What Remains (44 page)

Pushing the thought away, I led us forward.

There were no ready-made paths, no hints of the routes Grankin may have taken. Any path we cut out, we cut out through a bed of low-level weeds, of overgrowth and contorted tree roots. I moved deliberately slowly, partly because I knew nothing of this forest, its contours and dangers, and partly because I wanted to reduce the noise we were making. Grankin could have been anywhere.

He could be watching us now
.

The idea made me stop, Healy almost bumping into me. I scanned the area immediately around us, the trees so close in it was like being back in that tunnel. My heart rate increased again; my muscles hardened. We were barely any distance from civilization at all, and yet it felt like we were somewhere remote and uncharted.

‘What?’ Healy said softly.

To our right, there was a minor break in the trees, an oval-shaped gap that showed through to a sliver of open land. Was it a clearing? I pointed at it, telling Healy we were heading there, and we began to cross a dense patch of nettles and vines, pine cones crunching beneath our boots. The closer we got, the more I could see of what lay beyond the treeline: it looked like a field, full of knee-high grass, surrounded on all sides by a relentless, tangled barrier of trees.

But it wasn’t a field.

It was a garden.

As we stopped at its edges, the front of a building came into view, ugly and grey, flat-roofed, double-storeyed with two wings. It was big and functional, like a cross between a police station and a Victorian grammar school, but its windows and doors had been boarded up. The forest formed a broken circle around it, revealing the remnants of flower beds that had once grown here, and a driveway. It came up to the front of the building, looped around and headed out again.

‘What the hell is this place?’ I said, as much to myself as to Healy.

He didn’t reply, his eyes scanning the building for any sign of life, then settling on a warped, paint-blistered sign, half hidden by trees, at the bottom of the front steps. Moving a little further to my right, I tried to get a better view of it myself.

‘What was it East said?’ Healy whispered.

I looked at him. ‘Huh?’

‘He said he was put into a children’s home in Chingford.’

I looked back at the building.

Healy nodded, his eyes returning to the sign at the front, rinsed of colour but the letters still visible.

St David’s Children’s Home
.

‘This is where Korman and Grankin grew up,’ he said.

63

We waited, rain continuing to beat against the trees, drumming against the leaves, against the canopy. There were four huge windows on the front of the shell that had once been St David’s Children’s Home, all boarded up. What I was more interested in was an extension on the side of the building – a little newer, although still decades old – built in brick, with a slanted red-tile roof: it was half submerged behind a bank of big fir trees, but I could make out a set of grey double doors at one end.

One was slightly ajar.

I gestured for Healy to follow me, and we arced around, using the trees as cover. Forty feet short of the double doors, I stopped for a second time, taking in the view on this side of the building, waiting for Healy to fall in. As the wind picked up, the open door wafted out from its frame.

‘Are you coming in with me?’ I said to him quietly.

He frowned. ‘What sort of question is that?’

He was weary, his shoulders rising and falling, and I thought I could see him shivering slightly.

‘I don’t know what we’re going to find in there.’

He shrugged, his breathing slowly settling into a rhythm, and then looked at me, a shimmer in his eyes. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘All that matters is them.’

He didn’t mean Korman and Grankin.

He meant Gail and the girls.

Before I had a chance to say anything else, Healy was moving past me and along the edges of the treeline, in the direction of the extension on the side of the building. ‘
Healy!
’ I hissed, but he didn’t stop. He broke from cover very briefly as he crossed to where the extension jutted out, and then found a spot, out of view, in front of the fir trees.

He looked back at me, focused, defiant.

I scanned the boarded windows, trying to see if anything had changed, if there was any indication that his movements had been detected, but there was nothing. Every window remained hidden behind slabs of wood. Out in the forest beyond, however, changes were harder to spot: leaves moved, branches swayed, rain drifted out of the sky in grey lines. I started to worry that the door might be a trap, left open in order to draw us in, while Grankin waited somewhere else.

Maybe alone, maybe with Korman.

