Fall From Grace (29 page)

‘But he didn’t?’

She shook her head. ‘No. Nowhere in that case file will you find mention of the Boss putting in a search for a “Simon”. Like I said earlier, I never looked closely at the investigation he was compiling at the time – I had my own cases, my own problems. We
were
stretched thin. We
were
under-resourced. And then, shortly after he hit a dead end on it, he retired, and when he retired, everything got forgotten. But after I met him in that pub back in February, after the weird request for the Welland footage, and the questions about Reynolds, I went back through my notes and started to do a little digging.’ She paused, flicking a look at me. ‘A few days later, I pulled the file on the drug murder.’

‘What did you find?’

‘To my face, the Boss told me back in 2011 that the “Simon” lead was a dead end. He said he’d never been able to find out if the victim had been lying when he told those students his real name. I remember that, because I wrote it all down, just like he’d always taught me. He said he couldn’t find any connection to other drug-related cases, using the name “Simon”. But do you know how long it took
me
when I decided to put in a search back in February?’

I shook my head.

‘Half a minute.’

We both hung off the back of that. Despite how many times she must have processed that since Franks had disappeared, it was like she was still coming to terms with it for the first time. Franks had never been able to find a connection to a ‘Simon’.

She’d found one in thirty seconds.

‘In January 2011,’ Murray went on, ‘two months before this guy was found dead, cops down in Lewisham interviewed a Simon Preston after he was stopped and searched. They found an ounce of weed on him. They let him off with a warning, so there’s not much else in the computer on him,
except
in the PNC, where a search for his full name brings up a driver’s licence, and housing records.’ She pointed to the picture of him on the wall. ‘It’s him. The picture on his driver’s licence matches the guy on the slab there.’

I looked at Simon Preston.

Franks chose not to go looking for him
.

‘Have you read the transcript of the Boss’s interview with the students?’ Murray asked. When I shook my head, she continued, ‘Try and find the bit when they mention to the Boss that this guy referred to himself as Simon. They
don’t
. The Boss never included that part of the interview in the paperwork. The name Simon got mentioned in the office, verbally. That was why I wrote it down. But it never got included in the file itself. Instead, in his official conclusions, he said the students were “unreliable witnesses” – doped up, immature.’

‘So he lied?’

‘No. The girls
were
unreliable. The evidence of that is right there on the page. Their interviews are a mess. A high-ranking cop with thirty-five years’ experience dismisses a lead put forward by a bunch of potheads – so what?’

‘But he deliberately didn’t follow up –’

She held up a hand. ‘After I pulled the file, even as I tried to process the fact that he’d chosen not to look for this Simon guy at the time, I was thinking, “I trust the Boss. I trust him completely. There must have been a reason he didn’t look harder for Simon.” ’

Murray wasn’t seeing straight – or, at the very least, choosing not to. Franks had wanted to take the helm so he could control where the investigation went – and how he controlled it was by preventing it being linked to Simon Preston.

But why?

What was so special about Preston?

I glanced at my watch. We’d already been going thirty-five minutes, which meant we were running out of time before her partner got back. Gesturing to the photograph of Simon Preston’s house in Kingsbridge, I said to her, ‘So Preston was originally from Devon, but moved to London?’

Murray nodded. ‘In September 2010.’

‘And before that?’

‘As you can see, I found the house he sold before he moved. I also traced him to a job he used to have on a building site. Nothing there. He paid his taxes and didn’t seem to get into any trouble while he was in that part of the world. If he was in the drug game before he came here, he did a good job of keeping it all on the QT.’

‘So is it possible that Franks knew Simon Preston
before
Preston died?’

‘Maybe. The problem was, by the time I’d plucked up the courage to ask the Boss why he’d overlooked this Simon lead, to question his decision-making at the time he worked that case, he’d already disappeared.’ She paused, eyes narrowing, as if she’d seen some accusation in my face. ‘You don’t understand what our relationship was like. I never questioned a
single decision
he made in the entire time I worked for him. Do you know why I didn’t? Because he always made the
right
decision.
Always.’

‘And this time?’

A brief moment of fire, as if she was going to come back at me again – but then she started rubbing at her eyes, and a sudden, overwhelming sadness seemed to freeze her. She retreated to the windowsill once more, feet pressed into the carpet, looking down.

