What Remains (9 page)

‘The girls told me they don’t want fajitas tonight, Mummy,’ he said, winking. ‘They’d much rather have a big plate of vegetables.’

‘We didn’t say that!’ April shouted.

He broke out into a laugh. ‘Oh, I must have misheard you.’

‘Did you remember the sour cream?’ Abigail asked.

‘Of course I did,’ Gail replied, pointing to the fridge. ‘You only reminded me about seven thousand times, Abs.’ One hand swishing the chicken around the pan, Gail reached out to Abigail with the other and pulled her in. ‘Why don’t you and your sister go and watch
TV
for ten minutes? Mal will set the table and call you when it’s ready – and then we can all tuck in.’

After the girls were gone, he took April’s place at the window and he and Gail started talking about their days. Gail worked three mornings a week at a library just down the road from them and was studying for an Open University degree in the evenings. He worked five days a week as a delivery driver but always finished early on a Friday, so he’d come home and take the girls out with the dog, and Gail would cook something special. Fridays were treat night in their flat, and this week the girls had chosen fajitas.

‘I’m going to get changed,’ he said.

‘Be quick. I’m almost done here.’

He kissed her on the cheek again, then headed across the hallway to their bedroom. Like every other room in the flat, it was small and slightly shabby, but they’d been good enough to accept him here, and he was used to this place now: living on top of one another, the smell of damp in the kitchen, the lack of natural light in the rooms. It was all they could afford for now, and until either he or Gail landed better jobs, or maybe won the lottery, he knew they’d make the best of it.

As he was taking off his trousers, his mobile started buzzing in the pocket. He pulled it out, dumped his trousers on the bed and looked at the display. An unknown number. Pressing Answer, he wedged the phone between his ear and shoulder, and began looking through the wardrobe for his tracksuit trousers.

‘Hello?’

Silence on the line.

‘Hello?’ he said again.

‘What are you doing?’

He stopped, pausing in front of the open wardrobe.

‘Uh, who is this, please?’

‘What are you doing?’ the voice said for a second time: same flat tone, exactly the same pronunciation, like a recording on a loop. There was a slight buzz on the line; an echo, as if the call had come a great distance. ‘What are you doing with that family?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘What are you doing with that family?’

A coolness slithered down his spine. ‘Who is this?’

‘This must be stopped.’

‘What? Who is this?’

‘This must be stopped now.’

‘Who the hell is this?’

The line glitched, buzzed.

‘Everything you love must be taken away.’

12

I didn’t get home until almost six-thirty, the sky a vast, markless sweep of mauve, the sun too low to be seen beyond the roofs of the city. I pulled into my driveway and got out, and as I removed my laptop and some files from the boot, I glimpsed my neighbours, both of them on their knees and tending to the same flower bed.

They were a couple in their thirties, Andrew and Nicola, and six months after they’d first moved in, we’d barely spoken. In their first week, I’d introduced myself, found out he worked for an Aston Martin dealership on Park Lane, while she had some kind of marketing job in the City. And that was it. In half a year, that was all I’d managed to get out of them. We’d talked a few times in between, but it was bland, vacuous stuff: the house, the weather, the London property market.

Most of the time, it didn’t bother me. I lived alone, I spent my working life the same way. But occasionally, I felt regret – even a sort of mourning – for the woman who’d lived there before. That had been Liz, the first person I’d fallen in love with after the death of my wife, and a woman I’d eventually had to let go.

I closed the boot, its dull thud not disturbing either of them from their gardening. Even as I made my way up the drive, they didn’t turn around, and by the time I saw Andrew glance across the fence, my front door had long
since closed and I was inside the kitchen, looking out from the darkness of the house.

Opening it up – the windows, the rear doors – I started preparing some dinner, and once it was ready, I took my plate through to the back garden and sat on the decking with a bottle of beer, watching the sky burn out until it was black.

An hour later, the doorbell rang.

To begin with, I thought I was hearing things. I rarely got visitors at home – an indictment of my social life, of who I’d allowed myself to become – and as I turned in my chair on the back deck, a third empty beer bottle beside me, all I could hear was birdsong and the gentle crackle of a ceramic wood burner I’d bought the previous spring. Thinking I must have misheard, I watched the logs gently shift inside the burner, fire licking at them, embers spitting up and out of the chimney.

Then the doorbell sounded again.

I made my way through the house, turning on the interior lights, and opened up. The security lamp bathed the driveway in a lake of stark white light, washing out to where a Yaris was parked up, a woman about to get back inside.

‘Can I help you?’

She looked back at me, surprised.

It was Gemma.

I almost didn’t recognize her. At her daughter’s funeral three years before, she’d been dark-haired and thin, her green eyes revealing so much about her – her strength, her instinct for survival – even in the hours after Leanne’s casket had been lowered into the ground. Yet all that had
changed. This version of her was flabby, inflated, the lines of her face hidden behind thick, black-rimmed glasses and untidy strands of brown hair. She swiped some of it away, her black roots spidering out, and took a couple of steps closer. I remembered her being three years older than Healy, which put her in her early fifties, and she now seemed to carry so much of that half-century. As I came down the front steps, she pulled her hair back from her eyes again and I saw how marbled they were, how blotchy and irritated her skin was, how recently she’d been crying.

‘Gemma.’

She pushed the door of the car shut. ‘David,’ she said, her voice quiet, eyes on the house. ‘When you didn’t answer, I figured you weren’t home.’

‘Sorry. I was in the back garden.’

She nodded.

‘Do you want to come in?’

A black handbag was wedged between her breast and the inside of her arm, and as she looked from me to the house and then back again, she seemed to press it closer to her. ‘Yes,’ she said, nodding for a second time. ‘Thank you.’

