by Tim Weaver
‘But then?’
‘But then, in the days after, my resolve hardened. I thought, “I’m not running, I’m not being blackmailed by him,” and I started working through the file, trying to come up with ways to fight back against what he had on me. But there was nothing. I had nothing. I’m not sure Reynolds thought I’d have the balls to up and leave like that – leave my life behind, my wife, my daughter, my grandkids. That was why he gave me six weeks.’
‘But you ran anyway?’
‘What else did I have left?’
I looked at him. ‘Apart from your family?’
‘Don’t fucking judge me, Raker.’
For a second, there was a nasty twist to his face, the shadows of the man that had lucidly, willingly, crossed the line into murder – and then it was gone again.
Franks had forged his reputation as a straight arrow, a man of morals, a cop who held others up to standards he’d never come close to meeting in the depths of his hidden life. I understood very clearly why Reynolds saw mileage in that. The concept of getting it all on tape made a certain kind of sense too: it was clean, dramatic, easy to process for the media – and it would utterly destroy Franks.
Reynolds was merciless, a cold-blooded fixer, almost certainly a murderer too. And yet, in getting Franks’s confession on tape, he’d captured something true. He’d shone a light on the spaces between himself and Franks, and shown what divided them.
And, at points, there was nothing.
No division between them.
No difference at all.
79
As we were coming back towards the front entrance, daylight washing into the corridor, a thought came to me. I turned to Franks, and he stopped.
‘How exactly did you do it?’
‘Do what?’
‘Disappear like that.’
He nodded, glancing through the gap in the door where Craw was perched on the bank, looking out across the sea. ‘We had a routine. Ellie liked a routine. That time of year, we started the fire about three in the afternoon, and it would start to die out about five, five-fifteen. That was when I tended to get up and get some more logs.’ He sniffed, a smile flickering across his face. ‘When I made up my mind I was going to go, I spent a week timing how long it took to get to the log pile and back. On average, it took thirty-two seconds. No time at all. But then I spent a week timing how long it took Ellie to do her things: fill the kettle, boil the kettle, get two cups, make the tea, bring it back. That took, on average, four minutes and twenty-seven seconds. The day I left, we’d gone to a bakery in Widdecombe and bought a carrot cake. I knew that would add on time for me.’
I looked past him, at the darkness of the hospital, at the doors dissolving into the shadows. As I met his eyes again, he nodded at me once, as if he understood what I was thinking. This was the end of a journey: from their dream home on the open spaces of Dartmoor, to a place full of memories and ghosts left to rot in the middle of a causeway.
‘I bought a backpack, a change of clothes, some essentials, all for cash,’ he said, ‘and then left the backpack in the log pile. Separately to that, I’d stored about ten grand at the post office over there.’ He gestured across the water, in the direction of Brompton Lee. ‘It was part of that lump sum I took from my pension, so I wasn’t concerned about people looking into my financials after I was gone. Everyone takes that lump sum when they retire. I mean, it’s tax-free, why wouldn’t you? Plus we were doing that kitchen extension, so that was a good disguise for shifting bigger chunks of money around.’
‘But it was still light when you left that day?’
‘Yes.’
‘So how did Ellie fail to spot you on the moors?’
‘Because I wasn’t on the moors.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I was in the boot of our car.’
It seemed such an obvious ploy now, and yet at the time Ellie would never have thought to check. Why would she? They loved their house. They loved their retirement. As far as she was concerned, they loved each other. Why would her husband ever choose to pull a stunt like that? Parked at the side of the house, the car’s obvious use was as a means to get away – not something to hide out in. Except this wasn’t the retirement she expected.
This wasn’t the husband she knew.
‘And you waited until it got dark?’
He nodded, and this time there was a moment of sorrow in his eyes as they drifted out to Craw, hanging on her. I recalled the video of Casey Bullock he’d had on his mobile phone too. He loved them all in different ways; just not ways he could express.
‘I waited three hours, until it was pitch black.’ He stopped, seemed to waver. ‘And then I got out of the car – and I left for good.’
80
That was the last conversation I ever had with Leonard Franks. Shortly after, we crossed the causeway, back to shore. We chose a secluded cove as our destination, further down from Parl Rock and out of sight of people watching us from the coast. Craw sat at the back, saying nothing. She’d yet even to speak to her father, and he’d yet to attempt to engage her. As Franks guided the boat he’d kept hidden at the fence, back across the blue-grey water, I saw a slow change in his expression, as if a realization had taken hold.
He’d lost everything.
His wife. His daughter.
The woman he’d loved.
The son he’d hardly known.
And now, with Reynolds gone and the video in his possession, it was about to get even worse than that. Because leaving the island wasn’t the end of the journey for Franks.
It was only the beginning.
I helped him pull the boat back on to the shore and then stepped away from the two of them – from father and daughter – as they stood there, facing one another on the cold, sun-speckled beach. After a couple of moments, I could see a change in Franks’s eyes as a plan went through his head. He was going to run again. He was going to hide.
But Craw saw it too.
