by Tim Weaver
Milk.
Despite the doubts that had threatened to take hold, my instincts had been right: when Franks had written ‘Milk?’ on the pub flyer, it wasn’t part of a shopping list. It was a nickname. Which meant Reynolds had been on Franks’s radar that day in February. I felt a charge of adrenalin grip me: if ‘Milk?’ was relevant, then the sketch and ‘108’ had to be too.
‘Raker?’
I tuned back in. ‘They called him Milk because he was pale?’
‘Right.’
‘Craw said Reynolds got fired in June 2011?’
‘Right again.’
‘For what?’
‘Why don’t you ask Craw? Sounds like she’s got all the answers already.’
I ignored the jibe. ‘I want to hear what you think.’
‘All I’ve got is rumours and whispers,’ he started – and then stopped again. In the background, I heard another voice. ‘All right, pal,’ Healy said, his voice slightly muffled now. ‘See you in a bit.’ He waited another couple of seconds, then came back on the line, his voice as clear as before. ‘The guy I work with here is a major pain in the arse. Likes checking on me more than he likes checking on the bloody store.’
‘You were telling me about Reynolds.’
‘Yeah.’
‘He got the boot.’
‘Right. This is all second hand.’
‘That’s fine.’
A momentary pause, as if he was gathering his thoughts. ‘Basically, the way I heard it was that Franks started seeing a few wonky details in some of Reynolds’s murder cases. Tiny things. Indiscrepancies. And when he questioned Reynolds about it, Milk’s explanation didn’t do much to calm Franks’s nerves. Rumours started getting around about Reynolds being in the pocket of a guy called Kemar Penn. You ever heard of him?’
‘No.’
‘K-Penn. Real nasty piece of work. Penn ran the show at the Cornhill estate off Blackheath Hill. People said he’d buried a few bodies too – but he was smart. Just what the world needs: a psycho with brains.’ A snort of disdain. ‘Anyway, trying to convict him was like trying to make shit stick to a wall. He didn’t use his phone, didn’t use the Internet – basically, he made sure he never left a trail. Cops at the Met talked for years about K-Penn being able to see things coming, like he had some kind of sixth sense. Then a few of them started wondering if his sixth sense might be called Neil Reynolds.’
I paused, processing it all. ‘But Franks didn’t have enough to fire Reynolds?’
‘No. From what I heard, Reynolds covered his tracks. But while the brass might not have been able to pin anything on him, they knew something was up. Franks expected his teams to be squeaky clean – to do things by the book – so he had a hard-on for Reynolds a mile long. One of the guys I knew on Reynolds’s Murder Team said Franks pulled Milk into a meeting room one day and ripped him a new arsehole. This guy I know said Franks was so angry, they could hear him from the other side of the floor. So when Paige took over after Franks retired, Reynolds was on Paige’s radar from day one.’
‘And, two months in, Paige fired him?’
‘Yeah. But you can bet Franks was watching from the wings, even in retirement. He hated any sort of corruption. Any whiff of it got stamped out. He would have prepped Paige in the weeks and months before he retired, as part of the changeover, and then all Paige had to do was wait for Reynolds to slip up. And that’s exactly what happened.’
‘How?’
‘Rumour was, it had to do with Franks’s last case.’
That stopped me. Healy was talking about the drug murder. I looked down at the case in my lap, at the face of the victim. A ghost haunting the pages of the file.
‘What about it?’ I asked.
‘Again, this is all second hand,’ he said, but for the first time I could hear a subtle change in Healy’s voice, a buzz, as if this return to his days at the Met had brought him a sliver of salvation. ‘Franks retired having never found out who the victim was in this drug murder he was working – or why this guy had been killed. I remember chatting to a couple of informants I was using at the time, and they all got dragged in for interview, as suspects. Franks had a line-up with more lowlifes in it than you’d find at an EDL rally, but these snitches, they got the sense that K-Penn was always his number one suspect. Eventually he brought Penn in, grilled him over and over, but still couldn’t put him at the scene. So when he retired, the case was dead. Franks had worked all the angles, exhausted all possibilities. Yet, a few weeks later, Jim Paige finds Reynolds with his nose in Franks’s casework. I remember everyone at the Met was talking about that: Milk finally slipping up. Because why would he be doing that? Why would he be so desperate to get a look at that file?’
I got where he was headed. ‘Kemar Penn.’
‘Right. People reckoned Reynolds was trying to find out whether Penn grassed him up in interviews with Franks. The stakes were high for Milk: he probably was on Penn’s payroll, and Penn probably was involved in that murder. Cutting someone from ear to ear, and removing the guy’s teeth? That’s exactly the sort of shit Penn would pull.’
I made some notes, but didn’t interrupt.
‘Franks was gone by then, but everyone knew him and Paige went way back. Reynolds knew it too. He must have figured out that Paige would be all over him like flies on shit from the minute he took over Franks’s old job. So the most common theory was that Reynolds found the case on the computer and started going through it, trying to ensure he was still watertight after Penn’s interview. But when Paige found him looking through the case file, all he ended up doing was confirming the suspicions Franks and then Paige already had about him: that he was K-Penn’s man on the inside.’
