78
The next morning the doorbell woke me. I stirred on the edge of sleep, unsure whether I’d even heard it, and then it came again, longer and louder. The clock said it was 8.58.
I sat up in bed and looked out through the curtains. The sun was shining again, the skies clear. I grabbed a T-shirt and a pair of tracksuit trousers and wriggled them on, then moved through the house to the front door. I’d been expecting, maybe hoping, for Liz.
Instead I got Healy.
He looked terrible, like he hadn’t slept all night: his hair was a mess, not combed through or styled, his face etched with dark lines, his eyes bloodshot. His clothes were dishevelled, one half of his shirt tail hanging out, his tie loosened, his trousers creased.
I pulled the door open.
‘Healy.’
He didn’t say anything, just looked at me, and behind him – out on the street – I could see his Vauxhall, bumped up on to the pavement outside the gates. Behind that was another car, a grey Volvo. In the driver’s seat, Melanie Craw was leaning over the steering wheel, watching us. When I invited Healy in, she nodded at me, started up the engine and pulled away. I watched her head off down the street and then turned to Healy.
‘What the hell’s going on?’
He stood there in the silence of the house, looking at me.
‘Healy?’
‘Have you got any coffee?’
I looked at him. ‘Sure.’
We moved through to the kitchen and he sat at the counter while I brewed some coffee. Once it was on the go, I leaned against the sink, watching him, and for a moment he just stared at the floor, eyes dull and chipped, no light in them at all. After a while he seemed to become aware of the quiet and, with a long, drawn-out breath, looked up at me.
‘Craw found me,’ he said quietly.
‘Found you where?’
A pause. Eyes on the floor again. ‘Parked on the road outside the prison.’
‘Which prison?’
‘Belmarsh.’
‘What were you doing down there?’
He glanced at me and shrugged. ‘Sleeping in my car.’
‘Why?’
He smiled. Sad and tight. ‘Why not?’
‘Is that where you were yesterday when I called?’
He shook his head. ‘No.’
‘What’s at the prison?’
He didn’t reply.
I paused; let him have a moment.
He placed a hand flat to the counter top and looked down at his fingers, stained, blistered and cut. Then he sighed, deep and long, as if there weren’t enough words to put it all together. ‘At the beginning of January, I found something out,’ he said quietly.
‘What?’
‘Something I guess I probably shouldn’t have.’
I pulled a stool out and sat down across from him.
‘A guy I’ve known for years, an old drinking buddy of mine, works down at Belmarsh, in the high-security unit there.’ He sniffed. ‘About a week before I started back at the Met, I went out for a few with him and we got pretty pissed. Pretty emotional, I guess. He knew Leanne, knew the boys … I mean, our kids had grown up together.’
He brought his fingers into a fist.
‘He said there was this psychologist who came in every Monday to talk to the lifers down at Belmarsh. You know, the really worthless arseholes. The no-hopers.’
I was trying to work out where this was going.
‘Anyway, we were there, just the two of us, too many beers, too much emotion – I mean, this was only, like, eight weeks after I buried Leanne – and he let slip she did the counselling for a lot of these pricks. All over the place. The rapists and the killers; the paedos and the sacks of shit who don’t deserve to see the light of day … and she …’
‘What?’
‘This guy, my pal, he said she did exactly the same thing over at Broadmoor.’
My heart sank. ‘Oh shit, what have you done?’
He looked up, a shimmer in one of his eyes. Broadmoor was where Leanne’s killer had been shipped off to.
‘Healy?’
He shook his head but didn’t say anything.
‘Healy?’
‘That f*cking prick took my girl.’
‘What did you do?’
His face coloured. ‘Are you listening to what I’m saying?’
‘What did you do?’
‘You were there. You saw it. He took my girl from me.’
‘Healy, what did you –’
‘He took my f*cking girl from me!’
His voice crashed around the kitchen, a noise so loud it seemed to rattle the glass in the window frames. And then when silence settled around us again, all I could hear was the coffee percolator and Healy, looking down into his lap, sniffing gently.
He was crying.
‘Healy, look, why don’t –’
Out of his jacket pocket he brought a gun, laying it on the counter top. The barrel was pointing towards me, but he immediately turned it around so it was facing off the other way. When he eventually looked up, tears streaming down his face, he pushed the gun across the surface towards me. ‘Take it,’ he said.
‘What the hell are you doing with this?’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t know any more.’
‘Were you actually going to use it?’
‘I …’ His eyes turned to the gun. ‘I don’t know. Maybe. If I used her to get me inside Broadmoor …’ He flicked a look at me. Shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Did you really think you could walk into a prison with a gun?’
‘I know.’
‘You wouldn’t even get through the front gates.’
‘I know.’
‘So what was the plan?’
He looked at me. ‘I’ve been dating her since April.’
‘What?’
‘She thought it was real.’
I rubbed a hand to my brow. ‘This is insane.’
