by Tim Weaver
I slammed the boot shut. ‘Let’s go.’
52
Beyond the gates, the pier waited.
As we passed the rusty ticket booth, and moved to the paved area, it began raining hard, drifting in off the Thames. There was no security lamp on the back of the museum, and not much in the way of illumination from nearby flats, and yet – even with our torches off – it was possible to see enough. On the other side of the river was the glow of south London, pockets of light scattered in every direction along the fringes of the Thames. They painted the angles of the pier a smoky grey, almost backlighting it, its lines visible in the shadows of early morning, its legs planted in the murk of the river. The closer we got to the gates, the more prominent the sounds of the water became, fading in like a song.
I undid the padlock, pulled it from its loop and checked behind us. Healy was watching too, eyes scanning the buildings close by. Electrified fencing hummed above us as we passed through – and then, thirty seconds later, we were inside the gates, the padlock back in place, the pavilion ahead of us.
Briefly, Healy glanced at me.
There was no expression on his face, but something shifted in his eyes, a clear unease. The pavilion lay at the end of three hundred feet of slowly decaying wooden slats, a rectangular building with a huge domed roof. On either side of us were the stalls, boarded-up former shops from which people in period costume had once sold candyfloss and ice creams. On some of them were faded reminders of what they’d once been called, but most were way past that, their façades little more than bleached wood, rinsed of colour and form by years of hard weather.
We moved as quickly as we could, the rain getting harder. The promenade felt soft underfoot, the slats bowed or, in some cases, missing entirely, the gaps not big enough to fall through, but oddly disorientating. It wasn’t just the slats either: a third of the way along, some of the fencing, which hemmed in the promenade, had fallen away, washed out to sea at some point long forgotten. A rust-speckled bench was on its side in front of the gap, ripped from the metal plates it had once been secured to, and tossed around by the wind. A central glassed seating area – modelled after the one on the Grand Pier at Weston-super-Mare – had been destroyed too, most of the glass now gone, the intricacies of the metalwork caked in mould and salt.
Forty feet short of the pavilion, I became aware that Healy was no longer at my side, and looked back. He was struggling, his movements slow, laboured. As the rain and the wind pressed at him, he drew his coat tighter around himself like a second skin, revealing his contours, meagre and unimpressive. It was a mistake bringing him out here, I thought, his pale face looking out from the hood, seeing me waiting for him, waving me forward. I did as he asked, but the unease didn’t shift, a feeling that became more pronounced as I reached the red doors of the pavilion.
Above me, the front of the building climbed into the early morning, walls stained by age and abandonment. Windows remained intact at regular intervals, except for two which had been boarded up. Selecting the second key and springing the padlock, I grabbed one of the doors and heaved it open. Its hinges squealed. The smell of old wood, damp and rot wafted out of the pavilion, and I could make out a painted arch about seven feet high, just inside the doors. It said:
GOLDMAN’S VICTORIAN ARCADE WELCOME TO A LITTLE PIECE OF HISTORY!
A grinning clown in a Victorian top hat looked out from the middle, the words Goldman’s and Arcade either side of him. It was hard to see anything beyond that.
I remembered then that I hadn’t come alone, Healy’s feet slapping against the promenade behind me. When I turned back, my eyes were drawn past his sparse silhouette, to the distance we’d travelled. The rain had got so hard, it was difficult to make out the northern banks of the Thames now, our departure point obscured, the museum too, the warehouses of Wapping drifting in and out of the mist. It gave me the sensation of being out to sea, unanchored to anything, rain and water everywhere. Maybe this explained how I’d felt the day before, looking along the promenade. I’d seen a loneliness to the pier, a sense of isolation. As Healy moved level with me, out of breath, eyes on me – trying to get a fix on my thoughts – I turned back to the doors, to the darkness within, and recalled something Calvin East had said to me when I first met him: They say the ghost of Samuel Brown haunts this part of the river, and possibly the pier too.
I’d always believed in a different kind of ghost: heartache and loss and regret. But, even so, it was difficult to stand here and not feel something – a vibe, an anxiety – as the pier moaned in the rain.
‘You all right?’ Healy said, hoarse, fatigued.
I looked at him. ‘I guess we’ll see.’
I led us inside.
53
There was no sound under the pavilion roof. The roar of the rain, so powerful outside, ceased to exist the minute I pulled the doors shut behind us. Without our torches on, even as our eyes adjusted to the dark, it was impossible to see anything. No natural light escaped in at all, nothing from buildings on the other side of the river, no angles, slants or corners; it was all hidden in the shadows.
I flicked my torch on.
The interior was long: a single, high-ceilinged room with a mezzanine on the left, built on pillars. There was some sort of structure on top, difficult to make out from where I was, but – that apart – the layout was straight up and down.
As I edged forward, I could see the echo of the original arcade in discoloured squares on the floor. They ran in long rows, from the front of the pavilion to the back, each square marking out where a penny arcade machine had once stood. Underfoot, tiny chips of glass glinted in the torchlight, crunching softly, and as we inched forward, I thought of Gary Cabot, of how he’d spent his youth here, of what it must have looked and sounded like in its prime. There had never been anything electrical in here, save for necessities like lights. That meant the machines wouldn’t have been generating noise. The sounds inside this place would, instead, have come from period phonographs, from the brass band Arnold Goldman had employed, from conversation and laughter. But all that was gone. Years later, it didn’t have a voice.
