Vanished (36 page)

And yet as I walked, I felt a tiny shift in my thoughts, like I’d suddenly glimpsed the outline of a memory. Although I tried to pin down what it was, the harder I looked for it, the more of a blur it became. But as indistinct as the thought had been, something of it remained. A residual feeling. A certainty.

That the answers were still in the footage.

And they always had been.

When Healy finally got back to the station, he walked into the incident room to find a meeting taking place. At the front, Craw was addressing the Snatcher task force, Davidson sitting almost at her side, pad on his lap, pen in his hand. Both of them clocked the movement, Craw glancing across to Healy and then returning her gaze to the detectives in front of her; Davidson looking over, a half-smile forming on his face.

Healy moved to the back of the group and perched himself on one of the desks but he could barely hear anything Craw was saying. All he could hear was his own voice: had Sallows already sent the pictures? Did Craw already know about the hospital, about how he’d got together with Raker? And what lie could he spin to help minimize the impact?

There are no more lies worth telling if she knows.

The thought sent a bubble of bile up from the pit of his stomach, but he managed to pull himself forward, further towards the group. Davidson was swinging gently from side to side on his chair as he made notes. At the back of the group, one of the other cops looked around, saw Healy and nodded, but Healy was so distracted he didn’t even remember the guy’s name. All he could see were the decisions he’d made over the past few days, and – with absolute clarity now – how he’d become consumed
by revenge. He’d wanted to show them. He’d wanted to shove their taunts and their jokes and the looks he got in the office so far down their throats they’d be choking on them. They’d used Leanne against him, they’d tried to grind him down and spit him out, and he’d become so focused on that, he hadn’t been able to see where the road was leading. Raker was the only person he could trust – even after the hospital, even after the way things had been left, that still held true in Healy’s head – but Healy knew he should never have sought Raker’s help. Not now. Not this soon.

‘Healy?’

He looked up. Craw was addressing him. ‘Yes, ma’am?’

‘Did you get all that?’

‘Most of it, ma’am.’

There were a couple of sniggers, though he couldn’t see where from, and as Craw stepped forward, in front of Davidson, Healy watched a smile form on Davidson’s face.

You’re done
, he mouthed.

‘Good,’ Craw said. ‘Because you’re riding with me.’

Craw told him to head towards Highgate. She didn’t say much else. Healy drove, eyes on the road, hands on the wheel, and stared ahead, going over everything that had happened and everything that might be about to come. After about ten minutes they hit traffic in Holloway. For a while there was silence, just the sound of rain falling against the roof. Then, finally, Craw turned to him. ‘Where were you this morning?’

‘I’m sorry I was late –’

‘I’m not looking for apologies, Healy. Where were you?’

‘I called you and left a message on your –’

‘I got the message. You said you were going via Julia Wren’s.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘Why?’

‘I wanted to ask her a couple of questions.’

She pursed her lips, her eyes still fixed on him. She’d seen right through it. ‘Do you know where we’re going, Healy?’

‘Ma’am?’

‘Do you know where we’re going?’

‘Now?’

She nodded. ‘Now.’

‘You said it was an address in Highgate.’

‘I know what I said. But do
you
know where we’re going?’

He frowned. ‘I’m not sure I understand, ma’am.’

‘Let me paint you a picture, okay?’ She paused, looking at him. ‘I invited you back on to this task force because I thought I saw something in you. A hunger. Some sort of contrition. I saw the hint of
something
worthwhile, so I wrote off all the politics and bullshit, I put up with having my arse handed to me by Bartholomew in weekly meetings, and having him make me look like an idiot in the press, because I thought to myself, “If Healy does
one
good thing, if he gives me
one
worthwhile lead, the risk will have paid off.” Because, let’s face it, this case, beginning to end, has been one giant clusterfuck.’

He continued staring ahead, barely able to look at her.

‘But, you know, I look at you, Healy, and all I see are
secrets. And if I don’t know what those secrets are, if I don’t know what makes you tick and you won’t
tell
me what makes you tick, how am I supposed to work with you? How am I supposed to defend you in front of Bartholomew? In front of everyone else?
Everyone
is against you, Healy – you know that, right? And your only friend, throughout all of this, has been me.’

