Fall From Grace (54 page)

He pulled it from his pocket and looked at the display, eyes narrowing. Then he stood. He cleared his throat and took two long, deep breaths.

What the hell is he doing?

Another pause. ‘Hello?’

I watched him as he listened to whoever was calling. He seemed to shrink a little, become smaller, more vulnerable. ‘Yes,’ he said, his voice soft and weak, a tremor of emotion passing through it. Yet his eyes stayed the same: focused, unmoved, unaffected.

Because it’s all an act
.

‘Oh no, no, no,’ he said, and he began to pretend to cry, moving across the warehouse, sniffing, heading in the direction of the loading doors. ‘Yes. I will try to get there as fast as I can.’ There was something in his face now, something I recognized.

And then it came to me.

His father
.

I’d been trying to work out why I recognized Garrick’s dad. But it wasn’t his father I recognized: it was Garrick himself. I thought of the picture of the two of them, the way his father had looked – long hair, unruly beard – and then I cast my mind back further, to the minutes before I’d found Craw dying on the floor of her kitchen.

I thought I’d only ever seen one photograph of Garrick up until now, the one I found online after Dr Poulter had first given me Garrick’s contact details. In that one, he’d had shaved hair and a hint of grey stubble. But now I realized I’d seen a second picture of him too, without even knowing it – and, in this one, he’d had long hair and an unruly beard, mimicking the way his father had looked all those years ago.

The photograph had been in Craw’s living room.

And it had been of her with her husband, Bill.

John W. Garrick.

John
William
Garrick.

Bill
.

Garrick was Craw’s husband.

86

I retreated, almost stumbling, into the semi-darkness of the corridor. Once Garrick was gone from view, I backed right up against the wall – heart thrashing in my chest, head thumping – and let everything fall into place around me. It was like a bough breaking.

I understood how Garrick had got hold of Franks’s missing persons file: he hadn’t stolen Craw’s login, or anyone else’s at the Met – he’d simply lifted the file from her possession. He knew all about Craw coming to me, from minute one. It was why Derek Cortez had told Craw he’d seen someone at the house on Dartmoor three days before I arrived there, before the case had even got off the ground. It was why the mobile phone conversation I’d overheard Reynolds having with someone at his flat felt so much like Craw: she was keeping Garrick abreast of the case, and he was passing the information on to Reynolds. They’d had arguments, constant disagreements, but – with Franks gone and Ellie unable to cope – Garrick remained the only person she could talk to about it.

Even their marital problems seemed a calculated move by him: if he was absent from her life, he was absent from her thoughts; if there were problems between them, he knew she’d try to hide them from public view. That meant she wouldn’t try to include him in any search for Franks. That meant no photographs. That meant no trail to him. He was hidden because, when it came down to it, Craw was so much like her father.

I gripped the length of wood, images flashing in my head: everything Garrick had done, all the damage, all the violence – and then I remembered how he’d left his wife.

The mother of his daughters.

Taking a deep breath, I moved back to the door, fingers wrapped so tight around the club it felt like it might snap in my hand. At the frame I paused and looked around it.

He was standing at the kiln, watching me.

‘Ah,’ he said calmly, ‘I thought it might be you.’

‘It’s over, Garrick.’ I moved into the warehouse, the heat from the kiln gathering around us. He’d worked his way through two of the boxes, the last memories of whatever he didn’t want the world to see, burning to cinders. I looked at him. ‘Or is it Bill?’

A flicker of surprise. ‘So you’ve finally caught up.’

‘You’re done.’

‘You’re
the one the police want.’

‘You’re the one burning files.’

He glanced at the one remaining box. ‘There’s nothing incriminating in here – apart from the phone I called you on earlier. This is all housekeeping. The less paperwork you leave behind, the fewer questions can be raised about you.’

‘ “Leave behind”?’

His expression twitched. ‘A slip of the tongue.’

‘Are you going somewhere?’

‘Maybe for a short while, until everything dies down.’

‘And your kids?’

‘They’ve got used to not having me around. Melanie and I haven’t been living together since May. They have their grandmother. Plus they’ll be provided for.’

I shook my head. ‘You think they want
money
?’

