Doctors talked of the complications of the men’s injuries, of amputations and skin grafts and transplants, and the long road to recovery. Drake was relatively unharmed, on the surface at least. In the days that followed, though, he recounted how he’d been raped, how Smart had taunted him in the dark, how he woke up some nights and could feel him there, in the basement, but never see him. He revealed a little of the last conversation he’d had with Smart – the only conversation of any note – where Smart had talked of his father, also called Jonathan, and what his father had turned him into.
‘In that last conversation we had, before you found me, he started telling me about his upbringing,’ Drake told the police in his statement. ‘He said they used to call him “Ed Case” at school because he was always in trouble. He said he got caned fourteen times once, because he told a teacher to fuck off.’ Drake had paused at that point. The detective taking his statement thought it was because it was becoming too emotional for him. But it wasn’t that at all. It was that, just like I had after reading Smart’s suicide note, Drake felt a strange kind of sorrow for Smart, a sorrow he was desperately trying to fight because of everything Smart had done to him. ‘He said he grew up without a mother; that she died when he was one, so his father brought him up. He said he sometimes wondered whether life might have turned out differently if his mother had lived.’
Duncan Pell – never a victim like the others but, in a different way, manipulated by Smart as well – had been semi-conscious as they’d brought him out. When he got to hospital, Craw posted an officer outside his room. Pell and the police had a lot to talk about too, not just in terms of his involvement with Smart, but about who Smart was as a person. In order to close the case, the police would have to use Pell to fill in the blanks, and then – beyond that – they would start looking into the terrible things he’d done too.
Sam was in the best shape of all, although the term barely seemed appropriate to describe a man who’d been brutally assaulted, over and over, for the entire time he was missing. I headed down to the hospital after finishing at the Smart house, and saw Julia Wren briefly. I told her we’d catch up when the time was right. She thanked me but in her face I could see her mind was elsewhere, and I didn’t blame her for that. Her husband had returned, six months after disappearing into thin air. All she had for him were questions, one on top of the other, but – given everything I’d found out about him; all the secrets he’d kept from her and from himself – I doubted whether his answers would ever bring her the comfort she sought.
A couple of nights later, with Sam still in hospital, she called me at home and we talked for a while. ‘He keeps saying sorry to me,’ she said, but I couldn’t tell over the phone whether that made it better or worse for her.
‘Where do you think you guys will go from here?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know. I guess it’s just one step at a time.’
‘I guess it is.’
‘I know he regrets what he’s done. I just …’ She paused. I thought I might know where the conversation was about to go, but I didn’t jump in. ‘It just doesn’t feel like I thought it would feel, having him back. Does that sound strange?’
‘No,’ I told her. ‘That doesn’t sound strange at all.’
The question that would probably never be answered completely was why Smart had treated Sam differently from the others, and why he felt he was worth taking such a risk over. With Smart dead, there could only be more theories and more guesswork. But as I’d sat there in his living room after finding the basement, waiting for Craw to come through, I’d looked at the photographs Smart had left behind and seen something in them. In the way his father stood. In his blue eyes and fair hair. In his thin frame and the far-away look in his eyes, troubled and isolated. It was a picture that recalled the very first photograph Julia had ever shown me of Sam, standing there in front of a window, drained and ground down, a week before he disappeared. No one could know for sure, but maybe, in Sam, Smart saw the man he loved and hated like no other. And maybe, by taking a man who looked like his father, in a place he’d once worked, dressed in the T-shirt his father had worn at the end, Smart thought he could get closer to him than at any point since he’d died.
By the time I got home after leaving Craw and the Snatcher team working their way through Smart’s house, it was almost 10.30 and, next door, Liz’s house was dark. I checked my phone for messages, knowing that there wasn’t one from her, then went through my email as well, knowing the same was true there. Once I’d showered and changed, I sat at the counter in the kitchen and thought about texting her, but couldn’t find the right words – and, in some part of me, I wasn’t sure if I’d mean them anyway.
An hour later I went to bed, and I lay awake most of the night.
78
The next morning the doorbell woke me. I stirred on the edge of sleep, unsure whether I’d even heard it, and then it came again, longer and louder. The clock said it was 8.58.
I sat up in bed and looked out through the curtains. The sun was shining again, the skies clear. I grabbed a T-shirt and a pair of tracksuit trousers and wriggled them on, then moved through the house to the front door. I’d been expecting, maybe hoping, for Liz.
Instead I got Healy.
He looked terrible, like he hadn’t slept all night: his hair was a mess, not combed through or styled, his face etched with dark lines, his eyes bloodshot. His clothes were dishevelled, one half of his shirt tail hanging out, his tie loosened, his trousers creased.
I pulled the door open.
‘Healy.’
He didn’t say anything, just looked at me, and behind him – out on the street – I could see his Vauxhall, bumped up on to the pavement outside the gates. Behind that was another car, a grey Volvo. In the driver’s seat, Melanie Craw was leaning over the steering wheel, watching us. When I invited Healy in, she nodded at me, started up the engine and pulled away. I watched her head off down the street and then turned to Healy.
‘What the hell’s going on?’
He stood there in the silence of the house, looking at me.
‘Healy?’
‘Have you got any coffee?’
I looked at him. ‘Sure.’
We moved through to the kitchen and he sat at the counter while I brewed some coffee. Once it was on the go, I leaned against the sink, watching him, and for a moment he just stared at the floor, eyes dull and chipped, no light in them at all. After a while he seemed to become aware of the quiet and, with a long, drawn-out breath, looked up at me.
‘Craw found me,’ he said quietly.
‘Found you where?’
A pause. Eyes on the floor again. ‘Parked on the road outside the prison.’
‘Which prison?’
‘Belmarsh.’
‘What were you doing down there?’
He glanced at me and shrugged. ‘Sleeping in my car.’
‘Why?’
He smiled. Sad and tight. ‘Why not?’
‘Is that where you were yesterday when I called?’
He shook his head. ‘No.’
‘What’s at the prison?’
He didn’t reply.
I paused; let him have a moment.
He placed a hand flat to the counter top and looked down at his fingers, stained, blistered and cut. Then he sighed, deep and long, as if there weren’t enough words to put it all together. ‘At the beginning of January, I found something out,’ he said quietly.
‘What?’
‘Something I guess I probably shouldn’t have.’
I pulled a stool out and sat down across from him.
‘A guy I’ve known for years, an old drinking buddy of mine, works down at Belmarsh, in the high-security unit there.’ He sniffed. ‘About a week before I started back at the Met, I went out for a few with him and we got pretty pissed. Pretty emotional, I guess. He knew Leanne, knew the boys … I mean, our kids had grown up together.’