‘It wasn’t, at least in the traditional sense. Smart didn’t put a gun to Sam’s head. All he had to do was pump Sam full of drugs and get him to read from a cue card. If he could walk them out against their will, Smart could also get them to say what he wanted. You remember what you said to me about that message on Drake’s phone?’
‘No emotion in his voice. Just empty words.’ I heard a deep intake of breath and then a sigh crackled down the phone line. ‘But why take Wren from the train? Smart had a foolproof MO. Why change it?’
I didn’t have an answer, just another theory. ‘Maybe he became consumed by Sam for some reason.’
‘Consumed?’
‘Obsessed.’ I shrugged. ‘Thing is, though, if Smart first saw Sam on the Circle line like he did with the others, then he would have followed him and found out – as soon as Sam got home – that he was married. Smart’s thing, the thing that gets him off, is gay men. He wouldn’t have known Sam was gay, not from his daily …’ I trailed off, a memory stirring.
‘What?’ Healy said.
My mind moved back three days to my meeting with Robert Wren and then to the conversation Healy and I had in the coffee shop at Shepherd’s Bush. Healy had accused me of being too invested in Sam as a person, of not being able to see the killer in him. But there had never been a killer in him. The lies he told were the lies I knew about. And he hadn’t been lying when he’d talked to his brother about the night he met Marc Erion. He said the guy lived in this place where there were no lights, Robert Wren had told me. He said he got to his door, on to the floor this guy was on, and all the bulbs were out. We knew why the lights were out. Smart had been through the building a couple of nights before taking Erion, creating cover for himself. And when he got to the flat, Robert Wren had told me, Sam said it felt like someone was there in the corridor with him.
‘The first time Smart saw Sam was at Erion’s flat.’
‘How d’you figure that?’
‘Something Robert Wren said to me.’ I paused, trying to line everything up. ‘Robert Wren said Sam went to see Erion on 11 November. Erion was taken on 13 November. Two days later. By then, Smart had already taken the lights out in Erion’s building, and he was doing the last of his recon. When he saw Sam come up to the door of the flat, he liked the look of him immediately. Perhaps, given the risks he took to get him, liked the look of him more than any of the others. And because Sam had come to see a male prostitute, Smart assumed he was gay. So Sam wasn’t part of the plan. But as soon as Smart saw him, he made him a part of it.
‘He was different from the others: he lived with someone, he didn’t live in the anonymity of a tower block, there was no way Smart could knock out lights in Sam’s street and then walk him out without anyone seeing. So he had to come up with another idea. He would have known about the protests on 16 December, he would have foreseen the risks, but what risk there was in taking Sam from the train was reduced by the chaos of the protests. He must have got on at Gloucester Road, stayed close to Sam and then used the first opportunity that came his way. With or without the fight on the platform, he would have done it. But the fight just made it all much simpler.’
‘Yeah, but why not just take Wren outside on the street? That time of year, it’s dark early, lots of shadow and cover. Much easier than from the inside of a carriage.’
‘But Smart knew the Circle line intimately.’
‘So?’
‘So maybe, to him, the train was less risky than outside on the street. Or maybe he was just watching Sam that day, with no actual plan to take him, and then the fight kicked off and he saw his chance. Or maybe … I don’t know, maybe it was symbolic.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Something to do with his father. Some connection to the trains.’
The conversation died away and I hit traffic lights at the top of Heath Street, as it forked into Hampstead High Street. Rain chattered away against the roof of the car. The wipers whined back and forth across the glass. People passed along the pavements under umbrellas. And in that time, all I got from Healy was silence.
‘I’m almost here.’
No reply.
‘Are you going to meet me at Smart’s?’ I asked him, and realized how prophetic this moment was. The October before, we’d ended up hunting the same man together. Now we were doing it again, as if we were bound to one another somehow. Two sides of the same coin. At the beginning, I’d always thought I was on the other side to Healy. Now I was starting to wonder if we weren’t the same: built for the same reason, to hunt the same monsters. I glanced at the phone again as nothing came back but silence. ‘Healy? Are you going to meet me?’
‘I can’t do that,’ he said.
‘Fine. Then you need to call Craw and tell her –’
‘I’m not calling Craw.’
‘You need to tell her what’s happening, Healy.’
‘It’s too late for that.’
‘What are you talking about?’
He sniffed. Cleared his throat. Is he crying?
‘Healy?’
‘She fired me this morning,’ he said, and there was so much pain in his voice, it was like an electrical current travelling down the line. ‘They found out what I was doing.’
‘Oh, shit.’
‘So she fired me.’
‘I’m so sorry, Healy.’
