Never Coming Back Read Online Free PDF Page B

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.
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    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.

7
    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