What Remains (26 page)

‘Sir,’ the registrar said.

The patient opened his mouth, said something.

‘What did he just say?’ the nurse asked the registrar.

The registrar stepped away from the bed, eyes on the patient, watching as silence settled inside the room. ‘He said, “Don’t let him hurt my family.” ’

35

To start with, it was hard to even process what Craw was telling me: the idea seemed so alien, so irrational. But then, slowly, the concept of Healy being in a coma began to take grip and I realized that it made complete sense. It explained how he’d suddenly vanished in February, leaving everything he owned at the homeless shelter in south London.

‘How did you find out?’ I said to her.

‘I did everything I told you I wasn’t going to do: I got involved.’

‘Why?’

‘Why do you think?’ she said sharply.
I don’t know what it is about you, Raker. No one’s ever made me feel like this before. No one’s ever got to me like this
. ‘I didn’t tag him by name,’ she went on, softer and more sombre, as if she were mourning some lost part of herself. ‘I’m not that suicidal. Not yet, anyway. But I put in a database search for a 49-year-old man, about six feet tall, sixteen to seventeen stone, with red hair. And I found something.’

‘What?’

‘A request from King’s Cross General hospital. A senior nurse who works there …’ She paused, checking the name. ‘Inoka Gunasekara. She wanted help IDing a guy they’d had in there for eleven weeks – fingerprinting, DNA, dental, whatever we could organize. He had red hair, was forty-five to fifty years of age, 1.8 metres tall and 100 kilograms. That’s six feet tall and sixteen stone in old money.’

I tried to remain calm, realistic. ‘It’s the right ballpark, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it was Healy.’

‘The request took three months to sign off at our end because the government is full of idiots with calculators who only care about their bottom line. So by the time we were ready to get in there with our fingerprint kit, he’d already woken from a coma and discharged himself.’

‘What dates are we talking?’

‘He was brought in on Thursday 27 February, and woke on Monday 12 May. He walked out of the hospital five days later, on Saturday 17 May.’

The date he was admitted fitted the timeline.

‘I remember a story you told me once,’ Craw continued, ‘about when you and Healy first got together, when you were trying to find Leanne.’

‘So?’

‘He got stabbed, right?’

‘Yeah, in the chest.’

‘This so-called “Patient A” had old scarring on his chest.’

I felt a charge of electricity.

‘He suffered a heart attack,’ Craw said.

I recalled sitting across from him at the motel, ten months ago, his fingers straying to the centre of his ribcage, as if in discomfort. Had it been bothering him back then?

‘When he woke up, Gunasekara and a registrar called Richard Anawale described him as “unresponsive” to questions about who he was, with neither able to get even as much as a confirmed name out of him. According to Anawale, it wasn’t because the patient was incapable of communicating, it was because he chose not to tell them. However, Gunasekara said he spoke in an “Irish accent”.’

Healy.

‘It says here, he was referred to a psychologist.’

‘A hospital psychologist?’

‘On Friday 16 May. Dr Meredith Blaine.’

Blaine’s notes were obviously never going to be a part of the ID request the police had received, so I couldn’t say for sure whether she’d been any more successful, but it was hard to see Healy bowing to the gentle pressure a psychologist might apply. He’d have hated being analysed like that. I added her name to my notes.

‘What else?’ I said.

‘Gunasekara relayed an account of the day paramedics were called to the scene of Healy’s heart attack. She said a civilian, a former army sergeant, had been close by and performed CPR, and then the paramedics had applied their own procedures as they’d arrived.’

‘Where was this?’

‘Stables Market in Camden.’

What the hell was he doing there?

He didn’t have any money, so it wasn’t going to be a shopping trip. It was also six miles away from the homeless shelter he’d been staying in near the Old Kent Road, which made it inconvenient to get to. Yet he’d gone nonetheless. Why? What had he found out?

As I tried to align my thoughts, something Calvin East had said returned to me:
I’m a hoarder, a collector. Books, paintings, antiquities. I’m fascinated by London, I’ve lived here my whole life, so my collection is centred here
. Stables Market was home to countless antiques shops.

