by Tim Weaver
‘But he wasn’t composed when he called?’
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘Far from it. I’d rarely heard him like that. Maybe once or twice in twenty years. You remember the Richmond Park Rapist? That got to him.’
I recalled the newspaper coverage: ten women raped, the first two in Richmond Park itself, the rest on its fringes. Police failed to catch the man responsible for twenty-seven months, by which time the press and public were in a feeding frenzy. But the Met had refused to serve up a sacrificial lamb. Which had been lucky for Jim Paige: he would have been running Sapphire – the rape and serious sexual assault command – at the time.
‘Sapphire wasn’t even Franks’s command, though,’ I said.
‘So he’s only allowed to feel something for murder victims?’
‘That’s not what I meant.’
She took a long breath. ‘That was just the type of person he was.’
Certainly there was a pattern forming: for whatever reason, Franks couldn’t let go of cases where women were involved. Craw was probably a major reason for that: having a daughter of his own would bring everything into focus. He could put himself at the scene and see her there. He could imagine the feelings of the family. He could understand the vengeance they sought. Recently, it was a feeling I’d begun to recognize myself.
And yet those themes weren’t prevalent in the case he worked at the end. The murder of a drug dealer, trying to nail Kemar Penn – that had been Franks’s encore.
‘Anyway,’ Murray went on, ‘there were a few cases, but not many. Most of the time, if he felt anything, he internalized it, because you never saw it on his face, in the way he treated you or in the way he spoke. That’s not to say he didn’t lose his rag from time to time, but when you worked for the Boss, you knew what you were getting from him: candour, loyalty, trust. If you went at cases hard, honestly, properly, he’d be with you all the way. The whole journey. You couldn’t have anyone better at the helm.’ She stopped, rubbing an eye, her face a little greyer all of a sudden. ‘But if you were sloppy, if you didn’t do the best by the victims – and especially if you lied, or compromised the integrity of a case – he’d shut you down, without even blinking.’
I glanced at the picture of Reynolds. ‘Like he did with him.’
‘It’s obvious that you know a bit about that arsehole already.’
‘I’m certainly learning quickly.’
‘Milk just had this way about him. This weirdness. He’d look at you, but for a bit too long. You’d turn around in a meeting and find him watching you, or be sitting on your own in the cafeteria and he’d wander over and sit right beside you, even if every other table was empty. His real gift – if you can call it that – lay in surveillance, in watching and listening to people, and that just made him … I don’t know … creepier.’
I thought of the old-fashioned wiretap I’d found in his flat, and then the way he’d been able to trace the signal on my phone. Clearly, they were skills he was still putting to good use.
‘I used to think he was playing at being an oddball,’ Murray went on, ‘but after a while I started to realize that he wasn’t playing. He just was.’
Her hair had been tied into a bun, but it had started to come loose, and as she tried to address it, her eyes fell on one of the pictures of Reynolds.
‘Maybe that set alarm bells off with the Boss,’ she continued, ‘I don’t know. Or maybe it was the fact that some of Milk’s cases just never got solved, even when it looked like he was sitting on a cast-iron conviction. Suddenly a lead would evaporate or a witness would never resurface. People reckon it started when he was still working gangs, that that was when he first established contact with Kemar Penn. But there was never any talk of him being dirty then; not really any talk of him being dirty in Sapphire either, when he worked for Jim Paige. I mean, there was a lot of smoke, but no fire. Once he was put on a Murder Investigation Team, though, things changed. Rumours started.’
‘How did they start?’
‘I don’t know. They just started. The thing about that drug murder was that no one could connect Reynolds to it and no one could say for sure that he had tacit knowledge of it – or, worse, was involved. But it felt like it, you know? I mean, he was interested enough to dig it out of the computer after the Boss retired, in order to take a closer look.’
