by Tim Weaver
‘Why don’t I go in first?’ I said.
He frowned. ‘Are you kidding me?’
There had been sun and rain earlier, coming in from different sides of the forest. But now the sun disappeared behind a bank of cloud, the light altered and the house seemed to change subtly, a sudden narrowness to it as if it were closing in on itself, protecting what lay inside its walls. I looked back at Healy, and could see him watching me, trying to get a sense of what I was feeling, but what I was feeling was hard to articulate. I couldn’t put it into words, not in front of him. All I knew was that I’d spent a lot of time around people like Grankin, and the places they lived in. I’d become attuned to them. And I just knew this place was bad.
‘Wait here until I call you,’ I said.
Before he could reply, I made a dash for the house.
61
To the right of the property, indistinguishable pieces of old furniture had been dumped and were slowly decomposing: what could have been an armchair, torn and misshapen; a rusty sink; a wood panel from a wardrobe, split, broken. To its left an oak tree was growing out of the ground, its roots tearing through a concrete path – that connected the front of the house to the back – like it was paper. In its shadow was the side door I’d seen earlier.
It was set behind a screen made of blistered wood and pale green mesh, which swung out from the frame and then banged back against it every time a breeze passed through.
I paused at the very edge of the treeline, not breaking cover for the moment, listening for any sound of movement from the house. But the only noise came from the screen door, still knocking against the frame, and a soft humming from somewhere. I wasn’t sure if the humming was originating from inside the property or out in the forest. Satisfied no one could see me, I made a break for it, pulling the screen back and trying the door.
It popped away from the frame.
Briefly, I thought about a retreat, unsure of what I was getting myself into. It wasn’t just the house. It was Grankin, it was Korman, the things they’d done together. But then my head filled with images of the Clarks, the crime-scene photographs of two innocent girls in their beds, treated as if their lives meant nothing – and I made my way in.
The side door moved soundlessly, fanning back into the semi-darkness of the house. A hallway was directly in front of me, kinking left and connecting with the front door. Ahead of me was a long lounge-diner, the curtains pulled at the front windows; further on the right, out of sight from where I was standing, had to be the sliding doors I’d seen at the back. Beside me was a small cupboard, tucked in under the stairs. I quietly opened it; there was a vacuum cleaner and a bucket inside.
I inched my way forward, footsteps muffled by the carpet, which looked new. The house was immaculate. Fresh paint on the walls, pristine sofas in the living room and, as it came into view around the corner, on my right, I saw the kitchen at the back of the house looked new too: granite worktops, white tiles. It must have been why all the old furniture had been dumped at the side of the house.
In the kitchen, the back door looked out on to the tidy garden. I tried it but it was locked. Removing a knife from a rack on the counter, I made my way along the hallway, towards the front door and the bottom of the stairs.
Looking up, it was hard to see anything at the top. Maybe a flicker of light; a TV playing without sound. Beside me, I could see the banister was brand new, the gloss paint reflecting back my face. Gripping the knife, I started the ascent.
Immediately at the top was a bathroom, small and plain. Next to that was a spare bedroom, nothing inside. Literally no furniture at all, except for two built-in wardrobes on the left. The third door was where the light was coming from.
As I processed that, I became aware of something else: the extractor fan was still whirring in the bathroom. He’d used the toilet, or the shower, or both.
And he’d done it recently.
He’s in the third room.
I was squeezing the knife so tight, I could feel sweat popping out from my palms, breaking a trail across my skin. When I reached the third door, the floorboards moaned, a deep, unwelcome sound that echoed through the house.
But everything remained still.
Edging around the door, I looked in at his bedroom. It was dark, curtains half pulled at the windows, the TV on mute and throwing out grey-blue images of mountain scenery. The bed was unmade, the duvet pulled back, as if Grankin had been getting ready to sleep. On the bedside table was a set of keys.
But no Grankin.
He’s not here.
I walked around the bed and looked out at the street.
So where the hell is he?
Checking each of the rooms again, including the built-in wardrobes, I found nothing and headed back down.
In the living room, I went through his DVD collection, through a small pile of magazines, through the tedious detritus of his life – a few photographs of him in his twenties, on a trip back to Estonia; old receipts; electricity bills he’d paid long ago – and then finally found something worth stopping for: his laptop.
I booted it up, keeping my eyes on the side door. He’d left the TV on in his bedroom. He’d been about to get into – or had just got out of – bed. The extractor fan was still going in the bathroom. He had to have been in the house only minutes before we’d arrived, and yet there was no sign of him. Why? Where had he gone? If he’d headed out, it must have been on foot because the Citroën was still here – so why leave the side door open?
The laptop buzzed once.
A password screen.
I powered it off, put it back where I’d found it, and moved through to the hallway. The side door and the screen were moving in unison now, wafting back and forth, clattering against each other as they closed. As they did, a hush settled across the house, and I became aware of a different sound: a soft, familiar humming.
I’d heard the same noise outside.
Was it the TV upstairs?
The fridge?