‘I know. I didn’t …’ He stopped. ‘I’m not sure I was ever going to use that thing, but she kept refusing to take me inside. She wouldn’t even take me inside Belmarsh, and I’d been getting inside there myself, just watching her, for six months. I was already inside Belmarsh. What I wanted was to be inside Broadmoor. But while I had a job, while it was going all right at the Met, I was prepared to wait. Do it the right way. I could chip away at her until she gave in and started letting me tag along. I’d tell her it was field research, and eventually she’d take me right into the lion’s den. And then I’d get in the same room as him, and I’d stick a f*cking knife in his throat.’
‘This isn’t you, Healy.’
‘No?’
‘You’re talking about killing a man.’
‘He took my girl.’
‘But you’re not him. You’re not a killer.’
‘Killing him would have made me feel something,’ he said. ‘It wouldn’t bring Leanne back, but it would give me something. What else have I got?’
I looked at him. ‘You’re not a killer,’ I said again.
‘No job, no family,’ he replied, as if he hadn’t heard me.
I didn’t know what to say to that, so said nothing.
He wiped his eyes a couple of times and looked across me to the percolator. ‘How about that coffee?’
I got up and poured us both a cup.
‘How did Craw find out about the prison?’
‘She called me.’
‘This morning?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Why?’
‘Said she wanted to chat about what happened yesterday. Said I wasn’t getting my job back but she wanted to talk. So I told her where I was.’
‘Why were you even at the prison in the first place?’
‘I don’t know really.’ He paused. ‘Just seemed right. I’d been watching Teresa – this psychologist – come and go out of that prison since January. Since the time I got my job back. And by the time I was done yesterday, my job was gone, and so was she.’
‘What do you mean “gone”?’
‘Oh, she’s fine,’ he said. ‘I had a moment of clarity about five minutes after I got to hers. A flash of déjà vu. All the anger I felt for her, just building and building in me, was all the anger I felt for Gemma when she told me she was having an affair.’
Gemma was his ex-wife.
‘I hit Gemma,’ he went on, ‘but I wasn’t about to do it again to Teresa. I didn’t feel anything for her, but I was able to stop myself. And when I stopped myself last night, it was like I stepped out of myself, and I could see that part of me, plain as day.’
‘And this Teresa? Did she call the police?’
He shook his head. ‘No. She’s a psychologist. Doesn’t mean she didn’t tell me I was a f*cking bastard and she never wanted to see me again, but I think maybe, in some part of her, she knew why I’d done it. It might have been different if I’d actually pulled the gun, but I didn’t, so she just kicked me out and told me she never wanted to see me again.’
We sat in silence for a moment, both of us taking it in.
‘Did Craw know what was going on?’
‘I think she sensed that I was up to something from fairly early on. She can read people.’ He looked up at me. ‘She’s a bit like you.’
‘Craw said she couldn’t trust you.’
He nodded, turning his cup. ‘It was hard to lie, especially after what she’d done for me, but early on I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, how far I was prepared to go to get to him, so there didn’t seem much point talking to her about it. I’d just use my contact to get into Belmarsh and watch this psychologist talk to the scumbags there. It ate me up inside seeing this woman talking to those shitheads, all nice and polite, like they were just regular guys – but knowing that was how she must have been speaking to him in Broadmoor too, that was what really got to me. While it was going well at the Met, I found it easier to keep a lid on it, and easier to maintain control. Suck it down, don’t give them anything, keep the psychologist onside. That’s all I kept thinking.’
He took a couple of mouthfuls of coffee.
‘But after I got the boot I thought, “What does it matter any more?” I can carry on pretending I’m interested in her, or I can do what I’ve been thinking about for six months: put the gun to her head, and tell her I’ll kill her if she doesn’t find a way of getting me close to him.’ If I did that, if I did what I had to do to avenge Leanne and put that sack of shit in the ground, if I went to prison for killing him in the middle of his therapy session, who would care? I don’t have a job. My boys don’t speak to me. My wife hates my f*cking guts.’
‘She doesn’t hate your guts.’
‘She hasn’t come back to me.’
‘You must understand the reasons for that.’
He knew what I meant. The twin girls down in New Cross – the case, way before Leanne went missing, that had broken him – and then the aftermath: a moment he could never take back, a moment like a cut that would never heal, where he hit his wife.
‘I understand the reasons,’ he said after a while, pain in his voice.
Neither of us spoke for a time, both of us looking down into half-finished coffee cups. Then I saw him look up and study me for a second, as if he was deciding whether to ask something or not.
‘You remember what you said to me once?’
I smiled. ‘I said a lot of things.’
‘You said, “There’s no shame in hanging on. There’s no shame in believing they might walk through the door at any moment.” ’
I nodded.
‘Do you still believe that?’
I looked at him, then across his shoulder to where a picture still hung of Derryn and me, backpacks on, halfway up a tor in Dartmoor. It had been taken the week before Derryn found the lump on her breast. The last week before the end began.
My eyes fell on Healy again.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I still believe it.’