by Weaver, Tim
‘I used to be.’
‘You need to come and see this.’
‘See what?’
For the first time, the man seemed to realize everyone inside the bar was listening to their conversation. He turned back to Healy. ‘It’s better if you see it yourself.’
Three of them climbed up over the rocks and down towards the cove. The boy followed behind, reticence in every step, as if he were returning to a place he’d vowed never to go again. Healy followed the man who’d come to get him, and behind them both was the boy’s father, still suited and booted, having just returned home from work. He’d wanted to come out here to prevent his son having to see anything more than he already had. Healy knew less than anyone. He hadn’t got much out of any of the locals – many of whom he could see behind them, watching from the other side of the sea wall – but he doubted anything he was about to find was good. He’d worked murders at the Met long enough to see the connections, however small, between crimes; he knew that people handled death differently, but once you’d discovered a body – bereft of life; hollow and empty – it always left something of itself in the person who’d found it. Some held it together, some broke down, but everyone had that same look; a memory, deep and resonant, that would never fade.
When he’d left the pub, he’d told the landlord to call the police, but he and the villagers seemed reluctant, as if inviting the police in would shatter the equilibrium. Healy could understand it on some level: one of the reasons he’d come here in the first place was because he’d had enough of the city; its darkness and corruption. The people in the village had stayed here their whole lives because they’d wanted to avoid the same thing.
Healy watched as the man from the pub stepped down on to the sand of the cove, feet sinking into the shingle, the dad following in his wake. ‘Don’t go any further!’ Healy shouted to them, trying to prevent them contaminating any evidence that was down there. The rain and the wind would have damaged the scene already, but they had to preserve what they could. Healy shouted again for them to stop. This time they listened, but didn’t look back, as if unwilling to cede control to Healy. Finally, alongside Healy came the boy – maybe only twelve or thirteen – his face ghostly white, his hands rolled into fists at his side, eyes fixed off to his right, at the highest point of the cove, where something was sitting. Healy tried to get a better view of what it was, then dropped down a couple of feet to a platform gouged out of the rock. All the time, rain jagged in, almost horizontal, swirled around by the wind rolling off the sea.
Dread slithered through his stomach as he made the last jump down into the cove, and his boots started disappearing into the fine shingle. He looked at the man from the pub, then at the dad, then at the boy – cowed and frightened – waiting in the space behind them all. Waves crashed on the beach. ‘Stay here,’ Healy said to them all, including the boy. ‘Don’t follow me. We need to preserve whatever’s here.’
He waited for a moment, watching to see whether they were paying attention, and then he started making his way towards the back of the cove. Sea spray stalked him as he moved. He climbed towards a raised platform of rock at the far end of the cove and, as he did, he got a better view of what the boy had found.
It wasn’t crab bait.
He doubted the boy had even seen the whole thing: it required a level of elevation, a physical height, the boy simply wouldn’t have. Healy took another step forward. The wind and the rain masked the stench of decay, but it was there, in the background; accumulating, getting worse.
I thought it was a piece of sliced meat at first, the kid had told Healy, chewing his bottom lip as they left the pub. I thought it had shells stuck to it. But it wasn’t shells and it wasn’t sliced meat. Healy looked back to where the men and the boy were waiting. Clouds sloped over the hills either side of the beach, dark and twisted and pregnant with even heavier rain. Then the smell came again and he turned back to it, wrapped loosely in plastic, most of it – apart from an arm – washed up into the shadows of a gully.
Pale and skinny.
Bloodless.
5
Soon after, the police descended on the village. Healy had made the call himself, from inside the cove, and then waited for them on the main beach. He’d sent the locals back to the other side of the sea wall. The first responders found him – two uniforms with about five years’ experience between them – and as he explained who he was and what he’d discovered, he saw the colour drain from their faces. In this part of the world, most cops would go their whole lives without seeing a major crime scene; but for these two it had taken less than three years. He took one of them back over the rocks and down the other side to see the body while the other one stayed and called in CID and forensics. Healy pointed to where the arm snaked out from the shadows. Perched on top of the rocks, the uniform eyed it nervously for a second before nodding and retreating to the safety of the beach.
