What Remains (55 page)

‘Yeah, it’s here. So?’

‘Any mention of them there?’

A long pause. ‘Shit. Yeah, there is.’

‘What does it say?’

‘ “I’d like to thank the family of Eldon Simmons for their cooperation in the writing of this book, and for making their archive of material available to me. In trying to clear his name, the work of his sister, Moira Silke, and her daughter Ana Yost – both, sadly, gone – can only be admired.” ’

‘Ana Yost was related to Eldon Simmons,’ I said.

As we both took that in, I backed out of the true crime website I was on, and put in a search for Moira Silke, Simmons’s sister and Ana Yost’s mother. She’d died in 1986, from liver disease – leaving Yost to carry on the campaign to clear her uncle’s name.

‘She must have had something,’ I said, almost to myself.

‘What?’

‘Yost. She must have had something, some new piece of information that was going to clear Simmons’s name. That was why they got rid of her.’

‘Who? Korman and Grankin?’

‘Yeah.’

‘But why would they even care what she had?’

‘Maybe it implicated them – or whatever they were involved in.’ I tapped out a rhythm on the laptop, shifting my thoughts forward again. ‘What else does it say about the neighbour in there?’

‘Eldon Simmons’s neighbour?’

‘Yeah. The one that tipped off the police about him.’

‘Uh, hold on.’

The doorbell rang again.

I tried to ignore it, keeping my eyes focused on the laptop, even though I was finding it hard to concentrate. When I looked up, the woman was still standing there, face on, waiting for me to answer.

‘He never left a name,’ Healy said.

‘What?’

‘The neighbour. They traced the call to a phone box on the same street that Simmons lived on – but they never found the person who made the call.’

‘Did they actually interview his neighbours?’

‘Yeah, but it was a boarding house. People came and
went.’ Then Healy stopped and, quietly, started talking to himself, reading something back. ‘Wait a second, wait a second. It says here that “a witness at the time told police she thought she might have seen the neighbour, from down the street, making the call”.’

‘Did she give a description?’

‘No. Too far away. But she said his face was “pale and smooth”.’

‘ “Smooth”?’

‘Whatever that means.’

I thought about it for a moment, trying to line everything up, but then that word came back to me:
smooth
. Smooth, featureless, plain.
Just like Grankin had looked in the mask, the night he’d waited for Korman outside Searle House.

‘The neighbour was wearing the mask,’ I said. ‘It’s the same mask that Grankin’s been wearing.’

‘
What?
’

The doorbell.

Again. Again.

‘I’ll phone you back in a second,’ I said, pissed off now.

Ending the call with Healy, I set the laptop and the phone aside, and made my way to the front door. Halfway along the hall, I could see the woman shift as she saw me coming towards her, through the glass.

I grabbed the door and yanked it open.

‘What is it?’ I said sharply.

But it wasn’t a woman. It was a man, small, a hood up on his parka, the front edges of it overhanging his forehead and casting shadows across his face.

I stepped back, startled, placing a hand against the wall, steadying myself. The man on my doorstep, a gun concealed in the folds of his coat, came forward.

It felt like the room turned on its axis.

This was why police never found Eldon Simmons’s neighbour, the man who had tipped them off. This was why Simmons’s family thought he was innocent. This was why Ana Yost vanished, this was the real reason why Carla Stourcroft was killed, this was why Gail Clark was slaughtered in her home. Because, eventually, at different stages, they all began glimpsing the truth.

The Invisible Ripper didn’t die in 1953.

The pier, the museum – they just became his hiding place.

‘Hello, David,’ Joseph Cabot said.

82

‘You look surprised to see me,’ he said softly, his east London accent still strong, his words croaky and hoarse. He glanced out into the road, left then right, his milky eyes sluggishly switching direction, and I realized his vision was impaired badly, probably irreversibly – but he wasn’t totally blind. He just pretended he was. It was smart and it was devious – after all, who would suspect a blind man in his late eighties of anything? As if reading my thoughts, he pushed the gun towards me and said, ‘Are you going to leave an old blind man out in the cold?’

I stepped back.

