What Remains (13 page)

Again, the scene had been sketched out via a top-down diagram, showing Koekver’s position in relation to the man, their approximate routes in and out of the building added as a series of dotted lines. They’d passed within feet of one another, Koekver approaching the doors from the left, the man veering off to the right. He’d headed in the opposite direction to the way she’d come, down towards Cork Hill Lane, the road that led into Searle House and its two sister buildings. I remembered driving along it back in January, so I could take a look at the flats.

What made Koekver’s statement compelling wasn’t just the fact that the person she described seeing – mid forties, blond with a ponytail, jeans, a dark blue raincoat, a white shirt – chimed exactly with the one Kehal had seen on the stairwell, it was that the man had been sprinting as he’d left the building.

And something else too.

He’d had blood on his hands.

HEALY
: How much blood?

KOEKVER
: Not a lot … but … like, dots, you know?

HEALY
: Spatter?

KOEKVER
: I’m not sure what that means.

HEALY
: Lots of dots?

KOEKVER
: Not lots. But some.

HEALY
: Enough for you to notice?

KOEKVER
: Definitely enough, yes.

HEALY
: And you’re sure it was blood?

KOEKVER
: Now I know what happened to that family, I’m sure. But when I saw him, it was dark – not much light, you know? – so I wasn’t completely sure.

HEALY
: Which was why you didn’t report it at the time?

KOEKVER
: Yes.

This was where CCTV footage should have helped.

Except two of the cameras that night were on the blink, which meant the investigating team had to rely on the only one that worked: the camera that faced out towards Cork Hill Lane, the solitary road in and out of the estate.

At this point, it looked like they may finally have caught a break.

In a series of black-and-white stills from the night of the murders, the blond man with the ponytail was caught on camera leaving Searle House and heading to where a row of cars was parked on Cork Hill Lane. The clearest shot of his face was right at the start, as he exited: a side-on freeze-frame, his jacket covering a part of his chin, his ponytail obscuring an ear and cheek as it swung from behind him, swaying to the movement of his run.

He had a blond beard, the same colour as his hair, unsculpted and untidy. I wondered briefly whether it may have been deliberate, an effort to disguise himself: if it had been a conscious decision, it had been a clever one. The quality of the camera wasn’t good enough to differentiate clearly between the lines of his face – the angle of his jaw, the point of his chin, the crescent of his upper lip – so the
lower half of his face became a blur of blond, like a bleach stain on the film.

Above that, things were more distinct.

His nose was short, a little compacted, and looked as if it may have been broken a couple of times, without ever being properly reset. He was overweight too: not much, but enough. He didn’t overtly carry it on his body – he looked tall, well built, powerful – but I could see his cheeks were a little puffy, his eyes too.

His eyes
.

They were the part that didn’t quite fit.

There was an odd dichotomy to them, as if they should have belonged on someone else’s face. The colourless printouts didn’t help, reducing their subtlety to opaque black discs, but even if their actual hue was brown, hazel or bottle green, they looked out of place alongside his blond hair and fair skin.

That was the clearest picture the police had of him.

A second shot showed him halfway down towards the line of cars, his coat billowing behind him.

A third showed him reaching the pavement.

But then I got to the fourth.

I’d expected him to keep going, heading off in the direction of New Cross Road, but instead the fourth picture showed him reaching forward and opening one of the cars parked against the pavement. It was a dark-coloured Mondeo.

He was getting into the passenger side.

In the fifth, he was already inside the vehicle, pulling the door closed, but with the interior light on I could – for the first time – see something else.

There’s a second man
.

He was on the driver’s side, gloved hands on the wheel, indistinct face turned slightly towards his accomplice. The man at the wheel had a very similar black or blue raincoat on, and appeared to be wearing a dark baseball cap. In the sixth and final picture, the door was shut, and the Mondeo was pulling out.

The registration number was clearly visible.

I turned the page and found the line of inquiry on the vehicle: it had been found three weeks later in the Long Stay car park at Heathrow Terminal 4.

As soon as it was found at Heathrow, Healy’s team sourced footage from the car park, in order to get a clearer shot of the men, and traced the ownership of the car. But the car was stolen from an estate in Charlton on Friday 9 July.

And, as one avenue closed, so did another.

The Heathrow footage was worthless. The men appeared to have planned ahead: the car was parked two hundred and fifty feet from the nearest camera, in a corner of the lot that had the least amount of coverage, and when they left the vehicle, they’d changed clothes: black beanies, black coats with high collars. The fact that they’d dropped the car off in darkness, at 1.57 a.m., only helped them.

Afterwards, Healy’s team had gone through the footage from the Cork Hill Lane camera, trying to see if the blond man had been there
prior
to the family being murdered – watching them, scoping out their location and routines. But he never appeared again. Yet it seemed unlikely it would have been his first time there, especially if Gail let him in willingly. The conclusion the team reached was the obvious one: if he’d been to Searle House before, he’d approached from the direction of the Tube. Had he just got lucky,
inadvertently using the failing CCTV on that side of the building to his advantage? Or had he known the camera was out of service? The second option was the more worrying: it spoke of someone in control of every step, aware of his surroundings. It was cold-blooded planning.

I returned to the stills of the man leaving Searle House.

The first shot of him – the best the investigation had – was borderline unusable, which explained again why no physical description, or picture, was ever released to the public in the aftermath of the family’s death. It was blurred, over-saturated, even after going through forensics, and the public would have to work hard to make sense of it. His nose was an identifying characteristic – the fact it looked like it had been broken in a couple of places – but something about his eyes, the way they were at odds with the rest of him, didn’t sit right with me.

