by Tim Weaver
And, as she did, my stomach lurched.
Because she wasn’t alone.
Behind her, hidden in shadows, was Neil Reynolds.
73
The upper half of his face emerged, like a shark breaking the surface of the water. His forehead, eyes, a cheek, the ridge of his jaw. And then he stopped. He was an arm’s length behind Craw, a gun pointing at the back of her head.
He jabbed the gun into her neck, drawing a wince of pain. When I made a move towards her, he shifted the weapon in my direction.
There was no lateral movement.
His aim was utterly still.
‘I should probably make myself clear,’ he said. ‘If either of you do anything to fuck this up, I will put a bullet in your eye. So … did you want to be the hero, David?’
I held up both hands.
‘I thought not.’
He turned the gun back on Craw, forcing her forward. As more of him emerged from the black of the corridor, looking bigger than ever, I saw he had a backpack on.
When Craw got level with me, Reynolds shifted her around to face me, so she acted as a shield between us. There was nothing in her face but fear now. The control was gone, the sobriety, every technique she’d mastered, every stoic expression she’d used to get on in the Met, nothing but history.
I felt a spasm of guilt as tears flashed in her eyes.
Reynolds’s attention flicked between me and the doors to the greenhouse. When he looked at me again, he said, ‘Is Franks here?’
I didn’t reply.
His eyes narrowed and he jabbed the gun hard into the back of Craw’s head. She lurched forward, coming towards me, drawing a sharp breath as the pain passed through her skull. But as I went to catch her, Reynolds clamped a hand on her shoulder and yanked her back in towards him. A second later, he had the gun on her again.
‘Is Franks here?’ he repeated.
I nodded.
Craw’s face changed – shock, fear; a sudden, desperate need to see him with her own eyes – and she looked in through the glass panels. Reynolds did the same, briefly, before returning his gaze to me.
‘Do it,’ he said to Craw, even though his eyes were fixed on me.
Whatever he was asking her to do, she didn’t.
He pushed the gun into the side of her head, forcing her to lurch to her right. ‘I’m not playing games with you, you stupid bitch. Say exactly what I told you to say.’
His eyes returned to me.
Then, softly, as if practised, Craw said, ‘Dad?’
‘Louder.’
‘Dad?’ she repeated.
Reynolds kept the gun pressed against her head and used his other hand to gently push open one of the doors. When there was a gap of about a foot, he shoved her forward.
‘Again,’ he whispered. ‘Louder.’
‘Dad?’ she called, and this time her voice seemed to echo, carrying off into the high-ceilinged spaces of the greenhouse.
Silence.
Reynolds pushed her through the doors, then gestured for me to follow her in. Once we were both beyond him, he took a step back and nodded to Craw. ‘Again.’
‘Dad,’ Craw said. ‘Dad, it’s Mel.’
I looked across at the steps down to the kitchen, thirty feet away, and then back to the doors. Reynolds had retreated into the corridor. I couldn’t see him through the glass.
He was hidden from view.
‘Dad. Please.’
‘What’s going on?’ I said to her, keeping my voice low.
She swallowed, eyes on the kitchen, our backs to the panelled doors. ‘He came for me at your house this morning while I was sleeping on your fucking sofa.’ Her voice was taut, emotional. ‘You told me you were going to meet me at the house, Raker.’
‘I thought you were in on it.’
‘I told you I wasn’t. He’s my father.’
I tried to clear the fog – the missing persons file with her ID on it; her forgetting to call my new number; every suspicion I’d had about her – but it was happening too fast.
‘Is Dad really here?’
I looked from her to the kitchen steps, at least understanding something: Reynolds had used me to locate Franks, now he was using Craw to draw him out.
But it wouldn’t end there.
This was just the start of whatever Reynolds had planned.
‘Raker? Is Dad here?’
‘Yes,’ I said to her, ‘he’s –’
But, before I could finish, he appeared.
He came up the steps from the kitchen, knife in his hand at his side. I heard Craw take a sharp breath, at the sight of the man she hadn’t seen for nine months, at the sight of a man so different from the one she’d known all her life.
