What Remains (31 page)

But he needed to talk to him today.

‘Tom,’ he said quietly. ‘I need your help.’

Part Four

42

I had a million questions.

But I didn’t even know where to start.

Healy shrugged off his coat – letting it drop to the floor, its bulk gathering around his feet like a punctured inflatable – and then looked beyond me, his face pale and unmoved, to where he’d been keeping Calvin East, bound and gagged.

‘I went to his house to try and find a laptop or computer,’ he said, speaking to me like our last conversation had been an hour ago, as if ten months hadn’t passed since I’d hung up on him.
As if he wasn’t supposed to be dead
. ‘He brought his phone with him, so I’ve got his numbers. I can see who calls him. But he doesn’t email from it. He doesn’t use the Internet on it. Who doesn’t use email and the Internet on their phone these days? So he’s wiping it clean. He’s hiding something.’ He tore his eyes away from East and they settled on me. ‘But if he’s got a laptop, it must be at work.’

As I watched him, everything seemed to shift into focus, like a light passing across shadows.
It’s really him. It’s really him standing here.

He’s alive
.

‘I just …’ I stopped. ‘Healy, I just … ’

I was struck again by the change in him. It was hard to reconcile the man I knew with the one who was looking at me now. I’d only known him as heavy, a man whose shirts
strained at the waist, whose face bulged and hung, who had to use gel to keep his thick red hair back from his face. Now his jumper hung off him like a smock, his neck scrawny and taut, muscles and cartilage showing through skin as slight as tracing paper. As he leaned forward, hands on his knees, I saw blobs of light form on his hairless head; a shrunken cap that didn’t fit properly.

‘I didn’t know if you would understand,’ he said.

‘Understand what? That you’re still
alive
?’

‘No, not that.’

‘Then what?’

He came forward, off the last step of the staircase.

But he said nothing.

‘What don’t I understand, Healy? Have you got any idea what you’ve put your family through over the past month? They
buried
you yesterday. If it hadn’t been for Gemma –’

‘They’re better off without me.’

His voice was soft, crackling like fat in a pan. He had phlegm caught in his throat, and when he tried to cough it out, his body spasmed in pain. I felt so much in seeing him again – so many emotions – but whatever anger I had, at the way he’d deceived me, fooled his family, whatever his reasons and however he’d done it, I couldn’t bring myself to tear into him. A part of me was just elated at seeing him here, alive, in front of me. But it was more than that. I couldn’t go for him like this, not this version of him. He was ill, and his sickness cloaked him like a shroud.

‘How is this even possible?’ I said.

He looked at me for a long time, a blank look in his eyes, then he said softly, ‘There’s this guy I know. Tom Ruddy.’

He didn’t make a move to continue.

‘Healy?’

‘His brother was a cop I used to work with. This guy used to drink like a fish, but Tom was like the next level up from that. We’d go out on the lash, and he’d have us under the table. When we were flat out on the floor, he’d be across the other side of the pub, still stone-cold sober, with his hand up some woman’s blouse. I don’t remember us letting anyone outside the Met into our little drinking group,
ever
– but Tom was different. He fitted in with the rest of us.’

‘So?’ I said, unable to see the relevance. ‘So what?’

‘You asked me how this is possible.’

‘And you’re telling me some story about –’

‘We were at this family charity day the Met organized at Hampstead Heath back in 2004,’ he said, cutting me off, ‘and Tom’s kid wandered into one of the bathing ponds. I was hammered, and had gone off into the trees to take a piss. As I was coming back, I saw him out there, thrashing around. I don’t know how the hell he got that far from the group, but Tom’s wife wasn’t there, and Tom was too busy necking his tenth beer to notice his boy wasn’t playing with the other kids. So I went in after him. I swam out there, I grabbed him, and I brought him back in.

‘He was fine.’ He paused for a moment, taking a long, rasping breath. ‘But Tom changed. I mean, proper, Road to Damascus change. Gave up booze, stopped banging around with anything in a skirt, concentrated on his work, spent every waking moment with his family. That was fine. It bothered some of the lads, but not me. What bothered me was that he became so fucking
clingy
. He’d always bring up what I’d done –
always
, every time – just telling me how grateful he was. Every conversation we had was about that
day, about how he owed me so much, that he’d always be in my debt. “I owe you, I owe you, I owe you.” This went on for three years, until we all went to Dublin for his brother’s stag do in 2007.’

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 end of his life, asking me to finish him off? You think
I
did?’