What Remains (41 page)

I double-backed and crossed Wapping Rose Garden, heading out the other side on to Green Bank. A few people passed me in the park, eyes lingering on me, on my soaked clothes, but I kept my head down and my pace up. Green Bank was busier than the high street, a maze of four-storey residential buildings fringing one side of it, and it became even harder not to be seen. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw one old lady on the opposite pavement actually stop and watch me. Twenty feet further on, I glanced back over
my shoulder, and she was in the same spot, eyes tracking my movement, all the way down to the side street in which I’d parked. I tried not to let the idea of being ID’d distract me, and headed left, into the road.

Straight away, I stopped again.

At the other end, two uniformed officers were coming up from Wapping High Street, moving slowly in my direction. One of them had a notepad clasped in his hand, his eyes repeatedly returning to the page.

They’ve got my registration number
.

Someone had tipped them off.

I zeroed in on my BMW, left illegally halfway along in a residents’ parking bay. It was protected from view for the moment by a Sprinter van – but not for long. They were maybe only forty feet away from it, temporarily distracted by a second BMW, newer than mine, better and more expensive, but the same colour.

I moved fast, keeping to the edges of the pavement, using the van as cover. It was a risk: they couldn’t see me, but I couldn’t see them, which meant – if they picked up the pace even a little – they’d be on to me long before I got to my car.

Fifteen feet away, I sidestepped to my right, seeing they were still at the other BMW. I heard snatches of their conversation, one of them telling the other that it wasn’t the model they were looking for, and then I finally reached my car.

The boot was unlocked.

It sat there, an inch open, rising and falling gently as a breeze rolled in off the river. Almost on cue, a thread of sunlight broke above the rooftops to my left, bouncing off the bodywork and exposing a sliver of what lay under the lid.

Calvin East.

But not as I’d left him.

He was in the foetal postion, his legs and arms still together – bound with the duct tape Healy had used before I’d even arrived at the house in Camberwell. There was blood everywhere, so much of it, it was hard to get an idea of exactly how he’d died. The blanket he’d been lying on was twisted around him, coiled like a python, the upper half of it – around his chest, and his throat – stained red.

Worse, he still had tape over his mouth.

He’d died here, alone, unable to scream. I felt a flood of guilt wash over me, for the needless loss of life, for leaving him here. Despite everything he’d done – his failings, his culpability, the hand he’d played in Korman and Grankin’s awful crimes – he didn’t deserve an end like this.

Static. The sound of a police radio.

Slamming the boot shut, I moved to the driver’s side, the stark reality of my situation hitting home. They had the make and model of my car. They had my registration. They were only feet from me – and now I had a dead body in the boot.

I slid in at the wheel, started up the car, then swung the BMW out of the parking spot, into the road. I didn’t look at the two cops, but I could see them react: a quick glance at the notepad, and then they were running towards me.

I put my foot to the floor.

The tyres squealed on the tarmac, and I accelerated away, gunning the car to the end of the street. In my rear-view mirror, I saw the two cops pursuing me, one of them radioing for back-up, the other slightly in front, sprinting full pelt.

When I got back to Healy, he was in the same place, pale
face visible in the shadows between warehouses. Somewhere behind us, sirens started up again. He moved as quickly as he could, and got in. ‘What the hell happened?’ he said.

‘East is dead.’

It was difficult to read him, hard to tell whether the news made him feel better or worse. He’d waited a long time for this moment, to see the destruction of the men who’d cost him everything he’d ever loved. And yet, now the first of them had fallen, he didn’t look triumphant. There was no delight in this reprisal.

Maybe because it hadn’t been at his own hands.

Or maybe because – now, in these moments – he realized something he’d always known deep down: that four years after he’d found the Clarks, three years after he’d buried his daughter, there was no victory in savagery, and no joy in death.

58

I called Melanie Craw from Wanstead Flats, three hundred acres of grassland in east London that bisected Leytonstone and Manor Park. Despite being only yards from the noise of the city, from the hum of early-morning traffic and the squeal of commuter trains, inside the car – with the heaters blowing, and the gentle patter of rain against the roof – we couldn’t hear it. All we had was the view: grass and trees and birds, the blue smudge of distant roofs the one hint that we hadn’t left the city entirely.

