David Raker 05 - Fall From Grace

by Tim Weaver

  Simon took his sandwiches and bagged them.

  ‘How dare you talk about him –’

  ‘Fuck your son,’ he said.

  A moment later, he left.

  In the loft there was a series of boxes stacked against one of the walls, each one marked so she could remember what she’d put inside. This was where most of her stuff stayed now. She didn’t bring it down into his house, because he complained about her cluttering up the living room with pictures and ornaments, and after their argument, after what he’d said to her at the end, she was never going to share a single important moment with him again in her life. Not her day, not her thoughts, certainly not photographs and memories.

  Most of what she’d collected over the years, she’d dumped. When she hit a low, it became a cleansing ritual, a slow, painful sanitization process: she’d take everything that represented that stage of her life and she’d cast it aside. Clothes. Pictures. Music. Films. Books. But some things she found hard to let go, even as she recognized how dangerous it was to hang on to them. There were things in her possession that she’d promised she’d got rid of. She knew the risks in keeping them, but the risks always seemed worth it at times like this.

  These things were her anchor.

  Her constant.

  So she wiped her cheeks, shifted two of the boxes off the pile and on to the floor, and opened the lid on the one marked ‘1996’.

  On top were the newspaper clippings.

  ‘Hello, Pamela,’ she said softly.

  Part Two

  20

  Flakes of snow were drifting out of the night sky by the time I left the hotel. I zipped my coat up, wind ripping along the street, and tried to plan a logical route through what I’d just been told. A file had turned up for Franks in the post, almost certainly in late January. It had something to do with Pamela Welland, or with Paul Viljoen – or both.

  Several days later, he calls Murray, because they worked the case together, and tries to get her to source the footage for him of Welland and Viljoen at the bar the night Welland was killed; footage he’d taken out of evidence once already, five years after he and Murray had originally put the case to bed in 1996. When she refuses, he goes to Paige, playing on their friendship. Paige also refuses, realizing Franks is endangering himself, and tells him to back away. A month later, Franks has vanished.

  As I walked, I went to the browser on my phone and put in a search for Pamela Welland. There were a few stories about her murder, mostly covered by true crime sites, but 1996 was when the Internet was in its infancy, which meant newspaper accounts from the time were mostly front-page scans. What I managed to find backed up what I’d been told by Paige and Murray. I’d floated the idea of them getting me Welland’s file, but Paige had shot it down. There were other ways to secure a copy, through someone like Ewan Tasker, but if Paige or Murray went back in to look at the Welland case, for whatever reason, they’d find Task’s search for Pamela Welland logged – and that meant compromising one of my best sources.

  I wrote the idea off and clicked on one of the images of Welland. She was sitting on a whitewashed stone wall outside a Spanish hotel, probably sixteen when the picture was taken, blonde hair in a plait, eyes disguised behind mirrored shades. The newspaper that had run the picture had called her ‘tragic and beautiful’, and it was hard to disagree with either of those sentiments. I felt a pang of sadness, for her and her family.

  When I reached Millbank, flanked by the hardwood skeletons of Victoria Tower Gardens and the relentless grey of the MI5 buildings, I thought of Ellie, and then Craw. The worst she probably imagined was Franks in a hole somewhere, wrists cut, whatever he’d known about the Welland and Viljoen case, about everything else, lost on his lips for ever. She’d looked at me the day before, over her mother’s shoulder, and I’d seen as much in her face. She was prepared to accept that fate for Franks, if it came to it.

  And yet while Craw was realistic, her working life shaped by human tragedy, there were lies and there were lies. After nineteen years, the ones told to her by countless suspects in unending interviews passed right through her.

  But the ones told to her by her father wouldn’t retreat so easily.

  Those would feel like a knife in her back.

  As I entered Westminster Tube station, my phone started buzzing, so I double backed to preserve the signal and found a place in the shadows, behind the pillars on Bridge Street.

  ‘David Raker.’

