What Remains (54 page)

Kids can be duplicitous too.

Healy cleared his throat. ‘Are you saying that, despite how they were killed, you think they’ve got more in common with Gail, Stourcroft and me?’

‘It’s a theory I’m kicking around.’

A pause. ‘I can take a look in the box.’

He was talking about the box that Carla Stourcroft’s husband had passed to him when Healy had pretended to be with the Met. We’d returned to the house in Camberwell after I’d finished at the police station, and removed everything – the box, the handwritten notes that Healy had stuck to the walls, the transcript.

Now the box was in his hotel room.

‘Is there anything else in there you haven’t been through?’ I asked him.

‘No.’ He sounded despondent. ‘Anything on the pier, anything related to it, related to the disappearance of that
couple, I put on the wall. Everything else is just Stourcroft’s personal belongings.’

‘And you’ve been through those too?’

‘Yeah. Her husband said it was mostly stuff he cleared out from her office. A lot of old paperwork, framed book covers, desk junk – pencils and calendars, all that sort of shite. I’ll take a look at it again – but I wouldn’t go expecting much.’

‘All right.’

‘I’ll talk to you tomorrow.’

I hung up and closed the laptop, feeling tiredness kicking in again. When I closed my eyes, I saw photographs, frozen moments in time that I might never be able to erase: a mother, nine stab wounds in her chest, her life leaking out across a sofa; and two girls, skin so pale and flawless, reduced to statues in their beds.

My phone woke me up.

I started and felt my laptop fall off, on to the carpet. As I opened my eyes, sunlight blinded me, arcing through the windows of the living room, bathing me in winter sun. I sat up and swung around, checking my watch, confused, bleary.

7.32 a.m.

I’d been asleep for eight hours.

My phone continued ringing. I stood, unsure for a moment where I’d left it the night before, then saw it buzzing on the floor next to me. I scooped it up.

Craw
.

‘You keep waking me up,’ I said, after I’d answered it.

I’d tried to lace my voice with some humour, but maybe it was too early in the morning for that. Craw didn’t respond to the joke – and I heard a door close.

‘Craw?’

‘Are you functioning?’ she said.

‘Barely.’

‘Well, you’d better clear your head.’

I frowned. ‘Why? What’s the matter?’

‘You’re going to want to hear this.’

80

‘I’ve just got off the phone to someone I know in Bishara’s team,’ Craw said. She spoke in hushed tones, clearly squirrelled away in a room where no one would be able to hear her. ‘He says they’ve had forensics back on the items you found.’

She was talking about the waistcoat, the lighter, the gold chain, the watch, the flayed skin. The mask. I headed across the room to where I’d left my notepad.

‘What did they find?’ I asked.

‘The wristwatch was made by a company called Wirrek. You probably know that already. Their name is on the watch face. You ever heard of them before?’

‘No. Never.’

‘That’s because they went out of business in 1956. The watch is an antique, made in 1943. The cigarette lighter is even older – maybe 1940 or ’41. The manufacturer’s mark has been rubbed off because of its age, but my guy says the forensic team managed to narrow it down to an American company called …’ She paused, presumably checking what she’d written. ‘Purridean. Looks like these lighters were popular with GIs. The assumption is that it got left here by a US soldier after the end of the Second World War. The gold chain and the waistcoat are much harder to put a date on, but the flayed skin … that tattoo is old. The ink’s old. The skin has been coated with some sort of
preservative, a mix of chemicals that you can’t even get on the market now because most are carcinogenic.’

‘What about the mask?’

‘This is where it gets weird: the mask has got a label inside that says it was made by a company called Barrington Games – they were a toy company.’

‘ “Were”?’

‘They closed in 1958.’

‘So the mask’s old too.’

‘Right.’

‘What’s so weird about that?’

‘No other companies make masks like that any more – not from that same material, or to the same design. However, Bishara’s team found a business card in Grankin’s kitchen for a company called Masquerade – they’re a high-end fancy-dress and party company based near Spitalfields Market. They also happen to make custom-order masks for rich people with too much money. Bishara sent one of his detectives to speak to the manager, and this woman says that they’ve been repairing the same mask, for the same person, on and off, for the last twenty-one years. I’ll do the maths for you: twenty-one years means the first time this person came in was in 1993.’

