by Tim Weaver
PC DAVIS: So why did this one?
GEMMA: I think they reminded him of our kids at that age. And I think they reminded him of a time in his life when he understood them – and they understood him back.
Finally, in July 2013, after giving it some prolonged thought, she said she decided it was time to officially file for divorce, and went and saw her solicitor.
Gemma told Davis that the papers were mailed to a shared house Healy was renting a room in, on the Isle of Dogs, on 23 July 2013, and she followed up with a call a couple of days later, trying to tell him why it was for the best. Over the next three months, she repeatedly tried, again and again, to get him to sign them – ‘I was basically sending him texts, begging him to sign, for both our sakes’ – telling PC Davis she had always intended to keep things as congenial as possible.
But then, in October, Healy fell off the map.
GEMMA: My solicitor did a little digging and found out that in November Colm wasn’t living on the Isle of Dogs any more.
PC DAVIS: So where was he living?
GEMMA: I don’t know.
PC DAVIS: You couldn’t find him?
GEMMA: No. He stopped responding to my texts, my emails, didn’t call the boys again until January. He was just gone.
But he wasn’t gone.
He was homeless.
He was too embarrassed to tell his family the truth, to let Gemma and the boys know that, by November 2013, the money had run out.
He had nothing.
Except for a phone call to his sons in January – when he was staying at the motel – as far as the rest of the world was concerned, November was the point at which Healy had vanished, at least until the letter and the divorce papers were sent to Gemma on 21 August 2014. But I’d been with him for eight days from 8 January to 15 January. It meant Craw was probably right when she’d said I was the last person to see him alive, and it meant I had some knowledge of his movements after everyone else lost his trail.
Some, but not much.
And, after that last phone call on 16 January, nothing at all.
That was where Davis’s police work should have taken up some of the slack. The Met should have been trying to track Healy’s movements from November 2013, through the next ten months to 21 August 2014 – when they knew he was definitely still alive – and into early September, when things became less certain. Instead, apart from the case being referred to the Missing Persons Bureau, things had barely progressed.
As I went through the report, I couldn’t find a single useful lead. There were no interviews, apart from the one with Gemma, and Davis had failed to locate Healy’s whereabouts, at any point, between November and the date the letter was posted. She had no witnesses, there were no bank statements or phone records attached, no evidence of emails either. Did that mean she couldn’t find a single trace of him anywhere between those dates? That the only time he came up for air in that entire period was the eight days he spent in the motel?
I’d find out for sure once Spike had got back to me, but it seemed unlikely: the Healy I knew wouldn’t have had the discipline for that, especially if he was in the middle of another spiral. Yet Davis was at more of a disadvantage than I was: she didn’t know he’d become homeless, because – when she reported him missing – Gemma had no idea either. As a result, Davis wouldn’t have thought to try to find him in hostels or emergency housing.
His reappearance in January would have gone undetected, because I was the one who had paid for his accommodation, lent him money and organized a new phone. If he’d gone back to the streets after that, haunting the shadows of the city, the anonymity of doorways and shelters, he’d have taken the mobile I’d given him, leaving Davis trying to track him via the phone he had before that.
So, in theory at least, because the Met weren’t aware of his new number from January, Healy could easily have drifted uncharted for months. But, in order to do that, he would have had to rein in every aspect of his life. Because it was hard to disappear without a trace, perhaps impossible, and I doubted Healy’s ability to do that, even at his most focused. He might not have used credit cards, had an address, paid rent or run a car, but I was willing to bet he’d left a footprint.
I just had to find out where.
In the end, the best Davis had managed to do was confirm that the letter had come via the Mount Pleasant Mail Centre in Clerkenwell, which was futile. It was one of the largest sorting offices in the world, with millions of items being processed every day. Trying to track a signed-for package would be hard, but Healy’s letter had been sent first class. That made it basically untraceable.
Returning to the timeline I’d begun constructing the night before, I started adding more of Healy’s known movements, combining them into one long list:
23 JULY 2013 – Solicitor mails divorce papers to Healy. He’s renting a room in a shared house on the Isle of Dogs. (Where?)
23 JULY–OCTOBER – Gemma tries to get Healy to sign papers.
OCTOBER – Healy harder to get hold of. (Is this when the money runs out? When does he leave the shared house?)
NOVEMBER – Healy disappears completely. (Homeless)
7 JANUARY 2014 – Calls me, wants meeting.
8 JANUARY – 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 – Where is he during this time? What is he doing?
21 AUGUST – Sends letter and divorce papers to Gemma.
22 AUGUST – Gemma reports him missing.
23 AUGUST–2 OCTOBER – Where is he during this time? What is he doing?
The seven months between 17 or 18 January and 20 August felt like the centre of the case. I’d paid for ten days at the motel to start with, which meant he would have checked out on 18 January at the latest. I’d also loaned him enough cash to see him through another couple of weeks of expenses – perhaps to the start of February – but, after that, he’d have had nothing else to draw on. Yet he’d survived almost another seven months, apparently without either a job or a room to call his own, before sending Gemma the letter, entirely out of the blue. So what prompted him to do that? What had changed? Where did he go during that time?
