Fall From Grace (27 page)

She shifted in her seat and looked back up the road to the row of houses. ‘The one on the end, with the window boxes.’

‘That’s yours?’

She nodded.

I switched off the ignition and followed her up the short concrete path to her front door. As she unlocked it, she looked both ways along the terrace, checking we weren’t being watched, before gesturing for me to enter. As I stepped up into the warmth of the house, I saw her check her surroundings a second time. I wasn’t sure what worried her more: whatever she was about to reveal, or being seen at her house with me.

Inside was a small hallway, a kitchen directly ahead of us and what I assumed was the living room off to my left. It was hard to tell for sure. She’d pulled the door shut. When I looked up the stairs, I could see she’d done the same to the ones up there too.

‘Follow me.’

We headed up.

When we reached the landing, there was the scent of perfume, of fresh sheets and bath salts. The walls were decorated in a soft eggshell colour, the doors and frames newly painted. I glimpsed a photograph of Murray and what must have been her fiancé, a guy in his forties with the build of a rugby player, but otherwise there was no hint at what might have gone on in the house, of who else might spend time here. Instead the rest of the wall space was filled with paintings that all looked the same.

At the furthest room around, the one that faced off to the front of the house, she paused. It was the only interior door with a lock on it. ‘We have an hour before my partner gets home,’ she said, fishing in her pocket for a key. ‘I want you gone by then.’

It wasn’t the warmest invitation I’d ever had, but I said nothing, intrigued by what might lay beyond the door.

Finally, after a moment’s hesitation, she unlocked it, pushing the door back into the darkness. At first, it just looked like an empty room. There were curtains at the window, but she hadn’t bothered pulling them across. Instead, she’d taped thick black card to the glass, so no light escaped in.

Or, more likely, to stop anyone seeing in from outside
.

But then I realized it wasn’t empty. As I followed her in, I saw the wall behind the door was covered in something, half hidden. She flicked on the light.

It was a ten-foot-by-ten-foot map of London, tacks pinned to it, thin pieces of string running from individual tacks to the edges of the map, where Murray had stuck photographs, newspaper clippings and photocopied pages.

I took another step closer.

One piece of string connected a house in Lewisham to a photograph of the victim in the drug murder.

Another ran from the spot in Deptford Creek where Pamela Welland’s body had been found to the same picture of her – mirrored shades, perched on the wall outside a Spanish hotel – that had appeared in the newspapers.

There was a third, pinned to the Hare and Badger pub on Broadway, just down from Scotland Yard, where Leonard Franks had met someone, and lied to Ellie about going to the Black Museum with Jim Paige.

And then there were various shots of Neil Reynolds, long-lens photography – presumably taken by Murray herself – of him leaving his house, or sitting in the window of a café. From each of them came pieces of string, pinpointing the locations of the pictures: the Old Kent Road, Rotherhithe New Road, entering the Tube at New Cross Gate.

Finally, there was a picture of Franks; a picture of the place he and Ellie had lived in on Dartmoor; and then a third photo.

Another house.

One I didn’t recognize.

The room we were in was small, pokey. For most people it would have been a study, or a nursery. Maybe one day it might still become that for Carla Murray. But for now it wasn’t either of those things.

It was her own personal incident room.

‘What’s going on?’ I said to her.

She unzipped her jacket, removing her phone and an A6 notebook. ‘You’re not the only one trying to find Leonard Franks.’

39

She opened her notebook at the middle and then held it in place with her thumb and forefinger. Her eyes moved from what was written, to me, to the photos on the wall, then back to me.

‘I couldn’t say anything to you in front of Paige,’ she said.

I glanced at the map. ‘I’m not surprised.’

Her jaw tightened, throat muscles flexing. She looked conflicted again, decades of instinct – of interview-room sobriety – difficult to shake off. ‘I need to know that you –’

‘You don’t have to ask for my discretion.’

She looked at me for a moment more, then at the spaces around us, at this place she’d brought us to, and she seemed to realize there was no backing out now.

