by Tim Weaver
‘But where did you get the suit from?’
‘I swiped it from the back of a forensics van.’
‘Just like that.’
He was still. ‘I’ve become good at blending in.’
He seemed entirely unconcerned by what forensics might find. So why had Korman risked everything to return to the children’s home? If he didn’t care about the evidence he and Grankin may have left there, why bother taking the risk to go back and burn it down?
It wouldn’t be long before the Met started to realize he and Grankin were working together, that Calvin East had been involved too – three histories entwined from the early days at St David’s, all the way through to their alibis the night the Clark family were killed. But, without returning to St David’s, he’d have had a head start on the police. He could have made a break for it, left the country, found somewhere to dig in and lie low.
Instead, he’d compromised himself – for what?
Korman moved slightly, staring at me, dragging me out of my thoughts. He was aware that I was trying to piece it all together. He wasn’t going to share his reasons, and he wouldn’t be tricked into a confession, but then something else caught my attention, something I might be able to use: very quickly, he glanced at Healy, still out cold. It was as if he was checking up on him.
Because he is.
He was waiting for Healy to wake up.
Whatever his reasons for asking me here, whatever it was that he wanted to show me, he wanted to show us both: he wanted Healy awake, fully cognizant.
‘Aren’t you worried about what the police might find?’ I said.
His eyes narrowed, as if he sensed that I was getting close to an answer, an animal aware that his surroundings had changed. I was reminded of Healy’s description of him in the moments before the heart attack; how Korman had zeroed in on his weakness, sniffing out its scent: He punched me square in the chest, right on my heart, over and over. It was like a jackhammer.
‘There’ll be evidence Grankin didn’t wash away,’ I said again, but he didn’t respond. ‘The fire won’t have destroyed everything.’
This time he considered it. ‘It’ll have destroyed enough.’
‘Why did you go back in?’
Again, no response.
‘Why did you go back in?’ I repeated – and then a thought struck me hard. The night he and Grankin were caught on film at Searle House. It had looked like Korman had changed his appearance – and Grankin had no face at all.
The mask.
‘You went back in for Grankin’s mask.’
There was nothing in his face now, no expression, no movement at all, as if he’d deliberately closed himself down, a sudden blankness that was quite eerie. I didn’t know if he was calm or enraged. And yet the more I thought about it, the more it made sense.
‘The fire was just a distraction,’ I said, attempting to put myself there, to imagine it. ‘You went in, disguised as a forensic tech, and grabbed the mask. But people started to realize they didn’t know you, or recognize you. They realized there was an extra body in the forensic team. So you set the place alight to try and give yourself some time. But it was too late by then.’ I paused, recalling Bishara as he’d left the burning building, gesturing towards Korman: That’s him! ‘They realized that you started the fire.’
Nothing. No reaction at all.
‘Why did you have to go back for the mask?’ I asked.
He looked down at Healy, his fingers still pressed to the centre of Healy’s chest, where they’d been the whole time. ‘The heart is such a wonderful piece of engineering. Chambers, arteries, valves. I know the heart hasn’t got anything to do with emotion, with feeling. We don’t feel sad because our heart is sad: it’s just the brain telling us, it’s chemicals, it’s a cold, biomechanical process. But, sometimes, it’s easy to forget that. When I walked into St David’s today, with my evidence bags, my bottles of petrol, I felt something here.’ He pushed his fingers hard into Healy’s chest, forcing him sideways; he was still unconscious, his body straining against the duct tape, so he wouldn’t feel anything. But this wasn’t about punishing Healy, it was about using Healy to get at me. ‘I knew, unless everything went perfectly, that I would have to use the petrol. So I suppose, when I did, what I felt was a kind of sadness that this was all about to end.’
I glanced at Healy, at his chest. Be careful. ‘But what you were doing was killing people,’ I said evenly, calmly, trying not to aggravate him.
He remained stiff, apathetic.
‘You killed two eight-year-old girls.’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘That’s it? “Yes”?’
He sniffed.
‘Why did you kill them?’
‘It’s okay to kill their mother, but not them?’
I felt a twist of anger.
‘That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it? That you’re willing to overlook the fact that their mother was stabbed nine times, if I just give you the reasons why those two girls had to die as well.’ He looked at me. ‘Are their lives more important?’
‘They were kids.’
‘Kids can be duplicitous too.’
That stopped me. ‘What are you talking about?’
He didn’t reply immediately, glancing down at Healy, at his hand, and then he said, ‘If you’re looking for someone to blame, you should blame Stourcroft. If she hadn’t written her book, none of this would have happened. That family, those girls, would still be alive. Your friend here might still be fat and angry, and chasing his tail on the one that got away.’ His eyes widened at that last part, the words carrying the edges of the ruthlessness that really drove him. ‘All of this,’ he went on, voice steadying, slowing up, ‘it’s not down to us. It’s down to that woman’s book.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s got nothing to do with that.’
‘Really? But you’ve read the book?’
‘None of this is down to a book about a pier.’
Instantly, something changed, his hand finally moving away from Healy, his mouth forming an oh. A smile broke at the corners of his mouth, sly, crooked. ‘I think you need a change of perspective,’ he said.