Silence.
‘Where are you now?’ I asked. Faintly, in the background of wherever he was, I could hear rain and the distant sound of people’s voices getting louder and then fading.
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Where are you, Healy?’
‘It doesn’t matter any more.’
‘Don’t go and do anything stupid.’
A pause. ‘It’s too late for that now.’
And then he hung up.
71
Healy killed the call to Raker, flipped shut his phone and dumped it on to the passenger seat of the car. It was raining. A couple walked by, umbrella up, arms locked together, and then his eyes moved across the street to Teresa Reed’s house. It was time. There was nothing to stop him any more. No future. Nothing to get up for, nothing to come home to. He had no job, a wife who hated him and sons who never answered his calls. He reached into the pocket of his jacket and took out the photo of Leanne, tracing the lines of her face, his finger moving across the creases and bumps of the picture. ‘He won’t get away with it, baby,’ he said quietly, a deep, guttural sadness welling in the pit of his stomach.
I’ve got nothing else now.
Just you, Leanne.
When Teresa Reed answered the door, she broke out into a smile, came forward and kissed him. ‘How are you today, hun?’ she said, touching her hand to his. ‘I didn’t expect to see you so early.’ She looked at her watch. ‘I thought you were going to call.’
‘Something came up at work.’
She eyed him. ‘Is everything okay?’
‘Fine.’
‘Well, I’ve just put some coffee on.’
He followed her into the house, through a hallway full of ornaments and ornate junk. He hated her taste. In the kitchen, she stood at the counter and finished putting some of the dishes away, talking about what she’d done on her day off. He barely even listened. All he could think about was what he was going to do next. About Leanne. About how he was going to avenge her death.
And about the gun tucked into the back of his trousers.
‘You remember what I asked you?’ he said to her, still standing in the doorway of the kitchen, rain running off his jacket. ‘About coming with you to the prison one day?’
She looked at him. ‘You mean watching me talk to the prisoners?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I spoke to my boss about it after you asked,’ she said, taking two cups out of the cupboard, ‘but he wasn’t massively keen on the idea. Sorry, hun.’
‘Why?’
‘I think he’s just worried it might aggravate the men.’ She smiled. ‘I’ve only been seeing them seven months. That’s no time at all. I don’t want to upset the equilibrium because, slowly, I’m starting to gain their trust. But there’s also the problem that some of them see prison guards and cops – people like you – as the reason they’re inside in the first place.’
‘That is the reason they’re inside.’
‘I know. But it might promote negative feelings in them.’
‘They’re rapists and murderers.’
Teresa Reed paused, as if she’d glimpsed something in Healy that she hadn’t seen before. ‘I know what they are.’
‘Are you sure?’
She frowned. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘What about Broadmoor?’
‘What about it?’
‘You talk to the prisoners there as well.’
‘So?’
‘So, I’d like to go with you there.’
She shook her head, her defences up. ‘No way. It’s a high-security hospital, Colm. We’re talking about deeply disturbed patients. I can maybe talk to my boss again about letting you come along to Belmarsh with me, if that’s what you really want. I know you say you just want to watch me at work, but if we concoct some story about you using it as a research trip for the Met, Belmarsh might sign off the –’
‘I don’t want to go to Belmarsh any more.’
‘Sorry?’
‘I can get inside Belmarsh any time I want. I’ve been doing it five months already. I’ve been watching you talk to those men since January. I don’t need to see their faces up close. They’re not what I want.’
‘What do you mean, “watching me since January”?’
‘Belmarsh isn’t what I want. Broadmoor is.’
‘What are you talking about?’
He studied her, the silence in the kitchen deafening. ‘Belmarsh was just a stepping stone. The thing to make you trust me. If you’d watched me go in there, take notes, look interested as you laughed and smiled and batted your eyelids at the rapists and the killers and the worthless fucking scumbags you call patients, I knew I could get you to take me to Broadmoor too. I didn’t care how long it took, but at some point I thought you’d trust me enough to arrange it.’ He stopped. ‘But then I got fired today.’
Her face dropped. Confusion. Fear. ‘I don’t, uh …’
‘So now nothing matters any more.’
‘Colm, I –’
He sighed, taking a step into the kitchen. He could feel the gun at the back of his trousers, shifting against the belt. ‘Do you know who you talk to up at Broadmoor?’
She backed up against the counter. ‘Talk to?’
‘Your “patients”.’
‘I, uh … I talk to a lot of –’
‘I’m only interested in one of them. The one who killed my daughter.’ A shiver of emotion passed through him. ‘And I don’t care how you get it done, but you’re the one that’s going to take me to him.’