by Tim Weaver
‘Mr Raker,’ he said, ‘what is it I can do for you?’
I looked from him to his father, to East standing off to my left. This wasn’t exactly an ideal set-up for an interview, via Skype and surrounded by onlookers. Luckily, Cabot Jr seemed to pick up on it, even from three thousand miles away.
‘Tell you what,’ he said, looking at his watch, ‘my flight back to London is at 2 a.m. Don’t ask me why Emirates have to keep such unsociable hours, but that’s the flight time.’ He shrugged, smiled. ‘I’ll be back at 6 a.m. London time, so should be around tomorrow afternoon. I’d be happy to catch up then – as long as you can put up with me being a little tired. I don’t tend to relax much on planes.’
‘That sounds fantastic,’ I said.
‘Good. Get Calvin to give you my numbers.’
‘I will do. I’ll call you tomorrow afternoon.’
‘Perfect. All right, I’d better go.’
‘Travel safely, son,’ Joseph Cabot said.
‘I will do, Dad. I love you.’
‘I love you too, my boy.’
I stepped away from the conversation, out beyond the computer, feeling like I was intruding on this moment. There was a clear bond between father and son, one that made me think of my own father, a man for whom words didn’t come as easily, or outpourings of emotion – but one I’d loved nonetheless.
A second later, East had helped Joe Cabot sign off.
‘Modern technology,’ Cabot said. ‘The irony of me being able to see my son halfway around the world, but not be able to see him, definitely isn’t lost on me. So, do you work for the police, Mr Raker?’
‘David. No, I work for myself.’
‘Oh, how exciting,’ Cabot said. ‘Like Philip Marlowe?’
I smiled. ‘Something like that, sir, yes.’
‘Sometimes I think I should have been more ambitious,’ Cabot went on, but then seemed to lose the trail of his thoughts, fingers scratching at a dry patch on his right hand. ‘I spent most of my life under cars, trying to wash engine oil out of my hands, and thought that was a good career. But when I hear about my boy jetting off to Dubai, and listen to people like you, with these fascinating jobs, I think, “Joe, you really missed a trick.” But, alas, it’s a little too late for me now.’
He paused and looked down at himself, an instinctive movement that spoke of the fact that he hadn’t always been blind, but then it seemed to click that he couldn’t do that any more; that he was even incapable of being able to examine the shell he now called a body. He rubbed at his right knee again, and I heard a pop as he tried to straighten it out. When he looked up, his eyes were that same milk-white, but there was a sadness to them now.
‘Anyway,’ he said quietly, ‘I’ll let you two get on.’
I glanced at East, who leaned down to the old man. ‘I’ll call someone to come up and take you to my car, Joe. Will that be okay with you?’
‘Just get them to call me a taxi, son.’
‘I shouldn’t think we’ll be that long, will we, Mr Raker?’
East looked at me like he was attempting to catch me out, as if I might feel obliged to keep our conversation short because the old man was waiting for him.
‘I couldn’t say for sure,’ I said.
The smile fell from his face, but not from Joe Cabot’s, who appeared amused by my comeback. I’d warmed to him instantly. ‘Just call me a taxi,’ he said.
I took his hand again. ‘Nice to meet you, Mr Cabot.’
‘And you, son,’ he said.
30
Unlike Cabot’s office, Calvin East’s was a mess.
The desk was in the middle, in front of a small window, and around it, filling every space, were books, vertically, horizontally, in towers on the floors, spilling off shelves. Next to a pitching skyscraper of encyclopedias was a metal filing cabinet, but that and East’s computer were the exception; the rest was a cascade of paper.
East grabbed a chair for me from the staffroom, brought it back and set it down, then returned next door when one of the museum staff arrived for Joseph Cabot. As they helped the old man out, I realized how quiet the building was, the noise from the Thames and the streets below reduced to a low hum. All I could hear was East’s computer, purring softly, and the gentle snap of paper as pages in a book, high up on one of the shelves, were caught in the breeze from an air-conditioning grille.