Healy followed.
Scene of crime turned up forty minutes later, forensics in tow. Inside an hour they had a tent erected as close to the cove as possible, and the SOCO – a weather-beaten guy in his early sixties – had set up an incident room in the village hall. Techs did their best to preserve evidence, to scour the cove for what had been left behind with the body, but the whole time the wind and rain carved in across the bay. Healy watched from the sea wall with the others, until eventually a plain-clothes detective came up the beach towards him, flanked by a second. Both were dressed in grey suits and police-issue raincoats.
‘Can I have a word, Mr Healy?’ the older one said, a guy in his forties with prematurely silver hair and a salt and pepper beard. It was the type of question that wasn’t really a question. The other one, skinny and tall and in his thirties, said nothing, just followed behind.
The inside of the village hall was small and cramped, wet footprints criss-crossing at the entrance. A trail of rubber mats had been laid out, branching off in one direction to a forensics set-up, where techs had placed evidence bags under the watchful eye of a uniform; and in the other direction to a room beyond a serving hatch that had a table and four chairs in it. Everything smelt musty, of disrepair and age, and beyond the serving hatch it was worse: boiled food and furniture polish. Healy sat down at the table and the younger detective – without even being asked – disappeared back into the hall to get them all a cup of tea.
‘You’ve got him well trained,’ Healy said.
The detective looked up, a wry smile on his face, and leaned back in his seat. ‘DCI Colin Rocastle,’ he said, placing a hand on his chest. ‘That’s DC Stuart McInnes.’
‘Colm Healy.’
‘I’m told you used to work for the Met.’
‘Twenty-six years.’
‘That’s a long time.’
‘The Met would probably say too long.’
Rocastle smiled. ‘You don’t look retirement age.’
But Healy understood: So, why did you leave?
‘I’d just had enough.’
Rocastle nodded and looked down at his pad, dotted with rain, ink running, notes smudged. He didn’t seem convinced, but he didn’t say anything else. In the silence that followed, Healy almost started talking again, almost started weaving a supplementary lie, but then stopped: these were tactics he knew so well, had used every day of his life for a quarter of a century, but which – five months after he’d been fired from the police force – he’d almost become entrapped by. The long pause. The uncomfortable silence. The need of the witness, or the suspect, to fill gaps in conversation. It was Interviewing 101, part of every manual ever written on police interrogation. What bothered him wasn’t the quiet between them. What bothered him was that he’d been so close to walking into the trap.
This place is making you soft.
Rocastle looked up at him, as if sensing he was turning something over, but Healy just stared him out. The lies, the half-truths, they weren’t coming as easily any more. He was out of shape and he was losing his edge.
/>
‘… cross the body?’
Rocastle was talking. Healy looked at him. ‘What?’
‘How did you come across the body?’
Healy started to recount, in detail, how he’d been approached by the man in the pub, then led down to the cove, along with the boy and his father.
‘The guy in the pub’s a fisherman, right?’ Rocastle said.
‘I don’t know what he does. But he had been down to the cove once already, before he came to get me. He said the boy’s mother had come into the village, and he’d happened to be the first person she found.’
‘You don’t believe him?’
Healy shrugged. ‘He wasn’t surprised by what we found there, as if he’d already had the time to process it. How quickly does a person go from shock to acceptance?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, his face didn’t show anything when he got down there a second time. How do you think someone would react the second time they saw a corpse?’
‘People process things differently.’
‘It was a dead body.’
‘So what are you suggesting?’
‘Maybe it wasn’t the second time he’d been down there,’ Healy said. ‘Maybe it was the third, or the fourth, or–’
‘Thanks, Mr Healy.’
Rocastle didn’t write anything down.
Healy eyed him. ‘You spoken to him?’
‘Yes.’
