by Tim Weaver
‘Yes.’
‘How did he even end up in that job?’
East leaned his face into his shoulder and wiped his nose on his shirt. ‘I was put in a children’s home in Chingford when I was eight. St David’s. My mother died of pneumonia, and I never knew my father. That was where I met them.’
He paused. Earlier on, out in front of the pier as the tourists watched him, he’d spoken with confidence. Now, it was like listening to a child trying to form words he was scared of. There was something else that I’d noticed for the first time too: although he spoke eloquently, it didn’t sound like it came naturally to him, but through practice. The evidence of the boy he’d hidden was still there, a hard east London inflection that he sometimes failed to hold back.
‘You were talking about the children’s home,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘That was where I met them.’
‘You mean Grankin and Korman?’
‘Yes. I met Vic first. He was almost six years older than me, but he seemed immature for his age. Even at thirteen, his English was awful because he’d come over from Estonia and his parents were from Moscow and didn’t speak anything but Russian. Even so, the home had this old, broken table-football game, and because we were the only ones that ever played on it, gradually, I got to know him a bit.’
That tallied with what Task had told me earlier: Grankin’s parents emigrated from Estonia in 1974, died a year later in a car crash, and he’d grown up in care.
‘Korman arrived about eighteen months after,’ East continued. ‘He was two years younger than Vic, three years older than me, but he was … different. He hardly ever used to talk, except to us. He said his name was Paul, but the people at the home used to call him Ben. Sometimes he’d tell us to call him other names, and he wouldn’t respond to us unless we did. He’d just stare at us. Vic was pretty rough and ready. I mean, he could get violent. But Korman … he was worse. Much worse. He didn’t like being around others. He’d disappear for days, sometimes weeks at a time, and then – all of a sudden – he was back, watching you, and you didn’t even realize until he stepped out of the shadows. After a while, one of the other kids at the home started calling him “Dracula”, because he had this weird way about him.’ East stopped, his expression rippling with the anxiety of describing Korman. He looked down into his lap. ‘That kid was killed in the toilets a week later. Someone used a shard of glass to cut his neck, and just let the kid lie there and bleed out.’
‘It was Korman?’
‘No one ever admitted to it. But I knew it was him.’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Go on.’
‘Anyway, Vic was never the easiest person to get along with, but we were friends – of a sort, I suppose. Once Korman arrived, though, everything changed. Vic abandoned me, basically. I was suddenly the outsider. And when Vic turned seventeen – and Korman was almost fifteen – the two of them walked out of the home, and they didn’t come back. This was 1984. They took all their things with them, and left. I never saw Vic again for sixteen years.’
‘Until 2000?’
‘Right.’
‘What made you get back in touch?’
He shook his head. ‘I didn’t. Back when I worked insurance, I lived in this crappy place in Nunhead, and one Sunday, in November 2000, the buzzer goes.’
‘It was Grankin?’
‘Yeah. Sixteen years of radio silence, and all of a sudden he’s standing on my doorstep, acting like no time has passed at all. I remember thinking it was odd, but then Vic was never ordinary. He had a nasty temper on him. He could be vicious if he wanted. It was just lucky I was never on the receiving end.’
‘Where had he been for all that time?’
‘He wouldn’t tell me – or, at least, talked around it – and, instead, he starts asking me if I’m still into history. I told him I was. I’d always been a big reader growing up. Books were my escape in that place. Vic used to tease me, and call me “The Professor”, but I never used to mind. There are worse things to be called. So Vic hands me this advert he’s cut out of the newspaper, and says, “I think you should apply for that.” I unfold it, and it’s an ad for a job as a museum curator.’
‘At Wonderland?’
‘Yeah,’ East said. ‘We’d gone sixteen years without as much as a phone call – and then he turns up out of the blue and tells me I should apply for a job.’
Healy stepped in, frowning. ‘That didn’t strike you as weird?’
