What Remains (36 page)

‘This is bullshit,’ Healy said.

I looked at him. ‘Healy, let’s just –’

‘No, let’s
not
,’ he fired back. He gestured to East with the knife, the blade glinting in the dull light. ‘He hasn’t even
talked
about them yet. He’s sitting there spinning a yarn that doesn’t even matter. Korman, Grankin, we know
they did it. He should be telling us where to find them, not spinning some history lesson.’

I didn’t say anything in reply, and – in the quiet – we eyed each other, so much passing between us: a history littered with exchanges like this, moments where I’d been forced to subdue him, sometimes physically, dragging him back from battles he’d never had any hope of winning. It would be even harder now. As far as the rest of the world knew, he was in a cemetery in north London. That made him unaccountable to anyone, unencumbered by the rule of law. If he picked up the gun and shot East through the head right now, there would be no fallout. There was no trail back to him.

As I thought of that, my mind returned to Craw, to the idea of picking up the phone to her, of passing off the chaos of this case, of giving her Korman and Grankin’s names; and, as I thought of the alternative, of
not
picking up the phone to her, a kind of premonition took hold, utterly clear to me: Healy, face-to-face with Korman and Grankin, and this journey ending exactly how it had begun – in blood, in death.
This is going to spin out of control if you let it.

Call Craw.

Call her now.

‘What about Gail and the girls?’

Healy’s voice brought me back into the moment.

East looked at him, but didn’t reply.

Healy stepped forward, simmering. ‘What about Gail and the gir–’

‘We’re almost there now,’ East said, cutting him off, a bleakness to his voice that doused Healy’s fire. ‘But you’ll want to hear about the machines first.’

‘Machines?’

‘The ones in the museum.’

I looked from Healy to East, and said, ‘What about them?’

He looked between us. ‘Gail’s dissertation was about forgotten Victorian architecture. I don’t know if you know that already, but it was. Part of it was about the pier. She let me read it once. In it, she said she believed the pier had some undiscovered story to tell, a hidden secret of some kind. She didn’t know what; neither do I. I don’t even know if Carla Stourcroft did, despite everything. But I think maybe they were right.’ He paused, a blink of fear. ‘And I think it’s to do with the penny arcade machines.’

48

East turned from me to Healy and back to me, then took a long breath, as if readying himself for what was to come. ‘About five months after Mr Cabot hired Vic to run security, Vic comes to my office and says we should go for a drink. So we head to this place in Wapping, and there’s no sign of Korman this time – just Vic and I – but exactly the same thing happens. Vic gets out his chequebook and says, “How would you like to earn some more money? All you have to do is turn a blind eye to some things.” ’

I looked at him. ‘Meaning what?’

‘I asked him that. I said, “I don’t want to be involved in a burglary.” But he said, “It’s not a burglary. We won’t be stealing anything. There’ll just be a subtle change, here and there. Nothing serious.” I told him I couldn’t agree to anything that was going to get me fired, but he said Mr Cabot would never find out. I asked him again what was going on, and he said, “You’ll probably never notice.” It still sounded like something that was going to get me the sack, so I thanked him for the drink and told him I couldn’t do it …’ A pause. Sad, anguished. ‘But then, as I got up to go, he touched me on the arm to stop me, and he handed me a cheque.’

I nodded, said nothing.

‘Ten thousand pounds.’

‘That’s how much he paid you this time?’

‘Yes.’

‘And what happened?’

‘Like I told you, Stourcroft was on the right track.’ He glanced at Healy. ‘So was Gail, in her dissertation. The second time I met Carla Stourcroft, in early 2010, it was clear she thought something was going on at Wonderland. Gail eventually thought the same too. I found her dissertation in the flat when we were dating –’

‘You weren’t dating her,’ Healy snarled.

East looked at him. ‘I never wanted –’

‘I don’t give a fuck what you wanted.’

Silence, vibrating with the threat of violence.

I held up a hand to Healy and said, ‘
Specifics
, Calvin.’

‘Korman and Grankin …’

East faded out. He was leaning forward, arms uncomfortable behind him, muscles and bones starting to stiffen. I considered freeing his wrists, cutting the duct tape and letting him talk to us without being bound. But then I looked across the room at Healy, gaunt and pinched. Fire burned as clearly in his eyes as if we’d set the room alight. He had a knife and a gun – and nothing else to live for.