‘And what did he say?’
Rocastle placed his pen down, initially at an angle to the pad, before readjusting it so it was perfectly adjacent. Small things built a picture of someone at the start, and that one tiny movement told Healy that Rocastle liked precision, liked everything to fit together.
‘I can’t discuss that, Colm,’ he said.
Colm. Trying to soften the blow, one cop to another. Except Healy didn’t think it was that. It was nothing more than a hunch, but he got the sense Rocastle thought the fisherman might have some other story to tell too; perhaps some other reason for having gone to the cove first. Healy, curiosity aroused, made a mental note of it.
‘How long have you lived here?’ Rocastle asked.
‘Four months.’
‘You like it?’
Healy leaned back in the old, wooden chair. It creaked under his weight, and as he moved, the dead air in the kitchen shifted and he could smell boiled food again. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘It’s nice. No one ordering me around. No one trying to stick a knife in my back.’
‘Metaphorically or literally?’
‘Both.’
‘You fall out with someone at the Met?’
‘I can’t really discuss that, Colin,’ Healy said, and Rocastle nodded his reply. Touché.
Moments later, McInnes returned with three styrofoam cups, tea sloshing over the edges and on to his hands. He placed them down on the table. Rocastle took one and sipped from it, but his eyes never left Healy. ‘So why’d you choose Devon?’
‘Why not?’
‘You didn’t have any reason?’ Rocastle picked up the pen again, its nib hovering over a fresh page of the pad.
Healy shrugged. ‘Someone I knew has a place down here.’
‘A friend?’
‘I don’t have many friends.’
‘An acquaintance, then?’
‘What’s the relevance of this?’
Rocastle glanced at McInnes as the younger man sat down next to him, tea in one hand, mobile phone in the other. ‘You know how it works,’ Rocastle said. ‘We’ll obviously need to have a chat to everyone in the village, so we can see who knows what.’
Healy took one of the styrofoam cups.
‘Colm?’
He looked at Rocastle. ‘David Raker.’
‘Sorry?’
‘That’s whose house it is.’
6
Five months ago, my heart stopped for seven minutes. I can’t articulate what happened in the time I was gone, maybe because there aren’t the words, but I remember it being more light than dark, like sunlight refracted through glass. When my heart started up again, the first sensation was of weight: of skin, and bone, and blood; of tendons and nerve-endings. Then came the sounds, fading in like music: the voices from the medical team, the ECG, cars passing on the street outside and, further out, doors closing and people talking.
When I opened my eyes for the first time, there was no one in the room with me. I turned on the pillow one way, then the other. A white room, green floors, blinds twisted shut at the window. Still drowsy, I drifted off to sleep again. When I woke for the second time, Healy was there, sitting next to my bed, checking his phone. He was unshaven and unkempt, tie loose, shirt tails spilling out over his trousers. He didn’t notice me shift in bed, but he heard me grimace and suck in air, pain blooming in my stomach from the knife wound. As he put down his phone and leaned towards me, memories started going off like fireworks, one after the other. My parents, Derryn, the people I’d found and tracked down in the months after she’d died, and then the last of them: the man who’d tried to take my life on 19 June. The one who’d left me to die.
I woke with a jolt. For a second I was confused, hands slick with sweat, heart thumping. But then, out of the shadows of the living room came objects and furniture I recognized, and, as I looked through the window, reality set in and I remembered where I was.
Automatically, my fingers were drawn to my stomach. The bandages had been off for a month, but through the thin cotton of the T-shirt I could feel the scar: a thick knot of hard flesh, like a barnacle clinging to a rock. Some days, deep inside my gut, it felt like I could still feel the point of the blade; a cool ache, like a memory, right in the centre of my stomach. More often, though, I felt nothing; or, at least, nothing physical. The only pain that resonated was inside my head. I’d dream of crawling across the ground towards my phone; of dialling the first number I could find, anyone, any help at all; and then somewhere faintly, right on the periphery of my memories, I remembered a couple appearing, seconds after I thought they’d walked right past me, and the woman giving me CPR. After that, it became a blur of indistinct images, flickering like a strobe, until Healy arrived. That was remarkably clear: him running towards me, flanked by paramedics.