The pier lay silent.
Healy started moving to the right.
As the darkness began to thicken and congeal, so the smells of the pier got stronger; a long room besieged by rot and damp. At the centre of the pavilion, it grew even darker and more suffocating, and I started to feel a little unsettled, my mind playing tricks on me. Despite the predictable shape of the building, it felt almost as if the walls were closing in, sharpening to a point, funnelling me into a dead end. It was an absurd, irrational fear, but the more I pushed it away, the harder it rebounded, until a thought struck me: I haven’t slept for almost twenty-four hours.
I stopped where I was, legs heavy, eyes gritty, head humming with noise. Taking a series of long, deep breaths, I tried to bring some calm to my system, clear it, reboot it, begin again.
I directed the torch ahead of me.
Four white plaster pillars – crumbling and dirty – were thirty feet away, the mezzanine on top, penned in by a three-plank wooden fence. On the other side of the room was Healy’s torch, a lighthouse beam cutting through the night.
I headed up the mezzanine stairs.
Somewhere above me, I heard the flapping of wings, a bird taking flight, but at the top the pier fell silent again, and I realized where I was: above me was a painted arch, a smaller version of the one at the main doors, the same clown in a top hat. This time it read Goldman’s Spectacular Mirror Maze, and beyond were the traces of what once would have stood here. With the mirrored panels now inside the museum, all that was left were the emaciated frames that had housed them, like a forest of metal trees growing out of a dark, stagnant pond.
I headed in, walking among them, checking the frames and the floor on which they stood, and ended up on the left-hand side of the mezzanine where I shone my torch off the edge of the platform. It took me a moment – but then, below me, I saw som
ething, seared into the wooden floor.
Burn marks.
I headed back down to where the marks were. They were rings about two feet in diameter. The floor had been scorched so badly, it had actually been partly eaten away, creating a half-inch trench. Inside and outside the circumference of the circle, though, the pavilion’s slats remained unaffected.
‘What are you looking at?’
Healy was behind me now, shining his penlight across to where the circle marks were. I dropped down and ran a finger along the ridge of one of the burns, crackling as it travelled, gathering up a fine layer of dirt.
Except it wasn’t dirt.
‘What is it?’ Healy asked.
‘It’s ash.’
I directed my torch past the burn marks, towards the back of the pavilion. The light crept further into the shadows on the left-hand side and – ten feet further down – picked out a structure built against the wall. It was a stage about six feet across, with iron trellising enclosing it. As I got closer, it became clearer, and I saw a sign hanging from the trellis: The Amazing Mister E! Beneath that: Card tricks! Sleight of hand! Illusions! You won’t believe your eyes!
Whoever Arnold Goldman had employed as a magician was long forgotten – other than by a peeling, faded sign on the stage he’d once used – but there was something else there too, right at the edge of the platform, on its side; something that didn’t belong in this love letter to Victorian England.
It was a broken cassette recorder.
54
There was nothing else but the recorder.
I picked it up off the floor, turning it over in my hands. It was red, scuffed and damaged, with five buttons in a row on the front: Rec, Play, Rew, FF, Stop. On the back, the clip-in lid that secured the batteries in place was gone, the batteries too, but next to that was a small manufacturer’s logo and the words Made in China, 2006. It might have been ancient technology by modern standards, but the unit itself was only eight years old. So what was it doing here?
I shone my torch out, illuminating the spaces around us. Everything was a pattern on repeat: old wood, collapsed structures; the continuous unfurling of the pier, its blemishes, its disrepair, hidden by the dark.
The stage we were on wasn’t a circle but a hexagon, five sides of it finished in iron trellising, the sixth open and leading to the steps down. When I looked at Healy, I could see we were both thinking the same thing.
Neil and Ana Yost.
The tape recorder was made in 2006. They’d disappeared in 2007. Was this where they’d been brought? Had Korman and Grankin audio-recorded them?
For what reason?
Healy came up on to the platform and moved across it, looking at it under the glow of the penlight. ‘There’s nothing up here,’ he said. He meant blood. Hair. Trace evidence. He meant obvious signs of a murder having taken place.
‘Not any more there isn’t.’
‘You’re not saying you think that they’re dumped in here somewhere?’ He directed the torch out, into the spaces around him. ‘East said Cabot has been up here at least a couple of times trying to sort out the roof. He had people from the council in. Building inspectors. Workmen. You don’t think any of them might have noticed two dead bodies? Korman and Grankin wouldn’t be that careless.’
‘I agree,’ I said. ‘I don’t think they disposed of them in here.’
‘But you think the Yosts were kept in here before they were killed?’
‘Maybe not for long, but Grankin was employed by Cabot, so he’d know if Cabot had any plans to come to the pavilion. I think they brought the Yosts here, killed them, and then left the bodies until it was the right time to get rid of them.’
‘And when was it the right time to get rid of them?’
