What Remains (19 page)

Another long silence.

‘Craw?’

‘Look, Raker, I like you. I think you’re a good man.’

‘But?’

‘It’s complicated. My situation is complicated.’

Something collapsed in me, not anger now, something deeper and more painful. And then reality hit home: I was saying goodbye to two people today.

‘So this is what we are?’ I said to her, calmly, quietly.

‘Raker, you need to understand –’

‘I don’t think I need to understand anything.’

And when no further reply came, when there was no attempt from Craw to salvage the wreckage of our conversation, I hung up.

25

The day I found Healy’s body, I left the scene immediately. I didn’t go through his backpack, his clothes, I didn’t check the shadows for something that might help progress my search, I just climbed back out and dialled 999. The search was over. Healy was the full stop. I couldn’t bear to spend one more second alone in that room with his body, with the memory of who he’d become, with the insects feeding on him and the reality of his final moments.

I knew at the time that everything in that room would be processed and released, and I’d get my turn with his possessions. Ten days later that was exactly what happened: after DNA tests confirmed it was him, and his body was released, Gemma called and said the police had asked her to collect Healy’s things – his backpack, clothes, cup, the book he’d had on him, his mobile phone.

The only thing they didn’t release back to Gemma was the Clark family murder file. I called Ewan Tasker to let him know that someone at the Met might try to find out how the file had ended up in Healy’s possession, but he didn’t seem perturbed, and in the days after, something else began gnawing at me instead: what if I’d never left the file at reception for Healy? Would things still have ended up the same way? Or were my actions what had reduced him to this?

I went with Gemma to collect his effects, waiting outside the police station in Peckham, and when she came
out, she was holding a transparent plastic bag in one hand – the empty backpack inside – and another pressed between her arm and ribcage, with all his other belongings in it, as well as three photographs.

Gail, April and Abigail Clark.

As I drove her back home to Barnet, north through the city’s clogged arteries, she turned to me, bone white, no tears in her eyes, and said, ‘Why didn’t he have any photographs of Ciaran, Liam and Leanne?
They
were his kids. He should have had pictures of
them
at the end.’ She looked down at the three photographs in the bag. ‘Why only these?’

I tried to think of an answer that would help her.

Eventually, I realized I had nothing.

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

Yet I knew what the answer was the moment she asked. They were the three photos in the murder file, the same three printouts he’d laid out on the table of the motel bar nine months ago. He’d been attached to the shots back then, his fingers straying towards them without even realizing he was doing it, and he’d remained attached to them right up until the end. Because in a way, however difficult it was to grasp – even for me, who knew him so well – in his final days those pictures were his entire world. Gail, April and Abigail were the only family he had left.

When I got home from the funeral, I showered and changed, grabbed a beer from the fridge and sat at the half-light of the living-room windows. I hadn’t slept well for a month, not since I began the search for Healy, and as I listened to the rain peppering the glass, I knew immediately that tonight would be the same again.

On the living-room table was the plastic bag Gemma had taken possession of, Healy’s belongings still inside. She’d told me to keep it, that it would be of more use to me, but that wasn’t entirely the truth. I think mostly she was unsure of what to do with his things, with his tatty clothes, marked with the grime of the homeless, including the red T-shirt he’d been wearing the day before our argument; with a tin cup that reeked of alcohol, of the whisky he’d used to wash down ten Zoplicone; and with a phone he’d barely used since I’d first given it to him back in January, its battery long dead, its Call List empty.

I didn’t blame her for not taking ownership of the book he’d had on him either, but of all the things he’d left behind, that was the item I found hardest to square off. Entitled
A Seaside in the City: The History of Wapping Grand Pier
, its presence in the space beneath Highdale bugged me. It was a crumb left on the table; a lone, dangling thread. Old, faded and coffee-stained, it seemed bereft of relevance, of a reason for being there – and that was why I couldn’t let it go. I’d skim-read the book three or four times in the last two weeks, trying to understand why he might have kept a copy of it. He’d never expressed any interest in the narrative of the city; in fact, I’d never once seen him read a book in the entire time we’d known each other. Yet I had to accept that in his last days and weeks, in the grave he’d made for himself at the end, he’d chosen
this
book as a keepsake. The question was why.

