by Tim Weaver
But he was gone.
I stuttered, slowing instinctively – and then accelerated again, faster this time, trying to see if he’d got beyond the bend in the road. When I got there, I saw the route extended another five hundred feet, meeting a T-junction.
He’d vanished.
Movement in the trees to my right.
I looked back, unable to see the cops yet, then made a sideways dash, off the road and beyond the treeline. My surroundings immediately greyed, like a light being turned down, the canopy trapping the darkness. The forest went on in all directions, impossibly huge, the ground soft beneath my feet, spongy, where the rain had yet to dry out. The whole thing was carpeted in pine needles, cones and fallen leaves. I looked from tree trunk to tree trunk, trying to spot flashes of white. Korman should have been easy to see here, the brightness of the forensic suit like a beacon beneath a ceiling of branches. But there was nothing. As I moved further in, trying to avoid placing my feet where they would make a sound, I couldn’t see any sign of him.
Beep beep.
I stopped.
What the hell was that?
Looking back the way I’d come, I heard fast footsteps out on the road, the brief shadows of the three cops who’d been chasing me fading in and out, lost on the other side of the trees. Moments later, a sharp flare of sound, deadened by the forest: fire engines heading one way, towards the home, police sirens coming the other. Bishara has sent a car after us. They’d realize soon enough, if they hadn’t already, that we’d come into the woods, but, as a flash of blue painted the trees at the edges of the road, the car passed my position – for now, at least – and the forest settled.
Beep beep.
I tuned back in. The sound was coming from in front of me.
I moved slowly, gingerly, reaching down to pluck a fallen branch off the bed of the forest. It was damp, rotten at either end, but it would do. Off to my left, I could see traces of the police car’s flash bar, still smearing some of the leaves blue; to my right, in front of me, it was just trees. Infinite trees, unfurling into a sepia fog.
I gripped the branch even harder, my stomach tightening, churning. How had he disappeared? Why wasn’t I seeing him? My head was starting to hurt, the pain washing in like a tide, the same place as before, pounding right behind my eyes.
And then I saw something.
Lying on the floor of the forest, in the space between two huge fir trees, was a mobile phone. It beeped twice, the display illuminating the immediate area.
Did he drop it?
I scanned my surroundings, more cautious than ever now. But there was no movement, no sign of Korman. The place was silent. No wind. No rain. I inched in closer, keeping my eyes on the trees circling me, gripping the branch with both hands, one over the other. A couple of feet short of the phone, it beeped again.
This time I could make out a message.
Pick me up.
Spinning on my heel, I looked deeper into the forest, anticipating some sort of trap, but everything remained still. If it was a trap, I started to realize, it wasn’t one where he was going to attack me.
But he can see me.
I bent down and picked it up, looking around in every direction as I did so. Where was he? In my hand, the phone erupted into life.
Beep beep.
A new message.
Incoming call in 3 secs.
I’d barely had a chance to process that when the phone started ringing. I looked at the number: another mobile, but not one I recognized.
I hit Answer.
Silence.
Turning the whole time, trying to find him in the maze of timber, I started becoming aware of a soft sound on the line.
His breathing.
‘I have your friend, Healy.’
My heart sank.
But then I tried to think logically: did he really have him? How was it even possible? This is a trap. I started shaking my head. ‘No,’ I said. ‘No, you’re lying.’
‘I saw you give him a foot up,’ he replied. He was talking about me getting Healy up and over the gates to St David’s. ‘I saw him take off. Before I headed to Victor’s house, I grabbed him. He’s sick and slow. It wasn’t hard.’
‘No,’ I said again, but less certain this time.
A crackle on the line.
Korman was moving.
I heard footsteps and then the clunk of a van door opening, the quality of the call changing, softening, background sounds dying.
‘Say something,’ Korman said.
‘Hello?’
