Fall From Grace (31 page)

Part Three

42

The tidal island was six miles from where I’d grown up in south Devon, and about two miles west of Start Point lighthouse. Between them was a gentle, V-shaped bay, gouged out of coastline at the tip of the county, and surrounded by blue water and jagged rock. Before the construction of the lighthouse, the whole area had been a graveyard for ships.

But that wasn’t what made the island famous.

Once a monastery, and then a small fishing village, in the early 1850s the tidal island, and what remained of the buildings that existed on it, were razed.

In its place, a psychiatric hospital was built.

When it first opened its doors, institutional psychiatry didn’t even exist as an idea, so locals just called it the asylum, even though its actual name was Keel Point, after the region in which it had been built. But in 1897, a minister from Salcombe called Balthazar Rowe was put in charge, in an effort to bring an overcrowded, dangerous and fractious patient population into line with some old-fashioned fire and brimstone. Inevitably it failed: five years later, Rowe was killed by what modern doctors would probably call a schizophrenic – but not before he’d renamed Keel Point ‘Bethlehem’.

The name stuck.

As the building was six hundred yards across and a quarter of a mile from the mainland, the original thinking was that it would be easy to contain patients and prevent escape when the tide was in. But to ensure the place remained secure, even when the tide was out and the causeway between the mainland and island could be crossed – albeit with difficulty – on foot, a three-metre fence had been erected around the circumference of the island. I’d read about Bethlehem many times, seen articles about it in the local press, subconsciously absorbed its unique layout – the ‘stick man’ and the triangle – over and over again, without even realizing it. I would pass it in the back seat of my parents’ car when we took the coastal road, the glass panels of the greenhouse winking in the sun as they funnelled to a point at the south of the island. But I’d only ever been close to it once: my parents had taken me to Keel Point beach at eight years old, and I’d looked out to where it was perched on the undulating grass like the broken claws of a bird, and thought it was a prison camp.

It’s bad, sweetheart
.

It’s somewhere very bad
.

The catalyst for Mum’s warning had, most likely, come four years before, when a patient called William Silas ran amok in the place. Silas had murdered three men in a bedsit in Bristol in 1974, and stored their bodies in an outhouse at the bottom of his garden. Over the course of the next three weeks, he repeatedly returned to where he’d left them, cutting pieces from their bodies and cooking them. He’d eaten two of the men before neighbours started to become suspicious about his journeys to the outhouse in the middle of the night. Silas was told he would never be released, and sent to Keel Point.

On the ferry trip across to the island, he managed to break his thumb and two of his fingers, and slip one of his handcuffs. Once he was off the bus, he made a break for it, taking a guard hostage, killing another, then murdering four kitchen staff once he found a secure space to hole up. When armed response units finally got to him, he was sitting in the middle of the kitchen in a pool of blood, carving chunks off the people he’d killed.

After that, there were always stories about Bethlehem.

Locals would talk for years after about how blood from Silas’s victims washed up on the shore that day, but while that seemed unlikely – even if my mum believed it – there were other stories that were harder to dispel: the accounts from people who lived nearby who said, on a still night, you could hear screams carry across the water; the way that, when the sun set in the summer, it looked like the walls of the hospital were bleeding; or how the three banks of windows on its eastern wall – built so patients could look out to the channel – darkened like the eyes of the dead when the sun went down.

But then, in November 2011, all of it was consigned to history.

Unable to afford the running costs, criticized for security measures that didn’t come up to modern standards, and under pressure from locals who hated having it so close, Bethlehem closed its doors. Since then, there had been talk about tearing it down – countless, endless discussions about it – and yet still it remained: a ghostly, decaying memory on a slab of land a quarter of a mile out to sea.

43

As the sun came up four hours later, bleeding across a cloud-streaked sky, I arrived at the beach I’d been on thirty-five years ago. The drive down from London had been quick, the motorway empty, concrete giving way to fields, then fields giving way to coastline.

