by Tim Weaver
They were still talking about Leonard Franks.
The police hadn’t yet confirmed charges against him, but they would come soon enough. He’d been all over the TV for a week, his taped confession playing on repeat, and now Garrick’s involvement had elevated it to something even more. The story had burned brightly for seven days – now it was going supernova. For the media, there was no better tale than a twisted, deadly family feud, and this was all that and more. The victims along the way – Craw, Casey Bullock – were almost footnotes: heading news bulletins, dominating front pages, was the story of Leonard Franks versus John Garrick.
As I looked out at Bethlehem, like a shipwreck in the channel, I kept returning to the moments after I’d found Casey Bullock in the cellar. I’d managed to free her of her binds, prising the ankle clamp away with a pair of shears from the warehouse, and for a moment we paused there, either side of the room, her eyeing me, waiting for me to come at her again. When I didn’t, when I kept telling her she was safe, repeating it over and over, there was finally a shift in her expression, a soft acceptance, and she began to cry. I didn’t approach, just waited, and then – a couple of minutes later – she regained some of her composure, and I asked her if she felt ready to leave.
She said that she did.
In the warehouse, she’d paused, staring at Garrick, still slumped against the back wall, unconscious. By then, we could already hear sirens: I’d called the police while I’d been looking for the shears. She ran a hand across one side of her face, mud and tears smearing, long strands of matted hair slick against her skin, and then she turned to me, eyes narrowing, as if she couldn’t understand why I would come here and do this.
‘What’s your name?’ she said.
‘David.’
She didn’t reply straight away, her gaze moving between me and the hole she’d been kept in. ‘I thought no one would ever find me. I thought I was going to be there for ever.’
‘Do you know how long he kept you down there?’
‘What date is it today?’
‘It’s 22 December.’
A hint of more tears. ‘Fourteen months.’
And then she told me about the day Reynolds had come for her – at the place Franks had set her up in – and how her neighbour had started knocking on the door.
‘Except it wasn’t my neighbour,’ she said.
‘It was Garrick.’
She looked at me, wondering how I’d made the leap, but it suddenly seemed so clear: he’d sent Reynolds to get rid of her – but, ultimately, Garrick hadn’t been able to go through with it. I liked Casey. She was smart. He’d denied he felt anything deeper for her, and maybe that was true, but he’d become emotionally invested in her as a person, her decisions, her life; and the line between doctor and patient had blurred. When she finally told me about Leonard, about everything that had happened … I sort of felt betrayed. It was such a mess, so complex: he liked the woman who loved the man he hated. He knew what had to be done, but he couldn’t go through with it – so, instead, he told Reynolds he would take care of her. And how else could he hide her from view, without hurting her, than by making her a prisoner?
I doubted Reynolds knew she was still alive – even when he was occupying the warehouse himself – otherwise he surely would have seen the risks and attempted to do something about it. So, as far as he was concerned, the day Garrick took her away from her hiding place was the day Casey Bullock died.
When the police finally arrived, I watched them enter the warehouse, looking at me, at Casey, at the boxes of files and photographs waiting to be burned, at Garrick on the floor, his breath hoarse, and I had a moment of clarity. All the death, all the lies, all the suffering, and what it came down to in the end was loss: for Franks, the woman he loved but couldn’t have, and the son he knew only in passing; for Craw, the father she’d idolized and would never know again; for Garrick, the wife who abandoned him, and the father-in-law who rejected him; and for Bullock, the life she’d dreamed of, and the death of a son she’d loved, above all else.
A trail of wreckage.
A map of broken hearts.
Before I headed back to London on 28 December, I made two phone calls. The first was to Carla Murray to see how she was. She was abrupt, unemotional, unwilling – even now – to speak ill of Franks. But her pain, her sense of betrayal, was there, unspoken, unmissable. She said she’d talked to Jim Paige on the phone, that he was calm and rational about everything, but we both knew it was a show. It was all a show. The two of them had been hurt badly.
The second call was to Ellie Franks, to see how she was doing. She too remained resolute for a while, but then it began to get on top of her – all the news reports she’d had to endure, all the lies she’d had to try to process over the past nine days – and she broke down. As I listened to her cry, I thought about something she’d told me the first time I met her: Len said to me once, ‘Sometimes you just have to let people go.’ He was talking about a woman he’d had an affair with, about the son he’d had to watch being buried from the back of the church – and yet, in the end, it had probably been one of the most honest things he’d ever said to his wife.
I sat beside her bed as the sun came up, cutting through the blinds at her window. It was 3 January and one of the male nurses was busy taking down Christmas decorations.
She was sleeping on her side, pale and still, IV gently dripping, heaters humming. In my lap, I held a photograph: Casey, with her son. I’d managed to persuade the investigating team to release one picture for her.
At just before seven-thirty, she began to stir, making a gentle moaning sound as she rolled on to her back. I watched her surface, her eyelids flickering, her fingers pushing the blanket away from her. As she opened an eye, I looked down at the photograph again, at the face of a mother and the memory of her son, then returned it to my jacket pocket. She clocked the movement, realizing someone was beside her, and turned to face me.
A hint of a smile broke across her face, although much of her skull remained obscured by bandages.
‘Morning,’ I said.
‘I see you caught me looking my best again.’
I returned the smile. ‘How are you feeling?’
She took a long, deep breath, her eyes like a projector: doubt, pain, grief, worry, relief. Then, finally, Melanie Craw said, ‘I guess I feel like my life starts here.’
89
Everything is connected. It took me a long time to realize that. After my wife died from a disease I couldn’t fight for her, I spent two years drifting, propelled by the ghost of who she had been. All that I did in that time, every case I closed, every killer I found, all the darkness I faced down, was driven by her. Her ashes may have been scattered long ago, taken by the wind and washed away by the rain, but what she had been to me remained.
