sign, for both our sakes’ – telling PC Davis she had always intended to keep things as congenial as possible.

But then, in October, Healy fell off the map.

GEMMA
: My solicitor did a little digging and found out that in November Colm wasn’t living on the Isle of Dogs any more.

PC DAVIS
: So where was he living?

GEMMA
: I don’t know.

PC DAVIS
: You couldn’t find him?

GEMMA
: No. He stopped responding to my texts, my emails, didn’t call the boys again until January. He was just gone.

But he wasn’t gone.

He was homeless.

He was too embarrassed to tell his family the truth, to let Gemma and the boys know that, by November 2013, the money had run out.

He had nothing.

Except for a phone call to his sons in January – when he was staying at the motel – as far as the rest of the world was concerned, November was the point at which Healy had vanished, at least until the letter and the divorce papers were sent to Gemma on 21 August 2014. But I’d been with him for eight days from 8 January to 15 January. It meant Craw was probably right when she’d said I was the last person to see him alive, and it meant I had
some
knowledge of his movements after everyone else lost his trail.

Some, but not much.

And, after that last phone call on 16 January, nothing at all.