Fall From Grace (46 page)

‘Don’t move a muscle.’

I held up my hands either side of me.

‘You going to give me trouble?’

I shook my head, trying not to get my throat cut. But I was already moving ahead: I knew the voice.

And it wasn’t Reynolds.

This man had a London accent.

The rasp of an old man.

I’d heard the same voice – before this, before everything that had happened since – in the home movie Ellie had shot of her husband knocking down a wall in their Dartmoor home.

I’d found Leonard Franks.

71

‘Leonard, I’m not your enemy.’

The knife dropped away a fraction.

He didn’t reply, his hand still locked in place at the back of my neck, but as I said his name a second time, trying to soften my expression even more, I felt the knife drift even further out from my throat. An instant later, he shoved me forward.

I turned.

In front of me stood a pale reflection of the Leonard Franks I’d seen in photos, the ghost of the person I’d watched knock a wall down with a sledgehammer. The muscle he’d maintained into his sixties had gone; he was now a bleached, haggard old man, his clothes hanging off him, his skin drawn tight against the bones of his face. His silver-grey hair, so immaculately styled before, had grown out into an untidy, straggly mess.

He was an apparition, sallow and anaemic, even his tall frame giving way to a hunch, as if he’d spent the last nine months crouched in the darkest corner of the darkest part of this place. I thought, briefly, of the storage room, of the history on its walls, and realized maybe that
was
what he’d been doing. But then he raised the knife, almost jabbed it at me, a flash of steel returning to his face, and I could see not everything had gone. He was still smart.

He could still fight.

He could survive.

I held up a hand. ‘Leonard, I can help you.’

‘Who have you brought here?’

‘No one. It’s just me.’

‘Don’t lie to me, son.’

‘It’s true.’

He tilted his head slightly, as if trying to draw the real truth out of me, and then he waved the knife back along the corridor. ‘Have you even
looked
outside?’

I frowned at him.

‘Go.’

He waved the knife at me, gesturing for me to pass him and head back down the corridor. I did as he said. When I got to the hallway with the wards on it, I looked back at him, and he used the knife to tell me to head right. The whole time I was trying to figure out a plan. How to bridge the gap between us without getting a blade in the ribs. How to convince him I wasn’t his enemy. How to get the answers I needed out of him.

‘In there,’ he said.

He was pointing to one of the rooms on the eastern wall. I made my way in, over more debris, past a rusting metal bed frame, to a window looking out across the water.

Down at the jetty was another boat.

Shit
.

Someone had arrived after me.

I turned. ‘I didn’t come with –’

But he was gone.

Quickly, I moved out of the room and into the corridor, and – to my left – I caught a glimpse of him taking the stairs back down to the ground floor.

The shadows swallowed him up.

I headed after him. ‘Leonard, wait.’

Taking the steps two at a time, I sprinted back to the split in the corridor. The sun had made it down in patches – enough to create a low grey light; enough to see him take the corridor south, towards the back of the hospital – but the night still ruled here. Thick, unyielding shadows clung to pillars, coves and doorways, to sudden changes in the layout of the building as corridors fed off into different parts of the maze. I upped my pace and followed, watching Franks move from dark to light to dark again – then fail to reappear.

Now all I could hear were footsteps.

Countless doors whipped past as the corridor started to bend, drifting away from the eastern and western sides of the hospital, and ploughing its own furrow south, across the island. I caught another glimpse of Franks ahead of me, there and gone. Mostly, all I could hear were the echoes of his movement inside a tunnel of doors that never ended. The deeper I got, the more oppressive the darkness became, the grey becoming clouded and murky, the walls closing in around me. With it came a smell: decrepit and stale, like old paper – and then something more ripe and overpowering. The stench of compost.

Soon, I realized why.

Without warning, it began to get light again, colour rinsing into the corridor via a pair of double doors directly in front of me, glass panels in each. As I closed in on them, I saw they were still swinging gently. Franks had gone through them.

I slowed up.

