David Raker 05 - Fall From Grace

by Tim Weaver

  I took her hand and squeezed it gently. As the doorbell sounded, I got to my feet, washed my hands, wrists and arms, and rolled up the sleeves on my shirt to disguise the bloodstains. I paused at the rear door to look back at her, at the carnage around her.

  All of this for Leonard Franks.

  I headed out, pulling the door shut behind me, and found myself in the gap between Craw’s house and her neighbours’. A tall side gate disguised my position from the media and paramedics out front. At the rear was a long garden with a five-foot fence at the bottom. On the other side of it, I could see people walking, and hear cars.

  A road.

  I made a break for it across the lawn, scaled the fence and landed on the other side. As a couple of people eyed me, I headed in the direction of Wimbledon Park.

  Moving south across the park, I heard more sirens. This time they belonged to the police. I tried to remain focused, but panic was already taking hold. Craw wouldn’t be able to tell them anything. Not now. If her injuries were bad enough, maybe not ever.

  I was boxed in: fifty journalists had seen me enter the house and never come out again. My courtesy car – easily traceable back to me – was parked outside her house. Garrick had swept away anything implicating himself, but ensured the opposite was true for me. He didn’t have to read too far back into my history to know how things would play out with the police. I’d crossed swords with them before. There were cops at the Met who’d been waiting for a reason to bring me down. Garrick, anonymously, had just given it to them. He’d manipulated me, and my history – and yet I still couldn’t get a clear sight of his reasons.

  I’d eventually seen Reynolds’s endgame.

  But I couldn’t see Garrick’s.

  At the south-west corner of the park, I left its boundaries, headed along Church Road and turned left, in the direction of the Tube. It was Sunday, cold but clear, and the sun was out, none of which played in my favour. Good weather meant bigger crowds. With my head down, I kept moving, intermittently switching from one side of the street to another to lessen the chances of people seeing my face. If Garrick had called the police about the weapon twenty minutes ago, that meant they were probably turning up at my house now. If he’d hidden it relatively well, to make it seem less obvious, that gave me another ten minutes, fifteen maximum. That meant I was a quarter of an hour away from having my name and description wired out to every police radio within a five-mile radius of here.

  I need to get out of Wimbledon.

  Ahead of me was the Tube station. I went straight inside, past the gateline and down to the platform.

  The next train was two minutes away.

  Retreating to the furthest corner, I kept my eyes on approaching passengers while trying to form a plan of attack. Where did I head next? Where did I begin to look for Garrick? As I tried to come up with something, my mind kept returning to the carnage I’d left behind me: to Craw, to the moments before I’d found her, to news of Reynolds washing ashore, to the media baying for blood outside the front gates. The minute I snapped back into focus, I began to drift again, still trying to come up with reasons why Garrick had done this, why he would go this far, how he’d gone from treating Casey Bullock to killing Reynolds and trying to do the same with Craw.

  All in order to expose Leonard Franks.

  It didn’t make sense.

  As the train rumbled into the station, I found a seat at the end of an empty carriage and began trying to clear my head. Think. But, thirty seconds later, as the train lurched into action and we passed out into the sunlight, I let the warmth carve in through the windows and take me away again. I let my mind turn over, moving back through my conversation with Garrick, playing it, rewinding it, playing it, rewinding it, trying to see what lay in the spaces in between. His phrases. His choices of words. His explanations.

  His slip-ups.

  My eyes snapped open.

  Don’t try to trace this mobile. It’s pointless. This phone, this SIM, this number – I won’t ever use it again after this call. There’ll be nothing left of it.

  He wasn’t just going to dump the phone.

  He was going to turn it to liquid.

  85

  The warehouse off the Old Kent Road looked worse than ever in the daylight. The others, the ones still operating, were closed up too, shut down for the weekend, but they at least had evidence of a pulse. The one at the end was dark, dormant, a sepulchre built of steel.

