by Tim Weaver
‘Hello? Is everything okay in there?’
I tried rolling on to my back, and as I did, I thought I saw a brief, blurred impression of someone in a glass panel to my left. East. Maybe someone else. But then it was gone again.
I lay there, alone, at the centre of the maze, until the girl from the shop found me a couple of seconds later. It was her voice I’d heard. She knelt down, trying to help, telling me she’d popped to the toilet while the place was quiet, which is why it had been unmanned, and returned to hear a crash from here.
I was slumped against one of the glass walls, blood running from a cut on my right cheek. She fired a series of questions at me – What happened? Are you all right? Do you want me to call a doctor for you? – and then something seemed to click and she began trying to negotiate instead, pleading with me not to tell her boss that she’d left her station unattended. I told her she didn’t need to worry and tuned her out, trying to regain my composure. But as my nerves settled and the blood began to clot, I realized something: I was dazed, in pain, disconcerted.
And I was scared.
What the hell had just happened?
I shuffled out of the maze and straight to the toilets, cleaning myself up. At my hip, I could feel a lump forming, tender and bruised. The cut on my cheek was small and manageable, but my head throbbed, a pounding bassline that made me feel woozy.
When I got back down to the ground floor of the building, there were a couple of staff milling around, one cashing up in the restaurant, one sweeping.
‘Uh, sir, it’s past closing time now,’ the older of the two said.
‘I know. Is Calvin around?’
‘He’s already gone home.’
‘You saw him leave?’
She looked at the cut on my face. ‘Yes.’
My hip was agony now, my face throbbing. Touching a finger to my cheek, I noticed the cut had opened again, a trail of blood worming towards my chin.
Dabbing at it with the sleeve of my jacket, I felt a subtle change in the spaces around me, as if the air had shifted. Looking out to the entrance, back the way I’d come, I became aware of one of the staff asking me if I was all right.
I headed for the entrance, stumbling, nauseous. Was this what exhaustion felt like? What a month of broken sleep did to you? Or was it the blow I’d taken when I’d blacked out? Was I in danger?
Was I dying?
At the bottom of the steps, I backed up against the wall of the paper mill and closed my eyes.
Calm down.
I regulated my breathing, relaxed my muscles and turned my thoughts away from my body, back to East; to where he may have gone, to how I was going to pick up his trail – and why he might run in the first place. By the time I opened my eyes again, I felt better, clearer, back in control of myself.
Forget it. Move on.
Healy’s all that matters now.
What Remains
0 days, 0 hours, 4 minutes before
It was late on Friday night, with Gail and the girls already in bed, when Tom Ruddy called Mal. He’d been dozing in front of the TV when his mobile erupted into life and started travelling across the sofa towards him. He looked down at the display, saw it was Ruddy and thought about not answering: the last time he’d seen Tom was five months ago, when they’d both ended up on the same stag weekend, and the conversation had inevitably returned to that day at the lake, when he’d rescued Tom’s son from the water.
He let it go to voicemail, picked up the remote control and started flicking through the channels. Sixty seconds later, his phone beeped again and the display revealed that Tom had left a message. He picked it up, dialling into his voicemail.
‘Hey, it’s Tom.’ It sounded like he was in a pub somewhere. ‘Sorry to call so late. Haven’t seen you for a few months, so thought I’d check in. Just, you know … seeing how things are. Uh, anyway, give me a call back sometime.’
Mal deleted the message, dropping the phone back on to the sofa.
Maybe another time, Tom.
Three hours later, he stirred, not having realized he’d dropped off to sleep in the first place. On the TV, the channel he’d been watching was now replaced by a title card telling him its programmes would return at six the next morning. When he checked his watch, he saw that it was after 3 a.m. He edged forward on the sofa, head throbbing, hands slick with sweat. He felt a little disorientated, fuzzy-headed, as if he’d woken up somewhere he didn’t know and wasn’t familiar with.
You’re tired, he thought.
Getting up, he shuffled through to the kitchen, filling up the kettle. Out of the window, on the edges of the darkness that ringed Searle House, he saw something shift in the shadows and realized it was a tree – most of which he couldn’t make out – its branches moving like the arms of a conductor as wind passed across the grass. He watched it for a while, mesmerized, its graceful actions almost keeping him pinned there, his breath fogging up the glass.
Someone was standing next to it.
Obscured by shadows.
‘Are you okay, honey?’
He jumped, turning to find Gail at the door to the kitchen, in her nightdress. She looked from him to the window, then came across to where he was standing, one arm snaking around his waist, her eyes on the view. She squeezed him and asked again if he was all right, and he reluctantly looked out to where the tree was.
But there was nothing now.
No figure.
Just the tree.
‘I’m fine,’ he said.
She took a couple of steps away from him, returning to the door, a mixture of concern and fatigue in her face. He wondered for a moment whether she looked tired because of the hour or because she was becoming frustrated with him. She’d urged him to go to the doctor months ago, after weeks of sleeplessness, after he continued to wake up – time after time – from sweat-soaked dreams about the man in the raincoat. He’d told her about the dreams to start with, but couldn’t communicate the sense of fear they brought, of foreshadowing, like a premonition playing out over and over. So he’d stopped telling her. Basically, he’d lied to her for the first time in their relationship. He told her the dreams had stopped coming, and he was feeling better, and he was sure regular sleep would return. But the truth was, he couldn’t go to a doctor – because he couldn’t explain what he felt.
