What Remains (12 page)

That was where Davis’s police work should have taken up some of the slack. The Met should have been trying to track Healy’s movements from November 2013, through the next ten months to 21 August 2014 – when they knew he was definitely still alive – and into early September, when things became less certain. Instead, apart from the case being referred to the Missing Persons Bureau, things had barely progressed.

As I went through the report, I couldn’t find a single useful lead. There were no interviews, apart from the one with Gemma, and Davis had failed to locate Healy’s whereabouts, at any point, between November and the date the letter was posted. She had no witnesses, there were no bank statements or phone records attached, no evidence of emails either. Did that mean she couldn’t find a single trace of him anywhere between those dates? That
the only time he came up for air in that entire period was the eight days he spent in the motel?

I’d find out for sure once Spike had got back to me, but it seemed unlikely: the Healy I knew wouldn’t have had the discipline for that, especially if he was in the middle of another spiral. Yet Davis was at more of a disadvantage than I was: she didn’t know he’d become homeless, because – when she reported him missing – Gemma had no idea either. As a result, Davis wouldn’t have thought to try to find him in hostels or emergency housing.

His reappearance in January would have gone undetected, because I was the one who had paid for his accommodation, lent him money and organized a new phone. If he’d gone back to the streets after that, haunting the shadows of the city, the anonymity of doorways and shelters, he’d have taken the mobile I’d given him, leaving Davis trying to track him via the phone he had
before
that.

So, in theory at least, because the Met weren’t aware of his new number from January, Healy could easily have drifted uncharted for months. But, in order to do that, he would have had to rein in
every
aspect of his life. Because it was hard to disappear without a trace, perhaps impossible, and I doubted Healy’s ability to do that, even at his most focused. He might not have used credit cards, had an address, paid rent or run a car, but I was willing to bet he’d left a footprint.

I just had to find out where.

In the end, the best Davis had managed to do was confirm that the letter had come via the Mount Pleasant Mail Centre in Clerkenwell, which was futile. It was one of the largest sorting offices in the world, with millions of items being processed every day. Trying to track a signed-for
package would be hard, but Healy’s letter had been sent first class. That made it basically untraceable.

Returning to the timeline I’d begun constructing the night before, I started adding more of Healy’s known movements, combining them into one long list:

23
JULY
2013 – Solicitor mails divorce papers to Healy. He’s renting a room in a shared house on the Isle of Dogs.
(
Where?)

23 JULY–OCTOBER – Gemma tries to get Healy to sign papers.

OCTOBER – Healy harder to get hold of. (Is this when the money runs out? When does he leave the shared house?
)

NOVEMBER – Healy disappears completely.
(
Homeless
)

7
JANUARY
2014 – Calls me, wants meeting.

8 JANUARY – Meet at Hammersmith café.

8–16 JANUARY – Stays at motel.

17/18 JANUARY – Checks out of motel on one of these days.

17/18
JANUARY–20
AUGUST
–
Where is he during this time? What is he doing?

21 AUGUST – Sends letter and divorce papers to Gemma.

22 AUGUST – Gemma reports him missing
.

23
AUGUST–2
OCTOBER
–
Where is he during this time? What is he doing?

The seven months between 17 or 18 January and 20 August felt like the centre of the case. I’d paid for ten days at the motel to start with, which meant he would have checked out on 18 January at the latest. I’d also loaned him enough cash to see him through another couple of weeks of expenses – perhaps to the start of February – but, after that, he’d have had nothing else to draw on. Yet he’d survived almost another seven months, apparently without
either a job or a room to call his own, before sending Gemma the letter, entirely out of the blue. So what prompted him to do that? What had changed? Where did he go during that time?

What seemed certain was that he was alive just six weeks ago, and at the end of the file there was a log, listing all updates in the case since it was opened on 22 August, which confirmed it – to a point. The last recorded activity was nearly two weeks into the case, 2 September, when Davis got confirmation from the MPB that none of the unidentified bodies they’d recovered in the period up to, and including, 31 August matched Healy’s physical description or dental records.

That left two possibilities: that Healy was out there somewhere, and still alive; or that at the time the MPB conducted their search – 31 August – his body hadn’t yet been found.

I didn’t linger too long on the second prospect and instead refocused my attention on the file in front of me. Except there was nothing else for me to see.

It was done.

Six weeks after Gemma had turned up at Barnet station and reported him missing, the police investigation into Healy’s disappearance was effectively over.

17

I opened the murder file.

The Clark family looked out at me, April and Abigail standing either side of their mother, Gail in the centre, kneeling, her arms around their waists. In the background I could see foil party banners and balloons, for the girls’ birthday.

It wasn’t the same photo I’d looked at nine months ago, but as I traced the lines of their faces, their light hair braided, their skin unblemished, it had the same effect on me: I felt a part of me take flight. I’d tried to steel myself for this moment, had been dreading it, and as I gazed into their eyes, I wavered. Any ideas I’d had about remaining impassive, ideas of control and containment, were gone; when I looked at them, I felt anger burning a hole in the centre of my chest, an animal instinct kicking in. In a strange way, it moved me closer to Healy too; this family, this crime, it was worth more than the words we’d exchanged at the end. None of what he’d said to me mattered now. It was just this.

I started turning the pages.

A lot of it I remembered from what Healy and I had discussed in January, but I reread the same sections again, bringing myself up to speed: how the girls were found, covered with their duvets, and then their mother, on the sofa in the next room, stabbed nine times; the way Gail had cleaned up her life, and her absolute dedication
to her daughters after that; her Open University course in History and Social Science, her part-time job at the library, the way her children and her coursework usurped a social life and close friends.

