Fall From Grace (5 page)

I didn’t expect there to be many incoming calls after his disappearance on 3 March. Most would be from friends who didn’t yet realize he was missing, and were calling up to chat, maybe to organize some sort of social event. What I was certain of was there would be zero outgoing calls. Whatever had happened to him, he’d left his mobile phone behind.

‘I’ll give you the code for my bank when we’re done,’ Spike said.

Spike’s bank was a locker in his local sports centre. I thanked him, hung up and immediately went to my address book again, searching for a second name: Ewan Tasker.

‘Task’ was another old contact from my paper days, a semi-retired police officer who’d worked for the National Criminal Intelligence Agency, its successor SOCA, and now the organization’s latest incarnation, the National Crime Agency. At the start, we’d built our relationship on a mutual understanding: he’d feed me stories on organized crime that, for whatever reason, he wanted out in the open; in return, I got to break them first. Over time, though, we started to hit it off, and when I left journalism to nurse my wife through her last year, we’d stayed in touch. These days, I didn’t have much to negotiate with if I wanted his help, so my reparation was a charity golf tournament he forced me to attend once a year, where he took my money, then got to laugh at how badly I hit a ball.

‘Raker!’ he said, after picking up.

‘How you doing, Task?’

‘Well, the good news is, I’m alive.’ But even in his mid sixties, Task was big and strong, and still one of the smartest men I knew. ‘Wow, it’s been a while, old friend.’

‘I know. I’m sorry.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m balls-deep in casework, so it’s as much my fault as yours. I’m only supposed to be working three days a week – but that seems to have gone south pretty quickly.’

‘Your handicap must be suffering badly.’

‘Like hell it is! I’m still unbeaten on the nineteenth hole. Talking of which, I hope you haven’t forgotten the twenty-eighth. Rain, sleet or snow, you’re playing, Raker.’

This year’s charity tournament was just after Christmas.

‘I haven’t forgotten, Task.’

‘I know you haven’t,’ he said. ‘So what’s new?’

I filled him in on the disappearance of Leonard Franks and how the case had landed with me, and then zeroed in on what I needed: ‘I’ve got his missing persons file here, and there’s nothing in it. Nothing in his financials, no anomalies, no red flags. I’ve got a guy looking into his phone records for me, but I was hoping I might be able to get some sort of steer on what this last case of his might have been about.’

‘So this is
the
Leonard Franks?’

‘Yeah. You know him?’

‘A little. I’d heard rumours he’d disappeared.’

‘What else have you heard?’

‘Nothing sinister. I think people were just surprised. He was – what? – thirty-odd years on the force. You don’t last that long without becoming a minor celebrity.’

‘What did you make of him?’

‘He had a good reputation. People liked him. Franks was as straight as they come, so there was no wriggle room if you based your police work on Hollywood movies. But if you played by the rules, he had your back, every day of the week. You got any sighters on what happened to him?’

‘I’ve only just started, so it’s all still coming into focus. What I’m more certain of is that the file was the catalyst for his disappearance.’

‘You said his daughter works at the Met?’

‘Right.’

‘And her super put the kibosh on a database search?’

I understood what he was driving at: everything was audited and logged, which meant the minute Task went into the database, he’d leave a trail. Dangerous given the fact that Craw had put her boss, and possibly others, on high alert for searches related to Leonard Franks’s disappearance. I thought of what Craw had said about Reed, the cop who had set up the original missing persons file. He’d been unable to find the case Franks had been looking into, or at least one big enough to affect him in the way that it had.

And then I remembered something else she’d said.

Maybe it wasn’t an official police file
.

She’d floated the possibility that a civilian might have sent Franks the file, one they’d presumably put together themselves. It was an interesting angle. Even if it didn’t explain the perfect timing – being given a separate case while waiting for the CCRU to dot the i’s and cross the t’s – it would explain why the CCRU knew nothing about it, and why Reed wasn’t able to connect the case to anything Franks had worked on at the Met.

