Read What Remains Online

Authors: Tim Weaver

Tags: #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Mystery, #Thrillers & Suspense, #Crime, #Suspense, #Crime Fiction, #Thrillers

What Remains (35 page)

BOOK: What Remains
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‘She was planning to revise the book.’

‘Right. I didn’t think anything of it. In fact, we were all really happy about it, because it was more publicity for Wonderland. But then she arrived and the interview started, and …’ He paused, his eyes red from tears, a lack of sleep. ‘The interview was different this time. She was much more guarded, aggressive, and she was asking all these left-field questions. She asked me who had access to the pier itself, the promenade, and I thought, “Why would she want to know that?” ’

‘Who
does
have access to it?’

‘These days, only Mr Cabot and me. But back at the start of 2010, when Stourcroft came in, there would have been three of us. Mr Cabot, me – and Vic.’

‘Victor Grankin?’

He nodded. ‘Vic handled security at the museum, until Mr Cabot fired him for stealing a box of wood varnish from the store. That was the night they were all …’ He swallowed. ‘The night the family … the night it all happened.’

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Healy flinch.

‘Say it,’ he called out.

East glanced at him.


Say
it.’

East’s eyes pinged back to me: pleading with me, fearful. I held up a hand to Healy, then leaned in closer to East. ‘Okay, so let me get this straight, Cal–’

‘I want to hear him say it.’

I looked at Healy. ‘This isn’t the time.’

‘He can’t even say the fucking words.’

He came across the room towards East. The gun remained where it was, on top of the satchel on the floor,
but then I realized Healy was holding something else: the serrated bread knife I’d left next door. Before I could stop him, he had a chunk of East’s hair and was yanking his head back, the knife against his throat.

‘Say it.’

East’s eyes were filling with tears.


I wanna hear you say it!

‘The night they died,’ East moaned, saliva on his lips, tear trails carving a path down his cheeks. ‘The night they died, they night they died, the night they –’

‘Healy,’ I said quietly, forcefully. ‘That’s enough.’

It took a couple of seconds for him to snap out of it, hypnotized by East, his voice, the words coming out of his mouth – and then he stood down. He glanced at me, face pale, eyes dark, before returning to the far side of the room. In his wake, East started sobbing.

I gave him a moment, looking across at Healy. He stood there staring back at me, unapologetic, unmoved. I wondered briefly whether he even cared about any of this – about building a clear picture of motivation and reason – or whether none of it mattered to him. Perhaps there was no point to this. Perhaps he was too far gone: invested too heavily in revenge, clinging too faintly to life.

As East began to calm down, I ripped my gaze away from Healy and returned it to the man we were holding captive. He was dressed in the same clothes he’d left home in earlier, just dirtier, shabbier, blood at the collar of his shirt. His glasses – too big for him – had slipped down his nose, fingerprints marking the lenses.

‘So let me get this straight,’ I said to him. ‘Until Cabot sacked him after the summer fair in 2010, Grankin had full access to both the museum
and
the pier?’

‘Yes.’

‘How did he even end up in that job?’

East leaned his face into his shoulder and wiped his nose on his shirt. ‘I was put in a children’s home in Chingford when I was eight. St David’s. My mother died of pneumonia, and I never knew my father. That was where I met them.’

He paused. Earlier on, out in front of the pier as the tourists watched him, he’d spoken with confidence. Now, it was like listening to a child trying to form words he was scared of. There was something else that I’d noticed for the first time too: although he spoke eloquently, it didn’t sound like it came naturally to him, but through practice. The evidence of the boy he’d hidden was still there, a hard east London inflection that he sometimes failed to hold back.

‘You were talking about the children’s home,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘That was where I met them.’

‘You mean Grankin and Korman?’

‘Yes. I met Vic first. He was almost six years older than me, but he seemed immature for his age. Even at thirteen, his English was awful because he’d come over from Estonia and his parents were from Moscow and didn’t speak anything but Russian. Even so, the home had this old, broken table-football game, and because we were the only ones that ever played on it, gradually, I got to know him a bit.’

That tallied with what Task had told me earlier: Grankin’s parents emigrated from Estonia in 1974, died a year later in a car crash, and he’d grown up in care.