When East was done, he offered me a coffee, but I told him I’d pass, keen to get going. I watched him come around and push aside a reference book with London 1600–1699 on the front.
‘So what can I help with?’ he asked, sinking into the leather chair on his side of the desk. It wheezed as it took his weight, and he began turning from left to right, its mechanism making a tiny squeak every time he changed direction.
‘You’ve got a lot of books here.’
He smiled, looking around the room. ‘London has about four thousand years of history, give or take, going all the way back to the Bronze Age. So when I’m telling people about the story of this place, about this amazing city we live in, I like to know what I’m talking about. Plus, I’m a hoarder – and I’m a collector.’
‘What do you collect?’
‘Books, paintings, antiquities. I’m fascinated by London, I’ve lived here my whole life, so my collection is centred here. Are you a fan of history, Mr Raker?’
‘As long as we learn from it.’
‘Very wise,’ he said, smiling. ‘I have no formal education, which is why I would never be considered as a curator at any other museum. Everything I’ve learned has come from these.’ He gestured at the books around his office. ‘Gary Cabot was good enough to let me be a part of this, to help shape the tours here.’
I said nothing, taking out my notepad and pen.
He studied me, as if he’d noted something in my expression; something he didn’t necessarily like. ‘You know, a lot of people look down on us here. They say this isn’t a proper museum, that we’re a seafront arcade, just one that happens to come with a big city tax band. But this place …’ He paused. ‘Do you know how many other non-coastal pleasure piers there are in this country, Mr Raker?’
‘David,’ I said, and shook my head.
‘Zero. None. Do you know how many there are in the world?’
‘No.’
‘None. Wapping Grand Pier is unique. Utterly unique. That thing out there, it’s a one-off. Whatever people’s opinion, there’ll never be another one of those.’ East seemed to glaze over for a second, eyes on the pier, thoughts somewhere else. ‘Ever since it was first built, it’s been divisive. When it went up in 1888, some said it would be a white elephant, that the money would be better spent on Wapping’s flagging maritime industry. Others said it was in completely the wrong place, the wrong part of London, that no one would come down to Wapping, this place full of growling sailors and salt-blanched warehouses. But they came. They came in their hundreds of thousands, right up until Hitler flattened it in 1940. And then they came again when Arnold Goldman finally resurrected it in 1967 – because people can see it for what it is.’
‘Unique.’
He nodded. ‘Correct.’
‘Is Gary Cabot ever going to reopen it?’
‘The pier?’ East shrugged. ‘I’m not sure. You’d have to ask him. I know he would like to, but it’s Grade II listed, which complicates things. You have all sorts of hoops to jump through – rightly, I should add – before you can make structural changes to a listed building, and that only adds to the cost. Plus it’s in a general state of disrepair, hence the warning signs at the front. For now, I think he’s just happy that it’s his name on the ownership documents, because it means he gets to make the decisions about it. After all, history does nothing if not repeat itself.’
‘With regard to what?’
He ran a hand through his hair, one side of it matted to his scalp where the rim of his top hat had pressed it flat. ‘I mean, there are people out there who wouldn’t be disappointed if th
e pier got knocked down tomorrow. Some think it’s an eyesore on the river. Some, like the police marine unit next door, say it gets in their way and stops them doing their job. Even the mayor’s on record as saying he’s not a fan of it, that it’s located too far out for tourists, and too far from a convenient Tube stop.’ He held out his hands in a What are you going to do? gesture. ‘People had problems with the pier a century ago, they’ve got problems with it now. But they can complain all they like – it’s not going anywhere.’
I picked up my pen.
His eyes flicked to my pad. ‘Anyway, I’m rambling. Sorry. It just constantly amazes me that people can be so negative about the pier, because look at it. It’s history. It’s part of the city’s DNA, its biography. We even have our own ghost!’
‘Is that right?’
