David Raker 05 - Fall From Grace

by Tim Weaver

  But then some days she’d slip up or say something without thinking, and suddenly they’d manoeuvred past her defences and she was back beside the pond; and all she could see were arms thrashing around, above the surface of the water, clawing at air, tiny fingers desperately trying to find her as the dome of his head disappeared beneath for good.

  And there was nothing she could do.

  Before she realized, tears had filled her eyes, and as she looked over at Garrick, she saw a moment of pity pass across his face.

  ‘I couldn’t save him,’ she said softly.

  ‘Was Bear a replacement for Lucas?’

  She didn’t reply.

  Garrick came forward. ‘Was Bear how you tried to forget him?’

  Slowly, she started nodding – and then the words began to fall from her lips again. ‘Goodbye,’ she said. ‘Goodbye, my baby; goodbye, my beautiful baby boy.’

  9

  The next morning, I found a note in the kitchen from Annabel telling me she’d braved the rain and gone for a run. I admired her discipline, especially as I’d already told her I had a treadmill in the garage. After brewing some coffee and making some toast, I grabbed the DVD marked ‘Footage of the house’ that Craw had left in Franks’s file for me, and took it through to the living room. The fire was on, and rain was tapping against the windows.

  The video started with an establishing shot of the Frankses’ place, filmed from about a hundred feet away. It looked like it was autumn, which meant Craw must have filmed it recently, perhaps when she’d made up her mind about bringing the case to me: copper-coloured trees swayed gently beyond the A-frame roof of the house, and the fields around it were dotted with piles of golden leaves, mulched by rain. As she started to move the camera, wind crackled in the microphone, and for the first time I got a clear idea of how isolated the Frankses’ house was. It sat midway down a slope: to the left of the house, the incline continued, up towards a tor which was marked with a pile of huge boulders; to its right, the slope fell away like a breaking wave, eventually meeting up with Postbridge. The rooftops of the village – marks of charcoal in the distance – were the only civilization for miles. The rest was fields: segmented further down into the squares I’d seen in the photographs; a rolling carpet of bracken and yellow-specked heather further up.

  There were two cars at the house. One, a Mini Cooper – presumably Craw’s – was parked on the grass about fifty feet from the front veranda; a second, Leonard and Ellie’s Audi A3, was parked at the side of the house, under the plastic canopy. The dried mud track running from the house down to the village started close to Craw’s Mini and continued in a straight line across the moorland, carved out of it by years of use, before kinking right and following a treeline down to Postbridge. The trees, beginning to thin out, must have basically fenced the house in during the summer: fully covered, it would have been like a natural wall, preventing anyone beyond them from even knowing the house was there.

  A couple of seconds later, the camera cut to a shot of the rear of the house, not visible in the photographs Craw had provided. Here, I could see the toolshed. It was small – no more than five or six feet across – and, although it was padlocked, it was flimsily constructed, attached to the house but gradually leveraging away from it. The woodshed was out of sight, at the side of the house, but the camera briefly passed a tree trunk with an axe embedded in it, where Franks must have cut the wood.

  Next, the video switched to the interior for the first time.

  Immediately inside the front door was a living room, running the entire length of the house. Off it were three open doors: through one I could see kitchen units; through the next, a downstairs bathroom; through the third, a desk with a computer on it, and two bookcases. The living room itself was neat and uncluttered. Three big leather sofas surrounding a TV. A dining-room table. A sideboard dotted with photographs. A beautiful flagstone fire. As Craw panned from left to right, I could see the photographs were mostly shots of her, her family and their kids. At the back was an L-shaped staircase leading up to a small, open landing area overlooking the living room. Upstairs, I spotted three more doors.

  At this point, Craw spoke for the first time: ‘This room used to be divided into two, but Dad knocked the wall down when they moved in.’ A couple of seconds later, the video jumped again and we were in the kitchen. ‘This is the renovation they were in the middle of when he disappeared,’ she continued, and it was certainly clear that the kitchen had never been finished. There were spaces where some of the worktops hadn’t been placed yet; none of the cupboard doors had been attached; and the walls were half painted, two in cream, the others in a sickly yellow colour that they must have been in the process of covering up. Craw zoomed in slightly, taking in a long window above the sink that looked out over the back garden. This close, I could see a vegetable patch, a couple of flower beds and a patio. Again, I was struck by how much it seemed a part of its surroundings. Look quickly, and it was like the whole of the moor was theirs.

