David Raker 05 - Fall From Grace

by Tim Weaver

  ‘You’re going to get a shitload of hits. I take it you don’t want me concentrating on stolen bicycles and local shoplifters?’

  ‘No. Just major crimes for now. If things get uncomfortable, abandon ship. I don’t want to compromise you – but only because, if you get banged up for aiding and abetting, you won’t get the chance to see my new, improved golf swing in a couple of weeks.’

  He laughed. ‘It’s a big ask. It might take me a couple of days.’

  ‘Understood.’

  ‘Depends when I can get some alone time.’

  ‘Whenever you can, Task.’

  I thanked him, hung up, and went back to Craw’s file.

  5

  Inserted into a plastic sleeve taped to the back of the file was a plain DVD with ‘Footage of the house’ written on it, along with a series of photographs. The writing on the DVD belonged to Craw. I set it aside and concentrated on the pictures. They were all of the Frankses’ house on Dartmoor. Craw had taken them herself, printed them out on to A4, then explained which direction she was facing in, in a caption next to each one. Every picture underlined just how isolated the place was. I wanted to take a look at it myself eventually, in the flesh, but these made a useful starting point.

  Just as she’d explained, it looked like an old hunting lodge: dark wood, with a big veranda that ran the entire length of the front. There was a slanted roof with a brick chimney on one side, and a plastic canopy attached to it, under which sat an Audi A3. I checked back through the paperwork and saw that it was registered to Franks. I could add the car to his mobile phone and his wallet in the list of things he’d left behind.

  On the right of the house was the woodshed. It was more like a lean-to, really; just a piece of corrugated metal, bolted to the house on one side and to two support beams on the other. Inside were hundreds of chunks of wood, stacked right the way up to the top.

  Surrounding the house was rolling moorland, gateposts hemming in yellow and green fields, all of them stitched together like patches on a quilt. Its location, a mile north of Postbridge, meant it was elevated from the village, and in one of the shots I could see rooftops in the cleft of a valley, beyond the curve of a hill. Otherwise there was no hint of man-made structures: just a single-car dirt road snaking off from the front of the house.

  I turned to the missing persons report itself.

  It had been set up by Sergeant Iain Reed, as Craw had told me already. He was based in Newton Abbot. He had interviewed Franks’s wife Ellie, then Craw herself, on 4 March, the day after the disappearance. He had asked the two of them the same questions, before concentrating on their whereabouts on the day of the disappearance, probably so he could cross them both off any potential suspect list. A couple of days later, on 6 March, he had organized for a forensic tech to take a DNA sample from Franks’s toothbrush. Craw had already told me they’d found nothing, and the results backed her up.

  Ellie Franks’s statement offered little insight into her husband’s psychology, either on the afternoon he disappeared or in the weeks beforehand. It wasn’t a massive surprise: families were still dealing with the fallout in those first few days, angry that they weren’t able to see it coming, distraught at the lack of reason. Unearthing useful leads depended on the craft and skill of the interviewer, of being able to manoeuvre around people’s grief – and Reed hadn’t been able to. He’d compiled a solid report, one that covered obvious and important areas, but it was like a black-and-white picture crying out for some colour.

  Craw’s interview was different: shorter, because she hadn’t been there the day her father went missing, but more textured. Her abilities were right there on the page as she tried hard to steer Reed in the direction she felt an investigation needed to go. But ultimately, even if his police work lacked a little spark, Reed could see the crucial angles, and when it came down to the question of what had happened to Leonard Franks – if he hadn’t just left out of choice – Craw’s hunch saw her on less certain ground.

  REED: You don’t think he had it all planned out?

  CRAW: Had what planned out?

  REED: His disappearance.

  CRAW: No.

  REED: You don’t think there’s even the smallest of chances that he could have left of his own accord?

  CRAW: That doesn’t make sense to me. He left without a change of clothes, without his wallet, without his phone.

  REED: So you think someone was responsible for him going missing? Against his will, I mean.

  CRAW: I think that’s more likely.

  REED: But when I spoke to your mum about that, about whether she heard any cars, any voices, disagreements, any sign your dad was undergoing any struggle at all, she said she heard nothing.

  CRAW: I don’t have an answer for that.

  I could understand where Craw was coming from. Franks’s life at the end was one he’d spent the last part of his career dreaming about. His remote house in Devon, time with his wife, those were everything he told Craw he wanted as he fell more and more out of love with London. I believed a case could come along that might still affect him, surprise him, perhaps overwhelm him, even after thirty-five years as a cop. But I had a harder time believing it would be enough to have him heading for the nearest exit.

  Yet how did you get a car up a mile-long dirt track without being seen or heard by the occupants of the house? And how did you overpower a man the size of Leonard Franks, and do it in total silence, without raising the alarm? In her interview, Ellie said she had gone out to see where Franks had got to after ‘about five minutes’, which meant, judging by the photographs Craw had taken of the house – and the desolate dips and ridges of the surrounding moorland – she should have been able to see and hear a car winding its way back down to Postbridge, or people leaving on foot with Franks in tow.

  But Ellie told Reed that she hadn’t seen anybody.