‘Korman arrived about eighteen months after,’ East
continued. ‘He was two years younger than Vic, three years older than me, but he was … different. He hardly ever used to talk, except to us. He said his name was Paul, but the people at the home used to call him Ben. Sometimes he’d tell us to call him other names, and he wouldn’t respond to us unless we did. He’d just stare at us. Vic was pretty rough and ready. I mean, he could get violent. But Korman … he was worse. Much worse. He didn’t like being around others. He’d disappear for days, sometimes
weeks
at a time, and then – all of a sudden – he was back, watching you, and you didn’t even realize until he stepped out of the shadows. After a while, one of the other kids at the home started calling him “Dracula”, because he had this weird way about him.’ East stopped, his expression rippling with the anxiety of describing Korman. He looked down into his lap. ‘That kid was killed in the toilets a week later. Someone used a shard of glass to cut his neck, and just let the kid lie there and bleed out.’

‘It was Korman?’

‘No one ever admitted to it. But I knew it was him.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Go on.’

‘Anyway, Vic was never the easiest person to get along with, but we were friends – of a sort, I suppose. Once Korman arrived, though, everything changed. Vic abandoned me, basically. I was suddenly the outsider. And when Vic turned seventeen – and Korman was almost fifteen – the two of them walked out of the home, and they didn’t come back. This was 1984. They took all their things with them, and left. I never saw Vic again for sixteen years.’

‘Until 2000?’

‘Right.’

‘What made you get back in touch?’

He shook his head. ‘I didn’t. Back when I worked insurance, I lived in this crappy place in Nunhead, and one Sunday, in November 2000, the buzzer goes.’

‘It was Grankin?’

‘Yeah. Sixteen years of radio silence, and all of a sudden he’s standing on my doorstep, acting like no time has passed at all. I remember thinking it was odd, but then Vic was never ordinary. He had a nasty temper on him. He could be vicious if he wanted. It was just lucky I was never on the receiving end.’

‘Where had he been for all that time?’

‘He wouldn’t tell me – or, at least, talked around it – and, instead, he starts asking me if I’m still into history. I told him I was. I’d always been a big reader growing up. Books were my escape in that place. Vic used to tease me, and call me “The Professor”, but I never used to mind. There are worse things to be called. So Vic hands me this advert he’s cut out of the newspaper, and says, “I think you should apply for that.” I unfold it, and it’s an ad for a job as a museum curator.’

‘At Wonderland?’

‘Yeah,’ East said. ‘We’d gone sixteen years without as much as a phone call – and then he turns up out of the blue and tells me I should apply for a job.’

Healy stepped in, frowning. ‘That didn’t strike you as weird?’

‘Of
course
it struck me as weird,’ East replied, his voice still tearful, at points barely audible. ‘But I
hated
working in insurance. So we talked a little more about it, and he said to me, “Put on your CV that you used to work for Arnold
Goldman, at his casino on Brompton Road.” I looked at Vic, and said, “But I didn’t. That’s a lie,” and he fires this look at me, the same sort of look he used to have sometimes, back when we were growing up, and he says, “Put down that you used to work with Goldman. The guy who runs the museum and the pier now, he used to work for Goldman. He’ll like that.” So I ummed and aahed about it, about whether to lie like that, but eventually … I decided to do it.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘And then you got the job?’

‘In the interview, I made up a load of crap about meeting Arnold Goldman, about how he’d always been a hero of mine, and Mr Cabot bought it. He started going off on a tangent, reminiscing about Goldman, about how he owed Goldman so much, about how he was such an inspiration. I felt bad that I’d lied to him.’

‘Do you think Cabot was in on it?’

‘With Vic?’ East said. ‘No. No way. He gave me the job because I pretended to know Goldman, and because I was cheap. The pay’s
terrible
. I’ve had three rises since 2001. Mr Cabot’s a good man, a good boss, but he’s not benevolent.’ His head tilted in my direction, as if he didn’t want to have to make eye contact with Healy. ‘But then, after I started at the museum, I began to think back to Vic’s visit more and more, and it would bug me. I mean, why reappear after all that time just because he saw a job I’d like? There had to be something more to it.’