‘I never really stopped wondering why he disappeared,’ she said. ‘He wasn’t just a boss to me, a mentor. He was a friend. My father upped and left when I was three, so I never really had a dad.’ She paused. ‘I’m a walking cliché, I guess, but he was something like that to me. Not a father, but something close.’

I nodded, shrugging off my coat and laying it on the floor. It was warm in the house. Out on the landing, I could hear the boiler ticking over.

‘Anyway, when he called, asking about that CCTV tape of Pamela Welland, it was obvious he was upset about something. I worked with him for years –
years
– and after you’ve been around a person for that amount of time, you get to know their patterns and their rhythms. You get to see what upsets them, what makes them happy, their view on things. And the Boss was one of the most composed men I’ve ever known in my life.’

‘But he wasn’t composed when he called?’

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘Far from it. I’d rarely heard him like that. Maybe once or twice in twenty years. You remember the Richmond Park Rapist? That got to him.’

I recalled the newspaper coverage: ten women raped, the first two in Richmond Park itself, the rest on its fringes. Police failed to catch the man responsible for twenty-seven months, by which time the press and public were in a feeding frenzy. But the Met had refused to serve up a sacrificial lamb. Which had been lucky for Jim Paige: he would have been running Sapphire – the rape and serious sexual assault command – at the time.

‘Sapphire wasn’t even Franks’s command, though,’ I said.

‘So he’s only allowed to feel something for murder victims?’

‘That’s not what I meant.’

She took a long breath. ‘That was just the type of person he was.’

Certainly there was a pattern forming: for whatever reason, Franks couldn’t let go of cases where women were involved. Craw was probably a major reason for that: having a daughter of his own would bring everything into focus. He could put himself at the scene and see her there. He could imagine the feelings of the family. He could understand the vengeance they sought. Recently, it was a feeling I’d begun to recognize myself.

And yet those themes weren’t prevalent in the case he worked at the end. The murder of a drug dealer, trying to nail Kemar Penn – that had been Franks’s encore.

‘Anyway,’ Murray went on, ‘there were a few cases, but not many. Most of the time, if he felt anything, he internalized it, because you never saw it on his face, in the way he treated you or in the way he spoke. That’s not to say he didn’t lose his rag from time to time, but when you worked for the Boss, you knew what you were getting from him: candour, loyalty, trust. If you went at cases hard, honestly, properly, he’d be with you all the way. The whole journey. You couldn’t have anyone better at the helm.’ She stopped, rubbing an eye, her face a little greyer all of a sudden. ‘But if you were sloppy, if you didn’t do the best by the victims – and especially if you lied, or compromised the integrity of a case – he’d shut you down, without even blinking.’

I glanced at the picture of Reynolds. ‘Like he did with him.’

‘It’s obvious that you know a bit about that arsehole already.’

‘I’m certainly learning quickly.’

‘Milk just had this way about him. This weirdness. He’d look at you, but for a bit too long. You’d turn around in a meeting and find him watching you, or be sitting on your own in the cafeteria and he’d wander over and sit right beside you, even if every other table was empty. His real gift – if you can call it that – lay in surveillance, in watching and listening to people, and that just made him … I don’t know … creepier.’

I thought of the old-fashioned wiretap I’d found in his flat, and then the way he’d been able to trace the signal on my phone. Clearly, they were skills he was still putting to good use.

‘I used to think he was playing at being an oddball,’ Murray went on, ‘but after a while I started to realize that he wasn’t playing. He just
was.’

Her hair had been tied into a bun, but it had started to come loose, and as she tried to address it, her eyes fell on one of the pictures of Reynolds.

‘Maybe that set alarm bells off with the Boss,’ she continued, ‘I don’t know. Or maybe it was the fact that some of Milk’s cases just never got solved, even when it looked like he was sitting on a cast-iron conviction. Suddenly a lead would evaporate or a witness would never resurface. People reckon it started when he was still working gangs, that that was when he first established contact with Kemar Penn. But there was never any talk of him being dirty then; not really any talk of him being dirty in Sapphire either, when he worked for Jim Paige. I mean, there was a lot of smoke, but no fire. Once he was put on a Murder Investigation Team, though, things changed. Rumours started.’

