The Shadow at the Door, page 23
To Cara Coben’s house.
To what happened after they got there.
‘Does the name Gerry Stein ring any bells with you?’ Raker asks.
Healy tunes back in. ‘Who?’
‘Gerry Stein?’
‘No. Should it?’
‘He worked as a patrolman on the Tube.’
This time, Healy makes the connection: it’s not the name that sparks off his recollection, though – he still doesn’t remember a Gerry Stein – but he now knows where this conversation is going. It feels like a lifetime ago that all of that happened, but it’s only nine years: Raker had been looking into the disappearance of a man called Samuel Wren, who’d vanished after getting on to a Tube train as part of his morning commute; Healy had been part of a task force trying to find a psychopath the media had labelled the ‘Body Snatcher’. Eventually, their paths had crossed. By the end of it, Raker had almost lost his life, and Healy had been fired from the Met.
That case was the seed of the reason Healy was here.
‘Did we meet him?’ Healy asks.
‘Not him, no, but a friend of his, Stevie O’Keefe. Stevie was the guy who took us down on to the line at Westminster that time.’ Raker pauses, and in the quiet they both remember that night: they’d been looking for clues, working separate cases but ones connected by the same events. And they’d found something down there, on the line at Westminster, that neither of them were likely to forget. ‘Okay,’ Healy says, ‘so what’s the story with this Gerry Stein guy, then? Why you dredging all that stuff up?’
‘It’s not me doing the dredging, it’s a doctor.’
‘A doctor?’
‘Her name’s Emma Garrison. She turned up at my house a couple of days ago. We talked, she told me a little, but she wants me to go to the hospital tomorrow for the rest of it.’
‘The rest of it?’
‘A fuller explanation, I guess.’
‘What hospital is this?’
Raker pauses for a moment. ‘St Augustine’s.’
‘Shit, really?’
‘I know. I don’t want to go there, but I want to hear what she has to say. This Gerry Stein guy has been there since February – he killed O’Keefe and his family.’
‘Seriously? Weren’t him and O’Keefe mates?’
‘Very best mates.’
‘So what happened – Stein just flipped one day?’
‘I guess I’ll find out tomorrow.’
Healy thinks of that case again, the hunt for the Body Snatcher, and how it completely destroyed his life. It was four years after his and Naughton’s search for Thomas Coventry – but, with the benefit of distance, he can see now that the cracks were already showing, even before Rosa came to his desk with that case. His marriage was crumbling. His relationship with his kids was breaking down. His decision-making – at home, at work – was off. Four years later, all of those things came together, like the wires of a bomb, and went off in his face. Before that, on the case with Rosa, at home with Gemma and the kids, he never saw things as clearly.
As he remembers the Coventry case, he closes his eyes.
It barely seems possible that so much time has passed.
His memories are painful. In fact, it hurts him just to recreate images of it in his head, to be reminded of what happened after he and Rosa went to see Cara Coben. Not Coben herself, not the interview they did with her, but what came after.
More laughter from the pub drifts across the stillness of the evening.
‘Healy?’ Raker says. ‘You there?’
‘Yeah,’ he says, and then stops.
He’s still thinking about Rosa Naughton.
‘Listen, Raker,’ he says. ‘I need you to do something for me.’
‘Okay.’
He can hear the wariness in Raker’s voice, and he knows Raker’s immediate thought will be: ‘What’s he going to ask me to do and how will it have the potential to hurt us?’ Healy understands, but what he’s going to ask is important, and the one thing he knows about Raker, above all else, is that, like Healy himself, he’s grieved.
He’s grieved deeply and been broken.
He’ll understand, even if he doesn’t like it.
‘It’s a good few weeks away yet,’ Healy starts, ‘so you’ve got time to figure out a story for why you’re there, if anyone questions you.’ He stops, knowing Raker wants to ask the obvious question first: what’s the ‘there’ that Healy is talking about? But he doesn’t. He just stays on the line, patiently, silently, waiting to see where this is heading. ‘Next month, I’ll need you to buy some flowers.’
He pictures Rosa inside Cara Coben’s living room.
‘I’ll need you to put them on a grave for me.’
