He looked different from when I’d last seen him. He’d lost a little weight, had had his red hair cut and styled, and wore a tailored suit. He appeared fresher, more professional, with none of the ferocity I’d spent so much time reining in the October before. And yet there was just the hint of
‘You still drink coffee, right?’ he asked, pushing one towards me. ‘Black, no sugar.’
‘Well remembered.’
‘I’m clever like that.’
He nodded and a moment of silence settled between us. It wasn’t uncomfortable exactly, but it wasn’t relaxed either. The old Healy was a hard guy to like. He did his best to piss you off and fight you on everything. The new one seemed more controlled, but no less intense. I could see his brain ticking over, trying to figure out what he needed to say to me and why. He hadn’t told me a lot over the phone, which was fairly typical of him. In his search for Leanne, he’d spent so long bottling things up, working her case off the books and keeping it concealed, he’d eventually forgotten how to articulate himself.
‘How have you been?’ I asked.
‘Fine. You?’
‘I’m okay.’
He nodded, but didn’t probe any further.
‘How are Gemma and the boys?’
A flicker of sadness in his face. ‘They’re good.’
I hadn’t seen him for over seven months, but as I watched how he sat – his bulky frame perched on the edge of the stool; his hand wrapped around the mug, wedding band still on – it didn’t feel like it.
‘So I hear you’re back in the big time.’
He looked at me. ‘Who’d you hear that from?’
‘Someone I know at the Met.’
His eyes lingered on me – that trace of the old Healy – and then he broke out into a small, tight smile. It was a token effort; hardly even there. ‘That’s right.’
‘How’s it going?’
The smile dropped away. ‘That’s what I need to talk to you about.’
This time it was my turn to look suspicious. His face was turned away from me, half lit by the sun coming in from outside, half darkened by the shadows of the shop.
‘What’s going on?’
He took a long, drawn-out breath. ‘They don’t know I’m here telling you this, and if they found out, I’d get my arse handed to me. So you need to keep this on the QT.’
‘I can’t tell anyone anything if I don’t know what it is we’re talking about,’ I said to him and, almost immediately, he reached down to his side where a slip case was leaning against the legs of the chair. He brought it up and unzipped it. Inside there were six files. Four were thick, rammed with paper, all contained within identical Manila folders. A fifth was about half the size, in a green folder. The last was the thinnest – maybe only ten pages, in a charcoal-grey surround – and was the one he took out.
‘I’ve just come from Julia Wren.’
That stopped me dead. ‘
‘You’re working for her, right?’
But I didn’t hear him. My mind was already shifting forward: why would he have been to see Julia? Was this to do with Sam? Did I miss something? Overlook something? I reached into my coat pocket and took out my phone. On the display was one missed call, received while I was on the Tube. Julia. She’d been calling me about the police.
‘Raker?’
I glanced at him. ‘Yeah.’
‘You’re working for her?’
‘Yeah, I’m working for her. So?’
‘Have you found her husband?’
I shook my head. ‘No.’
‘Well, the Met are going to ask you to shut this down.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘They’re going to turn up on your doorstep’ – he looked at his watch – ‘in about an hour, and they’re going to want you to stop looking for him.’
‘Why would I do that?’
He handed me the file. On the first page was a colour picture of Sam. ‘Because they think Samuel Wren is the Snatcher.’
42
It had been 108 days since the third victim, Joseph Symons, was taken. Some people in the Met, some cops who Healy didn’t believe deserved to be cops, started talking about the end; whispers in the corridors at first, and then – like a wave of chatter – it filtered down through the hallways and into the meeting rooms. They believed a man who had taken three people and never been found could just stop; turn it off like a light. Or if they didn’t believe that, they held on to the remote possibility he’d got caught up in something else: that he’d been forced off the radar; that he’d been charged with another crime or gone to prison on something unrelated. But Healy knew it hadn’t happened like that, and so did Craw and the rest of the Snatcher team. And at 11.14 p.m. they got the call to prove it.
It was a tower block in Hammersmith, sitting in a patch of land between the flyover and the river. The call had come in from a neighbour who knew the occupant of Flat 312 and said she hadn’t seen him for three days. Ordinarily they’d chat in the corridors of the third floor every day when he returned from his job as a shop assistant. But the last time she saw him was the Tuesday before. She’d heard him leave for work, had even watched from her window as he headed off towards Hammersmith Tube station – but that was the last time she saw him. She thought she might have heard him come home that night, perhaps the sound of his door opening and closing, perhaps even the faint sound of conversation in the hallway, but she couldn’t say for sure. She definitely didn’t see him or hear him on Wednesday, and she hadn’t seen him since. It was now Friday night.
The tower block was perched on the edge of a grass bank that dropped down to a rusting fence and the train tracks beyond. It was one of five, all connected via walkways, all part of the same estate. If it hadn’t have been for the media, camped out in a space to his far left, light bulbs flashing, camera crews jostling for space, there might have been a strange kind of stillness to the place; a lack of light and sound, as if a pregnant hush were hanging in the air. In the walkways, in the alleyways, in the windows, Healy could make out figures – their faces freeze-framed in the glow from the police lightbars – looking on as things played out. At any other time, this was one of the most dangerous housing estates in London. He’d stood over bodies in this place. He’d knocked on doors and told parents their kids weren’t coming home. But now even the gangs and the dealers stood back and watched in silence as another came into this place.
One who was even worse than them.
After coming up the stairs – every light out, just like the others, bulbs smashed in the stairwell – he put on the forensic boiler suit, zipped it up and moved into the flat. Again, it was a carbon copy of the flats the other victims had lived in. Healy spotted Craw in the kitchen. There was a door off the living room, opening on to a bedroom. Chief Superintendent Ian Bartholomew stood in the doorway. Healy glanced at him but didn’t greet him. Bartholomew had started to get involved personally about four weeks after Joseph Symons went missing. ‘Three is three too many,’ he kept saying in daily briefings, as if no one on the task force felt anything for the men. Craw hated it; maybe hated him too. She’d never said as much to Healy, but her feelings were barely concealed: there, just below the surface, bubbling and stewing until one day in the future she would either say something she regretted to Bartholomew’s face, or she would walk into his office and hand in her resignation.
‘Melanie,’ Bartholomew said to Craw as she arrived from the kitchen. ‘What the bloody hell am I supposed to