Had he seen us approaching his house and made a run for it? I thought of how the TV was still on, the extractor fan going, as if Grankin had left in a hurry. And then I looked at Healy, still short of breath, my coat swallowing him up, even the gun big in his hands now, and had a moment of clarity:
I’m going to get us both killed
. I could look after myself, account for my actions, justify them, push the fear down and do what was necessary – but I couldn’t do the same for him. I couldn’t lead him in there, frail and vulnerable, incapable of defending himself.

I’d be leading him to his execution.

I couldn’t do that with a clear conscience.

Getting out my phone, I checked the signal, then looked at Healy again, our eyes lingering on one another.

Then I dialled Craw’s number.

Healy was still looking at me, almost enclosed by the fir trees, a frown forming on his face. He mouthed,
What are you doing?
I held up a finger to him, trying to tell him that he needed to trust me here.

Craw answered. ‘Raker?’

‘Craw,’ I said. ‘I need you to listen.’

‘Where are you?’

‘Just listen to me.
Please
.’ I glanced up at Healy. He’d stepped away from the fir trees, the gun at his side. ‘There’s a guy called Victor Grankin. He lives at 3 Poland Gardens in Whitehall Woods. You have to tell whoever needs to know that
this
guy – and another man, possibly called Paul Korman, possibly Benjamin Gray – are responsible for the death of that family. They murdered the Clarks, they probably murdered a couple called Neil and Ana Yost too. You getting this?’

A pause. ‘Let me get a pen.’

I waited, watching Healy.

Then she was back on: ‘Okay. What was the name?’

‘Victor Grankin, 3 Poland Gardens. I was in his house –’

‘You broke in?’

‘
Listen
to me,’ I said. ‘You need to send a team down.’

‘Raker, it’s not my borou–’

‘Then find out whose borough it is, and call them.
Please
, Craw. I’ve got …’ I stopped, eyeing Healy.
I’ve got Healy here, but not the Healy we knew. Not that version of him. Not any more. This version I can’t protect. I can’t protect him from Korman and Grankin.
‘Just send a team to that address, and to the former site of St David’s Children’s Home. That’s literally next door to the place Grankin is in.’

‘Why?’ she said. ‘What’s at the children’s home?’

‘I think that’s where these men are hiding out.’

‘Why?’

‘Because they grew up here.’

‘ “Here”? You mean you’re there already?’

I glanced across what used to be the front lawn, to where we’d come from. The thick forest. Grankin’s house, invisible, hidden.

‘Yes,’ I said to her. ‘I’m here.’

A sigh, but no response.

‘Just trust me, okay?’

‘Are you in danger?’

‘Not if you send a team down …’

I stopped.

‘Raker?’

Shit
. ‘I’ve got to go, Craw.’

‘Why?’

I looked across the front lawn.

Healy had disappeared.

64

Slowly, I pulled the grey door open.

Immediately inside the extension was a reception area, a wooden counter with a sliding glass window on the right, green linoleum on the floor, posters and notices still on a corkboard to the left. It had the vibe of a hospital ward, closed in and musty. Straight ahead were two security gates, one after the other, with a number pad embedded in the wall beside the first. Both gates were wide open.

I slipped inside and let the door fall softly back against the frame, the light dwindling. On the other side of the reception desk there was a small skylight, but most of what lay ahead remained in shadow, the corridor continuing beyond the security gates, both sides lined with identical grey doors, apart from a single red one on the left. That had been chained shut.

At the end was a staircase.

I hadn’t brought a torch, because I hadn’t been expecting to need one, so as I inched forward, I took out my phone, accessed the torch function and held it up in front of me. On the floor, I could see footprints, a mix of mud and leaves from the forest.
Healy
. They headed straight along the centre of the corridor, through the gates, in the direction of the stairs. As I followed them, I felt a mixture of anger and panic at his stupidity for trying to do this all by himself, alone and underpowered; at the idea of what may be awaiting him.

Midway along, I realized one of the doors to my left was slightly open, revealing an office. A desk had been turned over, as if toppled, chairs scattered too. A high window behind them looked over the long grass and knots of bushes on the lawn out front. Like a puddle of spilt paint, a little of the light from the room leaked out into the corridor, and I could see a series of signs hanging from the roof in front of me, pointing in different directions, to different parts of the building. Reception. Administrative offices. The North Wing. Something called the JJC Block.

