61
The next morning I woke to the sound of my phone buzzing on the bedside table. I pulled myself out of sleep and grabbed it. The number was withheld.
‘David Raker.’
‘Raker, it’s me.’
Healy. I could hear the soft sound of cars in the background, and the occasional voice passing. He was in a public phone box. ‘You all right?’
‘I’m eating shit for last night.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Craw. She’s so far up my arse, she’s practically in my f*cking throat. I can’t go for a piss without her giving me the eye.’ He paused, a sigh crackling down the line.
I looked at my watch. Five past nine. ‘What did she say?’
‘About what?’
‘About Wellis.’
A pause. ‘I didn’t call it in.’
Somehow I wasn’t surprised.
‘If I call in Wellis, it turns into a shitstorm on a hundred different fronts,’ he went on. ‘I have to explain what I was doing down there, I’d have to pretend I don’t know who Wellis is, would have to dream up some story for Craw about no one else being with me, despite O’Keefe and that station supervisor seeing you come in and go out.’
‘And if it gets out that Wellis is dead –’
‘Eric Gaishe isn’t gonna be scared about talking any more.’
The only reason Gaishe remained silent was because he was terrified of Wellis’s reach. With Wellis out the way, and if he had any sense, Gaishe would start angling for a deal, because he knew the clients just as much as Wellis. And that would eventually lead the Met to Duncan Pell.
‘Then we’re no longer ahead of the curve,’ I said quietly. ‘So if Craw doesn’t know, why’s she on to you?’
‘She knows something’s going on,’ he replied, and I remembered how she’d been when she’d come to the house. She was smart – even Healy’s lies were struggling to protect him.
‘You need to give her something.’
‘If I give her something, she’ll know I’ve been withholding.’
‘I know. But it’ll take out some of the heat.’
I could hear a sharp intake of breath, as if his teeth were gritted. ‘F*cking Davidson. He’s the reason she’s like this. He’s just there, putting ideas in her head.’
‘About what?’
‘About you and me.’
‘There’s nothing you can do about that. We did what we did last year, and there’s no going back. But we did it for the right reasons, remember that.’ I paused, letting that settle with him. His daughter, the man who had taken her, those were the right reasons. ‘You could take a bullet for Davidson right now and it wouldn’t make any difference.’
Silence.
‘There’s something going on with him,’ he said finally.
‘With Davidson?’
‘Yeah. He doesn’t say anything to me now.’
‘As opposed to?’
‘As opposed to baiting me every bloody day. If they’d left me alone, I wouldn’t have tried to shut them down. But since Sallows got the boot, Davidson’s hardly said anything to me. Not directly. It’s like I don’t exist any more.’
‘You exist. He must have some other plan.’
‘Like what?’
I was about to say I didn’t know, but then I recalled something in Healy’s face the day before, a hint of sadness, of suppression. I thought at the time that it might be a secret he was keeping, unrelated to the case.
‘You got any chinks in your armour?’ I asked.
‘What do you mean by that?’
He’s not going to play ball. ‘I mean, have they got anything they can come at you through? Davidson’s not going to outsmart you on police work, but he’s not stupid. I’ve met Craw. She’s clever. Watchful. She’s not going to have her head turned by a guy like him. She doesn’t care about the crap he’s spinning for her. Maybe she’s watching you more closely, maybe she isn’t, but if she is it’s not because of him, it’s because you’ve set off alarm bells in her head about something. Spun a lie she doesn’t believe.’
‘She thinks you and me are working together.’
‘Do you think that’s all it is?’
Another small pause.
‘Healy?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said eventually, and as I looked down at the phone I felt a bubble of anxiety. Not for me. I could handle it if the police turned up on my doorstep, if they found out I’d completely disregarded their wishes and continued to search for Sam Wren. It was Healy I felt uneasy for. He was lying to me, the only person he could trust, and if he was lying to me, it meant he had something he was willing to protect. And in my experience of him, that meant he was planning on doing something stupid.
‘Be careful, Healy.’
‘About what?’
‘About whatever you’re protecting.’
He didn’t respond. The line drifted a little, and I could hear more cars. A horn. He was calling me on a public phone so there was no trace of contact between us. It had been the same every time: every call to me had been from a random central London number. It was so typically Healy: on the one hand, he had the clarity of purpose not to leave a trace of himself; on the other, it was likely he was harbouring some rash and foolish plan.
‘You still want to find your man?’ he said after a while.
‘Of course I do.’
‘Then meet me at King’s College Hospital at twelve.’
‘Why?’
‘Because that’s where the girl on the DVDs is.’