by Tim Weaver
I started opening the wardrobes and going through the clothes hanging up inside. A couple of suits, jeans, sportswear. At the bottom were shoes, and a few cardboard boxes. I pulled one out and flipped the lid. A mountain of movie DVDs to add to the ones in the living room. In the second box were more clothes.
And then a series of printouts.
They were folded over, so I opened them up. The front page was blank, but the rest of it I instantly recognized.
Leonard Franks’s missing persons file.
At the top was the database ID number of the person who’d logged in and printed out the file. Next to it was the date: 12 March 2013. Nine days after Franks vanished. Reynolds was long gone from the Met by then, but he’d still managed to obtain the file somehow. He’d still found a way.
A sudden heaviness took hold as I looked down at the account of Franks’s disappearance, at the face I’d seen countless times over the past three days. Was all of this about Franks and Paige firing Reynolds? Was that really what it came down to?
I knew it would be worth checking the ID number at the top, so I noted it down and placed the printouts back where I’d found them, turning to the drawers of the dresser. More clothes, and then some electrical equipment: a portable DVD player, an electric shaver, an old mobile phone. I got the phone out and powered it on, but there was no SIM and it had been restored to factory settings. I put it back exactly where I’d found it.
Despite the cracked ceiling and threadbare carpet, Reynolds had treated this half of the flat better, as if he cared more about its contents. He’d started smoking as soon as he got outside, but it was clear he never smoked here. The way everything was boxed and lined up spoke of a different side of him. More ordered. More precise. And both of those things were frightening – because those things made him more dangerous.
In the last wardrobe, standing on its end, was a plain grey notebook. I removed it. As I brought it towards me, two photographs fell out.
I picked them up and opened the notebook.
There was nothing written inside. The only thing it was being used for was to store the pictures – to keep them flat and prevent them from fading.
Because they’re important to him.
The first was a shot of an imposing stone building, with a series of vertical stained-glass windows. It wasn’t the whole building, just a portion of it: an arched front entrance, a studded oak door, a semicircular sweep of steps leading up to it. Above the entrance, the building tapered into a spire.
A church.
Except it was a church in desperate need of repair: one of the stained-glass windows had been smashed – leaving a jagged mouth of broken glass behind – and a path to its left, tracing the slight curve of the cracked cream exterior wall, was overgrown and wild. On the very edge of the picture was something else: a fence, knotted with tendrils of long grass, and a river – or maybe a lake.
My first thought was that it could be the church I’d spotted in another photograph: the one Franks had two copies of in his possession. His had been a shot of a valley, with a spire in the distance, the rubble of a tinner’s hut embedded in the hill on the left.
Setting that thought aside, I went to the second photo in Reynolds’s possession. It was of a long corridor, windows on the left and right, each window made up of twenty separate glass blocks segmented by thin metal strips. The glass remained intact, but the rest of the corridor had long since begun the decaying process.
Paint had begun to peel away from the ceiling, mottled and coarse, like skin sloughing away from old bones. Big wooden boxes that had once protected radiators were stripped and fractured. Walls, rubbed raw of paint like the ceiling, had returned to the starkness of the concrete beneath. And, at the other end, was another door, arched like the one at the front of the church, two stained-glass windows flanking it. The door was slightly ajar, and through the gap the next part of the church revealed itself: a glimpse of what looked like benches, a shaft of light from a high window – and then some sort of tall metal stand, covered in cobwebs, looking somehow out of place.
As my eyes moved between the two photographs, I tried to imagine where this place was located.
If the spire in the valley belonged to this church, it meant both Franks and Reynolds were interested in it. If it didn’t, I now had two churches circling the case.
And no apparent connection between them.
I thought briefly about taking the photos with me, but it was clear from this side of the flat – by the way Reynolds had kept it – that he would notice if something was out of place. So I grabbed my camera phone, photographed them both, and then returned them – and the grey notebook – to the wardrobe.
That was when I heard a thud.
I stepped away from the wardrobe and listened. Nothing. Closing the wardrobe, I headed through to the living room and looked out on to the Old Kent Road. There was no sign of Reynolds. But then I heard the same noise a second time.
Shit.
It was the sound of a door shutting.
He was already back inside the flat.
37
I headed straight for the window and tried to inch it up on its runners. It made a soft squeak, juddered, and then jammed on the left side. Behind me, out in the hallway, the light had come on. Footsteps were coming up the stairs. I loosened it, trying to free the jam, and as it finally started to move again, it made a louder, deeper noise, like a painful groan.
The footsteps stopped.
Pushing at it more frantically, I continued shifting it up, conscious of the noise but even more conscious of being caught inside the flat. Behind me I heard another creak on the stairs. Then another. As soon as he got to the landing, the floorboards would let me know he was there – but by then he’d only be the width of a room away from me.
I pushed again. Despite a fresh wave of resistance, this time it shifted upwards, once, twice, leaving enough of a gap for me to get through. I ducked under the bottom edge of the window and out into the bitter cold. Rain fell against my face, melting ice too, falling from broken drainpipes further up. I grabbed the edge of the window and forced it down – back along its runners – until it hit the lip of the sill with a dull thump.
