Fall From Grace (42 page)

My lock picks.

‘That would be great,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

I told her what I needed and then left her, making a beeline for the saloon doors. On the other side, I waited for them to settle back into place, got out my phone, then put in the number for the general store. When I looked out over the doors, I could see the woman was already at a refrigerator.

‘What size milk do you want?’ she asked, without looking at me.

‘Just a couple of pints – thanks.’

I took in the boxes. They were standard-sized, all red, numbered 1 through to 110, and were built across three walls.

Box 108 was on the bottom row, right-hand side.

Returning to my phone, I called the number for the general store and placed the mobile back into my pocket. Somewhere beyond the cove I heard a ringing, then footsteps. They weren’t the woman’s, they were her husband’s. As I dropped to my haunches at the lock, I heard him say hello. By the time he was saying hello a second time, I had the tension wrench in and was using the pick to apply pressure to the pins.

The man put the phone down.

In my pocket: the soft sound of a dialling tone.

‘Brown or white?’ the woman called over.

‘Brown,’ I said, adjusting the tension wrench slightly and feeling the pins settle against the pick. I looked through the slats on the saloon door and could see her at the wicker baskets now, choosing the three apples I’d asked for. Returning my attention to the box, I tried to work faster, but any excessive movement and everything reset – and then I’d have to start all over again.

Suddenly, beyond the walls of the cove, there were more footsteps and the sound of a sliding door. The husband was in the shop now too.

Steadying my hand, I closed my eyes for a second, trying to focus on what I was feeling rather than seeing. As I slowly drew the pick back out, I heard the two of them talking – the woman explaining to her husband what she was doing and where I was – and, when I opened my eyes, I could see the husband looking my way, head tilted, frown on his face. She’d repeated what I’d told her: that he’d help me set up the box.

Except he couldn’t remember me.

Because it was all a lie.

He came out from behind the counter – and started to come towards me.

Damn it
.

Suppressing the urge to withdraw the pick, I steadied my nerves and wriggled the wrench again. Tiny, fractional movements, but enough so that I could feel the pins dab against the pick, and the lock turn gently from left to right.

Come on
.

The husband was six feet away.

Come on, come on
.

The dialling tone in my pocket had turned into the constant whine of a terminated phone call. I checked through the slats.

Four feet away.

One pin left.

Slowly drawing the pick towards me, I saw the husband’s feet come into view beneath the bottom of the saloon doors. Then the top of his head.

I’m not going to make it in time
.

Shit, shit, shi
–

The door of the box popped away from its frame.

Immediately dropping the pick and wrench into my opposite pocket, I opened the box and looked up over the saloon doors.

The husband’s head emerged fully above it.

He smiled politely. ‘Hi. How are you?’

I tried to look nonplussed, my hand snaking into my jacket and killing the sound of the phone. ‘I’m good, thanks. Nice to see you again.’

He nodded, still smiling politely at me.

He didn’t remember me, but he tried to pretend he did. With my hand still in my pocket, I pressed Dial, knowing it would call the last number.

Their telephone started ringing a second time.

The husband looked towards the counter and back to me, rolling his eyes. ‘Sorry. I won’t be a minute.’

I told him that was fine and then watched him go. Once he was far enough away, I turned my attention back to the box.

Inside was a foot-long mini-holdall.

The phone stopped ringing elsewhere in the shop as the husband answered. I heard his voice beyond the walls of the cove and an echo of it through my mobile. When he got no response, he asked who it was, annoyed, frustrated.

I dragged the bag out and slung it over my shoulder.

It was time to go.

64

At the car, I dumped the holdall and the shopping bag on to the passenger seat, then followed the signs out of the village, towards Parl Rock. It was a claw of land that reached out into the channel like a finger pointing across the causeway. A narrow road took me halfway down, where a car park had been created inside a natural ring of slate and knotted quartz.

Turning off the lights, I sat in the dark for a moment, wondering what I was about to find. And then I clamped the torch between my teeth and unzipped the holdall.

It was full of money.

For a moment I just sat there, looking into the holdall, slightly dazed, my mind spinning. But then I reached in and pulled some out.

It was segregated into three-hundred-pound bundles, secured with paperclips. As I started counting through them, I found twenty separate bundles.
Six thousand pounds
.

Beneath the money was something else.

A mobile phone.

I took it out and powered it on. It was a three-year-old Nokia – no touchscreen, just a selection wheel. At first I thought it had been restored to factory settings, or maybe never even used. There was nothing in the address book, no texts, no calls, no web history. But then I started looking through the photos and videos.

It wasn’t empty.

There was a single two-minute film.

I selected it and pushed Play.

At first it was hard to tell what was going on. The camera was struggling to focus in a poorly lit room, as fuzzy black-and-white shapes merged with one another, and then separated again. I looked at the timer on the video.

Fifteen seconds had already passed.

But then, a moment later, the picture snapped into focus.

The camera wasn’t amazing, but it was good enough, and it became clear what everything was: the fuzzy black was the edges of the dark room it had been filmed in; the white, blurry shape it had been merging with was a television.

The person recording the video moved closer to the TV, the camera snapping in, out and back in again to focus on it, and this time there was a much clearer sense of what was being filmed: a TV show set in a pub. It was packed: people lined up at the bar, trying to order drinks; the tables – further back – were all occupied; and a small dancefloor off to the right was filled. The camera-phone video had sound, because I could hear the rustle of clothes, and the hum of electrical equipment, but there was no sound coming from the TV show.

It was on mute.

Suddenly, there was a clumsy fast-zoom in towards the left side of the screen, and for the first time I caught a glimpse of the phone’s operator, frozen there in the black edges of the television.

It was Leonard Franks.

I’ve found you
.

