Fall From Grace (50 page)

Shuffling across the floor on my shoulder and hip – chair still attached to me – I turned, scooped up a sliver of glass and manoeuvred it around in my hands, so the point faced down towards my fingers. I started to saw away at the tape. I went slowly at first, careful not to cut myself, but then found a tempo, eyes fixed on the doors in case Reynolds came back. Sunlight broke through the clouds again, cutting down through the roof and forming a pale spotlight to the left of me. But the doors remained still, and the greenhouse stayed silent.

My wrist binds snapped loose.

Bringing the glass around, I cut through the tape at my ankles, got to my feet, then freed Craw. She nodded her thanks, wiped both eyes with the sleeve of her jacket and looked across the room at her father. So much passed between them, so much history I could never be a part of, or ever understand.

‘Can I have that?’ she said, gesturing to the glass.

I studied her for a moment, all the evidence of the past hour written in her face, her impassivity gone, her resolve challenged.

I handed it to her.

As she walked across to her father, I headed for the doors, coming in at an angle so I wasn’t in front of the panels. I glanced behind me, once, and saw her cutting away at his binds, the two of them silent: he was staring down at the top of her head; she was crouched beside him, using the shard to free his ankles, not making eye contact.

I reached the doors.

Spreading my hand across the middle of the one on the left, I gradually moved it back, the soft squeak of the hinge carrying off into the darkness. My heart was banging so hard it felt like it was bruising my ribcage. Images flashed in my head – snatches of what lay ahead of me – and then I left the greenhouse and hit the musty, enclosed spaces of the corridor.

It was dark.

Quiet.

But it was empty.

Reynolds was gone.

78

By the time we got to the front of the hospital, Reynolds’s boat was half a mile away, just a mark on the water as it headed east along the coast. From where we were, against the still of the early morning, we could hear its motor, its whine becoming ever quieter, as it faded from existence. Reynolds was standing at the controls, one hand on the wheel, the hood up on his top, his face a flash of white inside. He looked back towards us, a smudge in the distance, and then the boat started passing the eastern edges of the bay’s curves.

A minute later, he was gone from view.

For a moment, all three of us stood there, watching the empty causeway, sun on our backs, trying to work out what was happening, and what had changed Reynolds’s plans. Then I suggested to Craw that she should remain outside while Franks and I did another sweep of the hospital. Her head, understandably, wasn’t in the game, and she needed some time alone. Over the next hour, she was going to have to make some big decisions.

I went in, armed with my flashlight, and Franks followed behind me. For ten minutes we were silent, but as we got to the second floor of the east wing, approaching the day room – the false wall panel still open – I stopped.

‘What happened to Casey?’

I heard him come to a halt behind me.

When I turned, it was like he’d become bound to the floor, unable to move, frozen by his unintended part in her death. ‘Reynolds found out where I’d put her.’

‘She was in hiding?’

‘Yes.’

‘How did you keep in contact with her?’

‘I had two phones,’ he went on, ‘the one everyone knew about – and one that only Casey had the number for. After Reynolds cornered her on Keel Point beach, after she managed to give him the slip on the way up to Dartmoor, she called me on my other number. She was scared shitless. I calmed her down and asked her who the man had been, and she described Reynolds. And then she said he’d told her his name was Milk.’

‘That was when you knew he was after you.’

He nodded. ‘So I helped keep her off the radar for three months while I tried to find a permanent place for her. We met in person, or we spoke on payphones. Eventually, I set her up along the coast, in this tiny village, where I told her she wasn’t allowed to go out during the day, she wasn’t allowed to call me, she wasn’t allowed to use her mobile phone at all. She had to dial into a voicemail I’d set up, same time every day, to tell me she was safe – and she had to do that until I gave her the all-clear. I wasn’t sure when that was ever going to come. I wasn’t sure what the end even was. But when Reynolds cornered her on that beach, that was when I realized the secret was out.’

‘Did Simon Preston tell Reynolds about you and Casey?’

‘Yes. He must have.’

