What Remains (14 page)

Slowly, as the kettle reached boiling point, the window began to steam up, and by the time he’d cleared it the figure was passing directly beneath him. He leaned right against the glass, trying to follow the figure for as far as he could.

‘Are you okay, Mal?’

He started. Gail was standing in the doorway, dressing gown on. He glanced out of the window, but the figure was gone. ‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘Just couldn’t sleep.’

‘Bad dreams again?’

He frowned. ‘Again?’

She came in, slid her arms around him, and they stood there for a moment, comfortable in the silence. ‘You just seem to be having a lot of them lately.’

‘Do I?’

She broke off, grabbed two mugs from the cupboard and started making them both some tea. ‘Don’t forget, you need to take the girls to school …’ She looked at her watch and smiled. ‘In four hours’ time. I’ve got to be up early to get the bus.’

‘The bus?’

‘I’ve got my first exam paper today.’

‘Ah,’ he said. He’d forgotten. One of the most important days of her life, and he’d totally forgotten. He smiled at her, trying to pretend he hadn’t. ‘Your exams.’

‘Did you forget?’

‘No.’

That playful smile again. ‘Okay. I believe you. Today could be the start of something good for us. I could be Gail Clark
BA
(Hons) in a few months.’

‘You deserve it, honey.’

She went to the fridge to get some milk.

While her back was turned, he looked out of the window again, down seventeen floors to the area in front of Searle House; to the route the figure had taken, past the rows of wheelie bins.

‘Mal?’

He turned back to her.

‘Are you sure you’re okay?’ she said. ‘I’ve come in here a couple of times and found you like this, looking out of that window. When I ask you what the matter is, you say you’ve had a strange dream. How often are you getting them?’

‘On and off.’

‘Are you going to be all right to go away?’

‘Away?’

‘Next weekend.’

He remembered then: he was supposed to be going off with some mates for the weekend. It had been in their diaries for a year. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I’ll be fine.’

‘You’re not going to be much use to them if you’re falling asleep.’

He smiled. ‘But I’ll be a cheap drunk.’

Gail returned the smile and, as she finished off the tea, he looked out to the darkness that surrounded the block of flats.

‘What do I say I’ve dreamed about?’

She handed him a mug. ‘Huh?’

For the first time she was studying him, as if she wasn’t quite sure what was going on in his head. He smiled at her, trying to allay her fears, and rephrased the question. ‘Do I ever mention what my dreams are about?’ he said matter-of-factly.

‘You don’t remember?’

He shrugged; smiled again. ‘All I know is I sweat a lot.’

‘You’ve told me you’ve dreamed about a man.’ She backed up against one of the kitchen counters, watching him. ‘You say he’s always wearing the same dark blue raincoat – and he’s always carrying something in his hands.’

18

The day seemed to grow hotter as I went through the murder file again, making notes, posing questions to myself about possible new angles. I called Ciaran Healy and spoke to him for twenty minutes, asking him questions about his father, but things meandered once I got definite confirmation that neither he nor his brother had spoken to Healy since the turn of the year. At times there was a cynicism in his descriptions of his father, an acidity in the way he blamed him for the destruction of his parents’ marriage, and I realized Gemma hadn’t shown him Healy’s last letter yet. If she had, I doubted he’d have been talking the same way.

After that, I made a series of calls, retracing Healy’s original path through the investigation: the school the twins had gone to; the library Gail had worked at; friends of hers listed in the police file and neighbours at Searle House. It got me nowhere. I spent a while staring out at the garden, trying to gather my thoughts, trying to gain a clear line of sight – and then my phone started buzzing again.

It was Spike.

‘David,’ he said. ‘How are you doing?’

‘I’m good. Have you got something for me?’

‘Everything you asked for, basically. This is the complete picture on this guy Healy, starting 1 June 2012 and going all the way through to yesterday, 2 October 2014. Finances, phone records, bank account, car, rent – it’s all
there. To be honest, when I started, I thought, “Shit, this is going to take me
days
.” But after November 2013, he scales right the way back. Like,
really
scales back. He shuts up shop and vanishes. He stops paying for anything, stops making phone calls.’

That tallied with what Gemma had told me: July through to October 2013, after she’d sent him the divorce papers, she’d frequently been in touch, trying to get Healy to sign them. Then he became harder to get hold of, then she couldn’t reach him at all. Two months after that, in January, he called me up and we met in the café – and the reasons why Gemma couldn’t reach him became clearer.

‘Anyway,’ Spike continued, ‘I’ll email this through to you now. I’ve dug out the names and addresses of every incoming and outgoing caller on his phone records too. Otherwise, it’s exactly as you asked for. I’ll text you through the details about where to drop my money off.’

‘I appreciate it, Spike.’

I hung up and then returned to my laptop, accessing the PDF files that Spike had emailed through. It was after five o’clock, and despite the heat of the day and the emptiness of the sky, some of the light had begun to drift.

I’d already been through the email account I’d set up for Healy, but Spike had got me the username and password for the one Healy had maintained before that, in the years after he’d been fired from the Met. It was similarly fruitless: the last message he’d received was from Gemma, almost a year ago, on 28 October 2013:
I’ve tried to be cordial about this
, she wrote,
but it doesn’t have to be this way. Please, Colm, sign those divorce papers so we can all move on with our lives.

He had no mortgage, no insurance policies, only a small
amount of money left from the sale of the house in St Albans, no online subscriptions or pay TV. There was documentation for his pension, which looked pretty healthy, but it was like a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow: despite twenty-six years of service, he’d forfeited four years of pension contributions under the terms of his dismissal, and was unable to access his retirement pot until he turned fifty-five.

That was another six years away.

