What Remains (40 page)

What the hell is wrong with me?

I rubbed an eye, drifting for a few seconds, and remembered blacking out at the museum.

‘Raker?’

I looked at Healy.

‘Are you all right?’ he said.

Spinning on my heel, I began retracing my path in, past the stage again, the rings burned into the floor, the stairs to the mezzanine, the rows of discoloured squares, to the main doors. Every step I travelled, the air became thicker with the smell. It wasn’t the odours I’d inhaled as I’d come
in – not the rotten wood, the damp, the musty stench of a forgotten building – it was something else.
Clear your head.

Clear your head
.

Clear your –

‘Raker?’

Healy’s voice carried across the stillness of the pavilion. For a second, I’d almost forgotten he was here. I tried shining my torch in his direction, but it only reached to the halfway point between us. I couldn’t see him. He was just words.

‘What’s going on?’

‘Wait a sec,’ I said, my attention split between him and another prickle of recognition.
That smell.
A second later, goosebumps scattered up my arms, as if my body had skipped ahead of my brain.

‘Raker?’

‘Yeah, okay, just give me a secon–’

In an instant, it came to me, hard like a punch to the throat.
That smell. I know what that smell is
. Immediately, I looked towards the mezzanine, even though I couldn’t see it. ‘Healy,’ I said. ‘Healy, get down here. We need to go.’

‘What?’

I grabbed one of the main doors.

‘Why?’

‘Get down here,’ I said. ‘Get down here now.’

I heaved it open and looked out.

Holy shit.

The smell seemed to rush past me, drawn into the darkness, knocking me off balance like it was something solid and powerful. I took another step forward. The rain had stopped, the sky had cleared, the pier already drying out.

Halfway along the promenade, huge mushroom clouds
of smoke billowed up into the grey-blue of early morning, the stench of burning wood carrying across to me, beyond me. But it wasn’t that I’d been able to smell. It was the trail of liquid, starting outside the doors of the pavilion and snaking back along the wooden slats, towards land.

Petrol
.

Someone had set the pier on fire.

55

With no rain, there was nothing to stop it. The fire raged, vicious and ruthless, eating away at the pier’s old wooden frame, gaining ground all the time. I looked from the flames to the trail of petrol, which stopped inches from the main doors. The exterior of the pavilion had been doused in it too, the walls shining with it, the promenade glistening under my torchlight. Someone had wanted the entire thing to burn – and everything inside. That meant Healy and me. That meant every trace of whatever had gone on here.

I shouted for Healy and then rushed back inside, through the darkness, towards him. He was walking gingerly down the centre of the building, bony hand gripping the penlight. I saw him look towards the open door at the other end of the room.

‘What the hell’s going on?’

‘We’re in deep shit,’ I said, and grabbed him by the arm.

We were halfway back across the pavilion when he saw. Black smoke was starting to drift in through the doors, coming in on a faint breeze. An hour before sun-up, night was beginning to give way to morning, but it wasn’t the changing light that allowed him to see what lay ahead, it was the violence of the fire, the size of it, flames licking at the promenade as it rode the petrol trail towards us.

He hesitated, slowing down.

‘We have to go,’ I said, hand back on his arm.

He shrugged me off. ‘Go where?’

‘In ten minutes, this place’ll be a memory.’

‘Go
where
, Raker?’

I looked through the doors.

He was right.

There was no going back the way we’d come. Behind the crackle of the fire, there was the sound of the pier moaning, its archaic structure giving way, the criss-crossing struts beneath the promenade bending and burning. Pretty soon, they’d be falling away to the sea, the walkway toppling like a domino set.

Even if we’d been able to bypass the fire – which we couldn’t – there was no safety out there: on the other side of it, the pier had already been seared, the boards we’d walked, the fences on either side of us, now blackened and brittle.

‘Follow me.’

‘Are you
listening
?’ Healy said, a sudden panic in his voice. I paused for a second, taken aback, remembering what he’d said to me when we’d still been at the house in Camberwell:
Being in that coma, it took my survival instinct away. It took everything away. I didn’t want to live.
But now I realized that wasn’t true – or not entirely. He didn’t want to die here, just the same as me. He wanted to live.

