by Tim Weaver
‘On Friday 16 May. Dr Meredith Blaine.’
Blaine’s notes were obviously never going to be a part of the ID request the police had received, so I couldn’t say for sure whether she’d been any more successful, but it was hard to see Healy bowing to the gentle pressure a psychologist might apply. He’d have hated being analysed like that. I added her name to my notes.
‘What else?’ I said.
‘Gunasekara relayed an account of the day paramedics were called to the scene of Healy’s heart attack. She said a civilian, a former army sergeant, had been close by and performed CPR, and then the paramedics had applied their own procedures as they’d arrived.’
‘Where was this?’
‘Stables Market in Camden.’
What the hell was he doing there?
He didn’t have any money, so it wasn’t going to be a shopping trip. It was also six miles away from the homeless shelter he’d been staying in near the Old Kent Road, which made it inconvenient to get to. Yet he’d gone nonetheless. Why? What had he found out?
As I tried to align my thoughts, something Calvin East had said returned to me: I’m a hoarder, a collector. Books, paintings, antiquities. I’m fascinated by London, I’ve lived here my whole life, so my collection is centred here. Stables Market was home to countless antiques shops.
Had Healy followed East there?
‘They found some items on him,’ Craw said. ‘A book – and three photographs.’
I didn’t need more than that. The book would be A Seaside in the City by Carla Stourcroft. The photographs would be Gail, April and Abigail.
Everything else had been left at the homeless shelter.
I looked down at the passenger seat, Healy’s copy of A Seaside in the City lying creased, dog-eared, and then thought about what may have happened after he discharged himself on 17 May. The next time anyone saw him was on 18 August, when he returned to the homeless shelter to retrieve the divorce papers. That left three months still unaccounted for.
Notepad in my lap, phone to my ear, I realized that I’d become distracted. I was supposed to be watching the house.
As I looked up, Calvin East walked out of his driveway.
36
He paused at the gates, winter coat on, collar up, and looked either way along the street. Then he was off, heading away from me, north towards Jamaica Road.
‘Raker?’
I’d almost forgotten I was still on the line to Craw. ‘I have to go,’ I told her, ‘but thank you. Thank you for doing this.’
She didn’t reply immediately. ‘You and me, I’m not sure what the answer is. I love my job. It’s full of bullshit and politics and frustration, but I love it. And the minute people at the Met find out about us, about what I’ve just done for you …’ She paused, obviously conflicted. ‘Just be careful, okay?’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Thank you again.’
I hung up.
Ten minutes later, I was inside East’s kitchen.
I’d thought, briefly, about following him, to see where he was going, why he had been in such a state, then realized I might not get another chance like this to have a look around. East, and whoever he was associated with, knew who I was, and knew the kind of questions I’d been asking: about Healy, about the pier. The more time passed, the more they were going to circle the wagons.
I moved through the darkness of the interior, keeping my torch off. There was enough light – from street lamps, from digital displays on electronics, from a luminous wall clock in the living room – to navigate my way, room to room.
The house was like the garage: small, packed, but well organized. In the kitchen, he’d left his dinner plate in the sink, and the ripped packaging from a microwave lasagne on the counter, but otherwise it was clean. The living room was a lounge-diner, one long room that ran front to back. He had a small table at one end, next to the patio doors, and two sofas at the other, in an L-shape around a TV cabinet. A floor-to-ceiling bookcase dominated the space, six long shelves groaning under the weight of hundreds of books. These had been treated with more care than the ones in his office, many preserved in transparent sleeves.
Beyond the living room was a hallway, the front door to the right, stairs to the left. I headed up. At the top were three further doors: the first led into a tiny bathroom, tiled white with a wicker cabinet full of toiletries on the wall; the other two opened into bedrooms. One was clearly where he slept: clean, plain walls, a single bed with a pale blue duvet, and two stand-alone pine wardrobes.
The other room was full of antiques.
