by Tim Weaver
‘Even if I knew, I can’t discuss witnesses with –’
‘Make a few calls,’ I said to her, cutting her off. ‘Make a few calls to Tower Hamlets and ask them if he gave his name. Because I guarantee you: he didn’t.’
A pause. ‘So?’
‘So, there is no witness.’
‘They got a call –’
‘Did he leave his name?’
Silence.
‘It was the guy who burned the pier down, Craw – you know that as well as I do. It’s a set-up. Yes, I was on the pier. Yes, that was me. That was my car. But you know the first time I realized that the pier was on fire? When I walked outside and the promenade was collapsing into the river. I swam back to shore. He coated that whole place in petrol and set it alight while we were still inside –’
‘Who’s “we”?’
I stopped, glancing at Healy again.
There was something of the past in him now, a hint of suspicion that was like a bridge, connecting one point in time to another. I thought back to that first meeting we’d had in January, looking out from a café in Hammersmith at rowers carving through the icy Thames, and wondered if either of us imagined it would end up here: him, a spectre, a memory given life; me, a man on the run, under suspicion again, defending himself to the one person left who might believe him.
‘His name’s Paul Korman,’ I told her.
‘Who?’
‘This so-called witness. Or it could be Victor Grankin –’
‘I can’t hear this.’
‘They were using the pier for something –’
‘I don’t want to hear it.’
‘I’m trying to tell you the truth here.’
‘And what do you want me to do with this information, Raker? Shall I march up to Bethnal Green CID and tell them we’ve just had a nice little chat?’
‘Come on, Craw.’
‘No,’ she said, her voice quiet but sharp.
‘Who else do they have?’
‘Who else do who have?’
‘That family.’
She sighed. ‘This case isn’t yours.’
‘Then why did you help me yesterday? Why did you tell me about Healy? You knew I wasn’t going to leave it there.’
No response.
‘That family haven’t got anyone else. This is it. I’m as good as it’s going to get for them. The Met investigation is buried in a filing cabinet somewhere, and all this crap, this fantasy that Korman has reported to police this morning, it’s all just a distraction. That’s all him and Grankin are trying to do.’
‘Because?’
‘Because they know I’m getting close.’
Silence. I stopped and took a long breath. This was going nowhere good. I couldn’t explain what I felt, couldn’t express what I meant. In the years since I’d started tracking missing people, I’d seen something different from Craw, something worse: not just people trying to conceal the abhorrence of their crimes, but trying to scorch any trace of it from existence. When men and women vanished, everything was gone: there wasn’t a body, there wasn’t forensic evidence, there was no reason or motive, all you had was a mound of earth into which you dug and dug and kept on digging. And by the time you got that first glimpse of whatever was buried there, you were so deep into the earth, it was too late to claw your way out. All you had were these men, these devils.
The only choice left was to fight.
In the background, for the first time, I heard voices, slowly fading in. Craw covered the mouthpiece and said something short, muffled. The voices faded out again. She said, ‘I’m going to have to tell my super about this call.’
‘Do what you have to do.’
‘Even if you’re right, even if I believe you, they’re going to tear into your phone records and find this conversation. I can’t afford to get caught up in this.’
‘Do you?’ I said.
‘Do I what?’
‘Believe me.’
Craw didn’t respond, a long sigh crackling down the line. I looked at the time. Just after 9 a.m. My head was so full of noise, for a moment I struggled to recall when I’d last slept. Was it yesterday? Or was it the day before? The distant sound of sirens stirred me from my thoughts, and I gestured for Healy to start the car.
‘Do you?’ I said again.
No response.
‘Craw, do you believe me?’
It sounded like she was about to say something.
‘Craw?’
‘Yes,’ she said finally. ‘Of course I believe you.’
‘Okay,’ I replied, moving through the grass. ‘I’ve got to go, but I need to tell you this. Someone needs to know.’
‘I told you, I don’t want to –’
‘Please.’
