by Tim Weaver
She hung on to that last bit, swaying a little: stress-free work that may have ended up being the reason he disappeared. I gave her a moment.
‘So what happened after that?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Do you remember him receiving a file?’
‘Yes. It came in the post one day.’
‘Did you have to sign for it?’
‘No, it was just regular first class.’
‘Do you remember when the file turned up?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘I really need you to think hard about that.’
She took a long breath. ‘Maybe late January, early February.’
‘How sure are you about that?’
‘After he disappeared, Melanie said she and Len talked about the work he was doing, very briefly, when she came down for his sixty-second birthday, and as you might know already, his birthday is 23 February. So it must have been before that. It’s difficult for me to remember exactly, but I suppose he must have been working on the file for at least a couple of weeks beforehand. It could have been longer, perhaps a little shorter.’
‘Do you remember where it had been sent from?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Maybe a return address, or perhaps a postal mark?’
‘No,’ she said again. ‘I never thought to look.’
‘So you were the one who took receipt of it?’
‘Well, I picked the envelope up off the floor, if that counts as taking receipt of it. Len had gone to Ashburton to get some things for the house. We had a bit of a leaky roof at the time. I picked it up, sorted through our mail and left it to one side for him.’
‘That was your only contact with it?’
She paused, nodded. ‘Yes.’
It was obvious Ellie was smart enough to have figured out – if Craw hadn’t told her already – that, whatever case her husband had been working on at the end had probably been the reason for his disappearance. But I wondered if Craw had mentioned anything about its origins, about the truth behind the file: that Gavin Clark had confirmed to Franks that he’d have to wait until the start of March for his first case – and yet that file had landed on their doorstep several weeks earlier, in late January or early February.
My guess was that Craw had chosen not to tell her. If she had, Ellie would surely have glimpsed the deceit beyond: that taking delivery of the file meant Franks had lied to her about who he was working for – or, at best, chosen not to say anything. Maybe, in the grand scheme of things, not a massive lie, but a lie all the same. Separating out work and home life was one thing, but he’d already blurred the boundaries when he’d talked to his wife about taking on CCRU work to help pay for the kitchen. Ellie knew he was looking at a case – he’d just chosen not to tell her the truth about who had sent it.
‘Okay, so what about in the days after?’ I asked.
‘Days after?’
‘Did you ever see him working on the case?’
‘Oh yes,’ Ellie said. ‘We usually had a couple of hours every afternoon where – if it wasn’t too cold – we’d put the patio heaters on and sit outside. He’d be at one end of the veranda, at the table, and I’d curl up at the other, on our wicker sofa.’
‘So you sat apart when he was looking at the file?’
‘What do you mean?’
But then, a moment later, I could see she understood: maybe it was easier for him to work at the table – or maybe he’d chosen to sit at the opposite end of the veranda because he didn’t want her to see the file.
‘Did he ever look at the file at night?’ I asked.
‘Sometimes, when I watched TV.’
‘Did he sit apart from you then too?’
A flicker in her face. ‘Yes.’
There was going to be no way to trace the origin of the file. If it had been sent to Franks by recorded delivery, I might have had a trail, but locking down a location for where a first-class envelope had been mailed from would be like searching for a mote of dust. I looked at the photos of Franks, spread out on the coffee table in front of me, and then back to Ellie.
‘You’re positive you don’t remember seeing anything of the file? Even a brief look while Len was working on it: words, names, details, photographs, anything.’
She shook her head, certain. ‘No. I wish I’d taken more of an interest now.’
Briefly, that same sadness ghosted across her face. She reminded me so much of Craw, of the meeting we’d had the day before, of the times we’d crossed swords before that. Ellie was a little warmer, but there had been no tears from either of them, at any point. Yet stoicism could only disguise so much: they were hurting, and every attempt to conceal it just played out more clearly than ever in their eyes.
‘Okay,’ I said, keeping my voice even, patient, ‘so you didn’t see the contents, but do you remember what it looked like? For example, was it bound together and relatively tidy? Was it inside a proper hard-backed folder? Did it look official? Or did it look more home-made? Perhaps it was just a stack of paper, or maybe placed in a Manila folder?’
‘Like I said, I didn’t ever see it close up …’ She stopped, her eyes fixed on a space between us.
Come on, Ellie: give me something.
I waited her out and, after a couple of moments, she looked back at me. ‘From a distance, and from what I can remember, it seemed like the type of file you’d expect the police to compile. I mean, it was in a folder – a beige one, I think; just a standard A4 loose-flap folder – and the paper inside …’ She paused again. ‘It looked pretty tidy and well maintained, but I don’t think it was bound.’
‘All right,’ I said, writing down what she’d said verbatim. ‘All right, that’s really good, Ellie. Thank you.’
She smiled, and seemed to relax a little. It was clear she hated having to recall the day her husband vanished. Unfortunately for her, this was only the beginning.
‘So, I’ve been going through Leonard’s emails, and I see he still kept in touch with some old colleagues at the Met. I know he didn’t talk to you much about his job, but did he ever talk about the people he worked with?’