  So, in the end, even if her gut told her something more was at play, that someone else was involved, Craw had to go with what her mother had said she’d seen and heard.

  No cars. No people.

  No explanation.

  6

  A lonely shaft of winter sunlight punctured the glass roof of the station as I watched her moving along the platform towards me. She was wheeling a black suitcase and clutching her phone in her spare hand, and when she was halfway along, the light suddenly seemed to get drawn to her, freezing her for a brief second, like a camera flash had gone off.

  She hadn’t seen me yet, waiting for her on the other side of the ticket barriers, but I could see her clearly: blonde hair at her shoulders; a face full of gentle sweeps; pale skin that seemed to bleach under the light of the roof. She was trim, but not skinny: even through her jacket you could see the definition in her arms, a reminder of how she liked to run, of her days spent on stage, teaching dance and drama to kids. I saw nothing of myself in her and everything of her mother, except for the moments when she smiled. The way her eyes were. The way her mouth lifted. Those were mine, and I loved them.

  Once she got to the barriers, she fed her ticket into the machine and then started looking for me. I waved to her, and began moving closer. As she came through, the smile bloomed on her face. ‘Sorry I’m late. I thought you might have given up on me.’

  I brought her into me and hugged her.

  ‘Never,’ I said.

  At the age of forty-two, I found out I had a daughter. She’d been conceived when I was still a child myself, in a moment of immaturity I never looked back on for twenty-four years. In the summer of 1988, I’d left the village in Devon I’d grown up in, not yet eighteen, and sat in the back of my parents’ battered Ford Sierra, waving to my girlfriend as I left for London. Because I was going to be at a university two hundred miles away we’d tearfully agreed to end our year-long relationship in the days before, but she never mentioned that she was pregnant, even though she would already have been at the sixteen-week mark then.

  I didn’t see her again for almost a quarter of a
century.

  After I graduated, I landed my first newspaper job – on a regional paper in south London – met my wife Derryn, married her and eventually buried her, and I never knew about the girl growing up on a part of the south Devon coast I’d once called home myself. By the time I was carrying Derryn’s casket through the cemetery, I’d stopped thinking about becoming a father, accepting that my shot at it had been laid to rest alongside her.

  But then, after I was attacked and stabbed a year and a half ago, I returned to Devon to recover, and through a case I eventually took on down there, I met Annabel.

  Her first twenty-four years had been equally clouded; a young life built around a lie that everyone involved had been content to go along with for reasons that had probably seemed right at the time. She didn’t know about me, didn’t know that the people she’d spent her life with weren’t actually her parents at all, even though they’d been a mum and dad to her in every way that mattered. So when we met each other for the first time, and especially in the days after, our conversations were quiet, both of us still shellshocked by the enormity of what we’d been told. It didn’t help that she was grieving, having to cope with the deaths of people she’d loved, and the demands of an eight-year-old sister for whom she’d suddenly become the most important person in the world. I’d buried my wife, so I knew Annabel’s pain, or at least a version of it, and had answers to some of her questions.

  But not all.

  In the end, some things she’d have to figure out herself.

  7

  We walked from the Tube station in drifting rain, catching up on the month since I’d last been to see her in Devon. It was a welcome break from thinking about Leonard Franks.

  ‘How’s Liv?’ I asked, as we entered my road.

  Olivia was Annabel’s sister. She was staying with a friend’s family for a few days while Annabel came to visit.

  ‘She’s good. I’m catching glimpses of a teenager in her, which is slightly less good.’ She paused, smiling. ‘But she’s doing really well.’

  ‘Is it like catching glimpses of yourself?’

  Annabel frowned. ‘No. I was a model teenager.’

  I laughed. ‘I’m sure you were.’

  At home, I left Annabel to unpack and shower while I prepared dinner. I lived in Ealing, in something of a rarity for London: a two-bedroom detached bungalow. The ink had still been drying on the contracts when Derryn, my wife, was diagnosed with cancer, so although we’d got to spend some time enjoying our house together, before she passed on, in reality most of my time here had been spent alone.

  But slowly, thanks to Annabel, that was changing.

  Once I set dinner going, I headed through to the spare room and scanned in the phone bills Craw had given me. I emailed them to Spike and sent a message to Task with an outline of what I’d asked for: major unsolveds in London, for as far back as he could go.

  After pressing Send, I thought again about Franks’s disappearance, picturing how those last few moments must have been: what he’d said to his wife; whether – if he knew he was about to walk out for good – he might have acted a little strangely, said something that, in retrospect, could have been construed as a goodbye, or lingered for a moment longer than he might normally, watching Ellie Franks head to the kitchen.

  And then I thought about what it would mean if he hadn’t. What if he didn’t look back? It meant he’d gone out there expecting to return.