He looked at her. ‘I appreciate that, ma’am.’

‘Do you?’

‘I do.’

‘Then tell me where we’re going today.’

He studied her. They were headed to Highgate. That had been where Raker had said Duncan Pell lived. Except he couldn’t tell her about Raker, couldn’t tell her about knowing Pell, until he figured out how much she knew and whether she had the photos.

‘I don’t know, ma’am,’ he said finally.

‘Are you sure?’

He looked at her. ‘One hundred per cent.’

She nodded and then turned away from him, looking out into the rain as it drifted across the windscreen. ‘Early yesterday morning a man reported seeing something suspicious up in Highgate, close to Fell Wood. It’s an old railway line.’

‘Suspicious?’

‘Said he thought someone was trying to break into a house there.’

‘Whose house?’

‘It belongs to a Duncan Pell.’ She glanced at him but he didn’t react. ‘Ever heard of him?’

‘No, ma’am.’

She eyed him for a second and there was a fleeting hint of disappointment in her face. Then she moved on. ‘Couple of uniforms go and have a look and they find the front door open. No one’s inside, but they call it in. Anyway, the investigating team enter Pell into the system and find he’s already in there, along with our friend Samuel Wren. Both of them seem to have been involved in the same altercation at Gloucester Road Tube station in October 2010. So there’s a link, however small. Both were originally arrested, but neither of them were charged. There was no indication they knew each other, but something’s up with Pell.’

They found the knives. They found Spane’s jacket
.

‘He’s got a set of knives in there with blood all over them. Bartholomew barks some orders and we get them rushed through forensics last night, and when you walked in on us I was reading out the results. The DNA from the blood on the knives matches up with DNA taken from the flats of every single Snatcher victim. Wilky. Erion. Symons. Drake. All four of them. Their DNA is all over the knives. And you know what else?’

Healy looked at her.
No. But I can guess
.

‘Leon Spane’s blood was on the blades too.’ She glanced at him. ‘We all knew he was one of the Snatcher’s victims the minute Wren used his name for the message he left on Drake’s mobile. But you saw it before that. Way before that. You believed Spane was a victim, even when everyone else doubted.’ She nodded once: an acknowledgement she should have listened to Healy. ‘Pell even had Spane’s jacket and his holdall.’

‘Who made the anonymous call about the break-in?’

‘Didn’t leave a name.’

‘Where did he call from?’

‘A payphone on Muswell Hill.’

Which meant it was basically untraceable unless Craw signed off on CCTV footage being requisitioned from the street. Even then, there were no guarantees it would get them a face.
First Wellis, now Pell. It was Wren. Had to be. He’s trying to close down anyone who he had any sort of contact with as the Snatcher because he’s knows we’re on to him. He’s trying to insulate himself. This is the end game.

‘So what about Wren?’

‘What about him?’

‘Was his DNA on the knives?’

‘His prints were on the knife grips.’

‘Shit. So Wren looks good for this?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘You tell me.’

‘Ma’am?’

‘You were at his house this morning, right?’

He nodded. ‘Right. Yes, I was.’

‘So what did you find out?’

He couldn’t think of a single thing to say.
There are no lies left to tell
. He glanced at her. ‘I didn’t manage to find out anything new.’

But even to his ears it was weak.

She shrugged. ‘Then I guess we head to Pell’s house.’

The conversation died away and they sat in silence for a while as the traffic eased, Healy inching the car forward, rain getting heavier and spitting up off the road as mist.

‘I don’t think I’ve ever been so disappointed,’ Craw said finally.

‘Disappointed, ma’am?’

She shifted in her seat, all the way around, and just
stared at him. He looked ahead, not turning himself, trying to act normally even as a slow wave of dread washed through his system. Then eventually, as the silence became unbearable, he turned and looked at her.

‘You were right about Spane. You have good instincts, Healy. I knew it, right from the off. That’s why I tried to get you involved. But the trouble is, you don’t know how to curb them, you don’t know how to control your instincts.’ She paused; seemed to deflate. ‘Davidson handed me some photos this morning of you and David Raker. I don’t know what you were doing with him, and frankly I don’t care. What I care about is that you looked me in the eye when I sat there and handed you a second chance, and you told me – you promised me – you wouldn’t make me look like an arsehole. You
promised
me.’

