Never Coming Back (4 page)

Five months ago, my heart stopped for seven minutes. I can't articulate what happened in the time I was gone, maybe because there aren't the words, but I remember it being more light than dark, like sunlight refracted through glass. When my heart started up again, the first sensation was of weight: of skin, and bone, and blood; of tendons and nerve-endings. Then came the sounds, fading in like music: the voices from the medical team, the ECG, cars passing on the street outside and, further out, doors closing and people talking.

When I opened my eyes for the first time, there was no one in the room with me. I turned on the pillow one way, then the other. A white room, green floors, blinds twisted shut at the window. Still drowsy, I drifted off to sleep again. When I woke for the second time, Healy was there, sitting next to my bed, checking his phone. He was unshaven and unkempt, tie loose, shirt tails spilling out over his trousers. He didn't notice me shift in bed, but he heard me grimace and suck in air, pain blooming in my stomach from the knife wound. As he put down his phone and leaned toward me, memories started going off like fireworks, one after the other. My parents, Derryn, the people I'd found and tracked down in the months after she'd died, and then the last of them: the man who'd tried to take my life on June 19. The one who'd left me to die.

•   •   •

I woke with a jolt. For a second I was confused, hands slick with sweat, heart thumping. But then, out of the shadows of the living room came objects and furniture I recognized, and, as I looked through the window, reality set in and I remembered where I was.

Automatically, my fingers were drawn to my stomach. The bandages had been off for a month, but through the thin cotton of the T-shirt I could feel the scar: a thick knot of hard flesh, like a barnacle clinging to a rock. Some days, deep inside my gut, it felt like I could still feel the point of the blade; a cool ache, like a memory, right in the center of my stomach. More often, though, I felt nothing; or, at least, nothing physical. The only pain that resonated was inside my head. I'd dream of crawling across the ground toward my phone; of dialing the first number I could find, anyone, any help at all; and then somewhere faintly, right on the periphery of my memories, I remembered a couple appearing,
seconds after I thought they'd walked right past me, and the woman giving me CPR. After that, it became a blur of indistinct images, flickering like a strobe, until Healy arrived. That was remarkably clear: him running toward me, flanked by paramedics.

The man who had tried to kill me had been caught a couple of weeks later. He'd left behind a trail of bodies, of which me and a cop—a man called Bartholomew, the man leading the hunt for him—were the last two. Bartholomew hadn't been as lucky as me. They'd found him just as I'd reached the hospital in the back of an ambulance, tubes coming out of me, wires connected to every muscle in my chest. While I was being operated on, he was lying dead in his home.

I'd talked countless times—to Derryn in the weeks before she finally succumbed to cancer, and to Liz who came after her—about the debt I felt for the missing; about the responsibility I put on myself to bring them back into the light. It was something I only became more certain of in the years after, when sitting down with the families was like sitting in front of a mirror. The grief they felt for the people they'd lost, the sadness, the need to dig in and cling on, I recognized all of it. And when I came back after those seven minutes, that debt and responsibility hardened and formed, and I realized that, despite everything that had happened, this was who I was.

The missing were still my life.

The beach was lit by orange street lamps, clamped to the sea wall at fifty-yard intervals, and the pale glow of the pub, its light spilling across the shingle like an overturned pot of paint. On top of a blistered red pole out front, its sign swung in the wind, making the same rusty squeak every time it returned to the center. Everything had been blanched by sea salt: walls, doors, frames, patio slabs. In the twenty-four years since I'd left, only the name had changed. When I was growing up, it had always been called The Pike—as in the fish. Now it was called The Seven Seas, presumably because the owners thought that would play better with the tourists. But in truth what would play better with the tourists was a ground-up refurbishment. From the outside it looked almost derelict, and inside it wasn't much better. Cramped and dark, it was a two-room celebration of 1970s decor, with awful, threadbare patterned carpets, faded paintwork, and countless nick-nacks stuffed into every available space as if they all needed to be filled. It was busy too. Most of the time, Tuesday evenings were one-man-and-his-dog nights, but not tonight. Tonight the whole village was out, and they were talking about the body.

I scanned the room and saw Healy seated at the back, in his usual spot, facing the room so he could see what was going on. He had two drinks in front of him, one almost finished, the other untouched. I squeezed my way through the crowd, sat down and brought the beer toward me. “Cheers,” I said, and he just nodded, his eyes fixed on someone over my shoulder. I turned and followed his gaze. He was watching a guy from the village—a trawler fisherman called Prouse—talking to a small group of men.

“Where were you?” he asked. His eyes didn't leave the man.

“When?”

“I called you earlier and told you to come down to the village hall.”

“I was in the middle of something.”

His eyes flicked back to me. “Really?”

“If that cop needs to talk to me, you told him where I live.”

“You
were
listening to what I said, right?”

“You're not a cop anymore, Healy.”

He frowned. “What's that supposed to mean?”