The man who had tried to kill me had been caught a couple of weeks later. He’d left behind a trail of bodies, of which me and a cop – a man called Bartholomew, the man leading the hunt for him – were the last two. Bartholomew hadn’t been as lucky as me. They’d found him just as I’d reached the hospital in the back of an ambulance, tubes coming out of me, wires connected to every muscle in my chest. While I was being operated on, he was lying dead in his home.
I’d talked countless times – to Derryn in the weeks before she finally succumbed to cancer, and to Liz who came after her – about the debt I felt for the missing; about the responsibility I put on myself to bring them back into the light. It was something I only became more certain of in the years after, when sitting down with the families was like sitting in front of a mirror. The grief they felt for the people they’d lost, the sadness, the need to dig in and cling on, I recognized all of it. And when I came back after those seven minutes, that debt and responsibility hardened and formed, and I realized that, despite everything that had happened, this was who I was.
The missing were still my life.
7
The beach was lit by orange street lamps, clamped to the sea wall at fifty-yard intervals, and the pale glow of the pub, its light spilling across the shingle like an overturned pot of paint. On top of a blistered red pole out front, its sign swung in the wind, making the same rusty squeak every time it returned to the centre. Everything had been blanched by sea salt: walls, doors, frames, patio slabs. In the twenty-four years since I’d left, only the name had changed. When I was growing up, it had always been called The Pike – as in the fish. Now it was called The Seven Seas, presumably because the owners thought that would play better with the tourists. But in truth what would play
better with the tourists was a ground-up refurbishment. From the outside it looked almost derelict, and inside it wasn’t much better. Cramped and dark, it was a two-room celebration of 1970s decor, with awful, threadbare patterned carpets, faded paintwork, and countless nick-nacks stuffed into every available space as if they all needed to be filled. It was busy too. Most of the time, Tuesday evenings were one-man-and-his-dog nights, but not tonight. Tonight the whole village was out, and they were talking about the body.
I scanned the room and saw Healy seated at the back, in his usual spot, facing the room so he could see what was going on. He had two drinks in front of him, one almost finished, the other untouched. I squeezed my way through the crowd, sat down and brought the beer towards me. ‘Cheers,’ I said, and he just nodded, his eyes fixed on someone over my shoulder. I turned and followed his gaze. He was watching a guy from the village – a trawler fisherman called Prouse – talking to a small group of men.
‘Where were you?’ he asked. His eyes didn’t leave the man.
‘When?’
‘I called you earlier and told you to come down to the village hall.’
‘I was in the middle of something.’
His eyes flicked back to me. ‘Really?’
‘If that cop needs to talk to me, you told him where I live.’
‘You were listening to what I said, right?’
‘You’re not a cop any more, Healy.’
He frowned. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘It means you don’t owe them anything. It’s not your job to round up the suspects and throw them into the back of the van. Not for this Rocastle guy, not for anyone.’
‘I know that.’
‘Do you?’
He eyed me but didn’t respond. He’d become more controlled in the months since I’d known him, but it was still hard for him to bite his tongue. He was used to hitting out, used to lying and misleading when he needed to, and this new life – miles away from the city, miles from his ex-wife and two boys – was new and probably, in its own way, quite daunting. This wasn’t his playground. He wasn’t operating from a position of strength. He’d needed to get out of London because it was suffocating him; he’d been fired, he was still mourning the loss of his daughter, and he was on the verge of doing something rash in the days before I was attacked. After I was finally released from hospital, I needed to get away too, and I owed Healy my life, at least in part. So I offered him a room in the cottage my parents had left behind for me. I never put a time frame on it – I guess because I saw us driving each other insane inside a couple of weeks – but somehow we were four months down the line and he was still here.