Part Two
* * *
THE EX-WIFE
Thirteen Years Ago
Cara Coben lived in Canning Town, midway along a cul-de-sac of identical yellow-bricked terraced houses. On the drive down, Healy and Naughton had stopped to grab some lunch and, as they ate their pre-packaged sandwiches and drank their takeaway coffee, rain hitting their parked car in a relentless salvo, they laid out what they had.
‘So, first, we’ve got Thomas Coventry,’ Naughton said. ‘He disappears and then his business account is cleaned out to the tune of twenty grand. There’s nothing at his house except for a piece of broken tooth – which may or may not be relevant to this.’
‘It is,’ Healy said through a mouthful of sandwich.
‘We can’t prove it.’
‘No, we can’t, but we will. What else?’
‘Marie Havendish: the woman Coventry was seeing for six months, who now appears not to exist at all, anywhere, ever. Whatever her real name and identity, she rented a house in Tottenham for the same period of time she dated Coventry, and the rental on that house came to an end’ – sandwich propped between her lips, she flipped through the pages of her notebook – ‘six days after Coventry vanishes into the ether.’
‘A piece of timing that is far too coincidental.’
‘Far too coincidental,’ Naughton echoed.
‘And then there’s mystery-guest number three.’
‘Cara Coben.’ Naughton paused again and turned back in her notebook to the information she’d added right at the start of the case, when she’d spoken to Coben. ‘I don’t have much on her, I’ll be honest. Forty-two, pissed off with her ex-husband, in the middle of divorcing him. I wonder, legally, how she was set at the point that our guy disappeared. What I mean is, they haven’t divorced – so what then?’
‘You mean, does she inherit his estate if he dies?’
Naughton shrugged. ‘It’s worth looking into.’
‘Make some calls, find out. If that is the case, it begs the question as to why she hasn’t done something with Coventry’s house. Why leave it there, empty, collecting dust, when she could put it on the market, or rent it out and make some money?’
‘Maybe she’s just being cautious.’
‘It’s possible.’
‘It’s only been six months since Coventry disappeared: if she sold the place off the bat, it might look suspicious. If it sits there for a while, no one looks twice at her.’
‘Or she could be innocent in all of this.’
Naughton nodded. ‘She could be.’
But they both acknowledged the same thing.
Even if she was, something was off.
Healy knocked twice on Cara Coben’s front door while Naughton stayed in the car, making a call to Coben’s solicitor. To his left was a bay window. He took a step back so he could see in. Light reflected off the glass, despite the rain, but he could see enough: part of a sofa, a jumper draped over one of the arms; a coffee table with an open laptop on it; some papers next to that, a mobile phone, a mug, an empty plate.
She was home.
He knocked again, harder, and glanced at Naughton. She was speaking but, when their gaze met, she rolled her eyes at him. Healy suspected she wasn’t getting much joy out of Coben’s solicitor, which wasn’t surprising: the solicitor wouldn’t be under any obligation to tell them anything until Naughton came back with a warrant.
Movement beyond the door.
Healy watched as a shape formed in the door’s single frosted-glass panel, and then, right on cue, he heard Naughton getting out of the car.
‘Nothing?’ Healy said, keeping his eyes on the door.
‘We’ll need a warrant,’ Naughton confirmed as she fell into line next to him, her attention fixed on the same shape in the glass. They could see a distorted version of a face now: enough to make an identification. ‘Looks like her,’ Naughton whispered.
Cara Coben opened the door.
She was an attractive woman, with a short black bob and high, sculpted cheekbones. Healy wondered for a moment if she’d had work done, because the lines of her face seemed almost unnaturally perfect, but when she spoke, it was with no restriction, no sense anything on her had been carved, filled or moved.
‘Ms Coben?’ Healy asked.
‘Yes.’ She looked between them. ‘Can I help you?’
He showed her his warrant card.
‘I’m Detective Inspector Healy, this is DC Naughton. We were wondering if it might be possible to speak to you, perhaps inside.’ He gestured to the rain, which was still falling in a fine drizzle. ‘It’s not such a great day to be out here.’
‘What’s this about?’