‘Meaning what?’
He didn’t reply.
I was confused, thrown.
He slid in front of Healy, his smile gone, and reached around to the back of his belt. Suddenly, he had a knife in his hand. It was almost exactly the same as Grankin’s: a darker grip, more teeth on the blade, but the same length and size. Now I knew why he wasn’t interested in the gun to his left; why he hadn’t even looked at it. He preferred knives. It was how he’d accounted for Stourcroft, for Gail, the girls.
I moved towards him.
We were fifteen feet apart, surrounded by rows of dormant penny arcade machines. ‘Don’t come any closer,’ he said, quiet, still. ‘You come any closer and I will kill your friend, and then I will kill you. Is that clear?’
Something’s changed.
He was almost distracted now, eyes moving across the room, inching from one machine to the next. I could see a hint of grey in his irises, the light either side of him settling around the top of his cheeks. There was none of the menace in him I’d seen so clearly and briefly a second ago. When his gaze returned to me, his nose wrinkled – as if disgusted – and I recalled the very first thing he’d said.
Why did you have to ruin everything?
‘What’s going on, Korman?’
Behind him, Healy twitched.
Korman picked up on it, Healy’s bones popping and creaking as he shifted gently on the chair. Re-establishing his grip on the knife, Korman began to retreat. I followed him, trying to lessen the gap between us, in case he went on the attack. Healy was barely conscious, vulnerable, and I needed enough time to get to him. But Korman didn’t use the knife on Healy. He just stopped moving and said, ‘I’m glad you’ve woken up.’
Healy opened his eyes, groggy, looking straight ahead at me, and then to his side, where Korman wa
s still watching. ‘You …’ he said, voice full of fluid, and started coughing, hacking up lungfuls of air, saliva spilling from his lips. When he was finished, he glanced at Korman again. ‘I’m going to fucking kill you,’ he muttered.
Korman didn’t say anything.
Healy shivered, arms trapped behind him, trying to shake himself out of the haze. ‘I’m going to kill you,’ he spat again, stretching the binds. Muscle and veins showed through as he tried to lean towards Korman, tried to get to him, a dog straining on a leash. ‘You’re gonna pay for what you did!’ he screamed, but the effort was too much for him and he descended into another coughing fit.
Korman watched him, half turned towards me so he could keep me in his sights, then turned completely in my direction, looking down at the slats between us, the wood worn by years, by thousands of passing tourists. As Healy calmed down, Korman’s attention shifted to the machines again, looking at them the same as before, his eyes lingering on them, almost doting on them; how a parent might look at their child.
‘This is what I wanted you both to see,’ he said.
I studied him, his face, the knife in his hand, trying to figure out where this was going – but then, before I’d barely even processed it, he’d turned the knife around, the blade facing along the inside of his arm.
I leaped forward, arms out, trying to stop him.
But he wasn’t going for Healy.
He drove the blade into himself, the knife entering his stomach, just below the ribs. The impact sent him stumbling, one step, a second, and then he regained enough self-control to grip the handle and give the weapon a violent twist. There was a terrible sound of flesh tearing, a hiss of pain, and then he dropped to his knees, the impact sending a tremble through the slats, the room seeming to list. He looked up at me, knife embedded in his body, blood running out of him like a tap, and finally it came: the smile Healy had described seeing after Korman left him dying on the floor in Stables Market; the person Calvin East had been so scared off, silent and frightening, haunting him through the corridors of St David’s. Here was the man who had taken the lives of two eight-year-olds.
This was what he wanted us both to see.
Quickly, I closed the gap between us, but then I stood there, looking down at him, unsure what to even do. I had so many questions for him, and there was no time left to ask them. The smile faded from his face, his expression drooping, but his eyes remained alive for a moment more, confirming what this was.
One final act of cruelty.
There would be no answers to my questions, no closure for the families his actions had torn apart, nothing for Healy even after everything he’d sacrificed to get here. There would be no journey to the centre of whatever it was he and Grankin had done, no clues about how long it had been going on or how many had suffered; only the burnt, twisted traces of whatever hadn’t gone up in flames, and the worthless scraps I could pick out from the memory of this last conversation.
I grabbed him by the collar, pulling him towards me, his body jerking as he tried to hold himself back.
‘No,’ I said. ‘You’re going to tell me what you know.’
But it was over.
Whatever tiny flicker of light had ever existed in him fizzled out, and his eyes started a slow retreat into the void. The corners of his mouth, still turned up in the echoes of that last smile, began to drop – and then there was nothing.
I let him fall to the floor.
‘No,’ I heard Healy say. ‘No, no, no.’
He was sitting awkwardly, head looking one way, at Korman, body facing the other, trapped by its binds. One of his eyes teared up, the tear breaking free as he glanced at me, at Korman, just repeating the same thing over.
‘No. Not like this. No!’
I didn’t know what to say to him, because this was worse than anything I could have imagined for Healy. This was an ending filled with the tragedy and emptiness of revenge – except the vengeance wasn’t Healy’s, and it never would be. The real vengeance belonged to Korman. He’d denied Healy his retribution, denied any of us the answers we’d so desperately sought, and now all that was left was a promise: the one Healy had made to the girls, as he’d knelt there between their beds, the day he’d entered their bedroom.