  ‘David, it’s Spike.’

  I’d almost forgotten I’d called him. He’d been tasked with getting the names and addresses of all the people who’d made or received calls to and from Franks in the phone statements Craw had handed over. I’d also asked him to do the same for the rest of 2013, from 3 March through to now.

  ‘Spike, thanks for calling me back.’

  ‘Sorry it’s so late.’

  I looked at my watch. ‘Ten-fifteen? You call this late? I’m just getting started. So what have you got for me?’

  ‘Okay,’ he said. I heard a couple of taps on a keyboard. ‘Thirteen and a half months of phone statements – the first batch covers 1 November 2012 through to 3 March this year, as requested. The second will take you through to yesterday, 12 December. I’ve grabbed you names and addresses for each and every caller. That’s what takes time. Once you’ve got one number, it’s just a copy-and-paste job. But it’s the actual process of finding out who the number belongs to and then accessing their address which is the ball-breaker. Anyway, it should be all there.’

  ‘I appreciate it. Did you spot anything unusual?’

  ‘You’re not looking at a hell of a lot after your guy leaves on 3 March.’

  ‘Am I looking at anything?’

  ‘A few incoming calls, which I guess is to be expected, right?’

  Family and friends would have been calling him in the days and weeks after he disappeared, trying to find out where he was. Calls after that were likely to be from people he wasn’t as close to, who were unaware he was gone.

  ‘Any outgoing?’ I asked.

  ‘Outgoing calls from his mobile after 3 March?’ A pause, as he checked the statements. The answer came back quickly. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not a single one.’

  21

  An hour later, after a delay on the tube at Earl’s Court, I arrived home. As I approached the house, I saw movement through the corner of my eye and turned to see what it was. Liz was coming up her driveway, dressed smartly in a long black raincoat, dark hair swaying against her back, red scarf in a knot at her neck. She was carrying a slipcase in one hand and checking her phone with the other, her face illuminated by its blue light.

  For a moment, I paused there, watching her. She was oblivious to me, hidden on the other side of the wire fence that separated our properties. But, ten feet short of her house, the security light came on, flooding her approach, and she saw me paused halfway between my house and the road. She stopped, phone dropping to her side, and we looked at each other, stillness and silence the only things between us.

  ‘Hey, Liz.’

  ‘David. I didn’t see you there.’ Her eyes moved to my house, a light on inside. I could see Christmas decorations down the street, beyond her, blinking against the black.

  ‘How are you?’ I said.

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Looks like you’ve had a long day.’

  A flat smile inched across her face. ‘I had one of those cases I used to hate, where the person I’m defending …’ She stopped, rolling her eyes. I don’t really like. Even alone, she rarely bad-mouthed her clients. It was one of the things I’d always liked about her.

  ‘What are you doing for Christmas?’ I asked.

  ‘Katie’s coming to stay for a few days.’

  Katie was her daughter. In the time Liz and I had been dating, I’d never got to meet her, and I doubted I’d been painted in my best light in the year since we’d split.

  ‘That’s unless I get a flurry of viewings.’ We both look
ed at the FOR SALE sign. ‘I’m picking her up tomorrow, so I’m praying that doesn’t happen quite yet.’

  ‘I hope you’re …’ I paused. ‘I hope you’re not …’

  I didn’t know how to phrase the question without making myself seem arrogant. I hadn’t ever asked her if she was moving out because of what had happened between us, but she had never expressed any desire to move before then – in fact, quite the opposite – so it always seemed the most likely explanation. As she watched me flounder, she didn’t step in, and the corner of her mouth twitched in something approaching a genuine smile.

  ‘Help me out here,’ I joked.

  ‘Why would I do that?’

  But then the smile fell away as her eyes drifted across my shoulder to the house. I turned. Annabel had come to the door to see who it was, before disappearing back inside.

  I looked at Liz. ‘It’s not what you think.’

  ‘It’s none of my business.’

