Fall From Grace (6 page)

I didn’t see her again for almost a quarter of a century.

After I graduated, I landed my first newspaper job – on a regional paper in south London – met my wife Derryn, married her and eventually buried her, and I never knew about the girl growing up on a part of the south Devon coast I’d once called home myself. By the time I was carrying Derryn’s casket through the cemetery, I’d stopped thinking about becoming a father, accepting that my shot at it had been laid to rest alongside her.

But then, after I was attacked and stabbed a year and a half ago, I returned to Devon to recover, and through a case I eventually took on down there, I met Annabel.

Her first twenty-four years had been equally clouded; a young life built around a lie that everyone involved had been content to go along with for reasons that had probably seemed right at the time. She didn’t know about me, didn’t know that the people she’d spent her life with weren’t actually her parents at all, even though they’d been a mum and dad to her in every way that mattered. So when we met each other for the first time, and especially in the days after, our conversations were quiet, both of us still shellshocked by the enormity of what we’d been told. It didn’t help that she was grieving, having to cope with the deaths of people she’d loved, and the demands of an eight-year-old sister for whom she’d suddenly become the most important person in the world. I’d buried my wife, so I knew Annabel’s pain, or at least a version of it, and had answers to some of her questions.

But not all.

In the end, some things she’d have to figure out herself.

7

We walked from the Tube station in drifting rain, catching up on the month since I’d last been to see her in Devon. It was a welcome break from thinking about Leonard Franks.

‘How’s Liv?’ I asked, as we entered my road.

Olivia was Annabel’s sister. She was staying with a friend’s family for a few days while Annabel came to visit.

‘She’s good. I’m catching glimpses of a teenager in her, which is slightly
less
good.’ She paused, smiling. ‘But she’s doing really well.’

‘Is it like catching glimpses of yourself?’

Annabel frowned. ‘No. I was a model teenager.’

I laughed. ‘I’m sure you were.’

At home, I left Annabel to unpack and shower while I prepared dinner. I lived in Ealing, in something of a rarity for London: a two-bedroom detached bungalow. The ink had still been drying on the contracts when Derryn, my wife, was diagnosed with cancer, so although we’d got to spend some time enjoying our house together, before she passed on, in reality most of my time here had been spent alone.

But slowly, thanks to Annabel, that was changing.

Once I set dinner going, I headed through to the spare room and scanned in the phone bills Craw had given me. I emailed them to Spike and sent a message to Task with an outline of what I’d asked for: major unsolveds in London, for as far back as he could go.

After pressing Send, I thought again about Franks’s disappearance, picturing how those last few moments must have been: what he’d said to his wife; whether – if he knew he was about to walk out for good – he might have acted a little strangely, said something that, in retrospect, could have been construed as a goodbye, or lingered for a moment longer than he might normally, watching Ellie Franks head to the kitchen.

And then I thought about what it would mean if he hadn’t. What if he didn’t look back?
It meant he’d gone out there expecting to return
.

With that last thought still swimming through my head, I leaned back, the leather chair wheezing beneath my weight, and looked out across the spare room, a place that had, at best, become an office, at worst a dumping ground for my professional life. Shelves full of missing persons files; pictures, cuttings and photocopies trapped inside their covers. Random photographs stacked in piles against the wall, the faces of people I’d found, looking out in poses I’d come to know so well. And then another shelf full of printouts, most of them police reports, most in my possession thanks to the sources I’d managed to secure during my newspaper days and maintain ever since. There was little room for anything else, although there were some reminders of an old life that seemed so long ago now: photos of me and Derryn on a beach in San Diego; another from an awards ceremony in the late 1990s, a younger, different version of me receiving a statuette; and then a picture of me and a colleague in the searing heat of a South African township.

As my attention returned to the computer, I fired up the web browser and googled Franks’s disappearance. There was hardly anything: hundred-word stories in the
Guardian, Mail
and
Express
– all culled from the same press release – and a longer version of the same press release in a local Devon paper. Franks’s status as a thirty-five-year veteran at the Met counted for little: in the press release, there would have been few details, certainly not an account of how he vanished on open moorland, so all newsdesks had to work with was a former cop going missing. It was interesting, just not interesting enough. When people disappeared every minute, media coverage depended on an angle.