Wandering out into the long grass at the front of the BMW, I pieced my phone together again. I’d taken the SIM card and the battery out as soon as we’d left Wapping. When everything was assembled, I glanced back at Healy, his face peering out through the glass at me, one side of him completely in shadow. The dichotomy only seemed to accentuate his decline, pulling at the folds of his mouth and the hollows of his eyes, a pissed-off expression on his face. He didn’t understand why I needed to call Craw, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to tell him.

As the drizzle hit my face and my phone kicked into life, it buzzed three times in my hand. Three missed calls, all from Craw, all within ten minutes of one another. She’d phoned an hour after I’d left Wapping – and then again, and again.

I dialled her number and waited for it to connect. It rang for a long time without any response: nine, ten, eleven
rings. I thought about hanging up, my finger moving to end the call. But then, a moment later, she finally answered.

‘Raker.’

One word, but delivered with such weight. Sorrow, frustration, anger, disbelief. It threw me off balance, and I found myself looking back towards Healy, as if subconsciously reaching out for his support. Around me, the grass moved, swaying in the wind, its gentle whisper carrying off into the grey of the morning.

‘Craw, listen to me –’

‘What the hell’s going on?’

A lorry rumbled past, heading north on the three-quarter-mile stretch of road that ran through the centre of the Flats. There was no pavement on this side so I’d bumped up on to the kerb, the car partly submerged by grass like a slowly sinking ship. Once the lorry was gone, the Flats became quiet again: the softly falling rain, the gentle
whoosh
of the grass in the wind, the buzz of the telephone call.

‘You know I didn’t do this,’ I said.

‘Is that what you called to say?’

‘I wanted you to hear it from me.’

She didn’t respond this time. I looked back at Healy, his eyes on me. ‘Craw, listen to me,’ I said. ‘I’m being honest with you, I swear. We
were
on the pier –’

‘Who’s “we”?’

I stopped.
Shit
. ‘I was on the pier, but I didn’t burn it down.’

‘You’re lying to me, Raker.’

‘I’m not.’

‘Then who’s “we”?’

My gaze returned to Healy. ‘It’s complicated.’

‘It always is with you.’ She said it calmly, which only made the comment sting even more. ‘You’re all over the wires, Raker. This isn’t even my borough but you’re still the first thing I heard about when I got in this morning. A witness said he saw two men on the pier before it burned down, and one of them was a guy in his early-to-mid forties matching your description. He said they arrived in a grey BMW 3 Series with your plates. Two officers …’ She stopped. I could almost feel her anger, pulsing like an electrical charge. ‘Two officers saw you
making a fucking getaway this morning
. They
saw
you, Raker. Are you even aware of what you’re doing?’

‘Who was the witness?’

No answer, just a derisory grunt.

‘Did they give their name?’

‘Even if I knew, I can’t discuss witnesses with –’

‘Make a few calls,’ I said to her, cutting her off. ‘Make a few calls to Tower Hamlets and ask them if he gave his name. Because I guarantee you: he didn’t.’

A pause. ‘So?’

‘So, there
is
no witness.’

‘They got a call –’

‘Did he leave his name?’

Silence.

‘It was the guy who burned the pier down, Craw – you know that as well as I do. It’s a set-up.
Yes
, I was on the pier.
Yes
, that was me. That was my car. But you know the first time I realized that the pier was on fire? When I walked outside and the promenade was collapsing into the river. I
swam
back to shore. He coated that whole place in petrol and set it alight while we were still inside –’

‘Who’s “we”?’

I stopped, glancing at Healy again.

There was something of the past in him now, a hint of suspicion that was like a bridge, connecting one point in time to another. I thought back to that first meeting we’d had in January, looking out from a café in Hammersmith at rowers carving through the icy Thames, and wondered if either of us imagined it would end up here: him, a spectre, a memory given life; me, a man on the run, under suspicion again, defending himself to the one person left who might believe him.

‘His name’s Paul Korman,’ I told her.

‘Who?’

‘This so-called witness. Or it could be Victor Grankin –’

‘I can’t hear this.’