I nodded. ‘Why did Franks choose to run that case?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’ve read the paperwork, and it says he took over the running of the drug murder from a detective called Cordus two days into the investigation. You told me on the phone that you didn’t know why he chose this case in particular …’ I gestured towards the wall. ‘But then I find myself standing in your house in the middle of the night in front of a map you made and photos you took.’
She didn’t respond.
‘Look, for what it’s worth, I don’t care that you lied, to Paige or to me. I don’t care what secrets are swilling around the Met. All I care about is finding out what happened to Franks. So why’d he take the lead on the drug murder? Why not another case? Why any case? Did it have something to do with Reynolds?’ I paused, waiting for a response, but then a second, clearer thought hit me: ‘Or Pamela Welland?’
If I’d hit on something, Murray didn’t react. Instead, her eyes slowly returned to the map, to the photographs and newspaper cuttings.
‘You told me earlier on that you’d been following me since I called you,’ I said to her, trying to head off any thoughts she might have of backing away now. ‘But it looks like you’ve been watching Reynolds for a lot longer than that.’
A hesitant pause.
‘Murray?’
She watched me for a moment longer. ‘There’s this pub just down the road from the Yard. The Hare and Badger. I met the Boss there for a drink when I shouldn’t have.’
Something snapped into place. ‘So it was you he met there.’
‘You knew about the meeting?’
‘I just didn’t know who it was with.’
For a second that seemed to knock her out of her stride. Then she steadied herself. ‘This was in the days after he’d already asked Paige and me – and we’d already refused – to get hold of the footage from the night Pamela Welland died. The Boss … when he asked to meet up, he called me from a phone box near his house in Devon. A phone box. That set alarm bells off, minute one. It meant he didn’t want the call on his phone records.’
‘Or it meant he didn’t want Ellie to hear him.’
She nodded. ‘Yeah. I guess there’s that.’
‘So what did he say?’
‘He told me he understood about the footage, that he wasn’t going to press me on getting hold of it, but that he wanted to meet me all the same. He had some questions.’
‘About what?’
‘He started telling me he was going to be up for the weekend seeing Melanie and her family, and that he’d have some free time on the Monday. He asked if we could meet in the pub for lunch. So we did. We took a seat as far away from the action as we could possibly get – and, out of the blue, he starts asking me about Neil Reynolds.’
‘Reynolds? Why?’
‘He wanted to know what Reynolds was up to; whether I’d heard what he’d been doing since he got the boot from the Met. This was, like, two years after Milk got his P45 from Paige. I had no idea where Reynolds was. The question came totally out of left field. A couple of weeks before, the Boss was asking me to de-archive footage from a seventeen-year-old case, now he wanted the whereabouts of Neil Reynolds. I mean, what the hell? Reynolds wasn’t even a cop when Welland was murdered back in 1996.’
That confirmed something, at least: the mention of ‘Milk?’ on the two-line list he’d made on the back of the pub flyer. Now all I needed was a steer on the second part, the ‘Double-check 108’, and how it was linked to the scrap of paper with the sketch on it – if it was linked at all.
‘You remember I asked you and Paige about “BROLE
108”?’
She nodded.
‘Were you telling me the truth or trying to avoid a situation with Paige?’
‘Telling the truth.’
‘You don’t have any idea what that means?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Why?’
‘It’s just a loose end I haven’t been able to tie up yet.’ My eyes drifted to the pictures of Reynolds, and I said to her, ‘Franks didn’t ask about anything else that day?’
She shook her head. ‘Just Reynolds.’
I tried to piece it together from what I knew, tried to work out why Franks might have wanted the footage of Welland in January and the whereabouts of Reynolds in February.
‘What happened when you asked him why he wanted to find Reynolds?’
She shrugged. ‘He kept fobbing me off, trying to reassure me that none of it really mattered. I told him I could speak to Paige about it, and he told me not to. He said Paige wasn’t to know that he’d called to ask another favour. No one was. In the end, I asked him outright if he thought he was in some kind of danger.’ She paused, her gaze fixed on a space between us, her recollection of that day painted in her expression. ‘But he said no.’
