What Remains (15 page)

This, I realized, was where I had an advantage.

What the Met didn’t know, because Gemma didn’t know it at the time, was that when Healy posted the letter and the divorce papers in August, he’d been homeless since the previous November – except for ten days in a Kew motel in January. That meant that, even if the Met applied the same method I had, and used the abbreviation as a way to get a handle on his movements after November 2013, they’d
have been looking in the wrong place. They’d have probably gone looking for tenancy agreements he’d made at the time, evidence of him possibly renting a place near Brixton, or close to the Elephant and Castle. It would have been a pointless search, because he wasn’t renting anywhere.

But it didn’t mean he hadn’t been close by.

I spent the next ten minutes locating hostels and homeless shelters within a two-mile radius of both locations. The nearest to Electric Avenue was 2.1 miles away, and when I checked ATMs in the immediate area, I found two branches of Barclays within half a mile – but, crucially, no ATMs on Electric Avenue itself.

Would the bank still use an ELECA abbreviation if its branch wasn’t on the road itself? It seemed unlikely, and when I began looking into ATMs in and around the Elephant and Castle, I discounted Electric Avenue entirely: there was a Barclays next to the northern entrance to the Elephant and Castle Tube station.

This is where he was
.

What made it more compelling was that there were two hostels within a half-mile of the ATM, one – at the top of New Kent Road – barely any distance at all. Both were run by the same people, a charity called Christopher Gee Housing.

Dragging my phone towards me, I tried the one nearest to the ATM first. It went unanswered, then to voicemail. I decided against leaving a message, and tried the second one. It was in the other direction, west along St George’s Road.

This time someone picked up.

‘CGH.’

‘Hi,’ I said, pulling my notepad in closer. ‘My name’s David Raker, and I’m trying to find an old friend of mine. We lost contact back in January, but I think he might have sought shelter with you shortly before and after; possibly between November 2013 and February 2014. I’m not sure if you keep records of who comes and goes, but –’

‘We do, but those details aren’t something I can give out over the phone.’ It was a woman, softly spoken with a hint of a continental accent. ‘I’m sorry. We operate a privacy policy here, so for us to release that information you’ll either have to apply in person – with documentation to prove you’re a relative or guardian – or you might be able to find what you need by contacting social services directly.’

‘A relative or guardian?’

‘Correct.’

‘What about if he hasn’t got either?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘What if he doesn’t have any family left?’ I said. I kept my voice even and friendly, but made it clear that the rules weren’t going to get us very far. ‘He’s a 49-year-old man. His parents are dead, his wife’s long gone, his kids too.’

‘Have you contacted social services?’

‘No, I thought it would be better to get in touch with you guys first. I’m pretty sure he was there, or perhaps in your sister shelter on New Kent Road. Either way, I’ve got reason to believe he might be in danger. I need to find him.’

‘Danger?’

I looked out at the garden, making her wait. It was an old technique, one I hoped she wasn’t savvy enough to
read. She sounded young, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t smart. Even if she saw right through it, I hadn’t lost anything.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw movement next door. Nicola, in shorts and a vest, was watering the pot plants along the edge of our shared fence.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m not allowed to –’

‘Okay. What was your name again?’

‘My name? Ingrid.’

‘Okay. Thanks, Ingrid.’

I hung up, and immediately tried the other shelter again. It rang for about thirty seconds, then someone finally picked up. A man with a Scottish accent.

‘CGH.’

‘Hi, my name’s Alan Schaefer, from Southwark Social Services. I think we spoke last week? Anyway, I’ve just talked to Ingrid, and she told me to call you.’

‘Okay.’

‘I’m trying to trace the whereabouts of a man called … uh …’ I paused as I checked paperwork I didn’t have. ‘Colm Healy. That’s Colm spelt C-O-L-M. I think he stayed at your place on New Kent Road, but Ingrid couldn’t find his records. Anyway, I was in the process of dealing with his emergency housing application but he’s failed to turn up, and – given his recent history – I’m concerned for his well-being. I was wondering if you might be able to help with a couple of things.’

