What Remains by Tim Weaver Page A

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GEMMA : I think they reminded him of our kids at that age. And I think they reminded him of a time in his life when he understood them – and they understood him back.
    Finally, in July 2013, after giving it some prolonged thought, she said she decided it was time to officially file for divorce, and went and saw her solicitor.
    Gemma told Davis that the papers were mailed to a shared house Healy was renting a room in, on the Isle of Dogs, on 23 July 2013, and she followed up with a call a couple of days later, trying to tell him why it was for the best. Over the next three months, she repeatedly tried, again and again, to get him to sign them – ‘I was basically sending him texts, begging him to sign, for both our sakes’ – telling PC Davis she had always intended to keep things as congenial as possible.
    But then, in October, Healy fell off the map.
GEMMA : My solicitor did a little digging and found out that in November Colm wasn’t living on the Isle of Dogs any more.
PC DAVIS : So where was he living?
GEMMA : I don’t know.
PC DAVIS : You couldn’t find him?
GEMMA : No. He stopped responding to my texts, my emails, didn’t call the boys again until January. He was just gone.
    But he wasn’t gone.
    He was homeless.
    He was too embarrassed to tell his family the truth, to let Gemma and the boys know that, by November 2013, the money had run out.
    He had nothing.
    Except for a phone call to his sons in January – when he was staying at the motel – as far as the rest of the world was concerned, November was the point at which Healy had vanished, at least until the letter and the divorce papers were sent to Gemma on 21 August 2014. But I’d been with him for eight days from 8 January to 15 January. It meant Craw was probably right when she’d said I was the last person to see him alive, and it meant I had some knowledge of his movements after everyone else lost his trail.
    Some, but not much.
    And, after that last phone call on 16 January, nothing at all.
    That was where Davis’s police work should have taken up some of the slack. The Met should have been trying to track Healy’s movements from November 2013, through the next ten months to 21 August 2014 – when they knew he was definitely still alive – and into early September, when things became less certain. Instead, apart from the case being referred to the Missing Persons Bureau, things had barely progressed.
    As I went through the report, I couldn’t find a single useful lead. There were no interviews, apart from the one with Gemma, and Davis had failed to locate Healy’s whereabouts, at any point, between November and the date the letter was posted. She had no witnesses, there were no bank statements or phone records attached, no evidence of emails either. Did that mean she couldn’t find a single trace of him anywhere between those dates? Thatthe only time he came up for air in that entire period was the eight days he spent in the motel?
    I’d find out for sure once Spike had got back to me, but it seemed unlikely: the Healy I knew wouldn’t have had the discipline for that, especially if he was in the middle of another spiral. Yet Davis was at more of a disadvantage than I was: she didn’t know he’d become homeless, because – when she reported him missing – Gemma had no idea either. As a result, Davis wouldn’t have thought to try to find him in hostels or emergency housing.
    His reappearance in January would have gone undetected, because I was the one who had paid for his accommodation, lent him money and organized a new phone. If he’d gone back to the streets after that, haunting the shadows of the city, the anonymity of doorways and shelters, he’d have taken the mobile I’d given him, leaving Davis trying to track him via the phone he had before that.
    So, in theory at least, because the Met weren’t aware of his new number from January, Healy could easily have drifted uncharted for months. But, in order to do that, he