by Tim Weaver
26
At 1 a.m., unable to drop off, I padded through to the living room, picked up the book again, grabbed my notepad and pen, and returned to bed. For the very first time, I began reading the book properly. As rain stopped and started again, as the moon first broke through the clouds and then returned to darkness, I slowly moved through the history of Wapping Grand Pier. By 3 a.m., 101 pages into the 284, I could feel myself losing concentration, tiredness kicking in, so I set it down.
I woke again at six, tired, drained.
Making my way through to the kitchen, I put on some coffee and watched as, next door, Andrew and Nicola left their house, armed with suitcases for a weekend away, and then I headed back into the bedroom.
Picking up where I’d left off the night before, I reread the account of how Arnold Goldman bought Wapping Grand Pier in 1967. Carla Stourcroft’s narrative was ultra-dry, but I tried to keep focused as she talked about the expansion of the Goldman empire – to Las Vegas, Australia’s Gold Coast, even to a casino on Brompton Road in London – and then returned to the subject of the pier. After an hour, I glanced at my notepad, saw it was empty, and moved to the living room – a few brave shafts of sunlight puncturing the glass on the living-room windows – hoping a change of position might give me a fresh perspective. But, as I kept on turning the pages, getting further and further into the book, I found nothing of use in the long, rambling accounts of the pier’s last years on the river. In the Epilogue, it talked about the sale of the Ferris wheel to a Norfolk pier, and the ‘Spectacular Mirror Maze’ and Victorian penny arcade being sold to Rook’s Head, the same company that had then bought the entire site from Goldman in 2001, eight years after it had closed. Shortly after that, the book ended.
My pad empty, my major questions still hanging, I sat there staring at the cover again and a part of me began to rebel. The book was irrelevant. It was random. It meant nothing to Healy. It was an artifact from whoever had occupied the space beneath Highdale before him. Yet, though I could give voice to all those things, though I looked at my pad and worried that I’d found nothing – even on a detailed read-through – I couldn’t let go of the idea that the book represented something more. Its being there, next to the body of a man who rarely read, or showed any interest in history, didn’t sit right with me.
I went and grabbed my laptop.
Feeling like I knew everything there was to know about Arnold Goldman, I instead put in a search for Rook’s Head. A little surprisingly, it didn’t have an official corporate website, but its name brought up several related articles.
One was an interview on the website Business UK with a man called Gary Cabot, who I found out was the founder of Rook’s Head. The other was a link to the site for Wapping Wonderland and Museum, a place I’d never heard of, but which seemed to be a hybrid of amusement arcade and historical repository, built inside an old paper mill that lay on the banks of the Thames, directly behind the Grand Pier itself.
The design of the site was pretty clunky, a little ugly – and when I clicked on a picture gallery, I realized it was fairly reflective of the museum itself.
Like Goldman’s original Wapping Pier, Cabot’s Wonderland had taken its theme as Victorian and Edwardian Britain, the interior of the mill dominated by old signage, its staff dressed in slightly amateurish costumes, the corridors lined with stalls set under period typography; but the effect was rather spoilt by what they were selling: cans of fizzy drinks, disposable cameras, a raft of cheap plastic that normally cluttered up claw machines in modern arcades. Under one picture in the gallery section, a caption confirmed that Wonderland’s penny arcade was ‘the biggest Victorian amusement arcade in the UK, including seventy-two machines rescued and restored from the original Wapping Grand Pier’.
There was a café and a museum – where black-and-white photos formed a timeline across walls, detailing the history of Wapping Grand Pier, the paper mill, and the opening of Wapping Wonderland – and a shop as well. But the truth was, while the paper mill had a beautiful English baroque exterior, and the location was interesting, inside Cabot was running something scruffy and low rent.