‘Either hand yourself in – or I arrest you and take you in myself.’
He turned to her, disbelieving. ‘Are you kidding me, Mel?’
‘No,’ she said flatly, unmoved. ‘I mean it.’
‘I’m your father.’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t know what you are any more.’
In the hours afterwards, Craw drove him to a police station in Totnes and waited while he handed himself in. I wasn’t there at the time, so could only imagine what the moment had been like for her, for both of them, and knew the aftershocks would continue as the enormity of her father’s crimes became clearer. But I’d admired her for doing what was right, even as she must have glimpsed the personal damage it would wreak.
At the same time that she was watching her father being led away, deeper into the bowels of that police station, I was arriving at the motel Ewan Tasker had been keeping Annabel and Olivia in, just off the M5. Reynolds wouldn’t come after them now, I was certain of that. He had his tape. Franks was going to prison. That was his endgame. So I collected them both, thanked Task again and drove them back home to Buckfastleigh.
I stayed with them for a couple of nights, and at five on the morning of Thursday 19 December, unable to sleep, I got up, went downstairs and made myself a coffee. When I came back through to the living room, I was surprised to find Annabel sitting there, with her feet up on the sofa, wrapped in a dressing gown.
‘Morning,’ she said.
‘Morning. Do you want a coffee?’
She shook her head. ‘No.’
I sat down next to her. ‘Can’t you sleep?’
She took a long breath, but didn’t say anything.
‘Belle?’
Her eyes were fixed on a photograph opposite, of her, Olivia and the two people she’d spent twenty-four years calling Mum and Dad. ‘Things weren’t always perfect with them,’ she said quietly. ‘We used to argue. Sometimes Mum – or, I guess, the person I thought was my mum – could be overbearing. I th
ink maybe I understand why now.’
It was a veiled dig at me, and I didn’t blame her.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
She turned to me. ‘It is what it is, I suppose.’
‘You were never in danger.’
‘Are you certain?’
‘Positive. I was just being sure.’
‘And now?’
‘Now you go on living your life.’
‘And this won’t happen again?’
‘No,’ I said, squeezing her arm.
But it was difficult to look her in the eyes as I said it.
81
Three days later, I pulled into Melanie Craw’s driveway in Wimbledon. It was lunchtime on 22 December. At the front of the house, she and her family had decorated one of the fir trees, looping lights around it, a wooden reindeer perched in the mud beside it.
But that wasn’t the only thing outside the house.
Rows of photographers stood in a line at the fence. Even though there was no sign of Craw, no sign of her family, they jostled for position all the same, a series of news crews trying to create a space between them all where they could frame the house in the background. On the opposite side of the road, vans were bumped up on to the pavement, from Sky News, the BBC and ITV. As I passed into the driveway, journalists’ hands palmed at the bonnet and the doors of the courtesy car I’d been given while my BMW was brought back to life. But once I was past them, I paused, got out and made a point of pushing the gates shut again. They fired questions at me – a wall of noise – but I said nothing, got back into my car and headed up to where Craw’s Mini was parked.
She’d asked to meet on a Sunday morning because she said the house would be quiet. When I suggested she might want to spend the time with her family more than me, there was a pause on the line. ‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘Mum’s taken Mads and Evie out.’
It was the first time she’d ever mentioned her family without being asked a direct question about them. I knew her husband was called Bill, that her girls were called Maddie and Evelyn, but I didn’t know much more than that. As I got out of the car again – the day cold but bright – I wondered if this was the start of an adaptation process for her. She’d based her life so closely on her father’s, taken on his traits, his beliefs, his opinions – in her home life and in her work. Now she was five days on from hearing the real, terrible history of the man she’d loved. Maybe it was time to change.
She met me at the door, dressed casually in grey tracksuit bottoms and a hooded top, and a sea of camera flashes erupted behind us. I moved past her and she pushed the door shut, then gestured down, to the sunken living room. It was a little more untidy than before, kids’ toys scattered across one side of the room, a stack of DVDs sitting in front of the TV. It looked more lived in, more natural. Perhaps that was purposeful too.
‘Where’s your mum taken the girls?’ I asked.
‘Ice skating at Somerset House.’
‘Is she skating too?’
Craw smiled. ‘No. Just making sure they don’t break their legs.’
She made us both a coffee. When she returned, it was with two mugs and a pack of biscuits. ‘I’m not much of a cook,’ she said, ‘so I hope you’re okay with digestives.’
‘Digestives are good.’
She smiled again, more fleetingly this time, and as we sat down on opposite sofas, a silence settled between us. This time, unlike our first meeting in the members’ club ten days ago, it wasn’t awkward – but it was pregnant with everything that had taken place over that time, and everything that was taking place now. It was clear she’d been crying not too long ago as well.
‘Have you seen the news?’ she asked.
