Fall From Grace (49 page)

Franks seemed to slouch. ‘Cordus barely looked at Penn. He saw anomalies, things I hadn’t done to the body that had been done at other drug murders on that estate. So I had to step in. I told him that we were stretched, that I needed him on bigger cases – and I took it on. I worked his angles long enough to make it look convincing, but not deep enough to go anywhere. I brought Penn in and used him as a patsy – and I closed off any avenue to those potheads in the flat opposite who heard Preston call himself Simon.’

‘And?’ Reynolds said.

‘And Casey remained off the radar.’

‘No, not that.’

Franks stared at him for a long time, defiance in his face. But then his eyes flicked to the gun pressed against his daughter’s head, and he seemed to remember that he didn’t hold the cards here. Quietly, he said, ‘After I retired, I ended up talking to Carla Murray on the phone one day. I can’t even remember why she called. But we were just chatting when she mentioned that Cordus had decided to take another look at the case –’

‘What case?’ Reynolds snapped.

‘The Simon Preston case.’ Franks turned to me, as if he couldn’t bear to look at Craw – but especially at Reynolds. ‘ “Cordus thought he’d take another shot at solving it,” she said to me. I just
froze
. By that time, Casey was okay, living above this old woman who used to watch quiz shows all day. I had … I hadn’t
forgotten
her, but we’d both … Anyway, Ellie and I had retired, we were in a lovely part of the world. We were happy.’

‘It was a lie,’ Craw said.

He looked at her. ‘It wasn’t a lie. I
was
happ –’

‘Get to the fucking point,’ Reynolds interrupted.

Franks leaned forward into a shaft of sunlight pouring through one of the glass panels above his head. ‘There were all sorts of rumours about Reynolds being dirty.’

I glanced at Reynolds. His eyes were fixed on Franks.

‘When I retired, Jim Paige took over the running of the command, and when Carla called me, and mentioned the Preston case being looked at again, I got on the phone to Jim and said, “You need to take a closer look at Neil Reynolds’s involvement with this.” It was the only way I could think to deflect attention away from me, and I knew Jim would be responsive to it. I’d complained about Reynolds to him. I’d had Reynolds in a meeting room six, seven months before then, and told him I knew he was dirty.’ His eyes turned to Reynolds, a flash of aggression in them. ‘You
were
in with Kemar Penn, we all know that. You were in with him all over the city. I was doing the Met a favour.’

Reynolds smiled. ‘So you lied?’

‘It wasn’t a lie. You were guilty.’

‘I wasn’t the one that killed Simon Preston.’

‘But you’ve killed others.’

‘Did you ever find any evidence that I was involved in anything?’

Franks said nothing.

‘For the camera, Leonard.’

‘No.’

‘No what?’

‘No, I never found any evidence you –’

‘Neil Reynolds,’ Reynolds said.

Franks took a long breath. ‘I never found any evidence that Neil Reynolds was involved in anything untoward.’

‘So why did Paige fire you?’ I said to Reynolds.

He looked at me, as if he saw my question as some kind of trap. ‘He didn’t. I walked. Paige was never going to give me a chance, not after Leonard had finished bending his ear. Paige was in my shit from day one. It was only a matter of time …’

‘Before someone found out you were dirty.’

He didn’t reply to me. Instead he reached over and pushed the Pause button on top of the camera. It made a whirr as it stopped recording.

‘And the file?’ I said to Reynolds.

He looked at me.

A blank.

‘The file that got sent to Franks at his house, the file that started all this – you sent it to him to draw him out, right?’

Again, he gave me nothing.

But it was the only thing that made sense.

‘You were familiar with Preston,’ I went on, ‘because you’d been asked to scope him out by Kemar Penn; as a rival to Penn. But then you
really
started digging into who he was and you hit the jackpot. You found Casey Bullock. And then you found Franks.’

I stopped again, giving myself a moment to catch up, and remembered something Murray had told me:
There was never any talk of Reynolds being dirty in Trident, back when he was working gangs; not really any talk of him being dirty in Sapphire either. I mean, there was a lot of smoke, but no fire. Once he was put on a Murder Investigation Team, though, things changed
.

