Fall From Grace (10 page)

‘It was you who asked him?’

She looked thrown by the comment. ‘I’m not sure I …’

‘You asked him, rather than him deciding to go himself?’

She understood where I was headed now. Was there no intention on Franks’s part to head outside until she asked? Or did he instigate the decision himself?

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘You asked him?’

‘Yes,’ she repeated. ‘I asked him to go outside.’ The rest of it went unspoken but was basically painted in her face:
I made him go outside – and he never came back
.

‘So he went to the woodshed …’

She looked up, rocking a little now, like a boxer on the ropes. Then she took a breath and nodded. ‘Right. I guess it could have been a touch later than five o’clock, but it was definitely well before six, because the sun hadn’t set, and at that time of the year, up there on the moors, the sun goes down between about ten to and quarter past.’

‘Do you remember if he said anything to you before he went outside?’

‘He complained – tongue in cheek; it was a bit of a running joke – about having to go out into the cold, but I told him I’d put the kettle on and cut him a nice slice of cake as a reward.’ A pause. She sniffed gently. ‘So he got up and headed outside, and I went through to the kitchen, put the kettle on and grabbed a carrot cake out of the fridge. We’d bought it that morning at a bakery in Widecombe. Len loves his carrot cake.’

Something gave way in her face again. I pulled her back in: ‘And you reckon that took about five minutes?’

She nodded. ‘At least five. Again, it could have been a bit more. I remember I ended up getting distracted by a story I hadn’t got around to reading in the newspaper.’

‘And then what happened?’

‘I came back through and saw that he wasn’t back.’

‘How long did it normally take him?’

‘A minute. The woodshed was literally at the end of the veranda. All he had to do was go out, grab three or four logs and bring them back. He went outside in slippers.’

Craw hadn’t mentioned that.

If I was to run with the theory that he’d instigated his own disappearance, then the fact that he didn’t take his wallet or his phone made a certain kind of sense: the contents of his wallet – bank cards, driver’s licence – made him traceable, as did the technology on his mobile phone. But if you were planning on leaving, if you knew you were about to exit your life for good, would you really head out on to moorland, in the embers of winter, in your slippers?

It could have been another way of disguising his intentions, and there was nothing stopping him leaving a change of clothes somewhere close by. But something struck me: Ellie had been the one to ask
him
to leave the house, not the other way around. What if she’d never asked? Or what if the fire hadn’t gone out as fast that night? What if they’d already had enough logs stored inside the house?

He wouldn’t have gone out at all.

Either way, having watched the video Craw shot, I could picture the scene more clearly now: Ellie emerging from the kitchen and realizing he hadn’t returned; heading outside and calling his name.

‘I know this sounds like a weird question,’ I said to her, ‘but do you remember if, in the days after he disappeared, you noticed that any of his clothes were missing?’

‘Missing?’

‘Or maybe a backpack? You said you were both walkers, so I’m guessing you’d have a backpack of some description. Did you ever notice that disappearing before 3 March?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘No, I didn’t. I still have it.’

That didn’t necessarily discount the idea of him storing a bag somewhere: he could have just bought a new one. ‘So when he didn’t come back, you headed straight outside?’

‘Yes.’

‘And what did you find?’

‘Nothing. He wasn’t at the woodshed. I took a walk all the way around the house, as he has this rickety old toolshed at the back that he sometimes forgets to lock up at night. But when he wasn’t there, I came back inside. I figured I must have missed him.’

‘You said the sun hadn’t yet gone down by then?’

She was lucid enough to see where I was headed. ‘No. The day was overcast, so that made the last hour of the day quite gloomy, but I could see clearly in all directions.’

‘Down to the village and up to the tor?’

‘In all directions,’ she repeated, more forcefully. Again, I glimpsed Craw in her. She was sitting back on the sofa now, mug in her lap, the last cords of steam escaping past her face. ‘You can hear cars as soon as they get on the dirt road a mile away in Postbridge. On a clear day, you can see people approaching in whatever direction you’re facing. That Sunday was grey, but there was no fog. No mist. The policeman Melanie and I spoke to down in Newton Abbot – Sergeant Reed – asked me if it was possible I might have failed to spot Len, but there’s just no way: wherever he headed, I’d have seen him.’

