What Remains (2 page)

A ghost to his family, his career as a cop a memory, he’d wiped out most of his savings and been living in a homeless shelter, what money he had left just about stretching to a mattress, a pillow and a bunk. No one else – his ex-wife, his sons, his former colleagues at the Met – knew how low he’d sunk because he was too proud, too bruised, to call them. However, he and I were different: not friends exactly, perhaps never that – which had been part of the reason he’d phoned me – but there was a connection between us. He knew I’d understand him. Perhaps more importantly, he knew I wouldn’t judge him. We’d both lost
those we’d loved, we’d battled some of the same demons, we’d hunted in the same shadows for the same people and confronted the same darkness in men. I never believed in fate or destiny – in most ways I still don’t – but I’d begun to believe in something like it in the years since I’d known Healy. We’d gone our separate ways many times, but eventually, somehow, the paths of our lives always returned to the same point.

‘What are these?’ he said, looking at the jobs.

‘Short-term store security gigs.’

He nodded and pulled a couple towards him.

As I watched him, I could see a shaving rash on one side of his neck, fresh blood dotted in the spaces above it; a cut that hadn’t healed. There were plenty more of those where Healy was concerned, but most were better hidden. He was almost forty-nine, but he looked older. He was overweight and out of condition, his face a little swollen, his eyes marked by crow’s feet that criss-crossed so many times it was hard to see where one line ended and the next one began. His red hair fell forward as he continued reading, specks of water flecking off, on to the paper. On the front of his T-shirt, I could see what was printed:
Boys on Tour – Dublin 07
.

‘Memorable trip?’ I said to him.

He looked up. ‘What?’

I nodded at his shirt.

He looked down at the words on his chest, cracked and worn by years of being put through the wash. ‘Yeah,’ he said, seeming to drift. ‘I was the best man for someone. Took a group of us back to the motherland for a few days.’ He stopped, a hint of a smile – and then it was gone. ‘A different time, I guess.’

He turned his attention back to the printouts, clearly done talking about the trip, about returning to the city where he’d been born and grown up.

‘How did the interview go today?’

He shrugged. ‘Who knows?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, I drove all the way down to Rotherhithe, sat there and answered their questions, and they stared at me blankly and told me they’d let me know.’

‘Did they say when?’

‘A couple of days.’

The barman brought over Healy’s Diet Coke and set it down in front of him. Healy stayed silent, eyes fixed on the glass, but his thoughts were as clear as if inked on his face:
I don’t want to be drinking this
.

When I’d offered to help him out, I’d attached a couple of conditions: one was that he had to find a job, even if only temporary, to get him back on his feet financially as soon as possible; the other was that he had to stay off the booze. The day we’d met in the café I hadn’t smelled it on him, but I knew he’d been at the bottle in the weeks leading up to it. I could see it in his face, in the way it had begun to rub away at him. He’d been distressed, worn, a little bleary-eyed, the effect of the liquor still evident, clinging to him like a second skin.

‘What about the other thing?’ he said.

‘What other thing?’

‘The twins.’

I looked outside, the lights from the river blinking as sleet swept across the car park. The twins and their mother were where it had all begun; the catalyst for Healy’s decline. In July 2010, he’d walked into a tower block in south
London and found the three of them. He’d entered that place as one of the Met’s best detectives – and now, three and a half years later, he was a homeless half-drunk, mourning a failed marriage, the break-up of his family and the self-destruction of his career. He hadn’t called me six days ago because he wanted to find out how I was. He hadn’t even called me because he was insolvent, jobless, homeless and desperate. He’d called me because he wanted my help in finding the man who’d murdered that family; the faceless killer that had started it all.

Nothing else mattered to him any more.

As I thought of that, of a hunt for the man responsible, something Healy had said to me in Hammersmith started playing out in my head:
I couldn’t find the bastard who killed them, couldn’t find a trace of that arsehole anywhere, and from there my whole life got flushed.
His voice had been unsteady, his eyes full of tears.
Now look at me. I’m living in a homeless shelter. I’m pathetic.