‘You go to bed, sweetheart,’ he said to her.
She didn’t seem disappointed at the offer. As well as his insomnia, the twins had had colds the previous week, and they’d been up and down for five nights. Gail was short of rest just like him. The only difference was that she’d had five nights of broken sleep. He’d had five months. Maybe six. Maybe even more than that.
He couldn’t remember any more.
After she was gone, he poured himself a cup of tea and fished his cigarettes out of the drawer. Then he opened the kitchen window and lit up, looking down across the trees and pathways seventeen floors below, at the play park off to the left. His eyes drifted back to the tree, out there on its own like a lighthouse without a lamp, wind coming through its leaves again, branches shifting and rocking. He watched for movement on the pathway running parallel to it.
The man isn’t real, he thought. It’s just my insomnia.
Then, suddenly, he became aware of a noise.
A scratching sound.
He stubbed the half-smoked cigarette out in the ashtray and moved to the door of the kitchen. Silence. He checked again on the girls, and then on Gail.
She wasn’t asleep yet, and clocked his movement. ‘Are you okay?’
There was no noise now.
He smiled; a sense of relief. ‘I’m fine.’
‘Why don’t you come to bed, Mal?’
‘I will. I’ll just finish my tea.’
She returned the smile, and he felt a sudden, overwhelming love for her, for the girls too.
‘I love you, Gail,’ he said to her, and heard the tremor in his voice.
She seemed touched. ‘I love you
too, baby.’
‘I love you all so much.’
And then he heard the scratching again.
He turned away from the bedroom, looking both ways along the hall. The noise came a second time. He waited for it again, unsure of which direction it had come from. In the bedroom, Gail was calling his name now, concern in her voice, but he didn’t reply, instead trying to pinpoint the origin of the sound. In the silence of the flat, all he could hear was the hum of the television on mute, and the fridge.
Then it came again.
He turned.
It was coming from the other side of the front door.
Moving quickly, he unlatched it, turned the key in the lock and opened up. There was nothing on the other side, just the seventeenth-floor walkway, enclosed inside a monolithic tunnel of concrete. Something dripped close by, and a bulb was on the blink further down, way out of his line of sight, repainting the walkway a muted cream. He turned back, facing into the flat, and saw Gail come to the doorway of the bedroom. She had tears in her eyes. He tried to find the right words, words that would bring her comfort, reassurance that everything was okay – that he wasn’t losing it here, right in front of her eyes – but then he made a move towards her and she crossed her arms, squeezing them tight around her, protecting herself, and he realized something: she was frightened of him.
‘What the hell is wrong with me?’ he said.
She backed away from him.
‘Gail?’
A tear fell from her right eye, tracing the outline of her cheekbone, but when he tried to make another move towards her, arms out in front of him, desperately trying to bring her into him, she swivelled and headed back into the bedroom. The instant she passed the door, swallowed by shadows, a smell hit him: an awful, tangy stench, one he couldn’t place but somehow recognized. As he said Gail’s name again, the odour hit him a second time, even more powerfully than the first, filling his nose and mouth, crawling its way down his throat. A second later, he started coughing, reaching out for the nearest wall, barely able to support himself, barely able to get to Gail, the smell getting stronger and stronger as he gasped for air.
He doubled over, phlegm sticking to his throat like tar, and as he did, he noticed something: a thick trail of blood running out of Gail’s bedroom and into the hallway. As horror bloomed in his chest, the coughing subsided, and two more blood trails emerged beyond that, from the twins’ room now, moving in parallel.
‘No,’ he said. ‘No, no, no.’
‘That’s their death you can smell.’
He started, turning.
A man stood in the doorway now, blue raincoat buttoned up, dark baseball cap on, knife in his hand. He was looking down at himself, at his legs, his face obscured beneath the peak. There was blood all over his trousers, caked to the legs.
Then, finally, he looked up.
He was wearing a grey mask.
It was smooth and featureless, plain, and had a crack on the left-hand side, like a splinter in a pane of glass. Mal looked at the man in the mask, at the eye sockets, but there was nothing except black.
Only black.
‘No!’ he said again. ‘Please don’t hurt them. Don’t hurt my family.’
‘They’re not your family,’ a voice behind the mask said.
‘They’re my girls!’
‘Your girl is dead.’
Tears started to choke his words. ‘That’s my wife.’
‘Your wife left you.’
‘Don’t hurt them. Please don’t hurt them.’
‘You’re nothing to them.’
‘Please …’
‘You’re nothing to anyone, Healy.’
32
After calling Spike for a second time, I managed to find out that Calvin East lived in Bermondsey, in a tight network of new-build houses west of Southwark Park. His was a sand-coloured end terrace, an unremarkable two-up, two-down with white fascia boards and slate-coloured roof tiles. At the bottom of his road was a bricked-up former railway arch, with a studded iron bridge on top, its panels painted a bruise-coloured mauve. I drove past his house, getting a feel for the road – watching as a train moved along the bridge, the smell of diesel following in its wake – then pulled a U-turn and found a space fifty feet away.