But, halfway across the room, Leonard Franks stopped, eyes shifting beyond us.
A flicker of panic in his face.
Reynolds was inside the doors already, ten feet back from us, gun pointed in our direction. Franks – almost in the centre of the greenhouse, sunlight raining down on him – held up a hand. Then his eyes flicked to Craw again, anger flaring in his face as Reynolds moved in behind her and pushed the barrel against her head.
‘Let her go, Reynolds,’ Franks said to him. ‘She’s innocent here.’
With the gun still aimed at the back of Craw’s head, Reynolds started shrugging off the backpack. He let it fall to the ground.
Inside, something metallic pinged.
‘Slide your knife across the floor to me, Leonard.’
Franks did as he was asked.
Reynolds picked it up.
‘Okay then,’ he said, eyes on Franks, gun on Craw. He flicked a look at me, letting me know that, if I made an attempt to get to him, he’d be able to react. ‘I think it’s time to make a movie.’
74
‘My name is Leonard Franks, and this is my confession.’
He sat in the centre of the greenhouse, the sun like a spotlight on him, drawn and tired, hair matted to one side of his face. He looked ten years older, shrunken, his eyes on the floor in front of him. Six feet away was Reynolds, standing behind a video camera on a tripod. He had Craw seated to the side of him, her wrists tied with duct tape behind her, her ankles bound, her mouth gagged. Air jetted out of her nostrils as she watched.
Reynolds had the gun to her head.
He’d placed me furthest away, parallel to Franks, so I could watch, but not in the camera’s field of vision. He’d done exactly the same to me as he’d done to Craw, feet and arms anchored, a gag in my mouth.
‘Start at the beginning,’ Reynolds said.
He hadn’t tied up Franks. There was enough distance between the two of them for Reynolds to get in a shot if he needed to. Franks didn’t respond, eyes still on the floor in front of him. Reynolds took a sideways step towards Craw and placed the gun under her chin. Faster streams of air shot out of her nose, a tremor passing through her throat. And then a sound emerged: desperate, terrified, awful. Franks looked up instantly.
‘Don’t hurt her,’ he said.
‘Then start talking.’
This was another reason he hadn’t tied Franks up: whatever his endgame was, he wanted it to look like a real confession, an admission Franks had chosen to make, not one where his hand was being forced. Except, of course, that was exactly what was happening – and it was even clearer now why Reynolds had brought Craw: she was the bait.
‘Do you want me to hurt her, Leonard?’ Reynolds said.
‘I …’ Franks stopped, glancing at Craw. Something shimmered in his eyes. He’s going to talk about Bullock. And then, quietly, he started again: ‘Casey and I, we cou –’
‘Start with Pamela Welland,’ Reynolds said.
‘Okay. Okay.’ He swallowed, nodded. ‘In those first few days, we just couldn’t find a decent witness. No one saw Paul Viljoen the night she died. He dumped her body in Deptford Creek, but he got lucky: he didn’t leave a trail. We had a taxi driver who might have seen a car parked near the crime scene, but couldn’t be one hu
ndred per cent sure. We had a few leads, but nothing that would take us anywhere.’ He looked up from the floor, to the camera, to Craw. ‘But then …’
Reynolds used the gun as a prompt, pushing it hard into Craw’s jaw.
‘But then Casey came to see us.’
‘Casey who?’
Reynolds already knew. He just wanted it on tape.
‘Casey Bullock.’
‘So why don’t you tell Melanie who Casey is?’
Franks swallowed again and again, as if his throat were closing up. ‘She came to us about a week after we found Pamela. She spoke to Murray initially, told her that she’d seen a photo of Pamela in the papers, and recognized her from the pub that night. She said she might have some information we could use. But she was scared.’ He stopped, a twinge of sadness in his face. ‘I mean, she was young. Twenty-one. She hadn’t left Devon in her entire life, until she moved to London. She didn’t know anyone.’
‘But you sorted that out, right, Leonard?’