A pause. ‘What is it?’
‘Tell whoever’s running this case at the Met to get a forensic team into the museum at Wonderland and look at the penny arcade. Some of the machines in there …’ I stopped, knowing how this would sound to her. ‘Just look at them.’
‘Look at them for what?’
‘I’m, uh … I don’t know exactly.’
‘What the hell are you talking about?’
I glanced at my watch, remembering I was supposed to call Gary Cabot this afternoon. It seemed so long ago since I’d spoken to him at the museum.
‘The man who runs the museum,’ I said to her, ‘is a guy called Gary Cabot. He got back from Dubai this morning. He’ll be able to help you ID the machines –’
‘Cabot won’t be doing anything.’
That stopped me. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, he was reported dead forty-five minutes ago.’
‘Cabot’s dead?’
‘You didn’t know?’
‘No.’
‘I only heard whispers from someone I know,’ Craw said. ‘But apparently a team from the Met went to tell Cabot about the pier, and they found his front door unlocked. They go inside, and he’s face down in the kitchen with his throat cut. His dad’s there too. Looks like someone’s closing the circle.’
59
We’d stopped briefly at a supermarket in Stratford where I’d grabbed some clothes, and now I clumsily changed in the car, restricted by a lack of space in the front. I pulled on jeans, a T-shirt, socks, and laced up a new pair of boots, keeping my eyes on my mirrors. Sirens faded again as a police car headed off towards some other part of the city. But sooner or later they wouldn’t fade out.
Sooner or later they’d find us.
‘Are you going to tell me why you felt it necessary to stop here and call Melanie Craw?’ Healy said, making it clear how he felt about taking this detour.
‘She needed to know I didn’t do it.’
A snort of contempt. ‘Why the hell would she need to know that?’
I just looked at him.
‘Are you insane?’
I don’t know, I thought. Maybe.
‘You do realize you just confessed to a police officer, right?’
‘I know exactly what I did.’
‘She doesn’t give a damn what you tell her you didn’t do, Raker. Your registration number is out on the wires. Those uniforms can place you in this car, at the scene. You get that, right? You see the deep level of shite you’re in here?’
I turned to him. ‘We’re done talking about this.’
Looking out through the windscreen, I watched the rain hit the glass, and then thought of East, his butchered corpse still twisted up in a blanket in the boot.
Getting back out, I stood at the edge of the road and looked both ways, listening for any sound of traffic. It was quiet. Returning to the car, I opened the boot, grabbed hold of his body and hauled it on to the ground. He rolled slightly, concealed by the grass. Checking for traffic a second time, I dragged him off, deeper into the grass, until I got to an old, gnarled chestnut tree.
I covered him with the blanket.
DNA on the blanket and in my car would soon connect me to the corpse, so this wasn’t about trying t
o disassociate myself from the body. The only way I could prove I hadn’t killed him was by finding the person who had. Instead, by leaving him here, by putting in a call to police from the next payphone I found, I hoped, in some way, it might be better than carrying him around in the boot of my car, like a sack full of debris.
And yet, as I knelt down next to him, found two twigs and – using some vine from the tree – created a primitive crucifix, that rationale started to taste a little sour. This is no way for a person to be left. This is no better than having him in the back of my car. I swallowed, again, again, unable to tear my eyes away from the shape under the blanket, my mind returning to Craw’s words. You’re going to lie down in the dark, and you’re going to eat the same pills Healy did. Or maybe it wasn’t going to be like that. Maybe it was going to be like this.
A brutal death.
Lonely. Discarded.
I placed the crucifix in the ground and headed back to the car. Slamming the boot shut, I slipped in at the wheel and reversed it back out on to the road.
‘You’re just going to leave him here?’ Healy said.
I sidestepped the question. ‘Gary Cabot’s dead.’
‘What?’
‘Korman, Grankin – they’re tying up all the loose ends.’
‘I thought Cabot wasn’t involved.’
