Free Fall From Grace by Tim Weaver Page A

disappointed I’d brought it up.
    I pushed as gently as I could. ‘Did he maybe mention something that might have been bothering him, or seem in any way different?’
    She was already shaking her head, and I realized she’d become so used to the question now, she could almost sense it coming. ‘No,’ she said, ‘he was fine.’
    ‘Melanie said that he’d been talking to a man named Derek Cortez about possibly doing some consultation work for Devon and Cornwall Police. Did he mention that?’
    ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We talked about it over dinner one night.’
    ‘When would that have been?’
    ‘Oh, probably mid November last year.’
    ‘And how did that discussion go?’
    ‘It went fine. Len liked to keep his work and home life separate. It was one of the things I loved about him most. As I’m sure you can appreciate, it requires a determined, disciplined mind to do that, but he managed it. I’m not going to pretend that he didn’t ever bring up his time at the Met during forty-two years of marriage, but it was rare – and he certainly never brought it up in front of the kids. But he’d discuss big changes, and things that might affect us both, and he told me about his conversation with Derek, and how Derek was going to call his contact at the uh …’ She searched for the words.
    ‘The CCRU,’ I said. ‘And then they got in touch with Leonard?’
    ‘Derek said Len would have to get some sort of official clearance first. A month or so later – maybe the end of December – Len spoke on the phone to someone at Devon and Cornwall Police. I think they just wanted to get to know him a little better.’
    ‘That was Gavin Clark?’
    ‘Yes, that’s him. He spoke to Len, told him they were very interested in using his experience, but that they’d have to wait for everything to get cleared first.’
    ‘Did Clark say how long that would take?’
    ‘I think Len said at least a couple of months.’
    This all confirmed what I’d been told by Craw, Cortez and Clark himself. Two months on from that phone call between Franks and Clark would have been the end of February, beginning of March. By then, Craw had been down to Dartmoor for Franks’s birthday on 23 February, and he’d mentioned the cold case to her. Which meant he already had it in his possession by then . That either meant Clark had got the paperwork signed off in under six weeks, and lied to Craw, and me – for whatever reason – about never sending Franks a file. Or, more likely, the file came from someone else.
    ‘We’d planned a big kitchen renovation,’ Ellie Franks was saying, ‘and it was going to cost quite a bit more than we’d budgeted. Len used a chunk from his pension to pay for it, but that pension may have needed to last us another twenty or thirty years – so it seemed like a sensible idea, him taking on some stress-free extra work.’
    She hung on to that last bit, swaying a little: stress-free work that may have ended up being the reason he disappeared. I gave her a moment.
    ‘So what happened after that?’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘Do you remember him receiving a file?’
    ‘Yes. It came in the post one day.’
    ‘Did you have to sign for it?’
    ‘No, it was just regular first class.’
    ‘Do you remember when the file turned up?’
    ‘I’m not sure.’
    ‘I really need you to think hard about that.’
    She took a long breath. ‘Maybe late January, early February.’
    ‘How sure are you about that?’
    ‘After he disappeared, Melanie said she and Len talked about the work he was doing, very briefly, when she came down for his sixty-second birthday, and as you might know already, his birthday is 23 February. So it must have been before that. It’s difficult for me to remember exactly, but I suppose he must have been working on the file for at least a couple of weeks beforehand. It could have been longer, perhaps a little shorter.’
    ‘Do you remember where it had been sent from?’
    ‘No, I