Healy arrived back at the cottage just after nine. I knew he’d been drinking even before he stumbled into the living room and collapsed on to the sofa. He looked between me and the two computers—Paul and Annabel’s—still sitting on the table in the corner, and then to the laptop perched on my knees. As his eyes moved around the room, they shifted in stages, like they were dragging on something. He was finding it hard to even focus.
“Fun night?”
He shrugged. “Same old.”
I went back to what I was doing. After getting off the phone to Task, I’d googled Carter Graham. Sixty-seven. Divorced. Born in south Devon—hence him having a home at Farnmoor, about seven miles east, along the coast—but in pieces I’d read in Forbes and Business Week, and a profile in the Financial Times, it sounded like he spent most of his time eating plane food. His company, Empyrean, provided what they called “investment opportunity analysis,” and had offices in London, Frankfurt, New York, LA, Sydney and Tokyo. According to the FT, Graham toured them almost constantly for ten months of the year, looking for gaps in the market—start-ups, small businesses with big growth potential, and upcoming industries. Staff in his regional offices were scouring the local markets the entire time; when they found something, some business or technology they thought represented a potential money-maker, Graham flew in, listened to the pitch and decided whether to get his checkbook out or not. “He’s seen as something of a white knight,” the FT added, and it was hard to argue with the business model: the company goes stratospheric, he creams off a chunk of the profits, everybody makes lots of cash.
In the Forbes piece, it said Graham had started Empyrean in Dartmouth in 1967 at the age of just twenty-two, before shifting the whole operation to London shortly after—then things really started taking off. In 1971 he opened his first international office in Los Angeles. He didn’t talk much to the media, Forbes describing him as “a very private man,” and he was particularly protective of his personal life, which meant the same basic information got trotted out time and time again: divorced once, but “still on good terms with” his ex-wife, and no children. There was almost nothing else, bar a small mention of when his parents had passed on: his mother in 1962, and his father in 1968. If he’d vowed to keep his private life out of the media, he’d done a pretty decent job.
“I’m going back to London.”
I looked up at Healy. He’d wriggled his jacket off and was sitting—legs spread, hands resting on his belly—in the middle of the sofa. “What are you talking about?”
“I’ve had enough of it down here,” he said.
“You’d had enough of it in London.”
He shrugged.
“What’s brought this on?”
He shrugged again. “I don’t belong here.”
“And you belong in London?”
“What, you cut up I’m leaving?”
His defenses were up, which normally meant he was reacting to something. Either something he’d done, or was about to. “You do whatever you want to do,” I said to him.
“There’s nothing left for me here.”
I went back over all the conversations we’d had over the past seven days, trying to pinpoint the origin of this moment.
“Where are you going to stay?” I asked.
“I’ve got a few mates up there.”
I nodded. Not too many anymore.
Then I remembered what I’d said to him outside the Lings’: You got fired from the police. Those people there you call friends, colleagues, whatever they were to you—they aren’t going to go out to bat for you, because they don’t want to end up like you.
“Is this about earlier?”
He flicked a look at me and then away again, and I had my answer.
“I just like to run my cases a certain way,” I said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“We’re trying to have a conversation here, Healy.” He shifted on the sofa, slow and lethargic, and I suddenly remembered he was drunk. “Let’s talk about it tomorrow.”
“Talk about what?”
“We’ll talk in the morning,” I said again.
He eyed me, like he suddenly realized I’d worked him out, and then he got up, stumbling slightly, and headed upstairs without saying another word.
After he was gone, I returned to the sightings of the Ling family, booting up both Paul and Annabel’s computers for a second time. I went through them, folder by folder, program by program, looking for any connection to Carter Graham, to Farnmoor, to Miln Cross or to London ExCeL. There was nothing. By eleven, as the wind started to gather momentum outside, nearby branches scratching at the windows, I shut both computers down and headed up to bed.
Two hours later, I was still awake.
• • •
The next morning, Healy emerged just before eight. I was sitting at the kitchen table, cup of coffee in front of me, looking down toward the beach as the tide rolled in. He shuffled in, dressing gown on, half squinting as if bright sunlight were arrowing in toward him. In reality, the sky was a perfect ceiling of granite-gray cloud and it was drizzling.
I watched him pour himself a coffee and then, when he was done, he stood at the counter and looked across the room at me. Immediately on the defensive. He might have been hungover, but he obviously remembered enough of what we’d talked about the night before. I didn’t play up to it. On the table in front of me was the local paper—the body on the beach still the hot ticket, even though the crime scene was now just a distant memory—and, as he remained standing, I started flicking through it again.
A couple of minutes passed, both of us silent, and then he disappeared back into the living room. I carried on reading the sports pages. Twenty minutes later, shaved and showered, Healy returned to the kitchen, pulled out a chair and sat at the table with me.
“You were right—is that what you want to hear?”
I flipped the paper shut. He was eyeing me like he was waiting for a comeback, some sort of put-down. “It was never about that, Healy.”
“You think I haven’t got anything left in the tank.” That last part seemed to hang in the air, as if he were processing it for the first time too. “Everyone thinks I’m done.”
“I don’t think you’re done.”
He shrugged. “Maybe you’re all right.”
“Who’s ‘all’ of us?”
“It doesn’t matter.” His fingers rubbed together, like he wanted a cigarette. “I need to get back to London, get some normality back in my life. This isn’t a real existence.”
“What have you got back in London?”
He looked out through the window, and for a second it was like he was thinking out loud. He was watching the beach, the sweeping arc of the hills, the crashing waves. He was wondering if he really did want to leave all this behind for a city that had rejected him, for work colleagues who placed no trust in him, for the memories of a daughter he no longer had. But then he probably realized that if he had little left in London beyond his two boys, he had even less here. I had physical and emotional ties to the village, ties to this house, to the place where I’d grown up. Basically, the only attachment Healy had was me.
“I need to get back into work,” he said. “Some shitty security job signing people into a building.” He paused, the faintest hint of a smile on his face. “Something to forget about what I used to do. Something to help . . .” He stopped a second time, but I got what he meant: Something to help me forget I was once a cop. There was a sadness in his face as that dawned on him, and it felt like I glimpsed the origin of this moment: maybe a phone call to the people he’d worked with, trying to prove to me and to himself that he was still important; maybe nothing in return but a wall of silence.
“You’re a good cop, Healy.”
He looked at me.
“No one can take that away from you.”
“If I was so good, why did I get fired?”
“You did the wrong things for the right reasons.”
He shrugged again. “You ever coming back to London?”
On the table, beside the newspaper, were my notes. I pulled them toward me. “I want to take care of this first.”
“Then I guess I’ll see you on the other side.”
I nodded. “I guess you will.”
• • •
Two hours later, his car was packed. He hadn’t come with much in the first place. We’d both escaped London for different reasons, but we’d both escaped fast.
We shook hands in the rain, and I told him to call me once he was settled in, and then I watched his red Vauxhall take off down the hill, chugging along the lane that snaked toward the beach. At the bottom, a bright red speck against the concrete of the sea wall, the car seemed to pause, as if Healy was unsure whether to commit to this.
And then, a second later, he pulled away and was gone.