Fall From Grace (22 page)

‘I’ve got to run to a meeting.’

I gave her the man’s description, concentrating on the chipped incisor. That was what would get him found. ‘Do his details tally up with anyone you’ve met or known?’

‘No. Why, who is he?’

‘He broke into my house.’

‘What?’

‘Your dad’s things are gone.’

‘What?’

‘His iPad. My laptop. All I’ve got left is a notepad, which I had on me.’

The whole point of Craw coming to me was because she couldn’t go the official route. But now we needed her access. Specifically, her access to the police database.

‘So what are you asking me?’ she said, but she knew where this was heading.

‘I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.’

Nothing.

‘Craw?’

‘No way.’

‘The guy’s in the wind,’ I said to her, and then glanced at my mobile phone, the location app still ticking over. It wasn’t strictly true – not yet, anyway – but if he didn’t resurface in an area where the MacBook could access public WiFi, it soon would be.

‘And if he happens to be some long-lost pal of my dad’s?’

I didn’t reply, but that was where the risk lay: her being caught searching police records after she’d been told to back off – and finding someone linked to her father.

‘This is my
career
, Raker.’

‘I know. Look, if it can’t be done –’

And then my phone buzzed once.

Next to the MacBook listing, a green light had appeared. I tapped on it and the app transferred to a map screen, tagged with street numbers I didn’t recognize and side streets that meant nothing.

I zoomed out.

Waiting for it to fill in, I heard Craw saying, ‘Raker?’

‘Hold on a second.’

The green blob reappeared at the end of a small, unidentified road just off the A2.
Where the hell is the A2?
I zoomed out a third time, and the map began to fill in, this time loading in street names. But the blob didn’t move.

Because he’s reached his destination
.

I switched to a satellite view and saw he was inside an industrial unit, one of four crammed together in a cluster. The signal lasted about a minute before it went dead.

But by then he’d put himself on the map.

He was in a warehouse on Bayleaf Avenue, just off the A2 in south London. The A2, I discovered, was the Old Kent Road – and two streets down from that was Scale Lane. That was the address of the phone box I’d seen on the records that Spike had got me.

The phone box Franks had been called from.

29

At eight o’clock, night long since having taken hold, I made my way south along Bayleaf Avenue, a single-lane street that hit a dead end four hundred feet down. There were two units on either side, their corrugated-iron exteriors an exact match. The only difference was that the one furthest along had no signage on it and its windows were whitewashed.

It was empty.

His signal had come from inside.

I walked about fifty yards and looked back over my shoulder, to the glow of the Old Kent Road. It was like dropping into the shadows of a cave. There were no lights on inside any of the units any more, no security lamps to herald my approach, no cars or vans or delivery trucks. Halfway down, I had no choice: I checked no one was following me, removed the flashlight I’d brought, and switched it on.

Closer to the empty unit, I saw that a set of arches – sixty feet high – had been closed off with huge metal grates, and could hear the metallic whisper of a railway line above me. As the beam cut across the night, shadows danced in the ridged exterior of the unit. Close up, all the buildings seemed in various states of decay, but the vacant one was worse: hairline cracks had formed on its front, some of its roof tiles were missing, and the ground in front of the cargo doors was swarming with weeds.

The doors were padlocked to a metal plate, screwed into the ground. But on the side was a regular door, six feet off the ground and sitting at the top of a rickety wooden staircase. I made my way around, stepping over fallen pieces of masonry and a twisted, writhing mass of weeds. As I took the first step, I felt it bend gently under my weight, the wood warped and old. On the second, something snapped, so I moved as quickly as I could, taking the rest of them two at a time. At the top, I could see the door was equally neglected: its paint was blistered, it had bent slightly against the frame, and its single glass panel had cracked through the middle. But not everything had been allowed to rot.

The lock was new.