‘Raker, what about the twins?’

I stirred, tuning back in. He’d leaned forward in the booth, Diet Coke pushed to one side, hands together in front of him.

‘Someone I know at the Met is mailing me a copy of the file,’ I said to him. ‘It’ll be with me tomorrow. But I need to finish my current case first.’

I found missing people for a living, and my current case was a sixteen-year-old runaway from Greenwich. I’d located her, and returned her to her parents, but there were still things to be taken care of: calls to the Met to confirm she’d been found, a final meeting with the family to answer any questions, forms to sign, payment to be made. I sometimes let cases overlap at the beginning and end, but I
didn’t work them concurrently, because I believed each one deserved to be treated with the same level of care. I felt a natural connection to the lost, an emotional bind I wasn’t sure I could ever put into words, which made the girl every bit as important to me as Healy. More pragmatically, her family were paying me too.

In contrast, everything I’d ever done for Healy, perhaps everything I’d
ever
do, came with no financial reward. Often, it came with no reciprocation or thanks either. I’d accepted that reality a long time ago, accepted who he was, and the forces that drove him, because it felt like a lot of those forces also drove me. We were bound to one another. I’d saved his life once. He’d saved mine.

This was who we’d become.

‘So you’re just going to sit on their file until you’re ready?’ he said.

‘How can I sit on something I don’t have yet?’

A flicker of irritation.

‘Healy, I told you the situation when we met last week.’

He didn’t say anything, fingers tapping out a rhythm on the glass. After a long breath, he said, ‘Fine. Why don’t you give me the file when it arrives, so I can get started?’

‘I don’t think that’s a good idea.’

‘I don’t need babysitting, Raker.’

‘I never said you did.’

‘No one knows that case better than me.’

‘I know that.’

‘I was
there
. It was
my
case.’

‘That’s exactly why it needs a fresh perspective.’

He didn’t say anything else.

In the silence that followed, I started to leaf through
the printouts again, trying to consider how best to engage him with the jobs, but when I looked up, his eyes weren’t on me or the jobs any more, they were on the window, watching a car reverse out of its parking space. There was a sudden distance to him, as if he’d forgotten I was even here. ‘I knelt down between their beds,’ he was saying quietly, almost talking to himself, ‘in the middle of that desperate fucking flat, their mam dead in the next room, every atom of innocence ripped from them, and I remember the forensic team left briefly, and I was alone with those girls. And I … and I just …’

Even as he faded out, I couldn’t take my eyes off him, mesmerized by this flash of transparence. It was so unlike him, a moment so out of character my first thought was that something might be wrong with him. Seeing the rest of the sentence hanging there on his lips, I leaned forward, trying to hear him more clearly, but then he clocked the movement and seemed to shiver out of the lull, pulling away from its grip, and the mood changed instantly. He looked from the window to me, then to the jobs, clearly embarrassed about letting his guard down.

‘Are you okay?’

He remained still, silent.

‘Look,’ I said, keeping my voice steady, ‘I promised you I would help you, and I meant it. But I want to take a first run at it. I want to come in fresh. There’s no hidden agenda here, Healy. Don’t look for the negative in this.’

A snort, but no comment.

‘Healy?’

He just looked at me.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘What do you
think’s
the matter?’ he said, picking up one of the printouts. ‘All this shite. It’s worthless. What matters is finding out who murdered those girls.’

‘You need a job.’

He dismissed me with a shake of the head. ‘I hate it. Filling in application forms, pretending I’m someone I’m not, having to kiss the arse of people I don’t rate and won’t like. But you know what? It’s not even that. The thing that
really
pisses me off is that I could do any of these jobs in my sleep. I was on the force for twenty-six years, I saw things I can never wash away, I’ve been across the table from men so depraved they sucked the light out of the room. But according to the pile of rejection letters I’ve been busy collecting, I’m not even qualified enough to shuffle along shop aisles on the lookout for spotty dickheads trying to steal smartphones. I mean, the fact that I’ve managed to get one –
one
– two-month security gig in an entire year should tell you all you need to know. The spiel ain’t working, Raker. No one wants to employ me.’