Maybe it hadn’t sat right with Healy either.

I traced the man’s face with my finger, trying to get to the bottom of what was bugging me – and then, suddenly, the murmur of an idea formed and grew.

His hair. His beard.

They don’t belong with his eyes.

Because his hair and beard were dyed.

Instantly, it made sense: Healy hadn’t released the photograph because he knew he’d be asking the public, the media, to find the wrong man. That was why the beard was so unkempt –
because the man had never planned on keeping it
. And as I thought of that, I thought of something else: the ‘Mal’ that Sandra Westerwood had described seeing the family with, at the play park, in the months leading up to the murders – five-ten to six feet tall, black hair, medium build.

Were they the same person?

Apart from the difference in hair colour, they were certainly in the same ballpark physically, and it would explain why the blond-haired man was seen so close to the Clark’s flat that night. It might explain too why Gail had let him in, willingly, at night – even though he’d dyed his hair and changed his appearance – and why there was no sign of a struggle. No shouting. No noise.

Because she trusted him.

So, who was the second man – the driver?

I flipped forward in the file, to the fifth picture taken from the security camera at the front of Searle House. The blond man was inside the Mondeo, hand on the door, pulling it closed. The front light cast a dull glow across him and the person in the seat next to him. The driver’s face was a smooth, undefined mass, his eye sockets reduced to shadows, his cheeks just smooth, grey sweeps. Again, I took in the raincoat he was wearing, and the dark baseball cap, but there were no recognizable name brands on them – not helped by the quality of the footage.

I felt a knot of irritation form, imagining again how much worse it must have been for Healy at the time, sitting and looking at this succession of murky pictures, obscured by shadows and bad angles, overexposed, achromatic.

But then, off the back of that, I felt something stir, out on the periphery of my thoughts. As I failed to grasp it, my eyes returned to the shot of the two of them – but specifically to the driver, both his hands on the wheel, black gloves on, body half turned in the direction of his passenger. There were two versions of the shot in the file: the original, taken from the CCTV feed; a second, magnified by forensic techs, cleaned up, its noise reduced, but
with far less definition. The bigger the shot had become, the less sharp, its edges tapering off.

There’s something I’m not seeing
.

I compared and contrasted them both, hoping it would come to me, but the only thing I spotted this time was what must have been a mark on the CCTV camera lens itself: a crack, a hair, a fibre, something. From the angle of the shot, it made it seem as if the left-hand side of the driver’s face had cracked, giving him an even stranger quality than he had already: the neutral, emotionless lines of his face; the black discs of his eyes; the lack of definition around his mouth and nose.

I leaned back and looked out at the garden, the truth hitting home: Healy hadn’t been able to find either of the men because – through luck, but more probably, through good planning – they’d both made themselves untraceable.

One had changed his appearance.

The other appeared to have no face at all.

The Man in the Raincoat

22 days, 3 hours, 24 minutes
before

He woke suddenly, heart hammering in his chest, T-shirt and shorts soaked through. The moment he opened his eyes he instantly forgot what the dream had been about, but he knew it had been bad: his clothes, his pillowcase, the sheets he’d been cocooned in were all doused in sweat; and even as the thud of his heart receded, there was a residual sense of something, as if the dream had left a scar.

He sat up, flipping back the covers.

There was no window in the bedroom, but faint light washed in through the open doorway, cast by the moon as it angled down into the kitchen across the hall. He shifted, looking back over his shoulder. Beside him, Gail slept, her breathing soft and steady, and – as he watched her – he felt a swell of relief that whatever he’d dreamed about remained buried deep in his head. He was thankful to be back in reality.

Back with Gail. Back with the girls.

Peeling off his wet T-shirt, he grabbed his dressing gown, slipped it on and left Gail sleeping. He peered in at the room next to theirs, where the girls lay. They were sleeping soundly in adjacent beds, their night light plugged into the wall, a pale glow rinsing across their faces. They both went to bed with comforters, April a tatty cotton blanket, Abigail a brown-and-white puppy. There wasn’t a window in their room either, so he’d helped paint them a mural on the wall: a floor-to-ceiling view of a sun-kissed beach. They’d quickly added all sorts of things to it, including aliens, lorries and castles, and their room had also become home to the dog, who loved curling up next to the mural because that was where the bedroom’s radiator was.

Smiling to himself, he left them and padded through to the kitchen, filling the kettle. On the oven it read 03.42. As he stood there, he looked out of the window, into the night. The grass in front of Searle House was almost black, the other two buildings – identical to this one – like huge, beached ships around the same dark sea. There was no light in the sky now, the moon submerged behind banks of twisted cloud, so the only relief came from the orange glow of the street lights, one of them – close to the play park – blinking on and off, like a lighthouse.

Light. Dark.

Light. Dark.

Briefly, a breeze moved through the branches of a tree below – the only one this close to the building, its canopy five storeys beneath him, level with the twelfth floor – and as the wind died away again, he could see a figure emerge from the darkness on the far side of the park, arms in the pockets of a blue raincoat, baseball cap pulled down, eyes fixed on the ground. The figure was holding something.

A memory started to come back to him – some distant recollection – and as he stepped closer to the windows, he pulled the dressing gown a little tighter around him and a coolness began sliding beneath his ribcage. Below, the figure was crossing the grass in front of the flats, eyes still down, passing in and out of pools of light. Mal tried to grasp at the memory, but it was too indistinct. Did he know this person from somewhere? Was it the way they were dressed? Was it what they were holding? He tried to zero in on what the figure was carrying in their right hand, but it was small, being held close to their leg, and disguised by the darkness.