I grabbed the file Craw had given me, and opened it up to the list of names and addresses, zeroing in on two: Gavin Clark of the Cold Case Review Unit, and Derek Cortez. Craw had given both the all-clear, but I wanted to be sure.

I called Clark first. The number listed was his landline at work. After thirty seconds, and no answer, it went to voicemail. He sounded stiff and serious, so I kept my message deliberately short, explaining that I was looking into the disappearance of Franks, but stopping short of telling him I wasn’t actually a police officer.

When I was done, I hung up and dialled Cortez’s number. Unlike Clark, he picked up almost immediately. He sounded old, his voice a little hoarse, as if he was just getting over a cold; and there was a reticence to him initially, like he expected me to be selling him something. But after I explained who I was and what I was doing, he softened up.

‘Such a tragedy,’ he said in a soft Devonshire lilt.

‘Did you know Leonard well?’

‘Well enough. He and Ellie kept passing our house in the village, on their walks. We have a house almost on the road, and they’d come down the track from their place up there and take the path that runs just outside ours, down to the moorland behind us. I got to know them through repetition, really. Then we started talking.
Then
we got on to the subject of what we did, and that was when I found out that he’d been at the Met.’

‘And after that?’

‘After that, we started getting together properly: we’d go up there, they’d come down here, Len and I would go off and play golf. We all got on so well. At some point, I must have mentioned the work I was doing for the CCRU to him. Initially, I’m not sure he could have cared less. That’s not to say he wasn’t interested in what I was doing, but it was clear that he had no wish to return to that life. But then their kitchen renovations started and, boy, did they have some ambitious plans for that place.’

‘So you recommended him to Clark?’

‘Yeah. My part didn’t last long, though: basically the length of a phone call. I gave Clark a shout and told him Len was up for some freelance work. You can imagine Clark was interested straight away. He’s a miserable sod, but he knows when he’s on to a good thing. Len ran murders up in London for all those years, so he was a good find.’

‘Did he ever talk to you about his cases?’

‘At the Met? Never.’

‘That didn’t surprise you?’

‘Not at all. Some officers are like that, especially in retirement. In my experience, you get two types of cop: the ones who seek solace through sharing, and the ones who don’t.’

‘What about the CCRU?’

‘What about it?’

‘Did he ever mention receiving a case from Clark?’

‘No. And I never asked him. Even when I’d been selling the dream, so to speak, I didn’t ever give him details of cases I was looking into – and, to be fair, he never wanted to know. I got the sense we were from the same school of thought: these were cases and victims entrusted to us, and we had to do our best by them. Prudence was a part of that.’

We talked for a while longer, but the conversation started to dwindle, so I thanked him and hung up. On the list Craw gave me, I put a line through Cortez’s name. There was a chance that, at some stage down the line, he might come back into the picture. But somehow I doubted it.

In the file Craw had compiled, next to the phone bills, was Franks’s email address. A password had been pencilled into the margin alongside it. Craw had written, ‘He has an iPad too, which I have at the house. You can collect it whenever you want.’ I went to Gmail, put in his address and password, and accessed his inbox. He had two hundred and ninety-two messages. Nine had been sent to him in the days and months after he disappeared, five from friends who didn’t realize he was missing, four from others asking him to get in touch. All had been read, presumably by Craw.

I zeroed in on the email conversations Franks had had with Derek Cortez and Gavin Clark. The Cortez email chain seemed to back up what he’d just told me. At one point, Franks had thanked Cortez for recommending him to Clark; Cortez replied, telling him it was his pleasure.
And that’s where my part in this ends! Clark will get in touch directly
.

