Never Coming Back (3 page)

An hour later, Healy was sitting in the corner of the pub, a small, dark, two-room building with pebbledash walls and a thatched roof. A fire was going in the corner and locals were lining the bar, perched on stools. They all had their backs to him, which he liked, and there was no music being played or TV on—just the murmur of conversation—which he liked even more. Nothing made him more depressed than being forced to listen to some landlord's CD collection. When he looked up from the paper he was reading, he could see the regulars were all in; a mix of old sea dogs, their skin etched and weathered like the rocks on the beach, and younger couples in their thirties, part of the new money that the affluent surrounding areas had brought in. Healy was neither, but he had fitted in pretty well here by keeping himself to himself and only speaking when he was forced to.

About ten minutes later, as he sank the last of his beer, a man in his fifties entered the bar. Healy recognized him, just from having been in and around the village for the last four months, but he didn't know him. Didn't know his name, or what he did. The man was wearing a green waxed jacket—soaked through from the rain—and had wild, grubby hair, and a beard like coils of twine. As he came in, his Wellingtons slapped against the stone floor, puddles of water and mud following in his wake as he moved first to the bar, eyes scanning the locals, and then out into the middle of the room. A couple of the regulars greeted him, but the man didn't respond in any way; instead he continued looking around the bar, into the barely lit coves, where other regulars—alone, like Healy—were hunched over their drinks, either reading or just staring into space.

Then the man locked eyes with Healy.

He came over, stopping in front of the table Healy was sitting at, and stood there, rain dripping off him. The locals had all turned on their stools. There was no gentle hum of conversation anymore. Just silence.

Healy closed his newspaper. “You all right, pal?”

“You the copper?” the man said.

“Not anymore.”

“You used to be, though, right?”

Healy looked out beyond the man. All eyes were on him.

“I used to be.”

“You need to come and see this.”

“See what?”

For the first time, the man seemed to realize everyone inside the bar was listening to their conversation. He turned back to Healy. “It's better if you see it yourself.”

•   •   •

Three of them climbed up over the rocks and down toward the cove. The boy followed behind, reticence in every step, as if he were returning to a place he'd vowed never to go again. Healy followed the man who'd come to get him, and behind them both was the boy's father, still suited and booted, having just returned home from work. He'd wanted to come out here to prevent his son having to see anything more than he already had. Healy knew less than anyone. He hadn't got much out of any of the locals—many of whom he could see behind them, watching from the other side of the sea wall—but he doubted anything he was about to find was good. He'd worked murders at the Met long enough to see the connections, however small, between crimes; he knew that people handled death differently, but once you'd discovered a body—bereft of life; hollow and empty—it always left something of itself in the person who'd found it. Some held it together, some broke down, but everyone had that same look; a memory, deep and resonant, that would never fade.

When he'd left the pub, he'd told the landlord to call the police, but he and the villagers seemed reluctant, as if inviting the police in would shatter the equilibrium. Healy could understand it on some level: one of the reasons he'd come here in the first place was because he'd had enough of the city; its darkness and corruption. The people in the village had stayed here their whole lives because they'd wanted to avoid the same thing.

Healy watched as the man from the pub stepped down on to the sand of the cove, feet sinking into the shingle, the dad following in his wake. “Don't go any further!” Healy shouted to them, trying to prevent them contaminating any evidence that was down there. The rain and the wind would have damaged the scene already, but they had to preserve what they could. Healy shouted again for them to stop. This time they listened, but didn't look back, as if unwilling to cede control to Healy. Finally, alongside Healy came the boy—maybe only twelve or thirteen—his face ghostly white, his hands rolled into fists at his side, eyes fixed off to
his right, at the highest point of the cove, where something was sitting. Healy tried to get a better view of what it was, then dropped down a couple of feet to a platform gouged out of the rock. All the time, rain jagged in, almost horizontal, swirled around by the wind rolling off the sea.

Dread slithered through his stomach as he made the last jump down into the cove, and his boots started disappearing into the fine shingle. He looked at the man from the pub, then at the dad, then at the boy—cowed and frightened—waiting in the space behind them all. Waves crashed on the beach. “Stay here,” Healy said to them all, including the boy. “Don't follow me. We need to preserve whatever's here.”

He waited for a moment, watching to see whether they were paying attention, and then he started making his way toward the back of the cove. Sea spray stalked him as he moved. He climbed toward a raised platform of rock at the far end of the cove and, as he did, he got a better view of what the boy had found.

It wasn't crab bait.

He doubted the boy had even seen the whole thing: it required a level of elevation, a physical height, the boy simply wouldn't have. Healy took another step forward. The wind and the rain masked the stench of decay, but it was there, in the background; accumulating, getting worse.

I thought it was a piece of sliced meat at first
, the kid had told Healy, chewing his bottom lip as they left the pub.
I thought it had shells stuck to it
. But it wasn't shells and it wasn't sliced meat. Healy looked back to where the men and the boy were waiting. Clouds sloped over the hills either side of the beach, dark and twisted and pregnant with even heavier rain. Then the smell came again and he turned back to it, wrapped loosely in plastic, most of it—apart from an arm—washed up into the shadows of a gully.

Pale and skinny.

Bloodless.

Soon after, the police descended on the village. Healy had made the call himself, from inside the cove, and then waited for them on the main beach. He'd sent the locals back to the other side of the sea wall. The first responders found him—two uniforms with about five years' experience between them—and as he explained who he was and what he'd discovered, he saw the color drain from their faces. In this part of the world, most cops would go their whole lives without seeing a major crime scene; but for these two it had taken less than three years. He took one of them back over the rocks and down the other side to see the body while the other one stayed and called in CID and forensics. Healy pointed to where the arm snaked out from the shadows. Perched on top of the rocks, the uniform eyed it nervously for a second before nodding and retreating to the safety of the beach.

