Fall From Grace (9 page)

‘No family? No other reasons?’

She shook her head. ‘No. All our family are here.’

‘And you were happy down there?’

‘Oh, very happy,’ she said.

‘No problems?’

‘Absolutely none, I assure you. We bought that place about seven months before Len retired, and kept going back whenever we had free time, to get it ready for when we moved. And then, a few months after he turned sixty, we bid farewell to London for good.’ She paused for a moment, her eyes moving to the photographs of her husband. ‘There’s not a single day I regret that move, despite what’s happened. I can honestly say the two years we had down there, in that house, that beautiful place, were the best years we
ever
had.’

I gave her a moment to enjoy the memories. Next, we’d be walking over tougher, more painful ground. ‘What about in the days and weeks before Leonard went missing?’

She seemed disappointed I’d brought it up.

I pushed as gently as I could. ‘Did he maybe mention something that might have been bothering him, or seem in any way different?’

She was already shaking her head, and I realized she’d become so used to the question now, she could almost sense it coming. ‘No,’ she said, ‘he was fine.’

‘Melanie said that he’d been talking to a man named Derek Cortez about possibly doing some consultation work for Devon and Cornwall Police. Did he mention that?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We talked about it over dinner one night.’

‘When would that have been?’

‘Oh, probably mid November last year.’

‘And how did that discussion go?’

‘It went fine. Len liked to keep his work and home life separate. It was one of the things I loved about him most. As I’m sure you can appreciate, it requires a determined, disciplined mind to do that, but he managed it. I’m not going to pretend that he didn’t
ever
bring up his time at the Met during forty-two years of marriage, but it was rare – and he certainly never brought it up in front of the kids. But he’d discuss big changes, and things that might affect us both, and he told me about his conversation with Derek, and how Derek was going to call his contact at the uh …’ She searched for the words.

‘The CCRU,’ I said. ‘And then they got in touch with Leonard?’

‘Derek said Len would have to get some sort of official clearance first. A month or so later – maybe the end of December – Len spoke on the phone to someone at Devon and Cornwall Police. I think they just wanted to get to know him a little better.’

‘That was Gavin Clark?’

‘Yes, that’s him. He spoke to Len, told him they were very interested in using his experience, but that they’d have to wait for everything to get cleared first.’

‘Did Clark say how long that would take?’

‘I think Len said at least a couple of months.’

This all confirmed what I’d been told by Craw, Cortez and Clark himself. Two months on from that phone call between Franks and Clark would have been the end of February, beginning of March. By then, Craw had been down to Dartmoor for Franks’s birthday on 23 February, and he’d mentioned the cold case to her.
Which meant he already had it in his possession by then
. That either meant Clark had got the paperwork signed off in under six weeks, and lied to Craw, and me – for whatever reason – about never sending Franks a file. Or, more likely, the file came from someone else.

‘We’d planned a big kitchen renovation,’ Ellie Franks was saying, ‘and it was going to cost quite a bit more than we’d budgeted. Len used a chunk from his pension to pay for it, but that pension may have needed to last us another twenty or thirty years – so it seemed like a sensible idea, him taking on some stress-free extra work.’

She hung on to that last bit, swaying a little: stress-free work that may have ended up being the reason he disappeared. I gave her a moment.

‘So what happened after that?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Do you remember him receiving a file?’

‘Yes. It came in the post one day.’

‘Did you have to sign for it?’

‘No, it was just regular first class.’

‘Do you remember when the file turned up?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘I really need you to think hard about that.’

She took a long breath. ‘Maybe late January, early February.’

‘How sure are you about that?’

‘After he disappeared, Melanie said she and Len talked about the work he was doing, very briefly, when she came down for his sixty-second birthday, and as you might know already, his birthday is 23 February. So it must have been before that. It’s difficult for me to remember exactly, but I suppose he must have been working on the file for at least a couple of weeks beforehand. It could have been longer, perhaps a little shorter.’

‘Do you remember where it had been sent from?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘Maybe a return address, or perhaps a postal mark?’