  Garrick must have left his car somewhere else, so he wouldn’t draw attention to the fact that he was there, but, as I approached, it seemed unlikely anyone would notice, even if he had. It was deathly quiet, the noise from the Old Kent Road fading behind me, the buzz of the Overground line – passing across the top of the railway arch – a soft murmur.

  There were windows at the front, but they were whitewashed, giving no view out or in, so I headed all the way around to the steps I’d climbed just over a week ago. At the bottom, I paused for the first time and looked up: the door had probably been locked from the inside, which meant, to get in, I was going to have to pick it for the second time.

  I moved up the steps, feeling them bend beneath my weight. At the top, I looked around, removed my picks and started on the lock. Every few seconds, I stopped, listening for any movement on the other side, but it was silent. Four minutes later, as I felt the door bump away from the frame, I opened it a fraction and looked in.

  Darkness.

  Pocketing the tension wrench and the pick, I searched around in the scrub at the side of the warehouse for something I could use as a weapon. Discarded in a bunch of brambles, six feet away, was what looked like a snapped table leg. I moved back down and picked it up. It was damp, a little rotten along its edges, but it would be good enough.

  I pulled the door all the way open.

  There wasn’t as much heat this time, but I could still feel a change in temperature. He might not have been burning a lot, but he was burning something. In the air, there was the soft whiff of smoke, of ash, of melted plastic. I moved inside, pulled the door closed, and faced along the corridor. The entrance to the warehouse was shut. I inched forward, checking the office on my left. It had remained unchanged since my last visit.

  At the warehouse door, I paused again, placing my ear to it. On the other side I could hear a gentle hum and the pop of the kiln. Nothing else. Wrapping my fingers around the handle, I gently pushed it away from the frame and looked through the gap.

  Fire licked at the throat of the kiln, casting a watery yellow glow across the floor in front of it. Caught in the light were three boxes, one already empty, the other two full of things waiting to be erased from memory. As I opened the door further, I could see the table on the far side, where Reynolds had set up his laptop: in front of it was a chair with a blanket on it. On the table itself was a Coke can and a paper Burger King bag.

  No sign of Garrick.

  I pushed the door all the way back, and it swung soundlessly open. With daylight creeping in through the whitewashed windows, the shadows of the warehouse weren’t as deep and as long as the first time I’d been here. I couldn’t see everything, but I could see enough to know he wasn’t here. So where was he?

  I looked towards the boxes in front of the fire.

  Maybe he’s gone to get more.

  Moving inside, I headed for the kiln, looking back over my shoulder to make sure I was still alone. At the table, I picked up the Coke can. Empty. Inside the Burger King bag there was no evidence of food: no cartons, no wrappers. The only thing left at the bottom was a sachet of tomato sauce. I looked for a bin close by, to see how recently he’d eaten, but there was no bin, and no rubbish. It could be left over from the last time he was here. Except, beyond the smell of the kiln, there was the lingering stench of fast food.

  I turned and looked into the kiln.

  Paper burned. Files. A mobile phone.

  He’d done exactly what he’d promised.

  I dropped to my haunches and started goin
g through the boxes. Appointment diaries. More files. Photographs.

  I grabbed a selection of pictures. They seemed to be a chronicle of his working life. I cast them aside and, beneath, found a picture that was much older. Garrick in his mid twenties, hair slicked down, boyish, studious. He had a name badge: Dr John W. Garrick. He was standing next to an old man wearing dungarees and a shirt, his beard long and grey, his hair shoulder length but tied into a ponytail with an elastic band. There was such an uncanny resemblance, it had to be his father.

  Beyond them, in the background of the shot, was a smudge of orange.

  The kiln.

  His father was a glassblower.

  I looked at the warehouse around me. It all belonged to Garrick. His father had run the glassworks out of here – and then, when that had closed, he had left the building to his son.