I nodded, but the reality was that something had been missed. I’d have a clearer understanding once I’d been to the house and taken in the surrounding land, outside of the boundaries of Craw’s home-made movie. Just because Ellie Franks hadn’t seen her husband in the moments after he’d failed to come back from the woodshed didn’t mean he wasn’t there. In terrain like Dartmoor there were ravines, furrows, clefts, wrinkles, each a place to lay low, waiting for it to get dark.

There were countless places to hide.

Or countless places to be hidden.

12

After I’d thanked Ellie Franks for her time, Craw returned and led me along the corridor off the living room. There were two further doors, both open: one was a study, the other a plain white room that hadn’t been furnished with anything other than a desk and chair.

Sitting on the desk were two cardboard boxes.

As we passed the study, I glimpsed two sets of sofas in an L-shape, a glass coffee table, and a PC on a small desk in the corner. There was no chair under it, but there was a stack of books – too far away to make out – piled on top. I wondered if Craw’s husband worked from home – the set-up certainly made me curious as to what he did – but when I thought about bringing it up, a way to show an interest and further smooth our transition from adversary to ally, I knew she would hate it. She wasn’t a fan of small talk. It wasn’t just that she placed a high value on veracity, it was that she was, in her own way, quite awkward, incapable of feigning an interest in things that weren’t important to her. Her husband was likely to be very important to her. My interest in him wouldn’t be.

As we entered the room beyond the study, I thought again about Leonard Franks, about how Craw had described him the day before – and how she could have been describing herself. She had a resemblance to her mother as well, in all sorts of ways, but it was the traits she shared with her father that gave me a moment’s pause. Breaking down Craw was hard, and after thirty-five years of seeing everything human beings were capable of, I imagined Franks would have been even harder.
Dad was private
, she’d said to me.
He internalized everything
. In the end, that didn’t just make him less of a communicator.

It made him harder to find.

‘This is all Dad’s stuff,’ she said, placing a hand on top of one of the boxes. Both of them were big: two feet long by about a foot and a half high. ‘Obviously the furniture is still back at the house in Devon. Some clothes too. Other stuff as well: his tools are in the shed, his desktop PC in the lounge, nick-nacks, that kind of thing. But the rest is here.’

‘There was nothing on his desktop PC?’

‘It’s ancient. They used it to print off letters, and as a way to get photos off their camera. You can take a look when you head down there.’ The rest was implied:
if you don’t believe me
.

I flipped the lid on one of the boxes.

Inside it was like a car-boot sale: photographs, old diaries, some books, DVDs, an OS map of Dartmoor. Basically, an orderless cross-section of his life.

‘Have you been through this?’

She nodded. ‘Many times.’

I found more of the same in the second box, although there was an iPad this time – which Craw had mentioned in her notes – next to a framed photograph of Franks, in uniform, at another police ceremony. He looked much younger in this one, maybe late forties, and was standing on stage somewhere, shaking hands with a uniformed officer. On the other guy’s shoulder patch I could see his insignia: an assistant commissioner.

Next to the iPad was a mid-range SLR camera and shoebox on its side, an elastic band around it. I reached in and brought out the SLR first. As I started to scroll through the photos on its tiny digital screen – beginning with pictures of Ellie standing on their veranda – Craw said, ‘All the pictures on there are on the iPad if that makes it easier.’

‘All of them?’

‘Every single one. I’ve checked about fifty times. Of course, you’ll want to make sure, though.’ She phrased it vaguely like an insult, but I let it go, placing the camera back inside, and she gestured to the shoebox. ‘All his notebooks are in there. Before iPads and smartphones came along, Dad was a paper man – he wrote
everything
down.’

‘That’s good for me.’

‘The iPad’s his, but they both used it. Mum took a lot of video on it, so she could show me what they’d been up to when I went down to see them. I guess we both kind of forced him into buying it after he retired because they were down there in the middle of nowhere, and Mum worried that he’d go a bit stir-crazy after spending his life in the city.’ She pointed at the SLR. ‘But the truth was, he was fine. He really got into his photography, followed his sport, planned out hikes, kept in touch with friends.’

