What Remains (58 page)

Healy.

I could feel a breeze coming from my left; hear the soft whistle of wind drawn from one side of the house to the other.
The bedroom window was open too. Healy had caused a distraction in the kitchen and then made his way around.

Suddenly, I was back in the moment.

Cabot was face down, Healy on top of him, two gaunt, shrunken men, dazed in the corner of the living room. I wasn’t even sure if Cabot was breathing or not. Healy had a knee in his spine and a hand at the back of his neck, pushing his face into the floor. Except the closer I got, the clearer it all became, and I realized that it wasn’t a hand that Healy had pressed against Cabot’s skull.

It was the point of a blade.

‘Healy,’ I said. ‘It’s okay.’

He looked back at me for the first time, tears pouring down his face, saliva on his lips.
He heard the end of what Cabot was saying. He heard him talking about the girls.
My heart dropped at this portrait of him, so derelict and ruined. Cabot shifted a little, twitched, but Healy didn’t move. He just kept staring at me.

‘Healy, it’s okay,’ I said again, almost whispering it.

He shook his head.

‘Healy …’

He started shaking it faster.

‘We can sort this out,’ I said.

He tore his eyes away from me, released the knife and rolled Cabot on to his back. The old man started to cough, his ribcage juddering like a faulty engine. Once he’d calmed down, Healy slowly moved the point of the blade in against the craggy folds of his neck.

‘They were innocent,’ he sobbed.

It took Cabot a couple of seconds to find Healy, to see
his outline against the shadows around them. When he did, he said, ‘Are you going to kill me now?’

Healy whimpered.

‘Go on,’ Cabot said. ‘
Do
it.’

‘No, Healy. That’s not who you are.’

More tears.

‘Do it,’ Cabot spat. ‘They
deserved
to die.’

Healy reacted instantly. At first, I thought he’d put the knife straight into Cabot’s neck. But then, as Healy wailed in pain, I saw only a single trickle of blood, and realized Cabot was still alive. The knife had gently pierced his skin.

Healy muttered something.

‘You’re pathetic,’ Cabot said.

Again, Healy said something.

What is he saying?

He said it again, muted, indistinct: ‘ … you.’

I took a step closer.

‘What did you say to me?’ Cabot sneered.

Healy straightened slightly.

And this time I heard him.

He tossed the knife aside, watching the surprise in Cabot’s face, and then leaned right in, looking Cabot in the eyes. He didn’t want Cabot to miss anything.

He wanted him to see the words on his lips.

And with tears streaking his face, his voice crippled by four years of chasing this man, by four years of misery and misfortune, by four years of losing his daughter and almost losing himself, Healy grabbed Cabot’s collar, lifted him up off the floor towards him, and quietly, fearlessly, he said three words.

‘I forgive you.’

85

I sat in the car surrounded by long grass and the colours of autumn, rain dotting the windscreen, and watched the silhouette of Joseph Cabot totter out across Richmond Park, into the loneliness of a clearing.

As daylight drifted out of the sky above him, I saw more plainly than ever why he’d come to me, why he’d chosen to tell me everything, why – even when he’d failed to force Healy into taking his life – he still believed he’d won.

It was because of this.

Because I had no choice but to let him walk away.

He’d explained it to me himself: if I handed him in, he would tell the police about Healy. I’d turned possible scenarios over in my head, had thought about pretending Cabot had lost his mind, that he’d confused me mentioning Healy with Healy actually
being
there – because how did a man come back from the dead? But, while Cabot was many things, he wasn’t muddled. He was, in fact, extraordinarily lucid. One moment of doubt on the Met’s part, about what I was telling them, and they’d start looking exactly where I didn’t want them to: at Healy’s death, at the circumstances behind it.

All that Cabot had said to me made sense now:
I’ve burdened you with everything I’ve done, because I want you to sit there and chew on it after I’m gone. I know you’ll do that. That’s who you are.
He told me I’d ruined his life, the life of Korman,
the son he’d adopted as his own – and now this was his revenge.