What seemed certain was that he was alive just six weeks ago, and at the end of the file there was a log, listing all updates in the case since it was opened on 22 August, which confirmed it – to a point. The last recorded activity was nearly two weeks into the case, 2 September, when Davis got confirmation from the MPB that none of the unidentified bodies they’d recovered in the period up to, and including, 31 August matched Healy’s physical description or dental records.
That left two possibilities: that Healy was out there somewhere, and still alive; or that at the time the MPB conducted their search – 31 August – his body hadn’t yet been found.
I didn’t linger too long on the second prospect and instead refocused my attention on the file in front of me. Except there was nothing else for me to see.
It was done.
Six weeks after Gemma had turned up at Barnet station and reported him missing, the police investigation into Healy’s disappearance was effectively over.
17
I opened the murder file.
The Clark family looked out at me, April and Abigail standing either side of their mother, Gail in the centre, kneeling, her arms around their waists. In the background I could see foil party banners and balloons, for the girls’ birthday.
It wasn’t the same photo I’d looked at nine months ago, but as I traced the lines of their faces, their light hair braided, their skin unblemished, it had the same effect on me: I felt a part of me take flight. I’d tried to steel myself for this moment, had been dreading it, and as I gazed into their eyes, I wavered. Any ideas I’d had about remaining impassive, ideas of control and containment, were gone; when I looked at them, I felt anger burning a hole in the centre of my chest, an anim
al instinct kicking in. In a strange way, it moved me closer to Healy too; this family, this crime, it was worth more than the words we’d exchanged at the end. None of what he’d said to me mattered now. It was just this.
I started turning the pages.
A lot of it I remembered from what Healy and I had discussed in January, but I reread the same sections again, bringing myself up to speed: how the girls were found, covered with their duvets, and then their mother, on the sofa in the next room, stabbed nine times; the way Gail had cleaned up her life, and her absolute dedication to her daughters after that; her Open University course in History and Social Science, her part-time job at the library, the way her children and her coursework usurped a social life and close friends.
I went back through the testimony of her next-door neighbour Sandra Westerwood, who’d been the first to raise the alarm and who claimed to have seen the family with an unidentified man in his mid-to-late thirties – dark hair, medium build – in the months leading up to their deaths. Then there were the dead ends – the name ‘Mal’ or ‘Malcolm’, the delivery driver in the olive-green shirt, the lack of usable DNA evidence, the broken CCTV cameras in and around Searle House. Witnesses – or, at least, witnesses that might help push the case forward – were relatively few, but as I got to the point which Healy and I had reached in January, just before Annabel had called about Olivia, a name leaped off the page.
Joban Kehal.
If the case had been a dog, you’d have put the fucking thing down, Healy had said to me. No motive, no DNA, vague witnesses, eleven thousand men with a name that might not even be relevant. But then he’d taken the file, riffled through the pages and shown me a statement from another witness. I’d asked him what it was.
About the only thing worth a damn.
Kehal’s name was the last thing I read in the file before everything went south, and as I looked again nine months on, turning the pages, I realized there were actually two further witness statements, aside from Sandra Westerwood’s. One was from Kehal, who lived five doors along, in the flat closest to the stairwell on the seventeenth floor; the second was from a woman called Bridgette Koekver, who lived on the fourth floor. She’d been arriving back at Searle House on the Sunday night after going to a party.
I started with Kehal’s statement.
The layout of his flat – which he shared with his wife and two children – was exactly the same as the Clarks’, and he told police that on Sunday 11 July at around 10.30 p.m. he’d been coming out of the kitchen – the room closest to the front door – when he’d heard someone walking back and forth outside his flat.
As Healy pressed him, Kehal described how, at first, he thought he was hearing one person walking past and another coming the other way, but then it happened a second time, and a third, so Kehal stepped up to the front door and used the peephole. Outside, he could see a man off to his right, at the entrance to the seventeenth-floor stairwell. He was now standing there, with his back to Kehal.
HEALY: Standing there doing what?
KEHAL: Nothing.
HEALY: Just standing there?
KEHAL: Standing still. Not moving. Like he was waiting.
The file included pictures of the stairwell. There was no separation between stairwell and flats, and there was an open balcony too, which ran opposite the endless rows of uniform blue doors. On a top-down diagram of the stairwell, the corridor and Kehal’s flat, the man’s location had been marked with a cross. He’d been about fifteen feet away.
Unfortunately, Kehal’s English was only passable, so the interview started fraying around the edges when Healy began trying to drill down into the detail.
The distance from Kehal’s door to the stairwell didn’t help, but as Healy tried to get a sense of what the man may have been doing, Kehal just repeated the same thing: that the man was standing still, with his back turned, as if he was waiting for something. Or psyching himself up, I thought, and then saw that one of Healy’s team had speculated the same thing, writing: Nervous? Having doubts?
So was this ‘Mal’?
Thinking that Kehal’s recollection might be improved if he were able to communicate in the language he’d spent most of his life speaking, Healy brought in a Punjabi interpreter, and interviewed again. Kehal articulated himself better, but failed to add much texture. One thing that caught my attention, though, was when Healy pressed him on whether the man had looked nervous or scared.
