What Remains (32 page)

He gestured to himself, to the body he carried with him, empty, brittle, and it was hard not to feel sorry for him. His breath seemed to catch in his throat as he calmed down.

‘I phoned Tom for a second time and told him I was calling in my debt. Tom said no, straight off the bat. I expected him to. I told him he owed me, that he’d spent years
telling
me he owed me, but he just kept saying no. “This isn’t what I meant. This is illegal. This is ridiculous and insulting.” So I threatened him. I told him I would call
up his wife and tell her about all the women he’d screwed behind her back. I had five, six, seven years of women to draw on. I knew some of them. I could give her names, details, dates. I told him I would ruin his professional life too. I’d make anonymous calls to the authorities and claim impropriety at the lab. Mismanagement. Evidence tampering. He’d never get another government contract again by the time I was finished. He’d be unemployable. I told him he was going to do this thing for me or, with one call, I would tear his life apart.’ He stopped, a flash of guilt. ‘When he said yes, Stevie and I moved to Highdale.’

‘How the hell are you coming back from this?’

‘Coming back?’

‘Here.
Life
. You’re supposed to be dead.’

He looked at me for a long time, and something he’d said moments before returned to the surface.
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
. I saw it then: once this was done, he
wasn’t
coming back.

‘What about your boys?’ I said.

‘Stevie told me this story –’

‘Healy, what about your boys?’

‘
He told me this story
,’ he said, pausing for a moment, eyes fixed on me. ‘He told me this story about how, years ago, he got caught stealing nappies, boxes of Calpol, wet wipes, dummies, all from a pharmacist up in Dalston. He said this PC called Blake arrested him. Blake was in his twenties with no family of his own. He had no idea how much Calpol kids got through, or how many times you changed a nappy a day, so he never bothered asking Stevie about his kids, or his reasons for stealing all that stuff. Blake just waited at the pharmacy, caught Stevie in the act and slapped
the cuffs on him. He took Stevie back to the station, questioned him, but saw the case for what it was: a few hundred quid’s worth of stolen goods. Something that size, it’s wasted time and energy, for everyone. So Blake called the chemist and managed to persuade her not to press charges.’

For the first time, I could hear rain on the roof, a chant from somewhere beyond the walls.

‘About a year later, Stevie goes back to another chemist and does the same: grabs a shitload of Calpol and wet wipes and nappies, and makes a run for it. Blake hears about it from one of the boys in his station, picks up the case and goes down to the pharmacy. He checks the in-store tape and sees it’s Stevie again. The only thing that had changed in the time since the first arrest was that Blake had started a family of his own. He had a young son now, which meant he knew all about Calpol, the cost of nappies, all that other shite. So he drives to Stevie’s home, arrests him, takes him back to the station, and he says, “Why the hell did you steal so much, Stevie? Why not take those things in smaller amounts? You steal a bottle of Calpol here, a few nappies there, no one’s going to notice. It’s less conspicuous. You do it like that and your kids aren’t going to be talking to you from the other side of some prison Plexiglas.” Stevie said that Blake didn’t seem to care that he was stealing. He was just worried for Stevie’s kids – and that was when Stevie told him the truth.’

Healy turned to me, a sickly yellow tint pooling in the stretched contours of his face. ‘His wife, his baby boy, they were killed in a house fire a decade back. The two of them had been dead for years.’ He came forward, shrugged. ‘Blake is shocked, obviously, and he says, “So, why the hell are you even stealing this stuff?” and Stevie looks at him
and says, “Because when my wife and boy died, my whole life was taken from me – and, sometimes, even though I know it’s wrong, it hurts so much, I don’t want other people to be able to live theirs.” ’

In that moment, something else became clear.

Healy wasn’t just ill.

He was mourning.

‘My daughter was murdered,’ he said, voice cracking, ‘both my boys despise me, my wife is repulsed by me … and yet, for seventy-four days, I had a family again. Those girls were mine, Gail was mine, that life was
mine
. I breathed the same air as them. I could smell the shampoo in their hair. I could taste Gail on my lips. I was in that flat, tucking them in at night. When they told me they loved me …’ His words tailed off as tears filled his eyes. ‘I could feel it … I could feel it.’

