What Remains (51 page)

The Haunted House was the largest of the six cabinets by a long way, about five feet high and three feet wide – and it sat in the space where, if Korman and Grankin had completed their row of revarnished machines, the fourth point on the line would have been. It seemed obvious why they hadn’t revarnished this one, though: it was too big to move, too cumbersome, too heavy; the chances of being caught taking it out of the museum, too great.

But I wondered if there was another reason.

It sat among a group of others of about the same size, almost disguised by them. Its rear panel was incredibly difficult to get at: not only was it against a pillar, but there was no access to it from either side because of the location of adjacent machines. That, presumably, was the point. However, while under infra-red there was no evidence of varnish having been applied to this cabinet, I could see scratch marks on the wooden slats of the floor, made by the machine’s feet, where it had been levered out and then back in again.

‘Give me a hand here,’ I said to Healy.

With no space at the side of the machine, I bent down and pulled from the bottom, while Healy tried to heave it from the top. It was clumsy, difficult work, and we kept getting in each other’s way. Eventually, I told him to stand back, and – with a series of jerks – I managed to get it far enough out from the pillar to squeeze in behind it.

Manoeuvring into the space we’d created, a network of cobwebs and dust at ankle level, I tried the rear door of the machine. It was locked.

I looked back at the other machines in the row, starting to get a sense of what was going on here. ‘Korman removed something from them.’

‘What?’ Healy said.

He was standing behind me, shadowing me, partially reanimated by what he’d seen on the phone. ‘The other machines,’ I replied, ‘the revarnished ones in this row, their rear doors have been left unlocked. Because Korman removed something from each of them.’

Healy looked along the row, then back to the Haunted House, seeing where I was going with this. ‘And the reason this one is locked …’

‘Is because he put whatever he took out of
those
into
this
.’ I glanced across at Korman. ‘Can you grab his knife for me?’

He seemed reluctant to go back to the body at first, but then retreated down the middle row. Once I had the knife, I slid the tip of the blade in through the gap between door and frame, and began prying it open. Eventually, the panel started to bend.

With one final heft, it popped open.

Inside was a small sports holdall, zipped up, padlocked.
I removed it and shuffled out from behind the cabinet, to where Healy was standing. Puncturing the holdall with the blade, I cut along the top, adjacent to the zip, and opened it out. For a moment, I wasn’t entirely sure what I was looking at.

It was a series of five opaque plastic sleeves, all ziplocked. When I opened up the first, a wristwatch spilled out into my hands. The face was a sickly yellow, faded and discoloured, and it wasn’t working. The maker, Wirrek, I’d never heard of. When I turned it over, I found a manufacturer’s mark, a series of numbers, and then an inscription:
To our darling Edward. With much love. Mum and Dad.

I set it aside and opened up the next sleeve.

A gold chain with a crucifix attached.

In the third was a cigarette lighter, silver and ridged. I flipped it open. The spark wheel still turned, but there was no flame. I looked for any identifying marks, but all I could find were scratch marks on the underside of it.

I placed it down on to the floor, next to the wristwatch and the chain, and opened the fourth sleeve. Inside was a waistcoat. The last sleeve felt lightest of all – and, when I opened it up, I wasn’t even sure that there was anything in it.

But then something fluttered out.

I reached down and picked it up.

‘What’s that?’ Healy said.

It was plain, flat and stiff, like a piece of yellowing card. I turned it over. On the other side was a drawing: a bluebird carrying a heart, with the name
Life
in a scroll under it. The drawing had faded over time, its lines smudged.

I handed it to Healy.

He took it, examining it, turning it over again – and a
sudden realization bloomed in his face. It wasn’t a piece of paper. It wasn’t a drawing.

It was a tattoo on a flayed piece of skin.

‘Who the hell do these belong to?’ Healy said, looking from the skin to me, to the holdall on the floor – and then he started frowning. ‘Wait, you’ve missed something.’

I looked back at the bag.

Right in the corner, hidden beneath the folds, was another item. I reached in and grabbed it – but as soon as I took it in my fingers, as soon as I had it halfway out of the holdall, I knew what it was.

We both did.

It was the grey mask that Grankin had been wearing.

Part Five

75

Forty-eight hours later, I’d struck a deal with the police.

The alternative was admitting to nothing and building a lie, but as soon as I contacted Bishara and arranged to hand myself in, I realized there were too many ways to slip up, and he was too smart. Sooner or later, he’d find some area I hadn’t considered, an anomaly, and because he and his team were good at their jobs, and I was bone-tired and depleted – barely functioning after two days with no sleep, and a month of insomnia – the lie would reveal itself, and then everything would collapse. So I admitted to fleeing the scene in Wapping, putting it down to panic after finding East murdered in the back of my car; and then I admitted to leaving his body on Wanstead Flats, uncertain now of the reasons why I’d chosen to do that. Had I seen it as some sort of moral act? Had I really believed that there was something better and more principled in leaving him out there like that – exposed to the elements – rather than driving him around the city in my boot?

I wasn’t sure any more.

I couldn’t think straight.

Yet I maintained enough of a spark to know what I had to play with. If the police wanted the whole story, they’d have to come through me. For better or for worse, I had answers they didn’t yet – not everything, but enough. With my help, they could join the dots, knit everything together, and there’d be something close to a complete picture.
Without my cooperation, they’d carry on the search, never having the opportunity to call on Korman and Grankin, and particularly on Calvin East, who’d revealed so much about the life of the arcade, its machines, its secrets.

The only lies I told them were to safeguard Healy.

