What Remains Read online

  Tim Weaver

  * * *

  WHAT REMAINS

  Contents

  Part One: 14 JANUARY 2014

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part Two: 2 OCTOBER 2014

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Everything You Love

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  The Man in the Raincoat

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Voices

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Part Three: 31 OCTOBER 2014

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Tom

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  What Remains

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Seventy-Four Days

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Therapy

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Alone

  Part Four

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Part Five

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  For Mum and Dad

  Author’s Note

  In my second novel, The Dead Tracks, there’s a short conversation between David Raker and Colm Healy where Healy talks about the failed investigation that’s at the heart of What Remains. At the time I wrote the scene, I never really thought that a few lines of dialogue would eventually form the basis for an entire book. It’s a consequence, I suppose, of my tendency not to work to plans: in the latter stages of The Dead Tracks, and then through the three novels that followed, Healy took on much more of a role than I ever would have anticipated, and that case – and his failure to solve it – began to affect him in ways that I never considered until I got there.

  Because of that, eagle-eyed readers might notice a few minor changes between the case that Healy describes in The Dead Tracks and the version in What Remains. There were various reasons I felt I needed to make those alterations, but it ultimately came down to the fact that a full-length novel would have suffered without them. Where possible, though, I’ve tried to stay close to the details of the investigation that Healy (and, to a lesser extent, Raker) has talked about over the course of the series.

  Finally, I’ve made some small changes to the working practices of the Metropolitan Police too, purely to service the story more effectively; as always, my hope is that it’s done with enough subtlety and care for it not to cause offence.

  16 July 2010

  BRUTAL MURDER OF FAMILY SPARKS CITY-WIDE MANHUNT

  Eight-year-old twin girls and their 29-year-old mother have been found dead in what police are calling ‘an unforgivable and callous attack’. Gail Clark and her daughters Abigail and April were discovered after a neighbour became concerned she hadn’t seen or heard from the family in over four days.

  Last night, police were calling for witnesses in and around Searle House, a twenty-storey block of flats in New Cross, south London, where the family lived on the seventeenth floor. Detective Inspector Colm Healy, leading the investigation, said a news conference would be scheduled for later today, and further details would be released to the public then. In the meantime, he appealed for information from anyone who lived in Searle House or any of the surrounding estates: ‘We believe Ms Clark and the two girls were murdered on Sunday or Monday this week – that’s the 11th or 12th July. This was a particularly brutal crime, one of the worst I’ve seen in twenty-four years as a police officer, and I appeal to any member of the public who saw anything suspicious to bring that information to us without delay.’

  DI Healy continued: ‘We have a number of leads and I want to reassure the public and the local community that the person responsible will face the full force of the law.’

  Part One

  * * *

  14 JANUARY 2014

  1

  I met Colm Healy in a motel in Kew.

  It was just north of the motorway, a big steel-grey building with all the aesthetic beauty of a shipping container, perforated by two long rows of identical windows. The car park was half full, slush skirting the pavements and approach road, ice-cold water cascading from broken guttering above the main entrance.

  The bar was probably the best bit about the place, and not only because – with alcohol – you could eventually pretend you were somewhere else. It looked like it had recently undergone a refurbishment, and although the views only took in the car park and, vaguely, a glimpse of the Thames, the interior was smart and modern, a mix of booths and sofas, set in a semicircle around a curved counter.

  I made a beeline for one of the booths, shrugging off my coat and ordering a black coffee, and then spent the time waiting for Healy by removing a series of printouts from a slipcase I’d brought with me. They were all job vacancies. I laid them out in two lines of five, all ten facing away from me, and put them into chronological order, starting with the one that had the most imminent deadline.

  A few minutes later, the main door squeaked open on its hinges and Healy emerged into the stark light of the room. He nodded at me once, then headed to the bar. He was dressed in faded denims and a red T-shirt with something printed on the front of it, his hair combed but wet, his face flushed, like he’d just stepped out of the shower. I heard him ask for a Diet Coke, and then he came over. He eyed the printouts as he sat, but didn’t say anything.

  ‘Evening,’ I said. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  He looked at me. ‘Nothing. I’m fine.’

  But I knew what was wrong. We both did.