‘He wasn’t. But he was still a danger to them. All the stuff East told us last night, whatever’s going on at the pier, Cabot might not have been in on it, but – given enough of a push by police – he could probably have started putting it together for them. Grankin stealing those tins the night of the fair, whatever was going on before that, with the varnishing – Cabot was a smart guy. He’d have started connecting the dots. They couldn’t risk that.’
I stopped, thinking of Joseph Cabot for the first time, old and slow, blind, unaware. I imagined how his last moments must have been, the terror, unable to see what was happening, just the sound of it, until they turned on him. I felt a deep swell of sadness for him, for his son, for all the people cut down by Korman and Grankin.
And then the sadness began to harden.
‘We have to find Korman.’
Healy rubbed an eye. ‘What about at the market?’
‘You mean his antiques shop?’
He nodded.
In everything that had happened, I hadn’t given it a thought. Camden was ten miles west, back across London – a trip I didn’t want to make. I picked up my phone, found the number for Gray Antiques and Collectables, and dialled it. It hit a generic BT answerphone message inside three rings.
Hanging up again without leaving a message, I went to my browser, found the number of a clothing shop in the next unit along from Korman’s, and called them instead. After a couple of seconds, a female voice answered.
I spun a story about being from a data collection agency, employed by the management at Stables Market to get feedback from tenants. She told me she wasn’t even open for another forty minutes, that she had things to do before it did, and questioned why I was calling on a Sunday. Slowly, though, I managed to talk her around, asking her about ways she’d like to see her working experience improved. When I finally ran out of things to ask, I said, ‘I haven’t been able to get hold of the man in the unit next door to yours.’
‘Probably because he’s never around,’ she said.
‘How come?’
‘He just doesn’t run that place like the rest of us run a business. I can go a couple of months without seeing him here. That unit just sits there, locked up, until he decides it’s time to come back.’
‘I see. Have you ever been inside?’
A long pause. ‘Where did you say you were from again?’
‘Chalk Farm Data Collection.’
I said it without hesitation, hoping it would be enough.
‘I’ve been in once or twice,’ she said.
‘It seems pretty normal?’
‘It’s just an antiques shop.’
‘What do you make of him?’
Another even longer pause, and this time I realized the conversation was getting away from me. Even so, I waited, knowing it was the last question I was going to ask her. ‘He seems okay,’ she said finally. ‘You know … fine.’
But that wasn’t the truth. The truth flickered in her voice, long enough for me to pick up on it. She didn’t like him. She didn’t want to be next to him.
He was strange. He put her on edge.
Somewhere deeper down, he scared her.
I hung up. ‘He’s not at the shop.’
‘So?’
‘So we need to find him and Grankin. If we find them, we can end this.’
‘And how the hell do you plan to do that?’
‘By knocking on Grankin’s front door.’
60
Poland Gardens, the address Ewan Tasker had given me for Victor Grankin, was in Whitehall Woods, a thick knot of trees that straddled the London and Essex county lines and formed the southern tip of Epping Forest’s nine square miles.
We left the car at a multistorey in Leytonstone, then got on the Tube and rode the Central line north to the station at Buckhurst Hill. It was two miles west from there to Grankin’s house, a distance Healy claimed he would be able to do on foot – but we both knew that wasn’t true. Grabbing a taxi, we made the trip in silence, the lack of conversation and the hum of the cab gradually pulling me away, until I could feel myself starting to drop off. It wasn’t until we hit a bump in the road that I realized I actually had, waking to find us at a stop fifty yards from Poland Gardens, directly adjacent to a dreary, half-disguised caravan park.
Forest was everywhere, thick and opaque, fringing the sides of the two-lane road along which we’d travelled, and in my sluggish state I wondered for a moment whether we’d actually left London behind.
