Fall From Grace (53 page)

I paused. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Neil Reynolds.’

‘What about him?’

‘I decided to call the police – anonymously, of course – to let them know that Franks had been living in that hospital since he disappeared. It seemed the decent thing to do. Then they can find Leonard’s room full of memories too.’ He paused for a long time, deliberately drawing it out, and in the silence that followed I felt a tension grab hold of me. ‘I also told them that you were the one who killed Reynolds.’

‘They won’t believe that.’

‘I think they will, actually.’

My stomach lurched. ‘Why, what have you done?’

I heard the ambulance pull on to the driveway, the voices of newspaper journalists and TV crews rising in a crescendo, screaming at it, wanting to know why it was here.

‘I’ve hidden the murder weapon in your house.’

And then he hung up.

84

I secured Craw’s head, made sure she was conscious, and then used the blood I had on my hands to draw an arrow in the living room, pointing the way to her body. When I returned to the kitchen, her eyes were glazed and unresponsive. I bent down to her ear, whispering her name, trying to get some sort of reaction from her. Out on the driveway, I heard voices at the door. ‘Craw,’ I said softly. ‘I’m sorry, I’ve got to go.’

Nothing.

‘Hold on. Okay?’

Nothing again.

‘Just hold on.’

My car was still on the drive, my jacket still in the living room – but I couldn’t worry about those now. If the police weren’t on to me already, they would be before long. Garrick had made sure of that. Now the only way to head it off was to find him.

I took her hand and squeezed it gently. As the doorbell sounded, I got to my feet, washed my hands, wrists and arms, and rolled up the sleeves on my shirt to disguise the bloodstains. I paused at the rear door to look back at her, at the carnage around her.

All of this for Leonard Franks
.

I headed out, pulling the door shut behind me, and found myself in the gap between Craw’s house and her neighbours’. A tall side gate disguised my position from the media and paramedics out front. At the rear was a long garden with a five-foot fence at the bottom. On the other side of it, I could see people walking, and hear cars.

A road
.

I made a break for it across the lawn, scaled the fence and landed on the other side. As a couple of people eyed me, I headed in the direction of Wimbledon Park.

Moving south across the park, I heard more sirens. This time they belonged to the police. I tried to remain focused, but panic was already taking hold. Craw wouldn’t be able to tell them anything. Not now. If her injuries were bad enough, maybe not ever.

I was boxed in: fifty journalists had seen me enter the house and never come out again. My courtesy car – easily traceable back to me – was parked outside her house. Garrick had swept away anything implicating himself, but ensured the opposite was true for me. He didn’t have to read too far back into my history to know how things would play out with the police. I’d crossed swords with them before. There were cops at the Met who’d been waiting for a reason to bring me down. Garrick, anonymously, had just given it to them. He’d manipulated me, and my history – and yet I still couldn’t get a clear sight of his reasons.

I’d eventually seen Reynolds’s endgame.

But I couldn’t see Garrick’s.

At the south-west corner of the park, I left its boundaries, headed along Church Road and turned left, in the direction of the Tube. It was Sunday, cold but clear, and the sun was out, none of which played in my favour. Good weather meant bigger crowds. With my head down, I kept moving, intermittently switching from one side of the street to another to lessen the chances of people seeing my face. If Garrick had called the police about the weapon twenty minutes ago, that meant they were probably turning up at my house now. If he’d hidden it relatively well, to make it seem less obvious, that gave me another ten minutes, fifteen maximum. That meant I was a quarter of an hour away from having my name and description wired out to every police radio within a five-mile radius of here.

I need to get out of Wimbledon
.

Ahead of me was the Tube station. I went straight inside, past the gateline and down to the platform.

The next train was two minutes away.

