by Tim Weaver
He straightened. ‘You spying on me?’
‘Just a little.’
‘I think I preferred full-time employment to this.’
She chuckled and ended the video there.
Others painted an even clearer picture of the Frankses’ lives in retirement: movies of the house taking shape, as Franks first finished the donkey work, then a succession of tradesmen came in and transformed the living room; the two of them planning out their next project – the kitchen – talking about budgeting, about how it might look, Ellie always filming, which seemed to confirm her husband’s love was in still photography, not in film. There were smaller moments too. Ellie videoing her husband as they climbed a tor, wind crackling in the microphone, disguising their voices; Leonard saying something to her, seemingly having good-natured fun at her expense, then holding out a hand towards her to help her across a stream. Finally, Ellie trying to capture them both, using the iPad’s reverse camera function – while Franks pretended to take a picture of her trying to take a picture of them, using the SLR around his neck.
This was where video and photographs were so different. Most photographs only scratched the surface: how a person looked that day, what they were wearing, where the picture was taken. But video was different: these moments between the two of them were everything I needed to know about their relationship, a natural and genuine cross-section of their life, brought alive and played out in front of me. If I’d had any doubts about their marriage at the end, if I’d entertained the idea he might have left without feeling anything for his wife, they’d been extinguished.
This is what photographs can never give you, I thought.
And yet, a few seconds later, my eye was drawn away from the films, back to the physical photograph I’d set aside.
Because I’d spotted something.
14
Leonard and Ellie had begun using the iPad in April 2011, presumably shortly after it had been given to Franks, and around the time he’d retired. As I scrolled through the list of photos and videos, each broken down by date, I noticed the same picture I’d found in the box – of the valley, the tinner’s hut and the church spire – was also in digital form on the iPad.
Except it wasn’t exactly the same.
The physical copy was old and discoloured. It was impossible to tell how old, but it had been in the box, lost among his other photos, for a long time. Yet even taking into account its age, it was clear that the picture had originally been taken on 35mm film, not digitally. It wasn’t an ultra-crisp image constructed from tens of millions of pixels. It had the slightly smeared, tinted quality of film – or, at least, film in the hands of an amateur.
However, every picture he had on his iPad was digital: high quality, pixel-perfect. Every picture. That included the one of the valley, although it was subtly different from the physical version: it was taken from almost the same angle but not quite; it was framed the same way, but zoomed in a fraction more; there was frost – just not as much; and, on the right-hand side, further down the valley, was something new: fence posts. I checked the date it was last modified: 12 April 2012. The year after they retired to Dartmoor.
It’s the same location – but years later.
He’d been back to the valley, for whatever reason, and tried to take a like-for-like photograph. But why? Because the physical copy was degrading? My eyes moved over the newer, digital version and recalled my conversation with Ellie: We used to go down to Devon 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.
There were all sorts of reasons there might be two slightly different versions of the same valley, taken years apart. Perhaps it was a place that was special to them, and Franks wanted to remember it. Maybe this was the place Ellie talked about, the place that made them fall in love with Dartmoor. Or maybe it was their favourite hiking spot.
I grabbed my phone and dialled Craw’s home number, banking on her mum still being home. Ellie answered after five rings. We talked politely for a minute, and then I asked her about the photograph. She seemed to miss the point initially.
‘Oh, Len loved photography. After he retired he said he wanted to spend more time getting into it.’
‘I’m thinking of that one picture in particular.’
‘Why that one?’
I didn’t know why, I just knew something about it – and the fact that there was a newer, almost-duplicate version – didn’t sit right. Without all the facts to hand, it felt like it wasn’t worth leading her down that road yet, so I massaged the truth. ‘I’m pretty sure I know where most of these pictures were taken. But not this one. I don’t think it’s taken at Postbridge. There’s a valley with a church spire in the distance, and a tinner’s hut on –’
‘A what?’
‘A tinner’s hut. Those piles of rubble you see out on Dartmoor, they’re what the tin miners used to live in, before the industry collapsed.’
‘Ah, right. Yes, of course.’
‘Anyway, this shot I have, it’s got a church spire in the distance, and a tinner’s hut on the left. Does that ring any bells? Maybe this was a place you and Leonard loved?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘That doesn’t sound familiar?’
‘It’s hard to say without seeing it.’
‘Okay. Are you on email there, Mrs Franks?’
‘Ellie. Yes, I am.’
‘Could I email the picture to you, just to be sure?’
‘Yes, of course.’
She gave me her email address.
I took a camera-phone picture of the photograph and emailed it straight through to her.
‘Would it be possible for you to have a look at that right now for me?’ I asked.
‘Yes. Okay.’
‘That’s great. Thank you.’
After I hung up, I put the physical version of the picture next to the iPad version and took them both in. The differences seemed even starker now.
A couple of minutes later, Ellie called back.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t recognize that at all.’
‘You never went there with Leonard?’
‘No. Not that I remember, anyway.’