This was the victory he’d spoken of.

He stood there for a moment, like a blemish against the approaching dark, and looked back at me, a flicker of doubt in his face. He knew his DNA would get him caught. He knew he’d spend the rest of whatever life he had left rotting in a prison cell. Yet here, at the finale, he seemed unsure whether he could go through with it.

But then his expression changed, hardening, as if a realization had suddenly taken hold: that there would be no triumph in backing out, and no triumph in showing me he was scared. So he reached into his jacket, removed his gun and put it into his mouth. He made sure I was watching. And, a couple of seconds after that, he closed his eyes and pulled the trigger.

Birds scattered from the trees.

Then there was silence.

After his body crumpled to the floor, vanishing among the sea of grass, I became conscious of my headache again: pounding, massaged by the anger I felt, the bitterness that he’d got this ending where he never faced judgement for his crimes – at least, not in this life. He was right: I
would
chew on everything he’d told me, because that
was
the person I’d become. He’d gone out on his own terms, and I’d find that hard to let go. It would eat away at me, and maybe it wouldn’t come to the surface now – but it would come to the surface eventually.

As I drove home, my thoughts turned to Healy, to his forgiveness of Cabot at the end; to the moments afterwards, when he’d told me the reasons he’d come to the house.

‘I knew something was wrong,’ he’d said.

‘How?’

‘I know you. We were right in the middle of something big, and you told me you would call me back.’ He’d shrugged. ‘When you didn’t, it worried me.’

That had stuck with me, the idea that he might know me like that, the way I thought, the way I was programmed. It played into what Craw had told me about Healy and I being the same; and it made me think about something Joseph Cabot had said, perhaps the only rational thing that had ever come out of his mouth.

Everything was connected.

When I got home, it was pitch black. I wandered up the driveway alone, Andrew and Nicola visible through the living-room window next door, sitting beside one another on the sofa. My eyes lingered on them for a second, on this snapshot of a life I didn’t have, and then I let myself in to my own house, silent and dark except for the hum of the television and the light it gave off. A news channel was playing softly.

It took me a while to see him, sitting in the corner of the room.

As the fallout from another suicide bombing painted the edges of his thin, pale face, he turned to me, standing in the lightless hallway, and said, ‘Is it done?’

I nodded. ‘Yeah.’

It was hard to know what else to say.

I made my way through to the bedroom, showered and changed, and then returned in the darkness I’d left behind. He was in exactly the same place, half disguised by shadows: minimal, solitary, forgotten about by the rest of the world.

‘Are you sick?’

The question seemed to come completely out of the blue, his voice quiet. But then I started to recall the moments before he’d shot Grankin, when I’d told him the reasons I’d asked Craw to send the police.
There’s something wrong with me
.
I think I might be ill
. I’d become worried that I couldn’t protect us both.

‘I blacked out,’ I said eventually.

He turned towards me.

‘I’ve been having headaches. Panic attacks maybe. I don’t know.’

‘Are you going to see someone about it?’

His voice wavered briefly as he asked, and something stayed there, in the contours of his face. I thought it was concern to start with, but then it seemed to solidify and become more defined – and I realized it wasn’t that at all. It was fear.

He didn’t want to be left on his own again.

‘I’ve got a doctor’s appointment tomorrow morning,’ I said. ‘I don’t know if they’ll find anything. It’s probably hard to locate obsession.’

I smiled, but he just nodded.

‘We need to talk about what happens next,’ I said.

He shifted again, returning his eyes to the television.

‘You’re going to have to leave London.’

If I was expecting a reaction, I didn’t get one.

‘It’s too risky being in the city.’

‘And where am I supposed to go?’

‘You can lie low at my parents’ old place in Devon. No one will look for you there. In the winter there’s no one around, so just keep your head down until I figure this out. I know it’ll be hard – especially as you make friends so easily.’

This time, a hint of a smile formed at the corners of his mouth.

‘This’ll work out,’ I said softly, but the smile gradually fell away from his face, and when he looked at me, it was obvious he didn’t believe me. ‘I mean it.’

