Fall From Grace (15 page)

‘I can guarantee that.’

‘Yeah?’ He turned to me. ‘I don’t know anything about you, so your guarantee is worth absolutely zero to me. With that in mind, let me also give you a guarantee in return: if you cost me even a
second’s
sleep, if you drop me in the shit with anyone, even if it’s with the guy who cleans the toilets in Scotland Yard, I will make you pay for it. I’m not one for threats, but I mean this: number one priority for me is Leonard Franks.’

‘Same here.’

‘I need to be insulated.’

‘You will be.’

‘If it all goes to shit, and there are reasons it might, we never spoke.’

I looked at him. ‘Why would it go to shit?’

He emptied the last of his beer, placed it down on the counter and turned to me. ‘I’m prepared to tell you, but I’m not doing it here. There’s a hotel on Horseferry Road called The Neale. It has a bar in the lobby. I’ll meet you there in an hour.’

19

Annabel and I left the event and grabbed something quick to eat, then I paid for a taxi to take her home and headed south along Millbank. The Neale was a tiny boutique hotel overlooking St John’s Garden. Inside it was all marble and brushed steel. I headed past the reception desk towards a semicircular bar area, done out in charcoal sofas and mauve accessories.

Paige was right at the back in a booth.

He had someone with him.

At first, as I approached, it was difficult to see who – they were facing Paige, legs under the table, hand around a beer bottle, mostly disguised by the high back of the booth – but, as I got closer, I realized it was a woman. I could see her nails had been painted a subtle pink, and she was wearing an engagement ring on her left hand. Paige was talking to her, gesturing, but then broke off as soon as he saw me enter the bar.

A second later, she came into view.

It was Carla Murray.

She’d undergone much more of a change than Paige, shifting a ton of weight and growing her hair long. There was still a toughness about her, those grey eyes studying me as I approached, her hair scraped back into a functional ponytail. She must have been five foot nine, perhaps just shy of ten stone, but she’d never be petite, even if she wanted to be: whatever size she’d given away in the time since the photograph of her at the press conference, she’d now replaced with sheer muscle power in the gym.

Paige gestured for me to take a seat opposite him, and Murray shifted along her booth. She introduced herself in a broad Glaswegian accent, but didn’t offer her hand.

‘Well, this is a surprise,’ I said.

Paige nodded. ‘I take it you know Carla already.’

‘Only from what I’ve read.’

‘Then I guess that’ll have to do for now.’ He stopped, looking out across the bar, his gaze flicking between tables, ensuring we weren’t being watched. ‘I realized why I recognized your name earlier,’ he said, eyes back on me, a hint of hostility in them. ‘I was just telling Carla: you were the one who was all over the Snatcher case Melanie had last year.’

‘I’m not sure I was all over it.’

‘You ended up getting stabbed because of it.’

‘Well, that much is true.’

He watched me for a moment, like he expected me to add something else. When I didn’t, he said, ‘Lots of people at the Met don’t like you, David. You know that, right?’

‘I’m not here to make friends.’

‘You’re here to find people?’

‘Right.’

‘People like Len Franks?’

I nodded.

He studied me for a moment more, glanced at Murray, then leaned back in the booth, shrugging. ‘I care a great deal about finding Len.’

‘Then we’re all on the same page.’ Neither of them made a move to continue, so I turned in the booth and looked at Murray. ‘I didn’t realize you two knew each other.’

‘I’ve got to know Carla since Len disappeared,’ Paige replied for her.

‘How come?’

His eyes pinged to Murray and then back to me.

‘How come?’ I repeated.

Again, Paige didn’t reply, and Murray made no effort to fill the silence.

But then Paige started turning his beer bottle and looked up at me. ‘There are some things you should know. Things that might help you find Len. Given what you’ve found out already, what I’ve read about you, and what people at the Met have told me about you over the phone in the last hour, it’s safe to assume you’ll keep digging until you get to what we know, anyway. So I’d rather you heard it from me.’ Paige gestured to the bar. ‘Can I get you a drink?’