Retreating to the furthest corner, I kept my eyes on approaching passengers while trying to form a plan of attack. Where did I head next? Where did I begin to look for Garrick? As I tried to come up with something, my mind kept returning to the carnage I’d left behind me: to Craw, to the moments before I’d found her, to news of Reynolds washing ashore, to the media baying for blood outside the front gates. The minute I snapped back into focus, I began to drift again, still trying to come up with reasons why Garrick had done this, why he would go this far, how he’d gone from treating Casey Bullock to killing Reynolds and trying to do the same with Craw.

All in order to expose Leonard Franks.

It didn’t make sense.

As the train rumbled into the station, I found a seat at the end of an empty carriage and began trying to clear my head.
Think
. But, thirty seconds later, as the train lurched into action and we passed out into the sunlight, I let the warmth carve in through the windows and take me away again. I let my mind turn over, moving back through my conversation with Garrick, playing it, rewinding it, playing it, rewinding it, trying to see what lay in the spaces in between. His phrases. His choices of words. His explanations.

His slip-ups.

My eyes snapped open.

Don’t try to trace this mobile. It’s pointless. This phone, this
SIM
,
this number – I won’t ever use it again after this call. There’ll be nothing left of it
.

He wasn’t just going to dump the phone.

He was going to turn it to liquid.

85

The warehouse off the Old Kent Road looked worse than ever in the daylight. The others, the ones still operating, were closed up too, shut down for the weekend, but they at least had evidence of a pulse. The one at the end was dark, dormant, a sepulchre built of steel.

Garrick must have left his car somewhere else, so he wouldn’t draw attention to the fact that he was there, but, as I approached, it seemed unlikely anyone would notice, even if he had. It was deathly quiet, the noise from the Old Kent Road fading behind me, the buzz of the Overground line – passing across the top of the railway arch – a soft murmur.

There were windows at the front, but they were whitewashed, giving no view out or in, so I headed all the way around to the steps I’d climbed just over a week ago. At the bottom, I paused for the first time and looked up: the door had probably been locked from the inside, which meant, to get in, I was going to have to pick it for the second time.

I moved up the steps, feeling them bend beneath my weight. At the top, I looked around, removed my picks and started on the lock. Every few seconds, I stopped, listening for any movement on the other side, but it was silent. Four minutes later, as I felt the door bump away from the frame, I opened it a fraction and looked in.

Darkness.

Pocketing the tension wrench and the pick, I searched around in the scrub at the side of the warehouse for something I could use as a weapon. Discarded in a bunch of brambles, six feet away, was what looked like a snapped table leg. I moved back down and picked it up. It was damp, a little rotten along its edges, but it would be good enough.

I pulled the door all the way open.

There wasn’t as much heat this time, but I could still feel a change in temperature. He might not have been burning a lot, but he was burning something. In the air, there was the soft whiff of smoke, of ash, of melted plastic. I moved inside, pulled the door closed, and faced along the corridor. The entrance to the warehouse was shut. I inched forward, checking the office on my left. It had remained unchanged since my last visit.

At the warehouse door, I paused again, placing my ear to it. On the other side I could hear a gentle hum and the pop of the kiln. Nothing else. Wrapping my fingers around the handle, I gently pushed it away from the frame and looked through the gap.

Fire licked at the throat of the kiln, casting a watery yellow glow across the floor in front of it. Caught in the light were three boxes, one already empty, the other two full of things waiting to be erased from memory. As I opened the door further, I could see the table on the far side, where Reynolds had set up his laptop: in front of it was a chair with a blanket on it. On the table itself was a Coke can and a paper Burger King bag.

No sign of Garrick.

I pushed the door all the way back, and it swung soundlessly open. With daylight creeping in through the whitewashed windows, the shadows of the warehouse weren’t as deep and as long as the first time I’d been here. I couldn’t see everything, but I could see enough to know he wasn’t here. So where was he?

I looked towards the boxes in front of the fire.

Maybe he’s gone to get more
.

