The Dead Tracks

Chapter Seventy-six

Three weeks later, police were still trying to unravel the lie that was Aron Crane's life: his wife, his child, his victims, his reasons. The six women he'd left floating in formalin were there for reference. He could have buried them in the ground like Milton Sykes had, but as he got closer to working on Megan, he needed to be able to refer to the problems he'd encountered during surgery, and the mistakes he'd made along the way.

To start, as had been the case when he was first arrested, he refused to talk. But he did open up a little eventually. Police brought in the best psychologist they could find and he worked some details out of Crane. Small details, like how he pushed his wife Phedra off the decking on the top of his house. Whatever his reasoning, the psychologist failed to illicit any emotion from Crane about the moment he leaned over the railings and looked down at his dead wife, pregnant with his child. Any sign he missed her, or regretted what he'd done. He buried them in the woods, and in all the time people tried chipping away at him, it proved the only chink in his armour. The only way to get him to talk. Crane may have been a wall of silence, but Phedra was the tiny hole that would never seal over.

He pleaded guilty to murdering the six women he preserved in formalin, killing Susan Markham and kidnapping Megan, Jill and Sona, but said virtually nothing during the trial, other than to confirm his name. After four days, the jury found him guilty and he was given seven life sentences, to run concurrently. I watched the news every day during that time, waiting to see an egotistical flash, or hear how he'd smiled at jurors while recounting the horrific things that he'd done. But reporters always described him as subdued, and after a while I realized - without his project, without the opportunity to move from one stage to the next — he had nothing left. When he was even incapable of expressing any regret over what he'd done to his wife and child, it was obvious there were no hidden depths to him. Nothing else to his make-up. With no control and no power, there was no Aron Crane.

After the search of the Dead Tracks was completed, a smaller forensic team went over the burial site Crane had discovered to recover what was left of the thirteen women Milton Sykes had murdered. They found twelve. The thirteenth grave had animal bones in it, but no human remains. Even before an anthropologist had got close to the bodies, I knew what their conclusions would be. Sykes knew the woods better than anyone: the tiny ravines, the trails, the clearings, the hiding places. He'd lived on its edges all his life. Crane had lucked out by finding the twelve Indian women, but inside those fifty acres, tied to the roots of the place, Jenny Truman would remain hidden. And as long as she lay hidden, maybe there would always be a feel to its paths. A sense that something was trying to get away, to claw its way out of the ground and finally find peace.

The investigation into Russian organized crime continued after Crane was sentenced, and police visited him frequently in prison in the months after, trying to build a case. No one outside the task force knew how much Crane was willing to play ball, or how much he even really knew, but I heard from a couple of people that the prison service had rolled out an unofficial protection detail on the advice of the police - to prevent Crane being got at on the inside - and that they were closer to Akim Gobulev than they'd ever been.

Maybe that was true. But I hoped, most days, the police remembered the sacrifice they'd made to get there. Six dead women, including Leanne. Three more — Megan, Sona and Jill — lucky to be alive. Susan Markham. And then Crane's own wife and child.

Eventually, I went to visit Jill at home. She still had heavy bandaging around the top of her forehead where surgeons had sewn her skin back on to her scalp. But otherwise she looked good. Minimal bruising. little visible damage. She made some coffee while I stood at the kitchen door listening to her description of the night the man she thought was Aron Crane had come for her.

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.'