  My eyes returned to the picture, studying his father – and, as I did, something stirred in my thoughts.

  Do I know him from somewhere?

  I cast my mind back across the last week to every photo I’d seen, to every newspaper story. The old man would probably be in his late eighties or early nineties now – if he was alive – but I couldn’t remember reading anything about a man of that age.

  I moved on, hoping things would pull into focus if I sidestepped away from them. I dumped the pictures back in the box, then started to go through the patient files.

  They all belonged to people he’d treated at Bethlehem.

  Midway in, I found Casey Bullock.

  Clipped to the front page, her face looked out at me. She was younger than when I’d seen her in the newspaper account of her disappearance, but the loss was there in her face, clawing at her eyes, shadowing her expression. As I flicked through Garrick’s notes – the way he described her – it was clear that he’d felt a connection to Bullock.

  So is that what this is all about?

  Jealousy over her relationship with Franks?

  He’d denied it on the phone and, as I read on, I could see confirmation of that here too. Garrick didn’t feel the same about Casey Bullock as Franks did – but he felt something. Not love, not even friendship exactly, but something more than just a clinical rapport. I got the sense, in a way, he’d harboured hopes of saving her – and not just from her illness. From her dependency on Leonard Franks.

  Clunk.

  I looked back towards the door.

  And then a memory formed: when I’d been in here the first time, I heard the same noise. A deep, resonant sound, almost industrial. Dropping Bullock’s file back into the box, I stood and moved slowly across the warehouse, back in the direction of the door.

  In the corridor, there was nothing.

  The main entrance was still closed.

  I stood there for a moment – ten seconds, twenty – and, when the sound didn’t come again, I moved further into the corridor and began checking inside the office.

  It was empty.

  Clunk.

  I spun on my heel and looked back towards the warehouse. It had been louder this time. Gripping the table leg I’d pulled from the scrub, I edged back to the door.

  Stopped.

  Directly ahead of me, caught in the light coming through one of the whitewashed windows, I saw a shadow moving. It had been cast left to right in the glow from the kiln, and spilled across the floor towards the loading doors. It was black, shapeless.

  But then it formed.

  Garrick.

  From his shadow, I could tell he was kneeling at the boxes. I could hear him sorting through the files inside, tossing paperwork into the fire, the crackle as the pages instantly disintegrated, and then the same again: over and over.

  When I got to the door, I stopped.

  My mind was firing, trying to figure out how he’d got inside, whether there was a back entrance I’d missed both times I’d been in. But I knew I hadn’t. There was no other way in except through the loading doors, and those were still padlocked from the outside. And yet, as I peered around the door frame, I saw Garrick hunched in front of the boxes, his back to me, pulling piles of paper out of them and disposing of them in the kiln. A second later, his phone went off.

  He pulled it from his pocket and looked at the display, eyes narrowing. Then he stood. He cleared his throat and took two long, deep breaths.

  What the hell is he doing?

  Another pause. ‘Hello?’

  I watched him as he listened to whoever was calling. He seemed to shrink a little, become smaller, more vulnerable. ‘Yes,’ he said, his voice soft and weak, a tremor of emotion passing through it. Yet his eyes stayed the same: focused, unmoved, unaffected.

  Because it’s all an act.

  ‘Oh no, no, no,’ he said, and he began to pretend to cry, moving across the warehouse, sniffing, heading in the direction of the loading doors. ‘Yes. I will try to get there as fast as I can.’ There was something in his face now, something I recognized.

  And then it came to me.

  His father.

  I’d been trying to work out why I recognized Garrick’s dad. But it wasn’t his father I recognized: it was Garrick himself. I thought of the picture of the two of them, the way his father had looked – long hair, unruly beard – and then I cast my mind back further, to the minutes before I’d found Craw dying on the floor of her kitchen.