There were several other names I recognized, from the list Craw had already put together for me of Franks’s friends and associates. Quite a few were old work colleagues, Franks talking to them about life at the Met post-retirement; and although they replied non-specifically, not referencing individual cases, it was clear they still treated him with reverence, one – presumably from habit, or perhaps as a half-joke – even calling him ‘sir’. There weren’t any email chains dealing directly with the question of the case he’d been looking at before he’d vanished, but the messages provided a compelling insight into relationships he’d built over a long time. As I worked through them more closely a second time, I drafted a list of ten names that cropped up most regularly.

All of them were cops.

Despite the theory about the file coming from a civilian, I couldn’t dismiss the possibility he might have been sent it by someone still at the Met. Perhaps they’d seen it as a favour to him, or as a way to help him reach some kind of closure. That didn’t explain how the case had stayed – and remained – off the radar when Sergeant Reed had gone looking for it, why ex-colleagues had never mentioned it in correspondence with him, or why someone else inside the Met might care as much about its contents as Franks. It didn’t explain why they might be willing to take such a risk either, especially if they
had
printed off police records and then mailed them out. But just because it was a risk, it didn’t make it inconceivable.
Someone
had to have sent it to him.

‘Are you in the middle of something?’

I turned. Annabel was standing in the doorway. I hadn’t heard her.

‘Not at all.’ I waved her in. ‘Welcome to the nerve centre.’

She smiled and looked at the files, the photographs of the missing, the pictures on the wall. Last time she’d been up to London, she hadn’t come in here. I watched her edge further inside, her gaze returning to the files, before sitting on the floor and bringing her knees up to her chest. ‘What are all those?’ she said, gesturing towards the shelves.

‘That’s my work. That’s what I do.’ I looked at the files on the shelves. ‘All of those are cases I’ve closed in the four and a half years I’ve been doing this.’

‘How many have you closed?’

‘Sixty-seven.’

‘That’s a lot of cases.’

‘Most are pretty straightforward.’

‘So why do you keep all the paperwork?’

I shrugged. ‘I guess because things repeat.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’ve just found that life has a way of tethering you to certain people – to places as well. It’s like …’ I paused. ‘Like connective tissue. You’re bound to things, whether you like it or not, and it doesn’t matter if you fight it, you’re always drawn back to them.’

She nodded, but then slowly seemed to drift away.

‘Am I getting too mystical?’

A flat kind of half-smile. ‘No. I was just thinking about how hard it is for me to leave Olivia alone these days. The crazy thing is, the rational part of me knows she’s safe. I only texted her about five minutes ago.’

‘She’s fine.’

‘I know. But every minute of every day, it feels like I’m watching her. And I get scared …’ She stopped. ‘I get scared I can’t protect her.’

‘You don’t have to be scared.’

She glanced at me, her eyes glinting in the subdued light of the room. ‘What if it happens again? What if someone comes for us? I couldn’t do anything about it last time.’

‘They won’t.’

‘Are you saying that to make me feel better – or do you genuinely believe that?’

‘I genuinely believe it.’

‘What makes you so sure?’

‘I promise you, whatever you do now, wherever you go, I’ll have your back. Yours
and
Olivia’s. She might not be mine, but that doesn’t matter. I have a responsibility to you and, in turn, to her.’ I looked at the files, then back to her. ‘But what happened to you, it was a one-off. Most people will go their whole lives without experiencing what you two did. What’s getting to you, what’s making you think like this, isn’t reason – it’s fear.’

She didn’t say anything for a moment. Then: ‘Don’t you ever get scared?’

‘Of course.’

‘I don’t mean by an unexpectedly large gas bill.’

I laughed. ‘Neither do I.’

‘So what scares you?’

I briefly considered something soft and reassuring, something to allay her fears and send her back to Devon with the confidence to push on. But she wasn’t seeking fortitude, and I never wanted her to question anything I said.

‘Desperate people,’ I told her. ‘They’re what scare me.’

‘What do you mean?’

My eyes drifted to the files again, to the sixty-seven cases that had become the only life I knew. ‘I mean, sometimes it’s hard to believe what they’re capable of.’