Fall From Grace (18 page)

Snow scattered gently against the window, making a soft noise like fat crackling in a pan, and, as I looked out, I could see it swirling around in the glow of the street lights. A set of fairy lights winked from the guttering of a house opposite and, briefly, I wondered what Christmas at the Frankses’ house would have been like this time last year. Whatever it was like, a month later the file turned up – and everything changed.

I returned my attention to the PDFs.

I concentrated on the landline calls first, working in chronological order, from the first day the statements began – 1 November 2012 – all the way through to the date of Franks’s disappearance on 3 March. The same names came up time and again: Craw, at home and on her mobile; three long-distance calls to their son in Australia; Jim Paige at work and on his mobile; Carla Murray’s mobile; Derek Cortez; the main line at Franks’s local golf club, and the people he’d played with there, all of whom had already been checked out. Then a succession of builders’ merchants, plumbers, plasterers and decorators.

Nothing rang any alarm bells. The conversations between Paige and Franks seemed to stick to a fairly similar routine: fortnightly, between fifteen and twenty-five minutes. Ellie had mentioned the chats the two men had enjoyed when I’d spoken to her.

The only time the pattern changed was at the end of January: on Thursday the 31st, they’d spoken for fifty minutes, two or three times longer than usual. This must have been the call Paige had told me about earlier:
A day
after he called Carla, he got in touch with me to see if I could source the footage of Pamela Welland from the pub
.

When I backtracked twenty-four hours, I saw Paige was right: at 15.34 on Wednesday 30 January, Franks had called Murray. Their exchange had lasted twenty-two minutes. After that, there were a few short, sharp calls between Franks and Paige, again backing up what Paige had told me about trying to talk Franks down. Then their calls returned to normal, although notably didn’t last as long. The drop-off in duration mirrored the drop-off in email frequency to Murray in those last five weeks.

In the days after Franks’s disappearance, the landline statement took on the pattern I’d expected it to: frenetic phone calls from Ellie, first to Craw, then to the police, then to friends of Franks, trying to work out if anyone had seen him. Then a gradual reduction to the point at which she was hardly making any outgoing calls at all. On 27 November 2013, they stopped altogether, coinciding with Ellie’s return to London.

I moved on to the mobile records and immediately found a lot of duplication: the same numbers I’d already seen on the landline statements, the same people making and receiving those calls. I worked my way through November and December, then January and February as well. As Spike suggested, calls didn’t stop entirely once Franks disappeared: people he didn’t keep in touch with as regularly were obviously unaware he was gone and continued to phone, but from 3 March the records began to thin out until, in the autumn, no one was calling his phone any more and Franks had been forgotten.

But as I moved back through the mobile calls, I realized I’d missed something. On 10 March, seven days after the disappearance, a London number tried to get in touch with him. The call had lasted only two seconds, suggesting that whoever had made it had hit Franks’s voicemail and hung up. Typed in the margin, adjacent to all the numbers, were the names and addresses of the callers. Except there was no name for this one – just an address.

It was a public payphone.

A road called Scale Lane in SE15.

I scrolled further up, an immediate sense of recognition taking hold, and on 24 January I discovered why. Franks had received a call from exactly the same phone box.

Except this call had lasted seven minutes.

I minimized the PDF, fired up the browser and found the phone box on Google Maps. It was on a narrow side street which came off the Old Kent Road in a vague zigzag. The phone box itself was easy to miss, tucked away between a takeaway and a nail salon. Even in winter, with surrounding leaves stripped bare, it would have remained partially hidden, cast into shadow by nearby roofs. And, as I inched the view through a full three-sixty, I realized something more significant: there wasn’t a single CCTV camera within a hundred yards.

It had been purposely chosen
.

Pulling my pad across, I wrote down a brief timeline:

Late January – Franks receives a cold-case file in the post. Sender: unknown
.