The rain had gone, the early evening bright and clear. I inched the window down, letting air drift in, and found myself thinking of the last time I’d felt sun on my bones, of how I’d sat by a Walthamstow canal, had lunch with Craw, then agreed to look into what had happened to Healy. What if I’d said no to her that day? Would not knowing be better – or worse?
I turned my attention back to the house.
The curtains were drawn on the first floor, but not on the ground, and there were no lights on inside – or, at least, none I could see – making it hard to tell whether he was home or not. In the row of houses opposite, an old man was putting some rubbish out. Next door to East’s place, a mother was collapsing a buggy while her young son looked on. Other people came and went. The road wasn’t busy exactly, but if I had any ideas about getting out of the car and having a sniff around, it wasn’t as quiet as I needed it to be.
All I could do was wait.
An hour later, a green Citroën estate pulled into the driveway of East’s house. It was ten years old, dirty, the wheels coated in mud, the underside of the chassis plagued by rust. It stopped and then started again, inching further up the tarmac. At the end of the driveway was a garage I’d seen when I’d first arrived in the road, set back, level with the rear garden. A few seconds later, the driver switched off the engine and the interior light came on.
There was a man at the wheel, no passengers. He was balding at the crown of his skull and wearing a bright red Adidas training top. His head was slightly bowed, the soft glow of a mobile phone shining in the skin at his throat. Half a minute later, he got out of the car and locked up.
I had a better view of him now: wispy, untidy hair, presumably because he was in denial about the fact that he was balding; mid forties, tall and skinny except for a paunch poking through his dull green T-shirt. He wore a pair of oversized blue combat trousers too, the colours clashing so badly he looked almost comical.
Almost, but not quite.
As he glanced out into the road, I sank into my seat, disguised by the advancing darkness, and saw the truth: that despite the bad hair and the worse dress sense, this wasn’t a man to be laughed at. His eyes were small, set back into his skull like craters, his nose wide and flat, the contours of his face slightly misshapen – odd, awkward, a little off – like an artist’s impression gone wrong.
I’d never seen him, and I didn’t know him.
But I already didn’t like him.
He walked to the front door of East’s house and rang the doorbell. As he waited he looked out into the street again, eyes moving from window to window, from one vehicle to the next. I shifted further down into my seat, so my eyeline was level with the dashboard, watching as his gaze moved from the car in front to mine, lingering for a fraction of a second before moving on to the one behind.
Had he seen me?
A second later, the door opened.
East.
He’d changed out of his period costume and was dressed in a pair of tracksuit trousers and a plain white T-shirt, too small for him so it emphasized the fat he carried around his middle. He looked out into the street briefly, then back to the man at his doorstep. They said something to one another, East nodding and pushing his glasses up to the bridge of his nose, and then the man seemed to surprise East by stepping past him, into the house.
The door closed again.
A few moments later, I watched another light come on in the living room, both men appearing briefly at the window before East stepped up to it, looked out into the street a second time and pulled the curtains shut.
Ten minutes. Twenty.
Thirty.
Forty minutes later, the front door reopened and the two men emerged again, East follow
ing as they headed down to the garage, out of sight.
I picked up my phone, took a photograph of the Citroën, another of the licence plate – both shots aided by the glare of East’s security light – and then sent the two pictures through to Ewan Tasker with the message:
PNC check on this car? Thanks, D.
When I looked up, the two men had reappeared, each carrying something from behind the house and heading towards the car. In East’s hand was a slab of wood. In the other guy’s, a wooden box. A few moments later, as the boot popped open and they began loading the objects in, I realized exactly what they were: the box was a penny arcade machine, three sides of it intact, the fourth open, as if repair work was being done on its interior; the slab of wood was its back panel.
After they were done, the man stepped away from the car, said something to East, then whipped the boot shut. East just nodded, a timidity to him. He’s scared. The man’s eyes lingered on East, and then he looked out into the street again, studying the homes opposite, the cars parked at pavements, the footpaths that bisected properties and joined one road with another. I slid down into my seat as his gaze passed my car, and then watched his small eyes come back again, along the same path they’d already travelled – me, my car, other vehicles, other houses – like a pendulum. Finally, he returned his attention to East at the door. He said something: soft, inaudible.
East nodded diffidently.
Quietly, I wound down my window further, to about halfway, to see if I could pick anything up. East asked something, but with his back turned, it was impossible to make it out. Yet, as the man in the training top moved around from the boot of the car to the driver’s side, I heard him say to East, ‘Stay here and lock the doors. If you see or hear from this Raker guy, you phone me, okay?’
He had an accent: Eastern European.
East just looked at him.
‘Okay?’
A small nod of the head.
The man paused there – one hand on the roof of the Citroën, the other on the open door – and eyed East for a long time, as if unsure whether to trust him. Then, finally, he got in at the wheel and fired up the car. Reversing out of the drive, he switched his lights on and immediately accelerated away, heading north through the residential streets that would take him out on to Jamaica Road.