by Tim Weaver
‘Why take the Yosts to the pier and not Gail, or Carla Stourcroft?’
He shrugged. ‘Circumstances. We needed to make them disappear as quickly as possible once Victor got them away from that gala. They were all drunk – or, at least, Victor pretended to be – which helped, so they were up for a dare. The pier made sense. All the others we could take our time with – they weren’t supposed to be in the country, so no one was looking for them. People would be looking for the Yosts – but no one would be looking for them on the pier.’
‘You must have been so proud.’
A twitch of a smile on his face as he reacted to my contempt. ‘I wanted to enjoy those moments, which was why I used a tape recorder. I started in the days when digital recordings were just science fiction, but I never made the switch. You have more control over a single tape than you do over a digital file, out there on the Internet, leaving a footprint. I’d listen to the tapes I’d made, the tapes Ben made for me after he took up the mantle, and then – when I was done – I’d hide them among my music collection. In lieu of taking trophies, I chose them as my new keepsakes. It was only in the last couple of days that I told Victor to get rid of them all for me.’
Something else clicked into place: why Grankin had the tape of Gail’s last moments. It was Cabot’s. Grankin was in the process of destroying all the tapes, from decades of murders, but had held that one back. Perhaps he’d seen it as a way to draw Healy and me in; a way to destabilize us. It had almost worked.
‘The pier was such an inspired choice,’ Cabot said. ‘Ben would tell me the whole pavilion smelled of seared human flesh – but no one ever went inside.’
My phone started going again. Healy, for a second time.
‘You have persistent friends,’ Cabot said.
Ten seconds later, Healy hung up again.
‘Why are you telling me all of this?’
He tilted his head slightly, shifting in his seat, a hand drifting to his knee. ‘You ruined everything,’ he said, echoing what Korman had told me, a mix of anger and sadness in his voice.
‘Korman made the decision to kill himself.’
He studied me, his face like the grey mask he’d once worn: expressionless, barren. But, still, something lingered in it; something put there after my comment about Korman. A hint of pain, a flash of remorse.
And then I got it: ‘You told him to kill himself.’
‘In taking his own life, Ben was the victor.’ He watched me with those eyes, inscrutable, empty, but I knew exactly what he was saying: He agreed to kill himself in order to save me, his teacher, his father. The police were closing in. They would eventually find the link between us. So he hid the trophies in the holdall, and killed himself. He did it for me – and he did it because it meant your friend Healy never got the revenge he so desperately wanted. ‘Ben saw the beauty in that final act. Do you think your friend saw the beauty in it too, David?’
I didn’t say anything.
‘Did he cry?’
I glanced at my phone’s display:
Missed call: Spare mobile
‘Did he sit there and cry, David?’ He smirked. ‘Ben became the son I always wanted. I’m devastated he’s gone. But you know something? Doing it like that, in front of you, in front of your pathetic little friend, it was worth it. I love that the choice was taken from you.’
I remained still, unmoved.
But I was burning up inside.
His eyes shifted a little, amused, as if he could sense I was suppressing my hatred for him. ‘Why the twins, David? Is that what you want to know – why?’
But then his whole expression changed, brow creasing, the skin – dotted, blemished, marked by age – furrowing at the edges of his face like folded leather. For a moment, there was a hint of genuine anguish in it.
‘It was such a shame that Gail Clark had to fall in with Carla Stourcroft,’ he said. ‘It became so complicated once they’d begun chatting. Stourcroft filled that woman’s head with ideas.’
‘You’re confusing ideas with the truth.’
‘If we’d let it run, it just would have got bigger and bigger, and more difficult to resolve. Stourcroft was smart. In the end, she would have figured it all out.’
‘So you sent the son you never had to murder a couple of innocent eight-year-olds?’ I looked at him, absolute revulsion in my face. ‘How did that help?’
His eyes narrowed. ‘Let me tell you a story.’
‘You’ve already told me more than I ever –’
‘It’s about April and Abigail.’
His voice was flat and detached, the words delivered with no emotion – and yet the room seemed to congeal at their names being spoken aloud.
‘After Gary realized his miserable little dream and bought the paper mill and the pier in 2000, I knew the pier was going to be harder for Ben and Victor to access, because Gary was going to take an interest in it. That was when we went to Calvin East. He was weak and scared, and easily manoeuvred. I made sure I was whispering in Gary’s ear the whole time, pointing him first towards Calvin as curator, and then towards Victor as security.’
‘What’s this got to do with the girls?’
He held up a finger. ‘Spring 2010, the house in Whitehall Woods came on the market. I was extremely well off by then. So I put in an offer. I knew Ben and Victor would appreciate the symbolism of returning home, to the place we all first met – and, with St David’s closed and boarded up, I knew, on a practical level, that the children’s home would be a much safer environment to carry out our work. That was part of the reason Victor got himself fired – it meant we had an alibi in place, of course, but the fact was, the pier exposed us. When we first started using it in 1993, Wapping was a shell. By 2010, there were flats and apartments everywhere. We didn’t need the pier any more, all we needed was the museum, and our map – and we had Calvin to help with that.’