‘No,’ she said again. ‘I never thought to look.’

‘So you were the one who took receipt of it?’

‘Well, I picked the envelope up off the floor, if that counts as taking receipt of it. Len had gone to Ashburton to get some things for the house. We had a bit of a leaky roof at the time. I picked it up, sorted through our mail and left it to one side for him.’

‘That was your only contact with it?’

She paused, nodded. ‘Yes.’

It was obvious Ellie was smart enough to have figured out – if Craw hadn’t told her already – that, whatever case her husband had been working on at the end had probably been the reason for his disappearance. But I wondered if Craw had mentioned anything about its origins, about the truth behind the file: that Gavin Clark had confirmed to Franks that he’d have to wait until the start of March for his first case – and yet that file had landed on their doorstep several weeks earlier, in late January or early February.

My guess was that Craw had chosen not to tell her. If she had, Ellie would surely have glimpsed the deceit beyond: that taking delivery of the file meant Franks had lied to her about who he was working for – or, at best, chosen not to say anything. Maybe, in the grand scheme of things, not a massive lie, but a lie all the same. Separating out work and home life was one thing, but he’d already blurred the boundaries when he’d talked to his wife about taking on CCRU work to help pay for the kitchen. Ellie knew he was looking at a case – he’d just chosen not to tell her the truth about who had sent it.

‘Okay, so what about in the days after?’ I asked.

‘Days after?’

‘Did you ever see him working on the case?’

‘Oh yes,’ Ellie said. ‘We usually had a couple of hours every afternoon where – if it wasn’t too cold – we’d put the patio heaters on and sit outside. He’d be at one end of the veranda, at the table, and I’d curl up at the other, on our wicker sofa.’

‘So you sat apart when he was looking at the file?’

‘What do you mean?’

But then, a moment later, I could see she understood: maybe it was easier for him to work at the table – or maybe he’d chosen to sit at the opposite end of the veranda because he didn’t want her to see the file.

‘Did he ever look at the file at night?’ I asked.

‘Sometimes, when I watched TV.’

‘Did he sit apart from you then too?’

A flicker in her face. ‘Yes.’

There was going to be no way to trace the origin of the file. If it had been sent to Franks by recorded delivery, I might have had a trail, but locking down a location for where a first-class envelope had been mailed from would be like searching for a mote of dust. I looked at the photos of Franks, spread out on the coffee table in front of me, and then back to Ellie.

‘You’re positive you don’t remember seeing anything of the file? Even a brief look while Len was working on it: words, names, details, photographs, anything.’

She shook her head, certain. ‘No. I wish I’d taken more of an interest now.’

Briefly, that same sadness ghosted across her face. She reminded me so much of Craw, of the meeting we’d had the day before, of the times we’d crossed swords before that. Ellie was a little warmer, but there had been no tears from either of them, at any point. Yet stoicism could only disguise so much: they were hurting, and every attempt to conceal it just played out more clearly than ever in their eyes.

‘Okay,’ I said, keeping my voice even, patient, ‘so you didn’t see the contents, but do you remember what it looked like? For example, was it bound together and relatively tidy? Was it inside a proper hard-backed folder? Did it look official? Or did it look more home-made? Perhaps it was just a stack of paper, or maybe placed in a Manila folder?’

‘Like I said, I didn’t ever see it close up …’ She stopped, her eyes fixed on a space between us.

Come on, Ellie: give me something
.

I waited her out and, after a couple of moments, she looked back at me. ‘From a distance, and from what I can remember, it seemed like the type of file you’d expect the police to compile. I mean, it was in a folder – a beige one, I think; just a standard A4 loose-flap folder – and the paper inside …’ She paused again. ‘It looked pretty tidy and well maintained, but I don’t think it was bound.’

‘All right,’ I said, writing down what she’d said verbatim. ‘All right, that’s really good, Ellie. Thank you.’

She smiled, and seemed to relax a little. It was clear she hated having to recall the day her husband vanished. Unfortunately for her, this was only the beginning.