‘Did you believe him?’
A flicker in her face. ‘Not really, no.’
I gave her a moment, both of us taking in those last three words.
Her eyes were back on Franks, tracing the outline of his face, and for the first time I could read her as clearly as if she’d spoken the words.
Did I ever really know him at all?
‘So, since that meeting, you’ve been slowly trying to piece it all together?’
‘Yeah. One thing the Boss taught me, almost from the moment I arrived at the Met, was to write everything down – and never throw it away. He taught me to keep everything. That was what he did. It was an old-fashioned way of working – even back in the nineties – but I wanted to impress him, so I did what he asked. And I got into a routine of doing it, every case, every victim, every beat in an investigation …’ She faded out. ‘Especially the parts of an investigation that didn’t feel right.’
I understood what she was driving at: what didn’t feel right was Franks’s requests for the Pamela Welland footage – and asking the whereabouts of Neil Reynolds.
‘After I met him that day at the pub,’ she continued, ‘I went home and dug out my notes from the time of the drug murder. I didn’t work that case, but the Boss asked my opinion about it, like he always did, and handed me the file so I could give it a pass. I noted down some thoughts at the time, and when I went back over those notes at the start of this year, I began remembering more and more about what had happened back then.’ She paused for a second, gathering herself. ‘How much do you know about it?’
‘The drug murder? Not much.’
‘The victim may as well have been a shop-window mannequin. His teeth had been removed, his prints went nowhere, he used a false name, and had a landlord happy to just take the cash, no questions asked. Again, when I checked my notes I found reference to a meeting I’d had with the Boss on 13 March 2011 where he’d briefed me on it, and told me that he was going to take over the running of it from Cordus. I can tell you exactly what his reasons were, because I wrote them down verbatim. He said it was “because of cutbacks, because I can’t pile another case on teams that are already stretched to breaking point, and because I’m the only warm body left”. And you know what? I didn’t think twice about it. I was up to my neck in other cases, like everyone else. So we all thanked him for mucking in, we all went back to our desks, and no one gave it a second thought.’
She faded out. In the silence, I heard a car pass on the road outside.
‘But now …’ she said softly, her neck chain pinched between her fingers. ‘Now I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the truth.’
‘Maybe he thought Cordus wasn’t up to running the case?’
‘No. Cordus was one of the Boss’s go-to men. The Boss trusted Cordus like he trusted me. Cordus was whip-smart, had everything the Boss looked for in a murder cop.’
There was no desk in the room, no chair, just the map on the wall, and a series of box files stacked up on the floor beneath. Murray laced her hands together and leaned against the windowsill, her eyes not meeting mine. It was clear she still didn’t fully trust me, but I was in her house now, involved as much as she was.
‘I wrote some other things down too,’ she said finally. She flipped forward in her notebook. ‘The victim told the landlord that his name was Marvin Robinson. But some of the dead guy’s neighbours – these stoner party girls studying at the UEL – said he once got drunk with them and ended up confirming that – surprise – that wasn’t his real name at all.’
While waiting in the car, I remembered being about to read the interview with the students across the hall when I’d spotted Reynolds approaching.
I watched Murray’s eyes return to the map, to the photographs and cuttings, and then to the picture of the second house I hadn’t recognized, pinned to the wall on its own.
‘You know where that is?’ she asked.
I looked at the house. ‘No.’
‘Devon.’
I took a step closer, taking it in properly this time. It was a shabby-looking semi-detached backing on to fields that rolled up and away into an indistinct distance. Murray pressed a finger to the bloodless face of the victim in the drug murder, both his eyes closed, the mortuary slab a muted blue-grey behind the creamy dome of his skull.
‘It belongs to our victim,’ she said.
‘The house in Devon does?’
‘Yeah. Or at least it did.’
She turned back to the photograph of the dead man.
‘And according to those students across the hall, “Marvin Robinson” told them his real name was actually Simon.’