She didn’t seem fierce exactly, and her response wasn’t aggressive, but she had a definite hardness, a barrier, built close to the surface. Perhaps that’s what happens when you spend three miserable years married to a prick like Thomas Coventry.
‘It’s about your ex-husband.’
Her expression changed, although it was hard to say into what. Healy studied her and didn’t know if she was surprised at the mention of Coventry – or panicked.
‘Have you found him?’ she asked.
‘No, ma’am. Maybe it’s better if we talk inside.’
She didn’t concede any ground for a moment, just looked between them both, but then she retreated, pulling the door the whole way back, and invited them inside.
They moved through to the living room.
‘Did you want something to drink?’ Coben asked.
‘A cuppa would be great, thank you.’
She asked how they took it, snapped the lid of her laptop shut, then vanished into the kitchen. Once she was gone, Healy took a sidestep closer to Naughton and said quietly, ‘This is your show. You know this case the best. You ask the questions.’
‘Thanks, Boss.’
He saw a flicker of relief in Naughton’s face. She was a tough cop, a good cop, but even strong personalities like Rosa Naughton sometimes had doubts. And, as she and Healy had been chasing leads today, following fractional clues to a destination they couldn’t see, and didn’t even know if it was possible to reach, those doubts had begun to feel overwhelming. But they were edging closer to something here – both of them could feel it – and, as Coben returned to the living room, Healy could see Rosa physically change: her shoulders rose a little, her chest puffed out, she looked more confident. It gave him a brief frisson of pleasure to witness and in his head he saw Leanne again: not the closed seventeen-year-old who’d sat at the breakfast table that morning but the much younger girl who he could always find a way to comfort.
Coben put two mugs of tea down on to the coffee table and perched on the edge of one of the sofas. Naughton sat on the other. Healy remained standing for a moment, looking across the living room to the patio doors: beyond the back of the garden, on the other side of the boundary fence, was an art deco swimming pool, long since closed down. He could see its main, red-brick tower, with three long, vertical windows embedded in it, the letters of its name – CANNING TOWN PUBLIC BATHS – punctured and broken at the apex of the glass. The canopy, reaching out above the entrance and partly collapsed, still had We’re Open Today! printed on it, even though it must have been at least a decade since that was true. The whole thing was cordoned off behind ten-foot barricades.
‘As DI Healy said,’ Naughton started, bringing Healy back to the room, ‘we’re looking into the disappearance of your ex-husband, Thomas Coventry. I spoke to you six months ago, when this case first landed on my desk, and now I’d just like –’
‘Why now?’
Naughton paused, looking at Coben.
‘Why look for him now?’ Coben repeated. ‘I mean, he’s been missing six months already and you couldn’t find him back in July, so why bother looking for him again?’
‘You wouldn’t like to know where he is?’
‘I’m curious, sure, but Tom was a total bastard. I hated him. He treated me like shit the entire time we were married. So, yeah, there are days when I wonder what happened – but that’s it. I wonder. I don’t pine for him and I definitely don’t want him back. My life’s been a hundred times better since he fell off the map.’
‘So you wouldn’t care if he was dead?’
‘Is he dead?’
‘Well, he’s been missing six months.’
Coben paused for a moment, looking between Naughton and Healy, and then her mouth formed an O. ‘I see what’s going on here. You think I had something to do with him going missing, don’t you?’ She shook her head. ‘Believe me, there were a lot of times during our marriage where I gave serious thought to jamming a crowbar into his skull. I’m not going to sit here and pretend it didn’t cross my mind. He made me miserable. He hurt me, he taunted me, belittled me. He was an awful human being.’
‘Was he physically violent?’ Naughton asked.
For the first time, Coben looked less certain of herself, as if she hated the idea of going back. ‘Yes,’ she said finally, her voice shorn of its confidence. ‘He would push me around. I fractured my wrist once when he shoved me out of the door at the back of that house in Barking. I broke my fingers when I tried to shield my face from a punch. He was a violent piece of shit. But the physical stuff, that was really just the sideshow: what really got him off was playing with my head. Gaslighting, I guess they call it now.’ She was finding her feet again, showing the same assurance they’d been met with when Healy and Naughton had first arrived. ‘That was how he pinned me down and kept me in place: not with his hands, but his words.’ She gestured to the laptop on the coffee table. ‘I work now, just a boring admin job, but I love it. When I was with Tom, he wouldn’t let me. He wouldn’t let me do anything. I was a prisoner.’
