Fall From Grace (11 page)

I smiled. ‘Murray and Paige will be there?’

‘Paige will. I don’t know about Murray. Like I say, I don’t know her that well – only to say hello to, and only through Dad. Do you want me to get you a ticket?’

‘Can you get me two?’

She frowned, instantly suspicious. ‘Who you planning on bringing –
Healy?
That should liven things up a bit. I think he’s got even fewer friends in blue than you have.’

‘No. I haven’t seen Healy for over a year.’

Despite the way she’d spoken his name, a sadness lingered in her face. Colm Healy was a failed project of hers, a cop she’d tried to bring back from the hinterland, someone she’d rescued from the ignominy of suspension, but who had ultimately betrayed her trust. I’d known him even longer than Craw, but saw the same person as her: a man full of anger and bitterness, whose aggression was a way to subdue his own failings; and then the heartbroken soul drifting in the shadows beneath, still deeply affected by the death of his daughter, and a case that destroyed his life. I hadn’t talked with Healy for a long time; it sounded like Craw hadn’t either – but in a strange way he remained the one thing we had in common.

‘Any idea what he’s up to these days?’ she asked.

‘No.’ But then I remembered something I’d said to Annabel the previous day:
I’ve found that life has a way of tethering you to certain people
.

It was Healy I’d been thinking of when I told her that. We weren’t friends exactly – perhaps never would be, at least conventionally – but there was something between us: a kinship, a connection, some kind of subtle, unspoken duality. After Craw had fired him in June 2012, I’d offered to put him up at my parents’ old place in south Devon while I recovered from being stabbed. He’d had nowhere else to go, and – as he was one of the major reasons I hadn’t ended up dying that day – I felt I owed him for helping save my life. But then he’d come back to London five months later, in November, and I hadn’t heard from him in the thirteen months since. I’d tried calling him, but he’d never called back. In the end, I figured he wanted it that way.

‘So,’ she said, ‘if not Healy, then who?’

‘I’d like to bring my daughter.’

She frowned. ‘I didn’t realize you were a father.’

‘Neither did I until a year ago.’

She studied me a moment longer. ‘Fine.’

‘Thank you.’

‘For obvious reasons, though, I can’t –’

‘I get it. I’m on my own.’

Craw watched as I placed the iPad back and took out the shoebox that had been sitting next to it. I got the feeling that she was wondering what she’d signed herself up for with the charity event, but I didn’t say anything; this would probably be my only shot at Paige, and deep down, despite the reservations she had as a professional, her feelings for her father were pulling her in the opposite direction. She knew it had to be done.

I flipped the lid off the shoebox.

Inside was a series of black A6-sized diaries, spines facing up, each with a gold-foil year printed on it. At one end of the box was 1982; at the other, 1994. There were also two bigger A5 notebooks, thicker, with white covers. There were no dates on their spines. I picked one of them out and could see it had been used as much more than a diary: Franks had marked dates off, scribbled in meetings and reminders, sketched out crime scenes, listed theories and stuck in Post-its.

I held the shoebox up to Craw. ‘Have you been through these?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you didn’t find anything?’

She shook her head. ‘But that doesn’t mean there isn’t something worth finding. I worry that I’m too close – to him, to the life he led, to his career as a cop.’

‘Can I take all this stuff with me?’

‘That’s what it’s all here for.’

Briefly, something passed across her face. She’d probably spent the past twenty-four hours wondering if involving me was a good thing, not because she didn’t trust my abilities or my instincts, but because she had to accept her part in this was over. I was talking to her mother and to her. I was taking home the cardboard boxes and being given the keys to the Frankses’ house on Dartmoor. All of a sudden, this was my case, not hers.

Now all she could do was wait.

13

The steakhouse was at the northern end of Long Acre, halfway between Covent Garden and Kingsway. After I left Craw’s place in Wimbledon, I called Annabel and gave her directions to the restaurant, and then found a space in a car park close to Waterloo. The walk across the river was cold, wind rolling down the Thames like a wave, and by the time I got to the Strand, sleet was drifting out of the sky and I was chilled to the bone.

