by Tim Weaver
‘That was when you started following him?’
‘Yeah. I switched my routine. I followed him, found out he worked at the museum, and began to watch that place instead. I’d sit outside that place for hours. It was all I did. I’d watch him go to work, and then I’d follow him home. By that time, it must have been towards the end of February. I had no idea what my endgame was, I just knew I had to find out what was going on with East. Those cardboard crosses …’ He shook his head, clearing his throat. ‘The rain had turned them to mush a day later, but I started to think that might have been the point: he didn’t want anyone to know about them.’
It was all tallying up now. Healy’s Job Seeker’s Allowance ceased being paid in around the same time, because he’d stopped signing on. He’d stopped caring about finding work, if he’d ever cared in the first place. He was too busy with East.
Before he started speaking again, he broke out into a gluey coughing fit. When it was finally over, he looked across at me, a resignation in his face that I’d never seen before. ‘The money you gave me,’ he said, hoarse now, ‘it lasted me until the second week of February. I made it last a month, which was a month longer than I thought I would. But when it ran out, things started to get desperate. I’d stopped signing on, so I knew my JSA would end, and – once that ended – I knew I’d have no money for more petrol, no money to put clothes on my back or food in my stomach, no money to even pay for a bed.’ A long pause and then a wince: but it wasn’t because he was in physical pain. Not this time. ‘So I robbed this corner shop in Poplar. This old Indian guy. I scoped it out, saw it didn’t have any cameras, and turned it over …’
The rest went unspoken. Healy swallowed, his face creasing into a frown, and then he shifted position at the bed. Somehow, he seemed even more frail now.
‘He was stubborn. A few days later, I read that he’d needed ten stitches in his head. I took two hundred and ninety pounds, and put an old guy in hospital.’
I tried not to react. ‘What happened to your car?’
‘I sold it for scrap, no questions asked. The guy who bought it from me didn’t fill out any paperwork, so there was no record of it. That suited me fine. I just needed the money.’
He seemed to fold in on himself, leaning forward to his knees, as if trying to support the weight of his body. I gave him a moment. ‘And East?’
He shrugged. ‘All I could think about was those cardboard crosses he’d planted in the ground. It was like being back at the Met, back on a case. I became obsessed by it again. I started going to the local library, reading up about the pier, about its history, everything I could.’
‘That’s how you got the book.’
‘Right,’ he said. ‘They had a copy. So I swiped it. I read it while I waited outside the museum, day in, day out. East would come and go, the same routine every time, and I’d follow him. I robbed another store, made off with almost four hundred quid, and I used that money to fund my Tube travel, back and forth to Bermondsey, to Wapping, trying to get a sense of the guy. I thought about approaching him, about grabbing him and beating the truth out of him, but I became terrified of screwing things up like I did when I was at the Met.’ He stopped, swallowing. ‘I realized there never was any “Mal”. This was my Mal. East. I finally had a decent lead. All those months I spent on the case before, and I never had a single lead as good as this.’
Outside, the rain got harder again, drumming against the roof. For some reason, I thought of Craw then, of the day we’d met at Walthamstow Marshes and she’d first told me that Healy was missing. Only a month had passed since then, but that October day, the heat shimmering off the tarmac, the kids in shorts and summer dresses running down towards the river; the two of us sitting there as I tried to convince her that Healy wasn’t missing – it all felt a lifetime away.
I tuned back in as he started talking again: ‘The day I had my heart attack, East left work early. That never happened. Ever. I’d been watching him almost a month, and he’d never deviated from his routine. So I followed him, but instead of heading west on foot, towards Tower Bridge, like he normally did, he went the other way and got on the Tube. He rode the Overground up to Camden Road.’
‘He was going to Stables Market.’
He nodded.
‘To do what?’
‘He went into an antiques shop there.’
‘Do you know which one?’
‘Gray Antiques and Collectables.’