‘How did they start?’

‘I don’t know. They just started. The thing about that drug murder was that no one could connect Reynolds to it and no one could say for sure that he had tacit knowledge of it – or, worse, was involved. But it
felt
like it, you know? I mean, he was interested enough to dig it out of the computer after the Boss retired, in order to take a closer look.’

I nodded. ‘Why did Franks choose to run that case?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’ve read the paperwork, and it says he took over the running of the drug murder from a detective called Cordus two days into the investigation. You told me on the phone that you didn’t know why he chose this case in particular …’ I gestured towards the wall. ‘But then I find myself standing in your house in the middle of the night in front of a map you made and photos you took.’

She didn’t respond.

‘Look, for what it’s worth, I don’t care that you lied, to Paige
or
to me. I don’t care what secrets are swilling around the Met. All I care about is finding out what happened to Franks. So why’d he take the lead on the drug murder? Why not another case? Why
any
case? Did it have something to do with Reynolds?’ I paused, waiting for a response, but then a second, clearer thought hit me: ‘Or Pamela Welland?’

If I’d hit on something, Murray didn’t react. Instead, her eyes slowly returned to the map, to the photographs and newspaper cuttings.

‘You told me earlier on that you’d been following me since I called you,’ I said to her, trying to head off any thoughts she might have of backing away now. ‘But it looks like you’ve been watching Reynolds for a lot longer than that.’

A hesitant pause.

‘Murray?’

She watched me for a moment longer. ‘There’s this pub just down the road from the Yard. The Hare and Badger. I met the Boss there for a drink when I shouldn’t have.’

Something snapped into place. ‘So it was
you
he met there.’

‘You knew about the meeting?’

‘I just didn’t know who it was with.’

For a second that seemed to knock her out of her stride. Then she steadied herself. ‘This was in the days after he’d already asked Paige and me – and we’d already refused – to get hold of the footage from the night Pamela Welland died. The Boss … when he asked to meet up, he called me from a phone box near his house in Devon. A
phone box
. That set alarm bells off, minute one. It meant he didn’t want the call on his phone records.’

‘Or it meant he didn’t want Ellie to hear him.’

She nodded. ‘Yeah. I guess there’s that.’

‘So what did he say?’

‘He told me he understood about the footage, that he wasn’t going to press me on getting hold of it, but that he wanted to meet me all the same. He had some questions.’

‘About what?’

‘He started telling me he was going to be up for the weekend seeing Melanie and her family, and that he’d have some free time on the Monday. He asked if we could meet in the pub for lunch. So we did. We took a seat as far away from the action as we could possibly get – and, out of the blue, he starts asking me about Neil Reynolds.’

‘Reynolds? Why?’

‘He wanted to know what Reynolds was up to; whether I’d heard what he’d been doing since he got the boot from the Met. This was, like,
two years
after Milk got his P45 from Paige. I had no idea where Reynolds was. The question came totally out of left field. A couple of weeks before, the Boss was asking me to de-archive footage from a seventeen-year-old case, now he wanted the whereabouts of
Neil Reynolds
. I mean, what the hell? Reynolds wasn’t even a
cop
when Welland was murdered back in 1996.’

That confirmed something, at least: the mention of ‘Milk?’ on the two-line list he’d made on the back of the pub flyer. Now all I needed was a steer on the second part, the ‘Double-check 108’, and how it was linked to the scrap of paper with the sketch on it – if it was linked at all.

‘You remember I asked you and Paige about “BROLE108”?’

She nodded.

‘Were you telling me the truth or trying to avoid a situation with Paige?’

‘Telling the truth.’

‘You don’t have any idea what that means?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Why?’

‘It’s just a loose end I haven’t been able to tie up yet.’ My eyes drifted to the pictures of Reynolds, and I said to her, ‘Franks didn’t ask about anything else that day?’

She shook her head. ‘Just Reynolds.’

I tried to piece it together from what I knew, tried to work out why Franks might have wanted the footage of Welland in January and the whereabouts of Reynolds in February.