‘You think they don’t?’

‘They’re kids.’

‘And your point is?’

‘They want you. They want Craw.’

He shrugged again. ‘Yes, well, I just had the hospital on the phone and it sounds like the next time we’ll all be seeing “Craw” is in a pine box.’ He paused, his voice soft but clear, barely more than monotone. ‘No?’ he said. ‘Nothing? I thought this would be the point at which your superhuman powers of morality kick in.’

‘Are you even aware of what you’ve done?’

He nodded. ‘Unfortunately, I am.’

‘You killed the mother of your
children.’

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘There it is.’

I made a move towards him, and he immediately went for the inside of his coat. A second later, he had a gun in his hand.
Reynolds’s gun
. I stopped, six feet away.

‘So the gun’s not in my house at all,’ I said.

He shrugged. ‘I just needed to distract you for a few hours.’

‘To do what?’

‘To make sure things were watertight.’

‘And then?’

‘And then I suppose I would have had to kill you.’

As I studied his aim, I expected him to waver, to show some sign of being uncomfortable with the gun – but he wasn’t. He was steady.

‘Let me ask you something,’ he said, eyes not moving from me. ‘I met Melanie at a house party in 1989. We dated for three years, and then in 1992 we got married. Do you know how many times in over twenty-four years together – in two decades of marriage – Melanie ever came to
me
for advice? Bearing in mind, for a moment, I was her husband.’

I just looked at him.

‘Never,’ he said. ‘Zero times. Our marriage – if you can even really call it that – was defined by one thing, on repetition: Leonard Franks. When they were still up here in London, before the move down to Devon, I’d get home from work and Melanie wouldn’t be here – she’d be over at their place. At weekends, it was him she wanted to spend time with. She’d leave the kids with Ellie and go and play golf with him. She’d call me in the evenings to say she was going to be working late – and then I’d see Leonard pulling up outside and dropping her off, and find out they’d all been out drinking: her, him, every other starstruck moron at the Met who thought Len was the second coming. The two of them always made a point of never discussing work, even when they were out drinking like that, as if that were some incredible achievement. But they talked about everything else – literally
everything
and would never share any of it. Can you imagine how frustrating that becomes, David?’

‘So killing her makes it better?’

‘Over the course of twenty-four years,’ he said, ignoring me, ‘it just builds and it builds, until …’ A brief, distant look. ‘Until, finally, you snap.’

‘Well, you snapped all right, Garrick.’

‘If I hadn’t done it, she would have found out what I was doing eventually,’ he said, and smiled – but it was sad, as if it carried the weight of bereavement. ‘You know,’ he went on, ‘I bought Leonard this pen for his birthday one year, this beautiful, gold-nibbed Caran d’Ache Léman fountain pen from Switzerland. This was back when I was still trying to understand how to muscle in on their territory, when I still cared about becoming part of their clique. Melanie told me I didn’t need to – maybe she meant that I shouldn’t; that he wouldn’t like it – but I did it anyway. I ignored her, and I gave it to him, and he was very polite, thanked me, told me I shouldn’t have. About six months later, we were round there for dinner, and I happened to find it in one of the kitchen drawers, dumped there with the ninety-nine-pence biros. A four-hundred-pound pen.’

‘You know how pathetic you sound?’

‘Really?’ He made a
hmph
sound, like he was processing what I’d just said. ‘You know, I removed that pen – there and then – and claimed it as my own. I carried it through years of sessions with patients.
Years
. And you know the first person who ever guessed the importance of that pen to me?’

I didn’t reply.

‘Casey Bullock,’ he said. ‘Did you know Leonard bought her a dog?’

‘What?’

‘A dog,’ he said. ‘I had my fountain pen, and she had her dog. Bear, she called it. It was such a Leonard way of dealing with a situation. Their child drowns in a lake, and Leonard tries to fill the gap that’s left behind with an animal. I mean, Casey seemed to like the dog. In fact, she was very upset when it died. And then when she eventually told me everything – about her affair with Leonard, their child, all the secrets, all the lies – after it finally all spilled out of her after years of sessions, I sat there utterly stunned and thought, “What a mundane gift for such an elaborate liar.” A dog.’

