by Tim Weaver
‘He called me in January and asked for my help. I tried to get him back on his feet, loaned him some cash, put him up in a place just off the motorway, and then a week later he phoned me up drunk and we haven’t spoken since.’ I ran a hand across my face, finding the story painful to recount now, given everything I’d just read. ‘So, when he said in the letter he was doing something right by you, he meant he’d finally signed the divorce papers and sent them with the letter?’
‘Yes,’ she said, faintly. ‘Yes, that’s right.’
It was obvious that, in the letter, Gemma glimpsed the re-emergence of the man she’d married, the man who had always been so good, and so close, to her and the kids. That was what was getting at her: doubt over whether she’d been too hard on him; guilt over her brief, failed affair with another man; anger that Healy would only reveal this side of him again when things had reached the end of the line, when it was too late for her to do anything about it.
When, perhaps, all that was left of him was a husk.
A memory. A ghost.
A body.
14
‘What date did you report him missing?’ I asked.
We were in the living room now, Gemma more determined. She’d been to the bathroom and cleaned herself up, wiped the mascara away and tied her hair up into a bun. I’d spent time alone trying to recover some fortitude of my own.
‘I went to the police on Friday 22 August,’ she said.
‘The day after you received the letter and the divorce papers from him?’
‘Yes.’
‘What was the name of the cop you spoke to?’
‘PC Miriam Davis.’
I wrote both things down and pushed on. ‘Okay, so you decided to report him missing based on what he’d written in the letter – nothing else?’
She shook her head. ‘I didn’t initially report him missing. I just wanted to tell someone about the letter, about what I thought it might mean.’ She paused, a grimace on her face, but she was definitely in control now, seeing the importance of these moments: I needed her clear-headed, honest, decisive. ‘PC Davis seemed reluctant to do anything about it to start with,’ she went on. ‘When I told her our history, I think she saw it as some kind of … I don’t know, domestic. Something that would blow over. I told her I hadn’t seen him for a year, hadn’t spoken to him at all since October 2013, and that the only contact we’d had between then and now was the letter. But she said she couldn’t report him missing if all he was doing was choosing not to keep in touch with me.’
‘So what changed?’
‘I told her it was a suicide note.’ She paused, disturbed again by those last two words. ‘I told her that none of us – not me, not even Ciaran or Liam, who he always tried to stay in contact with – had heard from him, and if she chose not to look into it, his death was going to be on her. She seemed so young, skittish – like she hadn’t been in the job very long – so I suppose I took advantage of that, and I made a bit of a scene.’ Gemma stopped again, this time for longer. ‘It was worth it. By the time I was finished, Colm had been officially registered missing.’
‘What happened after that?’
‘PC Davis asked if she could come to the house to get a DNA sample from Colm’s toothbrush, but I told her, “I haven’t lived with him for three years. There is no toothbrush. I don’t own a single thing that belongs to him.” So she said she’d organize something through the employment records they had on file for Colm.’
I frowned. ‘Meaning what?’
‘I guess, meaning they’d get a DNA sample that way.’
She was clearly being palmed off by Davis: police officers didn’t give DNA samples as part of the job, and scrapings couldn’t be taken from the workstation Healy had used because, by the time Gemma reported him missing, he’d been out of the force for two years. His desk was occupied by someone else, if anyone at the Met even remembered which desk he’d once sat at. Things got even more complicated when you factored in his status as homeless. In fact, the only thing he’d kept through all of it was his car, a rusting red Vauxhall, which wasn’t taxed or insured until I’d paid for both of those things in January. But perhaps he’d finally got rid of that too in the months leading up to August. Davis could have found out through the Police National Computer. The fact that Healy hadn’t been located suggested that it was no longer registered to him – or, more cynically, she remained so unconvinced about Healy actually being missing, she hadn’t bothered looking in the first place.
‘Has PC Davis been in touch since?’ I asked.
‘Once,’ Gemma replied, pushing her glasses back to the bridge of her nose. ‘A month ago, the first week of September, she called to say that she’d passed all of Colm’s information on to the Missing Persons Bureau.’
She studied me, to see if that meant anything.
The MPB worked with police, trying to attach the names of missing people to unidentified bodies. They wouldn’t have a DNA sample for Healy, but they’d have his physical description, and could access his medical and dental records. If any match had been found on the system, it would have been found quickly – and Gemma would have received a call. Yet, a month on, the phone hadn’t rung.
Dead or alive, Healy was still out there somewhere.
I looked at Gemma again, trying to decide where to go next. Normally at this stage, the families were giving me detailed descriptions of their loved ones, their last movements, state of mind, routines, hang-ups, addictions, reasons for leaving. Here, I had none of that. I had the kindness of a woman who could easily have abandoned her ex-husband, especially after everything he’d done to her – but one who’d gone even longer than me without seeing him. Apart from what she’d read in the letter, she had no real idea who Healy was any more: she didn’t know how he thought now, or where he’d been in the three years since they split.
She didn’t have his recent history.