  ‘She’s my daughter.’

  Her eyes narrowed and I realized I’d done the opposite of what I’d hoped: she looked at me with renewed mistrust, unsure of whether I was telling the truth. These were the moments that had driven a wedge between us at the end, and the reason I knew we could never go back. This was the look in her face every time I talked about work, about the cases I took on and the people I found. And I didn’t blame her for a single second of it: I’d lied to her about the things I did in order to protect our relationship. But all it had done was undermine every conversation we had.

  ‘I mean it,’ I said.

  ‘It’s none of my business,’ she said again, and moved the rest of the way up the driveway to the front steps of her house. I watched her go, realizing that this might be the last conversation we would ever have. She turned back to me, as if she realized the same.

  But neither of us said anything more.

  Maybe because we knew we were irreparable.

  Maybe because this was what happened at the end.

  22

  After Annabel went to bed, I moved to the spare room, shut the door and woke the MacBook from its slumber. Logging in to my email, I found Spike’s message and dragged the PDF attachments on to the desktop. There were two, separated into landline and mobile. In turn, they’d then been subdivided into pre- and post-disappearance.

  Landline calls, over the course of the year I’d asked for, totalled twenty pages; mobile phone calls accounted for even more at thirty-nine. Spike had ensured each number that had dialled into either of Franks’s phones had a name and address marked against it. He’d also listed the recipients of every call Franks made out of his phones. I had to accept a fair proportion of the calls from the landline, before and after 3 March, would have been made by Ellie, but this would still help map out a trail.

  Before loading up the PDFs, I picked up the Moleskine covering 1995–2004, and opened the computer document that I’d created earlier, cataloguing every name and case Franks had listed in the notebooks. I zeroed in on 1996. The case of Pamela Welland was mentioned – but not anywhere near as much as I’d expected. In fact, it was one of the least detailed of any of the cases he’d made notes on in that first Moleskine notebook. I felt deflated as my eyes moved down the information he’d included.

  His notes ran in two separate clumps, one dated 12 April 1996, which was the day after her murder, the next a month later – 14 May – when Viljoen was under arrest. The first entry was just a basic listing of the facts; facts that I’d already gathered from Murray. In the second entry, on 14 May, Franks referenced Murray, saying she was leading the interview, and he had written down a series of questions, presumably so they could discuss them beforehand. He’d also written down a series of notes about Viljoen being refused bail, being remanded into custody, and then the date of his first appearance at the magistrate’s court. Nothing in it added anything to what I’d already found out.

  You’re still hiding from me, Leonard.

  I tried not to linger on the disappointment, and turned to the scrap of paper with the sketch and ‘BROLE108’ written on it, and then the pub flyer. I’d set them away from the other junk he’d stored in the Moleskines. If I was to accept that the scrap of paper came first, because I’d found it in the diary covering 1995–2004, I also had to accept that, years later – in the Hare and Badger pub on 11 February 2013 – the significance of the ‘108’ was still preying on his mind, whether he was in there on his own or with someone else. Again, my eyes lingered on the mention of ‘Milk?’, right above the number on the flyer – and, again, doubts began to creep in, a small, destructive voice trying to convince me that this was just some kind of shopping list, a reminder to pick something up.

  And yet I refused to let it take hold: the fact that the sketch held some distant kind of familiarity to me was one thing – but it was the repetition of the number ‘108’, years apart from the first mention, that felt most compelling.

  Snow scattered gently against the window, making a soft noise like fat crackling in a pan, and, as I looked out, I could see it swirling around in the glow of the street lights. A set of fairy lights winked from the guttering of a house opposite and, briefly, I wondered what Christmas at the Frankses’ house would have been like this time last year. Whatever it was like, a month later the file turned up – and everything changed.

  I returned my attention to the PDFs.

