Fall From Grace (56 page)

The second call was to Ellie Franks, to see how she was doing. She too remained resolute for a while, but then it began to get on top of her – all the news reports she’d had to endure, all the lies she’d had to try to process over the past nine days – and she broke down. As I listened to her cry, I thought about something she’d told me the first time I met her:
Len said to me once, ‘Sometimes you just have to let people go
.’ He was talking about a woman he’d had an affair with, about the son he’d had to watch being buried from the back of the church – and yet, in the end, it had probably been one of the most honest things he’d ever said to his wife.

I sat beside her bed as the sun came up, cutting through the blinds at her window. It was 3 January and one of the male nurses was busy taking down Christmas decorations.

She was sleeping on her side, pale and still, IV gently dripping, heaters humming. In my lap, I held a photograph: Casey, with her son. I’d managed to persuade the investigating team to release one picture for her.

At just before seven-thirty, she began to stir, making a gentle moaning sound as she rolled on to her back. I watched her surface, her eyelids flickering, her fingers pushing the blanket away from her. As she opened an eye, I looked down at the photograph again, at the face of a mother and the memory of her son, then returned it to my jacket pocket. She clocked the movement, realizing someone was beside her, and turned to face me.

A hint of a smile broke across her face, although much of her skull remained obscured by bandages.

‘Morning,’ I said.

‘I see you caught me looking my best again.’

I returned the smile. ‘How are you feeling?’

She took a long, deep breath, her eyes like a projector: doubt, pain, grief, worry, relief. Then, finally, Melanie Craw said, ‘I guess I feel like my life starts here.’

89

Everything is connected. It took me a long time to realize that. After my wife died from a disease I couldn’t fight for her, I spent two years drifting, propelled by the ghost of who she had been. All that I did in that time, every case I closed, every killer I found, all the darkness I faced down, was driven by her. Her ashes may have been scattered long ago, taken by the wind and washed away by the rain, but what she had been to me remained.

I found my calling in missing persons because I soon realized the families of the lost were just like me: wandering a road without boundaries, searching for answers in the dark. In the end, whether I walked their loved ones to the front door, or returned them as memories, dust and bones, I always brought them back – and I always closed the circle.

When Derryn died, I refused to believe there could be a reason. Perhaps, in a lot of ways, I still don’t. But, as my grief slowly subsided, I started seeing things with more clarity, moments in my cases that might have escaped me before: links between events, connective tissue binding one person to the next. I saw actions from one decade echoing through to the next, and saw how you could drift from people, become so distant from them it seemed impossible you would ever meet back in the middle. But then you did.

You were bound to them.

Perhaps even, in some small way, responsible for them.

The café was at the eastern end of Lower Mall, on the fringes of the Thames. When I arrived, Colm Healy was on a stool at the window, hands flat to the counter in front of him, eyes following two rowers as they passed under Hammersmith Bridge.

He’d barely changed in the fourteen months since I’d last seen him in the flesh: tall but overweight, his red hair thick and messy, his shirt bursting at the stomach, his expression dogged, tired, distressed. He wasn’t wearing a tie, and his jacket was on the back of the chair, but he’d rolled his sleeves up, as if preparing for something. He turned as I approached, and we shook hands, then he offered to get me a coffee. I couldn’t recall the last time he’d done that, and immediately, perhaps cynically, wondered what the real reason was for him inviting me here. In the days before I’d put the Franks case to bed, I’d told him I would call him to arrange something. But, in the end, he’d called me instead.

After my drink arrived, we talked for a while about Franks, about Craw, about the things the media had reported, and then a sudden greyness seemed to grab hold of him.

‘You all right?’ I asked him.

He nodded. ‘Yeah.’

‘You sure?’

‘I’m
fine
,’ he said.

I left it there, looking over at the river. It was 8 January, and there was fresh snow on the ground. In front of us, the sun winked through the naked branches of an oak tree.

