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  ‘That’s enough, Healy,’ I said, trying to sound calm.

  ‘Don’t patronize me. I know what –’

  ‘You were living in a homeless shelter seven days ago – are you capable of thinking back that far? I’m helping you find a job. I’m putting petrol in your car so you can get to interviews. I’m paying for a motel while you organize somewhere else to stay. Do you know what that means? Have you got even the faintest idea?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘It means I’m the only person you’ve got left.’

  No reply.

  ‘Call me back when you’ve sobered up.’

  ‘You think I’m a charity case, is that it?’

  ‘Just call me back tomorrow, Healy.’

  ‘How about I don’t?’

  This time I said nothing, not wanting this conversation to spiral any further out of control – but my lack of reply only seemed to make him angrier.

  ‘How about I don’t?’

  ‘I’m ending this call before you say something you really regret.’

  ‘You don’t know what it’s like to mourn anything. Not properly. You’d barely even buried your wife before you were balls-deep in your next-door neighbour. You probably couldn’t wait to get your missus in the fucking ground.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Were you glad she got cancer?’

  ‘What the fuck did you just say?’

  ‘You heard what I said.’

  I was so angry I could feel it tremoring through my chest, clawing at my throat, the heat like a fog in my head. ‘Don’t ever speak about her like that,’ I said, barely able to force the words out. ‘You haven’t got a clue what it was –’

  ‘You and me, Raker …’

  ‘What, Healy? You and me what?’

  He paused for a long time. ‘You and me are done.’

  The words pulsed along the line.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘at least you’ve finally got something right.’

  I hung up.

  I wouldn’t see him again for nine months.

  Part Two

  * * *

  2 OCTOBER 2014

  9

  The restaurant was in a converted textile factory, west of Walthamstow Marshes. Perched right on the banks of the River Lea, it was a red-brick, single-storey building with a series of identical windows, each one framed under individual gables. At the nearest end to the car park was the entrance, an ornate, wood-carved doorway with a blackboard leaning against one of its walls, and a faux-Victorian welcome sign. Two lines of six tables were on the gravel outside, matching umbrellas standing sentry at each one.

  Two days into October, and with summer showing no signs of waning, the restaurant was packed, people at every table, more on the banks of the river watching boats glide past. At first I couldn’t see her among the crowds, and wondered whether she was inside. But then she came into view at the furthest table away from me, staring into space, hand clamped around a glass of water.

  ‘Afternoon,’ I said as I reached her.

  DCI Melanie Craw turned, removing her sunglasses. She looked out at the crowds around her, at the people queuing up for a table, and then her gaze returned to me. ‘Afternoon,’ she replied, the merest hint of a smile on her lips.

  ‘There are some paparazzi watching us from the boats.’

  She rolled her eyes and put her sunglasses back on.

  I sat down. ‘What are you doing out in this neck of the woods?’

  ‘Waltham Forest has got a suspect I might be interested in.’ She looked at her watch, then out at the crowds again. ‘Weaselly piece of shit. You’d like him.’

  It was my turn to smile this time.

  Craw was forty-four, slim, understated, immaculately dressed in a grey trouser-suit. Ten months ago, she’d asked me to find her missing father. In coming to me, she’d not only gone against protocol, she’d employed someone whom the Met viewed with deep suspicion. I didn’t seek out the running battles I’d had with them – far from it – but the conflict was a consequence of my work. Most of the time, when families came to me, it was in the months after the official trail had gone cold.

  The irony was, she’d probably harboured more doubts about employing me than anyone. Before I’d agreed to help her, we’d had a series of bitter confrontations during my search for another missing person. But, after I finally brought her answers about her father, perhaps when she’d seen more closely what my cases meant to me and why I never relinquished my grip on them, things changed. She was still a little nervous in public, but in private her defences had lowered.

  We’d been to dinner a few times, met in public parks where we’d watch her girls play. Nothing had happened, and perhaps it never would. Yet I liked her company, and as difficult as she was to break down, it was clear the same was true for her. She was so different from Derryn, and from Liz, my former neighbour, who had come after – more guarded, more stoic. Despite that, I identified with her, particularly with the person she tried to hide in her professional life, where she was running a Murder Investigation Team of twenty-eight, twenty-six of whom were men. At the end – when I’d found out what had happened to her father – I saw that hidden side of her clearly: fiercely intelligent, conflicted, vulnerable just like everyone else.

  ‘So why make me come all the way over here?’ I asked.

  ‘I wanted to talk to you.’

  ‘About?’

  She checked her watch again. It was just before one. When she looked up, she gestured for the waiter to come over. ‘Do you want something to eat?’

  ‘Is the Met paying?’

  She smiled again. ‘You’re a funny man, Raker.’

  I ordered a steak, salad and coffee; Craw went for a chicken sandwich and another glass of mineral water. When the waiter was gone, she glanced off, past the edges of the restaurant, to where a conga line of kids was racing towards a rust-speckled iron bridge, its feet straddling the river. On the other side were the marshes, mown trails criss-crossing through sun-scorched, knee-high grass.

  ‘Craw?’

