Vanished

and eventually she’d take me right into the lion’s den. And then I’d get in the same room as him, and I’d stick a fucking knife in his throat.’

‘This isn’t you, Healy.’

‘No?’

‘You’re talking about killing a man.’

‘He took my girl.’

‘But you’re not him. You’re not a killer.’

‘Killing him would have made me feel something,’ he said. ‘It wouldn’t bring Leanne back, but it would give me something. What else have I got?’

I looked at him. ‘You’re not a killer,’ I said again.

‘No job, no family,’ he replied, as if he hadn’t heard me.

I didn’t know what to say to that, so said nothing.

He wiped his eyes a couple of times and looked across me to the percolator. ‘How about that coffee?’

I got up and poured us both a cup.

‘How did Craw find out about the prison?’

‘She called me.’

‘This morning?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Why?’

‘Said she wanted to chat about what happened yesterday. Said I wasn’t getting my job back but she wanted to talk. So I told her where I was.’

‘Why were you even at the prison in the first place?’

‘I don’t know really.’ He paused. ‘Just seemed right. I’d been watching Teresa – this psychologist – come and go out of that prison since January. Since the time I got my job back. And by the time I was done yesterday, my job was gone, and so was she.’

‘What do you mean “gone”?’

‘Oh, she’s fine,’ he said. ‘I had a moment of clarity about five minutes after I got to hers. A flash of deja vu. All the anger I felt for her, just building and building in me, was all the anger I felt for Gemma when she told me she was having an affair.’

Gemma was his ex-wife.

‘I hit Gemma,’ he went on, ‘but I wasn’t about to do it again to Teresa. I didn’t feel anything for her, but I was able to stop myself. And when I stopped myself last night, it was like I stepped out of myself, and I could see that part of me, plain as day.’

‘And this Teresa? Did she call the police?’

He shook his head. ‘No. She’s a psychologist. Doesn’t mean she didn’t tell me I was a fucking bastard and she never wanted to see me again, but I think maybe, in some part of her, she knew why I’d done it. It might have been different if I’d actually pulled the gun, but I didn’t, so she just kicked me out and told me she never wanted to see me again.’

We sat in silence for a moment, both of us taking it in.

‘Did Craw know what was going on?’

‘I think she sensed that I was up to something from fairly early on. She can read people.’ He looked up at me. ‘She’s a bit like you.’

‘Craw said she couldn’t trust you.’

He nodded, turning his cup. ‘It was hard to lie, especially after what she’d done for me, but early on I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, how far I was prepared to go to get to him, so there didn’t seem much point talking to her about it. I’d just use my contact to get into Belmarsh and watch this psychologist talk to the scumbags there. It ate me up inside seeing this woman talking to those shitheads, all nice and polite, like they were just regular guys – but knowing that was how she must have been speaking to him in Broadmoor too, that was what really got to me. While it was going well at the Met, I found it easier to keep a lid on it, and easier to maintain control. Suck it down, don’t give them anything, keep the psychologist onside. That’s all I kept thinking.’

He took a couple of mouthfuls of coffee.

‘But after I got the boot I thought, “What does it matter any more?” I can carry on pretending I’m interested in her, or I can do what I’ve been thinking about for six months: put the gun to her head, and tell her I’ll kill her if she doesn’t find a way of getting me close to him.’ If I did that, if I did what I had to do to avenge Leanne and put that sack of shit in the ground, if I went to prison for killing him in the middle of his therapy session, who would care? I don’t have a job. My boys don’t speak to me. My wife hates my fucking guts.’

‘She doesn’t hate your guts.’

‘She hasn’t come back to me.’

‘You must understand the reasons for that.’

He knew what I meant. The twin girls down in New Cross – the case, way before Leanne went missing, that had broken him – and then the aftermath: a moment he could never take back, a moment like a cut that would never heal, where he hit his wife.

‘I understand the reasons,’ he said after a while, pain in his voice.

Neither of us spoke for a time, both of us looking down into half-finished coffee cups. Then I saw him look up and study me for a second, as if he was deciding whether to ask something or not.

‘You remember what you said to me once?’

I smiled. ‘I said a lot of things.’

‘You said, “There’s no shame in hanging on. There’s no shame in believing they might walk through the door at any moment.” ’

I nodded.

‘Do you still believe that?’

I looked at him, then across his shoulder to where a picture still hung of Derryn and me, backpacks on, halfway up a tor in Dartmoor. It had been taken the week before Derryn found the lump on her breast. The last week before the end began.

My eyes fell on Healy again.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I still believe it.’

79

Derryn was buried in Hayden Cemetery, a sliver of parkland in north London, just off Holloway Road, between Highbury and Canonbury. As I pulled up in the car park, I felt a pang of guilt, as if I were somehow betraying Liz by being here. Maybe, in a weird way, I was. The first sign of trouble, the first sign of doubt, and I returned to my old life and to the woman who had shaped it. I rarely came back to the cemetery any more, but when I did it was always because I didn’t know where else to go; how else to get past the way I was feeling. It was quiet, undisturbed, and after the search for Sam Wren, after everything Healy had said to me that morning, all the pain I recognized in him, the cemetery brought a strange kind of comfort, even if my memories of it were sad.

The entrance itself was a huge black iron arch, the name Hayden woven into the top, and as I passed through I could see the split path ahead of me: one branch headed down to where hundreds of graves unfurled in perfect lines on a huge bank of grass; the other bent up and around, partially covered by tall fir trees, into the western fringes of the cemetery, where Derryn’s grave – in a tiny walled garden called ‘The Rest’ – was situated. Adjacent to The Rest was the older, Victorian part of the cemetery, all mausoleums and tombs, winding paths and walled gardens. One of the reasons Derryn chose this spot, when she’d decided against more chemo, was for its sense of peace. Once you were inside the walls of The Rest, no wind came through; you were protected on one side by a bank of fir trees, and on the other by the huge Gothic structures of the old cemetery.

I moved through the gate of The Rest, the sun piercing a film of thin white cloud, and across to her grave. The last flowers I’d brought, months before, were nothing but a memory now; if they hadn’t already been dead, they would have been baked by the sun and then washed away by the rain in the past week. I could see a trace of a petal on her gravestone but nothing more. Grass grew long at the base, up towards the date of her death, so I reached forward and tore some of it up, throwing it away and clearing a space.