In the end, what the PDF basically amounted to was two distinct sections: Healy’s finances across twenty-eight months, and then his itemized phone bills.

I started with his finances.

Through his bank statements, it was possible to subdivide his life into three further stages: June 2012 to March 2013; April 2013 to October 2013; and then November 2013 to October 2014. Each stage illustrated a gradual decline.

Between June 2012 and March 2013, even after he was sacked by the Met, his account remained relatively buoyant. A month after he was fired, I offered him the spare room at my parents’ old place down in Devon, so between July and November he stayed there, not having to worry about rent. In the November, he’d decided to return to London, and started paying out for a double bedroom in a shared house on the Isle of Dogs, presumably seeing that as a springboard to finding work. Spike had included the tenancy agreement as part of the document, which he’d got hold of through an estate agency. From there, it became possible to track some of the weekly routines via food shops and visits to petrol stations. Healy also took
out direct debits to pay for his mobile, and insurance on his car.

In December 2012, his account was bolstered by ten thousand pounds’ worth of savings from a second, separate account which he’d closed, cleared out and brought across. It was the last of the money from the property in St Albans. After that, things got even better before they got worse: in January 2013, he was offered the two-month security job at the building society, which paid him a total of £3,205 after tax, and that cash carried him through until the end of March.

That was when the decline started. It began as a slow drip of money going out, but not coming in. Throughout April and May, I could see evidence of him applying for jobs: filling up his car at petrol stations on opposite sides of the city; cash withdrawals from ATMs which, with the help of Google and job sites, I saw were situated close to places that had been advertising for security positions. By June, he swallowed his pride and applied for Job Seeker’s Allowance – just shy of three hundred pounds per month – paid on a Friday, in weekly instalments.

Throughout June, he’d continued looking for work, but by July 2013 the routine began to wane. The money from his stint at the building society was long gone, and now he’d begun eating into his ten grand. As a result, he’d started to scale back his job applications, his travel, even his direct debits, cancelling the insurance on his car. When I zipped through to the back of the document, I found a copy of a SORN application. Healy had put his car into cold storage, securing it off-road somewhere. It made sense, as he wouldn’t have to pay anything on it. It wasn’t
until the following January, after our meeting in Hammersmith, that I’d loaned him enough money to tax and insure the car, and get it back on the road.

What the financials hid was what else happened in July 2013: Healy had received the divorce papers from Gemma’s solicitors. I wondered if that might have been a part of the reason why he scaled back his job search. He would have been affected by that: knocked off balance, probably surprised, definitely angry.

By September 2013, a lot of the ten grand was gone, on running costs and bills. He was down to his last thousand pounds. He’d already moved out of the house on the Isle of Dogs, cancelling the tenancy agreement midway through a second six-month term. As a result, he had to absorb one month’s worth of rent.

Now came the systematic closing down of the account, dismantled piece by piece. By October, all direct debits had been cancelled, and he’d switched his mobile number to Pay As You Go. There was no evidence of where he was living – definitely no other tenancy agreements, no payments to B&Bs or motels via his account – so at this point he’d either found someone’s floor to sleep on, which seemed unlikely given how few friends he had left, or he’d already become homeless.

I felt another pinch of sadness for him.

By the end of October, just seven months had passed since his contract finished at the building society. That was only seven months of unemployment, plus his JSA – as small as it was – was still being paid in, every Friday. Millions of other people had gone far longer without being able to find work – but millions of other people didn’t have Healy’s history. All the time he couldn’t find a job, his
boys continued drifting away, his wife filed for divorce, his daughter remained a harrowing memory, and he was haunted by his failures as a cop. His career, the only job he’d ever wanted, was long gone, and the attritional process of applying for work he didn’t care about only accelerated his decline. In truth, he’d started along this road a long, long time ago, not just in the aftermath of his short-term contract ending in March. Even when he’d been staying with me in Devon, even when his account had still been healthy, he was a mess – resentful, grieving, self-destructive. Eventually it became hard to carry that burden, however well you disguised it. Eventually, you broke.

Healy broke in November.

Between November 2013 and February 2014, there was still
some
movement of funds – including, in January, the paying in of a small amount of money I’d loaned him, to go alongside the motel room, petrol money and Oyster card – but, from the end of February, he basically vanished from the page. In effect, the account became dormant. Even payments of his unemployment benefit, so consistent throughout the previous eight months, were halted in the third week of February, presumably because he’d stopped turning up for his interviews at the Job Centre.

From March, there was nothing.

Literally nothing.

From 1 March until 2 October there were no card payments or cash withdrawals at all. This left his balance at two hundred and fifty in the red, because of an overdraft limit that basically locked down his account until more money was deposited into it. If I’d been hoping that his
financial picture might give me a steer on what he’d done and where he’d gone in the months after we last spoke, I quickly realized that hope was forlorn.

Or maybe not.

As I went to close the file, something small caught my eye.

19

In the five weeks between 16 January, the day of our phone call, and 22 February, the date the last JSA payment entered his account, Healy developed a short-lived but noticeable routine. Every Saturday, after the Job Seeker’s Allowance was paid in on the Friday, he’d go to a cashpoint and take it out in its entirety. Different times on the Saturday, but always the same process.

And always the same cashpoint
.

It was a Barclays ATM, identified on his statement with the abbreviation ELECA. ELECA would be its geographical location. Off the top of my head, I could think of only two possibilities – Electric Avenue, or the Elephant and Castle – but I spent a couple of minutes making sure, using another web search to try to locate any other London streets that might match, and then seeing where ‘Eleca London’ took me. It basically took me nowhere – to classified ads for guitars, and companies dealing with electricals – so I returned to my original two addresses.