I didn’t have much of it either. I had year-long gaps in my knowledge, where I had no idea what he was doing or where he’d been. A lot of the time, he’d remained a mystery to me, even when – briefly – we’d been living under the same roof. But I had eight days in January, and soon I’d have the Clark family murder file.
That gave me something.
I walked Gemma to her car and told her I’d keep her up to date with what I managed to find out. She spoke again about money, but I told her not to worry. I was less concerned about being paid, and more concerned about the anxiety that was starting to pick at me. Could he really be dead?
And, if he was, how much blame lay at my door?
The things he’d said to me were like a residual ache, even if their impact had dulled over time, but the choices I’d made – to walk away from him, to leave him to fend for himself – seemed, at best, impetuous now, at worst misjudged and irresponsible. I should have had the capacity to look past the words and see the man underneath. I should have had enough control not to just abandon him.
Heading back inside, I grabbed my pad and started to construct a timeline of Healy’s movements over the last two years, starting with him leaving the Met.
JUNE 2012 – Fired from police.
JANUARY–MARCH 2013 – Starts and finishes short-term, two-month security job at building society in Kennington.
APRIL–DECEMBER 2013 – No other work, then homeless.
7 JANUARY 2014 – Calls me (from phone box), wants meeting.
I stopped. The phone box had been close to the hostel he was staying in at the time. Going back through my notes, I found an entry I’d made on 8 January, during the meeting I’d had with Healy at the café: Hostel on Goldhawk Road. If he’d been staying there before 8 January, maybe he returned there after checking out of the motel in Kew. I located the number of the hostel and tried calling them.
It was a dead line.
Doing another web search, I soon found out why: the George Lyon Shelter on Goldhawk Road had closed four months ago, at the beginning of June, citing a lack o
f funds. I tried not to let the disappointment get to me, and returned to the timeline, adding in more dates, beginning with that January meeting.
8 JANUARY 2014 – Meet at Hammersmith café.
8–16 JANUARY – Stays at motel.
17/18 JANUARY – Checks out of motel on one of these days.
17/18 JANUARY–20 AUGUST – ???????
21 AUGUST – Sends letter and divorce papers to Gemma.
22 AUGUST–2 OCTOBER – ???????
I circled the final three entries.
He’d spent months unaccounted for since our argument on 16 January – but had he gone completely off grid? It was hard to do that. In fact, it was almost impossible.
Picking up my phone again, I dug around in the S’s for Spike, a Russian hacker living anonymously in London on an expired student visa. I didn’t know his real name, and had never asked, but while Ewan Tasker was my man on the inside at the Met, Spike was my skeleton key for everything else. I’d made my peace long ago with the fact that what he did for me was illegal, and I cared even less about it now. The files from Task would be arriving in tomorrow’s post – the missing persons report, the triple murder. What I needed now was Healy’s life.
‘Laundromat,’ Spike said, when he answered.
‘Spike, it’s David Raker.’
‘David! How are you?’ His accent was a composite: the sternness of Eastern Europe, an American twang, a hint of south London.
I gave him as much as I knew about Healy: his employment history, his former address in St Albans, the address of the place he rented when he returned to the Met after suspension, all the mobile numbers I’d ever had for him and the registration of his car. When I was done, I said to Spike, ‘I need everything.’
‘Everything?’
‘Literally everything you can find on this guy from June 2012 on. That was the month he got the push from the Met. From then to today is what I need.’
‘It’s a big job,’ he said. ‘Might take me twenty-four hours, a little less, hopefully not too much more. Depends how much of a footprint your guy’s left.’
Now all I could do was wait.
15
A little while later, I called Annabel on Skype. After a couple of rings, she answered my call, dressed in a blue training top and sitting in the living room, the blinds pulled shut behind her. She looked like she’d just been exercising, her hair up in a ponytail, a sheen of sweat still visible at her hairline.
‘How are you doing, sweetheart?’
‘Good. A bit knackered.’
‘You been on the running machine?’
‘Six miles,’ she said, and then collapsed backwards on to the sofa. She came up smiling. ‘Plus, I chased around after six- and seven-year-olds this afternoon.’
Her career teaching dance and drama to kids didn’t pay much, but she loved it, and with Olivia in a good school, and the mortgage paid off on a beautiful house on the edges of Dartmoor, I understood the reasons she didn’t want to relocate closer to me. We began talking about her schedule for the rest of the week, her other classes and their plans for the weekend, and then, eventually, she asked about my day.
At the start, I’d made a promise never to lie to her about my work, but it was a promise I’d already failed to keep many times over. She knew about Healy, because we’d talked on and off about the cases I’d worked, including the ones I’d worked with him, but I didn’t want to get into a discussion about him – or the murder of a family. It would be too close to home for Annabel.
‘So when are you coming to visit us?’ she asked afterwards.
Before I could answer, Olivia leaped into shot, arms around her sister’s neck. She was a beautiful girl, her Asian heritage visible in the curves of her face and the dark sweep of her hair. ‘Hi David!’ she squealed, the speaker distorting.
‘Hey Liv. How are you?’
‘Good.’
‘Good, thank you,’ Annabel corrected.
