Tom Weaver - The Dead Tracks

As we talked, she played with the St Michael pendant at her neck, occasionally glancing at the photographs of her husband looking down at us from the mantelpiece. I saw a lot of myself in her at that moment; having to remind herself over and over that the one person she could rely on, the one person she could trust most in this world, was gone for good. And as I left her house and walked to my car, I realized - after what Crane had done to her - it might be a long time before she gained enough distance to trust again.

Megan was discharged at the same time as Jill. She'd suffered bumps and bruises but the baby was fine. James and Caroline Carver picked her up at the hospital, crying among a scrum of photographers as they walked her back to the car. Soon Megan was crying too. She told them she was sorry for the secrets she'd kept, and sorry for ever believing Daniel Markham. When they got home, the tears stopped for a while as the Carvers told her everything that had happened while she'd been gone. And then they took their pregnant daughter back upstairs to her bedroom and the Carvers—James, Caroline and Megan—spent ten minutes on the edge of her bed, holding each other, while Leigh played on the floor beside them.

Megan gave birth to a baby girl a week early. They called her Faith. She wouldn't ever know her father, and - given everything he had done — maybe that was for the best. But, one day, Megan might tell her of the things she'd had to endure to bring her daughter into the world — and how it was worth every moment of the doubt and fear she'd experienced along the way.

The Healy family finally buried Leanne on 3 November. It was a big Catholic ceremony in a huge church near their home in St Albans. The Irish side of the family flew over from Cork, packing the aisles at the front, and Leanne's friends filled out the middle. I sat at the back next to Phillips, Chief Superintendent Bartholomew and a couple of other members of the task force who had helped Healy, in those first few weeks after her disappearance, to try and find Leanne.

Until the shoot-out at the woods, Healy wouldn't have wanted Phillips there, and Phillips wouldn't have come. But in the bullet Phillips had taken in the leg, and in the wounds Healy had taken in his chest, they had some common ground. As well as that, Phillips had agreed to stand as a character witness for Healy at his review hearing. It was a selfish gesture in many ways, there as a way to prevent Healy from talking publicly about everything the task force had kept suppressed. But Phillips was highly rated and it would look good for Healy to have him there. At the wake afterwards, they talked uncomfortably for a while — Phillips signed off on sick for a month; Healy indefinitely suspended pending a review by the Directorate of Professional Standards — and then Phillips hobbled away on crutches and headed back down to London.

Most of the others who'd been there with us that night weren't so lucky. Jamie Hart had spent his first three days rigged up to life support after a bullet perforated his lung and lodged in his throat. Forty-eight hours later, his wife decided to turn the machine off. Three uniformed officers had also been killed, and the paramedic died on arrival at Whitechapel. The SFO who had provided the cover for me had taken a bullet, but survived, and so had one of the dog handlers. Aron Crane might not have fired the guns, but he was responsible for a bloodbath.

When the sun started falling in the sky, I left the wake and walked back across Verulamium Park to my car. As I started the engine, I looked up and saw Gemma Healy coming across the grass towards my BMW. She was in her late forties, but wore it pretty well: dark hair, a petite frame, tiny creases funnelling out from green eyes, and a strength and assurance in her movements that suggested she'd known pain and handled it better than her husband. For a moment, I thought she was heading to the church. But then she continued towards me and waited while I buzzed the window down.

'Hello,' she said softly. She also had an Irish accent, stronger than her husband's. 'We've never met before, but I know who you are.'

I smiled. 'I'm not sure if that's a good or a bad thing.'

'It's good,' she replied, and managed a smile. 'I just wanted to thank you for what you've done. Away from my husband.' She paused, corrected herself. 'Ex husband.'

'I don't understand.'

'He needed you. He needed someone strong to rein in his excesses. I don't know what you found in that place, and I don't want to know. But I was married to Colm for long enough to know that, in order for you to get him there, in order to contain him, you would have had to have been strong enough to face down his arrogance, his anger and his resentment. And as I can tell you from personal experience, that takes some doing.'

I nodded, not entirely sure how to respond.

'So thank you,' she added quietly.

She went to walk away, and, as she did, I killed the engine. She looked back at me, brow furrowed, eyes moving back and forth across my face.

'Has he ever told you why he did it?'

She knew what I meant. Subconsciously she reached to the spot on her face that he must have struck, and brushed it with a couple of fingers. Then she shook her head.

'It wasn't the affair,' I said, and watched colour briefly fill her cheeks. 'It was the fact that he thought everyone had turned their backs on him.'

'He still shouldn't have done it.'

'I totally agree.'

'And I can't forgive him.'

I let her know that I understood that too. 'I know why you walked away from him. I even know why you did what you did. But the isolation you felt before you made that decision, that's what he felt in those last few months. That's what he felt when we were looking for your daughter. You hated him. Leanne hated him. He had a case that completely consumed him. But he bottled it up and he pushed it down, and something had to give. I'm not saying it's right, I'm just saying that, if you felt he'd turned his back on you, then I think he might have felt the same.'

She studied me, but didn't say anything.

'I'm sorry,' I said. 'This is none of my business.'

'No,' she said, and held up a hand in front of her. 'It's fine. I just… the Colm you're telling me about isn't the Colm I've come to know over the past year.'

I told her that I understood, and started up the car.

Gemma studied me, as if she was about to ask me something, but then turned on her heel and started walking away. After about five paces, she stopped and looked back at me. 'How long Does it take?' she asked gently.

I looked at her, her eyes glistening in the half-light of the evening. Healy had asked me the same question two days before, and I wondered why they would both think I had the answer. Perhaps I still carried a sadness around with me, a stain in the fabric of my skin. Or perhaps they saw faint signs of hope, of recovery. A man who had been through the darkness and was standing in the light at the other end.

You say goodbye to them eventually,' I replied, the sun disappearing beyond a copse of trees behind us. 'But, the truth is… you never let them go.'

Chapter Seventy-seven

The sound of the shower woke me at six-thirty. As I slowly stirred, I lay on my back and looked up at the ceiling, steam crawling out through the partially open bathroom door. The bed was empty and the bedroom was cold. I pulled the duvet up and rolled over, studying the photograph of Derryn on my side table. I knew every inch of her face so well: the shape of her eyes, the way her mouth turned up when she smiled, the pattern of her freckles, the curve of her body. Next to the frame was a black coffee, steam rising from inside the mug.

The shower stopped.

I sat up, sipped on the coffee and watched through the gap in the door. The noise of the shower door opening. An arm reaching to the rail for a towel. One side of a body, water droplets running down the skin, tracing the waist and the hips.