East smiled. ‘The Devil of Wapping.’
Unexpectedly, he got up from his seat and looked out of the window behind his desk. He beckoned me over.
‘That bit down there,’ he said, pointing a pudgy finger at the paved area in front of the pier entrance, ‘was where they found one of his victims. The Devil had a taste for old women. He killed nine in all, and the one he left here was the oldest. Eighty-three. Anyway, when they finally caught Samuel Brown, aka “The Devil”, they hanged him here in 1674 – right where the paving slabs are now – and they say his ghost haunts this part of the river, and possibly the pier too.’ He turned to me, eyes wide, as if he’d mistaken our conversation for another part of his tour. ‘A cleaner on the pier in the ’70s said she thought she saw someone walking through the pavilion, dressed in a coat, breeches and stockings. Whoever it was had a noose around his neck.’
‘Maybe he was on a stag night.’
East smiled politely but looked hurt, as if I’d spoilt the mood, or the tour, or whatever this was. I returned to my seat and waited for him to do the same.
‘So,’ I said, ‘I was looking for some information.’
I dug around in my jacket pocket and took out a picture of Healy, setting it down on the desk in front of East. The picture was about eight years old, taken by Gemma in the garden of their house in St Albans. Different time, different life.
‘I wondered if you recognized this man?’ I asked him.
East picked up the photograph.
It was harder to see his expression now, his head slightly bowed, his eyes hidden behind the rim of the glasses. He began shaking his head. ‘No. Should I?’
‘He might have come here himself, back at the start of the year.’
‘He’s missing now?’
‘Yes,’ I said, unsure exactly why I was lying.
He looked up, Healy’s photo pinched between his thumb and forefinger, and returned his glasses to the bridge of his nose – a habit he repeated at least once every sixty seconds – his eyes fixed on me, his expression neutral. He’d crossed his legs under the desk, which tilted his body slightly to the left, and I could see one of his shirt tails had escaped the beltline on his trousers, revealing a shelf of pale white fat at his waist. I recalled, then, the photograph of him I’d seen downstairs, caught on the edges of the picture of Gary Cabot the day he had bought the pier from Arnold Goldman. Calvin East had been at least two stone lighter in 2001, but in the thirteen years since, clearly that hadn’t been the only change. That one picture of him, out there on the periphery of a celebration – nervous, intimidated – had captured something true about his personality at the time, something about his nature that was impossible to articulate, but very clearly on show. Yet here, in his early forties, that wasn’t who he was any more. Now he watched me from behind those big lenses, quiet, suddenly a little aloof, as if he was trying to do the same to me as I was doing to him: figure me out.
‘What’s this man got to do with the museum and the pier?’ he asked.
Briefly, there was a flash of something else in his face – panic? – there and then gone, and I thought again about how the years might have changed him.
Or maybe they haven’t changed him at all.
Maybe he’s just become better at disguising who he is.
‘I found a book among his belongings,’ I said. ‘A Seaside in the City: The History of Wapping Grand Pier, by Carla Stourcroft. Are you familiar with it?’
‘Yes. I’ve read it.’
‘He made some notes in the back of it.’
Another lie.
He came forward in his seat, shrugging off his jacket and unbuttoning his waistcoat. ‘Interesting. I wonder why he would be looking into the pier.’
‘That’s what I’d like to find out.’
‘I see.’ His gaze lingered on me for a second. ‘We always get people in here asking questions about historical items of interest – the pier itself, Victorian and Edwardian Britain. I mean, last week I was filling someone in on quack remedies, for example – specifically the ones that had cocaine in them.’ He laughed a little too hard. ‘Most of those remedies were outlawed by the early twentieth century, certainly by the start of the First World War.’
‘So you don’t recognize him?’
‘This man?’
‘He wasn’t one of the people you described?’
‘Described?’
‘The people you just talked about – coming in here and wanting to know about the history of this place, and of the pier.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘No, definitely not.’
