by Tim Weaver
‘Because your DNA is all over it.’
‘Correct.’ He pointed to the laptop again. ‘It won’t say it on there, but after Simmons’s sister died and young Ana took up the reins, things got a little hairy for a while. Ana was insatiable, absolutely obsessed about clearing her uncle’s name, and she somehow managed to track down the witness that claimed to have seen Simmons’s “neighbour” at the phone box that day. This witness even remembered seeing me hanging around Simmons’s place in the hours before the arrest. However, the witness was just a girl, barely ten years old at the time, so the police never placed much credence in her statements back then – which was just as well.’
‘For you maybe – not for Eldon Simmons.’
‘That’s true. This girl also described the neighbour as having “something wrong with his leg” – what police referred to in their reports as “a kind of nervous tic”. Basically, a predilection for playing with his left knee.’
I paused, looking at him, at his other hand: it was on his knee as we spoke – and, as I saw it, a memory formed. He’d been doing the same thing the day we met in Wonderland. It reminded me of Healy, in the weeks and months before his heart attack: his hands, his fingers, drawn to the weakest part of his body.
Cabot began massaging the joint with his thumb and forefinger. ‘I went to France in 1944, after the D-Day landings. I was only eighteen at the time. Got shot through the thigh by a German sniper in Caen on my second day.’ He pointed at a spot just above his knee, on the outer edge of the thigh. ‘Forty-eight hours of war, followed by a lifetime of pain. Does that seem fair to you?’
‘It would have been fairer if you’d died out there.’
A smile, there and then gone. ‘When we took Ana and her husband that night in 2007, we went to their house afterwards and removed any evidence she’d gathered from that witness. We got there before Ana had a chance to pass any of the paperwork on to Stourcroft. I mean, this was before Stourcroft had even started the research stage of Invisible Ripper – although the two of them had discussed the idea of a book. We found emails between Ana and Stourcroft to that effect.’
‘And no one suspected anything?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Ana Yost’s disappearance. No one looked in your direction?’
He smirked. ‘Do you know what Ana did for a job, David?’
‘She was a campaign manager.’
‘At an advertising agency and PR firm where her clients included Russian oligarchs, abortion clinics, those great believers in human rights Kazakhstan, and the Israeli government. Where, on a list of potential suspects, do you think the police would have placed “person who may have committed five murders in the early 1950s that someone else already confessed to, and was hanged for, and who has crawled out of the woodwork sixty years later to silence a woman who has no new evidence”?’ He stopped again, something insidious moving across his face. ‘Still, you should have seen Ana’s eyes when I introduced myself to her.’
I felt sick listening to him.
Before I could ask him why they’d killed the Yosts in the way they had, he said: ‘We had some good fortune too. In the time between Ana and Stourcroft first agreeing the idea of an Invisible Ripper book in 2006, and Stourcroft coming to research and write it in early 2008, the witness that saw me at Simmons’s house back in 1952 – with my mask and my “nervous tic” – suffered a stroke. She couldn’t talk, and it wasn’t going to get any better for her. We thought we were in the clear.’
‘But you weren’t.’
‘No. We may have got rid of the paperwork before Ana had a chance to pass it on to Stourcroft, but what we found out later was that Ana had mentioned to Stourcroft verbally that Simmons’s neighbour had had some kind of knee problem – only once, but once was always enough for Ms Stourcroft.’
It took me a moment to catch up. In 2008, the year before Carla Stourcroft published Invisible Ripper, she’d interviewed another contemporary of Eldon Simmons’s, Winston Cowdrey, at his flat in Wapping. They’d talked about the years Cowdrey had spent living in the same building as Simmons, and Cowdrey had mentioned seeing someone on the pier – in a mask.