  She turned back to me. We hadn’t quite manoeuvred ourselves away from using surnames yet. Old habits died hard, but there was something else to it too: I could see it brought her a level of comfort, anchoring her to a more familiar time – one when she was more confined and had to give less of herself away.

  ‘Colm Healy,’ she said.

  His name stopped me dead. ‘What about him?’

  ‘When was the last time you talked to him?’

  I knew straight away when the last time was, but I paused for a moment, trying to figure out why it would be of interest to Craw. ‘It was 16 January. Why?’

  ‘What happened?’

  He insulted me, my daughter, my relationship with her.

  The memory of my wife.

  ‘Raker?’

  ‘I’d met up with him a week before that, on 8 January. He’d wanted to get together, so we went to a café in Hammersmith. Then, on the sixteenth, we …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We had a disagreement.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘He said some things that I couldn’t let pass.’

  Craw knew what that meant. She’d once put her entire reputation on the line by backing Healy’s reintegration into the Met. At the time, he’d just come out of a two-month suspension. She’d vouched for him because she’d seen something good in him, the instincts of a gifted investigator, the humility of a damaged man, and for a while it had worked. But then Healy had self-destructed. That was what he did. That was what made him so frustrating. He was scarred by rooted, painful wounds, but behind the barricades, the aggression, the ire, was a different man; a better, quieter one. It was just hard to imagine it sometimes; even harder when I cast my mind back to what he’d said to me on the phone about my wife’s death.

  ‘Why are you asking about Healy?’

  She shifted forward in her seat, and some of the opacity left
her sunglasses. I could see her eyes on the crowds again, looking out for anyone she might know, for anyone that might be able to place the two of us here, right now, together.

  ‘So you parted on bad terms?’ she said.

  ‘He’d been drinking earlier in the day. I told him to call me back when he was sober.’

  ‘And he didn’t?’

  ‘Well, I haven’t heard from him since.’

  ‘Do you think he’s still drunk?’

  It was a half-joke, but neither of us was smiling. I leaned back in my seat, and watched a boat crawl along the water. ‘Look, before January I hadn’t seen him in the flesh for over a year. He just went AWOL. The only contact I had with him during that time was a phone call in December, when I was looking for your old man, as the two of them used to work together. I didn’t expect to hear from him after that – but first week of January he suddenly calls me up and wants to meet. So I met him on the eighth, near Hammersmith Bridge.’

  ‘And what happened?’

  I shrugged. ‘As soon as I got there, it was clear something was rubbing at him. He was agitated. He’d basically …’ I stopped. He’d basically hit rock bottom.

  ‘He’d basically what?’

  ‘He was living in a homeless hostel.’

  She frowned. ‘What?’

  When she saw I was serious, neither of us said anything for a while. In a way, before she’d hired me to find her father, before Craw and I had begun whatever this was between us, Healy had been the only thing we’d had in common: our shared irritation at him, our regret, our sorrow at the way he’d allowed his life to cave in. ‘Anyway,’ I continued, ‘he said he wanted my help.’

  ‘To do what?’

  ‘To find out who killed the twins – that family.’

  She started shaking her head and only stopped when the waiter arrived with our drinks. After he was gone, she leaned forward. ‘What did you say to that?’

  ‘I said I’d help him.’

  She sighed. ‘That’s an open case, Raker.’

  ‘It’s over four years old.’

  ‘That’s irrelevant.’

  ‘It’s dead in the water, and we both know it.’

  ‘So you’re working murders as well as missing people now?’

  ‘Don’t be like that.’

  ‘Like what?’

  I studied her for a moment. ‘When I met him, he was in a state.’

  ‘He’s always in a state.’

  ‘Not like this.’

  ‘So what else did he say?’

  ‘Why are you so interested in him?’

  She smirked. ‘What else did he say?’

  The sun had moved around in the sky, light escaping in under the lip of the umbrella, heat nipping at my arm. I shifted sideways so that I was back in the shade, and watched her. Over the past ten months, Craw hadn’t just changed emotionally. She leaned back and tucked her blonde hair behind her ears, shoulder-length now rather than short, and began playing with a thin gold chain at her throat. I’d never seen her wear any jewellery while working, and the chain was only a small concession, but small changes spoke of a greater shift: she didn’t want to be the same person as she’d been when she’d first hired me, for reasons she’d laid to rest alongside the memory of her father. And yet there were still moments, almost a year on, when it was much harder to see the change in her. As she watched me through mirrored shades – able to see me, unable to be seen back now – I caught clear flashes of who she’d been before, her face like an echo: unreadable, blank.

  I shook my head. ‘Are we really still doing this dance?’

  She swallowed, said nothing.

  ‘Craw?’

  She pushed her half-finished glass of water aside. As she pulled the fresh one towards her, fingers smearing the condensation, she took off her glasses. The silence between us was filled with the excited screams of kids on the bridge, by the chug of narrowboats on the river.

  Eventually, she looked up, a mix of steel and regret in her eyes. ‘You ever meet Healy’s ex-wife?’

  ‘Gemma. Yeah, once. Why?’

  ‘Six weeks ago, she filed a missing persons report.’

