The Shadow at the Door, page 20
NAUGHTON: It’s possible someone killed him?
RITTER: Like I said.
NAUGHTON: So who?
RITTER: You’re the bloody copper, not me.
NAUGHTON: Do you think you’re in danger?
RITTER: Me? No. I ain’t in debt to anyone.
NAUGHTON: What about Thomas’s girlfriend?
RITTER: What girlfriend?
NAUGHTON: His girlfriend, Marie Havendish.
RITTER: Who? He don’t have no girlfriend.
NAUGHTON: Marie reported him missing.
RITTER: What? What are you talking about?
NAUGHTON: Marie Havendish, his girlfriend. She came in and filed a missing persons report two days ago.
RITTER: Never heard of her.
Healy looked across at Naughton. ‘You didn’t think it was weird that his business partner and best mate hadn’t ever heard of a girlfriend he’d been dating for six months?’
‘Now it does, yeah.’ Naughton paused, grimacing. ‘Now it definitely does, but not then. Back then, her landline worked, her email, I was looking at her website every day. I interviewed her a couple of times – here and at her house. She lived up in Tottenham. She said they’d been seeing each other five, six months but it had only got serious the last couple, so that was the reason she hadn’t had the chance to meet up with friends like Ritter. I couldn’t find a reason not to believe her. All of it tallied up.’
Healy flipped back to the beginning, to the photograph of Thomas Coventry, looking at his face, his address in Barking, his personal details, known relationships.
‘What about this ex-wife of Coventry’s?’
Naughton shook her head. ‘Nothing doing. Like I said, they’d been separated a year. They hadn’t divorced yet, but the paperwork was in the process of being sorted. I called her up, just to dot the i’s … uh …’ She reached over for the file and found the page she wanted. ‘Cara Coben. She confirmed it. Said she and Coventry hadn’t seen each other for over nine months, and that they only ever spoke through a solicitor because – and I’m paraphrasing here – Coventry was an angry piece of shit. At best she was wary of him, at worst scared. I spoke to the solicitor and she pretty much backed up everything that Coben had told me.’
‘So that just leaves Marie Havendish.’
‘Right. The girlfriend.’
‘You think she got rid of Coventry, took the money and disappeared?’
‘I think it’s worth exploring.’
‘So what are you proposing?’
She took a breath, as if gathering herself.
‘I just need a day or two on this, Boss. There’s something here, I can feel it in my bones. Give me forty-eight hours, and if nothing comes of it, I’ll just forget it all.’
Healy glanced at his monitor, at the spreadsheet that needed filling out and then at his desk. The Coventry file was covering up the reports he was supposed to be writing. In his in-tray was even more paperwork. Forms to fill. Things to sign off.
He looked at Naughton, then at Marie Havendish.
‘Is this the only photograph you have of her?’
‘Yes,’ Naughton said. ‘It’s from the website she set up.’
Healy eyed Havendish. She was a timid-looking woman in her late thirties with long, mousy hair that was becoming wiry as it started to grey, dull brown eyes and a small, pale mole next to her nose. She wasn’t unattractive, though. In fact, the more Healy stared at her, the more he realized it was the opposite and he started to wonder if she might be wearing a disguise: not literally, but in the unkempt hair she’d allowed to grey and grow long, in her demure expression, and in the slight tilt of her head – her eyes looking up from under her brow – as if embarrassed at being on camera.
‘So is that a yes?’ Naughton pushed, half smiling.
‘Forty-eight hours, okay? No more.’
‘Thanks, Boss. I owe you.’
‘I know. Just don’t reward me with chocolate.’
He patted his belly for effect and then watched her stand, her grey trouser-suit tight against the lines of her body. Was this what happened when she started to bulk up? Was she building up to some sort of competition? He’d never asked her what she did away from the office, what she enjoyed, TV she watched, how she filled her downtime. He didn’t know if she lived alone, or with someone else, or with a whole bunch of people. He didn’t know if she was straight or gay or somewhere in between. He never asked because he was her boss, and she was fifteen years younger than him, and he was always scared that it would come across as inappropriate. But then she scooped the file off the desk and started to head back across the office to her booth at the far end of the room, and he found himself swivelling on his chair and calling her back.
‘Rosa, wait a sec.’
She stopped. ‘You haven’t changed your mind already, have you?’
He looked at the file in her hands and thought of everything she’d told him – about the disappearance of Thomas Coventry, about the girlfriend who didn’t seem to exist. ‘This case,’ Healy said to her, and glanced at the spreadsheet again, at the reports that needed writing. ‘How do you feel about an old man tagging along for the ride?’
Now
At the door, Healy lets himself in, locking it behind him, a habit he’s developed since he’s been here, just in case. He showers and changes, and then collapses on to one of the sofas in the cool of the living room. The cottage is old, its bones moaning in the heat, but he’s slowly got used to its sounds over the time that he’s been here: to the soft tick of the grandfather clock on the wall, to the clunk and gurgle of the central heating, to the whistle of the wind as it escapes through the paint-peeled windows that no longer fit their frames properly. When he first arrived, he thought he’d go mad, confined to this small, bleak sliver of coast on the Irish Sea, miles from anywhere. But instead the opposite has happened: a part of him has come to like it.