Stourcroft must have felt like she’d been gut-punched. A year before that, Ana Yost had disappeared from a party, after talking to a man in a mask. Now a man in a mask was out on Wapping Pier. She wouldn’t have been able to see all the links then, but, if nothing else, she wanted to find out what was going on at the pier, a place she already knew so much about from writing A Seaside in the City. So, in 2010, after publishing Invisible Ripper, she returned to see Calvin East, sniffing another story on the wind: that the man in the mask was responsible for the disappearance of Ana Yost; and that the pier had a secret.
Something else fell into place for me too. ‘She saw you,’ I said. ‘The second time that Stourcroft went to the museum to see East, in 2010 – she saw you there.’
‘Correct. I was sitting in Gary’s office, waiting for him to take me home, when I looked up and spotted her in the corridor, talking to Calvin. She was just staring at me. Eventually, I realized why: I was playing with my knee again.’
That was the moment Stourcroft started to put it together.
What Ana Yost had told her. What Cowdrey had seen. She was a year too late to put it all into Invisible Ripper – if, at that moment, she even knew what it was. But she looked at Cabot and saw a flicker of history; the outline of something.
And that was what got her killed, what got Gail killed too: the two of them had shared all that Stourcroft knew during the interview Gail did with her; Stourcroft thought she was being followed, that she’d set something in motion, and warned Gail to be careful. But she didn’t go to the police, maybe because she didn’t have enough evidence, maybe because Cabot was an old, blind man, and – although unnerved by the idea of who he might be – Stourcroft couldn’t see where the immediate threat was coming from. She knew that, if she was going to bring the story to the world, if she was going to do it properly, she needed time. She needed all her ducks in a row, the facts laid out for everyone to see. So she carried on piecing her investigation together, working the angles, and she carried on with her life at the same time – other paid work, family events, social get-togethers, holidays. But she never had a clue how close they were to her. She never understood that her existence was being measured in weeks, not years. Korman, Grankin and Cabot were just waiting for the right time to strike. As soon as she left for her Australian holiday in July 2010, they took care of Gail and the girls. As soon as she was back, they killed Stourcroft at the market.
And the whole thing was about a man stopping the world from finding out who he really was: a murderer six decades ago – and a murderer now.
‘What do you want?’ I said.
He glanced at the gun. ‘Isn’t it obvious?’
‘You’re going to shoot me?’
‘I can just about make out enough of you, even with my sight the way it is. I could hit you from here if I wanted. But I don’t – and you’ll find out why soon enough.’ It was a strange answer, one that made me think again of something he’d said earlier: You get to sit there and listen to me before I’m done. ‘An empire falls a lot faster than it’s built, David,’ he went on. ‘How does it feel to take down an empire? You’re destroying a sixty-three-year legacy here.’
‘You call what you did a “legacy”?’
‘Of a sort.’
‘It’s murder. It’s savagery, pure and simple.’
‘Different perspectives,’ he said ingenuously. His voice barely got above a murmur: it reminded me so much of those final moments in the arcade, listening to Korman. ‘A few things are slotting into place for you now, am I right?’
I studied him, trying to keep my face neutral.
But it was true. Now, finally, I understood why Korman and Grankin had recorded the deaths of Gail Clark, of Neil and Ana Yost, of others whose identities still remained a mystery. It was proof. It was so they could ta
ke them back to Cabot and he could hear them taking their final breath, even if he couldn’t see them.
And there was the map.
Maybe it was a kind of church to Korman and Grankin. Maybe the holdall and its contents were the altar to them, to Cabot as well. But it was practical too: since he was barely able to see any more, the luminosity of the pink light was the only way the Invisible Ripper could quickly and efficiently find his way back through the maze of penny arcade machines, to those original trophies.
‘Sixty years is a long time to hold on to a secret,’ he said, using the gun like a pointer. ‘Like I said, sometimes you get tired of keeping things quiet.’
I looked at him, letting him know what I thought of him. ‘Are you even aware of what you’ve done?’
‘Oh yes,’ he said, cogent, resolute. He watched me for a moment. ‘I should probably tell you that I started dating Gary’s mother the year that Eldon Simmons was arrested, and then we married in 1954, the year after he got the noose. I want you to know these things. It’s important.’
