by Tim Weaver
‘Follow me.’
‘Are you listening?’ Healy said, a sudden panic in his voice. I paused for a second, taken aback, remembering what he’d said to me when we’d still been at the house in Camberwell: Being in that coma, it took my survival instinct away. It took everything away. I didn’t want to live. But now I realized that wasn’t true – or not entirely. He didn’t want to die here, just the same as me. He wanted to live.
He wanted to survive for now.
I felt a strange sense of relief, even here, even in this moment, as we stood at the end of a structure that was about to plunge into oblivion; and then something cracked, a deep, creaking sigh, and the whole promenade seemed to pitch right.
Grabbing his arm again, I used torchlight to direct a path to our left, out around the side of the pavilion, where coin-operated binoculars stood sentry, ancient, corroded. Ahead of us, at the rear of the building, I could see half of the bandstand, its roof sagging. Tiles had fallen away and gathered in a pile at one side of it, and the platform under the roof – where Goldman’s brass band had once played – had begun to cleave apart, softened by years of rain and sea spray.
Right in the corner, behind the bandstand, a metal gate had been built into the fence. It was open, flapping in the wind, revealing a ladder down to a small wooden jetty, slathered in seaweed. As I got to the gate, I peered over: one side of the jetty was completely gone, ragged boards reaching out like fingers into the centre of the Thames. Small boats would once have used it to dock here.
But not now.
I looked at Healy, a hand pressed to the fencing, out of breath, his gaze fixed back across his shoulder. The fire was hardly visible from here, disguised by the pavilion, but we could hear it: the cacophony of snapping wood, like trees falling one after the other. And there was something else too, distant, fading in.
Sirens.
‘We need to go.’
Healy looked from me to the gate and started shaking his head. ‘You want me to swim back to shore? Are you kidding? Look at me. Do I look ready for that?’
‘Would you rather die?’
He peered over the fence, down to the water, then along the fringes of the pier, to the museum. Something crashed, a doughy moan like the last breath of a giant, and then – for the first time – we both saw it: the fire was at the pavilion, clawing its way around to the side, a monstrous, unstoppable force of nature.
‘We’ll get hypothermia,’ he said.
‘I’ve got a spare change of clothes in the car. As soon as we get back, you can have those. You’ll be fine. But we need to go right now.’ I glanced at the fire, at the roof of the pavilion, all under attack. ‘It’s not just about the fire any more.’
He knew what I meant.
Sirens meant fire engines.
It meant police.
We started the climb down, me leading the way. At the bottom, I pressed a foot tentatively to the jetty, making sure it wasn’t going to sink as soon as I stood on it, and then stepped off and waited for Healy. He was slow – much slower than I needed him to be – but I didn’t say anything. Once he was off the ladder, I knelt and watched the patterns of the river, the direction the current was travelling in.
‘There’s all sorts of shite in there,’ Healy muttered.
It was heading west to east, and it was fast, swollen by the rain. It meant, as soon as we got in, we’d get pulled towards the burning wreckage of the pier.
‘Did you hear what I just said?’
I looked up at him. ‘If we stay here, we’re dead.’
A flicker of something in his face.
‘Are you coming?’
He hesitated for a moment, then quietly: ‘I can’t swim.’
There was so much in those three words: another admission of failure; a silent call for help; and confirmation that I was right. For now, he wanted to live.
‘Okay,’ I said.
I stepped off the side of the jetty, into the water. It was cold – but not as cold as I was expecting. Immediately, though, I could feel the strength of the tide.
‘Okay,’ I said again, holding out a hand to him. ‘We need to go.’
56
The crossing was brutally, relentlessly tough. As I swam on my back, dragging Healy behind me – an eleven-stone dead weight – I was fighting the current the whole way, the course of the water pulling me sideways, in towards the burning pier.
It took everything I had – every ounce of energy, every atom of willpower – not to be pulled under the collapsing promenade, but the river was eventually too strong: it drew us in towards it like a magnet, under it, chunks of scorched wood hitting the surface like bombs. Healy started to wriggle, panic setting in, and I had to tell him calmly to keep still. But I felt none of that calm inside. My heart was a fist against my ribs, striking so hard I could hear it pounding in my ears. Broken slabs the size of railway sleepers were falling from the sky, slapping the water, churning it up, the heat from the fire like a furnace.
But then, suddenly, we emerged on the other side, the storm of debris and heat fading as we continued east. I looked back over my right shoulder and saw a sandbank ahead of us. It arced out from the river wall, directly under one of the old warehouses, now converted to flats. There were lights on inside, but I wasn’t near enough to see if anyone was watching. Instead, I heaved Healy closer to me, head to my chest, and started trying to steer us towards the sandbank.
It was hard, but I got there, hitting dry land at the very end of the bank. I dragged Healy up, out of the water, and paused there – doubled over – trying to catch my breath. Every muscle in my body ached. My lungs burned. My head was thumping so hard it made it difficult to see straight. I turned and looked at the pier, a quarter of a mile back up the river. The pavilion would be gone in twenty minutes, claimed by the fire. Half of it had already been consigned to history, the front slowly collapsing in on itself, like a mouth opening to scream.
