by Tim Weaver
That was the clearest picture the police had of him.
A second shot showed him halfway down towards the line of cars, his coat billowing behind him.
A third showed him reaching the pavement.
But then I got to the fourth.
I’d expected him to keep going, heading off in the direction of New Cross Road, but instead the fourth picture showed him reaching forward and opening one of the cars parked against the pavement. It was a dark-coloured Mondeo.
He was getting into the passenger side.
In the fifth, he was already inside the vehicle, pulling the door closed, but with the interior light on I could – for the first time – see something else.
There’s a second man.
He was on the driver’s side, gloved hands on the wheel, indistinct face turned slightly towards his accomplice. The man at the wheel had a very similar black or blue raincoat on, and appeared to be wearing a dark baseball cap. In the sixth and final picture, the door was shut, and the Mondeo was pulling out.
The registration number was clearly visible.
I turned the page and found the line of inquiry on the vehicle: it had been found three weeks later in the Long Stay car park at Heathrow Terminal 4.
As soon as it was found at Heathrow, Healy’s team sourced footage from the car park, in order to get a clearer shot of the men, and traced the ownership of the car. But the car was stolen from an estate in Charlton on Friday 9 July.
And, as one avenue closed, so did another.
The Heathrow footage was worthless. The men appeared to have planned ahead: the car was parked two hundred and fifty feet from the nearest camera, in a corner of the lot that had the least amount of coverage, and when they left the vehicle, they’d changed clothes: black beanies, black coats with high collars. The fact that they’d dropped the car off in darkness, at 1.57 a.m., only helped them.
Afterwards, Healy’s team had gone through the footage from the Cork Hill Lane camera, trying to see if the blond man had been there prior to the family being murdered – watching them, scoping out their location and routines. But he never appeared again. Yet it seemed unlikely it would have been his first time there, especially if Gail let him in willingly. The conclusion the team reached was the obvious one: if he’d been to Searle House before, he’d approached from the direction of the Tube. Had he just got lucky, inadvertently using the failing CCTV on that side of the building to his advantage? Or had he known the camera was out of service? The second option was the more worrying: it spoke of someone in control of every step, aware of his surroundings. It was cold-blooded planning.
I returned to the stills of the man leaving Searle House.
The first shot of him – the best the investigation had – was borderline unusable, which explained again why no physical description, or picture, was ever released to the public in the aftermath of the family’s death. It was blurred, over-saturated, even after going through forensics, and the public would have to work hard to make sense of it. His nose was an identifying characteristic – the fact it looked like it had been broken in a couple of places – but something about his eyes, the way they were at odds with the rest of him, didn’t sit right with me.
Maybe it hadn’t sat right with Healy either.
I traced the man’s face with my finger, trying to get to the bottom of what was bugging me – and then, suddenly, the murmur of an idea formed and grew.
His hair. His beard.
They don’t belong with his eyes.
Because his hair and beard were dyed.
Instantly, it made sense: Healy hadn’t released the photograph because he knew he’d be asking the public, the media, to find the wrong man. That was why the beard was so unkempt – because the man had never planned on keeping it. And as I thought of that, I thought of something else: the ‘Mal’ that Sandra Westerwood had described seeing the family with, at the play park, in the months leading up to the murders – five-ten to six feet tall, black hair, medium build.
Were they the same person?
Apart from the difference in hair colour, they were certainly in the same ballpark physically, and it would explain why the blond-haired man was seen so close to the Clark’s flat that night. It might explain too why Gail had let him in, willingly, at night – even though he’d dyed his hair and changed his appearance – and why there was no sign of a struggle. No shouting. No noise.
Because she trusted him.
So, who was the second man – the driver?
I flipped forward in the file, to the fifth picture taken from the security camera at the front of Searle House. The blond man was inside the Mondeo, hand on the door, pulling it closed. The front light cast a dull glow across him and the person in the seat next to him. The driver’s face was a smooth, undefined mass, his eye sockets reduced to shadows, his cheeks just smooth, grey sweeps. Again, I took in the raincoat he was wearing, and the dark baseball cap, but there were no recognizable name brands on them – not helped by the quality of the footage.
I felt a knot of irritation form, imagining again how much worse it must have been for Healy at the time, sitting and looking at this succession of murky pictures, obscured by shadows and bad angles, overexposed, achromatic.
But then, off the back of that, I felt something stir, out on the periphery of my thoughts. As I failed to grasp it, my eyes returned to the shot of the two of them – but specifically to the driver, both his hands on the wheel, black gloves on, body half turned in the direction of his passenger. There were two versions of the shot in the file: the original, taken from the CCTV feed; a second, magnified by forensic techs, cleaned up, its noise reduced, but with far less definition. The bigger the shot had become, the less sharp, its edges tapering off.
There’s something I’m not seeing.
I compared and contrasted them both, hoping it would come to me, but the only thing I spotted this time was what must have been a mark on the CCTV camera lens itself: a crack, a hair, a fibre, something. From the angle of the shot, it made it seem as if the left-hand side of the driver’s face had cracked, giving him an even stranger quality than he had already: the neutral, emotionless lines of his face; the black discs of his eyes; the lack of definition around his mouth and nose.