I finished my beer, headed to the kitchen and grabbed another, then removed the book from its bag on the way back. At one time it must have belonged to a library: it had a stamp on the inside front cover, faded and difficult to read.

The front cover was a black-and-white photograph of a pleasure pier, a Ferris wheel at the end of a slatted wooden
promenade. The shot looked like it had been taken at the southern edges of Wapping. In the background was a London skyline that no longer existed: warehouses and wharfs lined the Thames all the way to Tower Bridge. There was no Shard, no Fenchurch Street ‘Walkie-Talkie’, no ‘Cheesegrater’. This was the city before skyscrapers, before glass and steel.

The front-cover image was bleached, discoloured by age, but I could still make out the top half clearly –
A Seaside in the City
– and the rest of it,
The History of Wapping Grand Pier
, well enough. The author was a woman called Carla Stourcroft, and when I’d googled her name in the days after receiving Healy’s things from Gemma, I found out that she was a journalist and lecturer who had written a series of books, all centred on London. Her most well known was an acclaimed biography of Eldon Simmons, the notorious ‘Invisible Ripper’ who raped and murdered five men in run-down west London hotels in the early 1950s, but the rest of her output was much drier and had virtually no commercial impact at all.

She was hard to find on the web because of that: a few interviews off the back of
Invisible Ripper
, which was how I discovered she’d been a lecturer, but not much else. Her previous books were all released through small presses, or – in a couple of cases – self-financed and self-published, and without a website of her own and no social media presence, her footprint was absolutely tiny. Buried on the second page of my Google search, though, I did find one thing: a very short obituary that had run in a local newspaper. Stourcroft had died aged forty-six. It didn’t specify what her illness had been, but it said she’d passed away with her family around her.

I knew little of Wapping Grand Pier myself, other than that it had been a brave Victorian experiment to transplant the experience of a seaside pier to the capital. But over the course of the past few weeks the book had helped fill in some gaps in my knowledge. As I opened it up again, it fell open naturally to an eight-page section in the middle, stitched in on glossier paper, featuring a series of photos. It was a chronology of the pier, from the time the first support struts were driven into the bed of the Thames in 1888, to its total destruction during the German bombing of Wapping in the Second World War, and on to its gradual reconstruction in 1948. In 1967 the site was bought by an American businessman called Arnold Goldman, who modelled it on the pier at Weston-super-Mare, where his English wife was from, and – according to Stourcroft – the 1970s were the pier’s most successful period, making Goldman as much as eight million pounds.

The key to Goldman’s success, it seemed, was to give Londoners a taste of Victoriana. Shops selling ice creams, candyfloss and popcorn were made out of mahogany and cast iron, and finished off with period typography, mirroring the places that had lined the pier when it had first opened in 1889. In fact, Goldman gave it a theme-park feel all over: everyone who worked there had to dress in costume, while a brass band was employed full-time to occupy the bandstand he’d built beyond the pavilion. He also opened a hall of mirrors, and a penny arcade inside the pavilion itself, where visitors traded in the currency of the time for copies of Victorian coins, to spend on period arcade machines: bagatelles, an early arcade equivalent of pinball; steerable ball games; laughing sailors; coin-operated fortune tellers; strength and true-love tests.
Goldman kept it running at a profit all the way through the 1980s, but the fallout from the recession of 1990 was hard and fast, and Wapping Grand Pier never really recovered. In 1993, one hundred and four years after it had first opened, Goldman reluctantly closed it down.

The last photograph in the middle section of the book was one of only four in colour, taken in 1996, three years after the pier had shut its doors to the public. It was a shot from Waterside Gardens, looking east along the Thames, the towers of Canary Wharf in the distance. The pale pavilion looked like the carcass of a dying animal, marooned on the boardwalk, the whole pier built on stilts lathered with seaweed. The Ferris wheel had gone by then, dismantled and shipped north to a pier on the east coast, but the skeleton of the bandstand remained.

