Fall From Grace (4 page)

‘So you just stopped the search?’

‘No. I spoke to everyone Sergeant Reed spoke to, canvassed the village in case anyone saw anything, I went through Mum and Dad’s house, their finances, their entire life – but I had to do most of it remotely. I tried to get down to Devon, but it depended what shifts I was working and what cases were landing in my lap. When I couldn’t get down there, I checked in with Reed, and that went on until about a month ago when it became apparent that the search for Dad was dead in the water. I remember getting down to Devon three weeks ago and seeing Mum’s face, and it suddenly dawned on me: we’d be a year, two years, five years, ten years down the line and we’d still be in the same place.’ She looked from the file to me. ‘I’d searched that database top to bottom before I got told to back off, and I’d found nothing. Nothing. I’d reached the end of the road and didn’t have any more options. So I collected up everything I had – which didn’t amount to a hell of a lot, as you can see from what I’ve given you – and I called you.’

‘Why me?’

‘What do you mean?’

I smiled, because she knew what I meant. ‘A year and a half ago, you were telling me you’d make it your life’s work to put me behind bars.’

She nodded. ‘Look, there’s a bunch of ex-cops who are doing the private thing now. I could have asked them. But it’s too incestuous at the Met. I need someone on the outside, with no connections to the force, who I know …’ She paused, choosing her words carefully. But I saw where this was headed: up until now, the search for Leonard Franks had been played entirely by the book – now it was time for something else. ‘I don’t necessarily agree with the way you work, and I can’t condone it as a police officer. But, as a civilian, as a daughter, I’ve got to the point where I couldn’t care less. You know how to find missing people, you know the Devon area well, and – whatever your methods – you’re effective, and you care about people. And that’s what I need now.’

I started leafing through the file again. The missing persons report was the only official paperwork; everything else Craw had collated herself. As I came across Franks’s phone bills, I said, ‘What happened to your father’s mobile?’

‘He left it at the house.’

‘His wallet?’

I could tell before she replied what the answer was. ‘Same.’

More dead ends to add to the others she’d collected over the past nine months.

‘This file contains everything you have?’

‘Everything.’

Her eyes lingered on me, and it was like her thoughts were being projected. She’d made the commitment; now she was wondering whether she’d done the right thing.

A moment later, she said, ‘I can’t support you with any police resources. If you need to get hold of me, call my personal number, not my landline at the office. I don’t want to know what you do, how you get your information or who you talk to. I just want to know what happened to my father.’

‘Is your mother still living down in Devon?’

‘No.’ Craw shook her head. ‘She’s living with me.’

‘Here in London?’

‘She started to find their place down there too quiet, too big, too upsetting, so I moved her up here a fortnight ago. It didn’t feel like I had much choice. We’ve put the house down in Dartmoor on the market; now we’re trying to get her something in the city.’

‘I’ll need to speak to her.’

She nodded at the file. ‘There’s a list of numbers at the back, including Mum’s mobile. She knows I’ve come to meet you today, but if you hit any snags, let me know. I think it’s best I’m not around when you speak to her. I’m sure you feel the same way.’

I nodded, respecting Craw a little more for that: retreating from the case probably went against every emotion she felt as a daughter, and every professional instinct she had as a cop. But it was the right thing to do, and she was lucid enough to see it. If she was circling the case, she was trying to influence it, however unwittingly. She’d asked for my take, and she’d get it – but not on her terms, and not based on whatever conclusion she’d already reached about her father’s disappearance.

‘What about your kids and your husband?’ I said.

‘What about them?’

‘Is it worth speaking to them?’

‘You can speak to them if you like, but I think it’ll be a waste of time. No one else was there on the veranda the night Dad mentioned the case to me, and Bill stayed here in London and looked after the girls when I went down to Dartmoor in the days after Dad went missing. I can gather them together for you to speak to at the house if you want – but to be honest, if you want a character witness, you’d be better off with the people at the Met who spent thirty-five years with Dad. And if you want to know what actually happened on the day he disappeared, what his life was like at the end, I think there’s only one place to start.’

