couple of other members of the task force who had helped Healy, in those first few weeks after her disappearance, to try and find Leanne.
Until the shoot-out at the woods, Healy wouldn't have wanted Phillips there, and Phillips wouldn't have come. But in the bullet Phillips had taken in the leg, and in the wounds Healy had taken in his chest, they had some common ground. As well as that, Phillips had agreed to stand as a character witness for Healy at his review hearing. It was a selfish gesture in many ways, there as a way to prevent Healy from talking publicly about everything the task force had kept suppressed. But Phillips was highly rated and it would look good for Healy to have him there. At the wake afterwards, they talked uncomfortably for a while — Phillips signed off on sick for a month; Healy indefinitely suspended pending a review by the Directorate of Professional Standards — and then Phillips hobbled away on crutches and headed back down to London.
Most of the others who'd been there with us that night weren't so lucky. Jamie Hart had spent his first three days rigged up to life support after a bullet perforated his lung and lodged in his throat. Forty-eight hours later, his wife decided to turn the machine off. Three uniformed officers had also been killed, and the paramedic died on arrival at Whitechapel. The SFO who had provided the cover for me had taken a bullet, but survived, and so had one of the dog handlers. Aron Crane might not have fired the guns, but he was responsible for a bloodbath.
When the sun started falling in the sky, I left the wake and walked back across Verulamium Park to my car. As I started the engine, I looked up and saw Gemma Healy coming across the grass towards my BMW. She was in her late forties, but wore it pretty well: dark hair, a petite frame, tiny creases funnelling out from green eyes, and a strength and assurance in her movements that suggested she'd known pain and handled it better than her husband. For a moment, I thought she was heading to the church. But then she continued towards me and waited while I buzzed the window down.
'Hello,' she said softly. She also had an Irish accent, stronger than her husband's. 'We've never met before, but I know who you are.'
I smiled. 'I'm not sure if that's a good or a bad thing.'
'It's good,' she replied, and managed a smile. 'I just wanted to thank you for what you've done. Away from my husband.' She paused, corrected herself. 'Ex husband.'
'I don't understand.'
'He needed you. He needed someone strong to rein in his excesses. I don't know what you found in that place, and I don't want to know. But I was married to Colm for long enough to know that, in order for you to get him there, in order to contain him, you would have had to have been strong enough to face down his arrogance, his anger and his resentment. And as I can tell you from personal experience, that takes some doing.'
I nodded, not entirely sure how to respond.
'So thank you,' she added quietly.
She went to walk away, and, as she did, I killed the engine. She looked back at me, brow furrowed, eyes moving back and forth across my face.
'Has he ever told you why he did it?'
She knew what I meant. Subconsciously she reached to the spot on her face that he must have struck, and brushed it with a couple of fingers. Then she shook her head.
'It wasn't the affair,' I said, and watched colour briefly fill her cheeks. 'It was the fact that he thought everyone had turned their backs on him.'
'He still shouldn't have done it.'
'I totally agree.'
'And I can't forgive him.'
I let her know that I understood that too. 'I know why you walked away from him. I even know why you did what you did. But the isolation you felt before you made that decision, that's what he felt in those last few months. That's what he felt when we were looking for your daughter. You hated him. Leanne hated him. He had a case that completely consumed him. But he bottled it up and he pushed it down, and something had to give. I'm not saying it's right, I'm just saying that, if you felt he'd turned his back on you, then I think he might have felt the same.'
She studied me, but didn't say anything.
'I'm sorry,' I said. 'This is none of my business.'
'No,' she said, and held up a hand in front of her. 'It's fine. I just… the Colm you're telling me about isn't the Colm I've come to know over the past year.'
I told her that I understood, and started up the car.
Gemma studied me, as if she was about to ask me something, but then turned on her heel and started walking away. After about five paces, she stopped and looked back at me. 'How long Does it take?' she asked gently.
I looked at her, her eyes glistening in the half-light of the evening. Healy had asked me the same question two days before, and I wondered why they would both think I had the answer. Perhaps I still carried a sadness around with me, a stain in the fabric of my skin. Or perhaps they saw faint signs of hope, of recovery. A man who had been through the darkness and was standing in the light at the other end.
You say goodbye to them eventually,' I replied, the sun disappearing beyond a copse of trees behind us. 'But, the truth is… you never let them go.'
Chapter Seventy-seven
The sound of the shower woke me at six-thirty. As I slowly stirred, I lay on my back and looked up at the ceiling, steam crawling out through the partially open bathroom door. The bed was empty and the bedroom was cold. I pulled the duvet up and rolled over, studying the photograph of Derryn on my side table. I knew every inch of her face so well: the shape of her eyes, the way her mouth turned up when she smiled, the pattern of her freckles, the curve of her body. Next to the frame was a black coffee, steam rising from inside the mug.
The shower stopped.
I sat up, sipped on the coffee and watched through the gap in the door. The noise of the shower door opening. An arm reaching to the rail for a towel. One side of a body, water droplets running down the skin, tracing the waist and the hips.
Outside, rain spat against the window.
I glanced at the picture of Derryn again and then went to the window. The first pinpricks of day pierced a smear of cloud beyond the houses opposite. I pulled on a pair of boxers and watched one of my neighbours filling his car full of junk. When he was done, his wife came down the drive to him, kissed him, and watched him pull out and disappear along the road.
'Morning.'
I turned. Liz was standing looking at me, a towel around her, her hair darkened by water and sitting against one of her shoulders like a thick tail.
'Morning,' I said, smiling, and held up the coffee. 'Thanks.'
'You're welcome.' She moved around to my side of the bed, then perched herself on the edge. I sat down next to her. 'How are you feeling?' she asked.
I looked at her. She blinked, a little water breaking free from her hairline and running down her cheek.
'I feel good. You?'
She nodded. 'Sorry it's so early.'
'Are you in court today?'
'No,' she said, her eyes moving across my face. 'I'm driving up to Warwick to see Katie again. She's meeting with an investment bank about a graduate programme next week. I'll give her the old mum-to-daughter pep talk and then we'll probably head into Birmingham and go shopping'
'You excited about seeing her again?'
'Very.'
I remembered the photographs of them I'd seen at Liz's. Katie looked a lot like her mum. She was also
