What Remains (21 page)

‘I guess I was just lucky,’ Tom said.

Here it comes, Mal thought.

‘That you were there for Jonah.’

He nodded at Tom.

‘We’re all just so grateful, every day, that you –’

‘You don’t have to thank me again, Tom,’ he said, holding up a hand. ‘I did what I did, I would do it again, but you don’t have to thank me any more. It’s done.’

They landed back at Heathrow late the next day, all of them a little worse for wear. The weekend had been short, but the drinking felt like it had gone on for weeks. Now it was time to return to their responsibilities: wives, kids, work, mortgages.

‘You got much on this week?’

He’d sat next to Tom on the flight back. As they waited for the doors of the plane to open, he looked out at the darkness, lights blinking next to the runway, the glow from the terminal building revealing people working in the shadows beneath.

‘I’ve got tomorrow off.’

Tom rolled his eyes. ‘Lucky bastard.’

‘I’ve got to pick the girls up from school.’

‘I’ll trade your day for mine.’

He smiled. ‘Yeah. They’re not exactly a bind.’

As the passengers started to file off, Tom held out his hand. ‘It was good to see you again,’ he said. ‘If you ever need anything … you know … just call me, okay?’

They shook.

‘Anything at all,’ Tom added.

‘Okay.’

‘I hope the, uh …’ Tom paused, eyes narrowing a little, as if he were trying to avoid causing offence. ‘I hope the delivery business keeps on going well for you.’

He watched Tom go, suddenly disquieted for reasons he couldn’t quite place – and then he got up from his seat and grabbed his bag from the overhead lockers.

Kids spilled out of the main doors of the school, satchels hanging off them, across their chests, on their shoulders, some dragging theirs behind them like a cart.

He stood on a grass bank to the left of the doors, waiting for April and Abigail. He’d brought them back a treat from his weekend away, picking up two giant bottles of bubbles at the airport. The girls loved bubbles, seeing how big they could get them, seeing how far the bubbles would float before they finally popped. A couple of times he’d taken them up to the top floor of Searle House and watched as they’d sent bubbles out over the balcony, twenty storeys up.

A wind briefly stirred, moving the branches of the trees at the front of the school. He watched the way warm summer light winked through the foliage and cast an orange glow across the faces of the kids close by – and then his eye was drawn to the entrance of the school again. It was darker now. Children had suddenly stopped flowing out and a gloom had taken hold beyond the main doors.

He looked around him.

Most of the rest of the parents were leaving, their kids next to them, big arms around small shoulders. Others were standing at the main gates, or out at the edges of the school boundaries, children playing while the adults chatted together.

But he was still waiting.

When he turned back to the main entrance, he saw a flash of movement inside. A blur of colour against the darkness. He took a step forward, the first tremor of concern taking hold. Where were the girls? A second step, a third, and then he felt a weird kind of resistance, and it took everything he had to move again, to take another step closer to the doors. Finally, as he did, he saw someone shift against the dark of the corridor.

His heart dropped.

He tried to say something, but no words came out. When he tried again, he felt his voice catch, like there was dust in his throat, and he began coughing. He turned to the other parents, calling for their help, but there was no one left at the school. Not a single person. No kids. No parents. All the cars were gone from the car park, all the windows were shut, all the doors locked.

He was alone.

He turned back to the main entrance. The doors were closed now, chained and padlocked from the inside. He began to panic, began to scream the girls’ names, looking out at the main road, trying to get the attention of passing cars, pedestrians, cyclists, anyone. But as he finally found his voice, the wind whipped in and took his words away, and he felt himself slowly, magnetically, pulled back in the direction of the school. On the other side of the glass, obscured by shadow, a man was standing still, looking downwards.

A dark blue raincoat on.

A baseball cap covering his face.

‘No!’ Mal screamed. ‘No! No, don’t hurt th–’

Instantly, he woke, dizzy and confused, his clothes soaked through with sweat. It took a second for him to establish where he was: in the living room of the flat, the
TV playing on silent, the dog curled up at his feet.

