What Remains (16 page)

‘All of it?’

‘Everything. And then he vanished into the ether for six clear months. In the middle of August, he returns, picks up the divorce papers and tells the people at the shelter to dump the rest – even the pictures he had of his kids.’

I watched the wood burner begin to fade outside on the decking, its fire reduced to dying embers, its colours washing in across the living-room carpet.

‘You don’t have
anything
?’ she said.

‘Just some place he told the people at the shelter he was headed. It’s not another hostel. Knowing Healy, he was probably just palming them off.’

‘What was the place?’

‘He called it The Meadows.’

She didn’t reply.

‘Craw?’

‘The Meadows?’ she said.

‘Yeah. Have you heard of it?’

A pause. ‘Yeah. Yeah, I know where that is.’

Voices

8 days, 9 hours, 58 minutes
before

As he was heading out with his friends at the weekend for two days of drinking, he promised the girls he’d take them to school on the Tube that morning, instead of walking. It was only two stops, but they were excited about the change of routine and ready in plenty of time. At the station, he led them through the gateline and down the steps to the platform, and then they all sat on a metal bench playing ‘I Spy’. April always cheated, defaulting to the ‘I Spy with My X-Ray Eyes’ version of the game, but never telling her sister until Abigail had repeatedly failed to guess correctly. Eventually the girls started bickering, so he suggested they stop the game and talk about what they were going to do at the weekend instead.

They emerged from the Tube station ten minutes later and he walked them along the street to school. Kissing them both at the gate, he watched them amble side by side up the driveway, dressed identically, with the same satchels and the same hair, plaited in the same way. Their classroom was at the front of the building – an old, red-brick Victorian structure – and Gail told him that she always liked to wait at the gate until they appeared in the window of the building to show her they were inside. He did the same. After a minute, first April, then Abigail, came to the glass and waved at him. He blew them both kisses and pretended to catch theirs in return, then – once they’d retreated from view – he made his way back to the Tube.

Just as he was about to head down into the belly of the station, his phone started buzzing. He stopped, returned to street level and looked at the display.

An unknown number.

‘Hello?’

Static, like a bad reception.

‘Hello?’ he said again.

More static but then, briefly, another sound. Was it a voice? It played out, over and over in the background, beyond the buzz of the interference, like a recorded message on repeat. He cupped a free hand to his other ear.

‘Hello?’

‘ … them.’

‘What? Who is this?’ He heard a high-pitched squeal, like the whine of a fax. ‘I can’t understand what you’re saying!’ he shouted.

‘ … a chance to save them.’

The line cleared instantly.

‘Hello?’

‘Don’t let him take them from you.’

He felt his heart shift. ‘What?’

‘Look at what he’s carrying.’

‘What?’

‘Look at what he’s carrying in his hands.’

‘Who is this, please?’

Another high-pitched squeal.

‘He’ll have it when he comes for them.’

Mal lurched awake, body swaying to the beat of the Tube train. For a moment, he was disorientated, still cast adrift by the echoes of the dream; then he looked up at the route, fixed to the carriage above him, and realized he was seven stations past his stop and one station from the end of the line. Sitting forward, he pulled his phone out of his pocket and looked at his Recent Calls list: the last one made to his phone had been from Gail, the day before. He remembered it: she’d asked him to stop and get some milk on the way home, and he’d forgotten.

He ran a hand down his face.

He’d been having trouble sleeping for a few weeks now, and it was starting to get to him. Dropping off on the Tube was just his latest concern. He’d been forgetting stuff, been so tired some days he was even starting to hear things – voices calling his name, conversations between people who weren’t there. And then there were the dreams when he finally did get off to sleep: so vivid that at points he struggled to remember what was real and what was imagined. In fact, in his quietest moments, he’d started to worry that he might eventually get to the stage where he wouldn’t even be able to tell the difference.

As the train squealed to a stop, he got off, exited the platform and made his way over to the southbound track. There was a series of empty benches.

He collapsed on to one.

Maybe you really are losing it, he thought, and his mind returned to a night about a week before: as he lay awake in bed, he swore he could hear whispers coming from inside the flat. He’d got up to investigate and found Gail and the girls fast asleep, the
TV off, and silence from the adjacent apartments.

After a while, the voices had stopped.

In the days after, he’d started smoking again, even though Gail had told him she didn’t like it. He’d got into a routine of sitting at the window in the kitchen – 2 a.m., 3 a.m., 4 a.m. – looking out across the grass at the front of the tower block. Sometimes all he’d see were trees swaying in the night breeze, or rain hitting the uneven, pockmarked concrete in the Searle House car park. But sometimes he’d see other things: movement in the branches; shadows among the tree trunks; figures at the very corners of his field of vision, running between pools of light and then disappearing again. And then there was someone who never attempted to hide.

The man in the dark blue raincoat.

He felt a chill pass through him, a ghost of a memory, as he recalled the man: how he always kept to the same path – emerging from beyond the treeline, passing rhythmically under street lights all the way down, moving to the front of the block of flats, then disappearing into the darkness at its side – and how the man was always dressed the same way. That same raincoat. That same dark baseball cap. Jeans. Black boots. The man never looked up, just kept one hand in his pocket, the other at his side, holding something, head lowered, eyes on the floor. Mal had no idea why the man had got to him; why – when he saw the man out on the path – all that filled his chest was dread, an instinctive need to protect Gail and the girls. The man had even infected his dreams, returning again and again, a figure crawling out of the shadows inside his head.

Except somewhere, buried deep down, he could hear a voice that he couldn’t switch off; a whisper, on repeat, massaged by all the doubt, the exhaustion, the insomnia. A voice that kept saying to him, Are you actually dreaming when you see that man – or are you awake? What happens if that man is real – or not real?