A second later, the light came on.
I whipped back, out of sight, inches from the window itself. Initially there was no noise from inside: all I could hear were cars on the other side of the house, passing on the Old Kent Road, and the gentle patter of rain against the window. My hand was flat to the slanted roof, in a patch of freezing snow, but as I thought about moving – about trying to adjust position – a shadow shifted inside and I could see someone come to the window.
Reynolds.
He leaned right into the glass, almost pressed against it, his skin like flour, pale and powdery. I’d never been this close to him, even when he’d had a knife to the boy’s throat, and suddenly he seemed bigger and more muscular than ever. He looked down to the street below, studied it, as if trying to draw something from it. From beyond him, I heard something else – a low, inaudible noise – and realized it was Reynolds’s mobile phone. He couldn’t have stayed there for longer than fifteen seconds, but it felt like hours, his eyes shifting left to right, back and forth along the same patch of road. Eventually he stepped away from the glass.
‘Hello,’ he said quietly, his accent deadened by the rain.
I stayed exactly where I was.
Not moving an inch.
Listening to his side of the conversation.
‘What?’ He paused again: five seconds, ten seconds. ‘What help can that possibly be?’ Another, shorter pause. ‘Are you fucking insane? Now he knows all about me.’ A long silence – before, finally, Reynolds spoke again: ‘Yeah, well, you better hope so.’
There was a subtle change in the light.
He’s moving.
A creak close to the window, before his movement became more distant. He was crossing the room. Quickly, the sound of his footsteps disappeared altoge
ther, and all that was left behind was the rain, beating out a pulse on the walls, the roof, my coat.
I risked a look.
The living room was empty, light passing in from the hallway, out across the colourless carpet. Time to go. I slid forward, off the edge of the roof, and landed with a thud on a bare patch of cracked concrete. The impact tremored up my legs, settling as a sharp pang in one of my ankles. I pushed the pain down and made a break for the back wall, hauling myself up, easing over it and dropping down on to the other side.
Back at the car – cold, tired, aching – I slipped in at the wheel, fired up the engine and turned the heaters all the way up. As I slowly began to thaw out, the light in the bedroom came on and Reynolds’s silhouette passed against the thin curtains.
I glanced at the clock.
One-fifty.
Then, at the very periphery of my vision, I noticed something else for the first time: another vehicle on the far side of the car park, partially hidden next to a bent tree, its branches weighted with snow. The car was facing in my direction, motor running, a shadow sitting inside at the wheel. The driver’s side window was open, an elbow resting there, an orange glow winking in the black of the front seat as the person smoked a cigarette.
Casting my eyes out across the rest of the cars in the parking lot, I saw that all of them were empty. There were no all-night shops here. No ATMs. No reason to be here this late. I hadn’t seen the car when I’d parked up. I hadn’t even seen it when I’d left for the house.
Which meant it had just arrived.
I got out.
As I stood there, my eyes on the other vehicle, I could feel the warmth from the heaters take off into the night, dying instantly. A biting wind drifted in from my left. I glanced across the road, aware that this could be some kind of trap, but Reynolds had returned to the living room, its light on. When I looked back at the car – red, its make indistinguishable in the shadows – nothing had moved: the engine was running, the person inside was still smoking, their elbow was on the sill of the open window, clouds of cigarette smoke taking off into the cold and rain. I pushed the door of the BMW shut, and took three or four steps in their direction, expecting the driver to react in some way.
But they didn’t.
The car kept running.
The driver carried on smoking.
So I started moving. I headed as fast as I could in the direction of the car, careful to land my feet where there was no ice, determined not to let them get away. But the closer I got, the less concerned the occupant seemed to be, arm moving inside the car, bringing the cigarette up to their mouth, up and back, up and back, like a pendulum.
Twenty feet short of the car, I stopped again.
It was a woman.
She turned to face me, shadows shifting, and the faint orange glow from a nearby street light swept in across the driver’s seat. Her grey eyes were fixed on me and her hair had been pulled back from her face into a bun. After flicking her cigarette out into the snow, she zipped her leather jacket all the way up to her chin, the collar fitting snugly along her jaw, and then her eyes returned to the empty space beyond me, where her cigarette was a gently dying light.
‘We need to talk,’ she said.
It was Carla Murray.
38
I followed her north, across the river at Tower Bridge and then east along Whitechapel Road. Rain continued to fall, getting harder and more opaque, Murray’s headlights fading and re-emerging as we continually hit traffic. When we passed the Royal London Hospital a police car whipped past us, flashbar throwing blue light into the shadows, revealing the vague shapes of the homeless, camped in doorways among black rubbish sacks. Eventually, as Whitechapel became Mile End Road, she pulled a right.
A couple of minutes later, a bank of six terraced houses emerged from the night. They faced out at a row of trees, stripped for the winter, and backed on to a series of council garages, its maze of doors zigzagging off in the direction of Stepney Green.