‘Oh yes, quite often.’
‘Okay. Anyone in particular?’
‘Goodness. There were lots. He worked across so many different commands, it was difficult for me to keep up. I guess there were probably four or five who he would have considered to be his best people: Donna Jones, Alastair Jordan … uh … Tony Mabena, Carla Murray … Gosh, I’m trying to think. Jim Paige. Is any of this even vaguely useful?’
I cross-checked with the list of ten I’d made that morning and all five were on it. ‘Can you remember what those five did at the Met? Did they work for your husband?’
‘Jim Paige didn’t. He and Len were about the same age and came up through the ranks together. When Len retired in 2011, Jim was running the sexual assault … uh …’
‘Sapphire?’
‘Yes. That’s it.’
‘What about the others?’
‘The rest all worked for him at one time or another, though I guess Carla must have been around the longest. I wouldn’t be able to tell you how long, but Len recruited her from somewhere up in Scotland – Glasgow or Edinburgh – back in, I don’t know, maybe the mid nineties. It could have been earlier. He was a superintendent at the time, covering murders and all that sort of thing. After that, he went on to run the gang unit, and she went with him, then he moved on to the uh … oh, gosh, what are they called?’
I knew from the potted history Craw had given me that Franks ran the Directorate of Professional Standards after leaving Trident, the gang unit. ‘The DPS?’
‘Yes, that’s it. Anyway, after that, he returned to run the Homicide command and Carla moved back with him – and that was where he stayed until he retired.’
‘ “Carla” is Carla Murray, right?’
‘Right.’
I circled her name, as well as that of Jim Paige.
‘
Did you ever meet any of his colleagues socially?’
‘We used to see quite a bit of Jim, as he and Len were old friends, like I said. They talked regularly on the phone too – just catching up with each other – once every couple of weeks. There were a few dinner parties, summer barbecues, that sort of thing. We hosted a couple. I wouldn’t say they were super-regular, but maybe a few times a year. Back in his forties and early fifties, he used to go out drinking one night a week with his team. He said it kept morale up, and got everyone together; he’d buy them all a couple of pints and they’d get to know each other, beyond what they knew already through work.’
‘Why only up until his early fifties?’
‘After he got the promotion to chief superintendent, he started to scale that sort of thing back. I think he felt he couldn’t be one of the guys any more, that there had to be a clear line between him and those who worked for him. That’s just how Len was. It’s what I loved about him. He was good with people, gracious, treated them well whatever their background and however they’d come to him. But when he needed to take tough decisions, he always would. I suppose some people respect you for that and some don’t.’ She paused for a moment, more of a slump to her frame now. All of a sudden, she looked older, a little frailer. ‘I remember he said to me once, “Sometimes you just have to let people go.” I think he meant you can’t please all of the people all of the time.’
Or maybe he didn’t mean that at all, I thought.
Maybe he meant something else entirely.
11
Craw returned from the kitchen, placed a cup of fruit tea down in front of her mother, handed me a coffee and told us she’d be upstairs if we needed anything else. I thanked her and watched her leave, then turned back to Ellie.
‘Okay, so tell me about 3 March.’
She nodded, but didn’t say anything. For a moment it felt like she was wrestling with her courage as much as her recollection. ‘It was a Sunday, and we never did much on Sundays.’ She stopped, smiling, then cleared her throat. ‘I think we woke late that day, had a cup of tea in bed, read the papers and took it in turns to play around on Len’s iPad. Then, later, we went for a walk up to Stannon Tor, which is about a mile north of where our house is. Once you get up there it’s so lonely, and the views are absolutely stunning. Then we got back for lunch, and spent the afternoon sitting in front of the fire, dozing.’
‘Everything seemed normal?’
‘Everything was fine.’ But she cleared her throat again, and for the first time there was the merest hint of a flash in her eyes. ‘About four-thirty, five o’clock, the fire started to die out and it began to get cold, so I asked Len to get some more logs.’
‘It was you who asked him?’
She looked thrown by the comment. ‘I’m not sure I …’
‘You asked him, rather than him deciding to go himself?’
She understood where I was headed now. Was there no intention on Franks’s part to head outside until she asked? Or did he instigate the decision himself?
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘You asked him?’
‘Yes,’ she repeated. ‘I asked him to go outside.’ The rest of it went unspoken but was basically painted in her face: I made him go outside – and he never came back.
‘So he went to the woodshed …’
She looked up, rocking a little now, like a boxer on the ropes. Then she took a breath and nodded. ‘Right. I guess it could have been a touch later than five o’clock, but it was definitely well before six, because the sun hadn’t set, and at that time of the year, up there on the moors, the sun goes down between about ten to and quarter past.’
‘Do you remember if he said anything to you before he went outside?’
‘He complained – tongue in cheek; it was a bit of a running joke – about having to go out into the cold, but I told him I’d put the kettle on and cut him a nice slice of cake as a reward.’ A pause. She sniffed gently. ‘So he got up and headed outside, and I went through to the kitchen, put the kettle on and grabbed a carrot cake out of the fridge. We’d bought it that morning at a bakery in Widecombe. Len loves his carrot cake.’
