by Tim Weaver
The same year the pier closed.
The same year Korman and Grankin started using it as a kill site.
‘Did she ID this person?’
‘It was Grankin. Bishara’s people showed her a picture, and – straight away – she said it was him. She said that, every couple of years, he’d always bring the same mask in with him and have her work on it, trying to secure it, touch it up, whatever else – basically trying to stop it falling apart due to age. First time he came in, she saw the crack on the mask and said to Grankin that she’d try and close the gap and fix it. But he told her no. He said he wanted the crack on the mask. He said that was what made it unique.’
I paused for a second, thinking. Clearly, the mask represented something important to Grankin – but what? Why have it repaired, year after year, but not its obvious flaw? Why not just buy a new one?
‘Look,’ Craw said, ‘I’ve got to run.’
‘All right. Thanks for this.’
But, seconds after she’d hung up, my mind was already moving, returning to something Korman had said to me. I grabbed my laptop, his words still clear.
I think you need a change of perspective.
I thought he’d been talking about the arcade, about seeing it in a different way, through a different lens. Maybe he had meant that. It had certainly, perhaps inadvertently, led me to the holdall and the mask. But maybe he meant something else too. Maybe he meant that the pier and museum were a sideshow; that they led to something else. Something even worse.
My phone erupted into life again.
This time it was Healy. Last night, he’d agreed to go back through Carla Stourcroft’s possessions, double-checking the box her husband had passed on.
‘There’s nothing in here,’ he said, once I’d answered.
‘Nothing? No more notes?’
‘You’ve already seen all her notes.’
And they were all indecipherable, written in a bespoke pseudo-shorthand that she’d developed to keep them private. I hadn’t been able to translate them.
‘You’re absolutely sure?’ I said.
‘Positive.’
‘There’s nothing else in the box at all?’
He sighed, his breath crackling down the line, and then started to list everything in a bored voice: ‘Photos of her family. One with her husband. One with her kids. One with husband and kids. A certificate from the Institute of Leadership. A 2009 desk calendar. Some screen wipes. Two pencils. One copy of South of the River by Carla Stourcroft. One copy of From Richmond to Regent: London’s Parks from A to Z by Carla Stourcroft. One copy of Invisible Ripper –’
‘Okay, I get it, Healy.’
‘It’s just junk.’
I shifted my thoughts forward, trying to carve a path through everything I’d found out from Craw, from Bishara and Sewinson before that – and then something struck me about the holdall I’d found in the arcade. There were five items inside.
Five different items.
‘The stuff you just listed,’ I said.
‘What about it?’
I pulled my laptop towards me.
‘Raker?’
But I was hardly hearing him now.
I put in a new web search. It took me to an account of five murders, long past, that I’d never given a second’s thought to. And yet, the whole time I was working this case, the whole time I was trying to find the men who killed the Clark family, all five deaths were within sight of me, waiting to be brought back into the light. Edward Smythe. Gordon Gregory. Eric Bale. William Simpkins. Abel Dimas.
I think you need a change of perspective.
‘Raker?’
‘We’ve been looking in the wrong Stourcroft book.’
‘What?’ I could sense Healy shift. ‘What are you talking about?’
I felt dazed, light-headed, like a punch-drunk boxer reaching for the ropes. ‘This isn’t about A Seaside in the City at all,’ I said to him. ‘It’s about Invisible Ripper.’
81
The answers had been there the whole time.
Right in front of our eyes.
‘What are you talking about?’ Healy said.
‘The five items in that holdall. They don’t belong to one victim. They belong to five.’ I looked at their names again. ‘Edward Smythe. Gordon Gregory. Eric Bale. William Simpkins. Abel Dimas. The items are Eldon Simmons’s trophies.’
This time, Healy was silent.
