David Raker 05 - Fall From Grace

by Tim Weaver

  Instantly, it aligned. ‘It was Franks who started the rumours about you, to deflect attention away from him. He was the one who ruined your reputation at the Met. Franks was the reason cops started looking at your cases in a different light.’

  He blinked. ‘Now you know.’

  And as I saw that, I remembered the conversation I’d had with Healy when I’d called to ask him what he knew about Reynolds. When Franks retired, Healy had said to me, the drug murder was a dead case. Yet, a few weeks later, Jim Paige finds Reynolds with his nose in Franks’s casework. Why would he be doing that?

  Because Reynolds suspected the man Leonard Franks claimed to be – his principles, his integrity, his honour – was a lie. He wasn’t looking for evidence of himself in the case – he was looking for something he could use.

  A secret. A cover-up.

  He was looking for revenge.

  And that was what he found.

  ‘You’re clever, David. I could have killed you a long time ago. But I needed a fresh pair of eyes.’ Reynolds began removing the camera from its tripod. ‘I’d had a trace on Bullock’s phone for a long time, but she lay low for the first three months after she managed to lose me that day at the beach. Hardly used her mobile at all. Every so often, I’d manage to triangulate her signal to a youth hostel or some shitty motel, but by the time I got there, she’d moved on. She didn’t know I was tracking her, but she knew not to stay still, and while she never got in touch with Leonard on any of the numbers I had for him, I knew they were in contact. I knew he was advising her. And then, the following January, she disappeared for good. That was when he set her up in that place I finally found her in.’

  He stopped, glancing at Franks, a snide twist to his face. ‘But just before she went into hiding, she made a call to a phone whose signal originated from inside this hospital. She’d only made one other call to that number – and that was in the hours after she gave me the slip at the beach. I knew, even then, that the number probably belonged to Leonard, and it seemed pretty obvious in the days after she went into hiding that, during that second call, Leonard and Casey were nailing down the finer details of her disappearing act. What I could never figure out at the time was why – during that second call – his phone signal was coming from inside a hospital that had been closed for two months.’

  ‘The signal came from the chapel,’ I said.

  He nodded.

  Except, when he’d come across, he hadn’t found any evidence of Franks in the chapel. Because the signal hadn’t come from the chapel.

  It had come from the storage room next door to it.

  With that, something else slotted into place. What seemed like an age ago, I’d asked Ellie if Franks ever went out hiking by himself. Sometimes he just liked to be alone out there, she’d said. I’d wondered if he’d gone hiking at all, whether his journey might have been in the opposite direction, to the coast. Now I knew I was right: he’d been using the chapel as a place to hold his memories long before Reynolds had sent him the file. He kept returning here after the hospital closed, to build his mausoleum – a place no one would find – and he was here, at the altar of his son’s life, the day Casey called him to finalize her new life in hiding. She didn’t know she was being traced, perhaps thought a second quick call to Franks wouldn’t matter now he’d organized a safe house for her, but it helped Reynolds make the connection to the hospital; to a building Franks was returning to, on and off, for months before he finally ran.

  And then a building that became his permanent home when he did.

  ‘Casey managed to hide for ten months at that house,’ Reynolds said. His voice snapped me back into the moment, and I could see he was now clutching the videocamera. ‘She managed to hide until her loneliness came back to haunt her last October. And then I went to visit her, and this time …’ He glanced at Franks. ‘This time I made sure.’

  ‘You fucking bastard,’ Franks said. ‘Where did you bury her?’

  A snort of derision. ‘You just don’t get it, do you? This bullshit reputation you built yourself at the Met; all the doe-eyed pricks in that place who worshipped the ground you walked on – and this is the truth. You lied, you killed. This is who you are. Now I’m going to make sure the world gets to see it.’

  ‘The world?’ I asked.

  He held up the camera before returning it to his backpack. ‘Any media outlet that wants it. And I’m pretty sure there’ll be plenty.’