I glanced at my notes. I’d written nothing down.
When I looked up again, East was out of his seat. ‘Are you sure I can’t get you a coffee? I think I’m going to make myself some fruit tea.’
‘I’m fine, thank you.’
He headed out.
I went back over the last ten minutes. There wasn’t much to go on. Scraps. Maybe not even scraps. What bugged me more than that was why I’d felt compelled to lie to him. Was it that second of panic I’d seen in his face? That brief glimpse of the cowering boy inside him, the one I was positive I saw in the picture of him downstairs?
A noise out in the corridor.
I looked over my shoulder and then got up, walking to the door of East’s office. I looked left, down towards the staffroom.
‘Mr East?’
When there was no response, I headed towards it, pausing in the doorway. It was small. A table, four chairs. A counter with a microwave, a kettle and a toaster.
No exits.
Turning, I looked back to the other end of the corridor, to the door I’d first come in. I could hear noise from the other side: a laughing sailor, the tinny sound of Amberolas, the tannoy from the maze on the next floor above.
Because the door’s ajar.
East had made a break for it.
31
I headed out into the first-floor arcade.
It was five minutes to closing time and completely empty. I looked across the tops of the machines, along the canyons of cabinets, a familiar feeling passing through me. I’d felt it out front, at the gates to the pier; I’d felt it as I’d stood here earlier, alone, surrounded by the wooden skeletons of long-forgotten machinery. A mechanical graveyard.
Movement on my left.
Feet on the stairs, heading up.
I followed, taking two steps at a time. As soon as I hit the second floor, I stopped again, looking around, trying to spot him. On the other side, the shop wasn’t manned, the girl I’d seen earlier no longer behind the counter. I could see a wall lined with T-shirts, a different Victorian advert on each. Elsewhere there were pens, erasers, plastic beakers, replica coins, doorstops, mill photographs, old maps, countless junk.
More movement.
In the mirror maze this time: in one of its panels, reflecting a point much further in, I’d seen something – a man, dark clothes – there and then gone again.
It was East.
Or was it?
My eyes darted to the shop, to the vacant till, and then out at the room behind me, the machines as perfectly aligned and as silent as rows of corn. And then, out of nowhere
, I started to feel unsteady on my feet, unsure of whether I’d actually seen anyone at all, my head thumping, a fuzz forming behind my eyes.
What the hell’s the matter with me?
Suppressing a ripple of alarm, I headed into the maze, under the warped, bleached sign, my reflection emerging on one of the panels in front of me. Ten paces in, the maze dog-legged right, although it was difficult to tell, identical panels under identical coving making it seem as if the maze went on for ever. My reflection appeared on a panel next to me, then on one in front, then on both at the same time. I stopped just short of mistaking a solid glass wall for the next part of the maze, my face inches from making an impact. At another time, I might have seen the humour in my situation, the absurdity of all of this.
But not this time.
More movement.
Ahead of me: a flash, a shadow.
I upped my pace, hands out, unsure until I was almost upon it what was a reflection and what was the next turn. I glimpsed the exit somewhere in front, then realized it wasn’t in front at all, it was behind me, and I was looking at another pane of glass. I stopped, rounded the corner, double-backing on myself, a sense of panic starting to grip me. The worse it got, the more the walls seemed to close in. Suddenly, my breathing stuttered, my knees giving out from under me.
And, like someone hitting a switch, I blacked out.
The noise of my phone brought me around.
I’d fallen forward, cracking my head against a glass panel, the ripple still passing along adjacent panes as I started to wake up. I watched the impact go on for ever, repeated over and over, as the maze reflected ahead, into infinity. The more lucid I became, the louder my phone seemed to get, still ringing on the floor next to me. I looked down at the display. It was Craw.
I ignored it.
‘Hello?’
A female voice from somewhere else.
I felt saliva spill from my lips. When I’d hit the mirror, I’d punctured something on my face, and now my blood was warm and slick against my skin.