Fall From Grace (28 page)

‘What happened when you asked him why he wanted to find Reynolds?’

She shrugged. ‘He kept fobbing me off, trying to reassure me that none of it really mattered. I told him I could speak to Paige about it, and he told me not to. He said Paige wasn’t to know that he’d called to ask another favour. No one was. In the end, I asked him outright if he thought he was in some kind of danger.’ She paused, her gaze fixed on a space between us, her recollection of that day painted in her expression. ‘But he said no.’

‘Did you believe him?’

A flicker in her face. ‘Not really, no.’

I gave her a moment, both of us taking in those last three words.

Her eyes were back on Franks, tracing the outline of his face, and for the first time I could read her as clearly as if she’d spoken the words.

Did I ever really know him at all?

‘So, since that meeting, you’ve been slowly trying to piece it all together?’

‘Yeah. One thing the Boss taught me, almost from the moment I arrived at the Met, was to write everything down – and
never
throw it away. He taught me to keep
everything
. That was what he did. It was an old-fashioned way of working – even back in the nineties – but I wanted to impress him, so I did what he asked. And I got into a routine of doing it, every case, every victim, every beat in an investigation …’ She faded out. ‘Especially the parts of an investigation that didn’t feel right.’

I understood what she was driving at: what didn’t feel right was Franks’s requests for the Pamela Welland footage – and asking the whereabouts of Neil Reynolds.

‘After I met him that day at the pub,’ she continued, ‘I went home and dug out my notes from the time of the drug murder. I didn’t work that case, but the Boss asked my opinion about it, like he always did, and handed me the file so I could give it a pass. I noted down some thoughts at the time, and when I went back over those notes at the start of this year, I began remembering more and more about what had happened back then.’ She paused for a second, gathering herself. ‘How much do you know about it?’

‘The drug murder? Not much.’

‘The victim may as well have been a shop-window mannequin. His teeth had been removed, his prints went nowhere, he used a false name, and had a landlord happy to just take the cash, no questions asked. Again, when I checked my notes I found reference to a meeting I’d had with the Boss on 13 March 2011 where he’d briefed me on it, and told me that he was going to take over the running of it from Cordus. I can tell you
exactly
what his reasons were, because I wrote them down verbatim. He said it was “because of cutbacks, because I can’t pile another case on teams that are already stretched to breaking point, and because I’m the only warm body left”. And you know what? I didn’t think twice about it. I was up to my neck in other cases, like everyone else. So we all thanked him for mucking in, we all went back to our desks, and no one gave it a second thought.’

She faded out. In the silence, I heard a car pass on the road outside.

‘But now …’ she said softly, her neck chain pinched between her fingers. ‘Now I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the truth.’

‘Maybe he thought Cordus wasn’t up to running the case?’

‘No. Cordus was one of the Boss’s go-to men. The Boss trusted Cordus like he trusted me. Cordus was whip-smart, had everything the Boss looked for in a murder cop.’

There was no desk in the room, no chair, just the map on the wall, and a series of box files stacked up on the floor beneath. Murray laced her hands together and leaned against the windowsill, her eyes not meeting mine. It was clear she still didn’t fully trust me, but I was in her house now, involved as much as she was.

‘I wrote some other things down too,’ she said finally. She flipped forward in her notebook. ‘The victim told the landlord that his name was Marvin Robinson. But some of the dead guy’s neighbours – these stoner party girls studying at the UEL – said he once got drunk with them and ended up confirming that –
surprise
– that wasn’t his real name at all.’

While waiting in the car, I remembered being about to read the interview with the students across the hall when I’d spotted Reynolds approaching.

I watched Murray’s eyes return to the map, to the photographs and cuttings, and then to the picture of the second house I hadn’t recognized, pinned to the wall on its own.

‘You know where that is?’ she asked.

I looked at the house. ‘No.’

‘Devon.’