I led her inside, the ghost-white glare from the security lamp replaced by the semi-darkness of the hallway. ‘Would you like some tea or coffee?’

‘Tea would be fine.’

I filled the kettle and set it boiling.

For a moment, we stood opposite one another in the kitchen, awkwardly, her hovering in the doorway uncertainly, me half perched on one of the stools.

‘I take it you got my message?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I did.’

‘I didn’t want you to have to drive all the way down here.’

‘It’s fine,’ she said, eyes drifting to where steam was chugging out of the kettle and into the spaces above us. ‘I wanted to …’ Her eyes narrowed, as if she was first trying to form what she needed to say in her head. ‘I’d been thinking about calling you. I know this is kind of your … well, I guess this is what you do.’

‘I’m glad you came,’ I said.

A small smile: fleeting, fatigued.

I didn’t ask her anything else. Instead, I made her tea and led her through the house to the back deck. Gesturing for Gemma to take one of the chairs, we sat down either side of the burner, the brief silence filled with the pop of the wood. She laid her handbag on the floor, and then reached over to her tea, fingers lacing together around it.

‘How did you hear about Colm?’ she asked.

‘I know a few people at the Met.’

‘In Barnet?’

‘Not specifically, but I heard on the grapevine that you’d been there at the end of August. I’m conscious of stepping on any toes. But I wanted to call you.’

She nodded. ‘I’m really pleased you did.’

That was a good start. I wasn’t exactly sure how Gemma would view me, especially through the prism of the press – or perhaps through Healy himself. If she’d spoken to him on the phone in the moments after the two of us had fallen out, Healy would have ensured I’d come out looking second best. But Gemma was nothing if not battle-hardened: she’d been married to him for over twenty years, and that was a long time to get to know someone’s faults.

‘I don’t have any …’ She paused, looking down into her
mug. ‘I don’t have much money, David. The boys are grown up, Colm’s gone. I don’t know how I –’

‘Don’t worry about that.’

‘You can’t do this for free.’

I smiled. ‘I’m not even sure what “this” is.’

She swallowed, put her tea down and went to her bag. After a few seconds, she brought out an envelope. It was creased, a little marked, a trace of a coffee stain on its edge. Taking it from her, I saw it was addressed to her in an untidy, wavering hand. It had been postmarked 21 August.

‘What’s this?’ I asked.

Her eyes lingered on it, on the frayed corners of the envelope. It was clear she’d looked at it many times; taken it out and put it back. The flap was incapable of sticking any more, the adhesive long since worn out. ‘I think it might be …’

I waited, not interrupting.

‘I think it might be Colm’s suicide note.’

13

Something began to churn in the pit of my stomach as I opened the envelope and removed the letter. It was an ivory-coloured sheet of A4, thin stock, folded in half. On the side facing me, Healy had written
GEMMA
in uneven capital letters.

I glanced at her. She was leaning forward in her seat now, and I saw a flash in her eyes, the glow of the wood burner painting one side of her face. A second later, a tear welled, forming along the ridge of her lashes, and she lifted her glasses to wipe it away; but then another came in its place and this time she let it fall, a trail tracing the contours of her cheek. I wondered what could reduce her to this, a woman Healy had driven away, whom he’d wronged, hurt and betrayed, who no longer wore a wedding ring and was three years past caring what he did with his life.

But then I opened the letter.

It was in black ballpoint pen and barely legible in places. Halfway in, I couldn’t understand what he had written, and had to retreat back to the previous line to try to get a sense of his meaning. But even if his words weren’t always clear, his intention was obvious: this was Healy at his most vulnerable, his most lucid. This was a man who could feel the walls closing in.

Dear Gemma,

This letter is long overdue. I have had a lot of time to think over the past months about how I treated people, particularly you and the boys. I did what I thought was best for you all, for Leanne too, our precious daughter, our baby, our beautiful girl, when she was alive. I miss her so much, some days it’s like I can’t breathe. I couldn’t get to her in time – another failure to add to all my others – but I’ve often wondered what things would be like if I had.

Do you think maybe if I’d saved her, that would have made it right with her? With Ciaran and Liam? With you? All the arguments we had, all the stupid, petty fights I instigated with you four, do you think maybe we could have all gone on together as a family if I’d been a different, better person? I suppose it’s impossible to answer, what’s done is done, but when I lie awake in this place at night, it’s all I can think about. Because I had my time again, and I screwed it up the same as before.

Still, at least here at the end, I can do something right. I’m sorry for everything, Gem. Tell the boys I love them.

Colm

x

I looked at Gemma, her face marked by tears, mascara smudged, her body small again, as if she’d suddenly lost all the weight she’d gained. I closed my eyes, trying to get my own head straight – because I could see what she’d meant now.

I understood.

It was a suicide note.

Trying to focus, I put the letter down, drew my notepad towards me and picked up my pen. But then reality kicked in: what was I going to write down?

What was there to say?

‘Do you think he’s dead?’ she asked.

I glanced at the letter, then at Gemma, her eyes flickering in the light from the burner. A faint breeze picked up and sent the envelope drifting across the table, like a boat being carried away in a storm. I stopped it and pulled it back to me, trying to figure out what the best response was. I had no idea if he was dead.

But, in this moment, it felt like it.

‘What does he mean here?’ I said, pointing to the end of the second paragraph. ‘ “Because I had my time again, and I screwed it up the same as before.” Did you two get back together at some point – was that what he meant by that?’

She shook her head. ‘No.’

‘So do you know what he means there?’

She was still shaking her head, dabbing a finger to her eye. ‘No. Do you think maybe he’s talking about his work? You know, before he was fired. About being given that second chance, after his suspension, and how he messed it up.’

I reread that same passage again. ‘But he’s talking about you, the boys and Leanne. He’s talking about family here. This whole letter is about you four.’

‘I know.’