  With that last thought still swimming through my head, I leaned back, the leather chair wheezing beneath my weight, and looked out across the spare room, a place that had, at best, become an office, at worst a dumping ground for my professional life. Shelves full of missing persons files; pictures, cuttings and photocopies trapped inside their covers. Random photographs stacked in piles against the wall, the faces of people I’d found, looking out in poses I’d come to know so well. And then another shelf full of printouts, most of them police reports, most in my possession thanks to the sources I’d managed to secure during my newspaper days and maintain ever since. There was little room for anything else, although there were some reminders of an old life that seemed so long ago now: photos of me and Derryn on a beach in San Diego; another from an awards ceremony in the late 1990s, a younger, different version of me receiving a statuette; and then a picture of me and a colleague in the searing heat of a South African township.

  As my attention returned to the computer, I fired up the web browser and googled Franks’s disappearance. There was hardly anything: hundred-word stories in the Guardian, Mail and Express – all culled from the same press release – and a longer version of the same press release in a local Devon paper. Franks’s status as a thirty-five-year veteran at the Met counted for little: in the press release, there would have been few details, certainly not an account of how he vanished on open moorland, so all newsdesks had to work with was a former cop going missing. It was interesting, just not interesting enough. When people disappeared every minute, media coverage depended on an angle.

  I grabbed the file Craw had given me, and opened it up to the list of names and addresses, zeroing in on two: Gavin Clark of the Cold Case Review Unit, and Derek Cortez. Craw had given both the all-clear, but I wanted to be sure.

  I called Clark first. The number listed was his landline at work. After thirty seconds, and no answer, it went to voicemail. He sounded stiff and serious, so I kept my message deliberately short, explaining that I was looking into the disappearance of Franks, but stopping short of telling him I wasn’t actually a police officer.

  When I was done, I hung up and dialled Cortez’s number. Unlike Clark, he picked up almost immediately. He sounded old, his voice a little hoarse, as if he was just getting over a cold; and there was a reticence to him initially, like he expected me to be selling him something. But after I explained who I was and what I was doing, he softened up.

  ‘Such a tragedy,’ he said in a soft Devonshire lilt.

  ‘Did you know Leonard well?’

  ‘Well enough. He and Ellie kept passing our house in the village, on their walks. We have a house almost on the road, and they’d come down the track from their place up there and take the path that runs just outside ours, down to the moorland behind us. I got to know them through repetition, really. Then we started talking. Then we got on to the subject of what we did, and that was when I found out that he’d been at the Met.’

  ‘And after that?’

  ‘After that, we started getting together properly: we’d go up there, they’d come down here, Len and I would go off and play golf. We all got on so well. At some point, I must have mentioned the work I was doing for the CCRU to him. Initially, I’m not sure he could have cared less. That’s not to say he wasn’t interested in what I was doing, but it was clear that he had no wish to return to that life. But then their kitchen renovations started and, boy, did they have some ambitious plans for that place.’

  ‘So you recommended him to Clark?’

  ‘Yeah. My part didn’t last long, though: basically the length of a phone call. I gave Clark a shout and told him Len was up for some freelance work. You can imagine Clark was interested straight away. He’s a miserable sod, but he knows when he’s on to a good thing. Len ran murders up in London for all those years, so he was a good find.’

  ‘Did he ever talk to you about his cases?’

  ‘At the Met? Never.’

  ‘That didn’t surprise you?’

  ‘Not at all. Some officers are like that, especially in retirement. In my experience, you get two types of cop: the ones who seek solace through sharing, and the ones who don’t.’

  ‘What about the CCRU?’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘Did he ever mention receiving a case from Clark?’

  ‘No. And I never asked him. Even when I’d been selling the dream, so to speak, I didn’t ever give him details of cases I was looking into – and, to be fair, he never wanted to know. I got the sense we were from the same school of thoug
ht: these were cases and victims entrusted to us, and we had to do our best by them. Prudence was a part of that.’

  We talked for a while longer, but the conversation started to dwindle, so I thanked him and hung up. On the list Craw gave me, I put a line through Cortez’s name. There was a chance that, at some stage down the line, he might come back into the picture. But somehow I doubted it.

  In the file Craw had compiled, next to the phone bills, was Franks’s email address. A password had been pencilled into the margin alongside it. Craw had written, ‘He has an iPad too, which I have at the house. You can collect it whenever you want.’ I went to Gmail, put in his address and password, and accessed his inbox. He had two hundred and ninety-two messages. Nine had been sent to him in the days and months after he disappeared, five from friends who didn’t realize he was missing, four from others asking him to get in touch. All had been read, presumably by Craw.

  I zeroed in on the email conversations Franks had had with Derek Cortez and Gavin Clark. The Cortez email chain seemed to back up what he’d just told me. At one point, Franks had thanked Cortez for recommending him to Clark; Cortez replied, telling him it was his pleasure. And that’s where my part in this ends! Clark will get in touch directly.

  There were several other names I recognized, from the list Craw had already put together for me of Franks’s friends and associates. Quite a few were old work colleagues, Franks talking to them about life at the Met post-retirement; and although they replied non-specifically, not referencing individual cases, it was clear they still treated him with reverence, one – presumably from habit, or perhaps as a half-joke – even calling him ‘sir’. There weren’t any email chains dealing directly with the question of the case he’d been looking at before he’d vanished, but the messages provided a compelling insight into relationships he’d built over a long time. As I worked through them more closely a second time, I drafted a list of ten names that cropped up most regularly.