‘They were using the pier for something –’

‘I don’t want to
hear
it.’

‘I’m trying to tell you the truth here.’

‘And what do you want me to do with this information, Raker? Shall I march up to Bethnal Green CID and tell them we’ve just had a nice little chat?’

‘Come on, Craw.’

‘No,’ she said, her voice quiet but sharp.

‘Who else do they have?’

‘Who else do
who
have?’

‘That family.’

She sighed. ‘This case isn’t
yours
.’

‘Then why did you help me yesterday? Why did you tell me about Healy? You
knew
I wasn’t going to leave it there.’

No response.

‘That family haven’t got anyone else. This is it. I’m as good as it’s going to get for them. The Met investigation is buried in a filing cabinet somewhere, and all this crap, this
fantasy that Korman has reported to police this morning, it’s all just a distraction. That’s all him and Grankin are trying to do.’

‘Because?’

‘Because they know I’m getting close.’

Silence. I stopped and took a long breath. This was going nowhere good. I couldn’t explain what I felt, couldn’t express what I meant. In the years since I’d started tracking missing people, I’d seen something different from Craw, something worse: not just people trying to conceal the abhorrence of their crimes, but trying to scorch any trace of it from existence. When men and women vanished,
everything
was gone: there wasn’t a body, there wasn’t forensic evidence, there was no reason or motive, all you had was a mound of earth into which you dug and dug and kept on digging. And by the time you got that first glimpse of whatever was buried there, you were so deep into the earth, it was too late to claw your way out. All you had were these men, these devils.

The only choice left was to fight.

In the background, for the first time, I heard voices, slowly fading in. Craw covered the mouthpiece and said something short, muffled. The voices faded out again. She said, ‘I’m going to have to tell my super about this call.’

‘Do what you have to do.’

‘Even if you’re right, even if I believe you, they’re going to tear into your phone records and find this conversation. I can’t afford to get caught up in this.’

‘Do you?’ I said.

‘Do I what?’

‘Believe me.’

Craw didn’t respond, a long sigh crackling down the
line. I looked at the time. Just after 9 a.m. My head was so full of noise, for a moment I struggled to recall when I’d last slept. Was it yesterday? Or was it the day before? The distant sound of sirens stirred me from my thoughts, and I gestured for Healy to start the car.

‘Do you?’ I said again.

No response.

‘Craw, do you believe me?’

It sounded like she was about to say something.

‘Craw?’

‘Yes,’ she said finally. ‘Of course I believe you.’

‘Okay,’ I replied, moving through the grass. ‘I’ve got to go, but I need to tell you this. Someone needs to know.’

‘I told you, I don’t want to –’

‘Please.’

A pause. ‘What is it?’

‘Tell whoever’s running this case at the Met to get a forensic team into the museum at Wonderland and look at the penny arcade. Some of the machines in there …’ I stopped, knowing how this would sound to her. ‘Just look at them.’

‘Look at them for what?’

‘I’m, uh … I don’t know exactly.’

‘What the hell are you talking about?’

I glanced at my watch, remembering I was supposed to call Gary Cabot this afternoon. It seemed so long ago since I’d spoken to him at the museum.

‘The man who runs the museum,’ I said to her, ‘is a guy called Gary Cabot. He got back from Dubai this morning. He’ll be able to help you ID the machines –’

‘Cabot won’t be doing anything.’

That stopped me. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, he was reported dead forty-five minutes ago.’

‘Cabot’s
dead
?’

‘You didn’t know?’

‘No.’

‘I only heard whispers from someone I know,’ Craw said. ‘But apparently a team from the Met went to tell Cabot about the pier, and they found his front door unlocked. They go inside, and he’s face down in the kitchen with his throat cut. His dad’s there too. Looks like someone’s closing the circle.’

59

We’d stopped briefly at a supermarket in Stratford where I’d grabbed some clothes, and now I clumsily changed in the car, restricted by a lack of space in the front. I pulled on jeans, a T-shirt, socks, and laced up a new pair of boots, keeping my eyes on my mirrors. Sirens faded again as a police car headed off towards some other part of the city. But sooner or later they wouldn’t fade out.