by Tim Weaver
‘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.
But what really brought it home wasn’t any of that. Instead, it was a YouTube video of a news conference that Healy had held on 16 July 2010, a fuzzy image of a Sky News reporter standing in front of the Scotland Yard sign, giving an introduction, talking about the case, about the family.
Thirty seconds in, Healy appeared.
He was perched behind a nest of microphones. He’d smartened up for the TV cameras: a tailored navy-blue suit, a silver-grey tie, his red hair parted at the side and combed through. He’d lost some weight in the two years between this and the photograph I’d seen of him earlier: half a stone, perhaps a bit more.
As I watched him, I realized how disconcerting it was seeing him like this – this professional, this together, the same man who’d completely fallen apart and ended up on the streets of the city. As he introduced himself and the other officers at the table, as he began reading from a prepared statement, I felt an odd kind of regret at never having met this version of him.
The feeling had lingered while I’d listened to him detailing the names of the victims, the circumstances of their deaths, the location, the viciousness of the crime. After a couple of minutes, he’d set aside the official statement and looked out at the crowd. ‘I’ll try and answer as many questions as I’m able,’ he said, his voice clear, his Irish accent soft, ‘but this is an ongoing investigation, so you’ll appreciate that I can’t answer everything.’
His eyes had scanned the room, fixing on someone beyond the range of the Sky News camera, before nodding at them.
‘Why were the whole family targeted?’ a journalist had asked.
‘At this stage, we’re working from the assumption that the intended target was Gail Clark, but the investigation is fluid and that could change very quickly.’
‘So the girls were collateral damage?’
Healy winced. ‘I don’t care for your choice of words.’
‘What about the girls’ father?’
There had been a pause, filled with the chatter of cameras going off and the gentle whir of rolling film. Healy’s eyes lingered on the reporter who’d asked the question, and then he addressed everyone: ‘Gail’s former husband, and the girls’ father, Kevin Sims, is deceased. He died six months after they were born. Given that, clearly he’s not a line of inquiry we’re pursuing. However, we would be interested in talking to a white male in his mid-to-late thirties, who was seen in Gail’s company a number of times in the months before the family were killed.’
‘Can you tell us anything else about this man?’
Again, Healy stopped for a moment, appearing to gather his thoughts. ‘We believe he may be integral to finding out more about what happened earlier this week, so we appeal for that gentleman to come forward, or for anyone who thinks they might know anything relevant to get in touch with us immediately.’
‘Was this man Gail Clark’s boyfriend?’
‘I can’t confirm that at this stage.’
‘But you already have witnesses, correct?’
‘Again, I can’t confirm that at this time – but as I stated previously, we have a number of leads we’re pursuing.’
He’d offered nothing more and, shortly after, the footage had returned to the reporter at Scotland Yard. Five seconds after that, the video ended.
I’d continued searching online, rereading reports from the days that had followed the conference, and further soundbites from Healy. The more time that passed, the more the tone of his statements began to change, becoming terser and less engaged; he communicated less and less with the media, until he wasn’t giving them anything at all. Three months into the case, despite the age of the victims and the horrific nature of the crimes, the story began fizzling out entirely, until – at the four-month mark – it became hard to find any stories on the family
at all.
It had started with a press conference that Healy had hoped would zero in on the killer, and it had finished with failure, with resentment, with guilt. Maybe a man wasn’t built to handle the weight of those things, even someone as world-weary as Healy had been. Maybe it was inevitable you would lose something of yourself in the middle of such carnage, finding the bodies of two children slaughtered in their sleep, but not the person who’d done it. It was bound to consume you – and do it slowly, piece by piece.
I’d felt an abrupt and genuine sense of sorrow for him then, perhaps for the first time since he’d returned to my life. Sorrow for the loss of a different, better version of him, for the waste of a good career, for the horrific deaths of the twins and their mother. And sorrow for the destruction of Healy’s own family because he’d never been able to find the man responsible. As the feeling had grown, as I’d pushed aside my frustrations at him, I’d seen clearly what I had to do.
What I was always going to have to do.
I had to help him.
3
Twenty-four hours after I met Healy in the motel bar, snow began falling, drifting in from the northern fringes of the city, where black, swollen banks of cloud had gathered above the rooftops.
Having found their daughter and completed my part in the case, I left the family in Greenwich and headed west, along Blackheath Road, in the direction of New Cross. Traffic was heavy, brakes blinking in front of me, red smears against the drifting snow – but just as everything ground to a complete halt, I found the turning I’d been looking for, and pulled off the main road into Cork Hill Lane.
A few seconds later the noise of New Cross Road had vanished and a series of railway arches emerged from the night, the middle one straddling the road. On the other side of it was a sprawling council estate, endless doors embedded in a mixture of five-storey buildings and twenty-storey tower blocks. I pulled in at the kerb and switched off the engine. The radio went with it, plunging the car into silence, the falling snow adding to the lack of sound as it settled on the surrounding concrete.
I looked over my shoulder, into the back seat. A copy of the murder file sat there, pinched between the covers of a card folder and secured with an elastic band. When it had turned up in the post that morning, I’d toyed with the idea of holding it back from Healy, as motivation for him to get his life back on track. But I didn’t have the stomach to use the death of a family as a bargaining chip, and as I sat here now – yards from where they’d been found – I felt another flutter of sadness for the girls, for their mother, even though I knew nothing about them; and I felt sorry for the man who’d eventually become so haunted by their deaths. In an hour, I was supposed to be meeting him back at the motel in Kew, to talk about the interview he’d had at the recruitment agency, and about some new jobs I’d sourced for him. But he wouldn’t care about any of it – and being here, in the shadow of this place, maybe I understood better than ever why.