Simon
September 2010 | Three Years Ago
Simon left on a Thursday. She woke one morning to find him packing a suitcase in the spare room, clothes strewn around him. He stank like the morning after the night before, of booze, of sweat, of other women, and had a greasy sheen to his chest and back. As she approached, she thought he looked more at home than ever among the damp wallpaper and the musty stench of old carpets. At the window, instead of a pair of curtains, there was a tatty, mud-streaked orange blanket.
‘What’s going on?’ she said.
He didn’t answer.
‘Simon?’
‘Like you give a shit.’
The truth was, she didn’t. He’d fitted what she’d needed in the years after Lucas had died, in a way she could never fully articulate in sessions with Dr Garrick.
‘Are you going somewhere?’
‘Yeah,’ he replied. ‘You could say that.’
‘Where?’
‘I’m moving out.’
‘What?’ Her first thought was of losing the roof over her head, of no longer knowing she had a place to come back to. ‘Why?’
‘Why not?’
She frowned, taking a further step into the room. He watched her come in, his eyes lingering on her.
‘What’s going on?’ she said again.
‘Are you deaf?’
‘What, you suddenly decide you want to move out?’
‘Yeah. So?’
She looked at the suitcase. ‘So you’re going to need a lot more than a suitcase full of clothes. What about all this?’ she said, gesturing to the room, to the space around her, to the walls in need of paint, and to the cheap, faded furniture. ‘What about the house?’
‘What about it?’
‘What do you mean, “what about it”?’
He smirked. ‘It’s already sold, you stupid bitch.’
Her heart sank. ‘What?’
‘It’s been on the market for six months. I got an offer on it two months ago and just signed the contracts yesterday.’
She felt like she’d been punched in the stomach.
‘And you didn’t think to tell me?’
&
nbsp; ‘What the fuck’s it got to do with you?’
She backed up a little, hitting the panels of the door, her hands flat to them. ‘When were you planning on telling me that you were leaving me homeless?’
He shrugged.
‘That’s it? A shrug?’
‘You bring me down,’ he said, closing the suitcase. ‘You’re like a walking fuckin’ raincloud. All you do is piss and moan, and mope about because you’ve had a few tough breaks. We’ve all had tough breaks. We’re all dealing with the shit life throws at us.’
‘Yeah?’ she said, regaining her composure, anger suddenly burning in her throat and chest. ‘What tough breaks have you had, Simon? Not stealing as much as you’d like from work? Not making enough from stolen goods? Getting the clap from some skank you’ve been screwing?’
He took a sudden step towards her. ‘What did you say?’
‘You heard what I said.’
He grabbed her by the arm, his fingers digging into her flesh, pressing so hard it was like he was clawing his way through to the bone. ‘Don’t ever talk to me like that.’
‘Or what?’
‘Or I’ll fuckin’ kill you.’
‘Yeah? Maybe you shoul –’
He pushed her hard against the nearest wall, one hand instantly on her throat, the other still clamped on her arm.
‘You think I won’t do it?’ he spat through gritted teeth.
He pressed harder, as if trying to force a response out of her, but his grip was too tight: air ceased to ebb and flow and her vision began to blur, Simon starting to fade into a spill of muted colour, like she was seeing him from the other side of frosted glass. With one last push, she fought back at him, her nails brushing the front of his shirt, then again, then again. Finally, they glanced the side of his face, digging in and ripping their way downwards. He yelled and stumbled back, clutching his face, blood spilling out between his fingers. He hit the bed, the suitcase rocking behind him, and fell on to it.
‘You stupid bitch!’ he screamed, looking down at his hands, blood on his fingers, on his face, smeared along the ridge of his jaw.
She roused herself from the haze, the feeling of his fingers still burning on her throat, and ran downstairs, her hand gripping the banister, making sure she didn’t fall. She heard him behind her, on the landing – quick footsteps, floorboards creaking – and upped her speed, along the hallway, into the kitchen. She yanked open a drawer and grabbed a knife, six inches long with a serrated edge.