24 January – Franks receives call from phone box in S. London. Same person who sent the file to him?

30 January – Franks calls Murray, asking for Welland footage
.

31 January – Franks calls Paige, asking for same footage
.

11 February – Franks meets someone (who?) at the Hare and Badger pub for lunch; tells Ellie he’s meeting Paige
.

23 February – Franks mentions cold case to Craw
.

3 March – Franks disappears
.

10 March – Franks receives call from same phone box. Call lasts two seconds. Caller doesn’t know Franks has disappeared? Or knows he has and is trying to find out where he is?

Suppressing a prickle of unease, I called Craw. She didn’t bother with small talk, and asked me about the Met charity event: ‘Did you get what you wanted from Paige?’

‘I’m not sure yet.’ I left it at that. ‘I’ve got a quick question: your dad received two separate phone calls from a public payphone just off the Old Kent Road.’

‘Yes, I remember.’

‘Did you look into them?’

‘Yes. There didn’t seem much point in bringing it up with you – it’s just another dead end. I should know because I chased my tail on that for a week. The call box is two hundred and fifty feet away from the nearest CCTV camera. I went down and checked.’

‘Did he know anyone who lived in that area?’

‘No.’

‘What did you make of it?’

‘I asked around among his friends, trying to see if any of them lived in the area, and the caller wasn’t anyone he knew. I looked through his recent cases and found nothing. I was about to prep a request to requisition the footage from two cameras on the Old Kent Road, but then my super shut me down.’ A long, melancholic pause. ‘I don’t need to tell you it would have been a waste of time, anyway. You only need to see the location of that box to know why it was chosen.’

Anonymity
.

I was starting to realize why, in her interviews with Sergeant Reed in the days after Franks disappeared, Craw had suggested her father might not have left of his own accord.

She didn’t say anything else, but it was clear she was thinking about the call, about what it meant, about whether something had been missed. That wasn’t unique to missing persons: relatives clung to the unexplained, whatever the crime, because in the unknown there was hope, maybe answers, maybe some kind of resolution. Except, given what Paige and Murray had told me, I was starting to wonder what kind of answers Craw would end up with – and whether finding Franks could bring her any kind of comfort, or just another twist of the knife.

23

The next morning was beautiful. The snow had settled on rooftops, in gardens and streets, on windowsills and fence posts, its stillness reducing London to a hush. Cars remained on driveways, people remained indoors and, above, the sky was a vast sweep of blue without a single cloud to blemish it. I took my breakfast through and sat at the rear windows, looking out at a garden undisturbed by anything but bird tracks.

A couple of minutes later, I watched my mobile buzz across the table towards me. It was Ewan Tasker. Forty-eight hours earlier, I’d asked him to use the police database to look into any major unsolveds in London, in an effort to narrow down Franks’s cold case. That was before I knew about Pamela Welland. Now the question wasn’t who had got to Franks at the end, because it seemed likely – if Paige and Murray were correct – that the answer was Welland. Instead, it was why her death meant so much to him.

After we’d chatted for a while, I steered the conversation around to what Tasker had found.

‘I don’t know if you’ll be thanking me or cursing me,’ he said. It was Saturday, and he was at home, so there was no office noise behind him. ‘In a city of seven million people, across an unspecified time period, you’re looking at a shitload of hits, just like I said you would. I found ninety-eight unsolved cases that I would personally class as “major”. But if you’re talking about including people being held up at knifepoint, or beaten up getting the last tube home, then you’re going to have to widen the search, and that’s going to take more time. For now, though, I’ve just stuck to the really big stuff.’

‘That sounds great, Task.’

I grabbed the Moleskines from the spare room as well as the document I’d created and printed out: it gave me a full overview of every case, name and extraneous item – like the pub flyer – that Franks had made mention of, or included as part of the diaries.

Gradually, we started navigating through the ninety-eight unsolveds, Task giving me a brief account of what had happened – date, crime, victim, circumstances – before moving on to the next. I cross-checked each one with the printout. Where Franks had noted down a case that Tasker also mentioned, even only in passing, I asked for it to be set aside so we could come back to it. Fifteen minutes in, I’d finished my coffee. Twenty minutes after that, I heard Annabel get up and head to the shower.