‘Why?’
‘I knew I was in the clear by then,’ he continued, ignoring me, ‘but I didn’t want to take any chances. As soon as anyone smelled gay on the wind back then … well, it turned into a witch-hunt. That was why I set Simmons up: I had a close call with the fifth one. Abel Dimas. He was this beautiful Spaniard I met in a bar way before I got close to killing anyone. I suppose I was working up to him, always thinking about him. I didn’t want to mess it up. I planned the whole thing so carefully, and when I finally got him back to this hotel, when I got him alone, I wanted it to last.’ He paused. It was hard to make out the detail in his eyes, his irises pearly, their direction unclear. ‘But he was a screamer. He screamed a lot, even through the gag, and when I’d finished with him, and I left, I started to panic. Even though I wore that mask, I thought, “I could have got caught. I need to start over. I need to be better at this.” So I hid.’
Simmons was his hiding place.
His marriage was. Gary Cabot was.
‘I’d started working as a mechanic in the day,’ he went on, ‘and then – at night – I’d go off and do my own thing while Gary and his mother were at home. I told her I was doing extra shifts. When I finally opened my own garage, that was when it got easier. We used to have a scrapyard next door to us, and they had this furnace, and that was when I first thought about getting rid of bodies that way. Reduce something to ash, and what are you left with?’
There was a disconcerting calmness to him.
‘How many?’ I said.
‘How many what?’
‘How many have you killed?’
He shrugged again.
‘You don’t even remember?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘After a while, you lose count.’
To him, this was just a methodical unveiling of facts. He could have blandly been reading off a menu.
‘Do you know how much ash an average human male leaves after you cremate him?’ Cabot asked. ‘Six pounds, give or take. All that blood and bone reduced to a pile of dust …’ He cupped his spare hand. ‘Until the eighties, when DNA came in and we had to be more careful, there was no better way of making someone vanish.’
‘ “We” being you, Korman and Grankin?’
He looked down at the gun, cloudy eyes studying it. ‘How could I let my own son be killed,’ he said. It wasn’t a question, just an insipid repetition of what I’d asked earlier. ‘That was just the thing. I didn’t ever really see Gary as my son, I just saw him as someone I had to share my life with. Someone who would help hide me from view. That doesn’t mean I didn’t feel anything for him. Sometimes, I’d try so hard to look at him through a father’s eyes, especially after his mother died. I tried to influence him. I tried to shape him the way I wanted him to be. But he was fifteen by then, too well adjusted, too rational and wise, and I’d say things to him sometimes, catch myself off guard, and he’d look at me, and it was like he could see all the way into me; like he could see my history and who I was, in my face. That was when I realized I had to focus my attention elsewhere.’
I frowned, unsure of what he meant.
But then, all of a sudden, I was back inside the dark, abandoned corridors of St David’s, making my way through the extension, passing signs pointing out different parts of the building. Reception. Administrative offices. The North Wing.
The JJC Block.
‘The Joseph J. Cabot Block,’ I said.
Keeping the gun levelled at me, he began to unbutton his coat, letting it fall open. ‘Very good. I’d opened four garages by 1980, the money was rolling in. I was a successful, upstanding member of society. But I was getting on. I could feel my bones beginning to creak, I was slowing down, my eyesight was getting worse, and I started to think, “What am I going to do when I’m too old?” ’
‘You mean, too old to murder people?’
He ignored me. ‘Gary was twenty-eight by then. He’d started taking over the running of the garages and had plans to open more. He was an accomplished businessman. He was making me more money than I knew what to do with – but he couldn’t give me what I really wanted. He was just like his mother: so strait-laced and buttoned down, so uninteresting. I used to look at him when he was in his twenties and see nothing of myself. I’d literally made no impression on him at all. I mean, I’d deliberately kept my …’ He paused, trying to come up with the word. Excesses. Brutality. Depravity. ‘I’d kept it all hidden from him. He obscured me. I hid behind him. He was my suit of armour. And some days I hated him for that.’