And the certainty, now, that he could never honour it.
73
After a while, I picked up Korman’s knife and cut away Healy’s binds, dropping the knife to the ground again. Blood settled around it, around Korman, gathering like a cloak. But Healy didn’t move to him, or get out of the seat. He just sat there, muttering the same thing, tears marking his cheeks, skin bleached white beneath the floor lamp, narrow bands of fat gathered at his belly as he leaned to one side.
I thought about trying to comfort him, about trying to find the words to tell him we’d fix this, but I wasn’t sure what those words were, or whether there was anything left to fix. The answers were lying in a pool of blood on the floor.
Instead, I left him to gather himself, and scanned the arcade, across the tops of the machines, out to where the glow from the floor lamp made little impact. As I did, I recalled the look on Korman’s face as he’d done the same thing. In the seconds before he’d killed himself, what had been that expression on his face when he’d looked out at the arcade? Sorrow? Affection? I rewound further, to everything Calvin East had told us about the weird things that would happen here: cabinets changing position, cracks appearing in glass, cases being revarnished.
And always the same five machines.
I started moving slowly along the middle, in the direction of the mirror maze. There were a hundred machines here, maybe more than that, beginning in straight lines, then becoming messier and less ordered the further I went. The centre row maintained its linearity, all the way down to the maze, which was why I hadn’t been so aware of the layout the first time I’d been in. But I could see it clearly now as rows intersected, lines of travel merged, the room becoming a tangle of walkways, nooks and alcoves on either side of me as the space accommodated bigger machines with different dimensions – the height of the fortune tellers and laughing sailors; the width of pushers and puppet shows.
I stopped. What the hell am I doing?
What I should have been thinking about was getting out of here. Korman was dead, and now we had to clear up whatever part we’d played in this. That meant getting rid of Healy’s blood, wiping down surfaces, the chair he’d been tied to. If the police returned here in the morning, we needed them to find Korman, for the forensic team to determine it a suicide, and for no trace of us to be left here. After that, I’d have to figure out the rest.
Should I hand myself in?
Or should I wait for them to come to me?
I started making my way back to Healy, who was hunched and shrugging on his clothes, when something caught my eye, off to the right.
Making a detour, I passed from the middle row into a tangle of different machine types, all set in a rough circle. Among three matching kinetoscopes – Victorian motion-picture viewers – ornate and beautiful, with polished brass peepholes, was a strength tester, set inside a wooden cabinet. On the glass at the front, there was a crack, right in the corner.
This is one of the machines that East described.
I checked it over, running my fingers across the varnish. I wasn’t sure how the finish was supposed to feel, or what difference a tin of Hoberman’s might make, but nothing felt strange about it. It was smooth to the touch, and professionally applied. When I went around to the back of the cabinet, I found a rear door, about two and a half feet high, with a handle attached.
I pulled at it and it popped open.
Inside it was empty. I bent down, getting on to my hands and knees, and leaned closer, moving my hand around the interior, checking surfaces for anything that didn’t feel right. There was nothing. My fingers glanced off pulleys and cogs, the workings of the machine, but mostly the strength tester was just a tall, empty box, like a coffin.
&nbs
p; ‘Healy,’ I said.
He looked up, eyes shifting slowly.
As I waited for him, I continued moving through the arcade, circling the machines, weaving in and out of the chaotic aisles, keeping my eyes on the cases. Once he’d arrived, I returned to the strength tester. ‘You remember how East talked about the same five machines being varnished over and over again?’
He looked dazed, eyes moving sluggishly around the room. He glanced at Korman. ‘We should leave.’
‘We will,’ I said, trying to keep my voice measured. He wiped his eyes with his sleeve and then stood there, as if he hadn’t heard anything I’d just said. I tried again: ‘Once the police turn up tomorrow and find him, we’re not going to have another chance to look around this place.’
He glanced at the strength tester a second time.
‘Healy?’
He nodded.
‘You listening to me?’
He nodded again.
‘There are five machines they care about, one of which is this strength tester. We’re also looking for two bagatelles that are almost exactly the same design as one another, but there’ll only be one here tonight, because the other one is back at Grankin’s place.’ I paused, remembering how it had been hidden inside the false wall. ‘The other two machines are a fortune teller with a scratch down the side, and a phonograph. You getting this?’
‘Yeah,’ he said.
‘I’m not sure how we identify the phonograph, because I’ve seen about three of them already tonight – but let’s try, okay?’
Without saying anything else, he turned and headed across to the other side of the arcade, moving through the sea of cabinets, expressionless, remote. I wasn’t sure how much he was taking in, but he seemed to belong in this moment somehow: a ghost of a man wandering through a forest of archaic machines, surrounded by the façade of a long-forgotten pier. All of it, Healy included, was just a vague hint of something that had once been better.
I carried on moving through the rows, before eventually double-backing on myself and returning to the strength tester. There were countless bagatelles, countless phonographs too, but it wasn’t until I crossed the middle row, to Healy’s side of the room, that I finally found something.