In the silence, I tried to align my thoughts. Franks. Reynolds. Simon Preston. Pamela Welland. Everything was connected, I knew that for certain – but I still couldn’t work out how or why. Then I realized Murray was watching me, head tilted to one side, shadows marking her face.

‘Care to share your thoughts?’

I turned to her. There were so many layers to this case, I had to be careful it didn’t become a blur. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘It seems highly likely Preston was in the drug game, given the stop-and-search two months before he died, and the fact that five kilos of coke were found in his flat after he was killed. It also stands to reason that Kemar Penn wouldn’t much like someone else muscling in on his territory either. So, leaving aside the idea that Simon Preston and Leonard Franks somehow knew each other
before
Preston’s death, what if the reason Franks fudged the case was because he saw something else in it?’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning Neil Reynolds’s involvement.’

Murray frowned. ‘You’re accusing Reynolds of
killing
Simon Preston?’

‘He was K-Penn’s inside man. Does that seem so unlikely to you?’

I glanced at the photographs of Reynolds leaving his house, getting into his car, standing in the fuzzy half-light of a petrol station. Then I remembered him with a knife at a boy’s throat. I remembered watching from the shadows of the warehouse, his face lit by the molten glow of the furnace. He was capable of it. He was capable of killing someone.

Preston. Franks. Anyone.

When I turned back to Murray, she was looking at the same photographs as me, and something had changed in her.

‘No,’ she said finally. ‘No, it doesn’t seem unlikely at all.’

41

We had twenty minutes left.

‘The day Franks met you at the pub,’ I said, trying to maintain the momentum, ‘he asked if you knew where Reynolds was, right? So maybe whatever cold case he was working on in retirement, in the month before he disappeared, had some connection to that drug murder. What if it
was
the drug murder?’

I paused, remembering Craw’s words:
The only thing I can tell you is that the way he talked about it made it sound like it had some connection to a case he’d already worked at the Met. He talked about it like he was already familiar with it
.

‘Maybe he requested it,’ I said to her.

‘The file on the drug murder?’

‘Yes.’

‘From who?’

‘I don’t know.’

She looked at me, and I could see her mind ticking over. ‘What if …’ She paused, a moment of uncertainty. ‘What if the Boss had been using Simon Preston as some kind of …’

I saw where she was going. ‘Informant?’

She nodded. ‘We all have them.’

‘So you’re suggesting he buried the connection to Simon Preston because he didn’t want to reveal Preston as an informant?’ I stopped, considering it. ‘Why would he go to such lengths? Preston was dead. What did it matter if somebody found out he was a snitch?’

‘Because maybe there were others.’ She stopped, shrugged. ‘I’m thinking aloud here, but maybe the Boss had a few more scattered around, and if the secret got out about Simon, the secret got out about them all – and that meant
no one
informing on K-Penn.’

‘And that meant –’

‘There was no one to inform on Reynolds.
That
was what the Boss
really
cared about. He knew Reynolds killed Simon Preston, but didn’t have the evidence, so the Boss fudged the case in order to come back to it. He fudged it so that Reynolds wouldn’t know he was a suspect. Reynolds got enough of a look at the file on the Preston murder – before Jim Paige caught him with his nose in it – to think he was safe. But he wasn’t safe. Even in retirement, the Boss was waiting for Reynolds to slip up. And when Jim Paige gave Reynolds the push from the Met, and he no longer had the protection of the force, it gave the Boss the opportunity to
really
go at Reynolds – so that’s what he did.’

‘But what about Pamela Welland?’

‘What about her?’

‘Where does she fit in?’

‘Maybe she doesn’t.’

‘Then why was Franks calling you and Jim Paige, asking for a copy of that CCTV tape?’

Murray took a long breath. ‘I don’t know.’