Through the glass panels, I could see the greenhouse, the distinctive triangular kink on the western wing of Bethlehem’s layout. Sun streamed in, illuminating it, empty flower trays lined up in the middle. A gardening stool sat on its own, between two of them. Next to that were five chairs, stacked up. The greenhouse was forty feet from end to end, glass ceiling about thirty feet high.

I went to push open the door. Stopped.

There was no noise down here, no wind, no broken windows to pass through. It was silent. And yet I thought I’d heard a voice behind me.

I turned and looked back into the dark.

Nothing.

Glancing through the glass panel again, I saw only one way for Franks to go: at the opposite end, down a flight of steps. Above the door was a rusting sign that said,
STAFF ONLY
.
It must be the kitchens
.

The same noise again.

What the hell is that?

Stepping away from the door, I moved a few paces back along the corridor, still gripping the torch. I couldn’t switch it on. Not any more. It let Franks know where I was.

And whoever else was here
.

I kept going for another twenty feet, then stopped. Listened. Nothing. The hospital was so muted, the only thing I could hear was the soft buzzing in my ears.

But then it came again.

Louder. Closer.

A voice
.

‘David?’ it said again, the word echoing towards me.

And then I realized who it was: Melanie Craw.

72

The light from the greenhouse passed through the glass panels of the double doors and cast long, parallel rectangles across the floor in front of me. Beyond that, the corridor was opaque.

I heard her before I saw her.

She didn’t speak again, didn’t call out for me, but – gradually – I could hear her footsteps getting louder, rhythmic, steady, and then she appeared on the edges of the light, right at the apex of the rectangles. She stopped, half her face visible, her feet, some of her trousers. Everything else was still a part of the corridor, covered by the blackness.

‘Hello, David,’ she said.

I checked her hands. They were at her side, no weapons in them, one of them out flat against her thigh, the other balled into a fist.

‘Craw. What the hell’s going on?’

She nodded, as if she’d expected the question. Her skin was the colour of chalk, her hair a mess. She looked different, unexpectedly shabby.

She swallowed. ‘Reynolds said you would be here.’

I felt a twist of betrayal. Deep down, a part of me had still clung on to the idea of her not being in on this; of her not working
with
Reynolds, but against him. But then I remembered what I’d seen in Franks’s room upstairs: years of secrets, of duplicity. Craw was his daughter. They shared the same genes.

Anger burned in my throat, and the words were out of my mouth before I’d even processed them: ‘You fucking liar. You said you weren’t working with him.’

She blinked; said nothing.

‘Where’s Reynolds?’

I couldn’t still the rage, or the disdain I felt for her. It was pooling in my chest, forcing me towards her. Even as I tried to regain my composure, told myself she didn’t have any weapons, nothing to come at me with – that I didn’t have to get angry to get the answers I needed – I couldn’t suppress it. In that moment, I hated her for what she’d done.

She’d made me doubt myself.

Worse, she’d stabbed me in the back.

‘Is Reynolds
here
?’ I repeated, teeth gritted.

She seemed to start, as if jolted from a memory, coming forward half a step. ‘You tripped the alarm an hour ago. But he’s been on to you for a while now. He put a tracker on your mobile phone two days ago – after you crashed your car.’

A sudden realization hit me: I’d replaced my mobile once, when he’d managed to lose me on the Tube – but not a second time. In the hours after he’d cut my tyre, after I’d crawled out of a hospital bed with stitches in the back of my head, I’d lost my focus. I’d forgotten myself. I’d got sloppy. I never returned to those moments on Dartmoor. I woke from unconsciousness, watched him leave Franks’s house, got my injuries repaired, slept them off and changed my car. But the case just kept coming and coming – and I never stopped to think about what he might have done in the time that I was out cold.

I thought I’d been smart keeping my phone off, removing the SIM, reducing the amount of calls I was making – but they were on to me from the moment I’d woken up after the car crash. Every time I switched on my phone, they had my location again. And when I’d used it that last time, in the post office, they knew I was in Brompton Lee – and they guessed I was about to cross the causeway. Tripping the alarm just confirmed it. Reynolds had always known there was a secret hiding in Bethlehem: it was why he’d taken the photos of the outside, of the chapel; why he’d set up the alarm in the first place.

