What Remains (49 page)

He was covering Healy’s heart.

Korman hadn’t yet taken his eyes off me, but this time he did, his gaze shifting into the shadows, to the machines around him, his hand still in place on Healy’s naked chest. ‘Why did you have to ruin everything?’ he said.

I looked at him, uncertain what the right response would be.

When I gave no reply, he slowly returned to me, as if shaking off the remains of a dream, head dropping at an angle and rolling from side to side. Quietly, he said, ‘Which of you shot him?’

He was talking about Grankin.

‘It doesn’t matter now,’ I said.

‘It matters to me.’

I shrugged. ‘Why murder that family?’

A frown, as if the question were irrelevant.

‘Why kill people? Why burn everything down?’

He remained there, unmoved. ‘I’ve always liked fire. I
like the way it twists and contorts, how it changes things, reduces them. After Calvin told us about you coming to see him at the museum, I knew you would return to the pier eventually. I waited for you, and then set that whole place alight. I sat there for a while and watched it burn. It was beautiful.’ His tone was confusing: soft, a little melancholy; so at odds with the brutality of his crimes. ‘I didn’t expect you to die out there, but I hoped – after making my anonymous call to the police – that you’d get caught. Even if you told them who I was, what then? I’m a respected businessman with no history of trouble – at least on paper. A man with your track record; your friend here, who convinced the world he was dead. You’d both be revealed as liars. Who would believe you over me?’

For the first time, I noticed Healy’s gun: it was placed on top of one of the penny arcade machines to Korman’s left.

‘But I underestimated you,’ he went on, the first flash of resentment in his voice. ‘I didn’t realize how much you knew. When Victor called me this morning and told me you were at the house, I was on my way back from taking care of Cabot. I couldn’t get up there in time to help Victor. But, whatever happened, I knew St David’s had to burn to the ground. I had to make sure we didn’t leave anything behind.’

‘Except you did.’

He frowned, eyeing me.

‘The blood on the walls of the toilets, the oil drums.’

He shrugged.

‘There’ll be DNA on them.’

‘And what difference will that make?’

A weird answer, one I couldn’t interpret. There was no
viciousness to him, no ferocity, no sense of irrationality: he spoke flatly, even serenely, as if he were discussing something unimportant. It made me even more uneasy somehow, more perturbed by him. I’d come in expecting him to be unstable and crazed, a heightened version of Grankin: his insidiousness, his cruelty, channelled into something even worse. As I thought of the scene he’d left behind at Searle House, his violation of a family, I knew he
was
those things. But it didn’t seem like it – not here, not now.

‘How did you even get inside St David’s?’

He shrugged again. ‘You saw me in my forensic suit.’

‘So you just wandered in?’

‘I got there at the right time. It was chaos at the house, people coming and going. I used the confusion to take the tunnel through to the forest.’

‘But where did you get the suit from?’

‘I swiped it from the back of a forensics van.’

‘Just like that.’

He was still. ‘I’ve become good at blending in.’

He seemed entirely unconcerned by what forensics might find. So why had Korman risked everything to return to the children’s home? If he didn’t care about the evidence he and Grankin may have left there, why bother taking the risk to go back and burn it down?

It wouldn’t be long before the Met started to realize he and Grankin were working together, that Calvin East had been involved too – three histories entwined from the early days at St David’s, all the way through to their alibis the night the Clark family were killed. But, without returning to St David’s, he’d have had a head start on the police. He could have made a break for it, left the country, found somewhere to dig in and lie low.

Instead, he’d compromised himself – for what?

Korman moved slightly, staring at me, dragging me out of my thoughts. He was aware that I was trying to piece it all together. He wasn’t going to share his reasons, and he wouldn’t be tricked into a confession, but then something else caught my attention, something I might be able to use: very quickly, he glanced at Healy, still out cold. It was as if he was checking up on him.

Because he is.

He was waiting for Healy to wake up.

Whatever his reasons for asking me here, whatever it was that he wanted to show me, he wanted to show us both: he wanted Healy awake, fully cognizant.