‘Your mum.’

She nodded.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘One other thing. People will ask who I’m working for. I get that you want to keep it on the QT – I see the risks – but if I’m getting answers out of people, I need to be able to give them a name. It’s just easier. So how do you want to play it?’

‘I guess you’re going to have to tell them you’re working for Mum.’

‘Will she be aware that that’s the case?’

‘Yes.’

‘Okay. What’s her first name?’

‘Ellie.’

I wrote it down. ‘I’ll keep you up to date.’

‘Thank you,’ she said, but there was little of the gratitude in her face that she’d just given voice to. She’d opened herself up – and now she’d closed herself down again.

As I went to stand, she held her hand up.

‘Anything you find out, however insignificant you might think it, I’d appreciate hearing.’ She stopped again, a flash in her face that, on anyone else, might have looked like vulnerability. ‘He’s been gone two hundred and eighty-four days, so every scenario going through your head now, I’ve already accepted. I just want the truth.’

I nodded again.

But this time it was me who didn’t say anything.

Because everyone wanted the truth until they got it.

4

Craw and I left together, then headed in opposite directions: she, along the banks of the river, back in the direction of Pimlico station; I, north-west towards Sloane Square, so I wouldn’t have to change lines on the way to Paddington. As I crossed the railway tracks on Ebury Bridge, I could hear my phone going off inside my jacket.

‘David Raker.’

‘It’s me,’ a female voice said. ‘Annabel.’

I smiled. ‘Who?’

‘Ha ha.’

‘How’s the journey going?’

‘That’s what I’m calling about. We’ve been sitting outside Swindon for the last fifteen minutes. They reckon there’s been an accident somewhere. I could be a while.’

I looked at my watch. Twelve-twenty.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Don’t stress. It’s fine.’

‘Sorry to mess you around.’

‘You’re not.’

‘I’ll give you a call when we’re moving again.’

‘No problem. I’ve got plenty to keep me occupied.’

I found a quiet table at the back of a coffee shop at the eastern end of the King’s Road, ordered a coffee and a sandwich, and then unclipped Leonard Franks’s missing persons file from its binding. Using the table and two unoccupied chairs nearby, I managed to spread everything out in front of me. In total, I counted up fifty-two separate pages.

The actual report itself only accounted for sixteen of those pages. The rest had been attached by Craw in the weeks and months after her father had gone missing: statements, insurance policies, a financial breakdown for the year leading up to him vanishing, and another for the nine months since. I concentrated on the period since.

She must have been searching for anomalies in the time he’d been gone – payments in her parents’ joint account that didn’t make sense, things that were out of the ordinary – clearly hoping that she could find some evidence of her father continuing to spend money after he disappeared, or an indication of what had happened to him.
Maybe an idea of how the hell he never returned from the woodshed
. As my mind lingered on that last part, I returned to Craw’s description of what had happened on 3 March.

It was like he vanished into thin air
.

There was something weird and slightly unsettling about Franks’s disappearance: the way the house was a mile from the nearest neighbour, how it was so isolated you could hear a car five minutes before you could even see it, and yet, when his wife had been out to look for him, she’d found no trace of him anywhere. He hadn’t even been a mark against the moorland. No people. No cars.

No husband.

I cast the thought aside, trying not to let it sidetrack me, and, as I did, something more pragmatic took hold: if Franks had, for whatever reason, engineered his own disappearance, with his background he was going to be shrewd enough not to leave a trail, either out on the moors, or in the paperwork he left behind.

What I held in my hands seemed to back that up. Craw had made a series of annotations in the margins of the Frankses’ bank statements covering the year before 3 March. She’d done the same for her father’s pension too, where lump sums had been removed to pay for house alterations. But, in the nine months after that, from 3 March until now, she’d either failed to find anything or begun to lose some of her will. In the end, perhaps it was a little of both: before his disappearance, it was possible to see the intimate rhythms of Leonard Franks’s life right here in black and white; afterwards, there was a stark sea change – less money leaving their account, barely any movement of funds, all instigated by Ellie Franks. It was clear evidence he was gone. I’d take a closer look at the financials once I got home, but my gut told me they’d lead nowhere.