The same year the pier closed.

The same year Korman and Grankin started using it as a kill site
.

‘Did she ID this person?’

‘It was Grankin. Bishara’s people showed her a picture, and – straight away – she said it was him. She said that, every couple of years, he’d always bring the same mask in with him and have her work on it, trying to secure it, touch
it up, whatever else – basically trying to stop it falling apart due to age. First time he came in, she saw the crack on the mask and said to Grankin that she’d try and close the gap and fix it. But he told her no. He said he wanted the crack on the mask. He said that was what made it unique.’

I paused for a second, thinking. Clearly, the mask represented something important to Grankin – but what? Why have it repaired, year after year, but not its obvious flaw? Why not just buy a new one?

‘Look,’ Craw said, ‘I’ve got to run.’

‘All right. Thanks for this.’

But, seconds after she’d hung up, my mind was already moving, returning to something Korman had said to me. I grabbed my laptop, his words still clear.

I think you need a change of perspective.

I thought he’d been talking about the arcade, about seeing it in a different way, through a different lens. Maybe he
had
meant that. It had certainly, perhaps inadvertently, led me to the holdall and the mask. But maybe he meant something else too. Maybe he meant that the pier and museum were a sideshow; that they led to something else. Something even worse.

My phone erupted into life again.

This time it was Healy. Last night, he’d agreed to go back through Carla Stourcroft’s possessions, double-checking the box her husband had passed on.

‘There’s nothing in here,’ he said, once I’d answered.

‘Nothing? No more notes?’

‘You’ve already seen all her notes.’

And they were all indecipherable, written in a bespoke pseudo-shorthand that she’d developed to keep them private. I hadn’t been able to translate them.

‘You’re absolutely sure?’ I said.

‘Positive.’

‘There’s nothing else in the box at all?’

He sighed, his breath crackling down the line, and then started to list everything in a bored voice: ‘Photos of her family. One with her husband. One with her kids. One with husband
and
kids. A certificate from the Institute of Leadership. A 2009 desk calendar. Some screen wipes. Two pencils. One copy of
South of the River
by Carla Stourcroft. One copy of
From Richmond to Regent: London’s Parks from A to Z
by Carla Stourcroft. One copy of
Invisible Ripper
–’

‘Okay, I get it, Healy.’

‘It’s just junk.’

I shifted my thoughts forward, trying to carve a path through everything I’d found out from Craw, from Bishara and Sewinson before that – and then something struck me about the holdall I’d found in the arcade.
There were five items inside
.

Five
different
items.

‘The stuff you just listed,’ I said.

‘What about it?’

I pulled my laptop towards me.

‘Raker?’

But I was hardly hearing him now.

I put in a new web search. It took me to an account of five murders, long past, that I’d never given a second’s thought to. And yet, the whole time I was working this case, the whole time I was trying to find the men who killed the Clark family, all five deaths were within sight of me, waiting to be brought back into the light. Edward Smythe. Gordon Gregory. Eric Bale. William Simpkins. Abel Dimas.

I think you need a change of perspective.

‘Raker?’

‘We’ve been looking in the wrong Stourcroft book.’

‘What?’ I could sense Healy shift. ‘What are you talking about?’

I felt dazed, light-headed, like a punch-drunk boxer reaching for the ropes. ‘This isn’t about
A Seaside in the City
at all,’ I said to him. ‘It’s about
Invisible Ripper
.’

81

The answers had been there the whole time.

Right in front of our eyes.

‘What are you talking about?’ Healy said.

‘The five items in that holdall. They don’t belong to one victim. They belong to five.’ I looked at their names again. ‘Edward Smythe. Gordon Gregory. Eric Bale. William Simpkins. Abel Dimas. The items are Eldon Simmons’s trophies.’

This time, Healy was silent.

