by Tim Weaver
East closed the front door.
I waited another five minutes – and then I headed for the house.
33
The driveway was tarmacked, eroded at the edges like an old carpet, and East’s garden was plain and undistinguished, the grass about half a foot high, one solitary flowerpot sitting guard outside the front door, with nothing inside but soil.
There was no gate to the driveway itself, just a space between identical brick walls where one might have sat. On the side of the house, there was an old piece of wooden trellising, a vine snaking through its gaps, and a big metal dustbin. Beyond that was the garage, detached from the house, but bricked in the same style. It had a roof which funnelled to a point, and a light brown roller door.
I paused at the top of the driveway – checking up and down the street for cars, for people, for curtains twitching – then headed along it, as fast as I could.
The security lamp sprang into life.
There was no way to avoid it, the driveway too narrow to veer out of its range, so I picked up my pace, all the way down to the garage, and slipped into a space at its side, between its right-hand wall and the fence which surrounded the property. Halfway along, the shadows began to close around me and I stopped.
At the house, the side door opened.
I watched as East’s head emerged, looking up and down the driveway for any sign of life. I doubted, until he’d decided to make a run for it at the museum, that he’d ever been worried about the reasons his security light was going off.
But he was worried about it now.
He came down, on to the first step, eyes in my direction, squinting slightly. He was checking whether the gate through to the back garden – just ahead of me, in the space between the garage and the rear of the house – was ajar. When he saw it was locked, he looked the other way, up towards the silence of his street.
He lingered there a moment more and then retreated back inside, followed by the audible click of a key being turned.
Coming out from beside the garage, I paused in front of its door, making sure that the security light’s range didn’t extend this far, and then started picking the locks. Lockpicking was fiddly, frustrating work – but garage doors were easier. After a couple of minutes, I felt something pop.
Double-checking that East hadn’t returned to the side door, I turned the handle on the lock and the roller door juddered upwards on its runners, turning in on itself, its hinges moaning gently. I slipped inside, pulled the door back down and flicked my torch on.
The garage was small.
On the back wall was a tool board, with hammers, chisels, screwdrivers, drill bits, spanners and more, all hanging from hooks, all organized impeccably. Beneath that was a workbench, stretching wall to wall, a vice screwed to it and a series of shelves underneath, packed with old pieces of metal and wood. On top of the workbench, its back panel removed, was another penny arcade machine.
I turned it gently, silently.
It was a bagatelle, the penny arcade equivalent of a pinball machine, encased in iron rather than wood. It looked almost like a medicine cabinet. Inside the glass front panel were eight holes, big enough for a ball the size of a marble to drop through, six of the holes marked with numbers – 100, 200, 500, 1,000, 2,000 and 5,000 – the other two with ‘Scratch’. The launcher for the ball sat on the underside of the cabinet, although East had removed it, so all that was left was a square, and a view of the interior. I turned it back around to see what he was doing inside, and could smell Brasso. When I looked back at the rest of the garage, running the light along every shelf – top to bottom – I couldn’t find anything else of note. Was this really what the two men were doing? Discussing penny arcade machines? It seemed so insignificant, so mundane.
I exited the garage, closing it behind me.
At the rear of the house was his kitchen, the light still on. Through a door into the living room, I could see a sofa, a lamp, books. There was a television too, but it was off. To start with, there was no sign of East, but then I took a couple of steps closer and saw that he was there: he was on his side, head propped on a cushion, looking up at the ceiling.
What’s he doing?
But then I realized.
He was crying.
His chest moved up and down, heaving as tears escaped along his cheeks, their trails glistening in the half-light of the living room. He wiped them away, and then again, and after a while pressed the thumb and forefinger of his right hand to either eye, as if plugging a dam. A minute later, maybe more, he began to gather himself, sitting up, perching on the edge of the sofa, elbows on his knees.
I returned to the car.
34
Once I was back inside the BMW, I picked up my phone and saw that I’d missed a text. It was from Craw. I remembered then that I’d ignored a call from her as I’d been swimming back to consciousness in the mirror maze. She’d kept the message short:
Call me.
I tried to imagine what she might want. I had enough on my mind – Healy, his interest in the pier, whatever the hell had happened to me at the museum, Calvin East, the man he was working with – without being drawn into another argument. Craw had never been big on apologies, so I doubted she was calling to say sorry, and when I tried to think of another reason for her to get in touch, I came up with nothing. I texted her back, keeping mine brief too:
Busy at the moment.
Thirty seconds later, my phone erupted into life, her name flashing up on the display. It was going to be hard to pretend I wasn’t around to answer it now. Finger hovering over the button, I glanced out along the road to East’s place. The living-room light was off, and now an upstairs light was on.
I pushed Answer.
‘Raker?’
‘Yeah. I’m right in the middle of something.’
A pause on the line. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘I’m fine.’
‘You sound groggy.’
‘I’m fine.’
‘Does this have to do with Healy?’