Away from their accounts, pensions, insurance policies and financial breakdowns, Craw’s instincts as an investigator really started to kick in. It was a reminder of how good she was at her job, and a fascinating insight into her process: itemized phone bills for mobile and landline; a typewritten CV of her father’s time at the Met; a list of people in the village and transcripts of interviews she’d done with them; impressions of Derek Cortez, the retired cop who’d floated the idea of cold-case work to Franks in the first place; and then, finally, the same for DCI Gavin Clark, who was set to be Franks’s point of contact at the CCRU.

Yet while Craw had added some breadth to the investigation, she’d failed to add much depth. It was of course possible that the cold-case file wasn’t the catalyst for his disappearance; that one of her father’s other, countless cases, from three decades at the Met, had come back to bite him. It was possible one of the villagers had lied to her, Cortez too, and they’d managed to convince her of those lies. He could have been involved in an accident. His body could be lying in a ditch somewhere, waiting to be found.

In missing persons, all things were possible.

But, deep down, I had a hard time seeing most of those scenarios, apart – perhaps – from the idea of him already being dead. Whatever the truth, my first impression was that the last case was key, and that Franks’s disappearance had been as much of a shock to the villagers, to Cortez and to Clark, as it had been to Craw, her mother and their family.

As I scanned the phone bills, I knew numbers alone would mean little: there was nothing incongruous about the fact that some of the calls Franks made and received, in the months before he disappeared, were to and from London area codes, just as there was little to be read into others being Devon-based. The last two years of his life had been spent in a house on Dartmoor – he would have made friends there, and in the local area. The sixty years before that, he’d been living and working in London, so I wasn’t at all surprised to see both phone bills weighted in favour of calls to the capital.

However, the detailed annotations Craw had made in the margins of the Frankses’ bank statements and financial make-up weren’t replicated on the phone bills. She’d either decided it wasn’t worth doing, which seemed very unlikely, or, by the time she’d got to the phone bills, she’d been forced to stop her own investigation into what had happened to her father. I remembered what she’d said about her superintendent, how he’d warned her not to use police resources to find Franks. He must have stepped in just as she’d been about to tackle the phone bills.

Craw ran a team of her own, and she was – if nothing else – a pragmatist, so she would have understood the reasons why: her boss didn’t want her getting distracted by a case that was outside of the Met’s jurisdiction. But it still would have hurt her. She’d have felt angry and bitter that he couldn’t let her work the case off the books. In a weird way, maybe it was the reason she’d ended up asking for my help. If I was being kind, the Met were deeply suspicious of me; if I was being honest, they loathed everything I stood for. Coming to me, even if her employers never found out, was a clear act of rebellion.

Grabbing my phone, I scrolled through my address book until I got to the letter S. S was for Spike. He was an old contact from my days as a journalist, a Russian hacker living here on an expired student visa. Back when I’d been on the paper, I’d used him all the time: with a single call, he could get you inside any network and smuggle out as much as you needed to know. I only used him to help me find missing people these days, but I wasn’t under any illusions about the nature of his work – or the illegality of me asking.

‘David,’ he said, as he picked up.

‘How’s things, Spike?’

‘Good, man. How are you?’

‘I’m good,’ I said. ‘I need some help with a phone.’

‘You need me to get you a bill?’

‘No. I’ve already got the bill. What I need is names and addresses for the numbers
on
the bill. If I scanned some statements in and emailed them to you, do you reckon you could get me the details on every incoming and outgoing call made to these numbers?’

‘Names and addresses for each? Piece of cake.’

‘That’s the correct answer.’

He laughed. ‘How much we looking at?’

‘Thirteen months, in two chunks. Chunk one is November and December 2012, January and February 2013, up to 3 March. The second is the period after my guy goes missing, so that’s 4 March through to … well, I guess today: 12 December.’