  I shook my head. ‘No one’s going to trust you as a source, Reynolds.’

  ‘What? It’s all on tape. Once I’ve edited it down and created a little back story for how I got hold of it, people will be convinced. After all, I am a former police officer.’

  ‘And all of us?’

  ‘Well, I’ll keep Leonard alive, because I want to see him playing hunt the soap in Pentonville. I want to watch his downfall.’

  Franks looked at him. ‘You’re insane.’

  ‘Why am I insane?’

  ‘You think I won’t tell everyone what you’ve done?’

  ‘Who’s going to believe you? You’re confessing to getting a witness pregnant in one of the media’s favourite murder cases. This is Pamela Welland we’re talking about, not some two-bit pro spreading her legs for drug money. You compromised her case by fucking around with Casey Bullock, and now you’ve just told the world – on tape – you killed a man to prevent your lover’s identity from getting out. You think I haven’t spent two years preparing for this? Even if you tell them I’m involved, no one will find anything. They’ll come and ask me questions, and find nothing. You’re done.’

  Franks seemed to shrink then.

  Reynolds reacted with a flicker of a smile, then zeroed in on Craw and me, looking between us. He walked across to her, peeling the duct tape off the side of the tripod and placing it over her lips again.

  Franks started getting up out of his seat. ‘For the love of God, Reynolds – do anything you want to me, but she’s done nothing to you.’

  But then Reynolds stopped, raising a finger to his lips.

  We all looked at him.

  Silence.

  Softly, there was a sound from the other side of the doors.

  77

  The glass panels of the doors were perfect squares of black. There was nothing visible beyond them. Reynolds waited, watching, as if expecting the noise to come again. But it didn’t. He looked from me, to Franks, to Craw and back to the doors. Keeping the gun pointed at Franks, he retrieved his backpack and took out the duct tape, then tossed it over. Franks caught it.

  ‘Start tying your legs to the chair,’ Reynolds said. ‘Do it fast.’

  Franks did as he was told.

  Reynolds took the duct tape back from him, eyes still on the doors, and wrapped it around Franks’s chest, his arms locked in place at his sides. Then he checked the binds on me and on Craw, folded up the tripod, picked up Franks’s knife and zipped it all into the backpack. He glanced again at us – then moved swiftly across the greenhouse.

  He paused.

  Looked through the glass panels.

  A beat.

  Then he pulled one of the doors open and slipped through the gap, gun up in front of him, like the bow of a boat moving through the night. A second later, the door fell back into place and he was gone.

  I looked at Franks.

  He was watching me, as if expecting me to say something, to add to the chorus of judgement. Across from him, Craw was just staring into space. She was worn, betrayed, incapable of even looking at her father any more.

  ‘I disappeared to protect my family,’ he said, but the words sounded impossibly hollow, even to him, and they drifted off into the sunlight, vanishing instantly.

  A silence settled around us.

  Drawn out, painful, like a period of mourning.

  I looked towards the doors. The whole building seemed to have become still. No wind passing through the place. No birdsong.

  A minute passed.

  Two. />
  Craw’s watch made a gentle beep and I realized it was eight o’clock on Tuesday 17 December. I’d started working the case the previous Thursday. Now, five days later, everything had changed: the course of the investigation, a family’s life, their entire future.

  I looked towards the door. Still no sign of Reynolds.

  Do something.

  Slowly, I started shifting my chair forward, across the space between Craw and me. There were pieces of glass scattered across a patch of ground to her right.

  Franks shot me a look. ‘What the hell are you doing?’

  I ignored him, concentrating on keeping noise to a minimum. Craw was watching me now too. I paused close to her, scanning the ground for the biggest piece I could find.

  ‘He’ll kill you both if he finds you like that,’ Franks whispered.

  ‘He’ll kill us either way.’