He wanted to survive for now.

I felt a strange sense of relief, even here, even in this moment, as we stood at the end of a structure that was about to plunge into oblivion; and then something cracked, a deep, creaking sigh, and the whole promenade seemed to pitch right.

Grabbing his arm again, I used torchlight to direct a path to our left, out around the side of the pavilion, where
coin-operated binoculars stood sentry, ancient, corroded. Ahead of us, at the rear of the building, I could see half of the bandstand, its roof sagging. Tiles had fallen away and gathered in a pile at one side of it, and the platform under the roof – where Goldman’s brass band had once played – had begun to cleave apart, softened by years of rain and sea spray.

Right in the corner, behind the bandstand, a metal gate had been built into the fence. It was open, flapping in the wind, revealing a ladder down to a small wooden jetty, slathered in seaweed. As I got to the gate, I peered over: one side of the jetty was completely gone, ragged boards reaching out like fingers into the centre of the Thames. Small boats would once have used it to dock here.

But not now.

I looked at Healy, a hand pressed to the fencing, out of breath, his gaze fixed back across his shoulder. The fire was hardly visible from here, disguised by the pavilion, but we could hear it: the cacophony of snapping wood, like trees falling one after the other. And there was something else too, distant, fading in.

Sirens
.

‘We need to go.’

Healy looked from me to the gate and started shaking his head. ‘You want me to
swim
back to shore? Are you kidding?
Look
at me. Do I look ready for that?’

‘Would you rather die?’

He peered over the fence, down to the water, then along the fringes of the pier, to the museum. Something crashed, a doughy moan like the last breath of a giant, and then – for the first time – we both saw it: the fire was at the
pavilion, clawing its way around to the side, a monstrous, unstoppable force of nature.

‘We’ll get hypothermia,’ he said.

‘I’ve got a spare change of clothes in the car. As soon as we get back, you can have those. You’ll be fine. But we need to go right now.’ I glanced at the fire, at the roof of the pavilion, all under attack. ‘It’s not just about the fire any more.’

He knew what I meant.

Sirens meant fire engines.

It meant police.

We started the climb down, me leading the way. At the bottom, I pressed a foot tentatively to the jetty, making sure it wasn’t going to sink as soon as I stood on it, and then stepped off and waited for Healy. He was slow – much slower than I needed him to be – but I didn’t say anything. Once he was off the ladder, I knelt and watched the patterns of the river, the direction the current was travelling in.

‘There’s all sorts of shite in there,’ Healy muttered.

It was heading west to east, and it was fast, swollen by the rain. It meant, as soon as we got in, we’d get pulled towards the burning wreckage of the pier.

‘Did you hear what I just said?’

I looked up at him. ‘If we stay here, we’re dead.’

A flicker of something in his face.

‘Are you coming?’

He hesitated for a moment, then quietly: ‘I can’t swim.’

There was so much in those three words: another admission of failure; a silent call for help; and confirmation that I was right. For now, he wanted to live.

‘Okay,’ I said.

I stepped off the side of the jetty, into the water. It was cold – but not as cold as I was expecting. Immediately, though, I could feel the strength of the tide.

‘Okay,’ I said again, holding out a hand to him. ‘We need to go.’

56

The crossing was brutally, relentlessly tough. As I swam on my back, dragging Healy behind me – an eleven-stone dead weight – I was fighting the current the whole way, the course of the water pulling me sideways, in towards the burning pier.

It took everything I had – every ounce of energy, every atom of willpower – not to be pulled under the collapsing promenade, but the river was eventually too strong: it drew us in towards it like a magnet, under it, chunks of scorched wood hitting the surface like bombs. Healy started to wriggle, panic setting in, and I had to tell him calmly to keep still. But I felt none of that calm inside. My heart was a fist against my ribs, striking so hard I could hear it pounding in my ears. Broken slabs the size of railway sleepers were falling from the sky, slapping the water, churning it up, the heat from the fire like a furnace.