  I thought I’d only ever seen one photograph of Garrick up until now, the one I found online after Dr Poulter had first given me Garrick’s contact details. In that one, he’d had shaved hair and a hint of grey stubble. But now I realized I’d seen a second picture of him too, without even knowing it – and, in this one, he’d had long hair and an unruly beard, mimicking the way his father had looked all those years ago.

  The photograph had been in Craw’s living room.

  And it had been of her with her husband, Bill.

  John W. Garrick.

  John William Garrick.

  Bill.

  Garrick was Craw’s husband.

  86

  I retreated, almost stumbling, into the semi-darkness of the corridor. Once Garrick was gone from view, I backed right up against the wall – heart thrashing in my chest, head thumping – and let everything fall into place around me. It was like a bough breaking.

  I understood how Garrick had got hold of Franks’s missing persons file: he hadn’t stolen Craw’s login, or anyone else’s at the Met – he’d simply lifted the file from her possession. He knew all about Craw coming to me, from minute one. It was why Derek Cortez had told Craw he’d seen someone at the house on Dartmoor three days before I arrived there, before the case had even got off the ground. It was why the mobile phone conversation I’d overheard Reynolds having with someone at his flat felt so much like Craw: she was keeping Garrick abreast of the case, and he was passing the information on to Reynolds. They’d had arguments, constant disagreements, but – with Franks gone and Ellie unable to cope – Garrick remained the only person she could talk to about it.

  Even their marital problems seemed a calculated move by him: if he was absent from her life, he was absent from her thoughts; if there were problems between them, he knew she’d try to hide them from public view. That meant she wouldn’t try to include him in any search for Franks. That meant no photographs. That meant no trail to him. He was hidden because, when it came down to it, Craw was so much like her father.

  I gripped the length of wood, images flashing in my head: everything Garrick had done, all the damage, all the violence – and then I remembered how he’d left his wife.

  The mother of his daughters.

  Taking a deep breath, I moved back to the door, fingers wrapped so tight around the club it felt like it might snap in my hand. At the frame I paused and looked around it.

  He was standing at the kiln, watching me.

  ‘Ah,’ he said calmly, ‘I thought it might be you.’

  ‘It’s over, Garrick.’ I moved into the warehouse, the heat from the kiln gathering around us. He’d worked his way t
hrough two of the boxes, the last memories of whatever he didn’t want the world to see, burning to cinders. I looked at him. ‘Or is it Bill?’

  A flicker of surprise. ‘So you’ve finally caught up.’

  ‘You’re done.’

  ‘You’re the one the police want.’

  ‘You’re the one burning files.’

  He glanced at the one remaining box. ‘There’s nothing incriminating in here – apart from the phone I called you on earlier. This is all housekeeping. The less paperwork you leave behind, the fewer questions can be raised about you.’

  ‘ “Leave behind”?’

  His expression twitched. ‘A slip of the tongue.’

  ‘Are you going somewhere?’

  ‘Maybe for a short while, until everything dies down.’

  ‘And your kids?’

  ‘They’ve got used to not having me around. Melanie and I haven’t been living together since May. They have their grandmother. Plus they’ll be provided for.’

  I shook my head. ‘You think they want money?’

  ‘You think they don’t?’

  ‘They’re kids.’

  ‘And your point is?’

  ‘They want you. They want Craw.’

  He shrugged again. ‘Yes, well, I just had the hospital on the phone and it sounds like the next time we’ll all be seeing “Craw” is in a pine box.’ He paused, his voice soft but clear, barely more than monotone. ‘No?’ he said. ‘Nothing? I thought this would be the point at which your superhuman powers of morality kick in.’

  ‘Are you even aware of what you’ve done?’

  He nodded. ‘Unfortunately, I am.’

  ‘You killed the mother of your children.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘There it is.’

  I made a move towards him, and he immediately went for the inside of his coat. A second later, he had a gun in his hand. Reynolds’s gun. I stopped, six feet away.

  ‘So the gun’s not in my house at all,’ I said.