  Six days ago, on 8 January, we’d met in a café in Hammersmith after Healy had called and suggested getting together. It was the first time I’d seen him in fourteen months. In only six days, a lot had changed: not only had I paid for ten days’ accommodation for him in the motel, but I’d also topped up his Oyster card, given him enough money to cover petrol, trawled recruitment agencies for work, even run him to interviews and driven him to the shops to buy food.
He was uncomfortable with it – in a lot of ways I was too – but he’d got to the point where he didn’t have a lot of options left.

  A ghost to his family, his career as a cop a memory, he’d wiped out most of his savings and been living in a homeless shelter, what money he had left just about stretching to a mattress, a pillow and a bunk. No one else – his ex-wife, his sons, his former colleagues at the Met – knew how low he’d sunk because he was too proud, too bruised, to call them. However, he and I were different: not friends exactly, perhaps never that – which had been part of the reason he’d phoned me – but there was a connection between us. He knew I’d understand him. Perhaps more importantly, he knew I wouldn’t judge him. We’d both lost those we’d loved, we’d battled some of the same demons, we’d hunted in the same shadows for the same people and confronted the same darkness in men. I never believed in fate or destiny – in most ways I still don’t – but I’d begun to believe in something like it in the years since I’d known Healy. We’d gone our separate ways many times, but eventually, somehow, the paths of our lives always returned to the same point.

  ‘What are these?’ he said, looking at the jobs.

  ‘Short-term store security gigs.’

  He nodded and pulled a couple towards him.

  As I watched him, I could see a shaving rash on one side of his neck, fresh blood dotted in the spaces above it; a cut that hadn’t healed. There were plenty more of those where Healy was concerned, but most were better hidden. He was almost forty-nine, but he looked older. He was overweight and out of condition, his face a little swollen, his eyes marked by crow’s feet that criss-crossed so many times it was hard to see where one line ended and the next one began. His red hair fell forward as he continued reading, specks of water flecking off, on to the paper. On the front of his T-shirt, I could see what was printed: Boys on Tour – Dublin 07.

  ‘Memorable trip?’ I said to him.

  He looked up. ‘What?’

  I nodded at his shirt.

  He looked down at the words on his chest, cracked and worn by years of being put through the wash. ‘Yeah,’ he said, seeming to drift. ‘I was the best man for someone. Took a group of us back to the motherland for a few days.’ He stopped, a hint of a smile – and then it was gone. ‘A different time, I guess.’

  He turned his attention back to the printouts, clearly done talking about the trip, about returning to the city where he’d been born and grown up.

  ‘How did the interview go today?’

  He shrugged. ‘Who knows?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, I drove all the way down to Rotherhithe, sat there and answered their questions, and they stared at me blankly and told me they’d let me know.’

  ‘Did they say when?’

  ‘A couple of days.’

  The barman brought over Healy’s Diet Coke and set it down in front of him. Healy stayed silent, eyes fixed on the glass, but his thoughts were as clear as if inked on his face: I don’t want to be drinking this.

  When I’d offered to help him out, I’d attached a couple of conditions: one was that he had to find a job, even if only temporary, to get him back on his feet financially as soon as possible; the other was that he had to stay off the booze. The day we’d met in the café I hadn’t smelled it on him, but I knew he’d been at the bottle in the weeks leading up to it. I could see it in his face, in the way it had begun to rub away at him. He’d been distressed, worn, a little bleary-eyed, the effect of the liquor still evident, clinging to him like a second skin.

  ‘What about the other thing?’ he said.

  ‘What other thing?’

  ‘The twins.’

  I looked outside, the lights from the river blinking as sleet swept across the car park. The twins and their mother were where it had all begun; the catalyst for Healy’s decline. In July 2010, he’d walked into a tower block in south London and found the three of them. He’d entered that place as one of the Met’s best detectives – and now, three and a half years later, he was a homeless half-drunk, mourning a failed marriage, the break-up of his family and the self-destruction of his career. He hadn’t called me six days ago because he wanted to find out how I was. He hadn’t even called me because he was insolvent, jobless, homeless and desperate. He’d called me because he wanted my help in finding the man who’d murdered that family; the faceless killer that had started it all.

  Nothing else mattered to him any more.

  As I thought of that, of a hunt for the man responsible, something Healy had said to me in Hammersmith started playing out in my head: I couldn’t find the bastard who killed them, couldn’t find a trace of that arsehole anywhere, and from there my whole life got flushed. His voice had been unsteady, his eyes full of tears. Now look at me. I’m living in a homeless shelter. I’m pathetic.

  ‘Raker, what about the twins?’

