by Tim Weaver
‘How are you feeling?’ she said.
I shrugged and picked up the coffee that she’d left for me. ‘I didn’t land you in trouble, did I?’
I’d called her twice before I’d handed myself in – once from Wanstead Flats when I’d still had Calvin East in the boot of my car; and once from St David’s. The second time, she’d called Bishara, her equivalent in the borough of Waltham Forest, and told him he needed to get a team down there. As a result, Craw’s commanding officer would have wanted to know why it was her I’d chosen to contact.
‘I said we had history,’ she said, smiling.
‘Well, that’s not a lie.’
‘They know about Dad, and what you did for me last year. They don’t approve of it, but they know. They assume you chose to call me because of that.’ She eyed me for a moment. ‘So you didn’t answer my question: how are you?’
I shrugged again. ‘Why did they kill those girls?’
‘Life meant nothing to those men.’
‘That wasn’t the reason why.’
‘It’s a reason.’
Kids can be duplicitous too. ‘It’s not the reason.’
She studied me. ‘So what’s next?’
I perched myself on one of the stools.
‘Raker?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Maybe nothing’s next.’
‘You’re just going to let it go?’ She said it with an even expression, but it was clear she didn’t believe me. When I didn’t respond, she said, ‘I don’t know if you’re looking for advice, but I’m going to give you some anyway. Why don’t you see what Bishara comes up with? Forensically, I mean.’
‘I don’t think he’ll be calling me in a hurry.’
A half-smile. ‘I’m sure he won’t.’
She didn’t say anything else, although there was a hint of something in her face. ‘Are you offering to help me?’ I said.
In her pocket, her phone started ringing.
She took it out, looked at the display and said to me, ‘I’ve got to go.’ But she didn’t make a move to leave. ‘Look, I know Bishara a little. We went on a course together after he moved down here. We spent four weeks in each other’s company, and after a month you get the measure of someone. He’s a clever guy, and he’ll pull this investigation together, and everything that needs to be ticked off will be ticked off. But the reason why those girls were murdered …’
I got where she was going. ‘That won’t get ticked off.’
She didn’t commit either way, but it was obvious that was what she’d been driving at. ‘It’s a four-year-old case that’s been tainted by a disgraced detective.’
‘The girls don’t have to suffer because Healy –’
‘I’m telling you how it’s viewed at the Met. That’s all. What you’ve got to understand is that no one’s going to prison for this. There’s no conviction on the line here. Korman, Grankin, they’re dead. Bishara’s got the Clarks, the Yosts and Carla Stourcroft to deal with, before you even get into who the DNA in those barrels belongs to. He’s got techs inside those machines at the museum, he’s got a fire-damaged pier and a half-gutted children’s home. He’s got the very real prospect of a suspension in the pipeline too. Fact is, he doesn’t have time to find out why the girls had to die – however wrong that seems to you. I mean, maybe there is no why. Korman was a depraved psychopath. Is it so surprising that he’d kill them as well as their mother?’
I understood the logic, but it still didn’t feel right.
‘So are you offering to help me?’ I repeated.
She didn’t reply immediately, glancing at her phone again, at whatever was on the display. ‘I’ll keep you up to date with things I feel are relevant.’
‘Which means what?’
‘Which means exactly what I just said.’
I stared at her. ‘It’s not even your borough.’
‘But I know people there.’
‘And you’re prepared to do this why?’
‘Because otherwise you’re going to be chasing around after Healy’s ghost until there’s nothing left of you. And because I’m a parent too, and I can’t let this slip through the cracks. I think you’re right, basically. Maybe you’ve always been right.’ She pocketed her phone. ‘Those girls deserve an answer.’
78
After Craw left, I made some calls.
The first one was to Gemma, to see how she was. She didn’t cry this time, her tears for Healy all used up at his funeral, but it was hard to hear the emotion in her voice and sit there in silence, knowing the truth about her husband’s fate. I thought of him a couple of times, as she referenced things they’d done together – days when their marriage had seemed viable, even good – and pictured him in the place he was now: a bland hotel room half a mile away, alone and in pain.
‘Thank you for everything, David,’ Gemma said to me as the call began to fizzle out. ‘Thank you for finding out what happened to Colm, for all your help with the funeral – for bringing Liam and Ciaran, me, some sort of explanation.’
My lies stung even more now, sitting right in the centre of my chest, the truth so close to the edges of my tongue, for a moment it felt like I was about to tell her. But I didn’t. I muttered some conciliatory words, said goodbye, then sat there at the windows of the living room, remorseful, troubled, watching the rain.
Eventually, I hauled myself up, made some lunch and then spent an hour chatting to Annabel on Skype. It was a relief to see her, to hear her voice, to think about something else. After ten minutes of filling me in on what had happened at work, and then another fifteen talking about a parents’ evening she’d been to for Olivia, she stopped, a slight frown on her face, and I knew what was coming.
‘I know I keep saying this, but –’
‘I’m fine, sweetheart.’
She smiled. ‘You look tired.’
‘That’s just old age.’