‘There’s an inscription on the back of the watch,’ I said, needing to talk it through as much for myself as Healy. ‘ “To our darling Edward. With much love. Mum and Dad.” That’s Edward Smythe. He was Eldon Simmons’s first victim.’ I turned back to my laptop, scrolling down the page, skim-reading as much as possible. ‘Gordon Gregory, the second, was from Maryland, and stayed in the UK after the end of the war. His friends told police he loved and cherished his Purridean lighter – but, when they searched his belongings, they couldn’t find it anywhere. Because Simmons had taken it. The third victim, Eric Bale, had a crucifix lifted from him that his father had given him. The fourth, William Simpkins, was found with skin missing from his right arm where a tattoo of a heart with the inscription
Life
had been cut out. And the waistcoat belonged to Abel Dimas, the last victim.’

‘Let me grab the book,’ Healy said.

As I heard him moving, returning to Stourcroft’s box of possessions, to the copy of
Invisible Ripper
she had in there, I tried to imagine why. Why had Korman and Grankin become so consumed by Eldon Simmons’s work?

‘Do you know much about the case?’ Healy said, when he came back on.

‘Simmons? Not really. Why?’

‘I’m sure there was some story …’ He stopped, sucked in a breath, sounded frustrated with himself. ‘Ah, my memory’s shite, but I’m sure there was a thing in the news a few years back about him. Some retrospective on his arrest. Back in the fifties, they slapped the cuffs on him in some boarding house in White City – but something was wrong with it.’

‘Wrong with the boarding house?’

‘No, with Simmons’s arrest.’

He paused, and I heard him flicking through the book. While he was doing that, I managed to find a brief Internet account of the Ripper case: after killing five men between August 1951 and May 1952, Simmons was found living in a tatty boarding house in west London. A neighbour called the Met and said he’d seen Simmons bringing home a succession of men, one of whom left with blood all over his face. When police went to talk to Simmons, they found a knife hidden under sheets in his wardrobe. It had traces of blood from two of the victims on it. Simmons was arrested and charged, before being sentenced to death. He was hanged at Holloway Prison in March 1953.

‘The arrest seems pretty clean,’ I said to Healy.

‘Hold on, I’m trying to find the chapter here.’

Suddenly, the doorbell rang.

I tore my eyes away from the laptop and looked across the living room. From where I was sitting, I could see all the way down the hall. A silhouette was out on the porch, absolutely still, the shape distorted by the frosted glass.

‘I’m going to have to call you back,’ I said to Healy.

‘Why?’

‘Someone’s at the door.’

‘Just ignore it.’

He was right: we were on the cusp of something. I glanced at the silhouette again: petite, slim and motionless. It looked like a woman.

‘Okay, got it,’ Healy said.

‘What does it say?’

I could hear him muttering to himself, skim-reading the chapter that dealt with Eldon Simmons’s arrest. ‘No, it’s not this,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘This is the same thing everyone knows – about the police finding a knife in his bedroom, his arrest, his death. No, it was something else. What
was
it?’

‘Was it something you saw on TV?’

‘Maybe.’

‘In the papers? Online? Where?’

‘I can’t remember.’

‘Think, Healy.’

‘I
am
thinking.’

But then the doorbell rang for a third and fourth time. When I looked up again, the woman started knocking on the door.

‘His sister,’ Healy said.

I tried to tune back in. ‘What?’

‘That’s
it
. I remember now. I got it wrong – this was much more than a few years back; maybe the mid eighties. Anyway, before she died, his sister was trying to clear his name. I think Simmons had some minuscule IQ, and she claimed he was forced into signing a confession by the cops. She said the knife was planted in his room, and the Met and the courts never bothered looking at anyone else because Simmons was homosexual – and back in 1952, being gay was still a crime. His sister was the one that coined the name “Invisible Ripper”.’

Off the back of that, a thought came to me. ‘Has the book got an index?’

‘A what?’

‘An index – at the back.’

‘Uh …’ I heard pages being turned. ‘Yeah. Why?’

‘Is there a listing for Neil or Ana Yost?’

‘Why would there be a listing for them?’

‘Just have a look.’

I listened to pages being turned. ‘No. Nothing.’

‘Is there an Acknowledgements page?’

‘Where are you going with this?’

‘
Is
there?’