David Raker 05 - Fall From Grace Read online

  Suppressing a prickle of unease, I called Craw. She didn’t bother with small talk, and asked me about the Met charity event: ‘Did you get what you wanted from Paige?’

  ‘I’m not sure yet.’ I left it at that. ‘I’ve got a quick question: your dad received two separate phone calls from a public payphone just off the Old Kent Road.’

  ‘Yes, I remember.’

  ‘Did you look into them?’

  ‘Yes. There didn’t seem much point in bringing it up with you – it’s just another dead end. I should know because I chased my tail on that for a week. The call box is two hundred and fifty feet away from the nearest CCTV camera. I went down and checked.’

  ‘Did he know anyone who lived in that area?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What did you make of it?’

  ‘I asked around among his friends, trying to see if any of them lived in the area, and the caller wasn’t anyone he knew. I looked through his recent cases and found nothing. I was about to prep a request to requisition the footage from two cameras on the Old Kent Road, but then my super shut me down.’ A long, melancholic pause. ‘I don’t need to tell you it would have been a waste of time, anyway. You only need to see the location of that box to know why it was chosen.’

  Anonymity.

  I was starting to realize why, in her interviews with Sergeant Reed in the days after Franks disappeared, Craw had suggested her father might not have left of his own accord.

  She didn’t say anything else, but it was clear she was thinking about the call, about what it meant, about whether something had been missed. That wasn’t unique to missing persons: relatives clung to the unexplained, whatever the crime, because in the unknown there was hope, maybe answers, maybe some kind of resolution. Except, given what Paige and Murray had told me, I was starting to wonder what kind of answers Craw would end up with – and whether finding Franks could bring her any kind of comfort, or just another twist of the knife.

  23

  The next morning was beautiful. The snow had settled on rooftops, in gardens and streets, on windowsills and fence posts, its stillness reducing London to a hush. Cars remained on driveways, people remained indoors and, above, the sky was a vast sweep of blue without a single cloud to blemish it. I took my breakfast through and sat at the rear windows, looking out at a garden undisturbed by anything but bird tracks.

  A couple of minutes later, I watched my mobile buzz across the table towards me. It was Ewan Tasker. Forty-eight hours earlier, I’d asked him to use the police database to look into any major unsolveds in London, in an effort to narrow down Franks’s cold case. That was before I knew about Pamela Welland. Now the question wasn’t who had got to Franks at the end, because it seemed likely – if Paige and Murray were correct – that the answer was Welland. Instead, it was why her death meant so much to him.

  After we’d chatted for a while, I steered the conversation around to what Tasker had found.

  ‘I don’t know if you’ll be thanking me or cursing me,’ he said. It was Saturday, and he was at home, so there was no office noise behind him. ‘In a city of seven million people, across an unspecified time period, you’re looking at a shitload of hits, just like I said you would. I found ninety-eight unsolved cases that I would personally class as “major”. But if you’re talking about including people being held up at knifepoint, or beaten up getting the last tube home, then you’re going to have to widen the search, and that’s going to take more time. For now, though, I’ve just stuck to the really big stuff.’

  ‘That sounds great, Task.’

  I grabbed the Moleskines from the spare room as well as the document I’d created and printed out: it gave me a full overview of every case, name and extraneous item – like the pub flyer – that Franks had made mention of, or included as part of the diaries.

  Gradually, we started navigating through the ninety-eight unsolveds, Task giving me a brief account of what had happened – date, crime, victim, circumstances – before moving on to the next. I cross-checked each one with the printout. Where Franks had noted down a case that Tasker also mentioned, even only in passing, I asked for it to be set aside so we could come back to it. Fifteen minutes in, I’d finished my coffee. Twenty minutes after that, I heard Annabel get up and head to the shower.

  By the time we got to the end, we’d been going at it an hour. I could hear Annabel pottering around in the kitchen and I’d narrowed down ninety-eight cases to just four.

  Momentarily, I paused. The rational part of me knew there was no guarantee any of this meant anything. As much as I’d suspected that within the pages of the notebooks Franks might allude to an investigation that was important to him, it was just as likely that he’d opt not to write anything down. Pamela Welland had clearly been incredibly important to him, for whatever reason, but his notes on her case – and on Paul Viljoen – ran to two small clumps on a single page in the first diary. Maybe he’d gone in totally the opposite direction with cases that meant the most to him.

  Maybe he didn’t include those at all.

  I decided against worrying about it for now, and returned my attention to the four I’d asked to be set aside. If nothing else, I could confirm Franks had some involvement in these, either as an investigator, or as a command lead, overseeing the Met’s Murder Teams.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘let’s go back over them.’

  ‘You want me to go in chronological order?’

  ‘Yeah, that would be great.’

  A couple of taps of the keyboard, then: ‘First one: guy from King’s Cross named Burgess Smith tells his wife he’s heading to the shops to get milk. He never comes home again. Next day, his body is found floating in the Grand Union Canal about half a mile from the train station. Smith was dead before he hit the water. Got stabbed in the neck. Looked like a robbery – his wallet never turned up, even when police sent divers in.’