It was him. Shit, it’s Healy. He sounded in pain. He was distressed, tearful. His Hello? hung there in the quiet, a single word carrying the weight of so much.
‘What do you want?’ I said, anger building.
‘I will kill him,’ he replied calmly, matter-of-factly, his accent difficult to pin down, his words pronounced, precise. ‘Do you want to see him alive again?’
‘What do you think?’
A long drawn-out pause. ‘Then do exactly what I tell you.’
71
I got the mainline train down from Chingford to Liverpool Street, then walked the two miles south to Wapping. Maybe I was paranoid, or tired, or both, but as soon as I emerged on to the concourse at Liverpool Street there seemed to be police everywhere, and I figured that, if they recognized me, I had a better chance of making a break for it if I wasn’t trapped inside the Tube.
When I reached Wonderland, it was silent and dark. At the side of the old paper mill, police tape still flickered and twisted in the breeze coming off the river. I ducked under it and moved into the shadows, along the side of the museum. It was just before 7 p.m., a chill in the air, winter lying in wait, and as I looked out across the back of the building, the wind picked up again and seemed to pass right through me: my skin, my flesh, my bones.
There was even more police tape at the banks of the river, cordoning off what was left of the pier, out in the water. It was basically unrecognizable: a twisted, scorched series of legs, fanning out into the Thames; a piece of broken, faltering promenade midway along, great mouths of space everywhere else; skewed, crumbling slats hanging off like fingers; and then the pavilion, its roof collapsing in on itself, as if sucked into its centre, its walls gone, exposing an interior of blackened shapes, melted and indistinguishable.
The museum, untouched, now stood alone.
Ahead of me, its rear doors – the same ones that Calvin East had emerged from the first time I’d been here – were ajar. Not much, but enough. Korman had told me he’d leave them like that. Yet I didn’t move, keeping my eyes on the back of the building. Why had he asked me to come here? Returning to the museum was a risk, for him as much as for me. The police and the fire crews were gone, finished for now, but they would return. They’d spent the day walking the halls and offices of the museum, trying to discover the reasons why Gary Cabot and his father had been murdered, why the pier had been awash in petrol and set alight. I doubted they’d found anything. So for police, this was still a work in progress.
That made it a dangerous place to be.
I moved quickly, my steps punctuated by the wash of the Thames against the river wall, and slipped in through the gap. It took me a couple of seconds to get my bearings, as I’d come in through the front of the building the first time.
But then I saw where I was.
The entrance foyer was ahead of me, and a door marked Journey through Time was on the right – the room of photos, documenting the history of the pier.
The entire place was disconcertingly quiet.
Cautiously, I started moving.
At the foyer there was some dull low-level lighting, tiny lamps dotted around the base of the payment kiosks; and, beyond those, a night light in the restaurant, a muted yellow-green rinsing out across a room full of empty tables and stacked chairs. Part of the dining area was tucked away out of sight, but I knew Korman wasn’t going to be in there. I knew where he would be.
The penny
arcade.
I started the ascent. At the top was the arch that led to the pavilion-like façade, windows looking out on to painted seaside scenes, the old machines enclosed by a white picket fence. Five rows stretched out in front of me, the middle one leading to the next set of stairs, wooden slats whining gently as I moved towards them. Like the ground floor, everything was lit, just not well: above each window, a night lamp glowed, turning the place a pallid yellow. It was strange, unsettling, blobs of light reflecting in the glass of the cabinets, making it look like movement on either side of me. Every so often I’d stop – heart hammering, braced for impact – and then realize there was nothing there: just light and shadows and stillness.
The spiral staircase, corkscrewing up to the next floor, was iron. I hadn’t noticed it yesterday, but I noticed it tonight: as I stepped on to it, my feet made a soft ching. A second later, there was a brief noise above: a creak, a weight shift.
He’s seen me.
I looked up, craning my neck.
