‘You mean Healy?’
‘The very same.’
‘He’s working the Snatcher?’
‘Yeah. Don’t you
‘I haven’t been following the case.’
‘He’s manoeuvred himself back into the big time. Don’t ask me how he managed it. The shit you and him got up to last year, he should be getting bummed in the showers at Pentonville, and you should be there watching.’
‘What do you mean “back into the big time”?’
‘Way I hear it, he’s pretty much playing second fiddle to the SIO.’
‘Who’s the SIO?’
‘Melanie Craw. The chief clown at the circus.’
‘You know her?’
‘No. But people tell me she’s a bitch with ice for blood. You probably need to be when you’ve got a deranged killer pissing all over your career. I give it one more dead homo before they pull the plug on her.’
‘So she fell out with Sallows?’
‘Fell out, didn’t rate him, didn’t like the way he dressed – who knows?’
‘Has Healy been playing ball?’
‘Old Lazarus? Of course he has. He’s a clever bastard. He’s probably been on his best behaviour since the start of the year; probably managed to keep himself in check even while the people there are chipping away at him. But you can bet your arse he’s been spending the whole time plotting some sort of revenge mission.’
‘Against who?’
‘Who’d you think? Against everyone.’
39
Craw swivelled gently in her seat, half turned away from the men in her office, her gaze on the incident room. She wore every hour of the investigation on her face: dark rings under her eyes that she’d tried to disguise with make-up; the pale, almost translucent skin that shadowed insomnia; the far-away look of someone who’d imagined many times over what it would be like to walk away. Forty days after the third victim, Joseph Symons, went missing, they still had nothing.
Next to Healy was Davidson. On the other side of Davidson was Sallows. On the left-hand side of the office were other, senior CID cops: Sampson, Frey, Richter and then Carmichael, who had a notepad in his hand and was tapping a pen against his thigh. He hadn’t written anything down yet.
Finally, Craw looked back at the group. ‘I’ve got to do a press conference in two hours. I’ve got to go out there, in front of half the journalists in the country, and I’ve got to tell them what we’ve found and how we’re going to catch this bastard.’ She reached down in front of her and picked up a piece of paper off the desk. It was blank. ‘This is what we’ve found. What’s written on Carmichael’s pad is what we’ve found. Six weeks after Symons gets whisked off into the night, and we’re in the same place as we were when Wilky got taken. And he’s been missing
Silence. Then the gentle squeak of her chair as it moved back and forth.
‘So one of you give me
Healy waited for Davidson or Sallows to leap in; to try and build something from nothing, just so they could score points, but even they realized it was pointless. The case had already crossed that line. What it needed now was something to jump-start it.
‘Ma’am,’ Healy said, and everyone in the office turned to him.
He glanced briefly at Davidson and Sallows, their eyes narrowing, a faint look of disgust on Davidson’s face. Sallows made an obvious show of smacking his lips together like anything Healy said left a bad taste in his mouth.
‘What is it, Healy?’ Craw asked.
Healy turned his attention to her. ‘In October 2010 a man was found stabbed to death on Hampstead Heath. He –’
‘We’ve already been down that road, Colm,’ Davidson said, a hint of amusement – unseen by Craw – on his lips. When he turned to Craw, he’d wiped his face clean: no amusement, no expression of any kind. ‘You’ll remember, ma’am, that DS Sallows came to see you about this case a couple of days after our first victim, Steven Wilky, went missing back in August last year. HOLMES put it forward as a possible connection, given the circumstances of Wilky’s disappearance.’
Craw nodded, but her eyes didn’t leave Healy. ‘I remember,’ she said. In her face Healy could see an invitation to continue, not just because she was desperate for a lead, but because she wanted to see whether her instincts about him had been correct.
‘I know Sallows looked at this before,’ he said, and shifted forward in his seat. He hadn’t made any notes on this; this was all from memory. A couple of days earlier, he’d come into work and found the drawers of his desk had been pulled out and tipped all over the floor. Later the same day, in a Snatcher briefing, when Craw had asked him something, he’d opened his notepad to find pages had been ripped out. He’d stumbled his way through her question, to the amusement of Davidson, Sallows and some of the other cops, but he’d looked disorganized and amateurish. Craw had shown nothing, but it must have put doubts in her head. Now he was going to redress the balance.
‘So what have you got that’s new?’ she asked.
‘Nothing, ma’am.’
‘Then we’re done here.’
‘There are too many connections between the Snatcher victims and this case for us to bin it entirely,’ Healy continued. ‘Not without looking at it properly.’
‘We looked at it properly the first time, Healy,’ Davidson said.
‘We need to look at it again.’
Sallows smirked. ‘Are you saying I can’t do my job?’
‘No.’
‘You think I wasn’t thorough enough the first time round?’
‘No.’
‘Then what?’
But Healy wasn’t looking at Sallows, he was looking at Craw. She held his gaze for a moment and then scanned the room. ‘Who’s up to speed on the Hampstead Heath murder?’ Sampson, Frey and Carmichael all shook their heads. They would have seen that it had been marked up as an early potential lead when they joined the investigation after the second victim – Marc Evans – was taken, but they wouldn’t have gone into detail on it if it had already been relegated to a sideshow on Sallows’s say-so.
‘Okay,’ Craw said, looking at Healy, ‘you’ve got two minutes.’
He nodded. Davidson glanced at Sallows and shook his head. Healy ignored them and looked at the other cops. ‘The victim’s name was Leon Spane.’
‘Spane?’ Sampson asked.
‘Yeah. S-P-A-N-E. Spane was a 28-year-old from Tufnell Park. His naked body was found on the edge of Hampstead Heath, near Spaniards Road, on 19 October 2010. He’d been stabbed in the throat. The blade went so deep it perforated the skin on the back of his neck. His penis had also been removed – post-mortem, with the same knife – and left in the grass next to him. Lividity suggested he’d been brought from wherever he’d been killed.’ Healy paused, letting them take it all in. All eyes were on him now, even those of Davidson and Sallows. ‘And whoever killed Spane had shaved him.’
‘Shaved him how?’ Carmichael said, from the back of the room.
‘Shaved his head,’ Healy replied. ‘Right before the body was dumped.’
A tremor passed across the room, and a couple of the cops – Frey, who was the newest member of the