I nodded. Franks was all over it. A copy of the video – edited, and presented how Reynolds had promised – had been delivered to every newspaper in the country; every website, every TV station. In every part of the media, on every Twitter feed, there were countless freeze-frames of Leonard Franks sitting in a chair, confessing his sins. He didn’t look under duress. In the edited footage, he seemed strangely relaxed, almost comforted about being able to tell his story finally. Outside of the cuts was the truth of it, though: he’d done nothing on his own terms, even turning himself into the police.
‘Any luck finding Reynolds?’ Craw said.
I shook my head. As soon as I’d got back to London, I’d been around to his flat and tried ringing the front buzzer, but without any answer. Then, at night, I’d returned and got into the garden and up on to the slanted roof where the window had been unlocked before. This time Reynolds hadn’t made the same mistake: the window was locked, the latch down – and, inside, I could see the entire place had been cleared out.
He’d planned ahead, maybe even cleared the flat out in the hours and days before he’d headed down to Devon. Everything, all his planning, had been focused on one thing: securing the confession, delivering it to the media anonymously, then disappearing.
‘What about you?’ I asked. ‘Have you found any trace of him?’
A sadness moved across her face. Nothing.
I wasn’t sure, for the time being, what difference it really made. Even if she found him, what next? He’d pretty much admitted he was on the take in the moments before he left us in the greenhouse – but it would be her word against his. There was nothing on tape. No actual, usable evidence. Plus the confession that was playing on television now cleared Reynolds of any wrongdoing and admitted Franks had set him up. Reynolds was lying low, letting the confession speak for itself. Eventually, when he resurfaced, there would be difficult questions for him to answer, difficult questions for Craw too – about hiring me, about handing me police files – but I didn’t raise either of those things with her now. First of all, investigators needed to get Franks’s side of the story straight, and they were still locked away with him in a London station after he’d been transferred into Met custody.
Again, the house became quiet.
I thought about the things we’d talked through, in person and on the phone, over the past few days. Twenty-four hours earlier, I’d asked her why she’d come to Dartmoor that night at the house – curious now, not suspicious – and she’d told me.
‘Cortez called, and said he’d seen someone there. That wasn’t a lie. I never lied to you. I wanted to find Dad, as much of a mistake as that seems now. But things were … Things were difficult here.’ She’d paused then, and I’d caught a flash of where the conversation was heading: she meant things had been difficult with her marriage. ‘In truth, I wanted to get away. I’d had an argument with Bill on the phone, and I needed to give myself some time to think. I just completely forgot about you giving me a new mobile number. My mind was full of static from the fight, trying to think about where we went next. So I just called the mobile number I had for you – your old number – because I was too busy thinking about Bill. He and I …’
As she’d faded out, I’d said, ‘You don’t have to tell me.’
‘I want to,’ she’d replied, and I’d got the sense this might be strangely empowering for her, a change she was trying to embrace. ‘He moved out in May. All the stress from Dad going missing, it was all having an impact. All we did was argue – work, kids, the idea of Mum moving back here, everything. So he doesn’t come to the house. He picks the girls up outside, takes them out – but he never comes in. We just talk on the phone.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
She’d shrugged. ‘Life can be tough.’
As I returned to the present, she leaned forward on the sofa and picked up her mug. There was a flash of fresh tears in her eyes, but she held them back. I thought for a moment how different she’d become in the past five days, the emotion weighing heavy on her, hanging from her face, from her shoulders, in her voice. And yet, strangely, it added something to her, something that had never been there before. For the first time, Craw was less rigid and programmed. I didn’t wish any of this on her, but there was a slow change in her, as
if she were being shaped in a different, slightly softer way.
‘So what next?’ she said.
But then, on the sofa beside her, her mobile phone began buzzing gently. She looked down at it and rolled her eyes. ‘Speak of the devil,’ she muttered.
Her husband.
‘Maybe I should leave.’
‘No,’ she said, holding up a hand. ‘No, I want you to stay.’
Her eyes lingered on me, those last five words hanging in the air between us, and I saw something in them: a vulnerability, a loneliness, a need.
I nodded. ‘Okay.’
She got up and headed off towards the kitchen. It wasn’t long before I heard the start of a fight, of raised voices, but then the kitchen door closed, and I was alone.
I got up, went to the windows at the front and looked out from behind slanted blinds at the media. They’d settled back into small packs. With no sign of Craw, no sign of her family, her husband, or of the woman Franks had arguably betrayed most of all – Ellie – they had nothing to feed on. Craw had said on the phone the day before that Ellie was doing okay, that she was putting on a brave face – but I wondered how quickly that mask dissolved in private. She was bright enough to see where this ended up: Franks on trial for his crimes, and her sitting opposite him in the courtroom, in the stalls, on the stand, looking at a man she didn’t even know. I’d left it up to Craw to decide whether she also told police about the events at the hospital, about the room I’d found, full of memories of a second life. In the end, she’d decided not to. Maybe, lucidly, because without Reynolds, without a scrap of evidence about what he’d done, there would only be more questions; maybe, emotionally, and without caring to admit it, because she saw the room for what it was: a celebration, a funeral, a tomb. Whatever else Casey Bullock was, she ended up another victim: in life, in death, through the lies of Leonard Franks.
