What Remains (37 page)

‘How many times has this happened?’ I asked.

‘Since 2010? Twice. Once for that strength tester, and then once about a year ago when the coin slot packed up on the fortune teller.’

‘The one with the scratch in the side?’

‘Yeah. He arrived at my house and took that one away, revarnished it and then returned it a day later. That’s the weird thing.’

‘What is?’

‘He’s only interested in the wooden cabinets, because they’re the ones he can varnish. You can’t varnish the metal ones. But that’s literally
all
he’s doing. He’s not changing them, or bolting things on, or repairing them. He’s just recoating them.’ East looked between us. ‘And he’s only doing it to the same five machines.’

49

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Healy shaking his head. It looked like he was about to say something. ‘Wait a sec,’ I said, as much to Healy as to East, ‘wait a sec. Calvin, this doesn’t make any sense. Why would –’

Healy cut me off: ‘No. No, this is shite. I’m done listening to –’

‘I liked Gail.’

Healy stopped instantly.

East’s eyes moved between us, and then they dropped to the floor. A hint of a smile for the first time: sorrowful, forlorn. ‘I suppose I was predisposed to liking her because of how interested she was in the pier, in the history of the city, in her choice of dissertation. I got a call from her in the middle of 2009, months before Stourcroft came back to me for the second time. Gail came in, she interviewed me, asked me questions, and then she left. I gave her my card, in case she had anything else to ask, and as she was leaving, she said she’d requested an interview with Carla Stourcroft too, but hadn’t heard back from her agent. I remember what I said to her, as clearly as I’m saying it now: “Oh, Carla’s very knowledgeable. She’ll give you lots of good stuff.” ’

A solemn hush hung over the room.

‘I never thought for a second,’ East said quietly, ‘not one second, that the interview Gail eventually did with Stourcroft would lead where it did. How could I know?’
He looked up, tears filling his eyes again. ‘How could I know it would end so badly?’

‘You pretended to date Gail, Calvin.’

I said it without emotion, but the implication was clear: maybe he didn’t know at the start, but he knew at the end. He knew it was all a pretence, a lie.

I glanced at Healy, knife in one hand, torch in the other, and gave him a subtle shake of the head.
Hold off. We’re almost there
.

His eyes lingered on me, his body as rigid as iron now, fuelled by the knowledge – the dread – of what was coming.

‘Stourcroft came in to see me the second time, in January 2010,’ East said. ‘She didn’t outright accuse anyone of anything, she just said she had information that might not paint the museum, or the pier, in the best light, and that she wanted to speak to Mr Cabot. So, after she was gone, I went next door to see him, and he’s in there with Vic. A few weeks before, a TV company had been in touch about using some machines in a period drama they were shooting, and Mr Cabot had been pretty excited about it. He’d got Vic in to organize the transport.’ He stopped, a deflation to him. ‘I didn’t want to tell Mr Cabot in front of Vic, because I knew – whatever Stourcroft had got a whiff of, whether it was the machines, or the pier itself – it
had
to involve Korman and Vic somehow. So I made something up on the spot, and then told Mr Cabot I’d catch up with him later. But, after he was finished, Vic comes into my office, just walks in there and closes the door, and I can see on his face that he knows.’

‘He knew you were holding something back?’

‘Yeah.’

‘So you told him?’

He shot me a look like I’d accused him of something, a flash of anger in his face. ‘You don’t get it,’ he said. ‘You don’t know what he’s like, what Korman’s like –’

‘We know enough.’

I didn’t say anything else, dropping to my haunches in front of him again. He glanced at me, glasses back at the tip of his nose. He knew his failings better than anyone. My silence was my reply.

‘I told him,’ he muttered.

‘You told him what Stourcroft said?’

He nodded: culpable, unable to take it back.

I held up a hand to Healy, telling him to wait, clearly seeing now where it had gone from here. ‘Did Grankin begin tailing her after that, Calvin? Is that it?’

He didn’t reply, just nodded again.

I pushed on: ‘He begins tailing her, and when Gail finally gets to interview Stourcroft, Grankin sees the two of them together and starts looking into Gail as well. He finds out that part of her dissertation is about the pier. Maybe he even got inside her flat and
saw
the dissertation, but I doubt he saw enough to worry him. Gail was academically clever, but she wouldn’t have been battle-hardened like Stourcroft. Stourcroft was a lecturer, a journalist, a writer. She could smell a big story on the wind. She knew how to protect it.’

East was bent almost double now, the top half of his body at forty-five degrees, anchored in place by the binds at his wrist. He was motionless, quiet. Off to his left, coming around closer to him, Healy stood, half covered by darkness.

‘After a while,’ I continued, ‘just to be on the safe side, I
think he gets you in a room with him, and orders you to start making friends with Gail. Just in case Stourcroft puts any more ideas in Gail’s head. Just in case Gail knows anything she hasn’t put in the dissertation. And you’re so shit-scared of him and Korman, you do what he asks. You weasel your way into their lives.’

I paused, but I knew I was on the right track.