But then, suddenly, we emerged on the other side, the storm of debris and heat fading as we continued east. I looked back over my right shoulder and saw a sandbank ahead of us. It arced out from the river wall, directly under one of the old warehouses, now converted to flats. There were lights on inside, but I wasn’t near enough to see if anyone was watching. Instead, I heaved Healy closer to me, head to my chest, and started trying to steer us towards the sandbank.

It was hard, but I got there, hitting dry land at the very
end of the bank. I dragged Healy up, out of the water, and paused there – doubled over – trying to catch my breath. Every muscle in my body ached. My lungs burned. My head was thumping so hard it made it difficult to see straight. I turned and looked at the pier, a quarter of a mile back up the river. The pavilion would be gone in twenty minutes, claimed by the fire. Half of it had already been consigned to history, the front slowly collapsing in on itself, like a mouth opening to scream.

Next to me, Healy started coughing.

He lay on his back, sounding even worse than me, despite the fact that I’d carried him the whole way. His clothes clung to his meagre frame, his raincoat like a sheet of cling film, revealing the underside of his ribs, his left hip bone, the clefts and angles of a body that – less than a year ago – was hidden beneath layers of fat.

‘Korman did this,’ he said.

I glanced at the pier again, and could see a crowd at the edge of the water now, their gaze fixed on the fire. They were starting to gather, people out exercising, walking their dogs, all stopping to look at the pier’s atomized carcass; a monument from another time that soon wouldn’t even be that.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘This was Korman.’

‘How did he find out we were here?’

I shrugged, still catching my breath. ‘He knew we’d end up here. I didn’t see him following us, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t. He could have come in and killed us – but what if we’d escaped? Better to burn down the evidence first.’

‘Leaving us alive is a risk.’

‘Is it?’

‘We could go straight to the police.’

‘He knows we’re not going to do that,’ I said.

If Korman had followed us to the pier, he’d have seen Healy and me together, and he’d know Healy was alive. Right now, I was trapped.

Just another part of another lie.

57

A set of concrete steps led us off the sandbank, up to a narrow pathway that ran between two old wharves. I stopped and looked out between the buildings. We were right at the end of Wapping High Street, the museum about a fifth of a mile along, concealed beyond a bend in the road. I knew what awaited us there, though: sirens were still going, blue light painting the warehouse walls.

‘Stay here,’ I said to Healy.

We were both cold, chilled to the bone by the water, by the coolness of the morning, but he’d begun to shiver, to shrink in on himself, and if I took him with me, he’d slow me down. I shrugged off my jacket and handed it over.

‘This’ll dry fast, and hopefully keep you a bit warmer.’

He put it on.

I scanned the street again. It was just after seven and people were already up, even though it was a Sunday morning, seeing what all the fuss was about at the museum. I was soaked, which made me easy to place at the scene, but I didn’t have a lot of options. In my car were the fresh, dry clothes I’d promised to Healy. More importantly, East was still in the boot. I had to get him, us and the car away from Wapping as fast as possible.

‘I’ll be back in five minutes,’ I said to Healy, and then headed off, trying to straighten my clothes out as I went. There was no getting around the fact that I looked wet,
that my shirt was sticking to me, my trousers too, but I sorted my hair out, made it look respectable, and moved as quickly, as casually, as I could.

At the Overground station, I crossed the street, avoiding a couple milling around at the entrance, but then had to stop at the junction for Wapping Lane: two fire engines were travelling in my direction, lights flashing, sirens blaring. Stepping slowly back from the pavement’s edge, I kept on going until I was out of their line of sight, and then waited for them to take the roundabout and head east, down towards the museum. Once they were far enough away from me, I set off again.

There was a slight bend in Wapping High Street, left to right, and it wasn’t until I got to King Henry’s Wharf, about five hundred feet from the museum, that I realized two marked police cars had already cordoned off the area in and around the old paper mill. They’d parked diagonally across the road, three fire engines stationed between them. The fire crews were busy unfurling hosepipes from their trucks and running them alongside the museum and down to the banks of the river, where the pier was burning to ash. Tape had been used to ringfence an area about one hundred feet in length. There was no access.