Quickly, lightly, I headed up the stairs.

Another set of doors connected this newer part of the extension with what must have been the second floor of the original building. It was Victorian, polished marble floors, high ceilings, rooms and windows on either side. It was old, musty, airless, but it wasn’t in a state of decay, and it made me wonder how long the home had been shut. Did it close around the time that Grankin moved here? Was that another reason for him choosing to buy the house in Poland Gardens?

I refocused, passing the rooms.

They each appeared to have catered to different age groups, the remains of their previous life still evident: in the first few, big foam shapes, toys, pens, drawings that had fallen away from pinboards; then bookshelves, DVD boxes and old board games in the ones further down. At the end, another staircase wound back down to ground level, but not before I spotted something in the last room on the left: an old table-football game, uneven on its legs, its levers rusted, the glass cracked. It was just like the one East and Grankin had played on as kids – or maybe
was
the same one.

My attention drifted back to the stairs in front of me, and I took a couple of steps forward, peering over the side of the banister.

Darkness below.

But then distantly, almost beyond range, I started hearing something. Inching down to the second step, I looked again, still unable to see anything, but hearing it more clearly than ever. What
was
that? I continued my descent until, halfway down, I stopped again, staring into the shadows – and, like an explosion of fireworks, goosebumps scattered across my skin, along my back, the edges of my shoulder blades.

Because I knew what it was now.

I knew that noise.

It was someone crying.

65

At the bottom of the stairs, the building cleaved off in two separate directions: to a dining hall, out of reach beyond doors that had been chained shut; and then the other way, into a long, straight corridor that ploughed even deeper into the bowels of the building. Midway down, on the left, there was an open door, light flickering on and off inside, its glow spilling out into the hallway. As it did, shadows shifted and twisted all the way along, making it look like the whole corridor was moving, its walls alive, doorways changing shape and appearance. There was no mains electric – which meant it must have been a torch.

The crying was coming from that direction.

I switched off the light on my phone and looked behind me, through the glass panels in the dining-hall doors, knowing – logically – that there was no way anyone could come at me from there. The doors were chained, and there was no one else on the stairs. Any trouble was going to be in front of me. But I still felt hesitant, panicked.

As I stared along the corridor, at the light moving, at the gentle sound of sobbing, I closed my eyes again, trying to gather myself. I could feel the cut on my face throbbing, the pain of even older scars too, beneath my shirt. My head was hurting, my heart drumming in my ears. It was an orchestra, a wall of sound and doubt, and it felt like I was drowning in it. Before long, I started to worry that
I was about to drop to the floor again, just like I’d done at the museum.

Not here. Not now.

Please not now.

I took a long, controlled breath, then opened my eyes again, searching the immediate area for something I could arm myself with. A voice played out in my head on repeat, warning me that I’d been drawn into this way too fast, but I ignored it and kept looking. Finally, tucked away out of sight, in a space next to the dining-hall doors, was an old broom. I grabbed it, removed the bristles and managed to break the damp wood of the handle in two. Shorter was going to be better: it wasn’t the best weapon, but it was heavy enough – and now it had a sharp, splintered end.

I turned back, looking along the hallway.

Quickly, something seemed to shift in the darkness further down, beyond the open door, beyond the light and the sound of crying. Was someone there?

Was someone watching me?

If I’d been spotted, it was too late to back out, so I started moving forward, quicker than before, heart hammering against my chest. The corridor kept on going, a tunnel of doors, one after the other like a film rerunning, the same scene being played over and over again. Two or three were open, the vague shapes of bunks still inside, stripped of their mattresses.
These were all bedrooms
. This was where Korman and Grankin had slept, where Calvin East had tried to fit in. The further I got, the deeper I was drawn, the more the smell seemed to change. It became more ingrained, a blight, settling as I got to the building’s core: old wood, mould, the tangy stench of iron.