The snow had all but gone from this part of the country, pulped by the rain, but it was colder than ever. I got out of the car and wandered down to the edges of the sea, to where I’d stood with my mum what felt like a lifetime ago. Additional eight-foot walls had been erected around the circumference of the island now, obscuring most of the hospital. But not everything could be disguised: as the day broke beyond Bethlehem’s lonely spire, I could see graffiti on the perimeter, some on the actual building itself too. Smashed windows. Crumbling masonry. Holes in the roof. It was the kind of slow decomposition only a building could go through: solitary, silent, arrested.

People were already out walking dogs, or running across the sand, earphones in, breath forming above their heads. As I watched them, I thought again about the pictures of Bethlehem that Reynolds had been keeping. I thought about the reasons he might have them. I thought about Preston’s former girlfriend, about who she might be, and whether she might be relevant. And I thought about the sketches of the hospital layout that Franks had made, some time between 1995 and 2004. The question was why he’d drawn it.

And whether the answers might lie across the water.

Even if they did, they would have to wait for now. With the sun up, crossing the causeway on foot was going to be too much of a risk. I needed to travel at low tide and under cover of darkness and that meant either four-fifty tonight, or five-twenty in the morning. The issue with tonight was that, despite the winter gloom, people would still be around, walking dogs on the beach, coming home from work. At five-twenty tomorrow morning, it would be quieter, but the risk remained the same: if I was even
slightly
longer than an hour out there, there was the potential to get caught on the island. An hour either side of low tide, the water level could rise by as much as a foot – and the higher it got, the choppier it got, and the more difficult it became to navigate without a boat.

Rowing across gave me more options and would allow me to leave at any time I wanted. But for that I needed a decent boat, and there was nowhere to hire them on this part of the coast. The best I could lay my hands on at such short notice was a dinghy at my parents’ old cottage, and I seriously doubted it would be able to cope with the rigours of anything other than low tide. Plus, if I bought a bigger boat, I had to transport it, and then I had to find a way of securing it out of sight once I got across to the island.

That, in truth, was the real issue: not getting over there, but remaining unseen during daylight hours. If I got caught going out to the hospital – or coming back – by a passing boat, or people on the beach spotted me and reported me, I risked derailing the entire case. At best, I’d return to the loving arms of the local police force and get a ticking off. At worst, I’d be dragged into an interview room and charged with trespassing.

I also felt like I needed a clearer sight of where Bethlehem fitted into Franks’s life. It closed in 2011 – the year Leonard and Ellie retired to Devon – and Ellie had said Franks never came down to Devon, separately from her, in the years before they moved. It seemed likely she would have noticed if he had. And yet a conversation I’d had with her stuck with me. She’d said that, after they moved down, they liked to go hiking together.

Did he ever go hiking by himself, without you?

Very rarely
, she’d replied.

But it happened sometimes?

Yes. Sometimes. Sometimes he just liked to be alone out there
.

What if, when he went out alone, he wasn’t going hiking on the moors? What if he was heading to the coast? What if he was journeying across the channel? From the pictures in Reynolds’s flat, it was clear
he
thought there might be answers in the hospital, but what could possibly have been so important to Franks that he’d risk rowing across the causeway to a closed hospital complex? Whatever the answer, if Neil Reynolds had taken those photographs himself, it meant he had
also
been inside the hospital at some point since its closure. But nine months after Franks disappeared, he remained missing, which seemed to suggest Reynolds had found nothing, otherwise Franks wouldn’t still be in the wind.

Yet I wanted to make the crossing myself.

One of the two photos Reynolds had in his possession had been of the entrance to the room with the metal stand in it. Why photograph that entrance? Why that room? The hospital was a spectre, forgotten and empty – but Reynolds had gone anyway, and he’d chosen to take that shot.

He hadn’t found Franks.

But maybe he’d found something else.

44

An hour later, at just gone nine, I finally reached Dartmoor. Winter had robbed it of its colour, reducing its bracken to a scorched brown, its trees to corpses, its views to a fine grey mist. As I came in on the B3212, caught in a conga-line of cars, I could see snow in the craggy folds of the hills – but mostly it was wet, drizzle dotting the windscreen, obscuring the road ahead, slowing my progress even more into the heart of the park.