On its ceiling, he’d replaced the light fixture with three long fluorescent tubes, each covered in a UV filter. At the window was a thick blind, perfectly cut to fit inside the window space and prevent any light coming in from outside. As I moved further into the room, I could see he’d arranged his antiques in a vague S-shape, creating a path through them, that took you into the room and back out.
There were more books, again plastic-wrapped, but this time inside a revolving oak bookcase. Next to that was a polished mahogany bureau, perched on spindly legs, a lock on each of its drawers. I tried them. They were all empty.
I passed a striking walnut dresser, built low to the ground, a sheet of felt placed on top of it, a selection of plates, silver and sculptures on top of that. Then there were two ash dining chairs, and an art deco office chair, built on wheels, in green studded leather. Finally, there was a tortoiseshell writing box on the floor. I opened it up but there was nothing in it, just like the bureau.
Moving through to his bedroom, I looked in the pine wardrobes. One had five versions of the same outfit he wore to work, an additional top hat placed on a shelf above. His other clothes were the unremarkable attire of a middle-aged man. At the bottom he kept his shoes, all the same black boots, highly polished, except for a pair of light brown brogues.
The other wardrobe was full of junk.
He’d used it as a dumping ground for clothes he no longer wanted, for old photo albums, for more books, for a wristwatch that had stopped working and a phone without a back or a battery. There were Christmas cards, unwritten and unsent, the remains of an old stereo system, even an old typewriter. There were DVDs too. A Touch of Evil. The Godfather. 12 Angry Men. Casablanca.
On the spine of the Casablanca box, an X had been added in red marker.
Removing it from the pile, I opened it up. Inside were two discs. One was the movie itself; another was a blank DVD, nothing written on it. I checked the other films, but they just contained the discs they were supposed to. It was only this one that was different.
I felt a flicker of unease.
Clipping the official disc back into the Casablanca box, I returned it to the shelf, pocketed the blank disc and went through the remainder of the wardrobe.
After a while I found a scrapbook, a beach scene on the cover. East had written World Tour at the top. I opened it up and saw what it was: a chronicle of a gap year he’d had in his early twenties, photographs, ticket stubs and faded receipts from all across Asia, Australasia, Fiji and the US west coast.
A few pages in, something fell out.
It was a newspaper cutting.
It had been inserted loose inside, towards the back, and had nothing to do with his trip. When I unfolded it, I saw it was a story from a newspaper called the North London Gazette. I wasn’t familiar with it, and was pretty sure the paper wasn’t even in circulation any more – but that wasn’t what grabbed my attention.
It was the fact it wasn’t a story.
It was an obituary.
7 August 2010
CARLA STOURCROFT
Carla Stourcroft, a lecturer and local author, was perhaps best known for her last book, Invisible Ripper (2009), the acclaimed biography of serial killer Eldon Simmons, who raped and murdered five men in the 1950s. But she was also the author of four other books, all based around her love of London history: From Richmond to Regent: London’s Parks from A to Z (1996); Metropolitan: The First Undergroun
d Line (1998), which she wrote under her married name of Carla Davis; A Seaside in the City: The History of Wapping Grand Pier (2002); and South of the River (2006). As well as her career as a writer, she lectured in history at the University of East London. With her deep love of the area, and keen support for the local community, Ms Stourcroft’s tragic death at the age
The obituary had been torn off at the bottom.
My mind shifted back to when I’d first started reading A Seaside in the City at home. I’d found a similar obituary online when I’d googled Stourcroft, but not much else. Her career as a writer – except for her last book – had gone unnoticed, and even Invisible Ripper, although acclaimed by critics, only charted for a week. That made her hard to find on the web, especially given her lack of a website or social media presence. But one thing I was certain the other obituary hadn’t referred to were the circumstances of her death. Why was it referred to as tragic here?
And why had East made a special effort to find her obituary in one of the few media outlets that seemed to have covered her passing in any detail?
