Fall From Grace (16 page)

‘I don’t know.’

‘We’re supposed to be
sharing
here.’

‘I don’t know what it means,’ I said, looking at him. ‘Franks has got it written down a couple of times in his diaries. I haven’t figured it out.’

Paige eyed me with suspicion.

I grabbed a napkin and a pen from my jacket and then drew the sketch that Franks had made on the scrap of paper.

‘What about that?’ I asked, showing it to them both.

‘What about it?’ Paige asked.

‘Does that seem familiar?’

‘What is that – some sort of stick man?’

‘I’m not sure.’

I looked at the drawing: the body, arms and legs of the ‘stick man’, the triangle on its left shoulder, and the oval encasing it all. There was a part of me that felt like I might have seen it somewhere before, but I couldn’t put my finger on where. Franks had also written ‘Milk?’ – above ‘Double-check 108’ – on the back of the pub flyer, years after he’d made the sketch on the scrap of paper. Weirdly, that had begun to worry me: did a bland reminder to pick up milk mean the sketch and ‘108’ reference were just as unimportant? What if the sketch was just another doodle? What if none of it meant anything?

I pushed the doubts aside and moved on. ‘So did you send Franks the footage?’

She shook her head. ‘Absolutely not. I’d do anything for the Boss, but I wasn’t about to put my job on the line to fish out some seventeen-year-old CCTV film.’

Paige moved his beer bottle across the table, the remains sloshing around at the bottom. He’d peeled away most of the label. ‘A day after he called Carla, he got in touch with me. Asked me to do the same thing: see if I could source the footage of Pamela Welland from the pub. He asked Carla as a colleague, as someone who worked that case with him; he asked me as someone he’d known for a long time. I guess, cynically, he played on our friendship.’ He paused. ‘I found it difficult to say no to Len. But then I went into the system, had a look around and saw Carla had logged in the previous day and been looking at the exact same case. So I picked up the phone and called her.’

‘That’s how you two got to know each other.’

He nodded. ‘She came up to my office, we chatted about it and decided that this should all be kept on the QT. What he was asking was illegal, and could place us both in a great deal of harm. Look at me: I’m fifty-seven years of age. I wasn’t about to get caught with my hands in the till when I’m six months away from retirement. I wouldn’t expect Carla to either. She still has many important years ahead of her. Helping Len would have been career suicide. So I called him up, and I said we couldn’t do it. He was still a friend, so we wouldn’t tell anyone about what he’d asked us to do, but we wouldn’t be sourcing any CCTV footage,
or
passing on anything else from the database.’

I remembered the drop-off in email frequency between Franks and Murray in the five weeks before he’d left. The tone of the emails hadn’t really changed, but their regularity had. In that third week, Franks hadn’t even bothered replying to Murray.

Now I understood why.

He was angry, or hurting. Or both.

He hadn’t been emailing Paige anywhere close to as often as he had Murray, so if there had been a similar drop-off in the frequency of their contact, it wasn’t as noticeable when I’d looked. However, it explained why, in both cases, I hadn’t spotted anything out of the ordinary in any of the messages that had moved between Franks and Paige and Murray: no tension between them, no mention of specific cases, no indication there were any problems.

Because they’d hidden it all
.

Meanwhile, the most interesting conversation remained unspoken: why Franks had asked for the footage in the first place.

‘Did the Welland murder have any links to his new life in Devon?’

Murray shook her head. ‘No.’

‘You sure?’

‘Why do you think I went hunting around in the database?’ she said. ‘I wanted to see what his sudden interest in her was, seventeen years after Viljoen went down for her murder. I wanted to see what other case – especially an unsolved – could possibly tie into her death, or whether we’d missed something first time around.’ She started shaking her head, ponytail swaying from side to side. ‘I went through the file, back to front, front to back, but it was a rock-solid conviction. The police work was perfect. Viljoen was guilty. He
confessed
. There were no mistakes, no slip-ups. There was no reason for the Boss to want to see that footage. Viljoen isn’t even up for parole for another three years.’

Murray glanced at me.

She wasn’t done, so I didn’t interrupt.

‘Except the Boss …’ She stopped again. Some of the steel left her eyes, a sadness emerging for the first time. ‘He always took cases like that one hard. Kids. Women. I don’t know whether it was a paternal thing, maybe something you get once you’ve had kids of your own. But as I started to look at the paperwork again, at the way the case played out, I started to recall how invested he’d become in that particular one.’

‘Invested how?’

‘After he called me in February, I began to go back through the case and I started to remember more and more about the Welland investigation. Little things. Things I’d dismissed as unimportant at the time.’ She paused again and looked towards Paige. He didn’t move, didn’t try to stop her. ‘One day, a few weeks after the Boss disappeared, I was sitting around, thinking about him, and this clear memory came to me: of walking into his office – like, five years after Welland died – on a completely different case, with Viljoen already banged up, and finding him watching an old movie on this portable TV he had.’

‘What was the case?’

‘I don’t know. It was unrelated.’

‘To Welland?’

‘To anything. It’s not the
case
that was important.’

I looked at her, momentarily confused.

‘It was the movie he was watching,’ she said.

Suddenly, it clicked. ‘He was watching the CCTV footage?’

Murray nodded. ‘Five
years
after that case was put to bed, I walked in and found the Boss watching footage of the night Pamela Welland disappeared.’