At the top of the stairs was the Oracle, the same fortune-telling machine that I’d looked at previously. Inside the cabinet, the puppet was lifeless and slack, bent my way, its dead eyes peering past me into the half-light.
Gripping the railing, I began climbing, legs suddenly heavy, muscles stiff and unresponsive. I thought of the first time I’d been here, of standing among the machines on the second floor and feeling like I was in the middle of a graveyard.
I’d thought of it as a kind of mausoleum.
Maybe, tonight, it would become that.
I reached the top.
Directly in front of me, halfway along a canyon of machines, was Healy. He was tied to a chair, bound and gagged, head slumped sideways. A floor lamp had been placed next to him. There was blood on his face. Beneath the light, he looked ghostly, emaciated, both jackets on the floor, his sweater, his shirt, his shoes and socks removed too. He sat there with his body revealed, unconscious but alive. I could see the rise and fall of his chest, muscles shifting, ribs exposed.
I’d begun to accept how he looked, my eyes not lingering on him as often, not hypnotized by the sparseness of him, or his lack of force. But it was hard to take my eyes off him now, off this version of him, his shirtless torso like a sack of bones, his skin so thin it was barely able to disguise them. He was so small.
I wanted to go to him, but I didn’t. Instead, I reached into my pocket and removed the phone I’d found on the floor of the forest, holding it up to the dark. I tried to watch for signs of movement ahead of me, but it was just a sea of arcade machines, different shapes and sizes, rolling out into the shadows at the other end of the floor. The shop, off to the right, was closed up, its shutters down. The mirror maze I could see only glimpses of, its panels reflecting back a dull glow.
There was no Korman.
But I knew he was here.
I placed the phone on the floor in front of me, keeping my eyes up ahead, doing exactly as he’d asked during our call. He wanted the phone he’d left for me, to make sure it didn’t get in to anyone else’s hands. I turned three hundred and sixty degrees and then lifted my shirt up, revealing my stomach and chest, and did the same again. He wanted to see that I wasn’t carrying any weapons with me. Maybe he even thought I might be wearing a wire, even though the idea of me working with the police was laughable. I let my shirt fall back into place and stepped forward.
‘What do you want, Korman?’ I said.
Healy didn’t react, clearly not awake, and for a moment I stood there, looking off into a maze of machines.
Slowly, something started to shift.
To my right, across Healy’s shoulder, there was movement – and, from behind a hexagonal wooden pillar on which six bagatelles were mounted, Korman finally emerged. He was dressed all in black, his body another part of the shadows, but his head – the pink of his scalp, the colour of his cheeks – was different, his skin reflecting back the colour of the standing lamp. He stood there, on the edges of the light, and stared at me. His eyes were dark, small like bullet holes, and it gave him an odd look, as if I were seeing right into his head.
‘I’ve done what you asked,’ I said.
His eyes shifted from me to the phone, and he took another series of small steps forward, until he was behind Healy.
Softly, he placed a hand on Healy’s shoulder.
I felt myself flinch, readying for whatever he was about to do. But he did nothing. He just stood there, looking at me, one hand on Healy’s shoulder, one at his side. I refused to look away, even though it took everything I had not to. There was nothing in his eyes to focus on: no colour, no substance.
‘I’ve done what you asked,’ I repeated.
No response.
‘Are you listening to –’
‘You carry a lot of scars.’
He was talking about my back, about injuries I’d been left with on another case, a long time past. So much had happened since then, I sometimes forgot they were there, sometimes went weeks, even months, without thinking about the men who had carved them into my body. They’d been like Korman, lightless and savage, and when I’d faced them down, I’d done the same as I was doing now: I’d maintained a façade – even while the fear chewed me up inside.
‘So what now?’ I said.
Again, he didn’t reply.
‘It’s a risk coming here.’
‘I suppose it is,’ he replied, his voice quiet, benign.
‘So why choose this place to meet?’
‘Where else was I going to go?’
‘You have the whole city.’