‘There’s an inscription on the back of the watch,’ I said, needing to talk it through as much for myself as Healy. ‘ “To our darling Edward. With much love. Mum and Dad.” That’s Edward Smythe. He was Eldon Simmons’s first victim.’ I turned back to my laptop, scrolling down the page, skim-reading as much as possible. ‘Gordon Gregory, the second, was from Maryland, and stayed in the UK after the end of the war. His friends told police he loved and cherished his Purridean lighter – but, when they searched his belongings, they couldn’t find it anywhere. Because Simmons had taken it. The third victim, Eric Bale, had a crucifix lifted from him that his father had given him. The fourth, William Simpkins, was found with skin missing from his right arm where a tattoo of a heart with the inscription Life had been cut out. And the waistcoat belonged to Abel Dimas, the last victim.’
‘Let me grab the book,’ Healy said.
As I heard him moving, returning to Stourcroft’s box of possessions, to the copy of Invisible Ripper she had in there, I tried to imagine why. Why had Korman and Grankin become so consumed by Eldon Simmons’s work?
‘Do you know much about the case?’ Healy said, when he came back on.
‘Simmons? Not really. Why?’
‘I’m sure there was some story …’ He stopped, sucked in a breath, sounded frustrated with himself. ‘Ah, my memory’s shite, but I’m sure there was a thing in the news a few years back about him. Some retrospective on his arrest. Back in the fifties, they slapped the cuffs on him in some boarding house in White City – but something was wrong with it.’
‘Wrong with the boarding house?’
‘No, with Simmons’s arrest.’
He paused, and I heard him flicking through the book. While he was doing that, I managed to find a brief Internet account of the Ripper case: after killing five men between August 1951 and May 1952, Simmons was found living in a tatty boarding house in west London. A neighbour called the Met and said he’d seen Simmons bringing home a succession of men, one of whom left with blood all over his face. When police went to talk to Simmons, they found a knife hidden under sheets in his wardrobe. It had traces of blood from two of the victims on it. Simmons was arrested and charged, before being sentenced to death. He was hanged at Holloway Prison in March 1953.
‘The arrest seems pretty clean,’ I said to Healy.
‘Hold on, I’m trying to find the chapter here.’
Suddenly, the doorbell rang.
I tore my eyes away from the laptop and looked across the living room. From where I was sitting, I could see all the way down the hall. A silhouette was out on the porch, absolutely still, the shape distorted by the frosted glass.
‘I’m going to have to call you back,’ I said to Healy.
‘Why?’
‘Someone’s at the door.’
‘Just ignore it.’
He was right: we were on the cusp of something. I glanced at the silhouette again: petite, slim and motionless. It looked like a woman.
‘Okay, got it,’ Healy said.
‘What does it say?’
I could hear him muttering to himself, skim-reading the chapter that dealt with Eldon Simmons’s arrest. ‘No, it’s not this,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘This is the same thing everyone knows – about the police finding a knife in his bedroom, his arrest, his death. No, it was something else. What was it?’
‘Was it something you saw on TV?’
‘Maybe.’
‘In the papers? Online? Where?’
‘I can’t remember.’
/>
‘Think, Healy.’
‘I am thinking.’
But then the doorbell rang for a third and fourth time. When I looked up again, the woman started knocking on the door.
‘His sister,’ Healy said.
I tried to tune back in. ‘What?’
‘That’s it. I remember now. I got it wrong – this was much more than a few years back; maybe the mid eighties. Anyway, before she died, his sister was trying to clear his name. I think Simmons had some minuscule IQ, and she claimed he was forced into signing a confession by the cops. She said the knife was planted in his room, and the Met and the courts never bothered looking at anyone else because Simmons was homosexual – and back in 1952, being gay was still a crime. His sister was the one that coined the name “Invisible Ripper”.’
Off the back of that, a thought came to me. ‘Has the book got an index?’
‘A what?’
‘An index – at the back.’
‘Uh …’ I heard pages being turned. ‘Yeah. Why?’
‘Is there a listing for Neil or Ana Yost?’
‘Why would there be a listing for them?’
‘Just have a look.’
I listened to pages being turned. ‘No. Nothing.’