He checked again, up and down the street, and then came inside, moving easily, fluidly. Everything at Wonderland had been a show. He was old, slight, liver-spotted, but he wasn’t delicate or immobile. As one of his eyes began to water, he pushed the front door shut behind him and backed me into the living room. He entered, his eyes narrowing as he tried to focus on my photo frames, and then on my laptop still open on the table, poised on a shot of Eldon Simmons.

As we stopped, I tried to process everything.
Craw had told me that he was dead
. Or had she? He sat on one of the sofas, gesturing for me to take the opposite settee, and I tried to remember exactly what it was she’d said.
Cabot is face down in the kitchen with his throat cut. His dad’s there too.
Looks like someone’s closing the circle
.

She’d never actually confirmed Joseph Cabot was dead, just his son, and I’d never thought to ask about them again, to question it, to follow up on it. Healy and I had just swum for our lives from a burning pier. I’d fled a crime scene with a body in the back of my car. I’d gone for twenty-four hours without rest, a month without sleeping a single night through. I was dealing with the idea that I might be ill, that a sickness might be taking hold of me, coiling inside me like a tapeworm. I’d just assumed they were both dead, that Korman was taking care of anyone who could put him and Grankin anywhere close to the museum and the pier, instead of the reality: Korman killed Gary Cabot, but only injured his father.

A deliberate act.

Because they were all working together.

‘You let Korman kill your own son,’ I said.

He sighed, resting his elbow on the arm of the sofa. The sleeve of his coat sneaked a little way up his arm, and I could see evidence of bandaging, part of the injuries inflicted by Korman. They’d been clever: cutting the outside of Cabot’s arm would make it look like defensive wounds. He could spin a story out of that.

He gestured to the laptop. ‘Is that Eldon Simmons I can make out?’

I glanced at the stories I’d been reading, and then back to him. As I did, he came forward, gun levelled at my stomach, watching me. ‘I only got out of hospital yesterday,’ he said, ‘so it was only then that I was able to appreciate all your fine efforts. But this works out well, because you don’t know how long I’ve been waiting to
talk
to someone about this, about all I’ve achieved – and the fact that
you
get to sit there and listen to me before I’m done. This is so perfect.’

‘Before you’re done?’

He didn’t reply. As I went to repeat myself, my phone burst into life, buzzing next to me on the sofa. It was Healy.

Cabot raised the gun off the arm of the sofa. ‘Leave it.’

I ignored the phone as it continued towards me – then it snapped back into silence. I looked at him again. ‘What did you mean, before you’re done?’

‘Why did I let him kill my own son?’ he said, sidestepping the question. ‘Actually, you might be interested to know that Gary wasn’t my son. He was two years old when I married his mother, and then she died in a car accident when he was fifteen.’ He shifted on the sofa, his spare hand straying to his left knee. There was a momentary distance to him. ‘I never had any plans to be a parent. Not at the start. I never wanted to get married either, for reasons that you can probably imagine.’

He nodded at the laptop.

‘Women weren’t really my thing.’

‘But you married Gary’s mother anyway.’

‘It was a good cover story,’ he said, eyes still focused on the laptop. ‘It looks like you’ve been reading about the neighbour. What was it they said about me? I had a “smooth face”?’ He stopped, a flicker of a smile. ‘I always liked wearing that mask. The way it felt. I liked the anonymity it gave me, the way that anonymity hands you so much power. Victor developed a fondness for it too. He was a simple boy, really, and I think – by my allowing him to wear it – he saw it as a way to get close to me; maybe to gain my approval. Benjamin, Paul – whatever you prefer – he didn’t like it as much. We all have our quirks, things we
adopt, ways we like to get things done. Life’s a rich tapestry – isn’t that what they say?’ He shrugged. ‘Now you understand why Ben had to retrieve it for me.’

‘Because your DNA is all over it.’

‘Correct.’ He pointed to the laptop again. ‘It won’t say it on there, but after Simmons’s sister died and young Ana took up the reins, things got a little hairy for a while. Ana was insatiable, absolutely obsessed about clearing her uncle’s name, and she somehow managed to track down the witness that claimed to have seen Simmons’s “neighbour” at the phone box that day. This witness even remembered seeing me hanging around Simmons’s place in the hours before the arrest. However, the witness was just a girl, barely ten years old at the time, so the police never placed much credence in her statements back then – which was just as well.’