Retreat

July 2008
|
Five Years Ago

Crying, she retreated to the loft. She opened the hatch, slid the ladder down and climbed up into the shadows. At one end was a window, looking out over the fields at the back of the house, but otherwise it was dark. There were no bulbs, and she never wanted there to be. She liked its silence and its gloom. It reflected her mood whenever she came up here
.

They’d been fighting for a while now. In truth, they’d fought almost from the time they first got together, but at the beginning it was every so often; a blowout followed by a short stand-off, before they came together again, laughed things off, returned to normal
.

Or as normal as they got with Simon
.

But this one had been bad
.

Perhaps the worst yet
.

It had started just after breakfast. They’d overslept, which hadn’t helped. Her mind had been drifting over the past few months, and she’d spent most of the night lying awake in the dark, listening to the sound of him snoring. He’d come home stinking of booze, and had rolled into bed next to her and immediately fallen asleep. He’d sweated through his clothes, and she could see blood under his nails and a cut down his arm
.

She’d seen this same thing over and over during the three years they’d been going out, and had often thought about leaving. She’d told Garrick once that she’d gone out with Simon because he represented a risk, because he was different from the other men she’d dated – and because he was holding something back. Some kind of secret. At the start, she’d had a romantic vision of it being a secret like hers – a loss, an emptiness that could only be filled by someone who recognized it – but instead it was much more base than that: he was stealing building supplies from his employers and selling them on – and he was an aggressive, drunken cheat
.

Even so, she wasn’t scared of him. She hadn’t stayed because she was frightened. She absolutely believed him capable of bad things, had figured out early on that he wasn’t just earning money from his job on the site. But it wasn’t the fear of his lies, of who he was, or what he might do to her, that kept her here. It was the fear of being on her own. She didn’t need to go and see a psychiatrist to know that, and didn’t need to look in the mirror to see it in her face. She could feel it deep down in her bones, like a quiet murmur, constantly vibrating
.

That’s what loss felt like to her: an endless hum
.

You had to have a clear sense of your own mortality, of its boundaries, of the risks to it, to fear someone might hurt you or, worse, take your life. She’d lost that when Lucas had died, arms thrashing around above the surface of the pond
.

Her beautiful, beautiful boy
.

But at least here, in this relationship, the hum was suppressed. When they fought, she stopped being able to hear it. When they made up, it remained muffled. It was only in the quieter moments before and after, the moments when she was alone, that she heard it clearly, and felt it, and she realized she needed company, even if it had to be someone like Simon
.

She needed Simon in order to forget Lucas
.

So, as the first brave stabs of daybreak edged across the sky, her thoughts finally began to drift, and she’d managed to fall asleep. When she’d woken again, it was after eight and the sun was already up. She shoved Simon, telling him he was going to be late, and he rolled out of bed – shoulder-length hair licking at the side of his face, greasy and unkempt – and glanced at the clock. ‘What the fuck?’ he’d growled. ‘Look at the time.’

And that had been the start of it
.

As she’d stood there at the kitchen counter, preparing sandwiches for them both, he’d said something under his breath. She’d turned back to face him and asked him to repeat himself. He was wound tight, from waking up late, from not being able to find his work boots, from a night full of booze and whatever else he’d been up to. He found his work boots where he’d kicked them off the night before, outside the back door, and as he sat down at the kitchen table and started to lace them up, he said, ‘What do you need sandwiches for? You planning on going to work today?’

She stepped away from the counter, kitchen knife in her hand. He glanced at it briefly
.

‘It’s Tuesday,’ she said quietly. ‘You know I have an appointment with Dr Garrick today.’

He shook his head. ‘Garrick.’

‘You don’t have to pay, so what do you care?’

No reply. He continued lacing his boots
.

‘Huh? What do you care?’

He finished one boot and looked up at her, laces of the other between his fingers. ‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘But you’ve been seeing him – what? – three and a half years and it’s made zero fuckin’ difference. You still mope around like it’s everyone else’s fault but your own.’

‘What?’

‘You heard what I said.’ He finished the second boot and stood, facing her across the kitchen, using his height advantage to assert his authority. ‘You know what you might want to give some thought to? Getting a decent paying job. I’m out there busting my arse, trying to bring home a living wage, and you’re swanning around like royalty, wasting your money on this useless fuckin’ shrink.’

‘I’ve never asked you for anything.’

A snort. ‘You’re living under my roof.’

‘I pay my way.’

He nodded, kept on nodding, as he removed a high-vis jacket from the pegs at the front door. ‘You think a three-day-a-week job in a poxy shoe shop is going to help us?’

She just looked at him
.

‘Whatever,’ he said. ‘I don’t give a shit.’

‘That sounds about right.’

She could see him colour instantly
.

He stepped towards her, finger in her face. ‘You think anyone else would put up with all your shit, you snarky bitch? Do you? I’m a fuckin’ saint. It’s a miracle I haven’t hung myself from the rafters listening to you mope around like you’re the only person in the entire fuckin’ world who ever had a problem.’

‘That’s what you call it? A “problem”?’

‘It’s been nine years.’

‘So?’

‘So get over it.’

Anger rose in her throat. ‘ “Get over it”?’

‘Yeah. Get over it.’

‘He was my baby.’

‘He’s dead.’

‘You’re talking about my son.’

He didn’t respond this time, shrugging on the high-vis jacket
.

‘That’s my son,’ she said, trembling with rage, and she realized how hard she was gripping the knife; could feel sweat on her hands, licking against the handle of the blade
.