Vanished

78

The next morning the doorbell woke me. I stirred on the edge of sleep, unsure whether I’d even heard it, and then it came again, longer and louder. The clock said it was 8.58.

I sat up in bed and looked out through the curtains. The sun was shining again, the skies clear. I grabbed a T-shirt and a pair of tracksuit trousers and wriggled them on, then moved through the house to the front door. I’d been expecting, maybe hoping, for Liz.

Instead I got Healy.

He looked terrible, like he hadn’t slept all night: his hair was a mess, not combed through or styled, his face etched with dark lines, his eyes bloodshot. His clothes were dishevelled, one half of his shirt tail hanging out, his tie loosened, his trousers creased.

I pulled the door open.

‘Healy.’

He didn’t say anything, just looked at me, and behind him – out on the street – I could see his Vauxhall, bumped up on to the pavement outside the gates. Behind that was another car, a grey Volvo. In the driver’s seat, Melanie Craw was leaning over the steering wheel, watching us. When I invited Healy in, she nodded at me, started up the engine and pulled away. I watched her head off down the street and then turned to Healy.

‘What the hell’s going on?’

He stood there in the silence of the house, looking at me.

‘Healy?’

‘Have you got any coffee?’

I looked at him. ‘Sure.’

We moved through to the kitchen and he sat at the counter while I brewed some coffee. Once it was on the go, I leaned against the sink, watching him, and for a moment he just stared at the floor, eyes dull and chipped, no light in them at all. After a while he seemed to become aware of the quiet and, with a long, drawn-out breath, looked up at me.

‘Craw found me,’ he said quietly.

‘Found you where?’

A pause. Eyes on the floor again. ‘Parked on the road outside the prison.’

‘Which prison?’

‘Belmarsh.’

‘What were you doing down there?’

He glanced at me and shrugged. ‘Sleeping in my car.’

‘Why?’

He smiled. Sad and tight. ‘Why not?’

‘Is that where you were yesterday when I called?’

He shook his head. ‘No.’

‘What’s at the prison?’

He didn’t reply.

I paused; let him have a moment.

He placed a hand flat to the counter top and looked down at his fingers, stained, blistered and cut. Then he sighed, deep and long, as if there weren’t enough words to put it all together. ‘At the beginning of January, I found something out,’ he said quietly.

‘What?’

‘Something I guess I probably shouldn’t have.’

I pulled a stool out and sat down across from him.

‘A guy I’ve known for years, an old drinking buddy of mine, works down at Belmarsh, in the high-security unit there.’ He sniffed. ‘About a week before I started back at the Met, I went out for a few with him and we got pretty pissed. Pretty emotional, I guess. He knew Leanne, knew the boys … I mean, our kids had grown up together.’

He brought his fingers into a fist.

‘He said there was this psychologist who came in every Monday to talk to the lifers down at Belmarsh. You know, the really worthless arseholes. The no-hopers.’

I was trying to work out where this was going.

‘Anyway, we were there, just the two of us, too many beers, too much emotion – I mean, this was only, like, eight weeks after I buried Leanne – and he let slip she did the counselling for a lot of these pricks. All over the place. The rapists and the killers; the paedos and the sacks of shit who don’t deserve to see the light of day … and she …’

‘What?’

‘This guy, my pal, he said she did exactly the same thing over at Broadmoor.’

My heart sank. ‘Oh shit, what have you done?’

He looked up, a shimmer in one of his eyes. Broadmoor was where Leanne’s killer had been shipped off to.

‘Healy?’

He shook his head but didn’t say anything.

‘Healy?’

‘That fucking prick took my girl.’

‘What did you do?’

His face coloured. ‘Are you listening to what I’m saying?’

‘What did you do?’

‘You were there. You saw it. He took my girl from me.’

‘Healy, what did you –’

‘He took my fucking girl from me!’

His voice crashed around the kitchen, a noise so loud it seemed to rattle the glass in the window frames. And then when silence settled around us again, all I could hear was the coffee percolator and Healy, looking down into his lap, sniffing gently.

He was crying.

‘Healy, look, why don’t –’

Out of his jacket pocket he brought a gun, laying it on the counter top. The barrel was pointing towards me, but he immediately turned it around so it was facing off the other way. When he eventually looked up, tears streaming down his face, he pushed the gun across the surface towards me. ‘Take it,’ he said.

‘What the hell are you doing with this?’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t know any more.’

‘Were you actually going to use it?’

‘I …’ His eyes turned to the gun. ‘I don’t know. Maybe. If I used her to get me inside Broadmoor …’ He flicked a look at me. Shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Did you really think you could walk into a prison with a gun? ’

‘I know.’

‘You wouldn’t even get through the front gates.’

‘I know.’

‘So what was the plan?’

He looked at me. ‘I’ve been dating her since April.’

‘What?’

‘She thought it was real.’

I rubbed a hand to my brow. ‘This is insane.’

‘I know. I didn’t …’ He stopped. ‘I’m not sure I was ever going to use that thing, but she kept refusing to take me inside. She wouldn’t even take me inside Belmarsh, and I’d been getting inside there myself, just watching her, for six months. I was already inside Belmarsh. What I wanted was to be inside Broadmoor. But while I had a job, while it was going all right at the Met, I was prepared to wait. Do it the right way. I could chip away at her until she gave in and started letting me tag along. I’d tell her it was field research,