What if you’re slowly losing your mind?

What if the greatest danger to Gail and the girls is you?

21

Early the next morning, with the sun yet to rise, I sat in the darkness of the BMW and waited for Craw. The car park was small and surrounded by high banks of fir on three sides, as perfectly smooth as plasterboard. An arched doorway had been carved into one section of it, a black iron gate inside that, but the other side was still murky and indistinct, The Meadows disguised by the smoggy grey of dawn.

She arrived a couple of minutes later, steering her Mini into a parking bay two spaces down from me, even though there wasn’t anyone else around at this time. I got out and closed the BMW, then watched as she emerged from the darkness of her own car, the subdued morning light painting her skin a pallid grey, her black trouser-suit merging with the shadows as she came towards me.

Out through the entrance to the car park behind her, I saw traffic passing on Dog Kennel Hill, a road that curved south-east through Southwark, towards Peckham Rye Common. But the high walls did a good job of suppressing any sound, the thick firs reducing engine noise and car horns to a hum and replacing them with the trickle of water from a stone plinth on the other side of the gate.

‘Morning,’ Craw said, as she got to me.

‘Morning.’

‘You all right?’

I nodded. ‘This is a remembrance garden.’

She looked past me. ‘Yeah.’

‘For who?’

‘Come and have a look.’

She moved past me and lifted the lock on the gate. It squeaked on its hinge and then fanned out into the half-light of the garden. Over her shoulder, I now had a much clearer view of the sandstone plinth, carved into the shape of a crucifix and sitting on an island in a square of shallow water. It was possible to gauge the size of the garden for the first time: maybe only ten feet across, but about twice that in length, hemmed in by high hedges, except for a slab of marble that was embedded in the fir behind the plinth. As I followed Craw inside, I saw that the marble was engraved, the top half with a line from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’:
I shall but love thee better after death
. Beneath was a series of dates that felt familiar to me – 4 January, 12 January, 17 January, 25 January, 31 January, all five suffixed with the same year, 1988 – and, under that, six equally familiar names.

Four men. Two women.

‘You ever heard of Ian Arnold?’ Craw said.

At the mention of his name, I knew straight away why I recognized the dates. In January 1988, I was just seventeen years of age, still living in Devon, months short of moving to London, but I’d watched the news reports about him at the time, seen his face in the papers, and had continually heard him referenced by journalists I’d worked with in the years after. Some of them had covered the events of the time. Some were still affected by it. I didn’t know there had been a garden of remembrance built, didn’t know they’d named it The Meadows – but I knew what had happened on those days, because everyone remembered Ian Arnold.

‘I never realized they’d built this,’ I said to her.

Her gaze was on the marble wall. ‘Arnold’s case was way before my time, but Dad was drafted in on it towards the end. Just another warm body, I guess.’

She paused at the mention of her father, a man who’d spent thirty-five years at the Met. Since I’d worked his case, since she’d laid his memory to rest, she never talked about him; only ever in passing.

‘I’ve spent twenty years on the force, and every day I hope I don’t land a case like this one,’ she went on, and then stopped a second time, as if gathering her composure. ‘I remember Dad saying the guy never even broke a sweat. He said Arnold was interviewed for two solid days and he barely batted an eyelid.’

My attention returned to the six names on the wall, to the four men and two women. Except I knew now that they’d never been men and women at all.

They’d been children.

The Highdale housing estate, a sprawling maze of five-storey flats only two minutes’ walk from The Meadows, was Arnold’s stalking ground. It was half demolished now, in the process of being rebuilt as something more modern and efficient, following infamous estates like Heygate and Havelock into oblivion. But when Arnold had lived there, it had been different, a labyrinth of doorways and walkways, ugly and broken, zigzagging across the spaces between Dog Kennel Hill and Grove Park. Ultimately, its anonymity had been exactly what Arnold had needed: he’d kidnapped and murdered six children – all aged between eight and twelve – in a short but devastating twenty-seven-day spell. He’d snatched two of them on the same night, 31 January 1988, and was only caught a week
and a half later – on 9 February – because his seventh victim managed to escape his grasp and run screaming along a fifth-floor corridor he and his mother had lived on.

With the promise of newer, better housing to come, many argued that Highdale’s worst days were behind it – yet the truth was they were never going to be far enough away to repair its reputation entirely. I’d been down here many times as a journalist, as politician after politician cynically used it as a backdrop to try to launch campaigns about social inequality, about child poverty, about drugs and gangs and knife crime. But the reality was, shadows as long as Highdale’s would always weigh heavy, even if its façade was a little newer, its doorways a little less dark.

And there was no shadow longer than Ian Arnold’s.

I kept my eyes on the wall, on the names of the children whose lives had been taken so cruelly from them; then to the plinth, water gently cascading from the top of the crucifix and tumbling past its right angles to the pool below.

As I tried to imagine why Healy would tell the people at the shelter he was coming here, why he might choose this place as the termination of his journey, I kept coming back to the same idea:
It’s to do with the fact that they were children
. The kids at Highdale had suffered the same loss of innocence as the twins. They’d left this life at the hands of someone equally callous, someone equally abhorrent.

I saw that.

I understood his reasons.

But where did he go from here?

As the sky brightened further, the first hint of crimson staining the wide-open spaces above our heads, the crest of what was left of the old Highdale – its trademark turrets, like the last bastion of a crumbling castle – emerged
from the gloom. I couldn’t see anything else, not above the thickness of the high firs, but it was enough for an idea to form: the estate was divided into two, one half being rebuilt before the second half was demolished. People remained in the older half, yet to be rehoused – but a lot had been moved out to temporary accommodation.