‘Aren’t you worried about what the police might find?’ I said.

His eyes narrowed, as if he sensed that I was getting close to an answer, an animal aware that his surroundings had changed. I was reminded of Healy’s description of him in the moments before the heart attack; how Korman had zeroed in on his weakness, sniffing out its scent:
He punched me square in the chest, right on my heart, over and over. It was like a jackhammer.

‘There’ll be evidence Grankin didn’t wash away,’ I said again, but he didn’t respond. ‘The fire won’t have destroyed everything.’

This time he considered it. ‘It’ll have destroyed enough.’

‘Why did you go back in?’

Again, no response.

‘Why did you go back in?’ I repeated – and then a thought struck me hard.
The night he and Grankin were caught on film at Searle House
. It had looked like Korman had changed his appearance –
and Grankin had no face at all
.

The mask.

‘You went back in for Grankin’s mask.’

There was nothing in his face now, no expression, no movement at all, as if he’d deliberately closed himself down, a sudden blankness that was quite eerie. I didn’t know if he was calm or enraged. And yet the more I thought about it, the more it made sense.

‘The fire was just a distraction,’ I said, attempting to put myself there, to imagine it. ‘You went in, disguised as a forensic tech, and grabbed the mask. But people started to realize they didn’t know you, or recognize you. They realized there was an extra body in the forensic team. So you set the place alight to try and give yourself some time. But it was too late by then.’ I paused, recalling Bishara as he’d left the burning building, gesturing towards Korman:
That’s him!
‘They realized that you started the fire.’

Nothing. No reaction at all.

‘Why did you have to go back for the mask?’ I asked.

He looked down at Healy, his fingers still pressed to the centre of Healy’s chest, where they’d been the whole time. ‘The heart is such a wonderful piece of engineering. Chambers, arteries, valves. I know the heart hasn’t got anything to do with emotion, with
feeling
. We don’t feel sad because our
heart
is sad: it’s just the brain telling us, it’s chemicals, it’s a cold, biomechanical process. But, sometimes, it’s easy to forget that. When I walked into St David’s today, with my evidence bags, my bottles of petrol, I felt something here.’ He pushed his fingers hard into Healy’s chest, forcing him sideways; he was still unconscious, his body straining against the duct tape, so he wouldn’t feel anything. But this wasn’t about punishing Healy, it was about using Healy to get at me. ‘I knew, unless everything went
perfectly, that I would have to use the petrol. So I suppose, when I did, what I felt was a kind of sadness that this was all about to end.’

I glanced at Healy, at his chest.
Be careful
. ‘But what you were doing was killing people,’ I said evenly, calmly, trying not to aggravate him.

He remained stiff, apathetic.

‘You killed two eight-year-old girls.’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘That’s it? “Yes”?’

He sniffed.

‘Why did you kill them?’

‘It’s okay to kill their mother, but not them?’

I felt a twist of anger.

‘That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it? That you’re willing to overlook the fact that their mother was stabbed nine times, if I just give you the reasons why those two girls had to die as well.’ He looked at me. ‘Are their lives more important?’

‘They were
kids
.’

‘Kids can be duplicitous too.’

That stopped me. ‘What are you talking about?’

He didn’t reply immediately, glancing down at Healy, at his hand, and then he said, ‘If you’re looking for someone to blame, you should blame Stourcroft. If she hadn’t written her book, none of this would have happened. That family, those girls, would still be alive. Your friend here might still be fat and angry, and chasing his tail on the
one that got away
.’ His eyes widened at that last part, the words carrying the edges of the ruthlessness that really drove him. ‘All of this,’ he went on, voice steadying, slowing up, ‘it’s not down to
us
. It’s down to that woman’s book.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s got nothing to do with that.’

‘Really? But you’ve read the book?’

‘None of this is down to a book about a pier.’

Instantly, something changed, his hand finally moving away from Healy, his mouth forming an
oh
. A smile broke at the corners of his mouth, sly, crooked. ‘I think you need a change of perspective,’ he said.

‘Meaning what?’

He didn’t reply.

I was confused, thrown.