‘So that was what got him fired?’
‘Apparently – and, again, this is just what I heard – Paige made him a deal: walk, and we don’t dig down into all the cases you’ve worked. We don’t go after you. Fact is, no cop wants to have to deal with Professional Standards – or, worse, the fucking IPCC.’
All of which made sense, but still didn’t explain why Franks had taken on the role of SIO on the drug murder. Why that particular case? Why return to the front line at all?
I looked down at the file. ‘And no one ever found out who the victim was?’
‘All I remember is people thought the vic was a drug dealer – but someone new on the scene. Apparently, identification was made harder by the fact that the dump this guy was killed in was being paid for in cash, he was renting it under a false name, and through some two-bit landlord who didn’t give much of a shit, as long as he got paid.’
‘What name did the victim use?’
‘I’m trying to remember. Marvin Roberts. Or Robinson. Something like that.’
I looked at the photograph of the victim again. Who are you?
‘I better go,’ Healy said finally.
‘Yeah. Okay. Look, I appreciate your help.’
He didn’t reply.
‘Maybe, when this is done …’
‘Yeah,’ Healy said.
A brief, uncomfortable silence.
‘All right, Healy … well, we’ll meet up for a drink in a couple of weeks. Make sure you keep your phone on this time, okay?’
Silence.
‘Healy?’
‘Yeah,’ he said quietly, ‘see you around, Raker.’
35
I started going back through the file. As that same gaunt face stared out at me, I recalled something Carla Murray had said when I’d called her at work to ask her why Franks had taken the lead on this particular case: Did I ask the Boss the reasons why he decided to deal with the fallout from some random drug murder? No. Her choice of words hadn’t lodged with me earlier on in the day, but they did now: why he decided to deal with the fallout.
He’d taken it on from someone else.
As I flicked through the file, I could see the investigation had been split into two distinct sections: the two days after the victim was found dead, when a cop call
ed Cordus had been running the show; and the six weeks after that, leading up to Franks’s retirement, when he’d chosen to lead the investigation himself. Ultimately, the end result was the same: they never found the killer, and they never identified the victim.
There were clear differences in the two men’s police work. Franks was more exhaustive, his interviews slower and more temperate. The key question remained the same, though: why Franks had chosen to get involved in this case. He wasn’t just in charge of the Lewisham Murder Team at the time, he was in charge of all London’s MITs. This kind of investigation was a decade behind him. In March 2011, he was sitting in on meetings with Met commissioners, which – weeks short of retirement – meant he shouldn’t ever have been close to running an actual case.
I looked up and across at the house.
It remained quiet, unlit.
Given his position at the top of the Homicide command, it made sense that Franks would have been drafted into meetings about Reynolds, especially if there was possible corruption in one of his teams. It made sense that he would have been the one to give Reynolds the dressing down that Healy had described, because all murder detectives were ultimately his responsibility. Everyone I’d spoken to had said Franks was a straight arrow – if he’d been unable to trust Reynolds, if he’d had any doubts about his integrity at all, it didn’t surprise me he’d have tried to get rid of Reynolds immediately. So were his suspicions about Reynolds why he chose to take over the case from Cordus?
I checked the house again as I finished my coffee, and tried to clear my head. According to Paige and Murray, it was cases with women and children that Franks could never let go of. This case was the complete opposite. So did he take on the running of the case in order to make sure their pursuit of Kemar Penn was done by the book? Was it his one last job for the Met before he headed off into retirement? That sounded like the sort of thing Franks might do – especially as the force had been after Penn for years.
And yet something didn’t feel right.
I just couldn’t put my finger on what.
What’s going on, Leonard?
On 11 March 2011, neighbours found the front door of the victim’s house in Lewisham unlocked – when they ventured inside, they discovered him in the middle of the room, gagged and bound, his throat cut. There was five kilogrammes of cocaine in the kitchen, stored behind cereal boxes, and a stolen phone was on the floor next to him, his prints and blood on it. The place was dusted down, and a partial footprint was found inside the front door. Forensics said handles, work surfaces and door frames had all been wiped down.
Cordus, in his original assessment, noted that the place had been broken into. The front door had been forced open with a crowbar, the wood at the side of the frame split. In his assessment, Franks agreed, but went a stage further, proposing the suspect had broken into the house at night: the partial footprint had been formed from rain-soaked mud, and when Franks got in touch with the Met Office, he’d discovered that it had rained for three hours the night of 9 March 2011. Throughout, Franks’s police work was high quality, but it hadn’t brought him the answer he’d sought: by the time he retired, a man was still dead, and the killer still out there.
At the back of the file was an interview Franks had conducted with three female students who lived opposite the victim – but, as I began reading it, I noticed something.
The road had become quiet, a hush settling as the rain continued to fall lightly, chattering against the roof of the car. Slabs of grey slush had started to form at the edges of the pavements, pockmarks gouged out of them by the rain.
And someone was approaching the house.
It was Reynolds.
