Fall From Grace by Tim Weaver Page A

decisions, he always would. I suppose some people respect you for that and some don’t.’ She paused for a moment, more of a slump to her frame now. All of a sudden, she looked older, a little frailer. ‘I remember he said to me once, “Sometimes you just have to let people go.” I think he meant you can’t please all of the people all of the time.’
    Or maybe he didn’t mean that at all , I thought.
    Maybe he meant something else entirely.

11
    Craw returned from the kitchen, placed a cup of fruit tea down in front of her mother, handed me a coffee and told us she’d be upstairs if we needed anything else. I thanked her and watched her leave, then turned back to Ellie.
    ‘Okay, so tell me about 3 March.’
    She nodded, but didn’t say anything. For a moment it felt like she was wrestling with her courage as much as her recollection. ‘It was a Sunday, and we never did much on Sundays.’ She stopped, smiling, then cleared her throat. ‘I think we woke late that day, had a cup of tea in bed, read the papers and took it in turns to play around on Len’s iPad. Then, later, we went for a walk up to Stannon Tor, which is about a mile north of where our house is. Once you get up there it’s so lonely, and the views are absolutely stunning. Then we got back for lunch, and spent the afternoon sitting in front of the fire, dozing.’
    ‘Everything seemed normal?’
    ‘Everything was fine.’ But she cleared her throat again, and for the first time there was the merest hint of a flash in her eyes. ‘About four-thirty, five o’clock, the fire started to die out and it began to get cold, so I asked Len to get some more logs.’
    ‘It was you who asked him?’
    She looked thrown by the comment. ‘I’m not sure I …’
    ‘You asked him, rather than him deciding to go himself?’
    She understood where I was headed now. Was there no intention on Franks’s part to head outside until she asked? Or did he instigate the decision himself?
    ‘Yes,’ she said.
    ‘You asked him?’
    ‘Yes,’ she repeated. ‘I asked him to go outside.’ The rest of it went unspoken but was basically painted in her face: I made him go outside – and he never came back .
    ‘So he went to the woodshed …’
    She looked up, rocking a little now, like a boxer on the ropes. Then she took a breath and nodded. ‘Right. I guess it could have been a touch later than five o’clock, but it was definitely well before six, because the sun hadn’t set, and at that time of the year, up there on the moors, the sun goes down between about ten to and quarter past.’
    ‘Do you remember if he said anything to you before he went outside?’
    ‘He complained – tongue in cheek; it was a bit of a running joke – about having to go out into the cold, but I told him I’d put the kettle on and cut him a nice slice of cake as a reward.’ A pause. She sniffed gently. ‘So he got up and headed outside, and I went through to the kitchen, put the kettle on and grabbed a carrot cake out of the fridge. We’d bought it that morning at a bakery in Widecombe. Len loves his carrot cake.’
    Something gave way in her face again. I pulled her back in: ‘And you reckon that took about five minutes?’
    She nodded. ‘At least five. Again, it could have been a bit more. I remember I ended up getting distracted by a story I hadn’t got around to reading in the newspaper.’
    ‘And then what happened?’
    ‘I came back through and saw that he wasn’t back.’
    ‘How long did it normally take him?’
    ‘A minute. The woodshed was literally at the end of the veranda. All he had to do was go out, grab three or four logs and bring them back. He went outside in slippers.’
    Craw hadn’t mentioned that.
    If I was to run with the theory that he’d instigated his own disappearance, then the fact that he didn’t take his wallet or his phone made a certain kind of sense: the contents of his wallet – bank cards, driver’s licence – made him traceable, as did