‘What things?’

‘He was with you between November last year and February this year, correct?’

A pause. ‘What was his name again?’

‘Colm Healy.’

‘Fine. Give me a sec.’

‘Okay, thanks.’

As he put me on hold, I felt a charge of adrenalin. If they had anything on Healy, I couldn’t get it mailed to me now – if they were even inclined to do it in the first place – because I’d lied about who I was. But if they had something, and this
was
the right place, that was a start. I could work around it. I wasn’t sure exactly what I hoped to find, or how this would progress any search for him, but it was better than a set of bank statements that presented everything after 1 March this year as a blank.

The man came back on. ‘Right.’

I could hear pages being turned.

‘Colm Healy. According to this, he came to us on 18 January and stayed for nearly six weeks. He wasn’t with us in November or December, so if he was in accommodation it was at another shelter.’

The now-defunct one on Goldhawk Road
, I thought.

‘Okay. When did he leave you?’

‘His last recorded day with us was on Thursday 27 February. We didn’t see him after that.’ Another pause. ‘Someone made a note here, saying he left his stuff behind. Clothes, personal belongings, all that kind of thing. Any idea why?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘No idea.’

But in reality my mind was moving fast. The fact that he’d left his things behind suggested he hadn’t been expecting 27 February to be his last day at the hostel. Five days before, on the twenty-second, was the last time he withdrew his unemployment benefit from the ATM at the Tube station. So when he’d taken the £71 out on that Saturday, had he already known he was going to drop
everything – clothes, belongings, what constituted his life – just five days later? If so, why?

What would motivate a decision like that?

I thought about the alternative, that whatever happened on 27 February, happened without him ever seeing it coming – but reasons for that seemed even less clear. He was still alive in August, because he sent the letter to Gemma, so it seemed unlikely he’d come to any physical harm. So had he left because he hated the hostel? The people there? Even if he had, that still didn’t explain why he would purge so much of his life that day. After all, why leave his
clothes
behind?

‘Has this got anything to do with 18 August?’ the man asked.

I tuned back in. ‘Sorry?’

‘I’ve got a note here that says he returned on 18 August.’

‘Mr Healy did?’

‘Yes.’

Three days before he sent the letter to Gemma
.

‘Did he stay with you again?’

‘No. I’m just reading my colleague’s notes here.’ A brief pause. ‘Okay. She’s written down here that she asked him if he needed a bed, and he said he didn’t. When she asked him where he was staying, he was a little evasive, but in the end she managed to persuade him to tell her – and he said he was at The Meadows.’

I wrote it down. ‘Is that another shelter?’

‘No. Well, certainly not one I’ve heard of. Not one my colleague had heard of either, as she’s put a question mark here, next to the entry for it.’

‘Did he say anything else?’

‘He asked if we’d kept any of his things.’

‘The things he’d left behind on 27 February?’

‘Right. His backpack. The clothes in it.’

‘Had you?’

‘Apparently, after a month, with no sign of him coming back, we boxed up his clothes and sent the best ones to charity. However, we did keep some of his personal belongings, in case. He had a phone, some photographs, some paperwork.’

Paperwork
.

That had to be the divorce papers.

‘Do you know what the photographs were of?’

‘My colleague has put here that they were of his family.’

‘What happened with those?’

‘He said we could dump them.’

‘All of them?’

‘Everything except his paperwork. It looks like he took that with him.’

A silence settled between us: him, perhaps wondering why a man would choose to dispose of photographs of his family; me, caught between two ideas.

On the one hand, that it wasn’t Healy who had returned.

It was someone else.

On the other, that it was, and in the hours before he wrote that letter to Gemma, he’d set his mind to doing one final, noble thing for her: signing the papers. In a way, the second idea was even worse, because it clearly spelt it out.

By then, it was over.

Clothes didn’t matter to him.

Neither did photographs.

Healy was finished.