Removing a pick and a tension wrench, I spent the next ten minutes trying to feel my way along the pins, torch between my teeth, hands getting colder, breath steaming up the glass panel on the door. I hated picking locks, the patience it required, the absolute precision, and, in truth, I wasn’t particularly good at it. But, finally – on a fourth attempt – I heard a soft
dumph
, and the door gently kicked away from the frame, squeaking on its hinges.

A corridor stretched ahead of me, a door on the left leading into an office, another at the end pulled shut. Next to the one on the left was a window, creamy and smeared. There were the ghosts of old furniture visible through the smoky glass. As I stepped into the building, a fine layer of debris crunched under my boots – and then the temperature started to change. Subtly at first, barely there, the bitter cold still rolling in from behind me. But when I pulled the main door shut, the chill of winter died away and it became instantly, oppressively warm. On the wall beside me was a small, four-bar radiator. I touched a hand to it.

It was cold.

I continued moving. The further I got, the hotter it became. On the window into the office, condensation had formed, trails of water running down the edges of the glass.

Now I could hear a noise too.

A faint repetition, like a machine ticking over.

I stood there, hesitant, some part of me instinctively sounding an alarm. But then gradually I began moving again, inching deeper into the warehouse. I tried the office door, checking the interior. It smelled of damp and cigarette smoke, the odour ingrained in the walls and furniture. But it was cooler than the corridor.

Because the heat wasn’t coming from here.

I turned to face the other, closed door.

There was a slim gap at the bottom. Where it wasn’t quite flush to the frame, a soft wave of light escaped under it, washing out across the floor in front of me. The closer I got, the more heat I could feel. It pressed hard at the door from the other side, and when I touched the handle it was warm. I realized then that the noise I could hear, the mechanical repetition, was actually popping.

The kind of sound you get when something is burning
.

I pushed at the door and it opened out into the main warehouse. Most of it was cast into darkness, its ceilings too high for light to claw at, two of its walls a swathe of black. The room was divided up by banks of stand-alone storage units, their shelves cleared out. On the left was an L-shaped wall, about five feet high, its brick crumbling. It sectioned off a space behind which I could see a dirty silver metal hood, bolted to the wall ten feet up, and a series of ventilation pipes.

Underneath was a kiln.

As I approached, I saw the remains of a previous life, a time when this building had housed a glassworks. A set of callipers – almost rusted through – was discarded on the ground. A set of hand shears. A blistered blowpipe. The heat was intense, even from twenty feet away, but as I got closer, the popping noise got louder and I realized the kiln was full of debris: wood, brick, cardboard, plastic, anything at all.

Anything that needed getting rid of
.

Something fluttered in my stomach.

Stopping at the brick wall, six feet from the door of the kiln, I looked back over my shoulder. The warehouse felt even bigger now, as if the shadows had spread. When I turned back to the fire, the same anxiety hit me again, thick and congealed in my guts.

From this distance, I could see the remains of the Moleskines, shreds of paper – reduced to specks of ash – being drawn upwards, into the neck of the kiln. Another step closer, and I saw my laptop, sitting on its side among a knot of wood and brick, half of it already melted, splashed across the walls of the kiln like it had detonated. Had he dumped it in here after realizing I’d been tracing him? Or was it always the plan to dispose of the laptop and what was on it? My eyes moved again and I spotted a backpack – the one the man had carried all my things in – and the clothes he’d been wearing: the black trousers, the black fleece, the navy-blue balaclava. There was Franks’s iPad too, fused to the rear of the kiln, the screen cracked, its casing reduced to a molten silver pool.

He’d got rid of everything.

I leaned as close to the mouth of the kiln as I could go without scalding my face, trying to get a better view. Inside it was like a dumping ground: the gnarled skeletons of mobile phones; some sort of piping, coiled like a black snake; a pair of blue jeans, caked to the dome of the kiln, as if they had been painted on; countless other items long since burned, unrecognizable as they fused together in the heat. I half expected to find bones in it too, but if there had ever been bodies dumped inside, they had become memories long ago.