For the first time, Craw glanced up at Reynolds, confusion in her face, then at her father. In everything that had happened in the last thirty minutes, I’d forgotten something: Craw hadn’t been upstairs to the storage room. She didn’t know her father’s secret yet.
‘At twenty, she got married to Robert,’ Franks muttered.
‘Speak up.’
He cleared his throat. ‘He was seven years older than her. I’m not saying she didn’t love him, but I think what she wanted was company. London gave her that. Robert gave her that. She told me once that, growing up, her mother was always ill, and her father was never there. She spent her childhood alone.’ He paused, not meeting his daughter’s eye. ‘She thought talking to the police would end up making her lonely. She thought that her work colleagues would shun her, that Robert wouldn’t support her.’
‘But she talked eventually,’ Reynolds said.
Franks nodded, eyes downcast. ‘I told Murray to let me speak to her. Melanie was around the same age as Casey. I thought I could help her.’ His eyes finally flicked to his daughter, and then away again. ‘She didn’t want to come to the station, so I went to see her at the flat she shared with Robert, and … I don’t know, we just hit it off. I liked her. She was unsullied by life – but she wasn’t dumb. She definitely wasn’t that. I remember thinking to myself, “She’s smart. Give it ten years and she’ll have a great job.” ’ A pause. At the end, his voice had fallen away as he faced down the reality. ‘In her next life, I guess.’
‘Speed things up, Leonard.’
He was still looking down at the floor.
‘Leonard.’
‘I persuaded her –’
‘At the camera,’ Reynolds hissed.
He glanced at me, off to his left, facing him but unable to help – and then he looked into the gaze of the lens. ‘I persuaded her to tell us what she knew – and she did. She said she happened to be there that night at the pub, so we sourced the CCTV footage, and we zeroed in on Viljoen. But she was still scared. I kept reassuring her, over and over, that everything would be fine. I gave her my number and she just kept calling me. Sometimes she’d be in tears. By then, I’d … I’d really grown to like her.’
His eyes moved to Craw. She watched him, tears still glinting, but steadier, more contained. She’d caught a glimpse of where this was going now.
‘After we charged Viljoen, and she realized she’d have to go to court, she kept calling me, telling me she was scared. She kept saying Robert didn’t understand how she felt. I sat down with the CPS to talk about the case, and I told them that the only way we could be sure that she would give clear, concise testimony was if they kept her name out of the media. We had Viljoen’s confession on tape, but the forensic evidence tying him to the scene was nothing better than passable. That made a believable witness like Casey, someone the jury could get behind, even more important.’ He swallowed. Once. Twice. ‘But sitting down with the CPS, pressing them for anonymity, I realized after they signed off on it that I hadn’t been asking on her behalf. I could see what was happening between us.’
Craw flinched.
Franks began nodding, aware that she was ahead of him now. He was looking down into his hands, knotted together on his lap. Six feet from him, his daughter glanced at me, to see if I’d already known. I tried to make a sound through the gag, but when that failed, I just shook my head at her. I didn’t know until today. I swear, not until today.
‘So why don’t you explain “what was happening” between you?’ Reynolds said.
Finally, Franks looked up at Craw, his face an odd kind of blank. I’d expected a hint of an apology, some measure of contrition. But then I realized: he doesn’t regret it.
He doesn’t regret any of it.
‘She got pregnant,’ he said.
Craw hardly reacted. Instead, she sat there, motionless, her face impassive, staring into her father’s eyes. Beside her, Reynolds looked disappointed. He glanced from her to Franks, and took a step forward. ‘With your child,’ he added. ‘Say it.’
Franks kept looking into the camera. ‘With my child.’
This time it hit home with Craw: she took a series of short, sharp breaths, and moments later a tear broke from her eye. Franks didn’t turn to her this time.
‘I first saw Lucas when he was a month old,’ he said. ‘He was beautiful. I’d had all sorts of emotions in the months leading up to his birth. Panic. Fear. Regret. Anger. I was angry at Casey, and then I was angry at myself. I couldn’t leave my wife, my family. I knew, if the secret got out – if people discovered that I’d got a witness pregnant – my life would be over. I’d get sacked. I’d get prosecuted. I’d probably go to prison. So I told her I wanted her to have an abortion.’