By the time we got to the end, we’d been going at it an hour. I could hear Annabel pottering around in the kitchen and I’d narrowed down ninety-eight cases to just four.

Momentarily, I paused. The rational part of me knew there was no guarantee any of this meant anything. As much as I’d suspected that within the pages of the notebooks Franks might allude to an investigation that was important to him, it was just as likely that he’d opt not to write
anything
down. Pamela Welland had clearly been incredibly important to him, for whatever reason, but his notes on her case – and on Paul Viljoen – ran to two small clumps on a single page in the first diary. Maybe he’d gone in totally the opposite direction with cases that meant the most to him.

Maybe he didn’t include those at all
.

I decided against worrying about it for now, and returned my attention to the four I’d asked to be set aside. If nothing else, I could confirm Franks had some involvement in these, either as an investigator, or as a command lead, overseeing the Met’s Murder Teams.

‘Okay,’ I said, ‘let’s go back over them.’

‘You want me to go in chronological order?’

‘Yeah, that would be great.’

A couple of taps of the keyboard, then: ‘First one: guy from King’s Cross named Burgess Smith tells his wife he’s heading to the shops to get milk. He never comes home again. Next day, his body is found floating in the Grand Union Canal about half a mile from the train station. Smith was dead before he hit the water. Got stabbed in the neck. Looked like a robbery – his wallet never turned up, even when police sent divers in.’

I cast my eyes down the other details I’d managed to extract from the diaries and subsequent searches I’d done online. They didn’t add much. The case was from August 1997; the killer was never found; Franks was the lead, Murray working alongside him.

‘Okay. Next?’

‘Next is a 21-year-old woman called Mary Swindon heading back to her car near Kensal Green Cemetery after a night out. Some guy comes out of nowhere, grabs her, pulls her into a side street, rapes her, bashes her head in. The killer’s DNA was all over the body, but nowhere in the database. They never found out who the guy was, even retrospectively. This was 2002.’

I used the printout to remind myself of what Franks had written down concerning the case. He’d listed its headline details – all of which matched what I was having confirmed by Task now – but under that, in the diary, he’d also written, ‘We need to find this asshole NOW.’ As I read that back I remembered what Carla Murray had told me the night before:
The Boss always took cases like Welland’s hard. Kids. Women
. I’d added some other details too, based on what I’d found out through media reports. This one was roughly in the same ballpark as Welland.

But, for now, I moved on. ‘What about the third?’

‘A man gets stabbed in the chest outside The Knight in Mile End. I assume that’s a pub. I probably should have checked that. Anyway, he dies in hospital later. Witnesses say he was arguing with someone on the phone while he was there, but when police got hold of his bill, they found the caller had dialled in from a stolen handset.’

‘Who was the victim?’

‘Uh, Bryan Calhoon. Hold on.’ He paused for a moment as he read on down the file. ‘Building contractor. Apparently he was in some kind of major dispute with one of his rivals – a Dean Ireland – after Calhoon allegedly,
illegally
, got hold of a proposal and quotation that Ireland had given to the council, and then massively undercut him to secure the contract himself. Ireland obviously looked good for it – but he had an alibi.’

A dispute between two rival builders seemed about as far away from what I was looking for as it was possible to get, and by 2007 – when Calhoon was killed – Franks was already running the entire Homicide command. That put him way beyond cases like this one, something his diary notes backed up: he’d noted down the name of the victim and the people in his Murder Team, but beyond that there was nothing suggesting any kind of connection with Welland’s death.

‘And the fourth?’

‘Unidentified victim,’ Task said. ‘Thirty-something. White. Five foot eleven. He was killed in March 2011. This guy must have
really
upset the wrong people. Someone broke into his home, tied him up and slit his throat, ear to ear. Likely drug murder. The vic was found with five grand’s worth of coke tucked away in the kitchen.’