I took out my phone and opened up the email I’d sent myself earlier on, with a complete list of the shops at the market, and the names of the proprietors. Halfway down, I found the shop that East had gone into: Gray Antiques and Collectables. Proprietor: Benjamin Gray. I felt a memory stir as I remembered the phone call I’d had with Ewan Tasker about Paul Korman, the client Victor Grankin claimed to have met on the night of the murders, and the man – along with Calvin East – who had provided Grankin’s alibi for Sunday 11 July.
He’d told police that his name was Paul Benjamin Korman.
Were Korman and Gray the same man?
‘What happened after East went into the shop?’ I asked.
‘I waited and waited, out of sight. The market started to clear out, but East didn’t reappear. I just stayed there, not moving, but it was like he’d vanished. After a while, I began to panic. I started to think, “Have I missed something? Have I made a mistake?”, so I went into the shop and wandered around, pretending to be a customer, and there’s this weird guy behind the counter, just watching me.’
‘The owner – Gray?’
‘I didn’t know who he was back then, but the way he looked at me …’ He paused, unable to put it into words. ‘There was something familiar about him.’
Because, without knowing it, Healy had recognized him.
The blond man from the CCTV footage.
Nerves scattered down my back. ‘What did he look like?’
‘He’d shaved his head – but not because he was losing it. He had this black shadow on the top, where the stubble was showing through. It was thick. It covered his entire head, ear to ear, forehead to neck. He didn’t shave his hair because he was losing it – he shaved it because he wanted it that way.’
It was a way to hide who he was.
I thought of those dark eyes, the ones that never fitted with the colour of his hair in the CCTV film. He’d dyed it to disguise himself, let it grow long so he could shave it off in the hours after. He’d grown a beard too, altering himself, changing who he was. He knew he’d be caught on film, so he became someone else.
‘Anyway,’ Healy went on, ‘East wasn’t in there.’
‘He’d definitely gone in?’
‘Definitely.’
He stopped again.
‘What happened after that?’
‘I’d been having pains in my chest,’ he said to me. ‘This burning sensation. It had been going on for a while, from way before we met in January. I got into this habit of pressing my fingers to my chest, pushing at it, because that helped a bit. I did it without even realizing. Most people didn’t even notice. But this guy did.’
‘The guy who ran the store?’
He nodded, distressed. ‘I look around and suddenly East is there, as if begging to be followed. So that’s what I did. I followed him through the market, through all these alleys and lanes, and he kept picking up the pace, kept going faster and faster, until I was virtually running in order to keep him in sight. And my heart … Things started to get bad. It felt like it was being crushed.’ He swallowed. ‘After that, I lost East altogether. I was angry. I turned – and the guy in the shop, he’s …’
‘He was there?’
‘He was right there – behind me. I realized, too late, that I’d been drawn in to a part of the market that was already closed. There was no one else around.’
‘He attacked you?’
‘He punched me square in the chest, right on my heart, over and over. It was like a fucking jackhammer. I must have been ma
ssaging my chest when I was in that shop, wincing, because he knew. He knew. And it felt … it felt like I’d been hit by a car. I stumbled back and collapsed against a wall, and then he was off again. My vision was blurred. My chest was on fire. I could hardly get to my feet.’
He swallowed again, the noise registering in the silence, and I thought of Carla Stourcroft. She’d been stabbed there three and a half years before Healy, in what looked like a robbery, dying hours later in a hospital bed. It could have been Korman or Gray – or whatever his real name was – who’d wielded the knife that day, or it could have been Grankin, but one or both of them was involved, I felt certain of that. The question was, why did Korman change his method of attack for Healy? Why not stab him too?