‘You don’t know what church that is in the background?’
‘No. Sorry.’
I looked at the pictures. ‘Did he ever go hiking by himself, without you?’
‘Very rarely.’
‘But it happened sometimes?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Sometimes.’
‘Was it generally when you were busy doing other things?’
‘Generally.’
‘But not always?’
‘No.’ And then she said quietly, ‘Sometimes he just liked to be alone out there.’
15
A couple of minutes later, as I was finishing my coffee, Annabel arrived, face red raw from the cold, hair matted to her scalp by the sleet.
‘I look like a drowned rat,’ she said.
‘You look fine to me.’
‘You’re biased.’
‘Well, that’s true. How was the big city?’
She smiled. ‘I ended up having to imagine what the London Eye looks like from the top, because I didn’t want to remortgage my house in order to pay for a ticket.’
‘But everything else?’
‘Everything else was great. The bus tour was fun, the Tate was amazing. I loved riding the Tube too, though I’ll never understand how people put up with it at rush hour. There must be nothing worse than having to spend ten minutes sniffing a stranger’s armpits.’
‘You’re lucky if you’ve got a commute that keeps the pit-sniffing to ten minutes, believe me.’
We both ordered a steak, and she asked about my morning, so I told her how I’d been down to Wimbledon, but kept the rest of it deliberately vague; not because I didn’t trust her with the details, but because I didn’t want her to know Leonard Franks was still bu
zzing around my head, or to think that this meal, and her visit, weren’t important to me. But then I started to feel guilty, and remembered how I’d vowed never to lie to her or keep anything back. So I told her how he’d gone missing, and what I’d been asked to do.
‘He walked out of the house and never came back?’
I nodded.
‘So where did he go?’
‘I don’t know.’ I pulled a glass of water towards me. ‘You know Dartmoor just as well as I do. That place is vast, but it’s desolate. You get the right spot there, you can see for miles. From the photographs I’ve seen, it looks like they had a clear, unimpeded view of the surrounding valley. So if Franks was out there in the minutes after he decided to make a break for it, or somebody decided to do it for him, he should have been visible.’
‘But he wasn’t visible?’
‘No.’
‘Don’t you think that’s a bit …’
‘Weird?’
She shrugged. ‘I was going to say “creepy”.’
I looked at the picture of the valley. ‘Yeah, there’s definitely some of that.’ After I’d returned the photographs to the backpack, along with the iPad and the notebooks, I said to Annabel, ‘Look, I’ve been invited to a charity event in central London this evening. For the police. I feel I ought to go. It’s kind of a two-birds-one-stone thing.’
‘Work and pleasure?’
‘Mostly work.’
She smiled. ‘That’s fine.’
‘I feel bad about it.’
‘No, you must go.’
‘I was thinking maybe you could come too.’
As our waiter brought a couple of beers over, I studied the expression on her face, the fascination in it, the excitement of being let inside a case, and realized how alien it felt. Derryn had gone before my missing persons cases had got into double figures, and for Liz it had all been too much, and we’d got to a point where I stopped talking about my work altogether. She’d watched me tortured, arrested and left to die, and for her there was no logic in returning to a job like that, a job that had almost cost me everything.
After Derryn and until Annabel, I’d had no one to share my cases with, and I often wondered whether it was part of the reason the missing had become so important to me, why I still kept them stacked on a shelf at home. Often, in my quieter moments, when I had nowhere else to go, I found myself returning to the faces of people I’d helped, an unspoken ritual where I sought inspiration in cases I’d already put to bed. In a small way, perhaps that made me more like Leonard Franks than I’d ever given thought to.
Because we both had secrets.
Except my history, my secrets, were up there on that shelf.
His were somewhere out on Dartmoor.
16
Once we got home, Annabel said she wanted to call Olivia, so I gave her a little privacy, grabbed Leonard Franks’s boxes from the car and took them through to the spare room. Craw had given me contact details for her brother, so I fired off an introductory email, prepping him for the fact that I might call as part of a follow-up. I’d also told her to let her husband know I might be in touch at some point. But as he’d been left at home with the kids the night Franks disappeared, and in the days afterwards, and her brother was in Australia, it felt increasingly unlikely I’d need to pick up the phone to either of them.
I created a document on the computer and catalogued everything in the boxes, right down to golf trophies and snowglobes. Craw had told me her father’s desktop PC was still on Dartmoor, and I’d seen it myself in the video she’d shot, so I still wanted to take a look at that. But for now, as I set the box to one side again, I’d narrowed things down to three clear items of interest: the notebooks, the iPad and the photographs.
This time, I concentrated on the notebooks.
I’d been through the other, more traditional black diaries at Craw’s house – the ones covering the years 1982 to 1994 – and they’d been used as straightforward planners. The white notebooks were more than that. As well as being used as a way for Franks to schedule appointments and recall important dates, they’d also developed into a dumping ground for theories, names, crime-scene sketches, printouts, Post-its and receipts.