It had to have something to do with A Seaside in the City – except I’d read that book cover to cover, and there was nothing in it. There were no secrets, nothing that pointed to anyone or anything. It was clear East was hiding something. He’d made a break for it after I’d shown him Healy’s photograph at the museum. But if the answers were in Stourcroft’s book, they were so well hidden behind the dry, prosaic text that I doubted they’d ever be found.
I went back to the obituary and read it a second time. A third, a fourth. On the fifth, something stopped me.
… Metropolitan: The First Underground Line (1998), which she wrote under her married name of Carla Davis …
Her married name. The first time I’d read the obituary, it hadn’t even occurred to me. But it did now. Taking out my phone, I went to the web and, instead of searching for Carla Stourcroft, I went looking for ‘Carla Davis’.
My heart dropped.
Carla Davis hadn’t left much of an online footprint either – but she’d left enough. The first four links were for stories in the nationals – the Sun, Guardian, Telegraph, Mail – but when I clicked through to them, each of the reports was tiny; news in briefs forgotten as quickly as they’d been printed.
7 August 2010
POLICE CALL FOR WITNESSES IN ‘ROBBERY GONE WRONG’
Police have appealed for witnesses to come forward after a woman died from injuries sustained in what detectives are describing as a ‘bungled robbery’.
Carla Davis, 46, was attacked after reportedly trying to fight off a thief who’d attempted to snatch her handbag. Police said CCTV footage showed Mrs Davis refusing to let go of her bag, before her attacker produced a knife and stabbed her once in the stomach. ‘Although doctors initially managed to stabilize her,’ said Detective Inspector Oliver Cowley, ‘Mrs Davis later died from her injuries. We don’t believe that her attacker intended to kill her, but clearly this is now a murder investigation.’
Mrs Davis, a writer and lecturer, lived on Chalk Farm Road and had only been back in the country twenty-four hours after spending a month with her sister in Australia. According to police, her attacker confronted her as she was leaving Stables Market …
I stopped reading.
Stables Market.
She’d died in the same place Healy had had his heart attack.
37
As soon as I was back at the car, I grabbed my phone and searched for Stables Market. In a former life, as its name suggested, it had been a stables and horse hospital, its intricate design unravelling through a series of passages, stairwells and viaducts, alleys criss-crossing like veins, its spaces now occupied by both single-trader stalls and businesses big enough to fill the site’s converted railway arches.
I quickly found a list of four hundred proprietors at the market, a column of names I felt certain hid the reason Carla Stourcroft, and then Healy, had been drawn there. They’d gone separately, years apart, but in the end they’d suffered the same fate, Stourcroft losing her life in an apparent robbery – just outside the market walls – in August 2010; Healy suffering a heart attack three and a half years later, which he’d survived – but only physically. Seven months after that, I’d found him under the foundations at Highdale – a man alone, a man who’d given up his fight long ago. Increasingly, I was starting to wonder how much of the blame lay here.
In this list.
In these names.
What had drawn Stourcroft and Healy to the market? Was it Calvin East? Someone else? Whichever it was, the long list of antiques shops seemed like a good place to start. I worked my way through them, cross-checking the name of the business and the proprietor with my notes. There was nothing. I moved on to antique furniture shops, businesses dealing in clothing and jewellery, in homeware, even toy shops and shoe shops, and still got nothing. When I returned to the antiques shops for a second time, to ensure I hadn’t missed anything, I was more methodical: I used the name of the business as a jumping-off point, and went searching beyond the trading name, using Google in the worst way possible, to trawl social media for the accounts of the men and women who rented space there; their Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn profiles.
But it was the same as before.
A dead end.
Copying and pasting the list of business names and proprietors into an email, I sent it to myself, so I’d have easy access to it, checked it had come through, and then backed out of my inbox. Almost immediately, the phone started buzzing in my hand again.
It was Ewan Tasker.
I remembered then that I’d messaged him pictures of the Citroën belonging to the man I’d seen earlier at the house, removing one of East’s penny arcade machines. I’d asked Task to put the car reg and the owner through the Police National Computer.