He started to drift slightly, the gun inching a little to the left. But then he snapped out of it, and we were back in my living room, his eyes settling on me.
‘So I started a career of philanthropy.’
‘You invested in St David’s.’
‘Correct. I put money in, and I attended dinners there, and the more of my pounds they took, the more I got invited back. I started watching these kids they had there while I was standing around at garden parties and summer barbecues, and they were all so boring, so samey and colourless. All of them except for one. One of them always caught my eye. In 1982, he would only have been eleven, but it was so clear what he was, even back then – everything I didn’t see in Gary, I saw in this boy.’
‘Korman.’
‘Yes,’ he said, wistful, forlorn. ‘Through him, I learned that I did want to be a parent, after all. He taught me about fatherhood, about caring for something; and I taught him to survive, to control, to kill – and how to keep on doing it.’
83
Cabot’s breath rattled in his chest.
‘Korman was his mother’s maiden name,’ he said. ‘Benjamin Paul Gray. As the years went on, things just developed. I offered to help the home with him, to take him out; try and settle him down. He was the weird kid there that no one could get a handle on. He’d vanish, and the staff wouldn’t be able to find him anywhere, and then he’d just return out of the blue.’ He stopped, and I recalled something that East had said: Korman would disappear for days, sometimes weeks at a time, and then – all of a sudden – he was back, watching you, and you didn’t even realize until he stepped out of the shadows. Cabot said, ‘Do you want to know where he would go?’
‘He was staying with you.’
‘Right. We’d go places.’ A long pause. ‘Learn things.’
The temperature in the room seemed to drop. There was so much in those last two words, his tone loaded with over sixty years of cruelty and bloodshed.
‘And Grankin?’
‘Victor wasn’t as talented as Ben. But he had a drive, a focus, and because he wanted to belong, he was pliable. I figured he would prove useful.’
I thought about the three of them: Korman and Grankin had left St David’s in 1984 – Korman still only fourteen, Grankin seventeen – and never returned. Now I knew why. Cabot had taken them in, hiding them from sight, cultivating them, developing them, brainwashing them. That went on for ni
ne years, his own health deteriorating. By the time 1993 arrived, he was sixty-seven.
‘Why the pier?’ I said.
‘We’d taken Gary there as a kid. He loved it. The machines fascinated him. We lived in Whitechapel at the time, so he’d make us take him down there most weekends. When it closed in ’93, all it did was sit there. No one claimed it: this big, ugly, empty vessel. And then I remember being down there with Gary a few months after it shut, and he said to me, “If it didn’t cost so much, I’d love to buy it and restore it.” He was about the only person who was ever going to want to do that. Even Arnold Goldman couldn’t get it to work. It was a failure. It was just going to sit there – unused – until it got demolished.’
‘Not unused by you.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘For us, it was the perfect hiding place.’
I studied him, his eyes moving around the room. They shifted fast enough, even if they didn’t see much.
‘Ben saw a kind of purity in the penny arcade machines too,’ he said softly, ‘but for different reasons from Gary. Gary saw his childhood. He saw a chance to recapture it and invest in something. Ben saw decay and dysfunction, a place that reflected him and his tastes. The things we hid there, to him it was part of the elegance and artistry of it all.’
I watched his eyes shimmer.
‘My sight had got really bad by 1993,’ he continued, noticing my gaze. ‘I could make out shapes, like I can make you out now, but all the detail was gone. I was almost seventy, yet I still had the taste for it. Everything I’d taught Ben over the years, from when I first took them out of that home in 1984, it was all leading up to this point. Technique. Strategy. He’d watched me, and he’d learned from me, but this was when I had to let him go. I knew I would compromise him and Victor if I went with them to the pier. I wanted to go, believe me, to see what it was like in there, to see our new home. But not only did they have to get someone on to the pier, they had to get them off again. I would have slowed them down.’