Something gave way in her face again. I pulled her back in: ‘And you reckon that took about five minutes?’
She nodded. ‘At least five. Again, it could have been a bit more. I remember I ended up getting distracted by a story I hadn’t got around to reading in the newspaper.’
‘And then what happened?’
‘I came back through and saw that he wasn’t back.’
‘How long did it normally take him?’
‘A minute. The woodshed was literally at the end of the veranda. All he had to do was go out, grab three or four logs and bring them back. He went outside in slippers.’
Craw hadn’t mentioned that.
If I was to run with the theory that he’d instigated his own disappearance, then the fact that he didn’t take his wallet or his phone made a certain kind of sense: the contents of his wallet – bank cards, driver’s licence – made him traceable, as did the technology on his mobile phone. But if you were planning on leaving, if you knew you were about to exit your life for good, would you really head out on to moorland, in the embers of winter, in your slippers?
It could have been another way of disguising his intentions, and there was nothing stopping him leaving a change of clothes somewhere close by. But something struck me: Ellie had been the one to ask him to leave the house, not the other way around. What if she’d never asked? Or what if the fire hadn’t gone out as fast that night? What if they’d already had enough logs stored inside the house?
He wouldn’t have gone out at all.
Either way, having watched the video Craw shot, I could picture the scene more clearly now: Ellie emerging from the kitchen and realizing he hadn’t returned; heading outside and calling his name.
‘I know this sounds like a weird question,’ I said to her, ‘but do you remember if, in the days after he disappeared, you noticed that any of his clothes were missing?’
‘Missing?’
‘Or maybe a backpack? You said you were both walkers, so I’m guessing you’d have a backpack of some description. Did you ever notice that disappearing before 3 March?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘No, I didn’t. I still have it.’
That didn’t necessarily discount the idea of him storing a bag somewhere: he could have just bought a new one. ‘So when he didn’t come back, you headed straight outside?’
‘Yes.’
‘And what did you find?’
‘Nothing. He wasn’t at the woodshed. I took a walk all the way around the house, as he has this rickety old toolshed at the back that he sometimes forgets to lock up at night. But when he wasn’t there, I came back inside. I figured I must have missed him.’
‘You said the sun hadn’t yet gone down by then?’
She was lucid enough to see where I was headed. ‘No. The day was overcast, so that made the last hour of the day quite gloomy, but I could see clearly in all directions.’
‘Down to the village and up to the tor?’
‘In all directions,’ she repeated, more forcefully. Again, I glimpsed Craw in her. She was sitting back on the sofa now, mug in her lap, the last cords of steam escaping past her face. ‘You can hear cars as soon as they get on the dirt road a mile away in Postbridge. On a clear day, you can see people approaching in whatever direction you’re facing. That Sunday was grey, but there was no fog. No mist. The policeman Melanie and I spoke to down in Newton Abbot – Sergeant Reed – asked me if it was possible I might have failed to spot Len, but there’s just no way: wherever he headed, I’d have seen him.’
I nodded, but the reality was that something had been missed. I’d have a clearer understanding once I’d been to the house and taken in the surrounding land, outside of the boundaries of Craw’s home-made movie. Just because Ellie Franks hadn’t seen her husband in the moments after he’d failed to come back from the woodshe
d didn’t mean he wasn’t there. In terrain like Dartmoor there were ravines, furrows, clefts, wrinkles, each a place to lay low, waiting for it to get dark.
There were countless places to hide.
Or countless places to be hidden.
12
After I’d thanked Ellie Franks for her time, Craw returned and led me along the corridor off the living room. There were two further doors, both open: one was a study, the other a plain white room that hadn’t been furnished with anything other than a desk and chair.
Sitting on the desk were two cardboard boxes.
As we passed the study, I glimpsed two sets of sofas in an L-shape, a glass coffee table, and a PC on a small desk in the corner. There was no chair under it, but there was a stack of books – too far away to make out – piled on top. I wondered if Craw’s husband worked from home – the set-up certainly made me curious as to what he did – but when I thought about bringing it up, a way to show an interest and further smooth our transition from adversary to ally, I knew she would hate it. She wasn’t a fan of small talk. It wasn’t just that she placed a high value on veracity, it was that she was, in her own way, quite awkward, incapable of feigning an interest in things that weren’t important to her. Her husband was likely to be very important to her. My interest in him wouldn’t be.
As we entered the room beyond the study, I thought again about Leonard Franks, about how Craw had described him the day before – and how she could have been describing herself. She had a resemblance to her mother as well, in all sorts of ways, but it was the traits she shared with her father that gave me a moment’s pause. Breaking down Craw was hard, and after thirty-five years of seeing everything human beings were capable of, I imagined Franks would have been even harder. Dad was private, she’d said to me. He internalized everything. In the end, that didn’t just make him less of a communicator.
It made him harder to find.