I realized there was something else too, not just the sound. There was an abnormality to the house that was only now starting to dawn on me. I looked around, at the fresh paint, the new decor, the elegant kitchen, and realized the house felt cramped, confined and oppressive.
Returning to the kitchen, I opened up the refrigerator, trying to find the source of the humming noise. There were a few basics inside – butter, milk, some out-of-date eggs – but not much else. The bottom half was the freezer. I checked the three drawers, which were full of pizza and frozen meat.
Then I noticed something.
Next to the fridge, poking out from under an electric cooker, was a footprint. It was so clear on the pale cream lino, I could see a manufacturer’s logo. That wasn’t all: dust, crumbs and dirt were gently drifting across the floor, out from under the cooker, blown there by a breeze.
But the breeze wasn’t coming from the hallway.
Placing a hand either side of the cooker, I began rocking it back towards me, one side to the next. As I did, the humming got louder, the breeze cooler and stronger. Six inches clear of the wall, I stepped forward and looked behind it.
Grankin had cut a hole in the wall.
As I looked through the gap, I could see a space beyond it about two feet deep and at least six feet high, running right to left, and out of sight. And I finally understood why the house felt wrong; why it felt so constricting and closed in.
It was too small.
It was smaller on the inside than it was on the outside, because the work Grankin had done on the house hadn’t been to improve it, or extend it.
It had been to reduce it.
He was hiding something in the walls.
62
Crouching, I stepped through the hole in the kitchen, into a narrow passageway, the grey concrete blocks of the exterior wall on one side, and the plasterboard of the new interior wall on the other. A high-powered LED lamp hummed above my head, clamped in place with a crocodile clip and making a
similar noise to the one I’d heard outside. The lamp’s glare bleached everything in a harsh, white light.
The passageway ran for about ten feet to my right, struts knitted together overhead, until it hit a vertical slab of older plasterboard, which must have been the hallway wall. In front of that, Grankin had set up a wooden trellis table, a penny arcade machine sitting on it, tins of Hoberman’s varnish and paintbrushes as well. The penny arcade machine was the bagatelle I’d seen Grankin take from Calvin East’s house the night before. Its back panel was open, but there was nothing inside, just the basic mechanical skeleton of the machine: all its pulleys and cogs and wheels.
In the other direction, to my left, the space moved through to the back of the house about the same distance. Chipboard panels had been placed on the floor, covering the entire length of this new extension – except for a space about three feet in diameter where there was no flooring at all.
Just a hole.
I felt a flutter of alarm, not just at the discovery of this hidden extension, not just at the thought of Grankin maybe being somewhere deeper inside, but at the way the house had begun to change. It put a hesitation in my stride, as if this place were some sort of living, breathing thing, able to react, change shape and adapt.
You sound insane. Get a grip.
And yet I couldn’t dispel the idea entirely. I was tired, on edge, maybe not thinking straight, but these men, what they’d done, it was so abhorrent there was something of the unimaginable about it. So why wouldn’t Grankin’s home be like this? If a house reflected its owner, this was him: covert, elusive, unpredictable.
Dangerous.
I backed out and moved quickly to the side door, waved Healy towards the house, and then returned. A minute later, he entered the kitchen, his breathing heavy, wheezing gently. ‘What the hell is this?’ he whispered.
I put a finger to my lips, and listened.
No noise except the rain outside, the moan of the wind.
I looked towards the gap in the floor. It was like a sinkhole. When I began moving quietly along the boards, intent on finding out where the hole went, I felt them move and shift beneath me, like plates of sand. Behind me, Healy entered the space, heavy on his feet, ungainly, a crackle to his breathing that may as well have been a scream within the oppressive confines of the extension. I turned to him, gesturing for him to be quiet, and then stopped and looked down the hole.
It dropped away about six feet, and then dog-legged left. It was some sort of tunnel, a shaft, but not one that had been on the original plans for the place. Grankin must have dug it out. A metal ladder leaned against the hard walls of the hole, dropping away into the semi-lit chamber below. Another light – this one less powerful – was clipped to the bottom rung of the ladder, and shone off along the horizontal portion of the shaft, none of which I could see yet. I paused, momentarily uncertain.
And then I started the climb down.
At the bottom, I dropped on to my hands and knees and looked along the tunnel. Its length was difficult to judge, even though it was relatively straight. Forty feet, maybe fifty, the opposite end illuminated by a light that must have been secured out of sight, on one of the higher rungs of a second ladder propped there. Thick semicircles of metal sheeting had been placed all the way along, ensuring the shaft didn’t collapse in on itself, but it seemed pretty secure, even without them.
A deeper sense of unease formed in me.
This went all the way under the garden, beyond it – but to where? Why not just walk to wherever this led? It must have taken months to dig out.
What was worth that kind of effort?
Hesitantly, I started moving on my hands and knees. Behind me, I heard Healy’s heels chime on the metal ladder, but then the sound seemed to die, and the walls started to feel like they were closing in, like the shaft was changing shape, funnelling me into an even narrower gap.
Suddenly, I could feel my pulse quicken.