I backed out and went to the profile piece on him in Business UK. It was a year old. At the top was a photograph of Cabot, taken next to the main entrance of the mill, WONDERLAND in bright red lettering behind him, alongside a ladder of four signs, each one promising something different: Journey back to the 19th century! Spend old money in the UK ’s largest penny arcade! Lose your mind in the Spectacular Mirror Maze! Read the incredible history of Wapping Grand Pier! Around that, the walls were adorned with reproductions of old Victorian adverts for tonics and powders, soaps, cocoa and cigarettes.
Cabot himself was in his early sixties, had thin, greying hair, and thick arms resting on a paunch. He had the slightly dishevelled look of a man for whom success still came as a surprise: his beard was ragged along the jaw, even patchy in places, his shirt too big for him, his hands marked by grease. He was the antithesis of a figurehead, a self-made success story that had never wanted to make the leap from shop floor to boardroom, and – given his age now – probably never would. Beneath the picture, a caption read: Cabot was described as a ‘shabby Richard Branson’ by one national newspaper, but he takes it all in his stride: ‘I started off life repairing things and I still do, so why should I change just because I have more money?’
About halfway down was a brief history of Rook’s Head. It described how Cabot had left school in 1967 to train as a mechanic at the garage his father, Joseph, owned while, at the same time, beginning a lifelong obsession for the penny arcade games on Wapping Grand Pier. Because of that, and ‘being in the right place at the right time’, Cabot also started a side line, repairing broken arcade machines for Arnold Goldman.
‘Penny arcades were all but gone by the late 1970s,’ Cabot says. ‘It was all this soulless electronic stuff. But Mr Goldman had seventy-two machines on Wapping Pier, some from as far back as the 1880s, so I was still doing that for him until it closed in 1993 – oiling them, polishing them, staining them, ensuring mechanisms worked as they should. When the pier closed, he offered the entire stock to me for an excellent price, and later I took the mirror maze too. In 2001, the year I opened Wonderland in the paper mill next to the pier, Mr Goldman offered me the original pier itself. I bit his hand off. I planned to reopen it once I got Wonderland off the ground, but the costs have always been prohibitive. So, for now, I keep it as a piece of history; one that no one else can touch as long as I’m the one that owns it.’
It was getting harder than ever to see what connection Healy could have made to any of this. Was this really what had mattered to him at the end? The story of an American billionaire, who built, closed and then sold a pier – and the local boy done good, who took it on from him and opened a bargain-basement museum in an adjacent paper mill? I sat there, eyes on the picture of Cabot, and knew I had to dig out some sort of answer, however insignificant it turned out to be. If I didn’t, the incongruity of the book, and the disconnection between the museum and Healy, would continue to play on my mind. It would eat away at me. I worried that it might stop me from sleeping properly – and not just in the coming days.
For weeks, for months.
For years.
But, even deeper down, something else worried me more than all of this: that without knowing what Healy had found within the pages of the book, I might not ever be able to shake an uncertainty that had been shadowing me since the funeral – that there might be an element of truth in what Phillips and Davidson had said to me.
That I was the reason Healy had killed himself.
That all of this was my fault.
27
As I headed past Ealing Common in the car, rain in the air, traffic slow along Gunnersbury Avenue, my phone started buzzing across the passenger seat. I thought about not answering, my head full of static, already focused on the museum at Wapping and my plan once I got there – but then I saw who it was.
Annabel.
I hit Answer. ‘Hey sweetheart.’
‘Hi,’ she replied. ‘How are you?’
‘Pretty good. I thought you had your weekend workshop today.’
‘Just finished.’
‘Ah, right. How did it go?’
‘Good. The Saturday morning kids are my favourite bunch.’
I looked out at the northern fringes of the Common, oak and horse chestnut trees swaying gently in the breeze. On the other end of the line there was a brief silence, as if Annabel wanted to say something but wasn’t sure how to articulate it.
‘Is everything all right?’ I asked.
‘I just …’ A pause. ‘I just wanted to make sure you were okay.’