My thoughts shifted to Craw.

For the moment I decided against calling her, not until I had a clearer sight of how things fitted together: Preston, the woman he’d been living with, Bethlehem, Welland. But, even without calling her, I could guess how these latest revelations might feel: like her life was coming off the rails. The man she’d modelled herself on – her beliefs, her career, her family life – had spun a succession of lies to keep anyone from finding out who Simon Preston was – and, in doing so, he’d cheated the same system he demanded others uphold so aggressively. Given all that I’d learned about him, Franks was certain to have done it for what he thought to be the right reasons – but that didn’t change his actions.

Or the damage it might do to his daughter.

At nine-thirty, I finally reached Postbridge. It was still and silent, seemingly in hibernation, little sign of life except for the gentle, almost serene ascent of smoke from chimneys. There were six, maybe seven buildings visible from the road, and by the time I’d passed the last of them I’d left the village and could see a wooden sign ahead marked ‘Franks’.

I pulled off on to a mud track awash in water and grey slush. It rose sharply across the face of the moors, the house not yet visible from the bottom. On my left, I followed the treeline I’d seen in the video Craw had shot, a procession of old, gnarled trunks, their leaves long since gone. Halfway up, an A-frame rooftop emerged above the brow of the hill, and then the track started to veer right. As it did, more of the house came into view, perched like a bird in a nest, fields rolling off either side, the moor continuing its flight upward, beyond the boundaries of the property to where a tor – a third of a mile further up – was marked by a collection of huge boulders. Everything was just like it had been in the video, except film had failed to fully grasp how removed this place was: a tiny house set among endless fields, under the shadow of a tor, below perpetual sky.

I parked up and got out.

Standing in the drizzle at the front of the house, I knew answers were unlikely to be here, even though it was the scene of the crime. It was the reason I hadn’t already been down, why I’d relied on Craw’s video: if Franks had left of his own accord, I felt certain he would have covered his tracks; if he’d left because Reynolds had come for him, it was even less likely mistakes would have been made, let alone missed by Craw. Reynolds had been flying below the radar for a long time, and even when questions were raised about him – as they had been constantly, from the moment he came under Franks’s command – there was never enough to pin on him. He was slippery. But, worse, he was clever.

That was what made him frightening.

I did a circuit of the house.

The woodshed looked even less sturdy in the flesh, a lean-to with warped, misshapen support beams and a corrugated-iron roof that had rusted in the middle. Chunks of wood remained inside, but the nine months since Franks’s disappearance had seen them gradually succumb to moss.

I continued around to the back of the woodshed, where I found the tree stump I’d seen in the film. The axe that had been embedded in it was long gone.

A few feet further on was the toolshed.

Its door was padlocked. I opened it up with the keys Craw had given me, and looked inside. It smelled of old wood and oil, and Franks’s tools had all been removed, except for a shovel, a brush and a rusting lawnmower. No hammers. No screwdrivers. No chisels. I went through pots of nails, wall plugs and curtain hooks, and found nothing.

There was a small porch at the back, leading into the kitchen. Through the glass I could see glimpses of the Frankses’ half-finished renovation. In the parts that had been fully fitted, drawers were empty and shelves were bare. As I rejoined the front side of the house at the end of the veranda, I looked up to the tor, two hundred feet higher than me. The boulders that had marked out its peak had now been consumed by mist.

Inside, I walked the rooms, opened the cupboards and the wardrobes, and found nothing. Franks’s old PC was still in the study, but the electrics had long since been switched off. Craw had told me that would be the case, so I’d brought an extension cable and an adaptor. Setting the engine of my car running, I slotted the plug adaptor into the cigarette lighter, and the extension cable to the plug, then ran the cable all the way through the house to the study. But Craw had warned me about the PC too and after ten minutes all I found were duplicates of the pictures Franks had uploaded to his iPad.