  After that, there was a series of quick cuts, every room shown for thirty seconds. The house was bright and uncomplicated, and followed a similar pattern throughout: neutral walls, bright accessories, family photos, books, indoor plants. There were two bedrooms upstairs and a second bathroom. Finally, Craw returned to the spare room downstairs, which incorporated a prehistoric PC perched on a desk, and a cupboard. They sat either side of a narrow window that looked out across the moors, the edge of the toolshed visible on the left.

  Suddenly, on the sofa next to me, my phone started ringing. It was a Devon number, but not one I recognized. ‘David Raker.’

  ‘It’s Clark,’ a male voice said by way of introduction.

  Gavin Clark from the CCRU.

  ‘DCI Clark. Thank you for calling me b –’

  ‘Who are you?’ he said.

  ‘As I mentioned in the message I left, my name is David Raker. I’m looking into the disappearance of Leonard Franks. I believe he was in the process of taking on some –’

  ‘I never ended up giving him a case.’

  ‘That’s what I was told, yes.’

  ‘By who?’

  ‘By his wife.’

  ‘You’re working for her?’

  ‘Yes,’ I lied. ‘I was hoping to get an idea of the arrangement –’

  ‘We never had an arrangement because he never ended up taking on any work for the unit,’ Clark said. ‘I spoke to him on the phone, I liked what he had to say, he had the perfect CV, so I was in the process of getting him signed off. That’s it. End of story.’

  ‘You didn’t talk about a specific case to him?’

  ‘Why’s that your business?’

  ‘I’m just trying to find him.’

  ‘Yeah, well, so are the police.’

  ‘I think the police have run out of ideas.’

  ‘This is still an active case – you know that, right? Not my active case, so you do whatever the hell you like. I don’t care. But you buzzing around trying to get answers will make problems for someone somewhere.’

  You could never be one hundred per cent sure over the phone, but his annoyance sounded genuine, and the way he’d spoken about Franks backed up everything Craw had told me already: her father had never had a case through from the Cold Case Review Unit because Clark was waiting for his involvement to be signed off higher up the chain.

  I thanked him and ended the call.

  Now it was time to speak to Ellie Franks.

  10

  Craw lived in a big house on the edge of Wimbledon Park, set back from the road behind solid oak gates. I’d never asked her what her husband did for a living, but as I approached in the car, I doubted the Met were paying her anywhere near enough for a place like this.

  Built from red brick, it had gables at either end, with windows in a line under each roof. From the gates, the driveway split. A short left fork dropped away to an open garage door on the lower-ground floor, with the Frankses’ Audi A3 inside. On the righ
t, it curved up to where a Mini sat parked. I’d seen the same one on the DVD that morning.

  I pulled up at the gates in my creaking seventeen-year-old BMW 3 Series and pushed the intercom. It buzzed once. Ten seconds later, without any response, the gate squealed loudly and began to fan out. I could see Craw standing in a window at the front of the house, directing a remote control at the gate. I parked behind her Mini.

  Grabbing my pad and pen, I headed for the front door. It opened as I was about to knock, Craw standing in the doorway in a pair of white leggings and a pink long-sleeved sports top. I couldn’t help but be surprised at how she looked. I hadn’t ever seen her in anything other than the muted colours of a Met detective: greys, blacks, blues; a procession of identical trouser-suits notable only for their incremental colour changes.

  ‘How are you today?’ she asked.

  I stepped past her, into the house.

  ‘I’m fine. You?’

  ‘Fine.’

  It still felt odd seeing her like this, and talking to her in this way, even after processing it for a day: eighteen months ago we’d been at each other’s throats; now I was being invited around for coffee.

  She closed the door behind me.