‘Friends like Carla Murray and Jim Paige?’

She studied me, as if she thought I was trying to play her. ‘I suppose.’

‘You don’t know either of them?’

‘I know Jim pretty well, Carla not so much.’

I plucked the iPad out of the box. Franks had synced his Gmail account to the Mail app, and although I’d already been through all the conversations he’d had with ex-colleagues in the police force, I could see more clearly now, after speaking to Ellie, why she’d described Paige and Murray as being her husband’s two closest friends at the Met.

In the email chain with Murray, there were one hundred and sixty-seven messages over the course of the two years Franks had been retired. In one, Murray even directly referenced the number of cases they’d worked together.
I reckon it was one hundred and thirty-nine
, she said. I could see the level of comfort they had in each other’s company, how they used the same unofficial shorthand (‘the hole’ was the commissioner’s office; the weekly stats they had to compile were ‘Dumbers’ instead of numbers), and while they both stuck to the same subjects – she: office politics, promotions, government budget cuts; he: renovations, Dartmoor, retirement – it gave a clear sense of their relationship.

The only thing that really caught my attention this time was the frequency of the emails in the five weeks before his disappearance. Before 27 January, they were in touch with each other at least once a week; sometimes second or third emails were only short replies to previous messages, but clearly both Franks and Murray felt compelled enough to reply. And yet, after 27 January, up until his disappearance on 3 March, emails dropped right off: one exchange in the first week; nothing in the second; an email from Murray that Franks didn’t reply to in the third week; another from Murray in the fourth week that Franks
did
reply to; and then nothing in that final week before he vanished. The tone of the emails hadn’t changed: they were still friendly, and they were both still talking about the same sort of things – so why the sudden drop-off in volume?

I wanted to speak to her, and wanted to speak to Jim Paige too. He and Franks had come up through the ranks together and been friends ever since. A friendship over that period of time forged bonds that couldn’t easily be broken, and sometimes led along roads you might not travel for anyone else. Their conversations were chummier than the ones with Murray, and less reverent: she still treated him with respect, even while they joked around, whereas Paige called him ‘Len’ and ‘General Franko’, and constantly had fun at his expense. Like those with Murray, though, Jim and Franks’s conversations had a real warmth to them. And as I moved through the emails with a fresh sense of the role Paige had played in Franks’s life before retirement, things began to crystallize further: other colleagues who had been at their pay scale, the social circles they’d moved in, their love of being out on the golf course, memorable tales from a Met skittles league they’d both played in. The emails contained fine detail too, like the name of their local pub, a place called the Hare and Badger, which they both spoke of fondly, and which Paige talked up for serving real ale. It was one of the only times the pair of them got sentimental. In a conversation from 2012, where Franks mentioned that he missed their ‘weekly chinwag at the Badger’, Paige said things weren’t the same since he’d gone.

‘I’d like to speak to them.’

‘Murray and Paige?’ Craw asked.

I nodded. ‘Murray says she worked one hundred and thirty-nine cases with your dad. That’s a lot of cases. One of those might have a connection to the file he was sent.’

‘That’s going to be hard.’

‘Why?’

‘Why do you think? As soon as I do the introductions, they’ll know I’ve hired you to find Dad. Jim’s an old family friend – but he’s also part of the Met top brass. One call to my super and I’m on disciplinary. I didn’t get into this to end up with the sack.’

‘You got into it to search for your dad.’

A flash of frustration in her face.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘I get what the risks are, but if you want to find out what happened to him, you’re going to have to help me out a bit.’

She paused, annoyed that I wasn’t backing down. Then her faced softened: she’d thought of something. ‘Actually, there might be a way.’ She stopped a second time, her mind turning over. ‘There’s a Met charity event tonight at a wine bar on Millbank. It’s mostly cops, but there are some Whitehall suits, journalists – you shouldn’t look too out of place. Unless, that is, you run into one of your many friends on the force.’