Whatever his reasons, something about the attempt on Healy’s life got to me, disturbed me, perhaps even more than what had happened to Stourcroft. It painted an even darker, more frightening portrait of Korman, a man capable of picking up the scent of weakness instantly, like an animal. He’d never seen Healy in the flesh before he walked into that shop, but it took Korman only a couple of minutes to spot Healy’s vulnerability. The attack was less conspicuous too. Perhaps that was the reason Korman changed tack: Stourcroft’s death must have been messy, visible – perhaps it had brought the authorities closer to his door than he would have liked. But with Healy, it was just an overweight man in his late forties, a heavy smoker, an even heavier drinker, having a heart attack.
‘What happened after that?’ I asked.
‘I managed to haul myself up,’ he said, ‘despite everything, and I tried to take off after him. I mean, I could still see him. He was looking back at me, baiting me, this smile on his face. I’d lost my head by then. I couldn’t see straight I was so angry. But I got about fifty feet, back out to where there was a crowd, when my vision went again. And then the pain …’ His fingers drifted to his chest. ‘I’ve never felt anything like it. It was like my chest was ripping itself apart. All he did was stand among the crowds and watch, that same look on his face. And, there, in that moment, that was when I saw it.’
‘Saw what?’
‘It was the guy I’d never been able to find. It was him. He’d shaved his hair and beard off, had his nose fixed, but it was so clearly him: the same one from the CCTV video I’d watched over and over and over again. I’d finally found the man who’d ruined my entire fucking life – and all I could do was lie there and die.’
45
The penlight dropped to his side, its glow skittering over the remains of the carpet, and his face seemed to shrivel in the lack of light, his body shrinking as it was claimed back by shadow. Yet his eyes were the same: moist, sombre.
‘So where does this come in?’ I said, trying to keep him at it, pointing at the drawings he’d made of the grey mask.
‘I had this journalist I used to work with from time to time when I was still at the Met,’ he said. ‘You used to have your sources at the Met. You know how it is. Anyway, he worked the crime beat for six years in the late 2000s, spent a lot of time covering Scotland Yard, high-profile cases, police politics, all that shite. I pushed a few things his way during that time – scratched his back, he scratched mine. I liked him. He wouldn’t screw you over. So, three weeks after I found the family, I met with him. I thought I could use the media to cast the net wider, try and draw those two men – the blond guy and his driver – out into the open. I didn’t know how – I mean, there was no plan as such – I just knew I had to do something. So I met this source and showed him some of the case.’
‘And?’
‘And I showed him the picture from the CCTV cameras.’
‘Of Korman?’
‘Korman? Is that his real name?’ He paused, taking in the new information. ‘Yeah, him. Korman, Gray, whatever the hell he’s called. But I also showed the driver to my source. The driver was even harder to identify.’
‘I think his name might be Victor Grankin.’
Healy shrugged. ‘I believe you – because what else do I have?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, I showed my guy those pictures of the two men, and he looked at them, and he said to me, “How are you ever going to find out who the driver is?” I said, “That’s why I’m meeting with you.” But he shakes his head.’ Healy stopped, wiping an eye with the sleeve of his jumper. ‘He says to me, “No, what I mean is, you can’t even see his face clearly. The driver may as well be wearing a mask.” ’
A mask.
Instantly, something snapped into focus. Not just the drawings Healy had made, over and over again on the walls, but the CCTV photographs I’d studied from the night of the killings.
The driver. Both his hands on the wheel, black gloves on, body half turned in the direction of Korman, as Korman got into the car.
That shot of them had been cleaned up by forensic techs, its noise reduced, but the bigger the shot had become, the less sharp it had got, edges tapering off. I remembered being out on the decking at the back of my house, looking at that photo, seeing a hair or a fibre that must have been on the lens of the CCTV camera, transposed on to the picture. The neutral, emotionless lines of his face; the black discs of his eyes; the lack of definition around his mouth and nose. The position of the hair on the photo made it seem as if the left-hand side of the driver’s face had cracked somehow, giving him an even stranger quality than he had already. But it wasn’t a hair, and it wasn’t a fibre. It was a crack – on a mask.