As if on cue, he stepped away from the wall – fuelled by the mention of Gail and the girls – and said to East, ‘Korman and Grankin
what
?’

East glanced between Healy and me.

‘Come on, Calvin,’ I said. ‘You took another ten grand of Grankin’s money, and he asked you to turn a blind eye to what was going on. Which was what?’

The chair creaked again under his weight, as he shifted position. ‘He was right. Nothing got stolen – but strange things would happen. I remember, one day, about three months later, I was walking through the museum, across
the first floor, and I noticed two of the penny arcade machines had changed.’

‘Changed how?’

‘They’d swapped positions with each other. It was these two old bagatelles, which are kind of like non-electrical pinball tables. They were almost exactly the same design. Most people – even Mr Cabot, who knew all those machines so well – wouldn’t even notice. But I was in there doing tours every day. I noticed them.’

‘You think it was Grankin?’

‘It had to be.’

‘Why would he bother swapping them around?’

‘I don’t think he swapped them. I think he removed them, and when he brought them back again, he couldn’t remember which one went where.’

‘Removed them? Why would he do that?’

‘I checked both of the machines over, inside and out, to see if anything had been altered or updated – but pulleys, springs, mechanisms, they were all still in place, exactly as they should have been. It was just the finish that had changed.’

‘Finish?’

‘The finish on the cabinets. They’d both been freshly varnished.’

‘You’re saying he removed them in order to
varnish
them?’

‘Yeah. But they hadn’t been done well.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, from early on, Mr Cabot entrusted me with looking after the machines, but always,
always
underlined the importance of using the same brand of wood varnish – Hoberman’s. It’s super-expensive – like, forty-five quid for
a pot – but it gives the perfect finish and it’s the only varnish that should ever be used on machines as old as the ones in the museum. Usually it goes on so smoothly, if it wasn’t for the marginal colour change, you’d have a hard time even seeing it. I get why Mr Cabot pays so much for that brand. But the finish I found on those two bagatelles, it wasn’t smooth at all.’

‘What was it like?’

‘It was kind of globby. Careless.’

‘Did Cabot ever notice?’

‘No. Like I said, he didn’t have the time to attend to all the machines himself; the museum, the car workshops he still owned, they were keeping him too busy. So he passed the job of maintenance to me. He told me, if there was ever something more complicated, I should consult him about it – but basic stuff he was happy for me to handle. I wanted to tell him what I’d found the first time I saw it. I felt terrible lying to him. I felt frightened that he would find out what was going on, about these machines being varnished without permission … but I was even more frightened about what Vic and Korman would do to me.’

He swallowed, tried to speak, but then his words trailed off.

A brief memory sparked, of the conversation I’d had earlier with Ewan Tasker.
During the summer fair, Cabot told police that Grankin had stolen thirty-six 250ml tins of wood varnish from him
. That was eight years
after
this – East had noticed the machines swapping position in 2002, Cabot didn’t sack Grankin for stealing the varnish until 2010 – but clearly the two events were connected. The question was how – and
why
.
Why
was Grankin revarnishing the cabinets?

‘What else?’ I said.

‘About four weeks later, I was taking a tour group around and saw that something was wrong with one of the fortune tellers. They’re these old machines about six feet tall, set inside a wooden cabinet, with a kind of puppet character behind glass in the top half that tells your fortune when you insert a coin.’

‘What was wrong with it?’

‘It had a small scratch down the side.’

‘It wasn’t like that before?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘No way. Mr Cabot had spent his life preserving those cabinets when they were out on the pier. He used to joke to me that he never got married because he couldn’t love anything more than his arcade machines. The only reason he never noticed was because the side with the scratch on was hidden from view.’ He paused, looking between us. ‘But I noticed. I could see where the cabinet had been removed. Vic hadn’t quite lined it up with where it had sat before. I could see scratches on the floor.’

‘Did he revarnish that one as well?’

‘Yes. Just like the others.’

I glanced at Healy, then back to East. ‘Why would Grankin be doing that?’