The place was called Gustavo’s, after the owner. It was at the far end of a long, narrow cul-de-sac and was wedged between a property firm and an advertising agency. Instead of the bland, silver-grey panels of the businesses that surrounded it, its front was mostly all glass, potted bay trees sitting either side of its door, a striped canvas awning pulled all the way down, protecting lunchtime smokers from the sleet.

Inside it was done out in dark wood panelling, booths lined up around its edges, tables in the middle. It was small, but it was warm and the food smelled good. I asked for a booth at the window, looking back up the alley, so I could see when Annabel arrived.

I’d grabbed a backpack from the car and thrown in some stuff from the boxes that Craw had given me, including more photos, Franks’s iPad and the two white notebooks. A lot of the contents of the boxes, even at a quick glance, I knew wouldn’t come to much – old golf trophies, dog-eared airport thrillers, comedy snowglobes – but the iPad and notebooks were different. I unzipped the bag and took everything out.

The photos were a good spread, but nothing I hadn’t seen before. This collection leaned much more towards his work life than his home life: time-bleached shots of him sitting on the edge of a desk in a Santa hat at an office Christmas party; flanked by three other cops, what looked like a CID office in the background, all striking comedy poses; a serious picture of him at his desk; in plain clothes again, arms crossed, on a stage, listening to someone off camera; and an official police photograph, in full uniform.

Midway down the pile, sandwiched between interchangeable pictures of his career, was the only photo that didn’t include him. Not him, not his work, not the police, not his family. Instead, it was a discoloured shot of Dartmoor, taken in the depths of winter, the ground covered in a blanket of frost. There were swathes of bracken rising up out of the chalk-white grass and – in the spaces between – huge moss-covered boulders, scattered as if they’d dropped from the sky. Whoever had taken the picture was elevated, maybe even on a tor, looking down a valley between two sweeping hillsides. Nestled in the cleft at the bottom was a tiny stone bridge and, behind that, the silhouette of a spire. The drop from the point at which the picture had been taken, to the bridge, must have been eight hundred feet, and a stream – silvery in the soft morning light – ran almost the entire way.

I turned the picture slightly, holding it up to the light.

On the left, built in a natural plateau on the hillside, was what remained of a tinner’s hut, a square of grey rubble embedded in the grass where the foundations of a house had once stood. My eyes drifted to the spire again, trying to imagine where the shot might have been taken. If it was a spire, it was a church. If it was a church, that probably meant a village. It wouldn’t have been Postbridge because there was no church with a spire, but it was definitely Dartmoor: the bracken, the hut, the moorland. So why would Franks place this alongside photos from his life at the Met? Or was it here by mistake?

I set the picture aside and shifted my attention to his iPad.

His applications were spread across two pages, but the desktop had changed very little from how it would have looked, box-fresh, from the factory. He hadn’t divided any of them into sub-folders or tried to order them in any way, and the few additions he’d made didn’t stand out: BBC iPlayer, 4OD, Skype, Sky Go, a rambler’s app, maps for walkers. I logged in to Skype to see what his contacts list looked like and found only two names: Craw and her brother. In Videos, he’d added nothing; in Music, there were ten songs, all classical; there were no names in his Contacts, no Reminders or Notes, no magazine subscriptions in Newsstand.

I’d already been through his email, so I moved on to Safari, tracing Franks’s web history back. His life on the Internet seemed to reflect his taste in apps: walks around Dartmoor, sport, a little TV and film – and repeat visits to an amateur photography site, specifically their tutorials on how to take better pictures with the type of SLR he had.

Tapping on Photos, I found two hundred and five pictures and twenty-one videos. There were plenty of pictures of the house before and after they’d moved in, some of them renovating it, some of Craw and her family on its veranda, one of Franks at the side of the property, repairing something on their Audi – but mostly they seemed to be landscapes.

Ellie stood in a number of them, framed by stark, stunning scenery: hills rolling away into the grey mist of morning; sun falling out of the sky behind her; open farmland, cows grazing, a tor rising into half-light. I took a second look at the physical photo I’d set aside, of the valley and the remains of the tinner’s hut. It was of the same ilk. He was an amateur photographer, interested enough to spend hours on the Internet finding out how to take better pictures. It made sense he’d tried to capture this part of the world.