I went back through the testimony of her next-door neighbour Sandra Westerwood, who’d been the first to raise the alarm and who claimed to have seen the family with an unidentified man in his mid-to-late thirties – dark hair, medium build – in the months leading up to their deaths. Then there were the dead ends – the name ‘Mal’ or ‘Malcolm’, the delivery driver in the olive-green shirt, the lack of usable DNA evidence, the broken CCTV cameras in and around Searle House. Witnesses – or, at least, witnesses that might help push the case forward – were relatively few, but as I got to the point which Healy and I had reached in January, just before Annabel had called about Olivia, a name leaped off the page.

Joban Kehal.

If the case had been a dog, you’d have put the fucking thing down
, Healy had said to me.
No motive, no
DNA, vague witnesses, eleven thousand men with a name that might not even be relevant
. But then he’d taken the file, riffled through the pages and shown me a statement from another witness. I’d asked him what it was.

About the only thing worth a damn
.

Kehal’s name was the last thing I read in the file before everything went south, and as I looked again nine months on, turning the pages, I realized there were actually
two
further witness statements, aside from Sandra Westerwood’s. One was from Kehal, who lived five doors along, in the flat closest to the stairwell on the seventeenth floor; the second was from a woman called Bridgette Koekver, who lived on the
fourth floor. She’d been arriving back at Searle House on the Sunday night after going to a party.

I started with Kehal’s statement.

The layout of his flat – which he shared with his wife and two children – was exactly the same as the Clarks’, and he told police that on Sunday 11 July at around 10.30 p.m. he’d been coming out of the kitchen – the room closest to the front door – when he’d heard someone walking back and forth outside his flat.

As Healy pressed him, Kehal described how, at first, he thought he was hearing one person walking past and another coming the other way, but then it happened a second time, and a third, so Kehal stepped up to the front door and used the peephole. Outside, he could see a man off to his right, at the entrance to the seventeenth-floor stairwell. He was now standing there, with his back to Kehal.

HEALY
: Standing there doing what?

KEHAL
: Nothing.

HEALY
: Just standing there?

KEHAL
: Standing still. Not moving. Like he was waiting.

The file included pictures of the stairwell. There was no separation between stairwell and flats, and there was an open balcony too, which ran opposite the endless rows of uniform blue doors. On a top-down diagram of the stairwell, the corridor and Kehal’s flat, the man’s location had been marked with a cross. He’d been about fifteen feet away.

Unfortunately, Kehal’s English was only passable, so
the interview started fraying around the edges when Healy began trying to drill down into the detail.

The distance from Kehal’s door to the stairwell didn’t help, but as Healy tried to get a sense of what the man may have been doing, Kehal just repeated the same thing: that the man was standing still, with his back turned, as if he was waiting for something.
Or psyching himself up
, I thought, and then saw that one of Healy’s team had speculated the same thing, writing:
Nervous? Having doubts?

So was this ‘Mal’?

Thinking that Kehal’s recollection might be improved if he were able to communicate in the language he’d spent most of his life speaking, Healy brought in a Punjabi interpreter, and interviewed again. Kehal articulated himself better, but failed to add much texture. One thing that caught my attention, though, was when Healy pressed him on whether the man had looked nervous or scared.

KEHAL
: No.

HEALY
: He’d been pacing up and down the corridor before that. It sounds to me like he was nervous.

KEHAL
: I don’t think so.

HEALY
: What makes you so sure?

KEHAL
: He seemed … I don’t know, he just seemed relaxed. He kept checking his watch to see what time it was.

HEALY
: He kept checking the time?

KEHAL
: I didn’t stand there and look at him for long, but he checked his watch at least twice. Maybe three times.

HEALY
: So it was like he was working to a schedule?

KEHAL
: Working to a schedule, yes.

Using the interpreter again, Healy concentrated on a physical description of the man. He’d had his back to Kehal the entire time, and Kehal estimated that – in total – he’d spent no more than forty seconds watching through the peephole. Nonetheless, he was able to describe the man as being in his mid forties, with blond hair tied into a short ponytail, and about six to six-two in height. It didn’t appear to be the same man Sandra Westerwood had described seeing with Gail and the girls, but, with this second suspect, Kehal gave Healy more to work with: he was wearing jeans, a short, dark blue raincoat and a white T-shirt.

Nevertheless, the interview with Kehal and the pinpointing of the man on the stairwell made for slim pickings. With the man not moving from his position – or showing his face – it was impossible to connect him directly to the Clarks. If it wasn’t Mal, who was it? Their killer? Or just a man in a block of flats that housed six hundred and eighty other people, waiting for someone to meet him?

I moved on to the interview with Bridgette Koekver.

Koekver was a 25-year-old legal secretary, originally from Hoorn in Holland, who worked for a firm of solicitors on Marsh Wall, south of Canary Wharf. On Sunday 11 July she’d been doing overtime, as part of a big case the firm had coming up that week. She’d left work at 7 p.m., and had then gone to a colleague’s house-warming party at an apartment overlooking Blackwall Basin. At 10.15 p.m., she got the Tube back from Canary Wharf, changed at Canada Water and walked home from New Cross Gate
station. At around 10.45 p.m. – fifteen minutes after Kehal said he saw someone with their back to him, on the stairs of the seventeenth floor – Koekver described passing the same man as he left the building’s ground-floor entrance.