  Rocking my chair from side to side, until the legs began rhythmically leaving the ground, I felt the back of the chair bend slightly – and then it toppled over. I was ready for the impact, but it still hurt like hell: the ground was hard, full of jagged glass and uneven concrete, and although I managed to keep my head away from the floor, my shoulder bore the brunt. Pain lashed across my chest, reigniting memories of old injuries, of hitting a grass bank in my BMW, of knocking myself out, of accusing Craw of being in on this. I glanced at her as I lay there on my side, guilt blooming in my stomach, but although her gaze was on me, her mind wasn’t. She was somewhere else.

  Shuffling across the floor on my shoulder and hip – chair still attached to me – I turned, scooped up a sliver of glass and manoeuvred it around in my hands, so the point faced down towards my fingers. I started to saw away at the tape. I went slowly at first, careful not to cut myself, but then found a tempo, eyes fixed on the doors in case Reynolds came back. Sunlight broke through the clouds again, cutting down through the roof and forming a pale spotlight to the left of me. But the doors remained still, and the greenhouse stayed silent.

  My wrist binds snapped loose.

  Bringing the glass around, I cut through the tape at my ankles, got to my feet, then freed Craw. She nodded her thanks, wiped both eyes with the sleeve of her jacket and looked across the room at her father. So much passed between them, so much history I could never be a part of, or ever understand.

  ‘Can I have that?’ she said, gesturing to the glass.

  I studied her for a moment, all the evidence of the past hour written in her face, her impassivity gone, her resolve challenged.

  I handed it to her.

  As she walked across to her father, I headed for the doors, coming in at an angle so I wasn’t in front of the panels. I glanced behind me, once, and saw her cutting away at his binds, the two of them silent: he was staring down at the top of her head; she was crouched beside him, using the shard to free his ankles, not making eye contact.

  I reached the doors.

  Spreading my hand across the middle of the one on the left, I gradually moved it back, the soft squeak of the hinge carrying off into the darkness. My heart was banging so hard it felt like it was bruising my ribcage. Images flashed in my head – snatches of what lay ahead of me – and then I left the greenhouse and hit the musty, enclosed spaces of the corridor.

  It was dark.

  Quiet.

  But it was empty.

  Reynolds was gone.

  78

  By the time we got to the front of the hospital, Reynolds’s boat was half a mile away, just a mark on the water as it headed east along the coast. From where we were, against the still of the early morning, we could hear its motor, its whine becoming ever quieter, as it faded from existence. Reynolds was standing at the controls, one hand on the wheel, the hood up on his top, his face a flash of white inside. He looked back towards us, a smudge in the distance, and then the boat started passing the eastern edges of the bay’s curves.

  A minute later, he was gone from view.

  For a moment, all three of us stood there, watching the empty causeway, sun on our backs, trying to work out what was happening, and what had changed Reynolds’s plans. Then I suggested to Craw that she should remain outside while Franks and I did another sweep of the hospital. Her head, understandably, wasn’t in the game, and she needed some time alone. Over the next hour, she was going to have to make some big decisions.

  I went in, armed with my flashlight, and Franks followed behind me. For ten minutes we were silent, but as we got to the second floor of the east wing, approaching the day room – the false wall panel still open – I stopped.

  ‘What happened to Casey?’

  I heard him come to a halt behind me.

  When I turned, it was like he’d become bound to the floor, unable to move, frozen by his unintended part in her death. ‘Reynolds found out where I’d put her.’

  ‘She was in hiding?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How did you keep in contact with her?’

  ‘I had two phones,’ he went on, ‘the one everyone knew about – and one that only Casey had the number for. After Reynolds cornered her on Keel Point beach, after she managed to give him the slip on the way up to Dartmoor, she called me on my other number. She was scared shitless. I calmed her down and asked her who the man had been, and she described Reynolds. And then she said he’d told her his name was Milk.’

  ‘That was when you knew he was after you.’