The book was published in 2002 and, in a caption under that last picture, Stourcroft predicted it would be too expensive to refurbish the pier, suggesting that because of this its future might be bleak. Yet it was still standing twelve years on, a crumbling hulk reaching out into one of the busiest rivers in the world. According to its Wikipedia page, a company called Rook’s Head now owned it.

I closed the book, studying the cover image for what could have been the tenth, the twelfth, the twentieth time.

I’d thought frequently about it, but I still couldn’t imagine what power these pages had held over Healy in his last days. Why this book? Why this subject? I’d searched its pages for handwritten notes, for evidence he’d connected with something in it, a word, a paragraph, but there was no trace of him at all: nothing written on the covers, no scribbles in the margins. I knew he was a man on the precipice at the end, fractured and confused. I knew those things
and yet I couldn’t quell the belief that he’d had the book for a reason.

He’d seen something in it.

And so while I could forget the T-shirt and the tin cup, the mobile phone and the backpack, I couldn’t forget the book. The book kept playing on my mind.

The book was the reason I still couldn’t sleep.

26

At 1 a.m., unable to drop off, I padded through to the living room, picked up the book again, grabbed my notepad and pen, and returned to bed. For the very first time, I began reading the book properly. As rain stopped and started again, as the moon first broke through the clouds and then returned to darkness, I slowly moved through the history of Wapping Grand Pier. By 3 a.m., 101 pages into the 284, I could feel myself losing concentration, tiredness kicking in, so I set it down.

I woke again at six, tired, drained.

Making my way through to the kitchen, I put on some coffee and watched as, next door, Andrew and Nicola left their house, armed with suitcases for a weekend away, and then I headed back into the bedroom.

Picking up where I’d left off the night before, I reread the account of how Arnold Goldman bought Wapping Grand Pier in 1967. Carla Stourcroft’s narrative was ultra-dry, but I tried to keep focused as she talked about the expansion of the Goldman empire – to Las Vegas, Australia’s Gold Coast, even to a casino on Brompton Road in London – and then returned to the subject of the pier. After an hour, I glanced at my notepad, saw it was empty, and moved to the living room – a few brave shafts of sunlight puncturing the glass on the living-room windows – hoping a change of position might give me a fresh perspective. But, as I kept on turning the pages,
getting further and further into the book, I found nothing of use in the long, rambling accounts of the pier’s last years on the river. In the Epilogue, it talked about the sale of the Ferris wheel to a Norfolk pier, and the ‘Spectacular Mirror Maze’ and Victorian penny arcade being sold to Rook’s Head, the same company that had then bought the entire site from Goldman in 2001, eight years after it had closed. Shortly after that, the book ended.

My pad empty, my major questions still hanging, I sat there staring at the cover again and a part of me began to rebel.
The book was irrelevant. It was random. It meant nothing to Healy. It was an artifact from whoever had occupied the space beneath Highdale before him.
Yet, though I could give voice to all those things, though I looked at my pad and worried that I’d found nothing – even on a detailed read-through – I couldn’t let go of the idea that the book represented something more. Its being there, next to the body of a man who rarely read, or showed any interest in history, didn’t sit right with me.

I went and grabbed my laptop.

Feeling like I knew everything there was to know about Arnold Goldman, I instead put in a search for Rook’s Head. A little surprisingly, it didn’t have an official corporate website, but its name brought up several related articles.

One was an interview on the website Business UK with a man called Gary Cabot, who I found out was the founder of Rook’s Head. The other was a link to the site for Wapping Wonderland and Museum, a place I’d never heard of, but which seemed to be a hybrid of amusement arcade and historical repository, built inside an old paper mill that lay on the banks of the Thames, directly behind the Grand Pier itself.

The design of the site was pretty clunky, a little ugly – and when I clicked on a picture gallery, I realized it was fairly reflective of the museum itself.