‘I’m not interested in any of this.’
‘Do you believe everything is connected?’
I studied him.
‘Events, decisions, people,’ he said, his left eye filmy and wet. ‘Are you like me? Can you see all the parts clicking into place?’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘We installed Calvin as curator at the museum because he was a coward and could be controlled. I mean, it wasn’t for his qualifications. I don’t even know if he finished school. But the irony was he became very well respected by some of the local academics, who thought he really had a connection with kids, and he made learning enjoyable. So the schools would come back, year after year, to the museum, and he’d give them the tour, and they’d have some money to spend in the arcade, and everyone went away happy.’ He paused, obviously trying to see if I’d got ahead of him. ‘You can see now where this is going, can’t you, David?’
‘The girls came to the museum.’
‘Correct. Autumn 2009, they came with their school. I was waiting in reception for Gary to take me home, and I watched these two twins, so different from one another. One of them was quiet and watchful; the other was loud, showing off to all her friends. And then the show-off looked over at me and saw my eyes. I couldn’t react, because I was supposed to be blind – but I watched her whisper something to her friends and start to point at me, and they all started laughing.’
I was incredulous. ‘Are you listening to yourself?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘You misunderstand me. I wasn’t upset that they laughed at me. So what? They were just stupid girls. But I could tell, straight away, that the show-off – April, I later found out – was trouble. She had a furtive edge to her.’
‘She was eight.’
‘She was sly.’
‘She was eight, you fucking lunatic.’
‘Actually, I think she was seven at the time.’ He lifted the gun off the arm of the sofa, reminding me it was there. ‘But, anyway, my point is, later on the next year, when it became clear that Gail Clark might create problems for us, I asked Ben to ta
ke me down to Searle House. I don’t normally go on field trips like that, but this was a family; there were young kids. I felt it necessary to take a look.’
‘So suddenly you developed a conscience?’
‘Not really,’ he said. ‘But we were getting reports back from Calvin about how Gail didn’t know anything, that there was no reason to go after her, and the more reports we got back like that, the more it began to concern me. It felt like he was protecting them more than he was protecting us. So we dropped by, on the way back from signing the contracts for the place in Whitehall Woods. Do you see how everything connects, David?’ He waited for a response that never came, but didn’t seem perturbed by my lack of reply. ‘When we pulled up, I looked over to the park, and there they were. Right there. Those same two girls. I said to Ben, “I recognize them,” and he looked over and said to me, “Probably because they’re Gail Clark’s daughters.” But it wasn’t that. I mean, I knew she had girls, just not that they were twins. The twins. When I saw them there, when I realized they were the same girls I’d seen at the museum, the same one that laughed at me, it was like the universe had snapped together.’
I shook my head. ‘You’re insane.’
He took a breath, the exhalation whistling through his nose. ‘The quiet one was just sitting there on the swings, going back and forth. The other one was with a crowd of other kids, doing some stupid dance, showing off again and making a spectacle of herself. I disliked her immediately.’
‘She was a child.’
‘She was trouble.’
‘She was a chil–’
‘I went over to them,’ he said.
I came forward on the sofa. ‘What?’
‘After their friends disappeared, and it was just the two of them left, I felt compelled to go over. Ben advised against it, but I wanted to speak to them.’ He paused. ‘The quiet one sat there, swinging back and forth, watching. She was humming to herself, but she stopped when I got there. The other one, she spotted me first and came forward, all bold and brash, and she said to me, “I recognize you.” So, I said, “Where do you recognize me from?” She tells me she recognizes me from the museum. “You’ve got weird eyes,” she says, and I tell her that’s rude, but she doesn’t seem to give much of a damn either way.’
I thought about the video I’d seen of the girls, playing Scrabble with East, laughing, joyful. This picture of April Clark he was trying to build wasn’t who she was: she was just a child, innocent of any label he put on her, any brush he tried to tar her with. She’d laughed at him because she was unaware of social etiquette; she’d commented on his eyes because she didn’t understand them. She’d shown off because she was eight: her entire life was still in front of her, the world lying in wait, ready to teach her. He’d robbed her of that.
Cabot pursed his lips; an expression of distaste on his face. ‘She says, “Why are you here?” and I replied that I was an adult, and I could go wherever I wanted – but she just kept looking at me. Staring. I said to her, “You need to learn some manners, young lady,” but she just keeps staring.’
‘She didn’t mean anything by it.’
‘How do you know? Were you there?’
My whole body was like a furnace. I looked from the gun to him, imagining my fingers at his throat.
‘I told her to stop staring, but she just kept doing it, all brash and brazen, hands on her hips, so I stepped closer to her and said, “Did you hear me? Stop staring at me.” But she didn’t. So I went even closer, my weird eyes right up close to her face, and I said, “I can hurt you.” And she looked past me, to the car, to where Ben was, and she said, “I know you’re a bad person. I saw a picture of you on my mummy’s computer. I heard her talking about you on the phone.” ’
I swallowed.
He looked at me. ‘Stourcroft had sent Gail Clark a picture of me.’
It was so hard to listen to this, my fingers digging into the sofa, my chest on fire. I wanted to tear him to pieces.