‘Of course it struck me as weird,’ East replied, his voice still tearful, at points barely audible. ‘But I hated working in insurance. So we talked a little more about it, and he said to me, “Put on your CV that you used to work for Arnold Goldman, at his casino on Brompton Road.” I looked at Vic, and said, “But I didn’t. That’s a lie,” and he fires this look at me, the same sort of look he used to have sometimes, back when we were growing up, and he says, “Put down that you used to work with Goldman. The guy who runs the museum and the pier now, he used to work for Goldman. He’ll like that.” So I ummed and aahed about it, about whether to lie like that, but eventually … I decided to do it.’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘And then you got the job?’
‘In the interview, I made up a load of crap about meeting Arnold Goldman, about how he’d always been a hero of mine, and Mr Cabot bought it. He started going off on a tangent, reminiscing about Goldman, about how he owed Goldman so much, about how he was such an inspiration. I felt bad that I’d lied to him.’
‘Do you think Cabot was in on it?’
‘With Vic?’ East said. ‘No. No way. He gave me the job because I pretended to know Goldman, and because I was cheap. The pay’s terrible. I’ve had three rises since 2001. Mr Cabot’s a good man, a good boss, but he’s not benevolent.’ His head tilted in my direction, as if he didn’t want to have to make eye contact with Healy. ‘But then, after I started at the museum, I began to think back to Vic’s visit more and more, and it would bug me. I mean, why reappear after all that time just because he saw a job I’d like? There had to be something more to it.’
As I watched him, eyes alive with the memories of what had happened, I remembered the photograph of him I’d seen in the museum, caught on the edges of a shot taken at Wonderland’s opening ceremony in 2001. He’d looked nervous then, meek. He wasn’t much different now, thirteen years on. Perhaps Calvin East was always destined to be a victim, bent and shaped to somebody else’s agenda.
‘So what was going on?’ Healy said.
‘Nine, ten months after I started at the museum, I left work one night and Vic was outside. I hadn’t seen or heard from him since he came to my house. He said he wanted to buy me a drink, and a steak. I didn’t want to go – it just didn’t feel right – but Vic grabbed me by the arm and basically frogmarched me to the Tube. Thing is, when he wanted to be, Vic could be good company, really funny, and he was good company for a while that night. He made me laugh. By the time we got to this restaurant in Soho, I’d forgotten what I was even worried about.’
He rolled his head, his glasses sliding to the bridge of his nose, and looked out beyond me, into space. ‘He leads me to this booth in the corner, and there’s someone there already. And by the time I realize who, it’s too late to back out.’
‘It was Korman,’ I said.
A funereal pause; a nod of the head. ‘He said hello to me, shook my hand, asked how I was, started this normal, routine conversation – but his eyes were saying something else. That’s the real Korman. He looks at you, and his eyes … they don’t communicate with the rest of him. They aren’t part of the rest of him.’
I glanced at Healy. The aggression had momentarily gone from his face, replaced by a clear recognition of what was being described. To anyone else, in other circumstances, East’s description of Korman would have sounded absurd. But not now, to us. Healy and East had both suffered at his hands.
‘When he looks at you …’ East turned to me. There was a dried tear track on his face, skewing off
left. ‘It’s like looking into the eyes of the devil.’
He held my gaze for a second and then turned away, back in this moment, tied to a chair in a gnarled and twisted house. And yet I sensed that, in a strange way, he saw this as better than being in that booth with Korman and Grankin.
‘What was Korman doing there?’ I said.
‘He came to observe. After all the niceties, all the catching up, he just sat there, watching me. Vic did the talking for the rest of the night – all these stories from St David’s – and Korman said nothing. He sat back and to the left of me, so I had to physically turn in order to see him. And when I did, there he was: staring at me, totally silent, this half-smile on his face. Then, after an hour, he got up and left. Just like that. No goodbye, nothing. I didn’t think about it at the time, but I see it for what it was now: he was getting the measure of me. He wanted to see if I was still the same person he knew in St David’s; to see how weak I was.’
‘Where’s this going?’ Healy said, impatient, on edge.