He let out a breath.

It had been another dream.

He got up and hurried through to the girls’ bedroom. They were both asleep, their night light on, its pale glow revealing the gentle rise and fall of their chests. April lay in the foetal position, her comforter – a tatty cotton blanket – close to her face; Abigail was on her front, one hand clutching her brown-and-white puppy, the rest of her cocooned in a pink-and-white duvet. He felt the tension ebb away as he watched them, the colours from the mural above their bed – the sun-kissed beach, the outline of houses, the random aliens – adding a red tinge to their skin.

Pulling their door to, he made his way through to the kitchen. The digital display on the oven said it was 3.40 a.m. He set the kettle going and sat at the table, and after a while clocked movement out in the hallway. He watched as Gail passed from their bedroom into the toilet, bleary-eyed and exhausted. She’d been up late, studying for her second exam paper.

It’s okay, he said to himself.

Everything is fine.

Everything is normal.

There’s no need to worry.

28

Temporarily the sky cleared, late autumn sun weakly punching past the frayed edges of the clouds. It wasn’t warm, but it was better than being pelted by rain.

The old paper mill which housed Wapping Wonderland and Museum was on the high street, directly adjacent to Waterside Gardens, a small park on the fringes of the Thames. It was a brown-brick, three-storey building, its huge second- and third-floor windows perched on iron platforms, alongside a wooden treadmill crane attached to the wall, all of which spoke of the building’s previous life. Before Wapping had been redeveloped, before the luxury flats had moved in, the windows had been doors, used for unloading goods that had been shipped in on the river.

I’d called ahead, trying to get Gary Cabot on the phone, and had eventually been redirected to his PA, who told me he was in Dubai for a few days, at an auction. In his absence, and after some persuasion, she’d given me the name Calvin East, the museum’s curator.

The museum closed at six, and I wanted to wait until last entry at five for a reason. Cabot’s PA had said Calvin East would be tied up with tours of the penny arcade and the museum until five-thirty, and I needed to make sure I got a run at him without hordes of tourists vying for his attention at the same time.

As it was only half-four, I headed along a thin, cobbled street at the side of the museum, wedged between the mill
and Waterside Gardens. Part of the way down, out in the grey of the Thames, the pier began to drift into view.

I saw its blackened legs first, and then the remnants of the bandstand, clinging to the limits of the pier like a limpet. The further I went, the more of the pier slid into sight: first, furthest out, the pavilion, old, discoloured, huge broken letters spelling out
GRAND PIER
above its doors; then the wooden, three-hundred-foot promenade, echoes of Arnold Goldman’s theme park still evident in the blistered, boarded-up Victorian shopfronts that dotted its edges; and then, at last, the entrance, a huge white arch built on a slab of paved land at the back of the mill, with a turret on either side in which flags had once flown. Inside the arch were fifteen-foot metal gates topped with electric fencing, preventing anyone from getting on to the promenade.

Despite its location on the Thames, despite the boats drifting along the water barely feet from where it concluded, there was a strange sense of isolation here; a loneliness to the pier that was difficult to explain. I’d been to many places like this, inside structures that were nothing but skeletons, along corridors that were vessels for memories, for the nightmares that had taken place in them. I’d even started to believe, somehow, that I might be drawn to them, that my years of trying to track the missing had awoken something in me; a sort of magnetic pull. Maybe my own heartache had marked me. Maybe these places sought me out now.

A noise snapped me out of my thoughts, and I turned to see the rear doors of the mill opening up, a group of middle-aged American tourists filing out on to the paved area and gathering at a rusty ticket booth, waiting further
instruction. At the back of the group was a tour guide. He was in his early forties, studious, serious, wearing a pair of red-rimmed glasses that were too bright for his face and too big for his eyes. He adjusted them and came forward again, the costume he was wearing – a tailed coat, a waistcoat, a white shirt with a winged collar, a top hat – ill-fitting and unsuited to his flabby frame. He had the wispy hint of a beard, and bristles of black hair escaped from under his hat.

