Fall From Grace by Tim Weaver Read Free Book Online Page A

got the sense we were from the same school of thought: these were cases and victims entrusted to us, and we had to do our best by them. Prudence was a part of that.’
    We talked for a while longer, but the conversation started to dwindle, so I thanked him and hung up. On the list Craw gave me, I put a line through Cortez’s name. There was a chance that, at some stage down the line, he might come back into the picture. But somehow I doubted it.
    In the file Craw had compiled, next to the phone bills, was Franks’s email address. A password had been pencilled into the margin alongside it. Craw had written, ‘He has an iPad too, which I have at the house. You can collect it whenever you want.’ I went to Gmail, put in his address and password, and accessed his inbox. He had two hundred and ninety-two messages. Nine had been sent to him in the days and months after he disappeared, five from friends who didn’t realize he was missing, four from others asking him to get in touch. All had been read, presumably by Craw.
    I zeroed in on the email conversations Franks had had with Derek Cortez and Gavin Clark. The Cortez email chain seemed to back up what he’d just told me. At one point, Franks had thanked Cortez for recommending him to Clark; Cortez replied, telling him it was his pleasure. And that’s where my part in this ends! Clark will get in touch directly .
    There were several other names I recognized, from the list Craw had already put together for me of Franks’s friends and associates. Quite a few were old work colleagues, Franks talking to them about life at the Met post-retirement; and although they replied non-specifically, not referencing individual cases, it was clear they still treated him with reverence, one – presumably from habit, or perhaps as a half-joke – even calling him ‘sir’. There weren’t any email chains dealing directly with the question of the case he’d been looking at before he’d vanished, but the messages provided a compelling insight into relationships he’d built over a long time. As I worked through them more closely a second time, I drafted a list of ten names that cropped up most regularly.
    All of them were cops.
    Despite the theory about the file coming from a civilian, I couldn’t dismiss the possibility he might have been sent it by someone still at the Met. Perhaps they’d seen it as a favour to him, or as a way to help him reach some kind of closure. That didn’t explain how the case had stayed – and remained – off the radar when Sergeant Reed had gone looking for it, why ex-colleagues had never mentioned it in correspondence with him, or why someone else inside the Met might care as much about its contents as Franks. It didn’t explain why they might be willing to take such a risk either, especially if they had printed off police records and then mailed them out. But just because it was a risk, it didn’t make it inconceivable. Someone had to have sent it to him.
    ‘Are you in the middle of something?’
    I turned. Annabel was standing in the doorway. I hadn’t heard her.
    ‘Not at all.’ I waved her in. ‘Welcome to the nerve centre.’
    She smiled and looked at the files, the photographs of the missing, the pictures on the wall. Last time she’d been up to London, she hadn’t come in here. I watched her edge further inside, her gaze returning to the files, before sitting on the floor and bringing her knees up to her chest. ‘What are all those?’ she said, gesturing towards the shelves.
    ‘That’s my work. That’s what I do.’ I looked at the files on the shelves. ‘All of those are cases I’ve closed in the four and a half years I’ve been doing this.’
    ‘How many have you closed?’
    ‘Sixty-seven.’
    ‘That’s a lot of cases.’
    ‘Most are pretty straightforward.’
    ‘So why do you keep all the paperwork?’
    I shrugged. ‘I guess because things repeat.’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘I’ve just found that life has a way of