Clunk
.

A deep, resonant sound echoed across the warehouse.

I swept the flashlight out, to the spaces around me, to the way I’d come in, to the cargo doors. Nothing moved. I shifted the torch on to the shelves, wondering if something had fallen off. But then I remembered the shelves were all empty. I paused there for a moment, waiting for the sound to come again, but all I could hear now was the kiln: crackling, popping, burning.

I felt a trail of sweat run down my back, tracing the ridge of my spine, and then the torch hit an area on the far side. An old table, awash in empty food cartons and beer cans. Discarded magazines. A paint-specked radio which had fallen on its side. A torch.

There was a laptop too, ancient and battered. The electricity had been turned off in this place, so there was no power cord for the laptop, no plugs nearby to even charge it, no modem.

Yet, as I flipped the lid, it sprang into life.

It had been charged somewhere else, and brought here – and now it was leeching off the WiFi from the unit next door. There was also a thin, five-pin lead coming out of one of the USB slots, unattached to anything external – or, at least, not at the moment.

The desktop was clean in a way that could only have been intentional. There were no folders or files, no programs beyond what existed on it when it had first been shipped. I went to the menu and selected Documents and Pictures, and there was nothing in those either. Even the Recycle Bin was empty. The laptop was registered to ‘334’, which had to be deliberate: he’d left his name off, presumably as insurance against just this sort of thing.

His web history went back half a day. Prior to that – presumably prior to using it at lunchtime – there was no evidence he’d ever been on the Internet. He’d cleared out his cookies and cache, and there were no bookmarks.

He repeatedly wipes it clean
.

I went through what he’d been looking at today.

Various newspapers. Football sites. Late afternoon, he had spent two hours looking at porn, his history logging a succession of images where women were outnumbered by gangs of men. The more he watched, the darker and more aggressive the content became. But then, in the hour after that, things calmed down, and I found something else, another webpage he’d looked at. It was a tech site titled: ‘Do Mac files work on a PC?’

I realized then what the five-pin lead was for.

An external hard drive
.

I looked back at the kiln, at the remains of what had once been my MacBook. He’d copied everything on my Mac and on Franks’s iPad across to the hard drive. The next step was to move them across to his PC.

Then: another noise.

I pushed the lid of the laptop back down. It wasn’t the same sound as before – the clunk. This one was softer, less industrial.

I listened.

The hum of the laptop.

The soft crackle of the kiln.

And then a click.

I paused, eyes moving to the kiln, the shelving, the cargo doors; to the door that led back into the corridor.

Then I realized what it was.

Someone’s inside the warehouse
.

30

I moved quickly, across the floor of the warehouse, in the opposite direction to the exit. Where two shelving units had aligned in a T-shape, I dropped down and killed the light.

The door opened.

A shape emerged from the corridor, dark against it, the kiln painting one side of them in a soft orange glow. Beneath the hood of their top, I glimpsed a face: it was the man I’d chased; the one I’d tracked here. His skin looked like snow, pale and bloodless, but his eyes were the opposite, reduced to smooth discs like holes in his skull. His clothes from earlier were burning in the kiln, but this new set was basically the same: black hooded top, black trousers, black boots, a blue body warmer, zipped up.

The side door had had a cylinder lock on it – once I’d pushed it closed, it clicked shut and there was no evidence anyone had ever been here. Except, as he stood there in the doorway, I noticed a glitch in his movement, a momentary hesitation, and he paused – fingers still wrapped around the door handle – staring across the warehouse at the kiln.

Slowly, he looked out across the room.

His movements were sharp, robotic, like a machine scanning its surroundings. In the lack of light, there was something more menacing about him, his rigidness, the way he seemed to sense something was off, like an animal. I felt myself tense as he looked at me, towards the area on my left, and then on to the loading doors. When he came back again, the tiniest pinpricks of light registered beneath the hood – his eyes connecting with the kiln – and then they were gone again, reduced to an oily black.