The smile drifted away. I felt a bubble of annoyance at not being able to deter her, and frustration that I’d been so easily read. I knew her question only came from concern, but I didn’t want to get into the case with her, because then I’d start having to lie to her, and I feared that would be even harder to hide.
‘I just haven’t been sleeping well,’ I offered.
She nodded. ‘Because of Healy.’
I couldn’t look her in the eyes as I replied, ‘Yeah, him. But, you know, not just that. Some work stuff, people, relationships … Plus I miss seeing you both.’
‘Why don’t you come down?’
‘I promised you both that you could come here.’
We’d planned for them to stay for the week during Olivia’s half-term, but all that had fallen by the wayside after I’d found the body beneath Highdale.
That moment seemed so far away now: the warm weather, thinking Healy was dead, realizing that the truth was just another well-concealed lie. Maybe that was what was making me look tired, and adding to my fatigue: all the deception.
And not just other people’s.
‘I’m fine, though,’ I said to Annabel. ‘Honestly. Last night I slept for almost fourteen hours. I’m back on track. Maybe I can come down to Devon in a couple of weeks and see you. We can go crabbing. Last time, I trounced you both.’
She laughed. ‘You certainly did not.’
‘I did.’
‘I caught two more than you.’
‘Lies!’
‘Even Olivia hooked more than you did.’
‘Double lies!’
And so it went on, our conversation slowly changing course as I put on a show for my daughter that settled her anxiety and let her know that I was fine.
I maintained my smile for her until after I’d quit out of Skype, and then – as the last frame of her left a ghostly mirror-image on the screen – I let the smile drop away, and sat there staring at my laptop, wondering where I went next.
79
The answer was Neil and Ana Yost.
That night, as I lay spraw
led on the sofa, the room lit only by a small lamp on a side table, I realized that of everything I’d uncovered, everything I’d found out, I knew least about them. They were just more victims, seduced by Grankin, their fate hidden by shadows, what I knew of their lives beginning and ending inside the lines of a newspaper story pinned to the walls of a half-melted house.
I put in a search for them, and discovered the same newspaper stories I’d seen already: picture-perfect accounts of a beautiful couple in their twenties, two weeks into marriage, who’d attended a fancy-dress party and never come home.
Collating as many links as possible, including the subsequent search for them, I remembered Bishara’s theory: that if there were other victims, they’d be illegal immigrants, to prevent them from being missed, and to make identification even harder. Yet that wasn’t who the Yosts were.
Something about that didn’t sit right with me.
Did the fact that Korman and Grankin took a risk with the Yosts suggest that, in their eyes, Neil and Ana were more like Gail, Stourcroft and Healy? Were they people who could have cost Korman and Grankin their secrecy, through knowing that something was going on at the pier, at the museum? Were they people who were cut down before their investigations could go any further?
The idea was a good one, but as I went through what I could find of their history, I couldn’t see anything to support it. Neil Yost had just qualified as a vet, Ana worked as a campaign manager for an advertising agency in Holloway. I couldn’t find a single thing to connect them to Wapping, let alone to the pier. They lived in Ruislip. His parents were in Durham; hers were from Hounslow. The fancy-dress party they’d attended the night they vanished had been a charity gala, raising funds for disadvantaged kids. Why had Grankin made such an effort to be there that night? What had put Neil and Ana on his radar in the first place? I couldn’t see any clear lines connecting the Yosts to either him or Korman.
And yet he’d been there all the same.
I started to wonder whether, perhaps, he’d met them there by chance and just acted on impulse. Maybe he’d got them back to the pier, put them in front of Korman, but Korman hadn’t liked it, had seen the risk in deviating from their usual choice of victim. It made a certain kind of sense, because – in all of this – Korman was the driving force, the dominant power. He was the real killer.
I continued working through the stories about the Yosts, making some notes, but as the coverage began to wane, so the same old details were repeated: their recent marriage, their dream honeymoon in the Maldives, what eyewitnesses at the party had said about the man in the mask and the fact he’d had an accent. After a while, even the tragic disappearance of a beautiful, newly-wed couple couldn’t keep either of them on the front pages.
I picked up my phone and dialled the number of the spare I normally kept in the bedroom. It wasn’t in the bedroom now. It was half a mile from my front door, in a hotel room on Uxbridge Road.
‘Hello?’
‘It’s me,’ I said.
Healy sounded groggy. ‘What time is it?’
‘Almost 11 p.m.’
There was a risk in putting Healy into a hotel, a chance he might be seen. I felt the risk was lessened by the fact that it was my name in reception, my name on the booking, and I’d told him not to go out unless he absolutely had to. If I was concerned about anything, it wasn’t him being there. It was him being alone.
Was he still suicidal? Would I turn up there in a week and discover that he’d really swallowed the pills this time? Four days after Korman had killed himself in front of us, Healy was still living and breathing – and yet I hadn’t been able to relax. It wasn’t just the idea of him taking his own life which continually nipped at me, it was the thought of what we would do if he went the other way and decided to embrace this new existence, to start again. He would always be in the shadows, worried about being exposed. He’d made an irreversible choice – one where he could never maintain a normal life again.