I assured them that Grankin was dead before I ever arrived at St David’s, and pushed a theory that Korman was cutting off every avenue back to whatever it was they had done together. It was an obvious but logical route to take, not least because Korman had already accounted for Calvin East, for Carla Stourcroft and Gail Clark, even for Gary and Joseph Cabot, who thought the pier had just been a tourist attraction – and the twins, who knew even less than that. It made sense to Bishara, to Sewinson too, a petite detective sergeant on his team, who had a hard south London accent laced with steel and mistrust, and who asked most of the questions. After all, if Korman was prepared to kill himself, why
would
he leave Grankin alive? There was no logic in ignoring a loose end.

When they asked me if I knew who the person was who’d been caught on CCTV camera, scaling the front gates of St David’s minutes before police arrived, I said I figured it was Korman; that he’d done a loop and come back around to the house at Whitehall Woods to grab a forensic suit. When they asked me why, if that was the case, he didn’t just burn the place down before he left, I told them it was because he would have been spotted and cornered that way. Police were only seconds away by the time he jumped the gate. In using a forensic suit, in taking his time, he’d almost been able to walk in and walk out again.

Every time I tried to protect Healy with a lie, I thought of him, of what he might be doing, and how he might be
dealing with the fallout. He was somewhere safe for the moment, holed up in a hotel not far from my house. But while I could protect him from other people, at least for now, I couldn’t protect him from himself. That was what worried me most. He’d barely spoken in the hours after we’d left the museum. At the hotel, he’d gone to the toilet and locked the door, and I’d been able to hear him sobbing. Before I’d left to hand myself in early the next morning, he’d told me that it wasn’t over, not until we found out why the girls had been killed. But I wondered, with Korman and Grankin dead, if we would ever know – and whether, in some ways, it might even be better that way.

The other thing I had to sidestep was an eyewitness account from the day the pier was set on fire. At first, I thought they were still pushing what Korman had anonymously called in, but then realized it was a genuine eyewitness living in one of the flats surrounding the pier. She claimed to have seen two men out on the promenade in the minutes before it went up in flames. ‘Maybe she meant she saw me and, sometime after, she saw Korman,’ I said to Bishara and Sewinson.

‘She said she saw two people at the same time,’ Sewinson replied.

I nodded. ‘Maybe Grankin was there too.’

‘So you’re saying she saw Korman and Grankin?’

‘I was alone.’

She eyed me, face neutral.

‘I don’t play well with others,’ I said, attempting a half-smile. It was met with absolutely no response at all. Ultimately, I wasn’t sure if they believed me or not, but I hadn’t once deviated from the account I’d given them, so they couldn’t accuse me of changing my story. A couple of
times I saw them trying to trap me, clever attempts at backing me into a corner and forcing me to come to a different conclusion, or present a different set of circumstances. But I managed to head them off, and after a while there became fewer gaps for them to come at me through.

Eventually, they couldn’t find any gaps at all.

My solicitor had always been Liz, my former neighbour, my ex-girlfriend, but when she moved out, it was because she wasn’t coming back, not for me, nor for anything I became involved in, so I took the name of a solicitor the police gave me, and called him. He was an earnest man in his fifties, starchy and humourless, but he did what I needed him to. He listened to me, advised me, worked with the Met to draft an agreement where I wouldn’t be charged if I provided information that helped progress the investigation and close the case, and – after I signed it – he remained there in the room, taking notes, as I recounted everything I knew.

76

Eventually, the flow of information went both ways.

‘After you gave us the name of Korman’s antiques shop,’ Bishara said, ‘we raided it. Ninety-nine per cent of the stuff in there was legitimate antiques.’

‘But not all of it?’

Bishara shook his head. ‘Not all of it.’

‘What else was there?’

‘You ever heard of “murderabilia”?’

I had. It was the term used to describe antiques or collectables that were connected or related to violent crimes, or formerly owned by murderers themselves. It might be poetry written by killers. Artwork. Possessions. Diaries.
It could be watches, gold chains, cigarette lighters or waistcoats
.

It could be flayed skin.

‘Korman was a collector?’

Bishara nodded. ‘He had a storage area behind the counter, which he kept covered with a carpet. We found some knives inside, mounted in frames, which we can assume Korman bought or acquired somehow. We found other things too, yet to be catalogued and analysed – including some pricey medical equipment …’ Bishara stopped. ‘We think some of it was stolen from the Dead Tracks.’

Its name froze the blood in my veins. My experience in Hark’s Hill Woods, nicknamed the Dead Tracks by locals, had brought me into contact with the man that had murdered Healy’s daughter; a man called Glass. He was in
prison now, but the ripples of his awful crimes continued onwards in the hands of collectors like Korman. It made a certain kind of sense that Korman would find a fascination in Glass: the two men had never met, and never would – but they were both responsible for destroying the same person’s life.

It also confirmed now why Korman didn’t have to run his business like everyone else, only opening when he wanted to work, and closing it when he didn’t – because his bottom line was being bolstered by a lucrative sideline.

Bishara gave me a moment more and then continued, quietly, solemnly: ‘We found DNA belonging to three separate people inside the oil drums.’

My stomach clenched.

‘Two, we haven’t been able to ID yet,’ Bishara said.

‘And the third?’

‘We think that belongs to Ana Yost.’

The idea sickened me, but it didn’t surprise me. And, as I mulled it over, I started to line everything up.

‘David?’

I looked at Bishara. ‘I was just thinking, Grankin must have got Neil and Ana Yost out to the pier somehow. Maybe he told them he worked there and he had a set of keys. Maybe they were all drunk after the fancy-dress ball. Maybe they saw it as a dare. However he did it, Korman was waiting there, and he killed Neil and Ana, and then stuffed them into the drums and turned them to ash. Then Korman and Grankin just waited for the right moment.’