‘Is there an Acknowledgements page?’
‘Where are you going with this?’
‘Is there?’
‘Yeah, it’s here. So?’
‘Any mention of them there?’
A long pause. ‘Shit. Yeah, there is.’
‘What does it say?’
‘ “I’d like to thank the family of Eldon Simmons for their cooperation in the writing of this book, and for making their archive of material available to me. In trying to clear his name, the work of his sister, Moira Silke, and her daughter Ana Yost – both, sadly, gone – can only be admired.” ’
‘Ana Yost was related to Eldon Simmons,’ I said.
As we both took that in, I backed out of the true crime website I was on, and put in a search for Moira Silke, Simmons’s sister and Ana Yost’s mother. She’d died in 1986, from liver disease – leaving Yost to carry on the campaign to clear her uncle’s name.
‘She must have had something,’ I said, almost to myself.
‘What?’
‘Yost. She must have had something, some new piece of information that was going to clear Simmons’s name. That was why they got rid of her.’
‘Who? Korman and Grankin?’
‘Yeah.’
‘But why would they even care what she had?’
‘Maybe it implicated them – or whatever they were involved in.’ I tapped out a rhythm on the laptop, shifting my thoughts forward again. ‘What else does it say about the neighbour in there?’
‘Eldon Simmons’s neighbour?’
‘Yeah. The one that tipped off the police about him.’
‘Uh, hold on.’
The doorbell rang again.
I tried to ignore it, keeping my eyes focused on the laptop, even though I was finding it hard to concentrate. When I looked up, the woman was still standing there, face on, waiting for me to answer.
‘He never left a name,’ Healy said.
‘What?’
‘The neighbour. They traced the call to a phone box on the same street that Simmons lived on – but they never found the person who made the call.’
‘Did they actually interview his neighbours?’
‘Yeah, but it was a boarding house. People came and went.’ Then Healy stopped and, quietly, started talking to himself, reading something back. ‘Wait a second, wait a second. It says here that “a witness at the time told police she thought she might have seen the neighbour, from down the street, making the call”.’
‘Did she give a description?’
‘No. Too far away. But she said his face was “pale and smooth”.’
‘ “Smooth”?’
‘Whatever that means.’
I thought about it for a moment, trying to line everything up, but then that word came back to me: smooth. Smooth, featureless, plain. Just like Grankin had looked in the mask, the night he’d waited for Korman outside Searle House.
‘The neighbour was wearing the mask,’ I said. ‘It’s the same mask that Grankin’s been wearing.’
‘What?’
The doorbell.
Again. Again.
‘I’ll phone you back in a second,’ I said, pissed off now.
Ending the call with Healy, I set the laptop and the phone aside, and made my way to the front door. Halfway along the hall, I could see the woman shift as she saw me coming towards her, through the glass.
I grabbed the door and yanked it open.
‘What is it?’ I said sharply.
But it wasn’t a woman. It was a man, small, a hood up on his parka, the front edges of it overhanging his forehead and casting shadows across his face.
I stepped back, startled, placing a hand against the wall, steadying myself. The man on my doorstep, a gun concealed in the folds of his coat, came forward.
It felt like the room turned on its axis.
This was why police never found Eldon Simmons’s neighbour, the man who had tipped them off. This was why Simmons’s family thought he was innocent. This was why Ana Yost vanished, this was the real reason why Carla Stourcroft was killed, this was why Gail Clark was slaughtered in her home. Because, eventually, at different stages, they all began glimpsing the truth.
The Invisible Ripper didn’t die in 1953.
The pier, the museum – they just became his hiding place.
‘Hello, David,’ Joseph Cabot said.
82
‘You look surprised to see me,’ he said softly, his east London accent still strong, his words croaky and hoarse. He glanced out into the road, left then right, his milky eyes sluggishly switching direction, and I realized his vision was impaired badly, probably irreversibly – but he wasn’t totally blind. He just pretended he was. It was smart and it was devious – after all, who would suspect a blind man in his late eighties of anything? As if reading my thoughts, he pushed the gun towards me and said, ‘Are you going to leave an old blind man out in the cold?’