Immediately to my left, there was a small park, sitting in the space adjacent to the flats, a swing in the middle, on its own, moving gently in the wind. Everything – the grass, the swing, the blistered windowsills and fractured roofs – was being covered in a perfect, undisturbed blanket of snow.
I looked across to the tower block closest to me.
Searle House looked back.
It was twenty floors of misery, barely functioning, and a decade past its prime. At ground level on this side, there was a huge, ugly wall – once painted white, now tagged with graffiti – dumpsters pushed against it, and black refuse bags spilling out on to the floor. As I looked at it, I recalled a moment from the day before: Healy staring out into the car park of the motel, suddenly distant, disconnected from our conversation, recalling the moment he’d found them: I knelt down between their beds 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 just … He’d never finished what he was about to say, but as my eyes strayed to the seventeenth floor of Searle House, as the snow continued to fall silently around me, I could almost feel my way through to the next part.
He’d knelt down between them, so much anger in him, but so much sadness too, and felt a swell of responsibility. The weight of knowing that – by chance – he’d become their custodian, their conduit. Their avenger. And quietly, as the forensic team re-entered the room, he’d looked at the girls again, their eyes like lumps of chalk – empty, barren – and he’d told them he would find the man who did this.
Except he never did.
All the things that had happened to him since, mistakes he’d made, lies he’d told, every single failure, it had all started in this moment. Here. This was the case that had broken him and cost him his career as a cop. This was what had shattered his family life, driven a wedge between him, his wife and his children.
This was the beginning of the end.
4
When I arrived back at the motel, it was virtually empty, the car park deserted, snow piled high in sludgy grey mounds, skeletal trees thrashing left to right as wind whipped in across the river. Healy was in the bar, at the same booth we’d occupied the night before. I apologized for being late, the detour to New Cross and the city’s congested roads having made it a slow journey back, but he didn’t reply, eyes already on the file I was holding. I handed it to him and got us both a drink.
By the time I returned with two coffees, he was a third of the way through the file, skim-reading pages, reminding himself of the interviews he’d led, and the work completed by the detectives under his command. His face was like stone, apparently unmoved by what he was reading, but it was all an act. I knew him too well, knew too much of his history, to believe he felt nothing as he returned to this open wound. It would have been the first time he’d looked through the file since he was cut loose by the Met, the first time in eighteen months he’d been so close to the family, to their murder, to the scars their deaths had inflicted upon him. Even if he didn’t show it in his face, the file had got to him: he’d removed, and set aside, three printouts – each a photograph of one of them, on their own.
Gail Clark.
Abigail.
April.
He didn’t want them to be a part of this file any more, associated with the words in it, the clinical descriptions, the suffering, the dead ends. Every so often, as he kept moving through the pages, his left hand would stray to the pictures – clearly unaware he was doing it – and his fingers would settle close to them all.
Eventually, half an hour later, he was done.
He looked up, a troubled expression in his face, and reached for his coffee. It had gone cold. ‘Have you read any of this?’ he said, placing the mug back down.
‘Some.’
‘But not all?’
‘No. I wanted you to take me through it properly.’
I glanced at the file as another fuzzy colour printout of the family looked out at me. Pausing for a moment, eyes on the faces of the twins, on the face of the woman who had brought them into this world, I saw how much the girls looked like Gail: same colour hair; same slight bend in the nose from bridge to tip; same smile, one side of the mouth lifted a little higher than the other. Gail was plain, thin, her neck scrawny and loose, as if she’d lost too much weight too fast. She had bad skin as well, blotchy in the lines around her mouth, a trail of acne scarring around the cleft of her chin. But, like her, the twins had warm eyes, as perfect as pools of blue ink – and without any of the baggage of age, the girls were beautiful, flawless. As I looked at them, unable to tear my gaze away, something moved in me again.
‘What did you make of it?’
I looked up. ‘Make of what?’
‘What you read.’
As I’d gone through the file, I’d been impressed once more at how tight Healy’s police work was: the angles he’d worked and followed up, the theories he’d built and dismantled, how the int
erviews had been exhaustive but delicately handled. It didn’t square with the man I’d come to know over the past two years, but it squared with the one I’d found online. This was the articulate, reasoned man I’d seen in quotes, the hulking figure who’d fronted press conferences, who’d calmly batted back and rebuked salacious tabloid questioning. This was the investigator that the Met had rated so highly, not the man who’d been sacked at the end.
‘Raker?’
‘It looks like a good case, Healy,’ I said.
‘But I missed something.’
I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. That’s what we’re about to find out.’
Ordering some fresh coffee, we began.
I decided to let Healy talk me through the timeline of the case as I made notes. When I had a question, I’d ask; otherwise I let him talk. As we started, it was clear that he had an uncanny recollection of the details, perhaps bolstered by having just looked at the file again. Occasionally, he would pull the paperwork towards him to double-check a fact – but mostly it was etched into his memory.
‘Did you know she was a recovering drug addict?’ he asked.
‘Who, Gail?’
‘We never ended up making it public, because once she became pregnant, she went into rehab and got off them for good. By the time she died, she’d been clean for almost nine years. Even so, we brought in the local dealer, the guy who used to supply her back in the day. He’d been making people’s lives a misery down in New Cross for years, so he wasn’t hard to find. But he wasn’t our man. I also had one of my team call social services, just to make sure we hadn’t missed anything – mistreatment of the twins, neglect in the intervening years, whatever – but it all came up clear. I remember chatting to one of her friends a few days after that.’ He stopped, finding the relevant page in the file. ‘I quote: “Gail was lovely, don’t get me wrong, but after all her problems with drugs, I think she basically became scared about history repeating itself. So she stopped coming out. In fact, she hardly came out with us at all once the twins were born, because I guess there was less temptation that way. It made her more insular.” ’