Next to me, Healy started coughing.
He lay on his back, sounding even worse than me, despite the fact that I’d carried him the whole way. His clothes clung to his meagre frame, his raincoat like a sheet of cling film, revealing the underside of his ribs, his left hip bone, the clefts and angles of a body that – less than a year ago – was hidden beneath layers of fat.
‘Korman did this,’ he said.
I glanced at the pier again, and could see a crowd at the edge of the water now, their gaze fixed on the fire. They were starting to gather, people out exercising, walking their dogs, all stopping to look at the pier’s atomized carcass; a monument from another time that soon wouldn’t even be that.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘This was Korman.’
‘How did he find out we were here?’
I shrugged, still catching my breath. ‘He knew we’d end up here. I didn’t see him following us, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t. He could have come in and killed us – but what if we’d escaped? Better to burn down the evidence first.’
‘Leaving us alive is a risk.’
‘Is it?’
‘We could go straight to the police.’
‘He knows we’re not going to do that,’ I said.
If Korman had followed us to the pier, he’d have seen Healy and me together, and he’d know Healy was alive. Right now, I was trapped.
Just another part of another lie.
57
A set of concrete steps led us off the sandbank, up to a narrow pathway that ran between two old wharves. I stopped and looked out between the buildings. We were right at the end of Wapping High Street, the museum about a fifth of a mile along, concealed beyond a bend in the road. I knew what awaited us there, though: sirens were still going, blue light painting the warehouse walls.
‘Stay here,’ I said to Healy.
We were both cold, chilled to the bone by the water, by the coolness of the morning, but he’d begun to shiver, to shrink in on himself, and if I took him with me, he’d slow me down. I shrugged off my jacket and ha
nded it over.
‘This’ll dry fast, and hopefully keep you a bit warmer.’
He put it on.
I scanned the street again. It was just after seven and people were already up, even though it was a Sunday morning, seeing what all the fuss was about at the museum. I was soaked, which made me easy to place at the scene, but I didn’t have a lot of options. In my car were the fresh, dry clothes I’d promised to Healy. More importantly, East was still in the boot. I had to get him, us and the car away from Wapping as fast as possible.
‘I’ll be back in five minutes,’ I said to Healy, and then headed off, trying to straighten my clothes out as I went. There was no getting around the fact that I looked wet, that my shirt was sticking to me, my trousers too, but I sorted my hair out, made it look respectable, and moved as quickly, as casually, as I could.
At the Overground station, I crossed the street, avoiding a couple milling around at the entrance, but then had to stop at the junction for Wapping Lane: two fire engines were travelling in my direction, lights flashing, sirens blaring. Stepping slowly back from the pavement’s edge, I kept on going until I was out of their line of sight, and then waited for them to take the roundabout and head east, down towards the museum. Once they were far enough away from me, I set off again.
There was a slight bend in Wapping High Street, left to right, and it wasn’t until I got to King Henry’s Wharf, about five hundred feet from the museum, that I realized two marked police cars had already cordoned off the area in and around the old paper mill. They’d parked diagonally across the road, three fire engines stationed between them. The fire crews were busy unfurling hosepipes from their trucks and running them alongside the museum and down to the banks of the river, where the pier was burning to ash. Tape had been used to ringfence an area about one hundred feet in length. There was no access.
I double-backed and crossed Wapping Rose Garden, heading out the other side on to Green Bank. A few people passed me in the park, eyes lingering on me, on my soaked clothes, but I kept my head down and my pace up. Green Bank was busier than the high street, a maze of four-storey residential buildings fringing one side of it, and it became even harder not to be seen. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw one old lady on the opposite pavement actually stop and watch me. Twenty feet further on, I glanced back over my shoulder, and she was in the same spot, eyes tracking my movement, all the way down to the side street in which I’d parked. I tried not to let the idea of being ID’d distract me, and headed left, into the road.
Straight away, I stopped again.
At the other end, two uniformed officers were coming up from Wapping High Street, moving slowly in my direction. One of them had a notepad clasped in his hand, his eyes repeatedly returning to the page.
They’ve got my registration number.
Someone had tipped them off.
I zeroed in on my BMW, left illegally halfway along in a residents’ parking bay. It was protected from view for the moment by a Sprinter van – but not for long. They were maybe only forty feet away from it, temporarily distracted by a second BMW, newer than mine, better and more expensive, but the same colour.
I moved fast, keeping to the edges of the pavement, using the van as cover. It was a risk: they couldn’t see me, but I couldn’t see them, which meant – if they picked up the pace even a little – they’d be on to me long before I got to my car.
Fifteen feet away, I sidestepped to my right, seeing they were still at the other BMW. I heard snatches of their conversation, one of them telling the other that it wasn’t the model they were looking for, and then I finally reached my car.
The boot was unlocked.
It sat there, an inch open, rising and falling gently as a breeze rolled in off the river. Almost on cue, a thread of sunlight broke above the rooftops to my left, bouncing off the bodywork and exposing a sliver of what lay under the lid.
Calvin East.
But not as I’d left him.