I looked across at East’s house. ‘Healy’s dead.’
‘But his case lives on,’ she said.
She meant the Clark family. She meant the man who killed them was still out there, unaccounted for, and without Healy, there was only one person who was going to pick up the baton and finish what Healy started – and that was me.
‘I haven’t got time for this now,’ I said.
‘That is an active case, Raker,’ came the weary reply. ‘It doesn’t matter if it’s one or five or ten years old, it’s unsolved, so it’s still on the books.’
‘Whose books?’
‘The Met’s books.’
‘The Met couldn’t pick that family’s faces out in a line-up. The three of them are history. They’re consigned to a drawer in the basement.’
‘You know how much you’re starting to sound like him?’
‘I’m not sounding like anyone.’
‘This is the stuff Healy was saying,’ she said, clearly trying to contain her frustration. ‘However much you dispute it, you and him are alike. You’re smarter than him, better with people; kinder, with a clearer sense of right and wrong. But you’re still two sides of the same coin. You’re an obsessive, so was he. You’re both dangerous, destructive obsessives. And one day soon – maybe not with this case, but sometime soon – you’re going to become so fanatical, so unable to detach yourself from this connection you think you have with the missing, that you’re going to destroy yourself. You’re going to lie down in the dark, and you’re going to eat the same pills Healy did.’
Or I’m going to black out and not wake up.
‘Raker?’
‘I get it,’ I said to her.
‘Do you?’
She took a long, audible breath and I pictured her tucking her hair behind her ears, a habit she had picked up since she’d grown it longer, her slight frame – muscular, fit – shifting on whatever chair she was sitting on. Slate-grey eyes, li
ke unpolished stones. Fingers pinching the chain sitting at the base of her throat.
‘I need to go,’ I said.
‘The search for Healy became too personal,’ she continued, as if she hadn’t even heard me, ‘and I should never have asked you to get involved. But this search you’re on … Look, if you think you’ve got something we can use, that’s good. I can get a guy from my team to call you, and you can share what you’ve –’
‘Share? This is my case.’
‘It’s not your case. It’s a police case.’
‘It was Healy’s.’
‘Healy’s dead.’
‘Is this really what you wanted to call me about, Craw?’ I said, exasperated, frustrated, trying to close off the conversation.
The upstairs light in East’s house was still on.
‘Craw?’
Silence on the line.
‘Craw?’
‘I don’t know what it is about you, Raker,’ she said, but there was no aggression in her voice. In fact, almost the opposite. ‘I’ve been stewing on what you said to me at the funeral yesterday for twenty-four hours. No one’s ever made me feel like this before. No one’s ever got to me like this.’
I wasn’t sure what to say.
‘This fixation you have with Healy’s case, it’s going to make you sick, if it hasn’t already. It’s all wrong. The way you work, it’s all wrong. If I had any sense, I’d be running in the other direction.’ She stopped, and a long breath crackled down the line. ‘And yet here I am.’
‘What are you talking about?’
A pause. ‘I might have found some information for you.’
‘About what?’
‘About Healy.’
She’d hooked me and she knew it. ‘What about him?’
‘Have you been able to pin down his movements before he died?’
I thought of my notes, of the gaps in his timeline, between the ten days in January and the moment I found his body under Highdale a month ago.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Why?’
‘I think I might know what happened to him.’
Seventy-Four Days
0 days, 0 hours, 1 minute after
Nearly six months ago, at 5.37 a.m. on Monday 12 May, Inoka Gunasekara – a senior nurse in Cardiology at King’s Cross General – was checking the blood pressure of one of her patients when she noticed movement in his face. She removed the cuff immediately, set the monitor aside and studied him. He’d been in a coma for seventy-four days and hadn’t shown any muscle motility in his face until now. After a couple of minutes, with no further movement, she returned to her station where one of the registrars was seated, preparing forms for the day’s surgeries.
‘I think he just winced.’
The registrar looked up. ‘Who?’
‘Patient A.’
His eyes lingered on the nurse. ‘Really?’
He studied her like she was trying to catch him out. The patient had become known as ‘A’ because, as of yet, they’d been unable to find out his real name. He’d had no ID on him, no one had claimed him, and – because there was a cost attached – a request to try to ID him through police records was still being passed through layers of government bureaucracy. During his seventy-four-day coma, he’d shown some response to stimuli in his fingers and toes, in his calves too, as well as through an increased heart rate, but no facial motility, nothing in his upper arms or shoulders. When it was clear Nurse Gunasekara was serious, the registrar followed her to the room.
The patient lay on the bed in exactly the same position he’d been in since he’d suffered his heart attack. That had been almost eleven weeks ago. Against the soft chirp of the ECG, the registrar leaned into the patient and watched him. Removing a penlight from the pocket of his coat, he lifted both eyelids, working either side of the oxygen mask, of the feeding tube, checking for pupil dilation.
‘Where was the movement?’
‘The left corner of his mouth.’