‘Ma’am, I can explain.’

‘It’s too late for explanations, Healy,’ she said, steely but quiet. She was angry but mostly she was defeated and, in a way, that was worse. ‘
No one
wanted you here, you do get that, don’t you? Not one single person. Even cops who you go back years with, they can’t afford to get too close to you, because you drag people down. This …’ She waved a hand, her voice gradually starting to rise. ‘This agenda you’ve got. This is the one time you had to suck it up, you had to swallow your pride and you had to keep your head down. But you couldn’t even do that.’

‘I didn’t feel I could –’

‘I don’t want to hear any more,’ she said, and turned away from him, looking out through the windscreen. ‘When we get back to the station, you’re going to walk into my office and you’re going to hand in your resignation.
You’re going to tell me you can’t handle the pressure any more, or you feel it’s time to go, or whatever the hell excuse you want to make up. You’re good at lying, Healy, so I’m sure you can come up with something inventive.’ She paused, glancing at him. ‘I like you, Colm. I’ve always liked you. But I can’t trust you. And if I can’t trust you to protect your own career, I can’t trust you to protect mine. So now it’s time to fall on your sword. And once you’ve done that, you walk away from the police and you never come back again.’

Once I was back home, I returned to the footage. The last time Sam Wren was visible to anyone was the partial glimpse of his legs inside the carriage at Victoria. So that meant he definitely went as far as St James’s Park. Once the train entered the station I hit Pause and spent forty minutes going over the footage, rewinding it, tabbing it on, rewinding it, tabbing it on. By the end of it, as the train left St James’s Park and headed off towards Westminster, I was pretty confident he hadn’t disembarked. I’d been pretty confident all the other times I’d looked, but this time I felt a real certainty, a belief I couldn’t explain. I wondered whether writing out Sam’s life, every moment I’d discovered or had explained to me, had cemented my view of him. I accepted all the evidence against him, because it was compelling and real and difficult to dispute. But when I looked at Sam Wren I didn’t see a killer.

And I’d never seen one.

At Westminster, I paused the footage as the carriage doors opened. Everything I already knew about that day, everything I’d replayed over and over again in the footage, appeared on screen again. Two exits, one marked for those who’d landed at Westminster to take part in the protests; the other marked for those who worked close by, or were here to see the sights. The platform was already jammed, people everywhere, some bunched into pockets,
some a little more spread out, but once commuters and protesters piled out of the train, it became a mass of bodies, some barely even identifiable as men or women.

About five seconds after the carriage doors parted, the fight broke out, further up the platform. As it did, the crowd seemed to get sucked towards it, like a black hole drawing them in, and a small amount of space was created at the near end of the station, closest to the camera and furthest away from where the confrontation was taking place. By that time, the Tube staff had already made their move, six of them descending on the fight and breaking it up almost immediately, two more coming in from positions off camera, at the bottom of the frame. One of them, a ginger-haired man I’d spotted on the other run-throughs of the video, was gesturing for people to continue moving towards the exits. The second was a stocky woman, stood at the doors on the end carriage, urging people out of the train – particularly anyone in a red protest T-shirt – before feeding them into the traffic flow created by her male colleague.

A red protest T-shirt
.

Something flared, the vaguest tail of a memory, and as I fished for it, my eyes settled on the inside of the second carriage. The one Sam Wren had been in. I scanned from left to right, to every person I’d already seen. The woman with her headphones on, oblivious to what was happening. The guy in the suit, sitting down, head in a book but momentarily distracted by the fight on the platform.

And then the second man.

The one in the red T-shirt.

The same memory flared again, unrefined and cloudy.
Was there something about him I hadn’t noticed before? He was bending down to pick up a protest sign, and positioned in a space behind a throng of demonstrators looking to disembark. I couldn’t see his face properly through the glass, had never at any stage got a clear view of his features inside the carriage – I’d just always known he wasn’t Sam. He was too big, too tall, had a different physicality, even different coloured hair. There was nothing remarkable about him, nothing unique or unusual to make him stand out. He was just a protester. He picked up his sign, he moved to the doors, he left the train. I knew his movements, just like I knew everyone else’s by now.