But then a mixture of adrenalin and dread kicked in and I led Healy away from the taxi and down towards the entrance to the road. The caravan park was built in a semicircle, almost cut into the treeline, static vans sitting on breeze blocks in a line, all facing the road. There was an office at the front, a few cars in badly marked parking bays, and a waning plastic mesh fence beyond that, presumably being used as a boundary marker. As we walked, I saw flickers of Poland Gardens on the other side of the mesh, houses coming and going as the foliage seemed to blossom and dissolve, and then we were at the top of the road.
It was a cul-de-sac of five houses, the road in – one hundred and fifty feet of cracked tarmac, crumbling edges falling away on to the forest floor – bordered on the left by high fir trees and on the right by the caravan park. The foliage thinned out a little around the homes themselves, Whitehall Woods kept back by high property walls, but everywhere else the forest was unrelenting, dense and hermetic. It was mid morning and the light was only just breaching the top of the trees, thin spears of it glancing off the first of the houses and glinting in its windows.
‘Which one’s his?’ Healy said.
There were two houses on either side, facing each other, and then one on its own beyond the rest. I pointed to the one on its own. ‘That’s his,’ I said, and when I looked again, I saw for the first time that a faint 3 had been drawn on a steel dustbin sitting at the front of the building, rubbish bags spilling out of it. The windows of the house were dark and the tiled roof was littered with pine needles.
I tapped Healy on the arm and told him to follow me, and we headed back along the road and into the caravan park. I could see a man at a desk through the grubby office window, but he was leaning over, looking at something, and didn’t notice us. As we got beyond the row of caravans, the forest seemed to close in, the canopy like a landslide of leaves.
At the plastic mesh fence, I checked there were no eyes on us, then stepped over it and on to an undulating forest floor covered in fallen pine cones. Healy did the same, but much more slowly, and then we were moving again, between tree trunks, across gnarled, twisted roots reaching out of the ground like fingers.
/> We passed along the back of the two houses on the right and then stopped, peering along the outside wall of the second one, towards Grankin’s place. Our view was partly disguised by a nest of sycamore trees. Behind me, I heard Healy catching up, out of breath. He placed a hand against the wall as he got to me, and frowned, as if he couldn’t understand why I was looking so concerned about him. I didn’t say anything, returning my gaze to Grankin’s house.
Around us, the forest’s song faded in, leaves snapping in the wind, the dmph, dmph, dmph of rain against the canopy. ‘Stay here,’ I said to Healy, and before he could argue I left him catching his breath and moved further along the outside wall of Grankin’s neighbour, using the trees for cover.
Through the gap in a copse of pine trees I spotted his rusty Citroën, parked on a tarmac driveway. The closer I got, the more I could see evidence of work having been done on the property: part of the exterior had been rendered at some point, the colour of the rendering darker than the colour of the paint elsewhere; there were piles of breeze blocks and red bricks close to where the car was parked, with lengths of wood for a timber frame extension on the ground next to them. As I looked at the piles of unused material, I remembered something Ewan Tasker had told me: Grankin’s been at the address in Poland Gardens since October 2010. That was three months after he was given the sack by Gary Cabot. He was fired from his job, then went out and bought a house. Something didn’t add up.
Keeping the other side of the treeline, I headed towards the rear of the property. There was a door on the side of the house, and at the back I found dark windows on the top floor that mirrored those at the front, and sliding French doors on the ground floor, leading into a shadowy living room. There was no fresh rendering on this side, unlike the front. The garden at the back was small and unremarkable: a few pot plants, some flowers in the bed, a clean patio, all hemmed in by a five-foot brick wall.
So where was Grankin?
I returned to Healy.
‘See anything?’ he asked.
‘Nothing.’
His eyes snapped to the house and it was clear he had the same anxieties as me. Instinctively, without realizing, his hands went to the pockets of the coat I’d lent him. In one of them was the gun he’d had at the house in Camberwell. But that was all we had. We’d left the bread knife on the table I’d found him crying at, alongside the candles and the old mattress, with the memories of the months he’d spent there, waiting to die. Was that what we were doing here now – waiting to die?