‘I’m fine, thank you.’ When neither of them made an effort to continue, I said, ‘Look, anything you tell me will be in complete confidence. I know all you’ve got to go on is my word, but while I doubt you’ve heard anything positive about me from whichever colleagues you spoke to at the Met during the last hour, no one there can accuse me of not being able to keep my mouth shut. Whatever you’ve got doesn’t go any further.’

‘David,’ Paige said, ‘if I didn’t think that was the case, we wouldn’t be here.’

I reached into my pocket and got out my pad and pen, setting them down on the table. When I looked up, Paige and Murray were staring at each other. They didn’t try to disguise it. Instead, it was like they were still undecided about whether to move forward.

‘There’s one thing I need to be
really
clear on,’ Paige said finally. ‘When we met earlier, I promised I’d come after you if you dropped me in the shit. I meant that. I’ve had a look at your cases, at some of the places you turned up and people you found, and while everything looks watertight on the surface, I’m confident I could find some anomalies if I chose to look a little harder. This conversation goes anywhere beyond this booth, I’ll find holes in those cases, and I’ll take you to the cleaners. That’s a promise.’

He needed reassurance. ‘Understood.’

‘Len was,
is
, my best friend. But he made some decisions that were …’ Paige cleared his throat. ‘He made some choices that might have consequences. I don’t want to speak for Carla, but I know she feels the same way. He was her commanding officer, her mentor, her friend. The choices he made, we need to ensure …’ He stopped again. ‘We need to ensure we don’t give them oxygen. Or, at least – if they
are
to be made public – we need to ensure it’s an abridged version.’

‘So this is a skin-saving exercise?’

‘No,’ Paige said. ‘Far from it. Nothing you find out about Len will have any effect on us. Len’s choices are his choices. We were never involved in them. Not at any point.’

‘So you’re saving
his
reputation?’

‘I’m trying to help you find him.’

‘Why haven’t you tried to go after him yourselves?’ I looked between them. ‘If you know something, something that will get him found, why not make that available?’

Paige held up a hand. ‘It’s complicated.’

‘So Craw doesn’t know about these “choices” Franks made?’

‘No.’

It seemed unlikely she wouldn’t have asked Paige some questions, though. She knew about Paige and her father’s friendship. She’d have asked Paige if he knew why Franks left. She’d have sought him out.

‘So,’ I said to him, ‘what you’re saying is you lied to Craw?’

‘I chose to keep some things back.’

‘Why?’

‘For her protection.’

‘Craw doesn’t strike me as the type who wants to be protected.’

‘No one
thinks
they want to be protected. But Melanie has a career, a family. She has a professional obligation to the Met. Her commanding officer told her
specifically
not to use police resources to go after Len, but if I gave her what I had, the pull to find her father would be such that she would go against those orders and get herself fired. You, David …’ He paused, a wrinkle of distaste in his face. ‘You have no obligation other than to yourself. You have nothing hemming you in. This is your entire career.
This
is your family. That makes you impossible to police, and that’s why I invited you here. Because this is the only way I can, at least in part, try to limit the damage you’ll undoubtedly do. I care about what happens to Melanie because I care about Len Franks. Less kindly, I wouldn’t give a shit if you disappeared off the face of the earth tomorrow.’

I couldn’t pretend it was the first time I’d heard that. ‘So you’re the only two who are in on this?’

He nodded.

‘Why only you two?’

He nodded a second time, expecting me to ask. ‘At the end of January, Len got in touch – separately – with Carla and with me. Afterwards, we both agreed he sounded quite … distressed. He said he’d been looking at a cold case and he wanted our help.’

‘Okay, hold on. What was the case?’

‘He didn’t say,’ Murray replied.

It was the first time she’d spoken since she’d introduced herself.

‘He didn’t mention anything about it, to either of you?’ I glanced at Murray. She shook her head. ‘Did he hint that it might have been an old case he worked here?’

‘He didn’t say,’ Murray said again.

Which meant he’d only referenced the fact that he was working some sort of cold case. Same story he’d spun for everyone, including his family. Craw really hadn’t been exaggerating when she said he internalized everything.

‘So why did he choose to ask only you two?’

Paige this time: ‘I’d known him thirty-odd years. Carla was a trusted lieutenant and worked the most number of cases with him. I think it’s pretty obvious why.’

‘Why not Craw?’