I leaned back and looked out at the garden, the truth hitting home: Healy hadn’t been able to find either of the men because – through luck, but more probably, through good planning – they’d both made themselves untraceable.
One had changed his appearance.
The other appeared to have no face at all.
The Man in the Raincoat
22 days, 3 hours, 24 minutes before
He woke suddenly, heart hammering in his chest, T-shirt and shorts soaked through. The moment he opened his eyes he instantly forgot what the dream had been about, but he knew it had been bad: his clothes, his pillowcase, the sheets he’d been cocooned in were all doused in sweat; and even as the thud of his heart receded, there was a residual sense of something, as if the dream had left a scar.
He sat up, flipping back the covers.
There was no window in the bedroom, but faint light washed in through the open doorway, cast by the moon as it angled down into the kitchen across the hall. He shifted, looking back over his shoulder. Beside him, Gail slept, her breathing soft and steady, and – as he watched her – he felt a swell of relief that whatever he’d dreamed about remained buried deep in his head. He was thankful to be back in reality.
Back with Gail. Back with the girls.
Peeling off his wet T-shirt, he grabbed his dressing gown, slipped it on and left Gail sleeping. He peered in at the room next to theirs, where the girls lay. They were sleeping soundly in adjacent beds, their night light plugged into the wall, a pale glow rinsing across their faces. They both went to bed with comforters, April a tatty cotton blanket, Abigail a brown-and-white puppy. There wasn’t a window in their room either, so he’d helped paint them a mural on the wall: a floor-to-ceiling view o
f a sun-kissed beach. They’d quickly added all sorts of things to it, including aliens, lorries and castles, and their room had also become home to the dog, who loved curling up next to the mural because that was where the bedroom’s radiator was.
Smiling to himself, he left them and padded through to the kitchen, filling the kettle. On the oven it read 03.42. As he stood there, he looked out of the window, into the night. The grass in front of Searle House was almost black, the other two buildings – identical to this one – like huge, beached ships around the same dark sea. There was no light in the sky now, the moon submerged behind banks of twisted cloud, so the only relief came from the orange glow of the street lights, one of them – close to the play park – blinking on and off, like a lighthouse.
Light. Dark.
Light. Dark.
Briefly, a breeze moved through the branches of a tree below – the only one this close to the building, its canopy five storeys beneath him, level with the twelfth floor – and as the wind died away again, he could see a figure emerge from the darkness on the far side of the park, arms in the pockets of a blue raincoat, baseball cap pulled down, eyes fixed on the ground. The figure was holding something.
A memory started to come back to him – some distant recollection – and as he stepped closer to the windows, he pulled the dressing gown a little tighter around him and a coolness began sliding beneath his ribcage. Below, the figure was crossing the grass in front of the flats, eyes still down, passing in and out of pools of light. Mal tried to grasp at the memory, but it was too indistinct. Did he know this person from somewhere? Was it the way they were dressed? Was it what they were holding? He tried to zero in on what the figure was carrying in their right hand, but it was small, being held close to their leg, and disguised by the darkness.
Slowly, as the kettle reached boiling point, the window began to steam up, and by the time he’d cleared it the figure was passing directly beneath him. He leaned right against the glass, trying to follow the figure for as far as he could.
‘Are you okay, Mal?’
He started. Gail was standing in the doorway, dressing gown on. He glanced out of the window, but the figure was gone. ‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘Just couldn’t sleep.’
‘Bad dreams again?’
He frowned. ‘Again?’
She came in, slid her arms around him, and they stood there for a moment, comfortable in the silence. ‘You just seem to be having a lot of them lately.’
‘Do I?’
She broke off, grabbed two mugs from the cupboard and started making them both some tea. ‘Don’t forget, you need to take the girls to school …’ She looked at her watch and smiled. ‘In four hours’ time. I’ve got to be up early to get the bus.’
‘The bus?’
‘I’ve got my first exam paper today.’
‘Ah,’ he said. He’d forgotten. One of the most important days of her life, and he’d totally forgotten. He smiled at her, trying to pretend he hadn’t. ‘Your exams.’
‘Did you forget?’
‘No.’
That playful smile again. ‘Okay. I believe you. Today could be the start of something good for us. I could be Gail Clark BA (Hons) in a few months.’
‘You deserve it, honey.’
She went to the fridge to get some milk.
While her back was turned, he looked out of the window again, down seventeen floors to the area in front of Searle House; to the route the figure had taken, past the rows of wheelie bins.
‘Mal?’
He turned back to her.
‘Are you sure you’re okay?’ she said. ‘I’ve come in here a couple of times and found you like this, looking out of that window. When I ask you what the matter is, you say you’ve had a strange dream. How often are you getting them?’
‘On and off.’
‘Are you going to be all right to go away?’
‘Away?’
‘Next weekend.’
He remembered then: he was supposed to be going off with some mates for the weekend. It had been in their diaries for a year. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I’ll be fine.’