20

There were no organizations, shelters or homeless hostels in London that went by the name of The Meadows. The search term was too vague to get me anything through Google either. And an hour later, as darkness clawed its way in, I was done with Healy’s phone records as well. Calls had tapered off from the middle of 2013, coinciding with the point at which Gemma had first sent him the divorce papers, and he’d stopped applying for jobs. At points in the months that followed, he could go a fortnight without making a single call to anyone. From November, calls became the exception rather than the rule, and by March – the same time he disappeared from the pages of his financial records – his phone fell silent too.

I felt hollow.

The idea of how he’d spent his last few days rubbed at me, an emptiness settling in the pit of my stomach. I didn’t understand why he would go six months before returning to the shelter, or why he would leave without any of his things in the first place. I had no idea where The Meadows was, or if he’d even been telling the woman at the shelter the truth. Basically, despite whatever advantage I had over the police in knowing some of Healy’s movements after November, I wasn’t that far on from where the official search for him had ground to a halt. I’d doubted the intensity of their investigation, seen apathy in the file, but
maybe, when it came down to it, the Met had gone as far as they could.

I went inside and began making myself some dinner, but halfway in I just perched on the stool at the kitchen counter – meat lying raw on the chopping board, vegetables half prepared – and realized I wasn’t even hungry.

In every missing persons case I’d ever worked, there had always been the same routes in: financial statements and phone bills were like fingerprints, a trail formed of addresses and locations that propelled me forward, returning me to the moments before the victim became lost in the shadows. When they failed me, there were always the families: husbands and wives, parents, brothers and sisters, all able to paint a clear picture of the person they loved, and the ways in which they might have changed in the months before they disappeared. They gained me access to the parts of their loved one’s lives that no one else had ever glimpsed.

With Healy, there was none of that.

The traditional platform on which to build a search – his money situation, his phone calls – faded to grey from the moment he became homeless. He may have come up for air in January, but it was brief, and it had led nowhere. His family didn’t know him, even – arguably – when he was a part of their lives, and all that was left behind was a shell.

A lonely, drifting soul, unattached to anything.

Two hours later, I got a call.

I was in the living room, lights off, silent, a beer bottle resting on my chest, when my phone began buzzing across the sofa towards me. It was Melanie Craw.

‘Hey,’ I said, picking up.

‘You all right?’

It sounded like she was calling me from her car: there was the hum of an engine in the background, as well as a song on the radio. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I’m fine.’

‘You sure?’

‘Just a long day. Where are you?’

‘On my way back from the office.’

I looked at my watch.

Nine-forty
.

‘How’s that thing going?’ she asked.

She meant Healy. ‘It isn’t.’

‘What do you mean?’

I paused, thoughts returning to the day I’d spent out back on the decking, the pages I’d pored over, the data I’d tried to make sense of, the reality I’d had to face by the end. ‘I can’t find him,’ I said. ‘After 1 March this year, he vanishes into thin air for nearly six months and doesn’t leave a trace. I mean, literally no trace at all. He doesn’t access his bank account, he doesn’t make any phone calls. He’s gone.’

‘So what’s different?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What’s different from every other case you work?’

‘In the others, financial history and itemized phone bills aren’t my starting point. The families are. They notice changes in routine, in patterns, the way the person they love is behaving. I know where they disappeared from, the date, the location, who else was around. Even the official police report normally gives me something. An idea, a spark,
something
to run with. The best I can muster with
Healy is the likelihood that he was still alive on 21 August, because he sent his ex-wife a letter in which he tells her he’s going to do one, final thing for her.’

‘Which was?’

‘Sign their divorce papers.’

Silence on the other end of the line.

Eventually, she said, ‘Do you think he really killed himself?’

‘I think he was suicidal.’

‘Yeah, but do you think he’s dead?’

‘I don’t know. Normally I can read him, or at least read him enough. But this time …’ I took down a mouthful of beer. ‘Do you know he upped and left a homeless shelter on 27 February without taking anything with him? He had a backpack, clothes, belongings he kept there with him – and he just left them all.’