The irony was, in the end it had gone exactly as I’d predicted: he waited until I was close enough to the truth about Franks’s disappearance – and then he came for me. He needed a fresh perspective. He needed someone else to figure it out.

They both did
.

‘Why are you doing this?’ I said to her.

She didn’t react. She didn’t do anything. Instead, she muttered, ‘Have you found out what happened to him?’ There was no expression in her voice at all: it was colourless, almost robotic. ‘Have you found out what happened to Dad?’

I shook my head. ‘Is that a
joke
?’

‘I need to find him.’

For the first time, something registered with me. I looked at her hair again, messy and out of place; her clothes, dishevelled and spattered with mud; and then, finally, at her face. Had she been crying?

As if she’d read my thoughts, fear flashed in her eyes.

‘Craw?’

‘I’m not working with him!’
she said quickly.

Momentarily confused, I took an instinctive step towards her. But then she jolted again, more violently this time, and staggered out of the darkness.

And, as she did, my stomach lurched.

Because she wasn’t alone.

Behind her, hidden in shadows, was Neil Reynolds.

73

The upper half of his face emerged, like a shark breaking the surface of the water. His forehead, eyes, a cheek, the ridge of his jaw. And then he stopped. He was an arm’s length behind Craw, a gun pointing at the back of her head.

He jabbed the gun into her neck, drawing a wince of pain. When I made a move towards her, he shifted the weapon in my direction.

There was no lateral movement.

His aim was utterly still.

‘I should probably make myself clear,’ he said. ‘If either of you do anything to fuck this up, I will put a bullet in your eye. So … did you want to be the hero, David?’

I held up both hands.

‘I thought not.’

He turned the gun back on Craw, forcing her forward. As more of him emerged from the black of the corridor, looking bigger than ever, I saw he had a backpack on.

When Craw got level with me, Reynolds shifted her around to face me, so she acted as a shield between us. There was nothing in her face but fear now. The control was gone, the sobriety, every technique she’d mastered, every stoic expression she’d used to get on in the Met, nothing but history.

I felt a spasm of guilt as tears flashed in her eyes.

Reynolds’s attention flicked between me and the doors to the greenhouse. When he looked at me again, he said, ‘Is Franks here?’

I didn’t reply.

His eyes narrowed and he jabbed the gun hard into the back of Craw’s head. She lurched forward, coming towards me, drawing a sharp breath as the pain passed through her skull. But as I went to catch her, Reynolds clamped a hand on her shoulder and yanked her back in towards him. A second later, he had the gun on her again.

‘Is Franks here?’ he repeated.

I nodded.

Craw’s face changed – shock, fear; a sudden, desperate need to see him with her own eyes – and she looked in through the glass panels. Reynolds did the same, briefly, before returning his gaze to me.

‘Do it,’ he said to Craw, even though his eyes were fixed on me.

Whatever he was asking her to do, she didn’t.

He pushed the gun into the side of her head, forcing her to lurch to her right. ‘I’m not playing games with you, you stupid bitch. Say
exactly
what I told you to say.’

His eyes returned to me.

Then, softly, as if practised, Craw said, ‘Dad?’

‘Louder.’

‘Dad?’ she repeated.

Reynolds kept the gun pressed against her head and used his other hand to gently push open one of the doors. When there was a gap of about a foot, he shoved her forward.

‘Again,’ he whispered. ‘Louder.’

‘Dad?’ she called, and this time her voice seemed to echo, carrying off into the high-ceilinged spaces of the greenhouse.

Silence.

Reynolds pushed her through the doors, then gestured for me to follow her in. Once we were both beyond him, he took a step back and nodded to Craw.
‘Again.’

‘Dad,’ Craw said. ‘Dad, it’s Mel.’

I looked across at the steps down to the kitchen, thirty feet away, and then back to the doors. Reynolds had retreated into the corridor. I couldn’t see him through the glass.