Instantly, it aligned. ‘It was Franks who started the rumours about you, to deflect attention away from him. He was the one who ruined your reputation at the Met.
Franks
was the reason cops started looking at your cases in a different light.’

He blinked. ‘Now you know.’

And as I saw that, I remembered the conversation I’d had with Healy when I’d called to ask him what he knew about Reynolds.
When Franks retired
, Healy had said to me,
the drug murder was a dead case. Yet, a few weeks later, Jim Paige finds Reynolds with his nose in Franks’s casework. Why would he be doing that?

Because Reynolds suspected the man Leonard Franks claimed to be – his principles, his integrity, his honour – was a lie. He wasn’t looking for evidence of himself in the case – he was looking for something he could use.

A secret. A cover-up.

He was looking for revenge.

And that was what he found.

‘You’re clever, David. I could have killed you a long time ago. But I needed a fresh pair of eyes.’ Reynolds began removing the camera from its tripod. ‘I’d had a trace on Bullock’s phone for a long time, but she lay low for the first three months after she managed to lose me that day at the beach. Hardly used her mobile at all. Every so often, I’d manage to triangulate her signal to a youth hostel or some shitty motel, but by the time I got there, she’d moved on. She didn’t know I was tracking her, but she knew not to stay still, and while she never got in touch with Leonard on any of the numbers I had for him, I knew they were in contact. I knew he was advising her. And then, the following January, she disappeared for good. That was when he set her up in that place I finally found her in.’

He stopped, glancing at Franks, a snide twist to his face. ‘But just before she went into hiding, she made a call to a phone whose signal originated from
inside
this hospital. She’d only made one other call to that number – and that was in the hours after she gave me the slip at the beach. I knew, even then, that the number probably belonged to Leonard, and it seemed pretty obvious in the days after she went into hiding that, during that second call, Leonard and Casey were nailing down the finer details of her disappearing act. What I could never figure out at the time was why – during that second call – his phone signal was coming from inside a hospital that had been closed for two months.’

‘The signal came from the chapel,’ I said.

He nodded.

Except, when he’d come across, he hadn’t found any evidence of Franks in the chapel. Because the signal hadn’t come from the chapel.

It had come from the storage room next door to it.

With that, something else slotted into place. What seemed like an age ago, I’d asked Ellie if Franks ever went out hiking by himself.
Sometimes he just liked to be alone out there
, she’d said. I’d wondered if he’d gone hiking at all, whether his journey might have been in the opposite direction, to the coast. Now I knew I was right: he’d been using the chapel as a place to hold his memories long before Reynolds had sent him the file. He kept returning here after the hospital closed, to build his mausoleum – a place no one would find – and he was here, at the altar of his son’s life, the day Casey called him to finalize her new life in hiding. She didn’t know she was being traced, perhaps thought a second quick call to Franks wouldn’t matter now he’d organized a safe house for her, but it helped Reynolds make the connection to the hospital; to a building Franks was returning to, on and off, for months before he finally ran.

And then a building that became his permanent home when he did.

‘Casey managed to hide for ten months at that house,’ Reynolds said. His voice snapped me back into the moment, and I could see he was now clutching the videocamera. ‘She managed to hide until her loneliness came back to haunt her last October. And then I went to visit her, and this time …’ He glanced at Franks. ‘This time I made sure.’

‘You fucking bastard,’ Franks said. ‘Where did you bury her?’

A snort of derision. ‘You just don’t get it, do you? This bullshit reputation you built yourself at the Met; all the doe-eyed pricks in that place who worshipped the ground you walked on – and
this
is the truth.
You
lied,
you
killed.
This
is who you are. Now I’m going to make sure the world gets to see it.’

‘The world?’ I asked.

He held up the camera before returning it to his backpack. ‘Any media outlet that wants it. And I’m pretty sure there’ll be plenty.’

I shook my head. ‘No one’s going to trust you as a source, Reynolds.’

‘What?
It’s all on
tape
. Once I’ve edited it down and created a little back story for how I got hold of it, people will be convinced. After all, I
am
a former police officer.’