He was holding the phone out in front of him, his face claimed mostly by shadow, the room behind him indistinguishable and inexact. I heard him sniff once, then he moved away again, his reflection dissolving into the gloom.

Onscreen, the camera remained zoomed in on an actor at the bar, one elbow on the counter, one holding a beer bottle. He was talking to someone. Franks edged the zoom out again, more carefully this time, and there was an actress there too.

And then I realized something.

It’s not a TV show
.

It was security camera footage.

It was Pamela Welland and Paul Viljoen.

Franks adjusted his position and suddenly it became clearer. The scene was exactly as Murray had described: Viljoen, all muscle and brawn, trying to impress; Pamela Welland, blonde, petite, polite but disinterested. Franks’s hand steadied, showing the two of them interacting, Viljoen trying his luck again after a knock-back, getting closer, his fingers flat to the bar, almost brushing against her arm. She smiled at something he said this time, and he smiled back. She looked at her watch. He asked her something else and she leaned in towards his ear – the first time she’d been that close.

But then it started to break up.

Slowly, the quality of the footage on the TV began to deteriorate. Interference sparked on the screen, disrupting the clarity of the picture. Franks tried to move in closer, but it made no difference. As Viljoen closed the gap again, between himself and Welland, a series of scanlines broke, moving bottom to top, and I realized Franks must have been filming this from an old VHS tape.

So how old is this camera-phone footage?

I paused the film and went to the video’s data: Franks had shot the footage on 1 March 2013. Two days before his disappearance.

And yet the tape he was filming was much, much older.

I realized what that meant: he’d called Paige and Murray, not because he wanted a copy of the footage, but because he wanted a
better quality
copy of it. Better than the one he had here. But why? What was he seeing in these moments between Welland and Viljoen? What had made him rewatch it so many times his original copy – his VHS copy – had become so badly damaged? Why had he gone back and filmed it forty-eight hours before he vanished?

I returned to the camera-phone video Franks had shot and picked up where I’d left off, more scanlines pulling at the images of victim and killer.

There was thirty seconds left.

And that was when everything changed.

65

Franks moved even closer. He was right next to the television now – maybe two or three feet away – but his attention had drifted from Welland and Viljoen. They were on the far left of the shot. Instead he’d focused in on the edge of the dancefloor area to the right, where four men and five women were gathered around a table. It looked like they’d come straight from work: the men were in suits, the women in skirts and blouses, in dresses, in trousers and jackets. The scanlines were even worse, the picture on the TV jumping, stuttering, the colours fading and retuning. The tape had been played over and over – but why?

A second later, I got my answer.

One of the women left the table, her back originally to the CCTV camera, and headed towards the bar. She was in a grey patterned knee-length dress and black heels.

I recognized her immediately.

It was Casey Bullock.

Franks didn’t want the footage for Pamela Welland.

He never had.

He’d wanted it for Bullock
.

On her face was a residual smile, left over from whatever had been the subject of conversation at the table. The tape floundered again, the picture descending into a mess of static and scanlines.

Against the silence of the camera-phone footage, I watched Franks move again, his finger brushing the microphone on the Nokia. Then, on the TV, he paused the footage.

Suddenly, Bullock was freeze-framed.

The timing of the pause was perfect, as if Franks knew exactly when to do it: two scanlines framed Bullock’s face and shoulders, top and bottom, as she passed Welland and Viljoen at the bar. Above all three of them was a sign for the toilets. She was heading that way, but as she’d passed them – even with the deteriorating quality of the footage – I could see her attention had shifted towards them. Viljoen, partially hidden behind a scanline, had his hand on Welland’s upper arm now; Welland’s eyes were on his hand.

Bullock’s eyes were on them.

We had a couple of eyewitnesses, including one in the bar that night, and they said they saw Pamela talking to a guy in his early twenties
, Murray had told me when I’d met her and Paige in the hotel.
The witness in the bar said the guy was obviously trying to crack on to Pamela, but she didn’t seem to be playing along
. At this moment, the way Welland’s eyes were on Viljoen’s hand, it looked like she wasn’t happy about it. And this moment was what Casey Bullock had described to police afterwards.

She was the eyewitness in the bar.

As the phone lingered on a close-up of her, paused mid-stride halfway across the pub, there was a noise in the mobile’s microphone: a soft sound, like a gentle creaking.

A door moving in a breeze.

Or a chair being eased into.

Then the camera-phone video ended, plunging the car back into darkness. I sat there trying to take in what I’d just seen.

The money.

The footage of Casey Bullock.

Part of me was desperate to call Murray again, to find out what she remembered about Casey Bullock, about why Franks was interested in her – and why Bullock had become so scared of him. But then I remembered something John Garrick had told me.

Casey said the police were all in on it
.

I didn’t know if that meant Murray.

Instead, I switched on my phone, went to the browser and searched for Pamela Welland’s murder for the second time. I spent ten minutes reading the true crime websites, clicking on JPEGs of front pages from the time, and accounts of the murder. I’d been through the same pages four days earlier, when Paige and Murray had first mentioned the case to me, and just like before, there wasn’t much to go on. The case almost pre-dated the Internet. But when I’d looked at it the first time, I’d never seen the truth lying there between the lines: the name of Bullock never came up, at any point, even during court coverage.

Because she’d been deliberately kept out of it
.

Franks must have struck some sort of legal deal where her identity couldn’t be reported outside the courtroom. But it wouldn’t have stretched to police files at the time – or after. Which is why, fifteen years later, when Simon Preston was murdered, Franks stepped in and worked the case himself. Deep down I’d always known it, but now I knew it for sure: him taking on the drug murder never had anything to do with a lack of resources – it was because he knew, eventually, the death of Preston would lead investigators back to Bullock. So he cut the case off at the knees, and blocked the trail to Casey Bullock a second time.