KEHAL: No.
HEALY: He’d been pacing up and down the corridor before that. It sounds to me like he was nervous.
KEHAL: I don’t think so.
HEALY: What makes you so sure?
KEHAL: He seemed … I don’t know, he just seemed relaxed. He kept checking his watch to see what time it was.
HEALY: He kept checking the time?
KEHAL: I didn’t stand there and look at him for long, but he checked his watch at least twice. Maybe three times.
HEALY: So it was like he was working to a schedule?
KEHAL: Working to a schedule, yes.
Using the interpreter again, Healy concentrated on a physical description of the man. He’d had his back to Kehal the entire time, and Kehal estimated that – in total – he’d spent no more than forty seconds watching through the peephole. Nonetheless, he was able to describe the man as being in his mid forties, with blond hair tied into a short ponytail, and about six to six-two in height. It didn’t appear to be the same man Sandra Westerwood had described seeing with Gail and the girls, but, with this second suspect, Kehal gave Healy more to work with: he was wearing jeans, a short, dark blue raincoat and a white T-shirt.
Nevertheless, the interview with Kehal and the pinpointing of the man on the stairwell made for slim pickings. With the man not moving from his position – or showing his face – it was impossible to connect him directly to the Clarks. If it wasn’t Mal, who was it? Their killer? Or just a man in a block of flats that housed six hundred and eighty other people, waiting for someone to meet him?
I moved on to the interview with Bridgette Koekver.
Koekver was a 25-year-old legal secretary, originally from Hoorn in Holland, who worked for a firm of solicitors on Marsh Wall, south of Canary Wharf. On Sunday 11 July she’d been doing overtime, as part of a big case the firm had coming up that week. She’d left work at 7 p.m., and had then gone to a colleague’s house-warming party at an apartment overlooking Blackwall Basin. At 10.15 p.m., she got the Tube back from Canary Wharf, changed at Canada Water and walked home from New Cross Gate station. At around 10.45 p.m. – fifteen minutes after Kehal said he saw someone with their back to him, on the stairs of the seventeenth floor – Koekver described passing the same man as he left the building’s ground-floor entrance.
Again, the scene had been sketched out via a top-down diagram, showing Koekver’s position in relation to the man, their approximate routes in and out of the building added as a series of dotted lines. They’d passed within feet of one another, Koekver approaching the doors from the left, the man veering off to the right. He’d headed in the opposite direction to the way she’d come, down towards Cork Hill Lane, the road that led into Searle House and its two sister buildings. I remembered driving along it back in January, so I could take a look at the flats.
What made Koekver’s statement compelling wasn’t just the fact that the person she described seeing – mid forties, blond with a ponytail, jeans, a dark blue raincoat, a white shirt – chimed exactly with the one Kehal had seen on the stairwell, it was that the man had been sprinting as he’d left the building.
And something else too.
He’d had blood on his hands.
HEALY: How much blood?
KOEKVER: Not a lot … but … like, dots, you know?
HEALY: Spatter?
KOEKVER: I’m not sure what that means.
HEALY: Lots of dots?
KOEKVER: Not lots. But some.
HEALY: Enough for you to notice?
KOEKVER: Definitel
y enough, yes.
HEALY: And you’re sure it was blood?
KOEKVER: Now I know what happened to that family, I’m sure. But when I saw him, it was dark – not much light, you know? – so I wasn’t completely sure.
HEALY: Which was why you didn’t report it at the time?
KOEKVER: Yes.
This was where CCTV footage should have helped.
Except two of the cameras that night were on the blink, which meant the investigating team had to rely on the only one that worked: the camera that faced out towards Cork Hill Lane, the solitary road in and out of the estate.
At this point, it looked like they may finally have caught a break.
In a series of black-and-white stills from the night of the murders, the blond man with the ponytail was caught on camera leaving Searle House and heading to where a row of cars was parked on Cork Hill Lane. The clearest shot of his face was right at the start, as he exited: a side-on freeze-frame, his jacket covering a part of his chin, his ponytail obscuring an ear and cheek as it swung from behind him, swaying to the movement of his run.
He had a blond beard, the same colour as his hair, unsculpted and untidy. I wondered briefly whether it may have been deliberate, an effort to disguise himself: if it had been a conscious decision, it had been a clever one. The quality of the camera wasn’t good enough to differentiate clearly between the lines of his face – the angle of his jaw, the point of his chin, the crescent of his upper lip – so the lower half of his face became a blur of blond, like a bleach stain on the film.
Above that, things were more distinct.
His nose was short, a little compacted, and looked as if it may have been broken a couple of times, without ever being properly reset. He was overweight too: not much, but enough. He didn’t overtly carry it on his body – he looked tall, well built, powerful – but I could see his cheeks were a little puffy, his eyes too.
His eyes.
They were the part that didn’t quite fit.
There was an odd dichotomy to them, as if they should have belonged on someone else’s face. The colourless printouts didn’t help, reducing their subtlety to opaque black discs, but even if their actual hue was brown, hazel or bottle green, they looked out of place alongside his blond hair and fair skin.