  I stirred, tuning back in. He’d leaned forward in the booth, Diet Coke pushed to one side, hands together in front of him.

  ‘Someone I know at the Met is mailing me a copy of the file,’ I said to him. ‘It’ll be with me tomorrow. But I need to finish my current case first.’

  I found missing people for a living, and my current case was a sixteen-year-old runaway from Greenwich. I’d located her, and returned her to her parents, but there were still things to be taken care of: calls to the Met to confirm she’d been found, a final meeting with the family to answer any questions, forms to sign, payment to be made. I sometimes let cases overlap at the beginning and end, but I didn’t work them concurrently, because I believed each one deserved to be treated with the same level of care. I felt a natural connection to the lost, an emotional bind I wasn’t sure I could ever put into words, which made the girl every bit as important to me as Healy. More pragmatically, her family were paying me too.

  In contrast, everything I’d ever done for Healy, perhaps everything I’d ever do, came with no financial reward. Often, it came with no reciprocation or thanks either. I’d accepted that reality a long time ago, accepted who he was, and the forces that drove him, because it felt like a lot of those forces also drove me. We were bound to one another. I’d saved his life once. He’d saved mine.

  This was who we’d become.

  ‘So you’re just going to sit on their file until you’re ready?’ he said.

  ‘How can I sit on something I don’t have yet?’

  A flicker of irritation.

  ‘Healy, I told you the situation when we met last week.’

  He didn’t say anything, fingers tapping out a rhythm on the glass. After a long breath, he said, ‘Fine. Why don’t you give me the file when it arrives, so I can get started?’

  ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea.’

  ‘I don’t need babysitting, Raker.’

  ‘I never said you did.’

  ‘No one knows that case better than me.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘I was there. It was my case.’

  ‘That’s exactly why it needs a fresh perspective.’

  He didn’t say anything else.

  In the silence that followed, I started to leaf through the printouts again, trying to consider how best to engage him with the jobs, but when I looked up, his eyes weren’t on me or the jobs any more, they were on the window, watching a car reverse out of its parking space. There was a sudden distance to him, as if he’d forgotten I was even here. ‘I knelt down between their beds,’ he was saying quietly, almost talking to himself, ‘in the middle of that desperate fucking flat, their mam dead in the next room, every atom of innocence ripped from them, and I remember the forensic team left briefly, and I was alone with those girls. And I … and I just …’

  Even as he faded out, I couldn’t take my eyes off him, mesmerized by this flash of transparence. It was so unlike him, a moment so out of character my first thought was that something might be wrong with him. Seeing the rest of the sentence hanging there on his lips, I leaned forward, trying to hear
him more clearly, but then he clocked the movement and seemed to shiver out of the lull, pulling away from its grip, and the mood changed instantly. He looked from the window to me, then to the jobs, clearly embarrassed about letting his guard down.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  He remained still, silent.

  ‘Look,’ I said, keeping my voice steady, ‘I promised you I would help you, and I meant it. But I want to take a first run at it. I want to come in fresh. There’s no hidden agenda here, Healy. Don’t look for the negative in this.’

  A snort, but no comment.

  ‘Healy?’

  He just looked at me.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘What do you think’s the matter?’ he said, picking up one of the printouts. ‘All this shite. It’s worthless. What matters is finding out who murdered those girls.’

  ‘You need a job.’

  He dismissed me with a shake of the head. ‘I hate it. Filling in application forms, pretending I’m someone I’m not, having to kiss the arse of people I don’t rate and won’t like. But you know what? It’s not even that. The thing that really pisses me off is that I could do any of these jobs in my sleep. I was on the force for twenty-six years, I saw things I can never wash away, I’ve been across the table from men so depraved they sucked the light out of the room. But according to the pile of rejection letters I’ve been busy collecting, I’m not even qualified enough to shuffle along shop aisles on the lookout for spotty dickheads trying to steal smartphones. I mean, the fact that I’ve managed to get one – one – two-month security gig in an entire year should tell you all you need to know. The spiel ain’t working, Raker. No one wants to employ me.’

  ‘Getting a job these days isn’t eas–’

  ‘I don’t want a job.’

  I pushed down my irritation. ‘How are you going to help those girls if you’re living in a homeless shelter again?’

  ‘What’ll help them is finding the person who killed them.’

  ‘We will.’

  ‘We won’t if all we’re doing is sitting around staring at pieces of paper like these.’ He picked up a couple more printouts. ‘Like I give a shit about any of this.’