‘Clearly, he didn’t want to involve his daughter.’

I thought about what Paige had said earlier in the conversation:
The choices he made, we need to ensure we don’t give them oxygen
.

I looked between them. ‘So if he didn’t call to tell you what case he was looking into, what did he phone up to talk about?’

Paige looked at Murray. She adjusted her sitting position, so she was against the back wall, able to take us both in.

‘He didn’t say much,’ she said. ‘The Boss was never one for flowery language or drawing things out. He just said he was looking into a case, to help pay for his kitchen renovation at the house. “You might be able to help me,” is what he said.’

‘Help him how?’

‘He asked me if I remembered another, separate case we worked together back in 1996. I didn’t, not off the top of my head. Seventeen years is a long time in any walk of life, but it’s a whole lot longer if you’ve spent every single day of it standing over dead bodies.’

‘Did he try to jog your memory?’

‘Yeah. He mentioned the victim’s name.’

‘Which was?’

‘Pamela Welland.’

I wrote it down. ‘You remembered her?’

‘Yeah, I remembered.’

‘What happened to her?’

‘She was murdered. Her body was dumped in a patch of wasteland near Deptford Creek; eleven stab wounds to the stomach, one to the back. Pretty frenzied. She’d only turned eighteen a couple of weeks before.’

There was a heavy, funereal pause, as if we were all paying our respects to the girl’s memory.

‘This was in the days before everyone owned mobile phones,’ she went on, ‘before online dating – I mean, no one in Pamela’s family even owned a computer – so it was much harder to trace a victim’s movements. But it looked like she’d been on a date two nights previously, to a bar in Soho. That was the last time anyone saw her alive. We had a couple of eyewitnesses, including one in the bar that night, and they said they saw Pamela talking to a guy in his early twenties: blond hair, six foot, stacked. Could have been some sort of weights junkie. The witness in the bar said the guy was obviously trying to crack on to Pamela, but she didn’t seem to be playing along. I think the exact quote was something like, “She didn’t seem to be all that into him.” So we go to the bar and secure the CCTV footage, and we grab a list of calls made from Pamela’s parents’ landline in the days before she meets this guy. A couple of days after that, we’ve identified the suspect: Paul Viljoen.’

I added his name to the list.

She continued, ‘We brought him in. The Boss and I did the interview, and this Viljoen falls apart. He was Dutch, but spoke good English. I think he was here on some sort of work placement scheme. I can’t remember exactly. Anyway, he starts out all calm and collected, but once the Boss gets at him, Viljoen starts wrapping himself up in lies. Eventually, he realizes he’s in deep, deep shite, so he starts to slip into Dutch, pretending he’s not properly making himself understood in English. But it’s too late by then. He’s already dug his own grave. An hour later, he confesses. Basically, he was just a stupid kid: full of booze, whacked out on steroids. He kept apologizing to us, kept apologizing to her like she was in the room with him, saying he got angry because he thought she’d been laughing at his technique. I guess we’ll never know the whole truth. Pamela apparently didn’t look interested in him, and the CCTV backed it up. But she must have been interested enough to leave with him.’

‘So you charged him?’

‘Yeah. He ended up getting twenty years.’

I made a couple more notes, then looked up at her. ‘So Franks asked you if you remembered the case. Once he jogged your memory, what happened after that?’

Her eyes moved to Paige, like she was seeking his permission to continue. Paige nodded.

‘He asked me if I could get hold of the footage of Pamela Welland.’

‘Footage?’

‘The footage of her from the bar, the night she was murdered.’

‘Why?’

‘He seemed reluctant to say why exactly.’

‘You didn’t ask?’

‘I
asked
,’ she said, as if I were painting her as an amateur, ‘I asked plenty of times. But the Boss just kept saying the same thing: that it had to do with this cold case he was working. Whenever I’d tried to probe further, he’d always find a way to dance around it.’

My mind was already moving: what relevance did the murder of Pamela Welland have to Franks’s cold case? Then I thought of the scrap of paper and the pub flyer.

‘Does “BROLE108” mean anything to you?’

Murray frowned. ‘No.’

‘Wait a second,’ Paige said, holding up a finger. ‘What relevance has that got?’