I found my calling in missing persons because I soon realized the families of the lost were just like me: wandering a road without boundaries, searching for answers in the dark. In the end, whether I walked their loved ones to the front door, or returned them as memories, dust and bones, I always brought them back – and I always closed the circle.
When Derryn died, I refused to believe there could be a reason. Perhaps, in a lot of ways, I still don’t. But, as my grief slowly subsided, I started seeing things with more clarity, moments in my cases that might have escaped me before: links between events, connective tissue binding one person to the next. I saw actions from one decade echoing through to the next, and saw how you could drift from people, become so distant from them it seemed impossible you would ever meet back in the middle. But then you did.
You were bound to them.
Perhaps even, in some small way, responsible for them.
The café was at the eastern end of Lower Mall, on the fringes of the Thames. When I arrived, Colm Healy was on a stool at the window, hands flat to the counter in front of him, eyes following two rowers as they passed under Hammersmith Bridge.
He’d barel
y changed in the fourteen months since I’d last seen him in the flesh: tall but overweight, his red hair thick and messy, his shirt bursting at the stomach, his expression dogged, tired, distressed. He wasn’t wearing a tie, and his jacket was on the back of the chair, but he’d rolled his sleeves up, as if preparing for something. He turned as I approached, and we shook hands, then he offered to get me a coffee. I couldn’t recall the last time he’d done that, and immediately, perhaps cynically, wondered what the real reason was for him inviting me here. In the days before I’d put the Franks case to bed, I’d told him I would call him to arrange something. But, in the end, he’d called me instead.
After my drink arrived, we talked for a while about Franks, about Craw, about the things the media had reported, and then a sudden greyness seemed to grab hold of him.
‘You all right?’ I asked him.
He nodded. ‘Yeah.’
‘You sure?’
‘I’m fine,’ he said.
I left it there, looking over at the river. It was 8 January, and there was fresh snow on the ground. In front of us, the sun winked through the naked branches of an oak tree.
‘How’s the security gig going?’
He didn’t respond.
When I turned to him, he was looking down into his empty coffee cup. His hand was around it, wedding band still on, even though his wife had left him three years ago.
‘Healy?’
‘It’s not,’ he said.
‘It’s not what?’
‘It’s not going.’
‘The security job?’
He nodded.
‘You mean you left?’
He shook his head, then looked up at me. A movement in his face. ‘There never was a security job. I lied. I can’t get a fucking job anywhere. The guy I pretended was the other security guard, the one I told you on the phone was always checking up on me …’
I just stared at him.
‘He’s just a guy I bunk with in the shelter.’
‘You’re living in a homeless shelter?’
He looked out through the window; nodded.
‘Why the hell didn’t you call me?’
‘I called you today.’
‘I mean, before today.’
‘Yeah, well …’ He stopped, taking a long breath, and it was like something shivered through him. ‘You want to help me? I got something you can help me with.’
‘What?’
He sat there, unmoved, staring out at the river. ‘You know the point at which my life really started going down the shitter? It wasn’t when Gemma left me. It wasn’t even when I found Leanne. I mean, don’t get me wrong, that messed me up. You shouldn’t outlive your kids.’ He cleared his throat, and when he glanced at me, I could see his eyes had welled up. ‘What messed me up was those two girls. The twins. They were the start of everything. I couldn’t find the bastard who killed them, I couldn’t find a fucking trace of that arsehole anywhere, and from there my whole life got flushed: my marriage fell apart, my daughter was murdered, I got fired from the Met, and now look at me. I’m living in a homeless shelter, pretending that I’m working a security gig. I’m pathetic.’
‘Healy –’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Don’t tell me I’m not. Don’t lie to me.’
We sat there in silence for a long time.
And then, as I finished the last of my coffee, he swung around on his stool, some measure of composure back in his face, and he said, ‘You want to do something for me?’
‘This wasn’t what –’
‘You want to do something for me, Raker?’
I studied his face, the lines in it, gouged out by the journey of the last three and a half years; from the moment he’d found the girls, this was the path he’d been walking, these were his scars, this was where it was always going to end up.
Another broken heart.
‘You want to do something for me?’ he said again. ‘Help me find the man who killed them.’
Acknowledgements
As with all my books, Fall From Grace wouldn’t be possible without the incredible team at Michael Joseph. I started to list the names of everyone there who has supported and promoted my work, and then became terrified about forgetting someone, so I hope a company-wide and extra-, extra-large THANK YOU can go some way to expressing my gratitude. However, I must give a special mention to Rowland White and Emad Akhtar (and to my copy-editor, Caroline Pretty), who helped improve early drafts of the manuscript immeasurably.
Thank you to my long-suffering agent, Camilla Wray, whose patience, unflappability and eye for a story was, as always, just what I needed when I hit The Doubts. I don’t know what I would do without her. A big thanks to the ladies of Darley Anderson as well, who work so hard on my behalf.
To Mum, Dad, Lucy and the rest of my wonderful family: thank you so much for everything you do for me. And, finally, the biggest thank you of all to Erin, who was so excited to be allowed to read the first chapter of Fall From Grace (before being told she could read the rest in about eight years’ time), and to Sharlé, without whose patience, love and support none of this would be possible.
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PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
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First published 2014
Copyright © Tim Weaver, 2014
Cover images: Landscape/fence: © Iain Harris; Crow: © Duncan Usher/Alamy; Sky and grass © Shutterstock
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Typeset by Jouve (UK), Milton Keynes
ISBN: 978-1-405-91347-8