  I cast my eyes down the other details I’d managed to extract from the diaries and subsequent searches I’d done online. They didn’t add much. The case was from August 1997; the killer was never found; Franks was the lead, Murray working alongside him.

  ‘Okay. Next?’

  ‘Next is a 21-year-old woman called Mary Swindon heading back to her car near Kensal Green Cemetery after a night out. Some guy comes out of nowhere, grabs her, pulls her into a side street, rapes her, bashes her head in. The killer’s DNA was all over the body, but nowhere in the database. They never found out who the guy was, even retrospectively. This was 2002.’

  I used the printout to remind myself of what Franks had written down concerning the case. He’d listed its headline details – all of which matched what I was having confirmed by Task now – but under that, in the diary, he’d also written, ‘We need to find this asshole NOW.’ As I read that back I remembered what Carla Murray had told me the night before: The Boss always took cases like Welland’s hard. Kids. Women. I’d added some other details too, based on what I’d found out through media reports. This one was roughly in the same ballpark as Welland.

  But, for now, I moved on. ‘What about the third?’

  ‘A man gets stabbed in the chest outside The Knight in Mile End. I assume that’s a pub. I probably should have checked that. Anyway, he dies in hospital later. Witnesses say he was arguing with someone on the phone while he was there, but when police got hold of his bill, they found the caller had dialled in from a stolen handset.’

  ‘Who was the victim?’

  ‘Uh, Bryan Calhoon. Hold on.’ He paused for a moment as he read on down the file. ‘Building contractor. Apparently he was in some kind of major dispute with one of his rivals – a Dean Ireland – after Calhoon allegedly, illegally, got hold of a proposal and quotation that Ireland had given to the council, and then massively undercut him to secure the contract himself. Ireland obviously looked good for it – but he had an alibi.’

  A dispute between two rival builders seemed about as far away from what I was looking for as it was possible to get, a
nd by 2007 – when Calhoon was killed – Franks was already running the entire Homicide command. That put him way beyond cases like this one, something his diary notes backed up: he’d noted down the name of the victim and the people in his Murder Team, but beyond that there was nothing suggesting any kind of connection with Welland’s death.

  ‘And the fourth?’

  ‘Unidentified victim,’ Task said. ‘Thirty-something. White. Five foot eleven. He was killed in March 2011. This guy must have really upset the wrong people. Someone broke into his home, tied him up and slit his throat, ear to ear. Likely drug murder. The vic was found with five grand’s worth of coke tucked away in the kitchen.’

  I circled the case on the printout. ‘No dental records?’

  ‘His teeth were removed.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘And his prints didn’t lead anywhere?’

  ‘No. Prints, DNA, nothing.’

  Just like the builders’ dispute, Franks had only mentioned it in the loosest possible terms. His notes said, ‘UnID’d victim + CB?’, and he’d listed the home address for the victim: a council estate in Lewisham. When I’d filled in further details the previous evening, using what little there was online about it, I’d been unable to find out what the CB part related to. Still, it was difficult to picture Franks becoming so affected by a drug murder, two years after it happened, that it ended up being the reason he left.

  I looked at what I’d written down.

  The murder of Mary Swindon seemed the most immediate fit but, in truth, when I looked closer, there were few similarities between the two killings. There was certainly no question that Viljoen was involved. The DNA at the scene didn’t belong to him, and by the time Swindon was killed in 2002 he’d already been locked up for six years.

  ‘You got any idea why he was running the case?’ Task said.

  I tuned back in. ‘Sorry, what?’

  ‘Franks.’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘Says here he was running the case.’

  ‘Running what case?’

  ‘This drug murder.’

  Task was talking about the fourth case: the unidentified white male who’d had his throat cut. ‘Wait, Franks was running it?’

  ‘Yeah. Franks was the SIO on it. The file indicates that he was running point, and that it was his last ever case at the Met. Bit below his pay grade, I’d have thought.’

  ‘What else does it say?’

  Silence.

  ‘Task?’

  ‘Shit. I’ve just seen the time. I’m supposed to be meeting some friends for lunch.’ Another long pause. ‘I’m going to have to go, Raker. You want a copy of these files?’

  My mind was already ticking over. ‘Where are you meeting them?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, could I come and collect the files from you?’

  ‘Why, are you in town?’

  ‘I can be.’

  ‘We’re having lunch at a place near Waterloo.’

  ‘How about we meet on Westminster Bridge?’

  ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you there at one.’

  24

  By the time I’d finished up with Tasker, Annabel was sitting at the kitchen counter, eating breakfast. I poured us both some coffee and perched myself on a stool opposite.

  ‘Ready to get back to Devon?’ I asked.

  She shrugged. ‘Yes and no. I’m looking forward to seeing Liv. We normally go out for a milkshake on a Saturday afternoon.’ A pause, and then a second, smaller shrug. ‘But sometimes, returning … I don’t know, it brings back a lot of bad memories.’

  I nodded. ‘It’ll get easier.’

  She looked up at me, and then her eyes moved around the kitchen. ‘Do you ever feel that way about this place? I mean, this is where you were supposed to, you know …’

  When she didn’t continue, I let her know that I understood what she was asking. ‘Some days, I imagine what it would have been like to share this place with Derryn. I often think about how she might have done things differently, in the garden, in the house, whether – if we’d ended up having kids – we would have even stayed here long term.’