‘Well, we’re on a river.’
He understood. ‘But bodies wash up.’
‘Maybe they had access to a boat. Maybe they chopped them up and took them down the Thames. Maybe all the way out to sea. I don’t know.’
‘And that?’ he said, pointing to the cassette recorder that I still held in my hands. ‘We’re not in 1988 any more. If they wanted to record something, why not just put it on video – or on a phone?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, shaking my head. But then I started to become aware of something else. An odour. ‘Can you smell that?’
Healy glanced over, sniffed the air, but didn’t say anything, and I caught the same whiff of something for a second time. ‘Smell what?’ he said finally.
‘You can’t smell it?’
He shook his head, then ran his torch across the stage again. I paused there for a moment, unable to put a finger on what it was I thought I’d smelled, before shining my light out beyond the stage. Even though it was cool inside the pavilion, I could feel sweat running down my back, my T-shirt sticking to my skin. My head pounded, but I was unsure whether it was a headache or exhaustion now. When I paused for breath, when I stopped moving the torch, I felt light-headed, briefly unbalanced, white dots in front of my eyes.
‘What the hell is that smell?’ I said.
Again, Healy sniffed the air, and again he looked at me blankly. I placed the cassette recorder back down and moved off the platform, struck once more by how dark it was, shadows hemming me in from all sides, and – as I moved – the smell hit me again, even stronger than before. I turned back the way I’d come.
What the hell is wrong with me?
I rubbed an eye, drifting for a few seconds, and remembered blacking out at the museum.
‘Raker?’
I looked at Healy.
‘Are you all right?’ he said.
Spinning on my heel, I began retracing my path in, past the stage again, the rings burned into the floor, the stairs to the mezzanine, the rows of discoloured squares, to the main doors. Every step I travelled, the air became thicker with the smell. It wasn’t the odours I’d inhaled as I’d come in – not the rotten wood, the damp, the musty stench of a forgotten building – it was something else. Clear your head.
Clear your head.
Clear your –
‘Raker?’
Healy’s voice carried across the stillness of the pavilion. For a second, I’d almost forgotten he was here. I tried shining my torch in his direction, but it only reached to the halfway point between us. I couldn’t see him. He was just words.
‘What’s going on?’
‘Wait a sec,’ I said, my attention split between him and another prickle of recognition. That smell. A second later, goosebumps scattered up my arms, as if my body had skipped ahead of my brain.
‘Raker?’
‘Yeah, okay, just give me a secon–’
In an instant, it came to me, hard like a punch to the throat. That smell. I know what that smell is. Immediately, I looked towards the mezzanine, even though I couldn’t see it. ‘Healy,’ I said. ‘Healy, get down here. We need to go.’
‘What?’
I grabbed one of the main doors.
‘Why?’
‘Get down here,’ I said. ‘Get down here now.’
I heaved it open and looked out.
Holy shit.
The smell seemed to rush past me, drawn into the darkness, knocking me off balance like it was something solid and powerful. I took another step forward. The rain had stopped, the sky had cleared, the pier already drying out.
Halfway along the promenade, huge mushroom clouds of smoke billowed up into the grey-blue of early morning, the stench of burning wood carrying across to me, beyond me. But it wasn’t that I’d been able to smell. It was the trail of liquid, starting outside the doors of the pavilion and snaking back along the wooden slats, towards land.
Petrol.
Someone had set the pier on fire.
55
With no rain, there was nothing to stop it. The fire raged, vicious and ruthless, eating away at the pier’s old wooden frame, gaining ground all the time. I looked from the flames to the trail of petrol, which stopped inches from the main
doors. The exterior of the pavilion had been doused in it too, the walls shining with it, the promenade glistening under my torchlight. Someone had wanted the entire thing to burn – and everything inside. That meant Healy and me. That meant every trace of whatever had gone on here.
I shouted for Healy and then rushed back inside, through the darkness, towards him. He was walking gingerly down the centre of the building, bony hand gripping the penlight. I saw him look towards the open door at the other end of the room.
‘What the hell’s going on?’
‘We’re in deep shit,’ I said, and grabbed him by the arm.
We were halfway back across the pavilion when he saw. Black smoke was starting to drift in through the doors, coming in on a faint breeze. An hour before sun-up, night was beginning to give way to morning, but it wasn’t the changing light that allowed him to see what lay ahead, it was the violence of the fire, the size of it, flames licking at the promenade as it rode the petrol trail towards us.
He hesitated, slowing down.
‘We have to go,’ I said, hand back on his arm.
He shrugged me off. ‘Go where?’
‘In ten minutes, this place’ll be a memory.’
‘Go where, Raker?’
I looked through the doors.
He was right.
There was no going back the way we’d come. Behind the crackle of the fire, there was the sound of the pier moaning, its archaic structure giving way, the criss-crossing struts beneath the promenade bending and burning. Pretty soon, they’d be falling away to the sea, the walkway toppling like a domino set.
Even if we’d been able to bypass the fire – which we couldn’t – there was no safety out there: on the other side of it, the pier had already been seared, the boards we’d walked, the fences on either side of us, now blackened and brittle.