‘When?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe they came into contact before I …’
I killed Preston
. A long pause. ‘Maybe Reynolds had been around to see Preston on behalf of Kemar Penn; to deliver a warning about straying on to Penn’s turf. Maybe they got talking. Either way, once Reynolds knew about Casey and me, he got his ducks in a row, he waited until the time was right, and he sought her out. He wanted to use her to get at me. So I helped her stay hidden, and spent thirteen months wondering what the hell I was going to do next.’

‘Did he ever seek
you
out in that time?’

‘No. Never.’

‘Why?’

‘Because
she
was everything he needed. He could force her to tell him the truth. Manipulate her. Frighten her. Hurt her. He could coerce her, but he knew he couldn’t hurt or frighten me. So, even after she gave him the slip, he didn’t panic – he just spent those thirteen months waiting for her to make a mistake. And, once she did, he found out where she was and he forced her to tell him everything – and then he put it all in that file, and he …’

Murdered her
.

He couldn’t even say the words.

‘When she stopped calling the voicemail at the end of October, I knew something was wrong. I stewed on it for a couple of months, thought about driving to the village and calling at the house. I was
desperate
to find out where she was, and what had happened to her. But I couldn’t. It was too risky. And, deep down …’ A gentle breath. ‘Deep down, I knew she was gone. And, just as I was trying to cope with that, the file arrived.’

I gave him a moment. ‘What did the file have in it?’

‘Everything.’

‘Your entire relationship?’

‘Everything,’ he said again. ‘On the cover it said, “Confess your sins”.’

‘But why would Reynolds send it anonymously?’

‘Because he wanted me to walk
myself
to the newspapers, to the media, to whoever the hell else wanted to hear about what I’d done. The file he sent me, it wasn’t a threat. Not overtly. Not at first. It was an offer. It had everything in it – Pamela Welland, Lucas, Simon Preston, everything.’ He stopped, swallowing. ‘Inside, it said I had six weeks. If I didn’t confess what I’d done before then, there would be consequences.’

I remembered the two calls Franks had received from the phone box off the Old Kent Road. ‘He first called you on 24 January to – what? – make sure you had the file?’

He nodded. ‘Yes.’

Franks had received a second call as well, a week after he disappeared, from the same phone box. That had been his six-week deadline. Reynolds had been phoning to tell him, possibly to up the stakes – but Franks had pre-empted him.

He’d already gone.

‘That was why you met Murray that day in the pub a few weeks after the file arrived; why you asked her if she’d seen Reynolds around.’

It was why he’d written ‘Double-check 108’ on the back of the pub flyer too: he didn’t know whether the file was the end of what Reynolds knew – or just the beginning. Franks was reminding himself to make sure that the money he’d put in the PO box was still there, that neither that, nor the footage of Casey on the phone, had been compromised. But his habit of writing everything down, his obssession with detail, had left a trail: from the meeting with Murray, all the way to a post-office box in south Devon.

‘I wanted to find Reynolds,’ Franks said to me.

‘You wanted revenge?’

‘I wanted something.’ His eyes moved to the wall, to the mural on it. ‘The minute the file arrived, I thought about running. That was why I called Paige and Murray at the end of January, asking for a copy of the footage. I wanted …’ His eyes flicked back to me, a flash in them. ‘I’d exhausted the VHS copy I had; watched it over and over. So if I was going to run, I wanted a new copy. Wherever I went, I wanted to be able to see her.’

‘But then?’

‘But then, in the days after, my resolve hardened. I thought, “I’m not running, I’m not being blackmailed by him,” and I started working through the file, trying to come up with ways to fight back against what he had on me. But there was nothing. I had nothing. I’m not sure Reynolds thought I’d have the balls to up and leave like that – leave my life behind, my wife, my daughter, my grandkids. That was why he gave me six weeks.’

‘But you ran anyway?’

‘What else did I have left?’

I looked at him. ‘Apart from your family?’

‘Don’t fucking judge me, Raker.’

For a second, there was a nasty twist to his face, the shadows of the man that had lucidly, willingly, crossed the line into murder – and then it was gone again.

