Fall From Grace by Tim Weaver Page A

had once stood. My eyes drifted to the spire again, trying to imagine where the shot might have been taken. If it was a spire, it was a church. If it was a church, that probably meant a village. It wouldn’t have been Postbridge because there was no church with a spire, but it was definitely Dartmoor: the bracken, the hut, the moorland. So why would Franks place this alongside photos from his life at the Met? Or was it here by mistake?
    I set the picture aside and shifted my attention to his iPad.
    His applications were spread across two pages, but the desktop had changed very little from how it would have looked, box-fresh, from the factory. He hadn’t divided any of them into sub-folders or tried to order them in any way, and the few additions he’d made didn’t stand out: BBC iPlayer, 4OD, Skype, Sky Go, a rambler’s app, maps for walkers. I logged in to Skype to see what his contacts list looked like and found only two names: Craw and her brother. In Videos, he’d added nothing; in Music, there were ten songs, all classical; there were no names in his Contacts, no Reminders or Notes, no magazine subscriptions in Newsstand.
    I’d already been through his email, so I moved on to Safari, tracing Franks’s web history back. His life on the Internet seemed to reflect his taste in apps: walks around Dartmoor, sport, a little TV and film – and repeat visits to an amateur photography site, specifically their tutorials on how to take better pictures with the type of SLR he had.
    Tapping on Photos, I found two hundred and five pictures and twenty-one videos. There were plenty of pictures of the house before and after they’d moved in, some of them renovating it, some of Craw and her family on its veranda, one of Franks at the side of the property, repairing something on their Audi – but mostly they seemed to be landscapes.
    Ellie stood in a number of them, framed by stark, stunning scenery: hills rolling away into the grey mist of morning; sun falling out of the sky behind her; open farmland, cows grazing, a tor rising into half-light. I took a second look at the physical photo I’d set aside, of the valley and the remains of the tinner’s hut. It was of the same ilk. He was an amateur photographer, interested enough to spend hours on the Internet finding out how to take better pictures. It made sense he’d tried to capture this part of the world.
    I didn’t have any headphones with me, so I turned the volume down and started to go through the videos. They were dotted among the photos, and it was easy to establish a pattern: all the pictures had been taken on Franks’s SLR, transferred to their desktop PC at home and then across to the tablet. All the videos had been taken directly on the iPad.
    The first video had been shot two months after their move to Dartmoor, Ellie on camera, Franks putting a sledgehammer through a dividing wall in the living room. I remembered what Craw had said on the video she’d shot of the house: This room used to be divided into two, but Dad knocked the wall down when they moved in .
    This was the first time I’d seen him in motion, his thinning silver hair – parted to one side – soaked with sweat, his six-one frame still lean, despite a slight paunch. He moved cautiously at first, as if conscious of the limitations of his body, but then – as he began to swing the sledgehammer – he got into a rhythm and his age became irrelevant: even in his early sixties, he was still strong and powerful, returning again and again to the wall until all that was left of it was ragged plasterboard, wooden struts and dust.
    ‘Did you enjoy that?’ Ellie said, the microphone on the iPad distorting slightly as she strayed too close to it. Franks was clearing debris away from what little remained of the wall. He looked back over his shoulder at her and broke out into a smile. I’d seen him smile in pictures Craw had given me, but not like this: sweat glistened on his face, soaked through his