I looked at the wall again, trying to pull it all together. Murray’s theory made a certain kind of sense. The concept of Reynolds killing Simon Preston on behalf of Kemar Penn I could definitely believe. The idea of Preston being an informant also explained the connection, at least latterly, between Franks and him. And yet something wasn’t sitting right with me. Why would Franks – a straight arrow, a man of honour and integrity – put his entire career on the line to falsify a case? Why would he put himself, and his new life in Devon, in danger? He loathed Reynolds for being dirty and getting away with it, but I couldn’t believe he loathed him that much. What bugged me more was that at no point in the two years they’d been retired had Ellie
ever
mentioned Franks looking at a police case, let alone working one – not until that last one had turned up in the post. He left the Met at the end of April 2011, and was sent the cold case in January 2013. So if he was so obsessed with nailing Neil Reynolds, why hadn’t he done anything about it for almost two years?

I tried to clear my head again, my eyes returning to the map, string criss-crossing it like a loom, photos tacked to the crumbling plaster. Newspaper cuttings lifted away from the wall as warm air continued its journey through the house. For the first time, I noticed how exhausted I was. As my adrenalin started to fizzle out, as reality took hold and I felt frustration at not being able to get at all the answers, my body shivered, goosebumps scattering up my arms and tracing the ridge of my spine.

‘What about his life down in Devon?’ I asked, trying to stay focused.

‘Simon Preston?’

‘Do we know anything else about it?’

‘In what sense?’

‘In
any
sense. You said he worked on a building site?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you speak to his boss?’

‘Yes. The business closed in 2012, but I managed to track him down. He said Preston had a bit of a temper on him, but that he turned up on time, worked hard, et cetera, et cetera. After I finished there, I moved on to the local cops. They had nothing. He wasn’t anywhere close to their radar.’

Turning to face her, we watched each other in the semi-darkness, and then I said, ‘Are you going to slap the cuffs on me if I admit to some mild trespassing?’

The hint of a smile for the first time.

‘Reynolds broke into my house and stole everything I had on Franks.’

‘What?’

‘So I got inside Reynolds’s place tonight.’

‘You broke into
his
house?’

‘When you saw me returning to the car, that was where I’d been.’

I could see the conflict playing out in her face: her instincts as an investigator, the rule of law, versus the need to know what I’d found.

Then she said, ‘And?’

‘He had Franks’s missing persons file among his things, with an ID number at the top. We should find out who it belongs to.’

‘You mean
I
should find out?’ She studied me for a moment. ‘Okay.’

I nodded my thanks as slivers of street light peeked through the gaps between the black card and the window frames behind her.

Then Murray said, ‘There’s one other thing.’

‘What?’

‘I found out where the house was, mapped it’ – she nodded at the wall, at the picture of Simon Preston’s former home – ‘and printed it out. It’s a tiny cul-de-sac of ten semi-detached houses on the eastern fringes of Kingsbridge. At the back, they look out on to these fields that run parallel to the Plymouth road.’

‘So?’

‘So, anyway, two or three months back, I started calling the people in the other houses, hoping to find someone who remembered Preston. And I got talking to this guy who lived next door to him. Andrew Stricker. When I asked him if he recalled Preston, he was, like, “Are you kidding me? Of
course
I remember him.” So I asked him what he meant, and he said to me, “They fought so often, they’re impossible to forget.” ’

‘ “They”?’

‘Preston lived with someone.’

I glanced at his picture. ‘Who?’

‘I asked this Stricker guy and he said he never spoke to her for more than a couple of minutes the entire time she was there. He said she seemed pleasant enough, that she’d always say hello if they passed each other, but that she seemed to want to deliberately keep herself to herself. “She didn’t really seem his type,” is what Stricker said to me.’

‘In what sense?’

‘I asked him that, and he said, “Simon was pretty rough and ready. He’d come home drunk at night, the whole street could hear him swearing when something wasn’t going his way, but she seemed a lot softer. Not a mouse. Not someone who could be pushed around. But quieter.” He said you could tell she was smart. “You could tell she had a lot going on up top” are the exact words he used. So I asked him, if she was so smart, why was she shacked up with a scumbag like Simon Preston? He said he didn’t know, but when they were arguing – and this was often; like, blazing rows once or twice a week – he said she never backed down. Not ever. I asked him if he ever saw evidence of physical abuse, and he said no – not anything obvious, anyway. He told me, if he had, he would have called the police.’ She shrugged, a twist of frustration. ‘To be honest, it would have been better if he
had
called the police. Then we would have had her name.’