Vanished

82

7 July

There was only one space left in the car park, right outside the entrance. Healy swung the Vauxhall into it and killed the engine. The sun was shining, coming in over the roof of the building and in through the windscreen, and as he sat there in his shirt and tie, sleeves rolled up, jacket across the back seat, he watched the people gathered to his left.

On the radio, playing softly despite the engine being off, they were talking about how police had finally found Edwin Smart. He’d been on the run for eighteen days and had been discovered living rough in scrubland east of Glasgow. Everyone soon figured out why. After everything that had happened at Hayden Cemetery, Healy had been back to Raker’s place and been through his notes on Smart, and he saw that Smart’s father had been born in East Kilbride. If he could no longer visit the old man’s grave, maybe Smart figured the next best thing was his birthplace. The truth was, the relationship between father and son was, at points, too difficult to grasp. The father was a violent drunk, an abuser, a paedophile. The son was a killer in denial about himself, a kidnapper and torturer of men; he both loved and hated who he was, in the same way he loved and hated the man who had made him that way. In the days and weeks ahead, police and psychologists would begin to break the surface, but Healy wondered whether they’d ever be able to get at the answers within. By the time they did, if they even did, the public that was once so fascinated by the Snatcher, and the men and women at the Met who had tried to find him, would have moved on to something else.

Some other tragedy.

He turned off the radio, reached over to the back seat and grabbed his jacket, then got out of the car. Some people looked over, faces he recognized but didn’t want to talk to. He shrugged on his jacket and then stood there in the sun, enjoying the warmth for a moment and forgetting – just briefly – what he was here for. Then he noticed some of the crowd were looking past him, out towards the gates of the church, to the street beyond.

He thought of Leanne then, of how Raker had helped him find her, and a flutter of sadness took flight, like a bird escaping from its cage. And then the hearse finally pulled into view, the coffin inside it, and Healy headed into the coolness of the church.