‘I’ve been thinking about Neil and Ana Yost,’ I said.
‘What about them?’
‘Why were they selected?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Police have got traces of two other unidentified people in the oil drums. That’s two other victims, potentially. Then there’s whoever the items in the holdall belong to. The identities of all those victims have been well hidden. On the flip side, you’ve got Gail, Carla Stourcroft and you, people who were in the process of making, or about to make, waves for Korman and Grankin. You all suspected that something was going on at the pier. So you were dealt with, but in a different way. It was short, sharp. A murder. A murder-robbery. An assault that you weren’t supposed to wake up from. You were never part of the fantasy.’
‘Murders.’
‘What?’
‘Murders. It wasn’t just Gail.’
He was right, of course: there were two other deaths, perhaps the hardest to take of all, impossible to forget, unexplained, essentially unsolved. It made me wonder what was worse: not seeing the killer face justice – or not knowing his reasons.
Kids can be duplicitous too.
Healy cleared his throat. ‘Are you saying that, despite how they were killed, you think they’ve got more in common with Gail, Stourcroft and me?’
‘It’s a theory I’m kicking around.’
A pause. ‘I can take a look in the box.’
He was talking about the box that Carla Stourcroft’s husband had passed to him when Healy had pretended to be with the Met. We’d returned to the house in Camberwell after I’d finished at the police station, and removed everything – the box, the handwritten notes that Healy had stuck to the walls, the transcript.
Now the box was in his hotel room.
‘Is there anything else in there you haven’t been through?’ I asked him.
‘No.’ He sounded despondent. ‘Anything on the pier, anything related to it, related to the disappearance of that couple, I put on the wall. Everything else is just Stourcroft’s personal belongings.’
‘And you’ve been through those too?’
‘Yeah. Her husband said it was mostly stuff he cleared out from her office. A lot of old paperwork, framed book covers, desk junk – pencils and calendars, all that sort of shite. I’ll take a look at it again – but I wouldn’t go expecting much.’
‘All right.’
‘I’ll talk to you tomorrow.’
I hung up and closed the laptop, feeling tiredness kicking in again. When I closed my eyes, I saw photographs, frozen moments in time that I might never be able to erase: a mother, nine stab wounds in her chest, her life leaking out across a sofa; and two girls, skin so pale and flawless, reduced to statues in their beds.
My phone woke me up.
I started and felt my laptop fall off, on to the carpet. As I opened my eyes, sunlight blinded me, arcing through the windows of the living room, bathing me in winter sun. I sat up and swung around, checking my watch, confused, bleary.
7.32 a.m.
I’d been asleep for eight hours.
My phone continued ringing. I stood, unsure for a moment where I’d left it the night before, then saw it buzzing on the floor next to me. I scooped it up.
Craw.
‘You keep waking me up,’ I said, after I’d answered it.
I’d tried to lace my voice with some humour, but maybe it was too early in the morning for that. Craw didn’t respond to the joke – and I heard a door close.
‘Craw?’
‘Are you functioning?’ she said.
‘Barely.’
‘Well, you’d better clear your head.’
I frowned. ‘Why? What’s the matter?’
‘You’re going to want to hear this.’
80
‘I’ve just got off the phone to someone I know in Bishara’s team,’ Craw said. She spoke in hushed tones, clearly squirrelled away in a room where no one would be able to hear her. ‘He says they’ve had forensics back on the items you fo
und.’
She was talking about the waistcoat, the lighter, the gold chain, the watch, the flayed skin. The mask. I headed across the room to where I’d left my notepad.
‘What did they find?’ I asked.
‘The wristwatch was made by a company called Wirrek. You probably know that already. Their name is on the watch face. You ever heard of them before?’
‘No. Never.’
‘That’s because they went out of business in 1956. The watch is an antique, made in 1943. The cigarette lighter is even older – maybe 1940 or ’41. The manufacturer’s mark has been rubbed off because of its age, but my guy says the forensic team managed to narrow it down to an American company called …’ She paused, presumably checking what she’d written. ‘Purridean. Looks like these lighters were popular with GIs. The assumption is that it got left here by a US soldier after the end of the Second World War. The gold chain and the waistcoat are much harder to put a date on, but the flayed skin … that tattoo is old. The ink’s old. The skin has been coated with some sort of preservative, a mix of chemicals that you can’t even get on the market now because most are carcinogenic.’
‘What about the mask?’
‘This is where it gets weird: the mask has got a label inside that says it was made by a company called Barrington Games – they were a toy company.’
‘ “Were”?’
‘They closed in 1958.’
‘So the mask’s old too.’
‘Right.’
‘What’s so weird about that?’
‘No other companies make masks like that any more – not from that same material, or to the same design. However, Bishara’s team found a business card in Grankin’s kitchen for a company called Masquerade – they’re a high-end fancy-dress and party company based near Spitalfields Market. They also happen to make custom-order masks for rich people with too much money. Bishara sent one of his detectives to speak to the manager, and this woman says that they’ve been repairing the same mask, for the same person, on and off, for the last twenty-one years. I’ll do the maths for you: twenty-one years means the first time this person came in was in 1993.’