Often, there are moments when he pines for his sons: he’d grown apart from them at the end, but he still loves them deeply, and not speaking to them, not seeing them, not watching them get older, hurts. He missed Liam’s graduation; he’ll never meet Ciaran’s fiancée; he’ll never see either of them getting married, or get to hold his grandchildren in his arms. But as much as those things tug at him, as much as he mourns the loss of them, he never doubts that he’s made the right decision. He was no use to his boys. He was no use to his wife either. He was just an angry drunk, an obsessive, a man who’d made a series of terrible decisions – and would keep on making them. It’s better that they believe he’s six feet under the earth in a Hertfordshire cemetery. It’s better for them, better for him, better for everyone that the world now believes him dead. That way, what was once his family can at least remember him with some fondness, because he can no longer screw up their lives.
Marcus Savage is the name that he’s been using here. That’s what it says on his fake passport. It’s the only ID document Healy has: there, under his mattress, just in case he needs to make another quick getaway. He doesn’t have a driving licence or credit cards. He doesn’t have a car and only ever takes public transport. He has no Internet in the house and uses no mobile phone. He’s renting from an old couple in Bangor, but someone else pays them rent on his behalf. The same person pays the electricity bill, and gas and water too, and Healy just repays him the money he owes him – in cash – when they meet up every quarter. It’s in both their interests that no one looks too deeply into who Marcus Savage really is, or how he ended up in this house and this village. Because behind that name is Healy, and behind Healy are the things in his past that need to stay hidden. The man Healy was, his life before this, his former career, his lapses, his choices, they’re all buried in that cemetery – and the world needs to believe that’s all there is left of him now: just bones, and memories, and a headstone. Except, of course, two people know that Healy is alive and well.
One is Healy himself.
The other is David Raker.
Thirteen Years Ago
On the way out to Barking, Healy read through the file on Thomas Coventry’s disappearance. A couple of times he asked Naughton questions, but mostly he just soaked it up. He didn’t blame her for overlooking the girlfriend; even as he leafed through the investigation with the benefit of hindsight, he didn’t see many red flags.
A couple of Marie Havendish’s answers could, perhaps, have been termed elusive, but it would have been harder to see them as questionable at the time. He already knew what had happened when Rosa had tried to get back in touch with Havendish. He already knew Havendish had abandoned her landline, her email, her website and her history, both as a writer and as a person. That gave Healy an advantage. What was obvious was that something was going on, and it was down to Naughton’s inability to let the case die that they were even in a position to try and find out what.
Once he had finished reading, he snapped the file shut and looked out of the passenger window, watching the streets of the city pass in a blur of phone shops, takeaways and low-rent furniture stores. A while later, he caught a glimpse of himself in the wing mirror and didn’t much like what looked back, his face bloated, his expression heavy, the whites of his eyes bloodshot. He had bags under both of them, smeared beneath his lashes like lines of dark paint, and the irony was, none of it was down to proper police work. The way he looked wasn’t the result of late nights in an interview room, trying to drag a confession out of some arsehole who wouldn’t fold. It wasn’t solving crimes. It wasn’t trying to make some sort of difference. It was forms and spreadsheets. It was sitting in front of a computer until there was no one left in the office, and filling in columns on a document. He hated it. He’d taken the promotion for the money – but money didn’t matter when you never had any time to spend it.
‘You all right, Boss?’
Healy tuned back in. ‘Yeah, just thinking.’
‘About Havendish?’
He glanced at Naughton. She had her hands on the wheel of the Volvo and a pair of aviator sunglasses on, which made it hard to get a handle on her. He returned his gaze to the streets. It was late January and freezing cold, but the sky was empty of cloud and a pale sun winked beyond the rooftops of east London.
‘Yeah,’ he lied. ‘Just thinking about what her story is.’
They reached the house a couple of minutes later. It was a pebble-dashed mid-terrace with two bay windows top and bottom and a door with peeling white paint. The street was long and tightly packed, cars parked on one side, old telephone poles on the other, wires fanning out to surrounding houses like the spokes on a wheel. The birds that hadn’t flown south for winter were perched up there, and there were two kids who probably should have been at school playing football at the end of the road.
Naughton found a parking spot a little further on, and then they walked back while she fished around in the evidence packet for the keys. At the house, she let them both in.
Inside, it was musty.
There was a kitchen ahead of them, a living room off to the right and a staircase to the left. Sunlight carved across the garden and into the kitchen, highlighting a damp patch on the wall and fading lino. Dust swirled in the hallway.
Healy made his way into the living room, a space full of expensive furniture that didn’t feel like it belonged in the house. There was a TV too big for the room, shelves packed with DVDs, CDs and LPs, and a lot of paintings – what Healy supposed was termed ‘modern art’ – all of which, to his eye, looked like the same pretentious shite.
In his time, he’d been to a lot of homes like this.