As I watched him, eyes alive with the memories of what had happened, I remembered the photograph of him I’d seen in the museum, caught on the edges of a shot taken at Wonderland’s opening ceremony in 2001. He’d looked nervous then, meek. He wasn’t much different
now, thirteen years on. Perhaps Calvin East was always destined to be a victim, bent and shaped to somebody else’s agenda.

‘So what
was
going on?’ Healy said.

‘Nine, ten months after I started at the museum, I left work one night and Vic was outside. I hadn’t seen or heard from him since he came to my house. He said he wanted to buy me a drink, and a steak. I didn’t want to go – it just didn’t feel right – but Vic grabbed me by the arm and basically frogmarched me to the Tube. Thing is, when he wanted to be, Vic could be good company, really funny, and he was good company for a while that night. He made me laugh. By the time we got to this restaurant in Soho, I’d forgotten what I was even worried about.’

He rolled his head, his glasses sliding to the bridge of his nose, and looked out beyond me, into space. ‘He leads me to this booth in the corner, and there’s someone there already. And by the time I realize who, it’s too late to back out.’

‘It was Korman,’ I said.

A funereal pause; a nod of the head. ‘He said hello to me, shook my hand, asked how I was, started this normal, routine conversation – but his eyes were saying something else.
That’s
the real Korman. He looks at you, and his eyes … they don’t communicate with the rest of him. They aren’t
part
of the rest of him.’

I glanced at Healy. The aggression had momentarily gone from his face, replaced by a clear recognition of what was being described. To anyone else, in other circumstances, East’s description of Korman would have sounded absurd. But not now, to us. Healy and East had both suffered at his hands.

‘When he looks at you …’ East turned to me. There was a dried tear track on his face, skewing off left. ‘It’s like looking into the eyes of the devil.’

He held my gaze for a second and then turned away, back in this moment, tied to a chair in a gnarled and twisted house. And yet I sensed that, in a strange way, he saw this as better than being in that booth with Korman and Grankin.

‘What was Korman doing there?’ I said.

‘He came to observe. After all the niceties, all the catching up, he just sat there, watching me. Vic did the talking for the rest of the night – all these stories from St David’s – and Korman said nothing. He sat back and to the left of me, so I had to physically turn in order to see him. And when I did, there he was: staring at me, totally silent, this half-smile on his face. Then, after an hour, he got up and left. Just like that. No goodbye, nothing. I didn’t think about it at the time, but I see it for what it was now: he was getting the measure of me. He wanted to see if I was still the same person he knew in St David’s; to see how weak I was.’

‘Where’s this going?’ Healy said, impatient, on edge.

I glanced at him. He still held the penlight in his hand – clutched in his balled fist – shining it in East’s direction. In the silence, a faint breeze escaped through the gaps in the house, whining as it passed into the room and out on to the landing, and then there was nothing again.

Just the three of us.

‘After Korman left the restaurant,’ East went on, leaning forward in his seat, its frame creaking as his arms locked behind him, ‘Vic asked me if I wanted to earn some more money. I thought he meant freelance work. So I said yes. Of course I said yes. I was dirt poor, living in that
airless hole in Nunhead. I asked him what the job was, and he said it was more of a favour. He needed me to go in to work, talk to Mr Cabot and persuade him to hire Vic as his security guy.’

‘So he could get access to the museum?’

‘Right. Except I didn’t know that back then. He palmed me off with some excuse about needing to get his business off the ground, about building a client base. He said, “I let you know about that curator’s job, now it’s your turn to do something for me.” I couldn’t figure out his motivation, and he could see I was hesitant. So he gets out his chequebook and says, “This’ll help sweeten the deal.” ’

‘He writes you a cheque?’

‘For two grand. Two thousand pounds just for going in to see Mr Cabot and floating the idea of using Vic’s company. I said to Vic, “But what happens if he says no?” and Vic says, “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.” So I go in the next day and speak to Mr Cabot, and start to play on his insecurities, telling him how it would be a disaster if any of the penny arcade machines were stolen, how they were irreplaceable with insurance money – and finally, I started to realize.’

‘Realize what?’

Guilt seemed to claw up his throat like a virus, his Adam’s apple shifting, a tear blurring in one of his eyes. ‘I started to realize what a good liar I’d become.’

BOOK: What Remains
11.41Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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