‘You’re not going to be much use to them if you’re falling asleep.’
He smiled. ‘But I’ll be a cheap drunk.’
Gail returned the smile and, as she finished off the tea, he looked out to the darkness that surrounded the block of flats.
‘What do I say I’ve dreamed about?’
She handed him a mug. ‘Huh?’
For the first time she was studying him, as if she wasn’t quite sure what was going on in his head. He smiled at her, trying to allay her fears, and rephrased the question. ‘Do I ever mention what my dreams are about?’ he said matter-of-factly.
‘You don’t remember?’
He shrugged; smiled again. ‘All I know is I sweat a lot.’
‘You’ve told me you’ve dreamed about a man.’ She backed up against one of the kitchen counters, watching him. ‘You say he’s always wearing the same dark blue raincoat – and he’s always carrying something in his hands.’
18
The day seemed to grow hotter as I went through the murder file again, making notes, posing questions to myself about possible new angles. I called Ciaran Healy and spoke to him for twenty minutes, asking him questions about his father, but things meandered once I got definite confirmation that neither he nor his brother had spoken to Healy since the turn of the year. At times there was a cynicism in his descriptions of his father, an acidity in the way he blamed him for the destruction of his parents’ marriage, and I realized Gemma hadn’t shown him Healy’s last letter yet. If she had, I doubted he’d have been talking the same way.
After that, I made a series of calls, retracing Healy’s original path through the investigation: the school the twins had gone to; the library Gail had worked at; friends of hers listed in the police file and neighbours at Searle House. It got me nowhere. I spent a while staring out at the garden, trying to gather my thoughts, trying to gain a clear line of sight – and then my phone started buzzing again.
It was Spike.
‘David,’ he said. ‘How are you doing?’
‘I’m good. Have you got something for me?’
‘Everything you asked for, basically. This is the complete picture on this guy Healy, starting 1 June 2012 and going all the way through to yesterday, 2 October 2014. Finances, phone records, bank account, car, rent – it’s all there. To be honest, when I started, I thought, “Shit, this is going to take me days.” But after November 2013, he scales right the way back. Like, really scales back. He shuts up shop and vanishes. He stops paying for anything, stops making phone calls.’
That tallied with what Gemma had told me: July through to October 2013, after she’d sent him the divorce papers, she’d frequently been in touch, trying to get Healy to sign them. Then he became harder to get hold of, then she couldn’t reach him at all. Two months after that, in January, he called me up and we met in the café – and the reasons why Gemma couldn’t reach him became clearer.
‘Anyway,’ Spike continued, ‘I’ll email this through to you now. I’ve dug out the names and addresses of every incoming and outgoing caller on his phone records too. Otherwise, it’s exactly as you asked for. I’ll text you through the details about where to drop my money off.’
‘I appreciate it, Spike.’
I hung up and then returned to my laptop, accessing the PDF files that Spike had emailed through. It was after five o’clock, and despite the heat of the day and the emptiness of the sky, some of the light had begun to drift.
I’d already been through the email account I’d set up for Healy, but Spike had got me the username and password for the one Healy had maintained before that, in the years after he’d been fired from the Met. It was similarly fruitless: the last message he’d received was from Gemma, almost a year ago, on 28 October 2013: I’ve tried to be cordial about this, she wrote, but it doesn’t have to be this way. Please, Colm, sign those divorce pa
pers so we can all move on with our lives.
He had no mortgage, no insurance policies, only a small amount of money left from the sale of the house in St Albans, no online subscriptions or pay TV. There was documentation for his pension, which looked pretty healthy, but it was like a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow: despite twenty-six years of service, he’d forfeited four years of pension contributions under the terms of his dismissal, and was unable to access his retirement pot until he turned fifty-five.
That was another six years away.
In the end, what the PDF basically amounted to was two distinct sections: Healy’s finances across twenty-eight months, and then his itemized phone bills.
I started with his finances.
Through his bank statements, it was possible to subdivide his life into three further stages: June 2012 to March 2013; April 2013 to October 2013; and then November 2013 to October 2014. Each stage illustrated a gradual decline.
Between June 2012 and March 2013, even after he was sacked by the Met, his account remained relatively buoyant. A month after he was fired, I offered him the spare room at my parents’ old place down in Devon, so between July and November he stayed there, not having to worry about rent. In the November, he’d decided to return to London, and started paying out for a double bedroom in a shared house on the Isle of Dogs, presumably seeing that as a springboard to finding work. Spike had included the tenancy agreement as part of the document, which he’d got hold of through an estate agency. From there, it became possible to track some of the weekly routines via food shops and visits to petrol stations. Healy also took out direct debits to pay for his mobile, and insurance on his car.
In December 2012, his account was bolstered by ten thousand pounds’ worth of savings from a second, separate account which he’d closed, cleared out and brought across. It was the last of the money from the property in St Albans. After that, things got even better before they got worse: in January 2013, he was offered the two-month security job at the building society, which paid him a total of £3,205 after tax, and that cash carried him through until the end of March.