‘I don’t know,’ East said, ‘but it was definitely him. A couple of days after that, he came to my office and asked me out to lunch, and we hadn’t got a minute from the museum when he said to me, “When we paid you that money, we paid you to keep quiet.” It was like he
knew
that I’d noticed.’ A long silence. ‘We never even went out to lunch. He just turned right around and headed back to the museum.’

I tried to imagine the reasons that Grankin would go
around applying fresh varnish to machines in Cabot’s arcade –
and
doing it on the quiet. When I looked across at Healy, the same unanswered question was in his face.

‘There was one other time, four years later,’ East went on. ‘This must have been towards the end of 2007. Vic came to my office and asked me if I fancied some lunch, so I headed out with him, and we actually went to a restaurant this time. Except Korman was there. I hadn’t seen him at all since that meal we had in Soho at the start, back in 2002. He didn’t say anything.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, he didn’t speak.’

‘At all?’

East squeezed his eyes shut, as if trying to exorcize the recollection from his head. ‘He literally sat there in total silence for the entire time.’

‘Why do you think they took you out like that?’

‘I asked myself the same question, and remembered what had happened the last time – how Vic invited me out, and then all he did was warn me to keep my mouth shut. So I went back to the museum and looked around the arcade.’

‘Something was wrong with one of the machines?’

He nodded. ‘Except it wasn’t just one of them. It took me a while to find them, but I found them eventually. There was a very minor crack on the glass of one of the strength testers that I never remembered being there before. It had been revarnished too. So I checked the rest of it. Nothing else had changed, inside or out – it was just the varnish. But then I looked up and saw another machine. A phonograph. That had been revarnished as well.’

‘Just revarnished? Nothing else?’

‘Nothing else. He never made any other changes.’

I glanced at my watch.
Two-thirty
.

We’d been going an hour, and now East was getting tired, emotional again, his eyes shining in the glow from the penlight.

‘What happened after Grankin got sacked?’ I said.

East went quiet for a moment, eyes on the floor. ‘A few months after he got fired – I don’t know, maybe November, sometime towards the end of 2010, after Gail and the girls were gone – Vic turned up at my house. I’d started to think –
hope
– that I wasn’t going to see him again, but he came in, acting like nothing had changed. He said, now he wasn’t employed at the pier, there was going to be a new way of working. By then, when the arcade machines needed servicing, I was bringing them home – with Mr Cabot’s permission – and working on them in the garage.’

‘What did Grankin want?’

‘He told me that, before I brought a machine home to service it, I had to call him to let him know which one.’

‘Why?’

‘He didn’t tell me. I tried to stand up to him. I asked him why he was going around adding varnish to all these machines, why he was trying to
hide
the work he was doing, but he wouldn’t even respond to me. So, eventually, I said to him, “I refuse to lie to Mr Cabot any more …” ’

His words fell away.

‘He grabbed me by the throat, and he squeezed, and he said, “Do you want me to tell Ben you said no? Is that what you want me to go back and tell him?” ’

‘He called him Ben?’

‘Ben, Paul, Gray, Korman, I don’t know who he is, what he is. I don’t know anything about him, and I’ve known
him since I was nine. He used to change his name all the time at St David’s, and wouldn’t answer unless you called him by it. He’s had many names over the years.’ His voice cracked; emotion, fear, twisting the shape of it. ‘But then that’s what they always say about the devil.’

Healy had edged closer. ‘So he asked you to call him before you brought one of these machines home for repair,’ he said to East. ‘Then what?’

‘The first few times he didn’t do anything. I’d call him up the day before I planned to take a machine out, he’d listen to me describe the machine that needed servicing, and then he’d put the phone down. But, finally, about ten months later, I called him after that strength tester – with the crack in its glass – had packed up, and he told me to hold off taking it home for twenty-four hours. Next day, I bring it home, and he’s waiting there for me, and he says, “I’m taking this away for the night,” and started loading this machine into the back of his car.’ He stopped, shrugged. ‘And that’s exactly what happened. He brought it back to me the next day with a new coat of varnish on it. The finish was pretty much perfect this time. It had gone on smoothly. No bumps. He definitely used Hoberman’s on it, I guess from the batch he stole from Mr Cabot.’