“It means you don't owe them anything. It's not your job to round up the suspects and throw them into the back of the van. Not for this Rocastle guy, not for anyone.”

“I know that.”

“Do you?”

He eyed me but didn't respond. He'd become more controlled in the months since I'd known him, but it was still hard for him to bite his tongue. He was used to hitting out, used to lying and misleading when he needed to, and this new life—miles away from the city, miles from his ex-wife and two boys—was new and probably, in its own way, quite daunting. This wasn't his playground. He wasn't operating from a position of strength. He'd needed to get out of London because it was suffocating him; he'd been fired, he was still mourning the loss of his daughter, and he was on the verge of doing something rash in the days before I was attacked. After I was finally released from hospital, I needed to get away too, and I owed Healy my life, at least in part. So I offered him a room in the cottage my parents had left behind for me. I never put a time frame on it—I guess because I saw us driving each other insane inside a couple of weeks—but somehow we were four months down the line and he was still here.

“Your woman called for you again,” he said, fiddling with the lid on his cigarette packet as wind pressed again at the walls of the pub. “You ever gonna call her back?”

“You seem to be handling it pretty well.”

He smirked. “That's cold.”

“It's not cold.”

“What, you saying this is you all warm and fuzzy?”

“Why are you even taking her calls?”

“Because you're not.”

I looked at him.

“She started calling me when you stopped answering your phone.” He studied me, got no answer, and finished his pint. “She's desperate. What am I supposed to do?”

“Stop taking her calls.”

“What's wrong with speaking to her?”

“This is
my
life.”

“I doubt she'll call again, anyway,” he said after a while, shrugging. He pushed the pint glass away from him. “I told her you were gone and you weren't coming back.”

“Why did you tell her that?”

“Well, that's pretty much what's happened, isn't it?”

Again, I remained silent. I'd never talked to him about the reasons Liz and I had separated, and the reasons I could never go back to her, but sometimes it felt like he'd guessed. In the days before I got stabbed, I'd started to realize she didn't understand why I did what I did, the debt I had to the missing, and I realized I couldn't face a future where all I did was fight with her about it. Healy got that part—because he was driven by the same kind of ghosts as me—but while sometimes I felt the two of us were getting somewhere, able to understand each other, at other times he'd say something to me or look at me in a certain way, and I'd see that he was still the same man I'd never fully got to grips with: full of anger and resentment and bitterness. We had an attachment, most of it unsaid, in the loss we'd suffered and the way we'd been drawn together in our working lives; and we had an emotional tie to one another too, however slight: I'd saved his life once, and he'd repaid the favor. But, mostly, Healy was a wall I couldn't break down. Part of me wondered if he thought he was helping by taking Liz's calls; the other part, perhaps the part of me that had grown to know him over the past year, thought he was doing it so he had something over me. As long as I couldn't be sure, I couldn't discuss it with him, and whatever it was we had—our connection; our friendship, if it was even that—carried on undefined.

“They reckon it's a man,” he said.

“The body?”

“Yeah.” He nodded, using his thumb and forefinger to remove a sliver of tobacco from his lips. “No decomposition, that's the thing. Or, at least, none that I could see.”

“So it's fresh.”

“Or frozen.”

“By the air temperature?”

“By a refrigerator.” He shrugged. “They didn't tell me anything. I'm just going on what I saw. No sign of decomp anywhere. It was in good condition too—seriously good—so if you want my guess I'd say someone put him on ice before he gassed up.”

If you froze a body before putrefaction kicked in, you could keep it indefinitely with few, if any, signs of decay. As long as it wasn't allowed to thaw, bacteria couldn't feed on it, and the body wouldn't break down. No gases. No acids. I watched Healy turn his empty pint glass, deep in
thought, and I could see what was going on in his head: he'd got a taste of his old life, had felt—however briefly—the buzz of a case, and now he was struggling to rein his curiosity back in. I doubted he'd be willing to watch from afar, and as that thought came to me I turned and looked back at the man he'd been studying.

“What do you want with him?” I asked.

He flicked a look at me. “Eh?”

“The one you've been watching.”

“Any idea what he does for a job?”

“He's the skipper on a fishing trawler. What's your interest in him?”

“He was the one who found the body.”

“So?”

But he didn't respond. Instead he grabbed his coat, scooped up his cigarettes and stood. He didn't like the fact that I'd second-guessed him, so now came the blank. He just remained there, stock-still, any response or emotion wiped from his face. Except I knew that look. I'd seen it many times—and it was a look that couldn't lead anywhere good.

“Back away, Healy.”

“Don't talk to me like I'm a child.”

“You know what happened last time.”

He glared at me, but he knew I was right. The reason he was down here in the first place was because he didn't know where to draw the line. “Maybe
you
should take a bit more interest in the case, then,” he said to me, removing a cigarette from its packet. “Keep your mind occupied; help the healing process.” He was being facetions now, so I didn't bother rising to the bait. He nodded in the direction of the bar. “I heard a couple of the locals talking about this village being cursed—so who knows what it could lead to?”