  ‘What – for Healy?’

  She nodded. ‘I think you may have been the last person to see him alive.’

  10

  My mind was racing, returning to that first meeting Healy and I had had in the café, to the ones we’d had in the motel bar, to that last call. Were you glad she got cancer? I’d cut him loose without even pausing for thought. When I’d returned to London the next day, I’d written You’re on your own on the front of the murder file, and told the receptionist at the motel to give it to him when he next staggered back.

  ‘His sons haven’t heard from him since the week before you last saw him,’ Craw said, ‘and although apparently he wasn’t ever good at keeping in touch, nine months isn’t normal.’ She leaned forward in her seat. ‘What did you two discuss?’

  My head was buzzing with noise. ‘There wasn’t a lot of discussion. I offered to help him get back on his feet and said he could sleep on my sofa. But I’m not sure either of us really wanted that. So, I was helping him find a job, paying for his petrol to get to interviews, and I also fronted up the cash for a motel. He told me he’d pay me back once he got himself together again.’

  She nodded, sinking into her seat, a strand of blonde hair escaping past her face. She swiped it away, eyes on the gentle sway of the marshes. ‘I didn’t even know he was missing until yesterday. One of my team mentioned it to me.’

  ‘How did they find out?’

  ‘He knows someone who works for CID up in Barnet. Some guy called Fifield. Anyway, the two of them – Fifield and my guy, Sampson – used to work with Healy way back when. Fifield told Sampson he’d just got back to the station one day late August, and he passed Gemma coming the other way. They’d never spoken before, but Fifield recognized her from pictures Healy had kept on his desk for years. Fifield went back in and asked around, and ended up speaking to the PC who’d filed the report.’ She paused, rolling her chain between her thumb and forefinger. ‘The PC confirmed to Fifield that the woman had been Gemma.’

  ‘What else did Sampson say?’

  ‘Just that he’d had a short phone conversation with Fifield two days ago – the first they’d had in four months – and Fifield had mentioned that Healy had been reported missing.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  Her eyes narrowed, recognizing the subtext. Why hadn’t she asked Sampson more questions? Or found out more herself? ‘Look,’ she said, steely, curt, ‘when I had to fire Healy, it wasn’t only my life that he screwed up. Sampson had worked on Healy’s last case too. Hell, they were supposed to be friends. Because of Healy, all of us spent days in meetings with Professional Standards. Healy contaminated that whole investigation – and everyone on it.’

  There was a flicker of something in her face. She’d fired Healy because he’d lied to her, his deceit jeopardizing one of the biggest manhunts in Met history. Yet that didn’t stop her feeling a pang of guilt. Despite everything, she’d always been like me. She saw something in him.

  Something worth saving.

  I sat there, mind ticking over. I couldn’t forgive him for what he’d said to me, even now, even nine months on, but the idea of him missing, of him being a victim, it bothered me. It was an itch I had to scratch. Was it because somewhere, deep down, his plight still saddened me, the sharp trajectory of his fall? Or was it gravity at work: him, once again, without even being here, manoeuvring his way back into my life; me, inextricably being pulled towards him? The more I thought about it, the more conflicted I felt, the less able I was to see straight. My life was simpler without him – and yet I’d never been able to abandon him before.

  ‘He’s probably not even missing,’ I said.

  ‘His ex-wife says different.’

  ‘His ex-wife doesn’t know him.’

  ‘And you do?’

  I pulled my mug towards me, steam
coiling off the surface. ‘Maybe I don’t,’ I said, ‘maybe no one does. But he was living in a homeless shelter before I offered to help him. If he returned to that life after our last phone call, who would know whether he’s missing or not? He could have spent the last nine months moving around the city, one hostel to the next. He could be living on the streets for all we know.’ I stopped, remembering something Craw had said: His sons haven’t heard from him since the week before you last saw him. That was unusual for Healy – even during the darkest times in his life, he’d maintained some sort of contact with his kids – but a lack of contact still didn’t guarantee he was genuinely missing. If he was back on the streets, he’d have no money, no phone, just the clothes on his back. He’d have his pride too. He’d go silent before he showed the world what he’d become.

  ‘What’s the name of the PC that Gemma spoke to?’ I asked.

  Craw shook her head. ‘I can’t get involved.’

  ‘You haven’t even looked at the report?’

  She came forward, a flash of resentment in her eyes, that echo of her old self I’d seen earlier. But then she stopped before a single word had escaped: her jaw loosened, her muscles relaxed, she breathed in and sat back.

  ‘You know I can’t,’ she said quietly. ‘You know all the reasons I can’t get involved in this, even if I wanted to.’

  I nodded, realizing how quickly things had changed between us. In our old lives, she’d have let that flash of resentment turn to anger, and she’d have ripped into me. I wouldn’t have backed down, it would have escalated, and then it would have festered. These were the moments when it felt like there was something between us, even if neither of us knew what it was.

  My thoughts turned back to Healy.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she said.

  ‘It bugs me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why would Gemma report him missing?’

  Craw shrugged. ‘I imagine because he hasn’t picked up the phone to their sons for the past nine months. Or maybe because she was once his wife.’