It took me a couple of seconds to catch up, and then I realized what she was talking about: Healy. His death. His funeral. I felt a swell of emotion for her then at this small act of kindness, and with it, a flicker of recognition of what it was like to have someone looking out for you. It was the sort of call Derryn would have made to me, my parents before that. And while what I felt for Annabel was different from both – more protective; in its own way, more daunting – I liked how it returned me to the points in my history when I’d been at my happiest.
‘I’m doing okay,’ I said to her.
‘How did the funeral go?’
I thought of the service, of being cornered by Phillips and Davidson, of my argument with Craw, and said, ‘As well as can be expected, I guess.’
‘I’m sorry I couldn’t make it.’
‘I didn’t expect you to.’
‘I know. I wanted to be there to support you. You’ve told me about Healy before. I know you two weren’t close exactly, but that doesn’t make it easier.’
‘That’s really good of you, Belle.’
Finally, the heavens opened, rain hammering against the windscreen and roof. The signal faded in and out a little, and when Annabel returned, it was halfway through a sentence: ‘ … you working on next?’
‘What was that?’
‘What case are you working on next?’
I went to answer and then stopped myself.
What was I working on?
I wasn’t sure what the answer was, perhaps because I didn’t recognize the DNA of what I was doing: since I’d sat down with Healy in a Hammersmith café nearly ten months ago, no one else had asked for my help in finding the man who murdered the Clarks, no fee had been agreed, there had been no interviews with relatives, no recollections, no time spent in the rooms of their house. If this was a missing persons case, it was unique, one where I already knew how the pursuit ended. No one was coming home alive. Everyone was dead. There was no happy ending.
The only mystery was the motive.
And who did it.
Perhaps that was it. Perhaps that was the thing that was lost in all of this. Why that family? Why would anyone kill two innocent children in their beds?
Reason was what was missing.
The killer was what was missing.
Ten minutes later, as the traffic began to break up and I headed east towards Wapping, I was still thinking about that, the hum of the car helping me gather myself. The more I learned, the more anger I felt at the death of the family, the death of a cop unable to extricate himself from their suffering, and the impact that had resonated through to countless other lives: the family’s neighbours at the flats, the parents at the girls’ school, the kids the twins had sat alongside in lessons, Gemma, her two sons, even Craw. It was a ripple on a lake, moving across the surface of the water, all the way to shore. Some were more affected than others, but death was nothing if not seismic: it crazed and ruptured, and then the innocent fell through the cracks.
By the time I got to Wapping, my resolve had hardened even further. This wasn’t the type of case I specialized in, but I was going to get answers all the same. I was going to bring home the reasons like I brought home the missing. And I was going to do it for everyone who had fallen along the way.
Gail Clark.
April and Abigail.
Healy.
Tom
1 day, 23 hours, 11 minutes before
The pub was on the river. There were eighteen of them, tucked into a dingy corner, music playing from speakers directly above their heads. He didn’t know everybody, but he knew enough of them: they were all men, all part of the way to being drunk – or already there. One of them was telling a story he’d heard – or, perhaps, made up – about one of the girls at work being bisexual, while a conversation was being held in parallel, at the other end of the table, about the brand-new football season.
Mal sat there in silence, drifting between both conversations but not really taking part, and after finishing his drink told a couple of them he was heading out for a cigarette. It was a Saturday night, so the pub was packed, and he had to negotiate his way through countless clumps of people to get to the exit. By the time he finally hit the street, the night clear and warm, he was hot, tired and on edge.
The cigarette calmed him down, and as he watched people pass on his side of the road, on the other side of the river, he thought of Gail and the girls, of how they’d probably all be asleep now. The girls went to bed at seven-thirty every night, like clockwork. Gail was a big believer in routine. She tended to follow on at about ten, half past, sometimes earlier. She was much more of a morning person than him. He’d always liked the night, felt more alive then, but since his insomnia, his bad dreams, he’d started to find the darkness less appealing. These days, as he watched Gail doze off on the sofa in the middle of a film, or listened to the soft purr of her breathing while a football match was on, he just wanted to be able to do the same.