I took a step closer, taking it in properly this time. It was a shabby-looking semi-detached backing on to fields that rolled up and away into an indistinct distance. Murray pressed a finger to the bloodless face of the victim in the drug murder, both his eyes closed, the mortuary slab a muted blue-grey behind the creamy dome of his skull.

‘It belongs to our victim,’ she said.

‘The house in Devon does?’

‘Yeah. Or at least it did.’

She turned back to the photograph of the dead man.

‘And according to those students across the hall, “Marvin Robinson” told them his real name was actually Simon.’

Simon

September 2010
|
Three Years Ago

Simon left on a Thursday. She woke one morning to find him packing a suitcase in the spare room, clothes strewn around him. He stank like the morning after the night before, of booze, of sweat, of other women, and had a greasy sheen to his chest and back. As she approached, she thought he looked more at home than ever among the damp wallpaper and the musty stench of old carpets. At the window, instead of a pair of curtains, there was a tatty, mud-streaked orange blanket
.

‘What’s going on?’ she said
.

He didn’t answer
.

‘Simon?’

‘Like you give a shit.’

The truth was, she didn’t. He’d fitted what she’d needed in the years after Lucas had died, in a way she could never fully articulate in sessions with Dr Garrick
.

‘Are you going somewhere?’

‘Yeah,’ he replied. ‘You could say that.’

‘Where?’

‘I’m moving out.’

‘What?’ Her first thought was of losing the roof over her head, of no longer knowing she had a place to come back to. ‘Why?’

‘Why not?’

She frowned, taking a further step into the room. He watched her come in, his eyes lingering on her
.

‘What’s going on?’ she said again
.

‘Are you deaf?’

‘What, you suddenly decide you want to move out?’

‘Yeah. So?’

She looked at the suitcase. ‘So you’re going to need a lot more than a suitcase full of clothes. What about all this?’ she said, gesturing to the room, to the space around her, to the walls in need of paint, and to the cheap, faded furniture. ‘What about the house?’

‘What about it?’

‘What do you mean, “what about it”?’

He smirked. ‘It’s already sold, you stupid bitch.’

Her heart sank. ‘What?’

‘It’s been on the market for six months. I got an offer on it two months ago and just signed the contracts yesterday.’

She felt like she’d been punched in the stomach
.

‘And you didn’t think to tell me?’

‘What the fuck’s it got to do with you?’

She backed up a little, hitting the panels of the door, her hands flat to them. ‘When were you planning on telling me that you were leaving me homeless?’

He shrugged
.

‘That’s it? A shrug?’

‘You bring me down,’ he said, closing the suitcase. ‘You’re like a walking fuckin’ raincloud. All you do is piss and moan, and mope about because you’ve had a few tough breaks. We’ve all had tough breaks. We’re all dealing with the shit life throws at us.’

‘Yeah?’ she said, regaining her composure, anger suddenly burning in her throat and chest. ‘What tough breaks have you had, Simon? Not stealing as much as you’d like from work? Not making enough from stolen goods? Getting the clap from some skank you’ve been screwing?’

He took a sudden step towards her. ‘What did you say?’

‘You heard what I said.’

He grabbed her by the arm, his fingers digging into her flesh, pressing so hard it was like he was clawing his way through to the bone. ‘Don’t ever talk to me like that.’

‘Or what?’

‘Or I’ll fuckin’ kill you.’

‘Yeah? Maybe you shoul –’

He pushed her hard against the nearest wall, one hand instantly on her throat, the other still clamped on her arm
.

‘You think I won’t do it?’ he spat through gritted teeth
.

He pressed harder, as if trying to force a response out of her, but his grip was too tight: air ceased to ebb and flow and her vision began to blur, Simon starting to fade into a spill of muted colour, like she was seeing him from the other side of frosted glass. With one last push, she fought back at him, her nails brushing the front of his shirt, then again, then again. Finally, they glanced the side of his face, digging in and ripping their way downwards. He yelled and stumbled back, clutching his face, blood spilling out between his fingers. He hit the bed, the suitcase rocking behind him, and fell on to it
.