  He nodded. ‘So I helped keep her off the radar for three months while I tried to find a permanent place for her. We met in person, or we spoke on payphones. Eventually, I set her up along the coast, in this tiny village, where I told her she wasn’t allowed to go out during the day, she wasn’t allowed to call me, she wasn’t allowed to use her mobile phone at all. She had to dial into a voicemail I’d set up, same time every day, to tell me she was safe – and she had to do that until I gave her the all-clear. I wasn’t sure when that was ever going to come. I wasn’t sure what the end even was. But when Reynolds cornered her on that beach, that was when I realized the secret was out.’

  ‘Did Simon Preston tell Reynolds about you and Casey?’

  ‘Yes. He must have.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe they came into contact before I …’ I killed Preston. A long pause. ‘Maybe Reynolds had been around to see Preston on behalf of Kemar Penn; to deliver a warning about straying on to Penn’s turf. Maybe they got talking. Either way, once Reynolds knew about Casey and me, he got his ducks in a row, he waited until the time was right, and he sought her out. He wanted to use her to get at me. So I helped her stay hidden, and spent thirteen months wondering what the hell I was going to do next.’

  ‘Did he ever seek you out in that time?’

  ‘No. Never.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because she was everything he needed. He could force her to tell him the truth. Manipulate her. Frighten her. Hurt her. He could coerce her, but he knew he couldn’t hurt or frighten me. So, even after she gave him the slip, he didn’t panic – he just spent those thirteen months waiting for her to make a mistake. And, once she did, he found out where she was and he forced her to tell him everything – and then he put it all in that file, and he …’

  Murdered her.

  He couldn’t even say the words.

  ‘When she stopped calling the voicemail at the end of October, I knew something was wrong. I stewed on it for a couple of months, thought about driving to the village and calling at the house. I was desperate to find out where she was, and what had happened to her. But I couldn’t. It was too risky. And, deep down …’ A gentle breath. ‘Deep down, I knew she was gone. And, just as I was trying to cope with that, the file arrived.’

  I gave him a moment. ‘What did the file have in it?’

  ‘Everything.’

  ‘Your entire relationship?’

  ‘Everything,’ he said again. ‘On the cover it said, “Confess your sins”.’

  ‘But why would Reynolds send it ano
nymously?’

  ‘Because he wanted me to walk myself to the newspapers, to the media, to whoever the hell else wanted to hear about what I’d done. The file he sent me, it wasn’t a threat. Not overtly. Not at first. It was an offer. It had everything in it – Pamela Welland, Lucas, Simon Preston, everything.’ He stopped, swallowing. ‘Inside, it said I had six weeks. If I didn’t confess what I’d done before then, there would be consequences.’

  I remembered the two calls Franks had received from the phone box off the Old Kent Road. ‘He first called you on 24 January to – what? – make sure you had the file?’

  He nodded. ‘Yes.’

  Franks had received a second call as well, a week after he disappeared, from the same phone box. That had been his six-week deadline. Reynolds had been phoning to tell him, possibly to up the stakes – but Franks had pre-empted him.

  He’d already gone.

  ‘That was why you met Murray that day in the pub a few weeks after the file arrived; why you asked her if she’d seen Reynolds around.’

  It was why he’d written ‘Double-check 108’ on the back of the pub flyer too: he didn’t know whether the file was the end of what Reynolds knew – or just the beginning. Franks was reminding himself to make sure that the money he’d put in the PO box was still there, that neither that, nor the footage of Casey on the phone, had been compromised. But his habit of writing everything down, his obssession with detail, had left a trail: from the meeting with Murray, all the way to a post-office box in south Devon.

  ‘I wanted to find Reynolds,’ Franks said to me.

  ‘You wanted revenge?’

  ‘I wanted something.’ His eyes moved to the wall, to the mural on it. ‘The minute the file arrived, I thought about running. That was why I called Paige and Murray at the end of January, asking for a copy of the footage. I wanted …’ His eyes flicked back to me, a flash in them. ‘I’d exhausted the VHS copy I had; watched it over and over. So if I was going to run, I wanted a new copy. Wherever I went, I wanted to be able to see her.’