He’d dreamed of them all.

Suddenly, I remembered a line from the letter he’d written to Gemma:

I had my time again, and I screwed it up the same as before.

He’d been talking about Gail, April and Abigail.

I went towards him, unsure of exactly what I was going to do, but then he stepped away, one hand up in front of me, one desperately wiping tears away.

‘Healy …’

‘Stevie had nothing left,’ he said, his words broken and smudged. ‘But I have. I’ve got one last thing I need to do.’ Another pause, long and drawn out. ‘I’m dead. The police won’t come looking for me. How can they? I don’t exist. I’m a ghost. I’m nothing. I’m just a name on a piece of
granite. So here’s what I’m going to do: anyone who was there that night, anyone who had
anything
to do with what happened to that family, I’m going to find them …’

‘Healy –’

‘I’m going to
find
them, and I’m going to kill them.’ He gathered himself, wiping tears from his cheek with his sleeve. ‘And we’re going to start with that prick in there.’

44

Healy headed in the direction of the room behind me, the one he was keeping East in, but as he got level with me, I grabbed his arm, preventing him from going any further. I could feel his bones beneath my fingers, the paucity of him.

‘Wait a second.’

He frowned, looking down at my grip. ‘Get your hands –’

‘Calm down,’ I said quietly. ‘Don’t you think it would be better if we compared notes before you go charging in there? I can tell you what I know; you can tell me what you know. If you want to get East to talk, it’s going to go a hell of a lot smoother if we don’t look like a couple of strangers.’

He swallowed, turning the idea over.

Tentatively, I let go of his arm, but he didn’t move. Eventually, he nodded – as much of an acknowledgement as I was going to get – and gestured for us to go into the second bedroom. As I followed him in, I felt floorboards bend like springs beneath my feet and worried, briefly, about the whole structure giving way – but Healy moved with such confidence, as if he were tapped into the heartbeat of this place, that I just carried on in his wake.

‘These places have been boarded up for years,’ he said. ‘I remember one of the murder teams finding a body in here a few months after the original fire gutted it. Some
homeless guy. One of his eyes had been removed with a knife. Because of that, the drifters don’t like it – bad juju, I guess – which is why I knew it would be empty.’ He looked around the room, most of it slathered in shadow. ‘I never asked Stevie where he was from. We never talked about stuff like that. But it wasn’t from around here. If he was from around here, he would have been like all the others – scared of this place. Some of them, they act like it’s haunted.’

He moved across to where the bed frame stood, and leaned against it. Perched there – stooped, small – he looked like an ancient, withered bird, a man half the size of the one I’d known, weightless and shrunken.

‘Sometimes I think there really
are
ghosts in here,’ he said.

He removed a penlight from his pocket, switched it on and directed it to my right, into the space next to my shoulder, where two cracked wall panels were hidden by the dark. Across them was a series of drawings: a succession of grey masks, in every available space, some overlapping, some more developed, some in pencil, some in pen. Every single one was a variation on the same design: a regular party mask – coloured in grey chalk – with two eyeholes, pinprick-sized nose holes, but no space at the mouth. In the most detailed ones, the grey mask was cracked on the left-hand side.

‘Did you draw these?’ I asked.

He nodded.

‘Why?’

His eyes lingered on the wall. ‘In January, after our phone call …’ He faded out again, a hint of regret at that last conversation we’d had. ‘After I left the motel in Kew, I
went to the hostel on the Old Kent Road. That was where I was at night – but during the day I’d be down in New Cross, at Searle House. I told the people at the hostel that I was out, trying to find work, but all I was doing was driving down there and sitting outside that building day in, day out. I did that for a couple of weeks. That became my routine. That was how I first saw him.’

‘Saw who?’

He signalled to the room next door. ‘East.’

Stopping, he patted a space on his chest where a breast pocket might have been, where he might once have kept cigarettes, but there was no pocket and no cigarettes. It was habit, muscle memory, an echo of a former life.