‘You stupid bitch!’ he screamed, looking down at his hands, blood on his fingers, on his face, smeared along the ridge of his jaw
.

She roused herself from the haze, the feeling of his fingers still burning on her throat, and ran downstairs, her hand gripping the banister, making sure she didn’t fall. She heard him behind her, on the landing – quick footsteps, floorboards creaking – and upped her speed, along the hallway, into the kitchen. She yanked open a drawer and grabbed a knife, six inches long with a serrated edge
.

Except, when she turned around – backside against the knife drawer so he’d have to go through her to get one himself – he was
standing in the doorway, leaning against the frame, as if something had occurred to him. Blood ran in four separate trails down his face – but now he didn’t even seem bothered. She held the knife up in front of her, moving it in the air from side to side. He didn’t react. Just watched it
.

‘Don’t come any closer,’ she said
.

He didn’t say anything
.

‘I should call the police.’

This time he smiled, pushing away from the door frame. She jabbed the knife at him, but he wasn’t coming for her. He was going across the kitchen, to the phone
.

He picked it up. ‘Give them a call.’

She looked from him to the phone, confused
.

‘Give them a call,’ he said again. ‘Go on. Tell them what happened. Tell them everything. They can come around here, or we can go to the station, and then you can tell them all about who I am. And I can tell them all about you.’

She frowned
.

Another smile, even wider than the last. ‘You don’t know anything about me, really. If you did, you’d know I gave up stealing from my boss years ago. I’m into drugs now, honey. There’s more money in pills and coke than I ever earned siphoning off timber and fuckin’ metal sheets.’ He paused for effect, fingers touching the marks on his face. ‘And you know what? Because of that, I’d been thinking about getting the hell out of Devon for a while. Being in the arse-end of nowhere is a pain. The drugs are too much of a hassle to get hold of. I’ve screwed every skank in the county. It’s all fudge shops and cream teas. But you know where I could make a fuckin’ killing? London.’

He studied her, as if expecting a reaction, but she didn’t give him anything. And yet still the smile didn’t drop from his face
.

‘Anyway,’ he continued, ‘after I got an offer on this place, I started thinking about all the stuff I’d need to take with me to the Big Smoke, and I thought, “I wonder if I ever left anything important in the loft?” So I went up there, and remembered that was where we’d stored most of your shit when you moved in. You always told me that they were boxes full of worthless tat.’

Now she felt a flutter of panic
.

‘But they’re not – are they?’

She watched him place the phone back on the cradle, his eyes returning to her. Without even realizing, she’d dropped the knife to her side. Confusion and panic had taken over. He’d finally got at her – and this time he hadn’t had to lay a finger on her
.

‘What do you want?’ she said
.

‘What do I want?’ He smirked, taking a step towards her. ‘I want you to tell me everything – and you can start with Pamela Welland.’

40

We both stood in front of the map, our eyes on the victim in the drug murder.

Simon
.

He had a first name now, even if we didn’t know anything else about him. Yet something was troubling Murray. I saw a flicker, almost a grimace, in her face as she traced the piece of string connecting the crime scene at his house in Lewisham to the photo of him on the mortuary slab.

‘Where in Devon did he live?’ I asked.

‘Kingsbridge.’

I watched her. She was still caught somewhere, still troubled by something. I gave her a moment more, then pushed her on it: ‘Is everything okay?’

She glanced at me, almost jolted, and then her eyes shifted across from the photos of Simon, of the house, to where Franks was pinned up.

‘Not really,’ she said finally.

‘What’s up?’

She took a long breath. ‘Given everything I knew about the Boss, the way in which I’d seen him work across twenty years – this incredibly detailed, tireless crusade to do right by victims – what I would have expected him to do, when he found out from those students what this guy’s real name might be, was take that information and run with it. I would have expected him to use “Simon” as a jumping-off point; to use it as a basis to explore other drug-related cases in the computer, involving men with that name.’