Had Healy followed East there?

‘They found some items on him,’ Craw said. ‘A book – and three photographs.’

I didn’t need more than that. The book would be
A Seaside in the City
by Carla Stourcroft. The photographs would be Gail, April and Abigail.

Everything else had been left at the homeless shelter.

I looked down at the passenger seat, Healy’s copy of
A Seaside in the City
lying creased, dog-eared, and then thought about what may have happened after he discharged himself on 17 May. The next time anyone saw him was on 18 August, when he returned to the homeless shelter to retrieve the divorce papers. That left three months still unaccounted for.

Notepad in my lap, phone to my ear, I realized that I’d become distracted. I was supposed to be watching the house.

As I looked up, Calvin East walked out of his driveway.

36

He paused at the gates, winter coat on, collar up, and looked either way along the street. Then he was off, heading away from me, north towards Jamaica Road.

‘Raker?’

I’d almost forgotten I was still on the line to Craw. ‘I have to go,’ I told her, ‘but thank you. Thank you for doing this.’

She didn’t reply immediately. ‘You and me, I’m not sure what the answer is. I love my job. It’s full of bullshit and politics and frustration, but I love it. And the minute people at the Met find out about us, about what I’ve just done for you …’ She paused, obviously conflicted. ‘Just be careful, okay?’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Thank you again.’

I hung up.

Ten minutes later, I was inside East’s kitchen.

I’d thought, briefly, about following him, to see where he was going, why he had been in such a state, then realized I might not get another chance like this to have a look around. East, and whoever he was associated with, knew who I was, and knew the kind of questions I’d been asking: about Healy, about the pier. The more time passed, the more they were going to circle the wagons.

I moved through the darkness of the interior, keeping my torch off. There was enough light – from street lamps, from digital displays on electronics, from a luminous wall clock in the living room – to navigate my way, room to room.

The house was like the garage: small, packed, but well organized. In the kitchen, he’d left his dinner plate in the sink, and the ripped packaging from a microwave lasagne on the counter, but otherwise it was clean. The living room was a lounge-diner, one long room that ran front to back. He had a small table at one end, next to the patio doors, and two sofas at the other, in an L-shape around a TV cabinet. A floor-to-ceiling bookcase dominated the space, six long shelves groaning under the weight of hundreds of books. These had been treated with more care than the ones in his office, many preserved in transparent sleeves.

Beyond the living room was a hallway, the front door to the right, stairs to the left. I headed up. At the top were three further doors: the first led into a tiny bathroom, tiled white with a wicker cabinet full of toiletries on the wall; the other two opened into bedrooms. One was clearly where he slept: clean, plain walls, a single bed with a pale blue duvet, and two stand-alone pine wardrobes.

The other room was full of antiques.

On its ceiling, he’d replaced the light fixture with three long fluorescent tubes, each covered in a UV filter. At the window was a thick blind, perfectly cut to fit inside the window space and prevent any light coming in from outside. As I moved further into the room, I could see he’d arranged his antiques in a vague S-shape, creating a path through them, that took you into the room and back out.

There were more books, again plastic-wrapped, but this time inside a revolving oak bookcase. Next to that was a polished mahogany bureau, perched on spindly legs, a lock on each of its drawers. I tried them. They were all empty.

I passed a striking walnut dresser, built low to the ground, a sheet of felt placed on top of it, a selection of
plates, silver and sculptures on top of that. Then there were two ash dining chairs, and an art deco office chair, built on wheels, in green studded leather. Finally, there was a tortoiseshell writing box on the floor. I opened it up but there was nothing in it, just like the bureau.

Moving through to his bedroom, I looked in the pine wardrobes. One had five versions of the same outfit he wore to work, an additional top hat placed on a shelf above. His other clothes were the unremarkable attire of a middle-aged man. At the bottom he kept his shoes, all the same black boots, highly polished, except for a pair of light brown brogues.