He placed the penlight back into his pocket, checked the printouts from the ECG, then removed the medical records from a slot at the end of the bed.
‘Just keep an eye on him,’ the registrar said.
He went to leave – but then stopped again.
The nurse, who’d been reading the medical records over the registrar’s shoulder, glanced at the doctor, saw his gaze fixed on the patient, and followed his line of sight. The patient was still in the same position, unmoved, silent.
But something subtle had taken hold.
His breathing had changed, become quicker.
‘Hmm,’ the registrar said. ‘Something is definitely –’
Suddenly, a pained expression gripped the patient’s face, at the corners of his mouth, in the lines of his forehead. They both watched as one of his cheeks twitched, his face seeming to shiver as a ripple passed through his chest and legs.
‘Has this ever happened to him before?’
‘No,’ the nurse replied. ‘Never.’
The patient’s eyes squeezed shut.
‘Do you think he’s okay?’ the nurse asked.
The registrar’s eyes were on the ECG.
Then a series of sounds. Gurgles.
The nurse frowned. ‘Did he just try to say something?’
The registrar didn’t reply but stepped in towards the bed again, turning his head so his ear was right next to the patient’s mouth. Five seconds. Ten. Then another noise, this one from deep down in the throat: the words were inelegant, smudged by the feeding tube. But they were words. They were definitely words.
‘What did he say?’ the nurse asked.
The registrar glanced at her, surprise in his face. He’d seen people wake up from comas many times – but not like this. The patient rocked from side to side, slowly at first and then more forcefully, the bed squeaking on its locked wheels.
Then his eyes opened.
The registrar and the nurse watched as the patient struggled to focus.
‘Can you hear me?’ the registrar asked quietly.
The patient looked at him.
‘Sir, can you hear me?’
The patient blinked.
This time Nurse Gunasekara came closer, placing a hand on the patient’s arm. ‘Sir,’ she said, almost whispering it. ‘Can you hear what I’m saying to …’
She stopped.
Tears had started to form in the patient’s eyes.
‘Sir,’ the registrar said.
The patient opened his mouth, said something.
‘What did he just say?’ the nurse asked the registrar.
The registrar stepped away from the bed, eyes on the patient, watching as silence settled inside the room. ‘He said, “Don’t let him hurt my family.” ’
35
To start with, it was hard to even process what Craw was telling me: the idea seemed so alien, so irrational. But then, slowly, the concept of Healy being in a coma began to take grip and I realized that it made complete sense. It explained how he’d suddenly vanished in February, leaving everything he owned at the homeless shelter in south London.
‘How did you find out?’ I said to her.
‘I did everything I told you I wasn’t going to do: I got involved.’
‘Why?’
‘Why do you think?’ she said sharply. I don’t know what it is about you, Raker. No one’s ever made me feel like this before. No one’s ever got to me like this. ‘I didn’t tag him by name,’ she went on, softer and more sombre, as if she were mourning some lost part of herself. ‘I’m not that suicidal. Not yet, anyway. But I put in a database search for a 49-year-old man, about six feet tall, sixteen to seventeen stone, with red hair. And I found something.’
‘What?’
‘A request from King’s Cross General hospital. A senior nurse who works there …’ She paused, checking the name. ‘Inoka Gunasekara. She wanted help IDing a guy they’d had in there for eleven weeks – fingerprinting, DNA, dental, whatever we could organize. He had red hair, was forty
-five to fifty years of age, 1.8 metres tall and 100 kilograms. That’s six feet tall and sixteen stone in old money.’
I tried to remain calm, realistic. ‘It’s the right ballpark, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it was Healy.’
‘The request took three months to sign off at our end because the government is full of idiots with calculators who only care about their bottom line. So by the time we were ready to get in there with our fingerprint kit, he’d already woken from a coma and discharged himself.’
‘What dates are we talking?’
‘He was brought in on Thursday 27 February, and woke on Monday 12 May. He walked out of the hospital five days later, on Saturday 17 May.’
The date he was admitted fitted the timeline.
‘I remember a story you told me once,’ Craw continued, ‘about when you and Healy first got together, when you were trying to find Leanne.’
‘So?’
‘He got stabbed, right?’
‘Yeah, in the chest.’
‘This so-called “Patient A” had old scarring on his chest.’
I felt a charge of electricity.
‘He suffered a heart attack,’ Craw said.
I recalled sitting across from him at the motel, ten months ago, his fingers straying to the centre of his ribcage, as if in discomfort. Had it been bothering him back then?
‘When he woke up, Gunasekara and a registrar called Richard Anawale described him as “unresponsive” to questions about who he was, with neither able to get even as much as a confirmed name out of him. According to Anawale, it wasn’t because the patient was incapable of communicating, it was because he chose not to tell them. However, Gunasekara said he spoke in an “Irish accent”.’
Healy.
‘It says here, he was referred to a psychologist.’
‘A hospital psychologist?’