But if it
was
a civilian, they surely would have known Franks in some way: his background, his time at the Met, cases he’d worked. They’d need the skill to construct a compelling file, something to make him sit up and take notice. It made sense they would have crossed paths with Franks, perhaps known his cases. As I lingered on that last thought, I picked up my pen and made a note:
Was the sender an ex-cop?

‘Raker?’

‘Sorry. You can probably hear my brain whirring from there.’

Going into the database and searching for ‘Leonard Franks’ would compromise Task. But then more of my conversation with Craw came back to me:
The way he talked about it made it sound like it had some connection to a case he’d already worked at the Met. He talked about it like he was already familiar with it
. There was a possible workaround.

‘Task, do you reckon you could search the databases for any unsolved cases in London, for as far back as you can go? It’s broad enough not to set alarm bells off – but it means I can go back through them and look for any involvement Franks might have had.’

‘You’re going to get a shitload of hits. I take it you don’t want me concentrating on stolen bicycles and local shoplifters?’

‘No. Just major crimes for now. If things get uncomfortable, abandon ship. I don’t want to compromise you – but only because, if you get banged up for aiding and abetting, you won’t get the chance to see my new, improved golf swing in a couple of weeks.’

He laughed. ‘It’s a big ask. It might take me a couple of days.’

‘Understood.’

‘Depends when I can get some alone time.’

‘Whenever you can, Task.’

I thanked him, hung up, and went back to Craw’s file.

5

Inserted into a plastic sleeve taped to the back of the file was a plain DVD with ‘Footage of the house’ written on it, along with a series of photographs. The writing on the DVD belonged to Craw. I set it aside and concentrated on the pictures. They were all of the Frankses’ house on Dartmoor. Craw had taken them herself, printed them out on to A4, then explained which direction she was facing in, in a caption next to each one. Every picture underlined just how isolated the place was. I wanted to take a look at it myself eventually, in the flesh, but these made a useful starting point.

Just as she’d explained, it looked like an old hunting lodge: dark wood, with a big veranda that ran the entire length of the front. There was a slanted roof with a brick chimney on one side, and a plastic canopy attached to it, under which sat an Audi A3. I checked back through the paperwork and saw that it was registered to Franks. I could add the car to his mobile phone and his wallet in the list of things he’d left behind.

On the right of the house was the woodshed. It was more like a lean-to, really; just a piece of corrugated metal, bolted to the house on one side and to two support beams on the other. Inside were hundreds of chunks of wood, stacked right the way up to the top.

Surrounding the house was rolling moorland, gateposts hemming in yellow and green fields, all of them stitched together like patches on a quilt. Its location, a mile north of Postbridge, meant it was elevated from the village, and in one of the shots I could see rooftops in the cleft of a valley, beyond the curve of a hill. Otherwise there was no hint of man-made structures: just a single-car dirt road snaking off from the front of the house.

I turned to the missing persons report itself.

It had been set up by Sergeant Iain Reed, as Craw had told me already. He was based in Newton Abbot. He had interviewed Franks’s wife Ellie, then Craw herself, on 4 March, the day after the disappearance. He had asked the two of them the same questions, before concentrating on their whereabouts on the day of the disappearance, probably so he could cross them both off any potential suspect list. A couple of days later, on 6 March, he had organized for a forensic tech to take a DNA sample from Franks’s toothbrush. Craw had already told me they’d found nothing, and the results backed her up.

Ellie Franks’s statement offered little insight into her husband’s psychology, either on the afternoon he disappeared or in the weeks beforehand. It wasn’t a massive surprise: families were still dealing with the fallout in those first few days, angry that they weren’t able to see it coming, distraught at the lack of reason. Unearthing useful leads depended on the craft and skill of the interviewer, of being able to manoeuvre around people’s grief – and Reed hadn’t been able to. He’d compiled a solid report, one that covered obvious and important areas, but it was like a black-and-white picture crying out for some colour.