36
He came from the right, hood still up on his top, backpack on his shoulder, dressed the same as when I’d followed him earlier. He looked behind him, then across the road in the direction of where I was parked. I slid further down into my seat but his eyes were already past me, out along the road. As he stood there, trying to find the right key from a bunch in his hand, the light from one of the shop windows poured across him, and I could see the left sleeve of his top had burned away, reduced to thin, sinewy strings of material. He must have caught it dumping items into the kiln.
Letting himself in, he paused in the doorway, nothing visible beyond, and looked both ways again, up and down the street. Then he stepped inside – and closed the door.
I waited.
About thirty seconds later, directly above the betting shop, a light came on. For the first time I noticed the window had a plastic sheet taped to the glass. Briefly, I saw his silhouette, hunched over something, arms moving, before he disappeared again. After ten minutes, I glimpsed him a second time, closer to the window, facing off to his right. He was stationary now, hands gesturing. Is he talking to someone on the phone? He stayed like that for sixty seconds, before stepping away from the window completely.
Then the light went off.
A minute passed. Two. Five.
As I started to wonder whether he might actually have called it a night, the door to the house opened again. He emerged on to the icewater-slick pavement, breath gathering in a cloud above his head. He had a new beanie on, a new top too, but the rest of him was the same. He looked up and down the street, the paleness of his face like a moon inside the blackness of his hood. Logically, I knew he couldn’t see me: I’d parked behind a four-foot concrete wall, obscuring the make and registration of my car, and there were trees close to me, their branches clawing at the windscreen and touching the roof. And yet, as his eyes shifted left to right, passing my position, there was a sudden rigidity to him, as if he’d deliberately tensed, ready to go on the attack.
He senses he’s being watched.
I slid even further into my seat.
But then his attention shifted. After locking up the flat, he stood there, fiddling around in his pockets for something. Eventually he brought out a cigarette packet. He removed one, propped it between his lips and sparked up – and then he headed off south, moving through pools of light cast by the shopfronts. Briefly disappearing from view, he emerged again, this time in the brightly lit car park of a toy store. Cigarette smoke cast off into the night around him, once, twice, three times – and then, finally, he was gone.
I got out of the car and set the alarm.
As I moved, drizzle dotting my face, I thought about what I was about to do – but not for long. The more thought I gave it, the greater the doubts, and I didn’t want those now. Instead I headed around to the back of the row of houses that Reynolds lived in.
At the rear was a narrow one-way street. Grubby six-foot walls enclosed the gardens, and on the other side of the street was the south face of a twelve-storey block of flats, windowless and vast, like the hull of a supertanker. I’d thought about picking the lock at the front, but it was too exposed, plus there was a CCTV camera sixty feet from his front door. Here, there were no cameras, no people, barely any sound: this far back from the main road the snow hadn’t been cleared yet, the covering still thick and tumescent, like stepping into a different city in a different part of the world.
I moved level with Reynolds’s garden, checked I wasn’t being watched, then hoisted myself up and over the garden wall, dropping into a swirl of shadows.
Pausing there in the dark, I scanned the windows in the terrace.
Blinds had been closed, curtains pulled. I was hidden. Immediately in front of me was an extension with a slanted roof, a window showing through to a tiny staff room.
This was the back of the betting shop.
I used the drainpipe and windowsill to haul myself up on to the slanted roof beneath Reynolds’s first-floor window, and tried to lever it open. It was old-fashioned, fixed to runners, and as I applied some pressure, it shifted in its frame.
There was a latch inside, which hadn’t been secured. Beyond that, I could see the vague outline of a television and light from the Old Kent Road peeking through the curtains on the far side.
I tried pushing the window up again and this time it juddered on the runners, forming enough of a gap for me to feed my fingers inside and force it upward. I ducked under the window, into the flat, and pulled it shut behind me.
Grabbing a penlight from my pocket, I shone it into the dark.
It was the living room. A small TV on a cheap piece of flat-packed furniture. Some DVD boxes stacked against the wall. The other way was an old-fashioned gas fire, with a black hood and scorched metal frame. A three-seater sofa, which had lost its shape years ago, with a pillow on it. Adjacent to that was a cardboard box, acting as a makeshift table, and another full of electrical wires, circuit boards and dismantled pieces of plastic.
On top, half broken, was an old-fashioned wiretap.
As I edged closer to the sofa, a smell began to emerge. Unwashed sheets. Mould. Mildew. Reynolds’s smell. I pointed the torch towards walls that hadn’t seen a coat of paint in a decade, and a naked light bulb, its cord dangling down like a hangman’s knot.
I checked out front, making sure Reynolds wasn’t approaching, then moved from the living room into a short hallway. It smelled vaguely of damp. Off to the left was a windowless bathroom, the extractor fan still humming. On the right were stairs down to the ground floor and then a tiny kitchen with a skylight in the ceiling that was covered in moss and birdshit. At the other end of the hallway was a second room, door open.
It was a bedroom.
Inside was a bed, tidily made up with sheets and a duvet. A bedside cabinet. A chest of drawers and two wardrobes. This room smelled better, of deodorant and clean sheets.