‘A literal prisoner?’
‘I might as well have been. He locked me in when he was out, and I didn’t have any keys to the house. He disconnected the phone and the Internet. I had no mobile. Before I met Tom, I used to work in advertising – I was bloody good at it too – but by the time I finally found the courage to leave him, I’d been unemployed for a year and a half. I’d completely separated myself from my friends and family, to the extent I didn’t even talk to my mum any more. So was I a prisoner? Absolutely I was.’
As Naughton finished making some notes, Healy looked out at the garden again, at the public baths beyond the back wall. It felt like something had registered with him but he couldn’t figure out what. He wandered across the living room to the patio doors and took in the garden again, trying to grasp at a thread he couldn’t see. Was it something out there?
He looked at Cara Coben. Or is it her?
‘You ran an AA group, didn’t you?’ Naughton asked. ‘In the Parkland Community Centre?’
Coben looked surprised, slightly thrown.
‘Ms Coben?’ Naughton prompted.
‘Yes,’ Coben said. ‘Yes, I ran that group.’
‘How come Mr Coventry let you go out and do that?’
‘Because we were both recovering alcoholics,’ Coben said, ‘that’s how we met; and because the first year of our marriage, it wasn’t as bad. He wasn’t the total psycho back then that he’d turned into by the end. When we first got together, believe it or not, he was actually quite sweet. He told me he ran an import-export business and I believed him. That sounds naive now, but he had the gift of the gab; he could talk you into trusting him on anything, so even when I got the sniff of something – that maybe he was into drugs, stolen goods, that sort of thing – he always had some story and it always sounded plausible. So, yeah, we met through an AA group in Beckton. He had a warehouse down that way – so he was always in the area – and I used to live nearby.’
Healy glanced at Naughton and could see, from the notes that she was making, that she’d connected the dots, same as he had: Marie Havendish had told Naughton, in their original interview six months ago, that she’d met Coventry in a coffee shop in Beckton. That was after the split with Cara Coben, but if Coventry was always in the area – at his warehouse – it might explain how Havendish knew where to find him.
But not why she’d targeted him.
Turning his back on Coben for a second, disguising what he was doing, Healy got out his phone and sent a quick text to Rosa.
Did you check the warehouse?
Her phone beeped a couple of seconds later. She asked Coben to give her a few moments, checked who the sender was, read the text, then fired off a quick response.
Healy’s handset was set to silent so made no sound as her reply came through.
Yes. Found stolen goods but nothing re: disappearance.
‘Sorry,’ Naughton said. ‘Please, continue.’
‘There’s not much more to say,’ Coben went on. ‘Long story short, I eventually ended up running the AA group in Hackney, so obviously we both went to that one. Like I said, he was basically fine in that first year of our marriage, so we went on like that for a while, and then it was decided that our group should merge with another small group in Bethnal Green to create something bigger. I went to the first few at the place on Brick Lane but didn’t like it as much. I always preferred the group when there was less people, and I liked running it, which I didn’t get to do there – plus, Tom had started boozing again by that time, so he didn’t give a shit about coming along, or supporting me. In fact, he didn’t want me going at all, to that, to anything. When he took up the drink again, that was when it started up – all the shit, the cruelty, the pain he would inflict on me. I stopped going to meetings but I’ve never touched a drop of alcohol, even when I was in the middle of it all, unable to leave my own house. Tom? He was on it for most of our second year together, and every day for the final twelve months.’ She stopped, a little beaten down now. ‘People said to me after the split, before that arsehole vanished into thin air, “Why don’t you go to the police and tell them what happened? He deserves to be punished for what he did to you” – but I don’t want that. I’ve got some semblance of a life back now, I see my family. I just need to move on – and every day that I don’t see Tom’s face? Believe me, that’s a good day.’
