What Remains

by Tim Weaver

  A ripple passed across the room.

  ‘What?’

  ‘She invited him in,’ East said.

  ‘He was at the flat the night before they were killed?’

  ‘He was there, in the middle of their bloody flat, yards from where the girls were sleeping. I hadn’t seen him for a couple of years, and in that time he’d grown his hair long. He had this beard. He’d dyed everything blond.’

  ‘Did Gail know who he was?’

  ‘No. As she came back in with him, she said, “It’s one of your friends, Cal.” That’s what he’d told her: that he was a friend of mine. He’d told her his name was Samuel.’

  He watched me, seeing if I remembered our conversation at the museum. I did. We’d looked out of the window and down to the paved area in front of the pier, to the spot where Samuel Brown had dumped one of his victims in 1674.

  The Devil of Wapping.

  Straight away, I recalled something I’d read in the murder file, about how two of the cameras at Searle House hadn’t been working for months. Korman must have come from the other direction the night before – on foot, from the Tube. They’d arrived by car the following night because he’d needed a fast getaway – that was why he’d headed out in the other direction. If Healy’s team had been able to catch him on film the night before the murders, they might have got clearer shots of him. This whole thing might already have been over. Korman and Grankin might have been rotting in jail.

  ‘He stood there in the living room, talking to Gail,’ East was saying, ‘putting on this show of normality, telling her how he and I were such close friends, and how he’d been dying to meet her. I was just pinned to the sofa. I couldn’t move. “Calvin said that, if I was ever in the area, I should come and say hello.” That’s what he told her. Gail being Gail, she was so sweet about it all. She was just so … so …’ A shudder passed through him, cutting him off; and then a short, dreadful wail, like the cry of an animal. ‘She was so sweet,’ he said, his speech soft and slurred. ‘She stood there and listened to all his bullshit; invited him to have a drink with us. And all the time, I knew. I knew what he was doing there.’

  He was scoping it out.

  Gail.

  The flat.

  That was why she let him in the next evening, why there was no sign of struggle or a break-in. He was East’s friend – so why wouldn’t she trust him?

  But East knew the truth. He knew it then. He knew it the next day, when they were all dead. And he knew now, here in front of us, as tears spilled down his face: ‘Vic turned up at my house the next morning and told me I was going to be his alibi for the night of the fair, but I knew what he was really telling me. They were gone. They were all gone. I said to him, “No. No, I will not be your alibi! What the fuck have you done, you animals?” – and he grabbed me by the throat and squeezed so hard I thought I was going to pass out. He said, “You’re going to do this for me, or you die too …” ’ He was sobbing now. ‘I tried … I tried to fight back –’

  ‘Why did the girls have to die?’ Healy’s voice was steady, flat, as if shell-shocked.

  I was still on my haunches, but now I got up and took a step towards him. He didn’t move an inch, not even his eyes, his gaze fixed on the side of East’s face, the flat of the blade still pressed against the cheek. I took another step closer, my hand up.

  ‘Healy,’ I said quietly.

  But he didn’t look at me.

  ‘Why did the girls have to die?’ he repeated, the same way as before. Not a single tonal shift. Yet in his face there was movement: a wince, the weakness of his body trying to contain the strength of his anger; four years of searching for answers, for reasons, nearly a half-decade where his life had been laid to waste by the actions of these men. ‘Why did Korman have to kill the twins?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ East begged. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He doesn’t know, Healy.’

  For the first time, he looked at me. ‘He doesn’t know?’

  ‘He says he doesn’t know.’

  He stood there facing me, so much playing out in his eyes. For a moment, I thought he was going to sink the knife into East’s throat. His hands twitched, his thin fingers rolling along the handle of the blade.

  But then he opened his fingers and the knife fell to the floor with a clang. The penlight followed from his other hand.

  And he left the room.

  50

  I gave him ten minutes and then went to find him.

  He was sitting at the table downstairs, crying.

  As I moved in behind him, into the darkness of the living room, I expected him to try to recover himself, to disguise his sobs, but he didn’t. His back was to me, and he was hunched, fingers pressed to both eyes, trying to stem the flow.

  Eventually, I felt I had to attempt to comfort him – but when I reached out to one of his shoulders, he shrank away and a part of me felt a strange sense of relief that something of the old Healy still lived.

  ‘East just told me that he had no idea about Korman’s antiques shop in Camden,’ I said, ‘not until the day of your heart attack. He says he got a call from Grankin at work, and Grankin ordered him to leave early and head to that address, and he had no idea why. He says that day was the first time he even knew it existed. Korman and Grankin must have been on to you. They must have seen you watching East.’

  He didn’t respond.

  There were other questions too. Why had Grankin got so sloppy when he stole those tins of varnish from Cabot? Had he wanted to get sacked? Was it an attempt to bolster his alibi, playing further into the idea of him being there, at the summer fair, the night of the murders? He and Korman had made no mistakes until then – it seemed out of character to leave traces of varnish on the carpet of his office. And why even revarnish the machines in the first place?