  Immediately inside was a sunken living room. Around its edges were bookcases and storage cabinets, coat stands and pot plants; in the middle, three tan leather sofas and a fifty-inch TV. Photographs were conspicuous by their absence, of Craw, of her family, but I didn’t read anything into it. This was who she was, and now I understood where she got it from: she was inviting me into her life, but clearly she wanted some of it to remain off-limits. Like her father, she was drawing a clear distinction between work and home.

  The only place where she’d had to concede ground was on an oak coffee table in the space between the sofas: she’d left a pile of photographs there, all of her father.

  ‘Can I get you something to drink?’ Craw asked.

  ‘Coffee would be great.’

  She nodded. ‘Take a seat. I’ll go and get Mum.’

  I sat and started going through the pictures of Leonard Franks. In one of them, he was in running gear at the start of a half-marathon, and above his head, on a banner, I could see a date: 18 September 2006. He didn’t look that different from the photo of him I’d already seen in his missing persons file. Maybe the seven years in between had brought a little more wear and tear – a few more lines around the eyes, his grey hair a little thinner – but otherwise time had been pretty kind to him.

  When I moved through the others, I found him on a beach somewhere, with a salt-and-pepper beard, his grandchildren around him; in another, he was in uniform at a police ceremony, clean-shaven, arm around his wife. In another, he and Craw were smiling for the camera, beers in their hands and a barbecue smoking in the background. They were both on the veranda of the Frankses’ house on Dartmoor.

  A moment later, I heard voices behind me and turned and saw Craw and Ellie Franks coming down the stairs and into the living room.

  I got up.

  ‘David, this is my mum, Ellie,’ Craw said. ‘Mum, this is David Raker, the man I’ve asked to find Dad.’ Craw had dropped back behind her mother, and off the back of those last words, her eyes flicked to me as if to say, I can handle the truth if you find out he’s dead. But she doesn’t need a reality check yet.

  That wasn’t generally how I liked to work. It was important to be honest with the families, to temper expectations, especially after their loved ones had been missing for a long time. Nine months was a long time, and Craw knew that better than anyone. But I let it slide for now. She nodded her thanks, and as her mother got closer, I shook her hand.

  ‘Nice to meet you, Mrs Franks.’

  ‘Oh, please,’ she said, ‘call me Ellie.’

  She was smaller than Craw by about four inches, and dressed in a grey pleated skirt and a cream cardigan, but the physical similarity between mother and daughter was obvious: the same eyes, the same facial lines, the same slightly stiff gait. Just like her husband, Ellie Franks looked good on retirement, and as we chatted politely about the weather, she joked about how she and Leonard had once been trapped in their Dartmoor house for a week because of snow and that he’d almost driven her crazy.

  ‘He just can’t sit still,’ she said, perching hesitantly on the edge of one of the sofas, a smile on her face. ‘By the end, I was ready to tie him to a sledge and send him downhill to Postbridge.’ But then the smile started to fall away and a sadness washed across her face.

  Craw asked her mother what she wanted to drink, then disappeared into the kitchen, leaving us alone as she’d promised to the previous day.

  ‘How are you finding life back in London?’ I asked.

  She drew her cardigan around her. ‘Oh, you know …’ She paused, a small, sombre smile forming. ‘It’s fine.’ But it’s not the life I wanted. ‘Where are you from, Mr Raker?’

  ‘David. I live here in London.’

  ‘And before that?’

  ‘I was in south Devon until I went to university.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ There was a flash of hope in her eyes. She came forward, hands pressed to the sofa either side of her. ‘So you must know the area well.’

  ‘It’s a big county,’ I said, trying to introduce some realism.

  ‘Such a wonderful part of the country.’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘Len and I started to fall out of love with the city. It’s all noise and aggression. You get on the Tube and it’s like a war zone. I just couldn’t be bothered with it, and as Len got closer and closer to retirement, we talked more and more about moving away.’

  ‘Why Devon?’

  I’d asked Craw exactly the same question the previous day, but I wanted to make sure there was no undiscovered connection to the county. Ellie shrugged. ‘We used to go down there a lot, particularly in our fifties. Len loved the peace down there. In our later years, we became big walkers, and Dartmoor was just a place we fell in love with.’

  ‘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 c
ertainly 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.’