What Remains by Tim Weaver

had led me through the shadows, as I’d buried my wife, mourned her loss and struggled to come out the other side.
    I didn’t want to lose that.
    But mostly it was something much smaller and more personal: it was the fact that, even after almost two years, she still didn’t call me anything. I didn’t expect her to call me Dad because, for most of her life, someone else had been that person to her. But she didn’t even call me David.We were caught somewhere in between the memories of her surrogate family and the reality of who I was to her now.
    I was her father.
    Just one without a name.
    I went to bed straight after, exhausted, worn down, and lay on top of the duvet, looking out at the shadows in the corners of the room. Moonlight escaped in through the open window, casting a pale glow across the ceiling, the air in the room hot and still, the world beyond the house as quiet as a tomb. I sweated so much, the bed became damp, but it wasn’t the unseasonable heat that was doing it, it was what was filling my head: Healy, where he might be, the words he’d written in the letter, that last conversation we’d had.
    I didn’t sleep all night.
    Things only got worse from there.

16
    At 6 a.m., I got up and went for a run, beginning in darkness and ending in bright sunlight, and then sat at the counter in the kitchen as my neighbours went off to work together. At eight, I re-watched the video of Healy at the press conference, and at nine, the postman finally came up my drive, holding a brown A4 envelope.
    The murder file.
    The missing persons report.
    I took them through to the decking at the back, along with my third coffee of the morning. There was no note from Tasker inside, no hint as to who’d sent me the printouts, but that was pretty standard. Normally he’d send a separate email to ensure I’d received what I’d asked for, keeping his language ambiguous.
    I’d check for that later.
    I started with the missing persons report, an official police photograph of Healy on the first page. He was in uniform, the insignia of an inspector on his shoulder, making the photo at least five years old. He looked marginally younger, but not much: a little more hair, more colour in his cheeks. He was carrying plenty of bulk, and there were traces of a shaving rash above his shirt collar. I recalled he’d had a similar rash, in a similar place, one night at the motel bar.
    I knew most of his personal details already, so skippedpast those, on to the next page where the report had been filed with PC Miriam Davis at Barnet.
    Gemma’s statement began with a brief history of their marriage. She was pretty kind to Healy to start with: they got married in 1986, when they were both in their early twenties, and had bought a house in St Albans – ‘a total wreck, but Colm worked so hard on it for us’ – and then Ciaran was born two years later. Eighteen months after that, Leanne came along, and then two years later, Liam. But as the statement went on, the tone of it slowly began to change, and the turbulent later days of their marriage cast a pall across Gemma’s descriptions of Healy.
    Her account of how he had changed, especially in the days and weeks after he found April and Abigail, echoed much of what she’d told me the night before, and after they separated in 2011, she said they could go months without speaking to each other face-to-face, communicating only via email and text.
PC DAVIS : Why was that?
GEMMA : I couldn’t bear to look at him.
PC DAVIS : Why?
GEMMA : I think, after Leanne died, something got lost between us. I had nothing to say any more. But it wasn’t just that. He’d ruined our marriage way before then. That case with the twins, that completely messed him up. I mean, I understood why it got to him. They were eight years old. Them, their mother, it was all so senseless. But Colm worked cases like that every day of his life, and they’d never got to him like that before.
PC DAVIS : So why did this