Murray drove on to where a line of parking bays had been created for an estate further down. I pulled in next to her and buzzed down my window. She lowered hers.
‘How long have you been following me?’ I asked.
‘Not long. Since you called me.’
‘Why?’
She glanced in her rear-view mirror.
‘Murray?’
‘I don’t want to talk here.’
‘Where do you want to talk then?’
She shifted in her seat and looked back up the road to the row of houses. ‘The one on the end, with the window boxes.’
‘That’s yours?’
She nodded.
I switched off the ignition and followed her up the short concrete path to her front door. As she unlocked it, she looked both ways along the terrace, checking we weren’t being watched, before gesturing for me to enter. As I stepped up into the warmth of the house, I saw her check her surroundings a second time. I wasn’t sure what worried her more: whatever she was about to reveal, or being seen at her house with me.
Inside was a small hallway, a kitchen directly ahead of us and what I assumed was the living room off to my left. It was hard to tell for sure. She’d pulled the door shut. When I looked up the stairs, I could see she’d done the same to the ones up there too.
‘Follow me.’
We headed up.
When we reached the landing, there was the scent of perfume, of fresh sheets and bath salts. The walls were decorated in a soft eggshell colour, the doors and frames newly painted. I glimpsed a photograph of Murray and what must have been her fiancé, a guy in his forties with the build of a rugby player, but otherwise there was no hint at what might have gone on in the house, of who else might spend time here. Instead the rest of the wall space was filled with paintings that all looked the same.
At the furthest room around, the one that faced off to the front of the house, she paused. It was the only interior door with a lock on it. ‘We have an hour before my partner gets home,’ she said, fishing in her pocket for a key. ‘I want you gone by then.’
It wasn’t the warmest invitation I’d ever had, but I said nothing, intrigued by what might lay beyond the door.
Finally, after a moment’s hesitation, she unlocked it, pushing the door back into the darkness. At first, it just looked like an empty room. There were curtains at the window, but she hadn’t bothered pulling them across. Instead, she’d taped thick black card to the glass, so no light escaped in.
Or, more likely, to stop anyone seeing in from outside.
But then I realized it wasn’t empty. As I followed her in, I saw the wall behind the door was covered in something, half hidden. She flicked on the light.
It was a ten-foot-by-ten-foot map of London, tacks pinned to it, thin pieces of string running from individual tacks to the edges of the map, where Murray had stuck photographs, newspaper clippings and photocopied pages.
I took another step closer.
One piece of string connected a house in Lewisham to a photograph of the victim in the drug murder.
Another ran from the spot in Deptford Creek where Pamela Welland’s body had been found to the same picture of her – mirrored shades, perched on the wall outside a Spanish hotel – that had appeared in the newspapers.
There was a third, pinned to the Hare and Badger pub on Broadway, just down from Scotland Yard, where Leonard Franks had met someone, and lied to Ellie about going to the Black Museum with Jim Paige.
And then there were various shots of Neil Reynolds, long-lens photography – presumably taken by Murray herself – of him leaving his house, or sitting in the window of a café. From each of them came pieces of string, pinpointing the locations of the pictures: the Old Kent Road, Rotherhithe New Road, entering the Tube at New Cross Gate.
Finally, there was a picture of Franks; a picture of the place he and Ellie had lived in on Dartmoor; and then a third photo.
Another house.
One I didn’t recognize.
The room we were in was small, pokey. For most people it would have been a study, or a nursery. Maybe one day it might still become that for Carla Murray. But for now it wasn’t either of those things.
It was her own personal incident room.
‘What’s going on?’ I said to her.
She unzipped her jacket, removing her phone and an A6 notebook. ‘You’re not the only one trying to find Leonard Franks.’
39
She opened her notebook at the middle and then held it in place with her thumb and forefinger. Her eyes moved from what was written, to me, to the photos on the wall, then back to me.
‘I couldn’t say anything to you in front of Paige,’ she said.
I glanced at the map. ‘I’m not surprised.’
Her jaw tightened, throat muscles flexing. She looked conflicted again, decades of instinct – of interview-room sobriety – difficult to shake off. ‘I need to know that you –’
‘You don’t have to ask for my discretion.’
She looked at me for a moment more, then at the spaces around us, at this place she’d brought us to, and she seemed to realize there was no backing out now.
‘I never really stopped wondering why he disappeared,’ she said. ‘He wasn’t just a boss to me, a mentor. He was a friend. My father upped and left when I was three, so I never really had a dad.’ She paused. ‘I’m a walking cliché, I guess, but he was something like that to me. Not a father, but something close.’
I nodded, shrugging off my coat and laying it on the floor. It was warm in the house. Out on the landing, I could hear the boiler ticking over.
‘Anyway, when he called, asking about that CCTV tape of Pamela Welland, it was obvious he was upset about something. I worked with him for years – years – and after you’ve been around a person for that amount of time, you get to know their patterns and their rhythms. You get to see what upsets them, what makes them happy, their view on things. And the Boss was one of the most composed men I’ve ever known in my life.’