Healy followed.

Scene of crime turned up forty minutes later, forensics in tow. Inside an hour they had a tent erected as close to the cove as possible, and the SOCO—a weatherbeaten guy in his early sixties—had set up an incident room in the village hall. Techs did their best to preserve evidence, to scour the cove for what had been left behind with the body, but the whole time the wind and rain carved in across the bay. Healy watched from the sea wall with the others, until eventually a plainclothes detective came up the beach toward him, flanked by a second. Both were dressed in gray suits and police-issue raincoats.

“Can I have a word, Mr. Healy?” the older one said, a guy in his forties with prematurely silver hair and a salt and pepper beard. It was the type of question that wasn't really a question. The other one, skinny and tall and in his thirties, said nothing, just followed behind.

The inside of the village hall was small and cramped, wet footprints crisscrossing at the entrance. A trail of rubber mats had been laid out, branching off in one direction to a forensics setup, where techs had placed evidence bags under the watchful eye of a uniform; and in the other direction to a room beyond a serving hatch that had a table and four chairs in it. Everything smelled musty, of disrepair and age, and beyond the serving hatch it was worse: boiled food and furniture polish.
Healy sat down at the table and the younger detective—without even being asked—disappeared back into the hall to get them all a cup of tea.

“You've got him well trained,” Healy said.

The detective looked up, a wry smile on his face, and leaned back in his seat. “DCI Colin Rocastle,” he said, placing a hand on his chest. “That's DC Stuart McInnes.”

“Colm Healy.”

“I'm told you used to work for the Met.”

“Twenty-six years.”

“That's a long time.”

“The Met would probably say too long.”

Rocastle smiled. “You don't look retirement age.”

But Healy understood:
So, why did you leave?

“I'd just had enough.”

Rocastle nodded and looked down at his pad, dotted with rain, ink running, notes smudged. He didn't seem convinced, but he didn't say anything else. In the silence that followed, Healy almost started talking again, almost started weaving a supplementary lie, but then stopped: these were tactics he knew so well, had used every day of his life for a quarter of a century, but which—five months after he'd been fired from the police force—he'd almost become entrapped by. The long pause. The uncomfortable silence. The need of the witness, or the suspect, to fill gaps in conversation. It was Interviewing 101, part of every manual ever written on police interrogation. What bothered him wasn't the quiet between them. What bothered him was that he'd been so close to walking into the trap.

This place is making you soft.

Rocastle looked up at him, as if sensing he was turning something over, but Healy just stared him out. The lies, the half-truths, they weren't coming as easily anymore. He was out of shape and he was losing his edge.

“. . . cross the body?”

Rocastle was talking. Healy looked at him. “What?”

“How did you come across the body?”

Healy started to recount, in detail, how he'd been approached by the man in the pub, then led down to the cove, along with the boy and his father.

“The guy in the pub's a fisherman, right?” Rocastle said.

“I don't know what he does. But he had been down to the cove once already, before he came to get me. He said the boy's mother had come into the village, and he'd happened to be the first person she found.”

“You don't believe him?”

Healy shrugged. “He wasn't surprised by what we found there, as if he'd already had the time to process it. How quickly does a person go from shock to acceptance?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, his face didn't show anything when he got down there a second time. How do you think someone would react the second time they saw a corpse?”

“People process things differently.”

“It was a dead body.”

“So what are you suggesting?”

“Maybe it wasn't the second time he'd been down there,” Healy said. “Maybe it was the third, or the fourth, or—”

“Thanks, Mr. Healy.”

Rocastle didn't write anything down.

Healy eyed him. “You spoken to him?”

“Yes.”

“And what did he say?”

Rocastle placed his pen down, initially at an angle to the pad, before readjusting it so it was perfectly adjacent. Small things built a picture of someone at the start, and that one tiny movement told Healy that Rocastle liked precision, liked everything to fit together.

“I can't discuss that, Colm,” he said.

Colm
. Trying to soften the blow, one cop to another. Except Healy didn't think it was that. It was nothing more than a hunch, but he got the sense Rocastle thought the fisherman might have some other story to tell too; perhaps some other reason for having gone to the cove first. Healy, curiosity aroused, made a mental note of it.

“How long have you lived here?” Rocastle asked.

“Four months.”

“You like it?”

Healy leaned back in the old, wooden chair. It creaked under his weight, and as he moved, the dead air in the kitchen shifted and he could smell boiled food again. “Yeah,” he said. “It's nice. No one ordering me around. No one trying to stick a knife in my back.”

“Metaphorically or literally?”

“Both.”

“You fall out with someone at the Met?”

“I can't really discuss that, Colin,” Healy said, and Rocastle nodded his reply.
Touché
.

Moments later, McInnes returned with three Styrofoam cups, tea sloshing over the edges and on to his hands. He placed them down on the table. Rocastle took one and sipped from it, but his eyes never left Healy. “So why'd you choose Devon?”

“Why not?”

“You didn't have any reason?” Rocastle picked up the pen again, its nib hovering over a fresh page of the pad.

Healy shrugged. “Someone I knew has a place down here.”

“A friend?”

“I don't have many friends.”

“An acquaintance, then?”

“What's the relevance of this?”

Rocastle glanced at McInnes as the younger man sat down next to him, tea in one hand, cell phone in the other. “You know how it works,” Rocastle said. “We'll obviously need to have a chat with everyone in the village, so we can see who knows what.”

Healy took one of the Styrofoam cups.

“Colm?”

He looked at Rocastle. “David Raker.”

“Sorry?”

“That's whose house it is.”