  ‘The sun’ll be up in four hours,’ I said.

  This time he looked back at me, and in the lack of light, in the way the shadows wrapped around him, it was hard to make out much beyond the whites of his eyes.

  ‘Why didn’t they just make us all disappear?’

  I frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, they made that couple disappear into thin air. Why not do the same to me? To Carla Stourcroft? Why not do the same to Gail and the girls?’

  ‘Making people disappear is hard.’

  He shrugged. ‘Is it?’

  He meant all the people I’d been employed to find over the years.

  Maybe he even meant himself.

  In an ideal world, Korman and Grankin would surely have wanted to do that: to make it clean, to leave no trace of their victims. They would have had the opportunity too. Carla Stourcroft was a smart, ambitious, single-minded woman – but she had the instincts of a journalist, one who could be drawn out, lured somewhere remote, with the promise of a source or a tip-off. Yet they hadn’t done that. Instead, they’d made her death look like a bungled robbery.

  Healy was the same. He’d been following Calvin East for weeks, watching the patterns of his life repeat, and then Korman had snared him by changing the routine. By ordering East to leave work early, telling him to get on the Tube and head up to Camden, he knew Healy would follow. A suspicious ex-cop, focused on the only case that mattered to him, wouldn’t let it go. He’d want to find out why East’s plans had altered. And when he got to the market, Korman instructed East to lead Healy into the quietest part of it, and then Korman had gone on the offensive: a short, devastating act which would ultimately look like a heart attack. I wasn’t sure what made me more nervous: the fact that he’d been able to do it so quickly, so effectively, without anyone seeing him – or that he’d been able to detect Healy’s physical weakness in the first place.

  I didn’t know enough about Neil and Ana Yost to say exactly how they fitted in, but it was clear they’d been preyed upon by Grankin this time, and if they’d been talking to him the night they disappeared, his lies had plainly been co
nvincing enough for them to leave with him. Gail and the girls were always going to be harder, their physical location making them trickier to move. It wasn’t just seventeen floors of a tower block Korman had to negotiate, it was seventeen floors of a tower block with a woman and two eight-year-olds in tow. Moving Gail – silently, in fear of her life – was one thing; moving two eight-year-olds without them speaking, or making any sound, was much more difficult.

  In the end, Korman and Grankin had been devious, and incredibly smart: different crimes – two missing people whose bodies had never been found; a family killed where they lived; a robbery-murder – and then an overweight man suffering a heart attack, couldn’t easily be connected. It wasn’t good luck. It wasn’t chance. They’d done it that way on purpose. If Korman and Grankin had dealt with them all in the same way, there’d be a pattern. Someone, somewhere, would have noticed.

  But no one ever had.

  Not until now.

  ‘I don’t understand why Stourcroft didn’t raise the alarm,’ Healy said. ‘She was killed almost a month after Gail and the girls, but she never said anything to anyone. She must have seen what had happened, but she never went to the police. Why the hell didn’t she pick up the phone to them?’

  I thought of the obituary I’d read in East’s house. ‘Because she wasn’t in the country at the time. She was visiting her sister in Australia, and only landed back in London on 5 August. Korman and Grankin hit her the next day.’

  ‘She didn’t watch the news while she was out there?’

  ‘It wouldn’t have been on Australian news channels. I doubt it would have been reported in their newspapers either. How often do homicides in Sydney or Melbourne get reported here?’

  It all made sense. Korman had killed Gail and the twins, and then they’d done the same to Stourcroft. They’d done it before she even realized what had happened while she’d been gone, before she got the chance to find out.

  It was all planned perfectly.

  I looked back at Healy. He was wiping a sleeve across his cheek, some of his composure returning. Outside, the rain started up again.

  ‘Are you ready to go?’ I said.

  He nodded.

  ‘I need to walk back to East’s place and get my car, so you sit tight here – I shouldn’t be longer than forty-five minutes.’

  ‘And when you get back – what then? What are we going to do with East?’

  In my hands was Healy’s roll of duct tape.

  ‘We’re going to take him with us.’

  51

  We moved north through dark London streets. The rain had stopped again, but it was damp and cold outside, and the heaters of the BMW had to work overtime.

  Healy sat beside me, wrapped in his coat. I could smell sweat on him now, the odour of clothes that had gone too long without being washed. He spent the journey staring out of the window, exterior lights occasionally forming a ghostly reflection of his face in the glass. In the back, East lay flat, in a foetal position, his wrists and ankles bound, a fresh bandage of duct tape over his mouth. I looked at him occasionally, but he didn’t make eye contact, just stared off into the back of Healy’s seat, quiet, numb.

  At 5 a.m., we reached Wapping.

  The high street was silent, still to wake from its slumber. Most of the old warehouses were flats now, rather than businesses, and that meant the approach to the museum was lightless, windows black, curtains pulled. That was good and bad: most people would still be asleep, but not all. Some residents would already be moving around in the shadows of their homes, able to see us, but not be seen.