My heart was thumping in my ears.
I tried to focus on what was ahead, a brightly lit square about thirty feet further on – the end of this, just keep going, just keep going – but the faster I went, the worse my head started to buzz, white spots blinking in front of my eyes. I was sweating, panicked, unable to breathe properly, and then it started to feel like I wasn’t moving any more, my knees, my hands, desperately pumping, trying to carry me forward, trying to gain momentum. Keep going, keep going, keep goi–
The shaft ended.
I looked up, expecting to see another lamp – but instead it wasn’t artificial light that was illuminating this end of the tunnel. It was sky. For a second, I was unsure exactly what else I was seeing. It didn’t help that I was struggling to calm down, my breathing ragged, clothes soaked through with sweat, frightened by whatever had come over me again. I’d felt like this in the museum, in the seconds before collapsing. I closed my eyes, trying to calm myself.
A noise – from somewhere above.
I looked up again, starting to become aware of rain dotting my face, of the sounds of Whitehall Woods. Wind, leaves snapping.
I started the climb, then paused halfway, heart fluttering. All around me was forest: countless trees, one after the other, heading in all directions, twisted roots breaking out of the earth; at ground level was a sea of fallen leaves, golden brown, orange, all of them woven together like a quilt; and then, as I continued to turn on the ladder, and looked behind me for the first time – in the direction we’d come – there was something else, right on top of me.
A fence.
Except this one wasn’t like the thin plastic mesh fence dividing the caravan park and Poland Gardens.
This was an eight-foot steel perimeter fence.
It ran in a gentle arc, disappearing behind banks of tree trunks on the left and right of me. Grankin’s house wasn’t visible, even though it was only fifty feet away, its boundary, its back windows, its roof, all disguised behind a thick wall of fir trees and high brambles, of weeds and vines. It was why I never saw a hint of this fence, even when I’d been standing at the back of his property. I’d never seen the barbed wire around its top, the KEEP OUT! PRIVATE PROPERTY! signs. But I’d heard it. The humming. It wasn’t coming from the lamp in the shaft – it was coming from the fence.
It was electrified.
Grankin dug out the tunnel to get beyond the fence.
I climbed up and out of the hole. As Healy emerged – breathless; slow, leaden movements – I looked deeper into the forest. As I tried to imagine why he would go to such lengths, I recalled again what Ewan Tasker had told me over the phone, about Grankin moving into the house in October 2010, just three months after getting fired from Wonderland – and, slowly, an idea came to me.
You didn’t just buy a house, even if there was no chain. It took time. It took meetings, paperwork and phone calls. I’d wondered if Grankin had deliberately got himself caught, in order to provide a cover story for the night of 11 July 2010. Now I was starting to wonder whether this house may have been a part of it; that when he realized the house was going to be his, he realized he didn’t need access to the pier any more, and he deliberately got sloppy. He stole those tins of varnish and waited to get caught – because not only would he have his alibi for the murders, but whatever Korman and he were doing could be better done here.
In the house. In this forest.
I looked at Healy, gesturing silently to him, asking him if he was ready. He had one hand on his hip and was breathing hard, wheezing, his startling loss of weight seeming more pronounced among the giant trees. What had I done by bringing him here? What good was a gun if the man it belonged to couldn’t react in time?
Pushing the thought away, I led us forward.
There were no ready-made paths, no hints of the routes Grankin may have taken. Any path we cut out, we cut out through a bed of low-level weeds, of overgrowth and contorted tree roots. I moved deliberately slowly, partly because I knew nothing of this forest, its contours and dangers, and part
ly because I wanted to reduce the noise we were making. Grankin could have been anywhere.
He could be watching us now.
The idea made me stop, Healy almost bumping into me. I scanned the area immediately around us, the trees so close in it was like being back in that tunnel. My heart rate increased again; my muscles hardened. We were barely any distance from civilization at all, and yet it felt like we were somewhere remote and uncharted.
‘What?’ Healy said softly.
To our right, there was a minor break in the trees, an oval-shaped gap that showed through to a sliver of open land. Was it a clearing? I pointed at it, telling Healy we were heading there, and we began to cross a dense patch of nettles and vines, pine cones crunching beneath our boots. The closer we got, the more I could see of what lay beyond the treeline: it looked like a field, full of knee-high grass, surrounded on all sides by a relentless, tangled barrier of trees.
But it wasn’t a field.
It was a garden.
As we stopped at its edges, the front of a building came into view, ugly and grey, flat-roofed, double-storeyed with two wings. It was big and functional, like a cross between a police station and a Victorian grammar school, but its windows and doors had been boarded up. The forest formed a broken circle around it, revealing the remnants of flower beds that had once grown here, and a driveway. It came up to the front of the building, looped around and headed out again.
‘What the hell is this place?’ I said, as much to myself as to Healy.
He didn’t reply, his eyes scanning the building for any sign of life, then settling on a warped, paint-blistered sign, half hidden by trees, at the bottom of the front steps. Moving a little further to my right, I tried to get a better view of it myself.