The other wardrobe was full of junk.

He’d used it as a dumping ground for clothes he no longer wanted, for old photo albums, for more books, for a wristwatch that had stopped working and a phone without a back or a battery. There were Christmas cards, unwritten and unsent, the remains of an old stereo system, even an old typewriter. There were DVDs too.
A Touch of Evil
.
The Godfather. 12 Angry Men. Casablanca.

On the spine of the
Casablanca
box, an X had been added in red marker.

Removing it from the pile, I opened it up. Inside were two discs. One was the movie itself; another was a blank DVD, nothing written on it. I checked the other films, but they just contained the discs they were supposed to. It was only this one that was different.

I felt a flicker of unease.

Clipping the official disc back into the
Casablanca
box, I returned it to the shelf, pocketed the blank disc and went through the remainder of the wardrobe.

After a while I found a scrapbook, a beach scene on the
cover. East had written
World Tour
at the top. I opened it up and saw what it was: a chronicle of a gap year he’d had in his early twenties, photographs, ticket stubs and faded receipts from all across Asia, Australasia, Fiji and the US west coast.

A few pages in, something fell out.

It was a newspaper cutting.

It had been inserted loose inside, towards the back, and had nothing to do with his trip. When I unfolded it, I saw it was a story from a newspaper called the
North London Gazette.
I wasn’t familiar with it, and was pretty sure the paper wasn’t even in circulation any more – but that wasn’t what grabbed my attention.

It was the fact it
wasn’t
a story.

It was an obituary.

7 August 2010

CARLA STOURCROFT

Carla Stourcroft, a lecturer and local author, was perhaps best known for her last book,
Invisible Ripper
(2009), the acclaimed biography of serial killer Eldon Simmons, who raped and murdered five men in the 1950s. But she was also the author of four other books, all based around her love of London history:
From Richmond to Regent: London’s Parks from A to Z
(1996);
Metropolitan: The First Underground Line
(1998), which she wrote under her married name of Carla Davis;
A Seaside in the City: The History of Wapping Grand Pier
(2002); and
South of the River
(2006). As well as her career as a writer, she lectured in history at the University of East London. With her deep love of the area, and keen support for the local community, Ms Stourcroft’s tragic death at the age

The obituary had been torn off at the bottom.

My mind shifted back to when I’d first started reading
A Seaside in the City
at home. I’d found a similar obituary online when I’d googled Stourcroft, but not much else. Her career as a writer – except for her last book – had gone unnoticed, and even
Invisible Ripper
, although acclaimed by critics, only charted for a week. That made her hard to find on the web, especially given her lack of a website or social media presence. But one thing I was certain the other obituary
hadn’t
referred to were the circumstances of her death. Why was it referred to as tragic here?

And why had East made a special effort to find her obituary in one of the few media outlets that seemed to have covered her passing in any detail?

It
had
to have something to do with
A Seaside in the City
– except I’d read that book cover to cover, and there was nothing in it. There were no secrets, nothing that pointed to anyone or anything. It was clear East was hiding
something
. He’d made a break for it after I’d shown him Healy’s photograph at the museum. But if the answers were in Stourcroft’s book, they were so well hidden behind the dry, prosaic text that I doubted they’d ever be found.

I went back to the obituary and read it a second time. A third, a fourth. On the fifth, something stopped me.

…
Metropolitan: The First Underground Line
(1998), which she wrote under her married name of Carla Davis …

Her married name.
The first time I’d read the obituary, it hadn’t even occurred to me. But it did now. Taking out my phone, I went to the web and, instead of searching for Carla Stourcroft, I went looking for ‘Carla Davis’.

My heart dropped.

Carla Davis hadn’t left much of an online footprint either – but she’d left enough. The first four links were for stories in the nationals – the
Sun
,
Guardian
,
Telegraph
,
Mail
– but when I clicked through to them, each of the reports was tiny; news in briefs forgotten as quickly as they’d been printed.