He slid in front of Healy, his smile gone, and reached around to the back of his belt. Suddenly, he had a knife in his hand. It was almost exactly the same as Grankin’s: a darker grip, more teeth on the blade, but the same length and size. Now I knew why he wasn’t interested in the gun to his left; why he hadn’t even looked at it. He preferred knives. It was how he’d accounted for Stourcroft, for Gail, the girls.

I moved towards him.

We were fifteen feet apart, surrounded by rows of dormant penny arcade machines. ‘Don’t come any closer,’ he said, quiet, still. ‘You come any closer and I will kill your friend, and then I will kill you. Is that clear?’

Something’s changed
.

He was almost distracted now, eyes moving across the room, inching from one machine to the next. I could see a hint of grey in his irises, the light either side of him settling around the top of his cheeks. There was none of the menace in him I’d seen so clearly and briefly a second ago. When his gaze returned to me, his nose wrinkled – as if disgusted – and I recalled the very first thing he’d said.

Why did you have to ruin everything?

‘What’s going on, Korman?’

Behind him, Healy twitched.

Korman picked up on it, Healy’s bones popping and creaking as he shifted gently on the chair. Re-establishing his grip on the knife, Korman began to retreat. I followed him, trying to lessen the gap between us, in case he went on the attack. Healy was barely conscious, vulnerable, and I needed enough time to get to him. But Korman didn’t use the knife on Healy. He just stopped moving and said, ‘I’m glad you’ve woken up.’

Healy opened his eyes, groggy, looking straight ahead at me, and then to his side, where Korman was still watching. ‘You …’ he said, voice full of fluid, and started coughing, hacking up lungfuls of air, saliva spilling from his lips. When he was finished, he glanced at Korman again. ‘I’m going to fucking kill you,’ he muttered.

Korman didn’t say anything.

Healy shivered, arms trapped behind him, trying to shake himself out of the haze. ‘I’m going to
kill
you,’ he spat again, stretching the binds. Muscle and veins showed through as he tried to lean towards Korman, tried to get to him, a dog straining on a leash. ‘
You’re gonna pay for what you did!
’ he screamed, but the effort was too much for him and he descended into another coughing fit.

Korman watched him, half turned towards me so he could keep me in his sights, then turned completely in my direction, looking down at the slats between us, the wood worn by years, by thousands of passing tourists. As Healy calmed down, Korman’s attention shifted to the machines again, looking at them the same as before, his eyes lingering on them, almost doting on them; how a parent might look at their child.

‘This is what I wanted you both to see,’ he said.

I studied him, his face, the knife in his hand, trying to figure out where this was going – but then, before I’d barely even processed it, he’d turned the knife around, the blade facing along the inside of his arm.

I leaped forward, arms out, trying to stop him.

But he wasn’t going for Healy.

He drove the blade into himself, the knife entering his stomach, just below the ribs. The impact sent him stumbling, one step, a second, and then he regained enough self-control to grip the handle and give the weapon a violent twist. There was a terrible sound of flesh tearing, a hiss of pain, and then he dropped to his knees, the impact sending a tremble through the slats, the room seeming to list. He looked up at me, knife embedded in his body, blood running out of him like a tap, and finally it came: the smile Healy had described seeing after Korman left him dying on the floor in Stables Market; the person Calvin East had been so scared off, silent and frightening, haunting him through the corridors of St David’s. Here was the man who had taken the lives of two eight-year-olds.

This was what he wanted us both to see.

Quickly, I closed the gap between us, but then I stood there, looking down at him, unsure what to even do. I had so many questions for him, and there was no time left to ask them. The smile faded from his face, his expression drooping, but his eyes remained alive for a moment more, confirming what this was.

One final act of cruelty.

There would be no answers to my questions, no closure for the families his actions had torn apart, nothing for Healy even after everything he’d sacrificed to get here.
There would be no journey to the centre of whatever it was he and Grankin had done, no clues about how long it had been going on or how many had suffered; only the burnt, twisted traces of whatever hadn’t gone up in flames, and the worthless scraps I could pick out from the memory of this last conversation.