Free Fall From Grace by Tim Weaver Page B

don’t.’
    ‘Maybe a return address, or perhaps a postal mark?’
    ‘No,’ she said again. ‘I never thought to look.’
    ‘So you were the one who took receipt of it?’
    ‘Well, I picked the envelope up off the floor, if that counts as taking receipt of it. Len had gone to Ashburton to get some things for the house. We had a bit of a leaky roof at the time. I picked it up, sorted through our mail and left it to one side for him.’
    ‘That was your only contact with it?’
    She paused, nodded. ‘Yes.’
    It was obvious Ellie was smart enough to have figured out – if Craw hadn’t told her already – that, whatever case her husband had been working on at the end had probably been the reason for his disappearance. But I wondered if Craw had mentioned anything about its origins, about the truth behind the file: that Gavin Clark had confirmed to Franks that he’d have to wait until the start of March for his first case – and yet that file had landed on their doorstep several weeks earlier, in late January or early February.
    My guess was that Craw had chosen not to tell her. If she had, Ellie would surely have glimpsed the deceit beyond: that taking delivery of the file meant Franks had lied to her about who he was working for – or, at best, chosen not to say anything. Maybe, in the grand scheme of things, not a massive lie, but a lie all the same. Separating out work and home life was one thing, but he’d already blurred the boundaries when he’d talked to his wife about taking on CCRU work to help pay for the kitchen. Ellie knew he was looking at a case – he’d just chosen not to tell her the truth about who had sent it.
    ‘Okay, so what about in the days after?’ I asked.
    ‘Days after?’
    ‘Did you ever see him working on the case?’
    ‘Oh yes,’ Ellie said. ‘We usually had a couple of hours every afternoon where – if it wasn’t too cold – we’d put the patio heaters on and sit outside. He’d be at one end of the veranda, at the table, and I’d curl up at the other, on our wicker sofa.’
    ‘So you sat apart when he was looking at the file?’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    But then, a moment later, I could see she understood: maybe it was easier for him to work at the table – or maybe he’d chosen to sit at the opposite end of the veranda because he didn’t want her to see the file.
    ‘Did he ever look at the file at night?’ I asked.
    ‘Sometimes, when I watched TV.’
    ‘Did he sit apart from you then too?’
    A flicker in her face. ‘Yes.’
    There was going to be no way to trace the origin of the file. If it had been sent to Franks by recorded delivery, I might have had a trail, but locking down a location for where a first-class envelope had been mailed from would be like searching for a mote of dust. I looked at the photos of Franks, spread out on the coffee table in front of me, and then back to Ellie.
    ‘You’re positive you don’t remember seeing anything of the file? Even a brief look while Len was working on it: words, names, details, photographs, anything.’
    She shook her head, certain. ‘No. I wish I’d taken more of an interest now.’
    Briefly, that same sadness ghosted across her face. She reminded me so much of Craw, of the meeting we’d had the day before, of the times we’d crossed swords before that. Ellie was a little warmer, but there had been no tears from either of them, at any point. Yet stoicism could only disguise so much: they were hurting, and every attempt to conceal it just played out more clearly than ever in their eyes.
    ‘Okay,’ I said, keeping my voice even, patient, ‘so you didn’t see the contents, but do you remember what it looked like? For example, was it bound together and relatively tidy? Was it inside a proper hard-backed folder? Did it look official? Or did it look more home-made? Perhaps it was just a stack of paper, or maybe placed in a Manila folder?’
    ‘Like I said, I didn’t ever see it close up …’ She