On his lapel was a name badge.

Calvin East.

‘Okay, ladies and gents,’ he said in a soft London accent he’d worked hard to iron out, and began on the history of the pier. I stuck around for a while and then left, heading back around to the front and paying the admission fee.

Immediately inside the museum was a section marked
Journey through Time
, which turned out to be the room full of pictures I’d seen on the web. I passed through it, casting my eye across a photographic history of the pier and the mill, and then lingered on a last shot of Cabot, taken under the pier’s arched entrance in 2001, after he’d purchased the site. It was clearly a shot that had run in local newspapers, Cabot with his arms above him, like he’d just won the lottery.

At the edge of the shot was Calvin East.

Thinner. Younger. Skittish.

I exited, and headed up the stairs.

On the first floor was the start of the penny arcade. It was fenced in by a pavilion-style façade, funnelling people through to the room beyond, which had been done out like the inside of a pier: slatted floors, wooden walls, windows with amateur-looking paintings in them, replicating the view out to sea.

Clearly the machines were the museum’s highlight.

They swept across the space in five perfect rows, like gravestones in a field. They were mostly pinball precursors, though there were a couple of early ‘pushers’ too, machines with sliding trays moving back and forth, coins tumbling from one tray to another, and – with any luck – into the slot that paid out at the bottom. At the other end of the room was a spiral staircase, directing people to the next floor, with the promise of more machines, the mirror maze and a shop.

I headed up.

The place was virtually empty. At the top of the stairs was a fortune teller called the Oracle, a dial on its front handing you your fate. But with no plug to power it, it sat dormant and mute, just like the strength testers, kinetoscopes and early fruit machines that surrounded it. A little while later, off to my left, I heard a laughing sailor, his voice ringing out, and then the jangle of Amberolas – coin-operated phonographs. Mostly, though, the room was as silent as a mausoleum.

I imagined Healy walking this floor, these rows – a ghost among the gravestones – carrying his copy of the Stourcroft book. Had he found anything?

Each of the machines had a brassplate screwed to its side, with the date it was built, and – in some cases – where it originated from. While all seventy-two of Wapping Grand Pier’s machines were here, even without counting them it was clear there were way more than that, Cabot continuing his rescue work by salvaging old machines from lost piers all across the UK: St Leonard’s, Plymouth Hoe, Morecambe Central, Shanklin. The piers were demolished,
their wooden frames scattered like bones in the sea – but while they were gone, the machines survived.

The thought put an unexpected pause in my stride – and then I suddenly realized I was alone, the other visitors having drifted quietly out of the room without me even noticing. As I stood there, archaic machinery for as far as the eye could see, I felt a bristle of unease. I couldn’t place the feeling to start with, couldn’t understand where it had come from. But then, as I continued on, passing through the middle of the room, surrounded by dark walnut cases, by the slowly rusting metal grooves of century-old pinball machines, I paused.

I felt like I was being watched.

‘Mr Raker?’

A voice startled me and, when I turned, Calvin East was standing right at my shoulder, dressed in the same costume I’d seen him in earlier. I looked past him, expecting to find a tour group, but he was on his own. Behind me, next to the shop – manned by a disinterested girl in her late teens – was the entrance to the mirror maze. As if on cue, a burst of maniacal laughter came from a tannoy above it, and then a voice straight out of a 1950s B-movie said, ‘You’ll lose your mind in our mirror maze!’

‘I didn’t mean to surprise you,’ he said. ‘Kathy, Mr Cabot’s PA, mentioned that you would be dropping by at some point, so I’ve been keeping an eye out all day for anyone that didn’t look like they belonged to a tour group.’ He stopped, rocking his head gently from side to side, a guilty expression on his face. ‘Although I admit I may have given myself a
slight
head start by googling you.’