‘Did you pretend that you
also
thought something might be going on at the pier, Calvin? Was that how you got Gail to believe you were a good guy, that you weren’t involved in anything bad?’

He nodded.

‘But the thing is, you liked her – didn’t you?’

He nodded again.

‘You liked the girls.’

A flicker of emotion in his face. I remembered the video he had of them, how they’d behaved with him, laughed, how they’d played Scrabble and stolen some of his vowels. I could hear them giggling, could imagine how – for brief snatches of time – he might have forgotten what he was doing there, with them. I leaned in even closer, so he could see my face. ‘Why kill those two girls?’

No response.

‘Why did they kill the girls, Calvin?’ I said again.

Healy stepped closer, unable to get down on to his haunches or his knees, not without effort, not without the creak of old, defective bones. So, instead, he brought the knife forward, placing the serrated blade flat against East’s cheek. I glared at him as East drew a sharp breath, but Healy just looked back, eyes a void. This was the moment he reconnected with that family: their life, their death, his dream.

‘You’re going to tell us,’ he said to East, ‘or I’m going to cut your throat. Why did they kill those two girls?’

East took a moment to compose himself, the cold blade still pressed at his cheek. ‘Vic would call me three times a week, checking up on what Gail and I had been talking about. The night before they died, I went to see Gail after work, and we stood chatting while the girls went and played on the swings at the park.’

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Healy baulk, neck muscles tightening, veins worming their way up his throat. This had been his dream. This had been his life for eleven weeks. Now it was someone else’s reality.

‘I had no idea what was going to happen to them,’ East said, voice shrill. ‘I swear I didn’t. We got on. I wasn’t lying when I said I liked her. I really did like –’

‘Don’t,’ Healy said, teeth clenched.

‘Okay,’ East replied, panicky. ‘Okay, I’m sorry.’

The change in the mood was palpable. Healy was like an animal in a pen now, chewing through its cage. East swallowed, glancing at me, looking for help.

‘What happened, Calvin?’ I said.

‘Okay,’ he repeated. ‘Okay. So we’re out at the park, and Gail suddenly changes the subject and tells me that Carla Stourcroft called her. Straight away, my heart drops. Up until then, Gail had been safe. She was no threat to Korman or to Vic. But Stourcroft … she was like a contaminant, dragging Gail into this –’

‘She didn’t drag Gail anywhere,’ I said to him. I kept my voice measured, but I let him know what I thought of his opinion. ‘She knew there was something rotten going on. She was doing her job. The rest of the world deserved to know what –’

‘No,’ East cut in. ‘She screwed it up for every–’

‘Shut the fuck up,’ Healy said, pushing with the flat of the blade.

East swallowed again.

‘Let’s hear it,’ I said.

His eyes moved to me from the floor, but his head – pressed against the knife – was still. ‘Stourcroft thought she was being watched, that someone was following her. She told Gail someone had been inside her house. It wasn’t broken into, ransacked, but she’d got home and things were in the wrong place. So she was phoning Gail to tell her to be careful. Gail asked her why someone would even
want
to follow them, and Stourcroft gave her the basics: she had a witness who had seen someone out on the pier in September 2007 – and she’d tied this person to the disappearance of a couple at a fancy-dress ball the same month.’

Healy and I exchanged a look.
Neil and Ana Yost
. They were pinned to the wall next door, their disappearance like a tsunami: it hit Stourcroft, Gail, the girls – and in February 2014, when Healy had gone looking, it had hit him too.

‘Stourcroft told Gail that she believed one man linked both events,’ East continued, looking ahead, a prisoner walking to his execution, ‘and she believed he was Russian. I knew she was talking about Vic. I knew it in a second. I didn’t know anything about him being seen on the pier in 2007, anything about that couple, but I knew she was talking about Vic.’ He stopped again, and this time a tear broke free. ‘She said, “Do you know anyone at the museum like that?” ’

‘And you told her you didn’t,’ said Healy.

More tears ran out from under East’s glasses.

‘You lied to her.’

Healy was silent, paralysed, looking at East with a mix of regret and disgust. The rest of East’s sentence remained there, unspoken, like an echo:
And when Grankin rang me to check in on Gail, like he did every week, three times a week, I told him what she’d said, I told him that it wasn’t Gail who was the problem, it was Stourcroft. I sat there and begged him for Gail’s life.

‘But it wasn’t enough,’ East weeped. ‘It wasn’t enough,’ he said again and again, his words perishing the moment they came out, hollow and worthless. ‘He called me while I was
there
, at the flat with them. I went outside and finished the conversation, and when I came back in, Gail had prepared dinner for us all. I sat down with them to have dinner, looking across the table at Gail, trying to pretend nothing had changed. The girls went off to bed, we had a bottle of wine, and I was going to tell her to run, to take the girls and run – I swear I was – but then someone knocked on the door, and Gail went and answered it, and …’ He swallowed, eyeing Healy, then me. ‘It was Korman.’

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 conversa
tion 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 –’