‘Not any more.’
He meant not after today, after we’d uncovered Grankin’s house within a house; after Korman had been forced to breach a crime scene and flee from the police. Korman had disguised himself well, cloaked his existence in a series of different names and former addresses. But now, as Grankin’s life unravelled in the full glare of a police hunt, it was only a matter of time before they closed in on Korman. He could see that. He could see the stark reality of being on the run. So in a strange way, despite the obvious risk in returning here, maybe this was the smart place to be. Because it would be one of the last places anyone would think to look.
‘I’ve done what you asked,’ I said for a third time. ‘So what now?’
He nodded again, his head minutely shifting, the rest of him utterly still. ‘Now I want you to see something.’
72
I watched him, unnerved, unsure of where this was going.
He lifted his hand away from Healy’s shoulder, then stopped, touching the side of Healy’s face instead, gently, almost tenderly, fingers crackling against stubble. Slowly, he moved from the neck to the cleft between shoulder blade and collarbone, as if massaging it, and then further down, all the way to the centre of Healy’s chest, where his hand stopped, fingers settling like the legs of an insect.
He was covering Healy’s heart.
Korman hadn’t yet taken his eyes off me, but this time he did, his gaze shifting into the shadows, to the machines around him, his hand still in place on Healy’s naked chest. ‘Why did you have to ruin everything?’ he said.
I looked at him, uncertain what the right response would be.
When I gave no reply, he slowly returned to me, as if shaking off the remains of a dream, head dropping at an angle and rolling from side to side. Quietly, he said, ‘Which of you shot him?’
He was talking about Grankin.
‘It doesn’t matter now,’ I said.
‘It matters to me.’
I shrugged. ‘Why murder that family?’
A frown, as if the question were irrelevant.
‘Why kill people? Why burn everything down?’
He remained there, unmoved. ‘I’ve always liked fire. I like the way it twists and contorts, how it changes things, reduces them. After Calvin told us about you coming to see him at the museum, I knew you would return to the pier eventually. I waited for you, and then set that who
le place alight. I sat there for a while and watched it burn. It was beautiful.’ His tone was confusing: soft, a little melancholy; so at odds with the brutality of his crimes. ‘I didn’t expect you to die out there, but I hoped – after making my anonymous call to the police – that you’d get caught. Even if you told them who I was, what then? I’m a respected businessman with no history of trouble – at least on paper. A man with your track record; your friend here, who convinced the world he was dead. You’d both be revealed as liars. Who would believe you over me?’
For the first time, I noticed Healy’s gun: it was placed on top of one of the penny arcade machines to Korman’s left.
‘But I underestimated you,’ he went on, the first flash of resentment in his voice. ‘I didn’t realize how much you knew. When Victor called me this morning and told me you were at the house, I was on my way back from taking care of Cabot. I couldn’t get up there in time to help Victor. But, whatever happened, I knew St David’s had to burn to the ground. I had to make sure we didn’t leave anything behind.’
‘Except you did.’
He frowned, eyeing me.
‘The blood on the walls of the toilets, the oil drums.’
He shrugged.
‘There’ll be DNA on them.’
‘And what difference will that make?’
A weird answer, one I couldn’t interpret. There was no viciousness to him, no ferocity, no sense of irrationality: he spoke flatly, even serenely, as if he were discussing something unimportant. It made me even more uneasy somehow, more perturbed by him. I’d come in expecting him to be unstable and crazed, a heightened version of Grankin: his insidiousness, his cruelty, channelled into something even worse. As I thought of the scene he’d left behind at Searle House, his violation of a family, I knew he was those things. But it didn’t seem like it – not here, not now.
‘How did you even get inside St David’s?’
He shrugged again. ‘You saw me in my forensic suit.’
‘So you just wandered in?’
‘I got there at the right time. It was chaos at the house, people coming and going. I used the confusion to take the tunnel through to the forest.’