Moving inside, I headed for the kiln, looking back over my shoulder to make sure I was still alone. At the table, I picked up the Coke can. Empty. Inside the Burger King bag there was no evidence of food: no cartons, no wrappers. The only thing left at the bottom was a sachet of tomato sauce. I looked for a bin close by, to see how recently he’d eaten, but there was no bin, and no rubbish.
It could be left over from the last time he was here
. Except, beyond the smell of the kiln, there was the lingering stench of fast food.

I turned and looked into the kiln.

Paper burned. Files. A mobile phone.

He’d done exactly what he’d promised.

I dropped to my haunches and started going through the boxes. Appointment diaries. More files. Photographs.

I grabbed a selection of pictures. They seemed to be a chronicle of his working life. I cast them aside and, beneath, found a picture that was much older. Garrick in his mid twenties, hair slicked down, boyish, studious. He had a name badge: Dr John W. Garrick. He was standing next to an old man wearing dungarees and a shirt, his beard long and grey, his hair shoulder length but tied into a ponytail with an elastic band. There was such an uncanny resemblance, it had to be his father.

Beyond them, in the background of the shot, was a smudge of orange.

The kiln.

His father was a glassblower
.

I looked at the warehouse around me. It all belonged to Garrick. His father had run the glassworks out of here – and then, when that had closed, he had left the building to his son.

My eyes returned to the picture, studying his father – and, as I did, something stirred in my thoughts.

Do I know him from somewhere?

I cast my mind back across the last week to every photo I’d seen, to every newspaper story. The old man would probably be in his late eighties or early nineties now – if he was alive – but I couldn’t remember reading anything about a man of that age.

I moved on, hoping things would pull into focus if I sidestepped away from them. I dumped the pictures back in the box, then started to go through the patient files.

They all belonged to people he’d treated at Bethlehem.

Midway in, I found Casey Bullock.

Clipped to the front page, her face looked out at me. She was younger than when I’d seen her in the newspaper account of her disappearance, but the loss was there in her face, clawing at her eyes, shadowing her expression. As I flicked through Garrick’s notes – the way he described her – it was clear that he’d felt a connection to Bullock.

So is that what this is all about?

Jealousy over her relationship with Franks?

He’d denied it on the phone and, as I read on, I could see confirmation of that here too. Garrick didn’t feel the same about Casey Bullock as Franks did – but he felt something. Not love, not even friendship exactly, but something more than just a clinical rapport. I got the sense, in a way, he’d harboured hopes of saving her – and not just from her illness. From her dependency on Leonard Franks.

Clunk
.

I looked back towards the door.

And then a memory formed: when I’d been in here the first time, I heard the same noise. A deep, resonant sound, almost industrial. Dropping Bullock’s file back into the box, I stood and moved slowly across the warehouse, back in the direction of the door.

In the corridor, there was nothing.

The main entrance was still closed.

I stood there for a moment – ten seconds, twenty – and, when the sound didn’t come again, I moved further into the corridor and began checking inside the office.

It was empty.

Clunk
.

I spun on my heel and looked back towards the warehouse. It had been louder this time. Gripping the table leg I’d pulled from the scrub, I edged back to the door.

Stopped.

Directly ahead of me, caught in the light coming through one of the whitewashed windows, I saw a shadow moving. It had been cast left to right in the glow from the kiln, and spilled across the floor towards the loading doors. It was black, shapeless.

But then it formed.

Garrick
.

From his shadow, I could tell he was kneeling at the boxes. I could hear him sorting through the files inside, tossing paperwork into the fire, the crackle as the pages instantly disintegrated, and then the same again: over and over.

When I got to the door, I stopped.

My mind was firing, trying to figure out how he’d got inside, whether there was a back entrance I’d missed both times I’d been in. But I knew I hadn’t. There was no other way in except through the loading doors, and those were still padlocked from the outside. And yet, as I peered around the door frame, I saw Garrick hunched in front of the boxes, his back to me, pulling piles of paper out of them and disposing of them in the kiln. A second later, his phone went off.