I glanced at him. He still held the penlight in his hand – clutched in his balled fist – shining it in East’s direction. In the silence, a faint breeze escaped through the gaps in the house, whining as it passed into the room and out on to the landing, and then there was nothing again.
Just the three of us.
‘After Korman left the restaurant,’ East went on, leaning forward in his seat, its frame creaking as his arms locked behind him, ‘Vic asked me if I wanted to earn some more money. I thought he meant freelance work. So I said yes. Of course I said yes. I was dirt poor, living in that airless hole in Nunhead. I asked him what the job was, and he said it was more of a favour. He needed me to go in to work, talk to Mr Cabot and persuade him to hire Vic as his security guy.’
‘So he could get access to the museum?’
‘Right. Except I didn’t know that back then. He palmed me off with some excuse about needing to get his business off the ground, about building a client base. He said, “I let you know about that curator’s job, now it’s your turn to do something for me.” I couldn’t figure out his motivation, and he could see I was hesitant. So he gets out his chequebook and says, “This’ll help sweeten the deal.” ’
‘He writes you a cheque?’
‘For two grand. Two thousand pounds just for going in to see Mr Cabot and floating the idea of using Vic’s company. I said to Vic, “But what happens if he says no?” and Vic says, “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.” So I go in the next day and speak to Mr Cabot, and start to play on his insecurities, telling him how it would be a disaster if any of the penny arcade machines were stolen, how they were irreplaceable with insurance money – and finally, I started to realize.’
‘Realize what?’
Guilt seemed to claw up his throat like a virus, his Adam’s apple shifting, a tear blurring in one of his eyes. ‘I started to realize what a good liar I’d become.’
‘This is bullshit,’ Healy said.
I looked at him. ‘Healy, let’s just –’
‘No, let’s not,’ he fired back. He gestured to East with the knife, the blade glinting in the dull light. ‘He hasn’t even talked about them yet. He’s sitting there spinning a yarn that doesn’t even matter. Korman, Grankin, we know they did it. He should be telling us where to find them, not spinning some history lesson.’
I didn’t say anything in reply, and – in the quiet – we eyed each other, so much passing between us: a history littered with exchanges like this, moments where I’d been forced to subdue him, sometimes physically, dragging him back from battles he’d never had any hope of winning. It would be even harder now. As far as the rest of the world knew, he was in a cemetery in north London. That made him unaccountable to anyone, unencumbered by the rule of law. If he picked up the gun and shot East through the head right now, there would be no fallout. There was no trail back to him.
As I thought of that, my mind returned to Craw, to the idea of picking up the phone to her, of passing off the chaos of this case, of giving her Korman and Grankin’s names; and, as I thought of the alternative, of not picking up the phone to her, a kind of premonition took hold, utterly clear to me: Healy, face-to-face with Korman and Grankin, and this journey ending exactly how it had begun – in blood, in death. This is going to spin out of control if you let it.
Call Craw.
Call her now.
‘What about Gail and the girls?’
Healy’s voice brought me back into the moment.
East looked at him, but didn’t reply.
Healy stepped forward, simmering. ‘What about Gail and the gir–’
‘We’re almost there now,’ East said, cutting him off, a bleakness to his voice that doused Healy’s fire. ‘But you’ll want to hear about the machines first.’
‘Machines?’
‘The ones in the museum.’
I looked from Healy to East, and said, ‘What about them?’
He looked between us. ‘Gail’s dissertation was about forgotten Victorian architecture. I don’t know if you know that already, but it was. Part of it was about the pier. She let me read it once. In it, she said she believed the pier had some undiscovered story to tell, a hidden secret of some kind. She didn’t know what; neither do I. I don’t even know if Carla Stourcroft did, despite everything. But I think maybe they were right.’ He paused, a blink of fear. ‘And I think it’s to do with the penny arcade machines.’