It was the home of the middle-aged crook still swimming upstream in his fifties, still trying to crack the big one that was going to make him his millions and let him retire to Spain. But the trouble with people like Thomas Coventry was that they were never vicious enough to make it really big, so they either got banged up or killed. Or neither, in which case, this was what happened: they filled their shitty homes with stuff they thought spoke of how successful they were, how cultured they’d become off the back of it. It was a very particular mix of narcissism and tastelessness.
‘I’m going to look upstairs,’ Naughton said.
After she was gone, Healy moved to the shelves, running a finger along the spines of Coventry’s albums. He didn’t display much taste here either, but at least his taste in music was better than his taste in DVDs, which seemed to extend to straight-to-video mockney crime thrillers and live stand-up from racist comedians.
Halfway down the room was a sideboard.
Healy started going through its drawers. It was a mess of old papers and pens, utility bills, receipts, table mats, miscellaneous junk. He didn’t find much worth stopping for and walked to the back of the living room, where a set of patio doors looked on to a small, drab garden, hemmed in by six-foot walls. It was like a prison yard. The lawn was brown, the grass still packed tight from the morning frost; the beds were full of rusted leaves; and cheap plastic furniture had toppled over in the wind, rain pooling inside the upturned grooves of the chair legs.
As he headed into the kitchen, he heard Naughton moving around above him, the floorboards creaking. He flicked a switch and a long strip light hummed into life, revealing old-fashioned pine cabinets and white work surfaces long since marked with food and drink stains. Again, Coventry had spent his money not on the kitchen itself, but on equipment to fill it with – an expensive coffee machine, a rack of Japanese knives, a microwave with so many buttons it looked like a NASA computer.
Healy heard Naughton coming downstairs again.
‘See anything?’ she asked as she approached from the hallway.
He shook his head. ‘No.’
‘There’s nothing upstairs either.’ She stopped in the doorway and scanned the kitchen worktops. ‘It’s hard to tell for sure, but I don’t think anyone’s been back here.’
Healy looked out at the back garden. ‘Just remind me again what happened on the day he disappeared.’
Naughton pulled out her notebook. ‘Coventry left for work at about 8 a.m.’ She stopped, shrugged. ‘I mean, this is all according to the so-called “girlfriend”, so it’s up for debate, but Havendish said she left at the same time, because she wanted to get to the library. She said she was going there to do research and only returned to the house the next day, when Coventry had gone a full twenty-four hours without responding to her calls.’
‘She didn’t have a key for this place?’
‘No. She said it was because they’d only been dating seriously for a short time. He hadn’t offered her one; she hadn’t asked.’
Healy nodded. ‘Did she ever say how they met?’
‘In a coffee shop in Beckton.’
‘Beckton? She lived up in Tottenham, didn’t she?’
‘Yeah.’
‘So what was she doing down in Beckton?’
‘She said she’d gone there for research.’
‘Sounds like “research” is a popular pastime.’
‘That’s what I thought at the time,’ Naughton said. ‘So I pulled some camera footage from around the library and out at the café they met at in Beckton, and there was nothing screwy going on. Havendish was at the library and they were at the café.’
‘So she was telling the truth.’
‘About that, yeah.’
Healy rubbed his fingers together, a habit he’d developed during his latest attempt to give up smoking. Reaching into his pocket, he took out a pack of nicotine gum and shook a piece loose. It was becoming clearer than ever why Naughton hadn’t seen anything to trouble her about Havendish when she originally worked the case.
Popping the gum in, Healy walked back through to the living room, looking at the same pieces of furniture as before. He opened the drawers of the sideboard again. In one of them, there were photographs of Coventry: with what must have been his parents; with a group of men at an England football game; by himself in a pub garden holding up a pint. There were none of him with Marie Havendish, but there was one of him with his ex.
‘What was the name of his ex-wife again?’ Healy asked.
‘Cara Coben.’
‘You said you talked to her?’
‘Yeah.’
‘What did she say about him?’
‘She just said he was incapable of behaving like an adult, that he could be nasty, and that she’d wanted the divorce to be as straightforward as it could be. But Coventry made that impossible, which is why they were doing all the mediation through a solicitor.’
‘Did you ask her about Havendish?’
‘Not directly, because at the time it didn’t seem relevant. But I spoke to her in general terms about him having a new girlfriend, and she didn’t seem very surprised.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘She said he was cheating on her for most of their marriage.’
Healy put the photograph back into the drawer, but there was so much stuffed inside already that it slid off the top. It floated to the floor and came to rest under the sideboard. When Naughton bent down to pick it up for him, she immediately paused: something had caught her attention under the sideboard.
‘You all right?’ Healy asked her.
‘Yeah,’ Naughton said, but she was distracted now. Dropping on to her knees, she peered beneath the unit. Healy backed away a little bit, trying to see what had got her attention. The carpet looked dusty down there, like it had never seen a vacuum cleaner in the entire time it had been laid. Rosa angled her shoulder, pushing it closer towards the floor, so that she could more easily get her hand under. Healy moved again, coming around to her side, watching. She slid her arm even further.
‘Rosa?’ Healy said. ‘What is it?’
But then, finally, she had hold of it.
She brought it out, pinched between thumb and forefinger, and held it up for Healy to see. He moved closer, frowning. ‘Is that what I think it is?’
