12
As I entered Liz’s house there was the smell of coffee and perfume and the buzz of the electric shower along the hallway. Her living room was understated but stylish: an open fireplace, two black leather sofas, a TV, a huge bookcase; and then a potted palm, big and out of control, which looked like it belonged on a Caribbean island.
I went to the kitchen, got two mugs from the cupboard and poured some coffee, then padded through to the bedroom. She’d finished showering and was drying herself off, steam pouring off her, condensation on every surface. I announced my arrival by singing the Psycho shower-scene music.
She smiled. ‘Very funny.’
‘It’s like a volcano in here.’
Rolling her eyes, she hung her towel on the door, and started hunting around in her drawers for underwear.
‘How was your day?’ I asked.
‘I was defending that hit-and-run driver.’
She looked at me, her opinion on him clear to see. Even outside of the courtroom, in the privacy of her own home, she maintained a kind of dignified silence. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to discuss her cases with me, more that she preferred not to judge people, even if sometimes – like tonight – it was hard not to. I liked that quality in her.
‘And yours?’
‘It was okay.’
She looked at me. ‘Just okay?’
I put her coffee down and sat on the edge of the bed. ‘So this guy I’m trying to find gets on at Gloucester Road and then disappears. Just …’ I looked at her. It sounded strange saying it out loud. ‘Vanishes.’
‘How do you vanish from the inside of a train?’
I shrugged. ‘That’s just the point. You don’t. You can’t. He must have got off at some point – but I can’t see where. I’ve been over the footage twice today.’
‘No sign of him?’
‘Nothing after Victoria.’
‘He’ll turn up.’ She sat down on the bed and squeezed me, then shifted slightly, as if she’d suddenly remembered something. ‘Oh, I bumped into an old friend of yours today.’
‘I didn’t realize I had any left.’
Another smile formed on her face. ‘He was giving evidence in one of the other courtrooms.’
‘Who was the friend?’
‘Colm Healy.’
His name made me pause.
The last time I’d seen Healy was at the funeral of his daughter the previous November. He’d been in a bad way at the time: emotionally damaged, physically broken, estranged from his wife and suspended from his job at the Met. In the weeks before he buried his girl, we’d formed an uneasy alliance, one built not on trust, but on necessity, as we both came to realize we were hunting the same man.
‘Did you say hello?’
‘Yes. He passed on his best.’
‘Is he back on the force?’
‘Since 9 January. He said he’d had to suck up a demotion.’
‘But he seemed okay otherwise?’
Liz looked up at me. ‘He seemed better.’
He couldn’t have been much worse. Healy had gone against all the rules of his profession to find his daughter. In the interviews afterwards, police had accused me of feeling a kinship for him, using it as a stick to beat me with, a way of cornering me. But they’d failed to understand the relationship. We’d caught a monster – a murderer who’d eluded police for years – and, in order to do that, in order to go as far as we had, there had to be something deeper tethering us to each other. The police thought it was that I felt sorry for him.
But it was more than that.
Until you’d buried the most important person in your life, it was difficult to understand how grief forged a connection between people. Yet, ultimately, that was what had happened with Healy and me. I didn’t trust him, in many ways didn’t even really like him, but we each saw our reflection in the other, and – as we tried to stop a killer who had preyed on us both – that had been enough.