‘For you maybe – not for Eldon Simmons.’

‘That’s true. This girl also described the neighbour as having “something wrong with his leg” – what police referred to in their reports as “a kind of nervous tic”. Basically, a predilection for playing with his left knee.’

I paused, looking at him, at his other hand: it was on his knee as we spoke – and, as I saw it, a memory formed.
He’d been doing the same thing the day we met in Wonderland
. It reminded me of Healy, in the weeks and months before his heart attack: his hands, his fingers, drawn to the weakest part of his body.

Cabot began massaging the joint with his thumb and forefinger. ‘I went to France in 1944, after the D-Day landings. I was only eighteen at the time. Got shot through the thigh by a German sniper in Caen on my second day.’ He
pointed at a spot just above his knee, on the outer edge of the thigh. ‘Forty-eight hours of war, followed by a lifetime of pain. Does that seem fair to you?’

‘It would have been fairer if you’d died out there.’

A smile, there and then gone. ‘When we took Ana and her husband that night in 2007, we went to their house afterwards and removed any evidence she’d gathered from that witness. We got there before Ana had a chance to pass any of the paperwork on to Stourcroft. I mean, this was before Stourcroft had even started the
research
stage of
Invisible Ripper
– although the two of them had discussed the idea of a book. We found emails between Ana and Stourcroft to that effect.’

‘And no one suspected anything?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Ana Yost’s disappearance. No one looked in your direction?’

He smirked. ‘Do you know what Ana did for a job, David?’

‘She was a campaign manager.’

‘At an advertising agency and PR firm where her clients included Russian oligarchs, abortion clinics, those great believers in human rights Kazakhstan, and the Israeli government. Where, on a list of potential suspects, do you think the police would have placed “person who may have committed five murders in the early 1950s that someone else already confessed to, and was hanged for, and who has crawled out of the woodwork sixty years later to silence a woman who has no new evidence”?’ He stopped again, something insidious moving across his face. ‘Still, you should have seen Ana’s eyes when I introduced myself to her.’

I felt sick listening to him.

Before I could ask him why they’d killed the Yosts in the way they had, he said: ‘We had some good fortune too. In the time between Ana and Stourcroft first agreeing the idea of an Invisible Ripper book in 2006, and Stourcroft coming to research and write it in early 2008, the witness that saw me at Simmons’s house back in 1952 – with my mask and my “nervous tic” – suffered a stroke. She couldn’t talk, and it wasn’t going to get any better for her. We thought we were in the clear.’

‘But you weren’t.’

‘No. We may have got rid of the paperwork before Ana had a chance to pass it on to Stourcroft, but what we found out later was that Ana had mentioned to Stourcroft
verbally
that Simmons’s neighbour had had some kind of knee problem – only once, but once was always enough for Ms Stourcroft.’

It took me a moment to catch up. In 2008, the year before Carla Stourcroft published
Invisible Ripper
, she’d interviewed another contemporary of Eldon Simmons’s, Winston Cowdrey, at his flat in Wapping. They’d talked about the years Cowdrey had spent living in the same building as Simmons, and Cowdrey had mentioned seeing someone on the pier – in a mask.

Stourcroft must have felt like she’d been gut-punched. A year before that, Ana Yost had disappeared from a party, after talking to a man in a mask. Now a man in a mask was out on Wapping Pier. She wouldn’t have been able to see all the links then, but, if nothing else, she wanted to find out what was going on at the pier, a place she already knew so much about from writing
A Seaside in the City
. So, in 2010, after publishing
Invisible Ripper
, she returned to see
Calvin East, sniffing another story on the wind: that the man in the mask was responsible for the disappearance of Ana Yost; and that the pier had a secret.

Something else fell into place for me too. ‘She saw you,’ I said. ‘The second time that Stourcroft went to the museum to see East, in 2010 – she saw you there.’

‘Correct. I was sitting in Gary’s office, waiting for him to take me home, when I looked up and spotted her in the corridor, talking to Calvin. She was just staring at me. Eventually, I realized why: I was playing with my knee again.’