“Cursed?”

“Some woman and her family who used to live here.”

“What are you talking about?”

He buttoned up his coat. “I'm going for a smoke.”

The wind was dying down by the time I left the pub, but rain still swept in off the water. Fifteen minutes had passed since Healy had gone for a cigarette, and he hadn't returned. I looked along the front of the building, to where a group of smokers had gathered in the same place, underneath an overhang of thatch: three men, all of whom I recognized but didn't really know. They nodded. I nodded back. Then I looked across the beach.

On the other side of it, next to the cove, were two huge lights: one faced up the beach, lighting the way to the village hall; the other was partially obscured in the cove itself, facing the direction the body had been found. Although he'd done his share of stupid things in the past, if the police were still there Healy wasn't going to be sniffing around the crime scene. But something had got to him, which meant he probably had some sort of plan in place.

Something reckless.

“David?”

I turned. A woman emerged from the pub—gray-haired and slightly stooped, in her late sixties or early seventies—a silhouette for a moment against the brightness of the interior. Then, as she came further out into the drizzle, I remembered seeing her at the bar: she'd been sitting on one of the stools, talking to the guy who ran the butchery in the village. I hadn't paid much attention to her then, but now, as the light from the pub cast a glow across her face, something about her struck a chord with me.

“David?” she said again.

I stepped toward her. Nodded.

“Don't you remember me?”

I smiled as though I did, but the truth was, I couldn't recall where I'd seen her; whether it had been in and around the village over the past few months, or before that, when I'd been here as a boy. I'd maintained a pretty low profile since moving down from London, rarely going out, healing in isolation, so it was more likely the second.

She saved me from embarrassment: “It's me. Vera Kane.”

It came flooding back: she was the aunt of a girl I'd dated when I was in my mid-to-late teens. Emily. We'd gone out for almost eighteen
months, and then tearfully ended it when I'd got a university place in London. I took a step toward the old woman, and we moved all the way back under the thatched overhang. “Mrs. Kane. How are you?”

“I'm doing okay—for an old woman. How are you?”

“I'm well. You look good.”

“You liar,” she said, winking.

“I'm surprised I haven't seen you around.”

“Oooh, I don't live here,” she said. “I'm down in Kingsbridge. I don't come back very often because my bloody hips are agony and I've got no family here anymore. But when I heard what was going on . . .” She stopped; nodded to the beach. “Well, I've still got friends in the village and I was worried one of them might be the person that they . . .”

I followed her gaze. “Right.”

“How long have you been back?”

“Four months.”

“In your parents' old place?”

“That's right.”

She nodded. “So, I wonder who it can be?”

I glanced down at the beach again. “I don't know.”

“I thought your policeman friend might have said.”

She meant Healy. “No. Unfortunately, he didn't.”

A flicker of disappointment in her face. I understood then: she was after some fuel to take back into the pub, something fresh she could use. I didn't blame her. Knowledge was power in a village where everybody knew everything about everybody else. There was no way she could have known Healy's history, the fact that he was an ex-cop with a life as patched up as mine. She would have just seen him being led to the body by Prouse the fisherman—and then into the village hall by the investigating team for a cozy chat.

“How's Emily?” I asked.

She took a second to tune back in. “Oh, she's good, love.”

“She still local?”

“Totnes, yeah. I'm seeing her tomorrow.”

“Well, say hello to her from me.”

“I will.”

The conversation was fizzling out. “Nice to see you, Mrs. Kane.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Nice to see you too, love.”

•   •   •

The cottage had been bought by my parents when they'd started to fall out of love with the farm. When I was growing up, my dad and I used to go out shooting in a belt of woodland at the back of the property, where he'd set up targets for me to hit. I made it clear early on I wasn't interested in taking over the farm, so he started to cling to the idea of me being a marksman in the army, just like his brother had been. I didn't want to be that either, but I loved my dad and wanted to see him happy, so we compromised: whenever I was down from London, we'd go out shooting, hitting targets just like the old days.

Then, in March 2005, Mum died.

We got back from the woods, rifles under our arms, and found her slumped on a bench at the front of the farmhouse. She'd had a stroke. Dad fell apart after that. I sold the farmhouse for him, moved him into the cottage, and for a while he started to seem a little brighter. Then, in January 2006, I got a call from one of his neighbors, who'd been around to see him. He'd died quietly in the living room, looking out at the sea.

On the approach, up a narrow, winding road that took you out of the heart of the village and into the folds of the surrounding hills, I could see that same window, sitting in shadow under a sliver of slate-gray roof. Unusually for the village, which was dense, its buildings knotted together in a clump at the edge of the beach, the cottage sat alone, hemmed in by trees about seventy feet above sea level. It was why Vera Kane and the rest of the village had rarely seen me: I'd spent the first two months trying to live again.

And the following two wondering where I went next.