Franks had forged his reputation as a straight arrow, a man of morals, a cop who held others up to standards he’d never come close to meeting in the depths of his hidden life. I understood very clearly why Reynolds saw mileage in that. The concept of getting it all on tape made a certain kind of sense too: it was clean, dramatic, easy to process for the media – and it would utterly destroy Franks.

Reynolds was merciless, a cold-blooded fixer, almost certainly a murderer too. And yet, in getting Franks’s confession on tape, he’d captured something true. He’d shone a light on the spaces between himself and Franks, and shown what divided them.

And, at points, there was nothing.

No division between them.

No difference at all.

79

As we were coming back towards the front entrance, daylight washing into the corridor, a thought came to me. I turned to Franks, and he stopped.

‘How exactly did you do it?’

‘Do what?’

‘Disappear like that.’

He nodded, glancing through the gap in the door where Craw was perched on the bank, looking out across the sea. ‘We had a routine. Ellie liked a routine. That time of year, we started the fire about three in the afternoon, and it would start to die out about five, five-fifteen. That was when I tended to get up and get some more logs.’ He sniffed, a smile flickering across his face. ‘When I made up my mind I was going to go, I spent a week timing how long it took to get to the log pile and back. On average, it took thirty-two seconds. No time at all. But then I spent a week timing how long it took
Ellie
to do her things: fill the kettle, boil the kettle, get two cups, make the tea, bring it back. That took, on average, four minutes and twenty-seven seconds. The day I left, we’d gone to a bakery in Widdecombe and bought a carrot cake. I knew that would add on time for me.’

I looked past him, at the darkness of the hospital, at the doors dissolving into the shadows. As I met his eyes again, he nodded at me once, as if he understood what I was thinking. This was the end of a journey: from their dream home on the open spaces of Dartmoor, to a place full of memories and ghosts left to rot in the middle of a causeway.

‘I bought a backpack, a change of clothes, some essentials, all for cash,’ he said, ‘and then left the backpack in the log pile. Separately to that, I’d stored about ten grand at the post office over there.’ He gestured across the water, in the direction of Brompton Lee. ‘It was part of that lump sum I took from my pension, so I wasn’t concerned about people looking into my financials after I was gone.
Everyone
takes that lump sum when they retire. I mean, it’s tax-free, why wouldn’t you? Plus we were doing that kitchen extension, so that was a good disguise for shifting bigger chunks of money around.’

‘But it was still light when you left that day?’

‘Yes.’

‘So how did Ellie fail to spot you on the moors?’

‘Because I wasn’t
on
the moors.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I was in the boot of our car.’

It seemed such an obvious ploy now, and yet at the time Ellie would never have thought to check. Why would she? They loved their house. They loved their retirement. As far as she was concerned, they loved each other. Why would her husband
ever
choose to pull a stunt like that? Parked at the side of the house, the car’s obvious use was as a means to get away – not something to hide out in. Except this wasn’t the retirement she expected.

This wasn’t the husband she knew.

‘And you waited until it got dark?’

He nodded, and this time there was a moment of sorrow in his eyes as they drifted out to Craw, hanging on her. I recalled the video of Casey Bullock he’d had on his mobile phone too. He loved them all in different ways; just not ways he could express.

‘I waited three hours, until it was pitch black.’ He stopped, seemed to waver. ‘And then I got out of the car – and I left for good.’

80

That was the last conversation I ever had with Leonard Franks. Shortly after, we crossed the causeway, back to shore. We chose a secluded cove as our destination, further down from Parl Rock and out of sight of people watching us from the coast. Craw sat at the back, saying nothing. She’d yet even to speak to her father, and he’d yet to attempt to engage her. As Franks guided the boat he’d kept hidden at the fence, back across the blue-grey water, I saw a slow change in his expression, as if a realization had taken hold.

He’d lost everything.

His wife. His daughter.

The woman he’d loved.

The son he’d hardly known.

And now, with Reynolds gone and the video in his possession, it was about to get even worse than that. Because leaving the island wasn’t the end of the journey for Franks.