‘How you doing, Task?’
‘Good,’ he said. ‘Is it too late for you?’
‘No. Your timing’s perfect. How did you get on?’
‘That Citroën,’ he said, ‘is registered to a Victor Grankin.’
‘Okay,’ I said, grabbing my notepad. ‘Who is he?’
‘Born 25 January 1967 in Pärnu, Estonia. His parents emigrated to the UK in 1974, but were killed in a car accident in April 1975, so he grew up in care. No information on him as a minor, and certainly no record – if there even was one. Until 2006, police weren’t obliged to keep juvenile records on the system, so a lot of guys Grankin’s age who might have history as a minor won’t raise any flags.’
‘What about as an adult?’
‘No, he’s clean.’
‘Has he got a home address?’
‘Yeah. 3 Poland Gardens, Whitehall Woods.’
‘I don’t even know where that is.’
‘I think it’s up near the Essex county line. He’s been there since October 2010. Before that, he lived in a flat down in Beckton, near the airport. He runs a company called VG Security and Protection Ltd from his home address, but he’s the only employee. I dug around a bit for you and it looks like he hires security grunts from an agency on an ad hoc basis, as and when he needs them. Anyway, VGSP’s been going since January 2001. It’s some sort of private security firm.’
‘Okay. What about known associates?’
‘No.’
‘No black spots in his history at all?’
‘Only thing I could find was an incident four years back, when Grankin was wheeled into the station at Bethnal Green after being accused of stealing.’
‘Stealing from who?’
‘Someone called, uh … Gary Cabot.’
That stopped me. ‘Really? What did he steal?’
‘Uh … “a thirty-six-tin box of Hoberman’s”.’
‘Which is?’
‘Wood varnish.’
‘Honestly?’
‘That’s what it says down here. “Thirty-six 250ml tins”.’
‘Wood varnish?’
Task sighed. ‘Crime’s clearly no
t what it used to be.’
‘What else have you got there?’
‘Hold on,’ Task replied, and I could hear him muttering under his breath, as he read back the paperwork. ‘The entry’s vague because no charges were ever brought, but it looks like this Cabot guy ran some sort of tourist attraction in Wapping – “Wapping Wonderland and Museum” – and he claims that during a summer fair they had there, Grankin stole these pots of varnish. Part of the reason Cabot was so upset was probably because this Hoberman’s stuff is expensive.’
‘How expensive?’
‘It’s about forty-five quid per tin, so sixteen hundred quid in total for a box, plus the cost of transporting it down to London. It’s made by some company up in Blackpool.’
‘So the investigation never went anywhere?’
‘Cabot said he hired Grankin in 2002 to look after security at the museum, and never had any problems with him until 2010, when Cabot says he went into Grankin’s office at the museum, the day after the summer fair, and found traces of this varnish on the floor, next to Grankin’s desk. Cabot went to wherever they stored these tins of Hoberman’s at the museum – and there was a box missing.’
‘So why were no charges brought?’
‘The police looked into it, interviewed Grankin but never found the tins. They narrowed down the theft to the evening of Sunday 11 July.’
‘Wait, what was the date?’
‘Sunday 11 July 2010.’
The night the Clark family were murdered.
I felt myself tense.
‘Anyway,’ Task went on, ‘Grankin had hired four guys from a recruitment agency to help cover the fair, and the time slot of the theft – 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. – immediately put all four in the clear. Long story short: most of the museum was shut off to the general public, including where these tins of varnish were stored, and a whole bunch of eyewitnesses saw these four blokes outside at the fair, on and off, all night. The police were more interested in this Grankin guy – but he had an alibi. He’d popped out for a few hours to meet another potential client at a pub on St Katharine Docks, about seven forty-five. When interviewed, this client confirmed that they’d met in the pub that night, and footage pulled from a CCTV camera on the docks showed Grankin heading in that direction just after eight o’clock.’