They were both the same. White, 350-page Moleskines, with an elasticated red band, and an inner pocket stitched into the rear cover where he’d put even more stuff: notes he’d made on separate pieces of paper, presumably when he hadn’t had the notebooks to hand; lists of questions; a graph about police stats cut out of a newspaper. It wasn’t a diary exactly, because he didn’t always add days and months, and he sometimes went weeks between entries, but it was close enough. There were no printed dates inside, just lined pages, but the whole thing was structured with a vague chronology, the first notebook starting with his first day as a superintendent in May 1995. It wasn’t all work, either; it had been used for personal reminders too.
‘Why the sudden change?’ I’d asked Craw at her house.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Before May 1995, he was using these black diaries,’ I’d said, picking one of them out of the box. ‘After that, he switched to these white ones and filled them full of anything and everything.’ I’d flipped open the inner pocket at the back. ‘Look at what he has in here: paper he’s sketched ideas on, things he’s cut out – there’s even a napkin with a list on it.’
She’d shrugged. ‘Like I said to you earlier, he was old school. He grew up in a world where paper was the best weapon a cop could have. He always made notes, about everything, even when the Met started to modernize. If he hadn’t been given that iPad at the end, he probably would have single-handedly destroyed the rainforest.’
‘So he switched to these in May 1995 …’
‘Because that was when he was promoted to superintendent. I think, when he got that promotion, he felt he needed to step things up even more. Impress the top brass. He could see he’d need to bring his A game, every hour of every day.’
The two notebooks were certainly going to keep me occupied: the first Moleskine covered 1995 through to 2004, and although some of it – like birthday ideas for Ellie – I could immediately discard, it was still nine years of his life. The second covered 2004 through to the day he disappeared, entries getting thinner and less frequent as technology became more prevalent, and especially in the years after he retired in 2011. The last entry, the day before he vanished, was a list of items he needed to collect from a home-improvement store in Ashburton. I remembered Ellie saying they had a leaky roof.
It instinctively felt like there might be answers here; that, even eighteen years after that first entry, some event or bad decision could have come back to haunt him. The biggest secrets were always the ones buried the deepest – but they could still be found. History was fragile. There only needed to be one mistake, one oversight, one misstep, for the entire narrative to crumble. You just had to find the right crack to prise open.
I unclipped the inner pockets at the back of the notebooks, sorting the contents into two piles: 1995–2004 and 2004–13. Each pocket contained a mixture of pages torn from other pads, the backs of letters that Franks had used to jot down notes on, decade-old receipts; in the 2004–13 notebook there was even a birthday card. I started to go through them but soon got lost. In the notebooks themselves there was a logical route, from one date to another, but here there was no order at all: phone numbers without names, names without phone numbers, lists that didn’t make sense, receipts for lunches he’d bought or snacks he’d grabbed. The only picture it painted was of a hoarder, someone who was unable to discard, either out of habit or because of some innate fear of losing something important.
It could have been a time issue too: maybe, because of his schedule, he’d got into a routine of putting anything he deemed vaguely important into the notebooks, with the intention of coming back to sort them later. But the longer he went without sorting them, the harder it became for him to remember what mattered and what didn’t, and the trick
ier the system was to understand.
If there was even a system at all.
I went back to the start, and began going through the notebooks again, more methodically this time, adding names and numbers that repeatedly came up to the document I’d catalogued everything else in. After a while, despite some numbers not having names attached, or vice versa, I started to get an even clearer sense – from accompanying notes, from locations he’d included – who the people were he’d worked with, at what point in his career, and in what meetings or cases their paths had crossed. I ignored personal entries for now: social functions, dates spent with Craw and her family, lists of items he needed for home improvements, a kind of ad hoc diary he’d written on a trip to see his son in Australia. I’d come back to those things, because everything needed to be looked at and processed, but for now I concentrated on names and events from his day job, across the eighteen-year period the two notebooks covered.
An hour later, Annabel came through and said she was going to get ready for the police charity event. I told her I’d soon be doing the same. Afterwards, I returned to his diary system, this time concentrating on cases Franks had made a direct reference to.
When he hadn’t listed enough specifics for me to get a clear idea of exactly what the case involved, I cross-referenced what details I did have with news stories of the time to get a better overview: using Internet reports, I was able to trace the path of the case, from the first time the story broke, to a suspect being charged, to the day it arrived in court, and then to its conclusion. I kept my notes about each case brief and in shorthand and, by the end, had listed one hundred and forty-four of them, which wouldn’t have been anywhere close to every case he worked during the eighteen-year period the Moleskines covered, but it was every case listed inside their covers and it was a decent starting point.
The reason for making the effort was clear: if, as Craw suggested, that last case seemed to affect him somehow, it seemed a reasonable bet that he would have committed some of its details to paper, tried to work out his questions and frustrations inside the covers of the notebooks. Which meant, if true, I just had to locate it in the list.