Never Coming Back Read Online Free PDF

what are you suggesting?”
    â€œMaybe it wasn’t the second time he’d been down there,” Healy said. “Maybe it was the third, or the fourth, or—”
    â€œThanks, Mr. Healy.”
    Rocastle didn’t write anything down.
    Healy eyed him. “You spoken to him?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œAnd 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.
    â€œI 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.
    â€œHow long have you lived here?” Rocastle asked.
    â€œFour months.”
    â€œYou 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.”
    â€œMetaphorically or literally?”
    â€œBoth.”
    â€œYou fall out with someone at the Met?”
    â€œI 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?”
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œYou 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.”
    â€œA friend?”
    â€œI don’t have many friends.”
    â€œAn acquaintance, then?”
    â€œWhat’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.
    â€œColm?”
    He looked at Rocastle. “David Raker.”
    â€œSorry?”
    â€œThat’s whose house it is.”

6
    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