  I found a space two hundred feet away from the museum, under trees, and switched off the engine. Turning in my seat, I watched East’s eyes flick to me. A flash of panic now, his body squirming, rolling into the seat, pressing against it.

  ‘Calm down,’ I said.

  He looked from me to the back of Healy’s head.

  I removed a bunch of keys from my coat and held them up to him. Along with five hundred pounds in cash for the non-existent chair Healy was willing to sell him, and his mobile phone, they had been the only things East had on him. We’d been through the phone’s address book and Recent Calls list with East back at Healy’s hideout, asking him to show us Korman and Grankin’s numbers. They were listed under aliases: Grankin was Vic Smith; Korman was Paul Gray. But Korman never called him directly – ever – and Grankin always called from the landline at his house, up in Whitehall Woods. They’d also instructed East to wipe his phone clean after every use – calls, email, Internet.

  Yet taking possession of the phone would, at least, give us a clearer idea of when East’s absence might be noted by Grankin and Korman – and how closely he was being watched. Would they call East when he didn’t turn up for work this morning? Or would they fail to notice until later on? Or tomorrow? Or two days’ time? I didn’t think too hard about the other possibility: that, somehow, they knew already.

  I held up the key ring. ‘Which of these is for the pier?’

  There were ten keys in total. I started to go through them, one by one. At the eighth, East gave a nod of the head. It was a copper-coloured Yale. With the tenth, he nodded again. One for the gates, one for the pavilion.

  Removing them from the key ring, I pocketed the others as well as East’s phone, then got out of the car and spent a couple of minutes checking the area immediately around us, and on the approach to the museum. Much further down, I could see a lorry bumped up on to a pavement, hazard lights going. Otherwise, there was no sign of life. Again I felt a shiver of alarm: What if they already know? I pushed the question away, checking again for a tail, for any sign we were being watched.

  Returning to the car, I slipped in at the wheel, reached back to East and tore the duct tape away from his mouth. He winced in pain, his eyes watering.

  ‘When do you think Grankin will call you next?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said feebly.

  ‘How often do you speak to him?’

  He shrugged, as best he could. ‘It depends.’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘On when he needs my help. I hadn’t seen him for a while until last night – he came to my house and got a penny arcade machine from me.’

  He was talking about the two he’d had in his garage, one of which Grankin had taken away. I realized a couple of things now that hadn’t seemed important at the time: the one Grankin left behind had been metal, the one he’d taken was wood; and the one he’d taken was a bagatelle.

  ‘The machine he came and got last night,’ I said. ‘Was it one of the machines you noticed had been swapped around, back in 2002?’

  East nodded. It was just like he’d said: for twelve years, Grankin had been taking the same five machines, varnishing and revarnishing them, over and over again. Healy glanced at me, clearly as perturbed as I was by the strangeness of such an act.

  I looked across at the museum, thoughts continuing to turn over. Right at the edge of the old paper mill, I could make out what looked like the periphery of the pier. Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was just a trick of the dark; something to tempt me, to draw me closer.

  I turned back to East. ‘When did you last go inside the pavilion?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘You don’t remember?’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Take a guess.’

  He spent a couple of seconds trying to think. ‘Maybe eighteen months back. Mr Cabot had concerns about the pavilion roof four years ago, so he went up with a couple of people from the council. But it looked like it was about to collapse a year and a half ago, so he got in a building inspector to take a look, and some repairs were made to it. I asked him if I could tag along that second time, just so I could have a look around the place. We spent most of the time outside, though. It’s not very safe in there now – and it’s too expensive to fix.’

  ‘Nothing set off any alarm bells?’

  ‘Inside the pavilion? No.’

  ‘No sign of
anything suspicious?’

  ‘No,’ he said again.

  So what had Grankin been doing in there?

  Carla Stourcroft’s witness, Winston Cowdrey, had seen Grankin out on the pier in September 2007 – that was over seven years ago. I thought of Cowdrey, looking out from one of the flats dotted around us, and hoped he’d managed to remain off Korman and Grankin’s radar; then returned my thoughts to what East had just said: There was no sign of anything suspicious inside the pavilion.

  Maybe whatever Korman and Grankin were using the pavilion for had long since finished. If there had been anything inside – anything bad – Cabot would have noticed. East would have too. I looked at him again, watching for any lingering sense he’d lied to me – but we were past that now.

  He was done lying.

  I returned the tape to his mouth. He didn’t resist, just meekly accepted it. Getting out, I opened the boot of the car, grabbed a torch and wedged it into my belt, and then – with one last look around me – started pulling East out of the car. I checked again that there were no eyes on us, and then half walked him, half carried him to the boot, bending him into the space as gently as I could, on to a tatty blanket.

  I heard Healy get out.

  ‘We’ll be back,’ I said to East.

  He looked up at me, anxious, scared.

  ‘And when we get back?’

  Healy. They were the first words he’d spoken since we’d left Camberwell. He was standing next to me – raincoat zipped up, hood covering his baldness – looking down at East with disgust in his face. The truth was, I hadn’t yet decided what I was going to do with East – but now wasn’t the time to argue over it.