‘Too busy for you in there, Mal?’
He turned. It was one of the men from the group, a guy called Tom Ruddy. He’d known Tom for a long time, their histories entwined, first through work and then through a moment, three years before, when they’d both been at the same family charity event and one of Tom’s kids had almost drowned in a lake. Mal had been the one who had pulled Tom’s boy out of the water that day, dragged him up on to the shore, given him CPR, breathed air into his lungs. He’d saved the kid’s life, and understandably it had never been forgotten by Tom, his wife or their family.
He’d never regretted saving the boy, not for one second, but sometimes he’d regretted the echoes it had left: Tom became different after that day, retentive, clingy, his gratitude manifesting as a need to be close, to be complimentary, to buy the first round of drinks, to offer to help even if help wasn’t needed or wanted. And slowly, over three years, it had begun to annoy Mal, to niggle at him. It had got to the stage where he would honestly have rather gone back to the bad old days before the incident, when Tom used to be just like the other guys in the pub: bawdy and masculine, full of moronic stories about things that probably weren’t true.
‘Those stories always sound better after six pints,’ Tom said.
Mal grunted a response and continued smoking. He would have offered Tom a cigarette, but he didn’t smoke. Tom wasn’t out here because he was dying for a fag, he was out here because his son had been pulled out of a lake, lungs full of water.
‘How are things going with Gail?’
He looked at Tom. ‘Good.’
‘The girls okay?’
‘They’re good, yeah.’
They stood in silence for a moment, watching the crowds. After a while, he started to feel guilty about not asking after Tom’s family, after his wife and boys, but he knew – whatever approach he made, however he phrased the question – it would lead back to that day at the lake, and then he’d feel the suffocation of Tom’s gratitude again. Tom would start thanking him, and that would aggravate him.
‘How’s work?’ Tom asked.
‘Pretty good.’
‘Busy?’
He shrugged. ‘Usual.’
‘You still working at the same place?’
Same place as every other time you’ve asked over th
e past three years, Mal thought to himself. Out loud, he said: ‘Yeah. The life of a delivery driver isn’t very exciting, I’m afraid, so if you’re looking for juicy stories, I’m not really your man.’
‘Delivery driver?’
He frowned. ‘Yeah.’
Tom pursed his lips, as if puzzled.
‘Is there a problem?’
Tom started shaking his head, the frown falling away. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s good that you’re busy. It’s important to have full days, I think, otherwise work starts to drag. We’ve just taken on three people at our place, which was definitely needed. I guess the thing with what I do is that people always die, so we always have work.’
He looked at Tom: there was a half-smile on his face, which quickly faded as he realized the irony in his off-the-cuff remark. Three years ago, his son had almost died too. Three years ago, Tom could have been perched on a stool at his desk, filling out paperwork for his own boy.
‘I guess I was just lucky,’ Tom said.
Here it comes, Mal thought.
‘That you were there for Jonah.’
He nodded at Tom.
‘We’re all just so grateful, every day, that you –’
‘You don’t have to thank me again, Tom,’ he said, holding up a hand. ‘I did what I did, I would do it again, but you don’t have to thank me any more. It’s done.’
They landed back at Heathrow late the next day, all of them a little worse for wear. The weekend had been short, but the drinking felt like it had gone on for weeks. Now it was time to return to their responsibilities: wives, kids, work, mortgages.
‘You got much on this week?’
He’d sat next to Tom on the flight back. As they waited for the doors of the plane to open, he looked out at the darkness, lights blinking next to the runway, the glow from the terminal building revealing people working in the shadows beneath.
‘I’ve got tomorrow off.’
Tom rolled his eyes. ‘Lucky bastard.’