‘After that, she went and grabbed her sister’s hand and they ran off, back to their desperate little flat. I returned to the car and I said to Ben, “She’s got a photo of me. She’s seen you. She’s mannerless and crude, but she’s devious. If we let this drift, if we let that photo sit there on that PC, they’ll be in a police station before we know it, telling them everything. The mother, the daughter, all of them.” ’ He looked at me without contrition. ‘So I said to Ben, “When it comes to dealing with the mother, you’d better make damn sure you take them all.” ’
My head thumped.
My skin crawled.
And then: a noise from the kitchen.
84
We both looked along the hallway, before Cabot seemed to notice his attention had been diverted, and whipped the gun back around. ‘What’s that?’ he said. I’d barely had a chance to move, and silently cursed myself for not trying to go for the gun. He was agitated now, disquieted. ‘Go and see what it was.’
I got up. Once I was past him, he hauled himself to his feet, old bones creaking, hand planted for support. I heard him move in behind me as I walked along the hallway, heading to the kitchen, on the right.
A plate had shifted on the rack, moved by the breeze coming through a partially open window. Everything else was exactly as I’d left it this morning. Out through the window, I could see Nicola, my neighbour, on her driveway. Beyond, an old couple walked past, the woman wheeling a trolley. A scene of domestic normality outside, while, inside, a man – who’d killed for so long and so often he couldn’t even remember how many had suffered at his hands – was holding a gun at my back. I turned and found him behind me.
‘It’s just a plate,’ I said.
He watched me for a moment, the opacity of his eyes even starker this close in, and then he began backing up, gun steady in front of him. I followed.
‘I think maybe we’ve got to the end,’ he said, and the finality of his words sent a shiver through me, navel to throat. ‘I’m fascinated by you, David. I’ve read all about you, about your history. I think, perhaps, in different circumstances, you might even have been able to appreciate the similarities between us.’ His feet shuffled back, in sequence, like a machine on a factory floor. ‘You probably see this as some sort of victory – me coming here, telling you everything. But why would I willingly give you the inside track on sixty years’ worth of secrets?’
He finally stopped, a smile breaking across his face.
‘The victory isn’t yours, David. It’s mine. By a process of elimination, the police will come to realize my DNA is on that mask, then they’ll find me all over that house in the woods, inside St David’s – it’s over for me. But I’m not going to jail. I’m too old for that. So I’ve burdened you with everything I’ve done, because I want you to sit there and chew on it after I’m gone. I know you’ll do that. That’s who you are. I want you to remember how we got away with it, and you couldn’t do a damn thing about it. And if you come at me, if you try and hand me into the police today, I’m going to tell them about your friend Healy.’ The smile turned briefly into laughter – gluey and vile – and then all emotion fell from his face. ‘I was never going to shoot you, David. Why would I do that when I have you exactly where I want –’
A blur of movement.
It came from the left, from the direction of the bedrooms, careering into Cabot and taking him with it – crashing into the table, the table legs scraping across the floor, chairs spinning out from under it. Cabot’s gun was thrown across the carpet. And then, a second later, it all shifted into focus.
Healy.
I could feel a breeze coming from my left; hear the soft whistle of wind drawn from one side of the house to the other. The bedroom window was open too. Healy had caused a distraction in the kitchen and then made his way around.
Suddenly, I was back in the moment.
Cabot was face down, Healy on top of him, two gaunt, shrunken men, dazed in the corner of the living room. I wasn’t even sure if Cabot was b
reathing or not. Healy had a knee in his spine and a hand at the back of his neck, pushing his face into the floor. Except the closer I got, the clearer it all became, and I realized that it wasn’t a hand that Healy had pressed against Cabot’s skull.
It was the point of a blade.
‘Healy,’ I said. ‘It’s okay.’
He looked back at me for the first time, tears pouring down his face, saliva on his lips. He heard the end of what Cabot was saying. He heard him talking about the girls. My heart dropped at this portrait of him, so derelict and ruined. Cabot shifted a little, twitched, but Healy didn’t move. He just kept staring at me.
‘Healy, it’s okay,’ I said again, almost whispering it.
He shook his head.
‘Healy …’
He started shaking it faster.
‘We can sort this out,’ I said.
He tore his eyes away from me, released the knife and rolled Cabot on to his back. The old man started to cough, his ribcage juddering like a faulty engine. Once he’d calmed down, Healy slowly moved the point of the blade in against the craggy folds of his neck.
‘They were innocent,’ he sobbed.
It took Cabot a couple of seconds to find Healy, to see his outline against the shadows around them. When he did, he said, ‘Are you going to kill me now?’
Healy whimpered.
‘Go on,’ Cabot said. ‘Do it.’
‘No, Healy. That’s not who you are.’
More tears.
‘Do it,’ Cabot spat. ‘They deserved to die.’
Healy reacted instantly. At first, I thought he’d put the knife straight into Cabot’s neck. But then, as Healy wailed in pain, I saw only a single trickle of blood, and realized Cabot was still alive. The knife had gently pierced his skin.
Healy muttered something.