He was in the foetal postion, his legs and arms still together – bound with the duct tape Healy had used before I’d even arrived at the house in Camberwell. There was blood everywhere, so much of it, it was hard to get an idea of exactly how he’d died. The blanket he’d been lying on was twisted around him, coiled like a python, the upper half of it – around his chest, and his throat – stained red.
Worse, he still had tape over his mouth.
He’d died here, alone, unable to scream. I felt a flood of guilt wash over me, for the needless loss of life, for leaving him here. Despite everything he’d done – his failings, his culpability, the hand he’d played in Korman and Grankin’s awful crimes – he didn’t deserve an end like this.
Static. The sound of a police radio.
Slamming the boot shut, I moved to the driver’s side, the stark reality of my situation hitting home. They had the make and model of my car. They had my registration. They were only feet from me – and now I had a dead body in the boot.
I slid in at the wheel, started up the car, then swung the BMW out of the parking spot, into the road. I didn’t look at the two cops, but I could see them react: a quick glance at the notepad, and then they were running towards me.
I put my foot to the floor.
The tyres squealed on the tarmac, and I accelerated away, gunning the car to the end of the street. In my rear-view mirror, I saw the two cops pursuing me, one of them radioing for back-up, the other slightly in front, sprinting full pelt.
When I got back to Healy, he was in the same place, pale face visible in the shadows between warehouses. Somewhere behind us, sirens started up again. He moved as quickly as he could, and got in. ‘What the hell happened?’ he said.
‘East is dead.’
It was difficult to read him, hard to tell whether the news made him feel better or worse. He’d waited a long time for this moment, to see the destruction of the men who’d cost him everything he’d ever loved. And yet, now the first of them had fallen, he didn’t look triumphant. There was no delight in this reprisal.
Maybe because it hadn’t been at his own hands.
Or maybe because – now, in these moments – he realized something he’d always known deep down: that four years after he’d found the Clarks, three years after he’d buried his daughter, there was no victory in savagery, and no joy in death.
58
I called Melanie Craw from Wanstead Flats, three hundred acres of grassland in east London that bisected Leytonstone and Manor Park. Despite being only yards from the noise of the city, from the hum of early-morning traffic and the squeal of commuter trains, inside the car – with the heaters blowing, and the gentle patter of rain against the roof – we couldn’t hear it. All we had was the view: grass and trees and birds, the blue smudge of distant roofs the one hint that we hadn’t left the city entirely.
Wandering out into the long grass at the front of the BMW, I pieced my phone together again. I’d taken the SIM card and the battery out as soon as we’d left Wapping. When everything was assembled, I glanced back at Healy, his face peering out through the glass at me, one side of him completely in shadow. The dichotomy only seemed to accentuate his decline, pulling at the folds of his mouth and the hollows of his eyes, a pissed-off expression on his face. He didn’t understand why I needed to call Craw, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to tell him.
As the drizzle hit my face and my phone kicked into life, it buzzed three times in my hand. Three missed calls, all from Craw, all within ten minutes of one another. She’d phoned an hour after I’d left Wapping – and then again, and again.
I dialled her number and waited for it to connect. It rang for a long time without any response: nine, ten, eleven rings. I thought about hanging up, my finger moving to end the call. But then, a moment later, she finally answered.
‘Raker.’
One word, but delivered with such weight. Sorrow, frustration, anger, disbelief. It threw me off balance, and I found myself looking back towards Healy, as if subconsciously reachin
g out for his support. Around me, the grass moved, swaying in the wind, its gentle whisper carrying off into the grey of the morning.
‘Craw, listen to me –’
‘What the hell’s going on?’
A lorry rumbled past, heading north on the three-quarter-mile stretch of road that ran through the centre of the Flats. There was no pavement on this side so I’d bumped up on to the kerb, the car partly submerged by grass like a slowly sinking ship. Once the lorry was gone, the Flats became quiet again: the softly falling rain, the gentle whoosh of the grass in the wind, the buzz of the telephone call.
‘You know I didn’t do this,’ I said.
‘Is that what you called to say?’
‘I wanted you to hear it from me.’
She didn’t respond this time. I looked back at Healy, his eyes on me. ‘Craw, listen to me,’ I said. ‘I’m being honest with you, I swear. We were on the pier –’
‘Who’s “we”?’
I stopped. Shit. ‘I was on the pier, but I didn’t burn it down.’
‘You’re lying to me, Raker.’
‘I’m not.’
‘Then who’s “we”?’
My gaze returned to Healy. ‘It’s complicated.’
‘It always is with you.’ She said it calmly, which only made the comment sting even more. ‘You’re all over the wires, Raker. This isn’t even my borough but you’re still the first thing I heard about when I got in this morning. A witness said he saw two men on the pier before it burned down, and one of them was a guy in his early-to-mid forties matching your description. He said they arrived in a grey BMW 3 Series with your plates. Two officers …’ She stopped. I could almost feel her anger, pulsing like an electrical charge. ‘Two officers saw you making a fucking getaway this morning. They saw you, Raker. Are you even aware of what you’re doing?’
‘Who was the witness?’
No answer, just a derisory grunt.
‘Did they give their name?’