‘Okay.’

‘But you need to understand something: there’s no going back to the way it was before. Family, friends, this city – it’s all history. I know people who can help us – but they’re going to be wasting their time if you aren’t one hundred per cent clear on what you’re going to be.’

‘And what am I going to be?’ he said.

‘You’re going to be someone else.’

Someone Else

179 days, 16 hours, 44 minutes
after

That night, after falling asleep in front of the news, he dreamed.

They were on the swings as he approached. They didn’t see him at first, their backs to him – talking to one another, laughing about something – but as he came around beside them, April turned, and then Abigail, and they began to slow up, the arc of their swinging getting smaller and smaller until, eventually, it stopped altogether.

‘Hello,’ he said.

They stared at him blankly.

‘Do you remember me?’

Nothing.

‘Don’t you …’ He began to feel hesitant. ‘Don’t you recognize me?’

They both took a step back.

He held up a hand, telling them to stop. ‘It’s okay. I was the one that helped you paint the mural in your bedroom. Do you remember that? I played tag out here with you … I played every day after school for months. You must remember that.’

They didn’t react.

He stopped, swallowed, trying to think of other things they’d done together. ‘I used to take you both to school, and I’d kiss you goodbye at the gates. I took you on the Tube. We used to play with Charlie. You remember Charlie, right?’

He looked around for his dog, Charlie, expecting it to be shadowing him like it always had – thinking he could use it to reassure them, to remind them of who he was – but the dog wasn’t here. It was gone. It was part of another life.

He started to panic.

‘Please,’ he said, unsure what to say now, the twins stepping further away from him, from the swings, April looking off towards Searle House, as if she were about to make a break for it. She reached out for her sister’s hand, taking it in hers. ‘It’s okay,’ he repeated. ‘Please. Please don’t be scared of me.’

The girls looked off across the grass again, to the place in which they both lived, moving in unison, their gestures mirroring one other. They seemed to grow paler as they became more afraid.

I’m frightening them, he thought. How can they be frightened of me?

‘Please,’ he repeated, voice breaking up. ‘Please tell me you remember me.’

The two girls stood there for a long time, gazing at him, expressionless and mute, the breeze passing through the park’s trees.

‘I loved you girls.’ Tears filled his eyes. ‘You were mine once.’

Instantly, as he spoke those last four words, a change bloomed in their faces, like sun burning through cloud. The alarm, the confusion, it vanished, becoming nothing but a memory, and smiles began breaking across their faces – first April, then Abigail – as if he were only now coming into focus for them.

‘Oh, we so hoped you would come back,’ April said excitedly.

He swallowed again, his heart starting to swell.

Abigail let go of her sister’s hand. ‘We missed you so much.’

And as he wiped the tears from his eyes, April ran across to him, tapped him on the arm and shouted, ‘You’re it!’ – and the two girls took off across the grass, in the direction of Searle House, squealing with delight.

Acknowledgements

I feel very fortunate to do the job that I do, but none of it would be possible without the friendship, support and all-round brilliance of the team at Michael Joseph. Thank you once again to everyone there (and across Penguin as a whole) who has played a part in bringing
What Remains
to readers – from editorial to marketing, from sales to publicity, and everything in between. I must, however, give a shout-out to Rowland White and, in particular, Emad Akhtar, who worked so hard on knocking early drafts of the manuscript into shape, and to Caroline Pretty, who knows Raker’s history even better than I do.

Thank you to my agent, Camilla Wray, who pretends not to mind when I have a mid-manuscript meltdown, and whose patience, drive and eye for a story were like gold dust when I started to doubt myself; and to the ladies of Darley Anderson, who work so hard in the background for me – especially Mary Darby and Emma Winter in foreign rights, and Sheila David on the film and TV side.

To Mum and Dad, Lucy, and the rest of my amazing family: thank you for all your love and support. And, finally, to the two ladies in my life: my daughter, Erin, who makes me so proud, and my wife, Sharlé, who has been there since before my first book was even words on a page.