‘Good, thank you,’ Olivia repeated, and then instantly became distracted by something on TV. After about twenty seconds of Annabel trying to get Olivia to tell me about what she’d done at school today, she disappeared out of shot.
‘The last of the great conversationalists,’ Annabel joked.
‘How’s she doing?’
‘Yeah, she’s good. We went to see the doctor yesterday for a check-up, and he said he was really pleased with everything and there were no signs of any setbacks. Her hip’s still giving her a bit of gyp, but he says it’ll come right.’
‘That’s great news.’
‘Yeah, I’m really pleased,’ Annabel replied, and then I caught her looking at me, eyes narrowing slightly, as if she’d picked up on something.
‘I’ll be down the weekend after this one,’ I said, trying to head her off, but there was no response this time, and I realized it was too late.
‘You look troubled,’ she said with a half-smile, trying to make her concern seem less intense.
‘No, I’m good.’
‘Are you sure?’
I glanced at the bottom right of the window, to where my face looked out. Did I look weary? Distressed? Emotional? Or had I just become that easy to read?
‘All good,’ I lied.
‘Okay,’ she said, ‘if you’re sure. Is it still all right if you put us both up at the end of October? Liv’s got half-term and I thought we could show her London.’
‘I can’t wait.’
‘Thanks,’ she said, and then there was a minor hesitation, as if she wanted to add to what she’d said – but she didn’t and I didn’t raise it.
Yet I knew what it was.
My concerns in getting to know Annabel were few. Sometimes, quietly, she reminded me of lost years, and of lost people; of Derryn’s cancer and how it had stopped me from ever sharing the joy of building a family with my wife.
Sometimes I worried that my work would eventually drive an irreparable wedge between us, just like it had done with my neighbour Liz, and I became fearful – in the quiet of early morning, in the moments when I was on my own – that knowing Annabel might force me to give up on my search for the missing. My connection to the lost, and to their families, had been my constant, a map that had led me through the shadows, as I’d buried my wife, mourned her loss and struggled to come out the other side.
I didn’t want to lose that.
But mostly it was something much smaller and more personal: it was the fact that, even after almost two years, she still didn’t call me anything. I didn’t expect her to call me Dad because, for most of her life, someone else had been that person to her. But she didn’t even call me David. We were caught somewhere in between the memories of her surrogate family and the reality of who I was to her now.
I was her father.
Just one without a name.
I went to bed straight after, exhausted, worn down, and lay on top of the duvet, looking out at the shadows in the corners of the room. Moonlight escaped in through the open window, casting a pale glow across the ceiling, the air in the room hot and still, the world beyond the house as quiet as a tomb. I sweated so much, the bed became damp, but it wasn’t the unseasonable heat that was doing it, it was what was filling my head: Healy, where he might be, the words he’d written in the letter, that last conversation we’d had.
I didn’t sleep all night.
Things only got worse from there.
16
At 6 a.m., I got up and went for a run, beginning in darkness and ending in bright sunlight, and then sat at the counter in the kitchen as my neighbours went off to work together. At eight, I re-watched the video of Healy at the press conference, and at nine, the postman finally came up my drive, holding a brown A4 envelope.
The murder file.
The missing persons report.
I took them through to the decking at the back, along with my third coffee of the morning. There was no note from Tasker inside, no hint as to who’d sent me the printouts, but that was pretty standard. Normal
ly he’d send a separate email to ensure I’d received what I’d asked for, keeping his language ambiguous.
I’d check for that later.
I started with the missing persons report, an official police photograph of Healy on the first page. He was in uniform, the insignia of an inspector on his shoulder, making the photo at least five years old. He looked marginally younger, but not much: a little more hair, more colour in his cheeks. He was carrying plenty of bulk, and there were traces of a shaving rash above his shirt collar. I recalled he’d had a similar rash, in a similar place, one night at the motel bar.
I knew most of his personal details already, so skipped past those, on to the next page where the report had been filed with PC Miriam Davis at Barnet.
Gemma’s statement began with a brief history of their marriage. She was pretty kind to Healy to start with: they got married in 1986, when they were both in their early twenties, and had bought a house in St Albans – ‘a total wreck, but Colm worked so hard on it for us’ – and then Ciaran was born two years later. Eighteen months after that, Leanne came along, and then two years later, Liam. But as the statement went on, the tone of it slowly began to change, and the turbulent later days of their marriage cast a pall across Gemma’s descriptions of Healy.
Her account of how he had changed, especially in the days and weeks after he found April and Abigail, echoed much of what she’d told me the night before, and after they separated in 2011, she said they could go months without speaking to each other face-to-face, communicating only via email and text.
PC DAVIS: Why was that?
GEMMA: I couldn’t bear to look at him.
PC DAVIS: Why?
GEMMA: I think, after Leanne died, something got lost between us. I had nothing to say any more. But it wasn’t just that. He’d ruined our marriage way before then. That case with the twins, that completely messed him up. I mean, I understood why it got to him. They were eight years old. Them, their mother, it was all so senseless. But Colm worked cases like that every day of his life, and they’d never got to him like that before.