He paused, backing away from the kiln, and went to the table. He perched on its edge, gun resting on his lap. Next to him the empty Coke can rocked gently.

‘Living with her was like living with him,’ he said quietly. ‘The older she got, the worse she got. She never shared anything. She never told me about her day. All we used to talk about was what she wanted done around the house, about the girls and their fucking homework. That was all we had.’

‘And now you don’t even have that.’

He flashed a look at me, but his tone didn’t change: flat, quiet. ‘You’re so perfect, aren’t you? A perfect widower, a perfect dad. You think because you had some horny teenage romance twenty-five years ago that you’re now an expert father?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m no expert.’

His eyes lingered on me for a long time. ‘I hate him.’

A long silence, as if he were reassessing that statement.

‘Actually, that’s not true,’ he finally continued. ‘I hate him even more than that. Sending him that file in January … I would have loved to have been there when it arrived, when he looked at the envelope and figured it must have come from the cold-case people at Plymouth – and his face when he opened it up and his world fell apart. That was a great piece of timing. I didn’t mean it to be so perfect, because I didn’t know he’d been in contact with them about taking on freelance work. But he deserved it.’ He looked at me, taking a long breath. ‘The truth was, though, I started compiling that file long before he ever thought about taking on freelance work. It was eight months in the making. Do you know what started it off? Do you know what made me reach out to someone like Neil Reynolds, and get his help in compiling it?’

‘What?’

‘One night the June before last, nine months before Leonard magicked himself into thin air, we were at their place on Dartmoor. He and I were out front, sitting around a barbecue. He never let me cook. Even when they came to ours, Melanie would always let him take charge. He’d help himself to my tongs, to my cutlery. When we went down there, I just slumped into a chair and tried to drink my sorrows away. It was the same that day as it had been every year I was married to Melanie. The same as always: I didn’t know what to say to him, he didn’t know what to say to me – just this unspoken tension. Anyway, I knew all about his indiscretions by then – Casey had already told me everything – and the more I had to drink, the more I chewed on it, the more I wanted to call him out on it.’

He eyed me for a second. ‘I looked at him and thought, “You’re a fucking liar.” I
hated
him, just as much as Reynolds hated him. More. His public persona, it was a sham. He wasn’t that man. I saw the
real
him, even before Casey started telling me about what he’d done. I saw the real Leonard Franks every day of my miserable marriage. The way he treated me, the way he looked at me like I was something on his shoe. It ate away at me, until finally, we were standing over that barbecue, and I cracked. I said to him, “Are there any circumstances, any circumstances at all, where I might be good enough for you or for your daughter, Leonard?” After I said it, I stood there frozen, scared about what his response would be, but also somehow relieved that I’d actually got it out.’

‘And what did he say?’

‘He said no. He said to me, “You’re not the man I wanted my daughter to marry. You’re not the man she deserves. You’re not good enough for her, John.” He always called me John, not Bill. I hated the name John, even though I used it for work. It was my father’s name, and he was a man just like Franks: never happy with who I was, or what I wanted to be.’ He looked out at the warehouse, gesturing to the spaces around him. ‘Like I was
ever
going to settle for a life blowing glass.’

His voice raised just a fraction, but then, a second later, it settled back into the same tone: ‘That’s why Leonard started calling me John. He knew I didn’t like it. I’m sure he secretly loved the fact that Melanie decided to go with Ellie’s surname, even after we got married. And after it was all out in the open, after he told me I wasn’t good enough for his daughter, I knew it was over. Not for me. It was just the start for me. But I knew it was all over for him – because I was going to go after him. I was going to show the world who he really was.’

‘You think it was heroic?’

‘It was, in a way.’

‘You’re delusional.’

A twist of animosity, there and gone. Then he shrugged. ‘The chances of me working at Bethlehem at some point were always high. When it was still open, there were only four high-security psychiatric facilities in the entire country, and I was moving between them all the time. But Casey actually becoming one of my patients … it was fate. I was seconded down there, at the same time I was doing two days a week at the Met, and when Casey finally told me why the Pamela Welland case had meant so much to her, it was perfect. It took five years for it to all come out, every detail, but it was perfect.’