‘Getting a job these days isn’t eas–’

‘I don’t
want
a job.’

I pushed down my irritation. ‘How are you going to help those girls if you’re living in a homeless shelter again?’

‘What’ll help them is finding the person who killed them.’

‘We will.’

‘We won’t if all we’re doing is sitting around staring at pieces of paper like these.’ He picked up a couple more printouts. ‘Like I give a shit about any of this.’

‘Healy, you get a job, you’ve got money. You’ve got money, you’ve got a place to stay. When you’ve got a
place to stay,
then
you’ve got some firm ground to work from. If you want to do what’s best by those girls and their mother – if you
really
want that – you’ll apply for every one of these, and you’ll do whatever it takes to get one of them.’

He sat there, staring at me, the muscles in his face taut, his fingers playing with a part of his chest which was obviously giving him some discomfort.

‘You all right?’ I said.

He realized I was talking about his chest. ‘I’m fine.’

‘Just email your CV off to these places, okay?’

No response. I’d set up an email account for him, and he was using the PCs in the business centre at the motel to send off his applications. It wasn’t hard.

‘Okay?’

More silence.

I sighed. ‘Healy?’

‘When will you be done with your other case?’

‘Tomorrow afternoon.’

His fingers moved away from his chest and started playing with the edges of the printouts. Eventually, he gathered them all up and slid along to the end of the booth. ‘I’ve got that interview at the recruitment agency at three,’ he said to me. ‘But after I’m done there, we can meet here if you want. You can bring the file and we can talk about the girls.’

I nodded.

‘Will you bring the file?’

‘If it turns up, yes.’

‘Don’t play me.’

‘I’m not playing you, Healy.’

He shuffled out of the booth, his gaze lingering on
me. But it was harder to read him this time, his eyes showing nothing, his face a blank. At the door to the bar, he paused for a second and looked back, a loneliness clinging to him.

A moment later, he was gone.

2

It hadn’t always been like this.

The previous night, after I called my contact at the Met about getting hold of the murder file, I’d gone looking for Healy using Google, trying to capture a sense of who he was before it had all gone wrong. I met him in 2011, when his life was already unravelling, and had only known him as he was now. But that version of him wasn’t the original. Before the twins, he’d been smart, lucid, accomplished.

History hadn’t painted him as a failure.

In fact, quite the opposite.

I found countless quotes from him in relation to big cases he’d led, solved and closed. Further back, I discovered he’d won a Police Bravery Award in 2005 – something he’d never mentioned – for halting an armed robbery while off duty. There had been a photograph of him too, from 2008 – before the twins, before his marriage collapsed, before the tragic death of his own daughter – when he’d been at his heaviest. Three stone overweight, maybe more. His face was bloated, his cheeks flushed, his collar pinching at excess skin, and yet – despite the weight – there was a poise to him, a subtle confidence, a deftness and a strength that were difficult to define and harder to explain. But they were there, clear as day, as he’d been caught in the blink of that shutter.

Looking at that photo had made me wonder how it was that Healy had ended up getting the call about the twins.
Was he asked because he was highly rated and his commanding officer knew he’d do his best by that family? Or was it more random? Did he just happen to be the nearest available man, or the only one in the office at the time? I imagined, if it was the second, he’d been over that moment countless times: what if he hadn’t been able to take the case, or he’d been in the middle of something else? How would his life have been different? Either way, something was certain: the Met wouldn’t have harboured any doubts about his competency. They’d have expected him to close the case.

Finally, my search had taken me to media accounts of the night the family were killed. Even within the confines of sanitized newspaper reports, the details had been incredibly hard to stomach, something instinctive taking flight in me as I’d read them: unease, anger; a sudden, powerful connection to Healy, as if I’d been able to sense what he must have been feeling as he’d been left there alone with the bodies, kneeling between their beds as the forensic team drifted away.