Grankin had been wearing one that night.
‘Why would Grankin wear a mask, but not Korman?’ I said.
‘Because that was Grankin’s thing.’
‘Thing?’
Healy held up a finger, telling me the answer was coming. ‘A week after, my source calls me again. We’d agreed to meet a second time, to firm up the details of what he was going to write – but, instead, he started apologizing, telling me he’d been offered a job he’d gone for the month before, and now he had to drop everything and head out to the Middle East. This was August 2010. My plan to use him, to use the media, got flushed down the U-bend with everything else.’
I tried to imagine where this was going, to get a sense of it from the look in Healy’s face. But I couldn’t see ahead. I couldn’t see where he was taking me.
‘Anyway,’ he said, playing with the threads of his jumper again, ‘I didn’t have anyone else in the media, and you know what happened after that.’ Another solemn pause. ‘Then, back in February this year, after I’d been watching Calvin East for a while, I got hold of that copy of A Seaside in the City. I never, for one second, thought about trying to find out who Carla Stourcroft was. It didn’t occur to me. I mean, what difference did it make who wrote it? What mattered was the pier, the story of the pier. What mattered was East and those cardboard crosses. So I read the book, kept reading it, trying to see if there was anything in it that would connect with East – but I never gave Stourcroft a second thought.’
I’d done exactly the same. Her low profile and her lack of sales meant she had left only the tiniest of footprints online. The local newspaper obituary that Calvin East had kept had been torn off at the bottom, before it had got to her cause of death. It was only when I’d looked for her under her married name that I’d found out. The fact that the nationals had hardly covered her murder, and local stories were weighted almost entirely in favour of the writer Carla Stourcroft, not Carla Davis, meant the connection between maiden and married names hadn’t come up in web searches. So, while Invisible Ripper may have been her biggest success, it wasn’t big enough for her to be treated as anything more than a footnote by the national media; a brief mention, a paragraph, a few lines of ink. At the thought of that, I felt deeply sorry for her – and vowed that it wasn’t going to happen again.
I looked at Healy. ‘So what changed?’
‘My heart attack.’
‘What about it?’
‘I came back to this place, and I lay here for weeks, months, and then when
I decided …’ He stopped, glanced at me: a flash of remorse. ‘When I said to Stevie I would give serious thought to what he was asking me to do for him, when I had some strength back, I started going out again. I’d go to a library down the road here, and I’d dig around on the Internet. I didn’t know what the hell I was looking for, but I was looking for something. And that was when I found out about her.’
‘About Stourcroft.’
He nodded. ‘How she died. It basically went unreported – you know that? She was so small fry, none of the nationals gave a shit about her. The Met calling it a “bungled robbery” – that was a big mistake too. It made the crime seem like an aberration; like an error of judgement. It instantly made it less interesting for the Fleet Street vampires too. Who wants to read about a robbery gone wrong?’
‘But you knew it wasn’t a robbery.’
‘I read an obituary in a local newspaper that said her married name was Davis.’
The same one I read. ‘Which is when you found out where she died.’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘When I saw where she died, I knew it wasn’t any “bungled robbery”.’ He wiped some saliva away from the corners of his mouth. ‘She died in the same place I was attacked. Six hundred square miles of city and we both get done at the same market?’ He shook his head. ‘No,’ he muttered. ‘No way.’
‘And after that?’
‘I called her husband.’
I looked at him. ‘Stourcroft’s husband?’
He nodded again. ‘I found his number and called him up, pretending to be with the Met. I said we were reopening the investigation, and I needed to talk.’
A flicker of guilt in his face, presumably at the thought of lying to Stourcroft’s husband and playing with his emotions. Four years on, the pain of his wife’s death might have subsided a little for him – but, from bitter experience, I knew it would still be there; that it would never be gone entirely. Yet I couldn’t judge Healy. After all, what were we doing here if not reanimating an old case?