48
East turned from me to Healy and back to me, then took a long breath, as if readying himself for what was to come. ‘About five months after Mr Cabot hired Vic to run security, Vic comes to my office and says we should go for a drink. So we head to this place in Wapping, and there’s no sign of Korman this time – just Vic and I – but exactly the same thing happens. Vic gets out his chequebook and says, “How would you like to earn some more money? All you have to do is turn a blind eye to some things.” ’
I looked at him. ‘Meaning what?’
‘I asked him that. I said, “I don’t want to be involved in a burglary.” But he said, “It’s not a burglary. We won’t be stealing anything. There’ll just be a subtle change, here and there. Nothing serious.” I told him I couldn’t agree to anything that was going to get me fired, but he said Mr Cabot would never find out. I asked him again what was going on, and he said, “You’ll probably never notice.” It still sounded like something that was going to get me the sack, so I thanked him for the drink and told him I couldn’t do it …’ A pause. Sad, anguished. ‘But then, as I got up to go, he touched me on the arm to stop me, and he handed me a cheque.’
I nodded, said nothing.
‘Ten thousand pounds.’
‘That’s how much he paid you this time?’
‘Yes.’
‘And what happened?’
‘Like I told you, Stourcroft was on the right track.’ He glanced at Healy. ‘So was Gail, in her dissertation. The second time I met Carla Stourcroft, in early 2010, it was clear she thought something was going on at Wonderland. Gail eventually thought the same too. I found her dissertation in the flat when we were dating –’
‘You weren’t dating her,’ Healy snarled.
East looked at him. ‘I never wanted –’
‘I don’t give a fuck what you wanted.’
Silence, vibrating with the threat of violence.
I held up a hand to Healy and said, ‘Specifics, Calvin.’
‘Korman and Grankin …’
East faded out. He was leaning forward, arms uncomfortable behind him, muscles and bones starting to stiffen. I considered freeing his wrists, cutting the duct tape and letting him talk to us without being bound. But then I looked across the room at Healy, gaunt and pinched. Fire burned as clearly in his eyes as if we’d set the room alight. He had a knife and a gun – and nothing else to live for.
As if on cue, he stepped away from the wall – fuelled by the mention of Gail and the girls – and said to East, ‘Korma
n and Grankin what?’
East glanced between Healy and me.
‘Come on, Calvin,’ I said. ‘You took another ten grand of Grankin’s money, and he asked you to turn a blind eye to what was going on. Which was what?’
The chair creaked again under his weight, as he shifted position. ‘He was right. Nothing got stolen – but strange things would happen. I remember, one day, about three months later, I was walking through the museum, across the first floor, and I noticed two of the penny arcade machines had changed.’
‘Changed how?’
‘They’d swapped positions with each other. It was these two old bagatelles, which are kind of like non-electrical pinball tables. They were almost exactly the same design. Most people – even Mr Cabot, who knew all those machines so well – wouldn’t even notice. But I was in there doing tours every day. I noticed them.’
‘You think it was Grankin?’
‘It had to be.’
‘Why would he bother swapping them around?’
‘I don’t think he swapped them. I think he removed them, and when he brought them back again, he couldn’t remember which one went where.’
‘Removed them? Why would he do that?’
‘I checked both of the machines over, inside and out, to see if anything had been altered or updated – but pulleys, springs, mechanisms, they were all still in place, exactly as they should have been. It was just the finish that had changed.’
‘Finish?’
‘The finish on the cabinets. They’d both been freshly varnished.’
‘You’re saying he removed them in order to varnish them?’
‘Yeah. But they hadn’t been done well.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, from early on, Mr Cabot entrusted me with looking after the machines, but always, always underlined the importance of using the same brand of wood varnish – Hoberman’s. It’s super-expensive – like, forty-five quid for a pot – but it gives the perfect finish and it’s the only varnish that should ever be used on machines as old as the ones in the museum. Usually it goes on so smoothly, if it wasn’t for the marginal colour change, you’d have a hard time even seeing it. I get why Mr Cabot pays so much for that brand. But the finish I found on those two bagatelles, it wasn’t smooth at all.’