A snort of contempt, mostly for himself.
I glanced at Craw.
She’d closed her eyes to him.
‘But Casey was never going to do that. Never. She wanted the baby. She told me that she understood the reasons I couldn’t get involved, so she was going to tell Robert it was his, and if I wanted anything to do with my son, she would like that.’
He shifted in his chair.
The room was perfectly silent.
‘One month after Lucas was born, she called to tell me Robert was away, and I picked her up and we drove down to Dartmoor. We ended up at this beautiful valley called Parsons Wood. Casey had gone there as a kid.’
Parsons Wood.
The place in the photograph; in the mural she’d painted.
He’d taken a picture of it on 35mm film, way back at the start when Lucas had just been born. Then, as that had started to fade, he’d taken a newer one, once he and Ellie had settled on Dartmoor. It was a pattern he tried to repeat with the CCTV footage of Casey Bullock: replacing an older, degraded memory with a newer, identical version.
‘We went back once a month. I’d tell Ellie I was in meetings all day, and unable to answer the phone, and I’d book a day off, and we’d drive down there. Leave at nine, be back for five, so no one – not Robert, not Ellie – would notice. In between our visits, she’d take these photographs for me, paint pictures of him, of the places the two of them went, and then she’d leave them for me in a storage facility off Holloway Road. She’d leave his clothes there too, once he grew out of them. I liked that.’
He stopped for a couple of seconds, thumb massaging a graze on his knuckle. ‘When Lucas started getting old enough to remember me, we had to stop coming down to Dartmoor, in case he mentioned it. Instead, we’d meet in London parks, chance meetings that Lucas wouldn’t take any notice of. But it was agony: I realized the older he got, the less I could interact with him. The more love I showed him, the more I made him laugh, bought him toys, picked him up and carried him – all the things I was desperate to do – the more likely it was he would say something to Robert. And if he did that, everything was over.’
Reynolds had moved away from Craw to a position behind the camera. In the changing light, he was bleached
and still, sunlight reflecting in his hairless scalp, one hand on the tripod, one clutching the gun.
For a moment, the dynamic seemed to shift subtly: two liars, facing each other – one with a weapon, one confessing his crimes to a camera.
Then, unexpectedly, a tear broke from Franks’s left eye. He didn’t move, didn’t react to it, just let it run down the middle of his cheek, through the grey stubble along his jaw – and then it was gone.
‘The day I found out he was dead …’ He glanced at Craw, who was watching him again, her own cheeks marked. ‘At his funeral, I had to stand at the back, among all the people who would go away and forget about him the moment they left. My own son. And after it was over, I went home to Ellie, and I looked at her, and I thought to myself, “I don’t even know what to say to you.” She asked me about my day, started telling me about hers, and I just thought, “I don’t care.” But I couldn’t say that. I had to stand there and listen, and pretend like it mattered, hours after burying my boy.’
Craw made a noise behind the gag.
Reynolds flicked a look at her, then returned to her side. ‘Shall we see what your daughter makes of all this, Leonard?’
He ripped the duct tape away.
She sucked in a long breath, as if she’d never learned how, and I could see dots of blood had formed along the top of her lips. Despite the pain she was feeling, in all the forms it was attacking her, she didn’t show it. Not any more. She just looked at her father and said, ‘You lying piece of shit.’
He glanced in my direction and back to Craw. Her face was taut, outraged, barely able to contain its disgust. His was different: clearly emotional, but measured too, almost relieved, as if this confession was one he’d written in his head, countless times over.
‘Who are you?’ she said to him.
She’d recovered more of her composure now, but her face was a mess, marked by tear tracks, by blood, by specks of dirt and mud. Her hair fell across her eyes as she tried to wriggle forward in her seat, to get closer to him: the man she’d trusted, perhaps above all others.
‘Mel, I couldn’t –’
‘Who are you?’