‘The first time I saw him was 1 February,’ he continued quietly. ‘You know what’s significant about that date? It’s Gail’s birthday. He came all the way up to the children’s play park and stood there for ages, just looking up towards the seventeenth floor. Twenty minutes, maybe more. Then he placed these three cardboard crosses in the earth next to the play park.’ He ran a hand across his head, tiny bristles of hair making a crackle against the dryness of his palm. ‘Three days later, he was back again, standing in exactly the same place as before.’

‘That was when you started following him?’

‘Yeah. I switched my routine. I followed him, found out he worked at the museum, and began to watch that place instead. I’d sit outside that place for
hours
. It was
all
I did. I’d watch him go to work, and then I’d follow him home. By that time, it must have been towards the end of February. I had no idea what my endgame was, I just knew I had to find out what was going on with East. Those cardboard crosses …’ He shook his head, clearing his throat. ‘The
rain had turned them to mush a day later, but I started to think that might have been the point: he didn’t want anyone to know about them.’

It was all tallying up now. Healy’s Job Seeker’s Allowance ceased being paid in around the same time, because he’d stopped signing on. He’d stopped caring about finding work, if he’d ever cared in the first place. He was too busy with East.

Before he started speaking again, he broke out into a gluey coughing fit. When it was finally over, he looked across at me, a resignation in his face that I’d never seen before. ‘The money you gave me,’ he said, hoarse now, ‘it lasted me until the second week of February. I made it last a month, which was a month longer than I thought I would. But when it ran out, things started to get desperate. I’d stopped signing on, so I knew my JSA would end, and – once that ended – I knew I’d have no money for more petrol, no money to put clothes on my back or food in my stomach, no money to even pay for a bed.’ A long pause and then a wince: but it wasn’t because he was in physical pain. Not this time. ‘So I robbed this corner shop in Poplar. This old Indian guy. I scoped it out, saw it didn’t have any cameras, and turned it over …’

The rest went unspoken. Healy swallowed, his face creasing into a frown, and then he shifted position at the bed. Somehow, he seemed even more frail now.

‘He was stubborn. A few days later, I read that he’d needed ten stitches in his head. I took two hundred and ninety pounds, and put an old guy in hospital.’

I tried not to react. ‘What happened to your car?’

‘I sold it for scrap, no questions asked. The guy who bought it from me didn’t fill out any paperwork, so there
was no record of it. That suited me fine. I just needed the money.’

He seemed to fold in on himself, leaning forward to his knees, as if trying to support the weight of his body. I gave him a moment. ‘And East?’

He shrugged. ‘All I could think about was those cardboard crosses he’d planted in the ground. It was like being back at the Met, back on a case. I became obsessed by it again. I started going to the local library, reading up about the pier, about its history, everything I could.’

‘That’s how you got the book.’

‘Right,’ he said. ‘They had a copy. So I swiped it. I read it while I waited outside the museum, day in, day out. East would come and go, the same routine every time, and I’d follow him. I robbed another store, made off with almost four hundred quid, and I used that money to fund my Tube travel, back and forth to Bermondsey, to Wapping, trying to get a sense of the guy. I thought about approaching him, about grabbing him and beating the truth out of him, but I became terrified of screwing things up like I did when I was at the Met.’ He stopped, swallowing. ‘I realized there never
was
any “Mal”.
This
was my Mal. East. I finally had a decent lead. All those months I spent on the case before, and I never had a single lead as good as this.’

Outside, the rain got harder again, drumming against the roof. For some reason, I thought of Craw then, of the day we’d met at Walthamstow Marshes and she’d first told me that Healy was missing. Only a month had passed since then, but that October day, the heat shimmering off the tarmac, the kids in shorts and summer dresses running down towards the river; the two of us sitting there as I
tried to convince her that Healy wasn’t missing – it all felt a lifetime away.

I tuned back in as he started talking again: ‘The day I had my heart attack, East left work early. That never happened.
Ever
. I’d been watching him almost a month, and he’d never deviated from his routine. So I followed him, but instead of heading west on foot, towards Tower Bridge, like he normally did, he went the other way and got on the Tube. He rode the Overground up to Camden Road.’