  ‘It’s not painful living here?’

  ‘It was to start with.’

  ‘But not now?’

  ‘Over time, the pain dulls. It doesn’t go, but it dulls.’

  After that, without my intending it to, the conversation moved on to my work, and to Colm Healy. He was the former cop I’d been talking to Craw about the previous day.

  Annabel’s train back to Devon left in two hours, and the knotty nature of Healy’s and my history felt too ambitious for the time we had left. Yet, as I tried to move the conversation forward again, her eyes lingered on me and I got the sense that, once more, she’d glimpsed where my thoughts were. All I could see of myself in her, physically, was a smile. But beneath the surface there was something more, some kind of instinct, a sense of people that seemed to echo who I was more closely than anything aesthetic.

  ‘Why don’t you call Healy?’ she said.

  ‘I’ve tried before.’

  ‘Do you think it might be worth trying again?’

  ‘You sound like my conscience.’

  She smiled. ‘He’s a cop, right?’

  ‘Ex-cop, yeah.’

  ‘Does he ever make an effort to call you?’

  ‘Only when he’s in trouble.’ I looked at her for a moment, realizing what sort of picture that must have painted for her. ‘All I mean is, social calls aren’t exactly his style.’

  ‘Has he always been like that?’

  I cast my mind back across the two years we’d known each other, and then to everything I’d learned about his life before that. ‘Not always. People at the Met tell me he was up there with the best of them once. But then he had this case, and after that it all kind of …’

  ‘Unravelled.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that’s exactly the right word.’

  ‘What sort of case was it?’

  ‘Three murders. A mother and her daughters.’

  ‘Daughters?’

  ‘Eight-year-old twins.’

  Something moved in her face, and as she placed her hands flat to the kitchen counter I realized what: Olivia was the same age as those girls. This was everything she’d been talking to me about the day before. I get scared. I get scared I can’t protect her.

  ‘Maybe this is something for another day.’

  ‘What happened to them?’

  I hesitated for a moment, keen not to play on her insecurity – perhaps, deep down, instinctively looking to shield her – but then reality hit home: she was twenty-five, and she knew as well as me that this was how the world was, even if it was hard to stomach.

  ‘He talked about it once,’ I said. ‘He told me the hunt for their killer consumed him to the point where he couldn’t think of anything else. Every second of every day. It cost him his marriage, it cost him his kids. Literally in the case of his daughter, Leanne.’

  ‘She was murdered as well?’

  ‘Different time, different case – but yes.’

  ‘That’s awful.’

  I nodded again. ‘Leanne and Healy had this massive row the day she disappeared, and the next time he saw her she’d been left in a place so terrible sometimes I wonder how he ever sleeps at night. He’s got so much anger, bitterness and grief, all he knows how to do is hit out. But you know something? Sometimes I don’t blame him for that.’

  ‘And the twins?’

  I looked across to Liz’s garden, bereft of furniture and pot plants, and wondered if there was a way of cushioning the truth. ‘Nothing ended up the way it should have done,’ I said, imagining the horror that Healy must have walked into the day he found those girls and their mother. When I finally turned back to Annabel, there was a flash in one of her eyes. ‘Are you okay?’

  She blinked. ‘I’m fine. I just …’

  I slid an arm around h
er and brought her into me. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You don’t have to be sorry,’ she said.

  ‘Olivia’s fine.’

  She nodded gently.

  ‘You’re both safe. I promise.’ We stayed like that for a moment, the house quiet, the world beyond even quieter, its noise quelled by the snow. ‘I shouldn’t have talked –’

  ‘Was the case taken away from Healy?’

  When I didn’t reply, she looked up at me. Despite the tears forming, there was an unexpected determination to her now, a sudden fortitude.

  ‘Was it taken away?’ she asked again.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did anyone solve it?’

  I looked at her, but didn’t reply. I didn’t know how to make this better. She wiped the tears away, and for a second I could see my reflection staring back at me.

  ‘Did they?’

  ‘No,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘There was no happy ending.’

  25

  There was barely any evidence of snow out on the main roads, pavements almost cleared, roads slick with water and crumbs of grit – but it was still bitter. By the time Annabel and I had got to Ealing station, I was cold right through to my bones, skin raw and aching from where the wind kept snapping at us. We rode the train to Paddington and, at the gateline, I hugged her and told her I’d see her soon.

  After she’d boarded, I headed back to the Tube and worked my way down to the District line platform. The snow had long since ceased to fall, but as I stood there in the freezing cold, it blew in through the open spaces above: off the rooftops and windowsills high up on Praed Street, and from the arches, closer in, that ran along the back walls of both platforms. I moved for cover, where an arced roof straddled the line, perched myself on one of the benches and started checking the messages on my phone.

  A couple of minutes later, I looked up again.

  Instinctive.

  Automatic.

  An odd sensation ghosted through me – a brief shiver, but not instigated by the cold – and as I looked from my phone, along the platform, I realized what it was.