‘How’s the security gig going?’

He didn’t respond.

When I turned to him, he was looking down into his empty coffee cup. His hand was around it, wedding band still on, even though his wife had left him three years ago.

‘Healy?’

‘It’s not,’ he said.

‘It’s not what?’

‘It’s not going.’

‘The security job?’

He nodded.

‘You mean you left?’

He shook his head, then looked up at me. A movement in his face. ‘There never
was
a security job. I lied. I can’t get a fucking job anywhere. The guy I pretended was the other security guard, the one I told you on the phone was always checking up on me …’

I just stared at him.

‘He’s just a guy I bunk with in the shelter.’

‘You’re living in a
homeless
shelter?’

He looked out through the window; nodded.

‘Why the hell didn’t you call me?’

‘I called you today.’

‘I mean,
before
today.’

‘Yeah, well …’ He stopped, taking a long breath, and it was like something shivered through him. ‘You want to help me? I got something you can help me with.’

‘What?’

He sat there, unmoved, staring out at the river. ‘You know the point at which my life
really
started going down the shitter? It wasn’t when Gemma left me. It wasn’t even when I found Leanne. I mean, don’t get me wrong, that messed me up. You shouldn’t outlive your kids.’ He cleared his throat, and when he glanced at me, I could see his eyes had welled up. ‘What messed me up was those two girls. The twins. They were the start of everything. I couldn’t find the bastard who killed them, I couldn’t find a fucking
trace
of that arsehole
anywhere
, and from there my whole life got flushed: my marriage fell apart, my daughter was murdered, I got fired from the Met, and
now
look at me. I’m living in a homeless shelter, pretending that I’m working a security gig. I’m pathetic.’

‘Healy –’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Don’t tell me I’m not. Don’t lie to me.’

We sat there in silence for a long time.

And then, as I finished the last of my coffee, he swung around on his stool, some measure of composure back in his face, and he said, ‘You want to do something for me?’

‘This wasn’t what –’

‘You want to
do
something for me, Raker?’

I studied his face, the lines in it, gouged out by the journey of the last three and a half years; from the moment he’d found the girls, this was the path he’d been walking, these were his scars, this was where it was always going to end up.

Another broken heart.

‘You want to do something for me?’ he said again. ‘Help me find the man who killed them.’

Acknowledgements

As with all my books,
Fall From Grace
wouldn’t be possible without the incredible team at Michael Joseph. I started to list the names of everyone there who has supported and promoted my work, and then became terrified about forgetting someone, so I hope a company-wide and extra-,
extra
-large THANK YOU can go some way to expressing my gratitude. However, I must give a special mention to Rowland White and Emad Akhtar (and to my copy-editor, Caroline Pretty), who helped improve early drafts of the manuscript immeasurably.

Thank you to my long-suffering agent, Camilla Wray, whose patience, unflappability and eye for a story was, as always, just what I needed when I hit The Doubts. I don’t know what I would do without her. A big thanks to the ladies of Darley Anderson as well, who work so hard on my behalf.

To Mum, Dad, Lucy and the rest of my wonderful family: thank you so much for everything you do for me. And, finally, the biggest thank you of all to Erin, who was so excited to be allowed to read the first chapter of
Fall From Grace
(before being told she could read the rest in about eight years’ time), and to Sharlé, without whose patience, love and support none of this would be possible.

THE BEGINNING

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PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London
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www.penguin.com

First published 2014

Copyright © Tim Weaver, 2014

Cover images: Landscape/fence: © Iain Harris; Crow: © Duncan Usher/Alamy; Sky and grass © Shutterstock

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Typeset by Jouve (UK), Milton Keynes

ISBN: 978-1-405-91347-8

Table of Contents

Part One

1978

Chapter 1

2013

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

The First Goodbye

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

The Boyfriend

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Retreat

Part Two

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Box of Regrets

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Simon

Chapter 40

Chapter 41