  I concentrated on the landline calls first, working in chronological order, from the first day the statements began – 1 November 2012 – all the way through to the date of Franks’s disappearance on 3 March. The same names came up time and again: Craw, at home and on her mobile; three long-distance calls to their son in Australia; Jim Paige at work and on his mobile; Carla Murray’s mobile; Derek Cortez; the main line at Franks’s local golf club, and the people he’d played with there, all of whom had already been checked out. Then a succession of builders’ merchants, plumbers, plasterers and decorators.

  Nothing rang any alarm bells. The conversations between Paige and Franks seemed to stick to a fairly similar routine: fortnightly, between fifteen and twenty-five minutes. Ellie had mentioned the chats the two men had enjoyed when I’d spoken to her.

  The only time the pattern changed was at the end of January: on Thursday the 31st, they’d spoken for fifty minutes, two or three times longer than usual. This must have been the call Paige had told me about earlier: A day after he called Carla, he got in touch with me to see if I could source the footage of Pamela Welland from the pub.

  When I backtracked twenty-four hours, I saw Paige was right: at 15.34 on Wednesday 30 January, Franks had called Murray. Their exchange had lasted twenty-two minutes. After that, there were a few short, sharp calls between Franks and Paige, again backing up what Paige had told me about trying to talk Franks down. Then their calls returned to normal, although notably didn’t last as long. The drop-off in duration mirrored the drop-off in email frequency to Murray in those last five weeks.

  In the days after Franks’s disappearance, the landline statement took on the pattern I’d expected it to: frenetic phone calls from Ellie, first to Craw, then to the police, then to friends of Franks, trying to work out if anyone had seen him. Then a gradual reduction to the point at which she was hardly making any outgoing calls at all. On 27 November 2013, they stopped altogether, coinciding with Ellie’s return to London.

  I moved on to the mobile records and immediately found a lot of duplication: the same numbers I’d already seen on the landline statements, the same people making and receiving those calls. I worked my way through November and December, then January and February as well. As Spike suggested, calls didn’t stop entirely once Franks disappeared: people he didn’t keep in touch with as regularly were obviously unaware he was gone and continued to phone, but from 3 March the records began to thin out until, in the autumn, no one was calling his phone any more and Franks had been forgotten.

  But as I moved back through the mobile calls, I realized I’d missed something.
On 10 March, seven days after the disappearance, a London number tried to get in touch with him. The call had lasted only two seconds, suggesting that whoever had made it had hit Franks’s voicemail and hung up. Typed in the margin, adjacent to all the numbers, were the names and addresses of the callers. Except there was no name for this one – just an address.

  It was a public payphone.

  A road called Scale Lane in SE15.

  I scrolled further up, an immediate sense of recognition taking hold, and on 24 January I discovered why. Franks had received a call from exactly the same phone box.

  Except this call had lasted seven minutes.

  I minimized the PDF, fired up the browser and found the phone box on Google Maps. It was on a narrow side street which came off the Old Kent Road in a vague zigzag. The phone box itself was easy to miss, tucked away between a takeaway and a nail salon. Even in winter, with surrounding leaves stripped bare, it would have remained partially hidden, cast into shadow by nearby roofs. And, as I inched the view through a full three-sixty, I realized something more significant: there wasn’t a single CCTV camera within a hundred yards.

  It had been purposely chosen.

  Pulling my pad across, I wrote down a brief timeline:

  Late January – Franks receives a cold-case file in the post. Sender: unknown.

  24 January – Franks receives call from phone box in S. London. Same person who sent the file to him?

  30 January – Franks calls Murray, asking for Welland footage.

  31 January – Franks calls Paige, asking for same footage.

  11 February – Franks meets someone (who?) at the Hare and Badger pub for lunch; tells Ellie he’s meeting Paige.

  23 February – Franks mentions cold case to Craw.

  3 March – Franks disappears.

  10 March – Franks receives call from same phone box. Call lasts two seconds. Caller doesn’t know Franks has disappeared? Or knows he has and is trying to find out where he is?