I didn’t have any headphones with me, so I turned the volume down and started to go through the videos. They were dotted among the photos, and it was easy to establish a pattern: all the pictures had been taken on Franks’s SLR, transferred to their desktop PC at home and then across to the tablet. All the videos had been taken directly on the iPad.

The first video had been shot two months after their move to Dartmoor, Ellie on camera, Franks putting a sledgehammer through a dividing wall in the living room. I remembered what Craw had said on the video she’d shot of the house:
This room used to be divided into two, but Dad knocked the wall down when they moved in
.

This was the first time I’d seen him in motion, his thinning silver hair – parted to one side – soaked with sweat, his six-one frame still lean, despite a slight paunch. He moved cautiously at first, as if conscious of the limitations of his body, but then – as he began to swing the sledgehammer – he got into a rhythm and his age became irrelevant: even in his early sixties, he was still strong and powerful, returning again and again to the wall until all that was left of it was ragged plasterboard, wooden struts and dust.

‘Did you enjoy that?’ Ellie said, the microphone on the iPad distorting slightly as she strayed too close to it. Franks was clearing debris away from what little remained of the wall. He looked back over his shoulder at her and broke out into a smile. I’d seen him smile in pictures Craw had given me, but not like this: sweat glistened on his face, soaked through his clothes, and he was out of breath. But he was relaxed. The smile was real.

He straightened. ‘You spying on me?’

‘Just a little.’

‘I think I preferred full-time employment to this.’

She chuckled and ended the video there.

Others painted an even clearer picture of the Frankses’ lives in retirement: movies of the house taking shape, as Franks first finished the donkey work, then a succession of tradesmen came in and transformed the living room; the two of them planning out their next project – the kitchen – talking about budgeting, about how it might look, Ellie always filming, which seemed to confirm her husband’s love was in still photography, not in film. There were smaller moments too. Ellie videoing her husband as they climbed a tor, wind crackling in the microphone, disguising their voices; Leonard saying something to her, seemingly having good-natured fun at her expense, then holding out a hand towards her to help her across a stream. Finally, Ellie trying to capture them both, using the iPad’s reverse camera function – while Franks pretended to take a picture of her trying to take a picture of them, using the SLR around his neck.

This was where video and photographs were so different. Most photographs only scratched the surface: how a person looked that day, what they were wearing, where the picture was taken. But video was different: these moments between the two of them were everything I needed to know about their relationship, a natural and genuine cross-section of their life, brought alive and played out in front of me. If I’d had any doubts about their marriage at the end, if I’d entertained the idea he might have left without feeling anything for his wife, they’d been extinguished.

This is what photographs can never give you
, I thought.

And yet, a few seconds later, my eye was drawn away from the films, back to the physical photograph I’d set aside.

Because I’d spotted something.

14

Leonard and Ellie had begun using the iPad in April 2011, presumably shortly after it had been given to Franks, and around the time he’d retired. As I scrolled through the list of photos and videos, each broken down by date, I noticed the same picture I’d found in the box – of the valley, the tinner’s hut and the church spire – was also in digital form on the iPad.

Except it wasn’t
exactly
the same.

The physical copy was old and discoloured. It was impossible to tell how old, but it had been in the box, lost among his other photos, for a long time. Yet even taking into account its age, it was clear that the picture had originally been taken on 35mm film, not digitally. It wasn’t an ultra-crisp image constructed from tens of millions of pixels. It had the slightly smeared, tinted quality of film – or, at least, film in the hands of an amateur.

However, every picture he had on his iPad was digital: high quality, pixel-perfect.
Every
picture. That included the one of the valley, although it was subtly different from the physical version: it was taken from
almost
the same angle but not quite; it was framed the same way, but zoomed in a fraction more; there was frost – just not as much; and, on the right-hand side, further down the valley, was something new: fence posts. I checked the date it was last modified: 12 April 2012. The year after they retired to Dartmoor.