Craw’s interview was different: shorter, because she hadn’t been there the day her father went missing, but more textured. Her abilities were right there on the page as she tried hard to steer Reed in the direction she felt an investigation needed to go. But ultimately, even if his police work lacked a little spark, Reed could see the crucial angles, and when it came down to the question of what had happened to Leonard Franks – if he
hadn’t
just left out of choice – Craw’s hunch saw her on less certain ground.

        
REED:
You don’t think he had it all planned out?

        
CRAW:
Had what planned out?

        
REED:
His disappearance.

        
CRAW:
No.

        
REED:
You don’t think there’s even the smallest of chances that he could have left of his own accord?

        
CRAW:
That doesn’t make sense to me. He left without a change of clothes, without his wallet, without his phone.

        
REED:
So you think someone was responsible for him going missing? Against his will, I mean.

        
CRAW:
I think that’s more likely.

        
REED:
But when I spoke to your mum about that, about whether she heard any cars, any voices, disagreements, any sign your dad was undergoing any struggle at all, she said she heard nothing.

        
CRAW:
I don’t have an answer for that.

I could understand where Craw was coming from. Franks’s life at the end was one he’d spent the last part of his career dreaming about. His remote house in Devon, time with his wife, those were everything he told Craw he wanted as he fell more and more out of love with London. I believed a case could come along that might still affect him, surprise him, perhaps overwhelm him, even after thirty-five years as a cop. But I had a harder time believing it would be enough to have him heading for the nearest exit.

Yet how did you get a car up a mile-long dirt track without being seen or heard by the occupants of the house? And how did you overpower a man the size of Leonard Franks, and do it in total silence, without raising the alarm? In her interview, Ellie said she had gone out to see where Franks had got to after ‘about five minutes’, which meant, judging by the photographs Craw had taken of the house – and the desolate dips and ridges of the surrounding moorland – she should have been able to see and hear a car winding its way back down to Postbridge, or people leaving on foot with Franks in tow.

But Ellie told Reed that she hadn’t seen anybody.

So, in the end, even if her gut told her something more was at play, that someone else was involved, Craw had to go with what her mother had said she’d seen and heard.

No cars. No people.

No explanation.

6

A lonely shaft of winter sunlight punctured the glass roof of the station as I watched her moving along the platform towards me. She was wheeling a black suitcase and clutching her phone in her spare hand, and when she was halfway along, the light suddenly seemed to get drawn to her, freezing her for a brief second, like a camera flash had gone off.

She hadn’t seen me yet, waiting for her on the other side of the ticket barriers, but I could see her clearly: blonde hair at her shoulders; a face full of gentle sweeps; pale skin that seemed to bleach under the light of the roof. She was trim, but not skinny: even through her jacket you could see the definition in her arms, a reminder of how she liked to run, of her days spent on stage, teaching dance and drama to kids. I saw nothing of myself in her and everything of her mother, except for the moments when she smiled. The way her eyes were. The way her mouth lifted. Those were mine, and I loved them.

Once she got to the barriers, she fed her ticket into the machine and then started looking for me. I waved to her, and began moving closer. As she came through, the smile bloomed on her face. ‘Sorry I’m late. I thought you might have given up on me.’

I brought her into me and hugged her.

‘Never,’ I said.

At the age of forty-two, I found out I had a daughter. She’d been conceived when I was still a child myself, in a moment of immaturity I never looked back on for twenty-four years. In the summer of 1988, I’d left the village in Devon I’d grown up in, not yet eighteen, and sat in the back of my parents’ battered Ford Sierra, waving to my girlfriend as I left for London. Because I was going to be at a university two hundred miles away we’d tearfully agreed to end our year-long relationship in the days before, but she never mentioned that she was pregnant, even though she would already have been at the sixteen-week mark then.