I stepped back.
He checked again, up and down the street, and then came inside, moving easily, fluidly. Everything at Wonderland had been a show. He was old, slight, liver-spotted, but he wasn’t delicate or immobile. As one of his eyes began to water, he pushed the front door shut behind him and backed me into the living room. He entered, his eyes narrowing as he tried to focus on my photo frames, and then on my laptop still open on the table, poised on a shot of Eldon Simmons.
As we stopped, I tried to process everything. Craw had told me that he was dead. Or had she? He sat on one of the sofas, gesturing for me to take the opposite settee, and I tried to remember exactly what it was she’d said. Cabot is face down in the kitchen with his throat cut. His dad’s there too. Looks like someone’s closing the circle.
She’d never actually confirmed Joseph Cabot was dead, just his son, and I’d never thought to ask about them again, to question it, to follow up on it. Healy and I had just swum for our lives from a burning pier. I’d fled a crime scene with a body in the back of my car. I’d gone for twenty-four hours without rest, a month without sleeping a single night through. I was dealing with the idea that I might be ill, that a sickness might be taking hold of me, coiling inside me like a tapeworm. I’d just assumed they were both dead, that Korman was taking care of anyone who could put him and Grankin anywhere close to the museum and the pier, instead of the reality: Korman killed Gary Cabot, but only injured his father.
A deliberate act.
Because they were all working together.
‘You let Korman kill your own son,’ I said.
He sighed, resting his elbow on the arm of the sofa. The sleeve of his coat sneaked a little way up his arm, and I could see evidence of bandaging, part of the injuries inflicted by Korman. They’d been clever: cutting the outside of Cabo
t’s arm would make it look like defensive wounds. He could spin a story out of that.
He gestured to the laptop. ‘Is that Eldon Simmons I can make out?’
I glanced at the stories I’d been reading, and then back to him. As I did, he came forward, gun levelled at my stomach, watching me. ‘I only got out of hospital yesterday,’ he said, ‘so it was only then that I was able to appreciate all your fine efforts. But this works out well, because you don’t know how long I’ve been waiting to talk to someone about this, about all I’ve achieved – and the fact that you get to sit there and listen to me before I’m done. This is so perfect.’
‘Before you’re done?’
He didn’t reply. As I went to repeat myself, my phone burst into life, buzzing next to me on the sofa. It was Healy.
Cabot raised the gun off the arm of the sofa. ‘Leave it.’
I ignored the phone as it continued towards me – then it snapped back into silence. I looked at him again. ‘What did you mean, before you’re done?’
‘Why did I let him kill my own son?’ he said, sidestepping the question. ‘Actually, you might be interested to know that Gary wasn’t my son. He was two years old when I married his mother, and then she died in a car accident when he was fifteen.’ He shifted on the sofa, his spare hand straying to his left knee. There was a momentary distance to him. ‘I never had any plans to be a parent. Not at the start. I never wanted to get married either, for reasons that you can probably imagine.’
He nodded at the laptop.
‘Women weren’t really my thing.’
‘But you married Gary’s mother anyway.’
‘It was a good cover story,’ he said, eyes still focused on the laptop. ‘It looks like you’ve been reading about the neighbour. What was it they said about me? I had a “smooth face”?’ He stopped, a flicker of a smile. ‘I always liked wearing that mask. The way it felt. I liked the anonymity it gave me, the way that anonymity hands you so much power. Victor developed a fondness for it too. He was a simple boy, really, and I think – by my allowing him to wear it – he saw it as a way to get close to me; maybe to gain my approval. Benjamin, Paul – whatever you prefer – he didn’t like it as much. We all have our quirks, things we adopt, ways we like to get things done. Life’s a rich tapestry – isn’t that what they say?’ He shrugged. ‘Now you understand why Ben had to retrieve it for me.’