‘So, I’ve been going through Leonard’s emails, and I see he still kept in touch with some old colleagues at the Met. I know he didn’t talk to you much about his job, but did he ever talk about the people he worked with?’

‘Oh yes, quite often.’

‘Okay. Anyone in particular?’

‘Goodness. There were lots. He worked across so many different commands, it was difficult for me to keep up. I guess there were probably four or five who he would have considered to be his best people: Donna Jones, Alastair Jordan … uh … Tony Mabena, Carla Murray … Gosh, I’m trying to think. Jim Paige. Is any of this even vaguely useful?’

I cross-checked with the list of ten I’d made that morning and all five were on it. ‘Can you remember what those five did at the Met? Did they work for your husband?’

‘Jim Paige didn’t. He and Len were about the same age and came up through the ranks together. When Len retired in 2011, Jim was running the sexual assault … uh …’

‘Sapphire?’

‘Yes. That’s it.’

‘What about the others?’

‘The rest all worked for him at one time or another, though I guess Carla must have been around the longest. I wouldn’t be able to tell you
how
long, but Len recruited her from somewhere up in Scotland – Glasgow or Edinburgh – back in, I don’t know, maybe the mid nineties. It could have been earlier. He was a superintendent at the time, covering murders and all that sort of thing. After that, he went on to run the gang unit, and she went with him, then he moved on to the uh … oh, gosh, what are they called?’

I knew from the potted history Craw had given me that Franks ran the Directorate of Professional Standards after leaving Trident, the gang unit. ‘The DPS?’

‘Yes, that’s it. Anyway, after that, he returned to run the Homicide command and Carla moved back with him – and that was where he stayed until he retired.’

‘ “Carla” is Carla Murray, right?’

‘Right.’

I circled her name, as well as that of Jim Paige.

‘Did you ever meet any of his colleagues socially?’

‘We used to see quite a bit of Jim, as he and Len were old friends, like I said. They talked regularly on the phone too – just catching up with each other – once every couple of weeks. There were a few dinner parties, summer barbecues, that sort of thing. We hosted a couple. I wouldn’t say they were super-regular, but maybe a few times a year. Back in his forties and early fifties, he used to go out drinking one night a week with his team. He said it kept morale up, and got everyone together; he’d buy them all a couple of pints and they’d get to know each other, beyond what they knew already through work.’

‘Why only up until his early fifties?’

‘After he got the promotion to chief superintendent, he started to scale that sort of thing back. I think he felt he couldn’t be one of the guys any more, that there had to be a clear line between him and those who worked for him. That’s just how Len was. It’s what I loved about him. He was good with people, gracious, treated them well whatever their background and however they’d come to him. But when he needed to take tough decisions, he always would. I suppose some people respect you for that and some don’t.’ She paused for a moment, more of a slump to her frame now. All of a sudden, she looked older, a little frailer. ‘I remember he said to me once, “Sometimes you just have to let people go.” I think he meant you can’t please all of the people all of the time.’

Or maybe he didn’t mean that at all
, I thought.

Maybe he meant something else entirely.

11

Craw returned from the kitchen, placed a cup of fruit tea down in front of her mother, handed me a coffee and told us she’d be upstairs if we needed anything else. I thanked her and watched her leave, then turned back to Ellie.

‘Okay, so tell me about 3 March.’

She nodded, but didn’t say anything. For a moment it felt like she was wrestling with her courage as much as her recollection. ‘It was a Sunday, and we never did much on Sundays.’ She stopped, smiling, then cleared her throat. ‘I think we woke late that day, had a cup of tea in bed, read the papers and took it in turns to play around on Len’s iPad. Then, later, we went for a walk up to Stannon Tor, which is about a mile north of where our house is. Once you get up there it’s so lonely, and the views are absolutely stunning. Then we got back for lunch, and spent the afternoon sitting in front of the fire, dozing.’

‘Everything seemed normal?’

‘Everything was fine.’ But she cleared her throat again, and for the first time there was the merest hint of a flash in her eyes. ‘About four-thirty, five o’clock, the fire started to die out and it began to get cold, so I asked Len to get some more logs.’