‘And all of us?’

‘Well, I’ll keep Leonard alive, because I want to see him playing hunt the soap in Pentonville. I want to watch his downfall.’

Franks looked at him. ‘You’re insane.’

‘Why am I insane?’

‘You think I won’t tell everyone what you’ve done?’

‘Who’s going to believe you? You’re confessing to getting a witness pregnant in one of the media’s
favourite
murder cases. This is Pamela Welland we’re talking about, not some two-bit pro spreading her legs for drug money. You compromised her case by fucking around with Casey Bullock, and now you’ve just told the world –
on tape
– you killed a man to prevent your lover’s identity from getting out. You think I haven’t spent
two years
preparing for this? Even if you tell them I’m involved, no one will find anything. They’ll come and ask me questions, and find nothing. You’re done.’

Franks seemed to shrink then.

Reynolds reacted with a flicker of a smile, then zeroed in on Craw and me, looking between us. He walked across to her, peeling the duct tape off the side of the tripod and placing it over her lips again.

Franks started getting up out of his seat. ‘For the love of God, Reynolds – do anything you want to me, but she’s done
nothing
to you.’

But then Reynolds stopped, raising a finger to his lips.

We all looked at him.

Silence.

Softly, there was a sound from the other side of the doors.

77

The glass panels of the doors were perfect squares of black. There was nothing visible beyond them. Reynolds waited, watching, as if expecting the noise to come again. But it didn’t. He looked from me, to Franks, to Craw and back to the doors. Keeping the gun pointed at Franks, he retrieved his backpack and took out the duct tape, then tossed it over. Franks caught it.

‘Start tying your legs to the chair,’ Reynolds said. ‘Do it fast.’

Franks did as he was told.

Reynolds took the duct tape back from him, eyes still on the doors, and wrapped it around Franks’s chest, his arms locked in place at his sides. Then he checked the binds on me and on Craw, folded up the tripod, picked up Franks’s knife and zipped it all into the backpack. He glanced again at us – then moved swiftly across the greenhouse.

He paused.

Looked through the glass panels.

A beat.

Then he pulled one of the doors open and slipped through the gap, gun up in front of him, like the bow of a boat moving through the night. A second later, the door fell back into place and he was gone.

I looked at Franks.

He was watching me, as if expecting me to say something, to add to the chorus of judgement. Across from him, Craw was just staring into space. She was worn, betrayed, incapable of even looking at her father any more.

‘I disappeared to protect my
family
,’ he said, but the words sounded impossibly hollow, even to him, and they drifted off into the sunlight, vanishing instantly.

A silence settled around us.

Drawn out, painful, like a period of mourning.

I looked towards the doors. The whole building seemed to have become still. No wind passing through the place. No birdsong.

A minute passed.

Two.

Craw’s watch made a gentle beep and I realized it was eight o’clock
on Tuesday 17 December
. I’d started working the case the previous Thursday. Now, five days later, everything had changed: the course of the investigation, a family’s life, their entire future.

I looked towards the door. Still no sign of Reynolds.

Do something
.

Slowly, I started shifting my chair forward, across the space between Craw and me. There were pieces of glass scattered across a patch of ground to her right.

Franks shot me a look. ‘What the hell are you doing?’

I ignored him, concentrating on keeping noise to a minimum. Craw was watching me now too. I paused close to her, scanning the ground for the biggest piece I could find.

‘He’ll kill you both if he finds you like that,’ Franks whispered.

‘He’ll kill us either way.’

Rocking my chair from side to side, until the legs began rhythmically leaving the ground, I felt the back of the chair bend slightly – and then it toppled over. I was ready for the impact, but it still hurt like hell: the ground was hard, full of jagged glass and uneven concrete, and although I managed to keep my head away from the floor, my shoulder bore the brunt. Pain lashed across my chest, reigniting memories of old injuries, of hitting a grass bank in my BMW, of knocking myself out, of accusing Craw of being in on this. I glanced at her as I lay there on my side, guilt blooming in my stomach, but although her gaze was on me, her mind wasn’t. She was somewhere else.