Fall From Grace by Tim Weaver Read Free Book Online

although there were some reminders of an old life that seemed so long ago now: photos of me and Derryn on a beach in San Diego; another from an awards ceremony in the late 1990s, a younger, different version of me receiving a statuette; and then a picture of me and a colleague in the searing heat of a South African township.
    As my attention returned to the computer, I fired up the web browser and googled Franks’s disappearance. There was hardly anything: hundred-word stories in the Guardian, Mail and Express – all culled from the same press release – and a longer version of the same press release in a local Devon paper. Franks’s status as a thirty-five-year veteran at the Met counted for little: in the press release, there would have been few details, certainly not an account of how he vanished on open moorland, so all newsdesks had to work with was a former cop going missing. It was interesting, just not interesting enough. When people disappeared every minute, media coverage depended on an angle.
    I grabbed the file Craw had given me, and opened it up to the list of names and addresses, zeroing in on two: Gavin Clark of the Cold Case Review Unit, and Derek Cortez. Craw had given both the all-clear, but I wanted to be sure.
    I called Clark first. The number listed was his landline at work. After thirty seconds, and no answer, it went to voicemail. He sounded stiff and serious, so I kept my message deliberately short, explaining that I was looking into the disappearance of Franks, but stopping short of telling him I wasn’t actually a police officer.
    When I was done, I hung up and dialled Cortez’s number. Unlike Clark, he picked up almost immediately. He sounded old, his voice a little hoarse, as if he was just getting over a cold; and there was a reticence to him initially, like he expected me to be selling him something. But after I explained who I was and what I was doing, he softened up.
    ‘Such a tragedy,’ he said in a soft Devonshire lilt.
    ‘Did you know Leonard well?’
    ‘Well enough. He and Ellie kept passing our house in the village, on their walks. We have a house almost on the road, and they’d come down the track from their place up there and take the path that runs just outside ours, down to the moorland behind us. I got to know them through repetition, really. Then we started talking. Then we got on to the subject of what we did, and that was when I found out that he’d been at the Met.’
    ‘And after that?’
    ‘After that, we started getting together properly: we’d go up there, they’d come down here, Len and I would go off and play golf. We all got on so well. At some point, I must have mentioned the work I was doing for the CCRU to him. Initially, I’m not sure he could have cared less. That’s not to say he wasn’t interested in what I was doing, but it was clear that he had no wish to return to that life. But then their kitchen renovations started and, boy, did they have some ambitious plans for that place.’
    ‘So you recommended him to Clark?’
    ‘Yeah. My part didn’t last long, though: basically the length of a phone call. I gave Clark a shout and told him Len was up for some freelance work. You can imagine Clark was interested straight away. He’s a miserable sod, but he knows when he’s on to a good thing. Len ran murders up in London for all those years, so he was a good find.’
    ‘Did he ever talk to you about his cases?’
    ‘At the Met? Never.’
    ‘That didn’t surprise you?’
    ‘Not at all. Some officers are like that, especially in retirement. In my experience, you get two types of cop: the ones who seek solace through sharing, and the ones who don’t.’
    ‘What about the CCRU?’
    ‘What about it?’
    ‘Did he ever mention receiving a case from Clark?’
    ‘No. And I never asked him. Even when I’d been selling the dream, so to speak, I didn’t ever give him details of cases I was looking into – and, to be fair, he never wanted to know. I