Fall From Grace Read Online Free PDF Page A

same for her father’s pension too, where lump sums had been removed to pay for house alterations. But, in the nine months after that, from 3 March until now, she’d either failed to find anything or begun to lose some of her will. In the end, perhaps it was a little of both: before his disappearance, it was possible to see the intimate rhythms of Leonard Franks’s life right here in black and white; afterwards, there was a stark sea change – less money leaving their account, barely any movement of funds, all instigated by Ellie Franks. It was clear evidence he was gone. I’d take a closer look at the financials once I got home, but my gut told me they’d lead nowhere.
    Away from their accounts, pensions, insurance policies and financial breakdowns, Craw’s instincts as an investigator really started to kick in. It was a reminder of how good she was at her job, and a fascinating insight into her process: itemized phone bills for mobile and landline; a typewritten CV of her father’s time at the Met; a list of people in the village and transcripts of interviews she’d done with them; impressions of Derek Cortez, the retired cop who’d floated the idea of cold-case work to Franks in the first place; and then, finally, the same for DCI Gavin Clark, who was set to be Franks’s point of contact at the CCRU.
    Yet while Craw had added some breadth to the investigation, she’d failed to add much depth. It was of course possible that the cold-case file wasn’t the catalyst for his disappearance; that one of her father’s other, countless cases, from three decades at the Met, had come back to bite him. It was possible one of the villagers had lied to her, Cortez too, and they’d managed to convince her of those lies. He could have been involved in an accident. His body could be lying in a ditch somewhere, waiting to be found.
    In missing persons, all things were possible.
    But, deep down, I had a hard time seeing most of those scenarios, apart – perhaps – from the idea of him already being dead. Whatever the truth, my first impression was that the last case was key, and that Franks’s disappearance had been as much of a shock to the villagers, to Cortez and to Clark, as it had been to Craw, her mother and their family.
    As I scanned the phone bills, I knew numbers alone would mean little: there was nothing incongruous about the fact that some of the calls Franks made and received, in the months before he disappeared, were to and from London area codes, just as there was little to be read into others being Devon-based. The last two years of his life had been spent in a house on Dartmoor – he would have made friends there, and in the local area. The sixty years before that, he’d been living and working in London, so I wasn’t at all surprised to see both phone bills weighted in favour of calls to the capital.
    However, the detailed annotations Craw had made in the margins of the Frankses’ bank statements and financial make-up weren’t replicated on the phone bills. She’d either decided it wasn’t worth doing, which seemed very unlikely, or, by the time she’d got to the phone bills, she’d been forced to stop her own investigation into what had happened to her father. I remembered what she’d said about her superintendent, how he’d warned her not to use police resources to find Franks. He must have stepped in just as she’d been about to tackle the phone bills.
    Craw ran a team of her own, and she was – if nothing else – a pragmatist, so she would have understood the reasons why: her boss didn’t want her getting distracted by a case that was outside of the Met’s jurisdiction. But it still would have hurt her. She’d have felt angry and bitter that he couldn’t let her work the case off the books. In a weird way, maybe it was the reason she’d ended up asking for my help. If I was being kind, the Met were deeply suspicious of me; if I was being honest, they loathed everything I stood for.